Cloud and Wallfish

by Anne Nesbet

  He liked the idea of being a border fish, a wallfish, a stone creature swimming through stone.

  And the next day when he was wandering around the fence of the non-park, he found a small picture of a whale drawn in chalk on the bottom of the wooden fence, and that made him very glad indeed.

  His message had gotten through, apparently.

  That afternoon he put another cloud up in the window of his room. He began to think about making some actual cloud mobiles. He was getting ambitious!

  The next day there were a few tiny scraps of whale-shaped paper on the apartment stairs. He scooped them up and took them safely home in his hands.

  Cloud-Claudia was like a ghost haunting his steps. He kept finding little traces of her, in chalk or as whale-shaped pieces of paper, but she herself was absent.

  Secret File #16

  THE ZOO AND THE ZOO

  Berlin had two zoos. The old Berlin Zoological Garden, in the western part of the city and founded long, long ago in 1844, was one of the most famous zoos in Europe. Sometimes a tourist might lean a little far over the railing of the crocodile pit in the old, old reptile house of the Berlin Zoo, and those crocodiles would simply explode into action. See all the humans jump back! East Germany needed a zoo of its own, though, so in 1955 they built what was for the time a very large and modern zoo on the eastern side of the city.

  One of the features of the East Berlin zoo was that many of the animals wandered across large fields and meadows.

  “No cages!” said Noah, amazed, when they went there for the first time.

  But then he looked closer, and he saw that there were clever ditches dug into the ground, as effective as walls of bars. The animals weren’t free, not really. They just looked free.

  “When you look at it this way,” said Noah’s father, eyeing those ditches, “you see that freedom is a tricky, tricky thing.”

  He said it very quietly, though, so that no one but Noah could hear.

  August weighed heavily on Berlin. Everyone, not just Noah, who was now stuck on one side of his building’s horizontal Wall, was anxious and tense. Noah wished he had thought more about codes before coming to this country. Morse code, for instance . . . the basic code of wall-tappers! But even if he had known Morse code, Cloud-Claudia wouldn’t have had a clue, and what’s the point of a message that can’t be read? On top of all that, tapping wasn’t a safe activity, not for Cloud-Claudia, anyway, who must have been standing on her bed with a chair or a broom in her hands — risking Frau März’s wrath every minute.

  It wasn’t just Noah feeling blocked and worried. His parents were quieter indoors — which was a sign of having things to say that could not be said inside, because of the Rules — and more puzzling and cryptic in their comments to each other when walking outside with Noah, though they kept the smiles of a happy family outing on their faces. They were both working very hard over their notebooks, his mother sorting through her research notes, and his father giggling occasionally as he heaped up clues for his mink-farming, jam-making sleuth. Noah, who wasn’t writing a novel or a thesis, was lonely and bored.

  Without really meaning to, he finished the Tower of Babel puzzle. He had been putting in a piece here or there but no more than that, trying hard to save the puzzle for Cloud-Claudia, but she still wasn’t allowed to come over, so eventually, no matter how slowly Noah worked, he found himself putting the last two pieces into place.

  Then he said to his parents, “That’s it. I can’t spend one single more day doing absolutely nothing. Don’t we get to go on vacation? You’ve been working hard. It’s summertime. I know where I want to go.”

  He had been thinking this over for a while.

  “Where’s that?” said his parents.

  “Hungary,” he said.

  The parents looked at each other, changed the subject, and eventually moved that whole conversation outside, where the evening was warm and humid.

  “There’s a word for what you have,” said his mother, poking him. “I just learned it from someone here. You have a case of Fernweh.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Guess you’d translate it as farsickness. You want to travel. So does just about everyone in East Berlin. They want to go to places they can’t.”

  “We can go somewhere, though,” said Noah. “Can’t we? Let’s go to Hungary. We can find out what really happened.”

  “What do you mean, what really happened?” asked his father.

  “To Cloud-Claudia’s parents. Remember? She said her grandmother’s been hiding something. We can go to Hungary and find out the truth.”

  His parents exchanged another significant glance. This one had several layers to it.

  “Hungary’s a big place,” said his mother. “I’m sure car accidents happen there all the time.”

  “You’ll ask people and find something out,” said Noah. He had absolute confidence in his mother’s ability to find things out.

  “I’m curious about Hungary myself,” said Noah’s father, but there was something teasing in his voice that Noah didn’t quite understand. “Goulash and so on. Wild music. The fading border —”

  “Right,” said Noah’s mother, picking up the pace of her quick, determined feet. “Goulash.”

  “Wait!” said Noah. “What do you mean? How can a border fade?”

  His father sighed. “Hungary’s on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain; Austria’s on the west, right? They’re like next-door neighbors with a great big fence between them. But Hungary’s new government doesn’t seem to want to be shooting people trying to leave anymore. In fact, the leader of Hungary and the leader of Austria had a nice little ceremony where they snipped through some of that barbed wire at the border!”

  “Unclear what it all means,” said Noah’s mother with a carefree smile. “But people are full of talk about it, that’s for sure. Someone I know said, ‘Maybe we could even sneak across the Hungarian border into Vienna for breakfast and back again without anyone noticing. Breakfast in Vienna! I hear they have fantastic pastries.’”

  “Really?” said Noah.

  “Really could one sneak across the border or really do the Viennese make fantastic pastries?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, Vienna’s famous for its strudels; that’s a fact. The rest is less certain. The same person told me how she and her husband had been traveling in Hungary last summer, and there was a point on the road when a sign had said cruelly, ‘A hundred and fifty kilometers to Vienna.’ And she said she’d looked over at her husband and said to him, ‘For you and for me, it will always be a hundred and fifty kilometers to Vienna.’ And some people even say they may close Hungary as a place to travel to if the border rumors are true. People here vacation in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, right? Those are places they are allowed to go. But have you been paying attention to the posters in the train station recently?”

  She leaned closer and picked some imaginary specks of dust off his shoulder.

  “Posters only mention Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. No Hungary. Now that’s the sort of thing that starts rumors.”

  The scary thing about Noah’s mother was that you always had the sense that if she had been put in charge of a land behind a wall, she would have run the place much more effectively than the people who were actually in power.

  “Well, I think we should go to Hungary,” said Noah stubbornly. “And ask questions and stuff.”

  “You’re not smiling,” said his mother, who, of course, was smiling, though not with her eyes. “And you need to be about four notches quieter; you know that.”

  Noah could see that his parents thought the discussion was over, but he wasn’t going to give up that easily. He spent the next few days working all conversations back to the question. Back to Hungary, where the truth about that awful car accident must be hiding. Inside, Noah talked about sightseeing and goulash and fiddle music. Outside, Noah made his case differently:

  “It would be a rese
arch trip,” he said. “About the kind of bad magic that causes car accidents.”

  “It’s not bad magic that causes car accidents,” said his mother. “It’s bad roads or bad tires or bad luck. You know that.” Noah tried so very hard to see what thoughts were lurking there behind those secret-holding eyes of hers, but the curtains — so to speak — were thick. Noah’s mother did not let her inmost thoughts slip into view.

  And then that very evening in the middle of dinner, someone came pounding at their door.

  “Cloud!” said Noah. He could tell from the quick patter of the fist against the door. It wasn’t a grown-up sound. It was the same language the back of the chair or the broomstick spoke when it tapped against the horizontal Wall at night — only this time, Cloud-Claudia’s taps were shouting, loud and worried.

  His mother had already shot his father a lightning-fast glance and was hurrying to open the door.

  Cloud-Claudia was standing there, shivering and pulling at the fingers of her right hand.

  “Quick!” she said. “My grandmother — something’s wrong — please come —”

  And she turned and ran back down the steps.

  “Oh, no,” said Noah’s mother. For a split second she stood frozen.

  They were supposed to stay away. Even Noah knew that. They had been told: Please stay away. But if Frau März was really sick or hurt. . . . You can’t stay away when your friend comes pounding on the door. Noah was already leaping down the stairs, following Cloud. Behind him he heard his mother speaking right into the air of their apartment, as if someone might be listening: “If you people are listening — I think they need help downstairs,” she was saying, every word in the crispest and clearest German. “Something has happened to Frau März. She may have fallen down. Please send help.”

  Talking directly to the people who had planted those bugs in the walls! Wild!

  But Noah didn’t have time to think about bugs, because they were already running into Cloud-Claudia’s apartment, which was exactly like Noah’s, except completely different in every way.

  All its furniture was older and darker than the furniture Noah’s family had upstairs. There were more books on the shelves — even the complete works of Lenin. The very air smelled different down here, as if Frau März used a different set of spices when she cooked. And in the larger bedroom, right under Noah’s parents’ room, Frau März was resting her head on a desk.

  No, not resting her head.

  “She fainted!” said Cloud. “I think she fainted! I heard a sound when her head hit the desk!”

  “Oh, no,” said Noah. He tried to be brave, since that’s what Cloud needed right now. He walked right up to Frau März, with her head flopped sideways on the desk, and said, “Um, Frau März! Hello! Wake up . . . please!”

  Though maybe when you have fainted, it’s not just a question of waking up, exactly?

  He put his hand right out and shook her shoulder. The sweater she was wearing felt rough under his hand.

  “Frau März!”

  Wait — did her eyes just blink? Yes!

  His relief was so great, he could feel his arms tremble. She was alive. Thank goodness, thank goodness, thank goodness.

  “Oma!” said Cloud with a gulp. “Oma, are you all right?”

  Frau März was pushing away from the desk. Noah could see that her head had been resting on a very official-looking paper of some kind, covered with the kind of typewriting that looks cold and unkind. Noah would ordinarily not be interested in a letter like that, but there, right in the middle there, staring up at him —

  “What is going on?” Cloud’s grandmother was saying, dazed. “Claudia, is that you?”

  “You fainted, Oma,” said Claudia with a little quaver in her voice. “Come lie down. We’ll help you.”

  — right in the middle of that sheet of paper was a word Noah knew well:

  CLAUDIA

  And before he had any time to think about right and wrong or privacy or ethics or any Rules, his brain powered right up and took a picture of that letter. Click.

  Not that he had time to examine that new brain-photo now. There was a commotion out by the apartment’s front door, and he heard his parents’ voices, arguing there with somebody. Several somebodies.

  “I’d better go,” said Noah.

  “Thank you, you Wallfish, for helping us,” said Cloud. “I was so scared — I couldn’t help thinking —”

  She did not seem to have noticed that paper.

  “I know. Me, too,” said Noah, and two men came into the room, men too dressed up to be doctors. Noah recognized one of them: the same young-looking man with glasses who had sent them away from this apartment a week before. They looked at Cloud’s grandmother and looked around the room, and one of them said to Noah, “Out with you, now. Quick. Don’t cause trouble, boy.”

  “He was just helping!” said Cloud. “She bumped her head, but he helped wake her up!”

  “Your parents are waiting,” said the man to Noah. “Time to go.”

  Noah and Cloud looked at each other, and their eyes said, What can we do?

  “Bye,” said Noah. In German the word is Tschüß, and it was a word the Astonishing Stutter turned into a whole complicated code in its own right.

  Claudia made her hands clap, almost as if they were just nervously clapping on their own:

  Tu-tap tu-tap.

  She was very clever, Cloud-Claudia.

  At the front door, Noah found a third man, who also didn’t look like a doctor, busy keeping Noah’s parents from coming inside.

  “Jonah!” said his dad. “Everything all right in there?”

  “You — don’t mix yourself into places you’re not wanted,” said the third man. “You must go up to your own apartment now, please. Keep in mind that it is a crime to harass official representatives of the German Democratic Republic.”

  The man with the glasses was in the hall now, too. He gave Noah and his parents a rather nasty smile and said, “Can’t you people keep from causing trouble? Go away for a few days. Let things settle. Take this boy of yours to Hungary, the way he wants. I hear the goulash is tasty this time of year.”

  “Just please tell me, is poor Frau März all right?” asked Noah’s mother.

  “She’s fine. Of course she’s fine. Lots of alarm here over nothing at all. She thanks you for your concern but asks you not to keep forcing your way into her apartment. Good-bye.”

  Noah and his parents slogged back upstairs. There was nothing they could say to each other and still be following the Rules.

  In particular, no one said, How did those men who didn’t look much like doctors know where Noah wanted to go on vacation?

  Because they knew precisely how those men had known that. Their little bugs hiding in the apartment walls had told them — were always telling them everything. It made Noah shiver, deep inside.

  There can, however, be a silver lining to having little bugs in the walls, listening greedily to everything you say. This time Noah could think of two silver linings:

  Silver Lining #1: His mother had been able to get help for Frau März merely by speaking into the air! Almost like magic!

  Silver Lining #2: Noah’s parents were people who knew how to take a hint. The men in their suits really, really wanted them to clear out of that apartment for a while. Maybe the little bugs in the walls needed cleaning. Well, then, all right!

  The next day the Browns — Sam, Linda, and Jonah Brown, of Roanoke, Virginia — packed a couple of little bags and went to Hungary on vacation after all.

  Secret File #17

  HAPPY HOLIDAYS ABROAD, DEAR CITIZENS!

  From the “Recreation and Leisure” chapter of The German Democratic Republic, a book published in 1981 by the government of the German Democratic Republic “to serve as an introduction in words and pictures to a country which, along with its allies and friends, has been following the path of peace and socialism for more than three decades”:

  All the year round,
the GDR travel agency arranges excursions to cultural centres and areas of great scenic beauty in the GDR and neighbouring socialist countries. . . . With every year that passes more and more GDR citizens are spending their holidays abroad. The travel agency offers more than 400,000 package tours annually to the most beautiful regions of other socialist countries.

  On November 30, 1988, the government modified its rules for travel in a “Decree on Trips Abroad by Citizens of the German Democratic Republic.” This decree was read very carefully by the citizens of the German Democratic Republic, you may be sure. They noted particularly Sections 6 and 7 of the decree:

  §6. Private trips to the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, the Korean Democratic People’s Republic, the Mongolian People’s Republic, the People’s Republic of Poland, the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Hungarian People’s Republic may take place without presenting particular justification — as long as it is not decided otherwise.

  §7. (1) Requests for permission for private trips to foreign countries other than those named in §6 may be submitted by grandparents, parents (including stepparents), children (including stepchildren), and siblings (including half-siblings) on the occasion of births, baptisms, naming ceremonies, school entrance celebrations, dedication ceremonies for young people, confirmations and first communions, civil marriage ceremonies and religious weddings, on the 50th, 55th, and 60th birthdays, as well as every birthday after the 60th, on the occasion of 25th, 50th, 60th, 65th, and 70th anniversaries of weddings or civil marriage; also in the case of life-threatening diseases, the need to care for another, as well as for deaths and burials.

  Just because you applied for permission to travel did not, of course, mean you could be sure such permission would be granted! In the summer of 1989, travel to the People’s Republics of Mongolia or Hungary was still infinitely easier than travel to a non-socialist country. But pay attention to those last words of §6: “as long as it is not decided otherwise.”