Going Over (12 page)

“You're worrying about Savas,” Omi says now, the saucepan gone dry, the whole world silent.

I stare at her through the dark, a level stare. “I should have stopped her,” I say. “I should have helped.”

“Nothing to do,” she says.

“Why not?”

“Because people who run don't want to be caught. People who hide don't want to be found.” She dabs at her chin with her thumb, a bristling sound. She dares me to contradict her, but there's no point to it. I know what happened at the end of the war, when the Germans had lost and the Russians moved in, and when Omi, more than anything else, did not want to be found.

“Savas is afraid,” I say.

“We don't need more trouble here,” she says. “We have enough.”

The air is cold. The room is dark. I will write to Stefan tomorrow.

Beneath the quilt on the couch the fever heat runs between my breasts and pools—a hot trickle. I yank at the quilt and the air ices through me. I snatch the quilt back to my chin and the fever runs. The cold is in my bones and the heat is in my skin. I'm between sleeping and dreaming, lost in Berlin.

Sometime, late, I wake to the sound of Omi snoring behind the door to her room. She takes a long, rasping time filling her lungs, then snorts the air out quick, and then it's silence, then rumbling again. Who knows how she sleeps.
People who hide don't want to be found
, she said, and now when I close my eyes it's her world, the stories she's told me. The Red Army has made its way in, is crossing the river. There are German traitors—deserters—strung up by their flimsy necks from the lampposts at train stations, and women and children are almost all that is left of Berlin. There will be no virgins standing after everything is done, and the newspapers have stopped, and the phones ring empty, and the trains run two to three to a car while everybody
else walks, because no one else, including Omi, can afford the fare; they have all been issued the wrong ration cards. She will wait in many lines. She will fight for rancid butter. She will loot the abandoned bakery for whatever there still is, and at night she will warm her feet by that brick, her legs cold and white beside her mother's. When the bombs go off she will scramble, her heart high and sick in her throat. She will run, buckets of stolen things in each hand, the buckets clanging. She will run beneath the streets into the shelter.

Omi is hiding. The shelter is dark, but Omi will be found, and her mother, and her best friend, Katja, too, who can trade cigarettes for flour, a used pair of boots for a wool jacket, a tulip bulb for a bird in a cage, and who will grow up and be old, who will become Stefan's Grossmutter.

People who hide don't want to be found. But Savas is out there, running. All night long, I crack and sweat, and all night long, he's running, and what I need is a boy named Stefan. I need Stefan to help me. I feel my way to the kitchen and the book of matches. I strike a light, touch it to the wick. I tear a page from my journal of sketches and write the single word I'll mail tomorrow:

Now
.

I wake to Mutti's hand on my head, her eyes big in the powdered morning light.

“You were talking in your sleep again.”

“Didn't mean it.”

She turns her hand the other way, touches my forehead with her knuckles. “So many stories,” she says. She waits. Closes her eyes. Her forehead wrinkles. “Fever's gone.”

I shrug my shoulders and they don't hurt. I bring my knees up toward my chin, or as far as I can before Mutti's weight on the quilt tugs me down. I wonder how long she's been sitting here, listening to my babble. “I was dreaming about Savas.”

“Savas is a Turkish boy, Ada.”

I give her a funny look.

“You kept saying the Russians were coming.”

I wriggle my arms free of the quilt, push my hair out of my face, try to think myself backward into my dreams, remember
what I said out loud that brought Mutti here, beside me. I listen for the sound of sleep behind Omi's door, look for the page that I'd torn from my book. I hear it crackle beneath my pillow.

“What are you going to do?” Mutti asks.

“About what?”

“I know you, Ada. You're scheming.”

There are hard lines beneath my mother's eyes and shadows caught between them. Her hair is thistles. The light from the window glows through it, then storms her face with a seacolored green. Sometimes when I look at my mother's face I see every man she ever loved and how much loving bruised her.

“I think it's pretty obvious.”

“What is?”

“That there's nothing I can do.”

“Nothing?”

“It's impossible, Mutti. You know how it is. The Turks are their own country. I can't save Savas.” I won't talk about Stefan, because the worry will kill her. She'll tell Omi and Omi will tell Stefan's Grossmutter, and every shot I have at happiness will be gone.

Mutti straightens then shivers with the cold, unsatisfied. She pulls her thin sweater across her chest and buttons it up to her chin, knows that I'm lying in multiple dimensions, knows that if I knew how to rescue Savas I would. If I knew where to find him, that's where I'd be. If I knew Stefan would come, I'd open the door.

She stares at me for a long time. Draws her index finger across the bridge of my nose. “Impossible has never stopped you,” she says, and I wonder how much she knows about everything I'll always want. I wonder whether, in my dreams, I called out for Stefan.

“You can't save the world, Ada. You know that, don't you?”

“Somebody has to try,” I say, and I see the hurt go through her.

Outside the snow keeps falling—so thick now that soon the buses will stop and the only way around will be by foot, straight up to your knees in the white. Everything is silent. Everything is white. You're thinking about Heinz Holzapfel again, and how he got free on his own.

“Read it,” Ada had said, when she was here, and you told her you would and she wouldn't believe you, but the truth is you've read Holzapfel's story every night since the last time she kissed you. You have read it and creased it and uncreased it, whitened the words with your thumb, slipped it back into that tuck of space between your mattress and your bed frame, then pulled it back into the light again, where it smells of the inside of Ada's boot.

“Do you think your grandmother even loves you?” Ada asked.

“I don't know,” you said. Because you don't.

SWOOPS ACROSS WALL:
FAMILY MAKES DARING ESCAPE

Berlin (AP)
—In one of the boldest escapes of the cold war, an East German economist, his wife and their 9-year-old son swung themselves in a homemade cable harness from the roof of a heavily guarded Communist government building to the safety of West Berlin.

They came down over the barbed wire-topped wall Wednesday night from the top of the five-story “House of Ministries” where East German Premier Willi Stoph has offices.

“I was 80 percent certain that the plan would succeed, because everything had been well prepared and besides I had helpers in West Berlin.

“Often I had occasion to visit the Ministries building on business but in the building itself I had no help.”

Holzapfel took his family into the building Wednesday and at 5
P.M
. they went into an attic room, where they stayed until 10
P.M
.

The boy slept most of the time, and when it was time to get ready the father woke him with these words, “Now we are going to uncle. There you will get the bicycle we promised you. But first you must show your courage, because until now you have earned only the [bicycle's] turn signal and bell.”

The boy remained quiet and “we went out of the room onto the roof. It was pouring rain. We wanted to be across by 11
P.M
., but it took much more time.”

Holzapfel had a nylon-type cord about as thick as a tennis racket string tied to a hammer. His preparations were thorough. He had painted the hammer handle with phosphorous so that those waiting in West Berlin would see it when he threw it. So that it would make no noise when it landed, he had padded the hammer head.

Those in the West fastened a heavy cable to the hammer and Heinz and Jutta pulled it to them, “taking all our strength.”

“Now we were ready to begin the most dangerous part of our flight.”

“We were all very quiet. Guenter was sent over first.”

Holzapfel explained he had made a pulley out of a bicycle wheel axle, with a shoulder and waist harness slung underneath. They hung on to an attachment and rolled down the cable.

“You see how easy it is,” Ada had said, when she was here the last time. Her weight in your arms. Her smell in your nose. Her hair tickling the soft parts of your neck, where the stubble still doesn't grow. “Just a few parts and some string,” she said. “Just a wheel and a harness.”

“There's nothing easy about it,” you said, and she said, “Like there's anything easy about this.” Meaning her and us. Meaning stuck in time. But leaving is permanent, and failure lasts.

“Stefan,” Grossmutter calls, and you hear the shuffle of her slippered feet toward you.

“Yes?”

“You'll be late for the Eisfabrik,” she says. And studies you with the pinch of her eyes.

I'm wearing black patent-leather boots with a zipper up each calf, gray cabled tights, a corduroy jumper, and a long leather coat I borrowed from Gretchen, who stopped by early with a bowl of oatmeal and molasses; news travels fast when you're squatters. There's cold in my eyes and winter in my lungs, and when I call for Savas his name scorches through me.

Near the Landwehrkanal the vendor trucks are rutting the snow with their wide wheels, leaving grooves shellacked by the morning sun. Little girls in pink hats and boys with red mittens run the grooves—building speed with quick sprints then boot-tobogganing through. From behind, the mothers nag and warn, their heads wrapped twice in scarves, their jilbabs long over their stockinged feet and winter sandals. The smell is snow and sun but also pumpkin seeds and coffee,
gözleme
and boiled corn, used batteries and leather. I walk Oranienstrasse toward Heinrichplatz. I walk past buildings that are white, pink, yellow, old with bullet holes, beneath windows where spatulas
scrape against pans. Iced sheets are being unclipped from lines above. Someone is crying, but it isn't Savas. The chill is back in my bones. School starts in an hour and I'll be late again. I've mailed the letter I wrote.