“Okay,” I answered.
But I had no idea what I was supposed to say if someone came in.
I sat on the small chair behind the cash register as if it were a barricade and let my eyes wander around the room.
No one came in.
The white roses next to the entrance reminded me of the white flowers on the vine, and the dark violet stars next to them almost looked like the black flowers ... I ducked down behind the table instinctively.
Somewhere behind me I heard Ines rummaging around. If Ines was here, I told myself, there couldn’t be any lions or any giant eagles. I was filled with a feeling of thankfulness.
I decided to make a bouquet—a really nice one, not a brown, dried-out thing.
The table with the cash register on it had a row of drawers. I found a pair of scissors and a piece of green wire. And then I started looking around. I found the most wonderful flowers, big yellow sunflowers and small red striped ones, roses of every color, lilies with long, delicate leaves ... I cut the heads off of all of them and took a whole armful of them to the table.
I was so engrossed in my work with wire and flowers that I forgot everything around me. I forgot Arnim and the secret room, the cage with the silver bars and the old song, I forgot Tom and his sister, my adventure in the apple tree in the night, and my asthma.
There was just the flowers’ fragrance, their bright colors, and the wire that kept slipping away... no customers came in to disturb me.
Finally all that was missing was a bow, and I looked through the drawer for the right ribbon.
But I couldn’t find any, just a bunch of tape and packing paper and all kinds of odds and ends—I didn’t even want to open the bottom drawer because it would definitely just have more odds and ends.
But then I did it anyway, and the bracelet fell into my hand.
It was a little tiny bracelet, a silver chain with a pendant on it.
I held it up to the light, and for a while, I knelt on the floor like that, motionless, my hand lifted and my eyes fixed on the little thing.
Once Maria had taken us to a baptism, Karl and me and a couple of other kids. The baby that was being baptized was somehow related to her. And someone had given him a bracelet just like this.
At the time I had wondered what in the world the baby was supposed to do with it. Wouldn’t a milk bottle or a teddy bear have been better for him?
I let the chain swing back and forth from my pointer finger.
Whose baby had it belonged to?
It probably said on the pendant. I looked closer and paused. I had expected a silver charm—a heart or a lucky four-leaf clover.
But this pendant was a different shape. The birthday written on it was eleven years ago. There was no name.
The shape though—it was in the shape of a little tiny key.
“Achim,” said Ines. I looked up. She was standing in the door, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at the table where the bouquet that I had made for her lay.
And suddenly I felt scared.
Something was wrong, I could feel it.
“What—what is that?” stammered Ines.
“A bouquet,” I explained. “I—I made it especially for you. So that they wouldn’t all be old and brown. This one is really colorful...”
She slowly stepped closer. From the floor, I watched her pick up the bouquet and furrow her brow. “Achim,” she said, “Achim, you shouldn’t have done that.”
“What—what’s wrong with it?” I asked. My hand clenched around the silver chain in an anxious fist. “Don’t you like it?”
She shook her head. She looked irritated. “It’s beautiful, it’s just—the flowers, you know... these are all flowers that people only buy individually ... because they’re so big and expensive. You—you just cut the heads off of them?”
There was a big, heavy lump forming in my throat. Now everything was over. I had messed it up. But how was I supposed to know...?
I waited for the air to get thinner, but it didn’t.
Instead, I felt something wet rising inside me.
It tried to find its way out through my eyes and, before I could do anything to stop it, it ran down my cheeks.
“I—I made it for you ...” I stuttered. “I wanted you to be happy... I thought—I thought you could sell it for a lot of money...”
The words came out funny, because I had to sniff and swallow in between them, and the tears in my eyes made the world slimy like oatmeal.
There was no inhaler that could help me.
I was terribly ashamed because I was actually too old to cry but I still kept sobbing.
“And I wanted—I still wanted to find a—bow—for it...”
I leaned my head on an open drawer and gave up trying to fight the tears.
Then Ines knelt down on the floor next to me and took me in her arms—and as I looked out at her through my curtain of tears, all the anger disappeared from her face.
“Achim,” she said quietly. “Achim, don’t cry like that! It’s really not so bad.”
“Yes it is!” I sobbed. “It is! Because now—now you’ll give me back and—and ...” And no one will help Arnim.
At the last second I remembered that I better not say that out loud. She wouldn’t have understood.
“Such nonsense!” said Ines. She brushed a damp strand of hair from my forehead. “Such nonsense, Achim. We’re not going to give you back because of a couple of flowers! When I think about it... it’s basically a good idea. The next rich lady who comes by will just have to buy it...”
She laughed. “Too bad for her. Anyway, it’s beautiful.”
“You think so?” I whispered. I wanted to wipe the tears away, but more kept coming.
It was if a dam had broken—I hadn’t cried for a long time, and now that I had started I just couldn’t stop. I wasn’t just crying because of the flowers—I cried for Arnim and the birds in their silver cages, I cried for the broken plate under my mattress, because Karl couldn’t be here, because Tom had said that I didn’t have a mom, and because Paul had gotten up in the night, and because the Nut Bird couldn’t fly south ... I cried and cried, and Ines held me in her warm arms and gently rocked me back and forth like a little kid.
At some point though, the last tears dried up. There was probably just no more water inside me.
Ines gave me her handkerchief.
When I was blowing my nose, something fell from my hand. She picked it up and looked at it.
It was the small silver bracelet.
For a moment I was afraid she’d think that I wanted to steal it. But Ines just looked at it thoughtfully and finally said, “So that’s where it was. I didn’t know that I had it still.”
She looked at me and smiled. “It belonged to Arnim, you know. He got it when he was really little.”
“It’s—it’s beautiful,” I declared and lifted my nose.
Ines looked at me for a while, how I was sitting there with the big handkerchief and my sniffly nose and my swollen face. Then she took my hand and set the delicate silver chain into it.
“Maybe you’ll be able to use it at some point,” she said. And before I could reply, she did something she had never done before: She gave me a kiss on the forehead.
Then she stood up quickly and acted like she suddenly had an awful lot to do, even though there were no customers there at all.
The key was in my hand—the tiny silver key.
The key’s not something that you can find
if you look too hard for it.
No, I thought, and closed my fingers around it tightly.
The old song had been right:
It won’t be found until you forget.
CHAPTER 11
In which I soak a sofa and open lots of cages
At noon, Ines said she’d take me home.
Home ...
“Not because I don’t want you to stay here,” she explained as she set my bouquet of flower heads in a glass of water. ??
?But now it’s time for a little lunch, and child labor is definitely illegal after lunch.”
She was probably afraid I would make more bouquets, but I nodded and got into the car with her. Anyway, the thing I wanted most at that point was to drive back.
Outside it was raining; the weather really couldn’t make up its mind. It must have been because of the ocean. Where I had lived before, the weather had always stayed the same for a couple of days.
If it hadn’t been raining like that, Ines probably wouldn’t have lit the candle in the living room at lunchtime. And everything would have turned out differently.
“You look like you could fall asleep at any moment,” said Ines after we ate.
I nodded. “I think I’ll go upstairs and sleep a little,” I yawned.
I couldn’t stifle the yawn. I actually felt totally exhausted and perfectly empty inside from crying.
“Yes, you should,” said Ines. “I’ll straighten up the kitchen a bit and then drive back to my flowers.”
And she smiled at me encouragingly. “Don’t worry any more, Achim.”
“No,” I said.
But of course I was worried.
Was the key really the key? And if it was—would everything turn out all right? Would I be able to get past the Nameless One and get the knife without him noticing me?
I would have rather lay down on my bed upstairs or right on the colorful woven rug. I could have fallen asleep on the spot. But there was no time for that.
Before the front door closed downstairs, I slipped through the door with the silver handle and thrust my fist out toward Arnim.
He looked at me questioningly, and I opened my fist.
Inside was the small silver chain, twinkling and glittering, even though there was only a dim light in the secret room.
“The key!” whispered Arnim. “Where did you get it?”
“Don’t you recognize it? It belongs to you! It was a present you got when you were baptized!”
Arnim shook his head. “Maybe it was a present, but it hasn’t belonged to me for a long time. No, I can’t remember it. Otherwise I would have told you about it a long time ago.”
He ran his finger over the silver gently. “It’s yours now,” he whispered. “Go back and use it, Achim!”
There were two more paintings hanging on the rough wall of the secret room.
One showed a small white bird with violet speckles in a cage. The other showed a bird with black and white feathers soaring over the courtyard where the sheet of glass was. I pointed to the second one.
“Where am I in this painting?” I whispered.
But Arnim didn’t answer my question. “You came out of the other painting,” was all he said.
A white feather was tickling my eye.
I was a bird again. Next to my green bird feet on the floor of the cage was the chain with the little key on it.
I bent down and picked it up with my beak, but there wasn’t a lock or a door to the cage anywhere. What was I supposed to do?
Just then two birds trotted by on the gravel path below me—a yellow one and a green one. They were walking close together as if they were protecting one another from the trees’ sadness.
“Hello!” I called to them quietly through the bars. “Can you help me? I don’t know where the door to the cage is ...”
The birds stopped and pecked at the path as if they hadn’t heard me. Finally, the green one chirped very softly: “You’re sitting on it. The floor of the cage is the door.” And he quickly started pecking again so that it looked like he had never said anything to me at all. But I had recognized his voice.
It was the same bird that had sung the second verse of the song for me under the stars.
“What’s your name?” I whispered.
“Spinach Luggage,” he chirped without looking up. “But it’s just a name that Arnim gave me. It doesn’t matter who I am.
“And I know you already. You’re Yellow Pea of Santorini,” I said to the other bird. “You two showed me the window in the lion’s room. Why are you helping me?”
“You shouldn’t ask so many questions,” replied Yellow Pea, preening her feathers intently. “And you should try to get out of here. We never helped you. We’ve never seen you before. We were never in the palace garden.”
And with that they flew away—and a second later they disappeared. There were just two feathers lying on the bright white of the gravel path, a yellow one and a green one.
I bowed my head and looked under my feet. And I saw a little tiny silver lock. I stuck the little tiny silver key in it with my beak and struggled to turn it. There was a quiet creaking sound. Then the bottom of the cage fell out like a trap door and I flopped into the air. I was so startled I almost opened my beak and dropped the key.
But I spread my wings before I touched the ground and the next moment I was fluttering excitedly over the garden trees.
I had to find the end of the passageway that I had seen in the dream. Then I could just fly through the walls of the palace instead of over them, and maybe I’d be able to avoid the Nameless One’s keen eyes.
I circled the black-and-white outer walls in a wide arc.
I kept looking into the sky for a large dark shadow, but there wasn’t one. And there wasn’t a white predator lying in wait under the trees in the garden either. Was the ruler of the palace out making his rounds? Was he stealing the stone flowers from the walls of his prisons at that very moment?
I finally found the dark opening high above the ground at the north end and ducked into it. The passageway was too low to fly through so I landed. I hadn’t really considered it, and as soon as my feet touched the floor, I turned back into a person. So then it was really cramped in the dark shaft! I crept along on all fours.
The ceiling touched my back, cold and smooth, and I actually felt like I was in the bowels of a giant animal. The narrowness threatened to suffocate me. I knew that if the air went thin, I wouldn’t be able to get to my inhaler—but I had to go on. I just had to stay calm.
Which is easy to say! When you’re in a cold, dark tunnel and you can’t even turn around and you might at any moment hear a lion’s horrible snarl or a powerful eagle’s terrifying cry from behind you! Icy shivers ran up and down my spine.
An eternity passed before I saw a bright circle in the distance and another eternity before I reached the opening in the wall of the courtyard. I stayed there for a while, looking down and waiting for my heart to stop pounding so hard.
I just had to let myself fall, and as soon as I was in the air, I’d have my wings again. But I’d turn back into a person as soon as I touched the floor in the courtyard below. Darn, I thought.
How would I manage to turn into a bird again once I had the knife? There were no ladders or windows here. Nothing that I could jump down from. I would have to find my way back through the labyrinth of corridors on my own two legs. I shuddered at the thought.
“Arnim,” I whispered down into the empty courtyard. “I hope he’s collecting the flowers in front of your window right now and you can distract him for a while.”
And with that I let myself slide out of the passageway and fall.
I spread my wings and ...
I was standing in the middle of the secret room.
“What happened? Why am I here?”
But Arnim just shook his head in surprise. “No idea. Maybe you’re needed here?”
“Where, in the house? Are the Ribbeks back already?” I looked around. It was still bright outside. “Wait, I’ll go see.”
As I slipped through the door of the secret room, I saw a large black shadow pass across the barred window out of the corner of my eye. So I had been right—he was here.
He thought I was safe in my silver cage.
But for how much longer?
I stood standing in the hallway and listened. The house was silent.
But then I noticed my nose was twitching. What was that funny smell? I crept downstairs, sniffing. T
he smell was definitely coming from downstairs.
It actually wasn’t a bad smell.
It was a little like hot dogs ... or baked potatoes in aluminum foil... or like a campfire ... campfire!
I raced down the stairs, three at a time, and dashed into the living room. That’s where the smell of fire was coming from. I ran into a thick black cloud of smoke. And now, with the smoke all around me, it didn’t smell like hot dogs or baked potatoes any more, just like danger and burned cloth. I coughed and still couldn’t see a thing.
The candle, I thought. Ines must have forgotten the candle.
Where was it? Gasping, I tried to find my way back to the door. I couldn’t orient myself. I had to go into the kitchen. There was water in the kitchen. A bucket! Where could I find a bucket?
Instead I found a big cooking pot, which I filled to the brim. I could barely carry it, but somehow I managed to pour the water where I thought the table with the candle would be. It sizzled, but the smoke didn’t stop. I brought more water, a lot more—I dragged pot after pot from the kitchen to the living room. My shirt was clinging to me like a wet rag, and once I had to stand in the hallway and take out my inhaler—but I didn’t give up.
Finally, after a huge amount of water and sweat and coughing, the smoke started to clear. The sofa had been in the middle of it, and now I saw that the quilt on it had been responsible for the fat black billows of smoke. The candle must have fallen over right onto the sofa ...
I opened the window, flopped onto the flooded living room carpet, and stared up at the charred remains of the ceiling for a while. My pulse was pumping my blood through my body like an over-excited dog. Finally, I stood up and got an oven mitt. I used it to grab one end of the quilt and pulled it outside through the patio door. It could keep stinking out there if it wanted to.
I filled the pot one last time. Then I watered the burned corner of the sofa carefully, like a flower, and then watered the smoldering blanket in the grass.
And as I was standing there, wheezing, someone called my name from the fence.