Going Over (2 page)

When the magpies are out, they stripe the night. When the moon is lit, it finds me. My sack on my back, my Adidas on the pedals, I push my way out onto the street and ride the cobblestones beneath the scaffolding and flutter, and the shawls hanging
off the railings. I ride past the sleeping caravans and through the green-gray night of the Mariannenplatz—the old turrets of the old hospital casting their shadows and the soft wool streamers of Arabelle's bike kicking up around me. At the far end of the platz, the top of St. Thomas Church gets lost in the clouds, like an ornament wrapped up in cotton. I go as far as I can inside the crack of cold, skim the wide belly of the church, hang on to my breakneck speed. I brake before the wall slams me.

I work alone and in nobody's hurry. I work from my one black book and from the things that I know about sky and vanishing, fear and wanting. I tilt the flashlight up on the bricked-in windowsill behind me and stand inside its shine, the cans of color at my feet and the rabbits on the opposite side of the wall, looking for nibbles in the death zone. There's nothing like heat in this light. There's only what I'm graffing—the swirls and orbs and flecks and tags, the pictures I'm making for Stefan. Precision is the trick of the wrist. Curves jet from the shoulder. If you want a halo bigger than you've earned the right to be, you paint with your whole body. You can use your thumb to spare your index finger, but you can't lose your nerve, or your reason.

I work in fractions. I take my time. I listen for the guards in their tower, the knick-click of the rifles, the scrape inside the binocular barrels, the dogs on long, stinking leashes. I click the flashlight on and off to make my wicks and glyphs dance, and then I pack myself up and ride Arabelle's bike to the viewing platform on the West Berlin side. I leave the bike and climb.

“Hey!” I call from up there. “Hey! Hey!” Leaning as far as I can over the platform railing and waving my arms toward the East—my arms and my broad, arcing yellow light, which paints the night sky brighter. I squint against the crack of cold, daring the Stasi to see me. If Stefan's awake, Stefan will find me with the convex and concave lenses of his grandfather's old scope. If he can see the moon, then he can see me, painting his Welcome Here sign.

“My graffs are good,” I tell Stefan, when I see him. “It's art, pure and true.” He says I should take a picture and bring it to him, stick it inside my boot so that the border guards can't find it. I say taking a picture would ruin the surprise, and if he can't come see my art for himself someday, then he can't be my boyfriend—not forever. Look at yourself, I tell him. Look and imagine yourself free.

“Anything could happen,” Mutti says, to warn me when I get home, at whatever time it is, however long it takes me. Anything. Because the wall does not belong to West Berlin, and neither does the ground where I stand when I'm painting. I am a public enemy, a property defacer. I am an artist in love with a boy.

Anything can happen
. But then again, what hasn't happened already? I ride Arabelle's bike home and the birds watch me fly. My paint cans clang together in their pack. I skid to a stop, pull the front gate open, weave through the courtyards shaped like keyholes. I prop Arabelle's parade of a bike back
up beneath the basil and climb the clinking outside steps. I walk on my Adidas toes and keep my courier bag of colors quiet until I'm back in the room that we share.

Omi, Mutti, and me. Three in three rooms, sliding away from each other.

She has pink hair, a big pop of Bazooka color. She cuts it straight across, Cleopatra style, with scissors that she borrows from the co-op. Out in the night she shines like some West Berliner planet.

“Did you see me?” That's her question. “Did you see me up there waving to you?”

You tell her yes. It makes her happy. It isn't a lie, not every time. A splash of color will flash your scope and you'll think that it's her; think she's found you. Three letters and two syllables. That's her name, and it fits her.

She brings you basil leaves in summer and electric pop all year round. She hides chocolate in her pockets. She tears pages out of the books she likes and leaves them on your table. Once she showed up at the door in a spackled leather jacket, worn and beaten, she was boasting, by some surfboard-sanding punker.

“It's yours,” she said, and when she took it off, her arms were freckled color. She's a graffiti genius, if you believe what she says. Cocky looks good on Ada.

There's nothing she believes in less than black and white, or gray. Even the mole she paints above her lip is green sometimes, and sometimes orange, and the mole trades sides above her lip depending on the season. She wasn't always like this. She was a little kid once. You remember her even when she won't remember herself. Ponytails and questions. Big eyes. “Why not?” “What's this?” “Can I?” It's right there. In your head. Who she was before she had the power of being anyone at all.

“This is Ada.”

“This is Stefan.”

She was bored out of her mind. She'd drive you crazy. You'd be out on the balcony and she'd show up and want. Asking for it, always. Why. Why is the air thick blue up high and thin blue at the edges? What is the color of blur? Which one is Mars, and why does Cygnus fly south, and what do you mean: four-power finder scope? Why don't you get a bigger power? The only cure for her was a pencil. Give her one of those and a chart of the skies and at least she'd sit for a minute, looking and tracing, putting a shine on the belt of Orion, a couple of bows on the tail of Centaurus, fire in the mouth of Draco.

“I need paints,” she'd say.

“I need pastels.”

One day she showed up and she was twelve years old. She'd cut her long hair short, painted a stripe of blond that hung across one eye. She wore a hoop in one ear, nothing in the other. She had that mole on her lip. It could have been purple. Glitter, you think you remember.

“I'm Ada,” she said, like you were going to argue her wrong. Like you hadn't met her two dozen times before, four times each year, in the good years. Every time the door opens your grandmothers act like they can't believe the other one still exists, like surviving is the biggest miracle and maybe it is. But the year Ada turned twelve, she made like you were someone brand-new, a boy she'd never noticed before.

“I'm Ada,” she said, and you said, “Yeah?” careful to show that you noticed nothing new and couldn't remember the last time she'd come. Like some part of you hadn't been waiting for her, a little angry, maybe, at everything that keeps her far, at how many months had gone by between visits. She wasn't even through the door when she was out on the balcony, hands on her hips, acting as if you were her own appointed consulate of astronomers. As if your scope was made for her. It was dusk, next to night. The stars were playing tricks with the lights of West Berlin.

“Let me see it?” she said.

“What?”

She cocked her head to one side, like she was measuring you, like that mole of hers wasn't for kissing. “Everything,” she said. “Everything you can get from your measly four-power.”

“The air's rambunctious,” you said, holding back, not touching her. Not touching her yet, because you were waiting. “There's nothing to see.”

“Don't be stupid,” she said.

“I'm not stupid,” you said.

“The air is not rambunctious,” she said. “Can't be.” And she was so sure of herself, so pretending that you were brand-new in her life, that you had to kiss her.

Now when Ada comes she acts like she's a professor. She makes like she's researched every last centimeter of jumping the wall, everything it takes to be a hero—like she would do it herself, if she had to. Across a tightrope, she says. On a speeding train. In a stolen uniform. By way of a tunnel. In the trunk of a car, on the floor of a car, beside the heat of a car engine. Over the first fence and the next and the third, and past the mines and the twenty-two-centimeter-high asparagus grass and despite the dogs and in the middle of the night and across the river and in the basket of a hot air balloon stitched out of worn-down bedsheets. Four times a year, and sometimes less than that, she comes to your flat and stands there in the dome of night giving a little lecture on all the ways the wall's been overcome by people with less than you to lose. Her hair's whatever color she makes it. Her fingers are skinny as bone. She's cool in the summer and warm in winter. She's a girl who won't take no.

“I'm waiting,” she says.

And you're listening to her. You're listening, and so is everyone else, and afterward, after Ada has spent the day she's been allowed to spend and the half-zone of night, you can think of nothing but her at the Eisfabrik on Köpenicker Strasse. You work the boiler house and the engine room remembering her kisses. You check on the cork between the walls and think of
her slender weight on you. You write down the history as Alexander gives it—the old facts about Carl Bolle the Bimmel-Bolle man, who bought this place in 1893 and started making his sheets of ice three long years later. Carl Bolle ice went to breweries and pubs. It went out on the trucks with the dairymen. It went to houses before houses had refrigerators. It went to the men with the fish. Big sheets of ice, 1.5 meters long—that's what the Eisfabrik is famous for. Two world wars and a bunch of fires later, it's still turning running liquid into solid cold, and you're its newest apprentice. Alexander's your boss and your instructor. He's teaching you what he can about how pipes fit and how waters run, how cork insulates, how turbines hum, and all the time he talks you're picturing Ada, trying to remember which side of her face her mole had landed on.

Your future is plumbing, the Stasi say. Ada grinds the sole of her boot into the nubs of the rug and says you're aiming low.

I have a job, and it pays. On the best days, I hitch a ride on the back of Arabelle's bike and let her brown coat smother me like snow. It scratches my face as I squeeze in behind her.

“You're a whiff full of paint,” she says, as I latch my hands beneath her ribs and above the small mound of her belly.

“No time for the lavender cure,” I tell her. I'm already late as it is.

In the daylight her bike is a special sight—all those streamers of wool and the twin lime fenders, the baby-blue banana seat, the red handlebar bell that does a bad job of warning off traffic. I get all wrapped up in the wool and her hair. I wish I'd worn my gloves with the fingers. Another February freezer.

“You see Peter last night?” I holler forward.

She nods. Her rasta hair bounces crazy.

“He tell you he loves you?”

No answer.

“You tell him your part yet?”

She doesn't answer that either.

The vendors have been out since dawn. The caravans are busy, the little corner shops, the wood smoke piles, the minced lamb man and the dill weed man and the lady who sells the köfte. The air is a mix-up of factory bells and machine scree, the wide wallop of Arabelle's bike wheels across the cobblestone streets, the punk songs of Die Chaoten and the wind in the plane trees. The cars are pissed, the buses are crowded, the U-Bahn chinks on its rails. When we finally hit the platz, Arabelle takes her big booted feet off the pedals and conks her legs out straight, letting her coat catch the wind. She hee-haws like a donkey.

“Safe again!” she says.

“A miracle,” I say. The sun might be out but it's cold as hell as we wobble and spin toward St. Thomas. Before the Berlin Cathedral got built this was the biggest church on both sides of the wall—a church to thousands of people—and even though it's six stories tall, the war has got nothing on it. When people call Kreuzberg a ghetto on the news, when they complain about all the smells and the mess and the squatters, I say you can't be a ghetto if you're standing this tall. You can't be a ghetto if right here with you are Arabelle and basil forests and zurna songs and artists plus a hippie minister who's come all the way from California to keep us pure and holy.