Free Cloud and Wallfish by Anne Nesbet Page B

they curled up on the couch with him and the Jonah Book, “remembering” the past that had never happened.
    Sometimes Noah was tempted to say to his dear parents — ideally with that cutting lilt some of his classmates back in Oasis had already mastered, “Do you really think I’m that stupid?”
    But that would have been a violation of Rule 4, right? That would not have been smiling.
    And he knew his parents didn’t think he was stupid. He knew that. They were just worried, that was all. Worry might not have been showing on their faces, but it was seeping out of every other seam of them.
    So as much as he could, Noah kept his own worries to himself.
    His father scrambled a few eggs for breakfast that morning.
    “Protein!” he said. “To fortify you on your long expedition!”
    They made sure he had his jacket and an extra sweater in his bag, plus his map of East Berlin and a bit of money, in the very unlikely case Frau Huppe and the young Tweedle-Huppes managed to lose him somehow. And some chocolate bars for Ingo and Karl.
    Noah made a point of leaving
Alice
safely behind, though — enough lost pages.
    “Jonah, your friends are here!” said Noah’s parents when the Huppes arrived, even though it could hardly have been less accurate to call any of those three people at the door Noah’s “friends.”
    The young Huppes had on track jackets over their turtlenecks. They all — the boys and their mother — looked somewhat put-upon and under stress, as if Noah himself were a great big enormous bowl of curried rice they didn’t know what to do with.
    “It’s so kind of you to take Jonah around Berlin!” said Noah’s parents, even though they knew it had very little or nothing to do with kindness.
    “Our pleasure,” said Frau Huppe, while the upper half of her face frowned.
    “Have a lovely time, Jonah!” said Noah’s parents, even though it was exactly zero percent likely that Noah — or, from the looks on their faces, any of the Huppes — would have a lovely time. Tests aren’t like that.
    That was the moment when Noah stood extra straight and got ready to implement his secret plan: the Turn-the-Test-Tables Plan. He had prepared that weekend because, as his mother used to say back in Oasis, where it wasn’t even really necessary, “The best defense is a good offense.” Noah’s secret offense involved two German sentences he had practiced quite a bit, under his breath, that weekend, and they were:
    1. “Could you please tell me about X?”
    and
    2. “Could you please tell me more about X?”
    In the Pergamon Museum, on the Museum Island, in the misty, drizzly morning hours of that long day, Noah started out bravely with “Could you please tell me about this castle?”
    It was amazing: a huge blue-tiled structure right in the museum under a greenhouse roof. Just enormous! And with ceramic lions and dragons all over it and castle-like toothy battlements all along the top! But apparently it wasn’t really a castle. Apparently it was a famous gate, the Ishtar Gate, the entrance to the old city of Babylon.
    “Perhaps your parents have traveled to some of these old cities,” said Frau Huppe at the end of her long explanation. “Have they talked about their travels with you?”
    “Could you please tell me more about Babylon?” said Noah. Sometimes a sentence, even a German sentence, will just surprise you by tripping easily off your tongue. “And these lions?”
    Ingo and Karl were already staring at him with astonishment. We will not say admiration; we will leave it at astonishment.
    Soon enough Frau Huppe ran out of things to say about Babylon; they looked at the enormous Pergamon Altar, which is absolutely covered with statues of gods and goddesses and monsters and heroes all fighting one another.
    Ingo liked the gore and the weapons, so Noah had a bit of a break from his two magical questions, but eventually Frau Huppe became impatient with Ingo and mythological battles and announced they