Cloud and Wallfish (13 page)

Noah got to work. He desperately wanted to be putting little pieces together, bit by bit. After a few minutes, Cloud-Claudia leaned forward in her chair and started helping him. They didn’t talk. They just sorted pieces that had one straight edge over to the sides and started putting together the most obvious sections of the frame, like the part where the ships coming into the harbor had long masts that ran as thin lines from piece to piece, or the rooftops of the distant town on the left-hand side.

At dinner the fact that Cloud-Claudia wasn’t speaking became more obvious. She moved spoonfuls of soup from the bowl to her mouth with a kind of dogged determination. Noah wasn’t going to say anything, faced with that degree of not-wanting-to-talk, but at a certain point his mother put down her spoon and said, just to make a dent in that silence, “What, Claudia, is your favorite subject in school?”

Cloud-Claudia froze, her spoon hovering just a millimeter above the surface of the soup.

“None,” she said. In German that word has extra edges:
keines.
It bristled. It wanted everyone at the table to back off and stay away. Underneath the bristles, Noah could tell, lurked a squishy heap of misery.

Noah’s mother was not the sort of person to be frightened of bristles, though.

“Outside of school, maybe? There must be something you especially like to do.”

Cloud-Claudia put down her spoon.

“I like to be asleep in a tent when it’s raining,” she said.

“Oh,” said Noah and his parents, a quiet chorus of ohs. They put down their spoons, too. That silence was different from the one that had come before it. It was warmer. With fewer prickles. You didn’t want to interrupt it, but you didn’t want the warmth to wear off, unappreciated, either.

“I like a roof overhead, myself,” said Noah’s father after a moment. “Less wet and less chilly.”

“No,” said Cloud-Claudia with conviction. She was looking at her soup, and the words started to spill out of her, fast and quiet, first a trickle, and then a soft torrent of them: “A tent is the best, if it isn’t leaking. If there are blankets and you have spent the whole day climbing up the crazy rock castles by the Elbe River and stopping to draw pictures of them because you can’t imagine how much they look like magicians carved them and then later you eat sausages and crawl into the tent and have the every-evening picture-judging contest to see who drew the best rocks that day, which is not a fair contest says Papa, because his pictures are photographs so he can’t show them to us yet and ours always win, Mama’s drawings and mine, but that’s how it goes and you sing one more hiking song and then roll up in the blankets to sleep better and if then the rain comes, but not all at once, just
pat-pitter-pat
like it’s whispering something, then that’s the best.”

It was the longest group of words any of them had ever heard Cloud-Claudia say. They all tried not to gape at her. There was a lot of friendly staring at spoons.

“Yes,” said Noah’s father finally. “Oh, yes. I see your point. It sounds lovely.”

“Last summer my stupid lungs were all fine, one hundred percent super, and we went to the Little Switzerland in Saxony,” said Cloud-Claudia. “That’s when I found out what I like doing most: I like climbing rocks, and drawing things, and sleeping in tents. There. It was wonderful, until the tent started leaking.”

There was a pause.

“It’s so stupid. Nothing ever lasts. The tent
always
leaks,” she said, all fierce again, and then she sprang up from the table as if it had bitten her or something and went back to the jigsaw puzzle in the other room, and worked with Noah in silence for another half hour, until they had the whole frame put together, the top and the bottom and both sides, something to hold a small part of the chaos of the universe at bay, like a tent built well enough not to leak.

Cloud-Claudia came back the next day, with a ragged envelope in her hands. She pulled a bunch of black-and-white photographs out of it and slapped them down on the coffee table, on top of the puzzle pieces.

“See?” she said, as if she was defying Noah to say there hadn’t been actual photographs in that envelope.

There was a miraculous tower of wild rock, like one of those tall, bulbous mountains in a Chinese scroll, and there was Cloud-Claudia holding on to the sides of a rickety-looking iron bridge that seemed to run between boulders. And then came a picture of a light-haired woman with her arms around Cloud-Claudia in front of a landscape that was all hills and rocks and trees, two smiles that crooked up at the right side of the mouth with the same question mark of a dimple, one large and one small.

And another photo of a picnic next to some bicycles: that must have been from some other trip. And a very young Cloud-Claudia, her hair a puff of brightness, feeding the ducks in a lake. And then a blurry one of a man with a shadow across his eyes, looking up from a book.

“My mother took that,” said Cloud-Claudia. “Because it’s not fair, she says, if all the pictures are of the people who don’t know about cameras.”

“No,” said Noah, agreeing.

It was hard to make himself remember that the people in these photographs were now really truly gone from the world — the people, that is, who were not Cloud-Claudia, who was very much right here right now, and trembling slightly as she put the photos back into their envelope.

“So that’s it,” she said, like a drawer slipping shut, when the photos had gone away. What else was there to say?

The puzzle was still waiting there, where the photos had been.

So they worked on that puzzle some more.

Certain people like to do jigsaw puzzles by sorting pieces out by shape. Others like to sort by color and picture — all the sky pieces over here, all the pieces with little people quarrying blocks of marble over there. Both Noah and Cloud-Claudia belonged to the latter category. Noah liked also to take a piece, any piece, and then study it and the picture on the box until he found just that particular splotch of white with a little yellow dot in the corner. Perhaps this was cheating, but every time he figured out where a particular piece belonged, he felt like order was being made in his soul. A little, tiny, puzzle-piece-size bit of order.

They weren’t completely silent this time. Sometimes Claudia commented on what the little people in the picture were doing, and sometimes Noah said something. They understood each other better and better. It always helps to have a picture to point to.

For example, Noah pointed to the tippy-top of the tower (on the cover of the puzzle box — they weren’t yet far enough along with the puzzle itself to be examining the tops of any towers), where the narrow circle of those uppermost walls vanished for a moment behind a small white cloud, as a way to point out how high that tower was already getting.

“Cloud!” he said in English. “Like you! Cloud-Claudia.”

“I am a cloud?” said Cloud-Claudia. First she used the German word,
Wolke,
which sounds like “vol-keh,” because German
w
’s all sound like
v
’s. Then she tried out the English word, which came out sounding extremely German. Extremely like her own name — which, of course, it was.

That made her smile and reach for the mythology book, with all its lavish illustrations.

“And I saw you in here yesterday,” she said.

Cloud-Claudia must have been just about the first person ever to look carefully at that particular book. (Noah’s father liked to say the decorator probably chose it just because its cover matched the gold-tone carpet, and because it had so much
heft.
“Heft is a good thing in a book!” he had said. “That’s what I want my mink-farming novel to have: heft!” So Noah thought he’d better ask what “heft” meant. “Solid bones,” his father had said. “Strong plot, tricky characters, and enough pages that when you pick it up to throw it at the wall, you pretty much need both hands.”)

Cloud-Claudia had found the picture she wanted there: a mythological whale in a bright-blue mythological ocean.

Noah just blinked at her for a moment. Was there a Noah’s ark hiding in that picture that he wasn’t seeing?”

“Jonah,”
she said. “It says there was a Jonah in a whale!”

The German for whale is
Walfisch:
whale-fish. Even though whales are not actually fish at all.

“Oh!” said Noah. “Oh, right!”

He was remembering the story of Jonah now, or remembering having once heard a story about Jonah. More important, he was remembering all over again that he wasn’t named Noah anymore, not here. Here, he was one hundred percent Jonah. Whale-fish! Whale-fish! Whale-fish!

But then his mind tinkered with the sound of that word a little; he said it aloud, “Wallfish,” with the
w
turned into a changeling American sound, almost not a consonant at all — and thought about a special kind of fish that might especially like to swim in walls.

“Ja?”
said Cloud-Claudia, raising an eyebrow at him, since she couldn’t read his mind.

He realized he was making funny shapes with his lips, thinking about
w,
and snapped his mouth safely shut.

“Why don’t you show Claudia the Jonah Book?” said Noah’s father, who had suddenly appeared in the room with his notebooks and his tea.

“Um,” said Noah. He was reluctant. The Jonah Book made him feel creepy inside, like he was a character in a novel someone else was writing. But he couldn’t get out of it. Claudia looked politely at the blurry photos in the Jonah Book for a moment and handed it back.

“Your pictures are in color” was all she said. She did not ask him, thank goodness, how he had liked having
Mrs. Deerborne
as his
second-grade teacher
in
Roanoke, Virginia.

When Cloud-Claudia was leaving at the end of that day, she pulled something out of her jacket pocket and handed it to Noah.

“Your map,” she said. “I enjoyed it. Thank you.” And she looked at him with her intensely brown eyes, as if there were a message there for him that she was worried he wouldn’t understand.

“Danke,”
said Noah.

As soon as he had taken it into his hands, however, he realized that he should have just told her to keep the map. After all, he was pretty sure his parents could find another one. But by the time he had those thoughts, it was too late.

Later that evening, he spread out the map of Berlin to look at it, smoothing out the fold lines with his palm. That was when he saw it — a doodle on the map.

No, not a doodle.

Tiny little pictures, filling one corner of the large blank section of the map, the part where West Berlin had been erased from official consciousness.

Noah looked closer. These weren’t real monuments of West Berlin. There were tiny little buildings, and parks, and schools, and a playground, yes, but also a small castle, and a forest running around the castle, and trees on which apples and clocks and candy canes grew. You could see that Cloud-Claudia really did like to draw. And that she liked small, precise things. That made Noah very happy, because miniatures and pictures with tons of tiny detail, anything that made you want to reach for a magnifying glass, all those things made him very glad, too. It was much of the reason he liked that Tower of Babel puzzle so much.

She had even labeled the parts of her extra map: in tiny capital letters, very clear, though small, and boxed to set the words apart, she had given the place a name:
Im Land der Wechselbalgen.
The Land of the Changelings!

And little gates, here and there, between East Berlin and the Changelings’ Land, gates and bridges and doors. To keep people out or to let them in?

It was done with such care, so perfectly and so tinily, that the imaginary world took up only a quarter or so, so far, of the blank splotch on the map.

He looked at it for a long time, thinking.

It seemed like an invitation. It must be an invitation! Anyway, he couldn’t resist.

He got a couple of pens and tried them out until he found the one with the finest tip, and then he bent over the map and looked for the right place to begin.

What did he want there to be in the Land of the Changelings? He thought about it. A river, he decided, with islands in it and some icebergs for a polar bear or two. Drawing icebergs was highly satisfying, and he thought the tiny bear came out pretty well, too. And then he added more trees to Cloud-Claudia’s forest, and a hill with a cave in it, and a cabin tucked into the side of the hill, with a tiny stream that emptied into the river. And then he added a fancy bridge over the river, so that you could get from the forested hills to the city proper without having to swim or go the long way around.