A Fairy Tale (9 page)

I
wake up alone in the room. In the distance I can hear the sound of the chainsaw. I stay in bed and read the same comic over and over. I get to know every single cobweb on the ceiling. The abandoned ones and the ones where I occasionally see a black spider darting up and down. I get to know the cracks in the wallpaper; a small flap points down at me. I stand on the suitcase and pee out the window. I'm scared that the old lady is going to come and get me every time the house creaks. Then I hide under the blanket.

At noon my dad comes up to my room to fetch me. We go downstairs and have lunch together. I ask him if he would please wake me in the morning, take me with him outside, I promise to look after myself. He nods and I'm glad he doesn't ask why.

I stay on the lawn until my dad has finished his work for the day. He says goodnight to the car: “We were too hard on you. But you did well.”

In the kitchen a big pot of soup is waiting for us with slices of freshly baked whole-grain bread. Bowls have been set out on the table, a beer for my dad, a soda for me.

At night the wind makes the house squeak and groan, wood rubbing against wood like a ship sailing on a stormy sea.

When I wake
up
the next morning, I'm alone in the room again. I search the suitcases but grow increasingly convinced that my dad packed just a single comic when he cleared out the apartment. I know the words by heart; all I have to do is close my eyes to see the pictures, one by one. I sit on the bed and I cry. I think my dad is doing this on purpose, leaving me here in the room. I'm meant to learn something.

Before I've time to think about it, I'm standing with my hand on the door handle. I let go and race back to my bed. I pull up my feet as if the ground is toxic. I sit there for a while, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. My dad won't be coming to fetch me for a long time. Yesterday morning, I listened out for all the noises of the house, doors opening and closing. I'm almost certain that the old lady doesn't leave the drawing room until she goes to make lunch for us. I should have at least a couple of hours to make it down the stairs and out into the garden.

I open the door;
I hold my shoes in my hand. I walk down the passage as quietly as I can. I've reached the top of the stairs when I stop. One of the doors is ajar. I notice something inside. It looks like hair, but I'm not sure. I know it'll bug me for the rest of the day if I don't find out what it is. I go back and push open the door. The room I'm looking into is filled with antlers. Not just one or three: it's crammed with them, all four walls from floor to ceiling. No furniture, only antlers from deer, and gazelles, and every imaginable horned animal. I bolt down the stairs and out the front door.

I'm sitting on the
grass drawing when my dad appears between the trees. He smiles; I think he's proud to find me here.

“This is a strange house,” I say to him while we eat liver pâté sandwiches with meat jelly.

“People are much stranger than they're prepared to admit.” He takes a bite of a large pickle. “So why shouldn't their houses be?”

The next day I
stand at the top of the stairs again. I know that I should just walk down them. Not just walk, but hurry as much as I can without running. Down the stairs, out the door. And yet I stay where I am. I managed it yesterday, I still have all my arms and legs.

I pick the door opposite the room with the antlers. This door isn't ajar, but neither is it locked. A little boy looks out at me from the dimly lit room. When I raise my hand to my mouth, the boy copies my movement. I enter. The room is full of mirrors. From floor to ceiling, in wood or gold frames. I stand in the middle. I see an ear, a nose, a shin, some hair, the shoes in my hand. A little boy who looks like me, cut into small pieces and stuck on the walls. There are more mirrors in the ceiling; the boy looks down at me, very small and a little bit scared. When I leave the room I'm dizzy.

As I walk down the stairs, I promise myself to stop being so nosy. I don't want to take any more chances.

It's early in the
morning; I'm lying under the blanket, keeping my eyes closed. I hear my dad get dressed. He walks along the passage and down the stairs. The front door opens and closes. I leap out of bed. I've become a thief who doesn't steal. I explore the house in sock feet, a new room every day. I find one full of stuffed animals: dogs and cats, beavers and squirrels. Animals with bared teeth, all of them facing whoever enters the room. They stare at me until I leave. In another room there's only a single stuffed bison with its head facing the wall as if it's ashamed. It's much bigger than the doors and windows; the house must have been built around it.

I keep away from the old lady's drawing room, but I investigate the rest of the house, from the ground floor to the loft. I follow the loft beam to the end of a long corridor. I reach a red door. I push down the handle, but it won't open. I rattle it to make sure it's not just stuck.

Not all the rooms are as exciting as the first one I visited, but there's always something to discover, such as Chinese porcelain painted with tiny brushstrokes. A single cup tells a story about dragons and emperors, a mighty battle with hundreds of tiny arrows flying through the air. In another room a whole wall is covered with butterflies on pins. Hundreds of them in as many different colours.

In the afternoon, I sit on the grass drawing whatever room I've visited that morning. I've reached the eighth page of my sketchbook when I realize something's wrong. Something much stranger than anything I've found in the rooms.

I walk around the house and draw it from the outside. Two storeys, clad in broad wooden planks. I draw every single window. I try to draw everything as it is; many times, I have to erase everything and start over. It's not until I've finished drawing that I realize what's wrong. The outside of the house doesn't match the rooms inside.

The next morning I make notes in my sketchbook as I walk from room to room. I tap the panels. Where there ought to be doors there are walls with pictures of brown bears with fish in their mouths.

I finish up on the top floor. Again I stand in front of the locked red door. The explanation must lie behind it.

At night I dream about the door. It swings open all by itself; I'm blinded by a light coming from inside. I cross the threshold, then I wake up.

When my dad has risen and gone to work in the garden, I start looking for the key to the red door.

I'm no longer interested in the huge collection of walking sticks with carved animal heads or the curved sabres and the shrunken heads. All I care about is finding the key. The old lady is so tiny that if she had it on her, it would bulge like a bone sticking out.

I
'
m drawing when I hear a noise in the grass behind me. A slither like a rattlesnake or possibly an anaconda. When I turn around I see something that scares me much more than a wide-open jaw with fangs. The old lady isn't hidden by the shadows, nor does she have the blinding sunlight behind her. She stands only a few metres away from me.

Somewhere far away my dad starts up the chainsaw again. I look down at the sketchbook; if you meet a bear in the forest then you must stand very still. Dogs can smell fear. I start drawing a dog eating an ice cream cone; it holds it between its paws as it licks off the whipped cream. My hands are shaking, but I keep drawing, hoping the old lady will disappear of her own accord.

“I've heard you walking around the house,” she says to my back. “You think I can't hear you because I'm old.”

The hole in her face is a mouth; more words come out of it.

“You think that because you tiptoe around in your socks you won't make a noise. This is an old house. A wooden house. And wood creaks.”

I can no longer take my eyes off her, even though I try.

“I've lived here all my life. I've grown old with the house. I can hear you when I lie in my bed. I always know exactly where you are. I hear you in the kitchen, pulling out drawers. I hear you walk up the stairs; I know when you open the cupboard doors, when you rummage around the bottom drawer in the sideboard. I know this house. I could put it on my back like a snail.”

I want to run, I want to hide in the garden, but I stay where I am.

“I'm offering you a deal,” she says. “I'm going to show you what's behind the red door. I'll go up there with you. I'll give you the key so you can open it yourself. In return you have to do something for me.”

I try to keep my eyes on her white hair.

“Do we have a deal?” she asks.

I feel my head move up and down. The old lady starts walking back to the house. Just before the terrace she turns around: “Are you coming?”

I walk right behind her up the stairs, up to the top floor. We go down the passage to the locked door. The keyhole looks at me; it's very big and a little bit scratched after all the different keys I've tried to insert into it.

The old lady holds out a bony fist towards me, unclenches it, and shows me a black key.

“So, do we have a deal?”

I nod.

“You're not a very talkative boy.”

I try not to touch the palm of her hand when I take the key.

At first it refuses to go into the keyhole, possibly because my hands are shaking.

I try a couple of times. I'm about to give up, it must be the wrong key, the old lady must be mistaken, she hasn't been up here in years. I feel a certain relief, the deal's off, I'm going to forget all about the door. I'll sit on the grass and draw dogs and ice cream cones, wear down my pencil. My dad will finish in the garden, tomorrow will be like today and we can move on.

I hear a click when the key goes into the lock. I turn it around and open the door.

I blink a couple of times. I'm staring right into a brick wall. There's nothing behind the door, not even a big cupboard, just straight rows of red bricks with mortar in between.

I touch the bricks to be sure. Then I put the key back in the old lady's outstretched hand.

“Now it's your turn to do something from me. That was the deal.”

We go back down the stairs and into her drawing room, which I haven't been inside since we first came to the house. We walk past the porcelain figurines and the dark leather furniture. She opens the door to a smaller room with bookcases from floor to ceiling.

“You know how to read, don't you?”

I nod.

“I thought so. You're your father's son.”

She sits down in an armchair underneath the window. The sun blinds me so I can only see her outline.

All the books are bound in red leather; the title is printed in golden letters down the spine.

“Third shelf, far right. It's about a huge whale.”

I wipe dust off the book's cover, sit down on the chair she points out, and open the book. My voice is feeble and it trembles when I read the first words aloud.

M
y dad's T-shirt is soaked in sweat when he emerges from the bushes. Again he's scratched and covered in leaves. We sit down on the terrace and he looks at the drawings I've done during the morning. Many of them are of whales.

Then I hear the old lady behind us; the fabric of her skirt rustles as she moves.

“How is the garden coming along?” she asks.

My dad makes to stand up.

“Don't get up, you work hard.”

He wipes his hands on his trousers.

“I know what it could look like,” he says. “Now that we live here as well. But there's more work than I first thought.”

“It's a big garden.”

“That's not exactly what I mean.”

“I know. Last year, another young man came. I told him to take it easy, but he worked every day from morning till night. The first night he grinned like a man who has just survived a shipwreck; a week later, he looked like a convict. Then he vanished for good. I think he gave up. But, who knows, perhaps you'll stumble across him in the wilderness.”

She laughs to herself.

I look across at my dad. It's not until now that I notice that his cheeks seem sunken, his eyes have grown bigger. Perhaps I haven't seen it because he smiles all the time.

“What kind of tools did he use?” my dad asks.

The old lady hesitates as if she hasn't quite understood the question.

“His own,” she then replies. “He brought his own tools.”

My dad nods, runs his thumb across the metal plate on the chainsaw with the image of the bear.

“Tonight I'll put a little extra bacon in the soup,” the old lady says.

I follow her inside the house; it's time for me to read to her. Always when the sun is high in the sky and she can sit below the window and be only a silhouette.

Often I lose track of time. I'm on the ship with Ahab. Every day we come close to catching the great big white whale.

Some days I don't stop reading until there's not enough light in the room to make out the letters. Then her face emerges from the shadows. The first few times I nearly dropped the book. I said sorry and raced out of the room. Slowly I've grown used to her appearance. Just like I've grown used to the smell of wood when the summer sun has roasted the house all day long.

At night the water
comes. I see it burst through the trees, taking with it big and small plants. The old wooden house releases its grip on the earth and floats away like a ship. Only the three of us are left in the whole world. The birds fly above us. The sky is theirs now and they screech loudly. Cries of joy: no high-rise buildings, no telephone poles, only the open sky. They've yet to discover that they've no place to land.

I
read the last sentence in the book. I can now look at the old lady for several minutes without blinking.

We sit there, the two of us, neither of us saying anything. The words of the book still linger in the air between us. Then she straightens up in her chair.

“I tricked you. And you know it, you're not stupid.”

She wipes her mouth with a white fabric napkin, then she spreads it across her knee.

“All you had to do was ask me for the key, ask me what was behind the door. But you were scared.”

I don't say anything.

“And when you finally stood there, staring at the brick wall, you could have asked: ‘Why?' It was the only word you had to say, but you were still scared. Didn't you think it was odd, a brick wall in a wooden house?”

I don't know what to reply.

“Of course you thought it was strange. You're not stupid. But you were scared. And sometimes they're the same thing.”

She looks straight at me.

“Let's make a new deal,” she suggests. “If you carry on reading to me, I'll tell you the story of the house. No cheating this time. I'll tell you everything I know. I think that'll answer some of your questions.”

I still make no reply, but I don't think I need to, either.

“Very well. You'll get the story about the house, but not today.”

I feel my head nod. This time I'm not scared.

“Fifth shelf, three books in,” she says then.

I have to stand on tiptoes to reach it.

I dust off the book.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

It won't be the last book we read this summer. The days disappear into the books. When the sun turns red, my eyes are dry and they sting. When my dad and I eat dinner in the kitchen, I sit surrounded by musketeers. Outside the window a man rides past on a donkey.

The next day I'm back in the library reading to the old lady. If I struggle with a word, a word I don't quite understand, she helps me. She doesn't even have to look in the book. I think she must know what it says on every single page.

She leans back in the armchair and says: “This was always my favourite room, being surrounded by books. Now you know why. If we had another year, we could make a start on the great Russians.”

It's early evening when I come out on the terrace. My dad is smoking a cigarette. He runs his hand through my hair.

“Looks like you've got yourself a new teacher,” he smiles.