Cloud and Wallfish (15 page)

The next day, when Noah and his mother stopped by Cloud-Claudia’s door, it was opened not by Claudia, and not by the strange man, but by Frau März, who looked even worse than she had when Noah had last seen her.

She glared at them through the six-inch distance she had opened up between door and doorway.

“Haven’t you done enough harm?” she said.

Noah blinked in surprise. Then he blinked again, because his mother did not seem so surprised: sad, maybe, but not surprised.

“It has been brought home to me that it can’t be healthy for Claudia, who must adjust to a new way of life, to be spending so much time with a child who comes from such a different background,” said Frau März, the poison in her voice easing. Now she sounded both very formal and very ill at ease. “Though of course we thank you for having her visit, and thank you for the soups you have brought me during my illness. But I’m better now, and we will not need your aid anymore.”

“You should know we will be very glad to have Claudia over again anytime,” said Noah’s mother. “She has been a very good guest, and it is so lovely for Jonah to have a friend.”

“I’m afraid she has a great deal of work to do, to catch up with the curriculum before the new school year begins,” said Frau März firmly. “You will be doing us all a great favor if you just
stay away.
Stay away, please. Good-bye.”

And the door swung shut.

Noah jumped a little when it shut, from surprise and discombobulatedness more than from the noise. Frau März hadn’t exactly slammed the door: she had just moved her hands and let it fall closed. But if Noah’s toes had been a little closer to the inside of Frau März’s hallway, they would have been stubbed.

“Oh, no,” said Noah’s mother. She could probably see some sign of the steaming, unhappy pressure that was beginning to build up in Noah’s head. “Come outside with me for a moment — you can help me lug some grapefruit juice home.”

They had discovered little glass bottles of grapefruit juice from Cuba. So good! “I love Cuban vitamins!” Noah’s father had said. “First the lovely bell peppers and then grapefruit juice!” North Korea provided their soy sauce, which was also a fine thing to have, but it tasted just slightly off compared to the soy sauces found in Virginia. The Cuban grapefruit juice, however, was bright and sweet and tart and perfect.

Noah waited until they were twenty steps away from the building — that was the absolute limit of his patience for the Rules at that moment — then it all burst out of him, an angry, red-faced mix of words: “See! It
is
like Rapunzel! That Frau März is keeping her there! She won’t even let her out! And she’s blaming me! She’s saying it’s all my fault! We have to rescue her! She is my only friend in this whole country! I’m not staying in this horrible place if I’m going to be one hundred percent lonely
all of the time
!”

“I know, I know, I know,” said his mother. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for you, and I’m very, very sorry for Claudia. We were trying to help, but I’m afraid we only made things worse for her.”

“So you think it’s our fault, too? You’re as bad as that awful Frau März! How can it be
our
fault her parents were in a car accident? And she’s making Cloud-Claudia suffer for it — it’s awful!”

“It is awful, but listen,” said his mother. “That’s what can happen in a place like this. That’s
why
we have all the Rules. Because if we’re not really careful, people can end up getting hurt. Badly hurt, even.”

“But we
were
careful. How were we not careful?”

“Having Claudia over all those times — that wasn’t actually being as careful as we could have been. And then who knows? Maybe even the things we sometimes say to each other, even though I know we’ve all been good about following the Rules. Your father or I may have mentioned something accidentally about politics when she was visiting — that wouldn’t have been so smart. What if Claudia went home and told her grandmother something about how we talk about Gorbachev upstairs? That could get end up getting them into trouble. Not
us,
so much, but
them.
For associating with us.”

“I’m sure Cloud wouldn’t say anything about us,” said Noah, indignant on Cloud-Claudia’s behalf.

“Of course she probably wouldn’t,” said his mother.

But then he remembered what Cloud had said herself yesterday about her grandmother, about names and codes, and his stomach felt like ice inside.

“Cloud said, she said —” It was like the whole idea was stuttering in his head, not just some particular sounds or syllables. Maybe because it felt like telling Cloud-Claudia’s secrets somehow, and Noah was always careful about keeping other people’s secrets. But if she had said it aloud in their apartment, and the bugs in the walls were listening, was it a secret anymore at all? “She said there’s something strange about what happened to her parents in Hungary. She said her grandmother’s not telling the truth. She thinks there was some kind of bad magic that happened. Why would she say that?”

They were walking again, toward the Kaufhalle, but Noah still felt like kicking bricks, if only there had been some loose bricks around to kick.

He could see his mother looking surprised, starting to say something — and then biting it back. What was that?

“She said that
in our apartment
?” she said instead. It was so obviously instead of that other thing she had been about to say.

“It wasn’t her fault,” said Noah. He felt that so strongly. It wasn’t Cloud-Claudia’s fault! And just to be very clear about that, he added in the slimmest of whispers, “She doesn’t know the Rules.”

His mother bit her lip.

“She’s
upset,
” said his mother. “She lost her
parents.
They’d have to see that.”

Then she said, more bitterly, “Rats.”

“Why rats?” whispered Noah.

“Because we blew it, that’s why. Come on, keep smiling.”

Noah tried to smile for whoever might be watching, but it must have been a horrible smile, all tied up in knots the way he was feeling.

His mother was a thousand times better at the smile thing. Her face had absolutely nothing to do with the words she was saying. She looked cheerful and bouncy, but what she was saying was “I should have been more careful. I was so worried about what
we
might say, I forgot to worry about
her.
Well. I’m sorry. All we can do is back way the heck off and stay away.”

“What?” said Noah. “What? Back off from Cloud-Claudia?”

“Shh,” said his mother, brightening the smile a few notches. “You’re getting way too loud. But yes, we have to leave her alone.”

“No,” said Noah. “No way. That’s awful.”

“For her own sake,
Jonah,
” said his mother, putting some edge into her smile. “Look:
we
can leave if we get into trouble. The people we care about here can’t. They live here, and they can’t go anywhere else. It’s not a game for them. It’s their lives. Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you really understand?”

Noah nodded, but inside he was still dug in at
no way.
No way
was he abandoning his one and only friend in this whole place. No way!

“I see you,” said his mother, from whom secrets could not be kept. “You’re being all Alice. You can’t be Alice here.”

She was so tricky, his mother! She had caught him already, like a fish on a hook!

“What do you mean?” he asked. “What Alice?”

“The Alice-in-Wonderland Alice,” said his mother. “At the end of the story, when she gets fed up because the trial’s so unfair and the Queen of Hearts is so horrible, and she loses her temper and says, ‘You’re just a pack of cards!’ Remember that? I know you remember that. But you
can’t
be Alice,
Jonah.
”

“I’m not,” said Noah. He wanted to say, “And I’m not
Jonah,
either,” but the look in his mother’s eyes restrained him.

“None of us can safely be Alice,” said his mother, and her lips got very thin as she said it, “when it’s our friends who are cards in the deck.”

Noah sort of saw the point she was making, but he was mad all over again anyway.

“There’s only one single person I’m friends with here,” he said. “One person! And she’s being held prisoner downstairs. That Frau März is purely evil.”

He did take some pleasure in spitting out those words. He enjoyed the
rat-tat-tat
his voice made of the tricky letters. At that moment, he wanted to make all his words sound as vicious as possible. And yet that wasn’t the truly largest, most whale-like thought in his mind. To tell the truth, he knew that on some level he was only pretending to be furious. It was a way not to have to think about how awful it was going to be, not having Cloud-Claudia to talk to.

“Don’t say things like that,” said his mother. “She’s not very lovey-dovey, that’s true, but the woman has lost her daughter and her son-in-law. You can’t know how that feels. And she has a granddaughter to take care of. And you know what I learned today at the ministry? She’s lost her job, too. She’s retiring early; that’s the official story. But that man who was there yesterday, I’m pretty sure that’s what he was there for — to tell her she was going to have to leave her job.”

“Just because of
us
? Because her granddaughter was doing jigsaw puzzles upstairs with
us
?”

“It’s possible,” said his mother.

That was so hard to believe! But his mother looked serious. She wasn’t even kidding.

That night Noah lay in bed scowling up at the shadowy images of monkeys and giraffes, and he thought that the Berlin Wall had shifted position: now it was the floor of his apartment, which was the ceiling for Cloud-Claudia. He was on one side of that horizontal Wall, and Cloud-Claudia was on the other side, and they couldn’t even wave handkerchiefs at each other the way people had done in the old days right after the Wall had gone up.

He leaned over the side of his bed, looking at the floor that was really a Wall, and let his fingers drift down against its cool surface.

Cloud-Claudia was probably looking up at her ceiling right now, thinking upset thoughts in German.

That made him wonder about something. He was the Wallfish, after all. He knocked with one finger-knuckle against the floor:
tap tap tap.

What was the quietest possible tap that a person on the other side of a horizontal Wall might be able to hear?

He tried it again:
tap tap tap.

Then he padded over to his desk and got a pen, which he thought might tap more clearly than a knuckle.

Tap Tap Tap,
said the pen against the floor, three taps for three words:

Are you there?

As he let that pen click out its question against the floor, it occurred to him that in German those three words sounded even more tappy, thanks to all the consonants:

Bist Du da?

Once or twice, just for fun, he let the pen have a temporary, not-so-astonishing stutter of its own:

Tu-tap,
tu-tap,
tu-tap.

He tapped on the horizontal Wall a bunch of times, and then thought how terrible it would be if Frau März happened to barge into Cloud-Claudia’s room just at the very moment some mysterious wallfish upstairs (himself, Noah) was tapping away on the ceiling, and he put the pen down and waited.

At first: nothing.

Maybe it hadn’t been loud enough, the pen? He considered going into the kitchen to get a spoon, as the next step up in tapping material, but then he realized that if he left the room, he couldn’t be listening properly to his floor, so he curled up on his side in his bed and waited.

And almost dozed off.

And then woke up with a start when the floor suddenly spoke to him after all:

Tup! Tup! Tup!

Wow! It sounded like she might have hefted a chair over her head or something, to tap out that very solid pattern, but of course, it’s a lot harder to reach a ceiling than a floor.

Noah
tu-tapped
quickly back, but just once.

You’re there!

And then, despite all the misery of that day, he smiled himself to sleep.