by Nina Berry
“I think it’s dislocated,” Pagan said. “You need to…”
Frau Kruger put her left hand over her own mouth and rammed her right shoulder into the wall of the building beside her. The joint cracked audibly into place. She screamed into her hand, the harsh sound muffled.
Pagan stared at her as Thomas took Frau Kruger’s left arm again. “Mother saw far worse during the war in Moscow,” he said as Frau Kruger leaned against him, sucking in air.
“Remind me not to make your mother angry,” Pagan said.
Thomas breathed a faint laugh. Frau Kruger’s lips curled upward a little between gasps. Thomas eased her a step or two, holding her around the waist. “The car’s not far, Mutter.”
The car. Pagan didn’t let herself think about it, running behind Thomas and Frau Kruger, holding Karin’s hand. Thomas led them down some steps and opened an iron grate with a rusty squeal.
They all froze, waiting. Shouting voices bounced toward them from the street, but they weren’t cries of discovery. Thomas stuck his head into the unlit basement area. No sounds other than his own harsh breathing came back to them.
“I don’t need the light to find the car,” he whispered. “Mother, take my hand. Karin, you hold on to Mother’s skirt and hold Pagan’s hand.”
Aligned like that, they stepped into the pitch-black underground garage, the clip-clop of their shoes rebounding off the walls around them. Pagan shuffled her feet, worried that she might trip over something in the dark, sticking close to Karin.
“We could steal someone else’s car,” she whispered. “Yours isn’t big enough for all of us.”
“Mine is the only one here,” Thomas said. “And the only one where I know to find the keys. It narrows here.”
“Hardly anyone owns a car here,” Frau Kruger said. “You have to wait years even to buy a very old Trabant. Thomas is lucky his father was able to keep hold of this one.”
“Lucky,” Pagan muttered to herself. She put out a hand. Cold cement walls rose to both her right and left. “That’s one way to look at it.”
“Mostly they store construction equipment down here,” Thomas said. “It’s here to the left. Yes, come. Not far now.”
He flicked on a light to reveal a narrow space between piles of cement blocks and boxes just wide enough to fit the sleek red Mercedes convertible. Behind it a narrow driveway sloped up to a closed metal door, which could be hoisted up to access the street.
Pagan forced herself to take a long deep inhale, counting to ten. Just the sight of the car made her woozy. Every cell in her body screamed for her to run. She made herself hold still, made herself breathe. Maybe she could be a passenger in the stupid thing for a few blocks.
The thought darkened her vision. She leaned against the cement blocks so as not to fall down.
Okay, so the Krugers could take the car without her and she would find her own way back to West Berlin. No way was she getting in that car. She didn’t want to hold them back, and as a US citizen she could probably get back to her side of the border alone without much interference.
Thomas limped over to the boxes and reached behind them to fish out a hidden metal container with his one good hand. Frau Kruger was already opening the unlocked passenger door of the sports car and helping Karin into the narrow backseat with her left hand. She held her right arm close to her body. Her face was still gray with pain.
The keys jangled in Thomas’s hand. He took a step, wincing, then threw the keys toward Pagan. They landed with a clang at her feet.
She looked down at them, not understanding.
“My right foot isn’t working properly and my left hand’s broken,” Thomas said. “Mother can’t use her right hand to shift. Pagan, you’re going to have to drive.”
Her already churning stomach heaved. The last time she’d driven a car like this she’d killed everyone inside it, except herself.
Pagan gazed at Karin’s long blond ponytail and her big green eyes, and all she could think of was her sister, Ava, her little neck bloody and broken, eyes wide-open in death.
Thomas limped slowly up the ramp toward the garage door as Pagan stared down at the car keys.
Her knees were made of water. She stooped for the keys and stayed there, head down to stop it from spinning.
“Pagan, are you okay?”
Frau Kruger had put the top down on the red Mercedes convertible so that she could fit in the tiny backseat along with her daughter. Karin half sat, half lay on her mother’s lap, staring at Pagan. “Did you get shot?” Karin asked.
Pagan breathed in, breathed out, and stood up, shaking her head. “No, honey. I’m fine.”
She forced her feet to walk toward the car.
Yes, it was red. Yes it was sleek and sporty. But it wasn’t the Corvette she’d driven over the edge of Mulholland Drive the night of her sixteenth birthday, killing her father and younger sister.
This was a different car, a different night.
She was a different girl.
That got her as far as the driver’s seat. She put the key into the ignition and grabbed the wheel. Her whole body quivered uncontrollably, but she put up one hand and adjusted the rearview mirror. Reflected there she saw Thomas standing by the door to the garage.
“I’m going to turn out the light and pull up the door,” he said. “Then you back up the car.”
What choice did she have? “Yep,” she said, spitting the word out before she could think too much. “Hang on.”
She put the car into Neutral. This was no different than driving the bigger Mercedes-Benz, damn it. One car was just like another.
She turned the key and stepped on the accelerator. But she pressed too hard and the engine revved like a rocket.
She snatched her foot away as if the pedal had burned it. At least the car didn’t stall. She sucked in air, trying to ignore the churning of her stomach and leaned her head against the steering wheel for a moment. Sweat trickled down her temples.
A small warm hand rested itself on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” Karin said in English. Her voice was very small. She cleared her throat and said it again, more firmly. “It’s okay, Pagan.”
Pagan loosed a shaky laugh. A little girl was comforting her. A girl who’d been wrested from her home and shot at tonight, whose mother had been manhandled and injured, whose brother had been tortured and shot.
And here she, Pagan, was undone by a stupid sports car. It was ridiculous. Pagan herself was ridiculous. She laughed again and raised her head, swallowing her nausea.
“Thanks,” she said, and stepped on the clutch so she could put the car in Reverse. “Ready?” she called out to Thomas.
“Ready,” he said, and flicked off the garage light.
Darkness fell like a curtain. The garage door rattled under Thomas’s grip and then clattered upward. Pagan twisted in the driver’s seat, one arm over the back of the seat, and saw a square of charcoal night sky cut faintly out of the blackness around her.
“Just go straight back,” Thomas said. “And I’ll hop in.”
“Okay.” Pagan’s mouth was dry. Something lodged hard in her throat like a chunk of underchewed apple. She reached her hand to the backseat and found Karin’s skinny leg. She patted it. “Ready, Karin?”
“Ready,” the little girl whispered, and put her hand over Pagan’s.
That helped her to ease the car into gear. As the car rolled backward, the monster in Pagan’s gut rose up. She choked, swallowed it down, and kept going. So what if she threw up? So what if her heart was tap-dancing like Gene Kelly on cocaine and she was covered in a cold sweat? Nothing mattered but how she drove.
The car purred backward up the ramp. Pagan aimed for the square of charcoal sky. As it got closer, her eyes found more light. Thomas’s form resolved itself out of the dark beside the open
door, waiting.
They were out. The small street was quiet. No soldiers yet.
She jerked the car to a stop beside Thomas and gulped the night air as he climbed in. “You okay?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But that doesn’t matter. What’s the fastest way to the border?”
“There,” he said, pointing to her left. “Then right on Fehrbelliner Strasse. The French sector is just on the other side of Bernauer Strasse, to the north.”
“Not far now,” she said, and backed onto the street, pushed the car into first gear, and started off slowly.
The cool night air on her face was a blessing. Her eyes skidded over the barren street, trying to listen over her own engine for the rumble of trucks, the shouts of guards. She turned right onto the quiet, tree-lined Fehrbelliner Strasse. They crossed a tiny street and made it a full block before her gaze came to rest on the red dashboard.
Red as fresh blood.
She gagged, coughing. She couldn’t breathe. Blood was pouring down her throat, tasting of salt and metal, covering her nose and mouth, smothering her. She was buried beneath the bodies. They crushed the breath from her, pressing her face in a river of gore.
Her vision narrowed down to a black-red tunnel. Hot blood coated her skin, burning like acid.
She tried to stomp on the brake. Tried to swerve, but she was too late. Palm trees and scrub on the horizon tilted like a handheld movie camera. The hood of the car dipped down sharply over the cliff.
They fell, like a suicide off the Empire State Building, straight down. Ava screamed, sobbing out for help, trying to climb over Daddy’s shoulders to the backseat to get out of the car as it plunged. Daddy grabbed Ava with one arm, the other braced on the red red dashboard, shouting for Pagan to stop, please stop, Oh, God, stop!
The car pounded into a tree or a rock and kept going. The jolt shook Pagan loose. She flew sideways. The red steering wheel and the cherry leather seats ran with darker crimson as the car blew past her and kept falling and falling and falling…
She hit the pavement and rolled. Her stomach heaved. She was lying on her side in the middle of the street, throwing up so hard it hurt. All the tea, the black forest cake, all the stroganoff, spewed out of her and still she was hacking up bile.
The spasms subsided, and she pushed herself away to see the red convertible, still rolling down the street, driver’s door swinging wide. Karin’s wide-eyed face popped up over the back edge, staring at her.
She hadn’t gone over the cliff off Mulholland Drive. She was in East Berlin.
Not far away, men were shouting. Footsteps hammered closer.
Pagan fell onto her back on the road and stared up at the sky.
There was no way she could drive that car. The soldiers were coming. She was going to die here tonight.
She deserved it.
A breeze caressed her perspiring face, blowing away the sour odor of half-digested food. The fresh earthy aroma of soil, of grass, of living things washed over her.
A memory, sweet as the scents, stirred. She half sat up and turned her head to see a park to her right. The benches and young trees looked familiar. It was the same park she’d walked through when she’d followed the peacoat-clad Devin Black, empty now of mothers and children, still oddly barren and more brown than green.
But there was life there, trying to grow. She could smell it.
Her grandmother’s garden had held that scent of life, too. Her father had told Pagan once that she had a laugh just like his mother’s. He’d loved hearing it for that and so many other reasons.
Her grandmother’s laugh deserved to live, even if Pagan didn’t. Karin and Thomas and their mother deserved to live. And Pagan’s grandmother certainly would not have approved of Pagan lying in the middle of the road, indulging in thoughts of death when there was work to be done, work saving a girl a lot like Pagan’s little sister.
Mama had given up. So Pagan had sworn that she never would.
It was up to her now.
She sat up. The terrible shaking quieted to a low-grade tremor.
She looked over her shoulder. The shouts and footsteps weren’t far, but the soldiers hadn’t turned down this little street yet. The Krugers had a chance.
Thomas was limping painfully toward her, blood soaking his pant leg, green eyes owlish with concern. “Pagan?”
“Thomas.” She got to her feet. “Sorry about that.”
“You were screaming and then you just jumped out of the car!”
So that’s how she’d ended up on the pavement. It was all a horrible blur.
“I’m okay now.” She touched his outstretched hand briefly and sped back toward the car. She felt empty, like the shell of a ruined building after the bombing was over. She was in pieces, but at least the explosions had stopped. “We better get going. They’re coming.”
“I can try to drive if you can’t…”
“Don’t be silly,” she said briskly. It’s what her grandmother would have said. “Sit down and put pressure on that leg wound this instant. Karin, get down, please.”
She thumped down in the red leather seat, slammed the heavy door shut, and turned the key. The engine roared to life. “Where to?”
Thomas was staring at her. “Past the park, then stop at the next cross street, Anklamer Strasse. That will be a block south of the border. We should check down it to both the left and the right because there will be more soldiers there.”
“The good news is that the guys already looking for us won’t expect us to move toward the troops.” Pagan stepped gently on the accelerator, past the park. The car drove easily. A deep vibration still buzzed inside her, but she was driving.
As they approached Anklamer Strasse she slowed to drive the car between trees up onto the sidewalk where the trunks and leafy branches made the shadows deeper. She stopped just short of the corner.
She climbed out of the car, keeping her voice low. “Stay quiet. I’ll check down to the right and the left. The streets parallel to ours will cross the border, right?”
“Yes. Let me help you.” Thomas began to hoist himself painfully out of the car.
“Sit down!” Pagan snapped. “If you bleed to death it will be very inconvenient.”
“I can help!” Karin pushed off the back of the seat in front of her, standing up in the backseat. “I’ll go right and you go left.”
“Nein!” Frau Kruger said, grabbing her daughter with her good arm.
“One foot outside this car, and you’ll regret it!” Pagan whispered at Karin vehemently. “Now stay quiet and help put the top up. I’ll be right back.”
It was a relief to trot away from the red convertible, to make her legs move and get her heart thumping in a steady rhythm. Staying near the trees along the sidewalk, she looked carefully left down Anklamer Strasse. It was a very short block down to the cross street, Brunnen Strasse. Running lightly on her toes, Pagan hugged the buildings to move even closer.
A tank lumbered by, heading north. She pulled up short as a truck full of barbed wire tagged behind it. She got to the corner of Anklamer and Brunnen Strasse and peered around to the right, up the long block to the border between East and West Berlin.
Another truck was already there, at the corner of Brunnen and a Bernauer Strasse, which marked the border. A manned machine gun sat in the middle of the road, pointing toward West Berlin.
Machine gun and tank. Bad.
Pagan took a moment to make sure no one else was coming down either street before she skulked back down Anklamer Strasse, past the intersection where the convertible sat waiting, and up the slight curve of the street to the intersection on the right.
The street sign here said Ruppiner Strasse. It was a relief to find it much narrower than Brunnen Strasse, where she’d seen the tank, with no soldiers visible
yet. She crept down it half a block before she saw another machine gun in the middle of the intersection with Bernauer Strasse, again pointed at the border.
Two other soldiers, rifles in hand, watched the street, focused for now on the French sector on the other side of the border. Two soldiers moved slowly down the middle of Bernauer Strasse, a roller of barbed wire held between them as it unraveled, leaving spiked cable in their wake.
All around, the windows in the bullet-scarred buildings remained dark. Even if the citizens of East Berlin had been awakened by the sounds of a wall going up around their city, they were probably keeping their heads down and their lights off. There was nothing to distract the soldiers from their job.
Which gave Pagan a terrible, desperate idea.
Breathlessly, she ran back and reported in. “I don’t think we’re going to find a border street without soldiers on it,” she said, putting the car in gear. They’d put the soft top of the convertible up, as she’d said, “But Ruppiner Strasse has no tanks or trucks and only one machine gun.”
“Machine gun?” Frau Kruger asked weakly from the backseat.
“A total of five soldiers that I could see. The tank and trucks are a long block farther down. If we can surprise them and get you through, they won’t have time to react.” She turned the car onto Ruppiner Strasse, slowing to keep the engine’s growl low. Beside her, Thomas was peering up ahead. She said, “They’ve only laid down one layer of barbed wire so far. You have to go now.”
“You?” he asked. “You mean we.”
She didn’t answer but brought the convertible to a halt, throwing on the emergency brake, to do a quick check of her face in the review mirror. She wiped away a smear of dirt along her cheek and the bloodstain on her forehead. Not close-up ready, but pretty good given the night she’d had. She opened the door.
“You’re coming with us,” Thomas said, reaching for her but missing as she slipped out.
Pagan slid around the hood of the car, keeping to the shadows, glad that her Dior suit dress was a dark chocolate brown. It hid so much. She dusted off her skirt, adjusting her purse strap across her chest. “I’m sorry, but, Frau Kruger, you’re going to have to drive. Not far, just a little more than a block.”
