by Beth Kephart
“Oh, God,” Mutti says. “Thank God, Ada, for Henni. She said you’d gone out to the canal in search of the boy, but we couldn’t find you.”
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
You make a list of all that could go wrong. The arrow zings south or north, but not west. The cable snaps. The wheels jump the line. The handles pull you crooked. The rabbits will twitch, the dogs will bark, the guard will wake up from his half-sleep, his finger on the trigger. You will be heard. Seen. Found out. Betrayed. You will change your mind. Your body will not be returned. Your Grossmutter will be taken to the station. Your hole in the ground will curdle, empty, without you. She will not love you. She, your Grossmutter. She, Ada.
Do the drawings again.
Test the math.
Figure out a big-enough plan, figure out who, in the West, can help you.
Grossmutter whisper-walks to your room, leaves things behind. A pencil. Hot chocolate. A photograph that must have slipped from its triangle corners. That’s you. That’s him. That’s us. Here. She turns the TV up so loud that the ears won’t hear what you’re thinking. She stands in the threshold of your room, watching, minuscule. Taking a long tour of you with her black eyes. Studying the sack that you’ve packed and the bulge inside—the rope and rollers, locks and keys, handles and three kinds of wires. Soon it will be test day for the flying fox. You’ve bought the wire off the black market from a guy in the crane-repair business. You’ve smuggled hooks from the Eisfabrik. You’ve practiced every knot you know on the drapery cords and decided that if anybody asks, you will explain that you are practicing for the circus that’s come to town; there are signs all over town, pictures of skinny men on the high trapeze, the fantastic heroics of tumblers, midair.
“Know what you’re doing, Stefan.”
“I’m just—”
“No,” she says. “Don’t lie to me.” The husk of her lips against your forehead.
And then she is gone, and it is you, alone with your maps, your math, your tests, your half-lies. It is Ada, over there, with her wanting and her hurting and her love brighter than color. It is those bastard wolf boys, prowling in an alley, those bastard wolf boys winning because where were you? What did you do?
Nothing is certain, except that this is: Ada cannot be hurt again.
SO36
Sometimes you need color to tell a story, and sometimes the whole thing is there in black and white.
“Be careful,” Mutti says.
“I am.”
“Don’t stay out all night.”
She’ll listen for my boots on the stairs. She’ll wait for me to pass through the courtyard and out the gates, into the April night, beneath the rows of flower boxes, where the seeds are starting to split in their dirt. It’s near the hour. The bells will ring. Sebastien will place his chin on her shoulder as he does sometimes, his hair a bright red bloom on the sill of Mutti’s bones. They have been quiet at night. They have been quiet in the morning. They have let me be, because they know how mourning is.
I’ve left Arabelle her bike with the soggy streamers in case Peter wants to take her for a ride, her arms barely long enough now to reach beyond their baby. That’s what she calls it now—theirs, ours—ever since Peter found out. It was just after we knew for sure that Savas was gone and the news wilded through Kottbusser Tor and some people called us heroes, but we’re not. It took Meryem and Felice and the Köpi ladies and Henni and the reverend and Arabelle and me. It took the police, in the end, who fanned out along the canal and went farther past the bridge toward the brambles. It took four days. They were found in a room built of stone, a half-shelter. It had been done with a pistol—Savas’s mother murdered and Savas dead of heartbreak or of cold, or of so much hiding, or because he did believe in fear, or because he didn’t. They found him with his head on her heart, the thin cotton of her headscarf pulled like a shroud across his shoulders.
There will be, it has been promised, justice. There have been stories in the paper, photographs, Arabelle interviewed on the Gastarbeiter problem. “They are not a problem,” she said. “They are part of us.” Lifting her hands and letting her coat fall free and explaining the circumstance of people brought to a country to serve, the circumstance of women bartered into marriage, the circumstance of little boys who love and who are buried now beneath humped ground—bathed and clothed.
That’s when the camera snapped. That’s the picture that Peter saw the next day, front page, local paper, and that’s how he knew, and that’s why he came, and that is why he will stay, why they are together now, an American rebel and an Everything girl with a bike as spangled and streamered and strange as a Kreuzberg parade.
I didn’t want to go to the day care anymore. I didn’t want to pretend to be fearless when I’m not or tell stories I don’t have or stop Markus from teaching his protest songs, because maybe we all need to sing our protest songs, stand up and be counted, and besides, Meryem is gone. The stranger lady in the maroon burqa has taken her home, to the Anatolian farmlands, where Turkish girls have more choice than they do in Berlin and where maybe she will forget, or at least survive, the pictures in her head, the blood on her boots.
“You’ll come back,” Henni told me.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re always welcome back. You are loved here.”
But love is not enough. It is not the Great Escape. Isn’t Henni old enough, doesn’t she see how it is? Doesn’t she remember Ancient History? Love is what you give and love is what you want and love is how you wait, but it doesn’t save you. Across the long lawn of the Mariannenplatz I walk, the cans of paint clinking in my backpack, the skinnies and the fats rolling between them, the bandanas stuffed in, a chalky pencil losing its tip. Everything’s here in black and white. Everything’s lit by moonlight—the big belly of the church, the wing feathers of the magpie, the broad doors to the sanctuary, where Herr Palinski’s Bach has floated high and fills the round stone hollows. Depeche Mode on this side. Rabbits and dogs on the other. Stefan, who won’t answer yes or no.
Just tell me, I wrote last time. I need you to be honest.
But nothing comes in the mail for me, and when I stand on the observation deck by the wall and wave, nothing and no one waves back.
You can start to hate a boy whom you love as much as that.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
You have to know whom to trust. You have to see through the punker kid to his heart. You have to wait until he tells you his story because you can’t tell your own story first. Telling first is sabotage.
Winter has thawed. Today’s sun will rise early through the bundled clouds. Lukas peels his body away from the biggest linden tree as if he were a giant swatch of bark. He’s traded his trench coat for a thin tie that he wears loose around his neck. The two slicks of his black hair are struck apart by a bright white part. You haven’t seen him for days but you’re not surprised that he’s come. Lukas doesn’t surprise you anymore. Not what he knows. Neither what he does.
You show him what you’ve brought. You say it’s just a game, a little fun you’re having: You want to see how a gadget you’ve been building runs. You let him hold the parts, watch you assemble, see how it is. The lathed wheels and the various wires. The handle you built at the Eisfabrik when the men were outside, having lunch.
“You need an anchor,” he says, understanding.
“You bring your Trabbi?” you ask, meaning that pineapple-colored tin can of a car that he drives from time to time.
He nods.
“Your Trabbi would work,” you say. “As an anchor.”
“How’s that?”
“You park it over there,” you say, pointing to a place just past the park, beyond the hedge. “Hook the cable to its fender.”
“Huh.”
“I take the other end of the cable, hook it to that branch in the tree.” You point up toward the high limbs of the tallest linden. You help him imagine the tethered cable running at forty-five degrees from the tree branch to the fender. Yo
u put the wheel on the cable. You hang from the handles. You fly. “Easy,” you say. “Kid stuff.”
“Then what?” He rubs his chin and you see what he’s had done to his hand—a spider tattoo over the knuckles of his fist. A black spider, a blue web. Some of the lines still scabbed and healing.
“Then what, what? I take a ride. You take a ride. We see if it works.”
“Funny game,” he says, still rubbing his chin.
“Think what you want.”
“Think it will work?”
“I haven’t tried it.”
“Christ, Stefan. What were you going to do without my Trabbi?” He smiles, a bigger smile than you’ve seen before. Two rows of sugar-white teeth, small and square as a child’s. He turns in his loose shoes and makes his way across the park through the opening in the hedge, the points of his peach-colored tie tipping up in the breeze. You hear his car a little while later, the reluctant engine turning over, the thin wheels rolling across the loose gravel of the street. You climb the tree while he parks the car by the curb on the right side of the hedge and secure the cable, waiting for him to return. When Lukas shuts the engine down, it shudders like a wet dog on akimbo legs. By the time he hops the hedge and returns to you, you’re ready for action.
“It’s worth the risk,” he says, his eyes squinting into the rising sun. He takes the spool of cable from you and trots back toward the hedge, measuring the decline, linden tree to Trabbi fender. The pink part of the day has come up, a dent in the brown and blue sky. From where you sit hunched you watch the early people walk, the small dog at the street sign pee. Two months, you think. Two months you’ve been coming to this park with your amateur equipment, and nobody’s guessed what you want; nobody’s stopped you. Archery practice. Gravity tests. You put your secrets out in the open, and it’s the safest that they’ll be.
You can hardly see Lukas, on his side of the hedge. You see the cable jiggle as he works to make it taut, feel the struggle of it, wait. Truth is, he’s right: You need him, you need his Trabbi. If he hadn’t been here, you’d have had to wait—for the next day, and the next day, until he was good and ready. Your luck, in these matters, depends on him. And you haven’t told him an actual thing.
“Got it!” he yells at last, his words faint, and at the exact same time the cable snaps into a fine forty-five-degree slant, like there’s a big fish suddenly on a fishing line. He stands up, waves. There’s grease on his face. He finds the break in the hedge and trots toward the tree.
“You go first,” he says.
“No shit,” you smile. “What did you think?” He shakes his head and spits. Jogs back toward the street where the rusty Trabbi’s parked, following the angle of cable.
“All clear,” he says, saluting like a soldier.
The light’s good now. The streets are less quiet. The peeing dog has gone, left its puddle, but two old men and a couple of kids have come to see what the ruckus is about. In the street, Lukas talks about the circus. He explains extravagantly, with his big fluttering arms. More people come, but it’s not quite a crowd, and the police aren’t here yet, so there’s time, it’s time, to fly your fox from the high branch of the linden to the soft stop of the hedge (you’ll jump off there, so you don’t hit the street; you won’t fall far, should the fox fail; you hope it won’t fail). You fit the handles to your palms. You slip your feet free of the tree limbs that have held you all this time, shake the muscles in your legs out of their long crouch.
“Ready?” he calls.
Ready.
“Now?” he asks.
Now.
SO36
They buried Savas. They wrapped his body white and tucked it neat as a seed into the shallow grave. In the Muslim cemetery, Arabelle translated. Held one of my hands, while Mutti held the other, and beside Mutti, Felice, and beside Felice, Henni, and then the reverend, and then Omi and Markus, the tallest and the shortest, the survivors, hand in hand. We stood along the redbrick wall, listening, our heads bowed, our thoughts on Savas, the little boy with the huge heart, the boy on the bike in the dark. We watched as they walled the hoary earth back in around him:
From the earth did we create you.
And into it shall we return you.
And from it shall we bring you out once again.
Until the grave had risen like a camel’s hump, and it was time.
We need to go, Ada.
I can’t.
We need to leave him here, in peace.
I could have stopped this.
I still can’t breathe. It is too hard, every day, to find my face in a mirror and not to see the mistakes I made, the outcome. I have dyed my pink hair white, roots to end, let the bangs fall in, over my eyes. Stefan, you bastard, I need you.
On a wing of black, on an Eastern Bloc wall, on my piece of Kreuzberg, Savas will rise—bigger than all of Stefan’s skies. It has been weeks since I last wrote to Stefan. Twenty-four days. “Yes. No.” I wrote. “Yes/No. Tell me.” And every single day, no answer has come.
Now you will never meet Savas, I wrote.
I loved you, but not anymore, I won’t.
Why won’t you answer, Stefan?
This will be my last Great Escape. This will be my thirteenth and final panel, and here, tonight, alone, I black it again, my lamps bearing down behind me, my skin spackling with the violent propulsions of paint. Let it be. Let it stain. Let the sweet smell of aerosol be the smell of Kreuzberg tonight. I will black the black until it’s perfect. I will wait, again, until it dries. I will trust my own light and my own arms and my own heart as I paint Savas, his crescent moon and star, in eternal, holy white.
I will paint Savas, and he will rise. Give me that much. Make it mine.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
“It’s nothing,” you tell Grossmutter, but she sees how it is—the long sleeve of your arm torn up and bruised. The hedge didn’t stop you like it was supposed to do, and the rollers didn’t work, and you’ll need ball bearings to keep the axle spinning right, and you can do this, it can be fixed, but in the meantime, your arm is bleeding and you’ve ruined Lukas’s tie. “I don’t need the damned tie,” he said, as he wrapped your wounds tight in its cheap nylon, as he drove you back home in his Trabbi, the flying fox tossed to the backseat in its broken and assorted parts, the cable twisted as a snake. He dropped you off at the curb and you leaned back in to collect your stuff, fumbling with one hand, one bad-bleeding arm, and he said, “Don’t be stupid. I’ll see you soon. Get the arm fixed up in the meantime.” He drove off before you could stop him, the Trabbi dragging its muffler down the street.
She daubs your wounds with alcohol, the sting of a thousand bees. She uses a pair of tweezers to remove the pebbles and twigs that scraped in when you fell. It hurts like hell. You look away and let her work, calculating the things gone wrong, the stuff you’ll have to fix, if Lukas doesn’t drive your fox to the other side of East Berlin, if he comes back, like he promised.
You don’t even check the time. You’re not at the Eisfabrik, and there will be consequences, explanations owed to Alexander, who has been cutting you slack for weeks now, not asking.
“Have you called in?” Grossmutter asks, reading your mind.
“No.”
“Be intelligent,” she says, picking up the phone and calling the number that she has committed to memory, just in case. “For what?” you used to ask. For this, you guess. The call rings through. You have had an accident, she tells someone. You’re en route to the hospital. Yes, she says. Yes. Yes. Then, No. She hangs up, finally. You thank her.
“Get up,” she says.
“What for?”
“I’m not lying for you. Let’s go.”
“To the hospital?”
“Didn’t you just hear me?”
She grabs the boxy purse with the silver snap from the closet floor and the paisley brocade jacket from a hanger. She shuffles out of her slippers and into her square-heeled pumps. Now from a hook near the bathroom sink she grabs a terry-
cloth towel and wraps your arm, pinning the two ends together with a safety pin she unlatches with her teeth. “Okay,” she says, meaning stand up. A single key unbolts all four locks on the door.
“Now,” she says.
You aren’t going to fight her.
She’s a mite of a person. You’re your grandfather’s size. Out on the street you try to protect her. Through the terry towel your deepest cuts still bleed, and you think of Lukas out there, your stuff tossed into the backseat of his Trabbi. He knows more about you than you know about him: where you live. How you fall. He has your flying invention, your future, your life, and he has vanished beneath the brown sky, between walls.
“Stefan, are you listening?” Grossmutter says. She looks up, the folds of her neck dangling from the point of her chin.
“Yes.” You’ve gone six blocks and there are plenty more to go, and the towel has begun to crust and stick to the matted hairs of your arm. The foot traffic works against you—the factory hands, the bell ringers, the paper shredders, the technocrats, the apprentices aproned for work. Their noise crowds you in, their hurry to somewhere, and suddenly you realize that Grossmutter feels safe here, lost within the noise, invisible, unheard.
“Come here.”
“I’m right here.”
“Closer.”
You lean in.
“I know what you’re doing,” she says. “All right? I am no fool.”
You don’t agree. You don’t deny.
“Promise me something.”
“What, Grossmutter?”
“Be smart. Don’t make a long goodbye.”
SO36