by Anne Nesbet
Our young socialist order had its childhood diseases, and it has had its growing pains. It had and has good friends, and it has always had and still has today strong and dangerous enemies. We are forever forced anew to defend ourselves politically and economically in the international class struggle in direct confrontation with the strongest and most experienced imperialist forces.
Our epoch is a bellicose one and requires youth who can fight, who will help to strengthen socialism, who will take up the socialist cause, who will defend socialism with word and deed and, when necessary, with weapons in their hands.
She had also complained about “so-called ‘modern conceptions of literature’” — no “reading for pleasure” for her!— and scolded those teachers who let classroom discussions get out of hand.
If Noah had known these things about Margot Honecker’s speeches, which were studied in special meetings by all the unfortunate teachers at the Bruno-Beater-Schule, then he probably would not have bothered to go up to Frau Müller’s desk at the end of the day and say he would be glad to participate in class discussions.
As you can imagine, East German schools were not big fans of class discussion. Much less a class discussion led by a child from the capitalist West!
“It could all explode,” said his mother with a smile.
She was smiling because they were on a family stroll in the evening, which was when Noah’s parents exchanged the news. Even outside, it made sense to be reasonably cautious. Even outside, it was not impossible that someone could be listening. There were special antennas that could pick up things people said from fifty feet away. But that was pretty fancy technology, and probably they wouldn’t bother in the case of Noah’s family. “Our job is to be boring” was how his mother put it — but she had said that when they were walking around Budapest.
“Explode?” asked Noah. He didn’t like the way that word sounded in his brain or felt in his mouth.
“She means it’s all getting tenser in this country,” said Noah’s father. “People aren’t as patient as they used to be. Change is happening everywhere else, so they want change here, too. You know what? Every week in Leipzig — you’ve been to Leipzig, remember? — every week there are protests there, starting in a church. Last week I heard there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of people marching.”
“Really?” said Noah. It was so hard to imagine anything like that happening here in Berlin. A big demonstration. People marching and chanting. With all the police everywhere? Seemed impossible.
“It’s the pressure from the border opening in Hungary,” said his father.
“It’s the pressure from everywhere and everything,” said his mother with a very sweet smile.
“And guess what they were chanting this week?” said his father, pointing up at a cloud shaped like a frog.
“What?”
“It always used to be ‘Let us out! Let us out!’ But this week they changed the words —”
“We’re staying here,” whispered his mother. “Scarier, isn’t it?”
“I get it,” said Noah after a moment. “If they go, they’re gone, but if they stay, then they want things to change.”
“Whose child is this, anyway?” said Noah’s father with a very long, rumbling chuckle. “He’s turned out very clever. Is it our brilliant parental training or something in the water?”
“Something in the water,” said his mother. “I’m afraid we’re only so-so as trainers.”
“You know where things need to change?” said Noah. “School. I’m in a lot of trouble just being there. And I’m not even chanting and marching. I’m just there. . . .”
The faces of Noah’s parents fell, both at once. For about a second, they looked a little stricken — and then they seemed to remember their own Rule #4, about looking cheerful. Noah’s father put his arm around Noah’s shoulders.
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Doesn’t sound like fun.”
“Better than sitting at home,” said Noah, to make them feel a little less guilty.
That was true some of the time, but not during PE class, when they did gymnastics routines — like running and jumping off a thick beam thing and then doing a neat somersault on the mat on the other side. Sometimes it seemed to Noah that all the other kids must have been practicing gymnastics routines since they were tiny things.
And then there was the Young Pioneers kerfuffle.
The Young Pioneers — that East German scouting group everyone seemed to belong to — met after school. There was confusion about what they should do with Noah. One week the other kids lent him a red scarf to wear, and they all ran around together. The next week, a teacher said she didn’t think that was right, since the guest came from a different place, and they made him sit in an uncomfortable chair in the school principal’s office all afternoon. The next week, the grown-ups had changed their minds again, and the “Guest Jonah, from the U.S.A.” was allowed to come to the activities but warned not to talk.
What the Young Pioneers at the Bruno Beater School mostly did was prepare for the huge celebration coming up: the party for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic. To judge from the news programs on television, everyone in the whole country was supposed to be preparing for the fortieth anniversary. In school, Noah and his classmates spent hours studying how wonderful the celebration was going to be.
It was like the exact extreme opposite, Noah decided, of a surprise party. With a surprise party, you don’t expect there to be a celebration, and then something happens and it turns out everyone’s been preparing a party for ages that you didn’t even know about — unless, as often happens, you sort of guessed, a little bit around the edges.
But there were not supposed to be any surprises of any kind at the GDR fortieth-anniversary party.
None at all.
None.
Noah sat quietly all day, whether wearing the borrowed scarf or not, doing what everyone else was doing, but also trying to remember not to raise his hand when the teacher asked a question.
The other kids noticed how quiet he had become, but they didn’t know why.
A girl with brown hair in two pigtails came over to him one day and said, “If you don’t know how to talk, why aren’t you in the Sonderschule?”
Special school.
Her name was Anja, which sounds like “Anya.”
“What’s that?” said Noah, though his stomach was already sinking.
“I thought they put all the ones who can’t talk or do normal stuff in the Sonderschule.”
He couldn’t help it. He broke the teacher’s rules a little.
“I can so talk,” he said. “I’m talking right now. And I do all the work.”
He even showed her his math page, filled with neat rows of solved problems.
“You talk funny, though,” said Anja, giving him a suspicious stare.
“Ja, sure, I do,” said Noah, and then he couldn’t help it; he had to ham it up for her, just a little. “But where I come from, everyb-b-b-b-ody talks like this.”
“Oh!” said Anja.
Later that day, Frau Müller came by his desk and said, “I’m surprised and disappointed that I have to remind you, Jonah, about our agreement. You are not going to disrupt the educational program of the Bruno-Beater-Schule in any way.”
“Ja, Frau Müller,” he said. “Of course.”
Secret File #24
GOING AROUND THE WALL, GOING ON TRAINS, GOING, GOING, GONE . . .
Despite that new chant —“We’re staying here!” — in actual fact, more and more people were still racing to get out of the country. It was an untenable situation, which means it couldn’t last. The pressure on the government was enormous. Young people wanted out! Workers were leaving!
In September 1989, about 45,000 East Germans left for the West. A quarter of those had been given official permission. The other 33,000 or so just left — not through the Wall but by going around it, through the West German embassie
s in Poland or Czechoslovakia, or by walking or driving across the Hungarian-Austrian border.
At the end of September, the 3,500 refugees holed up in the West German embassy in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, were given permission, as a “humanitarian gesture,” to leave for the West. They got onto special trains that traveled right through the GDR — with their doors sealed so nobody else could get on — to West Germany.
People waved at the trains. A few months before, people might not have waved, but it was almost October now, almost the fortieth anniversary, and everywhere it was beginning to feel like something might just explode, for real.
Tup! tu-TUP!
The floor of Noah’s room called him outside, where Cloud-Claudia was waiting again by their fence, with the puzzle box in her hands.
“I did it twice,” she said, shaking the puzzle in its box a little. “It’s a good one. Did you bring our map, Wallfish? The street called Brunnenstraße — where is it?”
They found that street on the map. It was close to the edge of the printed city — at one end of the street, Claudia had inked in one of those gates she liked to draw.
“If we go look there,” she said, “we might be able to see them, the changelings. I’m going to go Wednesday after school, because that’s when the Oma is going to the doctor. Meet you on the steps, then, Wednesday, soon as I can sneak out.”
When Noah told his mother that Cloud-Claudia seemed to think there was a place in Berlin, somewhere on Brunnenstraße, where her parents could look in from . . . (here he got a little stuck, not wanting to say anything about the Changelings’ Land, which felt too private for sharing) . . . from another world? like from heaven, sort of? his mother looked very taken aback at first, and then thoughtful.
“I think I know what gave her that idea,” said his mother. “Remember we told you about those platforms along the Wall on the other side? People can climb up and peek in at this side of the city. All the peeking over goes one way, of course! That’s how it is. Your friend saw people looking once, maybe, and turned that into a story about her parents, poor girl.”
“Oh,” said Noah.
He was reminded all over again of how terrible it must be for Cloud-Claudia, having lost her parents. Cloud had only her grandmother now to take care of her, and her grandmother wasn’t a kind, sweet old granny. But if Noah — if Noah’s parents — he couldn’t even think the thought through.
He would have absolutely no one left in the world.
“She said she’s going there, Wednesday afternoon, when her grandmother’s out at an appointment.”
His mother thought about that.
“Wandering around the city alone?” she said.
“Not alone if I go, too,” said Noah.
“The Rules!” said his mother. “Not sticking out!”
“Walking isn’t sticking out,” said Noah.
His mother seemed to have another idea. She snapped her mouth shut and looked at him, calculating something.
“Wednesday,” she said. “Wednesday, then. Hmm. Well, okay: yes.”
And that was the strangest, most unexpected yes Noah had ever gotten from his mother. It was the kind of yes that is the tip of a great big enormous secret iceberg, but what could Noah do about that? He filed that yes away in the “Mom” file in his brain. She was up to something, but what was she up to?
On Tuesday, his mother went over to West Berlin to visit the library there, as she sometimes did, and that meant they had a nice big salad for dinner, with fresh tomatoes and everything, brought back through the Wall by Noah’s mother.
Then it was finally Wednesday afternoon, and Noah went down to the courtyard steps after he got home from school, wondering whether Cloud-Claudia would show up after all.
When he got downstairs, he found Cloud-Claudia already there.
“Hello!” she said. “Let’s go!”
She had a ragged grin on her face and was pulling on her jacket.
They started walking, just walking down the street, at first saying nothing.
“How’s school going now?” said Noah after a while.
“Bad,” said Cloud-Claudia. “Bad, bad, of course, very bad. And you?”
“Sometimes bad, sometimes all right,” said Noah. “I am supposed to sit very quietly and not say anything.”
“Me, too,” said Cloud-Claudia, and she grinned.
“They think changelings shouldn’t talk,” said Noah.
“Never, ever,” agreed Cloud-Claudia. “Because they talk very funny, like you, or they always say bad and wrong things, like me.”
“No, you don’t!”
“I do. But it’s not fair they don’t want you to talk. You should write an Eingabe about it, that’s what you should do.”
The word sounded like “Ine-gah-buh.”
“What’s an Eingabe?”
“An Eingabe! It’s like a question or a complaint. An official complaint. They have to listen, if it’s official. It’s one of the best things about the whole country, that they have to do something to make things better if there’s an official complaint. That’s what my papa used to say. When we bought that tent that turned out to be no good — it leaked and leaked, and so he wrote an Eingabe, and — oh, never mind. Give me a pen.”
She sat down on a stoop, pulled out a piece of paper from her pocket, and right then and there wrote a letter to the principal of Noah’s school. She wrote:
Dear Mrs. Principal,
I am writing this Eingabe to ask to be able to speak sometimes in class because I am just a kid like the other kids and although I talk funny, they will be able to understand me perfectly all right and it is hard to learn when you have to be silent all the time.
Many thanks,
Jonah
Cloud-Claudia had this funny, small, cramped handwriting. It was like something an elf would write. When she finished writing, she folded the paper into squares very carefully.
“Okay,” said Noah. “Now what do I do with this?”
“You give it to the principal of your school, of course,” she said. “Just walk into the office and give it to her.”
“Hmm,” said Noah. He wasn’t sure how likely he was to go storming into the principal’s office, but he appreciated Cloud-Claudia’s letter all the same.
“After all, I can understand you fine, and I don’t have magic ears,” said Cloud-Claudia, showing him her two, very ordinary, ears. “At your school they just don’t want to bother trying.”
They walked a few more blocks.
Then Cloud-Claudia said, “Did you bring the map?”
“No,” said Noah. “I just . . . remember how the map looks.”
He didn’t want to have to explain how that worked, that this morning he had filed a picture of the map away in his brain. Fortunately Cloud-Claudia didn’t ask what he meant.
“Ach! Too bad,” she said. “That’s foolish. If you come to the edge of the Changelings’ Land without a map, it’s like you’re rattling a locked door with no key. We won’t be able to get in.”
The thing was, Noah wasn’t even so sure anymore about whether she was kidding, whether this was about a pretend door into a pretend place or whether, somehow, she had slipped into the crack between the real and the not-real and gotten stuck there.
“Why do you need a map to get in?” he asked her.
“The map reminds the place it’s really there,” said Cloud-Claudia. “Otherwise it forgets.”
“Okay,” said Noah. She had such a strange way of looking at the world!
They walked quite far up the streets that Noah had memorized, all the way to the very end of Brunnenstraße. And then they were there, at the place where the Wall interrupted the street: where there was a blank end to their side of the city.
“This is it,” said Cloud-Claudia in a whisper. She seemed almost shy for a moment.
There weren’t a lot of people in this odd, blocked-off street. Far away, beyond the Wall, though, yes, there did seem to be people. Th
ey were up high, so they must really have been standing on one of those platforms his mother had talked about. Whoever they were, whatever their reasons were, they were looking now over the Wall at Cloud-Claudia and Noah, who were maybe inside and maybe outside, depending on your point of view. They were rather far away, but he had the impression there were a few men up there, some old and some young, and a woman with pale hair and one shoulder a little higher than the other. You couldn’t see details or anything, even if you were Noah, who had extremely sharp eyes.
Noah’s strongest wish right then was to turn around and get away from those staring people, quickly. He didn’t like being looked at, like an animal in a zoo. It felt wrong to him, everything about this place.
Cloud-Claudia was looking around; she seemed puzzled, even a little dazed.
“It doesn’t look exactly the way we drew it,” she said. “Where’s the gate?”
And then she, too, saw those tiny shadowy figures peering in, or maybe out.
“Are those people?” she said, squinting.
“Yes,” said Noah. “I think so, yes. Come on, let’s go.”
She caught him by surprise, however: she took a deep breath, straightened up, and all of a sudden right out of the blue she waved.
Right at the Wall.
Noah jumped. In fact, a pulse of anxiety went right through him, like a bolt of lightning. For that one moment, he hadn’t been paying close enough attention, and Cloud-Claudia went and broke Rule #3: Don’t call attention to yourself! Don’t stick out!
He felt very keenly that he should have seen that wave coming. He should have stopped it somehow before it happened.
“Oh, don’t,” he said, and he noticed his voice was sounding frantic. “Come on, Cloud — let’s go back home.”
“All right, Wallfish,” she said. She was calm now; she let him hurry her out of that street. “But you know what? It’s good to remind them we still exist.”
