The Secret Room

by Antonia Michaelis

  Arnim had absentmindedly played with its tendrils, and Paul watered and fertilized it.

  And it was always losing all its petals before they faded—summer and winter alike.

  What did it all mean?

  “I’m going to start doing something,” said Paul. He jumped up from the swing. “Raking leaves together would be nice. That’s one thing that doesn’t require thinking.”

  Oh, how I wished that I didn’t have to think anymore either!

  Not to have to rack my brain thinking about what would happen next!

  “Can I rake leaves too?” I asked.

  But Paul said sternly, “It’s out of the question. Then you’ll sweat and then you’ll start shivering and Ines will wring my neck because you’ll get sick again. You go inside where it’s warm and do something un-dangerous.”

  I grinned and nodded.

  But, a little later, as I walked up the narrow staircase, I was no longer grinning.

  Something un-dangerous.

  Paul had no idea.

  “Arnim,” I said. “Have you ever thought about the plant?”

  “About what plant?” asked Arnim.

  His voice came from under the bed. I knelt down and stuck my head under it.

  “What are you doing?”

  Arnim was crouching in a corner with his legs drawn up, and in the darkness there, his green eyes had no color at all. His red hair suddenly looked stringy and tired.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just didn’t want to see them gathering.”

  “Gathering?”

  “The birds. They’ve been flying across the sky all day, practicing their formations for the long trip. Turning to the left and to the right without losing each other...”

  I looked out the window. “None of them are there now. Come out.”

  And I gave him my hand.

  When he was standing in front of me, he hung his head.

  “You’ll be with them when they go, Arnim,” I said insistently. “Just be a little patient, just a tiny bit longer.”

  “I’ve been patient for seven years,” he replied. “And I can’t really do anything else except be patient. All day and all night I’m patient. It makes me so tired, Achim. So incredibly tired. My longing is growing and growing, and eventually it might just devour me completely.”

  “You can’t think about that right now. Because you have to help me.”

  I pulled him to the window.

  Outside the top tendrils of the vine were swaying back and forth in the autumn wind like a large insects antennae.

  On one of them, two new, fragrant blossoms had opened: a white one and a violet one—so dark that it almost looked black.

  “Look closely now, Arnim,” I said. “And try to remember: Was this plant always here?”

  He nodded. “When I woke up here in the tower for the first time, I saw it blooming far below. It was still really small. But over the years it climbed all the way up here to my window. And it’s still climbing. It’s growing and growing...”

  “And it blooms in the summer and in the winter,” I continued. “And it loses all its petals before they’ve finished blooming.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Paul told me. It’s not just growing here on the tower, but also on your parents’ house.”

  I reached my hand out to a flower and stroked the white petals with my fingers. Paul was right: They weren’t fragile at all. They were thick and hard. Hard as rock.

  And then I remembered where I had seen petals shaped like that before: They were on the small pieces of tile that lined the long corridors of the palace. It was a puzzle shape. You could put them together in lots of different ways to make patterns of flowers and stars ...

  I tried to bend one of the petals. But it wouldn’t budge.

  “Ceramic,” I whispered. “They’re ceramic. Just look at them, Arnim! This plant is producing hundreds of tiny tiles!”

  Then all at once—yes, all at once I understood.

  Arnim looked at me, confused. “Tiles?”

  “Of course!” I cried. “That’s it, Arnim! That’s it! Let me explain it to you. Tell me—what color would you say the flowers are?”

  “Some of them are white and the others … the closest thing would be violet. But so dark that you’d almost think they were black.”

  “And earlier, what did you say about your longing?”

  “That it... that it’s growing and growing.”

  “And what did you say about the plant?”

  He clapped his hand over his mouth. “It’s growing and growing,” he whispered, “just like my longing ...”

  I grabbed him by the arm and said solemnly, “The flowers, Arnim—they’re black. Black and white. And the white ones, Arnim—they’re your ...”

  Then a noise swelled up around us, it filled the air like an evil threat, and the next moment a huge shadow darkened the sky.

  We dropped to the floor and covered our heads with our hands, but between my fingers I saw the black eagle land on the narrow ledge in front of the iron bars for a few seconds. His sharp talons reached through the bars and ripped the black and white flowers from the tendril that hung into the room. Then he leapt into the air again and, with a horrible shriek, soared away on his powerful wings.

  We were breathing hard and looking at each other.

  “Achim,” whispered Arnim. “You’re bleeding. On your arm.” I touched it, and my fingers were red and sticky.

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” I whispered. “I just didn’t duck quickly enough. His talon scratched me. But now, now we know for sure!”

  “He carries the flowers away and uses them to build his palace,” whispered Arnim. “He must have always done it while I was asleep. The white flowers are my longing, right? And the black ones are Ines and Paul’s sadness.”

  I nodded, and Arnim nodded too, and then we just stood there in silence. Below us the vine’s tendrils wrapped around the tower in a never-ending embrace. A terrible embrace, I thought, icy and merciless. And then I felt so excited I could barely string two coherent thoughts together.

  “Arnim,” I whispered. “Arnim, I think I know what to do!”

  Break the shackles from the stone. The shackles were just the tendrils that crept around the tower every summer and winter, every tendril with black and white ceramic flowers.

  I clenched my fingers onto his cold, white arm out of sheer excitement. They left no mark.

  “The vine,” I whispered. “That’s what the Nameless One is using to keep you trapped. We just need something to cut its stem so that it can’t grow any more. And then ...”

  He looked at me, and his green, green eyes were hopeful but not without a fear of being disappointed.

  But I wouldn’t disappoint him.

  “Soon you’re going to be free,” I said firmly.

  In the kitchen I found a bread knife with serrated edges and a carving knife without them, a tomato knife, a bunch of small vegetable knives, a big pair of scissors, and, in the hallway, a jigsaw in a tool box.

  Outside, Paul was using a large rake to hunt down the leaves that the wind kept blowing away. I took the knives and dashed up the stairs.

  “To cut the stem, you’ll have to go down,” said Arnim. “But we can just try out the knives on the tendrils up here.”

  And so we tried.

  We cut and sawed all afternoon, using one knife after another—to no avail.

  None of the knives even managed to scratch the tendrils.

  Eventually, I brought them back down so that Paul wouldn’t wonder where they were and promised Arnim to keep thinking about it.

  He was sitting on the iron chair at the iron table when I left, his head in his hands, watching me go.

  “Yeah, please do,” he said. “Think about it, Achim. I’ll do the same—we have to. Because if we don’t think of something soon, it’ll definitely be too late to fly south.”

  Downstairs, Paul had given up raking leaves. I happened to fin
d him in the living room, where he was sitting at the big red wooden desk, rustling paper. His back was to me, and there was a stack of letters next to him.

  I cleared my throat to say something—I didn’t want to sneak up on him. Then the telephone rang and Paul jumped up. The telephone was in the kitchen.

  “So there you are, Achim,” said Paul as he walked past. Then I was alone in the living room.

  I thought I would check and see where the letters came from. But they all looked boring.

  In the middle of the mountain of papers there was another knife, one that you don’t find in a kitchen or in a toolbox. For a second, my heart started to beat faster—but then I saw that it was just a paper knife.

  I picked it up anyway and ran my thumb over the blade—just to see how it felt.

  With cry of surprise, I let it drop.

  Dark red drops of blood fell from my thumb to the carpet. They were coming out of a long, straight cut.

  “Achim!” cried Paul from behind me. He was holding the telephone in his hand, and he was saying into it: “Excuse me, I have to go, our kid is trying to kill himself with my paper knife … pardon me? Of course we have a kid. You didn’t know? Well, is that my fault?”

  And he hung up and looked at me, shaking his head.

  “The carpet...” I said meekly, sucking my thumb to stop the bleeding. The cut burned something fierce.

  “The carpet, the carpet!” Paul took my hand and looked at it. “Your thumb, that’s what we’re worried about! Why were you trying to cut it off? Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s still attached,” I muttered quietly.

  “But not for long if you keep doing stuff like that! What happened?” He pulled open one of the desk drawers and rummaged through it.

  “The paper knife,” I explained. “I wanted to see how sharp it was ... I thought it wouldn’t be sharp at all... you only use it to open letters ...”

  Paul found a band-aid. “Letters? You don’t open letters with a paper knife. You do that with a letter opener. Hold still.”

  “But you were just opening letters with it!” I protested.

  “No I wasn’t. I was cutting a piece of thick cardboard.”

  “Are you ... are you mad now?” I asked timidly, looking at my bandaged thumb.

  Paul gave me a hug.

  “Of course I’m not mad,” he said. “I’m just worried that one day you’ll stick your hand in a toaster to see how hot it is!”

  That made me laugh, even though my thumb still hurt a lot.

  Later that night, I took the paper knife up to the secret room.

  It couldn’t cut through the tendrils—but I hadn’t expected it to. Because I knew where to find the right knife. Now that I knew that paper knives were sharp and dangerous and not at all like letter openers.

  “First thing in the morning, as soon as Ines is gone, I’m going into the painting and flying back to the palace,” I assured Arnim. “Today it’s already too dark. But tomorrow, tomorrow I’ll lift the sheet of glass and get the small knife with the silver horsehead scabbard. And then you won’t have to worry about anything anymore.”

  CHAPTER 9

  In which I sit in a cage without a key

  The next morning Arnim was waiting for me.

  I gave him two thumbs up to let him know that everything would be okay, and then I touched the painting with a small white bird with violet speckles flying away from a giant tree.

  The sky was as blue as could be, and the plains below me were green in the sunshine. It could have been a photo from an advertisement if I hadn’t been so sure of what lay behind it.

  A couple of times I saw a flock of other birds flying far off in the distance—tiny specks on the horizon. But I didn’t cross paths with any of them.

  I wish I had. It would have been reassuring. I was so alone in the huge blue sky that I almost thought I would drown in it.

  Then I saw the palace.

  It gleamed and sparkled just like the first time, and a shiver ran down my spine.

  Because now I knew what the sunlight was reflecting off of: thousands and thousands of petals, black ones and white ones, that the Nameless One had stolen from all his prisoners.

  The plant on Arnim’s prison, though, it wouldn’t be around for much longer. And then there would be an end to stealing and collecting petals made of longing and sadness. Then the constant growth of the palace would come to an end. Then there would be an end to the triumph of this unbelievably greedy creature with white fur and black feathers.

  The trees in the palace garden appeared underneath me, and I flew lower.

  From above, you couldn’t see the birds in their cages if you didn’t know exactly where to look. Here and there the brightly polished bars shone through the dark foliage, and I could feel the desire for freedom that all those hearts held inside them—I felt it like a strong current.

  The trees rustled, though there wasn’t a breath of wind. When I flew close to the tops of them, I heard the same melody from the birds’ song in their rustling.

  “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?” rustled the trees.

  “It shall,” I whispered back to them.

  Then I flapped my wings toward the black and white glitter of the palace wall, and soon I had to fly up to cross over it. I sailed over the glistening rooftops, around towers and protruding walls, spiraled up higher and higher into the air—and finally the Nameless One’s palace was below me like an open book or a dissected animal, and I could see into its heart.

  The heart made me tremble.

  As uniform and ordered as the walls seemed, even from close up, from here they were nothing more than an unsettling jumble of elaborate heights and depths, a structure that made you feel crazy and dizzy.

  Stairs led to nowhere, columns stood without holding anything, bridges ended in midair.

  And in addition to all that were the deep, dark courtyards. They looked like vacuous eyes, like bottomless craters, like scars.

  I had to go down into one of those courtyards to get the knife.

  Fear seized me and shook me, and I could barely stay up in the air.

  “What’s gotten into you, Achim!” I scolded myself quietly. “It’s just a building down there! How can you be scared of a building?”

  But what a building, I thought. Gradually I began to suspect why it was making me feel so scared. Yes, people’s sadness and longing were gathered here—and the structure that had been built from them resembled our souls with all their incomprehensible, interwoven, knotted feelings all too well.

  I looked around: The giant black eagle was nowhere to be seen. At least not for me. He could be perching and lurking behind any corner, in any shadow, or on any overhanging roof.

  I forced my wings to take me lower. I looked in one courtyard after the other until I finally found the knife.

  It flashed from below like from the bottom of a lake.

  I flew circles around the courtyard and let myself slowly sink lower and lower. There it was in its chamber under the sheet of glass, and it was as if it were looking at me.

  The last circle that I flew was so close to the floor that I could make out the shape of the paper knifes horsehead scabbard.

  But I also saw something else that I hadn’t noticed the last time: On the side of the thick, glass sheet there was a small, metal lock.

  Then listen, listen: There’s a key you’ll have to find only then will you manage to cut the line...

  The key! I had forgotten about that.

  My white-feathered stomach was almost touching the tiles in the courtyard when I flapped my wings to climb into the air again. I still wasn’t ready.

  Now I knew the way to the right courtyard, but before I came back, I would have to find the key.

  But where should I look for it? Just when I thought I was getting clos
e, there was always a new obstacle in my path. It was incredibly frustrating.

  I was just about to leave the courtyard when suddenly the day grew dark.

  It had already been cool and cloudy, but now an icy wind was blowing between the high walls and an unexpected blanket of clouds covered the sky above me. I looked up and saw that the sun had disappeared.

  In a matter of seconds, the air had become as heavy as lead, and my wings were almost no match against it.

  I heard a faint rumble of thunder in the distance and somewhere lightning flashed across the sky.

  I reached the upper edge of the walls around the courtyard and remembered the Nut Bird. He had mentioned thunder and lightning when he talked about the night that the Nameless One had torn up his wings ...

  Was there such a thing as a normal storm here?

  I lurched aimlessly into the coming storm, above the confusing bowels of the palace—until I saw him. In the middle of the chaos, he was sitting on the top of the highest tower, craning his black-feathered neck into the wind.

  The Nameless One. I saw his cold yellow eyes flash in the darkness. They were looking at me.

  This time he would tear up my wing too because there was no Nut Bird around to save me. I had nothing more than my small claws and my stubby beak to defend myself.

  No, this was no normal storm—he had conjured it up. He roared the thunder. He controlled the lightning.

  The storm that he made propelled me to him like a helpless autumn leaf.

  And before I could think of what I should do, lightning flashed in the sky, brighter and more jagged than I had ever seen before, and it struck me.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw two other birds struggling against the storm, not too far away, a green one and a yellow one. But maybe it was just my imagination. The next moment the world disappeared.

  “Nut Bird?” I murmured, when I slowly came to. “Is that you? Did you snatch me out of the sky again?”

  Because apparently I was still all in one piece, and my wings didn’t feel like someone had tried to tear them up.

  I was lying on something hard—it wasn’t straw. But maybe the Nut Bird had needed the straw for something else.