Cloud and Wallfish

by Anne Nesbet

  He stood there for more than an hour, with other people, mostly tourists coming and going, looking at him with kind, puzzled expressions on their faces and sometimes asking him what he was doing.

  “It’s for my friend,” he said to them, and he could see them trying very hard to figure out what he was saying, trying to follow the choppy start-and-stop path of the Astonishing Stutter. “So she knows I’m not forgetting her.”

  Sometimes the other people helped him hold his sign up for a while when they heard that.

  When he came back down the stairs, his arms and fingers were very cold and stiff, but he felt alive inside.

  “Can we come back again tomorrow?” he asked his dad.

  His father thought about it.

  “If you really want to.”

  “I do,” said Noah with total certainty. “I want to come back every single day.”

  “Hmm,” said his dad, but they did. They came back the next day, the next day, and the day after that.

  The people on the S-Bahn and in the neighborhood of the viewing platform started calling him, in a friendly way, the “Cloud Boy” when he walked by.

  “Cloud’s my friend,” he told them. “I’m the Wallfish.”

  “What? what?”

  “Wallfish!”

  If he sang it, it came out more smoothly, but it was an odd sort of song: “Wallfish, Wallfish, my nickname is the Wallfish. . . .”

  “Kinda small for a Walfisch, aren’t you?!”

  (Because they heard it as the German word, of course. The Walfisch that meant “whale.”)

  He held up his bright-white cloud for Cloud-Claudia and stared at the little people in the street on the other side of the Wall, just stared and stared, wondering whether it was even possible to recognize particular people from this far away. The better-prepared visitors brought binoculars with them, and sometimes they would let him take a look while they took a turn holding up his cloud for a few minutes.

  In the mornings, he answered the questions of the U.S. diplomatic people and the U.S. Army people, and then in the afternoon one of his parents — usually his father, since his mother was salvaging what she could of her thesis — would take him and his cloud-sign to the Wall.

  “They’re shutting the gates,” said his father, only a couple of days into Noah’s cloud project. “They’ve changed the rules so East Germans can’t travel to Czechoslovakia anymore — unless they’re already old enough to be retired. No more Czech Center for German-German relations!”

  Noah’s father shook his head.

  “More history happening,” he said, but he didn’t even have the heart to sniff the air.

  “Do they think they can keep everybody locked up tight forever?” said his mother.

  Her voice was indignant and glum, both at once. You could tell she thought maybe they could just keep everybody locked up tight forever. Noah was less concerned about “everybody” than he was about Cloud-Claudia, who was probably still locked up tight in the evil grandmother’s apartment.

  But then again, maybe not. He didn’t think Cloud-Claudia was the sort of person to stay locked up forever. Someday she would find a way to get out, and then maybe she would wander back toward Brunnenstraße, or she would be walking around East Berlin, happy to be back out of doors, breathing in the lovely coal-smoky air, when she’d overhear whispers about how some crazy-person drüben was holding up some crazy crazy sign at the Wall, shaped like a — and then she would know:

  Noah had not forgotten her.

  He would never, ever forget her, no matter where he was: West Berlin, Virginia, or across the many rivers of the Wechselbalgland.

  She should not think she was so easily forgettable. Nobody should have to feel that way, and especially not Cloud-Claudia.

  Secret File #31

  MORE HISTORY HAPPENING

  On Wednesday, October 18, three very big things happened.

  Noah’s family woke up to the news that there had been a big earthquake in California. Bridges knocked down! Freeways collapsing! It sounded awful. Noah had never lived in a place that had earthquakes, but sometimes he had nightmares where things started falling down all around him, like the Tower of Babel when it was being destroyed.

  That same day, Erich Honecker, chairman, general secretary, et cetera, resigned “for health reasons.”

  “Ah!” said Noah’s mother.

  The following Monday, the regular protest march in Leipzig was absolutely enormous: more than three hundred thousand people walked through the streets, chanting their discontent.

  “We’ll see!” said Noah’s mother. Noah’s father perked up and took a whiff of the air, right there in front of their little television.

  “Smell it now?” he said to Noah. “Smell that history now?”

  That next Monday, October 23, Noah had a visitor, but not in his family’s own little apartment. An American official showed up to lead Noah to the place where the visitor was waiting.

  In the U.S. headquarters in West Berlin, there were a lot of rooms Noah had never seen, and then on top of those, there were probably many secret rooms he would never see in a million years, so he followed the man closely, thinking about what time it was and wondering how long this would take. He always left for the Wall at about one p.m., after lunch.

  They led him into another room, with windows looking out onto the courtyard and a number of dark chairs. The woman in that room wasn’t sitting in any of those chairs. She was facing outside and picking at the curtain with a nervous hand.

  It seemed like the sort of hand that would be good at drawing pictures of rocks that looked like magicians.

  Her hair was the hair of someone who had been worried for a very long time about things more important than haircuts or even brushes. It was a nondescript pale color, but her eyes weren’t nondescript at all. They were the deepest brown imaginable. They had worlds in them. He would have known those eyes anywhere.

  Her lips curled up higher on the right side than on the left, just as they had in that photograph Cloud-Claudia had shown him months ago.

  Sonja Bauer, said his mind confidently, reading that name off the lost map and the lost puzzle piece and the lost slip of paper in the lost pocket of Cloud-Claudia, who was also lost.

  Sonja Bauer, Sonja Bauer, Sonja Bauer.

  “You’re the boy who knows Claudia!” she said, coming over to take his hands. “Claudia’s friend! Is she all right? Is she okay? You know they won’t let me see her —”

  A sob hiccupped its way out of her, but she took a quick breath to disguise it.

  “— or even write to her. Or anything. My own daughter! She must be so unhappy.”

  For a moment Noah was stumped. What could he say?

  “Yes,” he said. “She’s pretty unhappy, I guess. First they told her you were dead, and then they told her at the police station that you ran away without her.”

  If he had been speaking English, and if the Astonishing Stutter hadn’t been blocking his path with special stubbornness, who knows? He might have been able to say all of that more gently. But on the other hand, there was nothing gentle about the plain facts. So maybe it didn’t matter so much, how cleverly you packaged everything up in words.

  Claudia’s mother was on the edge of tears, but she was rather tough, all the same. They were all tough in that family, Noah realized: the grandmother in a harsh way, but the mother and Claudia more like plants that keep stretching bent limbs toward the sun no matter how many times they get trampled on.

  “There’s so much I don’t understand,” she said. “Why did poor Claudia think I was dead? Didn’t she see me, that day at the Wall? I think she must have seen me. I saw her wave!”

  “That was you?” said Noah. Even as he said that, he noticed that one of her shoulders was a little higher than the other. “That was really you?”

  “Of course!” said Cloud-Claudia’s mother. “They had told me she might come, that Wednesday, and there she was, just like they said —” />
  The official American man stepped forward, one brisk step.

  “No details, please, about the arrangements.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said, flustered. “Never mind. As long as she knew I was there.”

  “Well,” said Noah, feeling a little flustered himself, “I did sort of hint you might have been watching. I — I thought I was lying.” He remembered, all at once, his mother saying something about his taking Claudia to the edge of the Wall, on the Brunnenstraße: Wednesday — hmm; okay; yes. Something like that. His mental gears went clickety-clack as he filed that away in the “Mom” file.

  “Tell me about her,” said Cloud-Claudia’s mother.

  So Noah told her everything he remembered: about the puzzle, about the photos Claudia had shown them from the camping trip, about the paper whales for the Wandzeitung, about the map. Claudia’s mother listened with hungry eyes.

  “She was lucky to find a good friend like you. Thank you, thank you for being such a friend. She must have felt so very alone —”

  But she stopped short there, almost as if she had been about to hit an astonishing stutter of her own. It was the loneliness she had run into. Now even Noah was gone, and Cloud-Claudia must be as alone as she had ever been.

  “You have to believe me: we didn’t mean to leave her, not really,” she said, all in a rush. “We heard they weren’t shooting anymore, on the Hungarian border, and we were just drawn like moths. Like stupid moths. Guess we thought they’d let us send for her if we were both on the other side. Every day I wake up and remember and am sorry all over again. Poor Claudia and poor Matthias!”

  She was beginning to lose her calm, Noah could tell. The man from the U.S. Mission was watching her with his eyes slightly narrowed. He was being very carefully sympathetic, Noah thought, as if this woman might unexpectedly burst into tears or flames. “Poor Claudia, who thinks I abandoned her! Because I did!”

  Noah could tell how much that thought must have been scorching her, from the inside out. Noah didn’t have the slightest clue what you said to someone being eaten alive by a terrible thought like that. She trembled there for a moment, and then repeated the question that seemed to be haunting her most:

  “But I don’t understand why she would think I was dead.”

  Noah blinked. “That’s what Frau März told her. Your mother. She said you were both dead, killed in a car accident in Hungary. So that’s what we all thought.”

  Except maybe my parents — but he didn’t say that, of course.

  “Oh, no!” said Sonja Bauer, putting a hand to her mouth, as if it could hardly believe her face was still there. The hand was shaking like a leaf. “No, no, no, no! How could she do that? How could she?”

  And then she just crumpled.

  Literally: she crumpled to the ground.

  The U.S. official jumped to help her. He must have pressed a secret button or something, too, because there were steps in the corridor outside the room almost immediately.

  “Oh, Claudia,” the woman said, but she was more crying than speaking now. “Oh, Claudia! Oh, my poor girl!”

  Noah didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter: he didn’t have time to say anything, anyway. Another official was already steering him out of the room, a no-nonsense hand on his shoulder, guiding him away, away from the misery that had welled up there.

  The Wall did not just slice across Berlin: it sliced right into the hearts of the people who lived there.

  Secret File #32

  MORE TROUBLES WITH NAMES

  An embassy is the place where you find the official representatives of one country in a different country’s capital. In East Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic, there was a U.S. embassy.

  So what could the Americans call their administration and their buildings in West Berlin? It was a problem.

  Remember that West Berlin was not officially a part of the Federal Republic of Germany, but rather an occupied city. The Americans did have an embassy in West Germany, in the faraway town of Bonn. In West Berlin they could not, technically, have another “embassy.” And yet they did have many people to house and lots of business to transact — and, of course, lots of codes to listen to.

  What the Americans ended up calling the non-embassy embassy in West Berlin was the U.S. Mission Berlin.

  It was — like everything about Berlin in those years — a most peculiar situation.

  “Let’s go on a walk in the woods this morning!” said Noah’s mother cheerfully in early November.

  That was code.

  It meant: Noah, it’s really getting to be time for us all to leave Berlin, since they’ve asked you all their questions and we can’t go back over the Wall, so let’s take the bus to the Grunewald forest and walk among late-autumn trees while I try to talk you out of your adorable but hopeless cloud-at-the-Wall project. Wear your scarf and mittens.

  They went through the gate into the woods, and Noah thought how peculiar it was that West Berlin, which was just a tiny island in the middle of East Germany, sometimes felt so large! The trees of the Grunewald went on and on and on and on, almost as if they’d never heard of borders, edges, or Walls. You could get lost in there, he bet, if you weren’t careful.

  It was cold that day. Even in all his layers, Noah was a little chilled in those cold, still woods.

  They were totally sympathetic toward Noah and Cloud. That’s how Noah’s mother started: Completely sympathetic.

  But very soon, it would be time for them to go home.

  “But I don’t know whether she’s seen me there yet,” he said. “I can’t leave until she knows I was there. That I didn’t forget.”

  “I think we have to be more realistic, sweetie. She’s most likely never going to see you,” said his mother. “I wish that weren’t true, but you know it is. We’ve wanted to support you in this thing, but I’m just telling you that soon, very soon, it’s going to be time to leave Berlin and go home.”

  “You’re saying that because they’ve asked us all their questions.”

  His mother gave one of her hooting laughs.

  “That’s one reason,” she said. “Also they’re tired of putting us up, and my usefulness here is running out, too. Aren’t you ready to go home?”

  Noah shook his head because he didn’t want to be distracted by thinking about home, not yet.

  “See, I’ve been wondering some things, too,” he said.

  “Oh, dear,” said his mother with a half laugh. “All right. I guess you have.”

  “I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot. About everything.”

  “And?” said his mother.

  “And one thing I’ve been thinking is that Dad must have been dropping those bits of paper on purpose. He wanted to keep them all guessing, on the other side of the Wall. It was like being a decoy, I think.”

  “Hmm,” said his mother. “Are you done?”

  “Not exactly,” said Noah. He didn’t add his other thought about his father, how if he was a decoy, then he must have been distracting the police from something, and how that something seemed like it might have to be what Noah’s mother might be up to. But he left that thought alone. Instead, he said, “And I think I know when you learned Hungarian. It was during those extra five years.”

  His mother stopped short, right in the middle of the path. Turned and looked at him. Just stared. She didn’t even say, What are you talking about? or something like that. She just stared.

  In his mind he had opened up the “Mom” file; he picked up those imaginary notes and looked at them, in his mind, and the words to explain what he thought tumbled out into the quiet woods in stops and starts and pauses and floods:

  “You told me I’m six months younger than I always thought I was, though now I don’t know what’s right, actually. But I think you are five years older than you say. Or maybe even six. That picture of you and Grandpa — that was from 1953. From the time of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. I figured that out. And you said that was y
our fourth birthday. So —”

  He paused only long enough to take a deep, cold breath. Forest air! No coal smoke anywhere! It was a treat to breathe in these woods.

  “So what I’ve figured out is, I think you must have been born in 1949 and then did something else after high school — after your first run through high school. I think you studied somewhere and learned all these languages. And then they sent you to Charlottesburg, to kind of pretend to be a senior in high school all over again. Like I’ve been pretending to be in the fourth class here. And maybe you even had a different name to get used to. Like you and Dad said, people change their names all the time, right? And then you just went on through college and everything, but with those extra secret years. And I don’t know what you were doing in East Berlin exactly, but I figure it’s got something to do with the names you sewed into my jacket —”

  “Names!” said his mother. Her eyes had secrets in them. Curtains and more curtains. “What are you talking about?”

  “The list of names you put in my jacket,” said Noah. “I found it.”

  “You found it,” said his mother. Echoing is safer than saying anything outright.

  “That awful night, when the police got us. I found it hidden in my jacket. I didn’t know what those names were, but I figured you didn’t want the East Germans to get them.”

  “No,” said his mother. She was really staring at him now. “Are you saying the East German police didn’t take anything out of your jacket that night?”

  “Well, they took our map — Cloud’s map — and some money and stuff. But there wasn’t any list inside my jacket by the time they were looking.”

  “No?” said his mother. “Why? Where did it go?”

  “I — I ate it,” said Noah, not sure whether he was mostly proud or mostly embarrassed.

  His mother looked entirely surprised and then threw her head back and laughed.

  “Oh!” she said. “You’re amazing! Really, you are! Well, it’s gone, then, one way or another.”

  Noah shifted his weight from foot to foot. He was nervous about this next part, too.