Cloud and Wallfish

by Anne Nesbet

  “What does that mean?”

  “No idea,” she said. “Something about prisoners and it being unfair. Don’t know what a Mahnwache is. Let’s sneak across the street that way, with all of them.”

  “Cloud, wait,” said Noah, but she wasn’t waiting. He didn’t want to leave her on her own in that crowd, where something huge was happening, or had already happened, or was about to happen — so he jumped out into the street, following her as best he could.

  Secret File #27

  FOR THOSE UNFAIRLY IMPRISONED

  A Mahnwache is a vigil. The candle church was called the Gethsemane Church, and so it was a good place to hold a vigil involving praying and waiting, since in the story in the Bible, Jesus prayed and waited in the Gethsemane garden in Jerusalem, under the olive trees.

  The sign hanging in the church’s doorway said this: “Keep watch and pray. Vigil for those unfairly imprisoned.”

  Those were some of the bravest words anyone had ever painted on a sheet on the eastern side of the Wall.

  Cloud-Claudia’s father, of course, was one of those unfairly imprisoned.

  But Cloud didn’t know that yet.

  Cloud and Noah were in front of the church, below the porch with the candles on it, when the police charged the crowd. They seemed to come from everywhere, all at once.

  Noah grabbed Cloud’s coat, and they tried to hide from the swinging batons and shouting voices in the middle of the crowd.

  “What are they doing? What are they doing?” said Cloud-Claudia.

  And she wasn’t the only one saying that. There were cries of dismay from all around them.

  “Stop! Stop! We’re peaceful!” people were saying. “Stop hitting!”

  But the shouting and thwacking sounds didn’t stop.

  “Stay with me,” said Noah to Cloud, but he wasn’t sure she could hear him. “Don’t let go!”

  Somewhere in the chaos of the last minute, they had grabbed each other’s hands, the way you hang on to a railing when the waves get so high the boat seems about to pitch right over.

  They hung on to each other, and the sea of people around them rolled and bobbed and shouted.

  That whole group of people was being moved over to one side, closer to a row of police vans. Sometimes the police would drag one or two of the people in that crowd away from the rest and throw them into a van.

  Noah and Cloud shrank back, hanging on to each other like crazy, but the crowd and the line of policemen with their batons and their crazy-angry voices kept moving, and so they had to move with them.

  Suddenly there was a gloved hand on Noah’s shoulder, yanking him out of the crowd. He yelped in surprise — a policeman was pulling him toward one of those vans! — but he didn’t lose hold of Cloud.

  A woman right nearby made an upset sound, an outraged gulp.

  “What are you doing, you people? These are children!” she said. Noah saw she had taken Cloud’s other hand and was trying to keep her own body between Cloud’s face and those awful batons, and he felt so grateful to this woman he had never seen before, he could almost have cried.

  But the policeman pulling on Noah just got angry.

  “Bringing children to your riots?” he shouted at her. “Idiots! Then you all come along. Come!”

  And a few other policemen came over their way, too, pulling on that trio of Noah and Cloud and the woman they didn’t know, who was still holding on to Cloud’s other hand. On the woman’s face was a mix of shock and distress and horror.

  “What are you doing?” she kept saying.

  Now the crowd was shouting at the policemen, too. Like Noah himself, they seemed to have trouble believing this, that the police would be dragging a couple of kids toward their dark police vans.

  “Mouths shut!” said the police. “Silence! Come! You’re under arrest.”

  And they shoved them right through the door of a van, into a dark space that already seemed full of people. Hands reached out to steady Noah and catch Cloud.

  “Children!” they were saying. “Treating children like this!”

  The door banged shut. The van leaped forward, throwing Noah and Cloud against all those people perched on benches along the sides of the van.

  The woman who had helped Cloud leaned closer to them.

  “You kids, where are your parents?”

  The van was bouncing along; Noah’s chest was zipped up tight with anxiety, and he saw that Cloud was gasping a little as she breathed. It had all happened so suddenly!

  “I don’t know,” said Cloud-Claudia to the woman. “They disappeared. Why did they put everyone in this truck?”

  There were murmurs from all the other people in the van. Things like “Poor kids” and “Shameful, grabbing children like that!”

  The kind woman put her arm around Cloud’s shoulders.

  “Stick with me,” she said. “I’ll try to look out for you.”

  “Where are they taking us?” said Cloud-Claudia. That was Noah’s chief question, too.

  “Police station, I guess,” said a man leaning against the other wall of the van. “They shouldn’t be picking up kids, though.”

  “They thought these were mine,” said the kind woman. “Brutes.”

  Noah’s head was spinning. The police station! He was being arrested by the East German police! What would his parents say? How could he have let this happen? And what would happen now to Cloud? Or to her father, already locked up in some prison somewhere?

  Those were all very unpleasant thoughts. But then he remembered yet another terrible thing: that thin sheet of paper, that list of names hidden in his jacket. What if the police found that? He had the feeling that would be worse than unpleasant: that would be a disaster.

  “We’ve got to get out,” he said while his hand pulled at the seam of his jacket. The bouncing of the van made the Astonishing Stutter more astonishing than it had ever been. Heads turned to stare at him through the gloom of the van.

  Cloud gave his other hand, his left hand, a firm squeeze.

  “He can’t speak,” she told the people in the van. “He can’t say anything, not at all.”

  Then another squeeze of the hand, like she was signaling something.

  What was that about, telling people he couldn’t talk? But then he realized with a kind of shock that she was trying to do for Noah what he had wanted to do for her: protect him. Shield him.

  She didn’t know how much more she had to lose than he did.

  He squeezed Cloud’s hand back. She was trying to take care of him. All right. He was determined to take care of her, too. They were changelings, both of them. That had to count for something.

  He had the tiny sheet of paper scrunched up in his right hand now, pulled out through the weak spot in the seam of his jacket. He rubbed it into a few pieces and then sank his head down into his hand, as if everything had just become too much for him. And, really, honestly, it sort of had.

  But he also got the little shreds of paper into his mouth. Just like a spy in the movies! His throat was so dry from nervousness, he thought he might choke on those little pills of paper — but he didn’t. He gulped them down, and the gulp sounded amazingly like a sob. Good. Good.

  “Mein Gott,” said someone in that van. “Taking children!”

  That was when the van lurched to a halt, and the doors were yanked open. There was a bright artificial light everywhere that made your eyes blink.

  “Hurry, hurry!” said the policemen, pulling people out through those doors. “You want to stay up all night causing trouble? Making your country look bad? Be our guest.”

  Noah hung on to Cloud-Claudia, and she hung on to him, and there on the far side of Cloud-Claudia, the kind woman was still holding her other hand. They stood blinking on the pavement, on the cement surface of some large garage. And then the whole group in that van was trot-marched through a door, down a big hall, and through other doors, and down another hall, and there were policemen everywhere. It was all very surreal, unbelie
vable, strange. The last doorway led into a big bare room, a kind of cellar-garage, ugly as could be and with fluorescent lights that made your head ache and filled with shouting. Other people were in here, too — from other vans, Noah guessed.

  They moved into that big cellar room cautiously at first, but then the policemen started shouting at everyone to hurry up, hurry up, you worthless slugs, and there were more of those awful thwacking sounds.

  Noah felt a whimper rise up in his throat. He swallowed it down as best he could. No time for that now! He had to be very strong and alert if he was going to keep Cloud safe.

  The policemen were shouting, shouting, shouting.

  “Schnell! Schnell!”

  They wanted everyone to stand against the wall, hands on the wall above shoulder height, legs slightly spread.

  There were shouts from the other side of the room, where, out of the corner of his eye, Noah could see a policeman whacking someone’s legs with his baton because he didn’t like how the man was standing.

  They’d better obey, then.

  That meant letting go of Cloud-Claudia’s hand. He tried to stay very close to her, though.

  Cloud was staying close to him, too.

  “Why did they take us?” she said. “We were just walking by.”

  There was a chorus of complaint from their side of the cellar.

  Noah kept hearing the word Kinder, which means “children.” The other prisoners clearly thought that Noah and Cloud shouldn’t be there in that awful cellar. They were calling out to the guards, trying to get them to come over and do something for the children, to get the children out of this place.

  The guards barked back and thwacked some more people on the legs, trying to shut everyone up, but eventually somebody who seemed perhaps slightly more senior than the others came up to where Noah and Cloud-Claudia and the kind woman were standing.

  “Na ja,” he said to the woman. “Bringing children along to your riots and your vandal parades! Not very clever, you hooligans! What kind of mother are you, putting a child through something like this?”

  The kind woman took a deep, shaky breath. Noah could see that she was frightened and angry, and that she was another person, like Noah, trying to do the right thing and not sure what the right thing to do was, exactly.

  “You’ve made a mistake, officer,” she said. “These children aren’t mine. They were playing near the church. They weren’t in any protest. I’m just trying to keep them safe from your batons. They shouldn’t be here.”

  The policemen’s eyes bugged out.

  “Nice try!” he said to her. And to the whole cellar, he shouted, “Who here is the parent of these children?”

  And there was silence, of course.

  “Let them go,” said some young man standing not too far away. “It’s not right, frightening children this way.”

  “Yes, yes!” said other voices from all around that bald, cold room. “Let the kids go!”

  The guards shouted again. “Stand properly and shut your mouths.” That’s what the guards kept shouting. The wall was cold and slippery under Noah’s fingers. And his legs kept trembling, which made it hard to stand the way the policemen wanted everyone to stand. And he could see, on his right, Cloud-Claudia’s hands on the wall, too. She had her head turned to look at him. Her eyes were large and tired, and her hands were beginning to slide down the wall.

  She said something to Noah.

  “What?” he whispered. “What?”

  Cloud-Claudia scooted a few inches closer to him.

  “Now we’ll never get there in time,” she said. “It’s already almost too late. They’ll forget us for good.”

  Noah stared at her, not understanding a thing for a second.

  Then he realized — it was the Land of the Changelings she was talking about. Nobody but Cloud could be in a police cellar and worry about an imaginary country!

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “We really do.”

  Well, Noah certainly agreed with that. He wasn’t at all sure what to do, though.

  The policeman nearest Noah and Cloud-Claudia, the one who had said all those nasty things to the kind woman, was consulting with another officer at the door at the far right of the room. Noah could tell they were talking about them, about him and Cloud, because they kept looking over in their direction. They seemed to be having an argument of some kind. Then the man in the door vanished into the hallway.

  “Don’t be afraid, children,” said the woman next to Cloud-Claudia. “They can’t possibly keep you here. They’ll have to let you go.”

  The next part of the night lasted forever. They just stood there and waited. Their hands would get tired of pressing against the cold wall and start slipping, and then some guard would shout, and they would try to put their hands up higher again.

  Finally, Cloud-Claudia just sighed, “Nein,” and she let her hands fall right down to her sides and rested with her head against the wall, and the guards didn’t do anything about it, so Noah let his hands slip down, too.

  It was like a bad dream.

  And he was so tired. Fear and tiredness were kind of wrestling to control his brain.

  He wondered whether his parents had even noticed he wasn’t in the apartment anymore. Perhaps they hadn’t! They might just peek into his room in the dark and not notice nobody was in there anymore.

  Of course, even if they found out he was missing, what could they do?

  And so on and so on. After a long bad stint of these thoughts, Noah saw a couple of officers coming toward him. One of them was a woman.

  “Come with me, you two,” she said. Her voice was very curt, no nonsense, the kind of voice that makes people line up and start marching.

  Cloud-Claudia darted close to Noah and slipped her hand into his. Her fingers were cold but comforting.

  Around the room, tired people were saying things like “Finally!” and “Those poor kids, having to wait here so long. You won’t get away with this!” and, to Noah and Cloud-Claudia as they passed by: “Finally letting you go. You’ll be all right now, children.”

  “Silence!” said the woman guard, and she hustled Noah and Cloud out of that cellar, moving them along so fast that Noah didn’t even have time to say Danke to the woman who had been so kind. He had to settle for sending grateful thoughts back in her direction from the hall: Thank you, thank you, thank you. And then the door of that awful cellar clicked shut behind them.

  They went farther down the hall. A second guard had joined them. Noah was wondering what time it was now. Some impossibly late hour, he guessed. He was so tired. His thoughts were just one big confused tangle. His parents were going to be mad. How were he and Cloud going to get home, anyway? He didn’t know where the van had taken them. He didn’t know what street they were on, or even what part of Berlin they were in. He had a feeling it would be a very long, cold walk home.

  Then the woman stopped.

  “You,” she said to Noah. “In here. We have a few questions for you. The girl comes with me.”

  “No,” said Noah, but it didn’t come out as a word you could understand.

  Cloud-Claudia was gripping his hand so tightly, he couldn’t feel the tips of his fingers. She shook her head. Shook her head again.

  “Nein, nein!” she said. “Don’t take him. He can’t even speak right. You have to leave him alone. Let us go home. He can’t talk.”

  “Be quiet, I tell you,” said the woman guard. “You both have gotten yourselves and your parents into a huge amount of trouble. You come with me. The boy goes in here.”

  And before Noah could think what he should do now, she had peeled Cloud-Claudia’s fingers loose from Noah’s hand and started leading her away. And at the same moment, the second guard pulled a key out of his pocket, unlocked the door on the left, and pushed Noah into that little room.

  “Sit down,” said a man behind a desk.

  The room was very small and very plain, but there was a bright light spilling
over everything. The chair the man wanted him to sit on was practically swimming in light. It made his eyes water. He was so tired. His eyes just wanted to close. He wanted to close his eyes and rest.

  He sat down in that chair.

  “So,” said the man, “what is your name?”

  Noah, however, was too distracted to answer right away. He had just noticed what was on the wall to his right: a blank rectangle of glass, pretending to be a mirror.

  Even though he was so tired that he just wanted to curl up in a heap in the corner, he still knew right away what that was.

  Secret File #28

  MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL

  Here is why Noah recognized that mirror: When he was very little, he had gone to a funny sort of nursery school, a school run by the local college. That nursery school had had a few of those mirrors — Noah had called them the ghost windows because he saw flickering shadows in them sometimes.

  “Good eye, Noah!” his mother had said. His name had been Noah then, of course. Noah’s mother was always proud when he noticed things. “You’re right about the shadows. The shadows are students doing research. They watch the children playing and take notes.”

  He had been only four years old, but it had shocked him.

  “You mean there are people spying on us?”

  “Observing,” said his mother. “Observing you. For their research. It’s completely normal. The parents all signed a release form at the beginning of the year.”

  But Noah hadn’t liked the idea of being spied on, no matter how ordinary his mother said it was.

  For a whole two weeks, he went on strike at that nursery school. He sat in a corner and wouldn’t do anything that might be interesting to the ghosts behind the mirror.

  The first day, the teachers said, “Oh, it won’t last.”

  The third day, the teachers said, “He can’t possibly keep it up.”

  By the end of the second week, however, they had explained to Noah’s parents that Noah was disrupting the normal function of the school and suggested they might want to find another place for him. So they did.

  That was long ago, but he had never forgotten it — and he always checked mirrors for ghosts.