Going Over

Going Over—a book about the Berlin Wall in 1983—is told in two alternating voices. Here, in these opening pages of Chapter 1, we meet Ada. More from Going Over will be shared here on WattPad over the next few weeks. Please come back for more. Please let me know what you think.

We live with ghosts. We live with thugs, dodgers, punkers, needle ladies, pork knuckle. We live where there’s no place else to go. We live with birds—a pair of magpies in the old hospital turrets, a fat yellow-beaked grebe in the thick sticks of the plane trees. A man named Sebastien has moved into the Kiez from France. My mother’s got an eye on him.

“You’ve had enough trouble, Jana,” Omi warns her.

Mutti shakes her head, mutters under her breath. Calls her own mother Ilse, like they are sisters, or friends. Like two decades and a war don’t divide them. Like sleeping, dreaming, waking, breathing so close has quieted the one to the other.

We live in a forest of box gardens and a city of tile. We live with brick and bullet holes. We live where Marlene Dietrich lived, and the Kaiser and the Reich. We live here, and here is where I have learned what I know, all that I can tell you, including: You can scrub the smell of graffiti out of the air with vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, lavender, sometimes oil of roses. But you can never scrub the paint off the wall.

“Be careful, Ada.”

Of course I’m careful. I’m in love.

*

What can I tell you, what should you know? There is a line between us, a wall. It is wide as a river; it has teeth. It is barbed and trenched and tripped and lit and piped and meshed and bricked—155 kilometers of wrong. There are dogs, there are watchtowers, there are men, there are guns, there are blares, but this is West Berlin, the Kreuzberg Kiez, Post Office Sudost 36, and we’re free. All of us up and down the Oranienstrasse and the Bethaniendamm, along the Landwehrkanal, beneath the cherry trees, in the run-down Wilhelmines, beside the last stand—all of us here, and the birds, too: We’re free.

It’s Stefan who I’m worried for. Stefan, on the other side, with his grandmother, Omi’s best friend from the war years. In Stefan’s Berlin the sky is the factory version of brown, and the air is the stink of boot treads and coal. On the dead-end streets the cars rattle like toys, the Vopos march, the kids wear the same shoes. In the brown velour living rooms with the burgundy rugs, test patterns crunch the TVs.

“Don’t exaggerate, Ada,” Mutti says.

I’m not. I’ve seen. I’ve known Stefan since I was two years old, loved him since the day I turned twelve. That’s three long years of loving Stefan in a city that keeps us apart. Two cities.

If you could see him, you would understand. Stefan is sunflower tall with deep blue eyes and thick, curling hair. He’s the strongest apprentice at the Eisfabrik on Köpenicker Strasse, which makes the shoulders of his shirts too small. He knows all the words to Depeche Mode songs and his hands are broad, his fingers thin and truthy. Whenever we go, my Omi and me—to the Friedrichstrasse stop, up the long flight of stairs, past the Vopos and the Vopos' eyes, all the way down to Stefan’s place—he takes me out onto his balcony and shows me the world through the eye of his telescope. In the cold, in the rain, in the snow, in the sun, we stand in a city of spies—our grandmothers behind us in the living room, knee to knee, remembering the Russians so that someday, maybe, they’ll forget them. Below us, the wall is a zigzag stitch and the river runs divided. The Brandenburg Gate hints gold. The trams shake their tracks. St. Thomas is two towers and a dome, a polished spit of spindle. I press my eye against the cool glass piece. Berlin rises and falls and the wall fogs in. Stefan tips the telescope up—angling the stars.