Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

“We should try to find the dead Passengers,” Kai said, but he sounded exhausted, and some train stop beyond sad. Despondent, maybe.

  Softly, I said, “No, Kai. Leave that to Felix. We should go home.”

  “Find me if you find anything more,” Felix said. “It’s better if the focus isn’t on you so much. I’ll try not to put you in danger. Kai, is she…?”

  I blinked, but they weren’t talking about me. Kai shook his head. “I don’t know. I am afraid to talk to her. It’s hard when she—”

  “It’s fine,” said Felix, his voice soft, as if he were trying to comfort Kai without ever touching him. “It’s probably wise not to trust her right now.”

  “Good night,” Kai said, cutting the conversation short.

  “Gute nacht,” said Felix, and he saluted us in his own peculiar way, three fingers to his lips, before walking off into the dark.

  We waited until the dark swallowed him before we went home. The walk was dark and quiet, Kai’s fear heavy in the air around us. It took up all the air. I looked up at the sky and thought about an alley full of red balloons and dead-quiet bodies.

  Silently, I said the Mourner’s Kaddish for them, saying the last few lines aloud. “Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu: v’al kol Yisrael. V’imru, Amen.”

  Kai startled me when he echoed, “Amen.”

  Chapter Twenty–Four

  DAYENU

  Łódź Ghetto, Poland, April 1942

  Benno

  Our wedding invitation, the relocation notice, came a week after Passover. We had done seders in secret, and for the first time in two years, I sang the Four Questions, usually reserved for the youngest child of the family. I had taught them to Ruthie years ago, just when she should have started school. Her birthday was during Passover. It had always been a special week for her, and she loved singing the question: Why is this night different from all other nights? I chanted the Hebrew, thinking the night wasn’t different at all.

  But it was different. Rebekah’s father was still at the ghetto and he hugged me, just as a father would a son. And in the basement of one of the buildings, there were twenty-four of us, six times the legal number to be gathered. I imagined us back in Egypt, slaves hiding and whispering ancient prayers in secret. I imagined us being taken away by Pharaoh’s army, executed in front of everyone to send a message.

  And then, when I thought about it, when I heard my mama whispering her part of the Haggadah, sounding tired but hopeful for the first time since she lost her husband and her daughter in the same two-week span, I thought I’d like to send that message. I knew we weren’t supposed to seek martyrdom, but if it came looking for me, I’d accept it. I’d die for this cause.

  Last year, when we were celebrating Pesach in relative freedom, we only sang a few stanzas of “Dayenu.” But this time, Chaim Eiderman, who led the service, said we’d sing all fifteen parts.

  His voice was hoarse, and he was bent over, his knuckles broken and cracked, his black coat hanging around his thin shoulders, but over the light of the candles, he said, “G-d bestowed fifteen gifts upon our ancestors. May he repeat the miracle we witnessed in the land of Mitzrayim here in Łódź.”

  The first five stanzas of “Dayenu” were about God freeing the slaves. The second five were about the miracles God performed, and the final five were about being with God. Chaim taught us all of them, painstakingly, one by one, risking his life and our lives the longer we were down there, but every time we whispered Dayenu—“It would have been enough”—the knots in my chest unraveled a little bit further. When we sang the last line, Ilu hichnisanu l’eretz yisrael, v’lo vanah lanu et beit hamikdash—Dayenu! I cried.

  I wept like a child.

  It would have been enough.

  It would have been enough.

  That night, I lay in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling. Why hadn’t a miracle happened here? What had we done wrong? Had the Jews in Egypt asked themselves the same thing? Did they also think God had abandoned them? Had it only been Moses, the speech-impaired shepherd, who had brought back their faith, wrapped up in their hope for freedom?

  Is that what faith is? The tangible hope for freedom? Was I a bad Jew, a poor practitioner of faith, because I no longer believed that I would be free? That I believed God had forsaken us in our greatest time of need?

  When I dreamed, I dreamed that I woke and the sun was shining, hot enough that the mud dried up in the ghetto, and when the bread truck came, it had a loaf for Mama and me both. When we went to work, our supervisor let us out early, without penalty, just because the sun was shining. As I walked home through the streets, Rebekah came out of her father’s house and slipped her tiny, warm hand into mine.

  “They took you away,” I said to her, bewildered, looking around for someone who would come to take her away from me again.

  She said, “They let me come home, because she’s coming.”

  “Who’s coming?”

  Rebekah smiled. I loved her smile. Her teeth bit her bottom lip, like she was afraid to be too happy. “She’s going to lead us out. She’ll part the Nazis like the Red Sea.”

  And as we walked, others came out of their houses, everyone dressed in their Shabbat clothes, all clean and washed up. People were singing “Dayenu” and holding hands. A few people linked arms, running, laughing, and shrieking, straight down the middle of the growing crowd. My mama came out of the hat-making factory and walked next to Rebekah and me.

  She said, “Do you think Ruth and Papa are waiting for us? Do you think Ernst is?”

  I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and said, “Yes.”

  I don’t know why I felt so sure, but I did. Wherever Rebekah and the others were going, whatever was happening, it was a miracle. My sister and my brother would come back to me, and my papa too. We were going to leave Łódź, walk through the fence and the guards, and then the fences would close around them, electric and barbed, wrapping them up, jailing them, just like the sea toppled the Egyptian army.

  When we reached the fence by the cemetery, the girl from the other side stood in a huge gap in the fence. She wore her purple dress, and her dog sat at her side. She held in her hand a red balloon, just like the luftballon Ruthie and I saw from the train.

  We walked toward her and she said, “Benno Hirsch. Dayenu.”

  Waking up made me want to die.

  Chapter Twenty–Five

  CONNECTING THE DOTS

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, May 1988

  Kai

  I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop moving. If I stopped moving, I was pretty sure I’d fall apart—and I didn’t have time to fall apart. None of us had the time, but I was the only one teetering on the edge. If this fell apart, if the balloons were bad, then I had to get Sabina out. But how? And I couldn’t leave Ellie and Mitzi behind. Not after everything.

  Ellie and I didn’t talk the whole way home, and when we got there, Mitzi was sitting on the bottom step, a beer in her hands, her eyes flat and vacant. I probably shouldn’t have let her check all those bodies. Mitz didn’t fall apart. She just shut down like a goddamn border crossing in protest.

  I paced the living room, staring at the papers on the floor. Not enough evidence, Felix had said. But this was all we had.

  I rubbed my face and then stopped, trying to rearrange the papers with my mind and find any clue to attach Aurora to the broken balloons. Or the not-broken balloons. It took me a few hours that night, long after Ellie had tired of watching me from the couch and had retired upstairs to her bed, to realize that there were two components to preventing what had happened tonight from happening again.

  First, we needed to find evidence connecting the balloons to one of the Schöpfers.

  Second, we needed to find motivation. Was it deliberate, or was it accidental? If it was accidental, how was the magic going so wrong? If it was deliberate, what was the intended purpose of the balloons? Why was someone releasing balloons so late in secret? Why were the balloons
undocumented?

  The more steps I took back and forth across the room, the more questions I had. There were no easy answers. The sketches told me nothing. Aurora, if it was her, was playing her cards close to her chest. If it was Ashasher, my gut told me we’d never catch him. He’d end us with one of those feathers of his, or he’d be out of the country with all the evidence as soon as he knew we were on to him. They could both lie through their teeth and I’d believe them. We’d all believe them. We’d never had cause to doubt them before now.

  Like Felix, I realized that it could only be those two. They were the only two Schöpfers who were experienced enough to write new magic, magic that wasn’t invented, magic that was only theory—and illegal theory at that. They were the only two Schöpfers willing to risk their jobs too.

  Ashasher had once fought tooth and nail for a Passenger who was denied on the grounds that she was an unaccompanied minor. He sent her over the wall—I ran the balloon—anyway. I got in trouble, but he got censored for a whole month. He lost out on helping four people over the wall for that one little girl. I asked him if she was worth it, and he said he could never know the answer to that, but he could sleep at night and that was enough.

  I didn’t have enough information to solve the problem in front of us. And that didn’t matter anymore. We were out of time to collect information. The problem was snowballing, and we needed to figure out how to stop it before we had thirty-two dead people on the streets next week. For a brief moment, I considered burning the whole damn workshop. But if the equations were on Aurora or Ashasher’s person, then that’d do no good at all. Almost all of the balloon supplies were in the workshop, but the Council, with Aurora and Ashasher at the head of it, wouldn’t be so inefficient as not to have backup balloons and writing utensils elsewhere. The Stasi could burn the workshop as well as I could.

  For a heartbeat, I thought about that too. About telling the Stasi. I’d be lauded as a hero and be granted immunity forever. I might even be able to keep Sabina safe. But no, I couldn’t. I didn’t give a fuck about the Schöpfers, but they kept all the records of our Passengers. I couldn’t do that to the people who were applying and had applied and were just waiting for a balloon. I couldn’t turn them into the ghosts of East Berlin.

  “I need more information,” I whispered. It kept coming back to that.

  “Want to know what I think?” Mitzi asked, scaring the shit out of me from the stairs. She sat there, wrapped in a blanket. I wondered how long she had been there. She stood sleepily and shuffled into the living room, carefully stepping over my piles of paper. We stood shoulder to shoulder, eyeing the mess. “I think that we have all the information. We just haven’t put it together yet.”

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  Mitzi shrugged, her arm moving up and down next to mine. “I don’t know. In our heads.”

  “They taught us everything, Mitz,” I said. When I said that to Ellie and Felix, they didn’t seem to get it.

  But now Mitzi turned to me, and I knew she understood. Her mouth tilted up, tight in the constraints of her sadness. “Yeah. Weird, isn’t it? Like, I don’t know. I’ve been running balloons for four years. And we’ve done two years together, all underneath someone who is betraying everything we were taught to hold dear.”

  “I don’t hold them dear,” I said. “They’re keeping Sabina safe, that’s all.”

  “Are they?” Mitzi asked.

  I flinched and said, “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “You’re serious? Of course I know what I’m saying, Kai. I’m saying that you were trying to keep Sabina away from people in Zerberus who wanted to pry open her brain and people who think she’s fucked in the head. She was supposed to be safe here where the Zerberus barely notice the Schöpfers, but we ended up under the magnifying glass of the Zerberus in the most dangerous city in the world. You think she’s any safer here now than she was in London? What are you smoking, and where can I get some?” Mitzi’s eyes flashed like a storm, and each word punched home a little harder than the previous one.

  I scrubbed at my face and sighed. “You think I should take her out of here.”

  “Before it gets bad,” Mitzi said softly. “If there are more bodies, the Stasi will put a curfew into effect and make traveling really difficult. You can get out now.”

  She was right. Sabina and I didn’t have East German papers. We had visas stapled to our UK passports. We should have been getting them renewed every thirty days, but given that we lived here now, the Schöpfers used a stolen stamp to keep them up to date. It wouldn’t be a problem for us to leave. And yet. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. What I would do. I sank onto the couch and Mitzi sat down next to me, throwing her blanket around my shoulders. We leaned against each other, heads touching, and stared at the piles of papers.

  “Just something to think about, Kai,” Mitzi murmured, touching my knee with her fingers. “If something happened to her, you would…God, Kai, could you do it? Could you survive it?”

  There was no question. I shook my head. “Where would we go?”

  “Get out. Far away from anywhere with these fucking balloons. A cottage in the Swiss mountains. Don’t let her write magic. Tell everyone she’s sick.”

  “She’s not sick,” I said. “That’s the best part of being here. No one calls her sick. No one says that she’d be better off dead because her brain’s so different, because her blood lets her do magic. They just let her be herself, Mitzi. How can I take her away from that?”

  “Because whoever’s doing this might kill her to punish you if you get too close to the truth. I can look for it. What are they going to do to me if you’re gone?”

  I turned my head and kissed the side of Mitzi’s head. She was too good for me. Mitzi was the only one who never called me racial slurs in class. She was the only one who would be my partner when I was done training. And I wasn’t scared of her. Her bark was much worse than her bite.

  “Are you going to sleep tonight?”

  I shook my head against hers. “I can’t.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to make us some tea. Sugar?”

  Chapter Twenty–Six

  THE LETTING GO

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, May 1988

  Ellie

  The morning after all the dead bodies and balloons in the street was eerily quiet. I came downstairs to Kai passed out on the couch under a pile of papers and Mitzi asleep at the table, drooling onto one of the sketches. I carefully moved it out from underneath her face and put the kettle on the stove. They wouldn’t sleep too long, not with the sunlight pouring through the front windows, creeping steadily closer to Kai’s face. They’d want tea when they woke.

  I sliced bread and popped it into the toaster and straightened all of the papers, figuring if they were in such a mess underneath Kai and on top of him, they couldn’t possibly be in a particular order. I stacked them on the coffee table and dragged it back into the middle of the living room.

  The kettle whistled, and Kai jolted upright on the couch, wide-eyed and alert. I stepped away from him, holding up my hands. “Just the kettle.”

  He slumped forward, pressing his face into his hands. “I thought it was the Stasi. I thought they’d finally come.”

  I wanted to touch him. I didn’t know where we were after last night, and now wasn’t the time to figure that out, but I didn’t know what to do with the need clawing at my bones. The need that said the way to comfort him was to reach out and touch him. Not even kiss him or any other kind of touching other than my fingertips on his cheeks, absorbing the bloodshot from his eyes and the tired circles curling from his tear ducts toward his cheekbones.

  I placed one of my paper doves next to him and he smiled, picking it up without seeing it. When his fingers touched it, the wings stopped. When I touched it, the wings beat to the rhythm of my heartbeat. Mitzi never picked them up. She said she didn’t need to know what would happen.

  “Thanks,”
he said softly, his eyes trained on the paper wings.

  Sponge, he had called me. I understood now. I wanted to absorb it all, take it away from him, so he could be the mirror to the world. He was so bright sometimes. He only reflected back at the world what existed. In this much darkness, he was reflecting dark. I saw the shadows in the irises of his eyes and my heart beat faster, sweat gathering in the lines of my palms.

  I retreated to the kitchen and slid the kettle off the stove, silencing the awful noise, but my eardrums vibrated even in its absence. Kai dragged himself into the kitchen and sank into a seat at the table. He hesitated, opening a hand to me, and I stepped toward him, unsure of what he was asking. But he only looped his arm around my legs and rested his head against my hip bone. I put a hand on top of his dark hair.

  “You slept well,” he said.

  “One of us had to,” I said, smiling despite myself. “Did you find anything?”

  “No,” he mumbled. “The toast is burning.”

  He wasn’t wrong. I had to untangle myself from his arm to free the bread before the smoke became too much of a problem. I dropped two more pieces of toast into the toaster and leaned against the counter.

  Kai put his head down on the table, staring at Mitzi. “She has this miraculous ability to sleep through anything. Why couldn’t she share that with me?”

  “It’s a family trait. One of my many gifts,” Mitzi said, her eyes still closed.

  “Put it on your résumé,” I said. “Employers love that.”

  Mitzi grinned. “Spoken like a true capitalist. Always thinking about how to turn something into a rung on the ladder.”

  I had been sarcastic, but maybe Mitzi was too. I couldn’t tell sometimes. I tossed two pieces of toast on a plate and slid it to her first, making Kai’s face twist into false wounded pride. Mitzi barely lifted her head as she grabbed the toast and ate while half asleep.

  Kai got the next two pieces, and then I sat down last. He reached over, stole one of my pieces of toast and, before I could cry foul, buttered it and returned it to me. “You don’t have the patience to butter toast without breaking the bread.”