Cloud and Wallfish (31 page)

And a moment later, he was.

Over the next few days, official people asked him questions in a nicer, warmer, comfier room. They let him sleep a lot, but Noah was tired of questions. And he had questions of his own, which he knew he couldn’t ask.

Questions like these:

When could his name go back to being Noah?

How much of what that
English-speaking man at the police station had said about Noah’s parents was true? Were his parents really spies? Had they really been using Noah like a disguise? Like a pawn?

And was he ever going to see
Cloud-Claudia again?

Part of getting older is realizing that sometimes you have to be the person who answers your own questions. Noah watched and listened carefully, and he got as far as this:

1. Since they all called him Jonah in that place, he figured he was stuck being Jonah for the time being, maybe until they got back to safe and quiet Oasis, Virginia. On the other hand, he discovered he didn’t mind being Jonah so much anymore. If he hadn’t been Jonah, he wouldn’t have ever known he was a wallfish!

That was the first question, more or less answered.

2. The second question had only dark tunnels for answers. He didn’t think much of the
East Germans’
evidence for his parents’ being spies — the page from
Alice,
the blank scraps of paper — but neither could he forget those file folders in his brain, the ones labeled “Mom” and “Dad” and growing thicker by the day. And what about the other part of this question: Had his parents been using him that way? As their
cover story
?

And then everything got very dark-tunnelly again in his brain, and he tried to turn his mind around and walk away from this whole question, which was so dangerous and seemed possibly about to hurt way too much.

3. The THIRD question, though! To that one, Noah got an official answer from his mother: “See Cloud-Claudia again? Oh, sweetie, probably not — I’m so sorry about that.”

But the more he thought about it, the less acceptable that answer was.

There were still things people wanted to ask Noah and his parents, and forms for them to fill out because they really were filing protests about the way Noah had been treated in that police station, and also there were some arrangements that had to be made concerning what they did next, so they were staying in a little apartment that belonged to the U.S. Army in West Berlin.

The television in it was, ironically, much smaller and plainer than the one they had had in Communist East Berlin. They were not much of a television-watching family ordinarily, but these days the television seemed always to be tuned to the news: seventy thousand people marching in Leipzig! Thousands of people protesting in East Berlin, just on the other side of the Wall! Noah kept his eyes peeled for Cloud-Claudia, but she never showed up.

Finally, he lost patience with merely watching and hoping. He took a very large cardboard box and cut it into the right shape; then he borrowed white paint from a very nice soldier who was touching up a wall downstairs.

“Take me to that place we were waving to from the other side,” he said to his parents. “Back when Cloud-Claudia and I went close to the Wall — so close we could see the people looking in from the West. Take me there.”

His mother gave him a look, but his father said, “All right, then. Tomorrow.”

They went on the S-Bahn with Noah’s huge slab of white cardboard balanced between his knees. He got a lot of funny looks from the West Berliners! But he absolutely didn’t care.

Right next to the Wall, which on this side was covered with graffiti and paintings and slogans and all sorts of things that were forbidden on the other side, there stood a kind of platform with steps up, and from the top of it, Noah could see that very street he and Cloud-Claudia had been on all those many weeks ago. He was looking into the other world.

“How long are you going to be?” asked his dad.

“A while,” said Noah.

“Okay,” said his dad. “I’m down there waiting when your arms get tired.”

And Noah turned toward the other world and hoisted his cardboard sign, his bright-white-painted cloud, right over his head.

I remember everything!
said that cloud.
I’m not forgetting you.
Never.

He stood there for more than an hour, with other people, mostly tourists coming and going, looking at him with kind, puzzled expressions on their faces and sometimes asking him what he was doing.

“It’s for my friend,” he said to them, and he could see them trying very hard to figure out what he was saying, trying to follow the choppy start-and-stop path of the Astonishing Stutter. “So she knows I’m not forgetting her.”

Sometimes the other people helped him hold his sign up for a while when they heard that.

When he came back down the stairs, his arms and fingers were very cold and stiff, but he felt alive inside.

“Can we come back again tomorrow?” he asked his dad.

His father thought about it.

“If you really want to.”

“I do,” said Noah with total certainty. “I want to come back every single day.”

“Hmm,” said his dad, but they did. They came back the next day, the next day, and the day after that.

The people on the S-Bahn and in the neighborhood of the viewing platform started calling him, in a friendly way, the “Cloud Boy” when he walked by.

“Cloud’s my friend,” he told them. “I’m the Wallfish.”

“What? what?”

“Wallfish!”

If he sang it, it came out more smoothly, but it was an odd sort of song: “Wallfish, Wallfish, my nickname is the Wallfish. . . .”

“Kinda small for a
Walfisch,
aren’t you?!”

(Because they heard it as the German word, of course. The
Walfisch
that meant “whale.”)

He held up his bright-white cloud for Cloud-Claudia and stared at the little people in the street on the other side of the Wall, just stared and stared, wondering whether it was even possible to recognize particular people from this far away. The better-prepared visitors brought binoculars with them, and sometimes they would let him take a look while they took a turn holding up his cloud for a few minutes.

In the mornings, he answered the questions of the U.S. diplomatic people and the U.S. Army people, and then in the afternoon one of his parents — usually his father, since his mother was salvaging what she could of her thesis — would take him and his cloud-sign to the Wall.

“They’re shutting the gates,” said his father, only a couple of days into Noah’s cloud project. “They’ve changed the rules so East Germans can’t travel to Czechoslovakia anymore — unless they’re already old enough to be retired. No more Czech Center for German-German relations!”

Noah’s father shook his head.

“More history happening,” he said, but he didn’t even have the heart to sniff the air.

“Do they think they can keep everybody locked up tight forever?” said his mother.

Her voice was indignant and glum, both at once. You could tell she thought maybe they
could
just keep everybody locked up tight forever. Noah was less concerned about “everybody” than he was about Cloud-Claudia, who was probably still locked up tight in the evil grandmother’s apartment.

But then again, maybe not. He didn’t think Cloud-Claudia was the sort of person to stay locked up forever. Someday she would find a way to get out, and then maybe she would wander back toward Brunnenstraße, or she would be walking around East Berlin, happy to be back out of doors, breathing in the lovely coal-smoky air, when she’d overhear whispers about how some crazy-person
drüben
was holding up some crazy crazy sign at the Wall, shaped like a — and then she would
know:

Noah had not forgotten her.

He would never, ever forget her, no matter where he was: West Berlin, Virginia, or across the many rivers of the
Wechselbalgland.

She should not think she was so easily forgettable. Nobody should have to feel that way, and especially not Cloud-Claudia.

That next Monday, October 23, Noah had a visitor, but not in his family’s own little apartment. An American official showed up to lead Noah to the place where the visitor was waiting.

In the U.S. headquarters in West Berlin, there were a lot of rooms Noah had never seen, and then on top of those, there were probably many secret rooms he would never see in a million years, so he followed the man closely, thinking about what time it was and wondering how long this would take. He always left for the Wall at about one p.m., after lunch.

They led him into another room, with windows looking out onto the courtyard and a number of dark chairs. The woman in that room wasn’t sitting in any of those chairs. She was facing outside and picking at the curtain with a nervous hand.

It seemed like the sort of hand that would be good at drawing pictures of rocks that looked like magicians.

Her hair was the hair of someone who had been worried for a very long time about things more important than haircuts or even brushes. It was a nondescript pale color, but her eyes weren’t nondescript at all. They were the deepest brown imaginable. They had worlds in them. He would have known those eyes anywhere.

Her lips curled up higher on the right side than on the left, just as they had in that photograph Cloud-Claudia had shown him months ago.

Sonja Bauer,
said his mind confidently, reading that name off the lost map and the lost puzzle piece and the lost slip of paper in the lost pocket of Cloud-Claudia, who was also lost.

Sonja Bauer, Sonja Bauer, Sonja Bauer.

“You’re the boy who knows Claudia!” she said, coming over to take his hands. “Claudia’s friend! Is she all right? Is she okay? You know they won’t let me see her —”

A sob hiccupped its way out of her, but she took a quick breath to disguise it.

“— or even write to her. Or anything. My own daughter! She must be so unhappy.”

For a moment Noah was stumped. What could he say?

“Yes,” he said. “She’s pretty unhappy, I guess. First they told her you were dead, and then they told her at the police station that you ran away without her.”

If he had been speaking English, and if the Astonishing Stutter hadn’t been blocking his path with special stubbornness, who knows? He might have been able to say all of that more gently. But on the other hand, there was nothing gentle about the plain
facts.
So maybe it didn’t matter so much, how cleverly you packaged everything up in words.