MRS. STROBE’S EYES peered down her unusually long nose, through her unusually thick eyeglass lenses that sat on the very tip of her nose, and focused on the little beings in front of her in the classroom and latched on to the smallest of them all:
“Mister Nilly!” Her voice crashed down like a whip.
“Mrs. Strobe!” the response came crashing back from the tiny student. “How can I be of service to you on this unusually beautiful Friday morning, a morning whose beauty is exceeded only, my teacher and supplier of intellectual sustenance, by your own magnificent face?”
As usual, Nilly’s answer irritated Mrs. Strobe. His answers irritated her because they made her feel guilty. And also a tiny bit flattered.
“First of all, you can stop whistling that ridiculous tune …,” she began.
“Not so loud, Mrs. Strobe!” Nilly whispered, his eyes wide with shock. “That’s the Marseillaise. Aren’t we studying French history this month? If anyone from their embassy were to hear you call the French national anthem a ridiculous tune, no doubt they would immediately report you to the president, who would declare war on Norway on the spot. French men love to go to war, even though they’re not particularly good at it. For example, have you ever heard of the Hundred Years’ War they fought against England, Mrs. Strobe?”
The whole class laughed while Mrs. Strobe drummed her nails against her desk and contemplated the strange little boy who had been in her class since the spring.
“If you had been paying attention instead of whistling, you would realize that the Hundred Years’ War in France is exactly what I’ve been talking about, Mr. Nilly. For example, what did I just say about Joan of Arc?”
“Joan of Arc,” Nilly repeated, scratching the sideburns by his left ear thoughtfully. “Hm, sounds familiar. A woman, right?”
“Yes.”
“A famous cancan dancer?”
“Nilly!”
“Okay, okay. Can you narrow it down for me a little?”
Mrs. Strobe sighed. “Joan of Arc was a nice, pious village girl. As a young girl she received a mysterious message to find the French crown prince, who was hiding somewhere in France, and help him.”
“Sounds very familiar,” Nilly said. “She didn’t by any chance get the message on a postcard from Paris with a rare stamp on it from 1888, did she?”
“What are you talking about? Joan of Arc’s message came from angels talking inside her head!”
“Sorry, Mrs. Strobe, just a short circuit in my tiny, and yet very complex, brain.”
Nilly glanced over at Lisa, who had her head down on her desk and her hands over her head again.
“It won’t happen again, Mrs. Strobe,” Nilly said. “So, what happened to this Joan of Arc?”
Mrs. Strobe leaned over her desk.
“That is precisely what I was about to tell you. Joan of Arc found the crown prince and they fought the English together. That young teenage girl put on armor, learned to use a sword like a master, and led the French troops into battle. To this day, she remains the great national heroine of France. Write that down, everyone!”
“Wonderful!” Nilly exclaimed. “The good girl won. I love a story with a happy ending!”
Mrs. Strobe lowered her long, protruding nose so that it almost touched her desk and peered at the class over the top of her glasses.
“Well, there are happy endings and there are happy endings. She was taken prisoner and sold to the English, who sentenced her to death for witchcraft. Then they invited all the inhabitants of Rouen to come to the Old Market Square where they tied her to a stake, tossed wood on a bonfire, lit it …”
There was a high-pitched, almost plaintive outcry from somewhere in the classroom: “… but then, just in the nick of time, the crown prince rescued her.”
Everyone turned to look at Lisa, who was holding her hands over her mouth in horror. No one—not even Lisa—was used to Lisa having an outburst like that.
“Look closely at the picture in your history book, Lisa,” Mrs. Strobe said. “You can see the flames reaching all the way up to the top of Joan of Arc’s white dress. Does it look like she got rescued?”
“No!” the class shouted in unison.
“And she didn’t,” Mrs. Strobe said. “She burned to death and they tossed her charred body into the river. Joan of Arc was nineteen years old.”
Lisa looked at the illustration in her history book. The girl’s face reminded her of another face in another picture. The young Juliette Margarine in the sidecar of Doctor Proctor’s motorcycle. Lisa’s eyes teared up at the thought of the awful thing that had happened.
“Of course the girl died,” Nilly said.
Mrs. Strobe took off her glasses. “Why do you say that, Nilly?”
“To be a real hero, you have to be really dead.”
The class laughed, but Mrs. Strobe nodded at this. “Maybe so,” she mumbled. “Maybe so.”
And with that the bell rang and even before Mrs. Strobe got to the h in “have a good weekend,” the first student was out the door. Because this was the last class on a Friday and now they were all free.
Lisa was putting on her jacket out in the hallway when she overheard some of the other girls talking excitedly about some party or other that it seemed like they’d all been invited to. Except for her. And Nilly, of course. She’d heard them whispering about him, too. That he was so little and strange and said and did such crazy things that they didn’t really understand.
“Hi!”
Nilly jumped up onto the bench next to her so he could reach his coat, which was hanging from a coat hook on the wall.
The other girls huddled together, whispering and snickering. Then the bravest one turned to face Lisa and Nilly, while the others hid behind her and laughed.
“So, do you two turtledoves have anything exciting planned for the weekend?”
“First of all, my dear girl, you have no idea what turtledoves are,” Nilly said, buttoning up his jacket, which he did quickly since there was room for only two buttons on it. “But if you do have space in your brain, you can of course try to store the information that turtledoves are owl-like doves with turtle shells that live by scratching out the eyes of their own young. Second of all, we were invited to some horrifically boring party here in town that we just can’t be bothered to attend. Oslo is such a boring little city,” Nilly yawned.
“Boring like you,” the girl said, lowering her hands, but it didn’t seem like she quite knew what else to say. So she said, “Hello!”
“Yeah, HELLO!” the other girls repeated behind her back. But one of them just couldn’t stop herself from asking, “So … so what are you guys going to do, then?”
“We …,” Nilly said, hopping down off the bench to stand next to Lisa, “are going to the Moulin Rouge in Paris to dance the cancan. Have an exciting weekend here in town, kids.”
Lisa didn’t look at them, but she knew that the girls were standing there gaping as she and Nilly turned their backs and walked out into the glittering autumn sunlight.
NILLY AND LISA walked over to the streetcar stop and caught the number seventeen to Oslo City Hall. There they got off and found their way to Rosen-krantz Street, which is a heavily trafficked and rather narrow street with lots of stores and plenty of people on the sidewalks. On one of the narrowest stretches of Rosenkrantz Street, above a door painted bright red, there was a little display window crammed full of clocks and, sure enough, a sign hanging out front that read TRENCH COAT CLOCK SHOP.
It turned out that the springs in the closing mechanism on the front door were so tight that they had to push against them with their full weight. And even then, they only just barely managed to force the door open. The springs squeaked in protest, as if they really had no desire to let Nilly and Lisa in. Once the two had finally made it inside and let go of the door, it slammed shut behind them with an angry bang. In an instant all the noise from the street behind them was gone and all that could be heard were clocks ticking. Tick-tock-tick et cetera. They looked around. Although the sun was shining outside, it was strangely dark inside the deserted shop. It was as if they’d suddenly wound up in a different world. There seemed to be hundreds of clocks in here! They were everywhere—on the walls, on shelves and tables.
“Hello?” Nilly called.
No one answered.
“These clocks all look so old,” Lisa whispered. “And so strange. Look at that one over there, the one with the second hand. It’s running … backward.”
Just then, a groaning, screeching squeak, like from an ungreased wheel, became audible through the ticking.
Nilly and Lisa both stared in the direction the sound was coming from, the other end of the shop, where there was an orange curtain with an elephant on it.
“What’s—” Lisa started to whisper, but just then the curtain was yanked aside.
Lisa and Nilly gasped. A figure came careening toward them. It was a tall woman—taller than either of them had ever seen before—and everything about her was thin, elongated, and sharp. Apart from her hairdo, which looked like one of those tumbleweeds that rolls around in the desert and takes root wherever the wind blows it. This specific tumbleweed had taken root over a face whose skin was stretched so tight it was impossible to say how old it was. The face was also decorated with plenty of black makeup and bright red lipstick covering its thin lips. The woman was wearing a floor-length, shiny black leather trench coat, which was unbuttoned, thus revealing the cause of both the grating, squeaking noise and her speed. She had a wooden leg, and on the end of her wooden leg, she wore a roller skate that was obviously in need of a little oil. With her other foot she kicked herself forward toward them, stopping all of a sudden, glaring down at them and saying in a voice so hoarse and whispery that it sounded like wind whistling through an old shack, “You’re in the wrong place, kids. Out you go.”
Lisa lunged for the door in fear, both because of the woman’s unpleasant appearance and because of her breath, which reeked of rotten meat and stinky socks. Nilly, on the other hand, stood his ground, gazing at the woman in the leather jacket with curiosity.
“Why is that clock running backward?” he asked, pointing over her shoulder.
The woman replied without turning around, “It’s counting down to the end of time. And for you guys, that’s now. Out!”
“What about that one?” Nilly said, pointing to one of the other clocks. “It’s not running at all. Are you selling broken clocks?
“Sea spray!” she replied. “That’s just a clock that claims that time is standing still. And who knows?—maybe it’s right.”
“Time can’t just stand still,” said Lisa, who had regained her composure.
The woman stared at her. “You obviously don’t know anything about time, you stupid little girl, so you ought to keep your ugly mouth shut. Everything in history happens simultaneously, all the time, over and over and over again. But most people have such small brains that they can’t perceive everything all at the same time, so they believe things happen consecutively one after the other. Tick tock, tick tock, I don’t have any more time for clock talk, so quick: walk!” She spun around on her roller skate and raised her other foot to push off.
“You’re contradicting yourself,” Nilly said. “If time is standing still, then you have all the time in the world.”
The woman slowly turned back around. “Hm, maybe this dwarf doesn’t have a dwarf brain. But all the same, you have to leave now.”
“We have a stamp to sell,” Nilly said.
“Not interested. Out.”
“It’s from 1888,” Lisa said. “And it looks almost new.”
“New, you say?” The woman raised her eyebrows, which looked like they’d been drawn in over her eyes with a black, and very sharp, pencil. “Let me see.”
Lisa held out her hand with the stamp.
The woman fished a magnifying glass out of her pocket and leaned over Lisa’s hand.
“Hm,” she said. “Felix Faure. Where’d you get this?”
“That’s a secret,” Lisa said.
The woman raised her other, equally thin eyebrow. “A secret?”
“Of course,” Nilly said.
“It looks like it got wet,” the hoarse, whispering voice said. “And there’s a whitish coating here along the edge of the stamp. Did you put this stamp in soapy water?”
“No,” said Nilly, who didn’t notice the warning look Lisa was giving him.
The woman stretched out her index finger and scraped a long, red-lacquered fingernail across the stamp. Then she stuck the fingernail in her mouth, which was just a narrow crack in her taut face. She smacked her lips. And then both her eyebrows shot up.
“Well, shiver my timbers,” she whispered.
“Huh?” Nilly said.
“I’ll buy it. How much do you want for it?”
“Not much,” Nilly said. “Just enough for the plane tickets to … Ouch!”
He shot an irritated look at Lisa, who had kicked him in the shin.
“Seven hundred dollars,” Lisa said.
“You cat-o’-nine-tails!” the woman shouted in outrage. “Seven hundred for a stamp with a picture of a dreary, dead French president?”
“Okay, five hundr—” Nilly started, but yelped as he was kicked in the shin yet again.
“Seven hundred, right now. Otherwise we’re leaving,” Lisa said.
“Five hundred plus a clock for each of you,” the woman said. “For example, this clock that runs slow. Specially made for people who have too much to do. Or this one that runs fast, for people who are bored.”
“Yes!” Nilly cried.
“No!” Lisa said. “Seven hundred. And if you don’t accept in the next five seconds, the price goes up to eight hundred.”
The woman gave Lisa a look of rage. She opened her mouth, about to say something, but stopped when she saw the look on Lisa’s face. Then she sighed, rolled her eyes and spit out a resigned, “Fine, you keelhauling, barnacle-baiting urchin.”
The woman disappeared behind the curtain on her roller skate and returned with a wad of cash, which she handed to Nilly. He licked his right thumb and started counting the bills.
“I hope you can add,” the woman mumbled.
“Simple math,” Nilly said. “Twenty-five twenties plus two old hundred dollar bills. That’s seven hundred. Thank you for your business, Miss …?”
“My name’s Raspa,” the woman said, with a thin, cautious smile, as if she were afraid her face would rip if her smile were any bigger.
“And what are your names, my dear children?”
“Nilly and Lisa,” Nilly said, and handed the money to Lisa, who stuffed it into a pocket in her school knapsack.
“Well then, Nilly and Lisa, I’ll throw in these gold watches.”
She dangled two gleaming watches in front of them.
“Cool!” Nilly said, grabbing for one of them, but Raspa pulled it back again.
“First I have to set the time for the time zone you’re going to,” she said. “So where are you headed?”
“Paris!” Nilly gushed. “The capital of France … Ouch!”
His eyes bulged from the pain.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I hit your leg?” Lisa asked. “Let me see it. Did I leave a bruise?”
She leaned over toward Nilly and snarled softly into his ear so that Raspa couldn’t hear, “The postcard warned us not to say anything about where we were going!”
“So sue me,” Nilly mumbled crossly.
“Ah, Paris,” the woman sneered, showing a row of sharp white teeth. “I was there once. A lovely city.”
“Nah, it’s not that great,” Nilly grunted, rubbing his leg. “Actually, we changed our minds. We’re not going there after all.”
“Really? Why not?” Raspa laughed hoarsely.
“Too dangerous. I hear the rivers in Paris are full of soggy, wet, venomous platypuses shaking water all over people.”
Raspa leaned down closer to Nilly and breathed her rotten-meat-and-stinky-sock-breath on him, “Well, then, good thing these gold watches are watertight.”
“W-w-watertight?” said Nilly, who had never ever stuttered before in his whole life.
“Yes,” Raspa whispered, so softly that they could hear all the clocks in the shop ticking. “Which means that you can swim underwater with them. And wear them in the shower. Or, for example, in a bathtub. Right?”
“B-b-bathtub?” Nilly said, wondering where his sudden stutter had come from.
“I’m sure you catch my drift, don’t you?” Raspa asked, winking knowingly.
“N-n-no,” Nilly said. Jeez, was this stutter here to stay?
The woman suddenly stood back up and snatched the watches back in irritation. “As a matter of fact, I should give you something more valuable than this. A piece of travel advice.” Raspa’s hoarse whisper filled the shop: “Remember that death—and only death—can change history.”
“Only d-d-death?”
“Exactly. History is carved in stone, and only if you are willing to die can you change what is written. Goodbye then, children.” Raspa turned round and, on that squeaking, shrieking roller skate, she coasted through the shop like a haunted ship and disappeared behind the orange curtain.
“G-g-g …,” Nilly tried.
“Good-bye,” Lisa said, and pulled Nilly out the door behind her.
