by Anne Nesbet
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.
They crossed a little river called the Spree and found themselves on an island with buildings that must once have been very grand hidden away behind fences. “Museums being renovated slowly,” said his dad. Many museums! Over on the right were the ruins of what used to be called the New Museum. It didn’t look very new anymore.
On the left loomed the great round dome of an old cathedral, which in the fog that day looked like a carnivorous iron bell preparing to swoop down and feed.
On the right was a kind of mock Greek temple, behind mud and painted metal fences.
“The National Gallery,” said his father, consulting Noah’s helpful map. “And where they’re working on the New Museum there’s supposed to be a little green park.”
Except, like the “little green park” across from their apartment house in the Max-Beer-Straße, this park was actually a construction site.
Peeking over the fence, Noah could see a large hollow statue of a woman lying gracefully on her back, waiting for better days when she could stand upright again.
“Creepy,” said Noah. All these huge buildings and ruined temples were beginning to weigh him down.
“Well, it’s all left over from the end of the Second World War,” said his father. “Makes you imagine how grim it must have been when the whole place was in ruins in 1945 —”
His father’s history lecture ended prematurely, though: he tripped on a loose flagstone in the sidewalk and managed somehow to drop a bunch of little pieces of paper.
On the other side of the Museum Island, Noah and his father walked down some other grand streets, and then they turned right and went up a set of steps into a building where an American flag was waving. That was the embassy.
They had to go through a metal detector to get in, and then his father talked to someone about mail, and a couple of letters actually ended up in his father’s hands, somewhat to Noah’s surprise. Then his father said to him, “This next bit is the important part, so pay attention.”
But the next bit was just that they went back out onto the big Berlin streets and headed back the way they had come.
“What’s the important thing?” said Noah. “Knowing how to get home? Is that it?”
“You’ll see,” said his dad. “Let’s find the supermarket marked on your map, how about that? We need all the basic provisions. Plus possible party food.”
“Okay,” said Noah. He was hungry; there was no doubt about that.
Back they went down the wide streets and past those rows of large buildings, and Noah was just about to complain that there hadn’t been anything worth paying much attention to that he could see, when suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere, a soldier popped up and raised his stern hands to stop them.
“Papers, please,” he said, and Noah’s dad gave Noah a comforting squeeze on the arm and then handed over their passports. The soldier opened them up and stared at the pictures in the passports, comparing them with the actual flesh-and-blood people in front of him — the same frowning stare that Noah had had to suffer through the day before. It made him want to hide somewhere very far away.
The soldier did more than merely stare. He carried on a kind of conversation with himself as he read over their papers:
“American citizens? Passport number blablabla, is that right? Visa seems to be in order. How long are they here for? Visa says six months.”
That was strange, wasn’t it? A policeman who talked to himself! But a second later, Noah realized there must have been a teeny-tiny little microphone hidden in his collar somewhere. The policeman wasn’t speaking aloud for their benefit but for some other policemen, somewhere else. Maybe in that green police booth Noah had just spotted, farther down the sidewalk.
“And what is the business of your visit to the German Democratic Republic?”
“My wife is researching classes in schools for children with speech delays.”
The soldier repeated something to that effect, using long German words Noah half recognized from the border guards the day before, and then seemed, finally, satisfied. He handed the passports back to Noah’s father and backed away so they could keep walking.
Twenty steps later — because of Rule #1 — Noah said, “Was that the important thing?”
And his father said, “Yep. You know why that just happened?”
“No, why?”
“Because we came out of the American embassy,” his father said. “And they keep very close tabs on everyone who visits the American embassy.”
“But that was like ages ago!”
“Not quite that long,” said his dad. “But you’re right: they’re clever that way. They don’t jump on you immediately; they give you just about seven minutes, and then they jump. But they’re always, always there. Always watching, always listening. That’s the reason for all our Rules. Is that clearer now?”
Noah nodded. Always watching. Always listening. All right. He wouldn’t forget that now. Also: it was amazing, the sorts of things his parents just seemed to know.
They walked out in the rain into a field of gray stone surrounded by city buildings all making an effort to be modern. Noah felt as small as a pigeon in all that stone. He couldn’t help looking around for places to hide.
“Okay, this is the Alexanderplatz,” said his father. “So where’s the supermarket?”
They turned around and around, looking. Everything was huge and square. Even the decorations were gigantic: massive mosaics of children picking flowers and boys holding on to telescopes ran around the waist of one of those tall buildings.
“They wanted this part of town to be as impressive as possible. Can you tell?”
“Hmm,” said Noah. He didn’t think he liked enormous modern gray buildings. Over there was a tall clock sculpture with
numbers and wires on it, though — that was more interesting. And behind it an enormous needle poking into the gray sky.
“That’s the television tower,” said Noah’s dad, pointing to the needle, and he said a word that sounded like “Fairnzaytoorm.” “That’s what they call it, the Fernsehturm. I think you can go up in it to the top; there’s a restaurant or something.”
The needle was huge and unsettling, but Noah liked the great big complicated clock. It looked like something a mad scientist would stick in the middle of a square.
“Over here! Over here!” said Noah’s father with some delight.
It was turning out to be a very good day after all: he had found the supermarket.
Secret File #6
HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU
The Fernsehturm looked like a needle with a great big eyeball on it, staring at you, wherever you were. That made the name especially appropriate:
FERN
SEH
TURM
=
FAR-
SEEING
TOWER
The supermarket was decorated with blue-tiled zigzags along the top of its walls and had a sausage stand outside. The rain had stopped. Noah and his dad wolfed one sausage each while they were waiting in line for a little grocery cart.
Noah had never had to wait in line to go into a grocery store, but that was the way it was done here. He got stared at in that line. He thought at first maybe he was eating his sausage incorrectly, or maybe you weren’t supposed to eat sausages while you were waiting in line for grocery carts, but then his father said, “The kids your age are all in school today.”
Oh, right: school!
“So when do I start school?” asked Noah. The thought of school in this strange place was somewhat scary, but having to sit in that apartment all day trying not to break the Rules was almost scarier.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” said his father. “We’ve asked, of course. Your mother’s trying to get the scoop from the Ministry of Education.”
During this not-so-very-long conversation, the stares from all those other people in line got twice or maybe even three times as intense. Noah figured he could guess the reasons why:
• He was a child who should be in school.
• He was eating a sausage in the grocery cart line.
• He and his father were speaking English.
• And of course there was the Astonishing Stutter.
Noah had had a lot of practice not minding being stared at, however. At least these people didn’t have the cold, spiky eyes of policemen or border guards. They were just curious. Well, Noah was pretty curious, too!
At the moment, he was figuring out the system of the grocery store. He was very interested in figuring out systems. He had made a Hierarchical Flowchart of his fifth-grade class that showed all the layers of popularity and mobility in the class subgroups. The really popular kids, like Brian and Casey, who were also, although this might be a random variable, tall (Noah was fully aware that he probably noticed their height because he himself was so short), were listed in a cluster at the top of the chart. Then there were the groups of sporty kids and nerdy kids and the ones who were hangers-on and desperately wanted to move up the chart and the wacko smart kids with Astonishing Stutters, who sometimes hung out with one group and sometimes with another: they were what you might call free-floating, like certain electrons.
That last group was pretty small. In fact, it was a set with only one actual member: the kid who used to be known as Noah.
Noah sighed. It made his heart hurt a little, thinking about his class back in Virginia. Stop that! he told himself, and he went back to noticing everything.
Anyway, the system followed by this grocery store was apparently that you waited outside for your cart and looked at the stands nearby. If you did not have a canvas shopping bag on you, perhaps because you had just arrived from America, you might well do what Noah’s father did, and dart over to the stand that sold shopping bags, returning very soon to rejoin your son in the shopping-cart line. And meanwhile, if you were that son, you made a ranked list in your head of all the different things sold in those stands. Cabbage and potatoes ranked low.
The best stand outside the supermarket, according to Noah’s mental list, sold little doughnuts that trundled along a mechanized gangplank from the frying vat to the sugar-covered cooling board.
“On the way out,” said his dad, following Noah’s eyes. “I agree.”
The closest stand sold two — exactly and only two — different kinds of cheese.
Near the entrance to the grocery store was a counter where people coming out wrapped their groceries in sheets of gray-brown paper. And then those people would put their wrapped groceries into their shopping bag and hand off their grocery cart to someone going into the store.
What was the store like? It was like a clever copy of any grocery store in Virginia. It had aisles and shelves like any grocery store, and fluorescent lights and containers of food with pictures on the outside, just like a store back home. But if you looked closely, you began to see the differences.
For one thing, the lights weren’t very bright. It was dimmer here than in the shiny American stores Noah was used to, and the vegetables were limited to the not-very-colorful kinds, like potatoes and onions and cauliflower. Everything for sale in that supermarket looked edible, looked perfectly okay, looked fine, but at the same time somehow managed to look like a rough copy of the things for sale in the supermarkets of Virginia. There were pictures on the cartons, sure, but the pictures were all a little indistinct, a little fuzzy.
Noah and his father bought a box with a blurry picture of crumb cake on its cover. And rice. And a slightly dreary-looking cauliflower. And a carton of eggs. And milk in a blue-and-white-checked cardboard pyramid.
A pyramid! Full of milk!
“That’s about the strangest bit of packaging I’ve ever seen,” said Noah’s dad. “Well, all right. There must be some good reason for putting milk in pyramids.”
He and Noah looked at each other, and Noah’s dad shrugged. They had no idea.
It was time to scoot home and make their party offering, anyway.
“What’s it going to be?” said Noah’s father.
Noah looked at the ingredients in their canvas bag and couldn’t guess. There wasn’t anything there that looked particularly party-like. Nothing fancy. But Noah’s father snapped his fingers. He always, always could come up with an idea about dinner.
“Fried rice!” say Noah’s father, obviously quite delighted with himself. “Curried fried rice. We can use some of our curry powder. It will be tasty!”
When Noah’s mother came through the door later that afternoon, she looked quite surprised to find the rest of her family filling the apartment with the smell of curry powder and cooking oil.
“What’s this?” she said. “You know they’re sending someone to pick us up in half an hour.”
“Food for the party!” said Noah’s father. “Party food!”
“I’m not sure people bring fried curry rice to parties in East Berlin,” said Noah’s mother. “In fact, I’m pretty sure they don’t.”
“They do now!” said Noah’s father, and then they had to rush to get ready, which basically meant putting clean shirts on and combing their hair and, in Noah’s case, popping his Alice book into his backpack so that he would have something to read while the grown-ups sat around and talked.
“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.
