Going Over (4 page)

This is why—after your grandfather left, after he didn't come back, after it was only your grandmother and you in the three-room flat, inside the burgundy walls, on the upholstered chairs striped thin, the chair legs like twigs, the TV the size of a small pane of glass, the oven too small for a turkey, after it was only you two—this is why you taught yourself seeing. Seeing is silent and it doesn't leave a trace. Seeing is waiting for the sky to lose its turbulence so that you can scope the distance. Seeing brings the far close in and the dark to light. It's the ten
billion stars, the galactic light, the buzz glow, the clouds that are frankly zodiacal. Seeing is boring the Stasi to tears. They watch you watching. You break no rules. They stand and they watch as you watch.

“I'll tell you a secret,” you'll say to Ada when she comes.

“What?” She'll stand so close, smelling like coffee and strawberries.

“If you want to see something at night, you look just past it.”

“Don't be stupid.”

“I'm not stupid. Looking straight on makes a thing disappear.”

“They teach it weird over here,” she'll say. “Don't they?”

“Shhhh.” You have to tell her. She is constantly forgetting.

She'll press her lips to your neck. She'll kiss your throat and bite your chin, take the words right out of your mouth, brush the light hair of your mustache with the red chip of her nail. Then she'll take your telescope in her hands and level it low for panoramic vision. Over the wall, over the Spree, past the canal, toward Kreuzberg. Ada prefers cities to stars.

“I'm trying to help you,” she'll say. “Trying to
show
you.”

“Shhhh.” Inside, your grandmothers will talk, they'll remember. They'll whisper the years before, when there was no wall, but there were Russians. Your grandmothers had thought they'd seen the worst of it all through the second world war, but then the Russians came, and then the wall went up, and
then the world was divided according to who was free and who was not, who would run and who could not, who escaped and who was murdered, or who was suddenly pregnant. There was a time when you had a mother. There was a time when you had a grandfather. There are the times that you remember and the times that you do not. All your grandmothers do is remember. They hold each other's hands.

“Look,” Ada will say, when she comes. “Out there.” She'll bring the streets into focus, the lovers along the canal, the big birds in the turrets of the old hospital, where there is art now, not sickness. She'll tell you to lean in, and you do. She'll say, “Listen, Stefan, they're playing our song.”

“Who?”

“At the café. Listen.”

“It's a telescope,” you'll remind her. “A
telescope
. For seeing.”

“You can't stay here,” she'll say. “All right? That's what I'm saying.”

“Ada.”

“I'm serious, Stefan. I can't keep waiting.”

“Can't or won't?”

She'll bite her juicy lip, touch the mole with her tongue, think on it. She'll kill you with thinking so long.

“Right now, can't. Someday, maybe, won't.”

Your heart will drop from your throat to your toes every time she says it. Burn a giant hole straight through. Make it a bad day with Alexander at the Eisfabrik the next day and
the next day and all the weeks you won't see her after that. “I thought you loved me.”

“I do love you, and that's the point.” She'll sway side to side, back and forth, in her Adidas sneaks or her beat-up patent-leather boots, one of its latches rusty and busted, one of the zippers going slack. “I love you so much that you're getting out of here.”

“It's not that easy.”

And then the lecture will come on. Ada Piekarz. Professor of Escape. And what can you do but listen? One after the other after the other, she'll tell her stories. Jumping, leaping, flying Ada. Like escape is one big circus act.

You'll let her go on, but you know how it is. You know how the jumpers have died: Bullets to the head. Nails in the feet. Volts up the spine. Lungs full of river. Falling from the sky. Chaos in the tunnel. Carried like meat. Caged like a monkey. In a holding cell. In the shock hands of the Stasi. In the teeth of a dog on a leash. In the bright light of the watchtower beams. When a herd of rabbits was watching.

You could counter everything she says—go story against story, proof after proof. You could tell the story you know best, about your own grandfather and how he went missing. About how you were only five when it happened and maybe it was all your fault. You spare yourself. You hold your tongue. You let Ada go on, being cocky. You let her say what she does, which is this: “Life's a big waste in the East. Life would be better with me.”

You don't need Ada to tell you about waste. You don't need a soul to tell you how it feels to be stuck up here as man of the house with the woman your grandfather left behind. Your Grossmutter can't look at you. She can't love you. Your grandfather left you with a tube to look through, some mirrors, a mount and screws. He left you with your grandmother shrinking, playing the Black Channel all day long, like the good commie she never was and probably isn't. He left her dressing you up for the Young Pioneers and putting you out on the streets for Volunteer Sundays and making you wave at the parades from your window. He left her sending you out of the house singing that song you will always, until the day you die, hate to hear anybody singing:

Take your hands from your pocket

Do some good, don't try to stop it
.

Your grandfather left her shaking.

The Stasi are close. They're always listening. Your grandfather is gone, and it's your fault. You see Ada four times a year, and by the way: You love everything about her.

By the time I get home the kitchen is dark except for the pilot light and the candle Omi burns, like that little bit of flame can warm her. I can see her hand, cutting through the light, stirring her coffee with yesterday's bread. I can see the soft hairs on her chin and the thin lines around her mouth, where she holds all her worry.

“Your Mutti's out,” she says, and I guess that means Sebastien. Another man to try to love. Another heartbreaker.

I shrug and my bag slides to the floor. I dig out three steaming bratwurst sandwiches and set them on the table, letting the smell of the hot mustard fume. The crinkled aluminum paper catches the light of the flame.

“We should eat ours now,” Omi says, like the conspirator she is, “while they're still hot.” Suddenly the ridge of worry above her lip is softening. She slides her coffee off to one side and unpacks her bratwurst until the aluminum is neat and square, polished as a dish. “You must have known I was hungry,” she says, biting in.

“You're always hungry, Omi,” I say. Because she is.

“Thank the war,” she says. She always says it.

“Good?” I ask.

“Delicious.” She never swallows anything until she's chewed a dozen times. “We made it last.” That's what she tells me. The frogs they boiled in heated buckets. The bark they pulled off trees. The chalk they ate that tasted like erasers. The candy the Americans had thrown from the skies. They made their food last through the worst years of the war and Omi makes her food last now. She sits there in her chewing silence, remembering how it was, going over the stories she has told me and told me. She was eighteen and her father had not come home from the front. It was the winter of 1946, and they'd been left—her mother, her sister, herself, the baby she didn't know she was having. Berlin was a city of smash, that's what she says. Seventy million cubic meters of rubble and the coddled afterstink of bombs. Berlin was shortages and ration cards, fake coffee, raisin bombers, and even the linden trees of the Tiergarten were gone, where she had chased big-winged birds when she was a girl. “Conquered and divided,” she will say. “Hungry,” she'll repeat. “We were always hungry. We made our meals last.”

She gnaws into her bratwurst sandwich. She chews, a squishy sound. I wait for her to tell me something about right now, or back then, but she's too busy with the hot mustard on the warm rye to start a conversation. I remember the war for her—how they made marmalade from carrot stalks and
honey out of pumpkins. How they traded American cigarettes for whatever they could find: a pair of shoes for a bar of soap, a bottle of beer for a pillowcase. How her own mother, in the room they borrowed, built a stove out of three bricks and some coal. The face of the building across the street had slid right off, and there were gardens planted on each floor, women sleeping with the turnips. In one room on one floor there was the stubble of a bush that would bloom lilac smells in the spring. That was the biggest mystery of all, Omi has said. The smell of lilacs in the spring.

“You know where Mutti is?” I ask her now.

She pretends she doesn't. There's glisten on her lips.

“You know if Arabelle's back?”

She gives me her don't-ask look.

I stand in the dark and walk past her to the square kitchen window that looks out over the thinnest part of the thinnest courtyard of our squatter's ville. Arabelle's bike is nowhere around, but somebody's stuck a German flag into Timur's empty box of basil, and the clothes on the line outside Gretchen's window are so frozen stiff with cold that they look like cardboard cutouts. It's blue and white and yellow out there, lit by flickering TVs and candles.

By the time I turn around Omi has finished. She has folded the aluminum into the smallest possible square. She's holding the candle like it's the center of a prayer, or like it's the only heat she'll ever have, or like she'll never forget that winter in Berlin, those walls without windows, those buildings without
walls, those gardens growing out of living room carpets, that horse that somebody brought home for meat, that ox attacked by the pocketknives of widows. Like she'll never forget, worst of all, the day the mountain of bricks in the street exploded—the rubble falling back toward the sky, taking a small man with it, two kids. “Everything tossed like jacks,” she has said. “Everyone coming down in pieces.” An empty pair of shoes. Ten missing fingers.

“You have told us,” Mutti will remind her.

“But it happened,” Omi will say.

She holds her candle very still and nothing moves except the creep of worry and the glisten on her lips.

It's late by the time Mutti comes home on the back of Arabelle's bike. I hear the ruckus of her, hear someone from an upstairs room calling “Shhhhh,” and now the baby on the third floor is crying. Gretchen's face appears in the window across the way, beyond the frozen aprons. She's tied a scarf around her yellow curls. When she opens the window to get a better look down below, I hear the wheeling rise of the reed high in the song of a zurna. Another Turkish boyfriend for Gretchen, the tattoo artist who lives across the courtyard. Another rule half broken.

In the courtyard Arabelle presses her big face against my mother's small one. She holds her arm across my mother's shoulders, her wire-framed glasses snug in her dreadlocks. She wedges her bike against the wall with one hand, then helps Mutti forward. They move along, the two of them, like someone tied their legs together.

“I'm fine,” Mutti is saying, her words slurred.

“Nothing to it,” Arabelle tells her. One door clicks and there are echoes on the metal staircase. There's no sound, then the sluff of carpet shuffle, then the loose jiggle of the one-screw doorknob, and now they are here, Arabelle's face like cardamom and Mutti's pale as moonlight. The two chestnuts of Arabelle's eyes tell me to be quiet.

“We'll put her to bed now, won't we?” she says, her voice like the low strings of a guitar.

She's done this before. She knows the way. It isn't far, anyway, to Mutti's bedroom. “We're home now,” Arabelle says, and Mutti agrees. She sits on the edge of her bed, obedient. She lets me peel away her gray felt coat, her scarf as long as the bedroom. Arabelle slips the boots from her feet. Mutti lies back and we pull both crocheted blankets to her chin. She sighs as if she's already asleep.