Going Over (15 page)

The branches of the trees along the Mariannenplatz are vanilla frosted. The lights from the old hospital are on
and the artists are inside, up on the scaffolding, climbing the ladders, rigging up for a new exhibition. It's always like this on the nights before the shows—like staring into a snow globe and wondering which artist my mother will be falling for next, which ones she already fell for. It's only the artists Mutti loves, never anyone else, and the best artists of all of Kreuzberg are here, at the old hospital which isn't a hospital anymore but one more abandoned space taken over by punkers and painters.

“You think Sebastien's in there?” I ask Arabelle as we push by.

“I don't know,” Arabelle says, her words coming out in soft puffs, like she's the one doing the pedaling. “Maybe he is.”

We creak and we wobble. We roll past the old hospital toward the front lawn of St. Thomas, which used to be the back lawn of St. Thomas before the wall went up and cut the church off from most of the people it was serving. I watch the dark places and the snowy places, looking for signs of little feet, or for the heat of an open day care window. Nothing. Savas is not out tonight. He has not come back to find me. Above our heads a big bird flies, and then another, escaping the bell tower, and for a split instant I think I see Meryem, hiding in the shadows.

Behind me Arabelle is quiet, her arms still tight. She fits her chin onto my right shoulder and searches the church grounds, too, her glasses still up high on her forehead. We round the church's stone face and head for the narrow space between
St. Thomas and the wall, wobbling a little but keeping our balance. There's only the creaking of the wheels and the knocking of the paint cans, the whisk of the air through the wool streamers, the squeak of the three of us on the blue banana seat that sparkles even at night.

“Almost there,” I say, and she says, “I'm ready,” and I think of all the times she has asked me about my graffing and all the times I told her to wait, to give me room to finish. Because maybe there are some artists who like to show off midwork, who like to splatter and dab inside the warm space of a snow globe, but I'm not one of those. A work of art has to speak for itself, and it can only speak when it is finished, and besides, my wall is Stefan's wall. I was hoping to show it to him first.

I brake the bike, hop off, steady it for Arabelle, who toes around on the walk for ice before she trusts both canvas shoes to the ground. In the thick dark I walk the bike to the base of the church and prop it up against the wall. When I turn back around I see Arabelle rubbing the cement slabs with her pink-mittened fingers as if I'd graffed everything in Braille.

“You going crazy on me again?” I ask.

“No crazier than you out here in the night.”

“You can't see anything,” I say, “if you stand that close.”

“I can't see anything anyway,” she says, backing off and coming toward me.

I unstrap my bag, rattle my cans around, dig until I have my lights. I switch them on, the first and the second, then balance them both on the bricked-in ledges. It's two sprays of bright slamming up against my graffing. It's the pictures I've made, one after the other. The Great Escapes in the order of my delivery. My butanes and my propanes. My
Ta Da
tag. Arabelle
returns to the wall, removes one mitten, traces the big boot of the running soldier with a finger. She stands back to get a better look at the loaf of bread and the toilet. Back and forth she goes, getting the big picture and the details. The ropes of her hair have fallen loose at her face.

“Ada,” she says at last. “Well, Jesus Christ, Ada. You're brilliant with a spray can.”

“I'm not finished yet,” I say, managing defensiveness and pride at the same time. I feel heat in my face, get down to my business, start pulling my cans out of the bag, my caps, my fingerless gloves, my green bandana. I arrange my colors, dark to light, switch around the caps. It's cold out here. My fingers feel knotty. Arabelle keeps talking.

“You don't have to be finished for me to see,” she's saying. “Nobody graffs likes this. Nobody. It's like, you know, Michelangelo quality. I mean, if Michelangelo had a spray can, Ada, Michelangelo would graff like that.” Her voice is rising, high on itself. She goes back to the wall, takes her other mitten off, walks the tightrope with her fingers, back and forth, like it's a real, sustaining line. She starts laughing all of a sudden and I have to cut her off.

“Shhh,” I say. “The guards will hear you.”

She spins quick, like she thinks a uniform with a gun has shown up here beside me. I point to the wall and the places beyond it, where the dogs are sleeping and the guards are on their watch, where the metal spikes of asparagus grass grow underground. In the silence now we hear the rabbits scramble,
their bodies too quick and light-boned to be detected by the no-man's-zone land mines that would blast a human into pieces. It's tricked up so good on that side.

“So what are we graffing tonight?” she whispers at last.

“We?”

“I'm out here, aren't I? Put me to work.”

“You're out here spying is what you're doing.”

“I'm out here as your protectorate.”

“My
protectorate
?”

“Whatever. Come on. Don't be such a nudge.”

“What do you know about writing, Arabelle?”

“I know everything you're going to teach me.” She smiles her full-wattage smile. When I don't smile back she changes her tune. “If I don't do something I'll freeze out here. There's got to be something.”

“All right,” I say, considering. “You can fill.”

“Cool,” she says. “How do I fill?”

“Christ,” I say. “How can you live in Kreuzberg and not know how to fill?”

“I do other things,” she says. “Remember?”

“Yeah. Like spy on your best friend.”

I take a can of sky blue and shake it well. I take a can of candy pink and tell her to shake it like I am. The agitator balls go from stuck to rattling free. When the propellant is loose and juiced inside, I tell Arabelle we're ready.

“Some tips,” I say, matter-of-fact, showing her how to fit her finger over the valve cap. “We're filling, so we're staying
close, all right? Top to bottom with a third overlap and never a continuous press. We're going for a fade fill—blue sky with some sunrise pink. A wall like this sucks the paint right up, so we'll need two coats, maybe three.”

“You should teach this stuff.”

“I'm already a teacher.”

“Yeah, but I mean—”

“You're stalling, Arabelle. I can tell you are.”

“Am not.”

“Then how about you get started. You keep your wrist moving, okay, but your arm and elbow quiet.”

“All right.”

“Wait.” I crouch back down over the bag, pull two bandanas out. One for her and one for the baby she's carrying. She stoops a little so I can tie the first and then the second. Then I cover my own mouth, and we are ready.

“We look like bandits out here,” Arabelle says, her words muffled.

“Have to work quick,” I say. “Have to work easy.”

She steps back and I show her technique. She steps forward, fits her finger on the valve, and presses down. Color hits the wall and splatters overhead, like one of Stefan's stars exploding. She stands back and I show her again. She moves the can in her hand, changes the angle of her wrist, lifts her elbow up, like she is dancing. Her color makes an even showing. She lifts her finger, laughs.

“What are we filling for?” she asks, after a while.

“Story of a man,” I say, “named Holzapfel.” I work beside her, a strip of vertical fills. She covers by thirds, working the long horizontals. There's a rhythm to graffing, and she's finding the beat, the loosened strands of her hair falling and rising like the streamers on her bike catching a breeze.

“Who's Holzapfel?” she finally asks.

“A great escapee. The one with the flying fox.”

“Oh, God. What's a flying fox?”

“Wheels on a wire,” I say, and then I explain. I tell her the story of the night and its rain, of how Heinz Holzapfel sent his son off first, and then his wife, and of how, because of the weather, he took his chances, waited. I tell her what happened when he finally soared himself—how every paper, every proof, every knuckle of everything he'd carried with him—in his pockets, in his suitcase, around his neck—jiggled loose during his flight and fell to the ground in the East. “It was like confetti,” I say, my voice getting loud, my sentences like victory punches. “It was like confetti, raining with the rain. And nobody saw it, can you picture that? The guards didn't look up because of the rain. They didn't look up because of
weather
. Because they were afraid of getting a little wet.” I put my fist up like Holzapfel himself just rode in. Like he just landed here beside me on his homemade flying fox.

“Crazy,” Arabelle says, slow and suddenly wary. “That's some crazy, crazy story, Ada.” She's stopped her filling. She's watching me. Those eyes above her bandit face. Those glasses on her forehead, splattered.

“Not so crazy,” I say, defensive.

“One in a million chance,” she says, “of not getting caught doing something like that.”

“Happened before, could happen again.”

Arabelle pulls the bandanas off of her face—the first and then the second—and drops them to her neck like coiled-cloth jewelry. She rubs at the pink that freckles her skin, the little bits of blue from my can. “You're scheming, aren't you?” she says finally. “With that boy of yours.”

“I'm just talking about flying,” I say.

“You're talking crazy, is what you're talking.”

“Finish the fill, all right?” I say. “Fill has got to be perfect.”

She yanks her bandanas back up, hooks them over her nose. She rattles the can. She molds her pressing finger. She does all of this while watching me, then carries on with the fill.

Left to right.

Third over thirds.

Release at the end of each stroke.

Everything, I think, in its time.

When we're done we're done: Our arms are shaking; the cans are empty; the agitator balls are spitting nonsense. I pack my bag, cut the lights, kiss Arabelle's cheek. “Not bad,” I tell her, “for an amateur.”

“Not bad for a spy,” she says, and she laughs, and when she laughs the air turns to crystal, and in the crystal there is pink, but just a little. No one has passed this way all night. The guards have not been bothered. Only now and then have we heard the Alsatian dog in the no-man's-zone bark at a phantom or a shadow, at one of those mine-defying bunnies. We filled and we confetti'ed. We flying-foxed Mr. Heinz Holzapfel, got him to freedom—fat caps and skinnies.

“Home?” Arabelle asks, headed for the bike.

“Not yet.”

She gives me a but-I'm-tired-and-it's-so-cold look. I shrug, because it's not like I asked her to come, and it's not like I've not been accommodating.

“You're here, right?”

“So?”

“And I didn't go off looking for Savas. As promised.”

“I guess not.”

“My reward is your reward. I want to show you something.”

We leave the bike where it is, propped up against the wall. I reach for her hand, her furry pink glove, which is pinker now in places and blue in some spots and crunchy, a little worn through on the index finger. We walk side by side, hand in hand, down the narrow alley between Kreuzberg and the Grenzwall 75, the meter of walking space that the East left to us made even narrower by piles of snow.

When we reach the observation post I put my arm across Arabelle's shoulder and guide her up the steep flight of planked steps until we're standing at the guardrail looking out over the wall's sewer-pipe cap. Past the anti-vehicle ditch, the hedgehogs, the control strips, the light poles, the patrol roads, the watchtower, the trip flares, the dog run, the signal alarms, the signal fence, the barbed wire on the other side. Past the bright glare toward East Berlin, Friedrichshain, where the old buildings are fortified and the new buildings are concrete boxes, one room on top of another, every room exactly the same size, one light still on, the rest of it darkness after so much glaring brightness.