Going Over (10 page)

You tossed the first handful of dirt. You heard the echo splatter through the empty spaces of the empty coffin. Your grandmother offered a single rose. The pastor raised his hands, the birds flew, the snow fell. Later you would wonder what had happened to the rose, but now, standing here on the balcony looking out over the snow, you remember how you couldn't save him, couldn't save your grandmother, how two years had gone by since the last time you'd seen him, two years and all your unanswered questions. “Put it to rest,” they had told your grandmother. “Put it to rest,” she had told you. But her eyes were small black fish inside two big oceans, and she could barely keep her hand in yours, and you were the man of the house; you remember.

The bells tolled. The pastor lowered his hands. The birds flew back into the trees. The snow fell. And when you turned around there were only four now on the other side of the wall—Ada and her mother and her grandmother and another woman, too, in a bright blue coat. She had blond hair, long curls, blue eyes. She had a fern pressed to her chest, a shine on her shoes despite the weather.

“Tanja?” your grandmother said. “Tanja?” Her mouth fallen open and her teeth starting to chatter, a goose in her throat.

“Tanja!” She screamed it louder than any word you'd ever heard. She dropped your hand—tossed it away. She ran between the tombstones, beneath the trees, beneath the birds, beneath the snow that was flying again—ran right up to the
edge of the first wall, the dividing line. Flying. Falling. Crash. But now Tanja was running, too, running away through West Berlin. The shine on her shoes was running. The bright blue coat. The hair like your hair—blond and curly. When your grandmother reached the wall—the signal fence, the concertina wire, the spaces in between, the division, the watchtower down the way, also above—there was no going on, there was nothing. There was Ada's grandmother reaching for your grandmother, but their arms couldn't touch, and there was your mother, running. It was the last time you would ever see her. It was the last time, and after that, the letters stopped, the small things she might send, the birthday cards. Her love.

“But where did she go?” Ada asks all the time.

“Free,” you say. “She's free.” And you hope Ada understands, takes it all in, does a little math on the bigger picture. You wish that she would. You leave or you stay. You're free or you're not.

There are always consequences.

“It's good,” Omi says. “We already tried it.”

“
She
already tried it,” Mutti says. “
I
said we should wait.”

I look from one to the other, each of them small in their own way and now, each of them glistening with white.

“How are you, Ada?” Mutti asks.

“She's better,” Arabelle answers.

“Better,” I parrot. Because the truth is that I fell back to sleep, that I'm not even sure what I dreamed and what I didn't. Maybe Gretchen came and went. There's noise past the doorway, down the long, dark hall. The black cat crying.

My mother's eyes are dark. It's like the storm has clocked her forward forty years. The crystal fur in her hair. The hard lines where the wind blew in. She's left her boots by the door and there's a lake of melt beneath them. The tip of her nose is the first edge of a flame. The skin beneath her eyes is purple
shadows. She sits at the ridge of the couch with her coat zippered on while Omi, at the table, stirs the pot. Omi uses the splinter of an old wooden spoon—bangs it around like she's playing a drum. Now she jacks the whole thing up with her tiny hands and brings it to me so that I can see. Cabbage, leeks, potatoes, onions in a chunks-of-parsley vegetable broth.

“Henni made this?”

“While we waited,” Omi nods. The carrots look like orange eyes. The whole thing smells like pepper. Omi carries the pot back to the table, her elbows out like pointy weapons, her knees a little wobbly with the weight, and I try to picture my mother and grandmother walking through the mess of Kreuzberg, the pot of Henni's
Eintopf
between them. The snow falling down and the steam rising up, putting its heat on their faces. I try to think of what they would say to each other. I cannot think of a thing.

Mutti unzips her coat to the halfway mark and stands on the fuzzy rug in her fuzzy socks. Finger by finger she peels away her gloves, then pulls her hands through the crystals of her hair until the color comes back—the black that is almost magenta. Now she turns and helps me up, too, lets me wear the quilt around my shoulders. She leads me to the kitchen table and sits me down. The chair is a Goldilocks chair. It wobbles.

“Arabelle?” Omi pulls out her chair and seats herself, like royalty in a hurry to be served. She pulls the collar of her black turtleneck up past her chin, gives me one quick look, closes her eyes not in prayer but in impatience. Behind her Arabelle
is digging. Through the one cabinet, crooked on its hinges. Through the drawer, which sticks when you pull. “Aren't there bowls?” she asks at last, but there are tea cups and a Garfield mug, three plates, two saucepans, one spaghetti strainer, one rusty cheese grater, five spoons, four forks, two towels, a plastic measuring cup, a garlic press, a bright red ladle, a silver measuring spoon, and three knives that are good for butter, maybe, but only if the butter isn't cold. It's all my mother got out alive with—the kitchen stuff and also the bear and a trunk of clothes for us both. It was the second time she'd had to run. “Bad taste in men,” Omi says. “Born unlucky,” Mutti says. I don't know if my father was luck or not, but I do know this: Mutti's still walking the canal late at night. Walking too close to the edge.

“All right,” Arabelle decides now. “This is it.” She slides the saucepans onto the table, the Garfield mug, the broadest teacup. She ladles in and we wait, Omi's eyes too big in her face. Mutti shakes her shoulders out of her jacket and laces the bones of her fingers.

“To Henni,” Arabelle says, when her ladling's done. One saucepan to Omi and one to me. Arabelle keeps the teacup.

“You sure?” Mutti says, unlacing her finger bones and offering a Garfield swap.

“I like what I've got,” Arabelle says. She balances the eye of a carrot on a sugar spoon and makes like cheers, and soon Omi is slurping as if she's all alone, like we're not all sitting right here listening. Against the windows, onto the streets, into the courtyard the snow still falls, the brown dust that falls with
the snow, the white and the brown that will spot the cow until the weather breaks. Stefan is out there far away and also close enough that I can feel him. Stefan is out there and I can't tell him a thing that I don't want the Stasi to read before Stefan reads it. “You write it in a letter and you give it to them,” Stefan says. We're not giving one centimeter of him or me away.

“What you did is dangerous.” It's Mutti talking, and even though I don't turn I know she means me, and even though I don't ask, I know Henni talked, that Henni would, because Henni says things. Henni talked while she made the soup, and my mother listened. Omi tasted. Mutti listened.

“Sorry, Mutti.”

“Out at Kottbusser Tor at four
A.M
., with a boy on your bike, in the snow? Is this true, what Henni says?”

“
Arabelle's
bike.”

“I don't care whose bike.”

“You asked about true. I'm just saying.”

“Ada.”

“Listen, Mutti. I wasn't looking for trouble. I swear it.” I try to catch her eye, want her to believe me, wish that everything in this world didn't make her so afraid of every choice that every single one of us, every single day, is making. But she stares into her Garfield mug, spooning the soup with her delicate fury. She looks into her soup, and not at me. It makes arguing hard, makes me feel sicker.

“Look where you are,” she says after a while, trying to keep her voice low, trying to keep this between us, not a fight
for the whole co-op. “Look how we live. Trouble finds us.” Behind her, on the other side of the window, the snow keeps falling and the dark keeps coming and now Arabelle stands, finds the old book of matches and a new wax stub and puts a flame down into one of Omi's short votives.

“Savas is a little kid, Mutti,” I say, as the fire wicks. “And he was scared, and I found him, and what was I supposed to do? What would you have wanted me to do? What would you have done? Leave him be, Mutti? Leave him alone in the church under the rack of coats, shivering away in his PJs?” I don't feel that great, and I'm talking too much. And Mutti won't look up when she should. I wish she'd push her hair out of her face and lift her chin and see me.

“I'm talking about your first choice, Ada. The choice you make, every night, to leave in here for out there. To think nothing bad will happen. This is Kreuzberg. This is now.”

“But aren't you glad, Mutti? Aren't you glad for Savas's sake that I'm out at night, that I was there? Don't you . . . ?”

“You're fifteen, Ada,” she interrupts, her words gaining speed, and volume, her wanting to keep this argument private not as big now as her wanting me to understand. “And every night you're out there with your color cans, arting up the wall, doing whatever you think you are doing, scheming whatever you're scheming, and they could shoot you, you know. They've shot at others. And then what would I do, Ada? Have you thought about that? What would I do without you?”

“Have
you
thought, Mutti, about you, about where you go? Have
you
?”

“This is not about me.”

“It's about us. It's about right now.” The words are wide red throbs in the tunnel of my throat. It hurts my tongue to talk, also my ears.

“Both of you,” Omi says now. “Quiet. We'll eat in peace.” She has been eating. Her soup is gone—every last fold of cabbage and lettuce, every parsley freckle. She gives Arabelle the eye and slides her the pan and Arabelle stands and slowly ladles in, her dreadlocks thickening with the steam and the small rise of her belly showing beneath her striped T-shirt. She's five months forward and Peter doesn't know and if she doesn't tell him soon he'll be gone, back to America, to whatever he's left back there. Man on a Mission, Arabelle calls Peter, my American Romantic, and the clock ticks and she's here, staring down at the city of vegetables through her wire-rimmed glasses, her eyes magnified and focused, her sides not chosen—friend to my mother, friend to me. She slides the saucepan back toward Omi. Mutti puts her face in her hands, keeps the line of silver pink from showing.

“I know Savas's mom,” Arabelle says now, leaving the ladle to rest in the pot and sitting back down, fitting her fingers up beneath her lenses and rubbing at the most chocolate-colored parts of her tiredness.

“Excuse me?” I ask, very quietly now.

“I mean,” Arabelle says, “I know about her. I know the stories the ladies at the Köpi tell. I know that she's in trouble.”

You learned the number eight by tracing your grandfather's face, which cinched in at his ears but was wide in all other places. You learned the stars from him. You learned waiting. He had round blue eyes, one shelved higher than the other. He had a tooth that turned in at a sharp angle, no hair on his head, a purple vein that ran a river from one ear to one eye.

“You'll be man of the house,” he told you. “Until we're together again.”

“Say goodbye, Stefan.”

“No.”

“Look at your grandfather.”

You wouldn't.

“You'll be late, Jorge. Leave him be.”

“Stefan?”

“No.”

But he waited for you. He got down on one knee. He took off his gray felt hat and shined his naked head. He smiled
at you beneath his mustache. “I'm going to find her,” he said. “I'm going to find her and bring her back.”

Then he stood up and you thought he was leaving, you thought this was it, you almost cried, you were crying, but he was going toward the closet instead, turning the knob on the door, pushing his arms between the old bear coats, the nylon raincoats, the wet boots strung by their tied laces. He was in there and you couldn't see anything but the back of his boots and the puddled black of his long wool coat on the floor and your grandmother walking back and forth, pacing, hooking her hands into the buckle on her belt, telling him to hurry. Her hands were shaking, but her voice was clear. She was watching the door, watching him through glasses steamed up with her crying, telling him to hurry, looking at you because it was your fault that he was in there digging. Your fault that he was making himself late. Your fault—everything.