Cloud and Wallfish (24 page)

Tup!
tu-TUP!

The floor of Noah’s room called him outside, where Cloud-Claudia was waiting again by their fence, with the puzzle box in her hands.

“I did it twice,” she said, shaking the puzzle in its box a little. “It’s a good one. Did you bring our map, Wallfish? The street called Brunnenstraße — where is it?”

They found that street on the map. It was close to the edge of the printed city — at one end of the street, Claudia had inked in one of those gates she liked to draw.

“If we go look there,” she said, “we might be able to see them, the changelings. I’m going to go Wednesday after school, because that’s when the
Oma
is going to the doctor. Meet you on the steps, then, Wednesday, soon as I can sneak out.”

When Noah told his mother that Cloud-Claudia seemed to think there was a place in Berlin, somewhere on Brunnenstraße, where her parents could look in from . . . (here he got a little stuck, not wanting to say anything about the Changelings’ Land, which felt too private for sharing) . . . from another world? like from heaven, sort of? his mother looked very taken aback at first, and then thoughtful.

“I think I know what gave her that idea,” said his mother. “Remember we told you about those platforms along the Wall on the other side? People can climb up and peek in at this side of the city. All the peeking over goes one way, of course! That’s how it is. Your friend saw people looking once, maybe, and turned that into a story about her parents, poor girl.”

“Oh,” said Noah.

He was reminded all over again of how terrible it must be for Cloud-Claudia, having lost her parents. Cloud had only her grandmother now to take care of her, and her grandmother wasn’t a kind, sweet old granny. But if Noah — if Noah’s parents — he couldn’t even think the thought through.

He would have absolutely no one left in the world.

“She said she’s going there, Wednesday afternoon, when her grandmother’s out at an appointment.”

His mother thought about that.

“Wandering around the city alone?” she said.

“Not alone if I go, too,” said Noah.

“The Rules!” said his mother. “Not sticking out!”

“Walking isn’t sticking out,” said Noah.

His mother seemed to have another idea. She snapped her mouth shut and looked at him, calculating something.

“Wednesday,” she said. “Wednesday, then. Hmm. Well, okay:
yes.
”

And that was the strangest, most unexpected
yes
Noah had ever gotten from his mother. It was the kind of yes that is the tip of a great big enormous secret iceberg, but what could Noah do about that? He filed that yes away in the “Mom” file in his brain. She was up to something, but what was she up to?

On Tuesday, his mother went over to West Berlin to visit the library there, as she sometimes did, and that meant they had a nice big salad for dinner, with fresh tomatoes and everything, brought back through the Wall by Noah’s mother.

Then it was finally Wednesday afternoon, and Noah went down to the courtyard steps after he got home from school, wondering whether Cloud-Claudia would show up after all.

When he got downstairs, he found Cloud-Claudia already there.

“Hello!” she said. “Let’s go!”

She had a ragged grin on her face and was pulling on her jacket.

They started walking, just walking down the street, at first saying nothing.

“How’s school going now?” said Noah after a while.

“Bad,” said Cloud-Claudia. “Bad, bad, of course, very bad. And you?”

“Sometimes bad, sometimes all right,” said Noah. “I am supposed to sit very quietly and not say anything.”

“Me, too,” said Cloud-Claudia, and she grinned.

“They think changelings shouldn’t talk,” said Noah.

“Never, ever,” agreed Cloud-Claudia. “Because they talk very funny, like you, or they always say bad and wrong things, like me.”

“No, you don’t!”

“I do. But it’s not fair they don’t want you to talk. You should write an
Eingabe
about it, that’s what you should do.”

The word sounded like “Ine-gah-buh.”

“What’s an
Eingabe
?”

“An
Eingabe
! It’s like a question or a complaint. An official complaint. They have to listen, if it’s official. It’s one of the best things about the whole country, that they have to do something to make things better if there’s an official complaint. That’s what my papa used to say. When we bought that tent that turned out to be no good — it leaked and leaked, and so he wrote an
Eingabe,
and — oh, never mind. Give me a pen.”

She sat down on a stoop, pulled out a piece of paper from her pocket, and right then and there wrote a letter to the principal of Noah’s school. She wrote:

Cloud-Claudia had this funny, small, cramped handwriting. It was like something an elf would write. When she finished writing, she folded the paper into squares very carefully.

“Okay,” said Noah. “Now what do I do with this?”

“You give it to the principal of your school, of course,” she said. “Just walk into the office and give it to her.”

“Hmm,” said Noah. He wasn’t sure how likely he was to go storming into the principal’s office, but he appreciated Cloud-Claudia’s letter all the same.

“After all, I can understand you fine, and I don’t have magic ears,” said Cloud-Claudia, showing him her two, very ordinary, ears. “At your school they just don’t want to bother trying.”

They walked a few more blocks.

Then Cloud-Claudia said, “Did you bring the map?”

“No,” said Noah. “I just . . . remember how the map looks.”

He didn’t want to have to explain how that worked, that this morning he had filed a picture of the map away in his brain. Fortunately Cloud-Claudia didn’t ask what he meant.

“Ach!
Too bad,” she said. “That’s foolish. If you come to the edge of the Changelings’ Land without a map, it’s like you’re rattling a locked door with no key. We won’t be able to get in.”

The thing was, Noah wasn’t even so sure anymore about whether she was kidding, whether this was about a pretend door into a pretend place or whether, somehow, she had slipped into the crack between the real and the not-real and gotten stuck there.

“Why do you need a map to get in?” he asked her.

“The map reminds the place it’s really there,” said Cloud-Claudia. “Otherwise it forgets.”

“Okay,” said Noah. She had such a strange way of looking at the world!

They walked quite far up the streets that Noah had memorized, all the way to the very end of Brunnenstraße. And then they were there, at the place where the Wall interrupted the street: where there was a blank end to their side of the city.

“This is it,” said Cloud-Claudia in a whisper. She seemed almost shy for a moment.

There weren’t a lot of people in this odd, blocked-off street. Far away, beyond the Wall, though, yes, there did seem to be people. They were up high, so they must really have been standing on one of those platforms his mother had talked about. Whoever they were, whatever their reasons were, they were looking now over the Wall at Cloud-Claudia and Noah, who were maybe
inside
and maybe
outside,
depending on your point of view. They were rather far away, but he had the impression there were a few men up there, some old and some young, and a woman with pale hair and one shoulder a little higher than the other. You couldn’t see details or anything, even if you were Noah, who had extremely sharp eyes.

Noah’s strongest wish right then was to turn around and get away from those staring people, quickly. He didn’t like being looked at, like an animal in a zoo. It felt wrong to him, everything about this place.

Cloud-Claudia was looking around; she seemed puzzled, even a little dazed.

“It doesn’t look exactly the way we drew it,” she said. “Where’s the gate?”

And then she, too, saw those tiny shadowy figures peering
in,
or maybe
out.

“Are those people?” she said, squinting.

“Yes,” said Noah. “I think so, yes. Come on, let’s go.”

She caught him by surprise, however: she took a deep breath, straightened up, and all of a sudden right out of the blue she
waved.

Right at the Wall.

Noah jumped. In fact, a pulse of anxiety went right through him, like a bolt of lightning. For that one moment, he hadn’t been paying close enough attention, and Cloud-Claudia went and broke Rule #3:
Don’t call attention to yourself! Don’t stick out!

He felt very keenly that he should have seen that wave coming. He should have stopped it somehow before it happened.

“Oh, don’t,” he said, and he noticed his voice was sounding frantic. “Come on, Cloud — let’s go back home.”

“All right, Wallfish,” she said. She was calm now; she let him hurry her out of that street. “But you know what? It’s good to remind them we still exist.”

“But Cloud,” said Noah, and then he was stuck for a moment. He was so rattled by the whole thing that thoughts he had kept carefully hidden inside were now threatening to spill right out.

“You do know — you do know — they can’t really be there?” he found himself saying. “Your parents — they can’t be there.”

The Astonishing Stutter had done its best to hold back those reckless words, but somehow they got through the gates all the same.

Cloud-Claudia’s back stiffened some beside him.

“Why not?”

“Because in real life it’s a city for — for —
living
people,” said Noah. He felt like a skunk, pointing that out. But he was so worried, he couldn’t help it.

“It’s the Changelings’ Land,” said Cloud-Claudia.

“On our map, it’s for changelings, but in
real life,
” said Noah, trying to be gentler now, in the way he said it, “people live over there. Ordinary living people.”

Cloud-Claudia spun around to glare at him.

“You think I’m crazy,” she said.

“No!” said Noah. That is, he certainly hoped she wasn’t.

She looked at him, and her eyes got wider and wider and stranger and stranger.

“But
how can they be dead
?” she said. “How
can
they be? How can that have happened?”

It was like a wild kind of crying, too wild even for tears, right there in the streets of Berlin.

“Shh, shh,” said Noah helplessly. “Oh!”

He had messed this up, messed everything up — that was for sure. He put his hand on Cloud’s shoulder and found that under his hand, her arm was bony and fiery, both at once, and all that pain that was burning in her — the loss of the mother who loved her, the father who loved her — jumped like a prairie fire right from her to him and ran through everything, burning through all the cautious little walls he had put up everywhere inside him and making him cry, too.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said Noah. For a while, that was all he could say.

When he had to wipe his tears away on his other sleeve, to see where they needed to be going, he saw she was still dry-eyed and staring, those sobs heaving up from somewhere deep inside her.

“They won’t even tell me what day they died,” said Cloud-Claudia in a tiny, awful voice. “They won’t even tell me the date. What
day.
What day they died.”

“But your grandmother — she must know —”

“She won’t tell me. I need to know what day they died. They left me all alone, and I don’t even know how long I’ve been all alone.
I need to know what day they died.
”

“You could ask —” said Noah, but he didn’t know whom she could ask. “I mean, that’s something they keep written down somewhere. Someone knows that.”

Cloud-Claudia took a breath and was already more like herself.

“I could write an
Eingabe,
” she said. “I could write an
Eingabe
of my own about it, and make them tell.”