Cloud and Wallfish

by Anne Nesbet

  There were signs up in Hungarian, banners that looked like they belonged at a fair or a political parade. Noah couldn’t read those — Hungarian is a very difficult language, and Noah knew pretty much only how to say “hi” and “thank you”: “szia” and “köszönom,” which sounds something like “kursurnum.” (That was already bad enough, but “good-bye” was hopeless. Noah’s mother had written it out to show him: viszontlátásra. Really!)

  In any case, there was so much German being spoken amid all the Hungarian that Noah didn’t feel completely at sea. He sort of lost track of his parents for a while, and even that felt gloriously refreshing and freeing.

  And then the crowds began to move. There was a German guy who started talking pretty loudly to the adults in the group, and pointing at some line at the edge of the woods, and the boys who had been running around with Noah were called back to their families by anxious mothers. Noah couldn’t see his own parents, but he knew they were here somewhere. He wasn’t too worried.

  He stuck near one boy’s family — the kid who had freckles — and just trotted along up the hill after them, wondering where they were going and hoping, in the carefree spirit that the grassy freedom had made rise up in him, that maybe dessert might be involved. Wouldn’t an ice cream bar be the perfect thing right now? Warm summer day, after running around chasing people in a field for an hour? Not that he’d seen a lot of ice cream bars so far here in Hungary.

  He still had bits of grass in his hair! What a great, scratchy feeling. It was the opposite, the exact opposite, of having the cloying taste of coal smoke clogging up your lungs and making you cough.

  There were pretty little hills all around, a rolling green carpet of trees.

  “Three p.m. — they’re going to open the gate!”

  “For people with papers.”

  “Who cares? If it’s open, it’s open. Why not for us, too?”

  Up ahead the crowd had reached the end of the field, where there were a handful of Hungarian soldiers in uniform — white caps with dark visors, light shirts, darker pants, handguns on belts — guarding the fence. On the other side was Austria, as well as trees. This was the actual Iron Curtain itself, Noah realized. Though here it looked more like a fancy fence. The crowd looked at the fence and at the soldiers — and past them at the soldiers in different uniforms on the other side, the side with more trees. Austria.

  And over there a guard tower, a real one, like in a World War II movie.

  Noah looked around for his parents and didn’t see them. But he couldn’t feel too worried, not yet. Although there were border guards here, they didn’t seem to be very threatening. They looked concerned but not exactly hostile.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, and time, apparently, for them to open the old gate in the fence, so that the people with papers — that would be the Austrians and (since very recently) the Hungarians, of course, and not the East Germans, who were not allowed to travel to Austria — could mingle happily. The soldiers discussed something among themselves, eyeing the crowd, and then two of them went over to the gate and opened it. It looked like a creaky old farm gate more than the border between two countries. Old wire holding on to weathered gray crossbeams. The gate squeaked a little as they opened it.

  Some of the Hungarians went up and showed papers and wandered on through, while the crowd murmured (mostly in German) and shuffled about. Then a small group of people carrying backpacks, sacks, and children came up to the open gate and did not show anyone any papers. The guards looked at them, but they went right through the gate and then kept going.

  The whole crowd held its breath. Would the guards haul them back? Would they shout? Would they shoot?

  But the Germans just pushed forward, and nothing terrible happened.

  A family with a tiny little girl, all blond curls, came forward. The girl tripped for a moment, and others picked her up and popped her back onto her feet: “Weiter gehen! Weiter gehen!” Keep going!

  The little road passing through the gate was crowded with people now, all surging forward. More and more were coming, hurrying up through the field from the road where all the East German cars had been parked. Mothers holding on to their children’s hands.

  “What’s going on?” asked the boy Noah had been running with earlier. “I want to go see!”

  The crowd was moving forward, making it hard to go any other way. The freckled boy’s mother was calling, “Come along, quickly!”

  And then they weren’t just walking forward; they were trotting. Everybody was running, even people who looked too grown up to move that fast. Noah trotted along with them, caught up in the crowd, hundreds of people running forward to that gate in the middle of nowhere.

  Some of the people had white handkerchiefs in their hands; someone near Noah was saying that was what you should do, that was what you should do, so the guards would know not to shoot at you.

  There was a little shouting among the guards, and then they shook their heads and turned their backs, to show all those people that they were not going to shoot.

  On the other side of that gate, Noah looked around, excited and disoriented. The family he had tagged along after was hugging one another. All these people around him were hugging, shouting, crying. But of course no one was hugging Noah!

  Now, as everyone around him pushed forward, farther into the Austrian side, Noah began to feel worried about his parents. Where had they gotten to? He didn’t see them anywhere in this crowd.

  He had been in one of the early groups to come through. So now he turned around and fought his way backward, trying to return to the creaky wooden gate, which was absolutely overwhelmed by people coming through. It was like swimming up a river that was flooding in the other direction.

  He was feeling a lot worse now. How stupid had he been, to let himself be swept along right into a different country? It wasn’t as if he had a passport or anything. His mother had his papers tucked into a pocket of her purse.

  Someone said something to him, patted him on the shoulder.

  Was he lost?

  “J-j-j-j-ja,” said Noah. It was breaking the Rules, but it was just a single word. And the Astonishing Stutter made it sound like he was so distraught that he was sobbing, which wasn’t really the case. He was worried, true, but it took more than mere worry to get Noah to the sobbing stage.

  He hadn’t really intended to put on an act, but here he was anyway, accidentally acting. People were taking him — the poor sobbing child — by the elbow, trying to lead him somewhere. Most were trying to lead him back in the Austrian direction, with all the flood of people. “Your family is surely already there,” they kept saying. “Come with us; we’ll help you find them.”

  But Noah shook his head and pushed on in the other direction, though people were shouting at him now not to go back.

  Then he heard the strangest and yet most familiar sound: his mother’s voice, fluently and urgently saying words that Noah couldn’t understand.

  His mother, speaking Hungarian.

  She was talking to the guards and pointing as she explained something, back on the Hungarian side of the border.

  Noah called out, not committing himself to any particular word, just shouting and waving his hand.

  His mother turned.

  “János!” she cried, and the guard talking to her gestured for Noah to keep coming. People scooted to the side to let him through, and some were laughing, caught up in the general excitement.

  Then he was back through the gate, and his mother had him wrapped in her arms, but still she kept scolding him in her fluent, incomprehensible Hungarian. The guard took them off to one side, where he gave Noah a drink of water and called him János, like his mother had done. Noah worked hard at looking very young and very unable to talk at all.

  Meanwhile, the border guard and his mother kept talking.

  The tone was different now. They were speaking in quick phrases, with shadows rippling through them.

  When Noah fin
ished his glass of water, the border guard shook their hands and sent them away. And they made their way back through the field down to the road, where Noah’s father was waiting for them.

  “Found him!” said Noah’s mother, as a report to Noah’s father. “Great success!” Considering that Noah himself had almost ended up in the wrong country, he was not sure that was the word he would have used to describe the past hour.

  “You were speaking in Hungarian!” he said to his mother. It was disconcerting having a parent who had all sorts of talents you knew nothing about.

  “Well, the guard didn’t speak German, did he?” said his mother, as if that explained everything, and then she nodded toward the car. “Rules are about to kick in. So hush.”

  Thinking can still be done when you’re being quiet, however. What had they been talking about, the guard and his mother? Something more than just how Noah had gotten himself lost. And then there was that other looming question: When had his mother learned Hungarian?

  It had to be pretty long ago, before Noah was old enough to notice Hungarian books or Hungarian tapes hanging around. And he had never seen any such thing.

  But when, then? His mother was fairly young, as mothers go. She had gone to college, and then started graduate school, and then taken time off to have Noah, and then gone back to finish her thesis, which was now on speech disorders. When was there time in that history to learn a whole language, not to mention one that was hard and rare and spoken in a country on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain? He added up the years, and he just didn’t see how it worked out.

  Research! That’s what his mother always said was the way to find things out. He would just have to do some research — that’s all.

  And in his mind he opened a new file: MOM.

  And a second one, while he was at it: DAD.

  Next to these new files, of course, was the older one, with a question for a title: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CLOUD-CLAUDIA’S PARENTS?

  Secret File #19

  IT’S ALL TRUE

  The Pan-European Picnic did actually occur, on August 19, 1989, at the border between Hungary and Austria, in the rolling hills near the little Hungarian town of Sopron.

  It had been organized to demonstrate growing friendship and cooperation between Hungary and Austria. But that summer many citizens of the German Democratic Republic, hearing that the Iron Curtain was growing thinner on the Hungarian border, came to Hungary with tents and backpacks, and literally camped out, waiting for an opportunity to leave for the West. The campgrounds in western Hungary were filled with East Germans; so was the embassy of West Germany in Budapest. Young families were living in tents on the embassy grounds!

  When all these desperate people heard that the border would be opened for a few hours for a ceremonial “picnic” near Sopron, Hungary, many of them decided to crash the party and try their luck getting through the gate.

  Hundreds of East Germans made it across the border into Austria, thanks to that picnic.

  It was one of the stranger events of that strange year.

  When they got back to Berlin, there was a blue paper fish dangling in the window below Noah’s room. No, not a fish: a whale. And around the whale, other smaller, more complicated sea creatures, since Cloud-Claudia was better at both drawing and scissoring than Noah was, but the center of that mobile was definitely a whale.

  It was like having a huge banner saying WELCOME HOME! hung up over the front door. And maybe there was a pale face at the window for a moment, when they hauled their rackety suitcases over the curb. In any case, however calm he kept his expression outside, on the inside he was grinning. Frau März must be all right if Cloud-Claudia was still living behind that decorated window!

  Noah’s mother went right back to her work. She sat at the table, going over her field notes and writing up preliminary versions of thesis chapters, and occasionally she went to visit the people at the Ministry of Education, to see how things looked for her research in the fall.

  She wouldn’t tell Noah what that conversation with the border guard had been about, however. Noah tried to wheedle hints out of her, and she just looked at him with shuttered eyes.

  Noah thought again about that mysterious h-a-f-t that had shown up in the long words in Cloud’s grandmother’s letter.

  “Prison,” he found himself muttering out loud on the evening walk.

  “What?” said his mother sharply. “What did you say? Where are you getting that?”

  “It was a letter I saw, back when Cloud’s grandmother fainted,” said Noah. He hadn’t meant to say anything out loud, but now that he had, he just kept going. “But what would prison have to do with car accidents?”

  His mother gave him a look that could have cut tidy little holes in concrete.

  “You need to leave this alone,” she said. “We’re not supposed to be mixed up in any of this stuff. You need to think a little less — all right, I know that’s hopeless. Think if you have to, but keep your thoughts strictly to yourself. And if I need you to know something, I’ll tell you.”

  That was irritating and frustrating, but you could not budge Noah’s mother when she was intent on keeping a secret from you. At least she was almost acknowledging there was a secret! Noah figured that was progress.

  He soon had a distraction from these thoughts he was not supposed to be thinking, however: one day his mother came back from the Ministry of Education with a smile so bright it made the August sun seem like a wimp.

  “Jonah! Good news! I mean, actually, great news!”

  “What? What?” said Noah, who was busy cutting out a new generation of clouds for his window.

  “They are letting you go to school! I’m so happy! I kept asking and asking and asking, and they kept giving me long-winded speeches about the difficulties or about how they were waiting for some other important office to sign off on the papers, et cetera, et cetera, but suddenly they’ve decided you can go! Of course, it’s a school way the heck away from where we live — out in the area where they’ve been building new apartments like crazy. A brand-new school, actually. Built this summer! Maybe that’s why they can fit you in. Wait, what kind of expression is that on your face? Sam, come look at our Jonah’s face — he’s in shock!”

  And her hooting laugh filled the apartment.

  “Eep,” said Noah. Or something along those lines. He was so surprised. He had to put the scissors down because his hands had started shaking. He was going to get to go to school! Where there were other kids! Like a halfway-normal person! Yes, it’s true: he was in happy shock.

  However, it’s funny how quickly happiness at getting what you’ve been asking for — even, if we’re totally honest with ourselves, whining about — for ages can turn a quick corner and metamorphose into a new set of worries.

  For one thing, his brain had already calculated the odds of Cloud-Claudia being in the same school he was going to be in, and those odds were zero. So he still wouldn’t be able to hang out with her freely, his one East German friend. In fact, that suspicious, file-opening, spy-versus-spy part of his brain he was beginning to get to know better figured that might even be the reason he was being assigned to a school that was “way the heck away” from the center of Berlin. To keep him far away from his only friend.

  For another thing, although it was great to have the chance to go to school like a halfway-normal person, of course Noah did have the profound sense — shared by most of us — that he might not actually be “halfway normal.”

  And school would be in German, and German has all those consonants for a person to slam into and be blocked by.

  “You’ll do great,” said his dad. “Such an opportunity, going to school in a place as different as this! Think of it this way: you’ll be the first American any of them has ever met! They probably think American children are mythical creatures, like unicorns.”

  “Hmm,” said Noah’s mother, rereading the letter with her research-sharpened eyes. “There’s actually a whole section i
n here informing us that if ‘scholarization in the GDR Polytechnical Upper School’ turns out to be a poor fit for you, due to behavior issues or your known speech defect or any other reason, then they will give you the boot. But I guess that was to be expected.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said his father. “That’s my advice. And consider everything you learn in this school a plus. What grade is it going to be?”

  “Well, with a birthday in the fall, that puts him in the fourth class here.”

  “No, really?” said Noah, in some shock. At home he had been finishing up fifth grade! So his stupid new birthday was going to give him trouble. He had thought it would eventually.

  “Don’t look so glum,” said his mother. “Remember, the whole system’s different from the one at home. And the age kids enter the different grades is different, too. For someone turning eleven in November, the fourth class is perfect.”

  Well, perfect if you hadn’t already secretly turned eleven back in March. But he knew better than to say any of that out loud. The “fourth class”! He would just have to be extra careful to make sure this bit of damaging information did not get out once he was finally back home, back in the sixth grade, where he belonged, with all of his friends.

  “An adventure!” his mother kept saying. And it was true. An adventure, for sure.

  They went shopping for the flat rectangular backpacks kids in East Germany wore to school, and they also bought pens and pencils and a ruler. For the last week of August, Noah let his parents drill him mercilessly on his German whenever they felt like it. He looked at grammar charts. He studied the public transportation out to Hohenschönhausen, where that new school he was supposed to be joining was being finished in a rush so it could be opened for actual students like him.

  And all the while, in a corner of his brain that his mother and father had no idea existed, he was beginning to work on those important, strange files, “Mom” and “Dad.” For some reason, it had begun to bother him, ever since that photograph had come tumbling out of Alice in Wonderland — and even more ever since he had seen his mother burning that one precious photo to ashes — that he knew of no living grandparents or cousins on either side. How likely was that? No grandparents or cousins anywhere at all? So he started asking very gentle questions whenever the opportunity arose (outdoors).