Second Fiddle (4 page)

“Come on!” I scrambled down the slope to the edge of the river, not even noticing the rocks under my bare feet. The current slowly turned the body as it passed under the bridge.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! They killed him!” Giselle said. She ran behind me.

“We can’t just leave him in there. Help me,” I yelled. I scanned the river’s edge for a good spot to wade out. The body bumped against the downstream abutment, and the slow current held it there. “Hold on!” I reached for Giselle, and we locked hands. I peered into the water, looking for solid footing, but in the shadow of the bridge there was nothing to see.

“Here goes!” I inched forward on the rocky river bottom.

Giselle clasped Vivian’s hand and followed me. The
water was biting cold but not fast enough to knock me over. I gasped as it soaked my jeans. My hands shook. Giselle leaned out with her long arms, and Vivian kept her feet on solid ground. Only a few more steps, and I’d be able to grab the soldier’s boot.

“Come on, Giselle, just a little farther!”

“He’s too far.”

“No, I’m almost there.” I leaned out farther and took a step. “Almost there.” I gritted my teeth to keep them from chattering as the water line rose to my ribs. I leaned harder, trusting my whole weight to Giselle’s grip, and snagged the boot.

“Pull!” I yelled. Giselle grunted and tugged me toward her. I dragged the body away from the piling. It came easily, like the blow-up alligator I pulled around the swimming pool with my little brothers on it. I pulled the body by the heel, shivering so hard I almost lost my grip. We stumbled toward shore. When we reached the edge, Vivian took hold of the soldier’s feet, and Giselle and I grabbed the back of his shirt to haul him out of the water. At first he was easy to lift, but as soon as he was out of the water, it felt like the body gained two hundred pounds. He was limp and cold. We finally dragged him free of the water and stretched him out facedown on the gravel of the riverbank.

“Oh my God,” Vivi said as we backed away. “They killed him.”

“Now what do we do?” Giselle said.

I shook the water off my arms and squeezed out the bottom edge of my T-shirt. There was a dark orange ring of scum around my ribs, and my wet jeans stuck to my legs.

“Should we roll him over?” Giselle said.

I nodded, still catching my breath. Giselle and Vivi grabbed a sleeve and a pant leg to turn the body over. He was young, and he had jet-black hair that was longer than most American soldiers wear it. His face was bruised and swollen. There was a scar under his lower lip, and the top one was split and bleeding.

“Who would do this?” I said, swallowing back nausea. “Why beat him up if you were only going to kill him anyway?”

The girls edged away, but I couldn’t resist touching his hand. The second I did, his head flopped to the side and his mouth fell open. Scummy brown water rolled out. Vivian screamed, and Giselle staggered backward a few steps.

“Oh my God, Jody,” Vivian said. “He’s not dead!”

Instinct kicked in. I knelt by his head and checked for breathing. I tilted his chin back and gave three puffs of air. His chest rose up and down just like the plastic dummy in Mom’s CPR class. I leaned over him and gave three compressions in the middle of his chest. They made a hideous sucking sound. I gave another rescue breath. I could taste oil and bleach from the river, but his chest went up and down just like it should.

Vivian sat on the bank a little above me, hugged her knees
to her chest, and stared at the drowned man, but Giselle came and knelt shoulder to shoulder with me.

“Sorry I freaked, Jody. Show me what to do.”

I put her hands on the right spot. “Down, up, down, up. Nice and steady.” I scooted up by his head and waited for five compressions before giving another puff of air.

“Vivi, don’t just sit there!” I ordered. “Get help!”

Vivian sat. She looked from the bridge to the body to the road, where the soldiers had driven away. Her mouth moved, but she didn’t make a sound.

“I mean it! Go!”

And then the body moved. It squeezed from the middle like it was trying to curl up in a ball. It jerked again and took in a breath.

“We have to roll him onto his side, Giselle. Come on—you move his hips and I’ll do the shoulders. Ready? One, two, three.”

We both heaved. The second we had him on his side, he barfed out a stream of yellowish water. We jumped out of the way. He threw up again and again and made the most in-human moaning noise. Vivian came up behind us and put an arm around each of us. We stood frozen while the drowned man fought river water out of his stomach.

My parents had talked about death, plenty of times. Mom’s an emergency-room nurse, and Dad’s a career soldier. But here it was, right in front of me. That soldier was dead, or almost dead, when I pulled him out of the river. He
was limp and cold, and now he was a real person, writhing in pain but alive.

I had no idea what to do next. The CPR class never said what to do when a person got better. It was always “Call an ambulance and help will be there in a few minutes.”

“We have to get him to a hospital,” Giselle said. “Where’s the nearest phone booth?”

“Wait,” Vivian said. “We have to think about this. He’s a Russian, right?”

“And the men who tried to kill him were officers,” I added.

Vivian paced along the water’s edge. “We can’t take him to the hospital, Giselle, they’ll give him back.”

“What are you talking about?” Giselle turned toward Vivian, glaring. “We have to help him.”

“He’s a soldier. He belongs to his unit. They’ll send him straight back to those guys who beat him up.”

“How can they do that?” I said. “It’s just wrong. Can’t they arrest the guys who tried to murder him?”

“I don’t think the Germans get to say what happens when one Russian tries to kill another one. Besides, I think technically he’s a deserter.”

“What?” Giselle yelled. “Technically they heaved him off a bridge!”

“Yeah, but they’re not going to admit it, are they?” Vivian said. “They’ll say it was a training accident or an attempted suicide. They have a terrible safety record.”

Giselle nodded. I’d heard the same thing.

“Isn’t there some kind of sanctuary or immunity or something?” I asked. “Look at him. They tortured him.”

“They are horribly mean to their own soldiers,” Giselle said. “Dad says they use physical punishment all the time.”

The man groaned and lifted his head an inch.
“Vodah,”
he said.

“What? What did he say?” Giselle and I both looked at Vivian for a translation.

“He wants water,” Vivian said.

“Water?” I said. “Do they even have drinking fountains in East Berlin? Bet they don’t work.”

“He can have my juice box,” Vivian said. “I saved it from lunch. He can have my sandwich, too.” Vivian had been on a different diet every month since fifth grade. I hadn’t seen her eat anything but Jell-O, Skittles, and bananas all week. She went back up to where we had been sitting and rooted around in her backpack.

Giselle circled the soldier, looking him over carefully. “I don’t think he’s armed,” she said. “And even if he did have a sidearm, it wouldn’t work when it’s wet.”

The soldier sat up a little further and then slumped forward, exhausted from that little effort. He looked up and down the riverbank and then at the road behind him. He spat river water onto the ground and turned toward Giselle and me.

“Hey,” I said, wondering what you were supposed to say
to a non-English-speaking almost-dead guy. We got German language class at school, but it didn’t exactly cover this. “Umm,
wie geht’s?
How are you?”

“I live,” he replied very slowly.

“You speak English?” I took a step closer.

“Yes.” He tapped a colored patch on his sleeve. “Translator.”

Vivian bounded up with her school lunch. She said something that sounded Russian, poked the plastic straw into the corner of the juice box, and handed it to the soldier. The box looked ridiculously small in his hand, and he glanced at it from several angles before lifting it in a little toast.

“Zum wohl.”
It was the German toast we all learned at school—“to your good health.” He drained the juice in one long swallow.

“You aren’t
wohl
, though,” I said, squeezing water out of my jeans as I spoke. “You aren’t even a little bit
wohl
. Look at you.” I pointed to the cuts on his face. His right foot pointed off at a weird angle.

“Yes.” He nodded in the direction of his leg. “Broken.” He ran a finger along his ribs on the left side. “Very much, probably, broken.”

“We have to get him to a hospital,” Giselle said. “Look, he’s shivering.”

“No!
Nyet!
” The Russian dropped the juice box in the dirt and tried to drag his body away from us. “Please!”

“But your leg is broken,” Giselle went on, switching to command volume. “You can’t just stay here.”

“No hospital, please! You save me!”

“What?” Giselle snapped back.

“Hospital will send me back. They start killing me all over again. You save me.”

“See?” Vivian said, glaring at Giselle for a change.

“But why are your own officers hurting you?” Giselle demanded. “Officers aren’t like that.”

“They hate me because I am not Russian. Because I will not do an evil thing like a man with no soul.” He looked straight into my eyes as he said it, and even though his were streaked with blood, he seemed much too young to be a soldier.

“I only want to go home. Home to my own country.” He kept looking at me, and I had to make myself look away.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Isn’t this your country? It’s probably the hypothermia making you talk like a crazy person. Look.” I turned to my friends. “We have to get him dry, at least, or he’ll die all over again.”

“I’ve got my skunky PE towel and gym clothes,” Giselle offered. “He can just have them. We’ve got plenty more at home.”

“Can you get out of your wet clothes?” I asked him.

“
Da
. Is only pain. I can do it.” He looked over his shoulder again and back up to the bridge.

“They’re gone,” I told him. “We’ll hide you if they come back.”

“Thank you.” He bowed his head to me.

Giselle dug her PE clothes and towel out of her backpack. She and Vivian went down by the river, but I stayed and stared at the soldier. His face was so beat up. Maybe I was trying to guess what he looked like when he hadn’t just been murdered. He unbuttoned his uniform jacket and let it drop in the dirt. Apparently T-shirts the color of dog poop are a military universal, because this guy had one just like all of Dad’s. He tugged it over his head, groaning as he did. I saw that he was as fair-skinned as me. He had more muscles than any boy in my class, but he moved like an old man, and it was easy to see why. There was a ring of bruises around the bottom of his ribs, one in the shape of the sole of a boot. There were three long red marks over his shoulders like he’d been beaten with a stick.

How could people do this? I wished I had some magic remedy to make all that pain go away. He tugged on Giselle’s PE shirt, which was skintight on him, but he left the shorts on the ground and wrapped the towel around his waist, squeezing water out of his pants.

I hopped up to get him another gym towel from my backpack. I could hear Giselle and Vivian arguing about what to do with the soldier. Vivian was so smart; she was usually the problem solver of the group. You could ask her
anything: the capital of Yugoslavia, what money is called in Czechoslovakia, how to order a hamburger in French. It wasn’t normal. But this time she didn’t have answers.

I kept imagining those Russian officers. What could possibly make them try to kill their own man? Soldiers fight sometimes. I guess that’s true in every army. There were rumors last fall about a soldier at our barracks who hit his girlfriend. Some of the other enlisted men saw it. That night when he got back to the barracks, a bunch of them beat him up so he’d get the picture about not hitting women. What if those officers beat him up because he was bad to his girlfriend or because he was a thief? I got a shiver, and not because I was sitting around in wet jeans. Suddenly I didn’t want to be near him. I got up and ran down to Vivi and Giselle by the river.

“I don’t know,” Giselle was saying. “Why should we trust him? He’s a Communist, and apparently even other Communists hate him.”

“We should take him back to the army base,” Vivian said. “There will be a hospital there at least.”

“And in what wheelbarrow are we going to take him home?” Giselle said. “He can’t walk; we can’t carry him.”

“We can’t just leave him here. He’s hurt,” I said. “If we walk away and let him die, we’re no better than those Communists.”

“Maybe we can leave him here,” Giselle said. “Look at him.”

We turned to see the soldier sitting up with his uniform in a heap beside him. We went closer. His lips weren’t so purple as before, and he wasn’t shivering.

“Are you going to be okay?” I said. “Maybe we should call the Polizei?”

“No! Please. No Polizei. They send me straight back to my unit. No. They spit on me first, and then they send me back.”

“Why?”

“Is a bitter history between the Germans and the Soviets.”

“Well, there isn’t exactly a great history between America and Germany, either, but we get along fine now.”

The soldier looked out over the river as he spoke. “Nazis killed twenty million Russians in the war, and when we finally fought them out of our homelands and back here to this city—well, Soviet soldiers took their revenge on the women and children of Berlin. It was cruel, and it was long ago. People do not forget.”

“But none of that is your fault. That was long before you were even born. Won’t the Polizei help you?”

He shook his head. “A soldier belongs to his army. Is settled law. Anyone you tell about me will send me back.” He turned to stare up at me, and I’ve never seen a person look more exhausted. “Please—let me live. Let me hide. Let me rest.”

“I bet he could hide here,” Vivian said. “In the whole time we’ve been down here, we haven’t seen or heard a soul. It’s kind of creepy.”