by Anne Nesbet
The important man from the library, the one who was a leader of the voluntary mass organization known as the FDJ, turned out to be named Jens, pronounced “Yens” (just as Jonah was pronounced “Yonah”), and he had a wife named Anke (two syllables: “An-keh”), and two boys around Noah’s age. Their last name was Huppe. They must have had those boys when they were very young, because even Noah’s parents, who weren’t very old, didn’t look quite as young as Jens and Anke Huppe.
Like the man driving the car, however, Frau Huppe had a stress wrinkle permanently engraved on her forehead. When she smiled, the top part of her face always looked like it was secretly trying to frown.
She seemed quite surprised by the fried curry rice, which Noah’s father handed over in the brand-new bowl they had found on their kitchen shelf.
“But you just arrived!” she said. “And already cooking? What an odd smell! Thank you! And you are . . .”
(She took the bowl of curry rice, held it at half-arm’s length for a while, trying to figure out what to do, and then put it down on a table — and it sat there, by the way, untouched, the whole evening through.)
“Jonah. I’m Jonah,” said Noah as quickly as he could manage, so that his parents wouldn’t tense up.
He shook the smiling-frowning Frau Huppe’s hand. She was looking at him oddly. For a person who was welcoming guests to a party, she had a surprising aura of the border guard about her.
“You’re the one who wants to go to school,” she said.
“I hope so,” said Noah in German. “Yes.”
Those weren’t very difficult words, but it took Noah a while to get them out anyway.
The thing about the Astonishing Stutter was that it really liked to roar into action in awkward social situations, like being grilled in German by a woman who clearly hates the smell of curried rice but is being polite to you because you are a foreigner.
“Oh,” said the woman assessingly. “Well. Ingo! Karl! Come over here!”
Those were the two boys. They were staring at Noah, so Noah stared right back and counted it as noticing everything: dark-blond hair on both of them, the older boy’s — Karl’s — one notch closer to brown. Karl was probably a couple of years older than Noah, and Ingo maybe a little younger, but those two Huppe brothers were almost the same height and looked a lot alike. They both had striped shirts on.
Noah, who had developed keen antennae for these sorts of things over the years, knew right away that he’d better be careful around the younger one. You could see from the glint in his eyes that he was the type who always wanted to take things one step too far. This was the kind of kid where you might end up hitting the blacktop hard before the end of recess even though things had started off so well at the beginning of the game.
“Hello,” said Noah. Actually, since he was speaking German, what he said was “Hallo.” There are, fortunately, some words in German that are pretty similar to English. Unfortunately, there aren’t nearly enough of those.
“Remember our discussion,” said the mother to the boys, in German that was, of course, nine million times more fluent than Noah’s. “You will treat our visitor with respect. He has come from a place where they hear only misinformation about socialist achievements.”
She actually said that! Then she shooed them off to what was apparently the boys’ room down the hall. The books lined up on the shelves drew Noah’s eye right away.
“We’ve studied America in school,” said the younger boy, Ingo. “Did you just come from there?”
Noah nodded and tried to get his mouth to produce the very troublesome German word for “yesterday,” which is gestern. It did not go well.
“All the millions of poor people,” said Ingo. “All the people with no work. Is that why you came here? Why do you Americans want world war again?”
Even once he figured out the words Ingo was saying, Noah had no idea how to answer any of these questions.
“War? No!” he said. In German the word is Krieg, which took some time for Noah to spit out.
“Stop it, Ingo,” said the older boy. “He can’t really speak German yet.”
“A little,” said Noah, still in German. He did not add: And I have a twisty language superpower that makes me understand about a thousand percent more than I can say. It took him long enough to come out with the two words he did say.
“Oh,” said Ingo.
“Anyway,” added Karl, “it’s the people running his country who want war, not the American masses.”
“Is he part of the masses?” said Ingo, eyeing Noah doubtfully.
Noah, desperate to change the subject, pointed to a picture on the wall, a man with a bulky white suit on, almost like a diving outfit, smiling and waving his gloved hand.
“Who is that?” he asked. That went better. Pointing helped!
“Don’t you recognize him?” said Ingo. “That’s Sigmund Jähn, the cosmonaut. Everyone knows him.”
“Oh, an astronaut?” said Noah. He hadn’t known there were astronauts here. He used the English word because he hadn’t heard the German one before.
“Cosmonaut,” said Karl. “He went into space. He’s a hero. Our father met him once at a Party conference.”
“Yeah, yeah, and that’s Antarctica,” said Ingo, slapping his finger against another picture on the wall. “We have scientists there now. We have scientists leading in every field. What else do you want to know? Is it hard living in a place where you have to pay all your money to go see the doctor and where the working classes are so oppressed?”
Noah went back to feeling slightly stumped.
He looked over at the books on the shelf. He didn’t recognize any of the titles, but he picked out one with a colorful cover and asked in his most careful German, “What — is — this — book?”
“That one’s good,” said Karl. “I liked it when I was younger. It’s by Alexander Volkov; he’s a Russian. It’s called The Wizard of the Smaragdenstadt.”
Noah must have looked completely blank. That last word! What the heck could it possibly mean?
“Shmara . . . ?” he began.
“Smaragd,” repeated Karl, who was definitely nicer than his slightly younger brother. “A jewel? Very green jewel?”
“Emerald!” said Noah in English.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
And Stadt was “city” in English; Noah knew that. So the book was about a wizard of an emerald city.
Ingo explained: “It’s about a little girl in America who’s very poor and goes to a magical land hidden in Kansas.”
“Oh, ja!” said Noah. That sounded like a story he knew. “Dorothy! The Wizard of Oz! By, by — somebody American.”
Karl and Ingo frowned at him.
“I suppose your American copied from Volkov,” said Karl politely. “They don’t let you hear much about Russian writers where you come from.”
“And anyway, the girl’s name isn’t Dorothy — it’s Elli!” said Ingo. He was beginning to dance from foot to foot. Getting impatient, though what he was impatient for, Noah had no idea. He was familiar with the ways of impatient kids, though, from the classrooms and playgrounds of Oasis. He could feel himself tense up, waiting for whatever was going to go wrong to go ahead and go wrong like it was going to —
And, sure enough, the next second Ingo had pounced on Noah’s backpack, which was almost empty, of course. “What’s in there?”
“Ingo!” said Karl, tugging the backpack out of his brother’s hands.
They glared at each other, Karl and Ingo, and with their striped shirts they looked almost like twins. Furious twins.
“A book,” said Noah, and he showed them Alice.
Those odd rabbits, marching away from you on the cover.
Ingo snatched the book away and started flipping through the pages, a little too roughly. “Ha!” he said a moment later, as if he’d found something he’d been looking for. Noah cricked his neck around to see what had stopped him. It was about halfway through t
he book, where the author had added a diagram of the chess game Alice’s second adventure is sort of based on. Through the mirror, she enters another world, where flowers talk and chess pieces walk about. The chess game itself doesn’t really hold together, logically — Noah and his dad had tried to figure it out on the plane. His dad had spent some time working out moves that made more sense. There were neat little notations in pencil where his dad had been trying to puzzle through everything.
“Look at this,” said Ingo, waving the book around. “Look at all of this! It’s a secret code.”
“Don’t be a donkey,” said Karl, grabbing at the book. “Ingo, give that to me.”
“Don’t you boss me around!” said Ingo, pulling harder.
And there was a terrible sound — the sound of paper tearing. Karl was left holding Noah’s book, and Ingo’s hand was clenching onto one severed page of it, and they both looked rather stunned.
At that moment, the two mothers appeared at the door of the bedroom.
“What is going on here?” asked Frau Huppe. Her frown-wrinkle was dark and ominous. Ingo shrank back — Noah noticed that the hand with the page in it was behind his back now.
Noah’s mother was surveying the scene, her eyes darting here, here, here, and there, taking it all in.
“Here’s your book,” said Karl as he handed back Noah’s poor wounded Alice.
“Thank you,” said Noah, feeling the slight tremor in his book-holding hand. He was careful not to look at Ingo.
“Why don’t you come out here with us, Jonah?” said Noah’s mother. “You must be exhausted.”
As they walked down the hall to the living room, where the grown-ups were talking about somewhere called Kampuchea, Ingo’s voice followed them, whining to his mother:
“How are we supposed to discuss things with him? He can’t speak German hardly at all!”
“Oh, dear,” said Noah’s mother in English, putting her arm around Noah’s shoulders. “It will get easier.”
It had to, right?
But when Frau Huppe came back into the living room, her face had a closed, grim look to it that would worry anyone.
“You can understand we’re not really equipped to scholarize someone like your son,” she said to Noah’s mother. “With his deficits. And his lack of German. We don’t have classes for English speakers.”
“Frau Huppe is in the national schools administration,” said Noah’s mother, smiling, to Noah. Her lips were clenched quite tensely around each of those words, which was how Noah knew she was raging inside, despite the smile. And she was using German on purpose, Noah could tell, as a way of saying-without-saying, “My son, Frau Huppe, understands quite a lot of this language of yours.”
“Oh, well, now, English doesn’t matter,” said Noah’s father. “Jonah doesn’t need English. He wants to learn German, of course. You know how children are. They pick up languages so fast.”
“Normal children do,” said Anke Huppe.
That kind of added an icy feel to the general atmosphere.
Noah’s mother drew Frau Huppe slightly to the side, so that Noah wouldn’t have to sit there politely listening to his own mother argue on his behalf. And Noah’s father, to defuse the tension in that room, started chatting with Jens, the father of Ingo and Karl, about world politics. “Chatting” in this case meant skillfully inviting Jens to talk about the virtues of East Germany while the rest of them listened. So they heard about full employment and free medical care and aid for young families and the housing-construction program. Noah leaned his head against his father’s side and let Jens’s explanations of how it was only natural that he, a leader in the FDJ, would also, of course, be a member of the governing Socialist Unity Party — because, although an American might not understand this, unity is everything — float above his head, somewhere way up high there, like a balloon.
“Ah,” said Noah’s father every now and then. “Interesting. Hmm.”
(Nothing ever got Noah’s father ruffled.)
At the end of the evening, the nervous man with the car took them almost all the way home, but not quite all the way, perhaps because he was in such a rush to get back to his own house, where maybe he could finally relax and stop sweating. He did offer to take them to their door, but after that painful party, Noah and his parents naturally wanted to breathe some nice, refreshing, coal-laden outdoor Berlin air. So they did not mind walking the last couple of blocks.
“Well,” said Noah’s mother, “that was truly something. Every person in that room was a Party member, I do believe. A Party party!”
She hooted with laughter, but when she looked over at Noah, that laugh turned into something else, more like a sigh.
“I’m afraid you may have to spend some more time with those boys,” she said. “That mother of theirs has agreed to let you write a little essay about Berlin and how you want to be educated. She seemed to think that would help the administration decide whether to let you into the schools or not. They are going to borrow you on Monday and show you around town. I imagine they will grill you constantly. Then you write your essay and see what happens.”
“Oh,” said Noah. His heart had just sunk right into the ground. Nothing in that plan sounded good to him.
“They didn’t like curry in their nice fried rice, either,” said Noah’s father sadly. He had that big bowl in his hands.
“Don’t feel bad about that. We’ll eat it when we get home!” said Noah’s mother. “With extra spices and extra garlic! Come on, people — cheer up!”
That was a Rule. That was Rule #4. Smile. Be polite. Don’t let your worries show.
“They’re probably all writing reports on each other right this minute,” said Noah’s mother with relish. “On each other and on us. Think of all the nonsense they’ll be having to write.”
Then she looked sternly at Noah: “I say that only because we’re out of doors, Jonah.”
Jonah. Would he ever get used to that name? Would it always feel unfamiliar and cold?
“Well,” said Noah. “If I wrote a report, I’d say . . . when they were fighting over my book, they looked like — like — like —”
His parents waited. Say what you want about Noah’s parents, even if they sometimes took their child’s name and birthday away and dragged him across the world to a place that smelled like coal smoke, they knew how to wait patiently for his words to appear.
“Like . . . Tweedledum!” he said finally, and it was an explosion. “And . . . Tweedledee!”
And then they all really did laugh like ordinary happy people, and went upstairs and had lots and lots of curried rice.
Secret File #7
THE WIZARD OF THE EMERALD CITY
The looking-glass cities of West and East Berlin did indeed each have a beloved children’s book about a Kansas girl who goes to a magic land and meets a wizard. In West Berlin, as in West Germany, as in the United States, that book was called The Wizard of Oz and had L. Frank Baum’s name on the cover. But in East Berlin (“Berlin, Capital of the GDR”), the book was known as The Wizard of the Emerald City, and the author was Alexander Volkov, a Russian.
How did this happen?
In 1939 — the same year, by the way, that The Wizard of Oz was turned into one of the most famous American movies ever — a Soviet professor of metallurgy named Alexander Volkov translated an old American book he had found into Russian. When he published this book in the Soviet Union with his own name on the cover, it was a huge hit. Later he even wrote a bunch of sequels. During the Cold War, these books by Volkov about the “Magic Land” were published in many of the countries on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain — Volkov proudly bragged it had been translated into thirteen languages!
West Germany, since it was solidly on the American team, published Oz books by Baum; East Germany imported Volkov’s versions.
And that is how the divided city of Berlin ended up with The Wizard of the Emerald City on the east side of the Wall and The Wizard of Oz on b
ookshelves in the West.
His parents were nice about it, but Noah knew the truth: this outing with Tweedledum and Tweedledee and their half-frowning mother was a test. A huge test. A test without hints or extra time or second chances.
Frau Huppe didn’t think he should be allowed to go to school. That was enough to make Noah want to show how very ready for school, any school, school in any language, he actually was. And it wasn’t just a question of his German; it was a question of how well he answered questions, maybe even questions about life back home in Roanoke, Virginia.
His parents tried not to show how worried they were. Noah could tell, however, because whenever they were safely outdoors together, far from whatever bugs inhabited the apartment, his parents kept dropping casual reminders into every possible conversation, about Rules 4 (Smile) and 5 (Don’t talk about the past!), not to mention 7 (When asked questions, say as little as possible!). And when they were indoors they curled up on the couch with him and the Jonah Book, “remembering” the past that had never happened.
Sometimes Noah was tempted to say to his dear parents — ideally with that cutting lilt some of his classmates back in Oasis had already mastered, “Do you really think I’m that stupid?”
But that would have been a violation of Rule 4, right? That would not have been smiling.
And he knew his parents didn’t think he was stupid. He knew that. They were just worried, that was all. Worry might not have been showing on their faces, but it was seeping out of every other seam of them.
So as much as he could, Noah kept his own worries to himself.
His father scrambled a few eggs for breakfast that morning.
“Protein!” he said. “To fortify you on your long expedition!”
They made sure he had his jacket and an extra sweater in his bag, plus his map of East Berlin and a bit of money, in the very unlikely case Frau Huppe and the young Tweedle-Huppes managed to lose him somehow. And some chocolate bars for Ingo and Karl.
Noah made a point of leaving Alice safely behind, though — enough lost pages.