Cloud and Wallfish (27 page)

And whose fault was it, anyway, that she had all these crazy ideas?

“Ja,
”
he said. “Of course I’m coming with you. Which way are you going?”

“Back where the edge is, maybe?” said Cloud-Claudia. “Where we saw her looking at us. Anyway, you’ve got the map.”

Noah jumped. He had forgotten about the map in his hand.

“Good,” she said. “Then the changelings will have to let us in this time. The whole country will know it’s supposed to be there if we’ve got the map with us.”

It was all so surreal. She turned around and kept walking, and Noah kept up with her, walking fast enough that it would have been hard to say anything. Not that he really knew what to say to her!

Also, he was thinking again about that day they had walked to the edge of East Berlin and Claudia had waved. His mother had thought that was a good idea, for the two of them to go to the Wall that day. Why? And she had known a lot about what had happened on the Hungarian border. He was beginning to have very tangled thoughts about all of these things. Could it be that —?

“Listen,” said Cloud-Claudia. They stopped in the dark, listening.

“Sounds like a bunch of people shouting.”

“Chanting all together,” she said. “Do you hear them? ‘Come out and join us.’ Hear that? Maybe they’re wanting to get through to the other side, too.”

She started running again, toward the chanting and the shouting.

“Oh, Cloud, be careful! What are you doing? Stop it — please stop.”

He was becoming desperate from being so worried and from so much not knowing what he actually should be doing or trying to do.

She paused to look back at him.

“
You
can go home if you want, Wallfish. I’m not stopping you.”

“But Cloud! You can’t just run up to some strange crowd of people. What if they’re dangerous?”

Dangerous
in German starts with a
g:
g-g-g-gefährlich.
He could have slaughtered that word, with its foolish
g
trying to trip him up.

Cloud-Claudia was already gone, though. So Noah had no choice but to follow.

They were going north, north, north on cold, dark streets, following the noise of that crowd. When at last they spilled out onto the big street, suddenly there was chaos all around. Hundreds of people marching and chanting — and following along beside them, what must have been policemen.

“Do you hear that, Wallfish? ‘We’re staying here.’ Do you know why they’re saying that?”

“Because they want things to change,” said Noah. “They won’t go away.”

“Because if you go away, you forget,” said Cloud-Claudia. “Maybe you remember something at first, just a little, enough to go to the edge and peek, but already then you’re forgetting, probably. ‘Waving? Who is that waving at me?’”

“Cloud, please — we’d better go home!”

“These people here are trying to remind us all of our names,” said Cloud-Claudia, and her voice was so fierce that Noah fell back a step. “Like we have to do for the changelings!”

Noah was feeling little prickles of fear running along his backbone. He felt very out of place here — like an alien changeling person, lost in a strange city at a strange time.

Behind them someone shrieked suddenly. The sound of someone being hit by something. What was going on? What was going on?

“Please, Cloud?” said Noah. “Please? Can we go now? I’m worried about all the police.”

“I want to see where the people are going. We’ll be careful.”

She pulled him farther along the street. They kept away from the loudest shouting, darting like shadows along the side of the crowd. There were other people doing the same thing, and they kept away from them, too.

“Look up ahead there!” said Cloud-Claudia. “The candle church! That must be where they’re headed.”

It was kitty-corner across the street from them, a church with candles burning on the porch in front. A group of people stood behind those candles, and above them, hanging in the doorway of the church, was a hand-painted sign, dark letters against the white background, hard to see. Noah tried to read it aloud, with his stop-and-start German:
“Wachet und betet. Mahnwache für die zu Unrecht Inhaftierten.”

He recognized
haft
hiding in that long last word, but that was pretty much all. It made him nervous.

“What does that mean?”

“No idea,” she said. “Something about prisoners and it being unfair. Don’t know what a
Mahnwache
is. Let’s sneak across the street that way, with all of them.”

“Cloud, wait,” said Noah, but she wasn’t waiting. He didn’t want to leave her on her own in that crowd, where something huge was happening, or had already happened, or was about to happen — so he jumped out into the street, following her as best he could.

Cloud and Noah were in front of the church, below the porch with the candles on it, when the police charged the crowd. They seemed to come from everywhere, all at once.

Noah grabbed Cloud’s coat, and they tried to hide from the swinging batons and shouting voices in the middle of the crowd.

“What are they doing? What are they doing?” said Cloud-Claudia.

And she wasn’t the only one saying that. There were cries of dismay from all around them.

“Stop! Stop! We’re peaceful!” people were saying. “Stop hitting!”

But the shouting and thwacking sounds didn’t stop.

“Stay with me,” said Noah to Cloud, but he wasn’t sure she could hear him. “Don’t let go!”

Somewhere in the chaos of the last minute, they had grabbed each other’s hands, the way you hang on to a railing when the waves get so high the boat seems about to pitch right over.

They hung on to each other, and the sea of people around them rolled and bobbed and shouted.

That whole group of people was being moved over to one side, closer to a row of police vans. Sometimes the police would drag one or two of the people in that crowd away from the rest and throw them into a van.

Noah and Cloud shrank back, hanging on to each other like crazy, but the crowd and the line of policemen with their batons and their crazy-angry voices kept moving, and so they had to move with them.

Suddenly there was a gloved hand on Noah’s shoulder, yanking him out of the crowd. He yelped in surprise —
a policeman was pulling him toward one of those vans!
— but he didn’t lose hold of Cloud.

A woman right nearby made an upset sound, an outraged gulp.

“What are you doing, you people? These are
children
!” she said. Noah saw she had taken Cloud’s other hand and was trying to keep her own body between Cloud’s face and those awful batons, and he felt so grateful to this woman he had never seen before, he could almost have cried.

But the policeman pulling on Noah just got angry.

“Bringing children to your riots?” he shouted at her. “Idiots! Then you all come along. Come!”

And a few other policemen came over their way, too, pulling on that trio of Noah and Cloud and the woman they didn’t know, who was still holding on to Cloud’s other hand. On the woman’s face was a mix of shock and distress and horror.

“What are you
doing
?” she kept saying.

Now the crowd was shouting at the policemen, too. Like Noah himself, they seemed to have trouble believing this, that the police would be dragging a couple of kids toward their dark police vans.

“Mouths shut!” said the police. “Silence! Come! You’re under arrest.”

And they shoved them right through the door of a van, into a dark space that already seemed full of people. Hands reached out to steady Noah and catch Cloud.

“Children!” they were saying. “Treating children like this!”

The door banged shut. The van leaped forward, throwing Noah and Cloud against all those people perched on benches along the sides of the van.

The woman who had helped Cloud leaned closer to them.

“You kids, where are your parents?”

The van was bouncing along; Noah’s chest was zipped up tight with anxiety, and he saw that Cloud was gasping a little as she breathed. It had all happened so suddenly!

“I don’t know,” said Cloud-Claudia to the woman. “They disappeared. Why did they put everyone in this truck?”

There were murmurs from all the other people in the van. Things like “Poor kids” and “Shameful, grabbing children like that!”

The kind woman put her arm around Cloud’s shoulders.

“Stick with me,” she said. “I’ll try to look out for you.”

“Where are they taking us?” said Cloud-Claudia. That was Noah’s chief question, too.

“Police station, I guess,” said a man leaning against the other wall of the van. “They shouldn’t be picking up kids, though.”

“They thought these were mine,” said the kind woman. “Brutes.”

Noah’s head was spinning. The police station! He was being arrested by the East German police! What would his parents say? How could he have let this happen? And
what would happen now to Cloud
? Or to her father, already locked up in some prison somewhere?

Those were all very unpleasant thoughts. But then he remembered yet another terrible thing: that thin sheet of paper, that list of names hidden in his jacket. What if the police found that? He had the feeling that would be worse than unpleasant: that would be a disaster.

“We’ve got to get out,” he said while his hand pulled at the seam of his jacket. The bouncing of the van made the Astonishing Stutter more astonishing than it had ever been. Heads turned to stare at him through the gloom of the van.

Cloud gave his other hand, his left hand, a firm squeeze.

“He can’t speak,” she told the people in the van. “He can’t say anything, not at all.”

Then another squeeze of the hand, like she was signaling something.

What was that about, telling people he couldn’t talk? But then he realized with a kind of shock that she was trying to do for Noah what he had wanted to do for her: protect him. Shield him.

She didn’t know how much more she had to lose than he did.

He squeezed Cloud’s hand back. She was trying to take care of him. All right. He was determined to take care of her, too. They were changelings, both of them. That had to count for something.

He had the tiny sheet of paper scrunched up in his right hand now, pulled out through the weak spot in the seam of his jacket. He rubbed it into a few pieces and then sank his head down into his hand, as if everything had just become too much for him. And, really, honestly, it sort of had.

But he also got the little shreds of paper into his mouth. Just like a spy in the movies! His throat was so dry from nervousness, he thought he might choke on those little pills of paper — but he didn’t. He gulped them down, and the gulp sounded amazingly like a sob. Good. Good.

“Mein Gott,”
said someone in that van. “Taking children!”

That was when the van lurched to a halt, and the doors were yanked open. There was a bright artificial light everywhere that made your eyes blink.

“Hurry, hurry!” said the policemen, pulling people out through those doors. “You want to stay up all night causing trouble? Making your country look bad? Be our guest.”

Noah hung on to Cloud-Claudia, and she hung on to him, and there on the far side of Cloud-Claudia, the kind woman was still holding her other hand. They stood blinking on the pavement, on the cement surface of some large garage. And then the whole group in that van was trot-marched through a door, down a big hall, and through other doors, and down another hall, and there were policemen everywhere. It was all very surreal, unbelievable, strange. The last doorway led into a big bare room, a kind of cellar-garage, ugly as could be and with fluorescent lights that made your head ache and filled with shouting. Other people were in here, too — from other vans, Noah guessed.

They moved into that big cellar room cautiously at first, but then the policemen started shouting at everyone to
hurry up, hurry up,
you worthless slugs,
and there were more of those awful thwacking sounds.

Noah felt a whimper rise up in his throat. He swallowed it down as best he could. No time for that now! He had to be very strong and alert if he was going to keep Cloud safe.

The policemen were shouting, shouting, shouting.

“Schnell! Schnell!”

They wanted everyone to stand against the wall, hands on the wall above shoulder height, legs slightly spread.