Cloud and Wallfish (32 page)

Claudia’s mother was on the edge of tears, but she was rather tough, all the same. They were all tough in that family, Noah realized: the grandmother in a harsh way, but the mother and Claudia more like plants that keep stretching bent limbs toward the sun no matter how many times they get trampled on.

“There’s so much I don’t understand,” she said. “Why did poor Claudia think I was dead? Didn’t she see me, that day at the Wall? I think she must have seen me. I saw her wave!”

“That was you?” said Noah. Even as he said that, he noticed that one of her shoulders was a little higher than the other. “That was really you?”

“Of course!” said Cloud-Claudia’s mother. “They had told me she might come, that Wednesday, and there she was, just like they said —”

The official American man stepped forward, one brisk step.

“No details, please, about the arrangements.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, flustered. “Never mind. As long as she knew I was there.”

“Well,” said Noah, feeling a little flustered himself, “I did sort of hint you might have been watching. I — I thought I was lying.” He remembered, all at once, his mother saying something about his taking Claudia to the edge of the Wall, on the Brunnenstraße:
Wednesday — hmm; okay; yes.
Something like that. His mental gears went clickety-clack as he filed that away in the “Mom” file.

“Tell me about her,” said Cloud-Claudia’s mother.

So Noah told her everything he remembered: about the puzzle, about the photos Claudia had shown them from the camping trip, about the paper whales for the
Wandzeitung,
about the map. Claudia’s mother listened with hungry eyes.

“She was lucky to find a good friend like you. Thank you, thank you for being such a friend. She must have felt so very alone —”

But she stopped short there, almost as if she had been about to hit an astonishing stutter of her own. It was the loneliness she had run into. Now even Noah was gone, and Cloud-Claudia must be as alone as she had ever been.

“You have to believe me: we didn’t mean to leave her, not really,” she said, all in a rush. “We heard they weren’t shooting anymore, on the Hungarian border, and we were just drawn like moths. Like stupid moths. Guess we thought they’d let us send for her if we were both on the other side. Every day I wake up and remember and am sorry all over again. Poor Claudia and poor Matthias!”

She was beginning to lose her calm, Noah could tell. The man from the U.S. Mission was watching her with his eyes slightly narrowed. He was being very carefully sympathetic, Noah thought, as if this woman might unexpectedly burst into tears or flames. “Poor Claudia, who thinks I abandoned her!
Because I did!
”

Noah could tell how much that thought must have been scorching her, from the inside out. Noah didn’t have the slightest clue what you said to someone being eaten alive by a terrible thought like that. She trembled there for a moment, and then repeated the question that seemed to be haunting her most:

“But I don’t understand why she would think I was
dead.
”

Noah blinked. “That’s what Frau März told her. Your mother. She said you were both dead, killed in a car accident in Hungary. So that’s what we all thought.”

Except maybe my parents —
but he didn’t say that, of course.

“Oh, no!” said Sonja Bauer, putting a hand to her mouth, as if it could hardly believe her face was still there. The hand was shaking like a leaf. “No, no, no, no! How could she do that? How could she?”

And then she just crumpled.

Literally: she crumpled to the ground.

The U.S. official jumped to help her. He must have pressed a secret button or something, too, because there were steps in the corridor outside the room almost immediately.

“Oh, Claudia,” the woman said, but she was more crying than speaking now. “
Oh,
Claudia! Oh, my poor girl!”

Noah didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter: he didn’t have time to say anything, anyway. Another official was already steering him out of the room, a no-nonsense hand on his shoulder, guiding him away, away from the misery that had welled up there.

The Wall did not just slice across Berlin: it sliced right into the hearts of the people who lived there.

“Let’s go on a walk in the woods this morning!” said Noah’s mother cheerfully in early November.

That was code.

It meant:
Noah, it’s really getting to be time for us all to leave Berlin, since they’ve asked you all their questions and we can’t go back over the Wall, so let’s take the bus to the Grunewald forest and walk among
late-autumn trees while I try to talk you out of your adorable but hopeless
cloud-at-the-Wall project. Wear your scarf and mittens.

They went through the gate into the woods, and Noah thought how peculiar it was that West Berlin, which was just a tiny island in the middle of East Germany, sometimes felt so large! The trees of the Grunewald went on and on and on and on, almost as if they’d never heard of borders, edges, or Walls. You could get lost in there, he bet, if you weren’t careful.

It was cold that day. Even in all his layers, Noah was a little chilled in those cold, still woods.

They were totally sympathetic toward Noah and Cloud.
That’s how Noah’s mother started:
Completely sympathetic.

But very soon, it would be time for them to go home.

“But I don’t know whether she’s seen me there yet,” he said. “I can’t leave until she knows I was there. That I didn’t forget.”

“I think we have to be more realistic, sweetie. She’s most likely never going to see you,” said his mother. “I wish that weren’t true, but you know it is. We’ve wanted to support you in this thing, but I’m just telling you that soon, very soon, it’s going to be time to leave Berlin and go home.”

“You’re saying that because they’ve asked us all their questions.”

His mother gave one of her hooting laughs.

“That’s one reason,” she said. “Also they’re tired of putting us up, and my usefulness here is running out, too. Aren’t you ready to go home?”

Noah shook his head because he didn’t want to be distracted by thinking about
home,
not yet.

“See, I’ve been wondering some things, too,” he said.

“Oh, dear,” said his mother with a half laugh. “All right. I guess you have.”

“I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot. About everything.”

“And?” said his mother.

“And one thing I’ve been thinking is that Dad must have been dropping those bits of paper on purpose. He wanted to keep them all guessing, on the other side of the Wall. It was like being a decoy, I think.”

“Hmm,” said his mother. “Are you done?”

“Not exactly,” said Noah. He didn’t add his other thought about his father, how if he was a
decoy,
then he must have been distracting the police from
something,
and how that
something
seemed like it might have to be
what Noah’s mother might be up to.
But he left that thought alone. Instead, he said, “And I think I know when you learned Hungarian. It was during those extra five years.”

His mother stopped short, right in the middle of the path. Turned and looked at him. Just stared. She didn’t even say,
What are you talking about?
or something like that. She just stared.

In his mind he had opened up the “Mom” file; he picked up those imaginary notes and looked at them, in his mind, and the words to explain what he thought tumbled out into the quiet woods in stops and starts and pauses and floods:

“You told me I’m six months younger than I always thought I was, though now I don’t know what’s right, actually. But I think
you
are five years older than you say. Or maybe even six. That picture of you and Grandpa — that was from 1953. From the time of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. I figured that out. And you said that was your fourth birthday.
So
—”

He paused only long enough to take a deep, cold breath. Forest air! No coal smoke anywhere! It was a treat to breathe in these woods.

“So what I’ve figured out is, I think you must have been born in 1949 and then did something else after high school — after your
first
run through high school. I think you studied somewhere and learned all these languages. And then they sent you to Charlottesburg, to kind of pretend to be a senior in high school all over again. Like I’ve been pretending to be in the fourth class here. And maybe you even had a different name to get used to. Like you and Dad said, people change their names all the time, right? And then you just went on through college and everything, but with those extra secret years. And I don’t know what you were doing in East Berlin exactly, but I figure it’s got something to do with the names you sewed into my jacket —”

“Names!” said his mother. Her eyes had secrets in them. Curtains and more curtains. “What are you talking about?”

“The list of names you put in my jacket,” said Noah. “I found it.”

“You found it,” said his mother. Echoing is safer than saying anything outright.

“That awful night, when the police got us. I found it hidden in my jacket. I didn’t know what those names were, but I figured you didn’t want the East Germans to get them.”

“No,” said his mother. She was really staring at him now. “Are you saying the East German police didn’t take anything out of your jacket that night?”

“Well, they took our map — Cloud’s map — and some money and stuff. But there wasn’t any list inside my jacket by the time they were looking.”

“No?” said his mother. “Why? Where did it go?”

“I — I ate it,” said Noah, not sure whether he was mostly proud or mostly embarrassed.

His mother looked entirely surprised and then threw her head back and laughed.

“Oh!” she said. “You’re amazing! Really, you are! Well, it’s gone, then, one way or another.”

Noah shifted his weight from foot to foot. He was nervous about this next part, too.

“What were those names?” Noah asked.

“Nothing that matters to you,” said his mother. “Nothing that matters now. That list is gone.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not really gone.”

“What do you mean?” asked his mother.

“I took a picture of it,” he said. “Is it important?”

“You did what?” said his mother. She sounded shocked, which was very seldom the case, when it came to Noah’s mother. “You took a
picture
? That’s not possible. Where in the world did you get a camera?”

Noah sucked in his breath.

“Not with a camera,” he said. “It’s in my head. I can keep pictures in my head.”

“You can’t keep a picture of a long list of words,” said his mother, but she wasn’t entirely confident now, Noah could tell.

Noah looked at her and started reading out names from the picture in his mind. Probably his pronunciation was pretty terrible!

His mother went pale and put her hand over his mouth for a moment, to stop him.

“Shh,” she said. “Wait one second — here’s a pen.”

Noah’s mother never went anywhere without a pen. And she always had a notebook, too.

While Noah wrote down the names he could see on the list in his mind, his mother stood there quietly, rubbing her arms because she was cold or because she couldn’t believe what was happening, or perhaps for both reasons. Noah had to focus very hard to get the names on the paper to match exactly the names in his mind.

As he finished, his mother plucked the notebook out of his hands and examined the list he had written there with a look that Noah had never seen on her face before: surprise and delight and awe, all mixed together.

“You did it,” she said, a few times in a row. “You really did do it. And I had no idea!”

That moment was very sweet: golden-rosy and brimming with satisfaction, like the best peach you ever tasted.

And then Noah thought of something:

“Who are they?” he said. The golden moment dimmed very slightly.

“That’s nothing for you to worry about,” said his mother.

“But what will happen to them now?” said Noah.

“We can’t know that,” said his mother.

“But are they going to get in trouble, now that I wrote their names down?”