Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  I took a deep breath. “Ashasher?”

  “Kai?” Sabina said, stepping out from behind a column where I hadn’t seen her and Aurora standing. She frowned. “What are you doing here?”

  “Why are you awake?” I asked, frowning at Aurora. Aurora’s hair was loose for once, a wild halo around her face, and she seemed distracted, her eyes following lines on a chalkboard. She didn’t acknowledge me in the least.

  “We’re troubled by equations,” Sabina said, turning back to Aurora. “We’re trying to solve everything that’s gone wrong in the world ever.”

  This was the version of my sister that couldn’t be trusted to make responsible life decisions. This was the version of my sister that I knew very well, the one who would jump from moving trains just to find out what it sounded like when she landed, the one who cut herself to see if she could see her blood change colors. The Schöpfers weren’t supposed to be encouraging this type of thought process though.

  Three o’clock in the morning, and my sister was talking about solving the world’s problems in a mathematical equation. I walked over to the blackboard and said, “What? You found the world’s problematique is solvable with a balloon and some pixie dust?”

  Sabina tilted her head and frowned at me, her eyes unfocused. “Problematique sounds like it’s from French.”

  “It is,” Aurora murmured and then tapped her chalk against the board. “I’m concerned about the distance of dissonance between two balloons with the same magical properties.”

  She might as well have spoken Latin to me. I rolled my eyes and said, “Aurora. I’m looking for Ashasher.”

  “We’re all looking for someone,” came her vague reply. She erased something on the chalkboard with the heel of her hand. She didn’t turn to me at all, but Sabina hadn’t stopped staring at me.

  I pressed my fingers to my forehead. “Are you two high? Did you get my sister high?”

  “I don’t need altering substances,” Sabina said. “My brain is wired alternatively already.”

  “True,” I agreed. I gestured for Sabina to nudge Aurora, but she didn’t move. “I need Ashasher.”

  “He isn’t here,” Aurora said, still not turning around. “No one who’s supposed to be here is here. Everyone who isn’t supposed to be here is here.”

  Whatever the hell she was smoking, I did not want it. I scribbled a note on a piece of paper:

  Ashasher,

  2nd Zeitreisender. Please find me immediately.

  KH

  “What do you need from him?” Sabina asked, watching me tape the note beneath Garrick’s photo.

  I brushed two fingers against his photo and then put the fingers to my lips. “There’s a second Zeitreisender.”

  Sabina and Aurora both turned to stare at me. “A second time traveler,” repeated Aurora like her words were made of glass.

  “Yeah. But this one was dead on arrival. I can’t figure out if our Passenger tonight is still alive.”

  “Did the light come on?” Aurora asked a little sharply, like she was coming down off her buzz. Sabina anxiously glanced back and forth between us, shifting her weight and wringing her hands. God, whatever they were on was a bad trip. I shrugged and nodded. Aurora turned away with a huff. “Then he is alive.”

  “Then another balloon went out tonight. This is our night. No one else is scheduled. Where is Ashasher?”

  “Undoubtedly working, as you should be. We will look into it. You may go home, Runner.” Aurora dismissed me by my title, right in front of my sister.

  I took a deep breath. They’re higher than kites right now. You can’t fix this now. Let it go, Kai. “Try not to let my sister wander off while you’re smoking whatever shit dope you found, Aurora. Good night.”

  “Temper, temper,” she murmured, but her voice carried all the way into the tunnels.

  When I returned home, the lights were off downstairs. I carefully unlaced my boots and took off my coat in the front hall.

  “Kai?” whispered Ellie, sitting up on the couch and startling me. I jumped and stumbled, hitting the wall and nearly falling over. She exhaled hard and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey,” I said, resisting the strange and immediate urge to go to her. “You just startled me.”

  “Did you find Ashasher?” she asked, stumbling over his name sleepily. God. This girl. She’ll be the death of me.

  “No,” I said, scared to leave the hallway. I didn’t even want to turn on the light. If I saw her, I’d want to hold her, or kiss her, or I didn’t even know what. “I left him a note.”

  “I’m sorry I left the house. But when I was following you—” she began to say.

  “Now that I’m back,” I said sharply. “Ellie. If we were ever picked up by the Stasi…”

  “I knew what I was doing,” she replied. She brushed her hair behind her ear, and my eyes followed the motion. I swallowed and nearly missed her next words. “Aurora was out there. She said she was worried about the balloons. She wanted to make sure your Passenger got off safely. He did, didn’t he?”

  I paused and then dismissed the brief thought. “Yes, he made it safely.”

  “Good.” Ellie’s hands twined in her lap. “Do you think it’s painful?”

  For a moment, I had no idea what she was talking about. Then it hit me. I whispered, “Dying?”

  “Do you think it hurt? For Garrick? For Dylan?”

  I didn’t ask how she knew the second guy’s name. She walked across the room until I could just see a glint of light across her face from the hall light at the top of the stairs. She looked older than sixteen for the first time since she’d come here.

  I said, “I think they died right away. They wouldn’t have felt anything.”

  Her lips twitched a little. “Are you saying that to make me feel better?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said, and rose on her tiptoes. She kissed me gently, her mouth soft and sure, just like her. I stood speechless in the hallway while she walked up the stairs. The door to her room clicked shut, and I heard the bed above me creak.

  I closed my eyes. Scheiße.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IF, THEN

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, April 1988

  Ellie

  Kai tried to slip out early in the morning, but I’d thought he might. I was in the kitchen making breakfast when I heard his feet on the stairs, the sound of his jacket sliding on, and the jingle of keys. I took a piece of toast with me as I headed toward the door, holding it in my mouth as I slid my arms into my coat in the front hallway. I wasn’t going to mention the kiss, but I also wasn’t going to let him pretend last night didn’t happen. His eyes weighed heavily on me, and for a moment, I thought he might not say anything at all. But it was Kai, and he couldn’t not say anything.

  “Ellie,” Kai said, his voice clear and steady despite the worry crisscrossing his face. “Please stay here. I have to go to work. I can’t…”

  He didn’t finish his sentence, and I didn’t ask him to elaborate. I buttoned up my coat and took the toast out of my mouth. Because I was not a teenage boy. “I’m not asking for permission anymore. I went out last night and returned home safe, didn’t I?”

  “Ellie, you found a body,” he pointed out, his hazel eyes more brown and green, wide and wary.

  “The body would have been there whether I had left the house or not,” I said and stepped toward the door. “It’s not Schrödinger’s body.”

  “El,” he said, and his hand wrapped around mine. I stilled as he stepped closer to me. His kind lie to me last night, my lips against his, everything distracting me from my purpose. I couldn’t get home if I didn’t figure out who was tampering with balloons. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Ellie is already a nickname,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth.

  I stared stubbornly at the door. He lowered his head so his face was dangerously close to mine. “What?”

  “El is not my name. Elea
nor or Ellie. Ellie’s already a nickname. It doesn’t need to be nicknamed any more.” I closed my mouth to prevent further babbling. It had sounded stronger in my head.

  “Okay,” he agreed, and brushed my hair behind my ear. He’s going to kiss me, I thought, but he didn’t. “You’re not going to look at me.”

  “No. Probably for the best. I’m trying to remember I’m mad at you for trying to make choices for me.”

  His laughter swam through my blood. “I have to go scout out a Passenger and then go to the workshop. I’m absolutely not taking you with me, but if we were leaving the house at the same time, and you just happened to come along, I can’t…wouldn’t…say no.”

  Relief brought the house, the closeness of him, and the rest of the world back into focus. I wanted to smile or laugh. Or look up and kiss him. Saba used to read me a book called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Apparently my future—ha!—biography would be titled If You Give a Girl a Magic Balloon. On page six, I’d kiss that tall, scowling guy who my parents would definitely disapprove of, but it’d be understandable because that’s what happened if you gave a girl a magic balloon.

  To be fair, Kai was rather kissable.

  But now was not the time for kissing. Instead, I lifted my chin and kept my eyes trained on the door. “Okay. On one condition.”

  “All right.”

  I stole a glance at him. “I have questions. You’ll answer them. No roundabout poetics or metaphors or anything that sidesteps the real answers.”

  He laughed, low and sweet, his breath warm and smelling like toast against my cheek. “You’re something else, Eleanor Baum. All right, I’ll answer your questions.”

  If you give a girl a magic balloon, she’ll become something else.

  He disappeared, and I waited by the door until he reappeared with a second piece of toast for me, his jacket on, and keys in hand. He opened the door, and we both stopped short at the police officer standing at the bottom of the steps.

  I’d forgotten about all of the risks in this world while I was busy flirting with Kai. But here, fear looked me right back in the eyes. The officer glanced at me, then Kai. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning,” Kai and I said back in unison, our voices stiff.

  He nodded to us and stepped out of the way. Kai locked the door behind us, and we walked past the officer. Kai’s hand slipped into mine, and our sweaty palms trembled between us. When we stepped around the corner, I almost doubled over with relief. Kai pulled me to the side, wrapping his arms around me. He kissed the side of my head. “You’re fine. We’re fine. Let’s just go.”

  I nodded against him. It was a reminder that the only people I could trust were him and Mitzi. Felix and the Schöpfers and the Volkspolizei and the Stasi…There were too many unknowns, and every doorway, every corner, every shadow held a threat.

  “Have you known people who were picked up by the Stasi?” I asked him.

  He hesitated and then said, “Is it going to make it worse to know?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Maybe.”

  His shoulder bumped mine lightly. “I know people. The ones who get out don’t like talking about it. They’re shadows of themselves. But we’re not going to let that happen to you, Ellie.”

  “I read that some spies in the Cold War carried cyanide pills with them,” I said. “We should do that.”

  “Or we can just be careful.” I heard the pause in his voice though. We both knew that caution might not be enough.

  It took a few minutes, but eventually, I relaxed until I finally came to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk. I lifted my face to the sky and opened my mouth, trying to pull as much of the warm spring air as possible into my lungs at once. The sunlight felt glorious and rejuvenating. When I opened my eyes and tried to watch where I was going, I could see Kai smiling out of the corner of my eyes. I lowered my face instantly. “What?”

  “Nothing.” He cleared the smile from his face. “Nothing.”

  We crossed the street and slipped south across the city. Every few blocks, I could see the wall to my right in the bareness of the area around it. Kai knew exactly where he was going.

  “How do you do it?” I finally asked. He gave me a sideways look with a raised eyebrow so I clarified. “All the unanswered questions. All of the unanswerable questions.”

  “You want answers. Go to the wall,” he said after a few beats of silence. I wasn’t sure he was ever going to answer me, and then the nonanswer frustrated me.

  “You said you’d answer straightforwardly.”

  “I’m not?”

  “You speak like the wall is a person.” I swung our hands in frustration. “Or like it’s a sage or a church or something.”

  “This city,” Kai said, “is allergic to trust. And desperate for it. Even cities want what they can’t have. The best we can do is trust the people around us and hope for the best.”

  I thought about that for a long moment. Here, it was hard not to look at everyone. It was hard not to want to touch everyone. Maybe that was why I didn’t mind Kai holding my hand. Maybe that was why Kai held my hand at all. In a city where most lived in miserable conditions, void of common courteous interactions, things began to feel false, like everything existed through panes of glass. I thought it was the way we—they—protected themselves from getting close to people who could inform on them.

  What oppression like this did was inhibit personal, individual connections. Personal connections created a community, and community wasn’t the opposite of individualism. We were collectively a whole made of millions and millions of moving parts, each of us our own gear interlocking with another gear and turning the world a little farther in the right direction.

  I wanted to stop everyone on the street, hug them, and whisper, The wall will come down, but the wall would come down and things wouldn’t get better, not right away. They’d built these walls within themselves, survival instinct embodied, and it would take more than a magical red balloon to carry these people onto the other side, no matter how resilient they were.

  I understood suddenly why Kai was so reticent and cautious, hot and cold, giving and taking, two steps forward and three steps backward. Fear was the foundation of all types of Walls, including the one to my right. I understood now. I understood him.

  We verified the identity of Kai’s next Passenger at the restaurant. She was six months pregnant out of wedlock. When she had begun to show, she’d lost her job as a teacher. When she couldn’t get another job, she became unemployed, which was illegal. She was arrested on charges that she was demonstrating and propagating antisocial behavior.

  I barely contained my anger, and anger was not my favorite feeling to carry.

  If you give a girl a magic balloon, she’ll rage against the machine.

  Kai laughed softly as we left the restaurant and headed north again. “Your mind is working so fast I can barely keep up, and it’s playing out on your face like a television screen.”

  “It’s stupid,” I spat out, grabbing for the only German word I knew to explain the absurdity of the woman’s predicament. A passerby glanced at me and stepped out of my way, his eyes following me. Kai grunted and pulled me down a side street, less crowded than the main road.

  “It’s East Germany,” he said.

  “Right now,” I started to say, about to tell him it would change, that the Monday protests started in a year, and in eighteen months, the wall would fall. The government would begin to dissolve into particles that, one day, I would again read about in history books. I closed my mouth around the words. I wasn’t supposed to talk about the future with them. That alone could change it.

  I growled in frustration. “Don’t you want to know?”

  He shrugged. “Sure I do.”

  “Things change, Kai,” I managed to say. I couldn’t give specifics. I didn’t want the guilt of changing history like that on my chest. “They change for the better. But it’s too late for a lot of people.”

  �
�It wouldn’t change if it wasn’t for those people, Ellie.” Kai flicked his fingers in the air. “Domino effect.”

  I chewed on my lip. “I guess.”

  But it didn’t feel like enough for me. That people had to suffer so that the wheels of history could turn. It didn’t feel fair. There had to be a way to help the people around me now, before the protests and the wall came down and reunification happened.

  Kai slipped his hand around mine again and pulled me toward a metal gate closing off a subway entrance. The German signs on the gates were faded, the paint peeling off, but I could read the words: Achtung! Betreten Verboten! Kai withdrew a key from his pocket and fit it into a lock.

  I blinked as the gate hummed, high-pitched and in tune, something I almost knew, and then there was a soft click. Kai pushed the iron gate open. I was about to refuse to walk into the dark with him when he said quietly, “Geisterbahnhof.”

  I stared at him in the dimly lit stairs. “What?”

  He slipped the key back into his pocket. “Ghost stations. The trains from West Berlin go through, but they do not stop here. Come.”

  At the base of the flight of stairs were a poorly lit hallway, columns, and walls of thin, crumbling tiles that had been white at one point. A sign on the wall warned passengers to stand back from the tracks, and a large, faded sign said, Potsdamer Platz.

  I stopped in my tracks. “I’ve been in this station.”

  We stood next to each other, staring at the sign, dripping snow onto the floor, trembling from adrenaline and the cold, hand in hand. The sign was bent and broken around the edges, black with white lettering, and the subway station was not at all what I remembered. The one I had passed through was clean and bright, the floors and walls and ceiling in good repair, and the sign was large and proud. The announcements for trains came regularly, and the platform had been packed with people from all over the world. Moment by moment, I swung between believing that I came here by some stroke of magic and time mix-up, and believing I was in a dream.