Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  “I don’t know what that is. I don’t think we have that yet,” he said cheerfully.

  I frowned, trying to keep with his long strides. “Should I not mention things that don’t exist? I don’t even know when the internet was invented.”

  “My point is that as long as you’re here, I’m sure we can find things that will help,” he said quietly. “But you must try not to turn into a ghost. Understand?”

  I’d thought I wasn’t nearly that transparent, and now I fought to keep the telltale guilty blush off my face at being so easily read. I kept my hands in my pockets, avoiding eye contact with everyone around me. My heart pounded in my palms. “Ja.”

  “Home is a fantasie,” he said after another block. “We make up our homes and our ideas of home. Some days, I can’t even bear all the guilt I feel at finding my home in a city that nearly everyone wants to leave.”

  I almost asked him what he meant, but when I glanced up at him, his face was closed and tight. Was that what he meant in knowing as much about ghosts as I did?

  As we walked through streets, he would occasionally pause and casually name whatever we were standing next to or looking at. He never pointed, and I guess he didn’t want to draw attention to us, though no one gave us a second glance. The clothes Mitzi loaned me let passersby’s eyes glide right over me, so they didn’t even notice that Kai was teaching me German. Some of the words I knew and others I didn’t. The language lesson made no sense, unless he believed I’d need to know these words because I’d be staying long enough, and I dismissed that thought immediately. The chances of me walking around alone were about as low as my chances of learning to spell freundschaftsbezeigungen.

  “What’s the point?” I finally asked him, stopping in the street. “Of going on. If it was an accident that I’m here, and you don’t know how to send me back, then what’s the point?”

  He gestured with his hand. “Come on.”

  We turned a corner and stopped immediately, my heart clutching my throat with clawed fingers. The wall. The Berlin Wall. Thin and concrete, razor wire in big lazy loops on the top of it.

  “This isn’t…” I managed to say before I swallowed and tried again. “This isn’t how I thought it’d look.”

  Kai spoke right against my ear, the words for me and me alone. “There’s this wall, then bare land for meters until the Berlin Wall. We call the middle land the death zone. There are few ways to leave here, but the balloons offer a chance to the most at-risk people.”

  Guards everywhere, and cars waiting in a long line to pass through the checkpoint. Police patrolled the area, their olive-green uniforms making me shake a little bit. Don’t get caught. Can’t get caught. Kai’s hand settled on my back and I jumped, nearly bursting into tears from adrenaline that couldn’t spike any higher in my body.

  His lips nearly brushed my ear, and his breath was warmer than the wool around my throat. I closed my eyes. “We live in a prison. We help people escape to the West, to freedom. We are helpers. And, Ellie, so help me, we’re going to get you home.”

  Home is a fantasy, he’d said, but he kept promising to get me home. I didn’t know which words to trust, where to place my faith, and it took me a few minutes to compose myself. I made myself look at the wall, the same way I made myself look at memorials. Bear witness, we always said, and here I bore witness not to the memorial but to the wall in real life.

  All the facts in history books couldn’t prepare someone for standing in a place where history was present tense. I knew about the wall from reading for the trip. I knew that the wall came down in 1989 after the German Democratic Republic, the official name for East Germany, was forced to follow the rest of the Eastern Bloc’s liberalization. They had been resistant to the Soviet Union’s new policies of glasnost and perestroika, or openness and transparency, combined with economic and governmental reforms.

  Openness and transparency didn’t fit so well with Communism, it turned out.

  There was no gum on this Wall. Just a quiet sort of despair, dusty gray and sharp. It reminded me of the apartment buildings hanging around the Karl-Marx-Allee. I had never seen this side of the wall. Every picture I had seen showed graffiti.

  “I’ve always seen it with art,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  Kai turned to me slightly. “Art?”

  I didn’t know the German word for graffiti. “Street art.”

  His eyes brightened, and my heart skipped a beat. “On the West side?”

  “It must be,” I said, shaking my head. “You can’t even get to the wall here, can you?”

  “Not for lack of people trying.” Kai’s eyes were cool, the gold in them dimming as they watched the guards move back and forth up the line of cars.

  “If they’re going to die, why do they try?”

  “You have not found something you wanted so badly that you’d die for it?” he asked, his eyes never leaving the wall.

  It took me a moment, but the only way I could answer was admitting the truth. “No.”

  Kai’s shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “Everyone calculates their own risks.”

  Walking out the front door this afternoon had felt like a calculated risk. I didn’t tell him that though. I just stood there for a long time, watching him watch the wall until I could figure out what I wanted to ask him. “What if we were caught?”

  His head snapped on a swivel, even though we were on an empty street, and I bit my lip, looking down shamefaced. I should have known that was a risky question to ask, even in German. The last thing we needed was to attract the attention of a police officer. Kai shook his head slightly.

  “There are things you can’t say out here. But I promise you, we won’t be.”

  “If we were?” I asked again.

  “It wouldn’t be good,” he said finally.

  I knew that much, but he’d dodged the question twice so I decided to let it drop. Two police officers wandered toward us, their gait too deliberately casual, so Kai touched my elbow and we began to walk again, parallel to the wall. The sun was beginning to dip behind the rooflines, sending warm light over the glittering, wet streets and up the sides of the buildings. The neighborhood we entered had narrower streets with overbearing rectangular, concrete postwar apartment buildings, like they’d been built using the same footprint as the rubble of the destroyed ones.

  Someone once told me that the Allied forces had dropped more tonnage of bombs on Germany in World War II than the total tonnage of bombs dropped anywhere else by anyone else in the war. I could believe it. I tried to imagine the city without the new buildings, as ugly as they were. It must have looked as if the streets were gap-toothed, as if Europe’s twentieth-century troubles had been nothing but a state-level bar fight.

  As the streetlamps flickered on, we wove through crowds of people, past historic old buildings with repaired facades, past Soviet-style gray administration buildings, past dozens of apartment buildings. Though my legs ached from all the walking, I didn’t want to stop and Kai seemed to understand. We wandered, our shadows absorbed into the low light of night. A steady drizzle started up, but we just pulled up our hoods and kept walking. I thought about what he’d said about finding safety and pleasure in a place that was nothing but pain for so many other people. He felt the same way about escaping to East Berlin that I felt about coming to Germany at all. Guilt.

  “So how do you bear it?” I asked him when we weren’t near people who could hear my accent. His brow furrowed in confusion, though he didn’t look at me. I clarified. “You seem to love what you do, despite where you are, but everything you do is a secret. No one will ever know how many lives you save.”

  “The people never mentioned in history books still made history,” he replied, his voice calm and even. “Whenever I doubt myself, I remind myself of that.”

  I wanted to tell him that people would write books about boys like him one day, boys who lived in fairy tales and changed the course of human history and human imagination. But then I r
ealized he was right. They wouldn’t write about magic balloons or Kai or Mitzi or anyone else here. No one would ever know what I already knew and had to accept as fact. What happened to all the people the Schöpfers and the Runners helped? How did they tell their story? Did they keep a secret until they began to lose their mind to dementia, the story coming out in fantastical memories that couldn’t be real?

  Part of me was angry for those people, those hundreds or thousands of people living in my day who knew that magic exists but were forced to remain silent. Like my grandfather remembering a girl with a red balloon who saved him from a death camp.

  “My grandfather,” I said haltingly. “He kept it a secret. No one knew how he escaped Chełmno. My mother looked it up. The records show he was on the train out of Łódź, and then he disappeared. When people asked him, he said he was lucky. That G-d had chosen him for saving. But he told me stories. One of those stories was of a girl with a red balloon who saved him.”

  Kai looked sideways at me as he led me to an apartment building. His gaze was partly obscured by his hood, and it reminded me of the night I met him. “No one believed him.”

  I inhaled, breathing in the cool night air, the sound of rain splattering on wet pavement. “I did. When I was little. But when his stories started getting mixed up, I started to wonder if any of his stories had been true.”

  “I miss believing,” Kai said, his voice dropping so low I nearly missed his words. Then suddenly, he reached for my hand, yanking me into the shadows beneath a fire escape. Police. I twisted against Kai and looked for the telltale gleaming boots and distinct uniforms, but the streets seemed empty. Then, on the other side of the street, three dark silhouettes turned the corner and walked with a red balloon west toward the wall. The balloon looked exactly like mine, waving around in the light rain as if it understood its mission.

  “Let go,” I whispered. It wasn’t the police. So why was Kai still keeping us in the dark?

  He shook his head and held a finger up to his lips. His grip on my hand remained tight and painful, and his arm trembled a bit. The tallest of the three figures handed over the red balloon, and the second person wrapped their hand around the string. In a blink, the second person was gone, invisible.

  Through the drizzle, we watched the remaining two turn toward the wall, and when I glanced at Kai, his gaze followed theirs. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  I squinted into the dark. “Can you see it? The balloon, I mean.”

  He shook his head, raindrops flying. “No. When the Passenger takes the balloon, it becomes invisible to the naked eye. Only the Schöpfer who made it can see it now because their blood is in the magic too. We know that they make it to the other side when a light in that church goes on.”

  “How do they know when to let go?” I asked.

  Kai’s eyes watched the other two people left on the street. “Passengers can see everything, and here, the Schöpfers only write the balloons to be higher than the guard towers. So they know when they reach the church. The magic is specific enough to control all of that.”

  But he stopped talking as the other two people began to walk back down the street. If Kai and Mitzi were balloon Runners, then the pair accompanying this balloon must have been too. They were both dressed in dark colors, and the taller one wore a lighter colored scarf, maybe purple or light blue. She clearly led the way, and the smaller person trailed behind as they turned away from the wall. Their footsteps slapped against the wet sidewalk as they walked down the street right by us. I kept waiting for Kai to call out to them, but he stayed silent, gripping my hand so tightly I nearly cried out. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was protecting or hiding me. They weren’t the same thing. Not at all.

  Instead, his frown deepened. “Shouldn’t be any balloons going over the wall tonight. But it went over safely, so it can’t have been broken. Your balloon…I’ve never had that happen before.”

  “Magic and balloons,” I whispered, shivering from the cold and the dark. “And Walls and time.”

  Kai’s voice was low and sad. “The things that get us out and the things that keep us in.”

  Chapter Nine

  THERE ARE NO MACCABEES HERE

  Łódź Ghetto, Poland, 1941

  Benno

  The day after I went to the fence and whispered to the girl on the outside, a man was shot for walking too close to the fence on his way to synagogue. At home, only Papa, Ernst, and I went to Shabbat services, and we were not very religious. But here, we clung to the synagogue like it was keeping us alive, and maybe it was. Papa knew the man who was shot. We spent Shabbat services reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, over and over. Yitgadal v’yitkadash…

  His name was Benjamin Ginsburg. May his memory be a blessing, we said that day. What we really meant was May his death be a warning, may his memory not be in vain. I did not go to the fence that day.

  Ruth was thin, but wavered on. I brought her home my soup. Mama cried and scolded me, but took it from my hands anyway to feed to my sister. Ruth’s hands shook too hard when she coughed. She would waste the soup.

  Our days were marked by the time before and the time after we received our daily soup. Our weeks were marked by the loaves of bread we received. We were supposed to receive three loaves of bread because Papa, Mama, and I were all working. But instead, we would get one, or two. Almost never three. Sunsets and sunrises meant nothing to us anymore. Even Shabbat became the day before we got more bread. We said prayers on empty stomachs to a G-d who didn’t seem to be listening to us.

  A few days after Benjamin died, I made it to the fence without getting shot. The search lights pooled past me and I crouched, counting the seconds before I could run to the corner. It was a crapshoot, a wishful guess, and an impossible hope. And yet, by the fence, in the grass, there was a small brown bottle of liquid. Penned on the label: For the sad boy’s sister. Administer two drops two to three times a day.

  I ran as fast as I could. Up the stairs into the tiny apartment, one room with a curtain dividing it, like this was a place I could call home. But my parents were there, and my sister was there, and that was enough. Home, without running water, without hot water, with broken windows and thin walls so we could hear the neighbors roll over in their sleep. Home, where my sister lay, a bag of bones beneath a blanket, shivering and coughing.

  When I handed over the medicine, my only thought was: If this doesn’t work…

  She couldn’t die. Not Ruth. She was bright and vivid, and when she smiled in my memories, the sun slipped free of the clouds.

  Mama and Papa fought over the medicine. Mama didn’t want to trust it. She said it could be arsenic. She said no one outside the fence wanted Jewish children to survive. Papa said Ruth was going to die if it was arsenic, and die if it wasn’t, and on the off chance it wasn’t arsenic, it was her only chance to live. They fought and shouted for hours, until I thought either I’d kill myself to escape that noise, or someone would come to take the medicine that everyone must have known we had by then.

  We gave Ruthie the medicine. And day by day, she grew stronger. I remembered the girl at the fence, throwing sticks for the dog. She’d said she didn’t have medicine, but that she had magic. Maybe she had a little bit of both.

  Ruthie recovering was a sigh of relief for us, and slowly, we adjusted to life at Łódź. Adjusted did not mean giving up. We adjusted. We worked twelve hours a day and grew used to being hungry. But then there was music, and art—quietly, of course, because we were forbidden to meet in groups—and then Rebekah arrived.

  The last of the Berliner Jews arrived by train in November, and on the train was Rebekah. Inga from our old neighborhood who had once kissed my brother Ernst behind the schoolyard came running down the street to tell me. I could have kissed her, but I wanted too much to see Rebekah.

  She was tired and sad, but she smiled wider than the ocean when she saw me. I hugged her, even though her father glared in disapproval at us, and whispered to her that life wasn’t so bad no
w that she was there. She whispered back that she was afraid, so afraid. Her mother wasn’t with them. She had been sick, so the Gestapo held her in a different camp to recover before she came here. I didn’t tell Rebekah what I feared. The sickness was already here. Her mother wasn’t coming.

  Rebekah and I joined a youth group where we sang Yiddish songs and dreamed of Palestine, a Jewish homeland, and quietly, where others couldn’t see us, we walked home hand in hand. It was a relief, this small sense of normalcy. We might live in an overcrowded miniature city, but we were still teenagers. We had friends at work and people we avoided.

  Our neighborhoods became our homes. I resisted, but slowly, the memory of our house in Berlin faded and was replaced by our apartment in Łódź, the mud, the stench, the ache in my stomach.

  Rebekah’s family was assigned to the other side of the ghetto, closer to the Gypsies, because that was where there had been room for newcomers. That was where the last people sent away on trains had lived. When I realized that, I couldn’t sleep for a few nights. Our homes were made of ghosts.

  The walk back from Rebekah’s place was long, quiet, and dangerous. When I came home late at night, only hours before work started again, Mama and Papa were already in bed. But Ruthie sometimes woke when I came home.

  “Is she pretty?” Ruthie asked me.

  “You don’t remember Rebekah?” I whispered back. I didn’t know why I asked her this. I was beginning to forget what life had been like before too. “I’d say she was the prettiest girl in the whole world, but the prettiest girl is right here. The prettiest girl needs to go back to sleep.”

  “What if you marry her? Will she move here? Where will we go?” Ruth wanted to know.

  I didn’t have any of the answers. And when I kissed Rebekah one night, just before Hanukkah started, she asked me the same questions. I didn’t have any better answers then, but the answers came to us.

  They, the Nazis and Chaim Rumkowski, began deportations that December. Hundreds of people at once, herded back onto trains, disappearing into the ether. First were the Gypsies. Groups of quiet-eyed people with long shawls wrapped around them, marching proud and silent to the trains. The Nazis instituted a curfew and searched the apartments one by one when people did not report. Their names were on lists, and they were brought by gunpoint to the trains. They were shot if they tried to flee.