Cloud and Wallfish

by Anne Nesbet

  From “Do you remember your first day of school?” to “Did you have any pets when you were younger?” to “Why were you wearing a crown in that picture of you and Grandpa?”

  That last question got a very sharp look from his mother in return.

  “Was I?” she said.

  She didn’t realize, of course, that Noah had filed away a picture of that picture in his brain.

  He took that mental photograph out of the “Mom” file now and looked it over again with his secret, interior eye.

  There was his grandfather in the armchair — the newspaper shouting about some CORONA — and that small version of his dark-eyed mother. A tiara sat confidently on her head.

  “Yes,” said Noah. “And you had a wand in your hands.”

  “Scepter,” corrected his mother automatically.

  “What’s the difference?” said Noah.

  “Fairies have wands,” said his mother. “Queens have scepters. It was my birthday, and I thought, quite reasonably, that I should be queen.”

  She had this sparkling, dangerous smile, still, that made her look oddly like that little girl in the picture.

  Noah couldn’t help smiling back.

  “Weren’t you young to be queen? What birthday was it?”

  “Fourth,” said his mother. “I was turning four. I remember —”

  And then she snapped her mouth shut, as if she had almost been caught in some kind of trap.

  “Remember what?” said Noah, but he knew it was hopeless. Once his mother had decided to shift gears, those gears were as good as shifted.

  “We’re out of milk again,” she said now. That meant the subject had been officially changed. “We can’t go home without milk —”

  She thought that photograph was burned and gone. She didn’t know that Noah was even now going back over it in his mind, paying attention to all the little clues hidden there.

  He thought about it, and thought about it, and then he asked his father about another piece of the puzzle when they were running errands in Berlin.

  “Was there a big star explosion or something, long ago in the month of June? In the 1950s? Like —”

  Noah counted in his mind. His mother had been twenty-three when he was born. That was the family story. And Noah was born in 1978 — of course he wasn’t as sure about when in 1978 as he used to be, but he was pretty confident the year was still 1978.

  “Like 1959 or so?”

  His father was used to hearing oddball questions from Noah, but this one managed to make him look completely taken by surprise for a while.

  “A what?” he said, laughing. “When? Did you just say ‘star explosion’?”

  “A corona,” said Noah. “Isn’t that something to do with stars? In the fifties.”

  “Good grief, where are you getting these things? Maybe a solar eclipse? I don’t know when those were. I guess we can look them up in an astronomy book somewhere.”

  “Something big that would fill headlines — corona-something. Corona —”

  “Sounds almost like you’re doing a crossword puzzle,” said his father.

  That was helpful, actually. When they got home, Noah looked the word up in the dictionary: corona . . . coronal . . . coronation.

  He stared at that page for a while. Hadn’t his mother mentioned something about a “coronation day,” way back when? Queens and crowns!

  “Dad,” he asked, “who’s the queen now?”

  “Queen of what, England? Queen Elizabeth the Second,” said his dad from the kitchen. Apparently saying queens’ names aloud didn’t break any Rules.

  “How long has she been queen? A long time already, right?”

  “Yep, a long time. Nineteen fifty-two? Nineteen fifty-three?”

  Noah’s brain was running back and forth, jumping up and down, waving bits of paper to catch his attention.

  “Nineteen fifty-three?” said Noah. “That can’t be right.”

  “Or nineteen fifty-two, I said. We can look it up in an encyclopedia somewhere sometime, if it matters. Does it matter?”

  “No,” said Noah. “I was just wondering.”

  That was a lie, however. The truthful answer to that question would have been YES, it really does matter!

  Why?

  Because in 1953 (or maybe 1952), when that photograph had captured the very young version of Noah’s mother, staring so boldly into the camera, she wasn’t even supposed to be alive yet!

  He checked his math all over again: 1978 minus twenty-three equals 1955. Maybe 1954, depending on when the months of everyone’s birthdays fall.

  A picture of Noah’s mother, aged four, in June 1953, therefore, standing next to a newspaper headline about Queen Elizabeth’s CORONATION, was one of those things that simply could not exist. A paradox. A puzzle.

  The file folder labeled “Mom” in Noah’s brain was beginning to get thicker in the middle. Bulging with questions. Something was definitely not right.

  Secret File #20

  THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN 1953

  The most successful movie of the year was Disney’s Peter Pan. The hero of Peter Pan is a boy who, like Noah’s mother, has a very ambiguous date of birth.

  Joseph Stalin died. He had been the leader of the Soviet Union for decades.

  Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine.

  Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to climb Mount Everest.

  Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

  There was a workers’ uprising in East Berlin; it was squashed violently.

  And Noah’s mother appeared, at the age of four, in a photograph taken two years before she was even born.

  ???

  For days there had been little whales on the stairs for Noah to find and take home and add to the envelope he now thought of as the Folded Ocean.

  Every now and then there was a Tup! Tup! Tup! calling up to him from his floor at night, and Noah would respond with a tu-tap or two, though he was worried, always worried, about Frau März catching him.

  Then, one afternoon, right before school started, there was a knock on their door. Of course, there had not been any knocks on their door since the awful evening when Cloud’s grandmother had fainted over that weird document with the long, long words, so they looked at one another in surprise as Noah’s father moved to open the door. Noah came along to see, of course.

  Outside the door was Cloud-Claudia, looking slightly scared but stubborn.

  “I’ve brought your map back to you,” she said. “Even Oma would say I should return it to you.”

  “How nice to see you!” said Noah’s father. “Come in, come in!”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Not allowed. But I brought the map.”

  “I’m going to start school tomorrow,” said Noah.

  Claudia grinned.

  “What school?” she said.

  “Out in — where is it, Dad?”

  “Hohenschönhausen,” said his father.

  “Oh,” said Claudia. “I don’t know where that is. Wish it were my school.”

  “Ich auch,” said Noah. “I do, too.”

  Then he had an idea after all.

  “I finished the puzzle. But I want you to have a chance to finish it, too. Here —”

  He darted into the living room, pulled the puzzle box off the shelf, and came running back with it.

  “Good luck, Cloud,” he said.

  “Thanks,” said Cloud-Claudia, and then she looked at him with that brave stubbornness she had, and she added, “Bis bald.”

  Which means “See you soon.”

  That made Noah happy, since what she meant was they shouldn’t just sit in their apartments dutifully, on either side of the ceiling-floor. There was something so ridiculous about it. A bunch of adults with their hysterical political Rules. It seemed so obvious, once Cloud-Claudia broke the ice. He looked right back at her and said it with gusto — with extra gusto, even, thanks to the Astonishing Stutter:

&n
bsp; “Bis bald!”

  There were steps on the stairs.

  Border patrol for the horizontal Wall, thought Noah. Frau März, stomping upstairs to see where her granddaughter had gotten to.

  “Tschüß, Jonah,” whispered Cloud-Claudia. “Bye.”

  And she was gone, clutching the puzzle to her chest, before the stomping feet had time to come around the bend in the stairs.

  Noah and his father ducked back into their apartment and closed the door.

  “I just hate that grandmother!” said Noah. “Is she going to take away that puzzle? And throw it out or something?”

  “Surely not,” said his father. Then he thought a little more. “Probably not?” There was another pause. “That is, to be honest, I sure do hope not.”

  It was a while before Noah could look at the map on his own, but when he did, he could hardly tear himself away from it. Every square centimeter of the blank splotch that had been West Berlin was filled in now with buildings, streets, lakes, trees, little people, dogs, camels, horses, boats . . .

  They had made a whole little world together, he and Cloud-Claudia. He let his eyes wander through it, testing the various alleyways. There was no doubt that Cloud-Claudia could draw! Noah’s contributions looked very basic in comparison — but precise! He was very neat with a pen.

  He didn’t have a lot of time to study the map just now, though, because there was school starting up the next morning.

  Noah’s mother was almost more excited about Noah getting to go to school than Noah was himself. She went through Noah’s clothes, trying to find the pants and shirt that would blend in best with the East German crowd. She put paper and pens and pencils into his mock-leather school backpack.

  “It’s going to be so much more interesting than sitting around here at home,” she said. “I’ve felt so guilty, dragging you off to a place where you’ve had to sit around so much. You’re just a kid! You deserve to have friends and a normal life!”

  She had a point. But really, who was anyone kidding? Noah was never going to blend in here, and this life in East Berlin was never going to feel “normal,” and he knew it.

  As they walked to the S-Bahn at what felt like dawn the next day, and was actually very, very early, since school started at 7:30 a.m. and was pretty far away, Noah voiced his deepest worry.

  “When I get home, I’ll still get to go into my usual grade, right? I’m not going to be left behind forever? I’ll still be graduating from high school in 1996?”

  He had always liked the number 1996. But mostly because it implied that his college class would be 2000, and only one lucky group of kids in a thousand years gets to say “Class of Something Thousand.”

  “Oh, goodness, yes,” said his mother. “I mean no. I mean, yes, you’ll be in your proper grade, and no, this bit of fourth class in Germany isn’t going to do you any permanent harm. I had to move around a million times when I was younger, and that didn’t damage me. In the end. I graduated just fine.”

  “In 1973,” said Noah.

  “Right you are,” said his mother. “Only a few months after I showed up at that school in Charlottesburg, by the way! So you see, it can be done.”

  “Showed up” was one way to say it, thought Noah, as he, almost automatically by now, tucked more data into his “Mom” file.

  “Where were you before? Where were you in 1971 or 1972?”

  Was it just his imagination, or was there the tiniest pause before she answered? But she answered with one of her hooting laughs.

  “Tiny Podunk town with a tiny Podunk school!” she said. “Glad to get out of there, you’d better believe it. And look what we have here: the opposite of tiny.”

  They were arriving at the station now, out at the edges of Berlin where that brand-new school was just dusting itself off and opening its doors. It might as well have been on the moon, almost, it was so far away.

  The moon, that is, after a few hundred years had gone by, and the astronauts — no, cosmonauts — had managed to build huge slab-like buildings all over the place. There were thousands and thousands of apartments in those buildings, but they looked like a giant with a strong affection for rectangles had set up a block village on the edge of town.

  “Remember what the name of this district is?” said Noah’s father, who was also coming along for this big occasion of dropping off Noah for his first day of school. “Hohenschönhausen! Sounds sort of like Tall-Pretty-House-Ville!”

  “Tall, yes,” said Noah’s mother. “Pretty — not so sure about that.”

  Noah knew exactly what they were doing. They were keeping the banter going so he would forget to be nervous. It wasn’t working perfectly, but Noah was determined to be brave.

  They took him into one of the new buildings, not very beautiful but recognizably a school.

  “Here we are!” said his mother, and she led them into the main office, where Noah’s parents and an official-looking woman had a quick chat.

  “COME. I WILL TAKE YOU TO YOUR ROOM NOW, JONAH,” said the woman, turning back to Noah.

  Well, how about that? Some things seemed to be true all around the world.

  “He has no trouble hearing,” said Noah’s mother politely, in German, as she had said in English to other teachers and principals and secretaries a million times before. “And his thinking is completely normal, too —”

  “Normal” might be pushing things too far, Noah thought. But he tried to smile like a normal ten-year-old boy with a fully normal brain.

  “It just takes him a little longer to speak sometimes. But he likes to participate.”

  “I see,” said the woman, though she looked skeptical. “So. How is your German, young Jonah? You know we are not a school here for the instruction of German as a foreign language. You will be expected to do what all the other children do.”

  “I can understand. Speaking is harder,” said Noah in German. Wow, the amount of rust on his tongue! And he had even chosen just about the simplest sentence he could think of.

  “Oh!” said the woman, since this was her introduction to the Astonishing Stutter. “Well! Well! We’ll have to see how you do, then, won’t we?”

  “Good luck, Yo-Yo,” said Noah’s father. “We’ll see you this afternoon. And his mother gave him a hug and waved good-bye, hope and worry fighting to see which would win control of her face.

  Secret File #21

  THE BRUNO BEATER SCHOOL

  If you think back to the schools you have attended over the course of your life, some of them may well have been named after famous people. Martin Luther King? Washington? Lincoln? The person in your small town who was on the school board for thirty years?

  Well, names of famous people were also commonly assigned to East German schools.

  The teachers at Noah’s brand-new school out in Tall-Pretty-House-Ville had been informed at an all-school teachers’ meeting the week before that their school was going to be taking part in a contest to earn the honor of naming the school “the Bruno Beater School.”

  Bruno Beater had been the German Democratic Republic’s first deputy minister of state security. His special tasks had been organizing spies in the West and perfecting the state’s electronic surveillance systems. Microphones and tape recorders and bugs! It was a very good name for an elementary school, the teachers were told.

  The hearts of all the nicer teachers at that school must have sunk when they heard that announcement at the pre-school-opening assembly.

  They had mostly decided to become teachers in order to get permission to go to college, and they wanted to go to college for the same reasons most people want to go to college: to read books, to think about history, to study other languages, to find out more about scientific discoveries, to learn.

  But being a teacher in the German Democratic Republic meant also having to watch your students, always, always, always, for ideological deviations. Which means: not thinking right.

  In the olden days, long before Noah arrived in Berlin, teache
rs were supposed to try to trick their students into revealing whether their parents watched the East German or West German news on TV at night. Story is, the clocks were different shapes on the Eastern and Western editions of the news. You could catch a little kid out by noticing a slip in the way he drew a clock on the news. That sort of thing!

  By 1989 they had given up on keeping people in East Berlin from watching the West German news. In fact, they had moved the East German news to a different time slot so it didn’t have to compete with the West.

  But teachers still had to pay checkup visits to their students’ homes, and were still dreaded by some of their students’ families, and were still, although Noah had no way of knowing this, largely miserable about it all.

  It turned out that the first day of the school year was officially called World Peace Day. The teacher made a little speech about world peace, and because Noah was in her class, she improvised by pointing him out and saying, “This year we have a guest among us, who comes from a land where many people suffer from homelessness and unemployment. We must work for world peace right here in our classroom by showing him how well behaved and studious children are in the German Democratic Republic, and how eagerly we are developing our talents and skills to be of use to our socialist mother country in the future. Are you prepared?”

  And all of the children, standing, chanted together, “Immer bereit!” Which means “Always prepared!”

  It was the slogan for the Young Pioneers, Noah learned later, the club they all belonged to, like a universal, required scouting association, only with lots more politics and no religion at all.

  When the teacher told the class they all had to bring in their dues for the Young Pioneers, she looked over at Noah and hesitated for a moment — she almost actually tripped on her words.

  But Noah said, “Ich auch,” which means “Me, too,” because he wanted to do whatever they all did. He certainly didn’t want to spend his school days sticking out like a sore thumb.