Emma in Buttonland Read online

  Emma in Buttonland

  In memory of my grandmother, Lisbeth Heinzig, whose button box inspired me even as a child to write this story.

  UR

  In tribute to my grandparents from Vorarlberg.

  SL

  Ulrike Rylance

  Emma in Buttonland

  Illustrated by Silke Leffler

  Translated from German by Connie Stradling Morby

  CONTENTS

  Nothing but Puzzles

  The Secret Room

  Lady Isolde

  A Child, Not a Button

  Gustav’s Story

  With the Hippies

  The Castaway Bride

  The Mysterious V

  The Literary Quartet

  Good Advice

  Mimi and Kitty

  The Fake Cowboy

  Nasty Mermaids

  Savior in Time of Distress

  At the Tea Party

  Louise’s Fate

  The Velcro Holds It Closed! Hurray!

  Emma’s Wishes

  Emma Straightens Up

  Friends

  NOTHING BUT PUZZLES

  “Children,” Uncle Hubert used to say, “should be seen and not heard.” Then he would almost always let out a giddy laugh and add, “Naturally, it would be best if you didn’t have to see them in the first place.”

  He was a small, fat man with a big mustache, which sat on his upper lip like a furry caterpillar.

  Emma secretly thought that it would have been very pleasant not to have to see Uncle Hubert all the time either, but she didn’t dare say that. After all, that wasn’t very polite; and she was a little bit afraid of Uncle Hubert’s false teeth. Because when her uncle was in a good mood (which was usually the case), or if he bad-mouthed children, sometimes in the heat of the moment his false teeth slipped out. Like a little living creature, they skipped over the table and then lay still somewhere, tipped over on their side. The yellowish teeth looked like the skeleton of a prehistoric fish. The dentures came from Uncle Hubert’s father. Uncle Hubert would never throw out anything that could still be used.

  Then Aunt Mechthild would always say, “Hubert, dear, your teeth.”

  After breakfast, once her uncle had his false teeth clamped firmly in his mouth, he and her aunt would likely start on a puzzle. All their love went to the puzzle pieces. Throughout the years they had put together countless numbers of puzzles, none of them under five thousand pieces. When they were finished with one, Uncle Hubert glued it on a board and hung it up somewhere or other.

  It was very fortunate that they had such an enormous house. Uncle Hubert’s father, the original owner of the false teeth, had been the director of a tin can factory and had bought the twenty-five-room villa. With great foresight, as it turned out, since Uncle Hubert couldn’t throw out a thing; and with Aunt Mechthild putting together one puzzle after another at breakneck speed, they would otherwise never have had room for everything.

  When Emma arrived at the villa a while ago, Aunt Mechthild showed her all the rooms.

  “The stone room, the snail shell room, the ticket room, the eyeglasses room, the perfume sample room, the catalog room, the receipt room, the stamp room, the ballpoint pen room . . . ”

  Aunt Mechthild briefly opened one door after another, so that the bewildered Emma could just catch a glimpse of gigantic piles of snail shells or ballpoint pens or mail order house catalogs before her aunt closed them again, going at full tilt. “The button room,” her aunt just murmured, but didn’t open the door. She looked almost anxious as she said it.

  “What are all of those things?” Emma asked, confused.

  “Things that you find or get for free,” her aunt explained.

  “And what do you plan to do with them?”

  Confronted with this question, Uncle Hubert turned fiery red. “She asked what we plan to do with them? Keep them, of course! You never know what might happen.”

  Emma thought over what might happen and on what occasion a room full of receipts could possibly prove useful, but she was unable to come to a reasonable conclusion. Her aunt and uncle were rather quirky, but Emma didn’t want to contradict them because of how long she had to stay here—until her mother got back from her trip to Africa. That meant until the end of summer vacation. She hoped that her mother would come back sooner. Then they would both finally live at their house again, without puzzles and rooms full of garbage.

  “Who’d like a surprise?” asked Uncle Hubert after breakfast one day.

  “You don’t possibly have . . . ?” asked her aunt, her cheeks red with eager anticipation.

  “Yes, my dear, I do!” Her uncle rubbed his hands together and stomped his feet with excitement. “Twelve thousand pieces, special edition!” He pulled an enormous box from behind the couch. Aunt Mechthild clapped her hands.

  “What kind of theme does the puzzle have?” she asked greedily.

  Uncle Hubert made a dramatic pause.

  “The Black Forrest!” he blurted out, unable to keep his surprise to himself any longer.

  “The Black Forrest!” squeaked Aunt Mechthild with great enthusiasm.

  Emma watched as the two of them tipped all the puzzle pieces onto the floor and tore into them like bloodhounds. Almost all the pieces looked the same and were either dark or light green. Aunt Mechthild’s red hair shone like a campfire in the green jumble. Emma was more bored than she’d ever been in her whole life.

  “I’m going to take a little walk,” she said after a while.

  “Children,” said Uncle Hubert without looking up, “should be seen and not heard.”

  Emma scampered into the hall and, just as she closed the door behind her, a clacking noise sounded in the room.

  “Hubert, dear, your teeth,” she heard her aunt say.

  Emma let out a deep sigh. Now what should she do?

  THE SECRET ROOM

  Emma roamed through the big house. When she passed the open kitchen door, she saw Mrs. Schulz, the plump cook. Mrs. Schulz was sitting on a chair, feet propped on a stool, sleeping with her mouth open. She was wearing weird rolled stockings on her legs, almost like a mummy. “Support stockings,” she had explained to Emma. “To prevent varicose veins when you have to stand so much.”

  Emma didn’t know what varicose veins were; besides, Mrs. Schulz seemed to take care of everything while sitting down anyway. Every so often she trudged, sighing, into the garden to get vegetables or herbs. In the process she always murmured, “What a burden it is, what a burden,” as her mummy stockings rasped as she walked. It sounded like krrrp, krrp, krrp.

  Emma decided not to wake Mrs. Schulz. What good would that do?

  The cook was quite possibly a thousand times more boring than Uncle Hubert and Aunt Mechthild put together. In front of Mrs. Schulz was a bowl of luscious red apples. Pepper, the cook’s gray cat, was lying next to her on the floor. He appeared to be sleeping, too, but as Emma came nearer so she could swipe an apple, he suddenly opened one eye and meowed.

  Mrs. Schulz twitched her eyebrows restlessly and shifted her left leg over her right, making a little krrrp sound.

  Emma decided to skip the apple and tiptoed back to the hall.

  Next to her was the snail shell room. She opened the door and went in. It was deathly still inside and smelled a little musty, like in a museum. Some of the snail shells were very pretty to look at; others were broken or dingy. What was her uncle going to do with them? If only Emma had at least been allowed to use them for some crafts!

  She picked up a little shell. There was something dry inside. She nearly dropped it. How disgusting.

  Something behind her went “Meow.” Pepper had followed her.

  “Hey, Pepper,” said Emma. “Do you feel like playing?”

  Pepper just rubbed against her legs and ran out of the room. “Meow,” he went again, and turned to look at her, almost as if he wanted to tell her something.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she wondered aloud, and followed him curiously. Pepper ran on lithe paws through the long hallway and stopped in front of a door.

  “Meow!” He stood in front of the room that Aunt Mechthild had called the “button room,” but whose door she hadn’t opened.

  “Yes, the button room. So what? Just more boring knickknacks,” said Emma.

  Pepper laughed.

  Emma gaped at him in astonishment.

  No, she thought, of course he didn’t laugh; how could he have done that? After all, cats can’t laugh. And yet it seemed to Emma that someone very close by was snickering quietly.

  “Did you say something?” she asked Pepper suspiciously, feeling quite silly. Good thing that nobody could hear her.

  Pepper certainly did not look at all cheerful—quite the opposite. He ran back and forth nervously in front of the door and kept scratching at the wood.

  “You want to go in, is that it?” asked Emma again. “I’m not sure if we’re allowed. Aunt Mechthild didn’t say anything, but she didn’t open this door either.” She thought it over. Why was that?

  In the meantime, Pepper was behaving like a crazy rubber ball. He flung himself with all his might against the door and yowled and meowed for all he was worth. There was a very clear rustling behind the door now.

  Suddenly, Emma understood. There were mice inside! And Aunt Mechthild was terrified of them; that’s why she hadn’t opened the door.

  Or was it . . . Emma’s breath caught. Was it rats, maybe? But rats . . . did rats laugh? No, the idea was simply too ludicrous.

>   “Pepper,” she said decisively. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  Emma turned the doorknob.

  The door was locked.

  That was odd. All the other rooms in the house were open. Could her aunt be so deathly afraid of mice that she had locked the door? And where was the key?

  It occurred to Emma that Mrs. Schulz owned a big key ring.

  “You wait here!” she ordered Pepper, so that he didn’t wake the cook with his yowling.

  Mrs. Schulz was still sitting on her chair; now, there were little whistling sounds coming out of her mouth. The key ring was hanging on the belt of her apron. Carefully, Emma began to untie the bow. There was a soft jangling. Mrs. Schulz gasped for breath, murmured, “It’s a burden, a miserable burden it is,” and dozed off again.

  Emma scampered back to the mysterious room and started trying the keys. The fourth one fit.

  “Well, Pepper, here we go,” she said, and opened the door. Pepper shot into the room like a bolt of lightning, and although there was no light on, Emma could see something tiny dash over the floor. So it was mice!

  “Eeew!” she squeaked, horrified. But wait, the crawling thing was too little to be a mouse; perhaps it was a spider?

  Emma quickly hit the light switch on the wall with her hand. There was nothing more to be seen. Only countless boxes full of buttons. There must have been thousands, in all colors and sizes.

  Without moving, Pepper, however, sat as though hypnotized in front of a corner cabinet and stared at something under it.

  “Pepper, come here,” scolded Emma. “There’s nothing there!” She’d probably been mistaken; at any rate there were no spiders or mice here. When the cat didn’t react, she lay down on her stomach and took a look for herself. “So, what’s the matter?” She could see something gold twinkling under the cabinet. A coin? No, something else. She squinted. Then she recognized it.

  “That’s a button, you silly old cat. You can’t eat that. Do you want to choke?”

  Shaking her head, she pushed the animal aside. She looked around. The buttons were much more beautiful than the junk in the other rooms. It didn’t smell so musty in here, either.

  The cat was driving her crazy. He was acting like he was going to die if he didn’t get the golden button under the cabinet right away! Again and again he stretched his paw toward it longingly. Emma lifted the fidgeting animal and put it down in front of the door in the hall.

  “You wait here,” she said firmly. “I want to look at the buttons in peace. And don’t you dare wake Mrs. Schulz!”

  Pepper looked mortally offended. Back in the button room, Emma closed the door behind her and took the box that was lying closest to her on a table. Inside, there were tiny buttons in all different colors. They were barely bigger than the nail on Emma’s pinky. Some were shaped like little flowers.

  Suddenly, she had an idea. She would play with the buttons! If there was no dollhouse here, at least she could play school with the tiny objects.

  She sorted out a handful of little flower buttons. “You’re the girls,” she said. “And you,” she reached into the box again, “are the boys.” The boys were blue or gray or black. She placed all the students in a row.

  Now all she needed was a teacher. The big gold button under the cabinet crossed her mind. It reminded her of her nice teacher at home, Mrs. Melzer. She liked to wear gold jewelry, too, and was a little chubby. Emma lay down on her stomach again and tried to grab the button, but without success.

  “Well, come here,” gasped Emma. “You’re going to be the teacher! I’m going to call you Mrs. Melzer!”

  Then something strange happened. The button ran away! It didn’t roll; no, it ran on two tiny legs into the farthest corner under the cabinet where there were a bunch of dust bunnies.

  What was going on here?

  “Mrs. Melzer?” whispered Emma.

  The button came back at once. To her amazement, she noticed that it also had two tiny arms and stood with its hands on its hips.

  And then the unbelievable happened; the button began to talk!

  “Those aren’t students, you silly thing,” said the golden button. “Those are just plastic buttons! And I’m no teacher! And will you stop calling me Mrs. Melzer; what kind of a ridiculous name is that?”

  Startled, Emma jumped and whammed her head on the cabinet.

  “Ow, that must have hurt!” exclaimed the button.

  “Wh, wh, what?” stammered Emma. “You can talk?” Carefully she extended her little finger toward the gold button.

  “And speak to me politely,” screeched the button. “I’m an aristocrat!”

  “An aristocrat,” repeated Emma, stunned. I’m talking with a button, she thought. Obviously, I’ve gone completely crazy. I’ve probably seen too many little puzzle pieces.

  Or, was it some kind of magic?

  Whatever it was, she had to have this talking button. It was the best thing she’d come across so far in this boring house. Longingly, she thrust her hand under the cabinet the way the cat had done before.

  Her arm was longer than Pepper’s. She stretched out her fingers.

  Finally!

  The moment she touched the button, a strange whirring noise began, as if a storm were sweeping through the room.

  Suddenly it got dark.

  LADY ISOLDE

  Emma opened her eyes. All around her it was light again. Where was she? There were odd little houses here, painted in every color possible. Everything was so colorful! Even the road on which she was standing was bright blue with pretty white designs. The road seemed familiar, but the town was completely strange. And anyway—how could she be in a strange town when she had just crawled under the cabinet? Not far from her something sparkled in the sunlight. It was an unbelievably fat lady in a magnificent golden bubble dress.

  “Hello?” Emma called tentatively.

  The lady stared at her, but didn’t answer. She wiped her face with a golden handkerchief. Even her skin had a metallic shimmer.

  “Are you a neighbor of Aunt Mechthild’s?” asked Emma.

  The golden lady snorted with disdainful laughter.

  “Neighbor? That’ll be the day! I live alone! What kind of a button are you?”

  “Button?” Emma blinked in confusion. What kind of a question was that?

  “Button?” mimicked the lady. “Of course, button. What else? Earthworm maybe?” She chuckled as though it were a good joke, then took a step toward Emma.

  “I’m not a button,” answered Emma.

  “Not a button? Not a button!” The lady dropped her handkerchief in shock.

  “Are you a button?” asked Emma cautiously. When talking to lunatics, you always had to pretend to believe them, at least that was what she had heard.

  “Address me politely!” bellowed the lady. “I’m an aristocrat! Lady Isolde is my name!”

  All of a sudden Emma felt like somebody had opened a curtain. Of course—she was speaking with the button that had been under the cabinet! The button had claimed to be aristocratic too. There was no other explanation. Somehow, Emma had shrunk and was now having a conversation with the big, round, gold button.

  “Where am I?” she asked, bewildered.

  “Braid Street, see. What did you mean, you’re not a button, hmm?”

  The lady came closer and blinked with curiosity at Emma. There was something about her expression that Emma did not like at all.

  Isolde bent forward. “Are you perhaps . . . ” She became quiet, took a quick glance from right to left, and whispered, “Are you perhaps a stone?”

  Emma shook her head. “Of course not. I’m a girl. My name is Emma.”

  Isolde looked at her, agape. Emma could see that even her eyes and eyelashes were golden.

  “Ah!” Isolde’s sudden cry was so loud that Emma reeled back in alarm and fell on her butt.

  “Are you kidding me? A girl? Do you think that I’ve never seen a girl in my two hundred years? They’re gigantic! Gigantic! Not as gigantic as their parents, but, nevertheless, not as tiny as you! I know exactly what you are. You’re a stone. Or even worse, a cherry pit. Ugh, yuck. I’m going to report you!”