Going Over (21 page)

She's dead
.

Then what, sweetie?

Savas is scared and he's hiding
.

Arabelle screeches back on the brakes, drags her foot on the ground, and stops. I slide off and she unstraddles and wheels the bike forward to the iron fence that separates the banks of the canal from the sandy, slushy path; she locks the bike in. For the first time in what feels like years the sun is in the sky, but still the wind blows cold, and out by a splintered dock an abandoned tug shivers.

We flare out, toward the underpart of trees, the hedges and the broken bits of things, the blue-bottle sculptures, the picnic trash, the smooth-faced houses with eyelid windows that nudge in along the banks—abandoned or taken and rotten. By now the reverend has called the police and back at the Köpi the women are gathering. But here and now, it's up to us, and besides, it's me Savas will come to. It's me who has to find him.

Arabelle fans her hands against her baby as she walks. She scans the water with the camera-click light of her eyes. I run ahead, out, back, trying to think like a murderer. Trying to think like a little boy lost.

“Savas!” A flock of pigeons scatter, a loose grebe. From across the canal, punk crackles on a transistor radio. On the
muddy bank of the canal, a pair of old swans squat. There are shadows beneath the bridges, but he isn't there. There's a water tank big as some army machine, and I trace its circumference, bend down to my knees, call: nothing.

“Anything?” I call to Arabelle now.

“Not yet.”

My words are white puffs. My fingers are cold. In a clump of grass by the shore of the canal a hightop Converse floats like a dirty duck. Beyond the next bridge the path narrows into bramble and low branches, gray slush. My feet are wet through. There's color high on Arabelle's face.

“Do you think Meryem would have gone this far?” she asks.

“I don't know.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“Not really. No. A dog crying. The smoke of some fire.”

“Maybe we missed something. Maybe, if we walk back, the same way . . .” Arabelle looks past me, into the thicket up ahead. She lifts her hand over her eyes to block the sun. A sleek-coated black cat walks past on four white paws. We watch it go. It tells us nothing.

“We should go back,” she says at last.

“I guess.”

“Maybe Felice has news. Maybe Savas is there, with the ladies.”

She blows air into her mittened hands, pulls her coat across her belly to save her baby from the wind. Lina, if it's a
girl, she's said. Peter, if it's a boy. The first red-headed, dark-skinned baby in the world—that's what she calls it, what she imagines.
You'll be Aunt Ada
. I've pictured a tiny thing with camera-click eyes in a house built of yarn, a thousand Turkish stitches. We walk side by side on the slushy path, beneath the silver gray of the weeping trees, the sun a glare and the canal sullen slow as syrup. “Savas!” I cry, and nobody answers, and Arabelle says that I have to be brave. I think of the story I told about fear, and what a liar I am, because I know what fear is, I know how it finds me.

Savas, please come. I am here
.

I hear the sound of wings overhead, one of the big magpies from the top of St. Thomas Church. It slaps like it's chained to the tree. Like it's been leashed and it's a war to get free. I hear the sound, and then I see it—the thing Savas has left behind.

“Arabelle?” But she has already seen it, too, and beside me she is running, holding her belly with her hands, tossing the ropes of her hair out of her face, away from the wind, until we both reach the tree where the magpie was, until she can help me up into the snaking branches, where Markus's patchouli-scented purple shawl clings like a nest.

“He was here,” I say, and she shakes her head. Yes, because he was here. No, because now he is not.

“Take it,” she says. “For the police.” Leaning down now and finding a stick and drawing an X to mark the spot.

There are five. They sit in the dark well of the back room behind the shop. Headscarves. Thick socks. Nervous needles. On the walls behind them, hung, cellophaned, nailed, are the sweaters they've made, signs in Turkish and German, photographs of Sandinistas, words stenciled in green:
the world is not a foreign land—there are no foreigners
. Felice has pushed back her dark hair with her hands. She sits on a bamboo stool, higher than the others, a pad of ecru-colored paper on her lap and a portable tank of kerosene at her feet, a wad of Kleenex in one fist. The three hoops in her one pierced ear make little cymbal sounds as she listens.

She doesn't turn to us. She follows the talk.

Arabelle steps in, breathless, her coat open, her hair wild, as now the lady in the orange scarf and green cotton coat jabs her knitting needle toward the room's one window at something she sees, some piece of evidence or story. She knows what has happened; it is clear. She has, like the other women gathered
here, borne witness to the private hell of Savas and his mother. She knows what men will do to disobedient wives. She knows what sons will do for their mothers. I feel my heart, cloggy and dense, and now Arabelle walks to the center of the room, and everything goes still. She takes the shawl from the sack she had strapped across her chest, and explains the canal, the tree, the patchouli. One woman then another begins to cry. Others nod their heads, confirming.

Change the story
, I want to say.
Change the ending. Please
.

Arabelle's spine curves. Felice's fingers knot. The talk goes too fast, and now the first woman, the orange and the green, lifts one hand and makes a pistol with her fist—cocks it and fires—and I cannot move in my wet socks and boots, cannot think, only

Don't
.

No
.

Please
.

But it's clear. It is too true. The mother is murdered. The son is missing, still. Lost, perhaps or probably. I feel Arabelle's arms around me. I hear the tinkle bell over the door out front, I turn to find the police, but they aren't there. It's Mutti who has come, and Omi behind her—one tiny and one small, both of them rearranged by the wind.

“Oh, God,” Mutti says. “Thank God, Ada, for Henni. She said you'd gone out to the canal in search of the boy, but we couldn't find you.”

You make a list of all that could go wrong. The arrow zings south or north, but not west. The cable snaps. The wheels jump the line. The handles pull you crooked. The rabbits will twitch, the dogs will bark, the guard will wake up from his half-sleep, his finger on the trigger. You will be heard. Seen. Found out. Betrayed. You will change your mind. Your body will not be returned. Your Grossmutter will be taken to the station. Your hole in the ground will curdle, empty, without you. She will not love you. She, your Grossmutter. She, Ada.

Do the drawings again.

Test the math.

Figure out a big-enough plan, figure out who, in the West, can help you.

Grossmutter whisper-walks to your room, leaves things behind. A pencil. Hot chocolate. A photograph that must have slipped from its triangle corners.
That's you. That's him. That's us. Here
. She turns the TV up so loud that the ears won't
hear what you're thinking. She stands in the threshold of your room, watching, minuscule. Taking a long tour of you with her black eyes. Studying the sack that you've packed and the bulge inside—the rope and rollers, locks and keys, handles and three kinds of wires. Soon it will be test day for the flying fox. You've bought the wire off the black market from a guy in the crane-repair business. You've smuggled hooks from the Eisfabrik. You've practiced every knot you know on the drapery cords and decided that if anybody asks, you will explain that you are practicing for the circus that's come to town; there are signs all over town, pictures of skinny men on the high trapeze, the fantastic heroics of tumblers, midair.

“Know what you're doing, Stefan.”

“I'm just—”

“No,” she says. “Don't lie to me.” The husk of her lips against your forehead.

And then she is gone, and it is you, alone with your maps, your math, your tests, your half-lies. It is Ada, over there, with her wanting and her hurting and her love brighter than color. It is those bastard wolf boys, prowling in an alley, those bastard wolf boys winning because where were you? What did you do?

Nothing is certain, except that this is: Ada cannot be hurt again.

Sometimes you need color to tell a story, and sometimes the whole thing is there in black and white.

“Be careful,” Mutti says.

“I am.”

“Don't stay out all night.”

She'll listen for my boots on the stairs. She'll wait for me to pass through the courtyard and out the gates, into the April night, beneath the rows of flower boxes, where the seeds are starting to split in their dirt. It's near the hour. The bells will ring. Sebastien will place his chin on her shoulder as he does sometimes, his hair a bright red bloom on the sill of Mutti's bones. They have been quiet at night. They have been quiet in the morning. They have let me be, because they know how mourning is.

I've left Arabelle her bike with the soggy streamers in case Peter wants to take her for a ride, her arms barely long enough now to reach beyond their baby. That's what she calls it
now—
theirs, ours
—ever since Peter found out. It was just after we knew for sure that Savas was gone and the news wilded through Kottbusser Tor and some people called us heroes, but we're not. It took Meryem and Felice and the Köpi ladies and Henni and the reverend and Arabelle and me. It took the police, in the end, who fanned out along the canal and went farther past the bridge toward the brambles. It took four days. They were found in a room built of stone, a half-shelter. It had been done with a pistol—Savas's mother murdered and Savas dead of heartbreak or of cold, or of so much hiding, or because he did believe in fear, or because he didn't. They found him with his head on her heart, the thin cotton of her headscarf pulled like a shroud across his shoulders.