Cloud and Wallfish

by Anne Nesbet

“What were those names?” Noah asked.

  “Nothing that matters to you,” said his mother. “Nothing that matters now. That list is gone.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not really gone.”

  “What do you mean?” asked his mother.

  “I took a picture of it,” he said. “Is it important?”

  “You did what?” said his mother. She sounded shocked, which was very seldom the case, when it came to Noah’s mother. “You took a picture? That’s not possible. Where in the world did you get a camera?”

  Noah sucked in his breath.

  “Not with a camera,” he said. “It’s in my head. I can keep pictures in my head.”

  “You can’t keep a picture of a long list of words,” said his mother, but she wasn’t entirely confident now, Noah could tell.

  Noah looked at her and started reading out names from the picture in his mind. Probably his pronunciation was pretty terrible!

  His mother went pale and put her hand over his mouth for a moment, to stop him.

  “Shh,” she said. “Wait one second — here’s a pen.”

  Noah’s mother never went anywhere without a pen. And she always had a notebook, too.

  While Noah wrote down the names he could see on the list in his mind, his mother stood there quietly, rubbing her arms because she was cold or because she couldn’t believe what was happening, or perhaps for both reasons. Noah had to focus very hard to get the names on the paper to match exactly the names in his mind.

  As he finished, his mother plucked the notebook out of his hands and examined the list he had written there with a look that Noah had never seen on her face before: surprise and delight and awe, all mixed together.

  “You did it,” she said, a few times in a row. “You really did do it. And I had no idea!”

  That moment was very sweet: golden-rosy and brimming with satisfaction, like the best peach you ever tasted.

  And then Noah thought of something:

  “Who are they?” he said. The golden moment dimmed very slightly.

  “That’s nothing for you to worry about,” said his mother.

  “But what will happen to them now?” said Noah.

  “We can’t know that,” said his mother.

  “But are they going to get in trouble, now that I wrote their names down?”

  “Why are you asking such wild questions?” said his mother with a quick lightning bolt of a smile. “Come on, notice how cold it’s gotten? It’s time to go home.”

  “But if you won’t tell me whose names those are, then how do I know whether it was the right thing to do, writing them down?”

  It was truly like an itch he couldn’t keep from scratching. His mother was looking at him in surprise, and he was almost as surprised by himself as she was.

  “Of course it’s right. What else could it be?” said Noah’s mother, tilting her head to one side before pulling Noah back onto the path that led out of the wood and back into ordinary life. “Anyway, it’s cold out here, and I promise you those people have been doing bad things.”

  “But do they have kids?”

  “Oh, now, really!” said his mother, but her voice was quieter.

  “It’s just — What if your names were on somebody’s list? Yours and Dad’s? What if someone arrested you? What would I do then?”

  It was Cloud-Claudia he was thinking of, of course. Someone had thought her parents were bad people — and look what had happened to them and to her!

  “I need to know what the right thing is.”

  His mother studied his face and shook her head.

  “Sorry, but we never get to know everything,” she said. “Not even us grown-ups. We just do the best we can.”

  Noah held out his hand.

  “Then maybe you should give it back to me, that page with the names.”

  His mother shook her head with a smile that was just the slightest bit rueful around the edges.

  “Can’t do that, sorry!” she said.

  “Then it’s like what that man said,” said Noah.

  Noah could feel his mother go instantly and completely still, studying him; she had a real talent for sudden focus.

  “What?” she asked. “What man? Said what?”

  This next part was especially hard:

  “The East German officer, the one who spoke English, he told me you and Dad were just using me. To get into the GDR. He said I was your disguise. A kid with a bad, bad stutter. Like a mustache or a wig!”

  “Oh, now. What a dumb thing to say.”

  “I don’t want to be somebody’s wig!” said Noah. He really was mad about it.

  “Shh, shh,” said his mother. “That stupid man must not have kids, that’s for sure. Not ones he loves, anyway. A wig is something you could wear or not wear. You could leave a wig in a drawer and put on a hat instead or decide to have red hair instead of brown hair for a while, am I right?”

  Noah was surprised to find he was holding his breath. He looked up at his mom and nodded once, very tightly, just hanging on hard to see what was coming next.

  “So that’s ridiculous. That’s got nothing to do with the way I feel about you,” said his mother. “Wherever we are, whatever our names happen to be, you aren’t something I could take off or set aside. Ever. You, Jonah-Noah Keller-Brown, are the center of the known universe as far as I’m concerned. And that’s true no matter what side of the Wall we happen to be on, and no matter what you do or don’t do. That’s always and everywhere true.”

  She was smiling. Noah couldn’t find the words to speak. It was like the curtains in her eyes had opened for a moment, and he could see all the way in, to where all the walls were turning out to be windows, and where his mother’s heart turned out to echo his own.

  His mother gave him a hug. “You’ve been amazing. Really, you have. No one would ever believe you could do all that. Keeping pictures of lists in your head! Eating secrets!”

  Then all of a sudden she straightened back up and grinned at him.

  “Here’s something I can say for sure: it would have been bad if those East Germans had seen that paper. So you’re a hero as far as I’m concerned, for eating that list. And then you’re my hero a second time for writing it down. And finally, here’s a secret.”

  She bent down, gave him another hug, and murmured very quietly, secret-like, into his ear: “All those questions you like to ask? Just because I can’t answer them doesn’t mean they’re not good questions. You keep asking them. It takes courage to ask why! And now, hero-times-three, it’s time to go home, don’t you think?”

  Time to go home, yes. But to tell the truth, Noah had never felt as much at home as he was feeling right at that moment, out there in the chilly Berlin woods. It turns out that home is not mostly a place. Home is someone putting her arms around you and saying the words your heart longs to hear: always and everywhere.

  Secret File #33

  WALLS AND WINDOWS, WINDOWS AND WALLS

  On Saturday, November 4, 1989, half a million people came out to the Alexanderplatz in East Berlin to demand reform, change, democracy. Noah and his parents watched on television — so many people! So many hopeful and determined faces! All those thousands of slogans on the handwritten banners and signs!

  PLURALISM INSTEAD OF PARTY MONARCHY!

  WE DEMAND FREE ELECTIONS!

  A writer took the podium and said, “It’s as if someone has pushed open a window. . . .”

  Noah’s father said, “How will all this end?”

  Noah’s mother said, “A window isn’t enough.”

  Noah thought, Oh, Cloud!

  Even More Secret File #33

  THE NAMES IN THE JACKET

  About those names: they were a small part of a list of people in West Germany who were spying for East Germany. Noah didn’t figure this out for years, but I’m telling you now. Don’t say anything out loud. Don’t make faces. Keep smiling and turn the page.

  It was November 8, a Wednesday. Noah had been gi
ven one more week by his parents, and this was nearly the end of that week.

  The cardboard clouds did not do well in bad weather, and sometimes got banged up on their way to the Wall, so Noah was on his fourth cloud. Fourth and probably last.

  “It’s amazing that you’re still doing this,” said his father. “It’s not just making the disappointment worse for you, is it?”

  “No,” said Noah. How did you measure such things, anyway?

  He lugged his cloud up the steps. He was telling himself that someday someone would notice — perhaps already had noticed. A rumor might start. Crazy guy with a cloud . . . And someday, maybe, she would hear about it, right? Even if it was years and years from now, and they were both all grown up.

  In other words, he was grasping at straws that day, because when time is running out, grasping at straws is the best we can do.

  Once again he hoisted the cloud, up as high above his head as he could reach. And he looked out over that so-completely-familiar street and tried not to feel impatient or disappointed or even cold and tired. He had said he wouldn’t forget her. And he needed her to know he had not forgotten.

  That was when the miraculous thing happened.

  One of those little figures walking across the street turned and waved at him. Sometimes a brave person did wave. That wasn’t entirely unheard of, especially these days. But this one waved and waved and waved, and even jumped up and down a little. And when it took off its hat to wave harder, it turned out to have what looked like short, misbehaving blond hair on the top of its head.

  Noah pointed and shouted and made his cloud bounce up and down some, and before he knew it, one of the other on lookers was handing him a pair of binoculars and holding his cloud up for a moment so that he could focus.

  “Hey, kid, is that her? Is that your friend over there?”

  Some of these people had been up here with Noah and his cloud before.

  The image was blurry. The image kept jumping up and down. But the image was absolutely certainly and amazingly Cloud-Claudia.

  He cheered! And you know what? Everyone on that platform cheered with him! Everyone cheered and waved. Noah’s father came up the steps to see what was happening.

  And Noah made the cloud go up and down, back and forth, sending its message over the Wall as surely as if it had been spelled out in great big ordinary words:

  I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN YOU, CLOUD!!

  They waved at each other for a very long time, seemed like, before some larger person appeared — some grandmother-like person — and took her away from that street.

  “Wow,” said Noah. His arms were more tired now than they’d ever been in his whole life. He felt completely and abruptly worn out, and all the cheering and handshaking that was still going on around him on the platform suddenly felt like too much, somehow.

  Fortunately his dad was there to help haul the cloud back down the stairs.

  “Well, how about that, kiddo?” said his dad. His voice tripped up in the middle of the last word, almost as if he had caught a very tiny case of the stutters. “You did it. You had more faith than the rest of us.”

  “I hope she’s not in terrible trouble now,” said Noah.

  “I don’t think so,” said his father. “All she did was wave at you! What’s so terrible about that?”

  Noah just looked at him.

  “No, really,” said his father. “Even that grandmother of hers must feel that things are changing. Anyway, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you, Noah.”

  Noah!

  Noah’s eyes caught him by surprise by filling with tears. He had been like a stretched rubber band forever, and now suddenly the tension had evaporated, and that was a kind of shock, too.

  “Do I get to be Noah again?” he said, keeping his voice very quiet, as if saying it out loud might frighten his old name away.

  “Soon you do,” said his father. “Very soon. And you know what? The truth is, you’ve always been who you are. You’re better than the rest of us that way. You’ve stayed Noah on the inside, deep down, haven’t you?”

  Noah thought about it.

  He had.

  It was true.

  Though he had learned a lot from being the Wallfish, too.

  “So here’s our promise to you: When we go home, which is going to be very soon, you’ll go back to being Noah. All the Jonah stuff will be put away.”

  Noah thought about that for a moment.

  “When I was born — was Jonah the name I had then? I mean, for real. Or Noah?”

  “For real?” said his father. “For real, your name was Baby Boy.”

  He was laughing now.

  “What?” said Noah.

  “We couldn’t choose a name. We had too many good ideas. So your first birth certificate just says Baby Boy —”

  “Baby Boy what?” said Noah. “What was my last name?”

  “That would be telling,” said his father, as if he were making a joke. “But it wasn’t Brown. Think of it this way: you’ve been Jonah Brown for a while; it was the disguise you needed to wear. Maybe you’ll want to dress up in another name someday, who knows? Or maybe you’ll go back to your Oasis name and never want that to change ever again.”

  “Can I have my birthday back, too?”

  “Yep. Everything can go back to the way it was. There’ll be some very boring story about where we all went to, some small boring town in the middle of boring nowhere for boring business reasons.”

  “Without any boring Wall,” said Noah, rubbing his eyes with his mittens. “Mom will make a picture album about all the boring things we did there.”

  “Right,” said his dad.

  They were silent for a moment.

  “Now Cloud knows I didn’t forget her,” said Noah.

  “You certainly didn’t. You are the truest of the true,” said his father.

  “And I won’t forget. I won’t ever forget. Can I write her letters?”

  His father didn’t say anything. The bus was coming, anyway.

  “Because I’d like to write her letters sometimes. I bet she’d like getting a letter.”

  “Now you’re getting carried away!” said his father. It was supposed to sound cheerful, but mostly it sounded sad. “A letter! How would you sign it? What address would you give? Not to mention that it would never get through.”

  Secret File #34

  EVERY SINGLE LETTER

  Here’s why Noah’s father was right, as things stood at the beginning of November 1989, about letters having trouble getting through. The Stasi — the East German secret police — didn’t just plant bugs in walls and listen to people’s secrets. They opened and copied every single letter that went between the GDR and the outside world. Every. Single. One. And Noah had been expelled! There really was no chance at all that a letter from him — if his cautious and clandestine parents, with all those secrets they were keeping, would even let him write such a letter — a letter that traveled through ordinary mailboxes and in ordinary mailbags, would ever reach Cloud-Claudia on the other side of the Wall.

  “So!” said his mother the next morning. “This is it. We’re going home!”

  She had been happy about the Cloud message finally getting through, too. But they had been told it was high time for them to leave. Thank you for your service, but enough is enough — that is what Noah gathered someone must have been saying to his mother.

  Noah wasn’t surprised that all the talk now was about leaving. What did surprise him was the news that they had tickets on a predawn flight out of Berlin the very next day.

  Well, they didn’t have all that much stuff to organize. They walked around town one last time — it still felt to Noah like a completely different city, with its burned-out church steeple and its glittering stores, from the other Berlin — and then packed up their bags and had one last spaghetti dinner cooked up by Noah’s father on the hot plate. They would have to get up so early the next day to catch their flight, it was practically goin
g to be the middle of the night.

  “Wait,” said Noah’s mother. She had been listening to something on the radio. “Turn on the news.”

  A bunch of men sitting behind a long wooden desk.

  “Press conference,” said Noah’s mother. “Just an hour or so ago. That’s Günter Schabowski right there — listen to what he said!”

  “Who’s Günter Schabowski?” asked Noah.

  “Party Politburo guy,” said Noah’s father. “Government official. The horse’s mouth.”

  The Schabowski person said a bunch of stuff, of which Noah understood bits and pieces. Something about a change in visa requirements?

  “It’s because of Czechoslovakia — they closed the border, they opened the border, everyone started leaving again —”

  That was Noah’s father, trying to give helpful explanations, but his mother said, “Shhhhhhh!”

  She was standing up now.

  A man in ordinary TV news clothes was reading an ordinary summary of news from a piece of paper on his desk. Behind him was a map Noah had seen a hundred times already this year: the two Germanies colored green, with a special yellow teardrop labeled “East Berlin.” And under the map, three tight-lipped words:

  “DDR öffnet Grenze.”

  The GDR is opening the border.

  That was a sentence Noah could understand the words of perfectly well, but still he had no idea what it actually meant. His father was standing up now, too, watching the man on the TV.

  “Wait — what does that mean?” he asked. “Opening the border? What border?”

  His parents were looking at each other, looks zipping back and forth between them like electricity running through cables, like lightning leaping from tower to tower.

  “Don’t know,” said his mother. “Schabowski just said the new visa rules would take effect right away. Right away? Oh, Lord, now they’ve gone on to insurance for old people. Where’s the real news?”

  She turned the channel dial, but there wasn’t anything else there.

  “Well, tomorrow’s going to be an interesting day!” said Noah’s father.

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” said his father. “We’ll see what that Schabowski really meant, I guess.”