I instinctively tightened my hand around Ellie’s as she said, “I figured.”
Ellie’s shoulder bumped into mine, but my mind was still on a delay. “But why? What’s someone trying to accomplish?”
“I think it’s fair to say that their goal isn’t to kill people in the future one balloon at a time. Beyond that, I cannot say at this time. We don’t know enough,” Ashasher confirmed, gesturing with a limp hand to himself and then Aurora. “The Zerberus are holding us responsible for the magic that caused the balloon to cut the fabric of time. Even if the magic to do that is experimental at best and by far illegal. It was banned before the wall was even erected.”
He shook his head while Aurora’s eyes shifted away from us, her mouth tight. I couldn’t imagine that it was a particularly pleasant experience to be investigated by the Zerberus. Couldn’t be much more pleasant than knowing the Stasi were investigating you. That thought made me shiver. Aurora wasn’t nearly as off-the-handle high as a kite as she had been the other night though, if she appeared this uncomfortable. Maybe she understood how serious it was. No more flippant comments from her today.
“If magic can go through time,” Ellie asked, her voice cautious enough that I turned back toward her and the way she frowned her worry, “then why is it illegal? Why not use magic to do good?”
Aurora cleared her throat. “The illicit nature of time travel through magical means comes from the complications arising in the brittle nature of history.”
Alright. So maybe she was high. Sometimes I wanted whatever they smoked here on the weekends. Other times, like now and the other night, I didn’t think it sounded so awesome.
Ellie stared at her and then, with a single raised eyebrow, turned to me. I said, in English, “She said that time travel is illegal because history is so easily altered.”
“She couldn’t have just said that?” Ellie asked. Fair enough question. I shrugged, trying to hide my smile. Aurora and Ashasher were my employers, and Sabina’s safety relied on their generosity. I could tell her more later, but not then.
“Time is like fabric. You can fold it and bend it and unravel it and twist it however you wish. The consequences are always extremely dangerous and frequently, as you’ve seen, fatal,” Ashasher said. He probably thought that his explanation would make more sense to Ellie. I grew up watching Sabina discover that the things she wrote down on paper turned into magic. I was used to hearing complicated and usually nonsensical descriptions to explain illogical events.
“So was Garrick trying to go to the future and only the balloon made it?” Ellie asked as a Schöpfer finally arrived with Garrick’s file. I reached for it, but Ashasher interfered, taking it between his long, delicate fingers.
We all fell silent as Ashasher flipped slowly through page after page, the feathers rising and falling around his head like hurricane tides. I had seen storm clouds swirl like this. Inevitably, he was going to look up and report impending doom: that Garrick was actually Ellie or some sort of shit like that, because I honestly wouldn’t have been that shocked at this point.
“Here,” Ashasher asked, pushing the file into Aurora’s hands and tapping at something on the page. He gestured to Aurora with a small wave. “It should be your right to say this.”
“Benno Hirsch,” said Aurora quietly.
“My grandfather.” Ellie lifted her chin.
“When we interviewed him about his family history, Garrick said his father’s brother, Benno, died in the Holocaust at Chełmno, along with his mother. Garrick’s grandfather and aunt, Aaron and Ruth, died at the Łódź ghetto.” Aurora closed the file. “But we know Benno survived.”
Ellie stared at Aurora, her mouth dropping open. I held my breath, glancing at Ashasher, who met my eyes and shook his head just a tad. He didn’t know what was going on either. Then Ellie whispered, “You.”
Aurora tipped her head a little to the side. “Yes.”
“What?” I glanced at Aurora and then back at Ellie’s washed-out face. “Ellie?”
“You saved my grandfather,” Ellie said, her eyes never leaving Aurora’s face. “You saved Benno Hirsch from Chełmno.”
We all knew that Aurora had been the first person to write a balloon used in the field, and we’d known it was in her native home of Poland. But I never thought that the world would spin like this, bringing a girl from the future to the past, that time would be a twisted, knotted bastard like this. Now I could only hope that finding this knot could help me keep my promise to Ellie to get her home.
“I did,” Aurora agreed, her voice soft. She sank into a chair and said, “I never thought I’d meet his granddaughter. I didn’t see that line in Garrick’s file when we first interviewed him. But it makes sense. We tie the magic to the Passenger’s blood. You grabbed the balloon because of Benno, and because of Benno, you, and Garrick sharing genetic material, the balloon recognized you. That is why you survived when the other time-traveler did not. And maybe, with this information, Ellie, we can get you a balloon home.”
Ellie reached out, and Aurora took her hand, two pale and shivering people reaching across space and time. Aurora’s eyes glittered with tears, but Ellie was the one who said softly, “Thank you.”
Chapter Eighteen
FREEDOM IS ANOTHER WORD FOR HOPE
Łódź Ghetto, Poland, March 1942
Benno
When Papa died, I didn’t cry. He simply fell asleep and didn’t wake up. Mama, who woke next to her cold, dead husband, didn’t cry either. He had disappeared from us sometime after the new year, as the calendar turned from 1941 to 1942.
Somewhere beyond here, the war raged on. We only knew its progress from the work we did. Because of my nimble fingers and sewing skills, taught to me by my mother years ago, I sewed with some younger boys and the women. Day after day, I stitched the same six buttons onto the same cut of coats, made at the station before me. Beyond us, bombs dropped. Men and women lived and died, just like here, but the ghetto’s war was fought with disease and hunger. The ghetto’s war was fought in lost minds. Papa stopped going to work. They were going to give him a wedding invitation, as we called the notices for relocation. Relocation, deportation. We began to mix our words. Words lost meaning here in the ghetto. They meant everything and nothing in the same breath.
Papa never got relocated. He simply gave up. His heart stopped when he went to sleep. Over his body, Mama and I whispered the Mourner’s Kaddish (yitgadal v’yitkadash s’hmei raba) because he believed in God and an afterlife, and he would have wanted us to say those words over him. We hugged each other, and then we did not have time to grieve. We went to work, because we needed to take care of Ruth, who had never recovered from her illness in the fall.
Life waited for no mourner. Not here in the ghetto.
When Papa died, I didn’t cry.
When Ruth died, my heart stopped too. She took some part of me across into the other world, wherever the dead’s souls go when they’re gone. I didn’t know I wanted to believe in an afterlife until Ruth was gone. She died, crying of hunger for days and days, even when Mama and I gave up our bread and soup for her, almost doubled over in pain ourselves. She died painfully and without relief. Her body turned stiff so quickly that I imagined she had been halfway to death for a long time. Mama cried too. I remembered when Ruth was born, the way her pink fingers curled in the air, clinging to my fingers.
Those pink fingers in my memory were the brightest bit of color in my life. Everything was cold and gray in the ghetto these days. The cemetery didn’t have room and we didn’t have a headstone, but they found room for Ruth to share with the other children that died that week in the ghetto. I had forgotten, until I was standing there by the fresh dirt, how many people were dying this winter. In Berlin, we had not been comfortable for years. But this—one day, there would be a boy to my left. And the next, he’d be gone. Dead. A girl with bloodshot eyes replacing him. Our eyes were always weary from the work. My eyes were weary of crying, weary of sewing. We
ary of seeing everything I saw.
For months, in the dead of winter, I hadn’t seen the girl at the fence. I had to be careful about visiting the fence when snow was on the ground because our tracks showed so clearly. Snowstorms were ideal, but my coat was thin, and the girl was not there in the storms. I cursed myself for not thinking of this.
But in March, I heard someone whistle softly by the fence, and when I looked for the culprit, I found her, without her dog, on the other side. She wore the same purple coat over a green dress. She appeared thinner and more tired, but she was on the other side. She was free.
She said, “I lit candles for Hanukkah.”
I said, “That does not make you Jewish. If you wanted to be Jewish, you and I could trade places.”
She made a face at me. “I don’t want to be Jewish. I wanted you to know that in case you died, I wanted to keep that story alive for you.”
I didn’t tell her that we didn’t tell stories for ourselves. We told stories for others. We told stories because our bones were full of ghosts whispering, Tell the story. I said, “I didn’t die. But my sister did.”
The girl’s face fell, to my surprise. She sucked in a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
I nodded and said thank you. We stood there for a few minutes, and then the girl on the other side of the fence said softly, “Will you tell me another story?”
Passover was coming up. So as quickly as possible, I told her the story of Exodus, of Pharaoh and his cruelty to his slaves, of Moses who came back from the desert with the word of God behind him, of the ten plagues, and then of the freedom of the Israelites. As I told her of the Red Sea parting for Moses, I imagined the fence breaking apart and letting us free into an untroubled world.
At the end of the story, the girl said, “Don’t you Jews have any happy stories? You’ve told me two sad stories. Tell me a happy one.”
“I’ve told you two stories that end in freedom,” I protested. “How much happier could you ask for?”
“But all of the story that comes before that tiny little bit of freedom is sad,” she said.
“If the story was happy, you’d care less about that tiny little bit of freedom,” I explained to her. “We wouldn’t like the daylight if it wasn’t for the night. We wouldn’t notice the stars if not for the endless dark of night. All the story, like you said? That’s the important part. The sad parts are all about surviving. We are a people who survive. We endure. We will endure this too.”
She thought about that for a moment and said, “Do you think you were put on earth to endure?”
I shook my head and said, “I don’t think I was put on earth for a specific reason. Do you?”
She shook her head, paused, and then met my eyes warily. She nodded a little bit. “Maybe. You didn’t believe me then, and you won’t now.”
“Try me,” I said. “I’ve come to believe in the unbelievable.”
She said, “I have magic. I believe I was put on this earth to help people. To use my magic to counteract all the evil here in this world.”
I said, “What kind of magic? Like Houdini?”
She shook her head, her raven hair flying wildly. “No. What I write becomes powerful. I have magic in my words and numbers.”
“Write me out of here,” I said without thinking.
Her smile back made my heart restart in my chest. It had been still for days since Ruth’s death, but now it thumped again. The girl said, “That’s exactly what I’m hoping to do.”
I held my breath as she waved good-bye and set off away from the ghetto. I didn’t believe in magic, but I could try to believe in the kind of magic that might set me free.
Chapter Nineteen
MAPS AND THREE-HEADED DOGS
East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, May 1988
Ellie
It was Mitzi’s idea to let Aurora and I work together. Aurora needed help sorting maps and other things the Zerberus kept in Berlin, and apparently the younger Schöpfers were more interested in writing magic than organizing dusty old papers.
To be fair, if I could write magic, I’d only want to do that too. When I saw all the paper doves and the young Schöpfers practicing writing bloody equations onto the wings of the doves, I thought about the doves I made back at the safe house.
But I couldn’t get myself to say anything to Aurora or Ashasher about how the doves flew for me. I remembered the fear and worry in Kai’s face when he told me not to ask questions to which I didn’t want answers. If they knew I could make doves, would they insist I make balloons? Would they make me stay instead of finding me a way home?
Maybe knowing that my doves could fly—I couldn’t make myself say what this meant—was why Kai hadn’t been happy about this arrangement. I promised to walk with him or Mitzi and not go out by myself again, so he grudgingly admitted that it’d be nice for me to know the person who saved my grandfather. “And,” he added, “seeing you every day might keep her on the track of finding you a way home.”
So I didn’t mention my doves, and neither did he, but I came to the workshop as often as I could.
The first time that Mitzi and I walked there together, she stopped and bought us pastries from a shop. We almost never splurged on anything, so I was surprised when she slipped the cookies into my pocket. She winked at me and swept her bright hair out of her eyes.
She said if I promised not to sneak out again, she’d buy me pastries every day. I asked her if she was bribing me, and she pretended to look offended and then reminded me that I was in East Germany. Of course she was bribing me. That was the currency.
I wrapped my hand around the cookies in my pocket for the whole walk as we hurried along the damp sidewalk. Mitzi was the opposite of Kai, and part of me loved spending time in her energy. She was so vibrant. I couldn’t help but walk with a little more spring in my step, have a little smile on my face, and be a little more excited about things to come. With Mitzi, I could forget, for a moment, that police lurked at every corner. And where we were going, Stasi patrolled.
Jumping down onto the train tracks today reminded me of Kai kissing me in this tunnel.
“You’re quiet,” Mitzi said. “Which means you’re thinking too hard.”
“Am I that easy to read?” I walked along one of the rails, trying to keep my balance. “I’m just thinking about how confused Kai is.”
“Ah,” Mitzi said, and she didn’t disagree with me. She sighed and said, “When he and Sabina left the Romanichal in England, they became outcasts. He can never go home to his family.”
“He isn’t Romani anymore,” I whispered. I remembered him saying bitterly, “Home is a fantasie.”
“He is, and he isn’t. He’s…When you think he doesn’t know who he is, it’s more complicated than you know.” Mitzi jumped up on the rail in front of me and then added, “And more than me. Even though I’m an East Berliner, I know that on a fundamental level, I am German and all of Berlin is one city. The wall’s a false divide. But he doesn’t have a Wall. He doesn’t have anything to point fingers at.”
The tunnel seemed longer and darker today, like the rails just kept going on forever and ever, and a train didn’t even blow by us. Something about the way Mitzi described Kai’s identity crisis pressed against me, a weight on my chest, but every time I reached for words, they slipped away. But when I tripped over something that smelled and sounded like a rat carcass bursting apart, I tried to concentrate on where I was walking.
Mitzi climbed up onto the platform and offered me a hand. I let her pull me up, and then she cranked open the door. I breathed in the sight of people bent over red balloons, long reams of paper, and tiny vials of blood. The Ellie who existed in that other time, my true time, would have found this grotesque. But now, blood and magic and math and cool, questioning gazes from the Schöpfers soothed me.
As we stood in the doorway, half silhouetted and half in the light, Mitzi grabbed my elbow. “Hey. Don’t tell Kai I told you, okay? He’s private.”
“I promise,” I said immediately.
She stepped through the door completely and slammed it behind us. “One map-sorting time-traveler safely delivered!”
At a nearby table, Aurora tut-tutted softly. “There’s no need to speak at such a loud volume.”
Mitzi rolled her eyes and gestured to the table full of maps for me. I’d sorted nearly three dozen yesterday, and the pile didn’t appear to be getting any smaller. I’d ask if it was magic, but I didn’t really want to know the answer. Still, at least I was sitting around other people while Kai and Mitzi worked today. At least it was better than sitting in the house alone. I slid into my seat and opened the first map of a city called Odessa. I labeled it USSR and put it in the pile with all the other Soviet country maps. The next map was for Ankara, and I put that in the Mediterranean pile. Not all the names of cities were easy to find, and some of the maps weren’t marked at all. Some were in other languages, and it took me ages to go through research books the old-fashioned way. When I jokingly asked for a phone, the Schöpfers handed me a landline. They had no idea how much easier research would be in another twenty years.
Yesterday, I’d asked Aurora what the reasoning was behind the maps, and she’d said that my help there was conditional on my ability to hold my tongue. She didn’t like questions very much. When Ashasher walked by, I had asked him and he had repeated exactly what Aurora had said. But today, at my table, instead of Sabina, two younger Schöpfers sat across from me, practicing equations in regular ink on large sheets of paper.
“So,” I said casually.
Both of them looked up at me, confused. Other than the soft murmuring of Aurora’s voice in the corner, the workshop was almost always quiet. It was busy but quiet, like a library at peak hours.
“Where are these maps from?”
“Oh,” said the young woman, looking relieved. She swept a blond lock behind an ear and glanced at her partner. “The Zerberus put them here for safekeeping. We’re their archival site.”
Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers) Page 14
