by Anne Nesbet
“Dad!” said Noah.
“That’s what we’re saying: all the data we show the East Germans — the birth certificates and marriage licenses and passports and everything — it all has to match up.”
Noah’s father used words like “data” because he himself was a “data analyst” for some big company in Virginia that probably did things with stocks or graphs or money or something. Noah was a little vague on the details of his father’s job, but it was the kind where you had to wear a tie and went early in the morning and came home when it was already a little bit dark, and to tell the truth, it was very peculiar that his father was in the car with them at this moment at all, so early on a Tuesday afternoon.
“What about your job?” asked Noah.
“I quit,” said his father. “This is worth it, I figured. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go live behind the Wall. Exciting! And I’m finally going to get to write my novel about mink farmers.”
Wait. Wait. Noah was beginning to feel downright head-spinny. He’d heard his father joke about writing a novel before, but mink farmers?
“So there you have it: that’s why there’s all this business about the paperwork being just so,” continued his father. “Everything has to line up right for the East Germans or we won’t be let over the Wall.”
“It’s the kind of wall you climb over? Like with ladders?”
His parents laughed for a moment, and then both seemed to have some sudden serious thought and stopped laughing.
“Sometimes people try — from the East German side,” said his father. “It’s been twenty-eight years already since the Wall went up in Berlin —”
“Summer of sixty-one!” said his mother. “We couldn’t believe it at first. No one could believe it.”
“— and people are still trying to get out.”
“Why?”
“Well, all sorts of reasons. You know, maybe they’ve got family on the other side. Maybe they want to be able to travel freely, not be told where they can go and who they have to be and what they have to do —”
“Ahem,” said Noah, who was being dragged off by his parents to some Communist country he had basically never heard of, four days before Zach’s birthday. “GET IN THE CAR, NOAH! YOU ARE ONLY TEN! NO MORE SOCCER FOR YOU! NO CASTLES! NO CAKE!”
The Astonishing Stutter made him sound even madder than he was, but that was okay with him.
“Hmm,” said his father. “I see your point.”
“Oh, nonsense!” said his mother, and there was a wicked glint in her reflected eye. “Our family is not a Communist country. Besides, like your dad said, this will be fun.”
And when she said the word “fun,” she gave the steering wheel an extra little yank, so that the car jiggled left across the lane.
“Well, anyway,” said his father, “in order to get through the Wall — to get us all through the Wall and into East Germany — you’ll just have to be a good sport and play along. That means using the birthday and the name that the birth certificate we sent the East Germans says you have.”
“My name is just Noah,” said Noah. “I’ve never been anything other than Noah.”
“Well, yes, of course, for us you’ve always been Noah. But I’m afraid officially that isn’t your name at all, so we’re all going to have to adjust to the change.”
“It will be an adventure,” said his mother. “Something different! Like putting on a new mask!”
“You’ll get used to it pretty soon, I think,” added his dad. “It’s just like any new habit. Do it for whatever amount of days, and it becomes normal. You’ll be totally adjusted to it sooner than you think. And anyway, there’s a sort of nautical relationship between your real name and the one you’ve been using all this time; you’ll see: one builds ships and the other sails in whales.”
“What?” said Noah. “What what what?”
It can be hard to breathe when people who ostensibly love you pop a new mask right onto your face.
“Your actual real name, dear,” said his mother as she sped that rental car up to chase down the next tractor-trailer on the road, “is — and I do think you’ll like it once you get used to the whole thing — Jonah Brown.”
Secret File #3
AND THIS ISN’T NOW, EITHER
The mathematically inclined reader will already have added twenty-eight to 1961 and discovered that Noah (now Jonah) is having this conversation on the way to the airport with his parents not “now,” but quite long ago, in 1989. Noah (Jonah) does not realize, however, that he is living long ago. He thinks of himself, as all of us do, as living in the present. So we will not trouble him with this added bit of confusion just at the moment.
After all, he is still thoroughly flabbergasted by the news that not only is he younger than Zach Blumberg, which is really galling and a shock, but that his name is Jonah and not Noah. That’s just one extra letter and a tiny bit of rearranging’s worth of difference, but you’d be surprised how disorienting an itty-bitty change like that can feel.
It made him feel sick inside, almost like someone coming down with the flu.
“Look in your new backpack,” said his mother as they slipped into a booth at a pizza and burger restaurant —“the most American food possible, since we’re about to leave all that behind,” his dad had said — on their way to the airport. “We put a book together for you, to help. Also because it was fun.”
It was buried under all those sensible socks and warm layers: a little photo album. On the cover were the words JONAH BROWN.
“What is this?” said Noah.
“Pictures,” said his mother, with a touch of pride. “To help you remember who you are, with your new name and all.”
“Your mother may have gotten a little carried away,” said his father.
Noah opened the photo album.
Right there on the first page was a picture of a house he didn’t know. A blurry family stood in front of it.
“What’s that house?”
“That’s Jonah’s house,” said his mom. “So for the next few months, that means your house, right? Also Sam and Linda Brown’s house — that’s us.”
Could you really do that? Could you take “Mark and Lisa Keller” and turn them into people with completely different names? Noah stared at these incomprehensible photos and then up at his incomprehensible (but smiling) mother.
“House? Why do we need a different house?”
“To keep our real home in Oasis private,” said his father. “To keep it safe and private, just for us, when we’re done being the Browns and want to go back to being Kellers. We don’t want the East Germans poking around our lives in Oasis. We don’t want anybody poking around. So the Browns have their own story! Like a novel, see? Set in Roanoke, Virginia!”
“Roanoke?” said Noah aloud, but inside his brain he was sounding like Alice: Curiouser and curiouser.
“Lots to remember!” said Noah’s father. “The names, the places, the dates. That’s why we thought it might be helpful to have a Jonah Book.”
“Yes, so, look: there you are as a baby,” said his mother, turning the page. “Weren’t you sweet?”
He thought he recognized the baby photo, but of course babies are babies.
There was a toddler edition of Noah, playing on a generic lawn.
That was fine, too.
Then things got weird.
First he saw his earliest school photo, with the hair sticking up on one side. He knew this picture by heart. But on the facing page was one of those class photographs with all the kids lined up on bleachers and the teacher standing to one side, and he didn’t know anyone in that picture. The sign propped up in the photo said:
MRS. WHEELER, FIRST GRADE
JEFFERSON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
ROANOKE, VIRGINIA
1985–1986
“That’s not my school,” said Noah. “Who are those people? I’m not even in this picture.”
“Sure, you are,” said his mother. “There you
are, Jonah Brown. Seems a long time ago, first grade.”
And she brushed her index finger against a boy in the middle row, the one whose face, as it happened, was mostly hidden behind his neighbor’s.
“What?” said Noah.
His mother, utterly unruffled, turned another page in the album.
MRS. DEERBORNE, SECOND GRADE
Another group of strange kids on bleachers.
His mother pointed to one of them, who had just looked down, apparently, when all the others opened their dutiful mouths to say, “Cheese!” A generic blur of brown hair, that was all you could see.
“There you are,” she said. “Jonah.”
Noah didn’t know what was more bizarre: this “Jonah Book” or the way his parents were behaving, as if it were completely normal to change your kid’s name, to tweak your kid’s age, and to make up a whole new past for him to choke on.
His father gave him a sympathetic pat.
“I know, I know! It feels sort of strange, right? But you’ll get used to it. You’ll learn to be careful. The book’s just a reminder.”
“Careful?” said Noah.
“We already had one of those rules for travelers: don’t stick out,” his mother said. “Well, here’s another rule — and it’s so important it should probably be Rule Number One: They will always be listening. They will always be listening. Indoors, we can’t ever say anything that might make them suspicious. NEVER. We’ll call that the second rule. And one of the things we can’t say is names. No names of people, Jonah. Not our old ones, and not anybody else’s names. And everything we say has to match our documents. I’m Linda — your dad’s Sam — you are Jonah — we’re the Browns, from Roanoke, Virginia. And, by the way, you loved Mrs. Deerborne, your second-grade teacher.”
Noah thought about all of this for a moment, and it seemed like just plain too much for any one brain to have to make sense of. An avalanche, a volcanic lava flow, a tidal wave of Too Much. So he did all he could do: he took the smallest, tiniest corner of that avalanche and he chipped away at that first small thing.
“What do you mean, ‘they’?” he asked. “Who’s the they that’s always listening?”
“The secret police,” said his mother. “The East German State Security agents.”
“There will almost certainly be bugs in the walls,” said Noah’s father. “Not bugs like cockroaches! Bugs like little tiny microphones recording everything we say. They’ll be listening to us, that’s for sure.”
“But why?” It seemed like so much trouble to go to, to put tiny microphones in the walls!
“Because we’re Americans,” said his mother, “and so they’ll assume we are spies.”
She could stare even better than Noah could stare — she’d had a lot more practice at it. She did such a good job of staring just at this moment that Noah found it impossible to ask the next question that came to mind: Why would they possibly think we’re spies?
He thought that question pretty loudly, though. Maybe his father overheard that loud thought, because he laughed and said, “We can’t be too flattered, though. They think everybody’s a spy. And so they spy on everybody. They spy on foreigners; they spy on their own people. There are probably more spies per square kilometer in East Germany than anywhere else in the world.”
Noah thought someone saying something like that should sound a whole lot more worried.
“So I have to pretend to be Jonah Brown, who had these other teachers in this other town, because the East Germans are going to be thinking we’re spies?”
“Exactly,” said his mother.
“We don’t want to look suspicious,” said his father.
But really, if you thought about it, what could look more suspicious than this Jonah Book, with its blurry-headed kid messing up all the school photos? What was more suspicious than suddenly showing up for your kid in a rental car, headed to an airport for a trip he didn’t know about? What was more suspicious than throwing out that kid’s new Batman backpack just because it had his name on it?
Noah’s father seemed to guess the general trend of Noah’s thoughts. He leaned forward and looked right into Noah’s confused and still-flabbergasted eyes.
“The truth is, buddy, we can’t do this without you,” he said. “Seriously. It’s a lot to ask, but it’s necessary, and you’re the smartest, best kid I know, and I know you can handle it.”
It was something about the way he said “necessary” that did it: out of that crazy, confused weed patch of emotions in Noah’s brain, a quiet tendril of something else was beginning to push its way toward the light. He didn’t understand why this was all happening, but something rang true in his father’s voice just now. Noah was needed. Noah was necessary.
“And now Rules One through Nine, plus milk shakes for dessert,” said Noah’s mother. “All coming right up!”
Secret File #4
THE RULES, AS EXPLAINED BY NOAH’S MOTHER OVER MILK SHAKES
1. They will always be listening and often be watching. Don’t forget that!
2. Don’t ever talk about serious things indoors; in particular, never refer to people by name. That could get you and them into a lot of trouble, because of Rule 1.
3. Don’t call attention to yourself. (“That’s a good one in other countries, too,” said Noah’s father. “Not just the ones with bugs in the walls.”)
4. Smile. Be polite. Don’t let your worries show.
5. If you absolutely have to talk about the past, stick to what’s in the Jonah Book.
6. Never ever ever use any of our old names. The old names will be waiting for us back in Oasis.
7. If you are asked questions, say as little as possible.
8. Really. Don’t talk. Think before speaking. Then, most of the time, don’t speak. Because of Rule 1 again. Always Rule 1.
9. Trust us because we love you. That means don’t ask awkward questions! Because of Rule 3 and always, always Rule 1.
And then Noah’s father added, “Hmm, well, seems to me, as a new-minted writerperson, there should be another rule — what number are we up to now? Ten? Okay. Rule Number Ten: While you’re doing all of that fine not-talking and not-frowning and not-sticking-out, also keep your eyes peeled and your ears open. It will all be new. It will all be interesting. Notice everything.”
They were flying the last leg of the trip to Berlin on a big, fancy Pan Am plane, though not quite as big and fancy as the plane that had flown them from the United States to Frankfurt, West Germany, and Noah (now Jonah), with his nose plastered to the little airplane window, was still, it’s fair to say, about one thousand percent in shock. But paying attention. Paying very close attention.
In fact, he was determined — and definitely not just because it was the tenth Rule — to notice everything.
Because, yes, he was going to a new and strange place, quite far away from Oasis, Virginia. And because, yes, he was supposed to be a new person, with a whole new name and a whole new life. But also — perhaps even mostly — because his parents were behaving like people who had huge secret lives he hadn’t known anything about.
He was reminded of this every time his parents handed over the brand-new passports, the ones that claimed to belong to “Samuel Brown” and “Linda Brown” and, worst of all, “Jonah Brown,” at the counters and the check-in desks and the airport gates. All those familiar faces next to those unfamiliar names! He remembered going to the photo store to get that picture taken. His mother had said it was for his player pass for soccer. Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha!
So how had his parents done it, all those years? How had they disguised themselves — and Noah — as Kellers? Was it that easy to sign your kid up for school under a different name? Apparently so, if the one doing the signing-up was Noah’s mother. And then he started feeling sad all over again about his Batman backpack and the soccer game and the birthday party and everything that he had left behind in Oasis, Virginia, so it was almost a relief when the pilot’s voice came booming in
to the cabin:
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the pilot, “we have entered the airspace of the German Democratic Republic. We’ll be flying along the narrow corridor permitted to Western air traffic approaching Berlin. We are not permitted to leave this corridor under any circumstances; otherwise there will be dire consequences. Fortunately, your pilot and copilot today have long years of experience and excellent navigation skills, and we are quite hopeful that we will manage not to get ourselves shot out of the sky — not today, anyway.”
“Really?” whispered Noah to his father. “They could shoot us down, really?”
He got stuck on the word “shoot,” perhaps because his mouth didn’t want his brain thinking about things like that.
“Seems like our pilot has a sense of humor,” said his father, who did not seem worried in the slightest. “But also — though don’t worry, it won’t happen — also, yes.”
The plane made a very tight coiling turn as it landed, staying carefully inside the area that belonged to West Berlin.
Noah’s father had explained it all on the Washington, D.C.–to– Frankfurt part of the journey: you couldn’t fly from Frankfurt right to East Berlin; you had to fly to West Berlin and then travel through the Wall. You could get to the border a bunch of different ways: car, train, subway, the S-Bahn, which was something in between a subway and a regular train and ran on tracks above the ground, or you could even go over on foot, if you didn’t have a lot of luggage.
Noah’s parents had it all figured out, though as Noah shivered a little in the cold air and lugged a suitcase up the stairs into a bus, he suspected they might not have chosen the easiest way: they were taking that bus to the nearest S-Bahn stop, and then riding to the Friedrichstraße Station, a place where hundreds or thousands of people crossed from West to East or East to West every day, under the tightest of controls.