Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  Ruth’s name was on the list, but our neighbor’s grandfather substituted his for hers by giving Rumkowski a handful of notes and his ration card. He said that Ruth was better. She ought to get a chance to survive the war with her family.

  Rebekah’s name was on the list too. I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye. I saw her look over her shoulder one last time at me, her eyes full of tears and her round cheeks hollowed out with hunger and grief. She gave me a little smile, and then stepped up onto the train and into the darkness.

  I wanted to be shot that night. I went looking for trouble. When they lifted the curfew, I went to the fence. But they didn’t patrol that corner as well as before. The girl with the magical medicine was there, wearing a black coat over a purple dress, like there wasn’t a war going on all around her. She stood there in the snow as if she had known I was coming. Her raven-colored hair fell in soft waves around her face, and her eyes were dark and solemn.

  She said, “I saw the trains.”

  I said, “I don’t want to talk about the trains.”

  She nodded, as if she understood—and how could she possibly understand? She was a girl on the other side of the fence. But I wasn’t ready to go back. Not yet. So I swallowed and said, “It’s Hanukkah.”

  She sat down in the snow, tucking her feet beneath her skirt. “Tell me.”

  So even though I was freezing and the snow must have soaked her straight through, I told her the story of Hanukkah. Once, in a land far away, the Romans ruled the Jewish homeland. They came into the land and seized it by force. They told the Jews they could not practice Judaism. They burned the temple and destroyed it, wrecked it with their idols and their hatred. And so Judah and the Maccabees went into the mountains and planned a war.

  It took them years, but they were insurgents in the night, fighting back against the oppressive force, until slowly, the small but mighty army pushed back the evil one. When they won, they found they only had a tiny amount of oil left for the Eternal Light. They lit it, and though it should have only lasted a day, it lasted eight, and that was why Hanukkah was celebrated for eight days. The temple was rededicated.

  The girl in the snow lifted her pale face to me and said, “If I were a Maccabee, I’d free you.”

  “You’re just a girl,” I said. “Not a Maccabee.” And then I added quietly, “And I’m just a boy. I’m not a hero either. I wish I was.”

  For a long moment, we were silent, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. For the first time in a long time, I let myself feel hopeless and young and afraid out there in the corner of the cemetery. I’d almost forgotten the girl was sitting there when she said, “If all of you die, what will happen to your story?”

  I tilted my chin to the sky, into the snow. It drifted down slowly on my face, which was numb from the cold. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw Ruthie’s hand in my mother’s hand and Rebekah’s face, sad and alone, as she boarded that train for the last time.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I guess stories die with people.”

  “I hope not,” she whispered back in the night. “If you die, I will celebrate Hanukkah. I’ll tell that story.”

  She wanted to be kind, but I hated her right then. Because she had the possibility of hope. She was on the other side of the fence. Simple borders and demarcations made such a difference in someone’s future, hopes, and dreams, and the promises they could make. How pointless the world could be.

  Chapter Ten

  DOVES AND MAYBES

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, April 1988

  Ellie

  When Mitzi and Kai didn’t have a Passenger, they liked to watch the other balloons go over the wall. I knew Kai was looking for more balloons that acted as mine had. They took me with them sometimes to a rooftop near where Kai and I had seen the rogue balloon. Each time, I looked for more balloons along the wall, bobbing in the dark alongside a Runner and a passenger. The first few times I tagged along, Mitzi kept telling Kai that this was too big of a risk with me. I didn’t have papers, and if I was caught, the consequences would be unthinkable. He kept telling her that they couldn’t treat me like a prisoner.

  Up here on the roof, we could see to the other side of the wall. The lights in West Berlin turned off and on, twinkling and mesmerizing, as if there were a secret Morse code hidden in their patterns. I couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen if there were more broken balloons. More dead Passengers, maybe. More people pulled through time. More dots that didn’t connect on a timeline.

  I had ventured, timid, into a world of magic and secrets, a world so gray and regimented that even those who knew nothing of magic balloons sought out brightness. The skateboarders breaking rules, Mitzi’s friends who came around and made her hair look dull against the rainbow of their heads and the metal in their faces, the balloon seller in the park.

  “You can ask me, you know,” Kai said one night up on the roof. His sister was with us, so Kai was pretending not to watch for Passengers and Runners going to the wall with balloons. It’d been his first night off all week. “Or Mitzi. Anything. Whatever we can answer, we will.”

  Mitzi was teaching Sabina how to do a fishtail braid in her hair. Sabina didn’t seem to be listening. She sat, her fingers working quickly over a paper square, folding it into a little white dove. When she let it go, it began to float up into the air, joining the others she’d folded. I couldn’t stop watching. My heart felt tight inside my chest.

  Kai didn’t have the answers to the questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I said, “What’s she doing?”

  He glanced sideways. “Making doves. It’s one of the ways the Schöpfers practice. She’s well past that stage, but I think it soothes her.”

  I sank down next to Sabina and said softly, “Can I try?”

  Sabina’s head jerked up, nearly hitting Mitzi in the face. She studied me with her dark eyes, not as shifting as Kai’s but deeper, somehow, the way Ashasher seemed like he could look straight through me. She nodded and handed me a square of paper. I watched her fingers as she folded slowly, showing me the way.

  I folded the paper in half, and half again, my mind tripping ahead of me. I’d loved to make origami once, when I was young, but I’d stopped. I didn’t remember why. But the draw I felt to the balloon in the park was the same as the draw here. Something tugging at me in the center of my chest.

  I sat my dove on my palm, and its wings began to move up and down. I looked up, startled, to see Sabina frowning at me. Mitzi tilted her head and started to say something, but stopped. My dove didn’t fly, not like Sabina’s, but it moved of its own volition, and my eyes filled with tears.

  The look on Kai’s face was full of wonder and fear. No one had ever looked at me like that before. I started to ask him what was wrong, why he looked at me like this, but he clapped his hand over my mouth. His skin was warm against mine. His palm smelled like fresh air. His eyes were wide and serious. “Don’t ask questions we don’t want answers to, Ellie.”

  He wasn’t magical and he couldn’t read minds, but I’d always been an open book. This time, he was wrong. I wanted answers. I just didn’t want answers that came with more questions.

  He looked at Sabina and Mitzi. “Not a word. Do you understand?”

  Sabina and Mitzi both nodded, and we didn’t talk about it up on the roof. But the next day, Mitzi brought me a stack of paper from the workshop, and I folded doves until my room was full of them. Each time, my fingers were a little faster. I remembered making an origami crane move when I was little and a friend accusing me of tricking her, of putting strings on the wings. It’d hurt, and I hadn’t understood it then.

  Kai was wrong. I didn’t ask questions because this time I knew the answer.

  Sabina never came back to the roof with us. Kai said it was because she was working, not because of the doves. I wasn’t sure if I believed him. Kai suggested one night that they could get me over the wall easy enough, and at least then I’d be safe. I’d
be whisked back to America. Right place, wrong time, instead of wrong place, wrong time. Half was better than none, he said. I didn’t know what to say because he was wrong—it wouldn’t be better—but I hadn’t turned him down yet.

  Kai and Mitzi passed a cigarette between them as they quizzed me on my German. Mitzi teased Kai, and the few times I joined in, she seemed delighted to have a coconspirator. She hooked her pinkie around mine and declared me klasse.

  “That’d be your Stasi code name,” she said, her pinkie tight around mine.

  “No,” Kai argued. “It’d be Reh. A doe. With those eyes.”

  He didn’t look at me, so he couldn’t have seen the flush rising on my cheeks. But Mitzi snorted. I pushed it back at her, even though my voice shook a little bit. “What’s your name?”

  “Oh, we know what my name is,” Mitzi said, lighting a new cigarette. “I’m Farbe. Kai is—”

  “Enough, Mitzi,” Kai said, his voice low. “She doesn’t have to worry about the Stasi.”

  “Liar,” Mitzi said softly, and neither Kai nor I had any reply to this. I knew they were trying to keep the police from noticing me. But if the police were monitoring Mitzi and Kai already, then they knew about me. I was strangely unalarmed by this revelation. I’d time-traveled. What were the Stasi after that?

  Some nights, Kai and Mitzi let slip gossip from the balloon workshop. Balloons unaccounted for in the stockrooms. A Runner who had disappeared. Maybe the Stasi, said Mitzi, and Kai nodded, but neither of them sounded convinced. We all paused when we saw movement along the wall and breathed simultaneous sighs of relief when the person kept walking, alone and dark, throwing shadows from the streetlights.

  “Sabina could spy for us,” Mitzi said one night.

  “No,” Kai said without blinking. “We’re not asking her to do anything illegal. She’s a kid, Mitzi.”

  “Yes,” Mitzi said, moving around him to stand by me instead. She almost always stood between us, as if to remind me that their friendship came first, but tonight she placed me in the middle. “Because the rest of what we all do is so legal.”

  “You know what I mean,” Kai replied darkly.

  When Mitzi asked me to tell a story, I couldn’t. I didn’t know which one to tell. I didn’t know which one felt most true. Sometimes, I thought my memory was lying to me. Maybe I remembered things wrong. Maybe I only remembered things the way I wanted to remember them. I built the maybes up inside me like a wall around my heart and hid behind them.

  Chapter Eleven

  A GIFT OF FREEDOM

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, April 1988

  Ellie

  The nighttime was so full of adventure and adrenaline, avoiding the police and looking over the wall into West Berlin, that the daytime dragged in comparison. I couldn’t leave the house because I had no papers, and it was, naturally, harder to sneak around in broad daylight. When she caught on to my boredom, Mitzi brought me a radio. I hadn’t ever seen one that wasn’t in a car, but I didn’t tell her that.

  She showed me the dial and tuned it to a pirate radio show called Radio Glasnost. “We make it here on tapes, but you can’t broadcast it here. Too dangerous,” she explained, moving the radio closer to the window for better reception. “So it gets smuggled back into West Berlin and broadcast over.”

  I asked her how she found out about it, and she tossed her head a little bit, giving me a wicked smile. “They need someone with good music taste to run the tapes to the West Germans.”

  The punk music from the show infiltrated my dreams. When I helped Mitzi cook, she translated lyrics for me. I couldn’t understand all of the German politics, but I started to catch on to certain stories and she filled in the blanks. Kai hated talking politics, but Mitzi didn’t.

  When I asked Kai why, he just shrugged. “It’s her life. This is her country. It’s not mine.”

  And she gave up everything for it. I asked her once if she had family, and she shrugged. “I do, but they don’t know where I am. It’s better this way. They can’t inform on me, and I can’t put them at risk.”

  I’d stared at her and finally blurted out, “I’m sorry.”

  It was the first time I’d seen her look a little sad. She had squeezed my arm as she passed me on her way upstairs. “Don’t be. It isn’t your fault.”

  Kai, Mitzi, and I were playing cards over lunch (a game of Hearts could keep even a sad mind busy for an hour) and listening to the radio when we heard the front door lock turning. Mitzi snapped off the radio. Kai moved fluidly out of his chair and grabbed my arm. He hauled me upright and shoved me toward the pantry in the kitchen while Mitzi headed for the front hall.

  “Ow,” I whispered, rubbing my arm.

  “Stay quiet.” His hand gripped my arm a little tighter as if to prove a point. “Don’t come out until you hear me call you. Verstehen Sie mich?”

  “Ja,” I said, and he shut the door in my face. Never change, Kai. Never change. Hot and cold. (Literally hot. It was hard not to blush at the thought of his hand on my arm just now. And at the same time, cold. He held his cards close to his chest.)

  The pantry closet smelled of stale pretzels and the foul glue they put down to keep out the mice. I’d probably die from inhaling that in a space without ventilation, but maybe whoever was out there would kill me too. I held my breath so as not to die and so I could better eavesdrop. The footsteps in the front hall were heavier than Kai’s or Mitzi’s, and I heard German exchanged in low voices. The longer it went, when I heard Kai’s voice pitch higher but I couldn’t make out the words, the more my muscles began to shake with anxiety.

  Stasi, or Volkspolizei. That’s why Kai was panicking. I sank to the floor, pressing my head against my knees.

  The other voice, new, was definitely male. Calm and authoritative. I couldn’t make out all of the words—German was still easier for me if I was figuring out context too—but then I heard him say, “Papers.” And I really started to panic. I curled my hands into fists, my nails cutting into the soft flesh on my palm.

  They had found me. And since I didn’t have papers, they’d hand me over to the Stasi and I’d never get home. I would break under torture. They’d be waterboarding me for information I didn’t have, and I could never make it stop. I’d die. I’d die. I should eat some of the rat poison. I thought about it for a good long moment, but I was too scared, shaking too hard to stand up and find the box in the back of the pantry. In my mind’s eye, I could see it: red with bold black letters warning that it was poison. If I just held a handful of it, I could take it as needed. I unfurled myself and scooted backward, fumbling as quietly as I could. I found the box and its worn-down edges. I scooped a handful of the teal powder into my hand and curled it back into a ball.

  When the door opens, I’ll just take it. It’s like my own cyanide pill.

  The heavy, unfamiliar footsteps crossed the foyer and into the kitchen.

  I won’t feel a thing.

  I wished I had a paper dove then. That a Stasi or a Volkspolizei wouldn’t be the last thing I saw.

  More German. A chair knocked over. The clatter of a cup to the floor.

  Mitzi and Kai couldn’t keep them from finding me. They were only teenagers like me.

  A voice, dark and low, “Wo ist sie?”

  “Verstecken,” Mitzi said. Hiding. Not for long.

  “I’ll get her. Ellie,” said Kai, his voice faint behind the door. “Come on out.”

  I shook my head even though he couldn’t see me, rocking back and forth. Tears streaked my cheeks and left damp spots on the knees of my jeans. The door jerked open and I flinched, burying my head against my legs. Do it, Ellie, do it. But I couldn’t make myself bring my fistful of rat poison to my mouth. I couldn’t.

  “Ellie?” Kai’s voice dropped, filling with worry. He sank to the floor next to me, touching my shoulder. “Ellie. It’s Ashasher. Remember? The raven man. He’s here for you.”

  My shoulders shook despite how hard I held myself in so I
wouldn’t just burst into hysterical laughter or sobs. Ashasher. Not the Volkspolizei.

  I hiccupped and Kai sighed, slipping an arm around my shoulders, surprising me. His warm voice next to my ear whispered, “You’re safe. Take a deep breath.”

  I inhaled deeply, trying not to transfer all my anxiety into the skin on the back of my neck where Kai’s arm brushed against my bare skin, grazing the soft hairs that had escaped from my ponytail. He took another deep breath and said, “You have to breathe out too, Ellie.”

  I breathed out in a burst of laughter. I could feel his smile in the small space between us. I hiccupped again. “Ashasher.”

  “Yeah,” Kai said, his thumb running a small circle on my shoulder. I shivered, and he stopped immediately. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it made the space between us feel small and the closet feel very large.

  “Not Volkspolizei,” I added to convince myself.

  “Definitely not Volkspolizei,” he reassured me. His hand ran down my arm, and I held my breath. He tugged at my fist. “What’s this?”

  “Rat poison?” Hard to explain that two minutes ago I’d been planning my suicide to avoid interrogation and torture.

  Kai’s expression was unreadable in the dark, but his breathing changed, turned ragged at the edges, as if he had just run a long distance. His warm fingers slid between mine, and he unbent my fingers from my palm, letting the cyan powder fall to the ground between us. Without saying anything and without letting go of my hand, he pulled me to my feet. I shook as we walked out of the pantry and to the kitchen sink.