Cloud and Wallfish (23 page)

Frau Müller went pale, then flushed pink, then went pale all over again.

“Axel, stand up. Our guest Jonah is here to see how a socialist classroom collective functions. We do not pester our guests with questions, Axel. I will be writing to your parents. Again! You are delaying our lesson and interfering with the normal progress of education.”

That was when Noah began to understand something about his teacher: it was not just about the stutter. When he stopped by her desk at the end of the day to say, “Frau Müller, I don’t mind if the other kids ask me questions,” her face took on the expression of someone trying not to show that she knows she has been caught in a trap.

“I’m certain, Jonah, you had a very different school experience before coming to visit us here in Berlin,” she said stiffly. “This is not really a classroom suited for someone like you. This is not the educational system you come from, and you will have to understand that we cannot allow the education of the other children to be derailed in any way. After all, they are the ones who will grow up to defend the socialist cause with word and deed, so we must not let anything happen in our classroom that might blunt their historical optimism.”

“Oh,” said Noah, understanding the words but not so much understanding the long, twisty sentences those words combined to make.

The teacher’s face softened for the briefest of moments; she was not unkind. Noah could see that she didn’t at all mean to be unkind. She was just caught in a trap.

“These are the arrangements that have been decided upon,” she said. “So of course we must all take on this task with dedication and consciousness. If you, Jonah, sit quietly and do not respond when the children ask inappropriate questions, then it will be best for everyone. Understand? It is best if you do not speak. You may sit quietly and work on your own.”

There! He saw it now. The reason she looked at him all the time the way she might have looked at a boy-shaped ticking alarm clock, ready to go off at any moment and disrupt the universe, had, for once, absolutely nothing to do with the Astonishing Stutter.

It had to do with where he, Noah, came from.

He was from
drüben.
No, worse than that, from Virginia. No, even worse, if only she knew: from the faraway Land of the Changelings. Who knew what terrible things a changeling like him might say?

That thought might make even a very slightly rebellious person want to talk loudly, just to make the point that he, too, was a person, even if he was also a
Wechselbalg
!

But Noah could see that if he opened his mouth in class, it was the other kids who were likely to get into trouble. And not only the kids.

He could see that in the anxious lines around Frau Müller’s eyes, the shadows on her face that had already deepened considerably only a few weeks into the year.

Oh, of course. The real question wasn’t whether she was “kind” or “unkind.” The truth of the matter was that Frau Müller was
afraid.

“It could all explode,” said his mother with a smile.

She was smiling because they were on a family stroll in the evening, which was when Noah’s parents exchanged the news. Even outside, it made sense to be reasonably cautious. Even outside, it was not impossible that someone could be listening. There were special antennas that could pick up things people said from fifty feet away. But that was pretty fancy technology, and probably they wouldn’t bother in the case of Noah’s family. “Our job is to be boring” was how his mother put it — but she had said that when they were walking around Budapest.

“Explode?” asked Noah. He didn’t like the way that word sounded in his brain or felt in his mouth.

“She means it’s all getting tenser in this country,” said Noah’s father. “People aren’t as patient as they used to be. Change is happening everywhere else, so they want change here, too. You know what? Every week in Leipzig — you’ve been to Leipzig, remember? — every week there are protests there, starting in a church. Last week I heard there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of people marching.”

“Really?” said Noah. It was so hard to imagine anything like that happening here in Berlin. A big demonstration. People marching and chanting. With all the police everywhere? Seemed impossible.

“It’s the pressure from the border opening in Hungary,” said his father.

“It’s the pressure from everywhere and everything,” said his mother with a very sweet smile.

“And guess what they were chanting this week?” said his father, pointing up at a cloud shaped like a frog.

“What?”

“It always used to be ‘Let us out! Let us out!’ But this week they changed the words —”

“We’re staying here,”
whispered his mother. “Scarier, isn’t it?”

“I get it,” said Noah after a moment. “If they go, they’re gone, but if they stay, then they want things to
change.
”

“Whose child is this, anyway?” said Noah’s father with a very long, rumbling chuckle. “He’s turned out very clever. Is it our brilliant parental training or something in the water?”

“Something in the water,” said his mother. “I’m afraid we’re only so-so as trainers.”

“You know where things need to change?” said Noah. “School. I’m in a lot of trouble just being there. And I’m not even chanting and marching. I’m just
there. . . .
”

The faces of Noah’s parents fell, both at once. For about a second, they looked a little stricken — and then they seemed to remember their own Rule #4, about looking cheerful. Noah’s father put his arm around Noah’s shoulders.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Doesn’t sound like fun.”

“Better than sitting at home,” said Noah, to make them feel a little less guilty.

That was true some of the time, but not during PE class, when they did gymnastics routines — like running and jumping off a thick beam thing and then doing a neat somersault on the mat on the other side. Sometimes it seemed to Noah that all the other kids must have been practicing gymnastics routines since they were tiny things.

And then there was the Young Pioneers kerfuffle.

The Young Pioneers — that East German scouting group everyone seemed to belong to — met after school. There was confusion about what they should do with Noah. One week the other kids lent him a red scarf to wear, and they all ran around together. The next week, a teacher said she didn’t think that was right, since the guest came from a different place, and they made him sit in an uncomfortable chair in the school principal’s office all afternoon. The next week, the grown-ups had changed their minds again, and the “Guest Jonah, from the U.S.A.” was allowed to come to the activities but warned not to talk.

What the Young Pioneers at the Bruno Beater School mostly did was prepare for the huge celebration coming up: the party for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic. To judge from the news programs on television, everyone in the whole country was supposed to be preparing for the fortieth anniversary. In school, Noah and his classmates spent hours studying how wonderful the celebration was going to be.

It was like the exact extreme
opposite,
Noah decided, of a surprise party. With a surprise party, you don’t expect there to be a celebration, and then something happens and it turns out everyone’s been preparing a party for ages that you didn’t even know about — unless, as often happens, you sort of guessed, a little bit around the edges.

But there were not supposed to be
any
surprises of any kind at the GDR fortieth-anniversary party.

None at all.

None.

Noah sat quietly all day, whether wearing the borrowed scarf or not, doing what everyone else was doing, but also trying to remember not to raise his hand when the teacher asked a question.

The other kids noticed how quiet he had become, but they didn’t know why.

A girl with brown hair in two pigtails came over to him one day and said, “If you don’t know how to talk, why aren’t you in the
Sonderschule
?”

Special school.

Her name was Anja, which sounds like “Anya.”

“What’s that?” said Noah, though his stomach was already sinking.

“I thought they put all the ones who can’t talk or do normal stuff in the
Sonderschule.
”

He couldn’t help it. He broke the teacher’s rules a little.

“I can so talk,” he said. “I’m talking right now. And I do all the work.”

He even showed her his math page, filled with neat rows of solved problems.

“You talk funny, though,” said Anja, giving him a suspicious stare.

“
Ja,
sure, I do,” said Noah, and then he couldn’t help it; he had to ham it up for her, just a little. “But where I come from, everyb-b-b-b-ody talks like this.”

“Oh!” said Anja.

Later that day, Frau Müller came by his desk and said, “I’m surprised and disappointed that I have to remind you, Jonah, about our agreement. You are not going to disrupt the educational program of the Bruno-Beater-Schule in any way.”

“
Ja,
Frau Müller,” he said. “Of course.”