by Anne Nesbet
“We won’t see,” said Noah, feeling bitter about it. All that talk of smelling history in the air, and they were going to get on a plane and fly away. “We’re leaving!”
His father looked at his watch.
“In six hours. You, young sprout, need to go to bed and pretend to sleep a little before they take our parent license away. Car’s coming for us at four a.m.”
“Bed” had been a euphemism in this place; Noah had been sleeping on the sofa. But this last night he was supposed to have his parents’ bed, while they got everything ready out in the living room. He stared at the walls and the shadows, wondering what would happen now. Wondering whether Cloud-Claudia’s grandmother was relenting. Wondering whether the news meant that someday Cloud-Claudia would see her parents again, and what that would be like — whether they could all forget how she had been left behind, sort of like how he was leaving Berlin behind and Jonah behind and . . .
So he did doze off, after all, despite thinking that couldn’t possibly happen.
He was asleep for what felt like about twelve seconds — then his father was shaking him awake.
“Up you get! Sorry, kiddo!”
“Is it four already?” asked Noah. Four a.m. in November feels like the middle of the night. Because it is the middle of the night.
But his father was shaking his head.
“Change of plan, change of plan,” he said. “It’s just about midnight, but we’ve got to see this. Come now, quickly. The driver will be here any second.”
What?
“Things are happening,” said his father. “We’re leaving a little earlier for the airport — we’re going to make a detour. Driver’s up for it, so off we go.”
Noah stumbled into his clothes, into his jacket, down the stairs, with his suitcase always threatening to topple into his ankles and trip him up.
It was cold outside, and so dark, and there was a car there with a guy standing next to it, smoking. He put their suitcases into the trunk and started chatting with Noah’s parents in German.
It was like something that might happen on another planet.
“Started coming through around eleven or so,” the driver was saying. “All right! Everyone in? How do you want to do this?”
“Get as close as you can,” said Noah’s father. “We’ll just see what we can see, and then head off to the airport.”
“Eyes open,” said Noah’s mother, giving him a bracing squeeze. She was in the backseat with Noah; his father was riding up front with the driver.
They drove up the big street into the center of West Berlin. Usually at this time of night on a weekday it would be quiet on these streets in Berlin. But there was a surprising number of people around, more and more as they got closer to the eastern side of the city.
And then it was entirely crowded, filled with people and cars — a huge party taking shape in the street. Like New Year’s Eve, sort of, only this was November.
“Bornholmer Straße,” said the driver, slowing to a crawl in all that crowd. “God in heaven. Looks like it’s all true, doesn’t it?”
“What’s going on?” said Noah, pressing his nose to the glass. “What’s all true?”
“We’re at the border now,” said his father. “This is the Wall. Those people there are coming through the Wall. It’s coming down. It’s coming down!”
“What?” said Noah. “Those are people from East Berlin?”
“Trabis!” said Noah’s mother, pointing at the little cars parading through the crowd. That was the name of those cars, Trabis. They were East Berlin cars, not West Berlin cars. They shouldn’t have been here, certainly not a whole parade of them, inching along. “Here they come!”
“Want to get out for a minute?” said the driver. “Just a minute, though. Don’t want to get lost in this crowd.”
They opened the doors and stepped out.
It was cold and bright and the middle of the night, and everybody was shouting and cheering and crying and thumping on the roofs of the cars coming through. There was a crowd of West Berliners cheering on the people coming through. And the bright lights of television cameras. And so much noise! It was the Pan-European Picnic all over again, but at night in a city in cold weather — and so much huger. You had the feeling that this might be the hugest thing you ever saw in your whole life.
Even Noah’s parents were crying. They were grinning like fools and waving and crying, which was just not what they ordinarily would ever do.
Noah’s eyes had gone right to work from the moment he had stepped out of the car: searching the crowd, searching the crowd.
He was looking for someone medium small, with crazy yellow hair that needed brushing. He looked for that person with as much concentration as he had used all those weeks before when he was hoisting his cloud up over the Wall.
Come on, Cloud-Claudia!
His fists were tense with the effort of that looking.
It wasn’t until his parents made some small noise that he remembered them and looked over their way. Their faces had changed. They were watching him, Noah, more than they were watching all the jubilant people.
“She won’t be here, kiddo,” said his dad. “You know that. That grandmother’s not the type to go running to the Wall the moment the gates open.”
Come on! thought Noah anyway.
He wanted to prove them wrong.
She had waved, just yesterday.
She knew he remembered her.
She had to be there.
They watched for an hour, and then the driver said they’d better start trying to get out of the neighborhood if they were ever going to get to the airport.
“She’s going to be okay now,” said his mother. “You know that. Her parents will find her. This has got to be the beginning of the end for all of those walls. Her father will get out of prison. Her mother will be able to come back home. Soon she’ll be okay again, whichever side of the border she ends up on.”
Noah leaned his head against the window of the car, beaming a good-bye back through all those happy crowds.
Good-bye!
He had never told her his real name, never once. And he never could: those were the Rules.
Well, then, part of him would have to stay Wallfish forever and ever.
Even in the land of the Wechselbalgen, some names will never be forgotten:
Cloud and Wallfish,
Wallfish
and
Cloud.
Some years have gone by. In Germany somewhere, there’s a teenager with slightly disobedient blond hair and a pile of postcards, mailed to her from all sorts of different places, from all over the world (but never from Virginia).
The postcards have been arriving ever since she was very young, back in the sad old days when she lived in Berlin without either one of her parents. She has made an arrangement with the people who moved into the apartment her grandmother used to live in: they save the postcards for her, and she brings them chocolates or something whenever she comes by to pick them up.
“Not much to those cards, honestly!” says the woman who lives in the apartment. She is a little embarrassed about taking presents in exchange for such a small favor. “But there’s no accounting for tastes.”
Every one of those postcards has a cloud drawn on the back.
Someday, Claudia knows, someone is going to come to that apartment, following the pull of all those clouds he sent on ahead to her. A true friend — truest of the true. She has told the people living there: When a guy shows up at your door one day and calls himself Wallfish, go ahead and give him this envelope with my address.
Her address, a puzzle piece with an inky whale drawn on its back, and a map of Berlin.
Some books live on the history shelves, and other books are fiction — but Cloud and Wallfish has deep roots in both places. Noah and his parents are entirely fictional, as are all the characters in the story. But the world they are living in — even the apartment Noah lives in in East Berlin — is as s
crupulously close to the historical truth as I could possibly make it.
I first got to know East Berlin in 1987, when I spent a summer there, working on my German. I made some good friends that summer, and found East Germany such a fascinating place that I decided to devote part of my PhD dissertation to East German literature. That meant coming back to the German Democratic Republic in 1989 to do research. My husband and I had to get married so that he could come along, so I know something about changing your personal life in order to get a visa. We arrived in January 1989 and left in July; we watched the Wall fall from the other side of the world (California) and then returned to East Berlin in the spring of 1990, during that fascinating period when no one really seemed to be in charge of the place and anarchists held parties in ruined buildings.
Every day in 1989, I would walk from our apartment in the Max-Beer-Straße, across the Museum Island (where a statue really did lie on her back behind a fence, waiting for better days), to the old library on Unter den Linden, where I read newspapers and journals from the 1940s. Our local supermarket was the one near the Alexanderplatz that Noah and his father visit. Our apartment really did have a “children’s room” — we used it as a study.
Everything that claims to be a historical document in this book — the speeches of Margot Honecker; the decrees of the East German government; quotes from the local newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung — is real. I have translated those passages from the German, but I haven’t changed what they say. As well as newspapers and books from the period, I also had the journals we kept, the notes I was always taking, the photographs taken at that time by us and by our friends.
One way in which my own experience in East Berlin was very different from that of Noah in this story is that I wasn’t as lonely. Eric and I had wonderful friends in East Germany, and with them we went on walks in the woods, attended concerts and plays, and talked endlessly about the future of the world.
In this book, the fictional parts — the story — are mostly to be found in the regular chapters, and the nonfictional historical material in the Secret Files at the end of each chapter. But of course there is a lot of history in the fictional parts of the book, and of course every account of history always has some fiction mixed up in it. When you read a nonfiction book, or nonfiction parts of fictional books, you have to stay as alert as any researcher (or spy). Truth and fiction are tangled together in everything human beings do and in every story they tell. Whenever a book claims to be telling the truth, it is wise (as Noah’s mother says at one point) to keep asking questions.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the two people without whom this book would still be nothing more than a secret file: Ammi-Joan Paquette and Kaylan Adair.
The people of Candlewick are fiercely creative and intelligent. Kaylan Adair’s amazing ability to ask the right questions about every page turned revision into a fine adventure. Allison Cole made the book better in countless ways. Maryellen Hanley designed the strikingly beautiful cover. My thanks also to John Mendelson, Kathleen Rourke, and Phoebe Kosman, for everything they do to get books into children’s hands. Betsy Uhrig did a valiant job with the copyedits, and Hannah Mahoney checked everything twice.
The wonderful Rosemary Brosnan gave me the great gift of encouragement at a crucial moment: thank you! Jenn Reese and Jayne Williams were catalysts for all sorts of small and large miracles, and I am so lucky to know them.
I have explored Berlin with many extraordinary people over the years. My parents, Robert Nesbet and Helen MacPherson Nesbet, dragged me to (West) Germany when I was a teenager. I wasn’t grateful then, but I am now. Susan Nesbet and Barbara Nesbet and Will Waters kept me reasonably sane that year and continue to do so.
Eric Naiman has been asking for a book about Berlin ever since the German Democratic Republic forced us to get married so that he could come East with me in 1989. It took a long time, but here it finally is! With Lee Naiman and Bob Naiman, we explored some remote East German corners in search of a really lovely dinner.
Above all, of course, are the people we came to know and love in East Berlin: my gratitude and affection go to Thomas Bachmann, Silke and Matthias Bugge, Annette Rauh, Grit Heiduk, Meike Bischoff, and Ines Kumanoff. This story would not exist without their stories.
The book about Berlin was drafted in Paris, where I was lucky to be surrounded by the energy and encouragement of Eleanor Naiman, Ada Naiman, and Hannah Konkel, not to mention Soushka. We all rejoiced when Thera Naiman visited. Thank you also to Yuri Slezkine and Lisa Little, who welcomed me back to Berlin on the pleasantest of research trips.
This book is dedicated to Ines, whose friendship melted the Wall.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2016 by Anne Nesbet
Cover map: Geobasisdaten © GeoBasis-DE/LGB 2016, GB-D 16/16
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2016
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending
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