by Anne Nesbet
That’s why East Germans noticed so keenly when Hungary seemed to vanish from the tourism posters.
It might mean nothing.
Or it might mean that the government was deciding otherwise. . . .
It’s not just people who change their names and put on disguises, Noah was learning. Towns do it, too. On the way to Hungary, Noah and his parents spent a day in the Czech city of Karlovy Vary, which — as Noah’s dad explained as they walked to dinner — used to be a German-speaking town called Karlsbad. Before the Second World War, it had been the sort of place where people went to spend time in spas, to sit in steaming baths and pools. It was the closest city outside Germany to both East Germany and West Germany, so there were a lot of Germans there, people separated by the Wall getting together for a few days for a visit, for news from home, for romance, for long discussions in which somebody would plead with some other body to please, please, please come over the Wall and join them on the other side. Noah’s family got into a cheerful conversation with some of those Germans — the West German kind, sitting over there at the next table, since it wouldn’t be safe for the East German Germans to chat so freely with foreigners. The biggest German guy at that table laughed and said there was a nickname for the city of Karlovy Vary: “The Czech Center for German-German Relations.”
At that point in their trip they were playing a game, thought up by Noah’s parents: they were pretending to be American tourists.
“But I don’t get it,” Noah had said. “How can we pretend to be what we are?”
“First of all, people are always pretending to be what they are,” said his father. “That’s basically a philosophical question. Part of being something is pretending to be it. When you were born, I felt like I was pretending to be a father. But I kept changing diapers and rocking you to sleep and feeding you, like a real father, and one day it didn’t feel so much like I was just pretending. Haven’t you ever had that feeling?”
“Well, duh!” said Noah the wallfish, who had spent the past three months pretending his name was Jonah, which perhaps it really was, and years before that pretending to be a normal elementary school student, when he hadn’t been sure that that was true at all. But that seemed different from letting people think they had just flown into Eastern Europe from the United States somewhere for a summertime tour.
Then they got to Budapest, in Hungary, and the game changed all over again.
“This seems a good place for us all to be inconspicuous for a few days,” said his mother.
“So you can do research,” said Noah, “into the bad magic that causes car accidents!”
“Who said anything about research?” said his mother. “We’re here on vacation.”
The curtains were tightly closed in her eyes. Not a chink of light was showing. Noah decided to hope anyway.
“So, inconspicuous!” said Noah’s father. “Inconspicuous means not looking American.” He smiled a little when he said that, but the look he and Noah’s mother shared was serious.
“How do we do that?” said Noah.
“We keep quiet,” said his mother. “And when we talk, we’re careful to talk only in German.”
It looked to Noah like he might not be doing very much talking of any kind here in Hungary. But at least they were somewhere new!
“Think of it this way,” said his father. “It’s an exciting time. There’s a tang in the air — can you smell it? Can you?”
“More coal?” said Noah, but his father shook his head.
“No! Not coal!” he said. “History! There’s just the slightest taste of history in the air! It’s wild! It’s like that tingle all around while the clouds are gathering and the sky’s beginning to churn itself into a fever and you just know a storm’s on its way — history! And not everybody gets to be right in the thick of actual history. Mostly history happens over there in a slightly different part of the world, or you miss it by a decade or a century. But we just maybe are going to be able to nose out actual history our very own selves. Keep sniffing the air; that’s what I’m saying!”
He demonstrated, his nose testing the atmosphere of Budapest, the breezes coming from the west, the east, the end of the block . . .
“You have lost your last marbles,” said Noah’s mother, but she was grinning. “Hmm! Sniff whatever you want — but a little more inconspicuously, would you mind? Not like a noisy horse hoping for sugar cubes.”
“Don’t you worry,” said Noah’s father. “We’ll sniff tactfully, won’t we, Jonah? We’ll be inconspicuous little East German tourists all day long, as quiet as mice and twice as shadowy.”
Despite their having to be mice, Noah liked Budapest very much. It was a city with big grand sights, domed monuments, imposing statues on tall columns, and a very wide river crossed by an impressive bridge. He liked the food, too.
But when he looked up at the clouds in the sky, drifting freely from east to west, he remembered all over again that this was the country where Cloud-Claudia’s parents had smashed up their car. And died. What was Cloud-Claudia doing this week, while Noah and his parents were eating goulash and going to museums? Was the evil Frau März well again? Was she still keeping Cloud prisoner, or now that dangerous Noah was gone for a few days, was she freer to go out to the non-park and maybe draw more whales?
Then he remembered the paper that had been on Frau März’s desk when she had fainted. He looked over that letter with his inside eye, and this time he noticed the date, which was early July. Then he tried to make sense of the endlessly long German words there. It was amazing to him that he could remember a bunch of words that he didn’t even understand, but he could. It was the picture of the words his brain held on to — every little stroke of every letter. Now and then he would try one of those words out on his parents:
“What does Er-zieh-ungs-recht mean?”
“Like custody rights,” said his dad.
“How about words with the letters h-a-f-t in them?” he asked.
“Has to do with prison. Have you been reading something strange?”
Stranger than strange, yes! Suddenly even the squiggle at the bottom of the page came together in Noah’s brain, and he recognized it as a signature: a name. Matthias Bauer.
Noah shivered. That was Cloud’s father, who had died in Hungary.
So it made no sense, did it, that his signature should appear on something that looked like a document about custody, dated (Noah shivered again) just about a month ago, but after that horrible day when they had learned about the car accident.
How could Cloud’s father be signing things if he wasn’t even alive?
His mother ran some errands that first day in Budapest — though to Noah’s disappointment those errands seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with car accidents or bad magic. Noah’s mother reported that there were hundreds of East Germans camped outside the West German embassy.
“Families with kids — tents — imagine!” said his mother. “That’s because of the possibly leaky border. They’re just going to wait until something happens.”
Noah’s father sniffed the air and gave Noah a significant look.
“What about Cloud-Claudia’s parents?” said Noah, impatient with all this irrelevant stuff. “When are you going to find out the truth about them?”
“Hold your horses,” said his mother. “This is vacation, remember? I’ve got another idea: Would you lovely people perhaps be interested in a picnic?”
“A picnic?” said Noah.
He was staring as hard as he could at his mother, but her expression gave absolutely nothing away.
“A very large picnic,” said his mother. “A large and special one. It will be fun and exciting — though a long day for you, I’m afraid. Sorry about that. It’s quite far away. Out in the country.”
Noah tried to be as sneaky in his thinking as his mother always was.
“Out in the country where car accidents sometimes happen?”
And he did think — just maybe �
�� that he saw a tiny quick shard of pride light up her eyes. But then the curtains went back down.
“And that’s about the end of questions from you, young fellow,” said Noah’s mother with a quick grin. “Back to being inconspicuous.”
“Not American,” said Noah.
“Right,” said his mother. “Tourists from East Germany, that’s who we are. Can you handle that, Jonah?”
“Technically not a lie,” Noah’s father pointed out.
“True,” said his mother. “But anyway, this picnic is way out in Sopron,” she said. “The Pan-European Picnic, that’s what they’re calling it.”
“History?” said Noah’s father, and he sniffed the air once or twice.
“Maybe so,” said Noah’s mother. “In any case, Jonah, Advanced Rules will apply. In fact, I kind of think you perhaps shouldn’t talk at all. And you” — she was waving a finger at Noah’s dad now —“should not sniff !”
Noah’s father just laughed at that.
Secret File #18
ACTING AND BORDERS
It wasn’t just Noah and his family who sometimes had to pretend to be what they actually were. All the German-German couples meeting in Karlovy Vary were pretending to be two people in love, on vacation in Czechoslovakia. And they were that. But they were also sneaking around the edges of the law. The one coming from East Germany would be careful not to bring much luggage, in order to look as much as possible like someone who wasn’t considering leaving the country. And much of the time he or she wouldn’t be thinking of leaving the country. But by the time a border agent has gone through all of your stuff three times and asked you five million times, Why are you going to Czechoslovakia? Whom will you meet there? Are you planning to attempt an illegal exit from the German Democratic Republic? — you feel like someone who is breaking the law. Even if you aren’t. And it feels more and more like just being who you are means actually playing a role, wearing masks, spying and sneaking and hiding something.
This is true even for people who aren’t crossing borders or dealing with police. Many people in middle school, for instance, are pretending to be who they actually are. A lot of bad acting is involved. That goes on way beyond middle school, because being human means sometimes feeling awkward in our skins — like we really should have learned our lines better, if only someone had shown us the script, but somehow here we are on stage, and we don’t remember ever having seen whatever the words are we’re supposed to be about to say.
It was promising to be a warm, warm August day, perfect for a picnic, but only just promising, because the sun was still busy rising when the man with the car came around to the hotel to pick them up.
They had to leave Budapest very early in the morning to get all the way to the picnic Noah’s mother had heard about, two-hundred-something kilometers to the west. Hungary is one of those sideways-lying countries in the middle of Europe, so distances are farther from east to west than from north to south. All Noah knew was that it was going to be a long, long drive.
A long, long, quiet drive, if you were Noah. He was under strict orders not to say anything. “Advanced Rules”! That meant being part of a very small audience watching his parents give their perfect performance as a pair of visitors from the German Democratic Republic — a pair of visitors with a silent child. They had even brought appropriate costumes along: items of clothing that looked — he had to admit — almost plausibly like something you’d see on the streets of East Berlin. A tracksuit for Noah. A blouse for his mother. Different shoes all around. And then they kind of ran their hands through their hair, and it looked more German, too.
Noah was impressed. Not just by the costumes, but by the way his parents talked to the driver: in absolutely perfect German. Of course he knew they could speak German, but all this time they had been living in East Berlin, Noah had never heard his parents sound like that, like actual genuine Germans. That was strange, thought Noah. That meant — and this was the really strange part — that meant they must have been holding back their German in Berlin. Talking more like Americans than they actually needed to. So were they acting there or acting here? Or acting, acting everywhere? It’s an odd feeling, when you realize there are all these corners to your parents that you’ve never been allowed to peek into. That you didn’t even know existed.
“Don’t you look comfortable and cozy back there!” said his mother in absolutely perfect East German German. She was sitting up front with the driver.
The driver — the only other member of the audience, though of course he didn’t know his car had just been turned into a theater — seemed reasonably all right, as people go: he had smiled at Noah and patted him on the head. The smile was nice, but being patted on the head is just like someone yelling right in your face: You are small for your age and I have mistakenly assumed you must still be a very young child! So Noah didn’t care for that, but he remembered to stay quiet.
In the actually not-so-terribly-comfortable backseat of the car, next to his father, Noah spent a few hours watching fields and fields of grain go by the windows. He stopped worrying about how well his parents spoke German and went back to thinking about Cloud-Claudia. Her parents. The mystery of what had happened to them. The letter that had apparently made Cloud-Claudia’s grandmother faint. One short word stuck out in his memory now, like a traffic sign: Haft. The word that his parents had said meant “prison.”
Prison? he found himself thinking. Really? That letter had something to do with prison?
Prison and horrible car crashes and bad magic all tangled themselves together in his brain.
They did not get into any accidents themselves. He was glad about that.
“It’s a pretty town, Sopron,” said the driver at one point to his parents. “You should go back sometime and see it properly. Nice square in the middle. Nice church with a pretty tower. Don’t want to stop on your way to the village?”
“Not this time, thank you,” said Noah’s mother in that scarily German German.
They were headed for a village in the middle of nowhere.
No, farther than that — they were headed for a field on a rolling hillside outside a village in the middle of nowhere.
“You know what’s over there?” said his mother in German, but before there was any danger of Noah forgetting the Rules and replying, she supplied the answer: Österreich. Austria.
They had driven so far west that they were now in a part of Hungary stretching right into Austria, like a finger poking at a mound of dough.
And here’s the really peculiar thing about this field in the middle of nowhere: it was absolutely filled with people. Picnics are something you do with a few people — your family, maybe, plus a couple of friends. Or at most your whole class from school. But in this pretty place, a field amid rolling hills and green, green trees, hundreds and hundreds of people — maybe even a thousand people — were milling about. Many of them, maybe most of them, were speaking German. They were flushed with excitement, talking in quick low voices among themselves. There were lots of other families with kids, and some people with little suitcases.
“This is the Pan-European Picnic!” said Noah’s mother from up front, seeming quite delighted. “They were distributing leaflets about it in Budapest, to all the people holed up around the West German embassy: ‘Pan-European Picnic in Sopron, at the Site of the Iron Curtain,’ that’s what the posters said. Right at the border here, both sides working together, Austrian and Hungarian. It’s quite an adventure. They’re going to open the border station itself for a few hours, so that the picnickers can mingle properly.”
None of this sounded at all like a picnic in the usual sense. Weren’t picnics about a family and a few friends and Frisbees, and spreading a tablecloth out on the grass, and ants? What kind of picnic advertised itself on posters and took place at borders? He opened his mouth, about to explode into the word WHY —
“Well, now, look at all those cars parked over there!” said his father just in time. Noah rem
embered he wasn’t supposed to say a single thing and swallowed that why, at least for now.
They got out of the car and stretched. There were people setting up grills for barbecuing food in the field — that much was picnic-like.
But one thing Noah noticed right away about the crowds was that they were more German than Hungarian, and they were more excited than people usually ever are about picnics.
It was pretty clear that the grilled food wasn’t the main thing for them at all. It would have been a very long way to come for a bite of sausage, out here in this westernmost cranny of Hungary!
A couple of boys his age ran by, walloping each other with handfuls of grass and laughing. All the kids! Noah couldn’t help himself: he grinned as wide as Humpty Dumpty. One freckled boy must have caught that grin because he echoed it and cried out, “Come along, slowpoke” in German, and before the cautious, practical side of Noah’s brain had any chance to sit down and consider its options, Noah was already running across the field, chasing the boys who were chasing one another — and now him. It was so great to be running! He felt like an animal that had finally gotten free from the zoo, released from bars and guard ditches and let loose on the grassy savanna!
His mother had said something when he had taken off, but Noah couldn’t even make his feet stop long enough to listen to it. Anyway, he was pretty sure he knew what she must have been meaning with whatever she said: Be careful! Be cautious! Remember the Rules!
But he thought he’d heard his father begin one of his chuckles just as Noah began running, so he didn’t worry too terribly much. Let his parents scout around in their parental way! For once Noah was just going to be a kid.
It was a glorious hour. He tore up and down the field and ate a sausage in a bun that some smiling person handed him at one point. And all that time, he even managed to stick pretty closely to the Rules — because it’s normal for a kid to nod and mumble when his mouth is full of sausage. And it’s also normal to tear around a grassy field without talking all that much.
