Going Over Read Online Free PDF Page B

no one suspected what she was bringing to you—the newspaper stories, the proof of best escapes.
    She read out loud. You calmed her down. She kept saying anything was possible and you kept telling her to mind her volume, to be aware, to remember the ears in the walls, in the hallways, in the balconies across the way.
    â€œShhhh, Ada.”
    â€œListen, Stefan.”
    â€œCould you please,” you said again, “be a little careful?”
    â€œCould you take an
interest
?”
    Her words sounded foreign against your words and youwondered: How could one language be so different? How could one girl be so wrong and also so kissable?
    There were all kinds of stories in the papers she brought. There was a list of best gadgets. Double-jointed ladders. Invisible string. Escapable coffins. Cars that run with only half of their engines. Flamethrowers. There were interviews with the escapees. There will always be a minor business in heroes.
    â€œWhere did you get these?” you asked her.
    She made like it didn’t matter.
    â€œYou’re dangerous,” you told her.
    â€œYou can be so smart,” she said back, “when you’re not so busy being stupid.” She has this gap between her two front teeth, and one of those teeth is bigger than the other so when she smiles, and she only sometimes smiles, it’s like two little surrender flags have been hung at different angles. You loved her that day more than any other. You loved her and you listened as she read, telling her over and over again to stop being so busy planning the end of your brown-colored existence. There were, you said, complications. There were problems with her stories. You asked her if she’d eaten. You asked her to go outside with you, hand in hand, and walk the park. You said you’d take her to one of the pubs and get her a sandwich and she looked like she thought you were crazy.
    â€œI’m talking about freedom and you’re talking about food?” she said.
    â€œAren’t you hungry?”
    â€œAre you serious?”
    â€œDo you want some noodles?”
    â€œPay attention!” she said, shaking the sizz of her fluorescent hair, which is charged, electric. You wanted to reach for her but you made yourself wait. It had been three months and you’d missed her crazy and she was right there with you in her tight jeans and splattered sneaks, her little T-shirt with the silkscreen ruffle, and she wouldn’t stop talking. “Kiss me,” you said, and she wouldn’t.
    â€œKiss me.”
    â€œNot until you listen.”
    â€œI’m listening.” Her skin so sweet. Her flesh soft and high on her bones. Her body so close on the balcony where your grandmothers couldn’t see you, beside the scope, which she was angling then, away from the sky, angling it toward Kreuzberg.
    â€œEverything you want is there,” she said, pointing to the canal and the church, the plazas and the crazies, the stretch of the wall that she has graffed just for you, her sacred trust. “And besides, I’m not waiting forever,” she said. She wasn’t keeping on like this, she said—striking the days between visits off that calendar of hers, standing in line at the station, trading her marks for your marks, hiking in with the bootleg videos, trying to remember the color of her mole in the last visit so that she could make herself seem brand-new again. She had so much to say. So much she wanted you to see. The Viktoriapark and painted trees. A kid named Savas who holds her hand. A bikethat drags wool streamers. She said you have no business being happy with what you’re allowed in the East. She said you do not know what happiness is.
    â€œHappy is right now,” you told her. Because finally, after all that, after you had not taken her to the pub, after you had only quickly kissed her, the moon had come up, a curved slice in the sky. The moon was out there and the moon was