by Anne Nesbet
“Frau März!” said Noah’s mother. “I’m so sorry to bother you! I heard you were sick —”
“You should not be here,” said Frau März, but she said it not in an angry way, or not only in an angry way, but with flat despair as well.
Noah shrank farther behind his mother.
“And bringing the boy,” said Frau März. “Bringing the boy. What do they know, at that age?”
“I’m so sorry,” said Noah’s mother. “I just wanted to say, if we can help — bring you soup, or take care of the child for you. Jonah said there was a child —”
“Yes, a child. The child is mine,” said Frau März, as if that were a very bitter thing indeed. “All mine now.”
And there was a strange whistling sound from a little farther down the hall, the faint sob of a shadow.
“If we can help . . .” said Noah’s mother, but you could tell she was beginning to feel they might be out of their depth. “Frau März, you have a fever, I think. You need rest. Let us take the child upstairs to our place for a while. She and Jonah can play, we’ll feed them supper, and you can rest.”
“Rest won’t help,” said Frau März. “Have you ever lost any children? My only daughter is gone.”
“Oh, no,” said Noah’s mother, and Noah could see the tremor of shock running through her. “Oh, I’m sorry. The child’s mother —”
“And her father,” said Frau März. “Mother and father. Car accident, in Hungary. They were on vacation.”
Cloud’s shadow fled down the hall and into a room.
“I am so very sorry,” said Noah’s mother. She put down her shopping sack and reached out as if to take Frau März’s hands, but those hands stayed put, on the frame of the door and on the doorknob, and there was no taking them. “Oh, I’m sorry. I had no idea. I wouldn’t have troubled you, but I thought you were ill and we might be of use. My husband will be very sorry, too, to hear this. If there is anything we can do, we would be glad to help. And the child —”
“Cloud,” said Noah in a whisper from behind her back, a whisper with a thousand stops and starts to it. He hadn’t meant to speak at all, but he wanted the shadow in the hall to have a name.
“Yes, Claudia,” said his mother. “Claudia is welcome upstairs, anytime you need some rest. Come now, Jonah.”
Frau März closed the door without saying any of the usual polite phrases: she just let go with her hands and it swung shut.
Noah had never seen his mother unable to speak, but for a moment, she just stood there, silent and still, in front of that door, her arms sagging.
Then she picked up the grocery bag and marched upstairs, with Noah behind her.
“The poor little girl,” she said to Noah’s father, many times over. And also, “The poor woman. She looked like she had been through the wars. They must have been holed up in that apartment for days, grieving. Think how awful.”
Noah’s father was if anything even more shaken by the news than his mother.
“We can’t do much, but I’ll certainly make them soup,” he said finally. “They may not have been eating properly. It was a good idea, offering to have the girl up here sometimes. Maybe she’ll rethink that. I’ll ask when I take the soup down.”
And Noah just felt that terrible awkwardness that blankets everything when bad things, really bad things, happen. At least his parents seemed to have some idea of what to do. But Noah could do nothing. He thought about what it would mean to have your parents swallowed up by something horrible like a car accident, and his mind went numb.
It was like being a changeling.
It was like being dragged from one world into another, different one, where everything was colder and lonelier.
Two months ago, he wouldn’t have been able even to imagine it.
But now, changeling that he was, and having lost some things — like his birthday, his name, and Oasis, Virginia — he could feel a flicker, only a flicker, of what it might mean to lose everything, and it made him feel sick inside, as if the ground under his feet had gone all wobbly.
His father chopped meat and vegetables, simmered things in the apartment’s largest pot, and then, when it was ready, hours later, went with Noah’s mother downstairs to deliver supper. Thank goodness neither of them suggested Noah should come along. The terrible awkwardness made him want to hide up here, out of view of Frau März and the Cloud shadow.
He sat at the table, looking at books, hoping his parents would forget to ask about Cloud coming upstairs with them for a visit, and of course feeling bad about wishing for something so selfish and immature.
But when he looked up from the table, there they were in the doorway: his mother, his father, and the thin, pale, indoors version of Cloud-Claudia, her eyes like shadows hiding down a long, dark hall.
Secret File #11
HUNGARY
Hungary — Ungarn — where Claudia’s parents had gone on vacation, was another country, on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, like Czechoslovakia and Romania and Bulgaria and Poland. Those were the places East German tourists could go on vacation, and there were interesting things to see and do in all of them. (If you were an East German tourist who wanted to go to, say, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, or any other country on the western side of the Iron Curtain — including, of course, West Germany — you were almost certainly out of luck. The East German government was afraid that something bad might happen to you if you visited the West — you might, for instance, decide not to come back. Not only would that set a bad example for other East Germans, but the money the government had spent on your education would have been wasted before you had finished helping make East Germany a better place to live.) Anyway, that is why Cloud-Claudia’s parents had ended up in Hungary: it wasn’t just a really beautiful and interesting place; it was a place they were allowed to go.
Hungary is well worth visiting. It has great food, including the famous goulash, and the capital, Budapest, has a huge river running through it called the Danube. Claudia had wanted to go to Hungary with her parents for their vacation. She had wanted, of course, to eat goulash with them and listen to Hungarian musicians play the violin and hear the strange sounds of the Hungarian language, which is quite unlike most other European languages. And see the Danube River! Claudia had very much wanted to see the Danube. But she had come down with a badly timed case of bronchitis and couldn’t go with her parents after all. Had been packed off to stay with her grandmother. Poor Claudia!
That gave Noah a funny feeling when he thought about it: if Claudia hadn’t been a little sick, if they hadn’t left her behind — which had made her feel so bad at the time — then would she have been in the car, too? She also wouldn’t be alive anymore? But she seemed so very much alive to Noah now. It was a thought that made him squirm to get away from it. People who are so alive shouldn’t just die. They shouldn’t just vanish.
But, of course, it happens all the time.
When Cloud-Claudia was shepherded in through the door by Noah’s parents, Noah’s first, heartfelt, shameful reaction was to wish he could run away and hide. What could he say to her that wouldn’t be stupid? He had never known anyone who had lost her parents in a car accident.
“Hallo,” he said, looking mostly at his parents’ shoes.
“Claudia’s having supper with us and staying a little while,” said his mother firmly. “You two go look at books or something in the living room while your dad and I get supper finished. Or do a puzzle. Here, have some cookies to tide you over.”
“Okay,” said Noah, and then he found enough courage to raise his head and look at Cloud-Claudia.
She had her mouth scrunched tight and her chin pointing forward. You could tell she was trying to be so haughty and grand that no one would dare make fun of her or pity her too much. Or pat her on her bristly blond head.
“Come in,” he said to Claudia, and he pointed to the coffee table in the living room. They had to move the three coffee-table books, the big one filled with GD
R photographs, and the other two, about mythology and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, but Claudia started looking at the Bosch paintings, her fingers trembling.
“Pictures of other places,” she said. They were worlds filled with demons and goblins and strange tormented creatures. The worlds were beautiful and dreadful and interesting, all at once.
“Yes,” said Noah. “Not ours, though.”
She stared at them for a long time and then pushed the book away.
Noah took one of the cookies — Hansa Keks, said the box — and nibbled it, so that it would seem normal for him not to be talking. The cookie wasn’t bad; it tingled in the mouth a little with the suggestion of molasses.
Not knowing what else to do, he took a puzzle, which his parents had brought all the way from Virginia, and dumped the pieces out onto the table. It was a puzzle made from an old painting of the Tower of Babel, which turned out to be a good subject for a jigsaw puzzle, because of all the little people laying bricks or climbing up ramps or greeting the ships bringing more supplies for the tower, which was rising splendidly into the heavens. Every inch of that jigsaw puzzle contained a whole story, a whole world, in miniature, and that makes for a satisfying puzzle — unless you’re the type of person who loves pure white puzzles with a million pieces and no picture at all. There are such people.
Noah got to work. He desperately wanted to be putting little pieces together, bit by bit. After a few minutes, Cloud-Claudia leaned forward in her chair and started helping him. They didn’t talk. They just sorted pieces that had one straight edge over to the sides and started putting together the most obvious sections of the frame, like the part where the ships coming into the harbor had long masts that ran as thin lines from piece to piece, or the rooftops of the distant town on the left-hand side.
At dinner the fact that Cloud-Claudia wasn’t speaking became more obvious. She moved spoonfuls of soup from the bowl to her mouth with a kind of dogged determination. Noah wasn’t going to say anything, faced with that degree of not-wanting-to-talk, but at a certain point his mother put down her spoon and said, just to make a dent in that silence, “What, Claudia, is your favorite subject in school?”
Cloud-Claudia froze, her spoon hovering just a millimeter above the surface of the soup.
“None,” she said. In German that word has extra edges: keines. It bristled. It wanted everyone at the table to back off and stay away. Underneath the bristles, Noah could tell, lurked a squishy heap of misery.
Noah’s mother was not the sort of person to be frightened of bristles, though.
“Outside of school, maybe? There must be something you especially like to do.”
Cloud-Claudia put down her spoon.
“I like to be asleep in a tent when it’s raining,” she said.
“Oh,” said Noah and his parents, a quiet chorus of ohs. They put down their spoons, too. That silence was different from the one that had come before it. It was warmer. With fewer prickles. You didn’t want to interrupt it, but you didn’t want the warmth to wear off, unappreciated, either.
“I like a roof overhead, myself,” said Noah’s father after a moment. “Less wet and less chilly.”
“No,” said Cloud-Claudia with conviction. She was looking at her soup, and the words started to spill out of her, fast and quiet, first a trickle, and then a soft torrent of them: “A tent is the best, if it isn’t leaking. If there are blankets and you have spent the whole day climbing up the crazy rock castles by the Elbe River and stopping to draw pictures of them because you can’t imagine how much they look like magicians carved them and then later you eat sausages and crawl into the tent and have the every-evening picture-judging contest to see who drew the best rocks that day, which is not a fair contest says Papa, because his pictures are photographs so he can’t show them to us yet and ours always win, Mama’s drawings and mine, but that’s how it goes and you sing one more hiking song and then roll up in the blankets to sleep better and if then the rain comes, but not all at once, just pat-pitter-pat like it’s whispering something, then that’s the best.”
It was the longest group of words any of them had ever heard Cloud-Claudia say. They all tried not to gape at her. There was a lot of friendly staring at spoons.
“Yes,” said Noah’s father finally. “Oh, yes. I see your point. It sounds lovely.”
“Last summer my stupid lungs were all fine, one hundred percent super, and we went to the Little Switzerland in Saxony,” said Cloud-Claudia. “That’s when I found out what I like doing most: I like climbing rocks, and drawing things, and sleeping in tents. There. It was wonderful, until the tent started leaking.”
There was a pause.
“It’s so stupid. Nothing ever lasts. The tent always leaks,” she said, all fierce again, and then she sprang up from the table as if it had bitten her or something and went back to the jigsaw puzzle in the other room, and worked with Noah in silence for another half hour, until they had the whole frame put together, the top and the bottom and both sides, something to hold a small part of the chaos of the universe at bay, like a tent built well enough not to leak.
Secret File #12
A TIP FOR UNSPEAKABLY TERRIBLE TIMES
Working on jigsaw puzzles together is the perfect way to spend otherwise awkward hours, or to bridge the kinds of silences that rise up when something literally unspeakably horrible has happened: so bad that you don’t know what to say. It is much more comfortable to have a project that keeps your hands busy. Best of all, something you can do together. So: cooking, making quilts, building something, jigsaw puzzles.
I hope nothing unspeakably terrible ever happens to you or to people you love. But if it does, remember about puzzles.
Cloud-Claudia came back the next day, with a ragged envelope in her hands. She pulled a bunch of black-and-white photographs out of it and slapped them down on the coffee table, on top of the puzzle pieces.
“See?” she said, as if she was defying Noah to say there hadn’t been actual photographs in that envelope.
There was a miraculous tower of wild rock, like one of those tall, bulbous mountains in a Chinese scroll, and there was Cloud-Claudia holding on to the sides of a rickety-looking iron bridge that seemed to run between boulders. And then came a picture of a light-haired woman with her arms around Cloud-Claudia in front of a landscape that was all hills and rocks and trees, two smiles that crooked up at the right side of the mouth with the same question mark of a dimple, one large and one small.
And another photo of a picnic next to some bicycles: that must have been from some other trip. And a very young Cloud-Claudia, her hair a puff of brightness, feeding the ducks in a lake. And then a blurry one of a man with a shadow across his eyes, looking up from a book.
“My mother took that,” said Cloud-Claudia. “Because it’s not fair, she says, if all the pictures are of the people who don’t know about cameras.”
“No,” said Noah, agreeing.
It was hard to make himself remember that the people in these photographs were now really truly gone from the world — the people, that is, who were not Cloud-Claudia, who was very much right here right now, and trembling slightly as she put the photos back into their envelope.
“So that’s it,” she said, like a drawer slipping shut, when the photos had gone away. What else was there to say?
The puzzle was still waiting there, where the photos had been.
So they worked on that puzzle some more.
Certain people like to do jigsaw puzzles by sorting pieces out by shape. Others like to sort by color and picture — all the sky pieces over here, all the pieces with little people quarrying blocks of marble over there. Both Noah and Cloud-Claudia belonged to the latter category. Noah liked also to take a piece, any piece, and then study it and the picture on the box until he found just that particular splotch of white with a little yellow dot in the corner. Perhaps this was cheating, but every time he figured out where a particular piece belonged, he felt like order was being
made in his soul. A little, tiny, puzzle-piece-size bit of order.
They weren’t completely silent this time. Sometimes Claudia commented on what the little people in the picture were doing, and sometimes Noah said something. They understood each other better and better. It always helps to have a picture to point to.
For example, Noah pointed to the tippy-top of the tower (on the cover of the puzzle box — they weren’t yet far enough along with the puzzle itself to be examining the tops of any towers), where the narrow circle of those uppermost walls vanished for a moment behind a small white cloud, as a way to point out how high that tower was already getting.
“Cloud!” he said in English. “Like you! Cloud-Claudia.”
“I am a cloud?” said Cloud-Claudia. First she used the German word, Wolke, which sounds like “vol-keh,” because German w’s all sound like v’s. Then she tried out the English word, which came out sounding extremely German. Extremely like her own name — which, of course, it was.
That made her smile and reach for the mythology book, with all its lavish illustrations.
“And I saw you in here yesterday,” she said.
Cloud-Claudia must have been just about the first person ever to look carefully at that particular book. (Noah’s father liked to say the decorator probably chose it just because its cover matched the gold-tone carpet, and because it had so much heft. “Heft is a good thing in a book!” he had said. “That’s what I want my mink-farming novel to have: heft!” So Noah thought he’d better ask what “heft” meant. “Solid bones,” his father had said. “Strong plot, tricky characters, and enough pages that when you pick it up to throw it at the wall, you pretty much need both hands.”)
