Going Over by Beth Kephart

named Stefan. I need Stefan to help me. I feel my way to the kitchen and the book of matches. I strike a light, touch it to the wick. I tear a page from my journal of sketches and write the single word I’ll mail tomorrow:
    Now
.

I wake to Mutti’s hand on my head, her eyes big in the powdered morning light.
    â€œYou were talking in your sleep again.”
    â€œDidn’t mean it.”
    She turns her hand the other way, touches my forehead with her knuckles. “So many stories,” she says. She waits. Closes her eyes. Her forehead wrinkles. “Fever’s gone.”
    I shrug my shoulders and they don’t hurt. I bring my knees up toward my chin, or as far as I can before Mutti’s weight on the quilt tugs me down. I wonder how long she’s been sitting here, listening to my babble. “I was dreaming about Savas.”
    â€œSavas is a Turkish boy, Ada.”
    I give her a funny look.
    â€œYou kept saying the Russians were coming.”
    I wriggle my arms free of the quilt, push my hair out of my face, try to think myself backward into my dreams, rememberwhat I said out loud that brought Mutti here, beside me. I listen for the sound of sleep behind Omi’s door, look for the page that I’d torn from my book. I hear it crackle beneath my pillow.
    â€œWhat are you going to do?” Mutti asks.
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œI know you, Ada. You’re scheming.”
    There are hard lines beneath my mother’s eyes and shadows caught between them. Her hair is thistles. The light from the window glows through it, then storms her face with a seacolored green. Sometimes when I look at my mother’s face I see every man she ever loved and how much loving bruised her.
    â€œI think it’s pretty obvious.”
    â€œWhat is?”
    â€œThat there’s nothing I can do.”
    â€œNothing?”
    â€œIt’s impossible, Mutti. You know how it is. The Turks are their own country. I can’t save Savas.” I won’t talk about Stefan, because the worry will kill her. She’ll tell Omi and Omi will tell Stefan’s Grossmutter, and every shot I have at happiness will be gone.
    Mutti straightens then shivers with the cold, unsatisfied. She pulls her thin sweater across her chest and buttons it up to her chin, knows that I’m lying in multiple dimensions, knows that if I knew how to rescue Savas I would. If I knew where to find him, that’s where I’d be. If I knew Stefan would come, I’d open the door.
    She stares at me for a long time. Draws her index finger across the bridge of my nose. “Impossible has never stopped you,” she says, and I wonder how much she knows about everything I’ll always want. I wonder whether, in my dreams, I called out for Stefan.
    â€œYou can’t save the world, Ada. You know that, don’t you?”
    â€œSomebody has to try,” I say, and I see the hurt go through her.

FRIEDRICHSHAIN

    Outside the snow keeps falling—so thick now that soon the buses will stop and the only way around will be by foot, straight up to your knees in the white. Everything is silent. Everything is white. You’re thinking about Heinz Holzapfel again, and how he got free on his own.
    â€œRead it,” Ada had said, when she was here, and you told her you would and she wouldn’t believe you, but the truth is you’ve read Holzapfel’s story every night since the last time she kissed you. You have read it and creased it and uncreased it, whitened the words with your thumb, slipped it back into that tuck of space between your mattress and your bed frame, then pulled it back into the light again, where it smells of the inside of Ada’s boot.
    â€œDo you think your grandmother even loves you?” Ada asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” you said. Because you don’t.
    SWOOPS ACROSS WALL:
FAMILY MAKES DARING ESCAPE
    Berlin (AP)
—In one of the boldest escapes of the cold war,