Going Over (13 page)

“Where do you think you're going?” Omi asked before I left.

“I have to find him,” I said.

“What did I tell you?” she said, and her eyes were small as I closed the door.

Savas's hair is black and in the sun it's almost blue. There's a pinch in his brow when he thinks. There's a way he has of holding your hand—like he's the one in charge, like he's protecting. There are other women, Arabelle says, who have tried to leave and who have been found dead later, murdered by husbands angry at them for removing their burqas or looking for a job or hoping to speak German in Germany. There are kids who get lost and no one finds them. I think of Arabelle at the shop with the Turkish women, trading their language for German, their submission for power. I think of Peter, Arabelle's lover, who says the Turks will not learn to save themselves until the Germans give them protection—give them papers and give them rights, give them police, when they need it. He gives them German words for what has been taken, pounds in about landlords, bosses, teachers, lectures in coffee shops and crowded salons, on street corners and in mosques, sits with the men of the Black Sea and plays their card games and tells them how to make it happen. Workers' unions. Workers' rights. You Turks
are not outsiders or
Gastarbeiter
, he tells them. You Turks are not the ghetto. You are the people crowded into lousy housing and paid less than you are worth and tossed to the gutter when your hips give in and your bones shatter and the black factory air you breathe stays permanent in your lungs. You are human beings, Peter tells them. Organize, he insists. Keep yourselves and those among you safe.

Take what you are owed.

Command respect.

Peter's hair is red fire and his glasses are John Lennon. His skin is so American pale that you can see his thoughts flick through it, and it worries Arabelle, how he's made himself dangerous with his own agitations, how he signs his name to the proclamations he glues to lampposts and to walls, how he lets nothing get in the way of his idealism. I don't know what will happen, Arabelle says, because Peter's time in Germany is almost up; his visa's running short. He'll return to the States and to graduate school, finish his thesis, send postcards, unless. And of course we both know what
unless
means. Unless there's a wedding in Kreuzberg.

“Tell him about the baby,” I say.

“He has to love me,” she says, “for the right reasons.”

“Savas,” I call. “Savas!” And the cold is straight through to my toes and knees, and my head is still weird from the fever, and when I call again my voice goes short—a word at the end of a wire. The kids tobogganing the grooves are still running, waving their mittened hands like United Nations flags, but none
of them are Savas. None are the little boy from St. Thomas Day Care who sits in my lap when I read about fear or holds my hand when I'm missing Stefan or tips down slightly when he says my name, as if I were an actual princess.

People who hide don't want to be found
, Omi says. But Savas is just a little boy, and maybe hiding is not what Savas wants, and maybe what happens next will be my fault: I shouldn't have let him vanish. And maybe, also, I should confess to this: Mailing a word like
now
across the border wasn't exactly Stasi smart.

“Just walking around,” Henni says now, arching the pencil line of her left eyebrow and smudging the fringes of her lashes with an incredulous finger. “Looking?”

“Yeah,” I say, feeling stupid. “Looking for Savas.”

On the other side of the kitchen wall, the kids are playing a game of Pied Piper, Markus in the lead being his skinny, tall self. Through the cutout window above the sink I watch him prancing in his green felt cap. The kids swarm Markus, forgetting their places in the line. They toot through their fingers and their plastic zurnas, Brigitte sucking her three fingers and Aylin wearing a paper crown. They finished their puppets and put on their show when I was gone. They made finger paintings that hang now, dry, from the clothesline that shimmies over their heads in the room. The church bells ring the eleven o'clock hour, but Markus keeps prancing and the kids keep following, all except Meryem, who stands at the window
looking out onto the snow that's been flattened, browned, and yellowed.

Through the bank of windows along the exterior wall the sun throws down a white line. Henni stands with her clogs toeing up to one side and I stand in the socks she pulled out of the dryer, some fuzzy lost-and-founds, one of them lime green and the other olive-colored. Deep inside I'm starting to thaw. My knees and my ankles feel crunchy. We watch the kids through the cutout window. Chaos could hit at any second.

“Did you really think he'd just appear, Ada? That walking for hours in the cold after you've been home sick for days was the best use of your time?”

“Sorry, Henni.”

“You've missed several days of work after a lot of coming in late, you get your mother and your grandmother so worried they come out to find me, to ask me questions, to see where you've been, what you've been saying—in a blizzard, no less, Ada—and the first thing you do when you're well enough is go walking around in Little Istanbul thinking maybe, just maybe, you'll see Savas.”

“The
Eintopf
was really good, by the way.”

“Don't change the subject.”

I bite the speckled cuticles of my little pinky. “I didn't have a better plan.”

Henni throws both arms up, flabby and unhappy, like it's just one more stupid thing I've said.

“Arabelle says—”

“Who's Arabelle?”

“The one with the bike.”

Henni's eyes track side to side, back and forth, trying to remember. Out behind Markus the kids are spinning and hiding, yelping and giggling, and if they don't back down soon the minister will open the door to his office and walk down the hall and step in among us, ask if everything's fine. He'll rub at the bald place beneath his hair and shake his head like he still can't decide whether having a multicultural day care in an empty room in his administrative wing is the smartest thing for St. Thomas.

“Go on,” Henni tells me.

“Shouldn't we help Markus?” I say, because I don't know how to go on, because I want to, but I can't.

“Finish your story.”

I try to think of where to start. I feel a little clutch in my heart. “Arabelle says Savas's mother is in really big trouble,” I start. “She says people like her can die in Little Istanbul and nobody will know and their children could die, too. I don't know how to find them, do you? I don't know what to do. But, Henni: It's Savas.”

The Pied Piper's still marching, but the kids have lost the song. They're jumping on the table now, hiding under the chairs, chasing each other into the closet, all except for Meryem, who has climbed up onto the windowsill. I watch the kids through
the interior window; Henni does, too. My job is out there with them. My knees are still crunchy. I look ridiculous in these lost-and-found socks, my legs so bare, my cabled tights spinning in the dryer. I look ridiculous, and Savas is missing. He should be out there with the others, leader of the band.

“And Arabelle knows this because . . . ?” Henni asks now, her voice measured and her blue eyes bright on me.

“Because of her job. She works at the Köpi, the co-op where the Turkish ladies knit.”

Henni blinks twice. Pauses. “This is your friend with the bike.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of trouble does she say Savas is in?” she finally asks, her eyes steady on me, the fat fringes of her lashes smudged. In the big room the twins are banging on the table. Brigitte has glue in her hair. Any second, I think, and the day care will explode. The minister will show his head. Someone will be planning to come and shut us down.

“Savas's mom was forced to marry Savas's dad,” I say, repeating what Arabelle told me. “She was sent here from Anatolia—put on a plane six years ago, married to this guy she'd never met. Second cousin or something. He's forty-one and she's twenty, and he beats her whenever he wants to, broke a bone in her face, Henni. She's had enough of it, you know, and she's trying to get back home—back to Turkey where her mother is, back to the farms she came from. She's trying to get home and the Köpi ladies were helping, raising
money for her tickets, making arrangements. But the sicko-husband found her suitcase and he beat her. He locked her in a room and by the time she got out, all her clothes were gone, all her papers, her passport, the money that the ladies raised, her tickets. When she started to cry he hit her worse, and Savas was there. Savas was watching. That's why he ran away. That's what Arabelle says. That's what the Köpi ladies told her. One of them saw Savas leave. Another heard his mother running. None of them know where they've gone.”

Henni takes in a big long breath, and I do, too. We stand there in the kitchen, watching each other—Henni looking for signs of truth from me, me looking for a real plan from her.

“Bastard,” she says at last.

“Yeah,” I say.

“And Savas saw all this?”

“
Love is a bad thing
. That's what he told me, Henni.”

Henni bites the inside of her cheek and closes her eyes. She gets a million lines of worry in her forehead. I can see her playing the story through, trying to imagine, but stuck. In the room beyond us, Ece's crying, both fists up to her eyes. Aylin's lost her crown and she can't find it. Markus has stopped the Pied Piper parade. Meryem is still turned away from it all, her little body perched up on the windowsill, her red shoes dangling out over the edge. She's got something in her hand, I see, and when I squint I realize what it is: Savas's playdough dragon.

“So we should call the police,” I say. “We should do something.”

“You know how it is. They won't get involved. They need hard evidence—a lot of it—before they'll get involved with a domestic dispute among the Turks.”

“It's not just some
dispute
, Henni.”

“What proof do we have? Think about it.”

“Savas isn't here,” I say. “Isn't that evidence enough?”

“This is a day care, Ada. Kids come and go.”

“But Savas ran here. By himself. At night.”

“And you're the only one who saw him, Ada. It's not enough to save a Turk in Kreuzberg.”

“There are the Köpi ladies. Arabelle's friends. Maybe—”

“Think about it, Ada. If they talk to the German police they'll be in trouble at home. They are learning German as a secret, remember? Their husbands haven't been told.”

“So what's our plan?” I hear my voice and it's pleading—too loud and so high that some of the kids in the classroom turn and watch us through the interior window, which is wide and short, its frame painted yellow on one side and left bare and knotted pine on the other.

“I don't know,” Henni says. “I'm thinking on it.”

The kids are all settled onto the storytelling rug by the time I go in to greet them—Markus made it happen, so I thank him. They watch me, different than before, like I'm a stranger to them, like being gone for a few days means I forgot them. Forgot how one twin sits perfectly still and the other one fidgets. Forgot the high shrug of Brigitte's shoulders. Forgot who sucks which fingers and who calls out and who has to be invited, every time, to say what she is thinking. I prop myself up on the too-small chair and wrestle the big book up onto my lap. I tell them that they have to come closer to hear, and one by one, on elbows and knees, they scoot forward—the paint in their fingernails, the smell of their playdough, the stain of their juice, the smashed dust bunnies on their sock toes.

“Meryem,” I say, “do you want to come and join us?” Because she hasn't moved from the window ledge and she's holding Savas's dragon like an old-world talisman.

“No thank you, Miss Ada,” she says.