Cloud and Wallfish (29 page)

“I’m so tired,” he said. “I’m so, so tired.”

And at that moment, two more people came into the tiny space, the man who had been asking him questions earlier and another quite different man, with gray hair and serious brown eyes.

“Here, now, you can’t do that,” he said to the guard who had slapped the desk. “We don’t frighten children needlessly. Out with you.”

Noah blinked a few times, to see whether maybe he was dreaming now. It wasn’t just that the gray-haired man had made the guard back off a bit. It was that the gray-haired man was speaking English.

“Yes, yes,” said the man, seeing Noah’s surprise. “As you see, we know who you are.”

“Then will you call my parents, please?” said Noah. “This is all a mistake. We just got caught by mistake.”

That was what he meant to say. What it came out sounding like was much more mysterious and choppy.

The English-speaking man went around to the chair behind the desk and sat down, while the German-speaking questioner stayed standing at the side of the room. Between them and the ghosts behind the mirror, Noah had perhaps never felt so stared-at in his life.

“Now, now, now,” said the English-speaking man. His hands were hiding inside thin black gloves. “First we have some little mysteries to clear up, of course. For one thing, you have been lying to us, Jonah. That’s not acceptable at all. That girl out there isn’t your sister.”

“Is she okay?” said Noah. “And I didn’t — didn’t say she was my sister!”

“What? Didn’t you?” said the gray-haired man. “I think you did. You certainly gave that impression. It really looks quite a bit like you have been trying to mislead us, Jonah.”

His dark eyes were miniature versions of the ghostly mirror on the walls: something was going on in them that was hard, from where Noah was sitting, to see clearly.

“It’s no good lying to us,” said the gray-haired man. “We know all about it. I think you have to show us we can trust you.”

The man who was standing said something worried in German. It was a little too fast for Noah to understand. The gray-haired man said something, also in German, about how this was too good a chance to pass up, and that they couldn’t be faulted, could they, because the boy’s handicap made it very difficult for them to understand the name he was giving.

“Your friend, the little girl who is not your sister, has already explained the situation quite clearly to us,” said the gray-haired man to Noah. He had switched back into English again to say it. “She has told us the whole story — how you were sent out to reconnoiter with the trouble-causing elements.”

“What? No!” said Noah. What a story this man was telling! “That’s not true. We just accidentally bumped into those people. No one sent us.”

The man smiled.

“You expect us to believe that? You really do? No, Jonah. We aren’t idiots here. It is shocking that parents would send children into such danger, but that’s part of the
little secret
about your parents, isn’t it? Not a very nice little secret, I’m afraid.”

He leaned forward.

“They’ve been using you, using you all the time, your parents. Haven’t they, Jonah? Using you and, I’m afraid, using that poor young Claudia as well. To tell you the truth, I’m a little shocked by such reckless behavior.”

Noah just looked at him. He really had no idea what this man was getting at. And he was so, so tired. . . .

Another one of those watchful smiles.

“You, Jonah. You were their ticket into this country, weren’t you? You were their perfect cover story, the boy with trouble speaking to show that his dear mother must really be dedicated to her research on that topic. They dragged you here so that we would be distracted, so that we wouldn’t notice what they were really up to. And we both know what that was, don’t we?”

“No,” Noah said. It was the most he could do at that moment. That one “no” was meant to negate absolutely everything the man was saying. One flimsy little word trying to hold back a flood of awful news.

There was ice forming in his belly again.

The man said, “I’m afraid, young man, that we both know the truth here: your mother is not just a nice researcher who cares about handicapped children, and your father is certainly no novelist on vacation in East Berlin. Your parents are
spies,
Jonah, American imperialist spies. Their chief goal is the destruction of the German Democratic Republic, and you, young man, are just part of their disguise. You are nothing more than a fake mustache or a clever wig.”

“No,” said Noah again. But of course some stunned and horrified part of him was also thinking,
What if it’s true?

“But
yes,
” said the English-speaking man. “We have plenty of proof, Jonah. What’s all this, for instance?”

And almost like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he brought an envelope out of a briefcase and dumped its contents onto the table: a hundred little blank scraps of paper. A rubbish heap of paper.

“Jonah Brown, what is this?” he said again, but Noah was just gaping at the mess of paper there.

He shook his head, puzzled. That didn’t please the English-speaking man very much.

“Every one of these pieces of evidence, Jonah, came out of the pockets of your father, Sam Brown.”

Trash from his father’s pockets! All this time, they had been
picking up all that trash that bumbled from his dad’s pockets to the ground and filing it away in envelopes.
It was like the people who follow horses on parade, scooping up all the horse poop. It was nonsensical. It was —

Noah felt the tickle of a laugh rising up in his throat, but he forced it back down.

“This is hardly a laughing matter, boy,” said the man, even though Noah had swallowed that laugh. “Your father, Sam Brown, has been distributing suspicious message-like items all over Berlin. But our people are alert; you can be sure of that. A gross violation of the laws of the German Democratic Republic will not be allowed to occur without notice. What do you have to say about these messages, Jonah?”

“They’re not messages,” said Noah. “They’re blank. They’re . . . garbage.”

The word “garbage” took him a while. During that time the English-speaking man frowned and brought out another piece of rumpled paper from another envelope.

This one was a page torn out of a book. Noah had a first brief impression of checkerboard squares and formulae and penciled numbers down the sides of the page, and then recognition flooded him, and once again he felt that ghost of an urge to laugh, only it was too much work to laugh.

“That’s the page he tore out! That awful boy Ingo! That’s the chessboard from
Alice
!”

The whole face of the English-speaking man lit up, as if Noah had said what he most wanted to hear.

“He admits it,” said the English-speaking man to the German-speaking one. Then he repeated the phrase again, probably for the benefit of whatever shadowy onlookers were standing behind the mirror. “
He admits it.
This evidence of illegal activity belongs to the American citizens currently resident in the German Democratic Republic, Sam and Linda Brown,” said the man. Noah couldn’t help noticing that when he spoke, all his consonants and vowels obediently lined up
just so.
“You see, now you don’t have to keep lying so carefully, Jonah. Now it is all out in the open, finally.”

“It’s a page from my book,” said Noah. “Only someone else wrote on it.”

“Who wrote on it, Jonah?” said the man. “Who wrote that? And that?”

“
That’s
just about chess,” said Noah. “My father was trying to explain it to me — but where all those other numbers came from,
there,
I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t know,” agreed the English-speaking man. “He wouldn’t have told you what any of those meant, I shouldn’t think. You were just a pawn.”

“What? No,” said Noah. “I just told you: those numbers weren’t there when Ingo tore the page out of my book.”

“Calm yourself, Jonah Brown,” said the man. “It’s too late for lies. You already admitted that your father wrote on this page. That’s enough. That’s sufficient. That will do.”

Now Noah didn’t know what to say at all.

The English-speaking man smiled and picked up the poor torn and number-covered page with great care, to slip it back into its envelope and set it to one side. He swept the scraps of paper, with a little less care, into their envelope, too. And then he folded his hands and looked at Noah again.

“So we will have no more fooling around,” he said, a new edge to his syllables. “The girl Claudia has given us other interesting pieces of information as well. Please empty your pockets.”

The German-speaking guard (Noah had almost forgotten about him, he was so quiet) took a step forward.

Noah put a cold hand in his jacket pocket. His fingers found the apartment key and the five marks that were his allowance for the week. He put those things on the table.

“Don’t waste our time,” said the English-speaking man. “The other pocket.”

Where the map was.

He pulled the map out and put it on the table, next to the five marks and the key.

“Exactly,” said the English-speaking man, pulling another pair of gloves out of a drawer in the desk and handing them to the other guard. “Very interesting. A map of Berlin. My colleague and I are quite interested in maps, young man. Did you know that? Put your jacket over here, now, please.”

The German-speaking man put the other pair of gloves on and opened the map, spreading it out over the desk. When he unfolded it, the German speaker gave a hiss of triumph. It wasn’t the streets of East Berlin he was looking at. It was the little inked-in houses and fountains and people and trees of the
Wechselbalgland.

“Carrying around secret maps of West Berlin! Who made this map for you?” said the English-speaking man.

“We were pretending,” said Noah. His own voice sounded especially weak and jittery to him. He doubted that these men spreading out his map with their gloved hands could understand anything he was saying. He almost didn’t care. It was so hopeless, and he was so very, very tired and worried and mad. “It was a
game.
”

The German-speaking man had actually brought out a magnifying glass from somewhere and was peering closely at the Land of the Changelings, making quick, excited comments to the other man, who answered in nimble German sentences. However well he spoke English, he seemed to speak German even better.

For a moment Noah dozed off, right there in that uncomfortable chair. He just winked out from sheer exhaustion. It was such a relief to close his eyes and let go.

A shout from the men looking at the map woke him right back up again.

The men were there again, shaking him and pointing at the map. Asking some sort of excited question. Shouting something that sounded very German but awfully familiar.

“Sonja Bauer! Matthias Bauer!”

“What? What?” said Noah stupidly.

“Why do you have criminals’ names inscribed onto your illegal map of West Berlin?”

The English-speaking man was pointing at something on the map.

“Stand up!” he said to Noah. “Right there! You are trying to smuggle classified information into West Berlin! You are working with your parents, whose project was to pay bribes to
these people,
to corrupt citizens of the German Democratic Republic and turn them into spies for the West!”

Noah stood up reluctantly to see what they were pointing at. It was a tiny little pair of people, added by Cloud-Claudia when she had last had custody of the map. And above their heads she had inked in names, in the teeniest print imaginable:
Sonja Bauer
and
Matthias Bauer.

He hadn’t even seen that she’d done that, until these awful men in their uniforms started shouting at him and tapping on the surface of the map with their magnifying glass.

Somehow, despite everything, Noah managed at that awful moment to remember what the story was about Cloud-Claudia’s parents. He managed somehow to say to the men with their gloved hands: “But those are just the names of her parents who died. They were in a car accident.”

The men stared at him. The people behind the one-way mirror undoubtedly stared at him, too. Noah didn’t care anymore about any of that staring.

“Car accident, you say?” said the English-speaking man. “Then why have you drawn them on the other side of the border? Why have you drawn pictures of GDR citizens
Sonja Bauer
and
Matthias Bauer
standing in West Berlin? There’s no point in pretending. Your little friend has already told us all about your parents’ secret mission here. She was recruited, like her parents, GDR citizens
Sonja Bauer
and
Matthias Bauer,
to engage in activities that would damage the German Democratic Republic. And your pictures here are the
proof.
”

He remembered not to correct them about who had done the drawing.

He shook his head.

“But I keep telling you: it’s not really West Berlin. That’s the
Wechselbalgland.
It’s where changelings come from. And maybe go back to. We made it up! It’s not real. Look at the little castles! Look at the flying horses! Look at the candy-cane trees!”

Noah couldn’t help himself. He pointed to those crooked little Pegasi, and some tiny little border fence snapped inside him, and he began to laugh the horrible exhausted laugh of someone who has been kept up for seven hours in garages and cellar rooms in a police station in East Berlin, who has been asked nonsensical questions a thousand times, and who can see that those nonsensical questions are simply never going to end. . . .

“C-c-c-candy-cane trees!” he said again, choking on fatigue, on misery, on fear, on laughter, and on those hard consonants, which fed the Astonishing Stutter and made it something huger than life, larger than any words he might possibly have been trying to say. And then that made him laugh again, and then there were tears splashing on his hands for some reason, and then he just couldn’t even speak or think a coherent thought anymore, he was so worn out.