Cloud and Wallfish (19 page)

“Well, now, look at all those cars parked over there!” said his father just in time. Noah remembered he wasn’t supposed to say a single thing and swallowed that
why,
at least for now.

They got out of the car and stretched. There were people setting up grills for barbecuing food in the field — that much was picnic-like.

But one thing Noah noticed right away about the crowds was that they were more German than Hungarian, and they were more excited than people usually ever are about picnics.

It was pretty clear that the grilled food wasn’t the main thing for them at all. It would have been a very long way to come for a bite of sausage, out here in this westernmost cranny of Hungary!

A couple of boys his age ran by, walloping each other with handfuls of grass and laughing. All the kids! Noah couldn’t help himself: he grinned as wide as Humpty Dumpty. One freckled boy must have caught that grin because he echoed it and cried out, “Come along, slowpoke” in German, and before the cautious, practical side of Noah’s brain had any chance to sit down and consider its options, Noah was already running across the field, chasing the boys who were chasing one another — and now him. It was so great to be running! He felt like an animal that had finally gotten free from the zoo, released from bars and guard ditches and let loose on the grassy savanna!

His mother had said something when he had taken off, but Noah couldn’t even make his feet stop long enough to listen to it. Anyway, he was pretty sure he knew what she must have been
meaning
with whatever she said:
Be careful! Be cautious! Remember the Rules
!

But he thought he’d heard his father begin one of his chuckles just as Noah began running, so he didn’t worry too terribly much. Let his parents scout around in their parental way! For once Noah was just going to be a kid.

It was a glorious hour. He tore up and down the field and ate a sausage in a bun that some smiling person handed him at one point. And all that time, he even managed to stick pretty closely to the Rules — because it’s normal for a kid to nod and mumble when his mouth is full of sausage. And it’s also normal to tear around a grassy field without talking all that much.

There were signs up in Hungarian, banners that looked like they belonged at a fair or a political parade. Noah couldn’t read those — Hungarian is a very difficult language, and Noah knew pretty much only how to say “hi” and “thank you”:
“szia”
and
“köszönom,”
which sounds something like “kursurnum.” (That was already bad enough, but “good-bye” was hopeless. Noah’s mother had written it out to show him:
viszontlátásra.
Really!)

In any case, there was so much German being spoken amid all the Hungarian that Noah didn’t feel completely at sea. He sort of lost track of his parents for a while, and even that felt gloriously refreshing and freeing.

And then the crowds began to move. There was a German guy who started talking pretty loudly to the adults in the group, and pointing at some line at the edge of the woods, and the boys who had been running around with Noah were called back to their families by anxious mothers. Noah couldn’t see his own parents, but he knew they were here somewhere. He wasn’t too worried.

He stuck near one boy’s family — the kid who had freckles — and just trotted along up the hill after them, wondering where they were going and hoping, in the carefree spirit that the grassy freedom had made rise up in him, that maybe dessert might be involved. Wouldn’t an ice cream bar be the perfect thing right now? Warm summer day, after running around chasing people in a field for an hour? Not that he’d seen a lot of ice cream bars so far here in Hungary.

He still had bits of grass in his hair! What a great, scratchy feeling. It was the opposite, the exact opposite, of having the cloying taste of coal smoke clogging up your lungs and making you cough.

There were pretty little hills all around, a rolling green carpet of trees.

“Three p.m. — they’re going to open the gate!”

“For people with papers.”

“Who cares? If it’s open, it’s open. Why not for us, too?”

Up ahead the crowd had reached the end of the field, where there were a handful of Hungarian soldiers in uniform — white caps with dark visors, light shirts, darker pants, handguns on belts — guarding the fence. On the other side was Austria, as well as trees. This was the actual Iron Curtain itself, Noah realized. Though here it looked more like a fancy fence. The crowd looked at the fence and at the soldiers — and past them at the soldiers in different uniforms on the other side, the side with more trees. Austria.

And over there a guard tower, a real one, like in a World War II movie.

Noah looked around for his parents and didn’t see them. But he couldn’t feel too worried, not yet. Although there were border guards here, they didn’t seem to be very threatening. They looked concerned but not exactly hostile.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and time, apparently, for them to open the old gate in the fence, so that the people with papers — that would be the Austrians and (since very recently) the Hungarians, of course, and not the East Germans, who were not allowed to travel to Austria — could mingle happily. The soldiers discussed something among themselves, eyeing the crowd, and then two of them went over to the gate and opened it. It looked like a creaky old farm gate more than the border between two countries. Old wire holding on to weathered gray crossbeams. The gate squeaked a little as they opened it.

Some of the Hungarians went up and showed papers and wandered on through, while the crowd murmured (mostly in German) and shuffled about. Then a small group of people carrying backpacks, sacks, and children came up to the open gate and did not show anyone any papers. The guards looked at them, but they went right through the gate and then kept going.

The whole crowd held its breath. Would the guards haul them back? Would they shout? Would they shoot?

But the Germans just pushed forward, and nothing terrible happened.

A family with a tiny little girl, all blond curls, came forward. The girl tripped for a moment, and others picked her up and popped her back onto her feet:
“Weiter gehen! Weiter gehen!”
Keep going!

The little road passing through the gate was crowded with people now, all surging forward. More and more were coming, hurrying up through the field from the road where all the East German cars had been parked. Mothers holding on to their children’s hands.

“What’s going on?” asked the boy Noah had been running with earlier. “I want to go see!”

The crowd was moving forward, making it hard to go any other way. The freckled boy’s mother was calling, “Come along, quickly!”

And then they weren’t just walking forward; they were trotting. Everybody was running, even people who looked too grown up to move that fast. Noah trotted along with them, caught up in the crowd, hundreds of people running forward to that gate in the middle of nowhere.

Some of the people had white handkerchiefs in their hands; someone near Noah was saying that was what you should do, that was what you should do, so the guards would know not to shoot at you.

There was a little shouting among the guards, and then they shook their heads and turned their backs, to show all those people that they were not going to shoot.

On the other side of that gate, Noah looked around, excited and disoriented. The family he had tagged along after was hugging one another. All these people around him were hugging, shouting, crying. But of course no one was hugging Noah!

Now, as everyone around him pushed forward, farther into the Austrian side, Noah began to feel worried about his parents. Where had they gotten to? He didn’t see them anywhere in this crowd.

He had been in one of the early groups to come through. So now he turned around and fought his way backward, trying to return to the creaky wooden gate, which was absolutely overwhelmed by people coming through. It was like swimming up a river that was flooding in the other direction.

He was feeling a lot worse now. How stupid had he been, to let himself be swept along
right into a different country
? It wasn’t as if he had a passport or anything. His mother had his papers tucked into a pocket of her purse.

Someone said something to him, patted him on the shoulder.

Was he lost?

“J-j-j-j-ja,”
said Noah. It was breaking the Rules, but it was just a single word. And the Astonishing Stutter made it sound like he was so distraught that he was sobbing, which wasn’t really the case. He was worried, true, but it took more than mere worry to get Noah to the sobbing stage.

He hadn’t really intended to put on an act, but here he was anyway, accidentally acting. People were taking him — the poor sobbing child — by the elbow, trying to lead him somewhere. Most were trying to lead him back in the Austrian direction, with all the flood of people. “Your family is surely already there,” they kept saying. “Come with us; we’ll help you find them.”

But Noah shook his head and pushed on in the other direction, though people were shouting at him now not to go back.

Then he heard the strangest and yet most familiar sound: his mother’s voice, fluently and urgently saying words that Noah couldn’t understand.

His mother,
speaking Hungarian.

She was talking to the guards and pointing as she explained something, back on the Hungarian side of the border.

Noah called out, not committing himself to any particular word, just shouting and waving his hand.

His mother turned.

“János!” she cried, and the guard talking to her gestured for Noah to keep coming. People scooted to the side to let him through, and some were laughing, caught up in the general excitement.

Then he was back through the gate, and his mother had him wrapped in her arms, but still she kept scolding him in her fluent, incomprehensible Hungarian. The guard took them off to one side, where he gave Noah a drink of water and called him János, like his mother had done. Noah worked hard at looking very young and very unable to talk at all.

Meanwhile, the border guard and his mother kept talking.

The tone was different now. They were speaking in quick phrases, with shadows rippling through them.

When Noah finished his glass of water, the border guard shook their hands and sent them away. And they made their way back through the field down to the road, where Noah’s father was waiting for them.

“Found him!” said Noah’s mother, as a report to Noah’s father. “Great success!” Considering that Noah himself had almost ended up in the wrong country, he was not sure that was the word he would have used to describe the past hour.

“You were speaking in Hungarian!” he said to his mother. It was disconcerting having a parent who had all sorts of talents you knew nothing about.

“Well, the guard didn’t speak German, did he?” said his mother, as if that explained everything, and then she nodded toward the car. “Rules are about to kick in. So hush.”

Thinking can still be done when you’re being quiet, however. What had they been talking about, the guard and his mother? Something more than just how Noah had gotten himself lost. And then there was that other looming question: When had his mother learned Hungarian?

It had to be pretty long ago, before Noah was old enough to notice Hungarian books or Hungarian tapes hanging around. And he had never seen any such thing.

But when, then? His mother was fairly young, as mothers go. She had gone to college, and then started graduate school, and then taken time off to have Noah, and then gone back to finish her thesis, which was now on speech disorders. When was there time in that history to learn a whole language, not to mention one that was hard and rare and spoken in a country on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain? He added up the years, and he just didn’t see how it worked out.

Research! That’s what his mother always said was the way to find things out. He would just have to do some research — that’s all.

And in his mind he opened a new file:
MOM
.

And a second one, while he was at it:
DAD
.

Next to these new files, of course, was the older one, with a question for a title:
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CLOUD-CLAUDIA
’
S PARENTS
?