Cloud and Wallfish (14 page)

By the time he had finished all of that, it was very late indeed, and time for bed. He folded up the map and tucked it away under his pillow, which seemed like the safest place. Safer, for instance, than the safe.

And the next time Cloud-Claudia came over, after they had worked on the jigsaw puzzle for a while — the Tower of Babel was beginning to take shape — he handed the map back to her. She looked surprised, only for a second, and then she grinned.

“Your turn,
ja
?” said Noah.

And she nick-nodded her head and tucked the map away into her jacket.

They worked on that map for a few weeks, becoming slower and more careful and more precise in their drawings as time passed.

And they started telling each other stories about the things they had included, dropping casual little bits of information as they built the picture of the Tower of Babel together.

“There are lots of little towers in the
Wechselbalgland,
but no one big tower like this one.”

“Do they speak the same language, all the changelings?”

“What?”

Noah pointed at the Tower of Babel.

“That’s in the mythology book, too, I think. The tower gets knocked down and all the people start speaking different languages, so they can’t understand each other and can’t build it back up again.”

“Oh,” said Cloud-Claudia, considering. “That’s sad. Well, they all have funny voices there, but they understand each other, I think, sure.”

“They do puzzles sometimes — big ones, so big they would cover this whole floor.”

“And they have
Wechselbalg
parties when the moon is full — they go skating on the pond and then sit under the tinselly trees and drink lemonade.”

“Or hot chocolate. They really like hot chocolate, in bright mugs with tops on, so it doesn’t spill on their feet.”

“Especially when riding on carved wooden horses. You can’t see it very well, but behind that big building in the center of the city is a merry-go-round; only about one horse’s worth of it actually shows, though.”

“Oh, right! Best job ever: merry-go-round engineer!”

“Your German is getting better,” said Noah’s mother to him one evening after Cloud-Claudia had gone home. “Have you noticed?”

No, he hadn’t really noticed. But once his mother pointed it out, he did think he was a little better at speaking than he had been. The stopping-and-starting was beginning to be only at ordinary levels. It made him hope, all over again, that they would let him go to school.

For the moment, however, it was July outside the windows of the apartment building.

Simply enormous black beetles sometimes flew in through the windows when they were left open, but you couldn’t shut out the warm July air. That would have been a criminal waste.

“I’m worried about Frau März,” said his mother one day when they were all walking outside, through one of the local parks, because Noah’s dad needed a break from writing his mink-farming novel. “I went to pick up some papers at the Ministry of Education, and I gathered she hasn’t been there for ages. I’m beginning to think she won’t come back. The woman in the office over there told me Frau März was probably thinking of retiring. And then she put her hand over her mouth, as if she hadn’t been supposed to say any such thing. It was very peculiar. If I knew Frau März better, I could just ask her, but she never comes upstairs, and we don’t really know her at all. Just her poor granddaughter.”

Noah frowned a tiny bit on Cloud-Claudia’s behalf. Usually his mother could be counted on not to get overly sentimental. His father put a hand on Noah’s arm, which meant he had seen that frown.

“Well, she may be a little young for retiring,” he said, “but they retire younger here than in the States. And, anyway, a tragedy like that would really knock anyone off her feet, wouldn’t it?”

When Cloud-Claudia wasn’t there, Noah didn’t touch the jigsaw puzzle, so the building of the Tower of Babel stretched out over a number of weeks. Cloud-Claudia couldn’t come over every day. Some days Noah’s parents were too busy, and some days they went on expeditions to other cities, even as far as Dresden, with its church tower still in skeletal ruins and the art museum filled with pictures from long-ago centuries, or as far as the city of Leipzig, in the south, where there was an enormous dark ziggurat of a monument left over from 1913.

It was Noah’s dad who used the word
ziggurat.
A ziggurat was apparently a kind of Mesopotamian pyramid built up from square-cornered layers. “Think of it like the tower in your puzzle,” said Noah’s dad. “Only squarer.” This particular ziggurat was German, not Mesopotamian, of course. It was called the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, which was a very long word meaning “Monument to the Battle of the Nations,” and had been built, all those years ago, to commemorate the 1813 Battle of Leipzig.

Of course, it’s not like Noah had ever heard of the Battle of Leipzig before. He inched his way through the informative displays in the little glass house and concluded that it had had something to do with Napoleon.

The Völkerschlachtdenkmal rose up, high and high and high and black and black and black, and you could climb up the dark staircases as if you were processing toward some sort of terrible sacrifice or a battle with orcs or both. In the little glass house at the side were old photos of youth groups using the place for ceremonies: the people back in 1913, and the Nazis during the thirties, and the Free German Youth in the decades after the Second World War. Apparently they all liked to parade up the five hundred steps, holding flaming torches.

Noah looked up and up and thought, with a satisfying chilly shiver, of the Tower of Babel.

When they got back from Leipzig, Cloud-Claudia came over to visit again, and they went back to work on the puzzle. It was August already.

“How’s your grandmother doing?” asked Noah’s mother.

“She’s getting better, but she’s very tired, thank you,” said Cloud-Claudia in that flat and automatic voice she used only with grown-ups. Her eyes, which were full of life and never flat, flickered away from Noah’s mother’s face, down toward the table where the puzzle was.

“And there’s no summer camp or something you could go to, somewhere that might be more fun for you?”

“They wanted me to go, but I screamed and carried on,” she said, still in her quiet, flat, careful voice.

“Oh,” said Noah’s mother.

They put some more pieces into the tower.

After supper, Cloud-Claudia handed over the map of Berlin and the Changelings’ Land.

“There’s a problem, you know,” she said. “When people cross that bridge over the river, when they go from one world to the other, their memories start to fade. They start to lose the names of things, all the names of the people they used to care about in the other world. Every day even their own names fade, and their pasts fade, and they forget about us a little more. But they don’t even know it’s happening. They’re just going about their normal lives in the
Wechselbalgland,
but everything they do makes us fade in their minds.”

“But were we in their minds in the first place?” asked Noah.

“Of course!” said Cloud-Claudia with the emphasis of someone who can’t believe you’re asking such a stupid question. “I’m talking about the people who start here and go get themselves lost in the other world, the Changelings’ Land. They get lost there because it’s so nice, and they don’t notice how they’re forgetting who they used to be. And the people they used to care about. They forget all the names of everyone.”

“Like the river,” said Noah. “There’s a river like that in the mythology book. Look, here —”

He knew the coffee-table books very, very well by now, since there were only those three of them.

“See!” he said. “The river called Lethe, on the border of the land of the dead. The water makes everyone forget.”

Cloud-Claudia squinted at the picture in the book and ran her finger along the lines on the page beside it; then she shook her head.

“No. Doesn’t look the same,” she said. “Where’s the bridge? There should be a bridge. And why’s everything so gray in that picture? That’s not the Changelings’ Land. Anyway, this is an emergency. We’ve got to get their names to them, somehow. If they could just remember what those names used to be, they could remember everything else, too, maybe.”

“How’s that?” Noah asked.

“Names are like codes, yes? Like magic codes. They have everything that ever happened to you squeezed tightly inside them.”

Noah twitched in his chair. For a moment he felt like someone whose life has been squeezed tightly into one name-shaped container after another. And he wasn’t sure whether you could talk out loud about codes that way. Not indoors!

But Cloud-Claudia had already pulled out a strip of paper and started furiously writing names — a strange sort of list, Noah saw.
Sonja Bauer Sonja Bauer Sonja Bauer Sonja Bauer
went the first four names on the paper. And then
Matthias Bauer Matthias Bauer Matthias Bauer Matthias Bauer.
And some
Claudias
, too.

“
She
doesn’t want me to worry about them forgetting,” she said, pausing mid-list to point with her finger downstairs. “
She
wants us all to forget, and to let them forget. Then they really will be all gone.”

Noah didn’t know what to say.

Cloud-Claudia leaned forward and whispered:

“I know something strange happened to them in Hungary. Some bad magic. Not just a car accident! Something
worse.
She’s not telling the truth. I can tell.”

And that was perhaps the least Rules-following thing anyone had ever said in that apartment.

That evening, when they dropped off Cloud-Claudia at her grandmother’s, the person who opened the door was not her grandmother but a youngish man with glasses on.

“
Hallo,
Claudia,” he said, in crisp, official German. “I’ve been chatting with your grandmother, who’s a colleague of mine. And may I ask who all of you are? Samuel and Linda and Jonah Brown? From the United States? How kind of you to invite Claudia to supper.”

“It was our pleasure, I’m sure,” said Noah’s mother. “Good-bye, Claudia.”

Cloud-Claudia looked a little lost, standing there clutching the map of Berlin in her hands — it was her turn to have it — but it couldn’t be helped. They had to leave her behind now and go upstairs, where their rooms felt empty and quiet.

They stood there, each thinking about what had just happened, in silence for about ten seconds.

“Oh, dear,” said his mother to his father, but it wasn’t entirely clear to Noah what she meant by that. His father squeezed his mother’s hand.

The little hairs on the back of Noah’s neck had reacted right away to that man, even though he had done nothing terrible. The little hairs on the back of Noah’s neck thought there was something scary about him. Noah considered the problem and decided it was the way the man spoke, almost like one of those soldier-policemen popping up on the sidewalks of East Berlin to check your papers. There was just the slightest hint of machinery about that man who had opened the door downstairs.

As he lay in bed later, trying to fall asleep, he found himself fretting about that man who had reminded him, oh so slightly, of a machine: wasn’t that just the kind of thing — thought Noah — that a
merry-go-round engineer
might start constructing, late at night in his workshop where nobody could see? Putting mechanisms together that would look just like human beings when you turned the clock key in the back? Who would protect the Changelings’ Land from
them
?

And then he realized that even his thoughts were now filled with Cloud-Claudia’s particular off-kilter way of seeing the world, and that made him feel sad and worried about her all over again.