Cloud and Wallfish (20 page)

When they got back to Berlin, there was a blue paper fish dangling in the window below Noah’s room. No, not a fish: a whale. And around the whale, other smaller, more complicated sea creatures, since Cloud-Claudia was better at both drawing and scissoring than Noah was, but the center of that mobile was definitely a whale.

It was like having a huge banner saying
WELCOME HOME!
hung up over the front door. And maybe there was a pale face at the window for a moment, when they hauled their rackety suitcases over the curb. In any case, however calm he kept his expression outside, on the inside he was grinning. Frau März must be all right if Cloud-Claudia was still living behind that decorated window!

Noah’s mother went right back to her work. She sat at the table, going over her field notes and writing up preliminary versions of thesis chapters, and occasionally she went to visit the people at the Ministry of Education, to see how things looked for her research in the fall.

She wouldn’t tell Noah what that conversation with the border guard had been about, however. Noah tried to wheedle hints out of her, and she just looked at him with shuttered eyes.

Noah thought again about that mysterious
h-a-f-t
that had shown up in the long words in Cloud’s grandmother’s letter.

“Prison,” he found himself muttering out loud on the evening walk.

“What?”
said his mother sharply. “What did you say? Where are you getting that?”

“It was a letter I saw, back when Cloud’s grandmother fainted,” said Noah. He hadn’t meant to say anything out loud, but now that he had, he just kept going. “But what would prison have to do with car accidents?”

His mother gave him a look that could have cut tidy little holes in concrete.

“You need to
leave this alone,
” she said. “We’re not supposed to be mixed up in any of this stuff. You need to think a little less — all right, I know that’s hopeless. Think if you have to, but keep your thoughts strictly to yourself. And if I need you to know something, I’ll tell you.”

That was irritating and frustrating, but you could not budge Noah’s mother when she was intent on keeping a secret from you. At least she was almost acknowledging there
was
a secret! Noah figured that was progress.

He soon had a distraction from these thoughts he was not supposed to be thinking, however: one day his mother came back from the Ministry of Education with a smile so bright it made the August sun seem like a wimp.

“Jonah! Good news! I mean, actually, great news!”

“What? What?” said Noah, who was busy cutting out a new generation of clouds for his window.

“They are letting you go to school! I’m so happy! I kept asking and asking and asking, and they kept giving me long-winded speeches about the difficulties or about how they were waiting for some other important office to sign off on the papers, et cetera, et cetera, but suddenly they’ve decided you can go! Of course, it’s a school way the heck away from where we live — out in the area where they’ve been building new apartments like crazy. A brand-new school, actually. Built this summer! Maybe that’s why they can fit you in. Wait, what kind of expression is that on your face? Sam, come look at our Jonah’s face — he’s in shock!”

And her hooting laugh filled the apartment.

“Eep,” said Noah. Or something along those lines. He was so surprised. He had to put the scissors down because his hands had started shaking. He was going to get to go to
school
! Where there were other kids! Like a halfway-normal person! Yes, it’s true: he was in happy shock.

However, it’s funny how quickly happiness at getting what you’ve been asking for — even, if we’re totally honest with ourselves,
whining about
— for ages can turn a quick corner and metamorphose into a new set of worries.

For one thing, his brain had already calculated the odds of Cloud-Claudia being in the same school he was going to be in, and those odds were zero. So he still wouldn’t be able to hang out with her freely, his one East German friend. In fact, that suspicious, file-opening, spy-versus-spy part of his brain he was beginning to get to know better figured that might even be the reason he was being assigned to a school that was “way the heck away” from the center of Berlin. To keep him far away from his only friend.

For another thing, although it was great to have the chance to go to school like a halfway-normal person, of course Noah did have the profound sense — shared by most of us — that he might not actually be “halfway normal.”

And school would be in German, and German has all those consonants for a person to slam into and be blocked by.

“You’ll do great,” said his dad. “Such an opportunity, going to school in a place as different as this! Think of it this way: you’ll be the first American any of them has ever met! They probably think American children are mythical creatures, like unicorns.”

“Hmm,” said Noah’s mother, rereading the letter with her research-sharpened eyes. “There’s actually a whole section in here informing us that if ‘scholarization in the GDR Polytechnical Upper School’ turns out to be a poor fit for you, due to behavior issues or your known speech defect or any other reason, then they will give you the boot. But I guess that was to be expected.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said his father. “That’s my advice. And consider everything you learn in this school a plus. What grade is it going to be?”

“Well, with a birthday in the fall, that puts him in the fourth class here.”

“No, really?” said Noah, in some shock. At home he had been finishing up fifth grade! So his stupid new birthday
was
going to give him trouble. He had thought it would eventually.

“Don’t look so glum,” said his mother. “Remember, the whole system’s different from the one at home. And the age kids enter the different grades is different, too. For someone turning eleven in November, the fourth class is perfect.”

Well, perfect if you hadn’t already secretly turned eleven back in March. But he knew better than to say any of that out loud. The “fourth class”! He would just have to be extra careful to make sure this bit of damaging information did not get out once he was finally back home, back in the sixth grade, where he belonged, with all of his friends.

“An adventure!” his mother kept saying. And it was true. An adventure, for sure.

They went shopping for the flat rectangular backpacks kids in East Germany wore to school, and they also bought pens and pencils and a ruler. For the last week of August, Noah let his parents drill him mercilessly on his German whenever they felt like it. He looked at grammar charts. He studied the public transportation out to Hohenschönhausen, where that new school he was supposed to be joining was being finished in a rush so it could be opened for actual students like him.

And all the while, in a corner of his brain that his mother and father had no idea existed, he was beginning to work on those important, strange files, “Mom” and “Dad.” For some reason, it had begun to bother him, ever since that photograph had come tumbling out of
Alice in Wonderland
— and even more ever since he had seen his mother burning that one precious photo to ashes — that he knew of no living grandparents or cousins on either side. How likely was that? No grandparents or cousins anywhere at all? So he started asking very gentle questions whenever the opportunity arose (outdoors).

From “Do you remember your first day of school?” to “Did you have any pets when you were younger?” to “Why were you wearing a crown in that picture of you and Grandpa?”

That last question got a very sharp look from his mother in return.

“Was I?” she said.

She didn’t realize, of course, that Noah had filed away a picture of that picture in his brain.

He took that mental photograph out of the “Mom” file now and looked it over again with his secret, interior eye.

There was his grandfather in the armchair — the newspaper shouting about some
CORONA
— and that small version of his dark-eyed mother. A tiara sat confidently on her head.

“Yes,” said Noah. “And you had a wand in your hands.”

“Scepter,” corrected his mother automatically.

“What’s the difference?” said Noah.

“Fairies have wands,” said his mother. “
Queens
have scepters. It was my birthday, and I thought, quite reasonably, that I should be queen.”

She had this sparkling, dangerous smile, still, that made her look oddly like that little girl in the picture.

Noah couldn’t help smiling back.

“Weren’t you young to be queen? What birthday was it?”

“Fourth,” said his mother. “I was turning four. I remember —”

And then she snapped her mouth shut, as if she had almost been caught in some kind of trap.

“Remember what?” said Noah, but he knew it was hopeless. Once his mother had decided to shift gears, those gears were as good as shifted.

“We’re out of milk again,” she said now. That meant the subject had been officially changed. “We can’t go home without milk —”

She thought that photograph was burned and gone. She didn’t know that Noah was even now going back over it in his mind, paying attention to all the little clues hidden there.

He thought about it, and thought about it, and then he asked his father about another piece of the puzzle when they were running errands in Berlin.

“Was there a big star explosion or something, long ago in the month of June? In the 1950s? Like —”

Noah counted in his mind. His mother had been twenty-three when he was born. That was the family story. And Noah was born in 1978 — of course he wasn’t as sure about
when
in 1978 as he used to be, but he was pretty confident the year was still 1978.

“Like 1959 or so?”

His father was used to hearing oddball questions from Noah, but this one managed to make him look completely taken by surprise for a while.

“A what?” he said, laughing. “When? Did you just say ‘star explosion’?”

“A
corona,
” said Noah. “Isn’t that something to do with stars? In the fifties.”

“Good grief, where are you getting these things? Maybe a solar eclipse? I don’t know when those were. I guess we can look them up in an astronomy book somewhere.”

“Something big that would fill headlines — corona-something. Corona —”

“Sounds almost like you’re doing a crossword puzzle,” said his father.

That was helpful, actually. When they got home, Noah looked the word up in the dictionary:
corona . . . coronal . . . coronation.

He stared at that page for a while. Hadn’t his mother mentioned something about a “coronation day,” way back when? Queens and crowns!

“Dad,” he asked, “who’s the queen now?”

“Queen of what, England? Queen Elizabeth the Second,” said his dad from the kitchen. Apparently saying queens’ names aloud didn’t break any Rules.

“How long has she been queen? A long time already, right?”

“Yep, a long time. Nineteen fifty-two? Nineteen fifty-three?”

Noah’s brain was running back and forth, jumping up and down, waving bits of paper to catch his attention.

“Nineteen fifty-three?” said Noah. “That can’t be right.”

“Or nineteen fifty-two, I said. We can look it up in an encyclopedia somewhere sometime, if it matters. Does it matter?”

“No,” said Noah. “I was just wondering.”

That was a lie, however. The truthful answer to that question would have been
YES, it really does matter!

Why?

Because in 1953 (or maybe 1952), when that photograph had captured the very young version of Noah’s mother, staring so boldly into the camera, she wasn’t even supposed to be alive yet!

He checked his math all over again: 1978 minus twenty-three equals 1955. Maybe 1954, depending on when the months of everyone’s birthdays fall.

A picture of Noah’s mother, aged four, in June 1953, therefore, standing next to a newspaper headline about Queen Elizabeth’s
CORONATION
, was one of those things that simply could not exist. A paradox. A puzzle.

The file folder labeled “Mom” in Noah’s brain was beginning to get thicker in the middle. Bulging with questions. Something was definitely not right.

For days there had been little whales on the stairs for Noah to find and take home and add to the envelope he now thought of as the Folded Ocean.