Sunday fiction: Hans and Lotte’s Big Adventure

A story for children, by Andrew McKenna

A strange thing happened to her when she was about half way through the piece – her feet lifted off the ground. She panicked for a moment and stopped playing, and her feet touched the floor again. She cleared her throat and looked around the room, as if someone might be playing a dirty trick on her, but no, no one was there. She could hear Hilde doing Parting Wild Horse’s Mane in the lounge room in her Calamity Jane outfit, Hans licking out the honey jar, and Dieter clicking away happily at the blue patches of sky. She recommenced where she’d left off, a little cautious this time, and as the notes glided around the room, she took off again. With her heart in her mouth, she kept playing, and this time she rose well up off the floor, started flying in graceful little curves and arcs around her room.

**

Hans and Lotte lived in a small apartment with their parents overlooking the church and the Platz in Breitenfelder Straße in Leipzig. Hans, who loved sticky cakes, was very fat. He went to bakeries all over town and bought all the sticky cakes he could afford: apfelstreusel, möhnstreusel, pflaumenkuchen, käsekuchen, Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, Münchner Biercreme and more. All were smothered in icing sugar, the thicker the better (usually he asked for extra) and Hans would moan, in his high-pitched, squeaky little voice, ‘Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm, these are absolutely nice!’

Often, swarms of wasps would follow him around town, attracted by the sweet smells coming from his pockets and the luscious fruity syrup dripping on the ground behind him as he waddled along. He would yell, ‘Ach!’ and run from them, dodging trams, street sweepers and other children who called him Fatty Hans.

He would find a quiet, dark alleyway where he would stuff them into his fat mouth, one after the other, jam one in before he’d swallowed the last one, so that his cheeks ballooned out and he looked like Dizzie Gillespe playing the trumpet.

Lotte wanted to learn how to fly. Ever since she was a little girl she had wanted to fly. Not in an aeroplane, but like a bird, flapping her arms till they would lift her off the ground like a real bird.

‘Don’t be so doof, Lotte!’ Hans would say, smearing whipped cream on his chin. ‘You can’t fly!

‘Shut up Hans,’ Lotte would say back to him, ‘and get out of here. These wasps are annoying me and I can’t practise the violin.’

‘Und what do you want to fly for, Lotte? It’s such a stupid thing!’

‘Yes I want to fly, little pig, because nobody else can.’

‘Ach!’ said Hans. ‘This is so doof!’

‘If you stopped chewing for a minute and listened, you might realise that it might help you as well.

‘Oh? How?’ he would ask, purposely letting syrup from one of his sticky cakes drip on her pillow.

‘It might give you something to think about other than your stomach and help you escape from the wasps!’

‘But I’m too fat to fly, Lotte!’

‘Now you’re the one being doof, Hans. Anyone can fly. Now stop dripping treacle on my head cushion and get out of here so I can finish my practice!’

Hans and Lotte’s parents, Hilde and Dieter, worried about Hans when they thought about it, and encouraged Lotte when they thought about that, sometimes even when they heard her playing the violin. But mostly they were caught up in their own problems. Hilde held down a high pressure job as a nuclear scientist during the week, and she practised Tai Chi twice a day for her nerves. She was also a member of the local Karl May society. On weekends, she would dress up in her Calamity Jane cowboy costume and loaf around with her friends Iris Mehring and Lili Scmidl, who both also dressed up as cowgirls, at the society’s saloon, talking about roping steers and chasing Indians. Hilde dreamed of going to Montana.

Dieter had worked for the State Photographic Laboratories in Leipzig, but since the reunification of Germany he had lost his job. He played Bach at the church down the road on the massive organ for Sunday church services and for the odd recital. He was very good, and was proud to boast that Bach had been choirmaster in the same church where he now played. But mostly, he spent his time down at the local council estate vegetable gardens, watching his sunflowers grow, letting the clouds drift by, talking to his neighbours about compost and baffling them with his theories of postmodernism.

By her ninth birthday, Lotte decided that she was going to get serious about flying. Reading stories about the Red Baron wouldn’t be enough, and nor would just watching the stars. She bought a season ticket to the zoo and went every day after school, come rain, hail or shine. She watched the parrots and woodpeckers, looked at the ducks and swans, saw the hummingbirds and magpies, but most of all she liked the eagles. She loved to stand outside their enormous cage, and way up high see them adjusting their nest, hopping around their platform or fluffing up their feathers. She took Dieter’s telephoto sometimes and snapped pictures of them. They didn’t fly so much as glide without effort. They didn’t need to flap their wings as much as flick their heads. Lotte thought about that a lot. She decided flight, then, was more about a state of mind than a matter of aerodynamics.

One day after school she was making her way to the eagles’ cage, when she heard running footsteps accompanied by the angry buzzing of wasps behind her. She turned, and there was Hans, red faced but for the whipped cream smeared on his cheeks, and running hysterically from a swarm of angry yellow wasps. In his pudgy hands he held two glistening möhnstreusels, both dripping sticky syrup and billowing clouds of icing sugar behind them.

‘Help me Lotte!’ he called, out of breath. He stopped in the middle of the path and did a crazy little war dance, just like an Apache Indian, and Lotte stepped back, bewildered.

‘They’re going to get me this time for sure!’ he yelped. ‘Ach!’ he screamed as he shook a stray wasp out from under his red cap. And with that he shoved one möhnstreusel in one side of his mouth and the second in the other side, and suddenly the wasps stopped chasing him, and buzzed uncertainly above their heads, unsure now where the sticky cakes had gone.

‘You’re so doof, Hans,’ Lotte said. ‘What are you doing here?’

But Hans couldn’t talk, his mouth was too plugged up. Spying a tap nearby she dragged her brother over to it by the wrist, and washed his face and hands. The wasps gradually flew away as she led him towards the eagles.

‘You can come with me to the eagles, but you are trying my patience. Then we have to be getting home. Me to my practice, and you to … ja … to grow a new brain.’

Hans struggled violently, went even more red in the face, then swallowed hard and said in a whingeing, whining voice, ‘Ach, Lotte, that’s not so funny! You always tease me and it’s not, strictly speaking, absolutely nice! And I’ll tell Hilde and Dieter!’

‘Shoosh,’ she said, ‘you’ll disturb the eagles.’

They had by now drawn up to the eagles’ airey, and they stood watching for a while. As they stood there, one of the eagles swooped down, snatched Hans’ hat from off his head through the wire mesh, and carried it back to the nest, fifty metres above their heads.

He’d nearly stopped crying by the time they reached home. Passing by JS Bach’s statue hadn’t stopped his wailing, hearing the choir practising one of the cantatas in the church hadn’t stopped his snivelling, passing the site of Bach’s house in the platz hadn’t stopped his tears, but when Lotte went into a bakery and bought him the biggest piece of käsekuchen he’d eaten all day, he calmed down and his wails turned into snuffles as he stuck his face into the bag of cake.

Hilde was practising her tai chi moves in the middle of the lounge room when they got home, dressed in her Calamity Jane outfit, and Dieter was hanging out of the kitchen window, taking pictures of the blue parts of the sky.

‘Ja, I’m going to stick them together and make a collage representing the postmodernist confluence of cultural gestalt and synchronous occurences of rainbows,’ he said to no one in particular.

‘Sounds good, papi,’ Lotte said, retiring to her room to practise. Hans stood in one corner of the kitchen with his hands in the honey jar, letting Dieter prattle on about whatever it was he prattled on about.

In her room, Lotte thought about how annoying Hans was and how Hilde and Dieter never seemed to take any notice of what she did. She threw her window open and crouched on her windowsill for a while, flapping her arms and squawking like a parrot, but she didn’t rise off the sill one centimetre. Old Frau Becker from next door was hanging out of her window calling her cat:

‘Come here, Schätzi! Here Schätzi!’ and she gave Lotte a very queer look as she squawked like a parrot. Lotte stuck her tongue out and jumped back into her room, took up her violin and began her practice. She thought about the statue of JS Bach she passed every day, and how bright and light it made her feel, and after her scales, she launched into Sheep May Safely Graze.

It was her favourite piece, and it made her think of fluffy white sheep grazing on a hillside, so fluffy and white they were like clouds flitting by in one of Dieter’s collages.

A strange thing happened to her when she was about half way through the piece – her feet lifted off the ground. She panicked for a moment and stopped playing, and her feet touched the floor again. She cleared her throat and looked around the room, as if someone might be playing a dirty trick on her, but no, no one

was there. She could hear Hilde doing Parting Wild Horse’s Mane in the lounge room in her Calamity Jane outfit, Hans licking out the honey jar, and Dieter clicking away happily at the blue patches of sky. She recommenced where she’d left off, a little cautious this time, and as the notes glided around the room, she took off again. With her heart in her mouth, she kept playing, and this time she rose well up off the floor, started flying in graceful little curves and arcs around her room.

‘Ach!’ she said, mimicking Hans. ‘This is unbelievable! This is completely unbelievable!!’

At the end of the piece she floated gracefully to the floor, just like a linden tree leaf floating down outside in Breitenfelder Straße. Her heart was beating so hard she had to lean against her music stand to catch her breath, and shake her head and wonder whether it had happened at all. Outside, Frau Becker still called for Schätzi, the birds twittered and she could hear Hans scraping at the honey jar out in the kitchen.

Lotte flicked through her music book and, stopping at Arioso, she decided she would try again.

Sure enough, and the moment her bow touched the strings this time, she lifted off the floor. She was flying! She had never felt so inspired, and the music that came from her violin was the best she had ever played. She was floating above her bed and concentrating on the ceiling when she heard the bedroom door open behind her. She looked down, and there was Hans, honey dripping down his chin and under his collar, saying, ‘Ach! Lotte, is this not a little bit wonderful?’ Hilde was there in her Calamity Jane outfit, a six shooter at her side, and she said, ‘But, Lotte, this is unbelievable! You must come to the clubroom on the weekend and show the other gals!’

Dieter was there, crowding in the doorway as well, of course, and he was saying, ‘I’m absolutely proud of you Lotte! You fly therefore you must be!’ and he snapped away at her with his camera. ‘I’ll put you in my next collage! Have you been reading my critique of Wittgenstein? What we are seeing here is an experience that possesses qualities as a whole that cannot be described merely as the sum of their parts. No!!’

Lotte had by now finished her piece and had drifted back to the bedroom floor, but she was feeling out of sorts. Her stupid family had spoiled the atmosphere, and she stood looking at them with a worried look on her face.

‘How do you do it?’ Hans squeaked. ‘It was absolutely … really … nice! Give me! Give me!’ Lotte’s eyes flicked to a couple of wasps that were going for her head cushion where Hans had spilt honey. She was very annoyed now, so she took up her bow and started playing again. As she did, two things happened at once. A gust of wind blew open her bedroom window, where only a few minutes before she had been squawking like a parrot. And Hans ran forward to grab her violin, tripped and got horribly tangled in her music stand. As he fell, his mouth got even more horribly tangled in Lotte’s shoelaces, the braces on his teeth caught fast in them like a fly to flypaper.

As Lotte lifted off the floor this time, she headed straight for the open window, and poor Hans trailed along behind her, dragged by the braces on his teeth.

Hilde and Dieter stood in the middle of the room, open mouthed, and waved goodbye to Hans and Lotte. As Hans’ feet disappeared out the window, Hilde turned to Dieter and said, ‘Ach, Schätzi, they’ll be all right. Will you play Billy the Kid at the Club this weekend? If we do a good performance at the OK Saloon for the national competition, we could win a trip to Montana! You know I’ve been wanting this for years!’

‘Ach,’ Dieter replied, ‘yes of course, sweetie, but only if you pose for my next exhibition piece.’ And so saying they kissed like two adolescents in love and ran into their bedroom.

**

‘Ach!’ shouted Hans as they floated off over Breitenfelder Strasse. ‘I’n tangled in oor shoelates, Lotte!’ he cried as the wind billowed in his hair and through his clothes.

‘Did id nod do nuch hum edy moo!’ (‘This is not so much fun any more!’) He swung his arms wildly to keep his balance, and Lotte said;

‘Hold still, stupid, or you’ll drop off. In fact,’ she added, ‘maybe I should drop you off!’

‘Ach!’ he squeaked. ‘Tlead on’t oo at! Tlead, Lokkie! I’ll lud you to eder and eder! I won’t be oof edy moo! I pronit!’ (‘Please don’t do that! Please Lotte! I’ll love you for ever and ever! I won’t be doof any more! I promise!’)

‘Well, all right,’ she said, ‘but you have to shut up for a while. You’re always opening your stupid little mouth, Hans, and if it’s not to shove something in it it’s to say something stupid. Just listen to the music and be quiet.’

Hans wriggled uncomfortably but didn’t say any more for the time being. He tried to listen to the Andante from Bach’s Italian Concerto that Lotte was playing, but as they flew up over the city, they came by the zoo, and Hans couldn’t help himself. He spied his favourite red hat sitting up in the eagles’ airey.

‘Lokkie!’ he called. ‘Ny kak!’

‘Your what?’ she asked him, pausing in her playing so that they started to drift downwards.

‘Ny kak! The eagers god id!’

‘I can’t understand a word you say, you nasty little brat, and you’re interfering with my playing. I’ll kick you loose.’

‘No, no, Lokkie. Ny kak! Ny led kak!’

‘All right, I know what you want. Your red hat. But first you have to empty your pockets. If you want your hat back you have to empty your pockets.’

‘Ach, no, Lokkie, tlead! No ny dicky caket! Tlead, anythink ut dat!’

‘All right, bye bye!’ she said, and kicked her feet back and forth trying to shake him loose. He swung around wildly in the wind, flinging his arms this way and that to try and hang on, and he could feel the shoelaces slipping through his braces. He panicked.

‘Al light, Lokkie!’ he said, and turned out his pockets.

It was getting on for dusk over Leipzig, and a crowd of children below had stopped on their way home from school to watch the strange sight and listen to the beautiful music in the sky. While they watched, they saw the fat boy hanging by his mouth from the shoes of a girl playing the violin, both of them swinging around through the air. They heard him squealing but couldn’t understand a word over the beautiful violin music, and besides, it sounded like gibberish to them anyway. Suddenly, it started snowing. It was getting on towards winter, and it had been a very cold autumn, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky so they thought it strange. But snow it was, drifting down out of the sky and shrouding everything – cars, houses, trees, the road – in a thick, white, glittering blanket. The children ran around and gathered up snowballs and threw them at one another, screaming with laughter, till one little girl was hit in the face by one. Licking her lips, she yelled to the others, ‘It’s not snow, it’s icing sugar!’

They all scooped some up and held it to their mouths, and most of them said, ‘Mmm mmm mmm, this is absolutely nice!’

The snow had no sooner stopped than a light rain started falling, melting the icing sugar away in sweet sticky puddles just as the children began building snowmen.

‘Das ist nicht regen!’ a little boy shouted gleefully as he licked some of the rain off his hand. ‘This is not rain! It’s treacle!’

‘No it’s not!’ another squealed. ‘It’s honey!’

‘Das ist kein honig!’ squeaked the first little girl. ‘It’s not honey! It’s the fruity syrup off a möhnstreusel!’

All the children in the street had come out now, and they squealed and laughed in delight as the contents of Hans’ pockets showered down on them, a thick, syrupy sweet juice from all the sticky buns and cakes he’d had in his pockets over the years. They ran squealing for joy and smearing it all over their faces and clothes, till their parents came out into the street and shouted, ‘Come in Ernst! Put it down, Ingmar! Wash your face, Wolfgang! Wipe your sticky hands, Gertemünde! It’s all in your hair, little Hermann! Ach, you’ve ruined your new skirt, Traudl!’

Meanwhile, Lotte played away on her violin, and Hans had managed to grab hold of her ankles. He felt a little more secure, now, and also a lot lighter than he had – lighter than he had in years, if he admitted the truth – after emptying his pockets. He untangled Lotte’s shoelaces from his braces and said, ‘All right, Lotte, I’ve done it! I’ve emptied my pockets, and it was absolutely nice, so now do you think we could go and get my red hat?’

‘Oh, all right, little pest,’ said Lotte, and she came to a slow movement in the piece she was playing and they drifted down to the eagles’ airey. They alighted on the top of the cage and Hans reached in and pulled his hat out from the eagles’ nest.

‘What are you doing?’ asked the eagle, whose name was Bud.

‘Wass?’ said Hans, startled to hear the eagle talking to him.

‘My German ist not zo gut,’ Bud continued in a strong American accent, ‘so you’ll have to talk slowly please.’

‘I didn’t know eagles could talk!’ said Lotte, nearly as startled as Hans.

‘Ja, und I didn’t know German children could fly,’ said Mary-Lou, Bud’s companion, who had landed on the perch and was watching them out of her beady yellow eyes.

‘Well, this is not so normal,’ squeaked Hans, ‘but Lotte just learned how to do it, und zo! Here we are!’

He was feeling most uncomfortable, and a little bit silly, sitting on top of the cage and talking to two eagles, when really, all he wanted to do was retrieve his red hat and go home and eat some käsekuchen.

‘Well, I decided I wanted to fly and I thought hard about it,’ said Lotte, and here we are.’ She blushed as Bud and Mary Lou fluffed their feathers and looked hard at her. ‘But wass, how can you talk! It’s completely unbelievable!’

‘And wha should that be so hard for us, darlin’?’ asked Mary Lou, who came from Texas. She scratched her belly vigorously with her yellow clawed foot. ‘We kinda done the same thing. We wanted to do it, and well, here we are, passin’ the time o’ day with y’all.’

‘Let’s go, Lotte,’ whined Hans. ‘These eagles are really doof!’

‘How ‘bout y’all do us a teensy weensy favour?’ said Mary Lou, ignoring him. Hans and Lotte stared hard at the eagles now, and it was their turn to fluff their feathers and shift uncomfortably on their perches.

‘Ja, it’s no big favour,’ continued Bud. ‘You see that door over there?’ he said, indicating a door in the cage a few metres away from them.

‘Ja, I see it,’ said Hans uncertainly.

‘Well, y’all just go over and pull the teensy weensy little latch, honey pie,’ said Mary Lou in her sweetest, southern belle kind of voice. ‘And then we’ll go for a little flap a do with y’all over Leipzig.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ gulped Hans, feeling he was going to start crying soon. He was hungry and a feeling bit dizzy from being so high up.

‘Ja, certainly it can’t do you any harm,’ said Bud. ‘And then if you like, I’ll show you Montana’

‘Where is Montana?’ asked Lotte, her eyes wide.

‘It’s where big Buddy boy comes from,’ said Mary Lou in an adoring kind of voice, ‘and he’s allus wanted ta show me his home town, din’t you, darlin’?’

The two eagles snuggled up next to one another and looked at Hans and Lotte in such a way that neither of them could resist their request.

‘Well, all right,’ sighed Lotte, ‘but only if you don’t tell anyone.’

‘Ja, natuurlich,’ said Bud in his best German. ‘Yes, of course.’

Lotte scrambled over the wire and pulled the latch, and the gate sprang open. Bud and Mary Lou hopped to the entrance, and if eagles could grin, Hans and Lotte thought they were grinning their broadest grins. They spread their considerable wings, gave each other a quick little preen by the throat and they left. Lotte quickly hitched Hans’ belt buckle to the bow of her violin and started playing Bach’s Ave Maria, and they took off after the eagles.

‘This oof! is most oof! uncomfortable Lo ooof! Lotte!’ Hans complained, getting dug in his belly each time she bowed her violin.

‘All right, Hans, climb onto my shoulders,’ she said, releasing his belt buckle. He nearly fell and they drifted down a little as she slowed her playing, but he soon managed to clamber over her shoulders and perch there, like a big parakeet with a red hat on, his hands clinging to Lotte’s face to keep his balance.

‘Keep your hands out of my eyes, little pest,’ she said, as she bowed harder and kicked her legs so they caught up quickly with Bud and Mary Lou. The two eagles were having a ball, soaring around the towers and rooftops of Leipzig. They flew past the church, hovered over the statue of Johann Sebastian Bach for a while and conferred together.

‘Ja, und why don’t you come with us to Montana?’ asked Bud.

‘Sure it ain’t that far, honey pies,’ said Mary Lou, ‘once we catch a few westerlies why, we’ll be there before y’all can say diddly squat.’

‘I want a käsekuchen!’ wailed Hans.

‘Shoosh, pest,’ said Lotte. ‘You would really take us to Montana with you?’ she asked them.

‘It would be our pleasure,’ said Bud, ‘a favour returned for the favour of releasing us from our cage.’

‘I’m for it!’ exclaimed Lotte, finishing Ave Maria and commencing Bach’s Violin Concerto in A Minor (Allegro Assai).

‘But I want a cake, Lotte!’ wailed Hans, now feeling desperate and miserable.

‘All right, I’ve been saving one,’ said Lotte, and she reached into her pocket and handed him an apfelstreusel. With whipped cream.

‘Mmmmmmmmmmn this is ABSOLUTELY NICE,’ he said, sticking his face into the sweet, sticky cake.

So they took off. They took a few shortcuts, skipped the Eiffel Tower and caught some good thermals over the Atlantic. New York was beautiful from the air at night, and La Guardia Airport air traffic controllers reported two eagles and two German children – one of them playing what sounded like a movement from the Brandenburg Concerto No 3 on her violin – flying by. By the time CNN had arrived, though, the four of them were somewhere over Illinois. Mid morning the next day saw them over the Big Sky country of Montana.

That weekend, Dieter and Hilde won the national Karl May competition for their performance of Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane at the OK Saloon. Hilde’s dreams came true and they won their trip to Montana.

As they packed that night, their flat was strangely quiet.

‘You know, Dieti,’ Hilde said, ‘I feel something’s missing.’

‘Ach, you’re right!’ said Dieter. ‘I’ve left out my copy of La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre. Thank you for reminding me.’

‘No, it’s not quite this,’ said Hilde, puzzled. ‘It’s, as if, there hasn’t been anyone around here for a few days.’

Dieter scratched his head. ‘Ach, you’re right again. I had to cancel my collective group meeting this Thursday night, so none of the boys came over as usual.’

‘Yes, maybe this is it,’ sighed Hilde, but she was still a little uneasy. They caught the bus to the airport that night and left for Montana on the 11pm flight.

They caught up with Hans, Lotte, Bud and Mary Lou out on the plains. Bud and Mary Lou were soaring up high, no more than tiny dots really, and Hans and Lotte were gliding around for the sheer joy of it no more than twenty metres off the ground.

‘Dieti!’ exclaimed Hilde. ‘I know what it was! What we were missing back in Leipzig!’

‘Ach, you’re right again,’ said Dieter. ‘This beautiful violin music, these sticky crumbs falling out of the sky, it could only be …’

And as they looked up, Hans and Lotte glided down to meet them, ten thousand kilometres from home but happy to be together again under the big sky country of Montana.

‘MMMMM, this is absolutely nice,’ they all said together, and Bud and Mary Lou gave each other a little peck on the beak.