Shock was the least of the emotions that flooded me, filling up the empty spaces of my chest so that I couldn’t breathe. My lungs had no room to move with that much anger and betrayal. Next to me, Ellie was so motionless I almost thought she was dead. Felix had the grace to look a little guilty.
“That’s not what we thought would happen,” I said as calmly as I could manage. My hands made fists on my lap. “We risked a lot for this. Ashasher sent the Volkspolizei this morning. It could be the Stasi tomorrow. And Felix, you know my sister’s at risk. He’s always used her as the threat against me.”
“I know,” Felix said, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t make the rules. I just follow them. Look, I doubt he’ll make a move before then. He’s not reckless. Mad, perhaps, but not reckless.”
“That’s bullshit,” Ellie said.
In English.
Heads turned toward us and I reached for her, but she was already standing up, her chair toppling to the floor in a silencing clatter. Waiters stopped on their way to the table. Ellie took a deep breath, spun on her heel, and began to run out of the restaurant.
“Scheiße.” I went to follow her, and then glared over my shoulder. “You fucked up, Felix. Fix it.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but Ellie was already down the street and out of sight. I was going to lose her, so I left without hearing what he had to say. Whatever it was, it was less important than keeping Ellie from doing something absolutely fucking insane right now. And what was she doing? Running down the street, dodging cars and soldiers and people? That was insane. Staying under the radar was completely useless now. We were on the radar. Ellie apparently wanted to be the very loud and obvious blip on the radar.
I followed her through the streets, losing sight of her and then catching her again, her blue skirt disappearing around corners. A policeman tried to catch me, maybe thinking I was chasing the girl for terrible reasons, but I escaped him and ducked down an alley, cutting between two streets, hoping to catch up with her. I knew where she was going. And sure enough, at the entrance to the tunnels, she stood, waiting for me, tears streaming down her face as her hands gripped the rusty gate. I had the keys. I stumbled to a stop, catching her face between my palms.
“I’ll come with you,” I told her. “Please don’t run, Ellie. Not from me.”
She nodded, her forehead touching my mouth. I closed my eyes and fished the key out from the chain around my neck. I unlocked the gate, and we stepped into the dark together. This time, we ran along the rails as fast as we could. We were out of time. Ashasher would have known how slow the Zerberus would work even when we brought them evidence. He would have us dead before they could act on anything. And Ellie needed to get home. Today. Today. I didn’t break promises I made.
“Kai,” Ellie said. “I’ll do anything to keep anyone else from getting killed. Anything.”
Me too, I wanted to say. Instead, I just opened the workshop door.
Chapter Thirty–One
THE GIRL WITH THE RED BALLOON
Chełmno, Poland, April 1942
Benno
When we unloaded from the train, German guards greeted us. One of them shouted for us to line up and we did, Mama’s hand tight in mine. In the daylight, the girl was gone again. A hallucination, but her words stuck to my blood, slowing it in my veins, steadying me. Trust me, Benno. Did I trust her? I didn’t know her. I didn’t know anything other than that she might be a mentally disturbed girl. But then, she didn’t know me either. She might be risking her life to help me. If she’s real, I thought to myself.
“You will be assigned work and fed soon. Here, unlike at Łódź,” said the guard, standing up on a box in front of us, “you will be fed for the work you produce. But first, you must be cleaned and disinfected. We do not want disease here.”
Long ago, we had stopped worrying about privacy. At the muzzle of a gun, I cared even less. We were divided into men and women before we stripped and headed into trucks to the showers. I hugged my mother before we parted ways, just in case. I whispered into her ear, “I love you. I won’t leave without you.”
Her fingers dug into the bones of my back. She whispered back, “I love you.”
As we began to get onto the trucks, the girl appeared again, still in purple. Her hair was loose this time, a wild mane around her face, and she reached for my hand. “Benno, now!”
I didn’t think. I took her hand, and an electric shiver went up my arm. Hand in hand with the girl, I walked away from the trucks and the other naked men, past the guards and toward a warehouse next to the tracks. I stared around in wonder as we walked through the crowds without a single person turning their heads. Impossible. But though I waited for the guards to shout and start shooting at us, not a single one seemed to notice me missing. Not a single one seemed to see us.
“Where are we going?” I asked the girl.
“I am giving you a balloon. It’ll carry you straight into a Polish resistance camp. They’re expecting you. They’ll get you out of Europe. You aren’t safe here. You need to go south, go to Palestine.”
Last week, I, with twenty-three others, had whispered, Next year in Jerusalem at the end of the seder. Today, a girl who had somehow made me invisible was telling me that I needed to go to Palestine.
I whispered, “I’m already dead, aren’t I?”
She shook her head and handed me a long wool overcoat. Too warm for the weather, but enough to cover myself. “No, you’re very much alive. The trucks are rigged to kill. They turned the exhaust back into the cabins.”
My veins froze, and my fingers stopped fumbling with the buttons on the overcoat. I turned away from the girl to look at the trucks where I could see people gathering, loading into them in hopes of a shower, of getting clean, of work and food. Mama.
“We have to go back.” I managed to make the words come out of my mouth. I pulled the girl back in the direction of the trucks. “My mama. Mama. She doesn’t know.”
“We can’t go back, Benno. We can’t go back. She’s already gone,” said the girl in the purple dress.
“Mama!” I screamed. Not a single head turned. “Mama!”
Panic seized my veins, and I fought against the girl. She was younger than me, but she had clearly eaten good food lately. I was weak from hunger and malnutrition, and though I was taller than her, no matter how hard I fought, she continued to drag me along the side of the warehouse. My breath stuck in my throat, and my vision turned black. The girl’s palm collided with the side of my face.
I gasped, blinking, and watched her untie the string of a red balloon from the handle of the door on the side of the warehouse. A red balloon, like the one Ruth and I had seen. She said, a little unkindly, “We do not have time for your emotions or any heroics. I can only save one life today. I chose you. You have all your stories, and you’re young still. Benno, you and I, we’ll change the world. But you must trust me. Take this and do not let go, even if your arms hurt, even if you’re afraid of heights. Do you understand? Until it lands, do not let go and do not look down.”
She handed me the string to the red balloon. It floated in the sky, like this was nothing more than another spring day, another sunny day. Like happiness. I stumbled backward, away from the girl and against the wall of the warehouse. I sank to the floor and held my hands over my face. Mama.
“Take the balloon,” whispered the girl. “Don’t let their deaths be in vain.”
I held out my hand, and she pushed the balloon string into my palm. My fingers wrapped around the string, and the balloon began to lift me off the ground, straining my arms and shoulders. I didn’t have the strength to tighten my muscles and hold on, so instead I dangled like an empty potato sack. My arms, thin and weak from hunger, shook, but I didn’t let go. I did not let go.
When we arrived at the Łódź ghetto, I was sixteen years old and Ruth was five. My mother was forty-six, my father forty-eight.
When I left the Łódź ghetto, I was seventeen years old and Ruth
was five. My mother was forty-six, my father forty-eight.
When I die, I will be an old man. My teeth will no longer work, and my eyesight will fail me. I will no longer hear anything, much less the distant memories of German and Polish and Yiddish. My mind may not recognize anyone around me. I will lose myself to the murky waters of time and age.
But even then, I know that I will always know that my sister is five. She will always be five. Even now, when I am old, her hand in mine is soft and clammy, fat and unsure in anything but its grip around my hand. A child’s hand. Her dark curls stick to her cheeks and get caught in the collar of her jacket.
The balloon carried me free of Chełmno. Dayenu.
The balloon carried me to a Polish resistance camp. Dayenu.
They snuck me south across mountains and through the Nazis’ backyard. Dayenu.
They found me a boat to Palestine. Dayenu.
They saved my life with a magic balloon. Dayenu.
They saved me. Dayenu.
And I never learned the name of the girl with the red balloon.
Chapter Thirty–Two
BURNING BRIDGES
East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, May 1988
Ellie
The workshop smelled like scented candles and coffee, a combination I might have found comforting in any other time because it almost smelled like home. Not today. Not now. Not with Sabina standing on a table in front of us, a noose around her neck, hands tied behind her back.
My eyes tracked upward, following the rope to a steel beam crisscrossing the ceiling above the upper walkway, and dropped back down to Sabina, her toes curled around the edge of the table. Next to me, Kai stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her. I didn’t know what to say, but I didn’t have to say anything. Sabina shivered and shot a glance sideways at Aurora sitting next to her, writing on a piece of paper. As if there weren’t a girl ready to hang beside her.
Ashasher wasn’t anywhere in the workshop. Just Aurora, and she wasn’t trying to get Sabina down from the table.
Aurora.
I looked to Kai, but he was staring at his sister, holding a finger against his lips as he tried to edge closer to the table. I had to distract Aurora. Maybe she wasn’t the one who put Sabina up there on the table with a rope around her neck. Maybe she wasn’t behind all of this. Maybe she too felt like she was chasing ghosts.
“Where’s Ashasher?” I whispered. “Where’s everyone else?” Aurora glanced up, and her eyes were wide. “He isn’t here. I’m surprised it took you this long, Eleanor. And I wouldn’t walk any farther, Kai. I sent the other Schöpfers elsewhere, of course. Out on errands, for fresh air.”
Kai stopped, rocking on the balls of his feet as Aurora shifted the table and Sabina whimpered. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the woman with the raven hair on the other side of the table. We didn’t have proof it was Ashasher. We only knew Aurora’s papers didn’t contain notes about the past, we couldn’t read Ashasher’s, and Sabina transcribed for someone. But now that I thought about it, I’d never seen Sabina with Ashasher. And Aurora was out that night I found the first dead time-traveler. She could have sent off a balloon before she ran into me.
It was Aurora. It’d always been her.
The woman who saved my grandfather killed people to try to go back into time. The person who saved my grandfather and thus helped me be who I am was the person responsible for where I was. For what had happened. For me being a missing person in my time. My heart cracked, crumbling around my lungs. I couldn’t breathe.
I took a step forward, and Aurora placed her hands on the edge of the table. Sabina wobbled, her feet inches from the edge. Behind me, Kai’s voice cracked. “Ellie, please.”
Sabina began to cry, and Kai made some sort of strange warbling noise and said something in Romani.
We wasted so much time. All that time. Being unsure, being unwilling to see what was right in front of us. The purple scarf from that rainy night that Kai and I saw two people send off an unscheduled balloon. Her presence the night the next time-traveler arrived, dead. All we knew was that a Schöpfer was doing the damage, but of course it had to be her. Of course. Who else would have been brave and bold enough to circumvent the rules as the one who brought a balloon to a boy in a death camp all those years ago? She never believed in rules. She’d always worked outside them. What made her brilliant at her work had also made her the Schöpfer who went rogue.
Aurora, with her beautiful hair swept back perfectly, like she’d walked off the cover of a Brontë novel. Aurora and her quiet, precise voice. Aurora, the girl who had worn a purple dress and brought my grandfather a red balloon. Aurora, the girl who had saved my grandfather’s life but killed his nephew decades later with another balloon. A life for a life, an eye for an eye…Aurora would see the whole world blind.
“But you saved my grandfather’s life. He had the first balloon.” The words I meant, the words I really wanted to say, wouldn’t come out. How could you kill? You were saving lives.
Aurora looked up at me, her absurdly light and bright eyes tired. She nodded slowly and said, “I wasn’t supposed to give him that balloon. We weren’t using the magic yet. I didn’t know if it would work, but the trains kept coming to Chełmno and people just kept dying. I thought since he was young, smart, and strong, he might survive.”
“He did,” I said. “He escaped south and then to Israel. He moved from Israel to the United States with my grandmother in 1952. He told me about you. You were the girl with the red balloon. The girl in the purple dress with the red balloon.” We’d never talked about the details. She thought my grandfather’s cynicism the heart of his resilience, but what was at the heart of her rebellion?
“I’d already learned how not to be seen. It’d been the first part of my magic I’d conquered, so I found it fun to stand out against a world that had gone so gray. There wasn’t anything happy about that world, you know. We were the magical counterpart to the Zegota. The Polish government in exile founded the Zegota to help the Polish Jews. There were so many. And then poof, there were so few. Where did they all go? How did they kill so many so quickly?” she whispered, like she was remembering.
I wondered what she and my grandfather would do if they sat down together. I think they’d cry. I didn’t know how to hold my hatred for her and all the deaths she caused and my gratitude that she’d saved lives in the Holocaust. She was someone we’d call Righteous Among the Nations. Could we call someone who later went on to become a murderer a righteous person?
Then she bent her head. “But never mind that. I’ve figured it out. How to stabilize the magic. And I knew you were coming, though I’m surprised you brought Kai. I’m sorry that you’ll have to die tonight, but I can’t have anyone too close on my heels.”
“Where are you going?” I asked. Kai edged forward in the corner of my vision.
“Now, now,” Aurora said, turning toward him. “I don’t want to kill your sister if I don’t have to.”
“Stop,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “You said you’d protect her. I trusted you.”
Aurora flinched. “I am trying to right a wrong. Sometimes there is collateral damage. Sabina is collateral damage.” She glanced at me. “You are collateral damage. You’re proof that not every balloon must kill someone. When the Stasi come for you, it will be because you wrote your own death certificate.”
The closet. The rat poison. “I won’t be taken by the Stasi. The Zerberus have all your papers. They know what you did. They don’t need to know why. Even if we don’t live, you will be arrested. They’re going to strip you of your magic, Aurora.”
Her eyes shifted down to the paper. “I will die for a cause then. I will die knowing that my path is the right one. I told your grandfather once that I’d tell the stories his people couldn’t tell if they all died.”
“But they didn’t all die. Hitler and the Nazis lost. And the next evil will lose too. Evil’s always done by people who believe they are in the right,” I sa
id, stepping toward her again. Her hands reached for the edge of the table, and I shook my head. Whatever I did, if I kept her arguing about moral ambiguity, she paid more attention to me than to Kai. Every time, he edged forward, a little closer to his sister. “You don’t need another body on your conscience, Aurora. You don’t want that. You’re not a murderer at heart, are you? You want to save lives.”
“You know nothing, child,” she said, her fingers closing around the edge of the table. If she pushed the table, Sabina would fall. “You think I don’t know how to write those balloons from my memory? I’ve written dozens. I’ll write more. I’m going to write them until I get what I want. Those papers that Kai took? They’re only half of what’s necessary. And I have copies.”
I stopped walking right next to one of the candles. “You’re not trying to go forward in time. You’re trying to go back in time. What? To kill Hitler?”
“Who wouldn’t kill Hitler? But you’re wrong if you think that’s all. I’d rescue Benno’s mother,” Aurora said, her voice trembling. “I could have, but I didn’t, because I didn’t know how. But now I do, you see. I have all the magic, and I know how to write more than one balloon at a time. Think of all the knowledge we have now. Think about how we can change lives. Save lives, Eleanor.”
I stilled. My grandfather’s mother. He never talked about her, but she survived Łódź with him and died at Chełmno. I’d found her name at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC last year. My grandfather sat shiva for her every year, even though he shouldn’t. Not anymore. Jewish law actually said he should move on, but every year, the week of her death, he sat in his house in the dark, and he said the Kaddish over and over again.
Aurora whispered, her voice carrying in my silence. “Eleanor, I’d rescue her. And I’d rescue Ruth. Because I knew she was sick. He asked me for medicine, you know. He told me stories about people who were braver than I was. But I know more now. I want to right wrongs. Wrongs I did out of ignorance and cowardice.”
Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers) Page 22
