Cloud and Wallfish (17 page)

“It’s not bad magic that causes car accidents,” said his mother. “It’s bad roads or bad tires or bad luck. You know that.” Noah tried so very hard to see what thoughts were lurking there behind those secret-holding eyes of hers, but the curtains — so to speak — were thick. Noah’s mother did not let her inmost thoughts slip into view.

And then that very evening in the middle of dinner, someone came pounding at their door.

“Cloud!” said Noah. He could tell from the quick patter of the fist against the door. It wasn’t a grown-up sound. It was the same language the back of the chair or the broomstick spoke when it tapped against the horizontal Wall at night — only this time, Cloud-Claudia’s taps were shouting, loud and worried.

His mother had already shot his father a lightning-fast glance and was hurrying to open the door.

Cloud-Claudia was standing there, shivering and pulling at the fingers of her right hand.

“Quick!” she said. “My grandmother — something’s wrong — please come —”

And she turned and ran back down the steps.

“Oh, no,” said Noah’s mother. For a split second she stood frozen.

They were supposed to stay away. Even Noah knew that. They had been told:
Please stay away.
But if Frau März was really sick or hurt. . . . You can’t
stay away
when your friend comes pounding on the door. Noah was already leaping down the stairs, following Cloud. Behind him he heard his mother speaking right into the air of their apartment, as if someone might be listening: “If you people are listening — I think they need help downstairs,” she was saying, every word in the crispest and clearest German. “Something has happened to Frau März. She may have fallen down. Please send help.”

Talking directly to the people who had planted those bugs in the walls! Wild!

But Noah didn’t have time to think about bugs, because they were already running into Cloud-Claudia’s apartment, which was exactly like Noah’s, except completely different in every way.

All its furniture was older and darker than the furniture Noah’s family had upstairs. There were more books on the shelves — even the complete works of Lenin. The very air smelled different down here, as if Frau März used a different set of spices when she cooked. And in the larger bedroom, right under Noah’s parents’ room, Frau März was resting her head on a desk.

No, not resting her head.

“She fainted!” said Cloud. “I think she fainted! I heard a sound when her head hit the desk!”

“Oh, no,” said Noah. He tried to be brave, since that’s what Cloud needed right now. He walked right up to Frau März, with her head flopped sideways on the desk, and said, “Um, Frau März! Hello! Wake up . . . please!”

Though maybe when you have fainted, it’s not just a question of waking up, exactly?

He put his hand right out and shook her shoulder. The sweater she was wearing felt rough under his hand.

“Frau März!”

Wait — did her eyes just blink? Yes!

His relief was so great, he could feel his arms tremble. She was alive. Thank goodness, thank goodness, thank goodness.

“Oma!”
said Cloud with a gulp. “Oma, are you all right?”

Frau März was pushing away from the desk. Noah could see that her head had been resting on a very official-looking paper of some kind, covered with the kind of typewriting that looks cold and unkind. Noah would ordinarily not be interested in a letter like that, but there, right in the middle there, staring up at him —

“What is going on?” Cloud’s grandmother was saying, dazed. “Claudia, is that you?”

“You fainted, Oma,” said Claudia with a little quaver in her voice. “Come lie down. We’ll help you.”

— right in the middle of that sheet of paper was a word Noah knew well:

CLAUDIA

And before he had any time to think about right and wrong or privacy or ethics or any Rules, his brain powered right up and took a picture of that letter.
Click.

Not that he had time to examine that new brain-photo now. There was a commotion out by the apartment’s front door, and he heard his parents’ voices, arguing there with somebody. Several somebodies.

“I’d better go,” said Noah.

“Thank you, you Wallfish, for helping us,” said Cloud. “I was so scared — I couldn’t help thinking —”

She did not seem to have noticed that paper.

“I know. Me, too,” said Noah, and two men came into the room, men too dressed up to be doctors. Noah recognized one of them: the same young-looking man with glasses who had sent them away from this apartment a week before. They looked at Cloud’s grandmother and looked around the room, and one of them said to Noah, “Out with you, now. Quick. Don’t cause trouble, boy.”

“He was just helping!” said Cloud. “She bumped her head, but he helped wake her up!”

“Your parents are waiting,” said the man to Noah. “Time to go.”

Noah and Cloud looked at each other, and their eyes said,
What can we do?

“Bye,” said Noah. In German the word is
Tschüß,
and it was a word the Astonishing Stutter turned into a whole complicated code in its own right.

Claudia made her hands clap, almost as if they were just nervously clapping on their own:

Tu-tap
tu-tap.

She was very clever, Cloud-Claudia.

At the front door, Noah found a third man, who also didn’t look like a doctor, busy keeping Noah’s parents from coming inside.

“Jonah!” said his dad. “Everything all right in there?”

“You — don’t mix yourself into places you’re not wanted,” said the third man. “You must go up to your own apartment now, please. Keep in mind that it is a crime to harass official representatives of the German Democratic Republic.”

The man with the glasses was in the hall now, too. He gave Noah and his parents a rather nasty smile and said, “Can’t you people keep from causing trouble? Go away for a few days. Let things settle. Take this boy of yours to Hungary, the way he wants. I hear the goulash is tasty this time of year.”

“Just please tell me, is poor Frau März all right?” asked Noah’s mother.

“She’s fine. Of course she’s fine. Lots of alarm here over nothing at all. She thanks you for your concern but asks you not to keep forcing your way into her apartment. Good-bye.”

Noah and his parents slogged back upstairs. There was nothing they
could
say to each other and still be following the Rules.

In particular, no one said,
How did those men who didn’t look much like doctors know where Noah wanted to go on vacation?

Because they knew precisely how those men had known that. Their little bugs hiding in the apartment walls had told them — were always telling them everything. It made Noah shiver, deep inside.

There can, however, be a silver lining to having little bugs in the walls, listening greedily to everything you say. This time Noah could think of
two
silver linings:

Silver Lining #1: His mother had been able to get help for Frau März merely by speaking into the air! Almost like magic!

Silver Lining #2: Noah’s parents were people who knew how to take a hint. The men in their suits really, really wanted them to clear out of that apartment for a while. Maybe the little bugs in the walls needed cleaning. Well, then, all right!

The next day the Browns —
Sam, Linda, and Jonah Brown, of Roanoke, Virginia
— packed a couple of little bags and went to Hungary on vacation after all.

It’s not just people who change their names and put on disguises, Noah was learning. Towns do it, too. On the way to Hungary, Noah and his parents spent a day in the Czech city of Karlovy Vary, which — as Noah’s dad explained as they walked to dinner — used to be a German-speaking town called Karlsbad. Before the Second World War, it had been the sort of place where people went to spend time in spas, to sit in steaming baths and pools. It was the closest city outside Germany to both East Germany and West Germany, so there were a lot of Germans there, people separated by the Wall getting together for a few days for a visit, for news from home, for romance, for long discussions in which somebody would plead with some other body to please, please, please come over the Wall and join them on the other side. Noah’s family got into a cheerful conversation with some of those Germans — the West German kind, sitting over there at the next table, since it wouldn’t be safe for the East German Germans to chat so freely with foreigners. The biggest German guy at that table laughed and said there was a nickname for the city of Karlovy Vary: “The Czech Center for German-German Relations.”

At that point in their trip they were playing a game, thought up by Noah’s parents: they were pretending to be American tourists.

“But I don’t get it,” Noah had said. “How can we pretend to be what we
are
?”

“First of all, people are always pretending to be what they are,” said his father. “That’s basically a philosophical question. Part of being something is pretending to be it. When you were born, I felt like I was pretending to be a father. But I kept changing diapers and rocking you to sleep and feeding you, like a real father, and one day it didn’t feel so much like I was just pretending. Haven’t you ever had that feeling?”

“Well, duh!” said Noah the wallfish, who had spent the past three months pretending his name was Jonah, which perhaps it really was, and years before that pretending to be a normal elementary school student, when he hadn’t been sure that that was true at all. But that seemed different from letting people think they had just flown into Eastern Europe from the United States somewhere for a summertime tour.

Then they got to Budapest, in Hungary, and the game changed all over again.

“This seems a good place for us all to be inconspicuous for a few days,” said his mother.

“So you can do research,” said Noah, “into the bad magic that causes car accidents!”

“Who said anything about research?” said his mother. “We’re here on vacation.”

The curtains were tightly closed in her eyes. Not a chink of light was showing. Noah decided to hope anyway.

“So, inconspicuous!” said Noah’s father. “Inconspicuous means not looking American.” He smiled a little when he said that, but the look he and Noah’s mother shared was serious.