by Anne Nesbet
And that made Noah realize that it could be useful, under certain circumstances, to have a kid with a bad stutter. Of course, it could be inconvenient, too, if you were trying to convince people to let the kid go to German-speaking schools! But if, say, you wanted to convince people that you had a good reason to be studying speech defects in the German Democratic Republic, then having a child with a stutter might be useful evidence. And that thought led to other ideas that troubled Noah’s brain. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be useful, not in that way.
That night Noah had trouble sleeping. And even once he fell asleep, it wasn’t for long. Sometime late, late that night, he found himself lying in his narrow bed, looking up at the ceiling, while his heart thumped away.
A breeze had wandered in through his bedroom window — it had been so warm and summer-like that they had started opening some windows at night — and was gently swelling the folds of his curtains.
An argument was coming in with the breeze, from somewhere not too far away.
He got out of bed and walked to his window to listen harder, and it seemed to him that the sound must be coming up from another opened window somewhere nearby.
That was interesting, because one of those voices arguing belonged to a kid. The kid, whoever it was, sounded lonely and sad.
Noah shivered a little and went back to bed, pulling the not-very-soft pillow up over his head so that he wouldn’t hear anything from outside that window anymore. Other people’s arguments feel like something you shouldn’t be listening in on, especially if you can’t do much about whatever it is that’s making them so upset.
He forgot about having been awake in the middle of the night during the next few hours of sleep and woke up with his mind all muddled by some fussy dream about running after balloons that kept dancing out of reach and then drifting away.
What a silly dream to have! Really, at least he should be able to have interesting and exciting dreams!
After breakfast he did three or four pages from a math workbook, but real numbers interrupted his work and distracted him. Namely, the number forty. Forty was a special number here this year. You saw it all over the place. That was because 1989 was the fortieth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic officially becoming a separate state. They were going to celebrate the heck out of that anniversary in October, but for now you could already see signs here and there, and of course headlines in the newspaper.
Forty is a square-cornered number, though not technically a square. Four times ten. Twenty times two. Or you could take the five out of hiding and call it five times eight. Hmm. That added some oddness to the square. Noah had always been fond of the number forty, but it was everywhere in Berlin. That might be too much of a good thing.
Then he took his mental arithmetic outside, something to think about while he wandered the construction site that was supposed to be a park.
He was feeling lonely. He was sort of a loner by nature, but this way of life was extreme. No classmates! No school! No soccer! Nothing!
In his sudden flood of self-pity, he stumbled over a small pile of sticks near the back fence.
“Watch your big galumphy feet!” said a voice nearby. Perhaps those weren’t the exact words, since the voice was speaking German, but that was certainly the general meaning.
Noah jumped about three feet in the air before he saw the person the voice had come from: a girl with short blond hair and jeans. She looked like she was just about Noah’s age, or maybe a little younger.
“You just broke my twig house!” the girl said.
“I’m sorry,” said Noah in German: “Es tut mir Leid.” The way you say “I’m sorry” in German is “It gives me pain.” Since in German that phrase is basically just designed to stop stutterers in their tracks, suffering really was involved.
The girl gave him a long, hard look.
“You talk funny,” she said in German. Or something to that effect.
“Ja,” said Noah.
“Are you from outer space?”
“Nein,” said Noah.
The girl slapped her grimy knee as if she had just figured something important out.
“Dann musst du’n Wechselbalg sein, wie ich,” she said.
By now — despite his lonely days — Noah could understand German sentences pretty well, and still the word at the center of this one felt like an incomprehensible mouthful.
“You must be a Wechselbalg, like me” — but what was a Wechselbalg?
“I don’t know what that means, but I’m sorry about the twig house,” he said, and then he remembered to start at the beginning, and added, “My name is No — Jonah. What is your name?”
One of the advantages of the Astonishing Stutter was that it covered up all sorts of other errors, like almost using the wrong name for yourself. The girl stared at him so intently he felt his ears beginning to pink up from embarrassment.
“Hello, Wechselbalg, called Nojonah,” she said. He definitely needed to look that word up: Wechselbalg. “I’m Claudia.”
Her name sounded like “Cloudia.” Noah said that a few times to himself in his mind: Cloudia, Cloudia, Cloud-ee-ya. It was a really nice name.
She stared at him another moment and then shrugged and got to work rebuilding the house Noah had tripped over. Noah felt bad about having knocked down the first twig house, so he helped.
When the twigs were in place, Noah pointed to the building behind them.
“That’s where I live,” he said.
“Ja,” said Claudia. “Me, too. That’s where I live now.”
He thought about that for a moment.
“You live there?” he said. “Really? I’ve never seen you.”
“But I’ve seen you,” said the girl. She squinted through a pretend peephole made with her fingers, to show him what she meant. “And I hear you, too. Loud feet.”
So she must be downstairs — and then he remembered the arguing he’d overheard in the night. Still, it seemed strange that he wouldn’t have seen her in the stairwell. On the other hand, it was the kind of stairwell that didn’t invite lingering. He almost never saw anyone on those stairs.
“I’m not staying long,” said the girl. “I don’t belong here, not really. I’m just visiting my grandmother while my parents are away on vacation.”
“I don’t belong here, either,” said Noah.
The girl Claudia nodded, a short, sharp nick of her head. “Wechselbalg!” she said again. That word!
And then his father called his new name from the other side of the little park, and Noah waved good-bye and ran upstairs to figure out from the German-English dictionary what Wechselbalg meant.
Secret File #9
WECHSELBALG
What the girl Cloud-Claudia had said (according to the dictionary) was this: “Then you must be, like me, a changeling.”
She was absolutely right, of course.
A changeling may look like a normal human child, but it’s not. It’s a fairy or a goblin or something else along those lines, swapped for a human baby at a tender age.
It’s a creature from one world forced to live in another world.
Noah sat looking at the dictionary for a long time, in wonder.
That’s what’s the matter with me. I’m a changeling. I always belong somewhere else.
That struck him as an important fact to have learned early on. It was so obvious, he was surprised he had never figured it out before.
Why would Cloud-Claudia call herself a changeling, though? An East German girl living in East Berlin — what did changelings have to do with her?
About that, Noah had no idea.
All that evening Noah puzzled over that thing the blond girl had said out there in the muddy non-park. She had said, “a changeling, like me.” Why would she call herself a changeling? And, for that matter, why was an East German kid out of school on a weekday? Noah knew from his mother that the East German schools were in session right through June.
The only children of re
asonable size that Noah had seen outside of school during school hours were Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Huppe brothers, and they, of course, had been part of a mission at the time — the tiresome mission of Testing Noah.
The next day, he went back to the non-park to see if she was there, but she wasn’t.
Time went by. He looked for her in the stairwell and listened for her at his window, but there was no Cloud-Claudia. She had vanished again, just as surely as if she had really come from another world.
He was getting better acquainted with East Berlin, however. His father took him on a lot of expeditions, looking for interesting buildings or parks or doughnut stands. Mostly people tried to ignore them, but every now and then someone would stare. After almost two months in East Berlin, they must still have stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs — even when Noah wasn’t talking.
On one of those expeditions, a strange thing happened. Noah’s father had paused to tie his shoe. Then two minutes later, a policeman came hurrying up behind them, even though they hadn’t been anywhere near the embassy at all!
“You dropped this,” said the policeman, and he handed Noah’s father a little piece of paper that did indeed look like the sort of thing that sometimes spilled out of Noah’s father’s pockets.
Noah’s father looked at it. (So did Noah.) It was blank.
“Oh,” said Noah’s father. “Thanks!”
And he put the blank little piece of paper into his wallet, at which point the policeman did what all those policemen seemed always to do, and asked for their identification papers so he could recite their statistics to his hidden microphone.
Noah’s father offered no explanation, either. The whole thing was, thought Noah, rather strange.
The next day, Noah was hiding in the non-park, studying his map of Berlin, when a medium-small hand reached out from beside him and tapped the paper. The hand had long, fragile fingers that came from a different world.
“Cloud!” said Noah. His voice fractured that one syllable into many happy ones.
She was smiling.
“Show me that map you’re holding, Nojonah,” she said to him, pulling gently at the map.
He let her take it. He was too busy trying to remember all the urgent questions he had been going to ask her if he ever saw her again.
“So why aren’t you in school?” he said. “Isn’t this the last week or something? Before summer?”
He knew that from his mother.
“School?” said Cloud.
She made a face and gagged a little and shrugged.
“I was sick for a long time. Lung sick. Then I got better, but not better enough to go on vacation. So they left me with my grandmother. My parents left me. I’m better now.”
Cloud-Claudia certainly didn’t look sick. Somewhat pale, yes, but healthy.
Noah asked the question that had been waiting in him for days and days:
“And why did you say you’re a Wechselbalg?”
She looked at him and put her finger to her lips and whispered from behind that finger.
“I told you: I don’t belong here,” she said. “I’ve never belonged.”
And then she went back to studying the map.
“Where have you been all these weeks?” said Noah. “I looked and looked for you.”
“The Oma doesn’t want me to talk to you,” the girl said. An Oma was a grandmother.
“Why not?” asked Noah.
She shrugged.
“Maybe because changelings are dangerous,” she said. “So two changelings together? Extra scary.” And she said something else that Noah had to work to translate into English in his head. In English it made almost a rhyme:
Changelings change things.
Noah wasn’t sure about that. There was so much in the world that was built of concrete and barbed wire and rules. How could anyone ever hope to change any of it?
“So, when are your parents coming back?” he asked, to shift the subject in a different direction. Claudia stared at him. He tried again.
“Where did they go, your parents? Mutter, Vater?”
“Ungarn,” said Cloud with another shrug.
“Ungarn,” Noah repeated. That didn’t sound like any place Noah had ever heard of.
But when he said that word — Ungarn — he had accidentally shrugged, just like her. He felt himself doing it. He hadn’t meant to mimic her, but that’s how it came out. Cloud’s face crinkled into a grin.
“Ha!” she said. “Nojonah!”
That was, however, the exact moment when someone stormed around the corner of the fence and grabbed Cloud’s arm, pouring angry German words all over her — and all over Noah, too, who stood there like a fool. It took him a few seconds to recollect himself well enough to recognize her: it was Frau März, his mother’s minder.
And she was very, very, very angry.
Sometimes she paused in her long scolding of Cloud to shake a fist at Noah, too. Apparently he had done something wrong by simply being in the non-park with Cloud, who had gone limp in the hands of Frau März and was only just barely standing now, with her head hanging down, all the spirit gone from her.
And while Noah stared in horror, the woman dragged poor Cloud back toward the door of their apartment building, pausing now and then to glare back at Noah so that he wouldn’t follow them. Except of course he did have to follow them eventually, because he lived in that building, too, didn’t he?
He gave them a few minutes to get into their apartment and then tiptoed up the stairs to the fourth floor, passing two men with briefcases coming down from upstairs. It was a busy day in that stairwell!
It was only when he opened the door of his own front hall and went inside that he realized Cloud had gone off with his map of Berlin.
Secret File #10
CHANGE IN THE AIR
It might have been hard to notice, if you were just a kid rushing through the hazy streets of Berlin or talking to your maybe-new-friend in the non-park across the street from your apartment building, but change was in the air in 1989. Not just in Berlin but all over the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain dividing East and West.
The leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev, had started talking about change, for instance. He called it “perestroika.” And at the beginning of May, the Hungarians — a couple countries south of East Germany but on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain — had decided not to be so particular about enforcing the border between Hungary and Austria.
That plays a big role in our story.
But Noah doesn’t know that yet.
Cloud’s grandmother must have been watching her like a hawk, because Noah didn’t see her again all that week.
She came up during a dinner conversation, however. Noah’s mother was happily talking about her research and about how well it was going.
“School’s ending, but I got so much data these last few weeks!” she said. “Enough to keep me happily busy all summer. And now I know the school people, so I’ll have a running start on round two in the fall when the schools start up again.”
“School? School? When do I get to go to school?”
His mother looked at him with those bright, sympathetic eyes of hers.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I’m so sorry about that. I’ve put lots of requests through, you know. I’ve told them it will not reflect well on socialism if you die of boredom. Everyone’s just worried about what someone somewhere will think. I’ve been meaning to take it up with Frau März again — she’s the one my official requests are supposed to trickle through. Although this whole week I haven’t seen her. She’s been ill, apparently. I’ve had to do this final round of schools on my own. Means I’ve triumphed over the Berlin bus and S-Bahn system, though.”
“She’s sick, Frau März?”
“That’s what they told me. Haven’t seen her in the stairwell recently, either, but I don’t want to trouble her by knocking on the door. That seems too forward.”
“She has a kid living with h
er, you know,” Noah said. “Her granddaughter.”
“Really?” she said. She was so surprised, she almost broke her own rules — Noah could see her swallowing her next question. “How — nice! Someone for you to play with.”
Noah waited until he and his mother were walking to the supermarket to buy more cardboard pyramids filled with milk before bringing up Frau März and Cloud-Claudia again. Then he unfolded his theory, such as it was.
“I think Frau März is holding Cloud prisoner. Locked up, like in the Rapunzel story. Maybe Frau März isn’t really her grandmother. Maybe she’s more like an evil step-grandmother.”
“Holy moly, now you’re exaggerating!” said his mother. “And did you say her name is Cloud?”
“Cloud-ee-ya,” said Noah, letting the syllables do whatever they wanted. “Her parents left her here while they went on vacation. We were talking outside, and Frau März saw and got mad and pounced on her and dragged her away. Poor Cloud! Frau März for a grandmother!”
His mother thought about things for a moment.
“Well, maybe I’ll have to knock on her door after all,” she said. “If Frau März is really sick with the flu or something, and trying to take care of a child, she might actually need some help.”
Noah could tell she was making up her mind all through those sentences. Noah’s mother didn’t like interfering in other people’s business, just as she didn’t like other people interfering in her business. But on the other hand, once she had decided something needed to be done, she left doubt behind. Just set it down like a package and did what needed to be done.
So on their way back up the apartment stairs, Noah’s mother shifted the grocery bag into her other hand and said to Noah, “Here goes!”
And pushed the buzzer beside Frau März’s door.
By the time Noah had caught his breath, the door had already opened, and here was Frau März.
Oh, she must really be sick, after all! thought Noah, angling himself a little behind his mother.
When Frau März had come storming out to the non-park to drag Cloud away, all Noah had been able to see was her anger. But now he saw that this Frau März was a far cry from the tidy, in-control, carefully dressed minder who had shown up at their door some weeks ago to pick up his mother. She was frazzled. Strands of hair, half gray, half brown, were spilling loose from the bun on top of her head, and her eyes were puffy and red.