Cloud and Wallfish (16 page)

Noah wanted to protest the injustice of everything that had happened to Cloud-Claudia, and the especially great unfairness of saying she could never come visit upstairs again. When he looked at the puzzle, which had finally been taking shape there on the coffee table, the sheer awfulness of it all rose up and threatened to capsize him.

He was not the sort of person who just gives up when things become difficult. Noah was used to finding a way around barriers and obstacles . . . including, when necessary, certain consonants. He thought about Berlin, the city of secret messages, and he decided that he was not going to abandon Cloud-Claudia, not now when she had had pretty much the most horrible thing you could think of happen to her, not now when she had lost her parents. And was even being held like Rapunzel in the apartment of the awful Frau März!

He had about twenty ideas for things he could do to help Cloud-Claudia or to see her, and each of those ideas was based on some ridiculous assumption or hope that made no sense at all when you looked more closely at the problem. It was not until the twenty-
first
idea that Noah thought he might have come up with something that could serve as an actual plan, a way to make sure she knew he hadn’t forgotten about her. And even then, it was probably silly.

But Noah didn’t care one single whit about seeming silly.

He found a sheet of paper. He found the scissors.

And he cut out a puffy white-gray cloud, and he stuck it up in his window. He figured it would go just fine with the monkeys and giraffes. Already they thought he was a little kid who wanted to sleep in a room with zoo animals on the walls, so how could they fuss about him hanging a puffy paper cloud in his window?

His parents saw the cloud hanging in his window but said nothing about it. He wasn’t sure whether they understood it was a message or not. Of course, it would be part of the Rules that you didn’t point at something and say,
Hey, is that a secret encoded message? Because it looks kind of cool!

Then he started the really difficult part of sending any secret message, which is the having to wait patiently, maybe for a long time, maybe even
forever,
to find out whether someone has received your message, whether that someone ever successfully decoded it, and whether when they got the message, they went, “Aha!” and smiled in satisfaction — assuming it was the sort of message that would make a person smile, which was probably not the case for many secret messages in Berlin.

Noah’s parents had told him — when they were well outside the apartment, looking at bears in the East Berlin zoo — that in West Berlin there was a place where you could climb up to a small platform from which you could look over the Wall into East Berlin, where at the far end of the street people seemed to be walking around, going about their ordinary lives. That made Noah feel a little queasy.

“Looking in at us like we’re looking at the bears?” he said to his parents.

“Not so much looking at
us,
” said his mother with surprise. “Looking at East Berliners. I’ve been up on that platform myself, years and years ago.”

“But we’re inside now,” said Noah. “No, wait.”

He had just remembered the map of Berlin.

“The Wall goes all around
West
Berlin,” he said.

“It does,” said his mother.

“So even though they feel like they’re peeking in at East Berlin from outside, the West Berliners are inside, and
we’re
outside,” said Noah. “Right? If I were standing over there, looking in here, would I be outside looking in or inside looking out?”

The bears had no comment. His parents gave each other looks.

“Complicated mind you have there,” said his father, and he scritched the back of Noah’s neck. “Guess it depends on how you look at it.”

Inside Noah’s complicated mind, he was saying to himself,
The way I look at it is, I belong to both places. What I am is a wallfish. I swim through the stone wall in the middle of inside and outside.

He liked the idea of being a border fish, a wallfish, a stone creature swimming through stone.

And the next day when he was wandering around the fence of the non-park, he found a small picture of a whale drawn in chalk on the bottom of the wooden fence, and that made him very glad indeed.

His message had gotten through, apparently.

That afternoon he put another cloud up in the window of his room. He began to think about making some actual cloud mobiles. He was getting ambitious!

The next day there were a few tiny scraps of whale-shaped paper on the apartment stairs. He scooped them up and took them safely home in his hands.

Cloud-Claudia was like a ghost haunting his steps. He kept finding little traces of her, in chalk or as whale-shaped pieces of paper, but she herself was absent.

August weighed heavily on Berlin. Everyone, not just Noah, who was now stuck on one side of his building’s horizontal Wall, was anxious and tense. Noah wished he had thought more about codes before coming to this country. Morse code, for instance . . . the basic code of wall-tappers! But even if he had known Morse code, Cloud-Claudia wouldn’t have had a clue, and what’s the point of a message that can’t be read? On top of all that, tapping wasn’t a safe activity, not for Cloud-Claudia, anyway, who must have been standing on her bed with a chair or a broom in her hands — risking Frau März’s wrath every minute.

It wasn’t just Noah feeling blocked and worried. His parents were quieter indoors — which was a sign of having things to say that could not be said inside, because of the Rules — and more puzzling and cryptic in their comments to each other when walking outside with Noah, though they kept the smiles of a happy family outing on their faces. They were both working very hard over their notebooks, his mother sorting through her research notes, and his father giggling occasionally as he heaped up clues for his mink-farming, jam-making sleuth. Noah, who wasn’t writing a novel or a thesis, was lonely and bored.

Without really meaning to, he finished the Tower of Babel puzzle. He had been putting in a piece here or there but no more than that, trying hard to save the puzzle for Cloud-Claudia, but she still wasn’t allowed to come over, so eventually, no matter how slowly Noah worked, he found himself putting the last two pieces into place.

Then he said to his parents, “That’s it. I can’t spend one single more day doing absolutely nothing. Don’t we get to go on vacation? You’ve been working hard. It’s summertime. I know where I want to go.”

He had been thinking this over for a while.

“Where’s that?” said his parents.

“Hungary,” he said.

The parents looked at each other, changed the subject, and eventually moved that whole conversation outside, where the evening was warm and humid.

“There’s a word for what you have,” said his mother, poking him. “I just learned it from someone here. You have a case of
Fernweh.
”

“What’s that?”

“Guess you’d translate it as
farsickness.
You want to travel. So does just about everyone in East Berlin. They want to go to places they can’t.”

“We can go somewhere, though,” said Noah. “Can’t we? Let’s go to Hungary. We can find out what really happened.”

“What do you mean, what really happened?” asked his father.

“
To
Cloud-Claudia’s parents.
Remember? She said her grandmother’s been hiding something. We can go to Hungary and find out the truth.”

His parents exchanged another significant glance. This one had several layers to it.

“Hungary’s a big place,” said his mother. “I’m sure car accidents happen there all the time.”

“You’ll ask people and find something out,” said Noah. He had absolute confidence in his mother’s ability to find things out.

“I’m curious about Hungary myself,” said Noah’s father, but there was something teasing in his voice that Noah didn’t quite understand. “Goulash and so on. Wild music. The fading border —”

“Right,” said Noah’s mother, picking up the pace of her quick, determined feet.
“Goulash.”

“Wait!” said Noah. “What do you mean? How can a border fade?”

His father sighed. “Hungary’s on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain; Austria’s on the west, right? They’re like next-door neighbors with a great big fence between them. But Hungary’s new government doesn’t seem to want to be shooting people trying to leave anymore. In fact, the leader of Hungary and the leader of Austria had a nice little ceremony where they snipped through some of that barbed wire at the border!”

“Unclear what it all means,” said Noah’s mother with a carefree smile. “But people are full of talk about it, that’s for sure. Someone I know said, ‘Maybe we could even sneak across the Hungarian border into Vienna for breakfast and back again without anyone noticing. Breakfast in Vienna! I hear they have fantastic pastries.’”

“Really?” said Noah.

“Really could one sneak across the border or really do the Viennese make fantastic pastries?”

“Both.”

“Well, Vienna’s famous for its strudels; that’s a fact. The rest is less certain. The same person told me how she and her husband had been traveling in Hungary last summer, and there was a point on the road when a sign had said cruelly, ‘A hundred and fifty kilometers to Vienna.’ And she said she’d looked over at her husband and said to him, ‘For you and for me, it will always be a hundred and fifty kilometers to Vienna.’ And some people even say they may close Hungary as a place to travel to if the border rumors are true. People here vacation in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, right? Those are places they are allowed to go. But have you been paying attention to the posters in the train station recently?”

She leaned closer and picked some imaginary specks of dust off his shoulder.

“Posters only mention Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. No Hungary. Now
that’s
the sort of thing that starts rumors.”

The scary thing about Noah’s mother was that you always had the sense that if
she
had been put in charge of a land behind a wall, she would have run the place much more effectively than the people who were actually in power.

“Well, I think we should go to Hungary,” said Noah stubbornly. “And ask questions and stuff.”

“You’re not smiling,” said his mother, who, of course,
was
smiling, though not with her eyes. “And you need to be about four notches quieter; you know that.”

Noah could see that his parents thought the discussion was over, but he wasn’t going to give up that easily. He spent the next few days working all conversations back to the question. Back to
Hungary,
where the truth about that awful car accident must be hiding.
Inside,
Noah talked about sightseeing and goulash and fiddle music.
Outside,
Noah made his case differently:

“It would be a research trip,” he said. “About the kind of bad magic that causes car accidents.”