by Anne Nesbet
Cloud-Claudia had found the picture she wanted there: a mythological whale in a bright-blue mythological ocean.
Noah just blinked at her for a moment. Was there a Noah’s ark hiding in that picture that he wasn’t seeing?”
“Jonah,” she said. “It says there was a Jonah in a whale!”
The German for whale is Walfisch: whale-fish. Even though whales are not actually fish at all.
“Oh!” said Noah. “Oh, right!”
He was remembering the story of Jonah now, or remembering having once heard a story about Jonah. More important, he was remembering all over again that he wasn’t named Noah anymore, not here. Here, he was one hundred percent Jonah. Whale-fish! Whale-fish! Whale-fish!
But then his mind tinkered with the sound of that word a little; he said it aloud, “Wallfish,” with the w turned into a changeling American sound, almost not a consonant at all — and thought about a special kind of fish that might especially like to swim in walls.
“Ja?” said Cloud-Claudia, raising an eyebrow at him, since she couldn’t read his mind.
He realized he was making funny shapes with his lips, thinking about w, and snapped his mouth safely shut.
“Why don’t you show Claudia the Jonah Book?” said Noah’s father, who had suddenly appeared in the room with his notebooks and his tea.
“Um,” said Noah. He was reluctant. The Jonah Book made him feel creepy inside, like he was a character in a novel someone else was writing. But he couldn’t get out of it. Claudia looked politely at the blurry photos in the Jonah Book for a moment and handed it back.
“Your pictures are in color” was all she said. She did not ask him, thank goodness, how he had liked having Mrs. Deerborne as his second-grade teacher in Roanoke, Virginia.
When Cloud-Claudia was leaving at the end of that day, she pulled something out of her jacket pocket and handed it to Noah.
“Your map,” she said. “I enjoyed it. Thank you.” And she looked at him with her intensely brown eyes, as if there were a message there for him that she was worried he wouldn’t understand.
“Danke,” said Noah.
As soon as he had taken it into his hands, however, he realized that he should have just told her to keep the map. After all, he was pretty sure his parents could find another one. But by the time he had those thoughts, it was too late.
Later that evening, he spread out the map of Berlin to look at it, smoothing out the fold lines with his palm. That was when he saw it — a doodle on the map.
No, not a doodle.
Tiny little pictures, filling one corner of the large blank section of the map, the part where West Berlin had been erased from official consciousness.
Noah looked closer. These weren’t real monuments of West Berlin. There were tiny little buildings, and parks, and schools, and a playground, yes, but also a small castle, and a forest running around the castle, and trees on which apples and clocks and candy canes grew. You could see that Cloud-Claudia really did like to draw. And that she liked small, precise things. That made Noah very happy, because miniatures and pictures with tons of tiny detail, anything that made you want to reach for a magnifying glass, all those things made him very glad, too. It was much of the reason he liked that Tower of Babel puzzle so much.
She had even labeled the parts of her extra map: in tiny capital letters, very clear, though small, and boxed to set the words apart, she had given the place a name: Im Land der Wechselbalgen. The Land of the Changelings!
And little gates, here and there, between East Berlin and the Changelings’ Land, gates and bridges and doors. To keep people out or to let them in?
It was done with such care, so perfectly and so tinily, that the imaginary world took up only a quarter or so, so far, of the blank splotch on the map.
He looked at it for a long time, thinking.
It seemed like an invitation. It must be an invitation! Anyway, he couldn’t resist.
He got a couple of pens and tried them out until he found the one with the finest tip, and then he bent over the map and looked for the right place to begin.
What did he want there to be in the Land of the Changelings? He thought about it. A river, he decided, with islands in it and some icebergs for a polar bear or two. Drawing icebergs was highly satisfying, and he thought the tiny bear came out pretty well, too. And then he added more trees to Cloud-Claudia’s forest, and a hill with a cave in it, and a cabin tucked into the side of the hill, with a tiny stream that emptied into the river. And then he added a fancy bridge over the river, so that you could get from the forested hills to the city proper without having to swim or go the long way around.
By the time he had finished all of that, it was very late indeed, and time for bed. He folded up the map and tucked it away under his pillow, which seemed like the safest place. Safer, for instance, than the safe.
And the next time Cloud-Claudia came over, after they had worked on the jigsaw puzzle for a while — the Tower of Babel was beginning to take shape — he handed the map back to her. She looked surprised, only for a second, and then she grinned.
“Your turn, ja?” said Noah.
And she nick-nodded her head and tucked the map away into her jacket.
They worked on that map for a few weeks, becoming slower and more careful and more precise in their drawings as time passed.
And they started telling each other stories about the things they had included, dropping casual little bits of information as they built the picture of the Tower of Babel together.
“There are lots of little towers in the Wechselbalgland, but no one big tower like this one.”
“Do they speak the same language, all the changelings?”
“What?”
Noah pointed at the Tower of Babel.
“That’s in the mythology book, too, I think. The tower gets knocked down and all the people start speaking different languages, so they can’t understand each other and can’t build it back up again.”
“Oh,” said Cloud-Claudia, considering. “That’s sad. Well, they all have funny voices there, but they understand each other, I think, sure.”
“They do puzzles sometimes — big ones, so big they would cover this whole floor.”
“And they have Wechselbalg parties when the moon is full — they go skating on the pond and then sit under the tinselly trees and drink lemonade.”
“Or hot chocolate. They really like hot chocolate, in bright mugs with tops on, so it doesn’t spill on their feet.”
“Especially when riding on carved wooden horses. You can’t see it very well, but behind that big building in the center of the city is a merry-go-round; only about one horse’s worth of it actually shows, though.”
“Oh, right! Best job ever: merry-go-round engineer!”
“Your German is getting better,” said Noah’s mother to him one evening after Cloud-Claudia had gone home. “Have you noticed?”
No, he hadn’t really noticed. But once his mother pointed it out, he did think he was a little better at speaking than he had been. The stopping-and-starting was beginning to be only at ordinary levels. It made him hope, all over again, that they would let him go to school.
For the moment, however, it was July outside the windows of the apartment building.
Simply enormous black beetles sometimes flew in through the windows when they were left open, but you couldn’t shut out the warm July air. That would have been a criminal waste.
“I’m worried about Frau März,” said his mother one day when they were all walking outside, through one of the local parks, because Noah’s dad needed a break from writing his mink-farming novel. “I went to pick up some papers at the Ministry of Education, and I gathered she hasn’t been there for ages. I’m beginning to think she won’t come back. The woman in the office over there told me Frau März was probably thinking of retiring. And then she put her hand over her mouth, as if she hadn’t been supposed to say any such thing. It was very peculiar. If I knew Frau März b
etter, I could just ask her, but she never comes upstairs, and we don’t really know her at all. Just her poor granddaughter.”
Noah frowned a tiny bit on Cloud-Claudia’s behalf. Usually his mother could be counted on not to get overly sentimental. His father put a hand on Noah’s arm, which meant he had seen that frown.
“Well, she may be a little young for retiring,” he said, “but they retire younger here than in the States. And, anyway, a tragedy like that would really knock anyone off her feet, wouldn’t it?”
Secret File #13
MINKS AND SAFES
Noah’s father’s mink-farming novel wasn’t really all about mink farmers. It did, however, have a main character who ran a mink farm near Vancouver, and who was at the same time a pepper-tongued, sharp-eyed amateur sleuth (“like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, only brinier,” said Noah’s father), a philosophical poet, and the producer of better strawberry jam than anyone else in the universe. The novel was apparently very cheery and heartwarming, despite all that talk about heft, and Noah’s father said he was going to publish it someday under some comfy pseudonym and retire to a big house in the country.
Every night Noah’s dad took his great pile of notebooks and draft pages and shuffled them into a more square-cornered heap, and then he made a big show of locking them safely into the safe in the closet in Noah’s parents’ bedroom, along with some of Noah’s mom’s notes for her thesis on speech impediments.
“Yes,” said Noah’s mother when he first did that. “Absolutely ideal.”
His parents grinned at each other.
Because of the Rules, they had to wait until they were outside to explain the joke to Noah.
“The private safe has to be the least private place in the whole apartment,” they said. “They pretend it’s private, and we pretend to put private stuff into it. It’s all part of the game.”
A strange game!
When Cloud-Claudia wasn’t there, Noah didn’t touch the jigsaw puzzle, so the building of the Tower of Babel stretched out over a number of weeks. Cloud-Claudia couldn’t come over every day. Some days Noah’s parents were too busy, and some days they went on expeditions to other cities, even as far as Dresden, with its church tower still in skeletal ruins and the art museum filled with pictures from long-ago centuries, or as far as the city of Leipzig, in the south, where there was an enormous dark ziggurat of a monument left over from 1913.
It was Noah’s dad who used the word ziggurat. A ziggurat was apparently a kind of Mesopotamian pyramid built up from square-cornered layers. “Think of it like the tower in your puzzle,” said Noah’s dad. “Only squarer.” This particular ziggurat was German, not Mesopotamian, of course. It was called the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, which was a very long word meaning “Monument to the Battle of the Nations,” and had been built, all those years ago, to commemorate the 1813 Battle of Leipzig.
Of course, it’s not like Noah had ever heard of the Battle of Leipzig before. He inched his way through the informative displays in the little glass house and concluded that it had had something to do with Napoleon.
The Völkerschlachtdenkmal rose up, high and high and high and black and black and black, and you could climb up the dark staircases as if you were processing toward some sort of terrible sacrifice or a battle with orcs or both. In the little glass house at the side were old photos of youth groups using the place for ceremonies: the people back in 1913, and the Nazis during the thirties, and the Free German Youth in the decades after the Second World War. Apparently they all liked to parade up the five hundred steps, holding flaming torches.
Noah looked up and up and thought, with a satisfying chilly shiver, of the Tower of Babel.
When they got back from Leipzig, Cloud-Claudia came over to visit again, and they went back to work on the puzzle. It was August already.
“How’s your grandmother doing?” asked Noah’s mother.
“She’s getting better, but she’s very tired, thank you,” said Cloud-Claudia in that flat and automatic voice she used only with grown-ups. Her eyes, which were full of life and never flat, flickered away from Noah’s mother’s face, down toward the table where the puzzle was.
“And there’s no summer camp or something you could go to, somewhere that might be more fun for you?”
“They wanted me to go, but I screamed and carried on,” she said, still in her quiet, flat, careful voice.
“Oh,” said Noah’s mother.
They put some more pieces into the tower.
After supper, Cloud-Claudia handed over the map of Berlin and the Changelings’ Land.
“There’s a problem, you know,” she said. “When people cross that bridge over the river, when they go from one world to the other, their memories start to fade. They start to lose the names of things, all the names of the people they used to care about in the other world. Every day even their own names fade, and their pasts fade, and they forget about us a little more. But they don’t even know it’s happening. They’re just going about their normal lives in the Wechselbalgland, but everything they do makes us fade in their minds.”
“But were we in their minds in the first place?” asked Noah.
“Of course!” said Cloud-Claudia with the emphasis of someone who can’t believe you’re asking such a stupid question. “I’m talking about the people who start here and go get themselves lost in the other world, the Changelings’ Land. They get lost there because it’s so nice, and they don’t notice how they’re forgetting who they used to be. And the people they used to care about. They forget all the names of everyone.”
“Like the river,” said Noah. “There’s a river like that in the mythology book. Look, here —”
He knew the coffee-table books very, very well by now, since there were only those three of them.
“See!” he said. “The river called Lethe, on the border of the land of the dead. The water makes everyone forget.”
Cloud-Claudia squinted at the picture in the book and ran her finger along the lines on the page beside it; then she shook her head.
“No. Doesn’t look the same,” she said. “Where’s the bridge? There should be a bridge. And why’s everything so gray in that picture? That’s not the Changelings’ Land. Anyway, this is an emergency. We’ve got to get their names to them, somehow. If they could just remember what those names used to be, they could remember everything else, too, maybe.”
“How’s that?” Noah asked.
“Names are like codes, yes? Like magic codes. They have everything that ever happened to you squeezed tightly inside them.”
Noah twitched in his chair. For a moment he felt like someone whose life has been squeezed tightly into one name-shaped container after another. And he wasn’t sure whether you could talk out loud about codes that way. Not indoors!
But Cloud-Claudia had already pulled out a strip of paper and started furiously writing names — a strange sort of list, Noah saw. Sonja Bauer Sonja Bauer Sonja Bauer Sonja Bauer went the first four names on the paper. And then Matthias Bauer Matthias Bauer Matthias Bauer Matthias Bauer. And some Claudias, too.
“She doesn’t want me to worry about them forgetting,” she said, pausing mid-list to point with her finger downstairs. “She wants us all to forget, and to let them forget. Then they really will be all gone.”
Noah didn’t know what to say.
Cloud-Claudia leaned forward and whispered:
“I know something strange happened to them in Hungary. Some bad magic. Not just a car accident! Something worse. She’s not telling the truth. I can tell.”
And that was perhaps the least Rules-following thing anyone had ever said in that apartment.
That evening, when they dropped off Cloud-Claudia at her grandmother’s, the person who opened the door was not her grandmother but a youngish man with glasses on.
“Hallo, Claudia,” he said, in crisp, official German. “I’ve been chatting with your grandmother, who’s a colleague of mine. And may I ask who all of you are? Sam
uel and Linda and Jonah Brown? From the United States? How kind of you to invite Claudia to supper.”
“It was our pleasure, I’m sure,” said Noah’s mother. “Good-bye, Claudia.”
Cloud-Claudia looked a little lost, standing there clutching the map of Berlin in her hands — it was her turn to have it — but it couldn’t be helped. They had to leave her behind now and go upstairs, where their rooms felt empty and quiet.
They stood there, each thinking about what had just happened, in silence for about ten seconds.
“Oh, dear,” said his mother to his father, but it wasn’t entirely clear to Noah what she meant by that. His father squeezed his mother’s hand.
The little hairs on the back of Noah’s neck had reacted right away to that man, even though he had done nothing terrible. The little hairs on the back of Noah’s neck thought there was something scary about him. Noah considered the problem and decided it was the way the man spoke, almost like one of those soldier-policemen popping up on the sidewalks of East Berlin to check your papers. There was just the slightest hint of machinery about that man who had opened the door downstairs.
As he lay in bed later, trying to fall asleep, he found himself fretting about that man who had reminded him, oh so slightly, of a machine: wasn’t that just the kind of thing — thought Noah — that a merry-go-round engineer might start constructing, late at night in his workshop where nobody could see? Putting mechanisms together that would look just like human beings when you turned the clock key in the back? Who would protect the Changelings’ Land from them?
And then he realized that even his thoughts were now filled with Cloud-Claudia’s particular off-kilter way of seeing the world, and that made him feel sad and worried about her all over again.
Secret File #14
CODES, CODES, CODES
Codes and walls, codes and walls. In places surrounded by walls, codes spring up like mushrooms after a rain. When the Wall went up overnight in 1961, families that had been separated so suddenly and so brutally would gather on either side of the Wall and convey life’s news to one another through signals and signs and hand gestures. The Wall kept growing, though, and simple signals became harder to convey.