Going Over (20 page)

I've found the reverend. Henni's come. Out here in the hall I tell them what I know, while inside the classroom Markus sits with the kids on the storytelling rug and teaches them the words to some song. Meryem huddles on his lap holding a stuffed anteater, the long yarn tube of its nose striped green and blue. She doesn't sing. She rocks.

“What do we know?” the reverend asks. Again.

“That she has seen Savas's mother. That she believes she is dead. That Savas is hiding.” I will myself to stand very still. If I don't I will start shaking.

“And you believe what she believes.”

“There is blood on her boots, Reverend.”

He uses the flat of his thumbnail to smooth the strands of his hair. He tips heel to toe, thinking.

“And this was by the canal. Meryem saw her there?”

“She was running after her dog, she says. He must have gotten loose. Or they were playing. Or—I don't know, actually.
Maybe the dog found the body first and started howling. Maybe that's how it was. But Meryem was there. Early this morning. She got close enough. It's not mud on her boots. I swear it.”

Henni keeps pulling at the corners of her mouth with one hand. She's stuffed the fist of the other into her apron pocket. She's gone halfway down the hallway twice, to call the police from the church secretary's phone, but each time she's come back—worried, mumbling. “We don't know enough,” she's said. “Since when do our police help the Turkish people?” she's said. “How can we tell the police without dragging Meryem down to the station to be grilled, and heaven knows, the child's been through enough.” There are a million reasons not to call, and there are a million reasons that she has to, and the reverend's going to rub off the last of his hair if he doesn't stop thumbing it soon.

“I'm worried about Savas,” I say.

“I know you are.” Henni says it.

“Well, aren't
you
?”

“I'm worried about all of it, Ada.”

“And that stranger,” I say. “The one who dropped Meryem off. The one in the burqa, who ran.”

“Yes,” she agrees, her shoulders sagging. “That, too.” She turns and watches the kids through the glass pane of the day care door. She smears her hands over the lines in her brow, anxious and undecided, until finally I tell them the only good plan I can think of, the only way out of standing here, still.

“Arabelle,” I say. “From the Köpi.”

“Who?” The reverend takes his hand from his head and fits it down on his hips. He looks at me through his thick glasses, the horizontal stripe between one lens and the other like a crack in ice.

“My best friend,” I say. He looks at Henni and Henni nods, but the reverend shakes his head no.

“We'll have to bring the authorities in,” he says. “We'll have to put our faith with them.”

“Do what you need to do,” I say. I am running down the hall and into the wind.

I find Arabelle on the street outside the Köpi, locking her bike to the lamppost, stroking the blue shine of its banana seat like it's some kind of prize pony. She's muffed a scarf around her neck and her hair is wild, her coat unzippered, as if she suddenly doesn't care who knows or not, who might tell Peter.

“Hey,” she says, when she sees me. “What's up?” Her eyes are dark except for the click of light in the center, like the flash caught off of an invisible camera.

“She's dead,” I say. “Savas's mother. Meryem said.” My words in spurts. Choked off. From St. Thomas to the Köpi, by foot—maybe a kilometer. Run against the wind—a good forever.

The light goes out in Arabelle's eyes. “Are you sure?”

“I can't cry right now. Okay? I can't. You just have to help me.” Suddenly I see myself in her eyes—the pale-skinned me with the bright pink hair that's grown black and a little bleachy at the roots. I see myself: Ada Piekarz, the most independent girl in all Kreuzberg, begging for her best friend's help because
her boyfriend's locked on the other side and her mother's much too fragile. Because she needs help after all.

“What are we doing, then?”

“We're going to the canal.”

“What are we looking for?”

“For Savas. He's still missing.”

“But the police—”

“The police have been called. The reverend did that. But we need to find him first, we have to, Arabelle. He'll be too afraid if the police show up. He'll run even farther. If he's still running. If—”

“Don't think like that.”

“He's just a kid.”

“I know.”

“It's been days and it's cold and I—”

“Don't do this. All right? We don't have time.” She looks from me to the Köpi and back again. She unlocks her bike from the post and rolls it to me, hesitates. “Wait for me, okay? I'll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“To tell Felice. She'll call the ladies. She'll get them to the shop to talk.”

“There are kilometers of canal,” I say.

“I'll be quick, Ada. Just wait for me.”

And I stand with the wind in my bones.

How like a cat she has become, padding the floor on small feet. When you look back over your shoulder, she's there. When you study the wall, it's her shadow. She brings you things. Macaroni and cheese. A pair of gloves from the secondhand shop. A mug of coffee. A new wallet that is an old wallet she found in a dresser drawer. Thank you, you say. Why, you don't ask. She sits and she doesn't talk, finger to her lips, eyes closed, thinking.

As if she knows what happened to your Ada. As if she feels the guilt you've always felt. The guilt of absence. The shame of not being there.

Today the sun is in the sky and the wind blows and you are off the schedule at the Eisfabrik, at home in your room, lying long on your bed, when you feel her behind you and you turn. She's brought her book of photographs, the two pieces of its wooden cover laced together with a cord of leather. She holds it like a platter and stands, determined but also uncertain.
“Here,” you say, sitting now on the edge of the bed and making room beside you. The mattress shifts—high, low—like a giant playing seesaw with a mouse.

She's careful with the book, turns its pages slow so that the grainy black-and-whites don't slip from their triangle corners. She starts at the start, drawing her finger through time. See how it was, she is saying, not talking. She was once a girl, wearing her hair in vertical curls. Berlin was once not bombs, not razor fences, not men living in boxes near the sky. There are potted plants on windowsills in the boxes she shows me. There are pianos and people who play them and Christmas trees with icicle limbs, and in a corner of a room sometimes, in a wide-winged chair, a woman sits, a boy on her knee.

“Your mother?” you say.

She nods.

“Your brother?”

“Once,” she answers.

She turns the pages, moves time ahead. She grows up, and she's a teen. The curls are gone and her hair falls wavy to her shoulders, and sometimes the boy is with her, growing up, and sometimes a second girl, beside her, waves to the camera from above a cup of tea or from the marching arches of Oberbaum Bridge or from a plaid blanket by the River Spree.

“Ada's Omi,” you say.

“Yes.” Barely a whisper. Closing her eyes. Leaving time where it is. Shifting the book of pictures to your lap, the heavy wood and the leather spine, the black pages with their
photographs, and if you turn too fast, the pictures will slip, the story. The two girls and the brother and the mother and the man who comes in and out of the pictures now with a pair of polished shoes, a uniform. He stares at you from the picture, through time. He blows the smoke of his cigarette toward you.

“Your father,” you say.

“Yes.”

One more picture, and he's gone. Two more pages and now the pages are blank, and they go on, blank for a long time, until you turn and turn and get to the other side, where Grossmutter and Omi aren't little girls anymore, but women with their hair chopped short, the parts under their cheekbones hollow. There is a baby in Omi's arms. Now there is a baby beside Grossmutter. Now the two of them are out in the sun and the streets are rubble and the girls are growing up, and now there's a man and the white frame that runs around the picture cannot hold him in. The top of his head is sliced off. The jut of his elbow. The length below his belt. The corner of the pom-pom hat he is holding in one hand. You draw in a sharp breath, lean forward. Your ribs dent your heart.

“Shhhh,” she says, coming close and touching your hand, because you both know how this story turns out. You know what happens to the man too big for the frame. You can't keep turning, because if you do you'll find yourself. You'll find you and him together. Then.

“I'm sorry,” you say, and she shakes her head no.

“You're a lot like him,” she says. And leaves you like that.

Arabelle pedals. I hold on from behind, my hands high above the swollen cocoon of her baby, my face whipped by the yarn of her hair. It's a little after ten, and the people with jobs are mostly at their jobs and everyone else is in the coffee shops or out on the street, keeping warm by the light of their cigarettes. We smell the market before we get there, see the pluming smoke, the fabric dust, hear the zurna songs, smell the salt pools of the wet cheese.

Arabelle slows her bike and crosses through, wheels us around strollers, baskets, wire carts, recycled paper sacks, the thick-socked shoppers until finally we're through the crowds and over and down along the Landwehrkanal. A dog could get lost here. A kid could run. Someone could be dead, alone. Savas has to trust me.

“Meryem,” I had said. “What do you know?” And she had said that it was just this morning, and she had promised that she would not cross the bridge and that when the dog
barked she thought he was crying. She had said there was a fire burning. Squatters' kindle, maybe. Or something else.

And then what, Meryem?