“Just you wait!” he bellowed. “You think you can escape from me? This ladder doesn’t lead anywhere! Not to your brother and not to freedom!”
I felt my strength fading. And now I could feel the pain that I hadn’t had time to feel before. The long wound on my leg burned like fire, and I could barely move the shoulder that the Nameless One had sunk his teeth into.
I climbed more and more slowly. I stopped turning around. I knew as soon as he could see okay, the snow white lion down there would turn into a pitch black eagle, unfold his giant wings, and come to get me ...
But the yellow and green birds were sitting up in the window waiting for me. Now I could see the blue sky behind them. The window was just a rectangular opening in the wall, and behind it was freedom.
When I got to the top of the ladder, the birds flew away— but I had recognized one of them, Yellow Pea of Santorini. What had brought her here? Here, where none of them had ever dared to go? And why had she brought the green bird with her?
Gasping, I pulled myself onto the window ledge and looked out.
The recognition came as a sudden, sickening blow.
The Nameless One had been right.
This ladder didn’t lead anywhere.
Outside, the wall fell straight down just like inside, and far, far below there was another courtyard. I would shatter into a thousand pieces on its tiles just like the plate I had broken at the Ribbeks’.
The hard floor made of white longing and black sadness was waiting for me on one side, and the claws and teeth of the Nameless One were waiting on the other.
I probably didn’t sit there on the ledge, high above the world, for very long. But it seemed like an eternity. And in that eternity, I made a decision.
I didn’t want to give the Nameless One the satisfaction of killing me.
If it had to happen anyway, I’d do it myself.
So, with my last ounce of strength, I crawled to the edge of the wall, right where it met the air of unattainable freedom, and I let myself fall.
“Achim!” I heard Ines’s voice. “Achim!”
And then, she continued, “I don’t understand. This morning everything was fine. The story with his asthma, well, okay, but otherwise ... I can’t explain it. Oh, Paul! He was lying in the middle of the hallway when I came home ... it was a good thing I closed the shop earlier than usual today! Who knows how long he had been lying there!”
“How high is it?” Paul’s voice asked. I couldn’t find a face for the voice. Everything around me was dark.
“A hundred and six point seven,” said Ines. “Where on earth do you think he caught it?”
“Probably from one of the neighbor’s kids,” answered Paul. “I’ll call over there right away and ask about it... and how can I find her telephone number, Doctor—what’s her name again?”
“... a compress,” answered Ines incoherently. “A cold compress...”
Her voice got quieter, trailed off into the distance, and a heavy, cottony silence enveloped me.
Later I felt someone set something cold and round on my chest. A hand pressed on my stomach and pushed my head forward so my chin rested on my chest. A man’s voice that I didn’t recognize said something that I didn’t understand. I was probably just dreaming it all. Once Maria had said that right before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. But where in my life had the stranger’s voice and the hand come from?
After that I noticed that someone was holding me in his or her arm, I couldn’t say who it was or whether it was another thing from a past that I didn’t remember.
Had it been my mother or my father?
But when a voice permeated the darkness again, it belonged to Ines, and she asked, “What’s happening, Achim? What’s happening now?”
“I’m falling,” I blurted weakly. I was so tired! “Am I still falling?”
Then I sank into nothingness again.
Maybe everything was over.
Finally, I thought, exhausted.
And I burrowed into the nothingness like a hedgehog right before winter and began to wait.
To wake up again as a small white bird with violet speckles, to stay a bird forever.
CHAPTER 7
In which I stop falling and see the
inside of a nut
When I came to the next time, it was night.
I knew that it was night because the darkness around me was different than the blackness that had surrounded me before. In this darkness there were streaks of light—streaks of street lights that flowed into the window and landed on the woven rug next to the bed.
A few beams of light fell onto the books on the shelves too and clung to their binding like small slugs that liked to read.
I found my old toy dog Lucas under the covers and buried my nose into his threadbare fur.
“Lucas,” I whispered. “I’m here. But I’m also falling out of a window. Isn’t that strange?”
I tried to sit up. It didn’t work until my third try, every single inch of my body ached, and my strength was gone.
I stared into the darkness.
“Lucas,” I continued. “I really have to stop. Stop falling, I mean. My head is so heavy. I want to finally land.”
But now I understood: If I didn’t do something, I’d keep falling forever. I must have come out of one of the paintings, and until I could go back into the painting, my story with the Nameless One in the palace could go no further.
There was a thermometer on the night table and a bottle of pills. So the Ribbeks thought I was sick. I smiled.
Then I laid Lucas back in bed, walked through the room on tiptoe, and opened the door. I had to hold onto the frame to keep from falling. Everything was spinning, the room was rocking like a ship on the high seas, and the walls seemed to swell one way and then the other.
I listened. It was silent. Somewhere downstairs, a clock was ticking.
Paul and Ines were sleeping.
I groped along the wall carefully until I got to the door to the secret room.
Even Arnim was lying on his iron bed and sleeping.
I crept forward to the painting of myself in midair, hanging there between the sky and the earth, falling.
I felt the wind in my hair and heard the last, furious roar of the lion behind me.
The courtyard’s tiled floor was rushing toward me.
Then a strange thing happened.
I was waving my arms—and suddenly I noticed that I didn’t have arms at all anymore. I was waving white wings with violet speckles.
So that’s how you got the magic back: you just jumped down from somewhere. Of course, I thought, as soon as I touched the earth, I’d be human again. And now that I left it, the opposite had happened.
I began to flap my wings desperately. One of my wings, the one the Nameless One had bitten, would only move with tremendous effort. I must have made a pitiful picture, lurching through the sky like that. But at least I’d stopped falling.
I was flying higher, wobbling upward like an awkwardly large butterfly and finally found myself high enough above the gleaming roofs of the palace to cross over them. The garden danced by underneath me. I could barely keep my balance in the air, I sank, rose again ...
The pain in my shoulder was as sharp as a butcher’s knife and almost took my breath away. But now I had no time for problems with breathing. I didn’t know where I was flying, didn’t know if it made any sense—but I had to keep going as far as I could.
My head felt so light sometimes that I thought it must have floated away. Other times it felt so heavy that I worried it would come loose and fall off.
And then I saw the shadow. It was already directly above me. Before I had time to think a single reasonable thought, he swooped down.
I expected to feel the sharp pain of his claws, to hear the triumphant cry of the giant black eagle with yellow eyes— but everything happened strangely silently.
Something grabbed me, I had been right about that.
It grabbed me gently all by itself.
I hung between its large claws like a wet rag—and later I felt myself being laid onto something soft and made of straw. I wanted to raise my head to see where I was, but I fell asleep immediately.
When I woke up again, I was lying next to Lucas under the blanket and had no idea how I had dragged myself here from the secret room.
The dawn was breaking outside.
I think I slept for two days and two nights, occasionally waking up for a few surreal moments.
“You have to sleep a lot to get better,” Paul said.
The man I didn’t know came again. He was a doctor.
“It’s my shoulder,” I tried to explain. “My shoulder and my leg.”
But my voice was still so faint that the doctor could hardly hear me.
“What’s wrong with your shoulder?” he asked kindly and pushed up the sleeves of my pajamas.
“A lion,” I whispered. “A really big lion. His teeth missed my throat—but they got my shoulder. Don’t you see the blood?”
The doctor turned away and whispered something quietly to Paul. I was sure he thought that I wouldn’t hear, but even though I could barely speak, I could hear perfectly well.
“He’s delirious,” said the doctor. “A lion!” And he shook his head with pity.
“And my leg?” I asked. “Look at my leg! It’s cut from the top to bottom! From the giant claws!”
But the doctor couldn’t find the giant cut anywhere. Doctors don’t understand anything, I thought.
But soon I realized that Paul and Ines didn’t see my wound either. It was an invisible wound—invisible for the people in this world. But how could they help me if no one believed that anything was wrong? Who would sew the stitches?
When I woke up, there was almost always someone there.
Ines wrapped wet towels around my legs and plastic around that. Paul gave me pills to swallow.
Ines sang me to sleep when my head hurt so badly that I didn’t want to dream.
Paul read me stories, and I only heard half of them because I’d fall asleep. And once he lifted me out of my bed in the middle of the night, carried me to the bathroom, and said, “So, now we want to see if cold water can really scare the fever away.”
He put me in the bathtub and sprayed me with such icy cold water that I screamed. But he was totally right, the fever must not have liked it either, because afterward, Paul happily announced that it had gone down.
He patted me dry and laid me into bed again. He stayed sitting next to me until my eyes fell shut.
“Was Arnim ever this sick?” I asked one evening when Ines brought me a bowl of soup.
She thought about it. “When he was three, I think,” she answered finally. “I sat on the edge of his bed for hours; I got sleepier and sleepier, and he just wasn’t getting better... we were really scared.”
She gave a small, sad laugh. “Of course he got better and would run through the yard shrieking when Paul tried to catch him ...”
As she was shaking her head, her red hair flew out in all directions—just like Arnim.
“Isn’t it funny, Achim?” she asked. “That they just said he was dead? Completely dead, without even being sick? Just because he crossed the street at the wrong moment?”
I nodded and set down the soup spoon to take Ines’s hand.
“Someday you won’t be sad anymore,” I said.
If I’m strong enough, I thought. If I make it.
But I didn’t say that out loud.
On the second or third day, Ines said it was Monday and they both had to go back to work because they had stayed home on Friday.
“Because of me?” I said with surprise.
“Of course, you goofball,” answered Paul kindly. “Or did you think that we took off work so we could finally count all the blades of grass in the yard? Or the white and violet flowers on the vine growing up the wall?”
He tucked the blanket around me snugly and made a stern face.
“Now be good and stay in bed,” he said. “Not that you seem like you’re planning a trip to Africa or anything.”
I nodded. He couldn’t know that the trip I was planning was much farther away than just Africa.
After they had left, I put on my clothes because I didn’t want to suddenly appear in the palace or wherever with just my pajamas on. Then I quietly slipped through the door to the secret room.
“Good grief,” said Arnim. “So you do still exist. I thought you had disappeared into thin air. What happened?”
I wondered if I should be angry with him. But then I saw Armin’s face and could tell he was really worried.
“It’s hard to say what happened,” I said. “I was sick—but what actually happened was that I fell. And someone caught me, but I still don’t know where I am, and Ines and Paul were there the whole time ...”
Arnim nodded, then shook his head, and finally shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, the important thing is that you’re here now.”
“Yes,” I said. “But just for a moment. Because now I have to see who saved me. If someone did.”
I didn’t see a painting of a large bird with a smaller, white bird in its talons, nor did I see a painting of a straw mattress.
But Arnim pointed silently. “You came out of this one.”
On the wall next to the iron bed there was a painting of a tree that was so tall that the other trees next to it looked like clover. The crown of the tree was small and flat, as if a tiny cloud were sitting on the incredibly long, thin trunk. Through the foliage you could see some kind of circular silhouette on one of the branches.
“A nest,” Arnim said. “You landed in a nest.”
“It looks more like a ping pong ball,” I said. “But I’m about to see it up close.”
And that’s just what I did.
The straw under me tickled, and I opened one of my eyes tentatively.
I saw the same dim light I’d seen over the last few days in my room.
Just as I was opening the other eye, I realized that the faint light I was seeing was coming through hundreds of small holes in a roof above me.
I pulled my head out from under my wing—because I was still a bird—and looked more closely at my surroundings. I found myself in a tiny, perfectly round room—it must have been what it looks like inside a marble. One that was hollow and riddled with holes, so actually more like a marble that should be thrown away.
The thought made me laugh.
“Well, hello!” said someone next to me who I hadn’t even noticed yet. “You’re awake again.”
“I—I think so,” I answered meekly and looked through the dim light at my disheveled companion. His feathers were of no distinct color. They were somewhere between brown, gray, and green, and the nearest thing he resembled was a vulture.
An old, worn out vulture.
“I’m Achim,” I said politely. “And what might your name be?”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter. What’s in a name? Around here they call me the Nut Bird, but I’ve had many names. Many names and many lives ...”
His voice gave way to a rasping cough.
“The Nut Bird?” I asked. “Why?”
The bird let out a scratchy laugh. “Because that’s what we’re inside of,” he explained. “That’s why.”
“Inside?”
“Inside a nut. We’re sitting in a giant nutshell. This tree here, you know, only produces a single large nut in its whole life. And because it’s so unbelievably tall, the nutshells have to be unbelievably sturdy so that the nut doesn’t crack open when it falls to the ground. It even has pores, see? That’s so the nut can breathe, because it matures as long as the tree’s alive. And that’s a long time, a very, very long time.”
“I didn’t know that nuts breathe,” I said—and didn’t believe it either.
He gave a dismissive flap with one wing.
“Anyway, one night the nut was struck by lightning. It was a terrible
night. It was storming and pouring rain, and the sky was spitting fire like an angry dragon. I went lurching through the air—just like you were doing when I found you. And someone very powerful was following right on my heels.
“Then I saw the lightning from far away. I thought it would set the whole tree on fire, but it just struck a circular hole in the nutshell. Didn’t even come out on the other side.
This shell, I thought, has to be the strongest structure imaginable.
“I didn’t really think about, I just slipped through the hole ... inside I found a little pile of ashes and the last bits of the nut.
“But I was safe. Whoever had been following me ranted and raged for a while outside, but the hole was too small for him. Then he turned back. So I’ve lived here since then.”
I fluffed my flattened feathers. “The one who was following you ... was that...”
“Shhh!” said my host. “Don’t say it out loud. He can hear you. You never know.”
“You never know ...” I repeated thoughtfully, and then asked, “Why did you save me?”
“I didn’t,” said the old bird. “You saved yourself, my boy. All I did was pluck you out of the air like a ripe apple.”
He chuckled quietly to himself. Maybe, I thought, he’s a little crazy.
I crawled to the entrance. It was really difficult to move one of my wings and my right leg still hurt.
I looked down at the plains. They were empty.
There were just a few scattered crowns of trees far below—but no twittering of birds came from them, no colorful spots adorned their branches.
I was horrified.
“Where are all the birds?” I asked anxiously. “Have they already set out? To the south?”
“No,” answered my host. “Don’t be scared. They’re just not gathering here. There are too few trees for protection. Everything’s bare and flat. Not a good place for nervous birds.”
I looked at him thoughtfully. Now, with the sunlight falling on him through the entrance, the bird looked even older and even more worn out than before.
“And you?” I asked. “Aren’t you going to be flying with the others?”
He shook his head, lifted both his wings, and let them fall again. “Look at me,” he said. “My wings haven’t been any good for a long time. The journey south is too far for them.”
The Secret Room Page 7