by Anne Nesbet
“To get the full flavor of the border,” said Noah’s father to Noah. “You’ll see. It’s apparently quite astonishing. I’ve studied some diagrams. Used to be one ordinary railway station, and now it’s the most amazing underground labyrinth. Miles of tunnels twisting and turning, sorting who can go in and who can go out.”
Noah was listening with about half an ear to all this talk of tunnels, while his eyes studied the world outside the bus. This place didn’t look anything at all like Oasis, Virginia. Instead of comfortable houses at the back of long green lawns, Berlin was filled with old-fashioned buildings, several stories high. The signs were all in German. He hadn’t slept very much on the plane, and now he had that weird exhausted feeling in his stomach that makes it hard to believe that what is happening to you just at the moment is actually happening in real life.
And there was a drizzle of rain, making everything grayer and stranger.
His father did some scribbling on a piece of paper.
“See, it goes something like this,” said his father, sketching the roughest of rough lines and pathways and arrows. “One of the tracks runs right through East Berlin but only carries West Berliners on it, from West Berlin stations to West Berlin stations, on a bit of the old route curling through East Berlin. And then the other track, for the trains East Berliners use, is blocked off right here, in the station. It just ends. So that’s how you turn one station into two stations, right next to each other. Just hammer up a wall between the tracks so people can’t jump from the East Berlin trains to the West Berlin trains.”
“And then add a lot of tunnels,” said his mother, sounding a little impatient. “Get ready to pay attention, now. Remember the Rules. All the Rules apply! And for Pete’s sake, don’t forget to throw out that suspicious-looking doodle of yours.”
They didn’t have a huge amount of luggage, but they sure had enough to stand out. People gave them a lot of polite sideways glances as they pushed themselves and their bags up a bunch of stairs and, finally, onto the S-Bahn train.
“All right. Are you ready?” said Noah’s father. “Heeeere we go.”
The train went past more buildings, across a gray river, through some complicated structures involving barbed wire, past more buildings —
“And this is already East Berlin,” said his dad. He sounded more excited than Noah thought was reasonable, considering how gray and drizzly the world outside the windows was turning out to be. “See that? We’re in East Berlin now, physically, but we won’t be really in East Berlin until we’ve gone through the border controls. All those tunnels. Okay. This is it. Grab your stuff.”
The train was pulling into a gray barn of a station.
Someone said something as they hauled their bags out onto the platform.
Noah’s father made a polite and noncommittal sound in response.
“What did that man say?” asked Noah as the train pulled out of the station, leaving them on the platform.
“Don’t be slowing us down with questions, now, Jonah!” said his mother, and the sharp edge of her eyes added: Have you already forgotten the Rules? Rule Nine? And always Rule One?
But his father smiled and said, “He said, ‘Aren’t you going the wrong way?’ Families with lots of luggage going into East Germany — probably not something you see every day.”
“Oh,” said Noah. He wasn’t sure how that explanation made him feel.
Then they turned to enter the Friedrichstraße labyrinth, and everything became more and more unreal. Notice everything, Noah reminded himself. They left the ordinary gray light filtering through the sooty glass of the S-Bahn station windows and went down a set of steps, down under the ground, where dozens of fluorescent tubes in the low ceiling cast a light that was probably actually quite bright but felt dark somehow, it was so much unlike sunlight or the sort of brightness that came from the friendly, old-fashioned lightbulbs Noah was used to. And the walls were covered in slightly glossy tiles, on the yellow side of yellow-brown, vertical rectangles everywhere, reflecting the unwarm light. It was chilly. It was like a place that didn’t know what exactly it wanted to be: the basement of a hospital, maybe, or a place where creepy things might be stored on metal shelves. And everyone who had come down the steps from the train platform with them was lining up in front of doors labeled with various letters: DDR, BRD, ANDERE STAATSBÜRGER.
“That’s us!” said Noah’s father. “Other nationalities. Over here. You must be a little tired, Jonah. You look tired.”
Jonah. It was meant as a reminder that he wasn’t Noah anymore, not here.
Noah just looked at him and nodded. He was tired; of course he was tired. But he was also noticing everything. He was, in fact, despite being tired, also incredibly, intensely awake.
There were cameras mounted up by the ceiling, for instance.
There were men in uniforms keeping the lines in order.
The door for Other nationalities led into a weird little hall of a room, with blond plywood walls and a man behind glass on the other side of a high counter. The counter was high enough that Noah didn’t see much of the man, just his officer’s hat and his small, grim eyes. Noah held on to his father’s hand, because this was a place designed to make you feel younger than you actually were, while his mother slid all the passports and papers across the counter.
There was another camera mounted up over there.
There was a mirror tilted right above their heads so that the man behind the glass window could look at the backs of Noah’s family’s heads, though what he expected to find back there, Noah had no idea.
The officer took what felt like forever, looking through those papers. He moved them around before him on his desk. He scrutinized every page of every passport. He asked Noah’s father to look one way and then the other way, so he could see whether the sides of his head looked right. He asked a bunch of questions that Noah was too nervous to understand, and then he stood up from behind the window and peered down at Noah himself.
Noah, who had more experience being stared at than most people his age, due to the Astonishing Stutter, had never ever been stared at quite as thoroughly as this: he felt very cold and small. And then the man’s face cracked into a brief, narrow smile, and he said something else that Noah also couldn’t quite follow.
The atmosphere was a little better now. Noah’s mother was saying thank you, and the man was stamping their papers. SCHWAMP SCHWAMP SCHWAMP.
More doors to go through. More cameras eyeing them from above. More steps to go down and up.
At some point they were in a slightly larger space, with low counters for their suitcases. This was customs, where men in uniform went through all the bags, piece by piece by piece. They took away for closer inspection Noah’s father’s New York Times and a magazine and the books for his mother’s dissertation and his father’s empty notebooks and the two books in Noah’s backpack, Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass and the Jonah Book. Then they made Noah’s parents make a list of everything they were bringing into the country. Everything.
“Even the curry powder?” asked Noah’s mother.
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. Ther
e 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.
Secret File #5
BROKEN BERLIN
First of all, here is something surprising: Berlin was not on the line between East Germany and West Germany. When Noah first heard about the Berlin Wall, he assumed that Berlin must have had the bad luck to be right on the border, and got split up because of that. But no. Berlin looked like a complicated island floating way in the eastern part of East Germany, closer to Poland than to West Germany.
When the Allies divided up Germany after World War II, the ruined city of Berlin, which had been the capital of Nazi Germany, was divided into four sectors, one for each of the occupying forces.
But when Germany became the Federal Republic of Germany in the west and the German Democratic Republic in the east, the city of Berlin was split like a walnut along the crack between the Soviet occupation zone and the parts occupied by the Americans, the French, and the British, into East and West.
East Berlin was named the capital of the German Democratic Republic. West Berlin remained, technically, an occupied city: not officially part of the Federal Republic of Germany but still under the watchful eyes of the Allies: France, Britain, and the United States. (Not to mention the watchful eyes of the Soviet Union.)
And Berlin stayed that way, divided, for forty years. Hard to believe, right?
In divided Berlin, the two sides caught up in what was known as the Cold War (the capitalists versus the Communists, the Western democracies against the Soviet Bloc) glared at each other over the border, and eventually over a barbed-wired, minefield-ridden, floodlit, concrete-slabbed, guard-dog-patrolled “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.”
Well, that’s what the East German officials sometimes called it.
Ordinary people just called it the Wall, and they hated everything about it.
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.”
