The Secret Room

by Antonia Michaelis

  I opened my eyes.

  No, I wasn’t in a nut. There was a faint light around me, but that was because it was evening. I could see the dark green of leaves on the branches of a tree and a white line that was snaking along in the distance.

  There were also flowers between the leaves, flowers that were so delicately beautiful they brought tears to my eyes.

  But birds can’t cry.

  So I swallowed and swallowed and the sadness that had no way out welled up inside me like a deep, hidden lake.

  Then I knew where I was.

  And at the same moment I saw the bars.

  Silver bars. They separated me from the twilight outside, from the flowers and leaves and from the white line too.

  The snaking line was a gravel path, and the flowers and leaves were growing on the trees of the palace garden.

  I was sitting in one of the cages hanging from their branches.

  Why hadn’t the Nameless One killed me?

  “Because,” whispered the bars of the cage. “Because you’re safe here. And because you’ll suffer here forever.”

  “The longing will come,” murmured the trees. “It will come and take possession of you. On the gate to the entrance of the palace, one more small, helpless bird has been carved into the silver. But who’s going to see it?”

  “The next one!” I whispered desperately into the evening. “The next one who comes! He’ll see me sitting here waiting for him! He’ll set me free!”

  “But no,” whispered the leaves. “He’ll end up here, just like you.”

  A terrible thought came to me. Were other birds in the cages people like me? People who had come here of their own free will to defeat the Nameless One? What had happened to them in the other world, the world of the living? In the newspapers there were always stories about people who had disappeared. Were they waiting here, in the cages in the palace garden, hidden beneath colorful feathers, next to the others who had become birds after they died? And would I just disappear too?

  The dusk faded while I thought about it, and the night came. A night full of sounds. Lots of birds sighed in their sleep. Invisible nocturnal creatures wandered under the trees, and once in the shadows, I saw a large rat scurry over the white gravel.

  I cowered in a corner of the cage and listened in the strange darkness.

  “Hey!” I whispered. “Hey! Can anyone hear me? Is there anyone else here who’s actually still alive on earth? And can you help me?”

  There was no reply for a long time, but then I heard a timid little voice from one of the branches next to me.

  “Why aren’t you sleeping?” whispered the voice.

  “What good is sleep?” I asked.

  “It alleviates despair,” answered the voice.

  “The key,” I whispered. “The song talks about a key. Do you know where I can find it?” The little bird sighed deeply.

  “There’s a second verse to the song,” he said quietly, and then, even more quietly, he began to sing:

  “The key’s not something you can find

  if you look too hard for it.

  It won’t be found until you forget.

  But listen: You have to hurry night and day

  over thousands of miles, but you can’t stay.

  You’ll travel the corners of your mind

  and go much farther than dreams can glide.”

  “Much farther than dreams can glide?” I asked. “How can I possibly go there?”

  Suddenly everything seemed totally hopeless. Even if I somehow managed to get out of the cage, I would never find the key.

  The sound of beating wings broke through the haze of my despair. A bird had flown over, very close, and now soared away almost silently.

  I was surprised. “What’s a free bird doing here in the palace garden?” I asked the little bird next to me.

  But I didn’t get an answer. Even the quiet rustling of my neighbor’s feathers were gone.

  Then I understood.

  He was the bird whose flapping wings I now heard in the distance.

  He had never been in a cage. He had come here to sing me the second verse of the song.

  But why had he risked so much for me? Who was he?

  “Hello!” said Arnim and snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Hello? Can you hear me? What’s going on? What are you thinking about?”

  I shook my head in confusion.

  “I’m, well—here,” I said.

  “Looks that way,” said Arnim and laughed a little. “What happened?”

  “Oh, Arnim!” I cried, letting myself fall onto the hard, iron bed in exhaustion and burying my head in my hands. “It’s terrible. He caught me. He put me in a small silver cage, and I don’t know how I’m ever supposed to get out!” I told him about the lightning and the second verse of the song and everything.

  Arnim sat down next to me and ran his cold fingers through his hair.

  “Don’t give up hope, Achim,” he said comfortingly. “It’ll all turn out all right. We’ll find a solution. For sure.”

  Funny, I thought. Now it’s suddenly Arnim who’s comforting me. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

  “Go back to Ines and Paul now,” whispered Arnim. “It’s not just me who needs you to go on long journeys and fight lions and eagles. They need you just as much.”

  What a strange observation, I thought as I ran down the stairs.

  Suddenly I couldn’t get to the kitchen fast enough, to feel the warmth, to smell the slightly burned potato pancakes ...

  “You seem to be pretty healthy again,” said Paul and grinned from ear to ear.

  “You’re late to dinner. That’s a pretty good sign!”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It is.”

  And I slid him my plate and smiled at Ines. I didn’t feel guilty that Paul had pointed it out.

  “They need you just as much,” whispered Arnim’s voice in my head.

  I looked at them, how they sat there talking and laughing.

  Before I had come into the kitchen, it had been quieter.

  Did they really need me?

  CHAPTER 10

  In which I go for a walk in a tree at

  night and make a bouquet of flowers

  That night, I spent so much time thinking about the second verse of the song the little bird had sung to me that I worried I would never fall asleep.

  I would travel thousands of miles—but in what direction? And how would I get so far?

  I pulled the old toy dog Lucas close.

  “Lucas,” I whispered. “Do you know what the worst part is? It’s no use thinking about it. The key’s not something that you can find if you look too hard for it. What should I do?”

  I must have fallen asleep at some point, because suddenly I was dreaming. In the dream I was walking down a staircase. Its steps alternated black and white. I still had Lucas in my arm. At first the steps seemed to be leading through nothingness, but then the nothingness dissolved into a fog.

  And then I saw that I was in the bowels of the palace.

  How confusing, I thought. In reality, I’m a bird sitting in a silver cage in the palace garden, and at the same time I’m in Paul and Ines’s and all the other people’s world, where I’m lying in bed and dreaming that I’m on a staircase in the Nameless One’s world.

  The stairs changed direction and now led upwards, curved and twisted. They had to be somewhere above the roofs of all the long, straight corridors.

  Maybe in this dream I could find the key to the cage where, outside of this dream, I was sitting.

  The steps turned, went around several towers, and, to my astonishment, behind one of them I finally saw the courtyard where the knife was waiting under the sheet of glass.

  And as I was standing there, looking down into the courtyard, I noticed something. There was an opening in one of the four walls, several feet above the floor.

  It looked like the beginning of some kind of passageway. And the light from the moon in my drea
m fell on the entrance to it.

  Where did the passageway go? Inside, to one of the corridors with the countless photographs? Or beyond the wall, to the other side of the palace into the open?

  “Lucas,” I whispered. “Lucas, what if the passageway leads out to the open! If it’s a connection between outside and inside! Then I could start outside and fly through the passageway into the courtyard—without having to cross over the palace! Then the Nameless One might not notice me at all!”

  The stairs led a little closer to the courtyard and got steeper—and finally they came to an end in front of the ridge of a roof.

  This ridge led right into the courtyard. I wanted to get a better look at the opening, so I would have to walk along the ridge first.

  “Well, okay,” I said to Lucas. I clamped him under my arm and climbed onto the black-and-white tiled roof with my arms outstretched.

  It wasn’t as hard as I had imagined. You just had to put one foot in front of the other and not think about anything else—not about how high it was and not about getting to the end—your feet would go on by themselves. In dreams it just worked like that.

  “Tightrope walkers,” I whispered. “This is just what tightrope walkers do, Lucas. Soon we’ll know if the passageway actually...”

  Just then someone called out: “Achim!” and the whole palace with its walls and parapets ripped open. I flailed my arms to keep from falling ...

  And made the mistake of looking down.

  Below there was grass wet with dew, and I saw outstretched arms.

  Then I fell.

  I landed softly. On someone, actually.

  “Achim!” gasped the voice again, and now I realized that it belonged to Paul.

  “Achim, are you awake? Can you hear me?”

  There was a tangle of arms and legs and wet grass around me, a piece of terry cloth almost choked me for a moment, but finally I managed to free myself and sat breathing heavily for a while.

  I could feel the wetness of the dew seeping through my pajamas.

  The images and thoughts in my head needed a while to calm down from their ridiculous dance.

  “Paul,” I said finally.

  “Yes,” said Paul.

  We were sitting next to one another under an apple tree. The swing was hanging next to us in the night. It swayed back and forth a little; even the branch it was attached to was swaying.

  Paul pointed up. “What are you doing here—at this hour?” he asked. He was also wearing his pajamas. That was the terry cloth that I had been wrestling with.

  “Where is here?” I asked blankly. “I was dreaming,” I wanted to say. But I couldn’t explain what I had been dreaming about, so I didn’t mention it.

  “You were balancing on that branch up there,” explained Paul. “I just happened to see you out the window when I was going to the bathroom. What were you doing?”

  He didn’t sound at all upset, just incredibly surprised.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Hm,” I said.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  I thought about it. “A little.”

  “I was scared you’d fall ...” he said, “and then you did fall, because I called your name. That might not have been such a good idea on my part.”

  “Hm.”

  He helped me up. Somewhere a cricket who hadn’t noticed that summer was almost over was chirping.

  A large bird rose from a nearby fruit tree and flew away, flapping strongly.

  “An owl,” said Paul, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “Does that happen to you a lot?” he asked. “That you walk around at night without realizing it?”

  “I—I don’t think so,” I answered quietly. How would I know if I didn’t realize it? Was it a bad thing to walk around at night? Would they want to give me back after all?

  “When I was a kid, I had a friend who would always walk along the top of the roof at night,” said Paul. “When it was a full moon. A dangerous habit...”

  I looked up into the branches of the apple tree, with the stars shining between them. They looked just like the stars shining through the branches of the tree in the palace garden.

  “And—she was still your friend?” I asked after a while.

  “Of course,” Paul nodded. “I was just always scared that she would fall. I could barely shut my eyes during the nights when there was a full moon.” He laughed. “But she didn’t fall. Never.”

  He took my hand. “Let’s go back inside,” he said. “We’ll try to sleep a little more.”

  When I was lying in bed again, I thought about the key and whether I had been on the right track in the dream, there on the black-and-white stairs.

  Then I remembered the last line of the song again.

  And farther than dreams can glide.

  The next morning Paul ate breakfast with Ines and me because he had overslept.

  He grumbled to himself a little and looked tired, but he didn’t say a word about my wandering in the night.

  Ines laughed at his scowling face. “What on earth is wrong with you?” she asked, spreading jam on her bread. “You look like you were climbing a mountain last night instead of sleeping.”

  “Tree,” mumbled Paul. “It was a tree.”

  I knew what he meant, but Ines just shook her head.

  After Paul had had a lot of coffee and left, Ines and I sat there for a while and looked out into the sunshine. Our thoughts hung over the table like a quiet cloud. I remembered how, at the beginning, Ines had always thought she had to talk the whole time. Everything was better now.

  “How would you like to come with me to the flower shop today? Just for a change of pace?” Ines asked finally. “And just for the morning.”

  “Oh—um,” I said, taken aback. Something in me wanted to invent an excuse so I could go up to the secret room, into the painting, and back into the cage where I was actually sitting the whole time. I had to figure out how to free myself. I needed every minute … but something else in me insisted that I say yes.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. And since I could always think better in the yard, I grabbed the bowl with the potato peels and added: “Just while I take this out to the compost.”

  “Don’t forget to come back and tell me whether you want to come!” Ines called after me.

  I nodded and waved. What was she thinking? The compost pile was just on the other side of the yard, not the other side of the world.

  But back by the compost there was someone standing at the fence.

  I emptied the bowl and pretended not to see who was standing there, but at some point I would have to look up.

  “So?” said Tom.

  He was leaning over into our yard and chewing his gum slowly while he eyed me. Now and then he’d blow a big pink bubble that he’d let burst with a loud pop.

  “What is it?” I asked and held the large bowl in front of my stomach like a shield. “What do you want here?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and looked into the distance.

  “Nothing’s going on at our house,” he said. “Just wanted to come take a look around. Say—shouldn’t I be asking what you’re doing here?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you, wise guy. You’re the one who came over. I was already here. And you know what?”

  He blew an especially big bubble. I stepped from one foot to the other uneasily.

  “My mom was looking out the window last night when you were wandering around in the yard. She said you even climbed a tree! In the middle of the night! You’re not really normal, are you?”

  “And why is your mom awake in the middle of the night?” I asked in return. I could feel the air getting thinner, but I forced myself to act like I didn’t notice it. Maybe I could somehow trick the air itself.

  “Is it illegal not to be able to sleep at night?” replied Tom angrily.

  “Is it illegal,” I asked, “to climb trees at night?” The air came back. I took a deep breath.

  Then I turned around and we
nt back to the house.

  “My mom says that you don’t have a mom!” Tom called after me.

  “That’s why I’m going to work with Ines now,” I muttered—but unfortunately he couldn’t hear me anymore.

  “Good,” said Ines, “then put on your shoes.”

  She watched me tie my shoelaces and pull on my jacket, and finally she said thoughtfully, “Soon we have to go into the city together. Go on a marathon spree.”

  “A what?” I asked, confused.

  “Visit all the stores. Come on!”

  “What do you need?” I asked as I hurried after her. We climbed into the big car—Paul’s school was close enough that he could bike there.

  “Not me,” said Ines and accidentally ran over an old lawn chair pillow in the garage as she backed out into the street. “Not me. You.”

  “Me?”

  “Pretty soon the soles of your shoes,” said Ines, “are going to go on a walk without you. And your jacket—it’s really nice, but it wasn’t made to take the wind here. And just in general. You need to get a few warm things for the winter. The weather was completely different where you were before.”

  “Hm,” I said.

  But inside I felt really funny. Ines actually wanted to go shopping for me. A jacket. Shoes. Things for the winter ... Did that mean I would stay? No, I said to myself silently, it didn’t mean a thing. You shouldn’t look forward to things that weren’t certain. Otherwise you’d just end up feeling sad if something else happened.

  So I muttered, “Winter’s not here yet.” She looked over at me.

  “But it’s on its way,” she said.

  Ines’s flower shop didn’t belong to Ines at all. It belonged to a big, chubby woman who smiled a lot and gave us homemade cake. Then she went home because Ines and I were there.

  Behind the shop itself there was a second room with an incredible number of flowers with long stems rising out of large vases. There was a very large table in the middle and there were scissors and rolls of wire and colored paper on the walls. There was a messy pile of dried plants lying in the middle of the table, but Ines said they were floral arrangements. If she said so ...

  “I’m going to finish making these arrangements,” she told me, “and you watch the front of the store to see if anyone comes in. If someone wants something, call me, okay?”