Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  I thought about sneaking out, but then I remembered the police who had stopped me the first time. I made myself promise that I wouldn’t sneak out until my German was good enough to get me out of trouble if I got into it.

  I didn’t know where I’d go. But I couldn’t stay here forever. I knew that, and still I couldn’t make myself get up. Stop wallowing, I told myself. Get up. When I heard Mitzi’s footsteps, I’d coach myself to interact with her. To ask her questions. To smile. To say thank you. But when she brought me food, the paper, and clean clothes, I couldn’t find the courage. I stayed quiet. I tried bribing myself and bullying myself, but nothing worked.

  I had a list of things I missed. My phone, Amanda, getting silly photos of our cat from my mom, the internet, showers with hot water that lasted more than three minutes, my own shampoo, Friday night services at synagogue. Simple things and big things, and they started to sound the same to me in my head. I tried to make a song out of what I missed, but even that was hard.

  Mitzi left the paper, and I tore out the date she kept circling. I collected the tiny pieces of paper in a small pile. Sometimes when I woke up, I still thought it was a dream. The tiny pile of dates was the only proof that I was in a different time. I couldn’t make myself say the word. I couldn’t. If this was a scam, it was the best stupid kidnapping ever. But it wasn’t a scam. It wasn’t a kidnapping. A week passed after the mysterious Council’s determination. Since I had arrived in 1988. Time passed. Time I shouldn’t have been in. Time I couldn’t escape.

  I hadn’t missed a Shabbat service since my Bat Mitzvah, so it felt strange to hold the newspaper in my hand and read the word Freitag, the German word for Friday. I should be at synagogue with my parents, lighting candles at home with Mom, telling them about my week at school and Amanda’s ridiculous antics.

  If I thought about what I was missing too much, I’d cry, and I’d done a very good job of not crying so far. I curled back up in bed, trying to make the stack of dates as perfect as possible, when below me, the front door opened and shut with a bang. Kai called out, “Hello, darling.”

  I stopped to listen. It’d been a few days since he’d been by the house. Mitzi below me said something back in German that made Kai laugh. I listened to them, their words curling up through the thin floors. Nothing was private in this house. Or between houses. I could hear the neighbors’ nightly fights in their bedroom, their hushed whispers over a son who had gone missing, over a daughter who wouldn’t quit her political organization. They whispered, but Mitzi and Kai never did. They never sounded afraid.

  “I’m going to talk to her,” Mitzi said. “Did you read my note last night?”

  “I did.” The oven door opened and shut, and Kai said something about whatever Mitzi was cooking. “We’ll have a new Passenger next week, by the way. They’re unsuspending us.”

  “Then you talk to her, Kai. She can’t just mope around. Unsuspending isn’t a word in any language.”

  “She’s not moping.” Kai’s voice chilled the entire house. “She’s grieving. Christ, you Germans. Just because you have no emotions—”

  “Shut it, Kai,” Mitzi’s voice pitched and shook the floor. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes. “You do not get to derail this conversation.”

  “You heard Ashasher. We lose our jobs if we ask her questions.”

  The quilt tickled my nose, but I didn’t dare sneeze or move. The questions filtered through the fog of my mind slowly. What questions? What do they want to ask me?

  “God, why do you think I don’t understand that? I said I’d talk to her, not interrogate her.”

  “You don’t want to know? It’s the future, Mitz.” Kai’s voice switched abruptly, smooth and coaxing. He was baiting her. Mentally I willed Mitzi not to rise to it.

  I didn’t have to worry. Mitzi’s voice steadied. “Wanting to and doing so are completely different. Maybe that’s your problem. You talk to her or I talk to her, but we can’t babysit any longer. It’s not good for her, and it’s not good for us.”

  “She’s grieving.”

  “We’re all grieving,” Mitzi said, and then their voices turned instantly too loud as the pipes in the walls trickled and fell mute. She must have turned the water off. “We’re in charge of thirteen more Passengers this month that we need to successfully send over the wall. I don’t feel obliged to the girl upstairs, but I do care.”

  “I know, I know. I’m not going to ask her about the future, and I won’t let anyone else ask her either. Like Ashasher said, to know the future is to change the future. I am going to go get her out of bed though. I have something for her. Maybe it’ll cheer her up,” Kai said, just barely loud enough for me to hear.

  I frowned against the edge of the quilt, curious. What did he have for me? I couldn’t hear what happened next but Mitzi laughed, loudly, and Kai joined her. Their voices dropped to a murmur, and then I heard footsteps on the stairs. I knew Mitzi’s by this point. Kai left me alone in the nights he spent downstairs, and these steps had to be his steps. Steady like a metronome, nearly ominous, the start of every horror movie I hadn’t successfully watched. When the bedroom door opened, I held my breath.

  His footsteps echoed in the room. He sat on the edge of the bed. His fingers touched my hair. And for some reason I didn’t understand, the touch sent a shiver through me, snapping the fragile dam holding back my sobs.

  “Hello, saddest girl in the saddest city,” Kai said in English, his voice gentle and low. I couldn’t see through the tears filling my eyes, but I stuffed my fist wrapped in the quilt into my mouth to suffocate my crying. Kai tugged the quilt away from my face. “There’s that pretty face.”

  That got me to snort, unprettily, and glare at him. He was all blurry through my tears, but I saw the part where his smile pulled up one side of his face. In the evening light of the room, he seemed neither as intimidating nor as angry as he had the last few times I’d seen him.

  He amended his statement with a half shrug. “Crying doesn’t make anyone feel pretty.”

  My voice was hoarse from disuse. There was snot on my lips. “You really know how to talk to girls.”

  “If you venture out of bed, you’ll find out I’m surrounded by them. C’mon. Sit up.”

  I shook my head, courage shriveling within me. He poked me in the shoulder. Hard. “Ouch.”

  “Get up.”

  “Where I come from,” I said grumpily, “guys don’t just come into strange girls’ bedrooms and sit on their beds.”

  “I don’t think you’re that strange.”

  I closed my eyes. “Where are you from?”

  “Ah, that old question. If I had a mark for every time I’d heard it, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I am Romanichal, which is the word we use for Romani who’ve been in England for a long time. I was born near High Wycombe, outside London. I live here. You?”

  “Pittsburgh,” I said. “My grandfather was German. What’s Romani?”

  “Some still call us Gypsies, but many of us prefer Roma or Romani. You should get out of bed.”

  “Why?” The breath I took smelled like the fresh air still clinging to him.

  “It’s Friday night, isn’t it?” he said, pointing at my stack of dates. “I have something for you downstairs.”

  “What?”

  “You have to come downstairs,” he insisted. “You’ll like it. I think. We’re breaking at least thirteen rules I know of.” He slapped the bed. “Up you go.”

  With bravery I didn’t know I had, I shook my head. “You don’t care about that. Rules don’t matter to you.”

  The corner of his mouth turned up and his eyes narrowed as he stood, backing toward the door. “Rules don’t matter much to me, but I need the job, so if I broke rules, I promise it was for a reason that’ll keep you happy and alive until we can get you home.”

  Home. He was lying.

  “If you let me die,” I said without thinking, “then you can stop pretending I’ll get home one day.”

  H
e stopped by the doorway, and I watched his shoulders rise and fall in a single deep breath. He said, his voice so low I almost missed it, “Death is one way of going home, Ellie. But you’re not going to die. Berlin has enough ghosts. Germany has enough ghosts. Europe has more than enough ghosts. Choosing to be a ghost is disrespectful to all the real ghosts.”

  He might as well have slapped me across the face. I swung my feet out of bed. “What do you know of ghosts?”

  “As much as you, I imagine,” he said and left the room.

  I’d gone to a different time and still managed to find the opposite sex as cryptic and difficult as I’d always found them. I huffed and flopped back on the bed, rolling his words over in my mind. Then I took a deep breath and sat up, wiping at my face with the heel of my palms.

  “No ghosts,” I said to myself, and silently added a few bad words aimed at Kai as I got out of bed.

  Reluctantly, I found a purple shirt and jeans that fit well enough to be decent. Decent for who, Ellie? And then I thought of Kai. Furiously, I shoved him out of my mind and glared at myself in the mirror. I didn’t have time for that. Time. Ha. I pulled a sweater over my head, and then brushed my hair and found my shoes. In retrospect, if I had known I’d be time traveling, I would have picked more comfortable shoes.

  Down in the kitchen, Kai stood behind Mitzi, who was filling a kettle with water at the sink. He said in German, “You’re jealous.”

  “I’m not jealous.” Her voice cracked a little bit. I paused in the doorway, unsure whether I should say something now or not. Then Mitzi leaned on the counter. “I’m just used to the two of us being the outsiders.”

  Kai poked her in the side, making Mitzi laugh. “Stop. Jealousy isn’t cute on you. You and me, Mitz, we’re the unstoppable duo. Other Runners are jealous of us. Broken balloons and time travelers can’t change that.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. Right, Ellie?”

  I flushed hot at being caught eavesdropping in the doorway. Mitzi shot me a look that I couldn’t read, and I made myself return the stare. I looked around, unsure of what surprise he had for me and what I’d be looking for. Something that broke the rules. Him and Mitzi? But for some reason I didn’t think that was it.

  “Here,” he said, gesturing to the kitchen table. On the table were two little candles in silver candlestick holders. A box of matches sat next to them. For a long beat, I stared at them and couldn’t place them. They were out of context, out of time, but then I sucked in my breath. He’d brought me Shabbat candles. He brought me, somehow, a piece of home, even though I was so, so far from home. Distances I couldn’t even imagine.

  “Ellie?” asked Mitzi hesitantly. “Are you all right?”

  I swiped at the tears running down my cheeks. “Yes. Sorry. Thank you. Both of you.”

  They nodded, and Mitzi turned back to the stove. I rocked on the balls of my feet for a moment, unsure if I should light the candles in front of them, or whether this was for another time. But Kai gestured to the table again, and I stepped forward. With trembling hands, I struck one of the matches. Habit or maybe even tradition steadied my hand, and I lit both candles. I shook my wrist, extinguishing the match, and held my hands over the candles, whispering the prayers. My mind cleared slowly, the words bringing me out of myself and back into the present—whatever that was.

  I sank into a chair, hands clasped to my mouth, and watched the flames dancing at the end of the wicks. “You know what’s weird?”

  “What?” Kai asked, easing into a chair next to me and propping his feet up on the empty chair so Mitzi couldn’t sit down. She smacked him with a spatula and then set a plate of cookies in front of him.

  “A world where it’s illegal to practice my faith, but where magic exists,” I said quietly. “That’s not the world I knew. It’s like the reverse of everything I knew.”

  “There’s magic in your time too,” Mitzi said. “You just didn’t know about it.”

  Except, I did. My grandfather had told stories about magic my entire life, and I just hadn’t been listening. I’d loved the act of storytelling without giving particular weight to the stories, and now when I tried to remember them, I could only remember the one about the red balloon. The flames danced in front of me, shielded from the view of the front windows by the half wall dividing the kitchen and the living room. I’d said words that my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and everyone before them had said over twin flames.

  “How long?” I asked. “How long has there been magic and magical balloons?”

  Kai slid his feet off the chair, and Mitzi sat down across from me. They exchanged a look, and then Mitzi sighed. Her English was careful. “I don’t know the answer to the magic part. I imagine it’s always been around, showing itself in different ways. But the balloons, they started in the nineteen thirties as Hitler rose to power.”

  “So they came out of a specific need,” I clarified.

  Kai said something to Mitzi in German that I didn’t catch and then said to me, “This was one need, and one solution. I don’t know details—”

  “Because you haven’t asked,” I interjected.

  “—but I assume there’ve always been uses for magic,” he said, his gaze sharpening. “Why?”

  I shrugged, not knowing how to explain all of the tangled feelings inside my chest. How much it felt like home to light Shabbat candles here, very far from home in every possible way, and how strange it felt for magic to be real, to be everywhere I’d been without me experiencing it before the red balloon. That reaching for the balloon that day in the park and striking a match to light these candles had felt the same.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly into the silence.

  “Best thing to do for a muddy mind?” He stood up, brushing cookie crumbs from his pants. “A walk. Fresh air is good for people, no matter what decade they’re from.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Mitzi, and she rolled her eyes at Kai. “She really shouldn’t be going outside. This isn’t what I meant by cheering her up, Kai.”

  “We can’t keep her a prisoner. And you’re the one who wanted to do something to get her out of bed. Can’t have it both ways, Mitzi.”

  “I didn’t really imagine you’d be parading her in front of the Volkspolizei. She’s already been stopped once. How are you going to sweet-talk your way out of this one?” snapped Mitzi, uncrossing her arms. “You understand we can’t send her back where she belongs if she’s rotting in a Stasi prison!”

  Kai’s eyes flickered to me, like he remembered our conversation upstairs about not needing to go home if I were dead. He leaned over to Mitzi and kissed her forehead. “We’re going to Sebastianstrasse. We promise not to attract unnecessary attention, girl with the very blue hair.”

  Mitzi scowled at him. “You only call me that when you want to piss me off. It’s condescending.”

  “When did I last call you that?” Kai demanded.

  “When you broke up with Marie and I started dating her,” Mitzi said.

  I blinked, but Kai continued on as if this wasn’t a revelation. “I just think it’s weird to date someone with the same first name as you.”

  “Who’s jealous now? Besides, I don’t use my full name,” Mitzi said, her voice drier than the toast she often made me. “I have a name, Kai. Use it. I’m not some random girl at some club.”

  “And upstairs, you called me the saddest girl in the saddest city. You called me the girl with the terrible German accent when I arrived,” I pointed out to Kai.

  Mitzi tossed me a smug smile and crossed her arms. Maybe I was forgiven for distracting Kai from her and their work. “See? It’s a pattern.”

  “I promise to use your names almost always.” He pouted dramatically at Mitzi, who turned away, but I thought only to hide the smile on her face. He turned to me, stuffing a cookie into his mouth and saying around it, “Ready?”

  Boys of any time period were all the same. I rolled my eyes. “Where are we going?”


  “Adventure,” he said, cookie crumbles on his lips. I tried not to stare, but I failed miserably. When I thought of what Amanda would say, I blushed, and Kai grinned. Mitzi stared at both of us with raised eyebrows.

  Tearing my eyes off his mouth, I made a face. “I’ve had my share of adventure this month, thanks. Hit my quota. I have no more adventures. Can I go back to bed now?”

  He shook his head, a dark lock of hair slipping loose from the ponytail holder. “Nope. You’re up. You have momentum. Come on. The sun’s setting. You have to promise me something though,” Kai said, washing his hands. “Only speak German out there. Too dangerous. Allons-y!”

  “That’s French,” I said without thinking.

  “Is it?” Kai asked with wide eyes. “Oh no. I can’t believe all these years I’ve been speaking French in Germany. That explains how no one ever understood me.”

  I flushed again from being teased, but behind Kai’s back, Mitzi gave me a thumbs-up and a wink. Maybe I had misjudged her when I first arrived. I slid on a coat and took a scarf from the hooks by the door. Kai gave me his almost-smile. “Come on. Fresh air. Adventure. I swear we won’t get arrested.”

  “Inspiring,” I said, but followed him out the door anyway.

  Chapter Eight

  OUT AMONG GHOSTS

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, April 1988

  Ellie

  Outside, Kai said to me, “Tell me what you miss. Maybe we can find an equivalent here.”

  The answer came quickly, my days upstairs in bed finally paying off. “My phone. My bed. My friends. Shabbat. My mom taking silly pictures of our cat.”

  He ticked them off. “We have a phone, bed, and new friends. We did the candles, so we covered that…” He didn’t say Shabbat in public. I winced, realizing I probably shouldn’t have either. He continued, “I can’t help with your mom, but I’m sure we could find you a cat. There. Homesickness solved.”

  “Not quite. But thank you. For the candles. That meant a lot to me,” I said, breathing in the fresh air deeply. “I miss the internet. Wherever you are, if you have an internet connection, it’s like being home.”