Going Over (19 page)

“Well, what did her father say?”

“It wasn't her father. Not her mother, either.”

“Who?”

“A woman.”

“A woman?”

“In a maroon burqa, blue sandals, a stack of bangles up her wrist. That's what I saw, Ada. That's it. She'd had Meryem by the hand. It was early still, so the door was locked. I'd heard her knocking and when she saw me coming, she left. I'd called to her. She didn't stop. She was in some massive hurry.”

“And Meryem isn't saying?”

“You see how it is.” Henni lets the zigzags crowd into her brow. The floppy charcoal cowl of her dress has swallowed half her chin. She totters on the tiny chair, doesn't take her arm from Meryem, or her eyes from me.

“Meryem, sweetie, I'm here,” I say, fitting my too-big butt into the half scoop of the chair on her left side. I try to take her hand, but she needs both fists to hide her eyes. I scan her head, her jacket, her yellow plastic boots, looking for trauma signs, scars, but whatever has hurt her is inside and she's sobbing too hard to try to tell me.

“How early?” I ask Henni.

“Fifteen minutes ago.”

“What did the woman say?”

“Nothing. I told you.”

For half a second, Meryem swipes her fists from her eyes, then swipes them back, like erasers on a chalkboard. In that
split half second I see enough to know she's terrified. There's a crust of something, I see now, on the tips of her boots. Not old snow. Not mud, exactly.

“Meryem,” I ask, “can you tell me what's wrong?”

She shakes her head side to side, her long black hair slapping. She kicks her dangling feet. The chair tips. I catch it.

“Would juice help?”

Her hair slaps.

“Will cookies?”

No. She shakes her head.

“I think she needs some privacy,” Henni says. “Before the others come.” The blush on one side of her face is gone, rubbed off. The blue lines beneath her eyes have smeared. Henni's been watching kids her whole life long. If she knows anything, it's when to be worried. Henni's worried.

I check the flag-faced clock on the wall, the time told in our national colors. Ten minutes before school begins. Five minutes before the others come wheeling and squealing, shouting
Mine
, digging for playdough, bothering Henni for an early cup of something, ignoring Markus and his songs. If Meryem's here like this when the kids come in, they'll all be crying by 10:15; sadness in day care is contagious. I crouch close and fit my arms beneath the weave of her coat, the little pair of elastic-waistband jeans. She kicks and twists, but lets me take her. She knots her arms around my neck and cries harder.

“We're just going to take a little walk,” I say.

“Miss Ada.” She clings to me like a suction cup and warms my neck with her breath.

Markus is heading down the hall when he sees us and stops, asks me with his eyebrows what's wrong.

“Just a little upset,” I say, and now he turns and follows me to the door, heaves it open to the wind. Beyond, on the outside walk, I see the twins running ahead of their mother, racing each other to the entrance on this side of the administrative wing. They see me headed in the wrong direction and yank up short. Markus waves them in with insistent hands and the promise of hot chocolate.

“Go on with Markus,” I tell the twins. “Everything's fine.” I walk fast, my coat flapping behind me, Meryem shifting in my arms. Her black hair gusts with the wind.

“Herr Palinski is practicing,” I tell Meryem as we reach the sanctuary door. “Do you want to listen?”

The jug of her chin goes up and down.

“We'll be his audience,” I say. “He'd really like that.”

“Okay.” She shudders. I hurry us deep into the belly of the church, away from the wind that tumbles in behind, toward Herr Palinski, who is still playing Bach like a four-armed man, like Berlin—both sides—is listening. Slowly Meryem eases in, lets me sit with her in a lonesome pew. She tilts her head and looks up, as if the music is coming from high in the church's hollows, or from the tenacious stain of the windows. Her ducky-yellow boots flop sideways. Her back scoops my ribs.

She takes a long quivering breath. She sucks a fingertip. She curls in close and I hold her, remembering Stefan and the next time I visited, six months after the attack. This time it was June. He had borrowed a motorbike from a friend, and a pair of banged-up helmets. We waited until after Omi and Grossmutter had put on their tea and settled. We took the steps to the lobby, then went out, silently, to the street, and climbed on the machine. I was wearing a purple peasant skirt and lime-green flip-flops, the brown T-shirt with the sleeves I'd replaced with the lace of a dress I'd grown out of. I sat on the hem of my skirt, front and back, so that it double parachuted up around me. I let the wind skim through my diaphanous sleeves and pressed against the thin white jacket that he wore, faux leather.

His hair was longer then, toward his shoulders. We buzzed through the streets, weaving in and out of traffic, breathing sideways through our noses. We stayed close to the wall, skirted the checkpoint, traveled south and west, past bars spilling out onto the street, past ladies in winter coats
and sunglasses, beneath lines of clothes hung in the brown air to dry, beside dogs leashed to the stop sign posts, past houses divided, the chainsaw architecture of his Berlin. He was taking us to Treptower, to his side of the River Spree, and I said nothing because there was no hearing anything over the spit of the motorbike.

Over the bridge we went and toward the forest. Through the forest and along the splitting waterways, the hairy grasses, the old, clobbered trees, until, through the fence I could see the endless around of the Ferris wheel and the noses of the floating swans of Plänterwald, the amusement park where the Bloc kids go. Stefan cut the engine on the bike and stopped. He lifted the helmet from his head, turned, unsnapped the strap at my chin. He kissed me like he does. On the thin bridge of my nose first. And after that, on the fat part of my lips.

“It's your birthday,” he said.

“May is my birthday.”

“You were over there,” he says. “I was over here. So today is the day.”

“If you want,” I said. “Okay.” He'd gotten taller than before. His eyes were more blue. Sometimes I looked at him and knew what he would be when he was old, but that day, when I looked at him, I remembered how he was as a kid. His head too big for his body. His incisor teeth too short for the rest of his smile.

Outside the entrance gate somebody had filled a low plastic pool with soapy water and had attached loops of thick
yarn to sticks. A crowd had formed—kids and parents, grandparents; it didn't matter. They were all standing there with these loopy sticks, moving them around like a conductor until a breeze blew and bubbles threaded through. Long bubbles, the size of sewer pipes. Funny-shaped things like luminescent trombones. Big soap animals with hovering wings. Cloud alphabets. Wet Slinkys. Only one of the kids in the crowd couldn't be convinced. She was little, stood apart, a pair of leopard-trimmed sunglasses on, a braid attached to her head with a polka-dot bow. She watched the upward drift from an angle, plugged her ears every time one would pop. She was only four or five, but she already knew too much. Or that's what it seemed like to me.

We were wearing the helmets by their straps around our wrists. We fit our hands together anyhow, and the helmets knocked as we walked through the gate and into the park. Stefan said it was my day. He said we could do whatever I wanted to do, but all I wanted was to be with him, to hold his hand, to let the helmets clack. It was more like a zoo than an amusement park—the bright cages and the Quik Cup ride, the little train on the tracks, the wood-necked swans down in the bumper-car pit. All the screams from things that moved too fast. It was making me dizzy and my stomach hurt and we walked the park's edges and across the footbridges until finally I said, “I choose the Ferris wheel,” and Stefan said, “I knew that you would.”

When it was our turn we climbed in, let the guy close the metal door behind us. The little girl with the leopard shades was
in the car ahead, knuckling the bar with both fists. When everyone was in and the wheel wound high, I waited, and everything stopped. We could see all of Berlin from there. The churches on both sides. The schools on both sides. The old buildings and the new buildings and the bombed-out places and the barbs and metal and meshes and bricks of everything that divides us.

I leaned toward Stefan. I told him the truth. “Those boys. They hurt me worse than I said.”

We were up there in the brown clouds of East Berlin. He looked at me for a long time, his eyes changing color, the muscles in his neck hardening into cords. It was like he couldn't speak, like all the words he knew had been snatched from him.

“Say something,” I said. “Why won't you?” Trembling up there. Afraid not just of what had happened, but of what he would think because he knew.

But he couldn't talk, or he wouldn't, and then when he finally did his sentences came out broken, unfinished. “Sons of bitches,” he said. “Sons of . . .” Lifting one fist from the bar, beginning to bang.
Bang. Bang
. Our seat swaying. Our world, already halved, falling harder apart.

“Who the hell . . .” he started again. “What were they . . .” His fist still finishing his sentences, his eyes searching mine, the sky so big and so wet and so unsafe, unholy.

“It shouldn't have happened,” he said then.

“I know it,” I said.

“It shouldn't have. It wouldn't have. If.”

“Bastards,” I said.

“Worse than that,” he said, and sobbed. The only time in all my life that I ever heard him sob.

It isn't mud on Meryem's boots. It isn't snow. The wrong person brought her to school, and she's still shivering, scared, in my arms. Herr Palinski is playing Concerto No. 7, and suddenly I don't want to understand, but I do.

“Tell me, Meryem.”

“I saw her dead,” she says. “I saw Savas hiding.”

“Where, sweetie? Tell me.”

“The canal,” she says. And then she loses her words, too. She loses her world. Unsafe. Unholy.

• Two wooden rollers, preferably beechwood, cut and lathe turned, fifteen centimeters across, two and a half centimeters thick
  
• A pair of wooden handles
  
• As much half-centimeter steel cable as you can borrow or steal (ask Alexander, come up with a story)
  
• Some steel bolts, sure things (the co-op won't notice, not if you take just one a day, not if you have deep enough pockets)
  
• Your grandfather's bow, his quiver of arrows (you've practiced enough, you know you can do this)
  
• Two kinds of fishing line (one for guidance, one for real)
  
• Some kind of spool for the cable, some kind of padding so the neighbors won't hear
  
• Other things you can't think of right now
  
• All the luck in the world