Cloud and Wallfish (8 page)

“They’ll be wanting to look us over,
to
get to know us,
” said Noah’s mother. She said it with one of her warning stares, and she wiggled seven fingers at Noah for a moment, almost as if by accident, as a way of reminding Noah of that seventh Rule:
If you are asked questions, say as little as possible.
“You just stick by me, Jonah, my dear. They’ll have to understand how jet-lagged and tired you are. . . .”

The car that picked them up was driven by a man with brown hair and a nervous twitch.

“Hello, hello,” he said. His English didn’t seem to have been used in a while. “Please take places in the car. We must not be late. What are you carrying there? Please, I hope no foods in this car will be spilt. Welcome to Berlin! We should go now, so we won’t be late.”

He was Somebody-or-Other from the library, and he was driving them to the apartment of Somebody-or-Other-Else, who was apparently very important at the library and who was a leader, said the driver, in the Eff-Day-Yot.

“What’s the Eff-Day-Yot?” Noah asked his mother in a whisper, which meant he had temporarily forgotten Rules Eight and Nine.

“Those are letters,” said his mother. “F-D-J. Stands for Freie Deutsche Jugend, which is a kind of political party for young people.”

“Not a party, excuse me!” said the driver nervously. There was this anxious grin that kept flickering across his face, and Noah could see little pearly tears of sweat slipping down the back of his neck, even though it was really quite chilly that evening. “Not, accurately, a party — a voluntary mass organization! Our FDJ is the unified socialist mass organization of young people here in the German Democratic Republic! In partnership with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, our FDJ encourages all young people to act in the spirit of socialist patriotism!”

Once the man had started, he was apparently too nervous to stop. He went on and on and on, slipping right out of his rusty English into long German sentences in which all the words seemed to have at least five syllables, and Noah’s family sat in the car and listened politely as the tires bumped along the streets of East Berlin.

The man’s hair was a little thin, which allowed a person riding in the backseat to appreciate the anxious sheen on his scalp.

Why is he so nervous?
Noah puzzled over this question all the rest of the drive.
He’s just taking us to a party!

But of course it wasn’t just a party, not for Noah’s family, and even Noah knew that.

For Noah’s family, it was
being looked over;
it was
the East Germans getting to know us;
it was the first test.

They climbed out of the car by an older, sooty-bricked building that actually had a tree growing in front of it. The party was in an apartment that felt darker and grander and more solid than the place they had just moved into, back in the middle of Berlin.

The important man from the library, the one who was a leader of the voluntary mass organization known as the FDJ, turned out to be named Jens, pronounced “Yens” (just as
Jonah
was pronounced “Yonah”), and he had a wife named Anke (two syllables: “An-keh”), and two boys around Noah’s age. Their last name was Huppe. They must have had those boys when they were very young, because even Noah’s parents, who weren’t very old, didn’t look quite as young as Jens and Anke Huppe.

Like the man driving the car, however, Frau Huppe had a stress wrinkle permanently engraved on her forehead. When she smiled, the top part of her face always looked like it was secretly trying to frown.

She seemed quite surprised by the fried curry rice, which Noah’s father handed over in the brand-new bowl they had found on their kitchen shelf.

“But you just arrived!” she said. “And already cooking? What an odd smell! Thank you! And you are . . .”

(She took the bowl of curry rice, held it at half-arm’s length for a while, trying to figure out what to do, and then put it down on a table — and it sat there, by the way, untouched, the whole evening through.)

“Jonah. I’m Jonah,” said Noah as quickly as he could manage, so that his parents wouldn’t tense up.

He shook the smiling-frowning Frau Huppe’s hand. She was looking at him oddly. For a person who was welcoming guests to a party, she had a surprising aura of the border guard about her.

“You’re the one who wants to go to school,” she said.

“I hope so,” said Noah in German. “Yes.”

Those weren’t very difficult words, but it took Noah a while to get them out anyway.

The thing about the Astonishing Stutter was that it really liked to roar into action in awkward social situations, like being grilled in German by a woman who clearly hates the smell of curried rice but is being polite to you because you are a foreigner.

“Oh,” said the woman assessingly. “Well. Ingo! Karl! Come over here!”

Those were the two boys. They were staring at Noah, so Noah stared right back and counted it as
noticing everything:
dark-blond hair on both of them, the older boy’s — Karl’s — one notch closer to brown. Karl was probably a couple of years older than Noah, and Ingo maybe a little younger, but those two Huppe brothers were almost the same height and looked a lot alike. They both had striped shirts on.

Noah, who had developed keen antennae for these sorts of things over the years, knew right away that he’d better be careful around the younger one. You could see from the glint in his eyes that he was the type who always wanted to take things one step too far. This was the kind of kid where you might end up hitting the blacktop hard before the end of recess even though things had started off so well at the beginning of the game.

“Hello,” said Noah. Actually, since he was speaking German, what he said was
“Hallo.”
There are, fortunately, some words in German that are pretty similar to English. Unfortunately, there aren’t nearly enough of those.

“Remember our discussion,” said the mother to the boys, in German that was, of course, nine million times more fluent than Noah’s. “You will treat our visitor with respect. He has come from a place where they hear only misinformation about socialist achievements.”

She actually said that! Then she shooed them off to what was apparently the boys’ room down the hall. The books lined up on the shelves drew Noah’s eye right away.

“We’ve studied America in school,” said the younger boy, Ingo. “Did you just come from there?”

Noah nodded and tried to get his mouth to produce the very troublesome German word for “yesterday,” which is
gestern.
It did not go well.

“All the millions of poor people,” said Ingo. “All the people with no work. Is that why you came here? Why do you Americans want world war again?”

Even once he figured out the words Ingo was saying, Noah had no idea how to answer any of these questions.

“War? No!” he said. In German the word is
Krieg,
which took some time for Noah to spit out.

“Stop it, Ingo,” said the older boy. “He can’t really speak German yet.”

“A little,” said Noah, still in German. He did not add:
And I have a twisty language superpower that makes me understand about a thousand percent more than I can say.
It took him long enough to come out with the two words he did say.

“Oh,” said Ingo.

“Anyway,” added Karl, “it’s the people running his country who want war, not the American masses.”

“Is he part of the masses?” said Ingo, eyeing Noah doubtfully.

Noah, desperate to change the subject, pointed to a picture on the wall, a man with a bulky white suit on, almost like a diving outfit, smiling and waving his gloved hand.

“Who is that?” he asked. That went better. Pointing helped!

“Don’t you recognize him?” said Ingo. “That’s Sigmund Jähn, the cosmonaut. Everyone knows
him.
”

“Oh, an
astronaut
?” said Noah. He hadn’t known there were astronauts here. He used the English word because he hadn’t heard the German one before.

“Cosmonaut,” said Karl. “He went into space. He’s a hero. Our father met him once at a Party conference.”

“Yeah, yeah, and
that’s
Antarctica,” said Ingo, slapping his finger against another picture on the wall. “We have scientists there now. We have scientists leading in every field. What else do you want to know? Is it hard living in a place where you have to pay all your money to go see the doctor and where the working classes are so oppressed?”

Noah went back to feeling slightly stumped.

He looked over at the books on the shelf. He didn’t recognize any of the titles, but he picked out one with a colorful cover and asked in his most careful German, “What — is — this — book?”

“That one’s good,” said Karl. “I liked it when I was younger. It’s by Alexander Volkov; he’s a Russian. It’s called
The Wizard of the Smaragdenstadt.
”

Noah must have looked completely blank. That last word! What the heck could it possibly mean?

“Shmara . . . ?” he began.

“
Smaragd,
” repeated Karl, who was definitely nicer than his slightly younger brother. “A jewel? Very green jewel?”

“Emerald!” said Noah in English.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

And
Stadt
was “city” in English; Noah knew that. So the book was about a wizard of an emerald city.

Ingo explained: “It’s about a little girl in America who’s very poor and goes to a magical land hidden in Kansas.”

“Oh,
ja
!” said Noah. That sounded like a story he knew. “Dorothy!
The Wizard of Oz
! By, by — somebody American.”

Karl and Ingo frowned at him.

“I suppose your American copied from Volkov,” said Karl politely. “They don’t let you hear much about Russian writers where you come from.”

“And anyway, the girl’s name isn’t Dorothy — it’s Elli!” said Ingo. He was beginning to dance from foot to foot. Getting impatient, though what he was impatient
for,
Noah had no idea. He was familiar with the ways of impatient kids, though, from the classrooms and playgrounds of Oasis. He could feel himself tense up, waiting for whatever was going to go wrong to go ahead and go wrong like it was going to —

And, sure enough, the next second Ingo had pounced on Noah’s backpack, which was almost empty, of course. “What’s in there?”

“Ingo!” said Karl, tugging the backpack out of his brother’s hands.

They glared at each other, Karl and Ingo, and with their striped shirts they looked almost like twins. Furious twins.

“A book,” said Noah, and he showed them
Alice.

Those odd rabbits, marching away from you on the cover.

Ingo snatched the book away and started flipping through the pages, a little too roughly. “Ha!” he said a moment later, as if he’d found something he’d been looking for. Noah cricked his neck around to see what had stopped him. It was about halfway through the book, where the author had added a diagram of the chess game Alice’s second adventure is sort of based on. Through the mirror, she enters another world, where flowers talk and chess pieces walk about. The chess game itself doesn’t really hold together, logically — Noah and his dad had tried to figure it out on the plane. His dad had spent some time working out moves that made more sense. There were neat little notations in pencil where his dad had been trying to puzzle through everything.

“Look at this,” said Ingo, waving the book around. “Look at all of this! It’s a
secret
code.
”

“Don’t be a donkey,” said Karl, grabbing at the book. “Ingo, give that to me.”

“Don’t
you
boss me around!” said Ingo, pulling harder.

And there was a terrible sound — the sound of paper tearing. Karl was left holding Noah’s book, and Ingo’s hand was clenching onto one severed page of it, and they both looked rather stunned.

At that moment, the two mothers appeared at the door of the bedroom.

“What is going on here?” asked Frau Huppe. Her frown-wrinkle was dark and ominous. Ingo shrank back — Noah noticed that the hand with the page in it was behind his back now.

Noah’s mother was surveying the scene, her eyes darting here, here, here, and there, taking it all in.

“Here’s your book,” said Karl as he handed back Noah’s poor wounded
Alice.

“Thank you,” said Noah, feeling the slight tremor in his book-holding hand. He was careful not to look at Ingo.

“Why don’t you come out here with us, Jonah?” said Noah’s mother. “You must be exhausted.”

As they walked down the hall to the living room, where the grown-ups were talking about somewhere called Kampuchea, Ingo’s voice followed them, whining to his mother:

“How are we supposed to discuss things with him? He can’t speak German hardly at all!”

“Oh, dear,” said Noah’s mother in English, putting her arm around Noah’s shoulders. “It will get easier.”

It had to, right?

But when Frau Huppe came back into the living room, her face had a closed, grim look to it that would worry anyone.

“You can understand we’re not really equipped to scholarize someone like your son,” she said to Noah’s mother. “With his deficits. And his lack of German. We don’t have classes for English speakers.”

“Frau Huppe is in the national schools administration,” said Noah’s mother, smiling, to Noah. Her lips were clenched quite tensely around each of those words, which was how Noah knew she was raging inside, despite the smile. And she was using German on purpose, Noah could tell, as a way of saying-without-saying, “My son, Frau Huppe, understands quite a lot of this language of yours.”

“Oh, well, now,
English
doesn’t matter,” said Noah’s father. “Jonah doesn’t need English. He wants to learn German, of course. You know how children are. They pick up languages so fast.”

“
Normal
children do,” said Anke Huppe.

That kind of added an icy feel to the general atmosphere.

Noah’s mother drew Frau Huppe slightly to the side, so that Noah wouldn’t have to sit there politely listening to his own mother argue on his behalf. And Noah’s father, to defuse the tension in that room, started chatting with Jens, the father of Ingo and Karl, about world politics. “Chatting” in this case meant skillfully inviting Jens to talk about the virtues of East Germany while the rest of them listened. So they heard about full employment and free medical care and aid for young families and the housing-construction program. Noah leaned his head against his father’s side and let Jens’s explanations of how it was only natural that he, a leader in the FDJ, would also, of course, be a member of the governing Socialist Unity Party — because, although an American might not understand this,
unity is everything —
float above his head, somewhere way up high there, like a balloon.