Going Over by Beth Kephart Page B

School starts in an hour and I’ll be late again. I’ve mailed the letter I wrote.
    â€œWhere do you think you’re going?” Omi asked before I left.
    â€œI have to find him,” I said.
    â€œWhat did I tell you?” she said, and her eyes were small as I closed the door.
    Savas’s hair is black and in the sun it’s almost blue. There’s a pinch in his brow when he thinks. There’s a way he has of holding your hand—like he’s the one in charge, like he’s protecting. There are other women, Arabelle says, who have tried to leave and who have been found dead later, murdered by husbands angry at them for removing their burqas or looking for a job or hoping to speak German in Germany. There are kids who get lost and no one finds them. I think of Arabelle at the shop with the Turkish women, trading their language for German, their submission for power. I think of Peter, Arabelle’s lover, who says the Turks will not learn to save themselves until the Germans give them protection—give them papers and give them rights, give them police, when they need it. He gives them German words for what has been taken, pounds in about landlords, bosses, teachers, lectures in coffee shops and crowded salons, on street corners and in mosques, sits with the men of the Black Sea and plays their card games and tells them how to make it happen. Workers’ unions. Workers’ rights. You Turksare not outsiders or
Gastarbeiter
, he tells them. You Turks are not the ghetto. You are the people crowded into lousy housing and paid less than you are worth and tossed to the gutter when your hips give in and your bones shatter and the black factory air you breathe stays permanent in your lungs. You are human beings, Peter tells them. Organize, he insists. Keep yourselves and those among you safe.
    Take what you are owed.
    Command respect.
    Peter’s hair is red fire and his glasses are John Lennon. His skin is so American pale that you can see his thoughts flick through it, and it worries Arabelle, how he’s made himself dangerous with his own agitations, how he signs his name to the proclamations he glues to lampposts and to walls, how he lets nothing get in the way of his idealism. I don’t know what will happen, Arabelle says, because Peter’s time in Germany is almost up; his visa’s running short. He’ll return to the States and to graduate school, finish his thesis, send postcards, unless. And of course we both know what
unless
means. Unless there’s a wedding in Kreuzberg.
    â€œTell him about the baby,” I say.
    â€œHe has to love me,” she says, “for the right reasons.”
    â€œSavas,” I call. “Savas!” And the cold is straight through to my toes and knees, and my head is still weird from the fever, and when I call again my voice goes short—a word at the end of a wire. The kids tobogganing the grooves are still running, waving their mittened hands like United Nations flags, but noneof them are Savas. None are the little boy from St. Thomas Day Care who sits in my lap when I read about fear or holds my hand when I’m missing Stefan or tips down slightly when he says my name, as if I were an actual princess.
    People who hide don’t want to be found
, Omi says. But Savas is just a little boy, and maybe hiding is not what Savas wants, and maybe what happens next will be my fault: I shouldn’t have let him vanish. And maybe, also, I should confess to this: Mailing a word like
now
across the border wasn’t exactly Stasi smart.

“Just walking around,” Henni says now, arching the pencil line of her left eyebrow and smudging the fringes of her lashes with an incredulous finger. “Looking?”
    â€œYeah,” I say, feeling stupid. “Looking for Savas.”
    On the other side of the kitchen wall, the kids are playing a game of Pied Piper, Markus in the lead being his skinny, tall self.