Going Over

by Beth Kephart

  “Could it mean anything else? Are you certain?”

  I pull the paper from her hand, run my splattered nail across the words, look up at the light in her eyes. “Yes,” it says. “See, Yes, Arabelle. Stefan is finally coming.”

  She stares at me for the longest time. She doesn’t ask me questions. Then, with her arms and her baby and her love, she stands. With all of that and more, she lifts me. We are two best friends, on the observation platform, dancing, creaking the wood beneath our weight, creaking the nails inside their joints. We turn at last and face the East, and both of us start waving.

  “He’s coming,” she says.

  “He is,” I say.

  “I’ll finally get to meet him.”

  “Oh, God,” I say, “is it actually happening?” and she says, “I guess it is,” and all of a sudden, just like that, I feel a wave of big sickness overtake me. I crumple to the step, start crying.

  “What?” Arabelle asks, stooping down beside me, holding her belly out of the way. “What’s wrong now? What’s happened?” She looks all around, east to west, sky to earth, looking for the source of the trouble.

  “But what if he doesn’t make it?” I say. “What if—?”

  “No, no, no,” she says. “Not at all. You can’t be afraid, Ada. Not now.”

  “I know,” I say. “But—”

  “No buts now, Ada.”

  But all of a sudden there are so many buts. Stefan failing. Stefan being found out. Stefan losing. Me losing Stefan.

  “It will be all my fault,” I say, a whisper.

  “Listen to me, Ada. You listen. What fault is freedom? What fault is love?”

  FRIEDRICHSHAIN

  He’s there, in the pineapple Trabbi. You’re dressed like the plumber you’ll never be. Your grandfather’s bow and arrows in brown wrapping, your things in a box, your cable around your neck, your overalls saggy with tools. It’s a dead-end neighborhood, pressed up against the wall. It’s quiet, but you’re even quieter—old socks pulled over your boots, only whispers between you, as you lug your things in now, one thing after the other, behind Lukas with his hair tucked into a cap.

  There are five stories in this abandoned place, just like Lukas said. Each story turns wide around the square staircase. When you reach the top, you set your things aside and unroll the blankets where you’ll work, and only after you have soundproofed this place as best as you can does he say, “Look at how perfect it is.” He lifts the skylight, an easy path to the roof. He shows you the chimney, how sturdy it is, how thick its brick and mortar are; enough, he says, to hold the cable fast. He points across the way, to No. 68. You see—don’t need his help—the guard in the watchtower. The guard has left his radio on. He’s playing an illegal station.

  Who is a hero?

  What is right?

  You make your choices, and after that, you live with them.

  You see, you say. You see it all, and it is day, still, and it will be day for hours. You have plenty of work you must do. You have plenty of waiting. Whenever there’s noise in the street, or a neighbor talking, you’re sure that the Stasi are listening.

  “Breathe,” Lukas says.

  You want to.

  It will go on like this. It is like this. Hour after hour. Noon toward dusk. Dusk toward evening. He’s brought sandwiches and you’ve brought pop. You’ve brought a photograph from your Grossmutter’s album, the last gift that she will give you. “The three of us,” she said. “Don’t you forget.” You were young once. You had a grandfather. There were three of you in a burgundy room, and in the picture she is smiling.

  When you talk, and you hardly talk, you talk in whispers. The rest of the time you remember. Ada, your pink-haired girl. Grossmutter at the scope. Your mother, still missing. Your grandfather. Man of the house. You remember that first morning in the park, your fingers brittle with the cold and the bowstring unruly, and you remember Alexander, just yesterday morning. “See you around, Stefan,” he said, gentle, like maybe he knows what you are up to, maybe he wishes he were leaving, too. But how could you know? How could you ask him?

  “Four arrows,” Lukas says now. “That’s all we’ve got.” Four arrows, three kinds of string, a chimney sturdy as the linden tree, two flying foxes with the wheels lathed right, the ball bearings balanced in, the handles well dispositioned for the flight, the harness that will hold us, but what difference can a harness make? If we jump the line, the guards will see us. They shoot to kill in the East. The dogs are down there, waiting. The guy’s in his tower, and maybe he’s sleeping to some rasping lullaby.

  “Ready,” Lukas says, half a question, and you say, “Now.”

  “You go first,” Lukas says, unwrapping the arrows. “Aim small,” he says. “Miss small. Remember the important stuff.”

  You hold your breath. You set your teeth. You stretch the blades on your back. I’m coming, you think. I’m coming, Ada. There will be no turning back.

  SO36

  The last time I saw Stefan I was a pink-haired girl who had never hated her boyfriend because she loved him so much. I’m not who I was. I’m no Professor of Escape. Sebastien’s moved in and Omi’s moving out. She made one more trip East; I watched her go. She came home, and hugged me hard, and that is how I knew.

  Yes/No. What kind of choice is that?

  “You can’t go,” I told her, just this morning, which feels like years ago, centuries, another time.

  “You know that I have to.”

  “But I love you, too,” I said, crying. “I wasn’t trying to choose. I want you, too, Omi. Don’t you know that?”

  She pinched my chin into her hand. She made me look into her eyes. She told me to listen with great care. “Enough is enough, Ada,” she said. “I don’t need my freedom. I just need someone who understands. Stefan’s grandmother and I understand each other. We will be happy together. We will be fine.”

  “But you’ll be so far away.”

  “I’ll be right across the wall.”

  “But I’ll have stories to tell you. Bratwurst to share.”

  “I’ll be looking out for you. You know that I will.”

  I looked at her, wondering, Would I see her again? Would I be allowed to travel, this way and that? Would I be blacklisted by guards who will finally know that I am the reason for this? That I am the Professor of Escape. That I forced a decision. That I made others choose, and by their choosing I changed the shape of family. “Your Mutti has what she needs now,” Omi said, meaning Sebastien, meaning happiness and love. “And you’re going to have what you want. And Katja says that she’s learned the way the telescope works. I’ll look for you. I’ll find you.”

  She kissed me on the part of my platinum hair, ran a finger beneath each of my eyes. “You’re all grown up,” she said, “and you’re beautiful, Ada. You make sure that boy always remembers that.”

  “He will.”

  “You make sure that you remember.”

  I nod. I cannot speak.

  Omi won’t be there when I get home. Her pearl-colored room will be empty. Sebastien and Mutti will be sleeping side by side. There’s bratwurst in the oven, getting soggy, and it will not be for her.

  It’s just Arabelle and me in the dark tonight. It’s just us because Mutti knows nothing; we haven’t told her yet; we can’t let her hope and hurt, she’s still too fragile, and besides: I am all out of words, I am done with explaining. I pedaled all the way to Neukölln, and Arabelle clung, and here we are, standing by the curb of this beat-up building with a tile roof. There’s a man sitting on the lid of his car, watching us.

  I look up and down the street, wondering from which direction Stefan will come. I check the skies, hold Arabelle’s hand. Her baby is kicking and dancing in there. Her hair is bike-ride wild.

  “He was there,” she tells me about the guy at the car. “At the Köpi. He was there. I saw him yesterday.”

  We watch him again, and he’s watching us. We choose to trust, because we have to.

 
“What do you think?” Arabelle asks, after an hour has gone by, and the night has grown chilly, even for May in Berlin. It’s a little past two, and the clouds of both sides of this city are high—plattering cirrus and the cumulus. I remember my wall of heroes, my every splatter of paint, my Savas, my Omi, tiny Katja. It’s quiet out here. The buildings are dark. The grebes and the magpies are sleeping. The man with the car is still waiting, watching the sky and watching us, his arms crossed, his long black hair tied back with a ribbon.

  It’s just as the wind starts to blow through that I hear a sound. Just then when the man stands, upright, steps away from his car, looks up.

  “Did you hear that?” I ask Arabelle.

  “Hear what?” Her hands on her belly, her round eyes bright. Our feet balanced on the curb of the street.

  “Up there.” I point toward the sound of the zing, the little whistle in the weather, the sudden skitter-clatter against a roof. Arabelle looks up, too, and the man keeps looking, and now he runs toward the sound and stops. Something has hit the roof of the building next door. Something’s wrong. The man pulls his hand along the black sheen of his hair and walks back, paces now, keeps looking skyward, looks worried.

  The second time something whistles through, it stops again in another wrong place. The man runs and stops. He turns around. He looks straight at me, calls my name.

  “Ada Piekarz?” he says.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Lukas’s brother,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  “There are only two arrows left.”

  “The flying fox?” I ask, and Arabelle tightens her grip around her hand and presses her other to my heart, hard.

  “Yes,” he says. “But the wind is messy.”

  I can hardly breathe, or see. I crunch the bones in Arabelle’s hand.

  “Have faith,” she says.

  I am suddenly desperate, terribly hot despite the chill in the night. I want to race up the stairs of No. 68 and fling myself out onto its roof and stretch my hands like a trapeze artist and catch the world’s most beautiful blue-eyed boy in my arms.

  Jump, I would say. I am here for you, Stefan. I love you, Stefan. I so completely do.

  “Two more chances is a lot of chances,” Arabelle is saying.

  “But maybe not enough,” I say, and my eyes are wet, almost too wet to see how, now, the third arrow has already begun zinging itself straight over No. 68 to us. The third arrow is well on its way. Diving and zagging and dropping into the bushes that press up against this house.

  “Help me find it!” Lukas’s brother says, and in an instant, Arabelle and I are at his side, digging through the sticks and the dirt with our hands, feeling for the sharp prick of the third arrow with the invisible fishing line tail.

  “Goddamn it,” Lukas’s brother says. Pushing through dead leaves, crunching through bush sticks, coming up muddy and empty. He plunges back in, and now Arabelle’s down on her hands and knees, her baby belly in the low grass of No. 68 where, a Turkish miracle, the lights are not on yet. I’m patting down a tall bush, squeezing my hand between every branch, taking the thwack of the green against my face, until suddenly I feel it. I run my fingers along the arrow’s blade to find the shaft. I yank it free, and the fishing wire is still attached. I am in possession of arrow number three. I am the lucky one.

  “Here!” I say, and the man says, “Hurry,” and we help him, best as we can, pull the fishing wire toward us until another thicker wire comes through and next a cable, thick and steely, everything scraping our hands, pulling the paint off my flesh, making the baby inside Arabelle tumble, until the man has all the thick cable he needs, and he secures it to the fender of his BMW 525 with the tools he brought for the job, like he does this every ordinary day. We wait for something, I’m not sure what, and when it happens, the man nods, jumps into his car, and turns the key in the ignition.

  “Watch out,” he says, driving to make the whole thing taut. He hops back out onto the street now, so that the three of us stand—this man, Arabelle, and me—watching the sky, watching the cable, watching for Stefan and for this mysterious Lukas, watching and waiting for freedom. The wind is blowing hard. The clouds are going crazy. I can’t remember cloud names or star names or anything Stefan has taught me. I need him to teach me forever.

  “They’re anchored in,” the man says, because the cable line goes heavy, tauter than it was, and now we stand there listening, the three of us—for the wind, for the clouds, for the stars, for the whir like wings, coming for us. There’s a sudden thud on the roof of No. 68—on the east-facing part of the building we can’t see. Seconds go by, and there’s another thud, and then there’s the loud sound of shouting. Deliberate. Defiant. Joyous.

  We made it! We made it! We made it!

  Voices from the rooftop. Voices no Eastern Bloc guard can do a thing about.

  I can barely breathe, can barely stand up. Only fractions of my eyes can see, but I know for sure: He is up there—against the sky, inside it. Stefan has come home. He’s come for me.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In the early hours of March 31, 1983, Michael Becker and Holger Bethke were heard singing and shouting in the attic space of an apartment house in West Berlin. They were twenty-three and twenty-four years old, a plumber and an electrician—two East Germans who had spent many months scheming their way to freedom. They had ziplined there by way of wooden rollers and a quarter-inch steel cable—traveled 165 feet, east to west, seventy feet above the East Berlin death strip, in close proximity to a watchtower guard.

  Failure was a real possibility, but it wasn’t an option. It could have meant death. It would most certainly have meant imprisonment and deprivation in a part of the world, East Berlin, that had been cordoned off from the West ever since the first barbed wall was thrown down among a surprised citizenry on August 13, 1961. Friends were separated from friends. Lovers from lovers. Employees from their jobs. Parents from children. The world had cracked in two. A socialist state on one side. A federal republic on the other. And so it would remain until November 9, 1989, when the East German government, responding to tremendous civil unrest and international pressure, announced that those who had been living the proscribed lives of East Germans could, at last, travel west. The wall was coming down.

  The official estimate of deaths associated with attempted escapes across the nearly hundred-mile “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart” stands at 136. Many historians suggest that the number was much higher. The official number of successful escapees, or defectors, has been placed at some 5,000.

  When I traveled to Berlin in the summer of 2011 I discovered a city palpably alive, brilliant with color. I stood before memorials. I cried inside museums. I touched pieces of the old graffiti wall and imagined the ache of being separated from people I loved, from landscapes I yearned to see. I hung out with artists and talked to jewelers and stood at the Brandenburg Gate past midnight in a wash of rain. I heard the great Berliner Dom swell with the sound of a cappella song, and watched the clouds, and got lost in Kreuzberg and didn’t mind for a second. I was interviewed—an impromptu moment—by schoolchildren who wanted to know what I saw in their city and what had drawn me to it. I used my hands in an attempt to explain. Words were not enough.

  I did not go to Berlin in search of a novel. I went in search of understanding. It wasn’t until several months later that Tamra Tuller, my editor, began a conversation with me that resulted, finally, in this book. Tamra had gone to Berlin, too. She had recognized the city’s power. She had wondered what might happen to a story set in Berlin, and she shared that wonder with me. I began to read, furiously. I began to dream.

  The brave escape of Michael Becker and Holger Bethke inspired one fraction of this story. So did the memoirs of Eloise Schindler, the wife of Reverend Martin Schindler, who did indeed lead St. Thomas Church in the early 1980s, sanction its day care, manage its notoriously mercurial (and talented) Herr Palinski, form a community with Felice and the Köpi, and make a car
ing difference among Kreuzberg squatters, foreigners, and artists. The scholarship of many, including that of my friend, Paul Steege, provided answers and insights.

  Still, this is a work of fiction. The historical facts of Becker, Bethke, the reverend, Herr Palinski, the day care children, the Turkish immigrants, the political agitators, and Felice were all but starting places. Going Over is, in the end, imagination set against the very real backdrop of a stunning era. It’s what might have been, and who could have been, inspired by men and women of integrity and courage.

  I hope that my selected source list will lead you toward a greater understanding of a city, a people, a time.

  Now, most essentially, some words of thanks. First, Tamra Tuller. This book simply would not exist without her. She invited me into a conversation. She shared stories of her own Berlin travels. She asked questions, but she never pressed. She said things—quietly, as is her way—that strengthened my resolve to find this story’s proper center. I loved every minute of working on this book. I loved writing it for Tamra.

  Second, Heather Mussari. Heather knows a little something about art, and a little something more about graffiti. She knows about pink hair, girl power, acts of courage, and beauty. Ada gets her light from Heather’s soul. It’s hard to explain. It just happened.

  Third, Annika Duesberg. Annika is German, born and bred. She brought her big heart and impeccable English to my country more than eleven years ago, and we have shared a love of dance and gardens. Annika read a late draft of this book to help safeguard me from errors. She was insightful. She was thorough. She was essential, and I am grateful. Any errors that persist are mine alone.

  My agent Amy Rennert is integral to my writing life, and for her care through the years and her enthusiasm for this book, I am grateful. To Ginee Seo, Kim Lauber, Lara Starr, Ann Spradlin, Jennifer Tolo Pierce, Wendy Thorpe, Claire Fletcher, and Johan Almqvist, deepest thanks for believing so deeply in me and in this story. Sincerest thanks to Michael Green and Jessica Shoffel of Philomel for the conversations and blessings.