Cloud and Wallfish (4 page)

“Well,” said his father in his mild-mannered way, “going to school could be a way, actually, of blending in, if you think about it.”

“The
Mafia
!” Noah’s mother laughed to herself as if it were the funniest thing anyone had ever suggested in the history of suggestions.

“Point is,” said Noah’s dad, “we came to Oasis to start our lives over as the nice, calm Kellers. People do that. They start lives over. But to pull off this trip to East Germany, our names and our birth dates have to match up with our documents. That’s just how it is. So what if the names are different from what we’ve gotten used to? It’s a matter of wearing the appropriate costume for the occasion. Think of it this way: Does Cinderella go to the ball in her ordinary rags? Does she ride to the ball in an ordinary pumpkin? No! She puts on a special ball-going gown, and she rides in a transformed golden carriage, and every part of that outfit of hers has to be just so, so that no one looks at her and says, ‘Hey! I think that’s that kid Cinderella from back in Oasis!’”

“Dad!” said Noah.

“That’s what we’re saying: all the data we show the East Germans — the birth certificates and marriage licenses and passports and everything — it all has to match up.”

Noah’s father used words like “data” because he himself was a “data analyst” for some big company in Virginia that probably did things with stocks or graphs or money or something. Noah was a little vague on the details of his father’s job, but it was the kind where you had to wear a tie and went early in the morning and came home when it was already a little bit dark, and to tell the truth, it was very peculiar that his father was in the car with them at this moment at all, so early on a Tuesday afternoon.

“What about your job?” asked Noah.

“I quit,” said his father. “This is worth it, I figured. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go live behind the Wall. Exciting! And I’m finally going to get to write my novel about mink farmers.”

Wait. Wait. Noah was beginning to feel downright head-spinny. He’d heard his father joke about writing a novel before, but
mink farmers
?

“So there you have it: that’s why there’s all this business about the paperwork being just so,” continued his father. “Everything has to line up right for the East Germans or we won’t be let over the Wall.”

“It’s the kind of wall you climb
over
? Like with ladders?”

His parents laughed for a moment, and then both seemed to have some sudden serious thought and stopped laughing.

“Sometimes people try — from the East German side,” said his father. “It’s been twenty-eight years already since the Wall went up in Berlin —”

“Summer of sixty-one!” said his mother. “We couldn’t believe it at first. No one could believe it.”

“— and people are still trying to get out.”

“Why?”

“Well, all sorts of reasons. You know, maybe they’ve got family on the other side. Maybe they want to be able to travel freely, not be told where they can go and who they have to be and what they have to do —”

“Ahem,”
said Noah, who was being dragged off by his parents to some Communist country he had basically never heard of, four days before Zach’s birthday.
“GET IN THE CAR, NOAH! YOU ARE ONLY TEN! NO MORE SOCCER FOR YOU! NO CASTLES! NO CAKE!”

The Astonishing Stutter made him sound even madder than he was, but that was okay with him.

“Hmm,” said his father. “I see your point.”

“Oh, nonsense!” said his mother, and there was a wicked glint in her reflected eye. “Our family is not a Communist country. Besides, like your dad said, this will be
fun.
”

And when she said the word “fun,” she gave the steering wheel an extra little yank, so that the car jiggled left across the lane.

“Well, anyway,” said his father, “in order to get through the Wall — to get us all through the Wall and into East Germany — you’ll just have to be a good sport and play along. That means using the birthday and the name that the birth certificate we sent the East Germans says you have.”

“My name is just Noah,” said Noah. “I’ve never been anything other than Noah.”

“Well, yes, of course, for us you’ve always been Noah. But I’m afraid officially that isn’t your name at all, so we’re all going to have to adjust to the change.”

“It will be an adventure,” said his mother. “Something different! Like putting on a new mask!”

“You’ll get used to it pretty soon, I think,” added his dad. “It’s just like any new habit. Do it for whatever amount of days, and it becomes normal. You’ll be totally adjusted to it sooner than you think. And anyway, there’s a sort of nautical relationship between your real name and the one you’ve been using all this time; you’ll see: one builds ships and the other sails in whales.”

“What?” said Noah. “What what what?”

It can be hard to breathe when people who ostensibly love you pop a new mask right onto your face.

“Your actual real name, dear,” said his mother as she sped that rental car up to chase down the next tractor-trailer on the road, “is — and I do think you’ll like it once you get used to the whole thing — Jonah Brown.”

“Look in your new backpack,” said his mother as they slipped into a booth at a pizza and burger restaurant —“the most American food possible, since we’re about to leave all that behind,” his dad had said — on their way to the airport. “We put a book together for you, to help. Also because it was fun.”

It was buried under all those sensible socks and warm layers: a little photo album. On the cover were the words
JONAH BROWN
.

“What is this?” said Noah.

“Pictures,” said his mother, with a touch of pride. “To help you remember who you are, with your new name and all.”

“Your mother may have gotten a little carried away,” said his father.

Noah opened the photo album.

Right there on the first page was a picture of a house he didn’t know. A blurry family stood in front of it.

“What’s that house?”

“That’s Jonah’s house,” said his mom. “So for the next few months, that means
your
house, right? Also
Sam and Linda Brown’s
house — that’s us.”

Could you really do that? Could you take “Mark and Lisa Keller” and turn them into people with completely different names? Noah stared at these incomprehensible photos and then up at his incomprehensible (but smiling) mother.

“House? Why do we need a different house?”

“To keep our real home in Oasis private,” said his father. “To keep it safe and private, just for us, when we’re done being the Browns and want to go back to being Kellers. We don’t want the East Germans poking around our lives in Oasis. We don’t want anybody poking around. So the Browns have their own story! Like a novel, see? Set in Roanoke, Virginia!”

“Roanoke?” said Noah aloud, but inside his brain he was sounding like Alice:
Curiouser and curiouser.

“Lots to remember!” said Noah’s father. “The names, the places, the dates. That’s why we thought it might be helpful to have a Jonah Book.”

“Yes, so, look: there you are as a baby,” said his mother, turning the page. “Weren’t you sweet?”

He thought he recognized the baby photo, but of course babies are babies.

There was a toddler edition of Noah, playing on a generic lawn.

That was fine, too.

Then things got weird.

First he saw his earliest school photo, with the hair sticking up on one side. He knew this picture by heart. But on the facing page was one of those class photographs with all the kids lined up on bleachers and the teacher standing to one side, and he didn’t know anyone in that picture. The sign propped up in the photo said:

MRS. WHEELER, FIRST GRADE
JEFFERSON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
ROANOKE, VIRGINIA
1985–1986

“That’s not my school,” said Noah. “Who are those people? I’m not even in this picture.”

“Sure, you are,” said his mother. “There you are,
Jonah Brown.
Seems a long time ago, first grade.”

And she brushed her index finger against a boy in the middle row, the one whose face, as it happened, was mostly hidden behind his neighbor’s.

“What?” said Noah.

His mother, utterly unruffled, turned another page in the album.

MRS. DEERBORNE, SECOND GRADE

Another group of strange kids on bleachers.

His mother pointed to one of them, who had just looked down, apparently, when all the others opened their dutiful mouths to say, “Cheese!” A generic blur of brown hair, that was all you could see.

“There you are,” she said. “Jonah.”

Noah didn’t know what was more bizarre: this “Jonah Book” or the way his parents were behaving, as if it were completely normal to change your kid’s name, to tweak your kid’s age, and to make up a whole new past for him to choke on.

His father gave him a sympathetic pat.

“I know, I know! It feels sort of strange, right? But you’ll get used to it. You’ll learn to be careful. The book’s just a reminder.”

“Careful?” said Noah.

“We already had one of those rules for travelers: don’t stick out,” his mother said. “Well, here’s another rule — and it’s so important it should probably be Rule Number One:
They will always be listening.
They will
always
be listening. Indoors, we can’t ever say anything that might make them suspicious. NEVER. We’ll call that the second rule. And one of the things we can’t say is names. No names of people,
Jonah.
Not our old ones, and not anybody else’s names. And everything we say has to match our documents. I’m Linda — your dad’s Sam — you are Jonah — we’re the Browns, from Roanoke, Virginia. And, by the way, you
loved
Mrs. Deerborne, your second-grade teacher.”

Noah thought about all of this for a moment, and it seemed like just plain too much for any one brain to have to make sense of. An avalanche, a volcanic lava flow, a tidal wave of Too Much. So he did all he could do: he took the smallest, tiniest corner of that avalanche and he chipped away at that first small thing.

“What do you mean,
‘they’
?” he asked. “Who’s the
they
that’s always listening?”

“The secret police,” said his mother. “The East German State Security agents.”

“There will almost certainly be bugs in the walls,” said Noah’s father. “Not bugs like cockroaches! Bugs like little tiny microphones recording everything we say. They’ll be listening to us, that’s for sure.”

“But
why
?” It seemed like so much trouble to go to, to put tiny microphones in the walls!

“Because we’re Americans,” said his mother, “and so they’ll assume we are spies.”

She could stare even better than Noah could stare — she’d had a lot more practice at it. She did such a good job of staring just at this moment that Noah found it impossible to ask the next question that came to mind:
Why would they possibly think we’re spies?

He
thought
that question pretty loudly, though. Maybe his father overheard that loud thought, because he laughed and said, “We can’t be too flattered, though. They think everybody’s a spy. And so they spy on
everybody.
They spy on foreigners; they spy on their own people. There are probably more spies per square kilometer in East Germany than anywhere else in the world.”

Noah thought someone saying something like that should sound a whole lot more worried.

“So I have to pretend to be Jonah Brown, who had these other teachers in this other town, because the East Germans are going to be thinking we’re spies?”

“Exactly,” said his mother.

“We don’t want to look suspicious,” said his father.

But really, if you thought about it, what could look more suspicious than this Jonah Book, with its blurry-headed kid messing up all the school photos? What was more suspicious than suddenly showing up for your kid in a rental car, headed to an airport for a trip he didn’t know about? What was more suspicious than
throwing out that kid’s new Batman backpack just because it had his name on it?

Noah’s father seemed to guess the general trend of Noah’s thoughts. He leaned forward and looked right into Noah’s confused and still-flabbergasted eyes.