Free Cloud and Wallfish by Anne Nesbet

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    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