by Anne Nesbet
“It’s because of where we’re going,” said his father. “We have to be very careful about everything. Come on, let’s get back in the car.”
“People can’t have Batman backpacks in Germany?”
“It’s not just the usual Germany we’re headed to — it’s East Germany,” said his father. “That’s the one behind the Iron Curtain.”
“East Germany?” said Noah. His mind was having trouble with the image of a curtain made out of iron. Curtains were supposed to ripple in the breeze.
“Remember the Olympics?” prompted his father.
That’s right. There had been two Germanies at the Olympic Games last summer. His parents had pointed that out to him then. One Germany was friends with the United States; the other Germany was somehow connected with Russia — now also called “the Soviet Union,” just to make things more complicated.
“Swimmers,” said Noah. “Didn’t they have a lot of swimmers?”
“You got it! East Germany — the Communist one — the German Democratic Republic. Home of some very strong swimmers! So here’s the thing. You know how your mother has been studying to be a teacher?”
“Sure,” said Noah. Secretly he thought she would be an excellent and terrifying teacher.
“And so she’s doing research on —?”
Noah knew this part, too: “Kids who have trouble speaking,” he said. “What does that have to do with swimmers, though?”
His mom hooted a little, like an amused owl.
“Nothing!” said his dad. “Stuttering, not swimming!”
“‘Differential Approaches to Elementary Education for Children with Speech-Production Impediments in East and West,’” said Noah’s mother. She said that title so fast it sounded like one impossible thirty-three syllable word. “Because I figured my thesis needed a comparative angle. A unique, comparative angle. Not just American schools. Schools from somewhere different, from a different system. So! Brainstorm! Bingo! East Germany! They’re quite interested in special education there, it turns out. And it’s hard to get more different than East Germany!”
They were all already back in the car. Noah’s mother turned the key with gusto, and the engine roared awake again. Noah looked back at the bright-yellow strap of his Batman backpack, poking out of the garbage can, and felt very strange about everything that was happening.
None of this sounded even the slightest bit like visiting the Black Forest and eating cake.
He was sorry about the cake, but on the other hand, Noah’s mother had been working on her graduate degree in special education as long as Noah could remember. Mostly that seemed to mean reading books with very plain covers and long titles, and sometimes using Noah as a guinea pig for all the various tests she had to learn how to give. Noah and his dad both took a lot of pride in being the Most Supportive Family Ever about Noah’s mother’s doctorate.
“There you go,” said Noah’s father. “It’s going to be an absolutely terrific thesis. But it turns out we have to go now.”
“Before schools let out there,” said his mom. “And other reasons: change being in the air, the visas having come through.”
“What’s a visa?”
“Official permission to enter a country,” said his mother. “Visas can be very hard to get for a place like East Germany. Lots of forms. And you can’t just jump up and decide you want to go there. First you have to apply to get a fellowship from this outfit in Washington, D.C., called the International Research and Exchanges Board — they’re the ones who fund this kind of trip. Did I mention I’m being paid? Actual money? To do research?”
“Well, it’s a great topic,” said Noah’s father. “Right, Noah?”
“Sure,” said Noah. His mind, however, was a great big tangle of swimmers and cake.
“Thanks!” said his mother. “So that’s how it went. First I got the fellowship, and then the East Germans needed to think about whether to give us our visas. They dig into everything. They ask all sorts of questions. But now we’ve got the visas, so we can go.”
“When are we coming back?” asked Noah. He didn’t want to miss any more soccer practices than he had to.
“We’ll have to leave the GDR in six months,” said his mother, with what seemed to be regret. “That’s when the visas run out.”
“Six months?” said Noah. “Did you just say six months?”
He couldn’t believe it. He could not believe it. It was unbelievable. He could feel his mouth hanging open, and he didn’t even care.
“Now, now, think of it this way,” said his father. That was one of Noah’s father’s favorite phrases, a signal that something over-the-top and extravagant was probably on its way. “It’s kind of like a trip to fairyland, right? I mean, because almost no one gets to go there, and it’s sort of sealed away behind tall walls, you know? Some people visit, sure, but almost nobody gets to live there, and certainly nobody your age from here. You are one hundred percent sure to be absolutely the only kid in the whole place who comes from Virginia.”
“Fairyland?” said Noah
“Not the kind of fairyland with fairies,” said Noah’s dad. “More like the places Alice goes in that book you’re reading. A fairyland with lots and lots and lots of rules.”
“East Germany, a fairyland? Hmm!” said his mother, swerving back onto the highway and making a beeline for the fast lane.
“It will be fun!” said his father. “It’s all about attitude, people; we just have to learn to think about things a little differently.”
Noah’s mother winked at him via the rearview mirror. Noah’s own attitude was feeling a little battered and bedraggled just at that moment, to be honest.
“More than just merely fun,” said Noah’s mother. “Even those scientists going to the South Pole that your father’s so fond of don’t head off that way just because it’s fun. A trip like this to the other Germany is guaranteed to be better than fun: it’ll be highly educational.”
Better than fun?
Noah was highly dubious.
Secret File #2
“TWO GERMANIES? WHY?”
When Noah asked this question, which had been simmering in his brain ever since he had heard he was going to the “other Germany” instead of the “usual Germany,” his father told him the following story:
Once upon a time there was a very terrible war. . . .
In 1939 the Germans invaded Poland, and that was the beginning of the Second World War. Germany looked pretty unstoppable at first, as it pushed on through Europe, occupying country after country, terrorizing and murdering those people who didn’t fit into Hitler’s warped ideas about “racial purity.”
But once the Soviets and the Americans joined the war against Germany in 1941, the tide began to turn. Slowly the Soviets pressed the Germans back out of Russia and Ukraine and then back through Poland toward the German capital, Berlin. The Allies on the Western Front — the Americans, the British, and the Canadians — pushed east through France, which had been occupied by the Germans since 1940. In March 1945 the Allies crossed the Rhine River, which marks a stretch of the border between France and Germany. In late April the Soviet army reached Berlin from the east.
Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945.
In Soviet Russia and in the United States — and in many other places around the world — people rejoiced.
Then things almost immediately got complicated again.
With Germany destroyed, the U.S. and the USSR (short for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) became the world’s two great superpowers: the most powerful countries left standing. You might think that the Americans and the Soviets would get along better than they used to, now that they had won the war together, but in fact the tensions between the Soviets and the West grew and grew during the years right after the war. Russia and the United States had very different opinions about how the world should be run. The U.S. believed in capitalism, in letting people’s drive to make money push the economy forward, while the USSR wa
s the world’s leading Communist country, supporting state ownership of factories and industries as part of a “planned economy” — which just means everything’s decided in advance by the government: how many cars and tractors to build this year; how many dentists the country will need three years from now; how many children of tractor builders, therefore, get to go to college now to study dentistry; everything. The idea was that with perfect planning, history would no longer be full of surprises, and everyone would be happy and safe.
The other countries of the world more or less lined up behind the (Soviet) Communists or the (American) capitalists. These decisions were not always made in a very democratic fashion: Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, for example, countries in the eastern part of Europe, found themselves — not by choice — on the Soviet side of the great divide. Austria and Greece fell under the influence of the Americans.
As for occupied Germany, the superpowers eventually decided to split the country into two. In 1949 the British, French, and American occupation zones in the western parts of Germany united to form the Federal Republic of Germany, and the eastern part of the country, which had been occupied by the Soviets, took the name “German Democratic Republic” and became part of the Communist group of countries known as the East Bloc.
That’s how that story seemed to have ended, but the two new Germanies did not exactly live happily ever after. With time that new border between them turned into a bristling line of mines and fences and watchtowers: the Iron Curtain.
And slicing across the city of Berlin, eventually: the Wall.
Back in the car, Noah put his book in the boring blue knapsack (no indelible ink anywhere) that his parents had brought along as a replacement for Batman. It was already almost full: there was a jacket in there, too, and socks. Nothing that Noah could see in that new backpack, except for Alice in Wonderland, had any character whatsoever. Would somebody come along and notice that there was a perfectly good Batman backpack abandoned at the rest area? Somebody who wouldn’t mind an N. KELLER in block print near the handle? Maybe there were other Keller families on their way somewhere; maybe they would stop at that very same rest area; maybe —
“So, Noah, the thing is,” said his father, interrupting that tangled mess of thoughts, “that there turn out to be some complicating factors.”
You could say that again. His parents had practically kidnapped him, had crumpled his math homework and thrown away his Batman backpack — that was definitely a lot of “complicating factors.” What, in all that had just happened in the previous two hours of Noah’s life, was not “complicated”?
“The age thing first,” said Noah’s mother from her confident place behind the wheel.
“Yes,” said Noah’s father. “See, like I said, there are many rules in this place we’re off to, and one of them is that they’re very fussy about people matching their papers. That means, if your birth certificate says one thing, then that’s what you’ve got to go with. So here’s the deal — it’s about your birthday.”
“It’s going to strike you as strange, and we’re really sorry about this,” said his mother. “You have to believe us that there isn’t another way.”
“What about my birthday?” asked Noah. And the word “birthday” came out with all sorts of extra stops and starts, as if it had a bunch of extra joints or something.
This was all getting weirder and weirder. His birthday hadn’t been that long ago — March 23. A bunch of kids from school had gone bowling with him, and there had been cake and eleven candles and presents and all the usual stuff. He didn’t see how even a trip to “the other Germany” could threaten a birthday that had already safely happened.
“Well, the thing is,” said his father, “to tell the truth, you were actually born in November.”
“What?” said Noah. “No, I wasn’t. March twenty-third. We went bowling for my eleventh birthday, don’t you remember? Joey got in trouble for throwing his shoes at Larry, and we ran out of —”
Pepperoni pizza. Why was something so tasty so impossibly hard to say?
“Of course we remember the party,” said his father. “The point is, that wasn’t in fact your birthday.”
“November eighteenth,” said his mother briskly. “That’s when your birthday actually is.”
“No way,” said Noah. Perhaps he just gaped from the backseat without saying anything out loud, but all of his inside mind was shouting in disbelief: NO WAY!
Birthdays are fixed dates. They do not just jump around.
“It’s partly because you were such a smart young thing,” said his father. “And the school had a silly super-early cutoff for kindergarten for boys. So we just worked a little documentary magic and voilà, new birthday for you.”
“No way, no way. You couldn’t do that. Even you couldn’t.”
“You’ve never seen your mother wield her extraordinary forgery talents? You’ve never seen her write notes in my handwriting? You’ve never seen her sketch ridiculously accurate-looking pictures of dollar bills when she’s bored or waiting in line?”
“Oh,” said Noah. Of course he had. But changing a birthday? Wasn’t that illegal?
In the rearview mirror, Noah’s mother smiled a satisfied, not-very-modest smile.
“Practice,” she said, “makes perfect.”
“Wait,” said Noah. He was beginning to feel ill, and not just because his mother was taking every curve about ten miles per hour too fast and a foot or two closer to the curb than was reasonable. “Are you telling me I’m not even eleven yet?”
“Exactly,” said his mother. “Technically, you’ll be eleven in November. Lucky for us! A child coming in through the Wall to stay with a parent on a research visa has to be young — ten’s already stretching it.”
“Moreover,” said his father, “there’s the business about your name.”
A great pool of icy numbness was swallowing up Noah’s legs and arms.
“What about my name?” Noah asked.
“More paperwork,” said his mother. “A graduate-school-meets-border-controls-paperwork thing.”
“Here’s the deal,” said his father, turning to look back at Noah. “People’s lives change. So, which only makes sense, their names change, too.”
“They do?” said Noah.
“Sure, they do. Names change all the time. Some people change names when they get married. Some people write books under a pseudonym. Some people just always wanted to be called Rainbow Stormchaser, and one day they decide to make it so. Some people emerge from their wild teenage years and decide it’s time to settle down to a quiet life in Oasis, Virginia, under different names entirely —”
“That would be us,” said Noah’s mother.
“You guys have two different names?” said Noah to his mother. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Bingo,” said his mother. “We all changed our everyday names when we moved to Oasis. That was actually kind of the point of moving. To start over.”
“Because you were in the picture,” said Noah’s father. “Look, think of it this way: a tiny sweet baby, born into a family of, um, let’s say, wild adventurers — that’s your mother and me. Magicians, trapeze artists, mountain climbers —”
“Trapeze artists?” said his mother. “Don’t get carried away!”
She was grinning, though, Noah could see. She would be a pretty awesome figure, catapulting from a high trapeze.
“Wild adventurers,” said his father again. “But let’s see. When wild adventurers have a baby, sometimes they decide it’s time to turn over a new leaf and start right over, do you understand me? To begin a brand-new life, somewhere quiet and peaceful. Because they’re nice people, even if they’ve been wild adventurers all those years, and so they’re going to do whatever it takes to make a nice, safe life somewhere for their sweet baby boy. Right? Am I right? They’re going to do whatever it takes.”
The rental car shuddered as Noah’s mother overtook another truck.
�
��So that’s what we did,” said his dad. “We gave up all our old names, and we became the quiet Kellers. We picked a quiet little town. We took you to play in the quiet little park. We became super normal, quiet, ordinary people for a few years.”
“Ten,” said his mother, as if that had been a very, very long time. “Ten years.”
“A great ten years. It’s been good, living normal lives in Oasis, right? But now this amazing opportunity for your mother’s research has come up! We have to grab that. The thing is, our Oasis names are lovely and useful, sure, but not technically official. So it’s simple: we have to leave those Kellers behind for a while. Just until we return to Oasis, of course. Then we can be Kellers again.”
“What are you saying?” said Noah, who had been stunned into complete, total silence for the whole one minute and fifty seconds of this extraordinary speech. Now he felt his lips going dry, his heart beating fast. Leaving themselves behind? “What are you even saying? Are you saying we’ve been hiding? Is this like the Mafia’s after us or something? Are we in danger? Because every day I go to school. That’s the opposite of hiding.”
“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!’”
