Second Fiddle Read online

  “You buy, miss?” one of them said as I looked over his tray of army badges. Some of the insignia were easy to figure out—parachutes and submarines look the same no matter whose side you’re on—but others were harder to guess. I wanted the rank insignia that was the Soviet version of sergeant major for my dad. Father’s Day was less than a month away. Dad had a whole collection of army coins and patches from his twenty years in the service. Giselle glanced at the pins and patches and then glared at the vendor.

  “It’s not legal to sell these things, is it?”

  Giselle’s dad was the commanding general of American forces in Berlin. You’d think she had rank herself, the way she bossed people around, even grown-ups. The crazy thing was, most people did what she told them to just because of the way she said things. Or maybe she could pull it off because she was going to be six feet tall, possibly by next week.

  “No, miss, is very proper.” The peddler held up both hands to show he wasn’t hiding anything.

  “Oh yeah? Explain that.” Giselle pointed to an open sack on the ground. It held what looked like tiny black pineapples.

  “Oh my gosh!” I said. “Are those hand grenades?” I took a step closer.

  “Jody!” Giselle shouted. “Don’t move!”

  I froze.

  “Those fat Frisbee things in the box behind the grenades. I’m pretty sure those are land mines.”

  I slowly edged back toward her and Vivian, clutching my violin case across my chest.

  “What do you people think you are doing?” Giselle said, putting on her father’s command voice. “You can’t have ordnance around civilians. It’s dangerous. You fools do know that that stuff tends to blow up from time to time?” She stretched up to her full five feet ten, hands on hips and glaring at the peddlers like they were a pack of bratty third graders.

  They started to look nervous. A few of them glanced down the street like they were expecting Giselle to call up her own reinforcements.

  “You stay right here, now. I’m going over to that phone booth to call the Polizei.” She turned away, shaking her head. “Land mines! Idiots!”

  The peddlers shoved their wares into sacks and dashed off to the graffiti-tagged back alleys of East Berlin.

  Giselle surveyed their departure with satisfaction. I just shook my head, once again dazzled by Giselle’s flair for command. It must be genetic.

  “Think we should tell our dads?”

  “Maybe,” Giselle said. “If he actually comes home tonight. I need to catch mine in the right mood for talking.”

  I totally got what she was talking about. Dad had worked all night last night, too. I’d heard him come in for a shower and a shave about five a.m. Mom had gotten up to fix him breakfast and have their usual argument about the hours he worked, and Dad had had his usual pot of deeply dark coffee and then gone straight back to work without a nap.

  “He probably knows,” Giselle said. She looked down the side street. “Dad talks to the German police commissioner about Soviet soldiers a lot these days.”

  I nodded and kept walking. Without the peddlers, the street was practically empty. There had been stuff in the news about the Russian soldiers not getting paid. I wasn’t a genius history student or anything, but it seemed like if you were going to stop paying soldiers, it would be smart to take away their weapons first.

  We walked to the corner where Gelato Mario was an oasis of red tables and sparkling clean windows in a drab gray block of empty storefronts. I held open the door, and we filed in, dropping our cases and backpacks in the booth by the window.

  From behind the ice cream counter Mario flashed a movie-star smile. “Buon giorno! What will it be, ladies?”

  Vivian smiled. She said something in flawless Italian. Vivian was no one special; her mom was just the U.S. consul general to West Berlin, and Vivian was one of the ten smartest kids on the planet. She came to eighth grade for half days. The rest of the time she studied math and languages at the high school, and dance at the Berlin Opera Ballet. I could barely keep up with square dancing in PE. If I took ballet with dancers who spoke German and a teacher who spoke French and an accompanist who spoke Russian, my head would explode.

  I studied the ice cream choices: hazelnut, espresso, cherry, spumoni.

  “What? No mint chip?” I said. “What’s the matter? Is it against the law to have mint chip in this country?”

  “It is not wise,” Mario replied in the grave tone most grown-ups reserved for talking about the economy. “With chocolate you must have orange or amaretto. Chocolate mint is not correct.”

  “Let’s have sundaes,” Giselle butted in. “I’ll treat.”

  “Mmm, yes,” Vivian said. “Let’s have doubles.”

  They weren’t actually sundaes in the whipped cream, nuts, and hot fudge way. In Germany they made sundaes with liquor and fruit. Apparently it was perfectly legal to sell alcohol to kids, so long as ice cream was involved. I used to hate it when we first moved here, but now I’m not sure I want to go back to plain old banana splits.

  “I don’t know, guys,” I said. “If I come home smelling like rum and cherries, Mom’s going to think we skipped out on our music lesson.”

  “So we won’t go home,” Giselle said. “Not right away. We can tell our moms we went to the National Gallery. They aren’t going to mind if we look at art, are they?”

  I should have said no. I should have gone straight home on the train like the good girl I’d always been and not made my parents worry, but it was our last afternoon together, and I didn’t want it to end.

  took our paper cups of gelato to the window booth and watched the peddlers drift back onto the main street to attract the early commuters. Except for the part about them selling weapons, they looked quite picturesque with their old-fashioned wooden trays and boxes, standing under the bright yellow flowers of the linden trees. There weren’t many takers for their wares. East Berliners had no money and no interest in Russian souvenirs, and West Berliners had gotten over their initial curiosity about the East and never crossed.

  East Berlin was like a giant ghost town where the ghosts weren’t quite dead yet. The East Berliners putted around in smelly cars and sat in clumps on park benches. Nobody seemed to have a job. Trainloads of East Germans had come over the border, crowding into refugee centers and moving in with relatives they hadn’t seen in forty years. There were a few gamblers like Mario who had come over from the West with cash and a business idea, but most West Berliners looked at the run-down filth of the East and asked themselves why they’d wanted reunification in the first place.

  “What a mess,” Vivian said, waving her spoon in the direction of a trash-filled doorway across the street.

  “Isn’t there anywhere pretty on this side of town?” I said. “I can’t believe these are the same Germans. Back on the West side they practically vacuum the parks.”

  “I’ve heard it’s pretty by the river,” Giselle said. “Not as pretty as Paris, but let’s find a nice spot, and we can at least pretend it’s the Seine.”

  We grabbed our stuff and headed outside. It was hot on the pavement, and the wind was absolutely still, which was rare for Berlin and definitely a preview of coming attractions when we moved to Texas at the end of June.

  We’d lived in Texas when I was five. I remembered two things about Fort Hood. The First Cavalry had real horses. Mom used to take me out to the stables where I could watch the cavalry horses, and sometimes one would come over and take a carrot from my hand. I’d loved those horses. I also remembered the day I got distracted petting one of them and stepped in a fire ant hill. Hundreds of red ants swarmed up my legs and bit me so many times, I had to go to the hospital. I missed three whole days of school. I cried because I missed my kindergarten teacher so much. She was pretty and cheerful, and she called me Sunshine even though I didn’t have blond hair. She taught us to read by singing, and she let me strum her guitar. We moved to Fort Drum in New York two months later. After that I learned not to lo
ve my teachers so much. Berlin was my fourth school in seven years.

  Like she was reading my mind, Giselle said, “So has your dad decided where to retire?”

  I shrugged. “He’s got interviews set up in Houston and Dallas and San Antonio. He’s not even looking outside Texas.”

  “What does your mom say?”

  “There’ll be a hospital no matter where we go. Emergency rooms always need nurses, so she’s not worried about a job the way my dad is.”

  “I don’t think he needs to worry,” Giselle said. “Dad’s going to give him a great letter. He likes Sergeant Major Field. ‘Hardest-working sergeant major I ever had,’ he says. ‘You never hear him complain.’ ”

  Not where General Johnson can hear it, I thought.

  I turned to Vivian. “What about you? Where will you go for high school now that the school on base is closing?”

  “They’re going to send me to boarding school.”

  “Cool!” Giselle said, turning us left into a park along the bank of the Spree River.

  “In Switzerland,” Vivian added.

  “Hey,” I said, “I went to Garmisch on vacation last winter. That’s practically Switzerland. It was really pretty.”

  “Do you have any idea how rich those girls are going to be? Mom was going on about how the duchess of this and the heir to that will be attending, like this is going to make me feel like I fit in.”

  I didn’t know what to say about that. Vivian always seemed rich to me.

  “Well, at least everybody who comes to your school will be new,” Giselle said. “Dad’s looking for a house in Palo Alto, next to the university where he’s going to teach. It’s this really old neighborhood and everybody has lived there forever. I bet I’m the only new girl at school.”

  “Well, at least they aren’t expecting you to have a title and a thousand dollars a month in spending money.”

  “At least at the boarding school there will be other girls who are looking for a friend and clubs you are allowed to join,” Giselle said. “I don’t know what those girls wear or what music they think is good or what sports they think are cool.” She picked up a broken paving stone from the path and chucked it clear across the grass and into the river. “What if those Palo Alto girls don’t play sports? If this turns out to be one of those cheerleader-only towns, I’m going to kill myself!”

  She picked up a bigger stone and threw it into the river. It almost made it to the other side. When Giselle pitched on our school softball team, she made the batters cry.

  “It’s not exactly a picnic to have everyone expect you to dress like a fashion model every day,” Vivian said, kicking a stone down the path. “As soon as they find out I got in on academic merit, they are going to start bugging me to let them copy my homework.”

  Giselle gave her a withering look. “It’s better than cheerleading—trust me!”

  Vivian opened her mouth to say something back, but then she turned away, swinging her hair forward to make a don’t-talk-to-me curtain around her face. Giselle muttered some cuss words and in a dozen long strides was yards ahead of us.

  It was green and quiet by the river, and there were pink flowers on the trees. We walked along without talking for a while, and then Vivian motioned for me to go talk to Giselle, because fixing things up between them was my main job in the group—that and second violin.

  “If the kids in your new neighborhood are mean to you, you could run away,” I called ahead to Giselle. She slowed down but didn’t turn around. “You could run away to Paris and live in a tiny but totally hip apartment and play your cello on the street corners.”

  “That would be perfect!” Vivian chimed in. She was dying to go to Paris and live a romantically impoverished artist’s life. “And then a handsome French painter will start painting your picture and fall in love with you, and—”

  “Don’t fall in love,” I said. “Everyone falls in love in Paris.” I turned around to glare at Vivian, and Giselle laughed.

  “Yeah,” Giselle said. “Besides, you should never fall in love with an artist. Have you ever looked at their photos at the museum? Not one of those boys knows how to dress, and they don’t look like they take baths, either.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “You should play on your street corner every day—sad, dramatic, romantic songs that you compose on the spot, and some famous old maestro will fall in love with your music and make you his protégée.”

  “Right,” Vivian added, “and then Jody and I will move to Paris, and I’ll go to art school and draw all your album covers, and Jody will … What are you going to do in Paris?”

  First violin for a change, I thought. No, better! Concert-master! Famous composer! Right, me with the secondhand sweaters and home haircuts. I’m not the type to attract fame. I kept that thought to myself because Vivian and Giselle were really into my story, and thinking about Paris was way better than thinking about trying to find new friends in a new town.

  “I’ll be your manager,” I said. “Someone has to look out for you, because that maestro is going to turn out to be a snake. He’ll try to control your career and crush your art.”

  “Crush my art?” Giselle let in some of her father’s North Carolina accent. “Bring it on! I’ll crush that maestro like a bug.”

  She probably could, too. Giselle took fencing three times a week. She had a girly figure, but I bet she could bench-press a pickup truck. She was going to scare the heck out of those California girls. We caught up to her and walked side by side.

  “So I’ll make you ditch the maestro, and we’ll start up an all-girl orchestra, the best one in Paris, maybe in all of Europe.” I paused a minute to make sure Giselle and Vivian were really done being mad. “What do you think?”

  Vivi sighed. “I just want to go to a normal American school and do the things other kids get to do and I only get to read about. Mom thinks I’m having this great international experience, but changing schools constantly is exactly the same horrible thing every time, no matter what country you’re in.”

  We came to a railroad bridge with an inviting stretch of shade underneath. I set my violin down in the shade and kicked off my shoes. Giselle did, too, but Vivian held back.

  “I wouldn’t wade in there. I hear it’s horribly polluted.”

  Giselle took a dramatic sniff. I could smell machine oil and something worse: vinegar, maybe, or battery acid. There was a yellow sheen on top of the water.

  “Eww, Jody, let’s go sit up there.” Vivian pointed to the top of the riverbank, right under the railroad tracks. She took one of the icky green army towels that everyone used for PE out of her backpack, and I followed her up the slope. We dropped our stuff, spread out the towel, and sat down. A blackberry patch grew on one side of the train tracks and a clump of evergreens on the other, hiding us from view. Giselle dug in her backpack for the cassette player and speakers so we could all hear.

  “I don’t see why you’re so worried about those rich girls, Vivi,” I said quietly. “I like you. And I’ve never made you do my homework, not even once.” I tried to look sympathetic, but sometimes these two seemed so far out of my league, I couldn’t believe they even talked to me.

  I was about to change the subject when we heard the sputter of an army jeep on the road above us. Brakes squealed. Men jumped out. Giselle shot me a look and we both froze, because even when they were losing, those guys were enemies. I turned to Vivian and held up a finger to quiet her, but Giselle went ahead and clamped a hand over her mouth. Vivi tended to scream, even when it was only a spider.

  We looked up and saw two men in uniform dragging a third man along the narrow iron grating that ran beside the train tracks. They were shouting to each other in a way that made me sure they were angry even though they weren’t speaking English or German. I turned to Vivian as Giselle let her go. Vivi knew lots of languages. Her eyes were wide with shock. She inched back into the shadows under the bridge, tugging at my sleeve to follow her.

  There was a shri
ll whistle from a freight train a ways up the track. The man who was being dragged began to struggle.

  “Nyet!” he groaned. He twisted and tried to tug his arms free. “Nyet!”

  One of the soldiers hit the man over the head. He crumpled to the bed of the railroad tracks. There was more shouting. Vivian gasped and Giselle clamped a hand over her mouth again. I inched to the edge of our hiding place to get a better look. The shape of the fallen man’s body made a silhouette on the walkway. The other men bent over to pick him up. There was a red star in a gold circle on the cap of one and a red-edged shoulder board on the other.

  Russian officers!

  The tracks hummed. The train whistle sounded again, much closer. The officers dragged the man upright. The train came around the final bend and roared over our heads. We curled up, hiding our faces on our knees to protect ourselves from the gravel and sparks that rained down on us. I squeezed my eyes shut against the blowing dust. Just as the last car passed overhead, I heard a splash.

  I jumped to my feet and strained to look for a body in the water without leaving the shadows. There was nothing, not even a ring in the water to show where the man had fallen. My heart hammered in my throat three times and then five and then ten as I scanned the width of the river. The body bobbed to the surface, bumped against a bridge abutment, and began to float under the bridge, facedown in the oily water.

  officers retreated across the bridge and climbed into their jeep. The engine sputtered to life, and they sped off in the direction of the Soviet army barracks.

  “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.