The Secret Room

by Antonia Michaelis

  “But that wasn’t always the case?”

  “My wings used to be impressive, glorious even. But they got torn up that stormy night. Before I found this tree.”

  His voice trailed off, and he stared out into the hazy blue in the distance like staring into a dream. “Since then I’ve stayed here and taken care of those who’ve also been injured. I take care of them until they’re healthy again, I don’t ask anything of them, and I let them go.” He sighed. “Maybe it helps—maybe not. I’ve never seen any of them again.”

  “You’re going to see me again,” I promised. “I’ll come back and tell you that I’ve freed my brother and everything’s going well. And we’ll fly out into the sky together and the ... he won’t be able to hurt us anymore.”

  The Nut Bird chuckled again. “Sure, my boy, sure. And pigs can fly.”

  “Really!” I said. “I know what I have to do! I just have to cut the wire that’s holding the photograph. That’s the shackle that the birds in the cages were singing about. As soon as I find the right knife ...”

  The old bird fell silent for a long time. Finally, he said, “You’re strong enough to fly. So fly. Do what you feel is necessary. But let me tell you one thing: The shackle the birds were singing about... I also heard their words once:

  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...

  Is that it?”

  I nodded.

  “The shackle isn’t the wire,” he continued. “It’s something else—I don’t know what. I never found out.”

  “How do you know that it’s not the wire?” I protested angrily.

  He ran his large, feeble wing over my head.

  “Because I tried it, that’s how.”

  “You ... tried it?”

  “I went into the palace to free my brother too, a long time ago,” answered the old bird. “And I thought the same thing as you. But I was wrong. The photos don’t mean anything. Later I saw that they were much too obvious. He’s smart. He hung them there intentionally so that you’d think that they were the key to the riddle. That mistake cost me my wings. Don’t you make the same one.”

  I thanked him, stunned. Now I was back where I had started—I had no idea what I should do.

  “What direction is the palace from here?” I asked.

  “Over there,” answered the large bird and pointed with his rumpled wing. “Farewell, my boy.”

  And then I spread my wings and left his unusual nest.

  Behind me I heard him murmur the last lines of the old song: “... but the suffering will be your own, your own.”

  I was starting to think about the words when I realized I was back in the secret room again. How did that keep happening? What kept making me appear here again? And— was there any way to predict it?

  Did it happen every time that the Ribbeks came home? I shook my head in confusion. It was almost as if there were someone somewhere who could see everything and knew when I’d be needed in the world on this side of the paintings. Someone like the narrator of a fairy tale. If this is a fairy tale, I thought, I’d like to give the narrator a piece of my mind and say that there were a few things in this story that I didn’t like one bit ...

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Arnim.

  He was leaning into the window next to me and, lost in thought, was wrapping another flowerless tendril of the vine around his finger.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said. “Maybe about autumn.”

  Yes, autumn was approaching with all its might; its wind tore through the world voraciously and took away what it could.

  I leaned far out the window, looking in the grassy plains below for the white and dark violet petals that had been torn from the vine. But they were nowhere to be found.

  “The wind’s strong,” I said. “But I promise that I’ll do it before the wind gets too strong for you to fly south.”

  Arnim looked up and smiled sadly.

  “Maybe,” he answered.

  CHAPTER 8

  In which Ines and I go shopping and

  I come to an astounding conclusion

  A little later I was eating dinner with Ines and Paul again for the first time in a long while.

  And because Ines thought that I still wasn’t totally well, she moved the meal to the living room and wrapped me from head to toe in a green woolen blanket.

  There was a fireplace in the living room that I hadn’t noticed before. I only saw it now that there was a fire burning in it.

  The logs crackled, I sat there and nibbled at my bread and cheese, and I thought, I could just sit like this forever and ever. If there were no iron bed and no tower and no palace made of black and white tiles—then I would have been happy to just sit there and look into the flames.

  That would be so nice, I thought.

  But there was an iron bed and a palace and a nameless ruler, and as long as they existed, I couldn’t just sit there quietly.

  That night I sat in front of the fireplace and wrote a letter to Karl.

  Dear Karl! I wrote. A lot has happened already, and I don’t know what’ll happen next. I have a brother now, he’s got very green eyes and red hair and very cold hands. I’ve flown through the air and have been inside a nutshell, but there’s no way you’ll believe all that. When I see you again, I’ll tell you all about it. If I don’t see you again, and someone tells you that I died or something, don’t worry. Because I will have turned into a small white bird with violet speckles and I’ll be going south with the others.

  Don’t forget me.

  Yours,

  Achim

  As I was putting the letter in the envelope, I knew exactly what Karl would say: “Good old Achim!” he would say and laugh. “He’s gone totally bonkers.”

  The fever had vanished. And since Ines didn’t have to go to the flower shop till later that day, we went shopping at the market together.

  Just her and me.

  I was allowed to sit up front like a grown-up, which felt strange and a little exciting. Flying through the air and fighting a giant white lion—that’s one thing. But sitting in the passenger seat!

  On the way from the car to the store, Ines wrapped me up as big as an Eskimo. Of course that was crazy because I wasn’t an Eskimo, and even an Eskimo would have protested. But she insisted.

  “It’s cold,” she said, “and you were sick. Ergo: You’ll immediately get sick again if you get too cold. Ergo: Hat, scarf, and my warm, old jacket.”

  The jacket was much too big for me, but Ines thought that my own jacket wasn’t warm enough.

  “What does ‘ergo’ mean?” I asked from under all my layers of clothes.

  “Ergo means that I’m right.”

  Ines took my hand. At least she had forgotten gloves.

  Shopping at the outdoor market was totally different than shopping as I knew it.

  “That’s why you have to help me,” said Ines. “Anyone can go shopping. That I can do by myself.”

  But now, she explained to me, she wanted fresh mushrooms and flowers and autumn air.

  Fact: I didn’t attract attention in my Eskimo suit. The women behind the vegetable stands all had scarves around their heads that made them look like they had toothaches. I held Ines’s basket and read the shopping list to her.

  It wasn’t easy. Ines’s handwriting looked almost exactly like the wrinkly walnuts that were lying around in big sacks here.

  “Couple of hammocks,” I read and tugged at Ines’s sleeve. “Ines, what did you mean with a couple of hammocks?”

  She bent over and frowned down at the list. “No,” she muttered, “it says: a couple of haddock. It’s a type of fish.”

  But she wasn’t sure anymore when we got to the fish stand. “I can’t remember what on earth I wanted the haddock for,” she said and looked at the list again.

  “Shallots!” she cried and held it up triumphantly. “It says shallots!”

  My
nose got colder as we went from stand to stand. It was happy to smell all the herbs and spices, but I could feel it starting to turn red.

  “It’s almost winter here,” I said. “But it hasn’t even been fall yet.”

  Ines laughed. “Maybe tomorrow it’ll suddenly be spring again.”

  We drank hot apple cider and bought roasted chestnuts from a very old man.

  The man suddenly reminded me of the Nut Bird. Here I was at the market, drinking apple cider and peeling chestnuts—and Arnim was sitting on his iron bed, waiting for me to come back!

  “Look!” said Ines. “Tom and Anna are over there with their mom! I’ve been meaning to go by their place this week to thank them for looking after you. The telephone was always busy when I tried to call...”

  “Yeah,” I said, “they talk on the phone a lot, those people.”

  Thank heavens that the phone had been busy, I thought. Because there was no doubt about it: Tom and Anna had to be the neighbors’ kids.

  The neighbors’ kids, who I was supposed to have spent the last few days with ...

  Ines stood on her tiptoes and waved over the crowd of people.

  “Andrea!” she called. I suddenly felt cold with fear. Because now, now Tom and Anna would come over with their mother and Ines would find out that I hadn’t gone to see them even once. It brought tears to my eyes.

  Everything had almost been working out! The fireplace and the feeling that Ines needed me to carry the basket and read her list out loud ... and now it was all going to shatter into a thousand pieces.

  A plump woman with curly blond hair waved back and pushed her two children through the vegetable displays and sacks of spices directly towards us.

  “Hello!” she cried. “Ines! I haven’t seen you in ages!”

  The kids both had curly blond hair like their mother. They just stood there staring at me.

  “What a great coincidence to run into you here,” said Ines. “I’ve been meaning to thank you for looking after Achim a little. Your phone’s been busy the whole time ...”

  The woman looked at Ines blankly. “We had the telephone disconnected,” she explained, frowning. “Because we were on vacation. Didn’t I tell you?”

  I thought it would have been really convenient to have an asthma attack right then. But I didn’t have one. I looked from Ines to the other woman and back again. The smile faded from Ines’s face, and I made myself as small as possible. Now the cat was out of the bag.

  “You—you were—oh God, I remember,” she said very quietly. “Yes, of course. You told me. Greece, right? You were in Greece?”

  Tom and Anna nodded proudly, and Tom quickly stuck his tongue out at me.

  “We got really tan,” said Anna and stretched out her arms.

  “We always are after vacation,” said Tom—more to me than to Ines. “We go away somewhere every year. You’re really pale. You’ve definitely never been overseas.”

  I wanted to say something back, but I couldn’t because I had to pay attention to the conversation that was happening over our heads. Maybe, I thought, I should plunge into the crowd of people and run away and just never come back. Now that Ines knew what a liar I was.

  “I’m such an idiot!” I heard her say. “I’m such a complete idiot! Andrea, you know what I did? I sent Achim over to you so that he wouldn’t be alone all day while we were at work.” She dropped her voice to a whisper, but of course I could hear her anyway.

  “And he didn’t say anything,” she continued. “He was alone the whole time and didn’t say anything!” She dropped to her knees so that her eyes were right at the height of mine and looked at me very earnestly.

  “You didn’t want us to be worried,” she said. “Is that right? That’s why you pretended that Tom and Anna and their parents were there?”

  “Well yeah, kind of,” I answered pitifully.

  Tom and Anna kept staring at me like an alien insect.

  I felt awful. Actually, I should have been relieved that Ines wasn’t mad. But instead I was ashamed. Ines thought I had lied to be polite, when really I hadn’t had the slightest idea that the neighbors hadn’t been there!

  “Achim lives with us now,” Ines said to the two blond kids.

  “Really?” said Tom, but you could see that he would have rather said something else, something mean.

  “Maybe you’ll be in the same class soon,” Ines said as she stood up again.

  While the two women chatted above us, Tom looked me up and down with contempt. Now I saw that he was a lot taller than me. He also looked a lot stronger—not quite like Karl, but close.

  “You’re going into sixth grade?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Funny” he said thoughtfully. “You look so small and thin. Is there something wrong with you?”

  The girl pulled at his sleeve. “Leave him alone, Tom,” she whispered.

  “Nothing’s wrong with me,” I said and, suddenly remembering the lion, took my inhaler out of my pocket. “I just have asthma.” And I held the small container up to Tom like a weapon. I didn’t press down on it.

  Tom wasn’t a lion.

  But he still looked impressed.

  “Asthma,” he repeated.

  “That’s right,” I said. “And you don’t have it.”

  I tried to sound as proud as I could. Maybe it would work and Tom would think that asthma was something great-like a cell phone or a mountain bike.

  “Is Ines your mom now?” asked Anna.

  I shook my head. “Of course not! That doesn’t just happen overnight!”

  And Tom nodded—somehow satisfied, I thought.

  Then Ines decided that we had to go home and pulled me away.

  “I’m incredibly sorry, Achim,” she said on the way home. “Would you like to go over and play with them tomorrow?”

  “I think I actually like playing by myself better,” I answered quietly.

  “Whatever you like,” said Ines.

  I think we were both very relieved. She was happy that I liked playing by myself; I was happy she wasn’t angry.

  At home, Ines asked cautiously if I wanted to take a nap since I was still getting better after having been sick. And though I actually didn’t want to take a nap, I nodded and slipped into bed.

  By the time I had woken up again, she had already gone to the flower shop.

  I wanted to go look at the apple trees before I went back to see Arnim in the secret room. Maybe the trees would help me think.

  Because I had no idea what to do next.

  I hadn’t gotten any smarter since I started, but I had done so much already...

  Someone was already sitting on the swing in the yard.

  It was Paul, and he was swinging back and forth and looked like he was thinking about something too.

  “Hello, Achim,” he said. “You were sleeping when I came home, and I didn’t want to wake you up.” He moved over. “Do you want to swing too? It’s great for clearing your head.”

  “Hm, maybe,” I said.

  We swung together for a while in the blue afternoon and didn’t have to talk at all. We both knew that the other was mulling over important thoughts.

  “We’re both just lost in thought,” said Paul suddenly, and I nodded, and it felt really nice.

  In my head the birds were singing the old song:

  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...

  “Where would you look for a key?” I asked Paul. “If you had lost one?”

  “You mean when it’s not hanging on the key rack? Or somewhere else you might expect to find it?”

  “Hm.”

  “I’d ask Ines,” he answered. “Ines puts keys in the strangest places. By mistake, it seems. Once I found the car keys in the butter dish in the refrigerator.”

  I giggled.

  “Paul,” I asked a little later. “What are you thinking about?”

  He si
ghed. “About a bunch of things. One of them is yard work. I came home early today to deal with it finally. But I just don’t know where to start. Look at this plant, for example.”

  He pointed to the wall of the house between the two hallway windows on the second floor.

  “I water it when the sun is out, and in winter I cover it with fir sprigs, I fertilize it—I really do everything that it could possibly want. But it still loses its flowers constantly. It blooms, white and dark violet, but every time I think that I’ve done everything right, all its flowers fall off again.”

  “It’s the wind,” I said. “Its flowers are especially fragile.”

  Then Paul shook his head. “They’re actually incredibly hard,” he objected. “And besides … maybe I should buy a different fertilizer. Even though ...”

  He fell silent and shook his head.

  “Hm?” I asked.

  “Well—it blooms even in the winter. A totally exotic creature. It’s just the flowers don’t stay.”

  I looked at the flowers, alternately white and dark.

  I looked at them, and we kept swinging a little, and then—all of a sudden ...

  I realized what it was.

  I felt cold and hot, and something tingled through my body like an army of ants. Because of what I realized.

  “Paul,” I whispered. “Paul, how long have you had that vine?”

  “Oh—a long time,” he answered. “Four years, five? No, longer.” He wrinkled his forehead and thought about it. “Right, it was in the summer, after... when Arnim... when he was no longer with us. So seven years.”

  “Did you plant it for him? For Arnim?”

  “No,” answered Paul. “Honestly, I didn’t plant it at all. One day, it was just suddenly there. The seeds must have blown over here from somewhere ...”

  “That’s what I thought,” I muttered.

  And I looked up into the cold blue sky, where a flock of geese was flying overhead.

  The plant.

  The plant was the single connection between the world behind the door with the silver handle and the world where Ines and Paul lived.