Going Over (7 page)

“Hold tight, little man,” I tell Savas.

The taxi circles again, a cat on a prowl, wicking its long tail of steam, and I'm shivering now, biting my lips, wishing Savas would tell me where he lives—which concrete room, which satellite dish, which place he's run away from, why. I push the bike harder but the snow fights back, and now Savas turns and gives me a black-eyed look, like he feels my fear, like I'm breaking my promise.
Nothing to be afraid of
. I yank my hood back, blow heat into my hands. Savas looks up and down the snowy splatter of me and puffs his cheeks into that smile.

“Now you're pink and blue and white, Miss Ada,” he says.

“And you're a king,” I say, my lips blue, my teeth chattering. “A hero.”

He forgets, for a half a fraction of a second, that he's escaped from somewhere, that he's been crying. I lift the shawl from his head and shoulders and flap its snow onto the ground. I wrap him up again and suck in the air and turn the bike back around the opposite way and keep searching for his home.

Past the concrete flats and the shallow dishes. Past the dark Turkish markets. Past the silver vendor carts and the mosques in the cobbled alleyways. Savas rules the banana seat and I rule the end of night beside him. Except: I don't want to rule. I don't want to be the one who is supposed to have the answers. I don't want to be by myself out here with a little boy, and it will be dawn soon, and everything hurts, and every part of me is tired, and I don't have a good plan. We go in circles and the snow falls hard, and my lashes are crusted, and the purple scarf is no shield. And maybe that's why I don't see what happens next at first, or why I can't understand. Maybe that's why I'm not ready when it happens. But something's coming—big and frightening—a giant bird, maybe, or a monster. It runs down the sidewalk, flapping its big black wings. I stop short in my tracks. My heart is pounding.

“Savas?” it calls.

It hurries like a terror down the long bent road, through the shadows. I lock both arms around Savas, let the bike fall—its lime-green fenders in the snow, its iced seat, its rusted chains, and bright red bell. I have nothing on whatever this is—nothing, and I wonder—split second—what Stefan would do if he could see me now, if he is watching through his scope, if he will
jump the wall and save me. I run toward where Savas and I came from, over our own wide marks. Savas is heavy. My boots are slipping. But I'm running.

“Ahn-neh,” Savas keeps saying, looking back toward the big black thing.

“Ahn-neh.”

“Ahn-neh.”

But I'm not listening. I'm just running, keeping us safe, until finally some of what the kid says rushes in. “No, Miss Ada,” he's saying now. “Stop. That's my mama.”

“What, Savas?”

“My mama.”

“That?” I stop in my tracks, skid a little in the icy snow, turn. The black bird is still after me. The black bird is a burqa.

“Savas!” it says.

“Ahn-neh!”

“Savas?” I say.

“My mama!”

He wrenches out of my arms and down onto the street and plunges toward it. It happens just like that—in a second, in the snow. I see her eyes above the veil, dark and nearly swollen shut.

“Are you all right?” I ask, as Savas buries into her.

But she doesn't understand my German.

“Somebody beat you,” I say. “Somebody did. Who?”

But she bows, lowers her gaze, doesn't understand me, or maybe she does. Savas clings to her like a spider.

“Ahn-neh,” Savas says again. She shifts him up higher, onto her hips. She reaches one hand to the veil across her lips and places a finger there, like a big shush sign. Then she turns and runs with Savas in her arms, and I know at once that I have done the wrong thing. I know that I have lost him.

“Savas!” I call, my hands at my mouth, my heart in my throat.

Whenever she comes she has to go, and then the bubble pops. And then nothing's pink, everything's brown. Brown and that burgundy that clings to the walls and the color of those chairs, which is nothing. When she's gone it's your life as it is. Your Introduction to Socialist Production. Your Technical Drawing. Your training and the certificate that's coming. The Eisfabrik where you apprentice for the life your comrades have picked out for you. Augers. Wrenches. Washers. Cutters. Grinders. Ice. Get the hang of it. You'll be a fitter. You'll cut and thread and hammer to spec, assemble and secure. You'll lubricate and heat and steam. Pneumatic and hydraulic. You were a champion swimmer once, a Spartacus athlete. But then they decided what your future is. They chose a track and a career, and now you're it.

“Think about it,” Ada will say. “You're good at this.”

“Good at what?”

“At pulling through.”

But they're not training you for the escape carnival—not on Köpenicker Strasse. They're training you to endure. They're training you for a thousand marks a month, which buys what you and Grossmutter both need as long as you stay two corners short of the important-customer grocery stores, and by the way: Even if you have the cash to buy a car, you'll still have to wait a lifetime for a Trabant, which is practically the only automobile they sell to ordinary commies. It takes them forever to manufacture a Trabbi, and when they finally get around to making yours, all you have is a lousy two-stroke engine and a tin can of a car that spits noxious fumes.

The stars are yours. The stars and how you see. Gas clouds and reefs and nebulae. Spokes and spirals and twilight steam. Amateur, Ada told you once, is another word for love.

Who is going to blame you for wanting to believe?

Your grandfather disappeared. Your grandfather left and he didn't send for you, didn't finish the job, didn't get there. No ashes, no ceremony, no news, no proof, nothing. Once the Stasi started showing up, the Stasi were everywhere. Your grandmother went from regular old to ancient. She went from small to the size of a breadcrumb bird. She started hiding photographs beneath her bed, talking to people who weren't there, tacking posters of Lenin to the dining room wall, crying when she was frying the bologna. She turned the lights out at night and the Black Channel on. She hung your flag and the flag of the Union and grew an ugly old hitch in her neck: too much
saluting. “Stop saluting,” you said. Remember? You said it. She said, “Sing me that song,” and you sang it.

Take your hands from your pocket

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

“
Guten Morgen
.” To the man in the Lada. “
Guten Morgen
.” To the gray overcoat across the street. “
Guten Morgen
.” To the skinny lady behind her
Neues Deutschland
. “
Guten Morgen
.” To Lenin on the dining room wall.

Ada brings you Pelikan ink pens and
Pop Rocky
magazines when she comes—smuggles them in, extra crafty. She traces your constellations with her fingers. She stands close beside you and even in summer, her skin is the perfect kind of weather. You show her the skies, she shows you her city—her Spree, her church spire, the signs on her shops where they sell duplicate versions of the exact same things, and also leather jackets. She shows you Arabelle out there somewhere. She shows you the idea of a boy named Savas. She changes the color of her mole and stares at you hard with her huge mineral eyes. She shakes her head of fluorescent pink. She puts her hand on your hands, her lips on your neck, she breathes and you smell paint.

She says, “I'll wait, but I won't wait forever.”

And it absolutely kills you.

“You're late,” Henni says.

“I know,” I say. “I'm sorry.”

“You're late, and good Jesus Lord, you're a mess. What happened?”

“Sorry, Henni. Really. I'll make it up to you.” I stare at her, hurting. Stand there on feet that won't thaw. My knees hurt and my butt and my arms. My back and my shoulders thanks to the push through the snow. I leave Mutti's old scarf in a knot at my neck. Keep the knitted cap on my head, my jacket zipped, my hands in my gloves, scanning the room for Savas. I smell like chickpeas to myself, old hummus. I have a spike of hurt in my head, a shiver in my bones, something hot behind my temple. Markus is over by the wide windowsill, looking blown about by wind, staring at the book in his hand. No Savas.

“What the hell is going on?” Henni asks, turning her back to the kids and to Markus.

“I'll tell you in a second, okay? I promise.” Henni has blue eyes with enormous black pupils. She has fat little lashes that look like broken pencil stubs. She studies me and I half study her, then look past her, once again, toward the long, speckled table. The twins are side by side, four wide crayons in Aysel's fist, a spot of green on Aylin's nose. Dominik is sucking his thumb, arranging paint pots. Daniel's fingers are slimy with glue. Meryem's thinking, her chin perfectly balanced on the points of her delicate fingertips, and I know that she's thinking about Savas. The table itself is like some dumped-out bottom drawer—paints, crayons, brushes, markers, triple-wide popsicle sticks, construction paper, felt squares, zigzag scissors, the pipe cleaners that Meryem thinks are caterpillars. “They aren't alive,” I always tell her. But she screams when they come near her.

There'll be a show, I realize, of some sort. The kids are making stick versions of themselves. It's all very abstract, and I don't understand, and there isn't time to piece it together.

“You look like you slept in a zoo,” Henni says.

“Savas is missing,” I say.

“I know,” she says. “I called his house. Nobody was at home, I guess. No answer.”

“We have to talk,” I say.

“What's going on?”

“Not here, all right?” I glance toward the back of the room, the wall of windows, the deep sill, where Markus is hovering. “Markus,” I call out. “Can you cover for us?”

“What,” he asks in his moody best, “do you think that I've been doing?”

“You're sure,” Henni says now, after staring at me for what feels like an hour.

I nod, gnawing the splattered cuticle around my little finger, where the paint leaked in last night. My gloves are warming on the heater. My jacket's unzipped. There are heat prickles inside my cap. It still hurts in every bone. I stop my teeth from chattering.

“He ran all the way here, by himself, and climbed through a window.” She tells me what I've just told her, in the same order I told it, every word measured and slow, like that will change the percentage of truth. She's old, Henni, like fifty or something. She has short legs and a wide middle. Her eyes are so blue they're almost violet. She had a boyfriend once, calls him Ancient History. She wears yellow canvas shoes and brown corduroy pants, that beat-up, rust-colored apron. These kids are her life. She's never had a runaway. She's refusing to believe it.
I remember something she said to me on the first day I started: The kids are only on loan to us. We screw up, and they vanish.