Cloud and Wallfish (11 page)

Forty is a square-cornered number, though not technically a square. Four times ten. Twenty times two. Or you could take the five out of hiding and call it five times eight. Hmm. That added some oddness to the square. Noah had always been fond of the number forty, but it was everywhere in Berlin. That might be too much of a good thing.

Then he took his mental arithmetic outside, something to think about while he wandered the construction site that was supposed to be a park.

He was feeling lonely. He was sort of a loner by nature, but this way of life was extreme. No classmates! No school! No soccer! Nothing!

In his sudden flood of self-pity, he stumbled over a small pile of sticks near the back fence.

“Watch your big galumphy feet!” said a voice nearby. Perhaps those weren’t the exact words, since the voice was speaking German, but that was certainly the general meaning.

Noah jumped about three feet in the air before he saw the person the voice had come from: a girl with short blond hair and jeans. She looked like she was just about Noah’s age, or maybe a little younger.

“You just broke my twig house!” the girl said.

“I’m sorry,” said Noah in German:
“Es tut mir Leid.”
The way you say “I’m sorry” in German is “It gives me pain.” Since in German that phrase is basically just designed to stop stutterers in their tracks, suffering really was involved.

The girl gave him a long, hard look.

“You talk funny,” she said in German. Or something to that effect.

“Ja,”
said Noah.

“Are you from outer space?”

“Nein,
”
said Noah.

The girl slapped her grimy knee as if she had just figured something important out.

“Dann musst du’n Wechselbalg sein, wie ich,”
she said.

By now — despite his lonely days — Noah could understand German sentences pretty well, and still the word at the center of this one felt like an incomprehensible mouthful.

“You must be a
Wechselbalg,
like me” — but what was a
Wechselbalg
?

“I don’t know what that means, but I’m sorry about the twig house,” he said, and then he remembered to start at the beginning, and added, “My name is
No — Jonah.
What is your name?”

One of the advantages of the Astonishing Stutter was that it covered up all sorts of other errors, like almost using the wrong name for yourself. The girl stared at him so intently he felt his ears beginning to pink up from embarrassment.

“Hello,
Wechselbalg,
called
Nojonah,
” she said. He definitely needed to look that word up:
Wechselbalg.
“I’m Claudia.”

Her name sounded like “Cloudia.” Noah said that a few times to himself in his mind:
Cloudia, Cloudia,
Cloud-ee-ya.
It was a really nice name.

She stared at him another moment and then shrugged and got to work rebuilding the house Noah had tripped over. Noah felt bad about having knocked down the first twig house, so he helped.

When the twigs were in place, Noah pointed to the building behind them.

“That’s where I live,” he said.

“Ja,”
said Claudia. “Me, too. That’s where I live now.”

He thought about that for a moment.

“You live
there
?” he said. “Really? I’ve never seen you.”

“But I’ve seen you,” said the girl. She squinted through a pretend peephole made with her fingers, to show him what she meant. “And I hear you, too. Loud feet.”

So she must be downstairs — and then he remembered the arguing he’d overheard in the night. Still, it seemed strange that he wouldn’t have seen her in the stairwell. On the other hand, it was the kind of stairwell that didn’t invite lingering. He almost never saw
anyone
on those stairs.

“I’m not staying long,” said the girl. “I don’t belong here, not really. I’m just visiting my grandmother while my parents are away on vacation.”

“I don’t belong here, either,” said Noah.

The girl Claudia nodded, a short, sharp nick of her head.
“Wechselbalg!”
she said again. That word!

And then his father called his new name from the other side of the little park, and Noah waved good-bye and ran upstairs to figure out from the German-English dictionary what
Wechselbalg
meant.

All that evening Noah puzzled over that thing the blond girl had said out there in the muddy non-park. She had said, “a changeling, like me.” Why would she call herself a changeling? And, for that matter, why was an East German kid out of school on a weekday? Noah knew from his mother that the East German schools were in session right through June.

The only children of reasonable size that Noah had seen outside of school during school hours were Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Huppe brothers, and they, of course, had been part of a mission at the time — the tiresome mission of Testing Noah.

The next day, he went back to the non-park to see if she was there, but she wasn’t.

Time went by. He looked for her in the stairwell and listened for her at his window, but there was no Cloud-Claudia. She had vanished again, just as surely as if she had really come from another world.

He was getting better acquainted with East Berlin, however. His father took him on a lot of expeditions, looking for interesting buildings or parks or doughnut stands. Mostly people tried to ignore them, but every now and then someone would stare. After almost two months in East Berlin, they must still have stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs — even when Noah wasn’t talking.

On one of those expeditions, a strange thing happened. Noah’s father had paused to tie his shoe. Then two minutes later, a policeman came hurrying up behind them, even though they hadn’t been anywhere near the embassy at all!

“You dropped this,” said the policeman, and he handed Noah’s father a little piece of paper that did indeed look like the sort of thing that sometimes spilled out of Noah’s father’s pockets.

Noah’s father looked at it. (So did Noah.) It was blank.

“Oh,” said Noah’s father. “Thanks!”

And he put the blank little piece of paper into his wallet, at which point the policeman did what all those policemen seemed always to do, and asked for their identification papers so he could recite their statistics to his hidden microphone.

Noah’s father offered no explanation, either. The whole thing was, thought Noah, rather strange.

The next day, Noah was hiding in the non-park, studying his map of Berlin, when a medium-small hand reached out from beside him and tapped the paper. The hand had long, fragile fingers that came from a different world.

“Cloud!” said Noah. His voice fractured that one syllable into many happy ones.

She was smiling.

“Show me that map you’re holding, Nojonah,” she said to him, pulling gently at the map.

He let her take it. He was too busy trying to remember all the urgent questions he had been going to ask her if he ever saw her again.

“So why aren’t you in school?” he said. “Isn’t this the last week or something? Before summer?”

He knew that from his mother.

“School?” said Cloud.

She made a face and gagged a little and shrugged.

“I was sick for a long time. Lung sick. Then I got better, but not better enough to go on vacation. So they left me with my grandmother. My parents left me. I’m better now.”

Cloud-Claudia certainly didn’t look sick. Somewhat pale, yes, but healthy.

Noah asked the question that had been waiting in him for days and days:

“And why did you say you’re a
Wechselbalg
?”

She looked at him and put her finger to her lips and whispered from behind that finger.

“I told you: I don’t belong here,” she said. “I’ve never belonged.”

And then she went back to studying the map.

“Where have you been all these weeks?” said Noah. “I looked and looked for you.”

“The
Oma
doesn’t want me to talk to you,” the girl said. An
Oma
was a grandmother.

“Why not?” asked Noah.

She shrugged.

“Maybe because changelings are dangerous,” she said. “So
two
changelings together? Extra scary.” And she said something else that Noah had to work to translate into English in his head. In English it made almost a rhyme:

Changelings change things.

Noah wasn’t sure about that. There was so much in the world that was built of concrete and barbed wire and rules. How could anyone ever hope to change any of it?

“So, when are your parents coming back?” he asked, to shift the subject in a different direction. Claudia stared at him. He tried again.

“Where did they go, your parents?
Mutter, Vater?
”

“Ungarn,”
said Cloud with another shrug.

“
Ungarn,
”
Noah repeated. That didn’t sound like any place Noah had ever heard of.

But when he said that word —
Ungarn —
he had accidentally shrugged, just like her. He felt himself doing it. He hadn’t meant to mimic her, but that’s how it came out. Cloud’s face crinkled into a grin.

“Ha!”
she said.
“Nojonah!”

That was, however, the exact moment when someone stormed around the corner of the fence and grabbed Cloud’s arm, pouring angry German words all over her — and all over Noah, too, who stood there like a fool. It took him a few seconds to recollect himself well enough to recognize her: it was Frau März, his mother’s minder.

And she was very, very, very angry.

Sometimes she paused in her long scolding of Cloud to shake a fist at Noah, too. Apparently he had done something wrong by simply being in the non-park with Cloud, who had gone limp in the hands of Frau März and was only just barely standing now, with her head hanging down, all the spirit gone from her.

And while Noah stared in horror, the woman dragged poor Cloud back toward the door of their apartment building, pausing now and then to glare back at Noah so that he wouldn’t follow them. Except of course he did have to follow them eventually, because he lived in that building, too, didn’t he?

He gave them a few minutes to get into their apartment and then tiptoed up the stairs to the fourth floor, passing two men with briefcases coming down from upstairs. It was a busy day in that stairwell!

It was only when he opened the door of his own front hall and went inside that he realized Cloud had gone off with his map of Berlin.