Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(117)

“I tried to keep you safe!”

“You lied to us! We are your friends and you lied to us!”

Jenny doesn’t know what to feel first—panic over her lost passport, hurt over Lena’s outburst, or gratitude at Anke’s surprising defense.

Andreas rests a hand on each of their shoulders. “Leicht, leicht.” He jerks his thumb toward the door. “Mal sehen, ob wir jemanden damit sehen.”

Lena turns to Jenny. “Right. We look in the crowd. See if somebody has it.”

They slither through the thrumming crowd, accepting praise for their performance as if that were their only concern. It’s a fire marshal’s nightmare, wall-to-wall bodies. “We’ll never find it in this crowd,” Anke says. A boy with a safety pin through his ear nods at Andreas, who nods back. Andreas moves toward him. The boy shakes his head slowly. Jenny needs no translator for Andreas’s expression. Something is wrong. Her heart pounds in time to the loud punk and this new, unspoken fear.

Andreas turns to Lena. He squeezes her hand. Lena’s eyes widen. She nods.

“Lena?” Anke says. She looks scared. Anke never looks scared.

Lena uncaps her marker and scrawls on her palm: They know.



* * *



Someone in the crowd is an informant. There could be dozens of IM here posing as punks. There’s no way of knowing the enemy. At the top of the church steps, Anke stops and grips Lena’s arm. Across the street, dark-suited secret police shine laser-thin flashlights through the windows of every car, including Anke’s.

“Keep walking,” Lena says.

“What if they detain us? Question us?” Anke says.

“They can’t prove anything.”

Anke’s eyes blaze. “You’re not the only one with family here, Lena. What if my cousins get demoted? They have a baby.”

“I’m never coming back here after this. You need the exit stamp. Go to the car,” Lena says.

“We have to state the reason for our visit.”

“So tell them you came for a concert but it turned out to be punk and you hate punk so you’re leaving.”

But none of it matters because the Stasi officer is calling to the others. He holds up a cassette he’s found in Anke’s car.

“Zehra…”

Zehra shakes her head. “I didn’t have anything. Someone must have put it there.”

The agent motions to the towing truck just down the block. Two men in coveralls hop out and loop a large hook through the bumper. The front end of Anke’s car is lifted into the air like a fish being pulled from the safety of water.

“You can still cross at Friedrichstrasse,” Lena says.

“They’ll stop us now. Ask us about the car.”

“Okay,” Lena says. “Change of plan. Just be cool.”

They start down the church steps as the Stasi agent, a wiry man with a receding hairline, heads up. He sweeps his eyes left and right without ever moving his head. He holds up a hand to stop them. Jenny feels as if her heart might split open from its relentless pounding.

“Sie sind wegen der Show hier?” It’s a question that sounds more like a command.

“Jawohl. Wir kamen wegen Blues. Aber es ist Punk. So schrecklich. Totaler L?rm! Und es gab Drogen!” Lena shakes her head in disgust.

Jenny can only understand some of it—the Stasi agent asking if they were here for the show and Lena answering that the music is awful and that there are drugs. The Stasi agent looks carefully at everyone. In her head, Jenny counts the seconds in German: Eins zwei drei vier fünf sechs sieben …

The Stasi agent points to Jenny. “Lass mich sehen. Bitte.” Jenny is close to fainting with fear. Her brain cannot process English, much less German. He repeats himself, points. Quickly, Lena lifts the pro-GDR pamphlet from Jenny’s jeans pocket and hands it to the agent. He turns it over, opens it up, runs his fingers along the seams. Satisfied, he gives it back.

“Warte bitte hier. Wir k?nnten Fragen haben,” the agent commands. He and his men march up the stairs and into the church.

“What did he say?” Jenny asks.

“He told us to wait here. They might have more questions,” Anke answers.



* * *



“Look happy. Like we are on holiday,” Lena says as they walk alongside the wall toward the River Spree. Jenny can’t smile. She’s more afraid than she’s ever been in her life. I could be thrown into prison. An East German prison. I could just disappear and no one would know. And even if she does get out, if she survives, her parents will kill her. She almost welcomes it. For the first time in a long time, she wants her parents. Wants them to come in and fix it all. She wants to be home. She wants a long shower and some bland jazz on the stereo. She’d even be okay letting Martina bore her to tears with various makeup tutorials borrowed from the pages of Cosmopolitan.

“Maybe you should have stayed and answered his questions,” Zehra says.

“Then we’d have no chance,” Lena says.

It’s getting toward dusk. The gray has softened to indigo. Lena has explained that they must make it to the safe house before ten. Jenny wonders what time it is. The sun sets late here in summer, as late as eight forty-five. They take a turn toward the looming wall. A black car comes around the corner at the other end. “Stasi,” Andreas warns. They duck into the cover of a lobby. The car crawls the street like a hungry predator. Zehra mutters something in Turkish. It sounds like a prayer. The minutes feel like hours. Finally, the car picks up speed and moves away.