Cloud and Wallfish (26 page)

Like everywhere else in East Germany, the fourth class of the Bruno-Beater-Schule had been filled for weeks and weeks with reminders that soon, soon, East Germany would be forty years old. The wall newspaper, no longer populated by friendly wallfish, displayed pictures the teacher was sure would be appropriate for the fortieth birthday of the GDR. Erich Honecker, the head of state, had been staring out from the wall of Noah’s classroom for ages, looking very earnest and making Noah nervous.

Noah spent the week sending stern, silent messages back in the direction of that self-satisfied face:

Did you really put
Cloud-Claudia’s father in prison just because he broke his leg at the Hungarian border?

And then he’d remember that he had to decide what to do, and the ball of ice in his stomach would roll around, making him feel slightly sick.

The whole first half of that week, he only saw Cloud-Claudia for about forty-five seconds, out in the non-park. He said to her then, “No
Eingabe
! I’ve been thinking — it might be a problem — don’t send that
Eingabe
!” and then, fortunately, he had to run back inside for dinner before she could ask any really difficult questions, like “Why?”

He had no idea how to answer a question like “Why?” He spent days going over and over the whole thing in his head: Was breaking the Rules and telling her what had happened to her parents the right and good thing to do — or a stupid and silly thing to do — or even a terribly wrong and dangerous thing to do?

He simply did not know. And it bothered him so much that for a couple of days he was as perfectly quiet at school as even Frau Müller could want him to be. She gave him an approving look at the end of his third completely silent day; that was irritating. But on the other hand, by the end of the third day of silence, he had figured out a possible solution. A fix. A possible way around the problem.

He tapped the signal on the floor for the back courtyard steps and then waited there for what felt like ages, his nervous fingers pulling at a loose thread in his jacket where his mother had tried to mend the seam — but nothing wanted to be mended anymore, and his fingers seemed to be rebelling against all of his mother’s projects, anyway.

“Cloud!” he said when she finally arrived. He had almost lost hope by then.

“I was thinking about something,” said Noah. “When we went up to the edge of the city and you waved — do you remember you waved?”

“Ja,”
said Cloud-Claudia.

Noah pressed his hands tightly together, trying not to mess this up. He was remembering the distant ghostly figures on that platform, in particular the woman with the uneven shoulders, too far away to be seen clearly.
Keep it vague and you’re not technically lying,
he told himself.
Keep it as close as you can to the possible truth.

“Well, I thought
maybe
I saw someone there, looking over at us. A woman, you know. I’m pretty sure, anyway. A woman who looked like you, sort of. With hair maybe a little like yours. Did you see her?”

Cloud-Claudia just stared at him for the longest time. Noah felt like a building with a huge elevator in it, and the elevator was sinking and rising, sinking and rising.

“Ja,”
said Cloud-Claudia in a whisper. “I think I did. Yes. I’m sure I did. Because it’s a magic place, the Land of the Changelings. In a magic place, she could still be alive.”

“Cloud! What I’m thinking is maybe —” said Noah, though the Astonishing Stutter had risen up like a tidal wave and was trying to drown every one of these words, “maybe your grandmother doesn’t always tell the exact truth.”

Of course, when it comes to
lying
and
telling the truth
— sometimes there’s a pretty complicated edge between those two. Sometimes you have to lie because you’re trying, as hard as you can, to find a way to tell the truth.

Cloud-Claudia’s face was beginning to shine. It was the sky when the sun finally is about to rise. It was the ocean with a great white bird soaring above it and an island just coming into view. It was a girl whose mother may not be gone forever after all.

I’m trying!
Noah told the universe.
I’m really trying, as best as I can.

Noah and his parents ended up watching the parade for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic on television. His parents were uncharacteristically nervous about wandering the town on such a momentous day. The security forces were jumpy, they said. Everyone was on alert.

“They don’t want trouble,” said Noah’s father. “What’s more, they’ll go to any length necessary to avoid trouble. So we definitely, definitely do not want to be seen as causing even one iota of trouble.”

Eventually Noah talked them into going out on a sausage-finding expedition, and what he discovered then was that it really felt like any big parade day. The weather was gray, and some adults looked bored, but most people were very much enjoying their bratwursts, and the kids had little flags in their hands, which made them happy, too.

Noah’s parents weren’t in the right mood for celebrations, however, and to be honest, Noah wasn’t, either. After their bratwursts and a few attempts to listen to bands playing, they wandered back home.

“Well, we’ll see how it all turns out,” said Noah’s mother, her hands doing some kind of nervous little dance against her sides. “It’s a pain that the embassy’s closed, though. I wouldn’t mind seeing if we have any mail. You guys can go Monday.”

Noah would have liked to see the thousands of tanks rolling down the Karl-Marx-Allee in person, rather than on television, but he didn’t mind all that much. The kids on television, waving their flags, looked more cold than thrilled, partly because every new military group had to stop so the leader could shout a long greeting to Mr. Honecker.

All in all, bratwurst plus watching things on television seemed like a fine option.

So the day lumbered to its conclusion. They had supper early.

Noah went to his room to work on the puzzle — in theory, anyway. He just mumbled excuses and left the living room, and then for a while he sat on his bed, pulling at the loose thread in his jacket seam and worrying. He still felt uncomfortable around his parents, since he wasn’t sure yet whether he had done the right thing, not leaving Cloud-Claudia, as his parents had insisted, in the dark. The dark was so dark for her; that was the thing.

And he hadn’t said
everything.
He had kind of led her to a break in the trees and told her to
look, look.
Maybe that didn’t count as telling.

Maybe, though, it did.

Finally he pulled that thread too hard, and the seam of his jacket came just very slightly undone. Oops! He hadn’t meant to do that, and after his mother had sewn it up and everything —

Then his mind turned an unexpected corner, because his finger ran into something strange inside that seam. He pulled it out — just a thin, thin piece of paper, covered with two columns of words.

Names.

A list of names hidden in his jacket.

Click.

Then he realized his hands were shaking:
Names hidden in his jacket!

His mother must have hidden them in there.
A safe hiding place,
she must have thought. Who would bother about a kid’s clothes? But that meant — what exactly did that mean?

Put it back, put it back, hide it away and pretend you never saw it
— that was what his brain had to say.

As his fingers were stuffing that thin scrap of paper back through the weak spot in his jacket seam, his muddled-up thoughts were interrupted by shouting from the apartment below. It sounded like Frau März was furious at poor Cloud-Claudia for some reason, and Claudia, uncharacteristically, wasn’t mustering up the shouting skills to be furious back. She said something loud and wobbly. A door was slammed. Then she must have been in her room, the twin room to the one Noah was in, each on his or her side of the horizontal Wall.

Something was definitely, definitely wrong.

Cloud-Claudia cried for a long time, and then the crying stopped.

It stopped all at once, as if she had had some sort of very clever idea and decided that crying would not be helpful.

And then the floor said to Noah,
Tap,
tu-Tap TAP!

The emergency signal.

Noah stood up in the dark. What do you do when there’s an emergency? You respond somehow. You do what needs to be done.

Outside his window, over by the construction site that was supposed to be a park, across the street there, a small shadowy figure had just appeared — a small shadowy figure in Cloud-Claudia’s coat. She looked up and down the street, and then she started pacing up and down the street.

What was she doing, out this late? He couldn’t let her actually run away, at night and everything, could he? Emergency!

Noah was already grabbing his scarf and the map. It was surprisingly easy to sneak out of the apartment, for the simple reason that his parents had absolutely no reason to think he would ever do such a thing, so their ears were not pointed toward the front door, listening for every possible creak. Of course, he did try not to make very many creaks or to pound his way down the stairs. He went fast and quiet. When he got out onto the street, he looked right and saw the small back of Cloud-Claudia’s coat, just about to turn right at the corner. He ran after her, not shouting, of course, because he certainly didn’t want to draw anyone’s attention to the girl who seemed to be running away, but moving as fast as he could.

“Cloud!” he half whispered when he was finally close enough. “What are you doing? Wait up!”

She wheeled around when she heard him begin to speak. There were streaks of tears shining on her cheeks, her eyes were puffy, her nose was running. She was in pretty miserable shape.

“What’s wrong?” asked Noah.

“Had a fight with the
Oma,”
said Cloud-Claudia. “It was a real stinker, too. She was mad because I don’t care about school, and my grades are bad. And she’s in a bad mood anyway, because watching all the TV reports makes her mad. Also, apparently it’s all my fault my parents are gone.
Ja.
That’s what she said.”

And she turned around with a shudder and started walking again.

“No, no,” said Noah, trotting after her. “It wasn’t your fault, Cloud. How can she say that?”

“I’ll tell you a secret,” said Cloud-Claudia.

She turned her head to look at Noah, her puffy eyes on a slight sideward slant.

“My
Oma
has been drinking a lot, all this week. She hides the bottles, but I know where she hides them. She says she doesn’t know where my mother and I came from, that we have to cause such trouble. She says why couldn’t she have a normal child and a normal grandchild? She would still have a job; she’d be celebrating the fortieth birthday with everyone. She says the whole country could have been normal if people like me and my mother and my father hadn’t messed everything up.”

“That’s not true.”

“She says” — Cloud-Claudia pulled herself up very tall, just daring Noah to laugh or make fun of her, though what Noah really felt like doing was throwing things or screaming or crying or something —“she says my parents couldn’t stand me, either, the way I behave, so abnormal all the time. She says — they were running
away from me.
”

She shot a very sharp-edged glance in Noah’s direction.

“Oh, Cloud, no,” said Noah, though the ice was rolling all around his stomach. “No, no, no. Why would they do that?”

“I was too difficult. I disgusted them. So finally they ran away and died.
And good riddance to all of you
— that’s what my
Oma
just said.”

“That’s awful,” said Noah. “She doesn’t mean it. Slow down, Cloud! You said yourself she’s been drinking a lot recently. It’s mixed up her thinking — that’s what’s happened.”

“Don’t make silly excuses, like I’m a baby who can’t take the heat or something. Anyway, my mother isn’t dead. They aren’t dead. I’m sure we saw my mother. They’re there.”

“There,”
echoed Noah.

“The Land of the Changelings,” said Cloud-Claudia patiently, and she started moving faster along the sidewalk. “I’m tired of waiting for them to remember their names and remember me. I’m going over there.”

“Cloud, listen. You know you can’t do this,” said Noah, feeling that guilt in his belly again. If he’d kept his mouth shut, maybe they wouldn’t be out in the dark streets of Berlin right now, heading God knows where. “You can’t just go over there — it doesn’t work that way.”

Cloud-Claudia wasn’t listening to him, though.

“And now they’re still not thinking,” she was saying, “and soon they’ll forget I ever existed, and I can’t stand that.”

She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.

“I saw her. She’s there. I know she’s there. You coming with me?”

Noah looked around, feeling helpless. What to do? He couldn’t drag her back home, and anyway, did he want to drag her back to that awful grandmother of hers? He knew they shouldn’t be running around Berlin on their own after dark, but it would be worse for Cloud-Claudia to be on her own, clinging to those crazy ideas of hers.