by Beth Kephart
“Safe again!” she says.
“A miracle,” I say. The sun might be out but it’s cold as hell as we wobble and spin toward St. Thomas. Before the Berlin Cathedral got built this was the biggest church on both sides of the wall—a church to thousands of people—and even though it’s six stories tall, the war has got nothing on it. When people call Kreuzberg a ghetto on the news, when they complain about all the smells and the mess and the squatters, I say you can’t be a ghetto if you’re standing this tall. You can’t be a ghetto if right here with you are Arabelle and basil forests and zurna songs and artists plus a hippie minister who’s come all the way from California to keep us pure and holy.
The wind picks up, blows the sound of my kids toward me. I drop my Adidas and drag them; Arabelle does the same thing with her boots. The bike swerves, then stops, and I’m off it in an instant—unwrapped from Arabelle’s coat and streamers and hopping until I am back at land speed.
“Pick you up this afternoon?” she asks.
“I’m walking home.”
“You sure about it?”
“Sure,” I say. “Mutti has put me on errands.”
“She must think you’re Superwoman,” Arabelle says. “Out all night, work all day, errands in the evening.”
“She thinks it because I am,” I say, not even smiling because it’s true.
“Peace,” Arabelle says, the donkey back in her smirk.
“And to you,” I say.
She’s off to the Köpi, where she works three days a week teaching German in secret to Turkish women in headscarves. “Earning them their independence,” she says, like the rebel she is, the rebel she’s made me. Later tonight she’ll be out on the streets, riding her bike full of streamers. She’ll be looking for Peter, her American boy, come all the way from a Pennsylvania college to help the Turks win their rights from this country.
Everybody has a plan, I guess. We’re all on a mission.
The kids are at their table when I walk in—their eyes gigantic over their plumped-up cheeks and their hands sticky slicked with playdough, a fresh batch from Henni’s kitchen. They’re rolling the dough into snakes, tying the snakes into wreaths, putting the wreaths on their heads. The twins Aysel and Aylin can’t stop standing and spinning. Henni doesn’t stop showing them their chairs.
“Late again,” she says, when she sees me shrugging off my jacket, unwrapping my scarf, tugging at my fingerless gloves.
“Sorry,” I say. “I’ll do cleanup later.” “No.”
“No?”
“Not today. I need you to talk some sense into our fearless leader. He’s over there in a psychic bind.” Henni juts her two chins and her chubby fingers toward the end of the long table, where Markus, six foot three and string-bean skinny, has folded himself onto a toddler stool and is drumming the table with his blue-painted nails.
“What’s he doing exactly?” I ask.
“Simmering,” Henni says, her eyes rolling beneath drawn-on eyebrows. She fits Aysel back down into her chair and works the twins’ hands into a bright ball of yellow dough. Aysel giggles when the dough glups, then Aylin starts, and now Savas yanks the wet wreath from the dark mop of his head and punches and pounds. “Making a dragon!” he says.
Meryem, already a flirt at four years old, gives Savas one of her missing-tooth smiles.
“What’s he simmering for?” I ask Henni about Markus.
“I told him he couldn’t teach the kids the protest songs.”
“What?”
“From the Sixties.”
“Why does he want to?”
“He says you can’t be a proper citizen of Kreuzberg if you don’t know your Sixties protest songs.”
“Chrissake. Way to shut us down.”
“Exactly. He’ll get us all in trouble. Imagine if the kids came home sounding like German hippies. Will you tell him for me?”
“You haven’t already told him?”
“He doesn’t believe me.”
I blow air into my hands, but they’re still cold. I warn Aysel and Aylin from dancing on their chairs, tell Savas good luck with his dragon, smooth the static out of Brigitte’s flimsy hair. I walk the length of the table and fit my rear onto a tiny bright-blue stool.
“Is it true?” I ask Markus. “About the protest songs?”
“It’s not your business,” he says. He doesn’t open his eyes. He pulls his shawl around his shoulders, carries on with his fingernail drumming.
“It is my business,” I tell him. “I work here.”
“You only just started and you’re only fifteen.”
“I started in November and I’m almost sixteen. We can’t go all radical with the babies, Markus. They’re still learning how not to eat playdough. Plus, their dads will kill us.”
He shudders beneath his shawl and uncurls the pencils of his fingers. He slowly opens his hooded eyes and sweeps a tragic look toward the dozen kids at the opposite end of the speckled Formica table—his would-be charges, his young radicals. He sighs, all bitterness. Everyone in the Kiez knows the sound of Markus’s sigh, the flutter of his shawl, the big bird wings he hides beneath his too-tight shirts, where shoulder blades should be. Everyone also knows the size of Markus’s heart, which is what keeps him here, at St. Thomas Day Care, where I took a job because we needed the money, and because Mutti couldn’t stop me, and because I was all done with what the Eberhard Klein school was ever going to teach me. We’re squatters, I told Mutti, and what we need most is cash, and then Mutti said, You’re too young to be so old, and I almost said, but I remembered not to, that Mutti wasn’t all that much older than I am now when she came home from the hospital with me. I almost said, Somebody has to be old. But I’m figuring out how I shouldn’t hurt her, and besides, it isn’t always her fault that she falls in love with the wrong men.
Stefan would never leave me like my father left Mutti. Stefan will do everything to have me. Love proves itself, someone said.
“Ada?” I hear Henni now, calling from the other end of the table. I look up at the clock—almost 10 A.M., story hour. She’s putting the playdough back in its plastic box, except for the blob Aylin won’t take from her head and for the dragon that Savas made, which he leaves to dry on the sill.
“So no protest songs today, right, Markus?” I say, as I stand up from the stool. “Promise?”
He presses his blue fingernails to his purplish eyelids. He sighs, the world’s tallest disaster.
Savas says he remembers. Says he knows exactly where we left off yesterday in our story. “It’s the fear one,” he says, rubbing his belly with one hand, picking at a thread in the rug with the other.
“Does everybody else remember?” I ask, and there are ten nodding heads—black and brown and blond. Aylin doesn’t nod because she’s still wearing her playdough crown. Brigitte doesn’t because she’s sucking her three longest fingers. “Brigitte,” I ask. “Do you remember?”
Her eyebrows quiver up, unsure. I open the big book to the very beginning and let the kids tell the story to me. “There was once a boy . . .” I start them off.
“. . . who didn’t know fear!” Savas says it twice—the first time in a whisper. He stands up again and raps his fingers against the tight drum of his belly, arching his back like he’s nine months pregnant. He bites his lip, plops down once more, closer to me now than he was before and hooking his hand around my little finger, as if I’ll need his strength to continue.
“That’s right,” I say, turning the page after he finally settles and unhooks his hand from my hand. “And so where does the boy go to find it?”
“To the thieves!” Aysel says. She puts her arms above her head, locks her fingers, holds the circle.
“And is fear there, with the thieves?” I ask the kids. I see Henni at the table, sponging off the playdough. I see Markus off behind her, watching the white day press against the room. He moves now, pushes the window up. He lights a long brown cigarette and blows the smoke out into the February weather.
“No, Miss Ada,” the kids are saying, a chorus. Savas watches Markus, watches the window, seems suddenly distracted.
“Is fear in the cemetery?” I turn the page. They study the picture. They shake their little heads no.
“Savas?”
He turns back toward me. Squints his eyes a little. Says no. His cheeks are chubby and his eyes are round. There are spaces between his teeth when he smiles like there are spaces between mine.
“Is fear inside a lonely house?”
“No, Miss Ada.” He makes my name last when he says it out loud. Ada. A name that could go on forever.
“Is fear at the bottom of the sea? On a boat in a storm?” I turn another page, and then another. The kids come close. They rock back and forth, pitching and falling, like they’re about to be shipwrecked. But there’s no fear on the sea floor and no fear in the storm, not for the boy in the fairy tale, the boy in the pages I’m still turning. Fear isn’t anywhere. The kid can’t find it. It’s courage right here on these pages.
“What can you do?” Henni asked me when I interviewed at St. Thomas Day Care.
“I can tell stories,” I told her. “And I can draw them.”
Sometimes the hippie minister comes inside, to our school. Modern-Day Prophet, he calls me, because I see things, know them. I know that Mutti is sad, and that I can’t fix it. I know that Omi will not forget the war. I know that Stefan will come and that I’ll be ready. “Wall jumping’s trouble,” Mutti says, because she’s watching. But I’m not afraid. I do not see fear. It’s not with the thieves, it’s not in the graves, it’s not lonesomeness, and it’s not in the storm. I keep turning the pages on the Turkish folklore.
“Brigitte,” I say now. “Where’s fear?” and she shrugs.
“Exactly,” I say. “Exactly.”
I close the book and promise the kids more of the tale tomorrow. I turn and watch the white sun against the window-panes and think of Stefan out there, Stefan with his shoulders so strong, his eyes so blue, standing high above his world and watching. I remember a summer day, three years ago, when the sky was pillow fluff. Stefan was waiting for us at the crossing, his grandmother beside him, his free hand stuffed behind his back. Joy is the silliest thing sometimes. Love is very funny. I ran to him and he bent to me. Kissed me on my nose, like a puppy.
“I have something for you,” he said.
“Tell me,” I said, stepping backward.
He took his hand from behind his back and it was there, like a shiny paper platter. A picture book of clouds in every color. A history of shapes. Cirrus and stratus and cumulostratus and every freakish and lovely combination.
“Secondhand,” he said, blushing slightly.
“Brand-new to me,” I said.
Omi had taken his grandmother’s arm in hers, and they were off ahead of us, through the streets, toward the apartment and their history. I linked my arm into Stefan’s, like we’d been married for years. “Take me to your balcony,” I said.
“Hello, Miss Ada,” Savas says now, and I look down and there he is, his arms raised high so I can pick him up and hug him. He extends his bottom lip and shrugs his shoulders. He paints a heart around my mole with his index finger.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
You don’t like it, but what’s true is true: Their ears are everywhere. Between the walls, inside the phone, inside the static of the TV. The Stasi are downstairs, upstairs, on the street, in the schools, behind the flowers, in the Fernsehturm on the Alexanderplatz, in the U-Bahn, in the S-Bahn, in the wires, all along Köpenicker Strasse. If you’re not extremely careful when you talk, the Stasi are at your front door and through, asking all the questions.
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 watch
ing.
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.
SO36
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.
