Going Over (16 page)

“You think they see us?” Arabelle asks, shivering a little. “The guards, I mean.”

My eyes track back toward the guards in their yellow-lit room, the steam in their windows, their radio antennae spiking up top. They've got portholes for firing through. They've got a 360-degree view. They've got shoot-to-kill orders if anybody flees, but right now, our graffing done, we are not their enemies. We are safe where we are against this splintery rail, safe watching that side from this side, looking for Stefan. He's out there, somewhere, in the dark. Isn't he?

Stefan. Please. Answer me
.

“Do you think . . . ?” Arabelle asks again, but I pull my left arm tighter around her and lift my right hand, marking that one solitary distant light in Friedrichshain with my spray-can finger. It twinkles on and off, yellow and blue. It looks like a star that has fallen.

“That's him,” I say, a whisper now.

“Stefan?”

I nod, proud and hurting, but not actually sure, my whole body suddenly electrified with how much I miss him. “He's gorgeous, isn't he?” The light goes on and off, bright and chilled, like one of the glitter sparks in Arabelle's bike seat.

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess he is.” Squinting as she says it, smiling like she sees, because she's my best friend and because what I have said is true: Stefan is the most beautiful boy in my world. No one can replace him.

“I'm going to need your help,” I tell Arabelle now.

“Help how?” she asks, her voice hushed.

“With Stefan and also with Savas,” I say.

She takes a step back. She stares at me. I see the questions bulge her eyebrows.

“I didn't know the two were related,” she says.

“Of course they are.”

“How?”

“Two people trapped in two wrong places,” I say, and I'm about to say more, but I stop. Arabelle will understand when I tell her someday. She's my best friend for a reason.

“You're going to have to tell your mother,” Arabelle says after a while.

“I will.”

“When?”

“When I know what I'm actually doing,” I say, and suddenly my teeth start to chatter and there's a clench up in my chest and my knees throb and Arabelle is here, her arms around me.

“Hey,” she says. “Hey. You've been sick, you know.”

“That isn't it,” I say, striking a tear from one eye.

“That's maybe partly it,” she says. “Come on.” She helps me down the stairs and down the alley. She balances me back onto the bike, takes the seat up front, leans in, and steers. She pedals, steady, all the way home. There are no lights on at the day care. No tiny bootprints in the snow. No letter waiting when I get home. Just the bear on the couch, and the darkness.

They never gave you your grandfather's body. You never had proof that he died. Even after they knocked his empty coffin into the frozen ground your grandmother went to the Vopos begging—for the bones of him, for the truth—and every time she came home empty-handed. A welt appeared beneath one of her eyes, like an underground tunnel for the tears that lived inside.

She'd waited four years to put his coffin in the ground. She waited another two before she dragged an old chest into the middle of the biggest room and asked for your help. He'd left six shirts and three pairs of trousers; you folded them into their smallest versions. He had a watch that worked and a watch that didn't; you wrapped them both into his flannel scarf, the good one wound and ticking. “Take it,” she said. “Pack it,” and she meant everything—the stiffened shaving brush, the caked cream, the towel that he'd worn around his waist when he was waiting for the shower to lose its steam, the pom-pom
hat, the belt with the torn third notch, the black socks with the gold toes, the windup metal monkey with the rusted metal drums that he'd kept on the counter beside the canister of flour for no reason you could remember, the pair of cufflinks, pretty as stars. You were eleven. You were a thief. You stole from his overcoat pockets and his picture frames. You stole the laces from his boots and the leather patch from the elbow of his sweater. You stole his books and his fishhooks, his homemade bow and his arrows, the map of stars that you pasted up to the ceiling above your head.
Take it. Pack it
.

“Just a few parts and some string,” Ada said. “Just a wheel and a harness.” She was explaining again how the Great Escapee had taken the pieces of one life to build another life. She was talking about courage. She was saying, The longer you wait, the harder it is, and sometimes you can't know until you decide. She was Professor Ada Piekarz, talking her thoughts over yours, there and not here, basil sprouts and zurna songs in place of interminable brown. “You don't want to be a plumber,” she said. “You love me,” she said. “Choose.”

She wrote her letter in purple glitter glue.

Her one single word:
Now
.

“Open it,” Grossmutter had said. Except the seal had already been broken. Maybe it was the Stasi who had read it before me. Maybe it was Grossmutter. Anything could crush a dream. You can't make promises unless you're sure you can keep them.

I sleep inside my own fumes, my hands ironed thin beneath my pillow, my skin too thin for the bones of my hip, which jut into the cushion on this couch like broken sticks.
Now
, I'd written, and I remember last winter when we crossed and Stefan was there wearing a big bear coat and an old man's hat and you could see, even so, his rare boy beauty. He was beside his grandmother, on their side of the wall, and he hadn't seen me yet in my Köpi sweaters, blowing on my hands. It was threatening to snow, or hail. The skies were a thick woolly gray. Cumulonimbus on our side. Praecipitatio on his. The border guards were taking their time. Every now and then Stefan would bend toward his grandmother and offer her his hairy coat. She would shake her head, insist no, and then he would offer again, draping his bear arm around her shoulders, until she finally laughed.
He loves her
, I thought, and I felt terrified, because who belongs to whom? Isn't that what we fear most? Being loved less? Being left out? Being chosen against?

“Hurry, Omi. Please,” I said. But we were caged in that line and Stefan was out there with his own life, keeping his small family warm. I was a fool that day when we finally made it through. Wouldn't let go of his hand, wouldn't leave his side, hardly looked at his grandmother, as if what she'd taken was mine. I made Stefan take me out to the balcony and show me the stars.

“It's cloudy,” he said.

“I don't care.”

I was wearing the bear coat by then. He was wearing an old sweater. His hands were slightly blue. His teeth were chattering. “What's gotten into you?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Ada.”

“It's just . . .”

“What?”

“It's that I hate how much I love you, Stefan. I hate this.” I pointed behind us to his little room. “I hate that.” I pointed to the wall.

“It'll work out,” he said, taking me into his arms.

“Not if you don't leave, it won't.”

Now
, I'd written.
Now. Now
. And nothing's come of it.

You head west toward the wall and to the idea of her, close. You tilt your head back, exhale your cold-breath cloud, and watch it fold, furl, cut the dark. If she's there, on the other side, she'll know it's you, your hopes rising.
Ada
. You have your old gloves on, a roll in your pocket. You have an extra pair of socks in your bag, a hunk of cheese and bratwurst, the two pompoms you untied from your grandfather's cap; he wouldn't have minded, you're sure of that. The bow you've slung across your shoulder seesaws back and forth whenever the wind picks up, slicing your jacket threads and creaking. Beside it, the cardboard quiver scratches your neck. In the streets the snow is dirtying beneath the tires of the Trabbis. From windows up above icicles snap. It's early, not yet dawn. The dark hasn't died but a pale day will come. The lights are on at the Delikat, in the windows of the early risers, in the weak eyes of the Trabbis, but still: You feel all alone and this isn't a promise. This is you, testing the possible.

By the time you reach the small park on the edge of things, the morning light is coming in. Through a break in the hedge you make your way, snow in your boots, loose snow in your hair. You pace it out. You set your pom-pom target in the nook of the biggest linden tree and measure back. You draw a line with the toe of your boot, slip the bow from your shoulder, your cardboard quiver, and try to remember what your grandfather taught you years and years ago. You were only small. You were only watching. You didn't know he was going away for good. You didn't know that someday you'd be here, in the loneliest big park, on winter's coldest day, trying your luck at shooting arrows straight and free.

Ready now, you remove your gloves. You fit the bow into your left hand and you stand, easy as you can in the mocking brown cold, nocking the arrow into the string. You give the string elbow room as you pull back, all the way back, your right index finger at the line of your jaw and the string near the tip of your nose. When the string is taut, you release, and the string goes snap. The arrow flies off in a wooden wobble—whining away like a misfired missile and waking a bird you hadn't seen in the tree. The arrow sinks at an angle. It strikes at the snow. The unpierced pom-poms sag in the cradle of the tree.

It was just a first shot
, you think. A warm-up. Now, your hands cold, you notch the second arrow in, plant your feet, and put more bend into your knees. You pull, release, and follow through. The arrow flies east of your target, lands on the thick of the hedge.

“Nice shot,” a voice says, and you turn. It's a tall kid, a punker, his arms crossed and his back slouched up against a smaller linden on the opposite side of the park. He stands there looking disappointed, like you owe him something, like he bought a ticket to see.

“What do you want?” you ask, getting the third arrow into the string and turning your back on the kid.

“You need some help with that?” he asks.

“Not really.”

“You sure?” You can hear the smirk in his voice.

“Yeah. Sure.” You lower the arrow, look up at the trees that circle the park, as if help is there, somewhere. You turn back and stare at the kid who has stubbornly settled in, one big sneaker up on the base of the tree. He wears a long coat that's way too big, a cheap pair of jeans, and canvas sneakers. He has a black thatch of hair, and you don't know the face behind it.

“Didn't know it was regulation, shooting in a park like this,” he says, like he's looking for some kind of conversation.

“Doing no harm.”

“The way you shoot, you could.”

“What do you want?”

“Name's Lukas,” he says, pushing away from the tree now and coming toward you with one hand out—long hand, skinny fingers. The snow fills up the loose places in his sneakers. His coat whips around below his knees. You hear the Trabbis out there, in the street. You hear a bus warming its engine.
Through the snow, into the snow, the kid tromps, but you're not shaking his hand, because he's not invited here. You work the string on the bow and the third arrow instead, but your hands are cold and shaking. If you plant and nock and then release, this arrow's going nowhere.