Going Over (23 page)

You don't even check the time. You're not at the Eisfabrik, and there will be consequences, explanations owed to Alexander, who has been cutting you slack for weeks now, not asking.

“Have you called in?” Grossmutter asks, reading your mind.

“No.”

“Be intelligent,” she says, picking up the phone and calling the number that she has committed to memory, just in case. “For what?” you used to ask. For this, you guess. The call rings through. You have had an accident, she tells someone. You're en route to the hospital. Yes, she says. Yes. Yes. Then, No. She hangs up, finally. You thank her.

“Get up,” she says.

“What for?”

“I'm not lying for you. Let's go.”

“To the hospital?”

“Didn't you just hear me?”

She grabs the boxy purse with the silver snap from the closet floor and the paisley brocade jacket from a hanger. She shuffles out of her slippers and into her square-heeled pumps. Now from a hook near the bathroom sink she grabs a terry-cloth towel and wraps your arm, pinning the two ends together
with a safety pin she unlatches with her teeth. “Okay,” she says, meaning
stand up
. A single key unbolts all four locks on the door.

“Now,” she says.

You aren't going to fight her.

She's a mite of a person. You're your grandfather's size. Out on the street you try to protect her. Through the terry towel your deepest cuts still bleed, and you think of Lukas out there, your stuff tossed into the backseat of his Trabbi. He knows more about you than you know about him: where you live. How you fall. He has your flying invention, your future, your life, and he has vanished beneath the brown sky, between walls.

“Stefan, are you listening?” Grossmutter says. She looks up, the folds of her neck dangling from the point of her chin.

“Yes.” You've gone six blocks and there are plenty more to go, and the towel has begun to crust and stick to the matted hairs of your arm. The foot traffic works against you—the factory hands, the bell ringers, the paper shredders, the technocrats, the apprentices aproned for work. Their noise crowds you in, their hurry to somewhere, and suddenly you realize that Grossmutter feels safe here, lost within the noise, invisible, unheard.

“Come here.”

“I'm right here.”

“Closer.”

You lean in.

“I know what you're doing,” she says. “All right? I am no fool.”

You don't agree. You don't deny.

“Promise me something.”

“What, Grossmutter?”

“Be smart. Don't make a long goodbye.”

In the day Sebastien goes to Bethaniendamm to work on the mural that will make him famous. (“Putting chickens before eggs,” Omi says.) In the afternoons and evenings he's here, turning our squatter flat into a color village. He has decided that what we need most are yellow, pearl, and green—a different color for each of our rooms. He's painted checkerboard squares on the narrow bathroom floor, a wire bridge arch over the place where the mirror will be, when and if we find a mirror. He's bought Timur a painted tin and some seeds, commissioned him to grow my mother flowers. It's early May, and the seeds have sprouts. I pass them going in and going out of the courtyard.

He cooks. Mutti eats. We all sit there chewing, Omi deliberate as ever and dark-eyed somber. Mutti's men don't ever last this long. Mutti's never been this happy. Omi keeps chewing and watching, reads in her pearl room or goes out for an afternoon of vanish and twice in these past two weeks
she has been gone all day, but she won't confess to where she's been. I smell the East on her, the brown air, but I know not to ask her. I see her packing things, moving things, setting off for the flea markets with the things she doesn't want in her hands. She comes home with coins in her pockets and no more castoffs in her hands.

“What are you doing, Omi?”

She doesn't say. She watches me. She asks me sometimes about Stefan.

“I don't know,” I'll say.

“You don't know
what
?” she'll say. Staring at me through half of her eyes.

“I don't know anything about Stefan,” I'll tell her. “I don't know anything about miracles.”

“You make room for miracles, Ada,” she'll say. “Do you hear me?”

She'll say it and leave. She'll do her business in the shadows of her thinning room. She'll go away and come back. The space around her grows bigger.

“Omi,” I will say to her. “Please tell me what you are doing.” But she has said all that she will say, and I have neither lied nor told her something.

I leave, too—leave when I can. I find myself places to go and things to do, like making a mobile for Arabelle's baby. I draw all the people the baby will know and string them together with hangers and yarn. Arabelle and Peter and Felice and the ladies and Mutti and Omi, and me, too, Aunt Ada—all of us
in black and white, stark and true, our mixed-up Kreuzberg blood. I want the baby to know who the world is made of. From its very first days on this earth.

So I go. I sit. I draw. On the park benches and by the sausage trucks. In the shadows of trees, by the canal. Behind the market and in the sanctuary of the church, where Herr Palinski never asks why I'm not at the day care anymore. I use graffiti tricks in miniature, working from memory and intuition.

And sometimes in the afternoon, when I can't not think of him anymore, when it's sadness I feel and not anger, when I think,
What if it's the Stasi taking my letters away, what if it isn't even Stefan's fault?
I wind down around the belly of the church and past the Thirteen Great Escapes and through the narrow lane between Our Side and Their Wall until I reach the observation tower and climb. The green is coming in on the trees over there. Nobody waves when I do.

Two weeks, the early hour, and Lukas doesn't come. You go to the park every day before starting time at the Eisfabrik and you wait, your back against the middle linden tree, your feet where you fell. They put ten stitches in your arm and the black threads itched beneath your sleeve, and you have tried to stay calm, to swallow past the sick hot spot high in your throat past your tongue. You didn't know him, after all, did you? You trusted the wrong punker guy, and now he has your stuff and he's guessed your story, and he knows where you live, and it's not like you can go to the police for a stolen flying fox,
come on
, and you swear to whatever God there is that if the Stasi come for Grossmutter, you will kill them. You trusted everything to a skinny guy with a spider on his fist.

And what about Ada? What about Ada, waiting, the letters you didn't answer,
couldn't
answer, because What if? What if you said you would come and it didn't work out? What if
something went wrong, and you had promised? What if the people who read the letters you write figured it out and came to get you? Losing Ada is nothing next to disappointing her, and losing Ada is enough.

It's getting late. You have nothing to carry but the stitches beneath your sleeve and the jacket you'll need inside the factory of ice. You study the break in the hedge, the tops of cars in the streets, the few people who pass by and stop to study you, as if they're waiting for the circus to come. The church bells from the other side ring. It's starting hour, and Alexander's there waiting, with his clipboard and his careful eyes. “You fell where?” he asked. “In the flat,” you said. His letting you lie, again, being his greatest act of friendship. You will never forget Alexander. You'll owe him big time someday.

There's that black cat again, on its white feet. There are the birds, and the sun sticking to the bottom shelf of the clouds that came in fat last night, blocked your view of Kreuzberg. The scope only sees so far. It's losing part of the color spectrum, and its capacity for pink. You stayed out late on the balcony last night, until it was only you and the TV tower, awake.

People in the street, cars passing. The cat rubbing its nose against the rough cloth of your jeans. The whistle of a policeman blows, more of a screech than a note, and it's time to go. You step away from the tree. You're halfway through the park when you hear the muffler yanking itself down the street.

Lukas?

You turn in the direction of the noise, and you wait. You see the pineapple Trabbi shivering at the curb, shutting its minuscule powers down, spitting Lukas out of its driver's seat. You stand where you are, not moving. You watch him trot, but slow, around the park's perimeter, toward the break in the hedge, across the hard earth, toward you.

“Hey,” he says, like it hasn't been two weeks, like you're not just standing there with a look of something fierce on your face.

“What the hell, Lukas?” you say, when you can speak.

“Man,” he says, lifting your pack off his back. “There was some work to do.” He crouches down by your feet, works the zipper on the pack. Talks down, toward the ground, so you crouch, too, and he unzips, and he talks, and you interrupt him.

“Two
weeks
,” you say.

“This was never going to work,” he says. “Good thing you went first.” He chuckles.

“I thought you were gone,” you say.

“I was busy,” he says, and by now the flying fox is out of the pack and on the ground, laid out for your inspection, much improved, according to Lukas, who is still explaining how you didn't lathe the grooves deep enough, didn't counterweight the handles, needed a stronger harness strap.
No wonder you fell
. You'll be late to the Eisfabrik if he goes on like this, but he doesn't stop, until finally, abruptly, the words shut off and he stares at you until you shift your gaze and look directly in his eyes.

“Corner of Schmollerstrasse and Bouchestrasse,” he says.

You shake your head, shrug, and say that you don't understand, he's talking crazy, and
two weeks, man
. You thought he'd absconded.

“Listen, Stefan. It's perfect. I went there. I looked. The place is abandoned. We'll make like repairmen.”

He's done his own math. He estimates a distance of fifty meters from the five-story house in the East to the four-story house in the West. He talks about how lucky we are that the house on our side is taller than the house on the other—how the angle of our escape will give our flying fox just enough speed. Yeah, sure, there's a watchtower in the midst. But if we play it right and wait until late dark, the guard might not see us.

“What are you talking about?” He could be a trap, you think. He could be Stasi ears, testing you. You have to test him back. Study his face, wonder what he knows and whom he's told. Like suddenly, after all these mornings in the park, and everything between you, and everything neither of you carefully said, you have to get the kid's credentials.

“No. 68-A Bouchestrasse,” he presses on. “Neukölln. I've got friends who will be waiting for us there with a car.”

“Friends?”

“All right, not friends. My brother. One guy, but it's enough. He made the escape last time, and I didn't. I got lockup. Twenty months. He's there, and I'm here, and there's nothing for me, unless I jump. It's our time to jump. I knew you
were the one the first time I saw you shooting lousy arrows in the park.”

Your heart pounds in your gut, against your throat. You keep your eyes on him, saying everything fast and everything in a whisper. He fiddles with the fox the whole time so that anybody passing will assume he's teaching you new laws of physics and mechanics. “We'll need more cable,” he's saying. “We'll need a fishing line.”

“You're assuming a whole hell of a lot.”

“Listen to me, okay? Just listen. The building at Schmollerstrasse is empty, and the chimney is solid stuff, thick and strong enough to take our weight. The skylights above the attic lead directly to the roof. We'll make them think we're repairmen. Carry our stuff in during broad daylight, and stay up there until any thinking guard is asleep in his watchtower. We fish the three lines out, one after another, over the wall. We hook our wheels in. And then . . .” He lifts his eyebrows like they can swoop off his face. He throws his hands up high, then scatters them, far as his skinny arms can reach. To Neukölln.