Cloud and Wallfish

by Anne Nesbet

  Of course, as soon as he opened his mouth, every kid in that room had turned around to stare at him.

  You’d think they’d never heard an American accent or an Astonishing Stutter!

  Oh, right. They probably hadn’t.

  Still, all things considered, everything went okay that first day. The kids were the usual mix of nice, neutral, and in-your-face. Most kept away from him, but a few made a point of saying hello. You could tell they weren’t sure whether he was really normal in his head, with his stutter, even though the teacher had made a point of saying, “Our guest, Jonah, has a serious speech defect, but I understand his intelligence is normal.”

  Which was well-meaning but still made Noah feel a little like a freak. However, he had had speeches like that made about him many times, and he knew he could survive it, if he just got through recess without doing something that looked stupid, like tripping over his shoelaces.

  When his parents showed up at the end of the school day to take him home, they were, of course, irritatingly interested in how the day had gone. They even asked dumb parental questions like “Any new friends?”

  Really! “Any new friends?” on the very first day, when you’re the strange outsider with an American accent and a stutter?

  “They’re all so young,” said Noah, with more heat than he really intended. He backtracked just a little. “I mean, they’re young, and I’m sure they’re nice. But it’s not really likely we’re going to sit around and talk about math or history for fun, or anything. Not anytime soon.”

  “History all around us!” said his father, taking a pointed sniff of the air. “Do you know how many East Germans are flooding into Hungary these days? You know how much pressure there is on the edges of everything all around? Look at it this way —”

  “No,” said Noah’s mother, and her voice alone was as good as any border. “Honestly. This is a crowded place. Time to hush.”

  She backed up that warning with one of her no-nonsense smiles.

  So they talked about homework instead.

  Later on, though, when Noah went into his room after his snack, an amazing thing happened. Even though it was daylight, the floor of his room spoke to him, soft but clear:

  Tup! tu-TUP!

  And a few minutes after that, he heard the door downstairs close, and when he looked out his window, there was the wild blond head of Cloud-Claudia, heading across the street to the not-park.

  Noah instantly understood: that Tup! tu-TUP! wasn’t just a hello — it was an invitation.

  He grabbed his jacket and waved at his parents and went down the steps, too, to find Cloud-Claudia at that ragged fence, waiting for him.

  She clapped her hands, Tup! tu-TUP! and grinned. “Come outside!”

  “Yes!” said Noah. Finally they could work out a proper code. They could make a start, anyway. They learned some message rhythms together and then sat there, feeling like they had accomplished something.

  “Hey, Cloud-Claudia!” said Noah. “How was school for you?”

  “Boring, very dull, bad,” said Cloud-Claudia. “And you?”

  “All right, I guess,” said Noah. Then he thought of something. “Listen, can you help me with this thing I have to do?”

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “For the wall newspaper.” The German word was Wandzeitung.

  This was a big display on one of the classroom walls, and it changed periodically. The children were supposed to contribute articles and pictures. The teacher had explained the current topic, and it happened to be —

  “Dolphins and whales,” said Noah. “I know you are very good at whales. Will you help me cut some out?”

  Cloud-Claudia smiled, smiled, smiled. Her smile was the smile of someone finding out that her secret messages have indeed been received.

  “Ja,” she said. “I’ll go get my scissors. In the courtyard on the other side of the building, there are actual steps to sit on.”

  They made a rhythm that would mean the steps in the courtyard: tap, taptap, taptaptap. And, while they were at it, a signal for emergencies — tap tu-Tap TAP! — though how a signal would help in an emergency, Noah really had no idea.

  Then Cloud-Claudia went home to get scissors, and when she came back, they sat on the steps and cut out whales companionably and talked about crises in the other world. Because there were bad things happening in the Land of the Changelings. So said Cloud-Claudia, who had been thinking about this a lot, apparently.

  “They’re forgetting themselves, always more,” she said. “They might think to themselves, ‘Oh, we had this funny dream once, with a girl named Something-or-Other in it! But what was she like, exactly, that girl? And what did she used to call us?’”

  Cloud-Claudia looked at Noah very seriously.

  Noah was thinking about the wood in his Alice book, the one where things have no names, where Alice doesn’t know she’s Alice anymore, and the faun she’s walking with (until they reach the end of the wood) doesn’t even know it’s a faun. There’s a picture in the book of Alice and the faun, leaning close together: friends — until a moment later, when they reach the end of the wood and remember who and what they are, and the faun takes fright and runs away. Noah could see that forgetting one’s name could be a problem — but also that someone finding out you are not who you said you were could be a problem, too.

  “They’ve forgotten even who they used to be,” she said. “In your name is a little seed of everything that you are.”

  She cupped her hands to show him, like someone carrying a teeny-tiny baby tree.

  “Oh,” said Noah, who wasn’t even Noah anymore. “So if your name is changed, you are a different person?”

  “But yes, of course, Wallfish,” said Cloud-Claudia.

  He was thinking about that. Did it matter that he wasn’t Noah anymore? What was the difference between being Noah and being Jonah?

  When he was two years old, his parents had given him the most beautiful wooden ark, with pairs of wooden animals — elephants, giraffes, seals, dogs, lions — to march up the plank and into the boat, two by two.

  “This is Noah’s Ark,” they had told him a thousand times, and they smiled when they said so. It had made him happy to be the sort of Noah who has a wooden boat filled with pairs of wooden animals, all to be sailed around in puddles — when Mom wasn’t looking — and to be kept safe from the flood.

  He liked to think of himself as the kind of person who kept things from drowning and went off in a boat to look for new land to live on.

  But now he was Jonah, and Jonah didn’t travel on top of the water, but underneath it, in the belly of a whale. That was darker and stranger and spookier than the Noah story, but all the same it was pretty cool, too. It must have taken a lot of courage to remain yourself when you had been swallowed by a whale.

  And he did like the way Cloud-Claudia called him Wallfish. That also felt right, somehow. He would never have known he could be a Wallfish if he hadn’t left his old name behind and become a Jonah.

  “They should have taken me with them to the Changelings’ Land,” said Cloud-Claudia. “Why didn’t they?” Her voice was so quiet now, but Noah could hear every word she said, and he knew, just knew, knew in his bones, who she must be talking about.

  “Your parents didn’t mean to leave you here,” he said. He had to push right through the awkwardness of saying something like that — not easy, not in any language. “It was an accident. They couldn’t help it.”

  “They’re forgetting me there, I guess,” said Cloud-Claudia. “They don’t have me there to remind them.”

  “But the Changelings’ Land — that’s something we made up. You know that, right?”

  Cloud-Claudia stared right at Noah, long and hard.

  “I can prove to you it exists,” she said. “There’s a place where the people from the Changelings’ Land come and look right in at us here. I found it once. Brunnenstraße. Want me to show you sometime?”

  She stared a
t him again, waiting for an answer.

  “Ja,” said Noah finally. What else, under the circumstances, could he say?

  Secret File #22

  THE MISUSE OF TRIPS TO THE HUNGARIAN PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC

  Noah’s father was right: more people than ever were flowing through the Hungarian border. Shortly after midnight on September 11, 1989, buses loaded with East Germans who had been camping out for ages on the grounds of the West German embassy in Budapest passed right through the border into Austria. They didn’t have to crash through the border — it was opened for them.

  The East German government understood that things were getting desperate.

  On September 13, the minister of state security issued a secret internal directive entitled “Actions Taken to Ensure the Timely Recognition and Prevention of the Misuse of Trips to and/or Through the Hungarian People’s Republic.” Here’s some of what that secret directive said:

  Section 1.2. At that frontier crossing point on the border of the CSSR [Czechoslovakia] most commonly used for travel to the Hungarian People’s Republic as well as in all international airports of the GDR, the expedient use of screening procedures is to be strengthened in collaboration with the border and customs personnel . . . in order to identify suspicious activity suggesting potential for illegal abandonment of the GDR.

  “Illegal abandonment” meant “leaving the country without permission.”

  “Suspicious activity” meant all sorts of things, but it could have meant having too big a suitcase or taking a photo album with you. Anything that made it look like maybe you were thinking you might not come back.

  The whales brought in by Noah for the class wall newspaper were reasonably well received and got put up along with some carefully lettered sentences about how (1) whales were the largest inhabitants of the oceans, and (2) whales and dolphins were both mammals, and (3) greed had made some people, especially under capitalist governments (that is, people who did not live in the German Democratic Republic), hunt whales practically to extinction. That was fairly funny, thought Noah, because of course if you looked at a map, you would soon see that it was a long way from Berlin to any possible whale you might want to hunt. Judging from the coal in the air in Berlin, East Germany wasn’t always the most environmentally conscious country in the world.

  Nobody wrote anything for the Wandzeitung about old long-ago Jonah and his ride inside the belly of a whale. They didn’t seem to know that story. That was okay with Noah, though. As he sat at his classroom desk solving math problems that, to tell the honest truth, were way too easy for someone who should rightly have been starting sixth grade this year, it cheered him up to look over at the wall newspaper from time to time and see the Walfische/wallfish there that Cloud-Claudia had made — so much more alive, so much more intricate in their decoration, in their cleverly curling water spouts, in their wise wallfish eyes, than the ones cut out by the other kids in that class.

  A wallfish on the classroom wall! It was like a secret message again, cheering him up when life at school threatened to become too dull or difficult.

  There were definitely some difficult things, that was for sure, although math wasn’t one of them.

  For the first couple of weeks, for instance, Noah couldn’t figure out whether his teacher, Frau Müller, was a friendly sort of person or not. That puzzled him, because he was used to being able to tell after about five minutes, max, whether or not the teacher in front of his class that year was going to be a good one. And usually he’d been pretty lucky.

  But it was surprisingly hard for him to read Frau Müller’s intentions.

  She had a brisk but pleasant way of telling the class what to do and when to put their notebooks away. Noah appreciated that. And she seemed, as far as Noah could tell, fair in her grading. So that was fine, too. But every time the class was reading a story aloud, she would give him a strange, he might even have said anxious, look — and skip him. If he raised his hand in class, she would give him another one of those strange, even anxious, looks and then only pick him if it happened to be a math problem — and even then, not often.

  After a few days of this, Noah began to get the point. His participation in class was not desired. He was used to teachers back home hemming and hawing sometimes, if they were a bit stumped by the Astonishing Stutter. But usually Noah could just keep talking and talking and raising his hand until it began to seem normal and the teacher relaxed a little. That had been Noah’s usual approach. He figured if he just forged ahead, everyone else would eventually come to see how normal — or normally abnormal — the whole thing was. But none of that worked with Frau Müller. It was a stumper.

  Then one day Frau Müller said something to the class about the problem of youth unemployment in the United States, and one particularly bold boy, named Axel, had said, “Why don’t we just ask Jonah? He comes from over there, doesn’t he?”

  Noah already knew Axel’s name because he was always getting himself into trouble and being asked to explain to the class why his behavior had been “unworthy of a student in the Bruno-Beater-Schule.”

  The word Axel used for “over there” was drüben, a word with the flavor of apples, tart and sweet. It’s hard for an English speaker to get that ü sounding sufficiently puckered up; Noah practiced it in his mind during the hush that followed on the heels of Axel’s boldness, his own silent inner voice toggling for a moment between “drooben” and “drewwwben.” It was an important word in East Germany, drüben, because “over there” actually meant “over there on the other side of the Wall.” That made it a dangerous word in classrooms like Noah’s.

  The effect it had now was magical.

  The whole class turned its collective head from Axel to the teacher to Noah, all at the same time, almost as if someone had decided to make a ballet for swiveling heads. They turned their heads and then froze, holding their breath. Waiting to see what would happen to someone who spoke so boldly, using words you did not use at school, like drüben. Or to someone, like Noah, who had just been so boldly singled out as coming from Over There.

  Frau Müller went pale, then flushed pink, then went pale all over again.

  “Axel, stand up. Our guest Jonah is here to see how a socialist classroom collective functions. We do not pester our guests with questions, Axel. I will be writing to your parents. Again! You are delaying our lesson and interfering with the normal progress of education.”

  That was when Noah began to understand something about his teacher: it was not just about the stutter. When he stopped by her desk at the end of the day to say, “Frau Müller, I don’t mind if the other kids ask me questions,” her face took on the expression of someone trying not to show that she knows she has been caught in a trap.

  “I’m certain, Jonah, you had a very different school experience before coming to visit us here in Berlin,” she said stiffly. “This is not really a classroom suited for someone like you. This is not the educational system you come from, and you will have to understand that we cannot allow the education of the other children to be derailed in any way. After all, they are the ones who will grow up to defend the socialist cause with word and deed, so we must not let anything happen in our classroom that might blunt their historical optimism.”

  “Oh,” said Noah, understanding the words but not so much understanding the long, twisty sentences those words combined to make.

  The teacher’s face softened for the briefest of moments; she was not unkind. Noah could see that she didn’t at all mean to be unkind. She was just caught in a trap.

  “These are the arrangements that have been decided upon,” she said. “So of course we must all take on this task with dedication and consciousness. If you, Jonah, sit quietly and do not respond when the children ask inappropriate questions, then it will be best for everyone. Understand? It is best if you do not speak. You may sit quietly and work on your own.”

  There! He saw it now. The reason she looked at him all the time the way she might have looked at
a boy-shaped ticking alarm clock, ready to go off at any moment and disrupt the universe, had, for once, absolutely nothing to do with the Astonishing Stutter.

  It had to do with where he, Noah, came from.

  He was from drüben. No, worse than that, from Virginia. No, even worse, if only she knew: from the faraway Land of the Changelings. Who knew what terrible things a changeling like him might say?

  That thought might make even a very slightly rebellious person want to talk loudly, just to make the point that he, too, was a person, even if he was also a Wechselbalg!

  But Noah could see that if he opened his mouth in class, it was the other kids who were likely to get into trouble. And not only the kids.

  He could see that in the anxious lines around Frau Müller’s eyes, the shadows on her face that had already deepened considerably only a few weeks into the year.

  Oh, of course. The real question wasn’t whether she was “kind” or “unkind.” The truth of the matter was that Frau Müller was afraid.

  Secret File #23

  HISTORICAL OPTIMISM! CHEW ON THAT!

  Frau Müller was afraid because part of the job of a teacher in East Germany was making sure nothing unexpected ever happened in any classroom, and an American child was bound to be a constant source of the Unexpected. It’s not that she disliked this Jonah Brown who had landed in her classroom like a meteorite from the outer reaches of space. But look what that foolish Axel had said so thoughtlessly about drüben! Life drüben was not a topic for the fourth class. If someone said the wrong thing, whether about here or about drüben — or said that Frau Müller had said the wrong thing — or made the kind of face that suggested he or she was even thinking the wrong thing — about anything — Frau Müller could lose her job.

  Noah’s teacher had gotten the stuff she said about historical optimism out of recent speeches by Margot Honecker, who was the minister of education as well as the wife of Erich Honecker. She set the tone for schoolteachers, and that tone was long-winded and icy. Here’s the sort of thing she said when talking to groups of teachers in 1989: