Cloud and Wallfish (34 page)

“So!” said his mother the next morning. “This is it. We’re going home!”

She had been happy about the Cloud message finally getting through, too. But they had been told it was high time for them to leave. Thank you for your service, but enough is enough — that is what Noah gathered someone must have been saying to his mother.

Noah wasn’t surprised that all the talk now was about leaving. What did surprise him was the news that they had tickets on a predawn flight out of Berlin
the very next day.

Well, they didn’t have all that much stuff to organize. They walked around town one last time — it still felt to Noah like a completely different city, with its burned-out church steeple and its glittering stores, from the
other
Berlin — and then packed up their bags and had one last spaghetti dinner cooked up by Noah’s father on the hot plate. They would have to get up so early the next day to catch their flight, it was practically going to be the middle of the night.

“Wait,” said Noah’s mother. She had been listening to something on the radio. “Turn on the news.”

A bunch of men sitting behind a long wooden desk.

“Press conference,” said Noah’s mother. “Just an hour or so ago. That’s Günter Schabowski right there — listen to what he said!”

“Who’s Günter Schabowski?” asked Noah.

“Party Politburo guy,” said Noah’s father. “Government official. The horse’s mouth.”

The Schabowski person said a bunch of stuff, of which Noah understood bits and pieces. Something about a change in visa requirements?

“It’s because of Czechoslovakia — they closed the border, they opened the border, everyone started leaving again —”

That was Noah’s father, trying to give helpful explanations, but his mother said, “Shhhhhhh!”

She was standing up now.

A man in ordinary TV news clothes was reading an ordinary summary of news from a piece of paper on his desk. Behind him was a map Noah had seen a hundred times already this year: the two Germanies colored green, with a special yellow teardrop labeled “East Berlin.” And under the map, three tight-lipped words:

“DDR öffnet Grenze.”

The GDR is opening the border.

That was a sentence Noah could understand the words of perfectly well, but still he had no idea what it actually meant. His father was standing up now, too, watching the man on the TV.

“Wait — what does that mean?” he asked. “Opening the border? What border?”

His parents were looking at each other, looks zipping back and forth between them like electricity running through cables, like lightning leaping from tower to tower.

“Don’t know,” said his mother. “Schabowski just said the new visa rules would take effect right away.
Right away?
Oh, Lord, now they’ve gone on to insurance for old people. Where’s the real news?”

She turned the channel dial, but there wasn’t anything else there.

“Well, tomorrow’s going to be an interesting day!” said Noah’s father.

“What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know,” said his father. “We’ll see what that Schabowski really meant, I guess.”

“
We
won’t see,” said Noah, feeling bitter about it. All that talk of smelling history in the air, and they were going to get on a plane and fly away. “We’re leaving!”

His father looked at his watch.

“In six hours. You, young sprout, need to go to bed and pretend to sleep a little before they take our parent license away. Car’s coming for us at four a.m.”

“Bed” had been a euphemism in this place; Noah had been sleeping on the sofa. But this last night he was supposed to have his parents’ bed, while they got everything ready out in the living room. He stared at the walls and the shadows, wondering what would happen now. Wondering whether Cloud-Claudia’s grandmother was relenting. Wondering whether the news meant that someday Cloud-Claudia would see her parents again, and what that would be like — whether they could all forget how she had been left behind, sort of like how he was leaving Berlin behind and Jonah behind and . . .

So he did doze off, after all, despite thinking that couldn’t possibly happen.

He was asleep for what felt like about twelve seconds — then his father was shaking him awake.

“Up you get! Sorry, kiddo!”

“Is it four already?” asked Noah. Four a.m. in November feels like the middle of the night. Because it
is
the middle of the night.

But his father was shaking his head.

“Change of plan, change of plan,” he said. “It’s just about midnight, but we’ve got to see this. Come now, quickly. The driver will be here any second.”

What?

“Things are happening,” said his father. “We’re leaving a little earlier for the airport — we’re going to make a detour. Driver’s up for it, so off we go.”

Noah stumbled into his clothes, into his jacket, down the stairs, with his suitcase always threatening to topple into his ankles and trip him up.

It was cold outside, and so dark, and there was a car there with a guy standing next to it, smoking. He put their suitcases into the trunk and started chatting with Noah’s parents in German.

It was like something that might happen on another planet.

“Started coming through around eleven or so,” the driver was saying. “All right! Everyone in? How do you want to do this?”

“Get as close as you can,” said Noah’s father. “We’ll just see what we can see, and then head off to the airport.”

“Eyes open,” said Noah’s mother, giving him a bracing squeeze. She was in the backseat with Noah; his father was riding up front with the driver.

They drove up the big street into the center of West Berlin. Usually at this time of night on a weekday it would be quiet on these streets in Berlin. But there was a surprising number of people around, more and more as they got closer to the eastern side of the city.

And then it was entirely crowded, filled with people and cars — a huge party taking shape in the street. Like New Year’s Eve, sort of, only this was November.

“Bornholmer Straße,” said the driver, slowing to a crawl in all that crowd. “God in heaven. Looks like it’s all true, doesn’t it?”

“What’s going on?” said Noah, pressing his nose to the glass. “What’s all true?”

“We’re at the border now,” said his father. “This is the Wall. Those people there are coming through the Wall. It’s coming down. It’s coming down!”

“What?” said Noah. “Those are people from East Berlin?”

“Trabis!”
said Noah’s mother, pointing at the little cars parading through the crowd. That was the name of those cars,
Trabis.
They were East Berlin cars, not West Berlin cars. They shouldn’t have been here, certainly not a whole parade of them, inching along. “Here they come!”

“Want to get out for a minute?” said the driver. “Just a minute, though. Don’t want to get lost in this crowd.”

They opened the doors and stepped out.

It was cold and bright and the middle of the night, and everybody was shouting and cheering and crying and thumping on the roofs of the cars coming through. There was a crowd of West Berliners cheering on the people coming through. And the bright lights of television cameras. And so much noise! It was the Pan-European Picnic all over again, but at night in a city in cold weather — and so much huger. You had the feeling that this might be the hugest thing you ever saw in your whole life.

Even Noah’s parents were crying. They were grinning like fools and waving and crying, which was just not what they ordinarily would ever do.

Noah’s eyes had gone right to work from the moment he had stepped out of the car: searching the crowd, searching the crowd.

He was looking for someone medium small, with crazy yellow hair that needed brushing. He looked for that person with as much concentration as he had used all those weeks before when he was hoisting his cloud up over the Wall.

Come on,
Cloud-Claudia!

His fists were tense with the effort of that looking.

It wasn’t until his parents made some small noise that he remembered them and looked over their way. Their faces had changed. They were watching him, Noah, more than they were watching all the jubilant people.

“She won’t be here, kiddo,” said his dad. “You know that. That grandmother’s not the type to go running to the Wall the moment the gates open.”

Come on!
thought Noah anyway.

He wanted to prove them wrong.

She had waved, just yesterday.

She knew he remembered her.

She had to be there.

They watched for an hour, and then the driver said they’d better start trying to get out of the neighborhood if they were ever going to get to the airport.

“She’s going to be okay now,” said his mother. “You know that. Her parents will find her. This has got to be the beginning of the end for all of those walls. Her father will get out of prison. Her mother will be able to come back home. Soon she’ll be okay again, whichever side of the border she ends up on.”

Noah leaned his head against the window of the car, beaming a good-bye back through all those happy crowds.

Good-bye!

He had never told her his real name, never once. And he never could: those were the Rules.

Well, then, part of him would have to stay Wallfish forever and ever.

Even in the land of the
Wechselbalgen,
some names will never be forgotten:

Cloud and Wallfish,

Wallfish

and

Cloud.

Some years have gone by. In Germany somewhere, there’s a teenager with slightly disobedient blond hair and a pile of postcards, mailed to her from all sorts of different places, from all over the world (but never from Virginia).

The postcards have been arriving ever since she was very young, back in the sad old days when she lived in Berlin without either one of her parents. She has made an arrangement with the people who moved into the apartment her grandmother used to live in: they save the postcards for her, and she brings them chocolates or something whenever she comes by to pick them up.

“Not much to those cards, honestly!” says the woman who lives in the apartment. She is a little embarrassed about taking presents in exchange for such a small favor. “But there’s no accounting for tastes.”

Every one of those postcards has a cloud drawn on the back.

Someday, Claudia knows, someone is going to come to that apartment, following the pull of all those clouds he sent on ahead to her. A true friend — truest of the true. She has told the people living there:
When a guy shows up at your door one day and calls himself Wallfish, go ahead and give him this envelope with my address.

Her address, a puzzle piece with an inky whale drawn on its back, and a map of Berlin.

Some books live on the history shelves, and other books are fiction — but
Cloud and Wallfish
has deep roots in both places. Noah and his parents are entirely fictional, as are all the characters in the story. But the world they are living in — even the apartment Noah lives in in East Berlin — is as scrupulously close to the historical truth as I could possibly make it.

I first got to know East Berlin in 1987, when I spent a summer there, working on my German. I made some good friends that summer, and found East Germany such a fascinating place that I decided to devote part of my PhD dissertation to East German literature. That meant coming back to the German Democratic Republic in 1989 to do research. My husband and I had to get married so that he could come along, so I know something about changing your personal life in order to get a visa. We arrived in January 1989 and left in July; we watched the Wall fall from the other side of the world (California) and then returned to East Berlin in the spring of 1990, during that fascinating period when no one really seemed to be in charge of the place and anarchists held parties in ruined buildings.

Every day in 1989, I would walk from our apartment in the Max-Beer-Straße, across the Museum Island (where a statue really did lie on her back behind a fence, waiting for better days), to the old library on Unter den Linden, where I read newspapers and journals from the 1940s. Our local supermarket was the one near the Alexanderplatz that Noah and his father visit. Our apartment really did have a “children’s room” — we used it as a study.