The Secret Room (5 page)

“Achim,” he said. “There you are.”

As if he had been expecting me!

“Who were you talking to?” I asked.

“To one of the birds. Vierkattel. I talk to him a lot.”

I thought Vierkattel was a strange name for a bird—it was a strange name for anyone, but I kept that to myself.

Arnim sat down on the iron bed, and I sat down next to him.

The mattress was just as hard as you'd imagine one to be in prison. But maybe you didn't notice it as much if you were dead.

I pulled my knees up and wrapped my arms around them. “It's so cold in here.”

“It's because of the Nameless One,” said Arnim. “He's still building his palace. You remember what I told you?”

I nodded. “Out of their sadness and your longing,” I said, and he repeated: “Out of their sadness and my longing.”

Our words sounded solemn, like an incantation.

And then he took my hands and looked at me earnestly with his green eyes.

“Do you remember what else I told you? That I don't know how he's keeping me prisoner? That I don't know why I can't turn into a bird?”

And I nodded again. The solemn feeling had spread throughout the room and enveloped us like a heavy, damp cloud.

“The Nameless One's palace,” Arnim continued, “is far, far away. That's where he takes all the sadness and the longing, and the answer has to be there. I can't leave this room. But you, you can.”

I swallowed.

“Achim,” he said. “In all these years, you are the only one who found me here. And you're the only one who can go there for me.”

I jumped up and went over to the window. The vine was holding out a white blossom, and I took a deep breath of its sweet scent to calm myself down.

My heart was pounding like a hammer.

“I can't get through the bars either!” I cried. “And even if I could get through, I'd fall seven stories to the ground!”

I turned to Arnim hopelessly.

He was still sitting on the iron bed, and his face was just as earnest as before.

“There is one way,” he said. “The birds told me. For a certain amount of time and by means of a certain magic—you could become one of them.”

“Me? Turn into a bird?” I asked in disbelief. “I—I mean, I can just do it? And you can't?”

He nodded.

“Don't forget—there's a big difference between you and me. You can also go through that door. I can't.”

“The difference is ... that I'm still alive?”

Arnim shook his head. “The difference is that you came of your own free will.”

I stared out the window at the rolling hills for a long time, thinking about what he said.

You can't just say, “Okay, sure,” when someone asks whether you want to turn into a bird. And, even if you want to, fly to a palace and possibly be chopped up into little pieces of chicken meat by a powerful nameless creature.

What would Paul say if he came home from work that evening—and I wasn't there?

I imagined him looking in all the closets for me.

“Achim!” he would call. “Achim, where are you?”

But I would be far away and wouldn't be able to answer. And then Paul would say to Ines: “I can't find Achim. He probably ran away. He probably didn't like it here. But he had only been here for two days.”

And eventually they would turn on the record player and eat jam and forget all about me.

And at that moment, a creature without a name might be tearing me to bits with its claws.

A thick lump formed in my throat. For the first time I realized that I really would have like to have stayed here—with the apple trees and the colorful rug and with Ines and Paul. I hadn't even been to the ocean yet!

But then I thought about Arnim, who was sitting on the iron bed and waiting for me to make a decision.

“You're the only one who can go for me,” he had said.

His longing for freedom must be enormous!

And Ines and Paul? What good would it do for me to stay with them if, deep inside, they were still just sad?

This might be the only way
, I thought. Maybe I had to go so that their sadness could finally come to an end and Arnim could fly away.

I gave a heavy sigh and suddenly felt much older than eleven.

“Okay,” I said.

“Are you sure?” asked Arnim.

“Yes.”

And Arnim laid his cold hand on my shoulder and said something very peculiar.

He said: “Achim, my brother.”

The sound of those words ran through me like—well, a lot like the way the chocolate cereal at Sunday breakfast at the orphanage poured out of its plastic bag. Nice and crackly and special, somehow.
Well
, I thought,
somehow Arnim was right. We were sort of like brothers
.

“Then we can call them now,” he said.

And he stuck one of his arms through the bars and whistled a melody that I'd never heard before. It was beautiful and infinitely sad at the same time.

He hadn't finished whistling when a large, dark blue bird with a long, curved neck landed on his hand, flapped his wings a couple of times, and tilted his head.

“You brought him,” said the bird. His voice didn't sound like other birds' voices. It wasn't a squawk or a chirp. It sounded deep and full and would have suited a big, strong man with a big, wild beard. I wondered to myself if he had once been one.

“This is Nreur,” said Arnim.

“What?” I asked. “I can't pronounce that.”

“You don't need to,” said the bird, laughing. I hadn't known that birds could laugh—but actually it was the voice of the man with the big beard that was laughing.

“He needs someone to go with him to the palace of ...” Arnim looked around and fell silent. “He needs someone to take him there, Nreur.”

The bird nodded. “Yellow Pea will do it.”

Then he climbed onto Arnim's arm, closer to the bars, and wriggled his neck through. “You're a brave boy,” he said. “What's your name?”

“I'm Achim,” I said.

“Good. Give me your hand, Achim. Palm up.”

I hesitated. Then I stuck my hand through to him—and before I could pull it away, he had cut a deep scratch into it with his sharp beak. I cried out. A thin trickle of blood ran down my arm.

“Tsk, tsk,” said the bird. “You didn't like that. I thought you were supposed to be brave? Put your hand on my chest. Yeah, like that...”

And with those words I found myself sitting on the windowsill. The bars in the window were suddenly much farther apart; I could slip through them easily.

And the dark blue bird with the unpronounceable name now towered over me.

“Cute,” he said.

I looked down at myself, and though I should have known what to expect, I was so shocked I almost fell off the window ledge. There were only feathers—an unbelievable pile of soft, white feathers with violet speckles, a lot like the flowers on the vine on the tower wall. And two green legs peeked out underneath. My neck wasn't as long as Nreur's, but it was still very flexible. It felt funny to twist it around and look behind myself.

“Take care, Achim,” said Arnim, reaching through the bars to stroke my feathers.

His green eyes weren't just earnest now, they were filled with worry.

Worry for me. And just when he should have been feeling happy that I had decided to go for him, I pushed off the ledge and flew out into the empty air.

Oh, and how I flew! What a wonderful feeling it was, not to have anything below me but the view of the land and nothing above me but the sky! I flapped my wings up and down and watched the land glide by below me.

And then I understood Arnim's longing.

I would go to the Nameless One's palace and find out how Arnim could turn into a bird. And then he would be free.

The dark blue bird sailed along next to me and nodded from time to time.

“That's right,” he said. “Nice and steady—raise your left wing a little ... no, not so much ...”

If Karl had told me two days ago that soon I would be getting a flying lesson from a dark blue bird seven stories above the ground, I would have laughed in his face.

The hills below us soon gave way to a dense forest of flowering trees—trees, like the ones you imagine growing in Africa, where it rains a lot, or in a greenhouse. And they were full of birds that were chirping and cawing to one another loud enough that we could hear it from where we were.

“When are all of you flying south?” I asked Nreur.

“In a week or two,” he answered.

“Then I should hurry up and figure this out,” I said, “so Arnim can go with you.”

We flew for a long time without resting, over meadows and mountains and forests and lakes—and strangely enough, I didn't feel tired at all.

But even in this place it becomes evening at some point, and as the shadows lengthened and took hold of the land, I saw another shadow circling far, far above us, one that had nothing to do with nightfall.

Nreur saw it too. I noticed that he was getting more and more uneasy. Every so often he would glance around, as if he were worried that the shadow would suddenly appear right behind us.

“This far but no farther,” he said finally. “I have to get back to my flock. They need me because it's my job to lead them south. Someone else will take you from here.”

And he whistled the same beautiful, deeply sad melody that Arnim had used to call him. He had hardly finished when another bird flew up to us—a small, pale yellow one who looked a little like a sparrow.

“This is Yellow Pea,” said Nreur. “Actually, her name is Yellow Pea of Santorini, but we just call her Yellow Pea. Her sister is Little Bit with Dried Cod.”

“Oh,” I said.

Nreur made a U-turn and vanished out of sight.

“You guys have really strange names,” I said to Yellow Pea.

She nodded. “Arnim named us. He was still really young at the time, you know.”

“And he made up things like Little Bit with Dried Cod?”

“Well, yeah—it was on a menu in some touristy place. Translated wrong. Paul read it to Arnim. He loves telling that story...” she trailed off.

“Why are you flying with me to the palace and not Nreur?” I wanted to know. “Isn't it dangerous for you?”

“Yes,” she answered, “but Nreur is leading the migration south. He's needed. I'm not.”

She was silent for a while, and then I could feel my courage fading until it almost disappeared.

“What—what's the worst thing that could happen?” I asked.

She didn't answer.

“Down there,” she said instead, “can you see it?” 

Yes, I did see it. The palace.

Its domes and roofs were gleaming in the last rays of daylight, and its towers rose into the sky like the necks of proud birds. The walls shimmered like ivory and ebony, but I knew that they were the black of sadness and the white of longing that the Nameless One had used to build them.

“And it just gets bigger every day,” said Yellow Pea, as if she had read my thoughts.

The palace stood in a huge garden, full of the most beautiful trees I'd ever seen. I couldn't explain why they were more beautiful than the flowering trees in the forest full of birds, but they were so beautiful that I felt a deep pain when I looked at them.

Either everyone who saw the palace garden felt the same way, or Yellow Pea really did seem to know what I was thinking because she said: “It's because they're so sad. The sadness creates a beauty beyond compare.”

And then Yellow Pea could go no farther.

She gave me a nod and turned around, just like Nreur had done. I looked up, watching for the menacing shadow in the sky, and thought this was how songbirds must feel when there's a hawk nearby. But whatever had been there before was gone now.

The sun was sinking into a puddle of red and violet on the horizon when I landed among the trees at the edge of the palace garden. My shoelaces had come undone, so I knelt down to tie them.