The Secret Room

by Antonia Michaelis

  “He can’t kill us,” warbled another small bird from the next cage. “Because we already died a long time ago. But you, you’re alive. Why did you come here?”

  I didn’t have to think about it, I just answered, “I also came to free my brother.”

  All the birds that had heard me began to chirp excitedly, but just for a moment, and then they were as silent as they had been before.

  “I don’t know if you’re courageous or crazy,” said one of the small white birds. “We’ll mourn for you.”

  And it didn’t say anything else.

  I shook my head in astonishment and walked on.

  I walked and walked, and my heart got heavier and heavier. It wasn’t from the fear that I felt; it was from the sadness emanating from the garden. It was crushing me like a fist and brought tears to my eyes.

  Was this how Ines had felt last night?

  After a while I wasn’t getting enough air and collapsed under a tree. Feverishly, I felt through my pockets for my inhaler, but I couldn’t find it.

  I lay under the tree wheezing and tried to pull my pants pockets inside out. I felt my fingers losing their strength.

  Then a shadow fell across the path.

  It was the shadow of an enormous bird, a bird so big that it could have carried a house on its wings. I looked up.

  The bird was black, so black that it seemed to be a shadow itself—and then I knew that it was the same bird that I had seen flying high in the sky once before. It was the Nameless One, the one who was smarter and faster and more powerful than any other creature in this strange land.

  His eyes glowed yellow like fire from amid all the black.

  I thought: Now he’s going to swoop down, snatch me up with his sharp beak, and tear me into a thousand tiny pieces. Or maybe I’ll suffocate first.

  But he didn’t see me, he flew right over me, and I didn’t suffocate either.

  Right at that moment, just as the shadow had passed over the white gravel path, I found my inhaler.

  It had been hidden in one of the folds in my left pants pocket and now it rolled out. Using my last ounce of strength, I grabbed it and sprayed the indescribably wonderful substance into my throat. Soon I could breathe again. My heart was pounding so hard that it seemed to fill my entire body. I sat there on the ground for a while and stared at the place where the Nameless One’s shadow had passed over the path.

  There was a feather lying there, a single black feather. I stood up and bent to pick it up.

  Yes, he would destroy me.

  The birds had been right.

  But all the same, I put the feather in my pocket. And all the same, I kept walking.

  I couldn’t abandon Arnim. I had made a promise to him, and I was going to keep it.

  Then I realized that all the birds around me were singing. They were singing quietly, very quietly.

  I stopped and listened. It sounded like they were singing an old traditional song that had been passed on from generation to generation, a song that’s sung to little kids at bedtime:

  “You’re seeking the place from which you should flee—

  trying all alone

  to set your brother free.

  Tell me, are you certain? Tell me, shall it be?

  Then listen, listen: There’s a key you’ll have to find

  only then will you manage to cut the line

  and break the shackles from the stone

  but the suffering will be your own, your own.”

  Their words made my throat tighten, and at the same time, my heart was like an open door. Yes, I had come to free my brother. And I was certain—just as certain as you can be.

  It might take a lot, maybe everything, but I was going to try.

  I was supposed to find a key? And break shackles?

  No, I didn’t understand it all right now, but suddenly I was sure: I would understand it when the time came.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you, my friends.”

  I kept walking, and now the sadness wasn’t as strong. The birds’ song had given me courage.

  Then I started feeling the longing too. It pulled and strained inside me. I felt it clearly, but wasn’t able to say what I was longing for. It was a vague longing, a little like nostalgia for something that you’ve never had.

  Just when I thought I couldn’t bear it for another second, I felt for the feather in my pocket. I took it out and looked at it, and the longing stopped tearing me to pieces, and I felt brave again.

  And I knew I was very close to the palace.

  Its walls looked like a checkerboard, tiled with white and black stones.

  Here and there the checkerboard pattern was interrupted by flowers and figures. The evening light was reflected by the glossy tiled surface a thousand times.

  Dazzled by its brightness, I stood there squinting my eyes. I put my hand out to touch the gleaming wall.

  “Hey,” said Arnim. “You look like you’re caught in some headlights. Wake up, Achim! You’re back! They’re waiting for you down in the kitchen!”

  CHAPTER 5

  In which I wander through a tiled

  labyrinth and have an asthma

  attack

  It was true, they were waiting for me in the kitchen.

  Paul was flipping pancakes into the air, Ines was pouring tea, and they were acting like they weren’t waiting at all.

  But when I came in, I noticed they breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Hello,” said Ines, and Paul said, “Oops!”

  He hadn’t been watching and a pancake had landed right on his arm.

  I giggled.

  “So, Achim?” asked Ines. “How was your day?”

  “Oh—hm,” I said.

  “You’re always over there for such a long time. You must be getting along well with the neighbor kids.”

  “Hm.”

  “What do you guys do together?”

  Paul saved me. “This is a perfect pancake!” he announced. “Who wants it?”

  And he threw it into the air. I think he was aiming for Ines’s plate, but he missed and the pancake landed on a tea cup.

  I shook my head. “Paul,” I said, “you need practice.”

  I clapped my hand over my mouth and looked back and forth between them.

  They just stood there grinning.

  That night I dreamed of the feather. It was floating in the middle of the room as if it were watching me.

  “I’m waiting for you,” said the feather. “I’m just waiting and waiting. I’m very patient. Time passes differently here. I know you’ll come. Soon. Maybe even tomorrow. I’m ready.”

  I woke up soaked in sweat.

  Ines was standing next to my bed and looking at me with a worried expression.

  She didn’t say anything when she saw that I was awake. She just stroked my head and then left silently.

  When I was getting dressed that morning, I wondered if she didn’t know everything. Maybe the other night she hadn’t really been scared that I had been run over in the street. Maybe she was scared of the endless sadness of the trees in the palace garden or of the Nameless One’s terrible shadow.

  “Ines,” I said as she was leaving the house after breakfast, “don’t worry. I can handle it.”

  She nodded. And then she left. I watched her until the gaudy yellow of her rain jacket was lost amid the red and violet asters around the corner. Then I raced up the stairs.

  “Which painting did I come out of?” I asked Arnim.

  The middle window had a blossom stretching through it that was such a dark shade of violet it almost looked black. He pointed at the painting next to it.

  “From that one, the one where you’re standing with your hand stretched out to the palace. Tell me, Achim—what happened last time?”

  “A lot,” I replied. “And nothing. I walked through the palace garden, where the trees are so beautiful it hurts. And I talked to the birds that are trapped in cages there because the Nameless One caught them
. They were all trying to free someone, just like me.”

  “That’s what they had been doing?” He looked at me intently. “And you’re still going back?”

  “Now don’t you start too!” I complained. “Everyone’s always telling me I should just back off. Is this some kind of game you’re playing? Did you all make bets about how many times I’d say ‘No, I’m not quitting’? About when I’d give up?”

  Arnim shook his head. “It’s just—a long time ago, you know, Ines and Paul used to tell me that one day I might have a brother. And I imagined a really small brother who would just lie in his crib and cry ... I never would have thought that he’d be so brave.”

  “There’s just no other way to do it,” I said.

  I reached out my hand to the second painting—

  And it touched the palace wall. The tiles were so hot from reflecting the sunlight that it felt like I’d stuck my hand in a fire.

  I blew on my hand, like Maria had always done when someone got hurt, and walked along the wall to find the entrance to the palace.

  What was Maria doing right now? And Karl, and all the other kids at the orphanage?

  Karl was at school, of course. And was my desk next to him still empty? Or was someone else sitting in it, and had Karl forgotten me completely?

  I decided to write him a letter and that he’d be the only one I would tell everything—about Arnim and the secret room and the birds.

  About the broken plate under my mattress and about the ocean and Paul’s pancakes.

  I had only been here for four days and so much had happened already! It almost seemed like I hadn’t seen Karl for years.

  While I was thinking all this, I walked farther and farther along the checkered wall, but I never came to a gate or a door.

  Maybe there wasn’t an entrance at all?

  Maybe the Nameless One got into the palace from above, gliding down on his huge black wings.

  But how was I supposed to turn back into a bird?

  I didn’t want to let Nreur scratch my hand again ...

  Just then I came around a corner and was suddenly standing right in front of the gate.

  It was as tall as an elephant and as wide as three cars and made of solid silver—like the door handle to the secret room.

  The silver was carved with a bunch of intricate, delicate lines, and as I was looking at the gate, I noticed that the lines formed a picture of a garden.

  No, not a garden: the garden. The garden I had wandered through, the garden with the sad trees and the birdcages.

  But on the gate, all the birdcages were open and the birds were sitting in the branches and singing. How strange, I thought, for freedom to be the image on the entrance to the palace itself. But then I understood: It was just like the white tiles. The silver gate was made from the longing of the birds in the palace garden.

  And I started to get really angry. This—whoever he was—this Nameless One, he didn’t own anything himself; he was just using the others to become more powerful. I would have bet that he himself hadn’t contributed a single speck of dust to the whole palace.

  In a fit of rage, I threw myself against the gate, since it didn’t have a handle or a knob. But my rage didn’t help. I just got a couple of bruises and bounced off the cool silver. The gate was still closed.

  Helplessly, I let my gaze fall over the huge silver surfaces. And then I saw a tiny inscription, right at eye level.

  PULL was all it read.

  I laughed. It was like the door to a department store or a school.

  But I soon stopped laughing, because I realized it was impossible. Without a handle, you can’t pull a closed door open, especially not if it’s made of silver.

  The inscription seemed to look at me gloatingly. I gave it an angry thump, knocking my knuckles on the hard metal.

  I cried out and shoved my aching hand into my pocket— and then I found the feather again. I took it out and looked at it.

  Then I had an idea. The feather had helped me once already, when I had felt the longing so strongly it had almost torn me apart. Who’s to say it couldn’t help me again? I stuck out my arm and touched the gate with it.

  And honestly, I barely had enough time to jump back before the doors of the gate swung open silently.

  For a moment I stood there hesitating in front of the open gate, and then I walked through.

  Inside was a long corridor with doors along both sides.

  I opened one, and behind it there was another corridor, also lined with doors, and behind the next door was another corridor and on and on ...

  I walked through dozens of corridors, all alone; the squeak of my sneakers on the tile floor was the only sound. Yes, everything there was made of tiles: the floor, the walls, even the ceiling that lay far, far above me.

  The checkerboard pattern was different here. It now had complex figures in it.

  Tiny pieces of tiles formed all kinds of new flowers and stars. But it was impossible to orient yourself based on them. And after a while, I had no idea how long I had been wandering through the palace. An hour? Ten?

  These corridors had to end somewhere!

  Or had I gotten turned around a long time ago and been walking in circles?

  For the third time since I had been there, I took out the feather. In fairy tales, I thought, everything happens three times, after all. I held it in front of me like a divining rod, and there was in fact a kind of magnetic pull on the feather that I could follow. Now I had the feeling that I was going through the right doors and going down the right corridors. Even though I didn’t know what to expect at the end of them.

  A butler holding out a red velvet pillow with a key on top? A band playing a fanfare for me? A room where Arnim was sitting on a stone bench looking at me?

  I could at least be sure that I wasn’t going in circles because I came to a corridor where there were pictures hanging on the walls. Or more precisely: framed photographs. Photographs of people.

  Black and white, of course. What else?

  I stopped in front of some of them to look.

  There was a little girl with long braids. She was sitting on a swing, and a man who must have been her father was pushing her from behind and laughing.

  There was an old man in an armchair with a young man sitting on the armrest and reading aloud to him.

  There were three triplet sisters in old-fashioned knee-highs and mini-skirts in front of a building that might have been a school. There were two men fishing and a huge family gathering in a garden.

  I noticed that there were no pictures that showed people all by themselves.

  The people in the pictures were always in groups, and they always seemed to have close relationships with one another.

  The feather pulled me on, as if it were impatient. The farther we went, the stronger its pull became.

  “Where are we trying to get to?” I asked it, but my voice was so surprisingly loud in the empty corridors that I clapped my hand over my mouth, like I had said something I wasn’t supposed to say.

  “... trying to get to ... get to ... to ...” my voice echoed from all directions.

  And then I gave in to the feather’s pull and went faster to escape the echo of my own words.

  Finally we came to a courtyard, but it was empty, and the feather dragged me on like a dog on a leash.

  It pulled so hard that I almost didn’t see the sheet of glass that was lying flat, embedded into the floor in the middle of the courtyard.

  Maybe the feather didn’t want me to see it. It was square and about the size of a table—and it had to be very thick, because before I had even really realized it was there I had already walked across it.

  Under the glass there was a rectangular room or chamber, tiled completely in white, without a single speck of black. In the chamber there was a small metal object. I knelt down next to the glass and pressed my nose against it.

  The object was made of the same carved silver as the palace gate. It had a handle o
n one end and the other end was stuck in an ornately decorated scabbard that looked like a horse’s head.

  A knife. But not one that could be used to threaten someone. A paper knife or a knife for cutting thread.

  Disappointed, I stood up and waited for the feather to lead me on.

  Why would someone bury a simple paper knife under a thick sheet of glass in a courtyard? In a courtyard that looked like it had been created for the sole purpose of housing this strange tomb?

  And why not bury a dagger or a sword?

  At the other end of the courtyard, I was swallowed up by another corridor, and again I wandered past an endless row of old photos.

  I only touched them in passing, with fleeting glances. Gradually the photographs began to infuriate me, and it took me a while to figure out why: They all showed the same things—families. Something that I’d never had.

  And then I stopped short, and my anger melted away like syrup into the ocean.

  I knew the faces in this photo!

  “Wait!” I whispered to the feather. “Just a second!”

  “Secondddd!” hissed the echo mockingly in my ear. “Sec-ondddd ...conddd... onddd... nddd... ddd... dd... d...”

  The sound scratched through my ears like cat claws, and I doubled over and clamped my ears shut.

  But afterward I stayed where I was to take a look at the photograph.

  It showed three people gathered around a table. In the middle there was a game board with a bunch of little figures, and there was a low-hanging lamp that gave off a warm light even in black and white. One of the people was sticking his tongue out and crossing his eyes. It was Paul. The other two were laughing. They were Ines and Arnim.

  I swallowed once, twice, then I backed away from the photograph, and then I turned and began to run.

  I didn’t dare stop until there were many doors and corridors between me and the picture. I couldn’t get enough air, and I leaned against the ice-cold wall and reached for my inhaler.

  When I could breathe once more, my shaken thoughts slowly started to calm down again—like cocoa powder that settles back to the bottom of the cup.