Cloud and Wallfish (6 page)

Even the curry powder. The man who answered that question didn’t even crack a smile.

To Noah’s enormous relief, an officer reappeared from a side office with Noah’s family’s books in a careful pile in his hand.

The
New York Times
did not come back, however. Nor did the magazine (
Time
) his mother had been reading on the plane.

They packed everything else back into their suitcases.

“Welcome to Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic,” said one of the border guards, and he pointed them forward, toward the steps that led back up to the outside world.

It was so good to be going outside!

But this was the “outside” that was the other side of the Wall. The East German side. And it did look different. People’s clothes were different. The cars were different. The air smelled different — it was full of a strange, tangy haze. There weren’t as many people in the streets. And it felt different in other ways, too, that Noah couldn’t quite put his finger on.

It was like going from a color movie into one in black and white.

Noah’s mother figured it out before Noah did: “First time I’ve ever missed billboards and ads,” she said.

All the buildings were so gray over here. And the sky was gray, too, but that couldn’t have had anything to do with the border.

A car was waiting for them, sent to bring them to one of the grayest and most looming buildings, which housed the Ministry of Education.

There they waited for a while, in a very large, dim hall with a squeaky wooden floor. Noah’s parents talked to various officials in German. It all took forever, but eventually a woman piled their suitcases back into another car, less fancy than the first one. A few minutes later, they were pulling up in front of an apartment building, five stories high, standing next to a series of other, quite similar buildings, all looking across the gray street at “the lovely park!” — as the woman from the ministry called it.

Only at the moment the park was all fences and cement trucks and machines. Apparently there were a lot of construction projects going on in the neighborhood. And as they climbed the stairs in the building, Noah noticed that his stomach, after all of this rushing around in the backseats of cars, was beginning to feel a little wobbly.

“Just you wait until you see this. You’ve been assigned an apartment that reaches a very high standard,” said the woman in a peculiar, square-shouldered sort of English. “The Ministry of Education just had me decorate it. Part of the current Apartment Construction Program. It’s culturally equipped.”

She looked at Noah as she put the key into a door on the fourth floor.

“I had the impression you would be littler, though,” she said. “You’ll see what I mean. There are monkeys and giraffes in your sleeping room.”

Really? Monkeys and giraffes?

Maybe Noah was hallucinating by then, but for a moment he calmly considered the possibility that inside this apartment in this gray city there might be actual monkeys and actual giraffes. He did even think,
But the ceiling is too low unless it’s a
super-little giraffe,
and he had not the slightest awareness that his thoughts had become illogical.

“Come in and look!” said the woman from the ministry with a proud swoop of her arm. “Just imagine! I had twenty thousand marks to spend in a week!”

There was a living room with a wood-like display cabinet along one wall, and a television, and a super-fancy lamp swinging peacefully on one end of its fake silk cord, and an overstuffed sofa, and all sorts of little extras that the woman kept pointing out to them with pride: the television, with remote control! The radio! The appliances! The wall-to-wall gold-tone carpet! The three beautiful coffee-table books, one on paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, one on
Myths of Antiquity,
and one called
The GDR in Pictures
!

There were gadgets in the little kitchen. There were two bedrooms down the hall: one for Noah’s parents, in which there was a safe with a combination lock —“Here’s where you can put anything secret,” said the woman — and another room that the woman with the keys to the apartment called the
Kinderzimmer,
the children’s room, and where there really were monkeys and giraffes romping across the walls. Only pictures, however.

Noah hadn’t expected to find monkeys and giraffes waiting for him in East Berlin, that was for sure. He sat down on the bed and looked up at the woman pointing out all the glories of the
Kinderzimmer.
But then she turned her head and looked at him, and it was as if all of a sudden she had caught some inkling of how tired Noah must be.

“Poor Jonah,” she said.

He turned his head to see who poor Jonah might be, and found her eyes resting resolutely on him, on Noah. Because, yes, that’s right, of course:
he
was poor Jonah now.

All right. He would be Jonah, since that was
necessary.
On the surface he would be Jonah. But underneath that mask — he promised himself — he would never forget he was Noah.

Because, for one thing, the animals on the walls! They made him dizzy. They made him feel like someone still on the storm-tossed ark.

The next time Noah opened his eyes, it was a different day entirely. It was quiet, there was no strange German woman pointing to the gold carpet and the television — had she really existed? — and he felt hungry.

He shook his head at the giraffes and the monkeys and padded across the carpeted floors to the kitchen, where he found his father drinking coffee and studying some notebook of his.

“Well, good morning, Yo-Yo!” said his father. “You had a nice long sleep.”

“Yo-Yo?” said Noah.

“I just thought that up,” said his father. “The Germans won’t pronounce your name ‘Jonah,’ the way we say it, because for them a
J
sounds like a
Y.
You’re going to have to be Yo-nah here. So, why not
Yo-Yo
? Has kind of a ring to it, don’t you think?”

His father raised an eyebrow at him meaningfully while he said this, so Noah knew right away what was going on: all this talk about “Yo-Yo” was meant as a reminder that he wasn’t supposed to be himself anymore.

He didn’t much like not being himself. And whoever he was, he was hungry, so he started opening the doors of the kitchen cabinets, hoping to find a shelf that wasn’t empty.

“Is there any food around here?” he asked. That seemed like a safe-enough question. “And where’s Mom?”

“Your mother went off to that nice Ministry of Education again, to start setting up research visits to schools. You know how your mom likes to jump right into a task! And so I’ve been outlining my novel about mink farmers and waiting for you to wake up so we can go exploring. As you see, we need to find a supermarket urgently, among other things. Because we’re hungry, and also because we have already been invited to a party.”

“A what?” said Noah.

“A party. We’ve been invited to a party. By someone in charge of some big section of the library your mother is going to be using. A telegram came right to our door while you were still asleep! Kind of an official sort of party, I gather. So anyway, we need to make something tasty to take along with us, don’t you think? Maybe the supermarket will inspire us.”

The word “party” sent Noah’s brain right back to that sore place around Zach’s birthday party and the spring soccer season and just generally everyday life in early May in Oasis, Virginia. Nothing he was thinking could be said aloud, however, without breaking the Rules, so he stayed quiet and pulled on some clean clothes, and he and his father went out to take a look at the city.

Outside it was gray, threatening to rain. Machines were busy digging up the earth in the park across the street, though they looked like they were in no rush about it, and there was a strange smoggy tang hanging in the air. It hung over the street like a cloud.

“What’s that smell?” said Noah.

“Mmm, yes. Coal,” said his dad. “They’re burning coal in their generators here. Haven’t smelled coal like that since I was hitchhiking through Yugoslavia.”

“When did you go hitchhiking through Yugoslavia?”

“My misspent youth,” said his dad with a chuckle. He actually did say things like that.

“And are you really writing a novel about mink farmers?”

His dad laughed.

“Why not?” he said. “I think I might as well try writing a novel about something while we’re here, and won’t mink farmers be a good topic for the people listening in?”

“Maybe,” said Noah. “It’s different, anyway.”

Raindrops began splatting lazily against the pavement around them. Noah’s father opened an umbrella and made room under it for Noah.

Noah was thinking about Rule #1:
They will always be listening.
Were there really bugs in the walls of their apartment? That wasn’t a very nice thought.

“You’re not going to keep calling me Yo-Yo, are you?”

“You don’t like it? There’s a famous cellist named Yo-Yo.”

“Okay, it’s fine for him, but I don’t want to be Yo-Yo.”

His dad squeezed his shoulder.

“I was just trying to remind us both that you’re Jonah now,” he said. “It’s not just you it’s hard for, learning to be Jonah. Well, enough of that, even outdoors here.”

They were walking through other streets now, and the buildings were getting larger and grayer.

“Where are we going?” said Noah. Nothing in these streets looked like a supermarket to him.

“There’s something I think you’d better experience right away, so you’ll understand why we need all these Rules. We’re going to swing by the American embassy and pick up our mail.”

“Mail!” said Noah. “We can’t have letters yet! In my class they probably think I’m just out with a cold.”

Then he thought some more.

“And who is ever going to write me a letter, anyway? They don’t know where I’ve gone.”

“But your mother and I might have letters waiting already. Official sorts of letters. That’s possible. Anyway, you need to see how things work here. It will be educational and informative. Sooooo . . . which way now?”

And Noah’s father pulled a map out of his pocket.

It was an East German map of East Berlin, so it called the city “Berlin, Capital of the German Democratic Republic.” And there was a huge blank puddle to the west and south; it covered the left-hand side of the map and a lot of the lower edge.

“What’s that missing bit?” said Noah. “What’s wrong with the map?”

“That’s West Berlin,” said his dad. “It’s a funny thing, but for East German maps, it officially doesn’t exist.”

“Oh,” said Noah, sucking some of Berlin’s odd-tasting coal-tinged air in through his teeth. “Oh!”

He couldn’t get enough of that strange pool of blankness. But to tell the truth, Noah liked all maps. Back home in Oasis, Noah had had old
National Geographic
maps covering every inch of his bedroom wall.

His father laughed when he saw the expression that must have already taken over Noah’s face.

“Okay, okay, it’s yours,” he said, and he tucked that map right into Noah’s hands. “Really, take it! I’ll get another one somewhere around.”

Now that they were walking through the streets toward an actual destination, Noah found that he was already feeling much more like himself than he had the day before. It was like the whole day of getting to Berlin had been some sort of peculiar dream, and now he was waking up again.