by Beth Kephart
Tonight it’s blues and purples I’m misting, white dust. Tonight my red bandana is high on my nose, my hood is pinched, and my light’s wedged in. I’ve shaken the Krylons hard, punched their noses, swapped a full cone out for a flat streamer, because I’m working the wall simple, in honor. I’m writing a burner. Horst Klein would like it this way—the acrobat on the high-tension cable. It’s his sky I’m writing, his cable. His one hand and the dozen machine guns. His tightrope balancing East to West over the heads of the Communists. Simple like this could take an artist all night. I don’t mind. When you’re an artist, you don’t.
“You’ll catch your death of cold,” Mutti tells me. “You’ll get the Vopos in a snarl.” But I know what I’m doing; I am fifteen, almost sixteen. I have been taking care of people all my life. I am out here because Stefan is coming—he will. He won’t let me down. He almost promised. And when Stefan comes, I want to say, This is for you; it’s for us.
I want to kiss Stefan up against the wall.
I want to press him into color.
I’m rounding the brick barrel of the church when I see the light in the day care window. It’s three in the morning, black as pitch, and there’s a soft snow falling, meaning: There should be nobody here. I stop the bike, hop off, untangle myself from Arabelle’s streamers, and dig into the courier bag for my keys. The empty aerosols rattle around, my capable caps, my black book, which has gotten loose at its bindings. The keys are there, at the bottom of the bag, on their little pom-pom ring. They feel like chunks of ice against the hard bones of my fingers.
The snow is falling faster. The banana seat is frosting. I breathe in and out, and when I do, the air spots lavender and titanium—the paint settling into my lungs.
Whoever is in there has been in there for a long, dry time—there’s no sign of snow or mud in the halls. Maybe Markus, I think, but I’d smell his cigarettes. Maybe Henni, but wouldn’t I hear her? The only light in the hall is the crack beneath the door. I press my ear against it. Nothing.
The key in the lock pops it free. The knob rattles loosely. If someone’s inside, they’ve locked themselves in. It’s probably nothing, I tell myself. But then again, something says Careful.
“Guten Abend,” I say. “Hello?”
The lights are on. The room seems empty. There’s snow blowing through the open window—a little crust of it along the low shelf of the back wall, where Markus will stand with his purple shawl on, puffing like a dragon. The blue and yellow plastic chairs are in their places at the speckled table. The nap-time pillows are in their pile by the rug. The smells are playdough, spilled juice, rag rug, dill, the hamper in the corner where we collect the warm, wet socks. When the wind blows and the snow skitters, the letters pinned to the ceiling by tacks make ripple waves above my head.
“Hello?”
I ask it; no one answers.
The bright lights, the locked door, the snow falling in through the window. Hello? I look behind me, toward the dark hall, then forward, toward that window. I turn my head like a periscope and concentrate my vision—slow and careful, high and low, into the bright and also the shadows. I see my own wet footsteps behind me, feel the slow run of blood through my half-frozen fingers, scratch the itch at my neck, under the bandana. It takes me a while before I see what I should have seen before—the hard clumps in the soft frost on the sill and along the shelf where hands have been, two feet. I drop my bag by the door, hurry across the room, and look out into the night, toward the fizz of snow that could any minute turn itself into a blizzard. There’s the faint trace of footsteps out there, the ghosts of little feet running. There’s a whole mess of scramble below the open window. There are no wet footsteps across the linoleum floor, no water stains on the braided rug. Whoever is here has been here for hours.
I turn back around—quick now. I feel eyes on me, something watching. I scan the room again and all is still, and then I see it: the black eyes and the puffy cheeks poking out from between the hand-me-down coats and scarves in the hook closet, the things left behind, or grown out of.
“Savas?” I ask.
“Miss Ada?”
If it weren’t so strange and the light so mean, I’d be almost sure that I was back with the squatters on the tweed couch, fast asleep and dreaming. But I’m too awake to fool myself. And Savas is too frightened.
“Little man,” I say. “What are you doing here, Savas?”
He’s like a rabbit with a bad twitch. He’s wearing a big black coat and polar bear jammies. His sneakers are loose and untied, dark and wet. He’s sitting cross-legged and now he’s rocking, back and forth—rocking and rocking, his teeth banging hard against each other. If I move too fast, he might go running—scramble back across the floor and up over the half-wall of books and onto the wide sill and through the window. If I don’t find him a blanket, his teeth will crack from the percussion.
“It’s late, Savas,” I say, quiet, so he knows that he can trust me.
“I’m cold,” he tells me, letting some air wheeze out of his cheeks.
“I’m closing the window,” I say. “Okay, Savas? I’m closing the window, and then I’m going to come get you, and we’ll talk. Okay, Savas? You okay with that?”
He nods, solemn. He nods, and he doesn’t budge, just keeps on rocking, his teeth knocking, like somebody’s playing the drums in his mouth, like this is what happens to little boys who hold on to silence too long, who are out in the night, out in the snow: How did he get here? What has happened? I walk slowly toward the closet, crouch a little, come closer. Markus’s purple shawl is hanging from a hook. I pluck it off and bend to one knee. Savas’s huge black eyes reflect the buzz of light in the ceiling fixtures above us.
“This should do the trick,” I say, about Markus’s shawl, which holds the smell of patchouli and smoke. Beneath the hems of coats and scarves, beside the boots and balls, the pogo stick, the Frisbee, I reach in and tuck the shawl over his shoulders and up under his chin like some enormous violet bib. He lifts his chin, then lowers it, like he’s just remembered to defend himself from whatever thing he’s run from. I loosen the bandana from around my neck, unzipper my coat. I pull the hood off my head and listen to the soft z-pop of static. And that’s how we sit, Savas and me, way after midnight as the snow pings the glass, dangling threads of busted coat seams and scarf fringes dripping onto our faces.
“You have paint on your face,” he says at last. “You have blue in your hair, Miss Ada.” He puts his own hand on his chin, muffling his chatter. He covers his mouth. His eyes are burning.
“That’s because I have a secret,” I tell him, my voice a whisper, as if someone else could hear us. “Do you have a secret, too?”
He pushes his bottom lip out, squeezes his eyes, pokes his longest finger into one ear. “I think so,” he says.
“Can you tell me?”
“No.” He’s sure about it.
“Do you want me to tell you my secret?”
“Uh-huh.”
“My secret,” I say, “is that I am in love.”
His eyes swell and his teeth bang harder. “Love is a bad thing,” he whispers. His rock is worse than it was, like he’s riding some bronco, chased by wolves.
“Not always, Savas. Not really. Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” he says, and again, he’s sure. He yanks the shawl over his face, and he starts crying.
Savas, Savas, Savas, sweet Savas. I hug his little body close and do not make him tell me.
The snow brooms down from the tops of the trees that stand rattling their bones along the Mariannenplatz. It gusts—a white wave, an attack of crystals. “Keep your head down, Savas,” I say, and the kid tucks his chin to his chest and holds himself steady on the bike’s blue banana seat. He wears Markus’s shawl like a cape and the gloves that I paint with. “Kottbusser Tor.” That’s all he said when I asked him where he lives. The heart of Little Istanbul in the riot of Kreuzberg on the right side of the wall.
It must be f
our in the morning, or close to five. The squatters are inside, the anarchists, the mosque men, the artists of Bethaniendamm, and all the shops along the Oranienstrasse are dark, the vendor carts locked up and shivering. Arabelle’s bike strikes a wide skid down the whitened streets. The wool streamers are stalactites. There are little hills of snow up above my ears, where my hood blows back and can’t save me. One arm around Savas, one hand near the bell, I’m pedaling fast, and I’m sliding. There’s a lone taxi circling the streets. In its headlights the snow is white static.
When I reach the five points at the intersection, I brake slow, don’t let the wheels flatten out beneath us. “All right, Savas,” I say. “Hold on.” He grips the handlebar more tightly. I hop off before we come to a full stop, keeping one hand around his belly. Now he sits on the bike like it’s his own show pony, wearing the snow like a helmet.
It’s bunker housing here—long parallels of concrete, the steel plates of satellite dishes, a mess of underground rails and overground rails and empty bus stops and tea rooms, kabob restaurants, kurdan cups. It’s everything that’s happened since the wall went up and the Turks came in to do the jobs that the East Berliners couldn’t get to. They call them Gastarbeiter—guest workers—but they mean the farmers who come from Anatolia to clean our streets and build our buildings and sit with our old and eat their own bulgur wheat. They mean prayer rugs and headscarves and chickpeas. They mean women who hide themselves behind their burqas and girls who marry their cousins and little boys like Savas who are born here but don’t belong here because with the Turks in Kreuzberg it’s always temporary status—has always been temporary status since October 30, 1961, when the two countries signed the Recruitment and Procurement of Foreign Workers Treaty. In their own home country, at brand-new recruitment centers, the Turks were lined up, nearly naked, to prove they were healthy. They were given tests to prove they had skills. Then they were put on trains or planes and sent far from what they knew to a country, my own, which gave them crude housing and put them to work in factories for nearly nothing and without rights. We’re not supposed to know what goes on behind those doors, but I’ve heard things. I’m not supposed to be here with Savas, but here he is beside me, my warrior boy on my best friend’s bike, trying to be brave and fearless.
Is fear here?
Yes, fear is here. But I don’t ask the question.
“Where?” I ask him instead, looking up at the faces of the bleak and endless buildings. But this kid is still not talking—this boy who ran all the way from Little Istanbul to old St. Thomas in some dark hour, his polar bear jammies going soggy to his knees and his big coat sliding off his shoulders, its lining smelling like beans. We read the fear book together, or at least I read it to him. We sat on the floor of the closet, all hungry and wet. We turned the lights off when we left, locked the door with my key, went down the hall, got on this bike, rode through the snow, ten centimeters now. It’s not that it’s far. It’s that it is another country. I don’t speak the language here, and Savas won’t explain. The sky is growing lighter behind the snow.
“Savas,” I say. “You’re going to have to tell me.” But he shakes his head no, and in the glow of a nearby street lamp I can see that he is crying. Big silent tears, like drops of rain streaking a window. Henni would know, I think. Henni the registrar, the administrator, the head teacher, the playdough maker. Arabelle could find out, Arabelle the hippie translator. All I am is me, almost sixteen years old, with a borrowed bike and a bag of caps and aerosols, my lovesick mother wearing herself thin watching for me through her suffering window.
I could keep on pedaling, but where? How far? I could turn around, follow the long white skid back to the Mariannenplatz, past the old hospital and the white-frosted birds in the turrets. I could key us back in to St. Thomas Day Care, or I could turn, go the other way, take Savas to Mutti and Omi, coffee and bread, candles burned down to their last centimeter of wick. I stand at five points looking three ways, my eyes blurring with snow, my feet like two chunks of the Arctic. I give the bike a nudge and it dips before it steadies.
“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.
FRIEDRICHSH
AIN
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.
