Going Over

by Beth Kephart

  “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.

  The kitchen is as dark as Omi left it when she blew out the candle in the jar. Now Arabelle takes her lighter to it and flames the wick and lets her face change colors above the yellow tongue of fire. She sits there tying the yarns of her hair into their Wildstyle, the flame going orange now, now purple.

  “She was down at the canal,” she finally tells me. “Too close to the edge.”

  “Why? Did she say?”

  “Who’s Sebastien?” Arabelle asks.

  “Never met him,” I say. Never want to, I think.

  “I don’t know,” Arabelle says. “Really. She just kept saying ‘Sebastien.’ Like he had hurt her somehow, broken some promise.”

  I imagine Mutti out there, without gloves, without a hat for her head, walking along the icy water. I think about how she zags inside her sadness, how that is what sadness is: a zag. If she fell in, the Vopos would shoot her in a minute. If she fell in and sank, none of us would ever find her. She was born too thin, that’s what Omi says. But there’s more to her sadness than that.

  “I have bratwurst,” I finally say to Arabelle.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” she answers. She moves the jar of light to the left, then back again, as if she is playing chess, or checkers.

  I dig both sandwiches out of the oven, where by now they’ve lost their heat, and sit back down. Arabelle splits the aluminum wrap with the other end of her lighter. I unwrap my own slowly.

  “Will you see Peter tonight?” I ask Arabelle.

  Her mouth’s full; she shakes her head no.

  “You should tell him, you know.”

  “When it’s time.” She eats slowly, her eyes on the sandwich, and tells me about her day instead, about the Turkish knitters of Köpi. Every day the women come to the shop and knit, and every day Arabelle teaches them German. The sweaters get sold and the husbands don’t know and stories get told and there are secrets. My own patchwork sweater comes from the Köpi, and so do both of Mutti’s blankets, and also my pink and green stockings, my gray cabled tights, all of it
smelling like dill and yogurt until you wash it once in the sink and hang it to dry on one of the lines that go corner to corner across the courtyard.

  I listen to Arabelle talk, don’t ask her questions. I don’t press her for the facts on Mutti, even if she is my best friend and not my mother’s. Arabelle’s older than me by four years, and she’s always keeping what she knows about my mother to herself. It mostly works out for the best.

  I eat my sandwich, savor the mustard. It’s the first taste and the last taste of a decent bratwurst sandwich. It’s the heat that you get when the meat goes cold.

  “You working tonight?” Arabelle asks me now.

  I nod.

  “You need the bike, you can have it.”

  “Danke.”

  “You should try pumice,” she says, about the flesh around my nails, all of it speckled and splattered.

  She yawns and I see both rows of her teeth. I think of all she’s doing for the Turkish women of Kreuzberg, who live in this part of Berlin like it’s someplace borrowed. Like it wasn’t the Germans themselves who begged the Turks to come here after the wall went up and the factories in our parts weren’t suddenly starving for workers.

  “Calling it a day,” she says.

  “Thank you.”

  She looks confused for half a second.

  “For Mutti,” I say. “For bringing her home.”

  “She’ll get better,” she says. “I promise.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “She’s always like this.”

  “Time,” Arabelle says.

  “You should tell Peter,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  She stands and the light leaves her face. I hear Mutti’s bed creak beneath her, hear nothing but silence from behind the door to the room where Omi sleeps. I fit the candle in the jar on the flat of my palm and walk Arabelle to the door.

  “Nacht,” she says.

  “Nacht.”

  I close the door, run the chain through the lock. Put the candle on the floor, rearrange my cans of colors. I sleep a little before I go back out—find a place on the couch, hug the pillow. I think of Stefan and the feel of his arms around me. Everything solid. Everything safe. As if I’m eternal for that instant. Love is knowing that you’re appreciated. Stefan appreciates me.

  “My balcony princess,” he says, when I’m there.

  “Leave here,” I’ll say, “and I’ll promote you to prince.”

  When I wake again it’s nearly ten o’clock. I grab my bag, head out the door, clack down the stairs, hike myself up onto Arabelle’s bike. I pedal, wobbly, across the courtyard and out through the open gate. I don’t need to turn around to know what I know. My mother’s up there: watching.

  FRIEDRICHSHAIN

  Leave it to Ada to bring them to you—folded in between her foot and boot, where the Vopos did not find them. She walked extra careful, she said; her footsteps never crunched. She stood in line with her grandmother and showed her papers, paid her marks, agreed to the terms of visitation, and all that time no one suspected what she was bringing to you—the newspaper stories, the proof of best escapes.

  She read out loud. You calmed her down. She kept saying anything was possible and you kept telling her to mind her volume, to be aware, to remember the ears in the walls, in the hallways, in the balconies across the way.

  “Shhhh, Ada.”

  “Listen, Stefan.”

  “Could you please,” you said again, “be a little careful?”

  “Could you take an interest?”

  Her words sounded foreign against your words and you wondered: How could one language be so different? How could one girl be so wrong and also so kissable?

  There were all kinds of stories in the papers she brought. There was a list of best gadgets. Double-jointed ladders. Invisible string. Escapable coffins. Cars that run with only half of their engines. Flamethrowers. There were interviews with the escapees. There will always be a minor business in heroes.

  “Where did you get these?” you asked her.

  She made like it didn’t matter.

  “You’re dangerous,” you told her.

  “You can be so smart,” she said back, “when you’re not so busy being stupid.” She has this gap between her two front teeth, and one of those teeth is bigger than the other so when she smiles, and she only sometimes smiles, it’s like two little surrender flags have been hung at different angles. You loved her that day more than any other. You loved her and you listened as she read, telling her over and over again to stop being so busy planning the end of your brown-colored existence. There were, you said, complications. There were problems with her stories. You asked her if she’d eaten. You asked her to go outside with you, hand in hand, and walk the park. You said you’d take her to one of the pubs and get her a sandwich and she looked like she thought you were crazy.

  “I’m talking about freedom and you’re talking about food?” she said.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Do you want some noodles?”

  “Pay attention!” she said, shaking the sizz of her fluorescent hair, which is charged, electric. You wanted to reach for her but you made yourself wait. It had been three months and you’d missed her crazy and she was right there with you in her tight jeans and splattered sneaks, her little T-shirt with the silkscreen ruffle, and she wouldn’t stop talking. “Kiss me,” you said, and she wouldn’t.

  “Kiss me.”

  “Not until you listen.”

  “I’m listening.” Her skin so sweet. Her flesh soft and high on her bones. Her body so close on the balcony where your grandmothers couldn’t see you, beside the scope, which she was angling then, away from the sky, angling it toward Kreuzberg.

  “Everything you want is there,” she said, pointing to the canal and the church, the plazas and the crazies, the stretch of the wall that she has graffed just for you, her sacred trust. “And besides, I’m not waiting forever,” she said. She wasn’t keeping on like this, she said—striking the days between visits off that calendar of hers, standing in line at the station, trading her marks for your marks, hiking in with the bootleg videos, trying to remember the color of her mole in the last visit so that she could make herself seem brand-new again. She had so much to say. So much she wanted you to see. The Viktoriapark and painted trees. A kid named Savas who holds her hand. A bike that drags wool streamers. She said you have no business being happy with what you’re allowed in the East. She said you do not know what happiness is.

  “Happy is right now,” you told her. Because finally, after all that, after you had not taken her to the pub, after you had only quickly kissed her, the moon had come up, a curved slice in the sky. The moon was out there and the moon was yours and she said—you won’t forget it: “I need you. I need you to help me with Mutti. I need you to meet Arabelle and Savas. I need you to see what I’ve been making for you, what kind of artist I am. I need you to surprise me, Stefan, to show up sometime when I don’t expect it, to leave a pot of flowers outside my door, to pedal for me on Arabelle’s bike so I don’t have to. I need you, Stefan. I need to be safe.” She said it, and she was crying, and you remember every word she said, you play it over and over in your head, in the night, at the Eisfabrik on Köpenicker Strasse, at lunch when you sit with Alexander telling him what it’s like to be in love.

  “I need you, too,” you told Ada Piekarz. “I need you for everything.”

  “Then prove it.”

  SO36

  Everything I write on the wall has either happened or will. Take the bent knee and black boot that I have graffitied in shadow 3D. That’s my symbol for Conrad Schumann, who was nineteen years old on August 15, 1961, just days after the East German Communist Party split this city with the silver thorns of a barbed-wire fence. Conrad was wearing his machine gun when he jumped the barbs. He was one of them, an East German border guard. He took a don’t-look-back run and Terpsichored far enough, from there to here, to safety. Conrad Sch
umann took a flying leap. I took a fat cap and three Krylon aerosols. Did my fills left to right, used yellow for my highlights, left the drips. You can stand up close to the wall, in Vopos country, and smell the color. Or you can stand back and let Conrad Schumann’s boots come for you. You can ride the freedom in his leap. That’s how I wrote it. That is my style.

  “Ta Da.” I tag it that way.

  Close by my Conrad, on the buff of a solid spray on my part of the wall, is Bread and Toilet. Another true story: Believe it. It’s 1964, and Wolfgang Fuchs is digging through the slippery mud of the dark ground between a bakery basement and an outhouse. Sometime soon entire families of not-Communists will walk from the smell of old shit to the smell of sugar before the Vopos take the whole thing down with a sick display of machine guns. But for a while that tunnel was light, and that’s why I wrote it in lime green and white, why I put a pair of wings on my loaf of bread and sprinkled some nice angel dust on my toilet. You don’t need the self-satisfying interlocks of Wildstyle when you have a story to tell, all those letters so secret and squished that no one but you knows their meaning. You just have to pop your colors, plant your outlines, and hold the can straight up so that the dip tube sinks deep into the butanes and propanes.

  I used the hollow-cone nozzle for the car escape story. I stayed very still and perfectly central to get my rounds right, my mists even. Horst Breistoffer, the hero of this getaway tale, would have wanted it that way. He would have liked how I write with my cans. He was a man of precision. He cut out the car’s battery and its heating system—genius, right? He folded people into the emptiness, under the hood. He drove escapees nine separate times under the noses of the border guards, who checked big cars, not small ones, put mirrors on the ground so they could look up and see if anybody was tied to a truck’s hard, bright bottom; they didn’t bother looking at his kind of car, which was, for the record, an Italian Isetta. Horst Breistoffer was betting on the guards’ big-car prejudice, and he bet right until the tenth time, but I don’t write about that. My wall’s the wall of great escapes. I only write true stories.