Going Over (11 page)

And then he was back there, in front of you, back on his knees. His body folded in half, his figure-eight face near to yours, those blue eyes, each on their own shelf. “This is for you,” he said, and it was there, on the wide bent plane above his knees—black and thin, narrow. He had large brown freckles. His face was islands and rivers.

But you closed your fists, pushed out your lip, would not look up at him. He put his fingers to your chin. He said your name. He waited. That is the sin, that is the crime: He waited.

“Look at me, Stefan.”

“I won't.”

“Look at me.”

“I won't. You're leaving.”

“Don't be stubborn, Stefan. There isn't time.”

“You said . . .”

“Take this,” he finally said. “It's yours.” Balancing the scope on his knees and opening your fists with his hands and rolling the thing from him to you. You almost fell down from the weight of it, the cold of it, the rattling up of the screws inside, the rack and pinions, the mirror cell, glass. You looked up and you were there, in the blue of his eyes, two versions of you in your birthday haircut and your too-big cardigan.

“The world is in here,” he was saying, tapping the scope with one hand. “The world is in here. You find it.”

“You'll be late,” my grandmother said then, her voice afraid. “It'll go wrong, Jorge. Please.” Her big belt buckle was a mean, toothy thing. She wore a dark turtleneck, black slippers.

“There's time.”

“There isn't.”

“It's all right.”

“You promised.”

“I still promise,” he said, and he was unfolding, standing, getting up off one knee and then off the other, putting the hat back on his naked head, standing there, the great tree of him, the purple river running ear to eye. He kissed her once on either
cheek, and then, for a long, quiet time, on her lips. He was so much taller that he had to bend his knees. She was so much shorter that her two feet left the floor.

“Man of the house,” he said, looking at you. He said it, and he didn't come back. You waited.

The candle's gone out twice on Arabelle telling the story of Savas's mom, and now the room is dark, but no one moves. There are five of us here, if you count Arabelle's baby. Still, the rooms feel black and empty.

“So she had no choice,” Omi says at last.

“No choice,” Mutti repeats, her words soft and heartbroken.

More silence rushes in.

Last night the snow was thick and the signals went dead. There was no one alive but Grossmutter. She sat on the upholstered chair for a long time staring at the empty TV screen, and after you came in from outside, where the snow had climbed up past your knees and numbed your toes and made your lips feel blue, you sat beside her not talking. Grossmutter is not a woman drowned in her tears. She is a woman mummified. What she wants is not here. Who she loves is gone. She sits and she waits for the end of time, but if you leave here—if you were to leave, how could you leave?—she'd have to get out, too. If you leave it has to be clean.

“Just look at it,” Ada said, last time she was here. “Look at it and tell me why not.”

She was lying beside you on your too-small bed, her head just below your ribs. You had been looking at the maps of stars you had taped up to the ceiling—old maps thin and crease-blurred. You had been explaining, pointing, left to right: Leo,
Cancer, Gemini, Auriga, Taurus, Aries, Pisces. Then Perseus above and Orion below. Then Canis Minor and Ursa Major. It was a winter evening in the northern hemisphere on the paper above your head. You thought she was listening. You stopped. She was quiet, her body curled into you like a seed. You could see the black part of her hair that was growing out and how the part between the black and the pink was gold, and you were touching the gold and now she lifted her head and propped it up with a hand, your bed so skinny that she had to work hard not to fall off.

“When you're free, will you go to find her?” she asked.

It was a dumb question, two impossibles. “No.”

“Don't you want to? Aren't you curious?”

“She should be curious about me.”

“Maybe she can't be.”

“Can't be curious?”

“Maybe she can't, Stefan. You don't know until you know.” She was sliding and you caught her. You shifted over in the bed.

“She shouldn't have run in the first place.”

“Maybe she couldn't help it.”

“Maybe doesn't count, Ada. Not when she's your mother.”

“Forgiveness is better than no forgiveness,” Ada said after a long time, and then she dropped her head back down to your stomach and stayed like that, not talking, and you didn't want her to be mad because there's no time to be mad, there's no time for anything when you're in love with a West Berliner.
You stared at the star maps and the stars were going nowhere. You listened to the crackle of talk beyond your door, where your two grandmothers were sitting, the radio on, the volume up, the noise masquerading around their words. There's a little one-drawer table beside your bed. You gave the knob a yank; Ada didn't budge. You felt around inside the drawer until you had what you wanted, and then you held it in your hand just so—above your face, so you could read it.

“What are you doing?” Ada asked, after a long time.

“Reading.”

“Reading what?”

“Come up here on my pillow. Come up here, and I'll show you.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“I'm mad.”

“Come on.” You pulled her toward you, pulled her deliciously near. She turned and was above you and was mad but not too mad to kiss you. Her body's sweet and thin but in the right places round. She smells like cinnamon. You hardly moved but the bed still squealed. You stopped, and it went silent. Again, you kissed her.

“Maybe,” you said.

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe maybe matters.”

“What, Stefan? Don't tease me.” Her lips were puffy with all the kissing, like gum before the pop. She pulled herself up
and away, and sat there on your stomach, and suddenly she was little again—the kid who would show up with the pigtails and hide behind her grandmother's legs. The crayon-hoarding kid beneath the table. The questions asked out beneath the stars. The in-your-way kid, like a puppy or a cat. You could see the kid she was then despite the girl she is now—the Cleopatra eyes and the Depeche T-shirt, the splatter of paint on her skin. She's just a girl. She is your girl. You'd do anything for her, almost.

“What?” she asked again, and you felt around on the floor for the thing you'd dropped in the middle of all the kissing, and there it was. The article she'd brought all the way here inside her boots—crumpled and folded and unfolded, more creases than the star maps, more black holes. “The Great Escapes,” the story was called, and it had all the details.

“You mean it?” she said. It was like she was trying to see you for you. Measure you up with her eyes. That was November, and now it's February, and when she comes again she will ask for your plan and the thing is, you don't have one. You want her to have faith in you, and if she did, wouldn't you naturally have faith in yourself? At least, just for the day.

“Where would you go,” you ask your grandmother now, in the dark, the TV black, “if you could go anywhere?”

“Back,” she says without a moment's pause. “I'd go back to then.” And she means the night when you were small and your grandfather was leaving. She means she'd make it different. You wouldn't say goodbye. You made your grandfather stop. You made him dig through the closet, bring out his scope,
wait for you to accept it. Take all of that away, erase it, and maybe he wouldn't have vanished. Maybe he would have gone, found the way, come back, and saved you—taken you with him to freedom. Maybe he would have met his friends at the pub at the right hour. Maybe he would have gone safe, to the tunnel. Crawled through first, maybe, or third, but not last and not alone—not after the tunnel beneath the streets, beneath the fenced-up border line, had already begun fracturing, collapsing. The water seeping in from a sewer above and fingering its way through the sand and between the reinforcements and scurrying down and through until it reached a soft, dirty spot. The walls gave up, that's what happened. And some of the East Berliners made it through, most of them did, but not your grandfather. Your grandfather vanished. No body. No proof. But he's gone.

You made him late, and your grandmother will never forgive you, and the truth is: You never will forgive yourself.

Forgiveness is better than no forgiveness, Ada says. But there are things you haven't told her. Things you can't explain.

We hear Arabelle's boots clomp the hall outside, then down the stairs and out and into the slush of the snow and through the first courtyard, under the arch, over the buried steel tracks, toward her own corner of this commune. Timur's basil box will be snuffed out by now. Arabelle's bike will be slicked and frozen. Gretchen and her lover will be asleep, the dealers, too, and the other tattoo artists, and the two old ladies who walk Kreuzberg hand-in-hand, everywhere they go it's hand-in-hand, and Gunter who is still in love with Marlene Dietrich and will never stop loving Marlene Dietrich, and the bead-stringers in the corner shop. Everyone's asleep, or everyone's watching the snow. Mutti has gone to her room and closed the door. Omi has ladled the last of the
Eintopf
into her saucepan and is stirring very slow, the spoon banging shyly against the inside metal making a dull song. She brings the last of the carrots to her lips and closes her eyes like it's the first taste of anything all evening.

“It's good, isn't it?” she asks, after she swallows.

I nod. The candle's gone out. There is wind beyond the windows, and beyond the windows are Savas and his mother, and they need us. She had been planning to leave, Arabelle said, when her husband found out. She had asked the women of the Köpi for their help, and with the marks they'd earned from the sweaters they'd knit, with the pfennigs they hid in their long coat pockets, they had raised enough for two tickets home. Savas's mother was twenty years old and two days away from gone. This is what Arabelle said, the story Savas's aunt had told in the workshop with the women with their curlicue accents. They unwrap their heads and their hair falls forward and their knitting needles click and Arabelle teaches them German and they talk—whatever words they can find are their stories. A few days ago, Arabelle said, they were talking about a boy named Savas and worrying about his mother, who had been beaten again, the bone beneath her one eye shattered, and she was going home. Packing her bags and taking Savas back to the Anatolian farmlands of Turkey and her own red flag and language, leaving the man she had been promised to and would not ever love. She was leaving, but her plans had been found out, and the women of the Köpi had talked of this, had asked for words, and Arabelle had walked among them as their needles clicked—listening and teaching, taking account.