Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(120)
There’s a light ahead. Not a small working light. Bigger. The end of the tunnel. A silhouetted man is calling to her, reaching out toward her. Her brain will not translate and then all at once it does: You are almost here. Just keep coming.
Several shots fire in rapid succession. They sound higher powered. Mud drops in heavy sheets just ahead of Jenny. If they shoot me, they will have to shoot me moving. I will not lie here to die, she thinks. Determined now, she scrabbles forward faster, ignoring the pain in her palms and knees. One hand, then the other, right, left, right, left, and then there are strong hands grabbing hers, dragging her from the tunnel into another basement in West Berlin. Water and dirt pool around her feet like an earthen birth. She pulls air into her starved lungs. In the corner, the mother is on the floor sobbing softly as she cradles her little girl, who is beyond crying.
Jenny looks up into the eyes of the blond woman she’d seen with Lena weeks ago. She’s talking to Jenny in German.
“S-sorry,” she says, exhausted. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
The woman startles. “You are American?”
Jenny nods. She knows it makes no sense. Why would an American need a tunnel?
“What happened?”
“The Stasi. They found the safe house. The tunnel,” Jenny pants out.
“Gott in Himmel,” the woman says. She speaks rapidly to her friend.
Jenny watches Lena slide out of the tunnel onto the basement floor. Lena rips the scarf from her eyes, blinking. “Andreas!” she screams. “Andreas!”
A few long seconds later, her brother’s hands flail at the tunnel’s mouth and he crawls out and Lena pulls him to her and they rock together on the basement floor, crying.
“Anyone else?” the woman demands of Lena.
“Nein. Wir sind die letzten, die es schaffen.” We are the last to make it.
“Und Hase?”
Andreas shakes his head.
“Seal it,” the woman tells the man, who comes with a bucket of concrete and a trowel.
The woman, whose code name is Magda, leads Jenny and the others up a set of old stairs and into the abandoned bakery, up another flight to a second floor, and then finally to the roof. Mere feet away is the West side of the wall. From there, they can see over the edge into the death strip and to the guards flooding the ruined tunnel, the Klieg lights sweeping back and forth, searching.
Jenny, Lena, and Andreas are so exhausted they fall asleep on the floor of the bakery covered by thin blankets. If Jenny dreams, she doesn’t remember it. When she wakes, morning sun is just poking its nose through the filthy bakery windows. Her muscles are stiff, her knees full of small cuts crisscrossed with a barbed wire of dried blood. The sun is a warm gold. It edges itself up in the East over the wall, rays bifurcated by razor wire until the light rises, free. The sun shines first on the drab gray of the no-longer safe house, then on the guard station where boys not much older than Jenny keep a close watch, hands on their rifles. And finally, the same sun finds Jenny. She looks out at it and lets it warm her.
* * *
Even in anything-goes Kreuzberg, they must look a sight—the three of them walking the streets caked in dried mud.
Andreas drinks in everything: the shops, the club kids stumbling home, the graffiti art giving middle fingers to the wall. “Das ist also West-Berlin?” So this is West Berlin?
Lena smiles. “Ja. Warte, bis du die Kniebeuge siehst!” Yes. Wait till you see the squat!
The two of them are inseparable, their arms entwined as if they are a strange body with a right, a left, and a double, middle arm.
“Kreuzberg,” Andreas says with such wonder he might as well be saying heaven.
Jenny doesn’t know if she will ever see Kreuzberg or Berlin or Germany again. She may be grounded until she’s thirty. Maybe forty. Delayed exhaustion weights her aching limbs. But that’s not what hurts. She’s looking at Lena. Really looking. The blindfold is off, and what she sees is like staring through a camera lens at a sudden, inconvenient truth: Lena may love her, but it’s Andreas she loves completely. To rescue him, she was willing to put everyone else—her best friends, even Jenny—at risk. She is the reason they were followed, the reason Hase is dead. She is reckless. Selfish. And it doesn’t matter whether that is her essential nature or the heartbreaking result of all that has been done to her and taken from her. Trying to make Lena love her the way Jenny needs to be loved would be like trying to keep water cupped in her hand without losing it through her fingers. Jenny can punk out her clothes and shave off her hair, she can try to make herself fit, but she never will. Lena is her own ghost station, defended and booby-trapped, with an empty space haunted by desertion.
At the squat, Zehra rushes down the stairs and wraps them all in a hug. Anke trails behind, arms folded, still mad, which Jenny is petty enough to appreciate.
“We split up. I made it through without too much trouble,” Zehra says. “Anke was detained for three hours!”
“I drank two beers first, so I had it on my breath. Then I showed them the receipts for Planterwald and said I had been too drunk to find my car. They didn’t have anything on me, so they had to let me go. I don’t think they will ever let me back in, though.”
“Ah, but you are okay!” Lena says. “And tonight we will have the best party! It will be SUPER! I have to show Andreas the squat!” Lena says, dragging her brother toward the stairs.