‘I love you, my brother,’ she said, putting her thumb in her mouth and wiggling the toes of her welly-less foot.
He held Lotte’s hand. The driver’s words spiralled around in his head. He wanted to understand, but then equally was scared to look ahead. East.
They queued for a long time and as they crawled East, Rune looked for Mama to change her mind and turn the taxi around, because no one from the West ever went East. Even the driver said so.
What was going to happen to them?
NOW
TUESDAY 9TH NOVEMBER 1999
SCHICKSALSTAG – DAY OF FATE
LOTTE
Her fingers were blue with cold as she walked to the bus stop. She kept thinking, What would Roo do? She knew he would slow down and think hard, so she did.
She knew that buses took people to places they wanted to go, so she walked to a bus stop and took the bus to the station. Using her thinking head, she decided she was going to be more than what people thought she could be. She was going to find these puzzle women and she was going to put Mama’s notebook back together again.
And she was going to do this alone.
Once at the bus station, her first stop was to find the toilets. She asked a cleaning lady with a blue tabard and pink gloves, who smiled and took her all the way to the cubicle door. It was a smelly toilet, but after Lotte had had a wee and washed her hands, she looked into the bathroom mirror and repeated the affirmation. ‘I am more than my Down’s syndrome. I am inde-pen-dent.’
Taking her time at the outgoing terminal of the bus station, she tried navigating the timetables, trying to fix words to times and places, but it was so complicated it made her want to cry. She didn’t even know what the word Zirndorf looked like. Instead of crying and going home, she thought about the puzzle women; how, maybe, they could bring the pages back for her. She could give them to Roo and Roo could tell her what they meant and she could miss Mama with him.
Lotte took a deep breath before asking a girl with purple hair and rings through her nose, eyebrow and lip to help her. Lotte made sure to speak clearly, and while she was listening she checked her tongue was firmly in her mouth. It was.
Lotte asked the helpful girl to repeat the instructions and she did.
Just like that. The girl told her exactly what she needed to do and even repeated it three times.
Papa was wrong – people were helpful if you asked them nicely and no one was shocked that she was travelling alone. Even though her face revealed to everyone that she was different, no one had made her feel scared or stupid. When she got home, she would tell Papa that he was wrong. The idea tickled a smile onto her lips as she waited in the right line, Haltestelle 19, for the correct bus, the 104, to take her on a journey. Alone.
On the bus, grey blurred into green and Lotte felt her head grow light, no longer a weight to be held on her shoulders. She rested her forehead on the glass and watched the sky grow big.
Berlin was drifting away as the bus rumbled towards Nuremberg, towards the puzzle women in Zirndorf, and maybe, just maybe, towards Mama. Because if Mama had written them a letter that said love and always then she couldn’t still be dead, could she? Even though dead was forever?
Hours later, the driver’s voice woke her up. The bus had stopped.
She was here.
She felt strange from sleeping in motion and held her rucksack close until she could work out where she was. Wiggling her toes, she carefully waited until everyone had lumbered off the bus before following suit. At the door, she joined the other passengers as they waited for their baggage.
The driver pulled heavy bags from the side compartment of the bus.
‘Do you have any luggage?’ he asked her.
Lotte shook her head: no. ‘I’m looking for the Stasi headquarters,’ she said, stuttering slightly as she tried to form the words. ‘I heard about it on the radio this morning. The puzzle women?’
‘You’re ten years too late for the Stasi,’ he said, straightening his cap and standing to his full height. He was shorter than Lotte and, standing on the steps of the bus, she could see a bald spot on the top of his head.
Lotte tried to awaken her brain; she felt suddenly sluggish, trying to un-muddle what the driver was saying. Not having planned how she was going to feed her empty stomach, Lotte had eaten nothing since the mouthful of pastry and felt the emptiness travel to her head. She leaned against the bus, feeling cool metal through her coat.
‘The Stasi have all but gone now,’ he said as he shut the luggage compartment of the bus. She bit her lip hard and the shock of pain cleared the fog.
‘I mean,’ Lotte said, ‘the former Stasi headquarters. Where they are working on piecing the torn papers.’ Her voice came out wispy, but the driver was looking intently at her now. She tried to mimic the voice that had come from the radio.
‘Do you mean the immigration centre? I think the old HQ was turned into a detention centre,’ he said, straightening his cap again and consulting a clipboard that had been resting on the steps leading up into the bus.
‘No,’ Lotte said. Unsure now, she held her bag tighter to her chest. ‘I heard on the radio, this morning . . .’
‘You’re wrong, old man,’ came a loud male voice behind Lotte. She whirled around to see a man in a leather jacket coming towards her, cigarette dangling from his lips and black shirt open to the navel.
‘This . . . lady,’ he said, looking carefully at Lotte as he passed her, ‘this lady is right – they’re reconstructing Stasi files in Zirndorf. The immigration centre shares the other side of the building.’
‘Stern!’ the driver said loudly as he recognised the other man. Lotte stepped back as they clapped each other on the shoulder. This man, Stern, wore a dozen necklaces, which jangled against the driver’s pristine white shirt buttons.
‘Comrade! Long time no see,’ the driver said. ‘Drink?’
‘I’m on duty, but saw you drive by. Thought I’d say hi,’ Stern said.
Lotte looked at him, at the open shirt and his visible chest hair, the necklaces and the cigarette dangling off his lip.
‘Have you lost the buttons?’ she asked. ‘From your shirt,’ and she pointed. Both Stern and the bus driver laughed.
‘That’s what Stern would consider fashion,’ the driver said.
‘I have great taste,’ Stern said, rubbing the shirt and losing the dangling cigarette from his lip. ‘I like my shirt,’ he added to Lotte.
‘I like yellow,’ she said shyly, ‘but I don’t wear broken clothes. I use my thinking head when I get dressed.’
The driver hooted like an owl and Stern smiled.
‘You want to go to the detention centre?’ he asked.
‘The Stasi headquarters,’ she corrected, and zipped her coat up tight.
‘The Stasi headquarters,’ Stern and the driver said together.
Lotte wasn’t sure why they were speaking together; she thought she might have lost what they were trying to say. People often spoke in the most roundabout ways to say the simplest things. She said nothing, waiting for one of the men to make himself clear.
Stern shrugged. ‘My car is over there.’ He pointed to the row of taxis parked outside the bus station. It reminded her of ants or small bugs forming a procession and something about that thought dragged at her, an echo of the same thought from another time perhaps. She was grappling with the obscure familiarity when Stern continued, ‘I can take you.’