Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  When Kai didn’t raise his head, just sat there limp with the raven man gripping his shoulder until the man’s knuckles turned white, my stomach turned over and heaved. I had to close my eyes and grip the knife tightly to keep from throwing up my bread and butter. A man was dead because of me, and it was someone they both liked.

  “Have other Runners reported this?” the raven man asked Kai. “Other missing balloons? Missing Passengers?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I am sure.” The heaviness in Kai’s voice carried the same edge as the heaviness on my chest, the knife at my hip, the churning of my stomach. Everything that had happened—the tug, the place around me so unlike the Berlin I’d seen, the balloon, the wall…It was like seeing an accident about to happen. I flinched and looked away.

  But my heart was a betrayer. “So it’s real,” I found myself saying. Kai and the raven man turned toward me, curious and confused. I clarified. “Balloons. Magic.”

  Kai looked at the raven man, who lifted his face to the sky. His nod was tentative and tenuous. “Yes.”

  I nodded slowly because I didn’t know what else to do. All those stories Saba had told…and where I was now. My ribs felt like they had closed with a cold, hard grip around my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I let the balloon escape from my arms. I wrapped my bare hand around the string and whispered, “Then why won’t it take me home?”

  “Balloons are not—” the raven man said in German, the last word unknown to me. I frowned at him, and he repeated in English, “Balloons are not omnidirectional.”

  I pressed my lips together and forced myself to keep my tone even. “Obviously.”

  The corner of Kai’s mouth twitched, and his gaze shot to his shoes again. I thought that was the closest he’d ever get to a smile, and it felt like a victory. The raven man said calmly, unaffected by my rancor, “What would you like the balloon to do? It brought you here. It did its duty as far as it is concerned.”

  “You speak like it is sentient.”

  He shook his head, the feathers spinning so fast I could no longer see his eyes. Kai clarified, translating my sentence from English into German. The feathers slowed, and the raven man’s eyes were dark but clear. “The magic may as well make it as such. It knew you somehow. You are meant to be here.”

  Kai scowled. “She isn’t. She can’t be.” He sighed and added in German, “She is from a different time.”

  I blinked. Exhaled. Inhaled. My vision tunneled down on a stray feather on the path. It was strange, wasn’t it, that no one walked by us. From a different time. In my mind, I saw the old-fashioned cars on the street. I thought about the wall and the people with me. I’d known. I just hadn’t wanted it to be true. I had seen without believing. It’s impossible. Balloons just go over walls. But here I was.

  Ashasher said, “Zeitreisende.”

  “What?” I asked. “What did you call me?”

  “Time traveler,” Kai said, his voice soaked with regret. “He called you a time traveler.”

  Chapter Five

  THE GIRL ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE

  Łódź Ghetto, Poland, 1941

  Benno

  The Łódź ghetto was in Poland, and when we arrived, it was already busting at the seams with people. The fence and wall around the ghetto were high and backed up to the forest, a road disappearing between trees. I eyed the forest as soon as we began to walk toward our assigned housing unit. The forest, deep and dark, could hide a family for years. We could stay there, I thought. If we hunted and found a cabin, or built one, then we could live this out. The walls and the guards of the ghetto made my stomach turn. Even in the open air, everything felt as if it was closing in around me.

  Papa, he wasn’t oblivious. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Son. Think of your mother. Think of Ruth.”

  It was cruel, but I knew why he said it. I looked over my shoulder at Mama, walking hand in hand with Ruthie through the mud and the gray sadness of the ghetto. They were singing that damned alphabet song again. Mama would die if she lost another son, and then…What happened to Ruthie if something happened to Mama or Papa? I couldn’t just leave them behind to try the forest.

  So I stayed. Papa went back and swung Ruth up onto his shoulders. He said, “Ruth, you have to be a big girl now.”

  They led the way into our apartment on the second floor, Ruth shrieking with laughter as she bent over, barely fitting into the doorway, wrapped around Papa’s head. Mama and I, we tried to smile as we watched them, but I think we knew what was coming before we even admitted it to ourselves.

  When we arrived at Łódź, the sun beat down on us, and though we were walking through snow and mud, we were hopeful. They showed us a small room where we would live as a family. The people who showed us around were Jews. They told us we would have jobs and work. They told us if we worked hard, we would have enough food. They said to us, “We are a community. We will survive this, b’ezrat HaShem.”

  G-d willing.

  G-d will.

  G-d willed.

  Łódź worked under the thumb of Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Council of Elders in the ghetto. He told us that the only way for us to survive was for us to be irreplaceable. To prove our worth. So under his leadership, Łódź supplied the German army with uniforms, metal replacement parts, and electrical equipment as Hitler marched across Europe. We fed the hand that bit us. Rumkowski said he was saving us, but it wasn’t hard to doubt that. Around us, people starved.

  When we arrived, we were still well fed. We were fat. We were soft. The people in the ghetto, they were thin. The ones who were emaciated, we skirted on the streets. They had tuberculosis or some other disease, and by the time they were that thin, they were days away from succumbing to their bed and the disease, if not deportation.

  We got a loaf of bread for the family to share for the entire week, as long as we all went to work. Ruth was too young for work, and the day cares, we were told, had been outlawed. Schools had been shut down a month prior to our arrival. Still, there was a covert, underground system for watching kids as young as Ruth. Soon, I saw boys and girls as young as seven sewing buttons onto coats.

  I wished that Ruth wouldn’t have to be one of those kids.

  They said, Be careful what you wish for.

  There were few other children in the ghetto. They had been taken, they said, to a children’s camp. There were whispers from the new Polish residents and from a few of the Germans though. No one who left on a train came back.

  Rumkowski said, Give me your children.

  And they whispered to us, You are new. Hide your little girl.

  We could hide her, but not from the cough. It came only a few weeks after we arrived at Łódź. I woke in the middle of the night, listening to the deep chest cough from her tiny body. Mama woke too, and I heard her whispering with Papa. They begged others on the street for medicine and for hot rags, anything. Some people shook their heads slowly, tears in their eyes, and closed their doors in my parents’ faces. Others shoved into our hands what they had—and then closed their doors. We were a family with the sickness.

  “Go to the fence by the cemetery,” whispered a girl down the street to me. “That’s where we leave notes for people who help us from the outside. Someone will find your note. You must be careful. The police will shoot you if they see you.”

  The fence was well patrolled, and the police shot without asking questions. But the gravestones and the trees in the ghetto cemetery made it easier to stay in the shadows, to look as if I were going to pray and not creeping to the corner where the fence was low and the barbed wire loose. And out of the gray and the wild, free world beyond the fence, I saw a flash of color. A girl about my age with glossy curls and a purple dress that must have cost a small fortune was throwing sticks for her dog down the long, empty street alongside the ghetto.

  I whispered to her, “Miss. Please.”

  She turned around and backed away from the fence,
staring at me like she hadn’t expected someone from inside the fence to speak to her on the outside of the fence. “You can see me? It didn’t work then.”

  I didn’t have much time so I didn’t dwell on the oddness of her question. I knew the risks when I said, “Are you from the resistance? My sister. She needs medicine.”

  The girl turned away from me. “You are a Jude.”

  “My sister…” I began haltingly. “She’s five. She didn’t get to bring her favorite doll here.” The girl on the other side of the fence didn’t walk away. I kept talking. “She loves toffee and her favorite holiday is Purim, when we dress up. She was the only girl who smiled on the train here. Do you know why? She saw a balloon. Just a red balloon outside a gap in the door. She’s just a child, but if she doesn’t get medicine, she’ll die. She has a cough.”

  The girl turned back to me, her face stitched into a frown. “I don’t have medicine. I have magic.”

  “Medicine can be magic too,” I said, desperate and angry. I’d wasted my chance on a rich girl who didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, who wouldn’t help me, a Jew. I couldn’t see her through my tears. I said, half hoping someone else from the resistance was out of sight, listening. “Please.”

  Then, to my surprise, she turned away from me and threw another stick for her dog. “Come back tomorrow.”

  Chapter Six

  ANOMALIES

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, March 1988

  Kai

  Leaving England with my little sister to accept an offer to work for the Schöpfers here in Berlin, to leave the free world and step into a Communist state, hadn’t been the easiest choice by any means. But our people, the Romanichal, couldn’t keep Sabina safe. I wasn’t even sure if they wanted to keep her safe anymore. There’d been talk of institutions. Her magic was wild and barely controlled at home. She was smart—too smart, maybe—for her age, and she lashed out at the children who teased her. They’d ended up on roofs and in trees.

  Sabina’s magic wasn’t something our neighbors and family could understand. It wasn’t something even I understood, but when outsiders started coming around, asking for Sabina, talking about her talents and how they could “use” them, I knew I had to get her out. We’d tried London, but they’d shown up there, demanding to see her.

  Going behind the Iron Curtain kept Sabina safe from those who were looking for her, and I liked what I did here—color me surprised. Shuttling people from a state of fear to a state of opportunity felt like doing something good for once. And god only knew that I needed to feel like that after leaving home.

  My family had roots in the Kalderaš Romani, but we’d lived in England for long enough that we were Romanichal now. We spoke what some called Angloromani, but mostly it was a mix of English and Romani. It was still the language Sabina liked to use with me, but speaking it made my heart ache. Sabina and I had moved into the gadjikano world, the non-Romani world. We’d left without permission. We could never go home, even if we wanted to. We were mahrime. Contaminated from the outside. I had left everything, all to protect my sister.

  But for all the things I’ve done in my life, I never thought one of the hardest would be the walk back from a Council meeting with Mitzi to the safe house where Ellie had been for three days now. Mitzi kept pausing to wipe tears off her face. Her bright hair was all neat and tidy, tied back and proper for the Council, her lower lip trapped under her top teeth to keep it from trembling. We’d both had to testify about Garrick’s balloon, but that wasn’t the part that was gutting us. We’d both expected more answers than we’d received. But as soon as the Council heard that Ellie said the wall had fallen more than twenty-five years before she visited Germany, they’d stopped talking to us and started shouting at each other. It’d been the end of anything useful and the beginning of everything terrible.

  “What are you going to tell her?” Mitzi asked, her voice trembling. Mitzi didn’t tremble, as a general rule, and I’d never seen her like this. She was always one thing or another, all or nothing, but never afraid or sad. Not like this.

  I shot her a look as I fished the key out of the depths of my coat pocket and fumbled until the key slid into the lock. She couldn’t honestly be suggesting I lie to Ellie. “The truth, Mitz.”

  “Kai,” Mitzi said, and she put a hand on my arm. I stopped and slumped against the door. She pressed close to me and leaned her head against my shoulder. I could barely hear her through the roar of trying to keep the sadness inside me. “Be gentle with her.”

  Normally, I’d give Mitzi a lot of crap for being this teary. But I couldn’t blame her. Not now. I nodded, put my arm around Mitzi, and pushed the door wide open so we could walk in together. There were a lot of people in this cursed-for-nothing world I wouldn’t do a damn thing for. Mitzi was among the minority of people for whom I’d give up my life and not even blink an eye. I had nightmares about someone making me choose between Mitz and my sister.

  We knocked the snow off our feet and shut the door loudly. The house hummed as the door locked behind us, the key warm in my pocket. Undoubtedly, the Stasi had wanted to bug this house more than once. They’d bugged our neighbors instead. Sometimes I felt guilty about that, but our neighbors didn’t seem to know or mind, and it’d be far more dangerous for our Passengers and the girl upstairs if we were bugged by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police.

  Above us in the bedroom, feet hit the floor. Mitzi turned away from the stairs, taking a whole bunch of really fast and deep breaths, like she was about to jump off a cliff when all she was trying to do was pretend she wasn’t crying about a girl who would be in tears within a few minutes.

  Ellie ducked her head and stared at us from the top of the stairs. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and even from the bottom of the stairs, I could see how blue her eyes were. I had to swallow and look away as I hung up my coat. She’d been so ferociously brave the other day in the park. It’d been hard to keep my eyes off her. Then again, she’d been staring right back at me.

  “You’re back,” she said, her German a little more comfortable the more she used it. She’d been practicing with Mitzi last night, and I thought her problem was more confidence than anything else. It was strange, hearing her talk in German. I liked her voice in English. There was a certain softness to it.

  “You cannot speak of the future to anyone,” Ashasher had told Mitzi and me, standing alone in the room waiting for the rest of the Council. “And you shouldn’t ask her about it. To know the future is to change the future, and that is playing a game we cannot win.” Then he looked away from both of us and said, “I would not want either of you to put Sabina’s safety here at risk.”

  The threat was implicit. I understood. And from the determined, angry set of Mitzi’s mouth, she did too. I was losing track of the places in East Germany where I could speak freely about everything on my mind.

  Clearing my throat, I tore my gaze from Mitzi to Ellie. “We should talk.”

  Ellie’s first foot hit the second stair, and then she just sat down at the top of the stairs, like yelling up the staircase was exactly how I wanted to explain this completely ass-over-heels situation to her. I raised my eyebrows and jerked my thumb toward the living room in invitation, but Ellie just curled her fingers around edge of the step. I wasn’t going to pull her off the stairs, if that’s what she was worried about. I just didn’t want her throwing herself down them.

  “The Council had a meeting,” I said, sinking to a step at the bottom. I figured this would be best in English. I couldn’t risk her not understanding me. But I could barely look at her. I stared at a spot on the stairs where the paint had chipped away instead. “They’re the Wundertätigluftballonschöpfers. Magical balloon makers. Mostly we call them Schöpfers. You met one of them, Ashasher. He and Aurora, the other Schöpfer who made the balloon, examined the evidence and had a couple of us testify. No one tampered with your balloon. Garrick’s balloon. It was a rare, unfortunate chronological ano
maly.”

  “A chronological anomaly,” she repeated, her voice faint at the top of the stairs. In the kitchen, Mitzi banged around and then hiccupped loudly.

  “The problem is…” I picked at a splinter on the stairs. “No one knows what happened to that balloon, so no one really knows how to get it to do the magic again. To get you home.”

  She blinked at me, her eyes wide and luminous from the top of the stairs. She was startlingly pretty, even when she appeared vulnerable. I added hurriedly, “Ashasher and Aurora, they’re working on it. And they’re the best of the best. They practically invented balloon magic. Hell, Ashasher started it all. We just…We just don’t know when they’ll get you home.”

  “If it’ll ever happen,” Mitzi said in the kitchen.

  I shot her a scowl, but Ellie didn’t seem to have heard her. Ellie’s face had gone completely empty, totally blank. My heart sank. Passengers cried all the time, but mostly about leaving their family. This was different. I couldn’t tell her if she’d ever see her family again, and it hadn’t even been her choice. I climbed the stairs two at a time.

  How could I tell her that I hadn’t expected that answer from the Council either? I’d assumed that Ashasher or Aurora knew how to do the magic and, though it was illegal, would do it to rectify a mistake. I’d thought we’d be able to fulfill our promise to her. But all I could give her was the truth, and it wasn’t enough.

  “Hey,” I said. “You there?”

  Ellie rose slowly, turned around, and walked back down the hall to the bedroom. I saw her face just as she shut the door behind her. Completely pale. Radio static. Nothing but white noise. Shit.

  I trudged back down the stairs into the kitchen. Mitzi looked at me over her shoulder as she took the kettle off the stove. “That went well.”