Cloud and Wallfish (10 page)

“Well,” said Frau Huppe, “of course, there is the impression one has of Jonah’s skills today, and the impression one had after our evening a few days ago.”

There was a reasonably long silence, while Noah’s family tried to figure out what this meant.

“Submit your letter to the ministry,” said Frau Huppe finally. “Come on, now, Karl, Ingo.”

Noah’s parents had him sit right down at the table and write his little essay. “Do it while it’s all still fresh in your mind,” they said encouragingly. Noah wrote down two sentences about each thing they had seen that day, and he said he very much wanted to go to school, to improve his German and to get to know more about the culture of the GDR. His superpower meant he could write a pretty good letter in German, but thank goodness he didn’t have to read it aloud!

“I’ll take this into the ministry tomorrow,” said his mother indoors that evening.

Outdoors,
however, she said, “That woman had already filed her decision after the Party party. I can just tell!”

And a moment later, “Well, never mind about that. Tonight we’ll make crumb cake from a mix and watch some East German television.”

“Well, that’s it, the spring holiday’s over,” said Noah’s mother one afternoon at the end of May. “The kids are back in school, finally, and that means me, too. Can’t believe how much time is being eaten out of my research by school vacations! But now my minder’s going to take me around.”

They were sitting on a bench in a park, because the weather was finally feeling less like winter. They had already been in East Berlin almost three weeks. Another week and it would be a month. Noah had an imaginary pencil clutched in his imaginary hand, just waiting to check off that first month on his secret imaginary calendar of How Long He Had to Be Jonah. One month down; five to go.

The hardest part about being Jonah was this: not going to school and not having any friends. Okay, that was two things. The Tweedle-Huppes — not good candidates for friendship, anyway — had completely vanished. Noah’s mother had even sent them an invitation to dinner, but they had turned it down. “It would not, unfortunately, be possible,” they had said. Whether it was fear of curried rice or just wanting to stay away from the dangerous Americans, Noah didn’t know. By now he was so tired of being the only kid in his world, he would almost even have been glad to see Ingo.

“What’s a minder?” said Noah, kicking a little at the ground beneath the bench.

“She’s another one from the Ministry of Education. She’ll take me to visit the various schools and make sure I don’t get into any trouble during my observations.”

“Like a babysitter,” said Noah.

His mother hooted (quietly).

“Kind of.”

“What about me going to school?”

The hoot evaporated.

“Well,” said his mother, “I don’t honestly know what’s happening with that. The ministry’s being slow. And remember that Frau Huppe wasn’t exactly encouraging.”

“Isn’t there a law that says kids need to be in school?” he asked. “Even here? Doesn’t everyone have to go to school?”

“Let’s keep hoping,” said Noah’s mother. “Let’s keep hoping. If not this spring, then maybe next fall.”

“
Next fall”
might have been two of the most depressing words Noah had ever heard. He tried very hard not to think about them.

The next morning, he woke up to the nutty-sweet smell of something cooking.

“Good morning, Yo-Yo!” said his father when Noah appeared in the kitchen. “Ready for some pancakes? I got a little carried away this morning. I was just lying around, thinking about pancake ingredients, and then I realized that since I found the little envelopes of Baking Joy, which seems to be baking powder, yesterday at the Kaufhalle, I mean
the store,
we now have everything, absolutely everything, you need to make pancakes, and pretty much two minutes after I realized that, I was in here mixing batter together. How are they?”

“So good!” said Noah. “Yum.”

Noah’s mom looked at her watch.

“Five minutes before the minder arrives! And we know she won’t be late, because for one thing people seem to run things on time here, and for another thing I learned
she lives in this very building.
”

“How extremely convenient!” said Noah’s father. “What a coincidence!”

He said all that using his special camouflage tone of voice, the one that gave you no clue whether he was joking or being perfectly serious.

“The babysitter lives here?” said Noah. He hadn’t seen anyone who looked even slightly like a babysitter in the stairwell.

“Minder,”
said his mother, shooting him a significant look. “I guess we live in a pretty high-toned building. People from ministries everywhere. Of course, they keep to themselves. And then there’s us.”

The doorbell rang.

“And that’s her now!” said Noah’s mother, jumping up.

The minder turned out to be a medium-small woman with gray-brown hair. If Noah had ever seen her before, he didn’t remember it.

“Renate März,” she said.

Noah’s mother organized all the necessary polite introductions. The woman looked at Noah with particular interest.

“Hello, young man,” she said in German. “You must be Jonah.”

Noah’s mother gave him a gentle prod in the back that meant
This is when you prove you’re a polite person who wasn’t raised by wolves.

“Glad to meet you,” said Noah. He was nervous, and the bicycle of his speech ran into wall after wall. It wasn’t really that being nervous made the stutter worse. It just made it harder for him to recover when he hit a wall or a bump, and
that
made the stutter worse.

As usual, in Noah’s long experience, the woman’s face changed while he was talking.

She shook Noah’s hand and said to Noah’s mother, “I see. He must inspire your work. It’s not easy, to have a child with such a defect.”

Noah bristled, but the Rules meant he couldn’t say anything even the slightest bit sarcastic. Why, though, should it be hard for his parents to have a kid who stutters? It wasn’t hard for
him,
particularly, to be the kid who actually did stutter; he just kept moving along and moving along, and eventually everything that needed saying got itself said. What was so hard about that?

But he noticed that the woman’s tone of voice had changed. It was as if she had been testing them, and they had passed the test.

“And your husband is here to take care of the boy,” she said. “Yes, I see.”

It sounded like she was filling out a form in her mind as she spoke to them.

“Sam is also working on his novel while we’re here,” said Noah’s mother, and Noah’s father made a modest little sound from over in the kitchen. Noah noticed that neither she nor his father went on to mention that the novel was about mink farmers, however.

Frau März didn’t seem to want to hear about the novel.

“Well, children are the future!” she said in a bright tone of voice, and in the stiffest English Noah had ever heard, she added: “I think you’ll see that we do everything we can here to promote the Well-Being of the Child.”

“Yes,” said Noah’s father, coming in with a dish towel in his hand. “Of course. I’m sure you do.”

Noah’s mother was gathering up her notebooks and pens. She tucked them into a bag and waved good-bye, and then off she went with the minder to visit programs for children with speech deficits in whatever East Berlin schools the minder was willing to show her.

Noah and his father looked at each other.

“Maybe I could go play in the park for a while?” said Noah. That was his place for being outside and alone when being inside and alone seemed particularly unbearable.

“Don’t bother those construction crews,” said his father, as he always did. “Promise to stay out of their way and out of trouble?”

Yes yes yes yes.

He always stayed a million miles out of trouble.

So he went down to the construction site and watched holes being dug for a while. Noah had a high basic tolerance for construction, because when buildings were going up, you could see the way they were put together, and he always liked knowing the way things were put together. But here they were still just digging holes, not building things up from those holes, so when watching them dig became too boring for words, he walked around the park that wasn’t really a park and kicked at weeds and twigs.

There were some interesting little nooks and crannies created by the extra fences up around the construction site, and Noah liked to seek out places to sit that were out of sight of workers and apartment windows.

He needed to think.

Something about the conversation with that minder had really gotten under his skin. She had softened so distinctly when Noah had opened his mouth and the Astonishing Stutter had popped right out and started showing off. Why was that?

And that made Noah realize that it could be useful, under certain circumstances, to have a kid with a bad stutter. Of course, it could be inconvenient, too, if you were trying to convince people to let the kid go to German-speaking schools! But if, say, you wanted to convince people that you had a good reason to be studying speech defects in the German Democratic Republic, then having a child with a stutter might be useful evidence. And that thought led to other ideas that troubled Noah’s brain. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be
useful,
not in that way.

That night Noah had trouble sleeping. And even once he fell asleep, it wasn’t for long. Sometime late, late that night, he found himself lying in his narrow bed, looking up at the ceiling, while his heart thumped away.

A breeze had wandered in through his bedroom window — it had been so warm and summer-like that they had started opening some windows at night — and was gently swelling the folds of his curtains.

An argument was coming in with the breeze, from somewhere not too far away.

He got out of bed and walked to his window to listen harder, and it seemed to him that the sound must be coming up from another opened window somewhere nearby.

That was interesting, because one of those voices arguing belonged to a kid. The kid, whoever it was, sounded lonely and sad.

Noah shivered a little and went back to bed, pulling the not-very-soft pillow up over his head so that he wouldn’t hear anything from outside that window anymore. Other people’s arguments feel like something you shouldn’t be listening in on, especially if you can’t do much about whatever it is that’s making them so upset.

He forgot about having been awake in the middle of the night during the next few hours of sleep and woke up with his mind all muddled by some fussy dream about running after balloons that kept dancing out of reach and then drifting away.

What a silly dream to have! Really, at least he should be able to have interesting and exciting
dreams
!

After breakfast he did three or four pages from a math workbook, but real numbers interrupted his work and distracted him. Namely, the number forty. Forty was a special number here this year. You saw it all over the place. That was because 1989 was the fortieth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic officially becoming a separate state. They were going to celebrate the heck out of that anniversary in October, but for now you could already see signs here and there, and of course headlines in the newspaper.