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Original text copyright © 2013 the estate of Michael Ende

Translation copyright © 2013 Lucas Zwirner

Cover & interior drawings copyright © 2013 Marcel Dzama

All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

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McSweeney’s McMullens and colophon are copyright © 2013, McSweeney’s McMullens

ebook ISBN: 978-1-938073-99-1

PART ONE

Momo and her friends

CHAPTER ONE

A big city and a little girl

Long, long ago, when people spoke different languages from the ones we speak today, many magnificent cities flourished in the warmer parts of the world. There were large palaces for kings and emperors; there were broad streets, narrow alleyways, and winding lanes; there were marvelous temples, decorated with gold and marble statues of gods; there were bustling markets where people sold wares from far and wide; and there were big, beautiful squares where people gathered to discuss the news and give speeches or listen to them. But above all, there were large theaters.

These theaters looked the way circuses look today, except that they were built entirely out of stone. The seats for spectators were arranged in the shape of an enormous crater lined with rows that circled upward like a winding staircase. Seen from above, some of the theaters looked round, while others were more oval, and still others formed wide semicircles. These last ones—the semicircles—were called amphitheaters.

There were large amphitheaters, as big as football stadiums, and smaller ones that could hold only a few hundred people. Some were lavishly decorated with columns and statues, and others were plain and unadorned. These amphitheaters didn’t have roofs, so everything took place under the sky. This was why, in the more luxurious ones, there were awnings made of gold-laced brocade that spanned the rows of seats, protecting the public from the harsh heat of the sun or from a sudden downpour. In the simple theaters, mats made out of cattail and straw served the same purpose. The theaters matched what people could afford, and everyone wanted one because they were all passionate speakers and listeners. When they saw exciting or amusing events being acted out on the stage, it was as if, in some mysterious way, the make-believe lives that they saw before them were more real than their own everyday lives. And they loved to watch and listen in on this other reality.

Thousands of years have gone by since then. Most of the great cities from those times have eroded; the temples and palaces have crumbled. Wind and rain, cold and heat, have ground down and hollowed out the stones, and even in the case of the big theaters, only ruins remain. In the broken walls, cicadas sing their monotonous songs, and it sounds like the earth is breathing in its sleep.

But some of these ancient cities have survived up to this very day. Life in them has changed, of course. People drive around in cars or buses, and they have telephones and electric lights. But here and there, scattered among the newer buildings, a few structures from the old days can still be seen—an arch, a piece of wall, or even an amphitheater.

Momo’s story took place in one of these cities.

At the southern edge of this big city, where the first fields began and the huts became shabbier and more run-down, the ruins of an amphitheater lay hidden in a small pine forest. Even in old times it wasn’t one of the magnificent ones; even then, it was a place for poor people to entertain themselves, and at the time when Momo’s story began, the ruin was almost entirely forgotten. Only a few professors of antiquity knew about it, but they didn’t bother with it anymore because there was nothing left to discover. It wasn’t the kind of attraction that could rival others in the big city either, so the few lost tourists who stumbled upon it every now and then merely clambered across the overgrown rows of seats, made noise, snapped photographs, and left again. Then silence would return to the stone semicircle and the cicadas would sing the next verse of their endless song, which was never any different from the preceding one.

Only the people from the nearby surroundings really knew of the strange, circular construction. They let their goats graze there, their children played ball on the round stage, and sometimes two lovebirds would meet there in the evening.

One day, though, rumors began to spread that something was living in the old amphitheater. It was a child, a small girl supposedly, but no one knew for sure because it was quite strangely dressed. It was called Momo, or something similar.

Momo looked more than a little bizarre, and her appearance could easily shock the kind of people who hold cleanliness and neatness in high regard. She was so small and skinny that people couldn’t tell, even when they tried their hardest, whether she was eight or already twelve. She had a wild, jet-black mop of curly hair that looked like it had never been touched by brush or scissors. She had large, beautiful, obsidian eyes, and because she was always barefoot, she had black feet the same color as her hair. She sometimes wore shoes in the winter, but it was a mismatched pair that was much too big for her. This was because Momo didn’t own anything apart from what she found lying around or had been given as a gift. Her skirt was made of many different colorful swatches of fabric sewn together, and it reached all the way down to her ankles. She wore an old men’s jacket on top of that, which was much too wide for her, and she rolled the sleeves up at her wrists. As a precaution, Momo hadn’t cut the sleeves because she wisely recognized that she would probably still grow, and who knew if she would ever again find such a beautiful and practical jacket with so many pockets.

There were a few collapsed chambers under the overgrown stage of the ruined amphitheater that could be reached through a hole in the outer wall, and it was in one of these that Momo decided to make her home.

One afternoon, a few people from the neighborhood came by and tried to talk to her. Because she was worried that they would chase her away, Momo stood across from them, glaring apprehensively, but she soon realized that these were friendly people who were poor like her, and who knew the hardships of life.

“So,” said one of the men, “you like it here?”

“Yes,” answered Momo.

“And you want to stay here?”

“Yes, please.”

“But aren’t you supposed to be somewhere?”

“No.”

“I mean, don’t you have to go back home?”

“This is my home,” Momo quickly assured them.

“But where are you from?”

Momo made an ambiguous movement with her hand, which seemed to suggest somewhere in the distance.

“Who are your parents, then?” the man persisted.

Momo looked helplessly from him to the others and shrugged her shoulders a little. The people looked at one another and sighed.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” the man continued. “We don’t want to chase you away. We only want to help you.”

Momo nodded silently but wasn’t quite convinced yet.

“Your name is Momo, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a pretty name, but I’ve never heard it before. Who named you that?”

“I did.”

“You named yourself that?”

“Yes.”

“When were you born?”

Momo thought about this. “As far as I can remember,” she finally said, “I’ve always been here.”

“Don’t you have an aunt or an uncle, or a grandmother, or any family at all who you could stay with?”

Momo only looked at the man in silence for a while. Then she murmured, “This is my home.”

“Well that’s all good and fine,” the man reckoned, “but you’re still a child. How old are you?”

Momo balked. “A hundred,” she said hesitantly.

The people laughed because they thought she was joking.

“Seriously, how old are you?”

“A hundred and two,” answered Momo, still more uncertain.

It took a while for the people to realize that she only knew a few numbers—ones she had picked up in conversation—but she didn’t know exactly what any of them meant because no one had taught her how to count.

“Listen,” said the man after consulting the others. “Would you mind if we told the police that you’re here? Then you’d go to a children’s home where you’ll get food and a bed, and where you’ll learn to do math and read and write, and much more. What would you think about that, eh?”

Momo looked up at him in horror.

“No,” she whispered. “I don’t want to go there. I’ve already been to one of those places. Other kids were also there. There were bars over the windows, and every day we were scolded for no reason. One night I slipped over the wall and ran away. I don’t ever want to go back there.”

“I can understand that,” said an old man, nodding, and the other people nodded as well.

“Okay, fine,” said a woman. “But you’re still so little. Somebody has to take care of you.”

“I’ll take care of myself,” answered Momo.

“Can you?” asked the woman.

Momo didn’t answer at once. Then she said softly, “I don’t need much.”

The people exchanged glances again, sighed, and nodded.

“You know what, Momo?” the man who had spoken first began again. “We were thinking you might want to stay with one of us. We don’t have much room ourselves, and most of us already have a bunch of kids to feed, but at this point one more won’t really make a difference. What do you say?”

“Thanks,” Momo said, smiling for the first time. “Thanks a lot. But couldn’t you just let me live here?”

The people argued back and forth for a while, deliberating, but finally they agreed. Here, they reasoned, the child could live just as well as with any of them, and here they could all take care of her together. In any case, it would be easier for all of them than for one person alone.

They immediately began to help by cleaning up Momo’s dilapidated stone dungeon and making it as habitable as possible. One of them, a bricklayer, even built Momo a small stone stove, somehow producing a rusty stovepipe to go along with it. An old carpenter nailed a few crate boards together to make a small table and two chairs. Finally, some women brought a rusted iron bed frame, ornamented with curlicues, a mattress that was only a little ripped, and two blankets. Last of all, the bricklayer, who was also a bit of an artist, painted a pretty flower-painting on the wall. He even painted a pretend frame around it and pretend nails. Suddenly the stone hole under the stage of the ruin had become a cozy little room.

Then the people’s children came and brought all the leftover food that they could scrounge together. One brought a morsel of cheese, another a hunk of bread, the third some fruit, and so on. And because there were so many children, a large enough crowd showed up that night that they were able to throw a real party for Momo in the amphitheater. It was the kind of warm and lovely celebration that only poor people know how to have, and it marked the beginning of a wonderful friendship between Momo and the people of the neighborhood.

CHAPTER TWO

An extraordinary gift and an ordinary argument

From then on Momo was happy, or at least happy in her own understanding of the word. She always had something to eat, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what the people could spare. She had a roof over her head, she had a bed, and when she was cold she could make a fire. But most important of all, she had many good friends.

You might think that it was only Momo who had been lucky to find such friendly people—Momo was thoroughly convinced of this herself—but it soon became clear that the people were just as fortunate to have Momo around. They came to need Momo so much that they began to wonder how they had ever managed without her. The longer the little girl was with them, the more indispensable she became—so indispensable that their main concern was that she would one day leave. And so it happened that Momo began to have more and more visitors. There was almost always someone sitting and speaking intently with her, and those who needed her but weren’t able to go visit sent for her to come. Anyone who hadn’t yet noticed that he needed her was always told the same thing: “Just go to Momo!”

This slowly became a common saying among the people in the neighborhood. In the same way that they might say, “All the best!” or “Bon appétit!” or “For god’s sake!” now, whenever the opportunity arose—which was often—they said, “Just go to Momo!”

But why? Was Momo so incredibly smart that she could give every person good advice? Did she always choose the right words when somebody needed to be consoled? Did she always pass wise and fair judgments?

No. Momo was just as bad at all of these things as every other child.

Then did she have some skill that put people in a good mood? Could she sing beautifully or play an instrument especially well? Could she dance or perform acrobatic tricks, seeing as she lived in a kind of circus?

No, it wasn’t any of these things either.

Could she do magic? Did she know a secret spell that could drive away worries and needs? Was she a palm reader, or could she foretell the future in some other way?

No, none of these.

The thing that Momo could do better than anyone else was listen. Now, many readers might say that being able to listen is nothing special—anyone can do it—but they would be altogether mistaken. Very few people can really listen, and the way Momo practiced the art of listening was unique.

Momo listened in a way that made slow people suddenly have the cleverest ideas. She didn’t ask or say anything in particular that would bring them to these thoughts. She merely sat and listened with the utmost attention and sympathy, fixing her large, dark eyes on them. And when they finally stumbled upon an idea that they had never even dreamt of before, they felt like it had come from deep within them.

She listened in such a way that anxious and indecisive people suddenly knew what they wanted. Shy people suddenly felt brave and free. Unhappy and depressed people suddenly became joyful. And when someone thought that his life was a meaningless failure, and that he was just one among millions of people who could all be replaced as easily and as quickly as a broken pot, then he would go and explain everything to Momo. Even as he spoke, it would become clear to him, in some mysterious way, that he was fundamentally mistaken, that among all the people in the world there was only one of him, and that he was therefore important in his own particular way.

This was how Momo listened.

One day, two men came to Momo’s amphitheater. They had gotten into such a vile dispute that they were no longer on speaking terms, even though they were next-door neighbors. Their friends had told them to visit Momo because it wasn’t right for neighbors to live as enemies. At first, the two had refused, but in the end they had begrudgingly given in.

So now they were sitting in the amphitheater, silent and furious, each opposite the other on one of the stone rows of seats. Both were glowering to themselves.

One of them was the bricklayer who had given Momo the oven and the stovepipe, which were now both in her “living room.” His name was Nicola, and he was a burly man with a black mustache that curled up at the ends. The other one was Nino. He was skinny and always looked a bit tired. Nino was in charge of a small pub at the edge of the city that usually had no more than a few old men in it, who spent the entire evening over one glass of wine reminiscing about bygone times. Nino and his plump wife were also Momo’s friends, and on more than one occasion they had brought her some very tasty snacks.

Momo quickly realized how angry these two men were at each other, and she didn’t know which one she should go to first. In order not to insult either, she sat down between the two of them. Then she turned her head from one to the other, looking at them both in turn, and waited to see what would happen. Some things simply take time, and time was the only thing that Momo had in abundance.

After the men had been sitting like that for a while, Nicola finally got up and said, “I’m going. I showed my goodwill just by coming here, but as you can see, Momo, he won’t budge. Why should I stay any longer?” And he turned to leave.

“Yeah, get out of here!” Nino yelled after him. “You didn’t need to come in the first place. It’s not like I’m going to apologize to a lowly thug!”

Nicola spun around. His face was bright red with fury. “Who’s the thug here?” he asked threateningly, walking back. “Say that again!”

“As often as you want!” Nino screamed. “You think that because you’re big and tough, no one’ll dare tell you the truth. But me, I’ll tell it to you and anyone else who wants to hear it.” He paused. “You heard me! Why don’t you just come over here and murder me. You already tried to the other day!”

“I wish I had!” roared Nicola, clenching his fists. “You see that Momo, see how he’s smearing me with his lies. I only grabbed him by the collar and threw him in a puddle of dirty water behind his pub. I couldn’t even drown a rat in there.” And then he yelled at Nino again, “Unfortunately you’re still alive and kicking! All the worse for me!”

For a while a storm of insults flew back and forth, and Momo couldn’t even put together what had happened or why the two were so furious at one another. Little by little, it came out that Nicola had only committed his outrageous act because Nino had slapped him in the face. But Nino claimed that Nicola had first tried to smash all his dishes.

“That’s not even true!” Nicola bitterly responded in his defense. “I threw a single jug against the wall, and it already had a crack in it anyway.”

“But it was my jug, get it?” retorted Nino. “You had no right to do that.”

But Nicola was convinced that he had had every right to do what he had done because Nino had insulted his honor as a bricklayer. “You know what he said about me?” he yelled at Momo. “He said that I couldn’t build a straight wall because I’m drunk day and night, and he also said that my great-grandfather was one of the drunkards who helped build the Leaning Tower of Pisa!”

“But Nicola,” said Nino, “that was only a joke!”

“Ha!” growled Nicola. “I can’t laugh about things like that.”

It turned out that Nino had insulted Nicola as payback back for a different joke. One morning Nino had woken up to find ONLY A LOW CREEP EVER BECOMES A BARKEEP written on his door in red paint, and Nino, for his part, hadn’t found it funny at all.

For a while they argued in earnest about which of the two jokes had been better, working themselves back into a rage, but suddenly they stopped.

Momo was staring at them wide-eyed and neither of the two could quite understand her gaze. Was she laughing at them both on the inside? Or was she sad? Her face betrayed nothing, but the two men suddenly felt as if they were seeing themselves in a mirror, and they became ashamed.

“Okay,” said Nicola. “Maybe I shouldn’t have painted that on your door, Nino, but I wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t refused to serve me a glass of wine the night before. That was a low blow, and you know it! I always pay! You had no right to treat me like that.”

“Oh really?” Nino spat back. “Don’t you remember the business with that picture of Saint Anthony? Yeah, now you’re getting pale! You pulled a fast one on me, and I don’t put up with stuff like that.”

“I cheated you?” yelled Nicola, putting his hand to his head. “It’s the other way around, my friend! You wanted to take me for a ride, but it didn’t work out!”

This was the story: There used to be a picture of Saint Anthony hanging on the wall in Nino’s pub. It was a color print that Nino had cut out of a newspaper and framed. One day Nicola said he wanted to buy the picture from Nino—supposedly because he thought it was beautiful—and after a lot of slick bargaining, Nino finally convinced Nicola to trade him his radio for it. Nino laughed himself silly because Nicola was clearly on the losing end of the deal.

But it turned out that there was money tucked between the picture and the back of the frame that Nino hadn’t known about. Suddenly, he angrily realized that he was the one who’d been outsmarted. In short, he demanded that Nicola give him back the money because it didn’t belong to the bargain. Nicola refused, so Nino decided he wouldn’t serve him anything else to drink. That was how the fight had originally begun.

Once the two men had traced the episode back to its beginning, they fell silent for a while.

Then Nino asked, “Now tell me honestly Nicola, did you know about the money before the trade?”

“Of course, otherwise I would have never given you my radio.”

“Then you did swindle me!”

“What? Didn’t you know about the money?”

“No, I swear I didn’t!”

“Well, there you are! It’s pretty clear that you were trying to cheat me. How else could you be willing to accept my radio for a worthless scrap of paper, huh?”

“How did you even know about the money?”

“I saw a customer stick it back there as an offering to Saint Anthony two nights before.”

Nino bit his lip. “Was it a lot?”

“No more and no less than the value of my radio,” answered Nicola.

“Then our entire argument,” said Nino thoughtfully, “is actually about a newspaper clipping of Saint Anthony.”

Nicola scratched his head. “I guess so,” he grumbled. “You can have him back if you want, Nino.”

“No way!” answered Nino in a dignified voice. “A deal’s a deal! After all, we did shake hands on it.”

Suddenly they both burst out laughing. They climbed down the stone steps, met in the middle of the round piazza, threw their arms around one another, and slapped each other on the back. Then they both took Momo down and said, “Thank you very much!”

When they left a little while later, Momo stood waving after them for a long time. She was glad that they were friends again.

Another time, a small boy brought her a canary that wouldn’t sing. This was a much more difficult assignment for Momo. She had to listen to it for an entire week before it finally began to trill and whistle again.

Momo listened to everyone and everything: dogs, cats, crickets, toads, even the rain and the wind in the trees. And everything spoke to her in its own way.

On some nights, when all her friends had gone home, she would sit alone for a long time in the old theater’s large, stone rotunda listening to the deepening silence while the starry sky arched high above her.

Whenever she did this, she imagined that she was sitting in the middle of a giant ear that was listening in on the entire cosmos, and she often thought she could hear soft but powerful music that went straight to her heart. On those nights she always had especially beautiful dreams.

Anyone who still thinks that listening is nothing special should simply try to do it half as well.

CHAPTER THREE

A make-believe storm and a real squall

It should already be evident that Momo treated adults and children exactly the same way when she listened to them, but there was another reason why children liked visiting the old amphitheater as much as they did. Ever since Momo had arrived, they were able to play better than ever before. There just weren’t any boring moments anymore. It wasn’t that Momo made especially good suggestions for games—no, she simply played along—but for some unknown reason, whenever she joined in a game, the children always came up with the best ideas all by themselves. Every day they came up with new games, each more imaginative than the last.

One hot and humid afternoon, ten or eleven children were sitting around the stone steps waiting for Momo, who had gone wandering around the neighborhood as she sometimes did. Thick, black clouds hung low in the sky, and it looked like there was going to be a thunderstorm.

“I think I’m gonna go home,” said one girl, who had her little sister with her. “I’m afraid of lightning and thunder.”

“And at home?” asked a boy with glasses. “You aren’t afraid when you’re at home?”

“No, I am,” answered the girl.

“Then you could just as well stay here,” reckoned the boy.

The girl shrugged her shoulders and nodded. After a while she said, “But maybe Momo isn’t coming today.”

“So what?” said another boy, who looked a little mangy and neglected. “We can still play something—even without Momo.”

“Fine, but what?”

“I don’t know, just something.”

“Just something is nothing. Who has an idea?”

“I know what,” said a fat boy with a shrill, high-pitched voice. “We could pretend that the entire ruin is a big ship and that we’re sailing in unknown seas looking for adventures. I’ll be the captain, you can be the first mate, and you’ll be the scientist because this adventure is a scientific expedition, got it? And the rest of you can be sailors.

“What about us girls, what’ll we be?”

“Girl sailors. It’s a modern ship.”

The fat boy’s plan sounded like a good one, and they tried to play but they couldn’t quite agree with one another, so the game never really got going. After a short time they were all sitting on the stone steps again, waiting. Then Momo came.

A wave whooshed by the Argo’s bow. The exploratory vessel was quietly bobbing up and down in the swell while it swiftly pushed ahead at full speed toward the Coral Sea. Since the dawn of man, no boat had dared enter these perilous waters, which were teeming with shallow coral reefs and unknown sea monsters, and, worst of all, the so-called Traveling Typhoon: a hurricane that never came to rest. It wandered eternally across the ocean looking for loot like a living, cunning beast. The hurricane’s path was completely unpredictable, and once it had trapped something in its mighty embrace, it wouldn’t let it go until that thing had been reduced to a pile of matchstick wood.

Naturally, the Argo was specially equipped for an encounter with this Traveling Typhoon. Its hull was made entirely out of lower bainite, an extremely flexible stainless blue steel that was as strong as a sword blade. And through a special process, the hull had also been cast all in one piece, without any welded edges or rivets.

But even with a well-equipped vessel like the Argo, scarcely any other captain and crew would have been courageous enough to put themselves in such danger. Captain Gordon was extraordinary though. From the steering deck, he proudly gazed down at his crewmembers, all of whom were tried and proven experts in their respective fields. Don Melu, the first mate, stood next to the captain. He was an old sea dog, who had already lived to see one hundred and twenty-seven hurricanes.

Professor Eisenstein, the scientific leader of the expedition, was further aft, on the sun deck, with his two assistants Maurin and Sara who, with their incredible memories, were like an entire movable library. All three of the scientists were standing over their various instruments quietly discussing something in complex technical jargon.

Momosan, the pretty native, was sitting cross-legged a little farther off to the side. Every now and then, the scientist would ask her specific questions about certain unique characteristics of the Coral Sea, and she would answer him in her melodious Hula dialect, which only the professor understood.

The aim of the expedition was to discover the cause of the Traveling Typhoon, and if possible, to eliminate it so that the sea would be safe for future boats to travel. But so far everything had remained calm, and there was no sign of the storm.

Suddenly the man in the crow’s nest yelled down, wrenching the captain out of his thoughts.

“Cap’n!” he yelled, cupping his hand around his mouth. “Unless I’m crazy, I swear I can see a glass island up ahead.”

The captain and Don Melu immediately looked through their spyglasses. Even Professor Eisenstein and his assistants hurried over. They were all suddenly brimming with excitement. Only the pretty native remained seated and unperturbed. The mysterious customs of her people forbade her to show curiosity.

They quickly reached the glass island. The professor clambered down the rope ladder on the side of the boat and stepped onto the transparent surface, which turned out to be so slippery that he had quite a hard time staying on his feet.

The island was completely circular, with a diameter of approximately sixty feet, and it rose up like a dome in the middle. When the professor reached the very top, he could clearly glimpse a pulsating orb of light in the heart of the island, deep below the transparent surface.

He shared his observations with the others, who were anxiously awaiting him at the boat’s railing.

“Well,” said Maurin, “we must be dealing with an Oggelmumpf Bistrozinalis.”

“Possible,” said Sara, the other assistant. “But it could just as easily be a Shluckula Tapetozifera.”

Professor Eisenstein straightened back up, pushed his glasses into place and yelled up, “In my opinion, this is an unusual variety of the ordinary Strumpus Quietshinensus. But we can only be sure once we’ve examined it from below.”

With that, the three girl sailors, who were also world-famous scuba divers, and who in the meantime had already put on wet suits, plunged into the water and disappeared into the blue depths. For a while, all that appeared on the surface of the water were a few air bubbles, but suddenly one of the divers, a girl named Sandra, popped up, gasping, and yelled, “It’s a giant jellyfish! The others are caught in its tentacles and can’t free themselves. We need to help them before it’s too late!” And she disappeared again.

One hundred frogmen, led by their captain, Franco, nicknamed the Dolphin, threw themselves into the water without a moment’s hesitation. A massive battle ensued beneath the surface, which became covered with froth and spray. But even these hundred men weren’t able to free the girls from the jellyfish’s horrible embrace. The creature was too powerful!

“Something in this water seems to be causing everything to grow extremely large,” said the professor, furling his brow. “This is a highly interesting phenomenon!”

Meanwhile, Captain Gordon and his first mate had come to a decision.

“Everyone back!” yelled Don Melu. “All hands on deck. We’re going to cut the beast in half, otherwise we won’t be able to free the girls.”

The Dolphin and his frogmen climbed back onto the boat. The Argo reversed a little and then shot toward the giant jellyfish at full throttle. The steel ship’s bow was razor sharp, and it silently cut the jellyfish in two without so much as a shudder. The maneuver wasn’t exactly safe for the two girls, but Don Melu had measured so precisely that the boat went right between them. The jellyfish’s tentacles immediately fell to the side, limp and lifeless, and the girls were able to untangle themselves.

They were received on the ship amid loud cheers. Professor Eisenstein stepped toward them and said, “It was my fault. I should never have sent you down there. Forgive me for putting you in so much danger.”

“Don’t worry about it, Professor,” answered one of the girls, laughing. “At the end of the day, that’s why we decided to come.”

“Danger is our profession,” added the other girl.

But there wasn’t enough time for a longer exchange. During the rescue mission the captain and crew had completely forgotten to keep watching the ocean, and only now, with almost no time to spare, did they finally see the Traveling Typhoon on the horizon, racing toward the boat at breakneck speed.

An immense wave picked the Argo high up into the air, spun it onto its side, and sent it plummeting down into a trough nearly one hundred and fifty feet deep. After the first impact, many less experienced and less courageous mariners would have fainted or been swept overboard, but Captain Gordon stood wide legged on the steering deck as if nothing had happened, and his crew stood fast just as calmly. Only the pretty native, who wasn’t used to such wild sea voyages, had scrambled into a lifeboat.

In just a few seconds the entire sky had gone pitch-black. The hurricane threw itself at the ship. Howling and bellowing, it hurled the Argo way up into the sky, only to throw it back down into the depths of a watery abyss. It was as if the storm were growing more furious from minute to minute as it tried in vain to crack the ship’s steel hull.

In a calm voice, the captain gave out orders to the first mate who then relayed them to the rest of the crew. Everyone was in position. Even Professor Eisenstein and his assistants hadn’t left their instruments. Instead, they were calculating the location of the eye of the storm because the boat would eventually have to be steered toward it. The captain silently admired these scientists, who remained calm and collected even though they weren’t familiar with the ocean the way he and his men were.

A lightning bolt shot down and struck the steel ship, which became electrically charged. Sparks shot out wherever anyone touched, but the crew onboard the Argo had trained for months in preparation, so this barely affected them. The one problem was that the ship’s thinner parts—steel cables and iron rods, for example—began to glow like the filament in an electric bulb. This made work a little more difficult for the crew members, despite the heat-resistant rubber gloves they had put on. Luckily, the glowing bits were soon extinguished by a downpour heavier than any crew member, except Don Melu, had ever seen. The rain was so dense that it soon made the air too thick to breathe, and the crew members had to put on diving masks with oxygen tanks attached to them.

Lightning bolt after lightning bolt flashed, followed by ever-louder thunderclaps. The storm howled, and waves as big as houses drowned everything under mountains of white foam. The Argo crawled forward, one foot at a time, fighting against the Traveling Typhoon, its engines running full steam ahead. Deep down in the engine room, the mechanics and fire stokers were giving it their all. They had lashed themselves tightly with thick ropes so that they wouldn’t be thrown into the open furnace by the boat’s violent heaving and pitching.

At last, after a long, toilsome struggle, the Argo reached the eye of the storm. What a sight!

The typhoon had knocked flat all the waves at its center, and the water was as still as a mirror. An enormous being of some kind was dancing in the middle of this glistening mirror. It was standing on one leg, and its body grew wider the higher one looked. It resembled a spinning top the size of an inverted mountain, and it was moving so quickly that nobody could quite make out what it was.

“A Shum-Shum Gummilastikum!” yelled the titillated professor while holding his glasses in place so that the torrents of rain wouldn’t wash them off of his nose.

“Translation please,” grumbled Don Melu. “We’re simple seamen here.”

“Leave the professor to himself while he does his research,” interrupted Sara. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This gyro-creature probably dates back to the very beginning of the earth’s formation. It must be more than a billion years old. Today there is only one tiny subspecies left, which can sometimes be found in tomato sauce and very rarely in green ink. A specimen this big is presumably the only one of its kind that still exists.”

“But we came here,” yelled the captain over the howling storm, “to eliminate the source of the Traveling Typhoon. Tell the professor to tell us how we can get this awful thing to stop spinning.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said the professor. “I have no inkling of how to do that yet. Science has never had the chance to study this phenomenon.”

“Okay then,” reckoned the captain. “We’ll just have to shoot at it a few times and see what happens.

“How horrible!” lamented the professor. “Shooting the only existing specimen of a Shum-Shum Gummilastikum!”

But the Counterfiction Cannon was already aimed at the giant gyro-creature.

“Fire!” ordered the captain.

Two blue flashes, each at least one hundred feet long, shot out of the twin barrels. Naturally there was no explosion because, as everyone knows, a Counterfiction Cannon fires proteins at its target.

The illuminated streaks flew toward the Shum-Shum but were deflected by the enormous vortex, pulled in, and then whirled around and around until they were finally catapulted up into the sky where they disappeared in the dark cloud bank overhead.

“It’s no use!” yelled Captain Gordon. “We have to get closer to the thing!”

“We can’t get any closer!” Don Melu roared back. “The engines are already running at full throttle, and it’s barely enough to keep us in place.”

“Do you have any suggestions, Professor?” the captain wanted to know, but the professor merely shrugged his shoulders. His assistants didn’t have any better ideas. It was looking like they would have to give up the expedition.

But just then, someone pulled on the professor’s sleeve. It was the pretty native.

“Malumba!” she said with a graceful gesture. “Malumba, oisitu sono! Erweini samba insaltu lolobindra. Kramuna heun beni beni sadogau.”

“Babalu?” inquired the surprised professor. “Didi maha feinosi intu ge doinen malumba?”

The pretty native nodded eagerly and replied, “Dodo um aufu schulamat wawada.”

“Oi-oi,” answered the professor, thoughtfully stroking his chin.

“What does she want?” asked the first mate.

“She says that her people have an ancient song that could lull the Traveling Typhoon to sleep if anyone were brave enough to sing it.”

“Is that some kind of bad joke?” growled Don Melu. “A lullaby for a hurricane!”

“What do you think, Professor?” Sara wanted to know. “Is something like that scientifically possible?”

“We should always stay open-minded. There is often a kernel of truth in the traditions of natives. Maybe there are specific sonic vibrations that have an effect on the Shum-Shum Gummilastikum. We simply know too little about its living conditions to rule that out.”

“It can’t hurt,” decided the captain. “Let’s give it a shot. Tell her to start singing.”

The professor turned to the pretty native and said, “Malumba didi oisafal huna-huna, wawadu?”

Momosan nodded her head and immediately began to sing a highly distinctive song that only consisted of a few different notes repeated over and over again: “Eni meni allubeni; wana tai susura teni!” She also clapped her hands and jumped around to the beat while she sang.

The simple melody and words were easy enough to learn, and slowly other people began to join in. Soon all the crew members were clapping their hands and dancing around to the beat. It was quite a nice surprise to see that the old sea dog, Don Melu, and the professor were also singing and clapping like children in a playground.

Lo and behold, the humongous top began to slow its spinning until it finally came to a complete halt and began to sink. The water thundered before engulfing it, and then the storm began to wane before stopping altogether. All of a sudden, the sky became clear and blue, and the ocean became calm. The Argo stood still on a glittering mirror of water, as though nothing had ever happened to disturb its voyage.

“Crew members,” said Captain Gordon, looking every single person in the eyes with appreciation, “we did it!” Everyone knew he was a man of very few words, so it meant that much more when he added, “I’m proud of you guys.”

“I think it actually rained,” said the girl with the little sister. “I, for one, am completely soaked.”

She was right. The storm had come and gone. The girl was especially surprised to discover that she had forgotten to be afraid of the thunder and the lightning while she was on the Argo.

The children spoke for a while longer about their adventure, explaining certain details to each other and trading personal experiences. Then they split up to go home and dry themselves off.

Only the boy with the glasses was not completely satisfied with the outcome of the game. As he was saying goodbye, he went over to Momo and said, “It’s too bad that we let the Shum-Shum Gummilastikum sink away without doing anything. The last specimen of its kind! I really wish I could have done some more experiments on it.”

But everyone agreed about one thing: they never had more fun than they did with Momo.

CHAPTER FOUR

A reserved old man and a silver-tongued boy

Even people with many friends always have one or two with whom they are especially close, and whom they like best of all. This was true in Momo’s case as well. She had two very special friends. They came to see her every day, and both shared everything with her. One was young and the other was old, and Momo could not have said which of the two she loved more.

The older one was named Beppo Streetsweeper. In reality, he probably had a different last name, but because he was a street sweeper by profession, and because everyone had always called him that, he had simply taken to using it as a surname.

Beppo Streetsweeper lived near the amphitheater in a small shack that he had cobbled together out of bricks, roofing tiles, and sheets of corrugated metal. Because he was an exceptionally small man, and because he had a slight hunch, Beppo was not much taller than Momo. He had a large head that was always slightly cocked to one side with many small white hairs protruding out of it, and he had a tiny pair of wire-rimmed glasses that he wore on the tip of his nose.

Many of the people in the neighborhood thought that Beppo was a little loony, because whenever anyone asked him a question, he almost always responded with a friendly laugh but no answer. The truth was that he was always considering what had been asked, and when he didn’t think an answer was necessary, he remained silent. When he did think an answer was necessary, though, he would weigh his words even more carefully, and sometimes it took many hours, occasionally even entire days, for him to reply. In the meantime, the other person had naturally forgotten what he had asked, so Beppo’s responses often seemed strange and out of context. Only Momo was patient enough to understand him. She knew that he took as long as he did because he never wanted to say anything untrue. In his opinion, all the misfortune in the world came from the many lies—the deliberate ones but also the accidental ones that were born of haste or imprecision.

Every morning, well before daybreak, Beppo would ride his old squeaky bicycle to a large depot in the city. He would wait there with his fellow street sweepers until he was given a broom and cart and a specific street to clean. Beppo loved the hour right before daybreak when the city was still asleep, and he did his job happily, throwing himself into it because he knew that it was very important work.

When he swept the streets, he did so slowly but steadily: one step for every breath, and one broom stroke for every step. Step, breath, stroke. Step, breath, stroke. In between, he would sometimes stand still for a while and stare thoughtfully off into the distance. Then he would begin again: step, breath, stroke...

While he slowly moved forward—the dirty street ahead of him, and the clean street behind him—he sometimes had grand ideas. They were wordless ideas, though, ideas that were as difficult to share as a smell that you can just barely remember, or a color from a dream. After work, when he was sitting with Momo, he explained his thoughts to her, and because of her special way of listening, he soon found the right words.

“You see, Momo?” he asked one day. “It’s like this: sometimes you have a very long street ahead of you. It’s so terribly long, you think to yourself, that you’ll never be able to finish sweeping it.”

He stared silently off into the distance for a while before continuing. “So you begin to hurry. You keep getting faster and faster, but every time you look up, you see that the street isn’t getting any shorter. There’s always just as much left as before. You start straining yourself even more, you panic, and finally you’re all out of breath. You can’t go on at all, and the street still stretches out far ahead of you. That’s not the way to do it.”

He thought for a while more. Then he said, “You can never think about the whole street all at once, understand? You can only think about the next step, the next breath, the next broom stroke. Only ever the next one.”

He paused and thought again before continuing. “Then it’s pure joy, and that’s the most important thing, because then you do your work well. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

He paused again for a long time. “Suddenly you notice that, step by step, bit by bit, you’ve finished the whole street, and you don’t even know how because you’re not out of breath.” He nodded again and finally said, “That’s also important.”

Another time he came and sat down quietly beside Momo, and she saw that he was thinking hard and that he had something particularly special to say. Suddenly he looked her in the eyes and began. “I recognized us,” he said. It was a long time before he continued, and then, in a low voice, he said, “It happens sometimes at midday, when everything is asleep in the heat. That’s when the world becomes transparent, like a stream, do you understand? You can look down to the very bottom.”

He nodded and fell silent for a while. Then even more quietly he said, “There are other times, other ages lying down there on the bottom.” He sat and reflected again for a long time, looking for the right words, but he couldn’t seem to find them because suddenly, in a completely ordinary tone, he said, “I went to the old city wall today to clean, and I found five different colored stones in the wall arranged like this. Now do you see?”

He drew a big T in the dust with his finger. He looked at it, his head tilted to one side, and then he suddenly whispered: “I recognized them—the stones.”

After a further pause he continued hesitantly. “Those were such different times back then, when the wall was being built... so many people worked on it... but there were two people there, and they arranged the stones in the wall like that... it was a drawing, a sign, do you understand now? I recognized it.”

Beppo rubbed his eyes. Whatever he was trying to say seemed to be draining him, because when he began to speak again his words sounded heavy, his breathing labored.

“They looked different, the two back then. Completely different.” Then he finally hurried on in a defiant voice. “But I recognized them... us—you and me. I recognized us!”

You can’t blame people for smiling when they heard Beppo talk like that. Many even pointed to their heads behind his back and made signs that he was crazy, but Momo loved him and she kept all of his words in her heart.

The other special friend that Momo had was young, and he was the opposite of Beppo Streetsweeper in every respect. He was a handsome youth with dreamy eyes, and he was a real chatterbox. He was always goofing off and playing practical jokes, but his laugh was so lighthearted and infectious that no one could help but laugh along. His name was Girolamo, but everyone just called him Gigi.

Like Beppo, Gigi also took his last name from his job, which was a bit more complicated because he didn’t really have one. He called himself Gigi the Guide, but he was by no means a certified guide. Being a tour guide was only one of his many jobs, all of which he took whimsically, depending on which opportunities presented themselves. The only actual qualification he had for the job was a peaked hat, which he immediately donned whenever he found a few travelers who had managed to lose their way in his neighborhood. He would step toward them with a serious air, offering to lead them around and show them all the sights. If the tourists fell for him, he really got going, bombarding his poor listeners with a multitude of names and dates that he had invented and that completely overwhelmed them. Some of them would notice and angrily stamp off, but most people took it all for the truth and paid him honestly when he finally held his hat out to them at the end of the tour.

Although the majority of Gigi’s neighbors laughed at his tall tales, sometimes they became stern and told him that it was one thing to make something up, but quite another to take people’s money in exchange for it.

“That’s what every poet does,” Gigi would say. “Didn’t the people get their money’s worth? I’m telling you, they got exactly what they wanted. What difference does it make if what I say is or isn’t written down in some old book? Who’s to say that the stories in the old books aren’t just as invented as mine, and people just don’t remember anymore? What do ‘true’ and ‘not true’ mean anyway? Who can really know what happened here one or even two thousand years ago? Do you happen to know?”

The others were forced to admit that they didn’t.

“Well then!” exclaimed Gigi. “What right do you have to say that my stories aren’t true? It might have coincidentally all happened exactly the way I told it, in which case I’m the only one telling the actual truth.”

It was difficult to contest Gigi on this point, and in general, no one had an easy time winning an argument against him.

Unfortunately, travelers only rarely came to see the amphitheater, so Gigi frequently had to take other jobs. Depending on how opportunities unfolded, sometimes he was a park ranger, a witness for two people getting married, a dog walker, a messenger delivering love letters, an assistant at a morgue, a souvenir seller, a cat food vendor, or any number of other things.

But Gigi dreamt of becoming rich and famous someday. He would live in a beautiful fairy-tale house in the middle of a lush park, and he would eat off of golden plates and sleep on satin pillows. He pictured himself in the future as a sun at the height of its glory, whose rays were already warming him now, from afar, even though he was still very poor.

“I’m gonna make it,” he would say whenever anyone laughed at his dreams. “Mark my words!”

Gigi still wasn’t quite sure how he was going to make it, though, because he didn’t think much of hard work and perseverance.

“There’s nothing special about getting rich by working hard,” he said to Momo. “Anyone who works hard can get rich quick. Just look at them all, the people who sold their souls for a little bit of money. Who would want to look like that? No, that’s not for me. Count me out. Even if I don’t have enough money for a measly cup of coffee, I’ll still be Gigi. Gigi will always be Gigi!”

You might think it would be impossible for Gigi the Guide and Beppo Streetsweeper—two completely different people with such different views on the world—to become friends, yet friends they were. Oddly enough, the only person who didn’t scold Gigi for his frivolousness was Beppo, and conversely, it was only loose-lipped Gigi who never made fun of Beppo’s eccentricities. And it probably had something to do with the way Momo listened to both of them.

None of the three suspected that very soon a shadow would fall over their friendship, and not only their friendship, but over the entire neighborhood. It was a dark, cold shadow that grew and grew and that had already begun to spread over the large city. It was like a soundless, surreptitious invasion that pushed further forward each day without any resistance because nobody noticed it was taking place. But who exactly were these invaders?

Even old Beppo, who saw many things that other people missed, didn’t notice the increasing number of gray men who were busily hurrying around the big city. But it wasn’t as if they were invisible. You saw them, and yet you didn’t really. Through some eerie trick, they knew how to make themselves inconspicuous—your eyes would pass over them or you would immediately forget that you had seen them—and because no one noticed them, naturally no one asked where they had come from or where they kept coming from, even though there were more of them every day.

They drove through the streets in sleek gray cars, they visited every building and home, and they frequented every restaurant. Here and there, they would jot something down in their little notebooks.

These men were dressed from head to toe in gray clothing the color of spider webs. Even their faces were as gray as ash. They wore round, gray top hats on their heads and smoked small, ash-colored cigars, and every one of them had a steel gray briefcase with him at all times.

Even Gigi the Guide hadn’t noticed the groups of gray men that sometimes prowled through the neighborhood around the amphitheater, all the while taking notes.

Momo alone saw them one night. Their gray silhouettes at the top of the ruins stood out against the night sky. They signaled to each other, and later they put their heads together, as though they were planning something. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but suddenly Momo felt cold in a way that she had never felt before. It didn’t matter how tightly she wrapped herself in her big jacket because the cold wasn’t ordinary.

That night Momo didn’t hear the soft and powerful music she so often heard; but the next day, life continued as usual and Momo didn’t worry too much about the strange visitors. Even she had forgotten them.

CHAPTER FIVE

Stories for many and stories for just one

As time went on, Momo became extremely important to Gigi. He had, as far as can be said of such a capricious and lighthearted young man, a deep love for this unkempt little girl, and he would have liked it best if he had been able to drag her along wherever he went.

Making up stories was his first passion, and it was precisely in this respect that a change had recently begun to take place as a result of his friendship with Momo. The stories he used to come up with were often very simple because nothing good would come to him. He repeated himself or retold something that he had seen on TV or read in a newspaper. His stories were often under the weather, as they say.

Ever since he had met Momo, though, his tales had grown wings, and whenever Momo was around listening to him, his imagination began to blossom like a garden in spring. Children and adults alike crowded around, and he began telling stories that spanned days or weeks and which he therefore broke into many installments. What’s more, he listened to himself with the same suspense and curiosity as the others, because even he had no idea where his imagination would lead him.

The next time a group of tourists stopped by to see the amphitheater (Momo happened to be sitting on the stone steps off to the side) Gigi began as follows:

“Ladies and gentlemen! As you may already know, the world-famous Empress, Exertia Augustina, fought many wars against two infamous tribes, The Tremblers and The Shakers, in order to defend her empire.

“At one point, after she had overthrown these two peoples again for the umpteenth time, she was so bitter and incensed by their ceaseless harassment that she threatened to exterminate every single one of them unless their king, Xaxotraxolus, gave her his goldfish as a penance.

“You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, at the time, goldfish were unknown in these parts, and Empress Exertia had been told by a traveler that King Xaxotraxolus owned a little fish that would turn into pure gold once it was full-grown. Naturally, the empress needed to have this rare treasure for herself.

“Xaxotraxolus laughed himself silly at her request. He hid the actual goldfish, which he did in fact own, under his bed, and in its stead he gave the empress a young whale, which he brought to her in a large, bejeweled soup tureen.

“The empress was more than a little surprised by the animal’s size. She had pictured the goldfish much smaller. But the bigger the better, she thought. The fish would ultimately give her more gold.

“However, this ‘goldfish’ didn’t shimmer or gleam the least bit, and this disquieted Exertia until King Xaxotraxolus explained that the fish would only turn to gold when it had finished growing, not a moment before. It was therefore especially important that its development wasn’t impeded in any way. The empress pronounced that she was very satisfied with his explanation, and the king was allowed to leave.

“The young fish grew larger every day, consuming vast quantities of food. But Empress Exertia was very rich, and the fish was given as much as it could manage to eat. It became big and fat, and the large soup tureen was soon too small for it.

“ ‘The bigger, the better,’ she said to herself, relocating the fish to a bathtub. But a short time later, it no longer fit in the bathtub either; it just wouldn’t stop growing.

“Soon it was transferred to the imperial swimming pool. This was already a rather complicated transport because the fish weighed nearly as much as an ox, and when one of the slaves who was helping carry it tripped and fell, the empress promptly had the unfortunate man thrown to the lions—the fish was now her one and only concern. It was the apple of her eye.

“Exertia would sit for hours every day at the edge of the pool, watching the creature grow. All she thought about now was the enormous amount of gold that would soon belong to her because, as we already know, Exertia led a very luxurious, even decadent life, and she could never have enough gold.

“ ‘The bigger, the better,’ the empress murmured to herself over and over again, and she had the phrase declared a national motto in her empire. It was written in large letters on all the public buildings.

“But finally the fish outgrew even the imperial pool, and it was then that Exertia ordered this edifice built, whose ruins we are currently standing in, ladies and gentlemen. It was an enormous, circular aquarium filled to the brim with water so that the whale would finally feel at home.

“From then on the empress watched the great fish day and night to see if it would turn to gold. She didn’t trust anyone anymore, not even her slaves or her relatives, because she was afraid that the fish would be stolen. So here she sat, wasting away with fear and anxiety, never closing her eyes, and forever watching her fish, who was blissfully splashing and frolicking around without the least intention of turning into gold.

“Slowly but surely, Exertia began to ignore her responsibilities as ruler, which was precisely what The Tremblers and The Shakers had been waiting for. Led by their king, Xaxotraxolus, they undertook one last campaign, and, in no time at all, they easily conquered the entire empire. They didn’t even encounter any soldiers, and the people didn’t care who was ruling them either way.

“When Empress Exertia finally got wind of the invasion, she yelled her famous last words, ‘Oh, woe is me! If only I had...’ Unfortunately the rest is lost to us in the haze of time. But we know for sure that she threw herself into this aquarium and drowned next to the fish on which she had set all her hopes and dreams.

“To celebrate his victory, King Xaxotraxolus had the whale slaughtered and cooked, and for eight days the entire public was fed baked-fish filets.

“So, my dear ladies and gentlemen, I offer you this one piece of advice: heed well the dangers of extreme gullibility!”

With those words Gigi ended the tour, and the listeners were visibly impressed. They examined the ruins anew with fearful gazes, and only one person was suspicious enough to ask, “So when was this all supposed to have taken place?”

But Gigi, never at a loss for words, simply replied, “Empress Exertia was a contemporary of the renowned philosopher, Noiosius the Elder.”

Naturally the skeptic didn’t want to admit that he had no idea when the renowned philosopher Noiosius the Elder had lived, so he only said, “Aha, thank you very much.”

All the listeners were thoroughly satisfied with the tour and said that the sight had really been worth it and that no one else had so grippingly and eloquently described the ancient times. Then Gigi held out his peaked hat, and the people gave generously—even the skeptic threw in a few coins.

Incidentally, since Momo’s arrival, Gigi had never told the same story twice; that would have been much too boring for him. Whenever Momo was among his listeners, a valve seemed to open inside him, out of which a constant stream of new inventions and fantasies bubbled forth without him ever having to stop and think about them. On the contrary, he often had to restrain himself from going too far like he did with two elderly American ladies who asked for his services, and whom he scared half to death with the following story:

“Highly distinguished madams, surely even in America, the land of the free, you have heard the story of the most terrible tyrant of all, Marxentius Communus. Nicknamed The Red, it was he who hatched a plot to remodel the entire world of his time to match the way he envisioned it. However, try as he might, no matter what he did, people stubbornly remained the same, not letting themselves be changed under any circumstance.

“As a result, Marxentius Communus spiraled into insanity toward the end of his life. As I’m sure you well know, madams, there were no psychiatrists in the ancient world to help heal mental illnesses, so the people simply had to let the tyrant do whatever his sick mind told him to do. In an extreme bout of madness, Marxentius Communus came up with a new idea: he would leave the existing world as it was, and create a brand-new one from scratch.

“He ordered a new globe built with exactly the same dimensions as Earth, complete with perfect replicas of every house, tree, mountain, and ocean. All mankind was compelled to work on the monstrous project under penalty of death.

“First, a socket-like base was built, on which the giant globe would stand—these ruins in front of you, madams, are what remains of that base.

“After that, everyone began work on the globe itself: a gigantic sphere as big as the earth. And once the sphere was finally finished, it was outfitted with all the replicas just as they had been on the old Earth.

“Obviously an incredible amount of material was needed for the globe, and nowhere else could this material be taken except from the earth itself. So while the sphere grew larger, the earth became smaller and smaller, so much so, that people had to use the very last stone of the old earth to complete the new one. All the humans were naturally obliged to move onto this new world because the old one had been used up.

“When Marxentius Communus was forced to concede that in spite of all his efforts the world had remained the same, he wrapped a toga around his head and left. Where did he go? To this day nobody knows.

“You see, madams, this crater-shaped cavity, of which only the ruins remain, used to be the base that was situated on the surface of the old world. It helps if you imagine everything upside down.”

The two fine old ladies from America grew pale, and one of them asked, “So where is the globe now?”

“You’re standing on it!” Gigi answered. “The world that we live on today is actually the new globe.”

Then the two fine old ladies shrieked, aghast, and made a hasty exit. This time Gigi held out his peaked hat in vain...

His favorite pastime, though, was telling Momo stories when no one else was around. Most of the time these stories were fairy tales, and they were almost always about Gigi and Momo. They were only meant for Momo, and they were quite different from all the other tales Gigi told.

On one beautiful, warm evening, the two of them were sitting silently next to each other on the top row of stone seats. The first stars were already beginning to wink and shine in the sky above, and the moon was rising, large and opalescent above the surrounding black pine trees.

“Will you tell me a story?” asked Momo quietly.

“Okay,” said Gigi. “Who should it be about?”

“Momo and Girolamo would be best,” answered Momo.

Gigi thought for a minute and then asked, “What should it be called?”

“Maybe... ‘The Tale of the Magical Mirror?’ ”

Gigi nodded thoughtfully. “That sounds pretty good to me. We’ll see how it turns out.” He put his arm over Momo’s shoulders and began:

“Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess named Momo, who dressed in silk and satin and lived high above the world on a snowy mountaintop in a castle made of stained glass. She had everything her heart desired. She dined on the choicest delicacies, she drank only the sweetest nectars, she slept on silk and satin pillows, and she sat on chairs of ivory. She had everything—everything, except she was all alone. All the things that surrounded her—her foot servants, her ladies-in-waiting, her cats and dogs, even her flowers—all of them were only reflections.

“You see, Princess Momo had a magical mirror. It was big and round, and it was made of the finest silver. Every day and every night she sent it out into the world where it would float over lands and seas, cities and fields, but the people who saw it weren’t surprised at all. They simply said it was the moon.

“Whenever the magic mirror returned, it would empty out all the reflections it had collected during its journey in front of Momo. There were beautiful and ugly things, interesting and boring ones; it all depended on what it had been able to collect. The princess would then pick out those reflections that appealed to her, throwing the others into a special brook. And faster than you can even think, the freed reflections would shoot back through the waters of the earth to their respective owners. That’s why your own reflection is always looking back at you whenever you bend over a well or a puddle.

“Now I forgot to tell you that the princess was immortal. Why? Well it was because she had never seen her own reflection in the magic mirror. Anyone who sees his own reflection immediately becomes mortal, and Princess Momo knew this very well, so she was careful never to look. She lived on that way, happily surrounded by all of her many reflections, playing or speaking with them whenever she was in the mood.

“But one day it came to pass that the magic mirror brought her a reflection that meant more to her than all the others. It was the reflection of a young prince, and when she saw it, she felt such a longing to see him that she knew she needed to meet him in person. But how would she do that? She knew neither where he lived nor who he was—she didn’t even know his name.

“Because she could think of nothing better, the princess decided to look into the mirror, hoping that maybe it would bring her reflection to the prince. ‘Maybe he will happen to be looking at the sky when the mirror is floating above him,’ she thought, ‘and then he will see my picture in it. Maybe then he’ll follow the mirror on its way and find me here.’

“So she gazed into the magic mirror long and hard, and then sent it off into the world with her reflection in it. But of course, as a result, she had become mortal.

“Now, before I go on with the story, let me first tell you a little about the prince.

“This prince was named Girolamo, and he ruled over a large kingdom that he had created all by himself. This kingdom of his wasn’t in the past and it wasn’t in the present. Instead, it always existed one day ahead, in the future, which is why it was called Morrowland. All the people who dwelt there loved and admired their prince.

“One day the ministers of Morrowland approached him and said, ‘Your majesty, it’s time you chose a wife and got married.’

“Prince Girolamo had no objections to their proposal, and the most ravishing damsels in all of Morrowland were brought to the palace so that he could choose one. They had all made themselves as beautiful as possible, because naturally each of them wanted to marry the prince.

“But a wicked fairy had slipped into the palace unnoticed among the damsels. She didn’t have warm, red blood in her veins like everyone else; instead, hers was cold and green. What’s more, no one could tell because she had guilefully applied makeup to hide her ugliness.

“When the Prince of Morrowland stepped into the great, golden throne room to make a decision, she quickly muttered a deceitful spell. All of a sudden the prince saw no one but her. She seemed so beautiful to him that he asked her to be his wife right there on the spot.

“ ‘With pleasure,’ hissed the evil fairy, ‘but on one condition.’

“ ‘Whatever you want,’ the prince blurted without a second thought.

“ ‘Good,’ answered the evil fairy, smiling so sweetly that that the poor prince completely lost his bearings. ‘For one whole year you shall not look up at the silver moon in the sky. If you do, you must relinquish all of your royal possessions. You must forget who you really are, and you must leave for Presentia, where nobody knows you and where you will live like a poor beggar. Do you agree to all of this?’

“ ‘If that’s all,’ exclaimed the prince, ‘then the promise will be easy to keep!’ Meanwhile, Princess Momo had waited and waited, but the prince hadn’t come, so she had resolved to go out into the world to find him. She freed her reflections, and then, all alone in her dainty slippers, she left her stained-glass palace and walked down the snow-covered mountain until she reached the world.

“She traveled until she reached Presentia. When she finally arrived there, her slippers were worn through, so she had to continue barefoot. But the magic mirror with her picture on it was still floating high above the world.

“One night, while Prince Girolamo was sitting on the roof of his golden palace playing checkers with the cold, green-blooded fairy, a drop suddenly fell down on his princely hand.

“ ‘It’s beginning to rain,’ said the green-blooded fairy.

“ ‘No,’ answered the prince. ‘That can’t be. There isn’t a cloud in the sky.’ He looked up and stared right into the middle of the magical silver mirror that was floating above him. There he saw the picture of Momo, the princess, and he noticed that she was crying and that her tears were falling on his hand. Right at that moment he realized that the fairy had tricked him and that she had nothing but cold, green blood in her veins. It was Princess Momo whom he actually loved.

“ ‘You have broken your promise to me,’ said the green fairy, and her face began to distort until it resembled a snake’s. ‘Now you will have to have to pay the price!’

“Prince Girolamo was paralyzed with fear, and the fairy reached into his breast with her long, green fingers and made a knot in his heart. He instantly forgot that he was the prince of Morrowland, and he left his palace and his kingdom like a thief in the night. He wandered far and wide across the world until he came to Presentia, and from then on he lived there like a poor, anonymous beggar, calling himself Gigi. The only thing he had taken with him was Momo’s reflection. The magical mirror remained blank from then on.

“By then, Princess Momo’s silk and velvet cloths had also become ripped and destroyed. She now wore an old men’s jacket that was much too big for her and a skirt made of many colorful swatches of fabric. She lived in an old ruin.

“One day the two of them met in that same ruin, but Princess Momo didn’t recognize the Prince of Morrowland because he was a poor beggar. And Gigi didn’t recognize the princess either because she didn’t really look like a princess anymore. But in their shared misfortune they became friends and comforted each other.

“One evening, when the magical silver mirror, now completely blank, rose up into the sky, Gigi pulled out Momo’s reflection and showed it to her. It was very wrinkled and quite faded, but the princess immediately recognized it as the picture of herself that she had sent out into the world. Then, under the mask of the poor beggar Gigi, she suddenly recognized Prince Girolamo, for whom she had searched all those long years and for whom she had renounced immortality.

“She told him everything, but Gigi sorrowfully shook his head and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s still a knot in my heart that stops me from remembering.’

“So Princess Momo reached her hand into his breast and easily undid the knot in his heart. Suddenly Prince Girolamo remembered who he was and where he belonged. He took the princess by the hand and went off with her into the distance, toward Morrowland.”

They both sat in silence for a while after Gigi had finished. Then Momo asked, “Did they get married later?”

“I think so,” said Gigi. “Much later.”

“And are they dead now?”

“No,” said Gigi resolutely, “I know for sure that they aren’t. The Magical Mirror only makes you mortal when you look into it alone, but if you look into it with someone else, then you become immortal again. That’s what the two of them did.”

The moon was big and silver amid the dark pines, and it made the stones of the ruin glimmer secretively. Momo and Gigi sat next to each other, staring up at it for a long time, and they were certain that while they were watching it they too were immortal.

PART TWO

The gray men

CHAPTER SIX

The bill is wrong but it does add up

There is a well known yet unspoken secret in this world.

Everyone is in on it and everyone knows what it is, but very few people ever think about it. Most people just take it for granted without wondering the slightest bit about it. The secret is time.

We have calendars and clocks to measure time, but they mean little: everyone knows a single hour can seem like an eternity or pass in a flash. It all depends on what we experience in that hour. Time is the very essence of life itself, and life exists in our hearts.

Nobody knew this better than the gray men. No one knew the value of an hour, a minute, even a single second of a life the way they did. But they understood time the same way leeches understand blood, and they acted accordingly.

They had designs on people’s time, and their plans were far-reaching and carefully prepared. The most important thing to them was to remain hidden, so they had inconspicuously fastened themselves to the very life of the big city and the lives of its inhabitants; and, step by step, day by day, they pushed forward, slowly taking people’s time without anybody noticing.

The gray men knew the identity of every person who might further their intentions well before these people knew anything about it themselves. They were only waiting for the right moment to ensnare them, and they did their very best to ensure that the moment arrived quickly.

One such person was Mr. Fusi, the barber. While he wasn’t by any means a famous hairstylist, he was well known and respected on his street. Neither poor nor rich, he owned a small barbershop in the middle of the city and kept one apprentice to whom he was teaching the trade.

One day, Mr. Fusi was standing in the doorway of his barbershop waiting for customers. It was the apprentice’s day off, so he was standing there alone, watching as the rain splashed onto the pavement. It was a gray, dour day, and Mr. Fusi was in a similarly miserable mood.

“My life’s passing me by in snips, gossip, and soap foam,” he thought. “What do I really have to show for it? When I’m dead it’ll be like I never even existed.”

It wasn’t that Mr. Fusi had anything against chatting, in fact, quite the opposite. He loved to ramble on to his clients about his opinions and hear what they thought. He also didn’t have anything against snipping hair or against soap foam. His work provided him with a great deal of genuine pleasure, and he knew that he was very good at what he did. He was especially good when it came to shaving under the chin; in fact, it would be hard to find anybody better in the whole city. But there were moments in his life when all this meant nothing to him. Everyone has times like these.

“I’ve lost the better part of my life,” thought Mr. Fusi. “At the end of the day, what am I really? A small-time barber! That’s what I am. If only I could lead the right kind of life, then I’d be a completely different person!”

How he would start this right kind of life was still unclear to Mr. Fusi. He was imagining something meaningful, something luxurious, something like what he saw in all the magazines.

“But,” he thought gloomily, “my work doesn’t leave me any time for things like that. For the proper life you need to have time. You need to be free. But I’ll be trapped by scissors, gossip, and foam for the rest of my miserable years.”

At that moment, a sleek, ashen gray car pulled up and parked right in front of Mr. Fusi’s barbershop. A gray man got out and entered the shop. He put his steel gray briefcase on the table in front of the mirror, hung his stiff round hat on the coat rack, sat down in one of the seats, and took his little notebook out of his pocket and began to leaf through it while he puffed a thin gray cigar.

Mr. Fusi closed the door to his shop because the little room had suddenly become uncomfortably cold.

“How can I help you?” he asked, confused. “Shave or haircut?” But even as was saying the words, he cursed himself for being so tactless: the man was completely bald.

“Neither,” the gray man said in a strangely flat and expressionless voice—a gray voice, it seemed. “I’ve come from the Timesaving Bank. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Agent No. XYQ/384/b. We understand that you wish to open a savings account with us.”

“That’s news to me,” exclaimed Mr. Fusi, even more confused. “To be honest, until now I didn’t even know a bank like that existed.”

“Well, now you know,” the agent answered curtly. He leafed through his little notebook and continued, “You are Mr. Fusi, the barber, correct?”

“Yes exactly, that’s me,” Mr. Fusi affirmed.

“Then I’m in the right place,” said the gray man, snapping his notebook shut. “You’re on our list of eligible applicants.”

“How’s that possible?” Mr. Fusi asked, increasingly surprised.

“You see, my dear sir,” said the agent, “you’re wasting your life on scissor snips, gossip, and soap foam. When you’re dead, it’ll be as though you never even existed. If you had time to lead the proper life, the life you want, then you would be a completely different person. Time is what you need, am I right?”

“I was just thinking that,” murmured Mr. Fusi, shivering. It had gotten even colder in spite of the closed door.

“Well then,” replied the gray man, taking a contented puff of his cigar. “How do you get more time? By saving up! You, Mr. Fusi, are wasting your time in a completely irresponsible fashion. I would like to prove it to you with a small calculation. One minute has sixty seconds, and one hour has sixty minutes. Are you following me?”

“Yes, of course,” said Mr. Fusi.

Agent No. XYQ/384/b began to write the numbers on the mirror with a gray pen:

“Sixty times sixty is three thousand six hundred. So an hour is comprised of three thousand six hundred seconds.

“One day has twenty-four hours in it. Three thousand six hundred multiplied by twenty-four comes to twenty-six thousand four hundred seconds in a day. As you know, a year has three hundred sixty-five days in it. That gives us thirty-one million five hundred and thirty-six thousand seconds per year.

“How long do you reckon your life will be, Mr. Fusi?”

“Well, I mean,” began Mr Fusi, stuttering, “I hope to make it to seventy or eighty, god willing.”

“Okay,” the gray man continued. “Let’s take seventy just to be on the safe side. That would be three hundred and fifteen million three hundred and sixty thousand multiplied by seven. Which equals two billion two hundred and seven million five hundred and twenty thousand seconds.”

He chalked this number out on the mirror in oversized digits: 2,207,520,000 seconds. Then he underlined it multiple times and explained, “That, Mr. Fusi, is the extent of the fortune at your disposal.”

Mr. Fusi gulped and ran a hand through his hair. The sum made him dizzy. He had never quite realized how rich he was.

“Yes,” said the agent, nodding and puffing on his little gray cigar. “It’s quite an impressive figure, isn’t it? But now let’s take it a step further. How old are you, Mr. Fusi?”

“Forty-two,” he stammered, and suddenly he began to feel guilty, as if he had recently begun embezzling funds.

“How long do you sleep per night, on average?” the gray man went on.

“About eight hours,” confessed Mr. Fusi.

The agent calculated lightning fast. The chalk screamed across the mirror, and Mr. Fusi got goose bumps.

“Forty-two years, eight hours per day, that alone comes to four hundred forty-one million five hundred and four thousand seconds. We can safely say that this amount is lost. How much time do you sacrifice every day to your work?”

“Also around eight hours,” Mr. Fusi admitted meekly.

“Then we’ll have to write off the same amount again,” the agent continued unrelentingly. “But clearly you also lose a certain amount of time when you nourish yourself. How much time do you need altogether for your daily meals?”

“I’m not quite sure,” Mr. Fusi said anxiously. “Maybe around two hours?”

“That seems like too little to me,” said the agent, “but we’ll accept it for now. That brings us to the amount of one hundred ten million three hundred seventy-six thousand seconds wasted over forty-two years. Let’s move on! You live alone with your old mother, as we know, and you devote one whole hour each day to sitting and speaking with her, even though she’s going deaf and can barely hear you anymore. That’s more time that you’re throwing away—fifty-five million one hundred eighty-eight thousand seconds to be precise. Furthermore, you have a parakeet that costs you another quarter of an hour each day in cleaning time. That translates into thirteen million seven hundred ninety-seven thousand seconds.”

“B-b-but...” pleaded Mr. Fusi.

“Don’t interrupt me,” the agent cut him off. He was calculating faster and faster now. “Because your mother’s arthritic, you are also forced to do all the household chores yourself. You do the shopping, you clean the shoes, and you do all the other similarly cumbersome tasks around the house. How much time does that cost you each day?”

“Maybe an hour, but...”

“That comes to another fifty-five million one hundred eighty-eight thousand seconds that you’re losing, Mr. Fusi. We also know you go to the movies once a week, sing with a glee club once a week, go to your regular restaurant twice a week, and spend the rest of your free evenings with friends or even reading a book. In short, you’re beating dead all your remaining healthy time with useless things, indeed, up to three hours a day of them. That comes to one hundred sixty-five million five hundred sixty-four thousand seconds. Are you not feeling well, Mr. Fusi?”

“N-n-no, I’m not,” answered Mr. Fusi, “Please excuse me...”

“We’re almost finished,” said the gray man. “But we still need to speak about a very special chapter of your life. You have that little secret... you already know what I’m talking about.”

It had gotten so cold that Mr. Fusi’s teeth began to chatter. “You know about that too,” he murmured helplessly. “I didn’t think anyone besides me and Ms. Daria...”

“In this day and age,” interrupted the agent, “secrets don’t mean anything anymore. Just be reasonable, be realistic, Mr. Fusi, and answer me one question: do you intend to marry Ms. Daria?”

“No,” said Mr. Fusi. “I can’t do that...”

“Precisely,” the gray man went on. “Ms. Daria will be in a wheelchair her whole life because she’s a paraplegic. Yet you still visit her every day for half an hour to bring her flowers. Why?”

“It always makes her so happy,” Mr. Fusi replied, now close to tears.

“But technically speaking,” responded the agent, “she’s wasted time for you. In fact, taken all together, the time you spend with her amounts to twenty-seven million five hundred ninety-four thousand seconds. Add this to your various habits—such as sitting in front of the window for fifteen minutes before you go to sleep every night in order to reflect on the day—and we get another sum of thirteen million seven hundred and ninety-seven thousand seconds that we can write off. Now let’s see what time is leftover for you, Mr Fusi.”

The following calculation was now written on the mirror:

“This figure,” said the gray man, repeatedly tapping the pen so hard against the mirror that it sounded like machine gun fire, “represents the amount of time that you have lost up to this point. What do you think of it, Mr. Fusi?”

Mr. Fusi said nothing. He sat down on a chair in the corner and wiped his face with a handkerchief because he had broken into a sweat despite the pervasive cold.

The gray man nodded solemnly.

“Now, you can easily see,” he said, “that it’s already more than half of your original fortune, Mr Fusi. But now let’s see what’s leftover from the past forty-two years. As you already know, one year equals thirty-one million five hundred thirty-six thousand seconds. That number times forty-two comes to one billion three hundred twenty-four million five hundred and twelve thousand.”

He wrote the number underneath the sum of the lost time:

He put away his pen and paused in silence for a long time to let the sight of all the zeroes take its full effect on Mr. Fusi. And it did.

This, thought Mr. Fusi painfully, is the balance of my entire life so far.

He was so impressed by this precise calculation, that he took everything in without so much as a word. And the arithmetic was correct. It was one of the thousands of tricks that the gray men used to deceive prospective clients.

“Don’t you think,” said Agent No. XYQ/384/b, beginning to speak again in a soft voice, “that you can’t really afford to keep going on like this, Mr. Fusi? Wouldn’t you rather begin to save?”

Mr. Fusi nodded his head mutely. His lips were blue from the cold.

“If, for example,” the agent’s ashen gray voice whispered close to Mr. Fusi’s ear, “you had begun to save just one hour a day twenty years ago, then you would now be in possession of a credit balance amounting to twenty-six million five hundred sixty thousand seconds. Two hours of saved time a day, would have naturally saved you double that, so fifty-two million five hundred and six thousand seconds. And I ask you, Mr. Fusi, what are two measly little hours compared to a sum like that?

“Nothing!” cried Mr. Fusi. “A drop in the bucket!”

“I’m glad that you see it my way,” the agent continued smoothly. “And if we add to that what you would have saved after another twenty years, we arrive at the handsome sum of one hundred five million one hundred twenty thousand seconds. All that capital would have been freely available to you at the beginning of your sixty-second year.”

“F-fantastic!” stammered Mr. Fusi, forcing his eyes open against the cold.

“Just wait,” the gray man went on. “It gets even better. We—that is, the Timesaving Bank—don’t only save your time for you, we also give you interest on it. That means that in reality you would have actually had much more.”

“How much more?” Mr. Fusi asked breathlessly.

“That depends on how much you want to save and how long you leave it deposited with us before collecting,” explained the agent.

“Deposited with you?” inquired Mr. Fusi. “What does that mean?”

“Well it’s very simple,” said the gray man. “If you decide not to ask for your saved time until five years have passed, then we give you your time plus the same amount again. Your fortune doubles every five years, you understand? After ten years, it’s already quadruple your original sum, after fifteen years it’s eight times the original, and so on. If you had begun to save two hours every day twenty years ago, then by the time you were sixty-two, after forty years total, you would have had two hundred fifty-six times the original amount of saved time available to you. That would be twenty-six billion nine hundred and ten million seven hundred and twenty-thousand seconds.”

He took his gray pen out again and wrote this number on the mirror as well: 26,910,720,000 seconds.

“You can see for yourself, Mr. Fusi,” he went on, smiling thinly for the first time. “You would have accumulated more than ten times your original lifespan, and that with only two saved hours every day. If that isn’t a lucrative proposition then I don’t know what is.”

“It is! It sure is!” said Mr. Fusi wearily. “Without a doubt, it is! It’s so stupid of me not to have already begun to save. Only now do I see it fully, and I have to admit, I’m ashamed.”

“Well,” replied the gray man softly, “you have absolutely no reason to be. It’s never too late. If you want, you could even sign up today. It’s worth it, you’ll see.”

“You bet I will!” yelled Mr. Fusi. “What do I have to do?”

“But, my friend,” answered the agent, raising his eyebrows, “surely you already know how to save time! In brief, you have to work faster and stop doing anything superfluous. Instead of devoting half an hour to your customers, only spend fifteen minutes with them. Avoid time-wasting conversations. Reduce the hour you spend with your mother to half an hour. Better yet, just put her in a good, cheap retirement home where she’ll be taken care of. That way you’ll already be winning an hour every day. Get rid of the useless parakeet! If you must visit Ms. Daria, only do so once every two weeks. Get rid of your fifteen-minute nightly review of the day’s events, and don’t waste so much of your precious time singing, reading, or going out with your so-called friends. Incidentally, I also recommend that you get a big, accurate clock for your shop so you can keep an eye on your apprentice’s work.”

“Well okay,” said Mr. Fusi. “I can do all that, but what should I do with the time that’s leftover to me? Do I need to bring it somewhere to deposit it, or should I keep it until you come collect it? How does the whole system work?”

“You,” said the gray man, smiling thinly to himself for the second time, “do not have to worry about that. Just leave it to us. Rest assured that we won’t lose so much as a second of the time that you save. You will soon notice that nothing is leftover.”

“Okay then,” replied Mr. Fusi, flabbergasted. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Do so with complete confidence, my friend,” said the agent, standing up. “I can now officially welcome you as a new member of the timesaving community. Now you too are a progressive and forward-thinking member of the modern world, Mr. Fusi. I congratulate you!” With that, he grabbed his hat and his briefcase.

“Just one more thing!” yelled Mr. Fusi. “Don’t we need to draw up some kind of contract? Don’t I need to sign something? Shouldn’t I get a document of some kind?”

Agent No. XYQ/384/b turned around in the doorway and eyed Mr. Fusi with a look of slight displeasure. “What for?” he asked. “Timesaving can’t be compared with any other kind of saving. It’s a thing that depends entirely on trust—trust on both sides. Your commitment is enough for us. It’s binding, and we—we’ll worry about the savings. But the amount you save completely depends on you. We never force our clients to do anything. Good day, Mr. Fusi.”

On that note, he got into his sleek gray car and roared off down the street.

Mr. Fusi looked after him, rubbing his forehead. He was gradually becoming warm again, but he felt sick and miserable. The dense blue smoke from the agent’s small cigar hung thick in the air for a long time before dissipating. Not until after the smoke had dispersed did Mr. Fusi begin to feel better. But as it faded, so did the figures chalked on the mirror, and when they had finally vanished altogether, so too had Mr. Fusi’s memory of the gray man. But it was only his memory of the visitor that had vanished, not his memory of the decision. He now simply thought he had come to this new resolution all by himself. His intention—to save time in order to begin another life in the future—held fast in his soul like a barbed hook.

When the first customer of the day entered, Mr. Fusi saw to him cantankerously, leaving off all extra niceties; indeed, he was already finished after twenty minutes.

So it continued with every customer from then on. His work didn’t give him any pleasure, but that wasn’t important anymore. He hired two assistants in addition to his apprentice, and he paid sharp attention that they didn’t waste a single second. Every move they made was determined ahead of time by a detailed schedule, and a new sign now hung in the window of Mr. Fusi’s barber shop. It said: SAVED TIME IS DOUBLED TIME.

He now only wrote brief, businesslike letters to Ms. Daria, informing her that, because he was short for time at work, he could no longer come visit. He sold his parakeet to a pet shop, and as for his mother, he put her in a good but inexpensive retirement home and visited her there once a month. Because he believed all the gray man’s suggestions were his own ideas, he followed each and every one of them to the tee.

In the meantime, he was becoming increasingly nervous and anxious. One thing continued to bother him: despite all the time that he saved, not one second was leftover for him. It all disappeared mysteriously; it simply wasn’t there anymore. The process was barely noticeable at first, but soon he began to feel his days becoming shorter and shorter. Before he knew it, another week, another month, another year, and then another and another had passed.

Since he didn’t remember the gray man’s visit anymore, he should have seriously asked himself where all his time was going, but he posed this question as infrequently as every other timesaver. He was overcome by a kind of blind obsession, and when he sometimes noticed, with horror, that his days were flying by faster and faster, he would simply become even more determined and dogged in his timesaving.

Many of the city’s inhabitants were in the same state as Mr. Fusi. Every day more and more people took to saving time, and the more that did, the more that followed, because even those who didn’t want to had no choice but to join in.

Daily advertisements on the radio, on the television, and in the newspapers revealed and praised the advantages of new time-saving devices that would one day leave people free to live the “proper” life. There were posters stuck on the walls of houses and billboards throughout the city, all displaying different images of prosperity. Underneath them, in bright neon letters, stood slogans like:

EVERYTHING RUNS BETTER ON SAVED TIME!

SAVING TIME FOR THE FUTURE!

MAKE MORE OF YOUR LIFE—SAVE TIME!

But the reality of timesaving was quite different. True, the timesavers were better dressed than the people who lived around the old amphitheater. True, they earned more money and could also spend more. But they had morose, exhausted, and even bitter faces with unfriendly eyes. They had never heard the expression, “Just go to Momo!” They had nobody who could listen to them in a way that would make them cleverer, more forgiving, or just plain happy. And even if they did have someone like Momo, it would be very unlikely that they would to go her unless the whole affair could be handled in five minutes or less. Otherwise they would consider it lost time. Even their unused hours, they claimed, had to be used up quickly in order to deliver them as much pleasure and relaxation as possible in the future.

They couldn’t really have parties anymore—neither big celebrations nor serious get-togethers. Daydreaming nearly counted as a crime among them, but silence was worst of all. In silence they were overcome by fear because they began to suspect what was actually happening to their lives. So they made noise whenever silence threatened. But it wasn’t joyful noise, like the kind you hear on a playground, but an angry, bitter din that grew louder in the city every day.

It had ceased to matter whether or not people enjoyed their work or found pleasure in it. It was important only to finish as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. Signs hung above every workplace, large factory, and office building, and they all said:

TIME IS EXPENSIVE—DON’T WASTE IT!

or

TIME IS MONEY—SAVE!

Similar signs also hung above bosses’ desks and executives’ seats; they hung in doctors’ offices, in stores, restaurants, and warehouses; they even hung in schools and preschools. No one was exempt.

Last of all, even the appearance of the big city slowly began to change. The old buildings were torn down and replaced with modern houses devoid of anything considered superfluous. Architects no longer tried to design houses that suited the people who lived in them because that would mean building a whole range of different ones. It was cheaper—not to mention it saved time—to build all houses alike. An enormous district of modern developments was rapidly growing in the northern part of the city. Endless rows of identical high-rise tenements sprang up, each an exact replica of all the others. And because all the houses looked the same, all the streets looked the same as well; and these identical streets grew and grew, stretching straight to the horizon—a desert of rigid uniformity.

The lives of the people who lived there moved in exactly the same way—straight as bullets—because there, everything was precisely calculated and planned, every inch and every moment.

Nobody seemed to notice that by saving time they were actually losing something much more important. These people didn’t want to believe that their lives were becoming poorer and poorer, colder and more monotonous. Only the children seemed to notice because no one had time for them anymore.

But time is life, and life exists in our hearts, and the more of it that the people saved, the less they actually had.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Momo searches for her friends and is visited by an enemy

“I don’t know,” Momo said one day. “It just seems like all our old friends barely come visit me anymore. There are a few that I haven’t seen in ages.”

Gigi the Guide and Beppo Streetsweeper were sitting next to her on the overgrown stone steps of the ruin, watching the sunset.

“Yeah,” Gigi agreed thoughtfully. “I feel the same way. Fewer people are coming to listen to my stories. It’s not like it used to be. Something’s up.”

“But what?” asked Momo.

Gigi shrugged his shoulders and pensively spat on a piece of slate in order to wipe away the letters he had just scratched into it. Beppo had found the piece of slate in a garbage can a few weeks earlier and had brought it to Momo. It wasn’t new anymore, of course, and it had a large crack in the middle, but it was still completely usable. Every day since then, Gigi had been teaching Momo how to write this or that letter, and since Momo had a very good memory, she had managed to learn how to read quite well. It was only the writing that still caused her some problems.

Beppo, who had been thinking about Momo’s question, nodded slowly and said, “Yes, that’s true. It’s coming closer. It’s all over the city. I noticed it a long time ago.”

“What is it?” asked Momo.

Beppo thought for a while and then answered, “Nothing good.” And again, after a while he added: “It’s getting cold.”

“Oh don’t worry!” said Gigi, putting his arm around Momo in consolation. “More and more kids are coming here anyway.”

“Yes, that’s why,” said Beppo. “That’s why.”

“What do you mean?” asked Momo.

Beppo thought about it for a long time and finally answered, “They’re not coming here for our company. No, they’re looking for refuge, that’s all.”

The three of them looked down at the round grass floor of the amphitheater, where some children were playing a new ball game they had invented that afternoon. A few of Momo’s old friends were among them: the boy with the glasses, named Paolo; the girl Maria with her little sister, Didi; the chubby boy with the shrill, high-pitched voice, whose name was Massimo; and the other boy named Franco, who always looked a bit mangy and neglected. But there were other children who had only been in the group for a few days, and there was one little boy who had arrived that afternoon. It really did seem to be exactly as Gigi had said: there were more of them every day.

Momo should have been delighted, but most of the new children had no idea how to play. They sat around, sullen and bored, watching Momo and her friends. Sometimes they interrupted on purpose and ruined everything. Squabbles and arguments had become frequent now, though they never lasted long because Momo’s presence had its usual effect, even on these new children. Very soon they started coming up with the best ideas themselves and taking part in the games enthusiastically. But new children were coming all the time—they even came from distant corners of the city now—so everything began anew each day, and as we all know, one bad sport is enough to ruin a game for everyone.

There was also something else that Momo couldn’t quite understand because it too had just begun. More and more frequently, children would bring all sorts of toys to the amphitheater that no one could really play with. A remote control tank that you could drive around but that wasn’t good for much else. Or a spaceship that turned around on a metal rod, but that you couldn’t really do anything with. Or a small robot with glowing eyes that waggled around and turned its head, but which wasn’t suited for any more complicated games.

They were very expensive toys, the likes of which neither Momo nor any of her friends had ever dreamt of owning, but they were so complete, down to the smallest detail, that nothing was left to the imagination. The children would often sit watching, bored and mesmerized for hours on end, while the machines purred, waggled a bit, or sped around in circles. But the children were never able to come up with any ideas on their own while they watched. That was why, after a while, they returned to their old games in which a few cardboard boxes, a torn tablecloth, and a molehill or a handful of pebbles were enough to bring an entire imaginary world to life.

This evening there also seemed to be something else getting in the way of the games. One after another, the children stopped participating until finally they were all sitting in a circle around Gigi, Beppo, and Momo. They hoped that Gigi would begin to tell a story, but that didn’t work because the little boy who had showed up for the first time that afternoon had brought a portable radio with him. He was sitting a little apart from the others with the volume turned all the way up. There was an advertisement on.

“Couldn’t you turn your stupid machine down a little bit?” growled Franco, the shabby boy, in a threatening tone.

“Can’t hear you,” said the new boy, grinning. “My radio’s too loud!”

“Turn it down now!” yelled Franco, getting up.

The new boy grew slightly pale, but defiantly answered, “You can’t tell me or anybody else what to do! I can turn my radio up as loud as I want.”

“He’s right about that,” said Beppo. “We can’t command him. The best we can do is ask him nicely.”

Franco sat back down. “He should just go somewhere else,” he said bitterly, “he’s been ruining everything for us all afternoon.”

“I’m sure he has his reasons,” said Beppo, shooting the boy a friendly and attentive look through his small glasses. “He must.”

The boy was silent. After a little while he turned down his radio and looked away. Momo went over and sat down quietly beside him. He turned the radio off altogether. It was completely silent for a while.

“Will you tell us a story, Gigi?” begged one of the newer children.

“Oh, yes please,” yelled the others. “A funny story! No, an exciting one! No, an adventure!”

But for the first time ever, Gigi wasn’t in the mood to tell a story. “I would much rather hear something from you all,” he finally said, “something about your homes, what you do, and why you’re all here.”

The children remained mute. Their faces suddenly looked dejected and sad.

“We’ve got a really nice new car,” someone said at last. “Saturdays, when Mom and Dad have time, it gets washed, and if I’ve been good I get to help. One day I wanna have one just like it.”

“I can go to the movies every day now if I want,” said a little girl. “My parents say it’s okay because then they know I’m taken care of, even when they don’t have time.” And after a short pause, the girl added, “But I don’t want to go to the movies every day. That’s why I secretly come here and save the money for myself. Once I have enough, I’m going to buy a train ticket and take a train to see the Seven Dwarfs.”

“That’s stupid!” yelled another child. “They don’t even exist.”

“They do too,” the little girl said defiantly. “I even saw a picture of them in a travel magazine.”

“I already have eleven books on tape,” explained a little boy, “and I can listen to them as many times as I want. My father used to tell me stories himself when he got home from work. I liked that. But now he’s barely ever home, and when he is, he’s too tired or he isn’t in the mood.”

“And your mother?” asked the girl named Maria.

“She’s also gone all day now.”

“Yeah,” said Maria. “It’s exactly the same with us. But luckily I have Didi.” Her little sister was on her lap, and she gave her a kiss before continuing. “When I get home from school I warm up some food for us. Then I do my homework, and then...” She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, then we just run around until it’s nighttime. Usually we come here.”

All the children nodded because it was more or less the same story for all of them.

“I’m actually really happy that my parents don’t have time for me anymore,” said Franco, although he didn’t look happy at all. “Otherwise they’d just begin to fight and take it out on me.”

Now the boy with the portable radio suddenly turned to them and said, “But me, I get a lot more pocket money now than I used to!”

“Of course you do,” answered Franco. “They do that to get rid of us. They don’t like us anymore! They don’t even like themselves anymore. They don’t like anything anymore. At least that’s what I think.”

“That’s not true!” screamed the new boy furiously. “My parents like me a lot! It’s not their fault that they don’t have time anymore. That’s just the way it is. They gave me this portable radio to make up for it. It was really expensive. That proves they like me, right?”

Everyone was silent.

Suddenly the boy with the portable radio began to cry. He tried to stop himself, wiping his eyes with his dirty fists, but the tears streamed down, light stripes on his dirty, besmirched cheeks.

The other children looked at him sympathetically, or stared down at the ground. They understood him because it was how all of them were really feeling. They felt abandoned.

“Yes,” Beppo said again after a while. “It’s getting cold.”

“Soon I won’t be allowed to come here anymore,” said Paolo, the boy with the glasses.

Momo looked astonished. “Why not?” she asked.

“My parents told me that you’re all just slackers and good-for-nothing day-stealers,” Paolo explained. “ ‘You waste god’s time,’ they said, ‘that’s why you have so much. And because there are too many like you, other people have less and less time,’ they said. And I shouldn’t come here anymore because if I do I’ll just become like you.”

Many of the other children nodded again because they had all been told very similar things.

Gigi stared at the children, one after the other. “Is that what all of you think of us? Then why do you still come here?

After a short silence Franco said, “It’s all the same to me. My old man always says that I’m gonna land in prison later anyway. I’m on your side.”

“Oh, I see!” said Gigi, raising his eyebrows. “So you do think we’re stealing other people’s time?”

The children stared at the floor, ashamed. Finally Paolo looked searchingly into old Beppo’s spectacled eyes. “My parents don’t lie,” he said quietly. And then he asked even more quietly, “Aren’t you time thieves?”

Then the old street sweeper raised himself up to his full, though not very imposing height, stuck one finger up in the air and said, “I have never, not once in my life, stolen even so much as a millisecond of time from god or any other person. I swear it. May god be my witness.”

“Me neither!” added Momo.

“Same here,” said Gigi earnestly.

The children remained silently awestruck. Not one of them doubted the words of these three friends.

“And while we’re on the subject, I want to tell you all something else,” Gigi went on. “It used to be that people always looked forward to visiting Momo because she would listen to them. They found themselves when she listened, if you know what I mean. But now they don’t even stop to ask themselves if they’re lost anymore.” He paused. “It used to be that people also loved to come hear me tell stories. They would forget themselves. Now they don’t ask for my stories either. They say they don’t have time for things like that anymore. They don’t have time for you either. Have you noticed anything odd? It’s strange, all the things they don’t have time for anymore!”

He narrowed his eyes and nodded at the listening crowd. Then he continued. “I recently ran into an old friend of mine in the city, a barber named Mr. Fusi. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and if I hadn’t run into him when I did, I wouldn’t have recognized him anymore. He was so changed, so nervous, so weary and sad. He used to be a nice guy and a pretty good singer, but best of all, he used to have his own special opinions about all sorts of different things. And now, now he has no more time for any of that. The man has become his own shadow. It isn’t even Mr. Fusi anymore, you know what I mean? If he were the only one, then I’d just say that he’d lost it a little, but no matter where you look you see the same kind of people. Their numbers are growing. Now even our old friends are beginning to act the same way, and I’m beginning to ask myself in earnest if there isn’t some kind of contagious madness that’s spreading around.”

Old Beppo nodded. “Definitely,” he said. “It must be some kind of sickness.”

“But then we have to help our friends!” said Momo, completely crestfallen.

That night they all stayed up together for a long time worrying about what to do, but not one of them had the faintest idea about the gray men and their ceaseless machinations.

Over the next few days, Momo went searching for her old friends in order to figure out what was wrong with them and ask why they didn’t come visit her anymore.

First she went to Nicola, the bricklayer. She walked over to the building where he rented a small attic room under the roof, but when she got there he wasn’t home. The other people in the building could only tell her that he was now working at one of the new housing developments across the city and that he was making a pile of money. He seldom came home, and when he did it was only very late at night. He usually wasn’t quite sober either, so it was often hard to get along with him.

Momo decided to wait for him. She sat down on the stairs in front of the door to his room. It slowly grew dark, and she fell asleep.

It must have been very late at night when she was woken up by thumping footsteps and rough singing. Nicola was blindly swaying his way up the stairs, but when he caught sight of Momo he stopped short, dumbfounded.

“Heelllooo Momo!” he grumbled, visibly embarrassed that she was seeing him this way. “You’re still around, are’ya? What’re you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” Momo answered shyly.

“Well aren’t you something!” Nicola was shaking his head and smiling. “Came all the way over here in the middle of the night just to see about your old friend Nicola. You know, I would have visited you by now, but I just don’t have any more time for things like that... for private things.” He made an erratic gesture with his hand, and sat down heavily on the stairs next to her. “If only you knew what’s been going on in my life these days, kid! It’s not like it used to be. Times are changing. Over there, where I’m at now, they have a whole different kind of tempo. It’s devilish. Every day we throw another story on the building, one after another. It’s not like it used to be! Everything’s organized, you know, down to the order we lay our bricks...”

He rambled on and Momo listened attentively. The longer she listened the less and less enthusiastic he began to sound, and suddenly he stopped altogether and wiped a sweaty hand across his face.

“It’s all nonsense,” he said unexpectedly. A sad note could now be heard in his voice. “You see Momo, I had too much to drink again. I’ll admit I often drink too much now, but if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to stomach what we’re doing over there. It really goes against an honest bricklayer’s conscience. Much too much sand in the mortar, you understand? It’ll hold everything together for four or five years, but then the whole thing’ll topple over if someone sneezes. All bad, all really vile, really bad workmanship! But that’s not even the worst thing. The tenement houses we’re building are the worst. They aren’t houses at all... they’re... they’re... soulless silos! Makes you sick to your stomach! But what does all that have to do with me? I get my money and that’s it. I guess the times are just changing. It used to be different. I used to be proud of my work when I helped build something that people could see. But now... at some point when I’ve earned enough I’m gonna pack it in and do something else.”

He let his head hang down and stared off into the dark stairwell with bleary eyes. Momo didn’t say anything. She only listened to him.

“Maybe,” Nicola continued after a while in a quiet voice, “I really should come visit you and explain everything. Yeah, I really should. What about tomorrow? Or maybe the day after tomorrow is better? Well, I’ll have to see how I can fit it in, but I’ll definitely come by. What do you say?”

“It’s a plan,” Momo answered happily, and then they parted ways because they were both very tired.

But Nicola didn’t turn up the next day or the day after that or any other day. He didn’t come at all. Maybe he really didn’t have the time anymore...

Next, Momo visited Nino, the barkeep, and his plump wife. The little old tavern with the rain-speckled plaster walls and the small wine cellar out back lay at the very edge of the city.

Momo went around to the kitchen door like she always used to. It was open and Momo could tell from afar that Nino and his wife, Liliana, were in the middle of a serious argument. Liliana was clattering pots and pans around on the stove, and her thick face was glistening with sweat. Nino was talking to his wife and waving his arms wildly. Their baby was lying in a cradle in the corner, screaming.

Momo sat down quietly next to the baby. She took it onto her lap and rocked it gently until it became quiet. The adults broke off their dispute in order to look over.

“Oh, Momo it’s you,” said Nino, giving her a fleeting smile. “It’s nice to see you again. It’s been such a long time.”

“You want something to eat?” asked Liliana, a bit surprised.

Momo shook her head.

“Well, what do you want?” inquired Nino aggressively. “At the moment, we really don’t have any time for you.”

“I just wanted to ask you why it’s been such a long time since your last visit?” answered Momo.

“Well, I don’t know either,” said Nino, now irritated. “But right now I have other things to worry about.”

“Yes!” said Liliana banging two pots together. “He sure does! Like getting rid of regular customers who’ve been coming here for years! That’s one of his concerns now! You remember the old men, Momo, the ones who always used to sit around the table in the corner? He chased them off! He threw them out!”

“I did not!” said Nino defensively. “I politely asked them to find another pub. As host and owner, I have every right to do that.”

“The right, the right!” responded Liliana furiously. “You just don’t do things like that. It’s horrible, it’s inhuman! You know perfectly well that they won’t find another pub. They didn’t bother a soul here!”

“Obviously they didn’t bother a soul,” yelled Nino, “because no decent, paying person would come here as long as those unshaven old men were loafing around. You think people like seeing those guys? Besides, we can’t make any money off the one measly glass of cheap wine that they can each afford to buy every night! We’ll never get anywhere like that!”

“We’ve managed so far,” retorted Liliana.

“Yes, so far!” answered Nino violently. “But you know full well that it can’t go on like this. The landlord raised the rent on me—I have to pay a third more than I used to! Everything is getting more expensive. How can I make any money if I turn my pub into an asylum for doddering old men? Why should I give other people a break? No one’s giving me one!”

Liliana slammed a saucepan down on the stove so hard that it sounded like a small gas explosion.

“Now let me remind you of something,” she yelled, bracing her arms on her wide hips. “My own uncle, Etorre, belongs to that group of ‘doddering old men,’ as you like to call them, and I will not allow you to insult my family. He’s a good, honest man even if he doesn’t make as much money as your paying patrons!”

“Etorre can come back!” replied Nino with a large, gracious gesture. “I already told him he can stay if he wants. Clearly he doesn’t want to.”

“Of course he doesn’t want to—not without his friends! What do you think? You think he wants to sit in that corner all by himself?”

“Well I can’t change that!” yelled Nino. “And I’m not interested in finishing my life as a lousy bartender just out of concern for your uncle Ettore! I want to be successful too! Is that a crime? I want to get this place going. I want to make something of this pub! And I’m not just doing it for me. I’m doing it just as much for you and for our child. Can’t you understand that, Liliana?”

“No!” said Liliana callously. “If it forces you to be heartless, and if it begins like this, then you’ll have to do it without me! One day I’m just going to leave, and then you do whatever you want!”

She took the baby out of Momo’s arms because it was beginning to cry again, and ran out of the kitchen. Nino didn’t say anything for a long time. He lit a cigarette and twirled it around between his fingers. Momo watched him.

“Well,” he finally said, “they were nice guys. I liked them a lot myself. You know, Momo, I really do feel bad that I... you know... but what am I supposed to do? Times are changing!” His voice trailed off. “Maybe Liliana’s right,” he said after another pause. “Ever since the old guys have been gone, my pub has felt strange to me. Cold, you know? I can barely stand it myself anymore. I really don’t know what I should do. But everyone is doing it this way. Why should I be the odd man out?” He hesitated for a moment. “Or do you think I should?”

Momo nodded imperceptibly. Nino looked at her and nodded as well. Then they both smiled.

“Good that you came,” said Nino. “I had completely forgotten what we used to say in times like this: ‘Just go to Momo!’ But now I’m going to come visit with Liliana. I have the day after tomorrow off, so we’ll come then. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Momo.

Then Nino gave her a bag of apples and oranges and she went home.

Nino and his plump wife did, in fact, come two days later. They even brought the baby with them and a basketful of goodies.

“Just imagine!” said Liliana, beaming. “Nino went to see Uncle Ettore and the other men—every single one of them—and he apologized and asked them to come back.”

“Yep,” added Nino, smiling and scratching behind his ear. “They’re all back. Maybe I won’t get my pub going after all, but at least I like it again.”

He chuckled and Liliana said, “We’ll be just fine, Nino.”

It turned into quite a lovely afternoon, and when they finally left, they promised to come back soon.

Momo went looking for all of her friends in the same way. She went to the carpenter who had made her the table and chairs when she had moved in. She went to the women who had brought her the bed. In short, she went looking for all the people whom she had listened to in the past and who, at one point or another, had become cleverer, more resolved, or simply happier thanks to her. All of them promised to come and visit Momo soon.

Many didn’t keep their promises or couldn’t keep them because they didn’t have enough time. But just as many of her old friends did come back, and it was almost how it used to be.

And so, without even knowing it, Momo began to get in the way of the gray men, and that they could not tolerate.

A short time later—it was an especially hot afternoon—Momo found a doll on the overgrown stone steps of the ruin.

Now, it wasn’t all that uncommon for a child to forget one of the expensive toys that you couldn’t really play with and leave it lying on the steps. But Momo couldn’t remember ever having seen any of the children with that particular doll, and it was certainly the kind of toy she would have noticed because it was a very unusual one.

The doll was nearly as tall as Momo herself, and it was so lifelike that someone could easily have mistaken it for a small person. It didn’t look like a child or a baby, though. It looked more like a stylish young woman or a mannequin. It was wearing a red miniskirt and high-heel, lace sandals.

Momo stared at it, fascinated. After a while, she stretched out her hand to touch it, and the doll instantly fluttered its eyelids a few times, moved its mouth, and in a voice that sounded a little croaky, as if it were coming out of a telephone, it said, “Hello. I’m Barbiegirl, the complete doll.”

Momo jumped back, startled, but then automatically replied, “Hello, my name is Momo.”

The doll moved its lips again and said, “I belong to you. Everyone is jealous of you.”

“I don’t think you belong to me,” said Momo. “I think someone probably just forgot you here.”

She went over to the doll and picked it up. Its lips began to move again, and in its flat, monotone voice it said, “I want more new things.”

“Oh?” answered Momo and thought for a second. “I don’t know if I have anything you would like. But wait, I’ll show you my things, and then you can tell me what you think.”

She took the doll and clambered down through the hole in the wall that led to her room. She pulled a box out from under her bed that was filled with all sorts of treasures, and presented it to Barbiegirl. “Here,” she said. “That’s everything I have. If you like something, just say so.”

And she showed the doll a pretty, colorful feather, a beautiful grainy stone, a golden button, and a piece of sea glass. The doll didn’t say anything, so Momo gave it a light nudge.

“Hello,” quacked the doll, “I’m Barbiegirl, the complete doll.”

“Yes,” said Momo, “I already know that. You said you wanted things. Here, what about this beautiful pink shell of mine? You like it?”

“I belong to you,” answered the doll. “Everyone is jealous of you.”

“Yeah, you already said that,” explained Momo. “But if you don’t like any of my things, maybe we can play instead. You want to do that?”

“I want more new things,” repeated the doll.

“I don’t have any more,” said Momo. She took the doll and climbed back up with it. She put Barbiegirl down on the floor and sat across from it.

“Let’s play that you’re coming to visit me,” suggested Momo.

“Hello,” said the doll, “I’m Barbiegirl, the complete doll.”

“How nice of you to come pay me a visit!” replied Momo. “Where do you hail from, honorable lady?”

“I belong to you,” continued Barbiegirl. “Everyone is jealous of you.

“Hey listen,” said Momo, “we can’t play like this. It won’t work if you keep saying the same things over and over again.”

“I want more new things,” answered the doll, batting its eyelashes.

Momo tried with another game, and when that too failed, she tried another and another and another. But nothing came of them. If the doll had just been silent, Momo would have been able to answer for it, and they would have had the most interesting conversations. But precisely because it could speak, Barbiegirl made conversation impossible.

After a while, Momo was overcome by a sensation she had never felt before, and because it was completely new to her, it took her quite some time to realize that it was plain old boredom.

Momo felt helpless. She would have liked to abandon the complete doll in order to go play something else, but for some strange reason she couldn’t tear herself away from it. So she just sat there staring at the doll, and the doll stared right back at her, its glassy, blue eyes fixed on her face. It was as if the two had hypnotized one another.

When at last Momo managed to force her eyes away from the doll, she gave a surprised start. A sleek, ashen gray car, whose arrival she hadn’t noticed, was standing very close to her. A man wearing a stiff gray top hat and a suit the color of spider webs was sitting in the car, smoking a small gray cigar. Even his face was the color of gray ash.

The man had presumably been watching her for some time because he nodded at Momo with a smile; and although it was so hot out that the air was shimmering under the sweltering sun, Momo suddenly began to shiver.

The man now opened the car door, got out, and walked toward her. He was carrying a steel gray briefcase.

“What a pretty doll you have there!” he said in a distinctively expressionless voice. “I bet all your friends are jealous of you.”

Momo just shrugged her shoulders silently.

“I’m sure she was pretty expensive, huh?”

“I don’t know,” murmured Momo, clearly embarrassed. “I found it.”

“You don’t say!” replied the gray man. “It looks to me like you’re a really lucky girl.”

Momo was silent again, and she hugged her baggy men’s jacket tight around her body. It was getting colder.

“But I don’t really get the impression that you’re especially happy about it, little girl,” said the gray man with a thin smile.

Momo shook her head a little. It suddenly seemed as if all the joy in the world had disappeared forever—no, as if joy had never even existed, and everything she had thought was joy had merely been a figment of her imagination. At the same time, though, she felt something deep inside warning her.

“I’ve already been watching you for quite a while now,” the gray man went on, “and it seems to me that you don’t have any idea how to play with such a fabulous doll. Should I show you?”

Momo looked at the man, startled, and then nodded her head.

“I want more new things,” the doll suddenly quacked.

“You see little girl?” said the gray man. “She’s telling you herself. You can’t play with such a fabulous doll the same way you play with other dolls, that much is clear. And she’s not meant to be played with like any other doll. You need to offer her a little something if you don’t want to get bored with her. Pay attention to me little girl!”

He went over to his car and opened the trunk.

“First of all,” he said, “she needs lots of clothes.” He reached into the trunk. “Like this ravishing evening gown.”

He pulled it out and threw it to Momo.

“And here’s a fur coat made of real mink, and here’s a silk dressing gown, and here’s a tennis skirt, and a ski outfit, and a bathing suit, and riding clothes, pajamas, a nightgown, another dress, and another one, and another one, and another...”

One by one he threw all of the things onto the floor, where they began to form a large pile between Momo and the doll.

“There,” he said, smiling thinly again. “You can play with those things for a while, right little girl?” He paused. “Oh, so you think that will become boring after a few days? Well all right, then you just need to get more things for your doll.”

He bent over the trunk again and began to throw things over to Momo.

“For example, here’s a real snakeskin handbag with real lipstick and a real makeup kit inside. Here’s a little camera. Here’s a tennis racket. A dolly television that really works. A bracelet, a necklace, earrings, a doll revolver, silk socks, a fedora, a spring hat, golf clubs, a little checkbook, a bottle of perfume, bathing salt, body spray...”

He paused for a moment and scrutinized Momo, who was sitting on the floor trapped by all the different things strewn around her.

“You see?” the gray man went on. “It’s all very simple. You just have to keep buying more and more, and then you’ll never get bored. But maybe you think that the complete Barbiegirl will one day have everything and that she’ll become boring again? No, little girl, don’t worry! We have the perfect companion for Barbiegirl.”

And now he pulled another doll out of the trunk. It was just as big as Barbiegirl and just as complete. The only difference was that this one was a boy. The gray man sat it down next to Barbiegirl and began to explain.

“This is Barbieboy! There are just as many accessories for him as there are for Barbiegirl. And when all of that gets boring, Barbiegirl has another friend, and she also has unique accessories that suit only her. And Barbieboy also has a friend, and that friend has other friends and girlfriends. You see? You never have to be bored again because it goes on and on, and there’s always something new to wish for.”

While he was speaking, he pulled one doll after another out of the trunk of his car, whose contents seemed inexhaustible, and placed them in a ring around Momo, who was still sitting motionless, watching the man in bewilderment.

“So?” the man finally said, puffing out thick clouds of smoke. “Do you see how you’re supposed to play with a doll like this?”

“Yes, I get it,” answered Momo.

She had begun to shake violently from the cold. The gray man nodded with satisfaction and took a long drag of his cigar.

“Now, you would obviously like to keep all these pretty things, right? Okay fine, my dear, I’ll give them to you! You’ll get all of this—not right away mind you, but one after the other, all in good time—and you’ll get much, much more too. You don’t have to do anything for it. You only have to play with them the way I explained to you. What do you say?”

The gray man smiled expectantly at Momo, but since she was returning his gaze with a serious one of her own and not saying anything, he quickly added:

“You won’t even need your friends anymore, you understand? You’ll have enough distractions when all these pretty things belong to you and when you keep getting more, right? Don’t you want that? You do want this fabulous doll, don’t you? You have your heart set on it, am I right?”

Deep down Momo sensed that she was approaching a serious battle, indeed, that she was already in the thick of it. But she knew neither what the fight was about nor with whom she was fighting. The longer she listened to this visitor, the more she felt the way she had felt before with the doll: she heard a voice speaking, she heard words, but she couldn’t hear the person behind the words. She shook her head.

“What’s this now, what’s this?” said the gray man, raising his eyebrows. “You’re still not satisfied? You kids these days are so spoiled! Do you want to tell me what this complete doll is still missing?”

“I think,” Momo interrupted quietly, “that it’s impossible to love it.”

For a long, long time the gray man said nothing. He stared glassily off into the distance, like the doll. Finally he pulled himself together.

“That’s not important,” he said icily.

Momo looked him in the eyes. This man made her afraid, above all, because of the coldness that seemed to emanate from his gaze. Somehow she also felt strangely sorry for him, but she couldn’t really say why.

“But my friends,” she said. “I love my friends.”

The gray man grimaced as if he had suddenly gotten a severe toothache, but he quickly regained his composure and shot Momo a razor-thin smile.

“I think we should speak honestly with one another for a moment, little girl,” he replied softly, “so that you know what this is really about.”

He pulled a gray notebook out of his pocket and leafed through it until he found what he was looking for.

“You are Momo, correct?”

Momo nodded. The gray man snapped his notebook closed, put it back in his pocket, and sat down on the floor next to Momo with a slight groan. He didn’t say anything for a while. Instead he just puffed on his little gray cigar, deep in thought.

“Okay Momo, now listen to me carefully!” he finally began.

Momo had been trying to do that the whole time, but it was far more difficult to listen to him than any other person she had ever listened to before. Most of the time she could slip into other people, so to speak, and discover what they really meant and who they actually were behind their words. But she couldn’t do it with this visitor. No matter how often she tried to understand his thoughts, she always got the feeling that she was falling into empty darkness, as if there weren’t even a person there at all.

This had never happened to her before.

“The only thing that matters in life,” the gray man went on, “is success, making something of yourself, owning things. Anyone who goes further, makes more of himself, and earns more money than other people will get all the rest automatically: friendship, love, marriage, etc. Now, you say you love your friends. Let’s examine that statement objectively.”

The gray man puffed a few smoke rings into the air. Momo tucked her bare feet under her skirt and crept as far as she could into her oversized jacket.

“First things first,” began the gray man again. “What do your friends get out of the fact that you exist? Does it help them toward anything? No. Does it help them move up, make more money, and make something of their lives? Certainly not. Do you help them in their efforts to save time? Quite the opposite: you hold them back from everything. You’re a weight attached to their legs. You obstruct their forward motion. Maybe you haven’t realized it until now, but your mere existence is a clear detriment to your friends. Yes, without wanting to be, you’re actually their worst enemy. Is that what you call loving someone?”

Momo didn’t know how to respond. She had never looked at things that way, and for a moment she wasn’t completely sure that the gray man was wrong.

“That’s why we want to protect your friends from you,” he continued. “If you really love them, you’ll help us. We want them to make something of themselves. We are their real friends, and we cannot sit idly by and watch you stop them from doing anything important with their lives. We want to ensure that you leave them alone, and that’s why we’re giving you all these pretty presents.”

“Who’s we?” asked Momo with trembling lips.

“We’re from the Timesaving Bank,” answered the gray man. “I’m Agent No. BLW/553/c. Personally, I mean you no harm, but the Timesaving Bank doesn’t like being trifled with.”

At precisely that moment, Momo suddenly recalled what Beppo and Gigi had said about saving time and about some kind of mental disease, and she came to the horrible realization that this gray man probably had something to do with it. She desperately wished that her two friends were with her now. She had never felt so alone, but she decided not to be afraid. She gathered all her courage and she plunged herself into the dark emptiness behind which the gray man was concealing himself. He had been watching Momo out of the corner of his eye, and the change in her face didn’t escape him. He smiled sarcastically while he lit a new cigar with the stub of his old one.

“Don’t even bother,” he said. “You can’t do it to us. You can’t get inside.”

Momo didn’t relent.

“Doesn’t anybody love you?” she asked in a whisper.

The gray man began to writhe, and quite suddenly, he sank into himself a little. Then, in an even grayer voice, he answered:

“I must say, I have never encountered anyone quite like you, not once, and I know many, many people. If there were more of your kind, we would just have to close our bank and dissolve into thin air. What would we have to live on?”

The agent interrupted himself. He stared at Momo, and he seemed to be fighting against something that he couldn’t quite comprehend and that he couldn’t suppress. His ashen face turned a shade grayer. When he now began to speak, it was as if he were doing so against his will, as if the words were pouring out despite his greatest efforts to stem their flow. His face became increasingly distorted with horror at what was happening to him. Finally, Momo heard his real voice. It sounded like it was coming from infinitely far away.

“We must remain unrecognizable. No one can know that we exist and what we do... We make sure that no one remembers us... We can only do our work as long as no one knows who we are... exhausting work, stealing people’s time—hours, minutes, and seconds... all the time that they save is actually lost to them... we take it for ourselves... we store it up... we need it... we hunger for it... ah! You have no idea how valuable your time is! But we, we know, and we suck it away from you... suck you dry... and we always need more... always more... always more...”

He uttered these last words laboriously before literally clamping both hands over his mouth to stem the outpouring. His eyes bulged out of his head, and he goggled at Momo. After a while, it seemed like he was coming back to himself and emerging from a kind of stupor.

“What... what was that?” he stammered. “I’m sick. You made me sick!” And then in a nearly pleading tone: “I said a whole lot of nonsense, dear child. Forget it all! You have to forget me the same way everyone else forgets us! You must! You must!”

He grabbed Momo and shook her. She moved her lips but couldn’t say anything.

The gray man sprang up, looked around as if he were being hounded, grabbed his steel gray briefcase, and ran to his car. Then something very strange occurred: as if in a reverse explosion, all the dolls and all the other scattered items flew into the trunk from all different directions. The trunk slammed shut with a bang, and then the car raced away, spitting out little pebbles from under the wheels as it drove off.

Momo sat in her spot for a long time, trying to understand what she had heard. Little by little, the dreadful chill faded from her arms and legs. At the same time, everything also slowly became clearer. She didn’t forget anything. She had heard a gray man’s real voice. She saw a tiny column of smoke rising up in the grass in front of her. The squashed butt of a small gray cigar was slowing burning down to ash.

CHAPTER EIGHT

High hopes and a few misgivings

Gigi and Beppo came by the amphitheater in the late afternoon to find Momo crouched in the shade by a wall, still quite pale and haggard. They sat down next to her and anxiously asked what was wrong. At first, Momo was hesitant to tell them what she had seen, but eventually she repeated word for word the entire conversation she had had with the gray man.

Old Beppo had been watching her with grave intensity throughout, and the folds of his wrinkled brow became thicker and deeper. When Momo had finished, he was silent.

Gigi, on the other hand, had listened with increasing agitation and excitement. His eyes began to gleam the way they often did when he fell too deeply into the rhythm of a story he was telling and got carried away.

“Momo,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “This is our big chance! You’ve discovered something that no one else knows, and now we’re not only going to rescue our friends—no, we’re going to save the whole city! The three of us: me, you, and Beppo!”

He had jumped up, and both of his arms were spread wide. In his imagination, he saw a gargantuan mass of people cheering for him, their savior.

“All right,” said Momo, a bit dazed. “How will we do it... how will we beat them?”

“What do you mean?” Gigi demanded irritably.

“I mean,” explained Momo, “how will we actually do it? How will we defeat the gray men?”

“Well,” said Gigi, “obviously I haven’t thought that far ahead, so I’m not sure yet. We’ll have to make a plan of action first. But one thing’s for sure: now that we know they exist and what they do, we have to fight against them... or are you scared?”

Momo nodded with embarrassment. “I don’t think they’re normal men. The one who came here was... well... he looked different somehow. And the cold is terrible. If there are a lot of them, I’m sure they can be very dangerous. Yes, I’m really scared.”

“Oh please!” exclaimed Gigi enthusiastically. “The situation’s simple! These gray men can only do their dirty work if no one knows about them. The visitor said so himself. All we need to do is make sure that they become recognizable. Anyone who recognizes them will remember them, and anyone who remembers them will be able to recognize them right away! So they can’t do anything to us—we’re untouchable!”

“You think?” Momo asked doubtfully.

“Of course!” Gigi continued with glowing eyes. “Otherwise your visitor wouldn’t have scampered off head over heels. They’re terrified of us!”

“But maybe we won’t even be able to find them,” said Momo. “Maybe they’ll hide from us.”

“They could very easily do that,” admitted Gigi, “so we’ll just have to lure them out of their hiding places.”

“How?” asked Momo. “I think they’re very clever.”

“Nothing could be easier!” yelled Gigi with a laugh. “We’ll catch them with their own greed. You catch mice with cheese, so you catch time thieves with time. We, of all people, have enough of it! For instance, you could set yourself up as bait somewhere, while Beppo and I hide, and when they come we’ll jump out of our hiding places and overpower them.”

“But they already know me,” Momo objected. “I don’t think they’d fall for it.”

“Well, okay,” said Gigi, who was now having one idea after another. “Then we’ll just do something else. Didn’t the gray man say something about a Timesaving Bank? That must be their headquarters, and it must be somewhere in the city. All we have to do is find it, and we’ll definitely be able to do that because I’m sure it’s a very particular building. I can see it now: gray, creepy, no windows, like a giant concrete safe. Once we find it, we’ll go in armed with pistols, and I’ll say, ‘Hand over the stolen time!’ ”

“We don’t have any pistols,” Momo interrupted sadly.

“Then we’ll just do it without pistols,” said Gigi, dismissing this new objection with a grandiose gesture. “That would even be scarier. The very sight of us would be enough to make them panic.”

“It might be good if there were more of us when we do it, not just us three,” said Momo. “Then we might also be able to find the Timesaving Bank more quickly. If others help, I mean.”

“That’s a great idea!” replied Gigi. “We should mobilize all of our friends and all the kids that keep showing up here. I suggest that the three of us split up and go give the heads up to as many people as we can find. Then those people can go tell other people, and everyone can come here at three in the afternoon tomorrow for a big council!”

They all set off at once, Momo in one direction, Beppo and Gigi in the other. When the two men had been underway for a while, Beppo, who had remained silent until then, suddenly stopped short.

“Listen, Gigi,” he said. “I’m worried.”

Gigi turned around so they were facing each other. “About what?”

Beppo looked at his friend for a while. “I believe Momo,” he said.

“So do I,” Gigi responded quizzically. “What’s the big deal?”

“I mean,” Beppo continued, “I think that everything Momo told us is true.”

“Yeah, so what? I do too,” said Gigi. He still didn’t understand what Beppo was getting at.

“You know,” explained Beppo, “if it all really turns out to be true—everything that Momo told us—then we have to think very carefully what we’re going to do. If there really is a secret band of criminals... well, you don’t just go up against people like that without any real planning, you know? If we draw them out just like that, something very bad could happen to Momo—not to mention us too, but that’s not as important—and if we pull the children into it as well then we may be putting them in danger. We have to think carefully about what we’re going to do.”

“Oh come on!” yelled Gigi with a laugh. “You’re always worrying about everything. The more the merrier! That’s obvious. I hope everyone joins in.”

“It seems to me like you don’t actually believe Momo’s story,” Beppo whispered gravely.

“What does true mean, anyway?” retorted Gigi. “You’re a man without imagination, Beppo, that’s your problem. The whole world is a big story and we’re all characters in it. I do believe it, Beppo. I believe every single word Momo told us, just the same as you!”

Beppo didn’t know how to respond, and Gigi’s playful answers weren’t helping calm his worries in the least.

Then they parted, each going in a different direction to find their friends and the children and tell them about the meeting the next day, Gigi with a light heart and Beppo full of baleful foreboding.

That night Gigi dreamt of his future glory as the city’s savior and liberator. He saw himself in a tailored suit jacket, Beppo in a tuxedo, and Momo in a dress of white satin. All three of them were being presented gold necklaces by the mayor, who was draping them over their necks. Then they were each crowned with a laurel wreath. Triumphant music could be heard, and in honor of its saviors, the city had built and ignited a splendid Olympic torch, the likes of which had never been seen before.

At the same time, old Beppo was lying in his bed. He couldn’t fall asleep. The more he thought about it, the more obviously dangerous the whole operation seemed. He wouldn’t let Gigi and Momo perish alone—he would go with them no matter what ended up happening, that went without saying—but at the very least he had to try to dissuade them.

By three o’clock the next afternoon, the ruins of the old amphitheater echoed once again with the clamor of many excited voices. Unfortunately, none of Momo’s old, grown-up friends had been able to make it—not including Gigi and Beppo, of course—but fifty to sixty children had come. Poor and rich, big and small, well brought up and wild, they had come from all over the city to hear what Momo had to say. Many, like the girl Maria, had brought siblings with them, who were being led by the hand or held, and who were watching the bizarre gathering with wide eyes while sucking their thumbs. Franco, Paolo, and Massimo were also there, but the remaining children belonged almost entirely to the group of newcomers who had recently begun congregating in the amphitheater. They were all especially interested in the subject of the meeting.

Incidentally, the little boy with the portable radio also showed up, this time without the radio. He sat down next to Momo and told her straight away that his name was Claudio and that he was very happy to be able to participate.

When it finally became clear that there were no more stragglers coming, Gigi the Guide stood up and made a wide gesture, signaling for silence. The hum of conversations grew quieter and an anticipatory hush spread across the stones of the round stage.

“Dear friends,” Gigi began in a loud voice. “You all pretty much know what this is about—we told you when we invited you to this secret meeting. More and more people have begun to have less and less time despite all the new harebrained schemes to try and save as much as possible. The truth is that the time people thought they were saving is actually slowly seeping away from them. Why? Thanks to Momo, we now have an answer! Their time is literally being stolen away from them by a gang of time thieves! And we’re going to need you to help if we want to put a stop to this cold-blooded criminal organization. With your cooperation, we can banish the horrible specter that’s hovering over the people in this city in one stroke. Don’t you think that sounds like something worth fighting for?”

He paused and the children applauded.

“Later,” Gigi went on, “we’ll discuss what we should do, but first Momo is going to tell you how she met this thief and how he gave himself away.”

“Just a moment,” interrupted Beppo, standing up. “Listen to me, children! I’m against Momo speaking to you. It won’t work like this. If she tells you what she saw, she’ll be putting herself and you in grave danger...”

“No!” cried several of the children. “We want Momo to tell us!” Others joined in until there was a chorus of voices chanting: “Momo! Momo! Momo!”

Old Beppo sat back down, took off his glasses and wearily ran a hand through his hair.

Confused, Momo stood up. She didn’t quite know whose demands she should listen to, Beppo’s or the children’s, but eventually she began to tell the story. The children listened with suspense, and when she had finished, a long silence followed.

During Momo’s account everyone had become more than a bit anxious. They hadn’t pictured the time thieves as so sinister. A younger sibling began to cry loudly but was quickly comforted.

“Well?” asked Gigi, breaking the silence. “Who’s brave enough to take a stand against these gray men with us?”

“Why didn’t Beppo want Momo to tell us what happened?” asked Franco.

“He thinks,” Gigi explained with a smile, “that the gray men consider anyone who knows their secret to be a danger to them, and that they’ll stalk anyone who does. But I’m positive that it’s precisely the other way around, that anyone who knows their secret is invincible and can’t be harmed by them. It’s perfectly clear! Admit it, Beppo!”

But Beppo only shook his head slowly. The children were silent.

“One thing’s for sure,” Gigi insisted, beginning to speak again. “We need to stick together through thick and thin! We need to be careful, but we can’t be afraid. So I ask you one more time: who’s willing to help?”

“I am!” yelled Claudio, standing up. He was a little pale.

To begin with, only a few people shakily followed suit, but slowly they became more determined until finally everyone at the meeting had agreed to help.

“Now, Beppo,” said Gigi, gazing at all the children, “what do you say?”

“Okay,” said Beppo, nodding sadly. “Of course I’m going to help as well.”

“So,” said Gigi, turning to the children again, “now we need to decide what we want to do. Who has a suggestion?”

They all thought quietly to themselves.

Finally Paolo, the boy with the glasses, asked, “How do they even do it? I mean, how can you really steal time? How does it work?”

“Yeah!” yelled Claudio. “What is time anyway?”

No one had an answer.

Then Maria, the girl with the little sister Didi, whom she had been holding on her lap since the beginning of the meeting, stood up on the other side of the round stage. “Maybe it works like sound waves or something?” she said. “There’s already a special machine that can record people’s thought waves—what they’re thinking in their heads. I saw one on TV. There are all sorts of machines today that can do things like that.”

“I have an idea,” yelled Massimo, the chubby boy with the high-pitched voice. “When you film something, it’s all on the film, right? And with tape recorders, everything is on the tape. Maybe they have a machine that can record time. If we only knew what kind of machine it was, then we could play it backward and all the stolen time would be here again.”

“One thing’s for sure,” said Paolo, pushing his glasses up his nose. “We need to find a specialist who will help us, otherwise we can’t do anything.”

“You and your specialists!” yelled Franco. “You can’t trust those guys anyway. Even if we did find someone who knows about time, how could we be sure that he wasn’t working for the time thieves? Then we’d really be in trouble.”

It was a legitimate objection, and everyone seemed impressed.

Then a visibly well brought up and polite girl stood up and said, “In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to tell everything to the police.”

“That does it!” scoffed Franco. “What will the police do about it! These aren’t your ordinary thieves. Either the police know everything already, in which case they’re obviously powerless, or they haven’t noticed any of this yet, in which case they’d never believe us. At least that’s what I think.”

A helpless silence ensued.

“But we have to do something,” Paolo said eventually. “And we have to do it fast—before the time thieves get wind of our plan.”

Then Gigi rose to his feet.

“Dear friends,” he began, “I have considered this matter carefully. I have already thought up hundreds of schemes and rejected them all until I finally found one that will undoubtedly do the trick as long as you all help! I only wanted to see if one of you had thought of something better, but seeing as that hasn’t happened, let me tell you what we’re going to do.”

He paused and slowly looked around the whole stage. More than fifty faces were turned toward him. He hadn’t had this many listeners in a long time.

“As you already know,” he continued, “these gray men are only powerful because they are unrecognizable and can do their work in secret. The simplest and best way to stop them is to make sure that everyone discovers who they really are. How will we do that? We’ll organize a mass demonstration! We’ll make posters and signs and we’ll walk through the streets with them. We’ll get everyone’s attention and then we’ll invite the entire city here to the amphitheater so we can tell everyone what’s happening. There will be a lot of commotion! Thousands of people will flock to us! And when a big crowd has gathered, we’ll reveal the horrible secret! And then... then in one fell swoop, the world will change! No one will be able to steal away time from anyone else. Every person will be able to have as much of it as he or she wants because from then on there will be more than enough. My friends, we can do it together if we want to!” He paused. “Do we want to?”

A deafening cry was the only answer.

“I think it’s fair to say that we have unanimously decided to invite the entire city to the old amphitheater next Sunday afternoon,” Gigi concluded. “But until then there needs to be strict secrecy regarding our plan, understood? And now, friends—lets get to work!”

The next few days brought with them a secret but feverish bustle in the old amphitheater. As if by magic, paper, buckets of paint, brushes, glue, planks, cardboard, pickets, and whatever else was necessary appeared. (How it all got there and where it came from is better left unsaid.) And while some began to put together banners, signs, and placards to hang around their necks, others, who were better at writing, thought up impressive phrases and painted them on.

For example, there were banners that said things like:

WHO ARE YOU REALLY

SAVING TIME FOR?

WHY DO YOU NOT HAVE

ANY MORE TIME?

WE CHILDREN, WE’LL TELL YOU!

COME TO A MEETING

3 PM NEXT SUNDAY

AT THE OLD AMPHITHEATER

SUNDAY, SUNDAY COME AT 3

THEN YOU’LL KNOW BECAUSE YOU’LL SEE

THAT NO MORE TIME

IS BEING WON THE SECRET’S OUT

YOU BETTER COME

NEXT SUNDAY: 3 PM

BE THERE OR BE SQUARE

At long last, when everything was finally finished, the children assembled in the amphitheater with Gigi, Beppo, and Momo at the front, and marched off into the city in a long, snaking formation. They made noise with pots, pans, garbage can lids, and little pipes; they yelled chants; and they sang the following song, which Gigi had composed specially for the occasion:

Listen, all, to what we say:

It’s fast approaching noon today.

So wake on up and hear us whine:

The men in gray are stealing time!

Hear, you people, what we say:

Don’t let yourselves be led astray!

Come on Sunday, right ’round three

Listen to us and you’ll be free!

The song obviously had more verses—twenty-eight all together, in fact—but we needn’t quote them all here.

The police intervened a few times, breaking up the procession of children when it was blocking traffic, but the children wouldn’t let themselves be deterred in the least. They gathered anew in other places and began all over again. Other than that, though, nothing happened to them, and in spite of their careful vigilance, they didn’t see a single gray man.

Many other children, who saw the train but hadn’t been told about the meeting, tagged along until there were many hundreds and finally even close to a thousand of them all together. All over the big city, children were walking through the streets in long processions, inviting the grown-ups to an important gathering that would change the world.

CHAPTER NINE

A good gathering that doesn’t take place and a bad one that does

The great moment had passed. It had passed, and nobody had come. Precisely those few adults who needed the most help had barely even noticed the demonstration the children had put on. All their efforts had been in vain.

The sun was already dipping down toward the horizon, big and red in a sea of purple clouds. Its rays now only reached the uppermost rows of the amphitheater, in which hundreds of children had been sitting and waiting for hours. There was no happy chatting or jabbering to be heard anymore. Everyone sat there in sad, still silence.

The shadows were quickly growing longer. Soon it would be dark, and the children were beginning to shiver in the cold. A church tower in the distance chimed eight times. Now there could be no more doubts: the whole plan had failed miserably.

The first children began to get up and silently drift away. Others tagged along. No one said a word. The disappointment was too great.

Eventually, Paolo walked over to Momo and said, “There’s no point in waiting any longer. No one’s going to come now. Good night, Momo.” And he left.

Then Franco came up to her and said, “What can you do; it’s hopeless. At least we know that we can’t count on the grown-ups anymore. We’ve seen that. I’ve always mistrusted them a little, but now I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

He left as well, and others followed. Finally, once it was already quite dark, the last few children gave up hope and took off.

Momo alone stayed with Gigi and Beppo. But after a while even the old street sweeper stood up.

“Are you going too?” Momo asked.

“I have to,” answered Beppo. “I have overtime.”

“At night?”

“Yes, just for tonight. They asked us to help unload garbage at the dump. I have to go there now.”

“But it’s Sunday! And besides, you’ve never had to do that before!”

“No, but today they’ve asked for the help, otherwise they won’t be able to finish it all. Shortage of workers and such.”

“That’s too bad,” said Momo. “I would have felt better if you’d stayed.”

“I feel the same way. It doesn’t make me happy that I have to leave now,” said Beppo. “But I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He swung himself onto his squeaky bicycle and disappeared into the night.

Gigi was quietly whistling a melancholy song to himself. He could whistle very prettily, and Momo was happily listening to him when he suddenly broke off.

“Christ, I have to go too!” he said. “Today is Sunday! I almost forgot. Today I have to go be a night watchman. Didn’t I tell you? It’s my newest job! I must have lost track of time.”

Momo stared up at him with big eyes and said nothing.

“Don’t be sad that our plan didn’t work the way we wanted it to,” Gigi went on. “I thought it would go differently as well. But still—we had a really good time! It was great.”

Since Momo was stubborn in her silence, he soothingly stroked her hair and added, “Don’t take it so seriously. We’ll just think of something else, a new game. Sound good?”

“It wasn’t a game,” Momo said quietly.

Gigi stood up. “I know all that, but we’ll talk more about it tomorrow, okay? I have to go. I’m already running late. You should go lie down.”

And he left, whistling his melancholy song as he went.

Momo sat all alone in the big, round stone stage. There were no stars that night because the sky was overcast. A strange wind began to blow. It wasn’t strong, but it was persistent and distinctively cold. It was a gray wind.

Massive garbage dumps towered up beyond the city limits. They were veritable mountains of ash, glass shards, tin cans, old mattresses, plastic debris, cardboard boxes, and all the other things that got thrown away each day in the big city and slowly but surely made their way into the enormous furnaces that incinerated them.

Until late that night, Beppo and his fellow workers had been helping shovel garbage out of the many garbage trucks that were standing in rows with their headlights on, waiting to be unloaded. The more of them they emptied, the more arrived, attaching themselves to the long lines.

“Hurry up, people!” the foreman kept repeating. “Let’s go, let’s go! Otherwise we’ll never get it all done!”

Beppo had shoveled and shoveled until his shirt stuck to his sweaty back, and finally, around midnight, they finished. Since Beppo was older than the rest of the men and not exactly the strongest, he was exhausted, and he sat down on an upside-down, hole-ridden plastic tub trying to catch his breath.

“Hey Beppo,” one of the workers called. “We’re going home now. You coming?”

“Just a minute,” said Beppo putting a hand on his aching chest. It felt like his heart was on fire.

“Hey buddy, you feeling all right?” someone else asked.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Beppo called back. “You guys go on ahead. I’m just going to stay and rest for a moment.”

“Okay then,” yelled the others. “Good night!” And they drove off.

It became very still. Only the rats were making noise, rustling here and there in the garbage and squeaking sometimes. Beppo dozed off with his head in his arms.

He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep when he was suddenly woken up by an ice-cold gust of wind. He looked around, and in an instant he was completely awake.

The gargantuan garbage heap was teeming with gray men. They all wore fancy gray suits and top hats, had steel gray briefcases in hand and were holding little gray cigars clenched between their lips. They were all silently and steadily staring up at the summit of the garbage mound where three more identical gray men were sitting behind a makeshift judge’s bench that had been erected there.

A jolt of terror shot through Beppo. He was afraid of being discovered. He wasn’t supposed to be here—that much was clear to him even before he thought about it—but he soon noticed that the gray men were looking at the judge’s bench as if transfixed. Maybe they couldn’t even see him, or maybe they just thought he was some discarded object.

“Agent BLW/553/c, please step forward!” A voice from up behind the judge’s table pierced the silence.

The call was repeated down below, farther off in the distance, where it resounded like an echo. Then a narrow path opened up between the mass of gray men and one gray man slowly climbed the garbage heap. The only thing that differentiated him from the others was his face, which was almost completely white.

At last he reached the judge’s bench.

“Are you Agent BLW/553/c?” asked the man in the center. “Yes, your honor.”

“How long have you been employed by the Timesaving Bank?”

“Ever since I came into existence.”

“That goes without saying. Spare us such unnecessary inanities! When did you come into existence?”

“I have existed for eleven years, three months, six days, eight hours, twenty-three minutes, and—at this exact moment—eighteen seconds.”

Although the conversation was taking place quietly and very far away, Beppo could somehow hear every word.

“Are you aware,” the man in the center continued, “that a not-insignificant number of children in this city marched around today carrying signs and banners, and entertaining the unspeakable idea of inviting the entire city to a meeting to tell the public about us?”

“Yes, I am aware,” answered the agent.

“And how do you account for the fact that these children knew about us and our activities?” the central judge continued ruthlessly.

“I can’t explain it either,” the agent answered. “But if I may be allowed one remark, I would like to suggest that the High Court not take this affair more seriously than it warrants. It was merely a childish game, nothing more! Additionally, I entreat the court not to overlook that we effortlessly succeeded in thwarting the planned meeting simply by not giving people enough time to go. And even if that had failed, I’m quite positive that the children wouldn’t have known any better than to tell the people some childish story about robbers, which we can agree, would undoubtedly have failed. In my opinion, we should have actually allowed the meeting to take place in order to...”

“Defendant!” the central judge interrupted sharply. “Do you realize where you are?” The agent seemed to deflate visibly. “Yes, sir,” he wheezed.

“You are not in front of a human court,” the judge continued, “but a court of your peers! You know perfectly well that you cannot lie to us. Why are you bothering to try?”

“It’s... a... it’s an occupational habit,” the defendant stammered.

“However seriously or not seriously to take the affairs of these children,” said the judge, “is something you had better leave to the judgment of this court. I should hardly have to remind you that nothing and nobody presents a greater threat to our work than these children.”

“I know,” the defendant admitted meekly.

“Children,” explained the judge, “are our natural born enemies. If they didn’t exist, mankind would have long been under our complete control. It is much more difficult to convince children to save time than adults. That is why one of our strictest laws stipulates that children should be dealt with last of all. Are you familiar with that law, defendant?”

“Very familiar, your honor,” he gasped.

“And yet we have irrefutable evidence,” the judge continued, “that one of us—I repeat, one of us—spoke with a child and betrayed the truth about us. Defendant, do you perhaps know which one of us this was?”

“It was me,” answered Agent BLW/553/c, completely shattered.

“And why did you transgress one of our strictest edicts?” inquired the judge.

“Because,” the defendant began, attempting to plead his own defense. “Because the child in question was impeding our work through its influence on others. I had the interest of the Timesaving Bank at heart. I did it with all the best intentions.”

“Your intentions are of no interest to us,” the judge responded icily. “We are only interested in the results. And in your case, defendant, not only did we not get any more time, but you actually gave away one of our most important secrets. Do you admit to that, defendant?”

“I admit it,” gasped the agent with a sunken head.

“So you admit that you are guilty?”

“Yes sir, but I beg the High Court to recognize the extenuating circumstances, to recognize that I was downright bewitched. The way this child listened to me, it managed to draw everything out. I can’t even explain it to myself, but I swear that is how it happened.”

“Your apologies are of no interest to us. Extenuating circumstances do not apply. Our laws are inviolable and do not admit any exceptions. Nevertheless, we will pay special attention to this strange child. What is it called?”

“Momo.”

“Boy or girl?”

“A little girl.”

“Residence?”

“The ruins of the old amphitheater.”

“Good,” replied the judge, who had written everything down in his little notebook. “Rest assured that this child will never again harm us. We will do everything in our power to incapacitate it. Now let us proceed, without further interruption, to your sentence.”

The defendant began to tremble.

“And what is the court’s decision?” he whispered

The three men behind the judge’s bench leaned toward one another, whispered something, and nodded. Then the one in the center turned back toward the defendant and announced:

“The verdict regarding Agent BLW/553/c is as follows: the defendant is found guilty of high treason. He admitted his guilt himself. Our laws require that, as punishment, all his remaining time be confiscated at once.”

“Mercy! Have mercy!” howled the defendant, but two gray men had already taken his briefcase and snatched his cigar.

And then something very strange occurred. The moment the condemned man didn’t have the cigar in his mouth anymore, he quickly became more and more transparent. His screams also became thinner and quieter. He stood that way, his hands covering his face, and began to disappear into thin air. At the very end, it was as if the wind were tossing a few remaining bits of ash in a circle, and then those too disappeared.

The gray men who had been watching the trial silently began to disperse. The darkness quickly swallowed them all, and then only the gray wind remained, blowing over the desolate and deserted garbage dump.

Beppo Streetsweeper was still sitting in the same place, staring at the spot where the defendant had disappeared. He felt as if he had frozen all the way through and was only very slowly beginning to thaw. Now he knew for himself that the gray men existed.

Around the same time, as the clock tower in the distance struck midnight, Momo was still sitting on the stone steps of the ruin. She was waiting. She couldn’t say what she was waiting for, but for some reason she felt like she had to keep waiting, so she had decided not to go to sleep yet.

Suddenly she felt something rub up against her bare foot. She bent over because it was very dark, and was just barely able to make out a large turtle, whose raised head was looking straight up into her face while a strange smile played on its mouth. Its clever black eyes sparkled with such intensity that it seemed like it might begin speaking right there. Momo leaned all the way down and gave it a light scratch under the chin.

“And who might you be?” she asked quietly. “It’s nice to see that at the very least you came to visit me, turtle. What do you want from me?”

Momo didn’t know if she had failed to notice them earlier, or if in fact, they had just now appeared, but she could suddenly make out lightly glowing letters that seemed to be emanating from the natural pattern on the turtle’s horned shell.

“FOLLOW ME,” Momo slowly deciphered.

Astonished, she sat up. “Do you mean me?” she asked.

But the turtle had already set itself in motion. After a few steps, it stopped and looked around for the child.

“It really does mean me!” Momo said to herself. Then she stood up and began to walk behind the animal.

“Go ahead,” she said quietly. “I’m following you.”

And step by small step, she began walking behind the turtle, as it slowly, very slowly, made its way out of the stone amphitheater before setting off in the direction of the big city.

CHAPTER TEN

A wild chase and a calm escape

Old Beppo peddled through the night as fast as he could on his squeaky bicycle. He heard the gray judge’s words ringing in his ears again and again: “...we will pay special attention to this strange child... rest assured that it will never harm us again... we will do everything in our power to incapacitate it.”

There could be no doubt that Momo was in grave danger. He had to go to her at once to warn her about the gray men and protect her from them. He wasn’t sure how, but he’d figure it out. Beppo kicked down hard on the pedals, his tufts of white hair fluttering in the breeze. It was still a long way to the amphitheater.

The ruin was flooded by the harsh headlights of many sleek, gray cars parked all around. Dozens of gray men hurried up and down the overgrown stone stairs, scouring every nook and cranny until they discovered the hole in the wall that led to Momo’s room. Some of them climbed through and looked under the bed—they even went so far as to peek inside the stone oven. Then they clambered back out, brushed the dirt off their fancy gray suits, and shrugged their shoulders.

“She flew the coop,” one of them said.

Another snarled, “It’s incredibly aggravating that children these days wander around at night instead of going to bed like they’re supposed to.”

“I don’t like the way this looks,” said a third. “It almost looks like someone managed to warn her in time.”

“Impossible!” said the first. “The person would have had to know about our decision before we were informed by headquarters.”

The gray men looked at each other, alarmed.

“If He really did warn her,” the third began to say, “then she certainly isn’t around here anymore. By continuing our search we would just be wasting even more time.”

“You have a better idea?”

“I think we should notify headquarters so they can give orders for a search to be carried out on a much larger scale.”

“You know as well as I do that headquarters is first going to ask us if we thoroughly searched the surroundings, as they should.”

“All right,” said the first gray man. “Let’s search the surrounding neighborhood. But if, in the meantime, the girl is being helped by Him, then we’re making a big mistake.”

“Nonsense!” the other went on angrily. “And even if she is, headquarters can still order a full-scale manhunt using every available agent. The child doesn’t have the slightest chance of escaping. Right, gentlemen, let’s get to work! You know what’s at stake.”

That night, many people from the neighborhood lay awake, wondering why, even here on the outskirts of town, the noise of cars racing by their windows didn’t seem to be subsiding. Even the smallest side streets and gravel paths roared as noisily as some of the busiest roads and intersections during the day, and no one could get any sleep.

At the very same moment, the turtle was slowly leading Momo through the big city, which never slept anymore, regardless of the hour. Even now, endless streams of people were impatiently hurrying through the streets, surging by one another, pushing, jostling, and elbowing, or just letting themselves be carried along by the endless columns of moving bodies. Cars pressed forward on the streets, which were interspersed with roaring omnibuses overflowing with people. Neon advertisements on the facades of almost every building briefly blazed up, their colorful lights all aglow, before going dark again.

Momo, who had never seen any of this before, followed the turtle wide-eyed, as if in a dream. The two of them trudged across broad squares and brightly lit streets while cars raced back and forth in front of them and behind them and pedestrians pressed in on every side. But amid all the hustle and bustle, nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention to the child following the turtle. The two never had to duck out of anyone’s way, no one ever bumped into them and not one car ever had to break to let them pass. It was as if the turtle knew beforehand precisely where cars and pedestrians wouldn’t be, so that their path was always clear. They never had to hurry up, nor did they have to slow down to wait, and Momo began to wonder how it was possible to go so slowly and still make so much progress.

When Beppo Streetsweeper finally arrived at the amphitheater, the dim light on his bicycle revealed the many tire marks around the ruin even before he got off. He left his bike in the grass and ran to the hole in the wall.

“Momo,” he whispered, cautiously at first, and then louder. “Momo!”

No answer.

Beppo gulped. His throat was dry. He climbed down into the pitch-black room through the hole, stumbled over something and sprained his ankle. He lit a match with trembling hands and peered around.

The table and the two chairs made of crate boards had been thrown to the side, the blanket and mattress had been dragged off the bed frame, and Momo was nowhere to be seen.

Beppo bit his lip and forced back a hoarse sob that was threatening to burst from his chest.

“My god,” he murmured. “Oh my god, I’m too late. They’ve already gotten her... they’ve already taken away my little girl. What should I do now? What can I do now?” The match was burning his fingers so he tossed it away. Then he was standing in total darkness.

He climbed out into the open as fast as his sprained ankle would allow and limped over to his bicycle. He swung himself onto it and kicked off. “I have to tell Gigi!” he kept repeating to himself. “I have to tell Gigi! I only hope I can find the shed where he’s been sleeping.”

Beppo knew that Gigi had recently been making a few extra dollars by sleeping in the work shed of a small car repair shop every Sunday night. He was supposed to make sure that no more car parts went missing, as there had recently been some problems with disappearing hardware.

When Beppo finally arrived at the shed and pounded against the door with his fist, Gigi, mistaking him for a thief, kept completely silent. But then he recognized Beppo’s voice and opened up.

“What’s the matter?” he grumbled with a start. “You know I can’t stand it when people disturb my sleep.”

“Momo!...” exploded Beppo, gasping for air. “Something terrible has happened to Momo!”

“What?” asked Gigi, stunned. He slowly sat back down on his makeshift bed. “Momo? What happened?”

“I’m not even sure myself,” gasped Beppo, “but it’s bad.”

And then he told Gigi everything that had happened to him: the High Court on the garbage dump, the tire marks in the amphitheater, and Momo’s deserted room. Naturally it took a while for him to tell everything in order because, despite his fear and concern for Momo, he still couldn’t speak any faster than usual.

“I had a bad feeling from the very beginning,” he said at the end of his account. “I knew it wouldn’t end well. Now they’ve taken their revenge by kidnapping Momo. My god Gigi, we have to help her. But how? How?”

All the blood had drained from Gigi’s face during Beppo’s story. He felt like the floor had suddenly been pulled out from underneath him. Up until now, the whole thing had just been a big game for him. He had taken it as seriously as he took every other story, and as in every other story, he hadn’t ever stopped to consider the consequences. For the first time in his life, a story had gone on without him, had become independent of him, and all the imagining in the world wouldn’t be able to make it his again. He felt crushed.

“You know, Beppo,” he began after a while, “it could also just be that Momo went out for a walk. You know she does that sometimes. One time she even walked around the countryside for three days and nights before coming home. I mean, maybe there’s no reason for us to get worried yet.”

“And the tire marks?” asked Beppo indignantly. “And the mattress that was thrown off the bed?”

“Well, okay,” Gigi answered evasively. “Let’s assume that the men really were there. How do we know that they found Momo? Maybe she was gone before they came. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have gone through everything and ransacked her room.”

“But if they did find her!” yelled Beppo. “What then?” He grabbed his younger friend by the coat and shook him. “Don’t be a fool, Gigi! The gray men are real! We need to do something, and we need to do it now!”

“Try to stay calm, Beppo,” Gigi stuttered, now startled for the second time that night by a rare and sudden outburst from the old man. “Obviously we’re going to do something, but it needs to be well thought out. We don’t even know where to begin looking for Momo.”

Beppo let go of Gigi. “I’m going to the police,” he announced.

“Be reasonable!” protested Gigi, who was appalled by the idea. “You can’t just do that! Imagine if they actually found her. Do you know what they’d do to her? Do you, Beppo? Do you know where wandering orphans get taken? They stick them in a home with bars over the windows! You want to do that to Momo?”

“No,” Beppo murmured helplessly. “Of course I don’t want that. But what if she’s really in trouble?”

“But what if she isn’t?” continued Gigi. “What if she really did just go for a walk? I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when she looks at you for the last time.”

Beppo collapsed into a chair at the table and put his face into the crook of his arm.

“I just don’t know what to do,” he groaned. “I just don’t know.”

“I think we should at least wait till tomorrow or the day after until we do anything,” said Gigi. “If she still isn’t back by then—well then we can go to the police. But I’m guessing it’ll all be fine by tomorrow, and the three of us will be sitting around laughing about the whole thing.”

“You think?” murmured Beppo, suddenly overcome by an acute weariness. All the excitement had been a bit much for the old man.

“Definitely,” answered Gigi. He slowly began easing off Beppo’s boots, taking extra care of the swollen ankle. Then he helped Beppo onto the makeshift bed and wrapped his ankle in a cold, wet cloth.

“It’s all going to be fine,” he said softly. “It’s all going to be fine.”

When he saw that Beppo had fallen asleep, he sighed and lay down on the floor, bunching up his jacket under his head as a pillow. He couldn’t sleep, though. He stayed awake all night thinking about the gray men, and for the first time in his carefree life, he was overcome by anxiety and fear.

The headquarters of the Timesaving Bank had issued the order for a full-scale manhunt. Every available agent in the city had been instructed to stop all other activities and concentrate on finding the child known as Momo. The streets were teeming with gray figures. They sat on roofs and in manholes; they secretly monitored every train station and airport, every bus and train—in short, they were everywhere.

But try as they might, they couldn’t find the child known as Momo.

“Hey turtle,” asked Momo. The two of them were just making their way through a dark backyard. “Where are you leading me anyway?”

“DON’T BE SCARED” appeared on the turtle’s shell after a moment.

“I’m not,” she said after she had deciphered the letters. But she was saying it more to herself, to bolster her courage, because in reality she was more than a little scared. The turtle’s route was becoming stranger and more tortuous. They had already traversed gardens and squares, walked over bridges and under dark overpasses, made their way into entryways and hallways of homes they didn’t know—they had even crept through a stranger’s cellar once or twice.

Had Momo known that she was being hunted by an entire hoard of gray men, she probably would have been much more afraid, but since she had no inkling of what was happening around her, she happily followed the turtle, step by step, as it wandered down an increasingly confusing path. And that was the best possible thing for her to do, because in the same way that the turtle had been able to predict traffic earlier, it now seemed to know ahead of time just where and when their pursuers would appear. Sometimes the gray men arrived at a spot where, just a moment earlier, the two had been standing, but Momo and the turtle never encountered them.

“What good luck that I can read so well,” Momo said merrily. “Don’t you agree?”

One word instantly popped up on the turtle’s shell, flashing like a warning beacon: “QUIET!”

Momo didn’t understand why, but she obeyed. In the very near distance, three dark figures flitted across their path and out of view.

They had now reached a part of the city where the houses looked grayer and shabbier the farther they went. High tenements with crumbling plaster walls rose up on either side of the street, and the streets themselves were pocked with potholes full of stagnant water. Everything was dark here, and there wasn’t a soul in the deserted streets.

A message had just arrived at headquarters of the Timesaving Bank: the child known as Momo had been spotted.

“Good,” came the answer. “Do you have the child?”

“No, it was there and then it was suddenly gone again as if the ground had swallowed it up. We lost it.”

“How is that possible?”

“We’re asking ourselves the same question. Something isn’t quite right.

“Where was the child when you spotted it?”

“Well, that’s the thing... the child was in a part of the city totally unknown to us.”

“There isn’t any part of the city that you don’t know,” came the reply from headquarters.

“Apparently there is. It’s—how can I put it best—it’s as if this neighborhood is right on the edge of time and the child is moving toward the edge.”

“What?” screamed headquarters. “Begin pursuit! You must apprehend it at all costs! Do you understand?”

“Understood!” came the ashen gray reply.

For a moment, Momo thought dawn was about to break, but the strange light that now flooded the area had come so suddenly—precisely at the moment they had turned onto a new street—that it couldn’t be. It wasn’t night anymore, but it wasn’t day either, and the twilight that Momo saw didn’t fit dawn or evening. It was a light that sharpened contours and corners, yet it didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular; or rather, it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. The long black shadows that were now being cast by even the smallest stones on the street went in many different directions, as if the tree Momo was passing were being lit from the left, the house next to her from the right, and the monument up ahead from the front.

Incidentally, the monument looked quite peculiar itself. It was an enormous white egg perched on a square, obsidian pedestal, nothing else.

The houses here were also different from any other houses Momo had ever seen. They were all dazzling white with pitch-black shadows for windows so that you couldn’t see if anyone actually lived in them. For some reason, Momo had the feeling that these houses hadn’t been built for people at all, but for other, more mysterious reasons.

The streets were devoid of all life, not only of humans, but also of dogs, birds, cats, and cars. The entire neighborhood was motionless, as if encased in glass, and there wasn’t even the slightest breeze or hint of wind to disturb the complete stillness. Momo was surprised at how quickly they moved forward here, even though the turtle was plodding along even more slowly than before.

Outside of this strange part of the city, three sleek cars with bright headlights chased through the derelict streets. There was a group of gray men in each one. The one driving the first car had discovered Momo as she was turning onto the street with the white houses and the strange light.

But when they arrived at the corner where she had turned off, something quite incomprehensible occurred: the cars simply couldn’t move forward anymore. The drivers stepped on the gas, the tires screamed against the pavement, but the cars remained stuck where they were, almost like they were on large treadmills that were spinning in the opposite direction. The more they sped up, the more immobile they became. As the gray men began to notice, they sprang out of their cars, cursing, and tried to catch up with Momo by foot, even though she was already far away in the distance. They ran on, their faces distorted, and when exhaustion finally forced them to stop, they realized that they hadn’t moved more than thirty feet. Looking up, they saw that Momo had disappeared somewhere in between the snow-white houses.

“It’s no use,” said one of the men. “It’s over and done with! We won’t get to her anymore.”

“Why couldn’t we move from where we were?” asked another, perplexed. “I don’t understand.”

“Me neither,” answered the first man. “The question now is whether or not they’ll consider our extenuating circumstances when we’re tried for treason.”

“You think they’ll put us on trial?”

“Well they’re not exactly going to welcome us with open arms.”

The gray men hung their heads wearily and sat down on the hoods and bumpers of their cars. They weren’t in a rush anymore.

Far, far away, somewhere in the maze of snow white streets and squares, Momo was walking behind the turtle. And precisely because they were walking so slowly, it seemed like the street they were walking on was gliding away beneath their feet while the houses shot by on either side in a blur. The turtle turned around another corner when Momo, who was still following closely, stopped short. This new street was unlike the others.

It was really more of a narrow alleyway than a street. The tight-knit houses crowding up against each other on either side were covered by small balconies and towers that seemed to be growing off of them. They looked like glass palaces that had stood on the ocean floor for an eternity and suddenly risen up, still draped in seaweed and algae, and encrusted with barnacles and coral. They all shimmered iridescently, like mother-of-pearl.

There was one house separated from all the rest that stood perpendicular to the end of the alley. Its big copper doorway was artfully engraved with various figures.

Momo looked up at the white marble street sign standing above her on the wall of the nearest house. “Never Street,” it said.

Although it had only taken Momo a few seconds to sound out the words on the sign, by the time she looked back down to where the turtle had been, she saw it was already much farther ahead of her, almost at the house.

“Hey turtle, wait for me!” she yelled. But for some reason she couldn’t hear her own voice.

The turtle seemed to have heard her, though, because it stopped moving and turned around. Momo hurried, trying to catch up, but as she stepped onto Never Street, it was suddenly as if she were fighting against a powerful underwater current or being blown backward by an overpowering but completely silent wind. She bent over against the mysterious force, pulling herself forward on corners and ledges and sometimes even crawling on all fours.

“I can’t move!” she finally yelled in the direction of the turtle, which she could see sitting alone at the end of the alley. “Please help me!”

Slowly the turtle came back. When it was finally standing in front of Momo, some words appeared on its shell: “WALK BACKWARD.”

Momo turned around, began to walk backward and suddenly she was able to move without any difficulties. But it was very strange to see what happened to her when she started moving. While she was going backward she also began to think backward, breathe backward, and feel backward—in short, she was living backward! Finally, she bumped up against something hard. She turned around and saw that she was standing in front of the last house, the one that sealed the alley. She shrank back a little because up close the carved copper doorway was enormous.

“I wonder if I’ll even be able to open it?” Momo thought doubtfully.

But at the same moment, the two sturdy doors slowly began to open. Momo stood outside for a little longer because she had discovered another sign over the door. This one was held by a white, marble unicorn. It said: THE NOWHERE HOUSE.

Since Momo wasn’t a very fast reader, by the time she had finished sounding out these three words, the doorway began to close again. She quickly slipped through, and the giant doors thundered shut behind her.

She now found herself in a long, high-ceilinged hallway. There were stone statues spaced evenly on either side of her that seemed to serve as supports for the ceiling. Nothing noticeable remained of the mysterious current. Momo slowly followed the turtle through the long hallway. When they got to the end, the small animal stopped and sat down in front of a much smaller door. It was just big enough for Momo to get through if she crouched down.

“WE’RE HERE,” she read on the turtle’s shell.

Momo bent all the way down and was now looking straight at the little door, where an even smaller sign was hanging. This one said: “Master Secundus Minutius Hora.”

Momo took a deep breath and pressed down firmly on a small ringer next to the sign. As the door opened, Momo began to hear a faint chorus of musical ticking, buzzing, ringing, and purring...

She followed the turtle in, and the little door closed quietly behind the two of them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When nasty people turn the best things sour...

A throng of agents was scurrying about the numerous pallid corridors and side corridors of the Timesaving Bank. They were agitated as they whispered the news to one another: the Board of Directors had been called together for a very unusual meeting!

Some said that this could only mean one thing: they were all in grave danger. Others claimed that the meeting had been called to unveil heretofore-unknown methods for stealing vast amounts of time.

The board members were already gathered in a large auditorium. They were sitting next to one another on either side of an extremely long conference table. As usual, each man had a steel gray briefcase with him and was smoking a thin gray cigar. They had all removed their round top hats, revealing identical shiny bald heads.

The mood in the room—as far as these men spoke about things like mood—was very tense. The chairman stood up at the head of the table. The murmuring died down and the two endless rows of gray men turned toward him.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “the situation is serious. I feel obliged to familiarize you all at once with the bitter but unchangeable facts.

“During our pursuit of the child known as Momo, we employed nearly all of our available agents. In total, the chase took six hours, thirteen minutes, and eight seconds, and all participating agents were inevitably forced to ignore their actual purpose—to collect time. To this loss of potential time-gain, we must add the time that our own agents used during the chase itself. Together, these two debit entries amount to a total loss of exactly three billion seven hundred thirty-eight million two hundred fifty-nine thousand one hundred and four seconds.

“Gentlemen, that’s more than an entire human life! I hardly need to explain what that means to us.”

He paused and made a sweeping gesture toward a massive steel door set into the wall at the far end of the auditorium. It was covered with keypads, combination locks, and innumerable other safety devices.

“Gentlemen!” he yelled in a louder voice. “Our time reserves are not inexhaustible! If the chase had only been worth it then this loss wouldn’t be so catastrophic. But as it stands now, we are talking about a completely pointless waste of time! The child escaped us!

“Gentlemen, this cannot be allowed to happen a second time! I will make it my business to summarily oppose any further measures with such high time-loss potential. We need to save time, gentlemen, not waste it, so I entreat you to forgo and oppose any similar plans as well. I have nothing more to say. Thank you.”

He sat down and blew out a thick cloud of smoke. Nervous whispers flew up and down the length of the two facing rows.

Then a second speaker stood up at the other end of the table. All the heads now turned toward him.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “the well-being of our Timesaving Bank lies equally close to all of our hearts. However, it seems completely unnecessary that we become worried over this affair, or worse, that we see it as some sort of devastating catastrophe. Nothing could be further from the truth. We all know that our time reserves are already so immense that even a loss of many times the aforementioned number would not put us into any real danger. What is a human life to us anyway? A trifle by any standards.

“I agree with our honored chairman that something of this nature should not be repeated. That said, please keep in mind that nothing like what happened with this child has ever happened before, and it is highly unlikely that anything similar will ever happen again.

“The chairman rightfully rebuked us for allowing the child to escape, but what more did we want than to incapacitate it? And that’s exactly what was achieved! The child disappeared. It fled the domain of time! We’re free of it, and I think we should be happy with this outcome.”

The speaker sat back down with a self-satisfied smile. Weak applause could be heard on either side.

Now a third speaker stood up toward the center of the long table.

“I would like to be brief,” he explained, his face pinched. “I consider the comforting words we just heard completely irresponsible. This is not an ordinary child. We all know that it is predisposed to certain skills that are extremely dangerous for us and our business here. The fact that something like this has never been seen before does not give us proof that it won’t happen again. We must be vigilant! We cannot be satisfied until we have this child in our grasp. Only then can we really be sure that it will never harm us again. For now, it has left the domain of time, but it could easily return at any moment. And it will return!”

He sat down. The other board members sat slumped over, their heads sagging.

“Gentlemen,” a fourth speaker, who was sitting across from the third, began, “please excuse my bullishness, but I feel obliged to say this as clearly as possible: we’re missing the real problem here. We must look this thing in the eye and recognize that a foreign power has involved itself in this affair. I have calculated the possibilities with precision, and the probability that a living human child left the domain of time all by itself is exactly one to forty-two million. In other words, it’s virtually impossible.”

An excited murmur shot up and down the rows of board members.

“Everything speaks in favor of the fact,” continued the speaker once the murmuring had died down, “that the child known as Momo was aided in escaping our grasp. You all know who I’m speaking about. The person in question here is the self-proclaimed Master Hora.”

At the sound of this name, most of the gray man twitched in one way or another, as if they had been hit. Some even jumped up and began to scream at one another, gesticulating wildly.

“Please, gentlemen!” yelled the speaker, his arms spread wide. “I respectfully ask you to control yourselves. I know as well as the rest of you that the use of this name isn’t—how should I put it—quite proper. It’s difficult for me to say it as well, but if we want to see the situation clearly then we must address it as it appears!

“If the aforementioned individual helped the child, then he has his reasons for doing so, and we can safely assume that his reasons are directed against us. In short, gentlemen, we must take into consideration that the aforementioned will not only send the child back, but that he will send her back with weapons to ruin our operation, and then, gentlemen, she will become a deadly danger to us indeed. So we must not only be ready to sacrifice the equivalent of a human’s life again, or four times that—no, we must be prepared to use everything, gentlemen. I repeat, everything! Any stinginess could become damn expensive for us in the long run. I think you get my drift.”

The room was in complete disarray. Everyone began speaking and interrupting everyone else. Eventually, a fifth speaker jumped on his chair and waved his arms.

“Quiet, quiet!” he roared. “Unfortunately, the man who spoke before me limited himself strictly to the indication of every possible catastrophe. Obviously he himself has no idea what we should do about any of it. He says we should be ready for any sacrifice—well fine! We should not be parsimonious with our savings—well fine! But those are empty words! He should tell us what we can actually do! We don’t know how the aforementioned will equip the child against us! We will be facing a completely unknown danger. That, gentlemen, is the problem we should really be concerned with!”

The noise in the room rose until it reached fever pitch. Everyone was screaming, some were banging on the table with their fists, others had put their hands over their faces. A mood of complete panic had set in.

Finally, with extreme difficulty, a sixth speaker managed to gather the audience. “But gentlemen,” he repeated soothingly again and again until silence reigned.

“But gentlemen, I must beg you to remain calm and collected. That is the most important thing now.

“Let’s imagine that the child returns from the aforementioned, equipped with whatever he gives it. Even that wouldn’t entail a direct confrontation. We know that we aren’t especially well suited for such a confrontation—the deplorable skills of our newly disintegrated Agent No. BLW/553/c poignantly demonstrated that for us—but a direct conflict isn’t even necessary. We have more than enough human accomplices! If we employ them in a sly and inconspicuous manner, gentlemen, then we can eliminate the child and those connected with it without ever involving ourselves directly. Such an action would save us time, it would not endanger us, and above all, it would undoubtedly work.”

The congregation of board members all sighed with relief. This suggestion appealed to all of them, and it probably would have been accepted immediately if a seventh speaker hadn’t stood up at the end of the table.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “we have only been considering how we can rid ourselves of this child. Let’s just admit it: fear is the catalyst in our discussion here. But fear is a bad advisor, gentlemen, and it seems to me that we’re letting an incredible opportunity pass us by. An old saying tells it all: ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ Why don’t we try to win the child over?”

“Hear, hear!” yelled a few voices. “Be a little more precise!”

“It seems quite obvious,” the speaker went on, “that this child has found the path to the aforementioned, the same path that we have been searching for and failing to find from the very beginning! Presumably, the child could find its way back there any time. In other words, it could lead us to him! Then we would be able to deal with the aforementioned any way we see fit, and I have a feeling that once we’re there, we’ll be able to make short work of him. Then, once we’re sitting in his place, we won’t have to wearily collect mere hours, minutes, and seconds—no, in one fell swoop, we would be in control of all the time allotted to humans! And whoever controls human time has unlimited power! Gentlemen, just imagine! We would have achieved our goal! And the same child that all of you want to eliminate is the only person who can help us achieve it!”

The auditorium went dead silent.

“But you can’t lie to the child!” yelled one man. “Just remember Agent BLW/553/c! Every single one of us will suffer the same fate!”

“Who said anything about lying?” replied the speaker. “We will tell it our entire plan.”

“But the child will never go along with it!” screamed another, waving his arms wildly. “It’s completely unthinkable!”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, my friend,” said a ninth speaker, now entering the debate. “We would obviously have to offer it something quite lucrative. For example, we could promise it as much time as it wants...”

“A promise,” interrupted the other again, “that we would clearly never dream of keeping!”

“But of course we would keep it!” replied the ninth speaker with an icy smile. “Because if we aren’t honest with it from the start the child will just pull it out of us.”

“Absolutely not!” screamed the chairman, slamming his hand down on the table. “I won’t stand for it. It would cost us a fortune to give it as much time as it wants!”

“Not in the slightest,” replied the speaker calmly. “How much can one single child use? True, it would be a constant source of loss, but consider how much we would be getting in exchange! All of human time! The little used by the child would simply be taken as an expense and entered in our books as a very slight loss. Just imagine the incredible advantages, gentlemen!”

The speaker sat down to let everyone consider how advantageous the plan really was.

“Even so,” the sixth speaker finally said, “it won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the simple fact that this child already has as much time as it wants. It’s pointless to bribe it with something that it already has in abundance.”

“Then we just have to take it all away first,” replied the ninth speaker.

The chairman wearily stood up. “Just leave it be, gentlemen,” he said. “We’re turning around in circles. We can’t get to the child: that’s the problem we began with.”

A groan of disappointment ran through the two rows of board members.

“I have a suggestion,” said a tenth speaker, “with your permission.”

“You have the floor,” said the chairman with a sigh.

The man leaned forward slightly and began. “This child is dependent on its friends. It loves to give its time away to other people. But imagine what would happen if no one were there for it to share its time with anymore. Since the child won’t willingly cooperate with our plan, we should simply target its friends.”

He pulled a folder out of his briefcase and opened it up. “We’re primarily interested in a certain Beppo Streetsweeper and another, Gigi the Guide. There’s also a longer list of children that regularly visit her. You see, gentlemen, it’s simple! We will lure all of these people so far away that the child won’t be able to contact them at all anymore. The poor thing will be all alone. What will all its free time be worth then? A burden, a curse is what it will be, and sooner or later the child won’t be able to take it anymore. Then, gentlemen, we will be in a position to name our conditions. I would bet a thousand years against a tenth of a second that it would show us the path in order to get its friends back.”

The gray men, who had looked so crestfallen a moment ago, suddenly raised their heads. Triumphant, razor-thin smiles played on all of their lips. They clapped in applause and the noise echoed through the endless corridors and side paths like a stone avalanche.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Momo discovers where time comes from

Momo was standing in the largest room she’d ever seen. It was bigger than the biggest cathedral or airport terminal. Massive columns bore the weight of a roof that Momo sensed rather than saw because it was so high up that light didn’t reach it. There were no windows anywhere, and the golden light that pervaded this immense room, snaking its way in every direction, came from countless candles, whose flames burned so steadily that they looked more like bright blots of paint that needed no wax to remain lit.

The ceaseless ticking, buzzing, ringing, and purring that Momo had heard upon entering the room came from countless clocks of every kind and size that were strewn all over, as far as the eye could see. Some were standing up or lying flat in glass encasements on long tables; still others were perched on golden wallmounts, or in endless rows of shelves.

There were delicate pocket watches encrusted with gems, basic alarm clocks, hourglasses, musical clocks with dancing figures on them, sundials, wooden clocks, marble ones, glass clocks, and clocks that were kept in motion by a constant stream of water that powered their tiny mechanisms. Hanging on the walls were all different kinds of cuckoo clocks, and other clocks with weights and pendulums, some swinging slowly and majestically, driven onward by gravity, and others with miniature pendulums that quickly wiggled back and forth.

A small spiral staircase led to a walkway one level up that circled around the room. There was a second one even higher, and another above that, and another and another.

Wherever Momo turned she saw clocks standing or lying around. There were world clocks in the shape of globes that showed the time at every different point on earth, there were large, stelliferous clocks that showed the sun, the moon, and the stars, and an ancient forest of floor clocks was growing in the middle of the room. It began with a few smaller grandfather clocks and ended somewhere deep in the center with full-size bell towers whose peaks Momo could just make out.

There was an uninterrupted stretch of ringing that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, since every one of the clocks showed a slightly different time. The result wasn’t a displeasing cacophony, though, but a steady humming, like the sound of a forest in the summer.

Momo walked around wide-eyed, examining all the different oddities. She had just stepped in front of a lavishly decorated musical clock adorned with two tiny figures, a man and a woman, who were preparing to join hands for a dance. Momo was on the verge of giving it a gentle nudge with her fingers to see if she could make them move, when she suddenly heard a friendly voice say: “Ah, there you are again, Cassiopeia! Did you bring the little girl, Momo?”

Momo turned around and saw a frail old man with silver hair stooped over the turtle in the space between two grandfather clocks. He was wearing a long frock coat made of gold threads, blue silk shorts, white knee socks that reached up to his shorts, and little boots with big golden buckles. Frilly cloth spilled out from under the sleeves and neckline of his jacket, and his white hair was braided into a small ponytail behind his head. Momo had never seen any outfit like it, but anyone with a little more worldly experience would have immediately recognized it as a style that had been fashionable two centuries ago.

“What’s that?” continued the little old man, still speaking to the turtle. “She’s already here? Well, where is she?”

He pulled out a very small pair of glasses that were similar to the ones that old Beppo wore, except that these were made entirely out of gold, and began to look around the room.

“Here I am!” called Momo.

The old man approached her with outstretched arms, a warm smile playing on his face. As he came toward her, Momo began to notice that with every step he took he grew younger and younger, so that by the time he was finally standing in front of her, vigorously shaking both of her hands at once, he barely looked any older than she was.

“Welcome!” he said with delight. “I sincerely welcome you to the Nowhere House. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Hora—Master Secundius Minutius Hora.”

“Have you really been expecting me?” asked Momo with surprise.

“But of course! I even sent my very own turtle, Cassiopeia, to pick you up and bring you here.”

He pulled out a flat, diamond-encrusted pocket watch from his waistcoat and flipped open the cover.

“In fact, you were uncommonly punctual,” he determined with a smile, holding out the watch for her to see.

Momo saw that there were neither hands nor numbers on the face of this watch. Instead, there were two very fine spirals superimposed on each other that were slowly rotating in opposite directions. Here and there, wherever the two lines overlapped, she saw minuscule dots of light.

“This,” said Master Hora, “is a Star Hour watch. It accurately displays the rare Star Hours, one of which just began.”

“What’s a Star Hour?” asked Momo.

“Well, you see,” he explained, “in the course of history there are certain special moments when all beings and things, including the stars, are synchronized in an extremely unique way. At these rare moments, something special can happen that wasn’t possible before and that won’t be possible again afterward. Unfortunately people generally don’t know how to make use of these Star Hours, so they often pass unnoticed. But whenever a person who can sense them is born, very big things happen in the world.”

“Maybe,” said Momo, “you just need one of these watches.”

Master Hora shook his head with a smile. “The watch alone would be of no use to anyone. You must first be able to read it.”

He closed the watch and put it back into his waistcoat pocket. When he looked back up, he immediately saw the astonished expression on Momo’s face. She was staring at his clothes. He thoughtfully gazed down again, frowned, and said, “Oh, excuse me, I seem to be a bit behind the times in my choice of style. How thoughtless of me! Allow me to correct myself.”

He snapped his fingers and was suddenly standing in front of her wearing a different frock coat. This one had a stiff, stand-up collar.

“Is that any better?” he asked doubtfully, but Momo’s increasing astonishment said it all. “Of course not!” he exclaimed. “Where is my mind today?”

He snapped his fingers again and was suddenly wearing clothing that neither Momo nor any other person in the world had ever seen because it was a style that would only become popular in the next century.

“Still no better?” he asked. “Oh, Orion’s Belt! Just give me a moment. I promise I’ll get it right this time.”

He snapped his fingers for the third time and was now finally standing in front of Momo wearing normal everyday clothes, the kind men wear today.

“Now I have it, right?” he said, winking at Momo. “I hope I didn’t scare you. I was just having a little fun. But now, dear girl, I invite you to join me at the table. Breakfast is ready. You have a long road behind you. I hope you enjoy the food.”

He took her hand and led her into the middle of the clock forest. The turtle followed but remained slightly behind them. The path was like a maze. It led back and forth and in and out before ending in a small room, which was formed by the backs of a few enormous adjacent grandfather clocks. There was a small table in one corner with wheels on its legs and a dainty little couch in the other with a pair of matching armchairs. Here too the light from the many motionless candles illuminated everything.

The table was set with a bulbous golden kettle along with two small teacups, plates, spoons, and knives, all made out of white gold. There were crispy, golden-brown rolls in a little basket; there was golden yellow butter in a small bowl; and in another, there was honey that, at a glance, looked like liquid gold. Master Hora poured them each a cup of hot chocolate from the strangely shaped kettle, and then, with an inviting gesture he said, “Please, my little guest, dig right in!”

Momo didn’t need to be told twice. She had never before heard of drinkable chocolate! Rolls with butter and honey also belonged to the very rarest of delicacies in her life, and these were more delicious than any she had ever tasted.

For a little while, Momo was completely focused on her breakfast, and she gorged herself, cheeks completely full, without thinking about anything else. For some strange reason, the food also rid her of all weariness, and she suddenly felt refreshed and energized even though she had just gone an entire night without sleep. The more she ate, the better it all tasted to her, and she felt like she could have continued eating for days on end.

Master Hora watched her with a smile and was considerate enough not to disturb her before she finished. He understood that his guest was satisfying a hunger that had been building for many years. Maybe that was why, as he watched, he began to look older and older, until he was finally the man with white hair again. When he noticed that Momo didn’t know how to use her knife properly, he began spreading the breads for her and putting them on her plate, but he ate very little himself and joined her more out of propriety than anything else.

Finally Momo was full, and as she finished drinking her hot chocolate, she peeked over the edge of her golden teacup, scrutinizing her host, and began to wonder who and what he might be. Obviously he wasn’t anybody ordinary, but she realized that she didn’t know anything about him besides his name. At last she put her cup down and cleared her throat.

“Why did you send your turtle to come get me?” she asked.

“To protect you from the gray men,” Master Hora answered gravely. “They’re looking all over for you, and you’re only safe from them here.”

“Do they want to hurt me?” Momo inquired with a frightened look.

“Yes, child,” sighed Master Hora. “You could say that.”

“Why?” asked Momo.

“They’re afraid of you,” explained Master Hora. “You did the worst possible thing to them.”

“I didn’t do anything to them,” said Momo.

“Yes you did. You got one of them to betray himself and you told all of your friends about it. You even tried to reveal the truth about the gray men to the whole city. Don’t you think that’s enough to make them hate you?”

“But the turtle and I walked right through the middle of the city,” she said. “If they were looking all over for me, then they would have easily been able to catch us. We were going very slowly.”

Master Hora took the turtle, which was sitting next to his foot, and placed her on his lap. He began to scratch her neck gently. “What do you think, Cassiopeia?” he asked with a smile. “Would they have been able to catch you?”

“NEVER” appeared on her shell, and the letters flickered so cheerfully that Momo almost thought she could hear a faint snickering.

“You see,” explained Master Hora, “Cassiopeia can actually see a little into the future. Not a lot, but even so, close to half an hour.”

“EXACTLY!” stood on the shell.

“Pardon me,” Master Hora corrected himself. “Exactly half an hour. She knows with certainty what will happen half an hour ahead of time. That’s why, for instance, she also knows ahead of time whether she will run into a gray man or not.”

“Wow,” said Momo, astonished, “that’s very practical! So if she knows ahead of time that she’ll run into a gray man in one place or another then she can just choose a different path?”

“No,” answered Mr. Hora. “Unfortunately, it isn’t all that simple. She cannot change anything that she knows ahead of time because she only knows things that are definitely going to happen. If she knows that she will encounter a gray man, then she will simply have to encounter one. She can’t do anything to prevent it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Momo, a little disappointed. “Then it doesn’t even help to know something ahead of time.”

“Sometimes it does,” replied Master Hora. “In your case, for instance, she knew that on this or that road she would not encounter a gray man. That’s worth something, don’t you think?”

Momo was silent. Her mind began to wind itself into a knot like a tangled ball of string.

“But back to you and your friends,” continued Master Hora. “I must compliment you. Your signs and posters were really quite impressive.”

“Did you read them?” Momo asked happily.

“All of them,” answered Master Hora. “Word for word!”

“Unfortunately, no one else did,” said Momo.

Master Hora nodded regretfully. “Yes, unfortunately. The gray men made sure of that.”

“Do you know them well?” asked Momo.

Master Hora nodded again and sighed. “I know them, and they know me.”

Momo didn’t quite know what to make of this strange answer. “Have you been to see them before?”

“No, never. I never leave the Nowhere House.”

“But, the gray men, I mean, do they visit you sometimes?”

Master Hora smiled. “Don’t worry, little Momo. They couldn’t come in here even if they knew the way to Never Street, and they don’t even know that.”

Momo thought for a while. Master Hora’s explanation had calmed her, but she still wanted to discover more about him.

“How do you know all of this?” she began again. “All the stuff about our signs and the gray men?”

“I spend all my time watching them and everything that relates to them,” explained Master Hora. “That’s how I came to be watching you and your friends.”

“But you never leave the house?”

“It isn’t necessary,” said Master Hora, becoming visibly younger again. “I have my Omnivision glasses.” He took off his little golden glasses and handed them to Momo. “Would you like to try looking through them?”

Momo put them on, blinked, squinted, and said, “I can’t see anything at all.” All she could make out was a storm of different blurry colors, lights, and shadows. It actually began to make her dizzy.

“Yes,” said Master Hora. “It’s like that in the beginning. It isn’t so easy to look through the Omnivision glasses, but you’ll get used to them soon enough.”

He stood up, stepped behind Momo’s chair, and softly put both of his hands on the rim of the glasses. The picture quickly came into focus.

Momo first saw the group of gray men with the three cars standing at the edge of the city district where the strange light began. The men were busy trying to push their cars backward.

Then she looked farther out and saw other groups milling around the streets of the city. These men were gesturing excitedly and talking to one another. They seemed to be trying to convey a message of some kind.

“They’re talking about you,” explained Master Hora. “They can’t understand how you escaped them.”

“Can you tell me why their faces are so gray?” Momo asked, still looking through the glasses.

“Because they feed on dead matter,” Master Hora replied. “You already know that they live off of people’s time, but what you may not yet know is that time literally dies once it’s been ripped away from its original owner. Every person has his or her allotted time, and the time only stays alive as long as it continues to belong to that person.”

“Then the gray men aren’t even really human?”

“No, they have merely disguised themselves as humans.”

“So what are they really?”

“Strictly speaking, they are nothing.”

“So where do they come from?”

“They exist only because humans let them. That’s all they need. Now humans are even giving them the opportunity to rule them, and that too, is enough for them to take power.”

“And what would happen if they couldn’t steal any more time?”

“Then they would have to return to the nothingness that they came from.” Master Hora took the glasses off of Momo and tucked them away. “But unfortunately,” he continued after a while, “they already have many human accomplices, and that is very bad indeed.”

“Well, I don’t let anyone take away my time!” Momo said resolutely.

“I should hope not!” replied Master Hora with a twinkling smile. “Come, Momo, I want to show you my collection.” Suddenly he looked like an old man again.

He took Momo by the hand and led her out into the great room. There he showed her many different timepieces, making some chime while explaining the inner workings of others, like the world clock; and slowly, under the influence of his little guest’s visible delight at all these wonderful treasures, he began to grow young again.

“Do you like riddles?” he asked casually as they walked on.

“Yes!” answered Momo. “Do you know any?”

“Yes, I do,” said Master Hora, looking at Momo with another special smiles. “But it’s quite difficult. Very few people can solve it.”

“That’s good,” said Momo. “I’ll memorize it and tell it to my friends later.”

“I can’t wait to see if you solve it. Now listen carefully:

                Three brothers live in one shared house,

                they look quite different from without,

                but if you ever try to choose,

                each becomes like the other two.

                The first isn’t there; he’s on his way to the house.

                The second isn’t there; he just went out.

                Only the third brother is there, the smallest of the three,

                yet without him, the others wouldn’t be.

                But the third, about whom we presently reckon,

                only exists because the first becomes the second.

                If you look at him, you only ever see

                the first or the second of the three!

                So tell me: are the three of them one?

                Or just two? Or perhaps—none?

                And if you, my child, can tell me their names

                you’ll know three rulers of limitless fame.

                They rule together over one large realm;

                they are it themselves! That’s how they’re the same.”

Master Hora looked over at Momo and nodded encouragingly. She had listened intently, and because she had such an extraordinary memory, she began to recite the riddle over to herself slowly, word for word.

“Phew,” she sighed. “That really is hard. I have no idea what it could be. I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Just try,” said Master Hora.

Momo murmured the entire riddle to herself once more. Then she shook her head.

“I can’t do it,” she finally admitted.

In the meantime the turtle had followed them out, and was now sitting on the floor next to Master Hora, looking attentively up at Momo.

“Well, Cassiopeia,” said Master Hora, “you do know everything half an hour ahead of time. Will Momo solve the riddle or not?”

“SHE WILL!” appeared on Cassiopeia’s shell.

“You see!” said Master Hora, turning to Momo. “You are going to solve it. Cassiopeia is never wrong.”

Momo furrowed her brow and began to rack her brains. What three brothers live in the same house anyway? Obviously this riddle wasn’t about real people. In riddles, brothers always meant apple seeds, or teeth, or something like that. But these three brothers transformed into each other. What kinds of things transform into each other? Momo looked around for inspiration. There were the candles with the motionless flames, for instance. The wax transformed into light through the flame. Yes, these were three brothers. But it didn’t work after all because all three of them were there, and the riddle said that two of them weren’t supposed to be there. Maybe it was something like flowers, fruits, and seeds. Yes, she thought, she must be on the right track because a lot fit the riddle: the seed was the smallest of the three, and when it was there, the other two weren’t. And without it, the other two wouldn’t exist. But it still didn’t quite work! You could easily look at a seed, and the riddle said that any time you tried to look at the littlest brother you only saw one of the other two.

Momo’s thoughts wandered around in circles. She tried and tried, but she just couldn’t find a clue that would help her forward. But Cassiopeia had said that she would solve the riddle. She began again from the beginning, slowly murmuring the words to herself. When she came to the part that said, “The first isn’t there; he’s still on his way to the house...” she saw that the turtle was winking at her. On her back, the words, “WHAT I KNOW!” appeared, and quickly disappeared again.

“Stop, Cassiopeia!” said Master Hora with a smile, although he hadn’t even looked down at her. “Don’t give it away! Momo can do it by herself.”

But Momo had just been able to glimpse the words on the turtle’s shell, and she began to think about what they could possibly mean. What did Cassiopeia know? She knew that Momo would solve the riddle, but that wasn’t any help.

So what else did she know? She knew things that were going to happen. She knew...

“The future,” yelled Momo loudly. “The first isn’t there; he’s still on his way to the house. The first one is the future!”

Master Hora nodded.

“And the second isn’t there; he just went out. The second is the past!”

Master Hora nodded again and smiled happily.

“But now,” said Momo thoughtfully, “now it gets tricky. What is the third one? ‘He’s the smallest of the three, yet without him the others wouldn’t be,’ it said. And he’s the only one who’s there.” She thought for a moment and then suddenly yelled, “That’s right now, this exact moment. The past is all the moments that already happened, and the future is all the ones that will happen. So both of them wouldn’t exist if there were no present. I got it!”

Momo’s cheeks began to glow with pride. She paused, and said, “But what does this mean:

                But the third, about whom we presently reckon, only exists because the first becomes the second...

It must mean that the present only exists because the future turns into the past!”

She looked at Master Hora with surprise. “That’s right, isn’t it? I’ve never thought about that before, but I guess the moment itself doesn’t really exist. There’s only the past and the future? This exact moment, for instance—this exact second that I’m talking about—it’s... it’s already the past!” She paused. “Oh, now I know what this part means too: ‘If you look at him, you only ever see, the first or the second of the three.’ And now I also understand the rest because you could also say that only one of the brothers really exists, the present, or you could just as easily say that none of them exist because each only exists if the others also do! My head is spinning!”

“But the riddle isn’t quite finished yet,” said Master Hora. “What is the big realm that the three of them rule together and are also part of?”

Momo stared at him blankly. What could it be? What were past, present, and future all together?

She looked around the giant room. Her gaze passed over thousands upon thousands of clocks, and suddenly it struck her like a bolt of lightning.

“Time,” she yelled, clapping her hands. “Yes, it’s time! It’s time!” And she hopped up and down out of sheer happiness.

“And now tell me what house the three brothers live in together?” demanded Master Hora.

“The world!” answered Momo.

“Bravo!” exclaimed Master Hora, also clapping his hands. “You have my respect, Momo. You’re a genuine riddle solver! I’m delighted!”

“Me too,” answered Momo, silently wondering why it made Master Hora so happy that she had solved the riddle.

They walked on through the great room, and Master Hora showed her other rare and interesting clocks, but Momo wasn’t paying attention anymore. Her mind was still on the riddle.

“Tell me,” she asked finally. “What exactly is time?”

“You just discovered that for yourself,” answered Master Hora.

“No, I mean time itself—it must be something,” explained Momo. “It exists... so what is it really?”

“It would be nice if you could answer that for yourself as well,” said Master Hora.

Momo thought for a long time.

“It exists,” she murmured, lost in thought. “That much I know for sure. But you can’t touch it, and you can’t hold onto it either. Maybe it’s a smell? But it’s also something that always moves past you, so it must come from somewhere. Maybe it’s like the wind?” She paused. “Or no! I think I know what it is. It’s a kind of music that you can’t hear because it’s always playing, although I think I’ve heard it sometimes, very quietly.”

“I know you have,” nodded Master Hora. “That’s why I was able to call you to me.”

“But there must be something else as well,” said Momo, who was following the train of thought. “The music came from far away, but I felt it deep inside of me. Maybe it’s the same with time.”

She remained in silent bewilderment for a while and then helplessly added: “I mean, maybe it’s like waves in the ocean that exist because of the wind... oh, it’s probably all just nonsense!”

“I think you said that quite beautifully,” said Master Hora, “and because of that, I’m going to trust you with a deep secret: all of time comes from right here in the Nowhere House on Never Street.”

Momo looked at him in awe.

“Oh,” she mumbled quietly. Then, after a pause, she said, “Do you make it yourself?”

Master Hora smiled again. “No, my child, I’m only the caretaker. It’s my responsibility to ensure that every person gets his or her proper allotment of time.”

“Couldn’t you easily just make it so that the time thieves can’t steal anymore time?”

“No, I cannot,” answered Master Hora. “People must decide for themselves what to do with their time, just as they must defend it themselves. I can only give it to them.”

Momo gazed around the giant room, and then quietly asked, “Is that why you have all these different clocks? One for each person?”

“No, Momo,” replied Master Hora. “These clocks are simply a passion of mine. They are only very imperfect replicas of something that every person has in his or her chest. Just as you have eyes to see light and ears to hear sounds, you also have a heart with which to feel time. And all the time that isn’t felt by the heart is as lost as a rainbow to a blind man or a birdsong to a deaf one. Unfortunately, there are many deaf and blind hearts that don’t feel anything, even though they continue to beat.”

“And when my heart stops beating?” asked Momo.

“Then,” replied Master Hora, “time ends for you as well, my child. One might even say that you yourself are walking backward through time, through all of your days and nights, months and years. You wander backward through your life until you exit through the big, round, silver gate through which you first came in.”

“And what’s on the other side?”

“Then you come to be where the music comes from, the same music that you sometimes hear very quietly. But then you belong to it. You become a note, a part of the whole, the great harmony.” He scrutinized Momo. “I imagine you can’t quite understand that, can you?”

She was reminded of her walk along Never Street, where she had experienced everything backward. Then, without answering, she asked, “Are you Death?”

Master Hora smiled and remained silent for a while before he answered. “If people only knew what death was they wouldn’t be so afraid of it; and if they weren’t afraid of it, no one would be able to steal their time anymore.”

“Well, then all you have to do is tell them,” suggested Momo.

“Do you think so?” asked Master Hora. “I tell it to them with every hour that I send forth, but I’m afraid they don’t want to hear it. They would rather listen to the people who make them afraid. That may be the greatest riddle of all.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Momo.

Master Hora nodded slowly. He looked at Momo for a long time, and then asked her, “Would you like to see where time comes from?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“I’ll take you,” said Master Hora. “But when we get there you have to be completely silent. You can’t ask or say anything at all. Will you promise not to make a sound?”

Momo nodded mutely.

Then Master Hora bent down, picked her up, and held her perched in one arm. Suddenly, he seemed breathtakingly tall and unspeakably old, not like an old man, but like an ancient tree or mountain. Then he gently covered her eyes with his hand and it felt like cool, powdery snow was falling on her face.

Momo sensed that Master Hora was taking her down a long, dark hall, but she felt completely secure. She wasn’t afraid. In the beginning she thought she could hear the beating of her own heart, but then, more and more, she began to think it was only the echo of Master Hora’s footsteps.

It was a long way, but eventually he put Momo down. His face was very close to hers, and he was staring at her with one finger pressed against his lips. Then he stood up and stepped back. Golden twilight engulfed them.

Little by little, Momo began to see that she was standing beneath an immense, circular dome that seemed as big as the sky. This round dome was made entirely out of pure gold. Far above her, in the center of the dome, there was a small oculus allowing a single column of light to fall vertically down onto an equally round lake, whose dark water lay flat and motionless, like a black mirror.

Just above the surface of the water, inside the column of light, something was glistering like a bright star. It moved unhurriedly, with majestic grace, and Momo soon recognized it as an enormous pendulum, swinging back and forth over the black mirror. But the pendulum wasn’t attached to anything. It was suspended in the air, floating with seeming weightlessness.

As the glittering star pendulum slowly got closer to the surface of the lake, a flower bud emerged. The closer the pendulum came, the wider the bud opened, until it was finally lying on the liquid surface of the mirror in full bloom.

Momo had never before seen such a magnificent blossom. It seemed to be made entirely of pure, glowing colors, but they were colors of a spectrum that Momo had never seen or even so much as imagined before.

The star pendulum paused over the blossom, and for the duration of that moment, Momo was so completely overwhelmed by the sight of the flower that she forgot about everything else around her. Its scent alone seemed like something she had yearned for all her life without knowing what it was.

But then the pendulum slowly began to swing back, and as it gradually distanced itself, Momo saw, to her dismay, that the magnificent flower was beginning to wilt. Petal after petal broke away, sinking into the dark water, and Momo found it almost too painful to watch. It was as if something were leaving her forever.

When the pendulum was above the middle of the black lake again, the blossom had dissolved completely. But simultaneously another bud began to emerge from the dark water on the opposite side of the lake. As the pendulum slowly approached this one, Momo saw a much lovelier blossom beginning to unfold. She walked a little farther around the lake to get a closer view.

This one was completely different from the previous one. Momo had never seen these colors before either, but they seemed even deeper and richer. It smelled completely different as well, much lovelier; and the more Momo beheld it, the more exceptional details she began to discover.

But eventually, the star pendulum began its upswing once again, and this new blossom also began to fall apart and sink, petal by petal, into the bottomless depths of the black lake.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the pendulum swung back to the other side, but it didn’t arrive at exactly the same spot as it had the last time; instead, it went a tiny bit farther. And there, one step to the side of where the first blossom had appeared, another bud began to rise up and gradually unfold.

This is the most beautiful of them of all, thought Momo. This was the blossom of all blossoms, a singular wonder.

And as she was eventually forced to watch this perfect flower wither away and sink into the dark depths, Momo began to feel tears welling up deep inside her. But she remembered the promise she had made to Master Hora, and she held them back.

After its downswing, the pendulum also wandered a step farther on the opposite side, and there too, a new flower rose up out of the dark water.

Gradually it dawned on Momo that each flower was completely different from all the others that had preceded it, and that at the moment of its blossoming, each subsequent flower seemed to be the most beautiful one of all.

She wandered around the lake, watching as blossom after blossom came into being and fell away again. She thought that she would never grow tired of this performance.

But little by little she became aware that something else was happening, something that she hadn’t yet noticed. The column of light beaming down from the middle of the dome wasn’t only visible—Momo was also beginning to hear it!

At first, it was just a rustle, like wind through the leaves and branches of faraway trees. But then the whooshing became more powerful, until it rivaled the crashing of a waterfall or the booming of ocean waves against a cliff.

And Momo could hear, ever more clearly, that the roar was made up of innumerable different sounds that were constantly rearranging themselves—transforming and building new harmonies. It was music, but it was something else at the same time. Suddenly Momo recognized it again: it was the music that she had sometimes heard playing quietly, as if from far away, whenever she sat under the stars, listening.

But now the sounds were growing clearer and brighter. Momo sensed that this pealing light was calling each of the flowers up from the dark water and crafting each one into its unique, unrepeatable form. The longer she listened, the more clearly she could distinguish single voices.

They weren’t human voices, though; instead it sounded like gold, silver, and all the other metals were singing. And right behind these voices, other voices of a completely different kind could be heard, voices traveling from unthinkable distances and possessing indescribable power. They became ever clearer, so that Momo was now listening for words, words in a language she had never heard but that she still somehow understood. The sun and the moon and the planets and all the stars were revealing their true names to her. And in these names lay hidden what each of them did and how they all worked together to create and destroy every single one of these Hour Blossoms.

All of a sudden, Momo understood that the words were directed at her! The entire universe, all the way out to the farthest stars, was turned toward her like a giant face that was looking at her and speaking to her.

She was overcome by something greater than fear.

At that moment, she caught sight of Master Hora, who was waving at her in silence, and she bolted toward him. He picked her up in his arms and she buried her face in his chest. He put his snowy hands back over her eyes. It grew dark and quiet, and she felt safe again. He walked back down the long hall with her, and when they were in the room between the clocks again, he laid her down on the sofa.

“Master Hora,” whispered Momo. “I never knew that human time was so...” she looked for the right word but couldn’t find it. “So big,” she finally said.

“What you saw and heard, Momo,” replied Master Hora, “wasn’t human time. It was only your own time. The place where you just were exists in every single person, but it’s impossible to get there without allowing oneself to be carried by me. And it can’t be seen through ordinary eyes.”

“So where was I then?”

“In your own heart,” Master Hora answered, softly running a hand over her mop of hair.

“Master Hora,” whispered Momo again. “Can I bring my friends to you as well?”

“No,” he answered. “That isn’t possible yet.”

“How long can I stay with you?”

“Until you feel yourself being pulled back to your friends, my child.”

“Can I tell them what the stars said to me?”

“You may, but you won’t be able to.”

“Why not?”

“The words would first have to grow in you.”

“But I really want to tell them about it, all of them. I want to be able to sing the voices for them. I think everything would be right again if I could do that.”

“If you really want that, Momo, then you have to be able to wait.”

“I don’t mind waiting.”

“You’ll have to wait like a seed, child, sleeping in the earth for one entire revolution before it can open. That’s how long it takes for the words to grow inside of you. Do you want that?”

“Yes,” whispered Momo.

“Then sleep,” said Master Hora, putting a hand over her eyes. “Sleep!”

Momo inhaled deeply and fell asleep.

PART THREE

The Hour Blossoms

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A day there and a year here

Momo awoke and opened her eyes.

It took a while before she had collected herself enough to discover where she was. It confused her that she was back on the overgrown stone steps of the old amphitheater. Hadn’t she been with Master Hora in the Nowhere House just a few moments ago? How had she suddenly appeared here?

It was cool and dark outside. The first bit of dawn was peeking over the horizon off to the east. Momo shivered and pulled her baggy jacket tighter around her.

She vividly remembered everything that had happened: the nighttime journey through the big city behind the turtle, the part of the city illuminated by strange light and filled with bright white houses, Never Street, the vast room with the many clocks, the hot chocolate and the honey breads, and her conversation with Master Hora—she could still remember the riddle word for word! But above all, she remembered what she had seen and heard under the golden dome. She had only to close her eyes in order to see, once again, the never-before-seen colors of the blossoms; and the voices of the sun, the moon, and the stars, were still ringing in her ears so clearly that she could hum along with the melody.

And when she did that, words formed within her, words that could describe the scent and unknown colors of the blossoms! The voices in Momo’s memory were speaking these words, but something wonderful had also happened with the memory itself. Momo remembered not only the things she had seen and heard, but other things as well. Pictures of different Hour Blossoms came to her like an endless train of images out of a magical well, and with every flower she saw, she also heard new words.

Momo only had to listen attentively inside herself to be able to repeat and even sing along with them. The words spoke of wonderful and mysterious things, but by repeating them, Momo could understand what they were saying.

This was what Master Hora had meant when he told her that the words first had to grow inside of her. Or had all that just been a dream? Had it all not really happened?

While she was contemplating this possibility, Momo saw something crawling down in the middle of the round stage out of the corner of her eye. It was a turtle, and it was leisurely sniffing around for edible plants!

Momo quickly clambered down and crouched on the floor next to it. The turtle only briefly raised its head to examine the child with its ancient black eyes before it went back to eating.

“Good morning, turtle,” said Momo.

Nothing appeared on its shell.

“Was it you,” she asked, “who led me to Master Hora last night?”

Still no answer. Momo gave a disappointed sigh.

“Too bad,” she murmured. “You’re just an ordinary turtle and not... oh... I forget the name. It was a pretty name, but long and unusual. I had never heard it before.”

“CASSIOPEIA,” suddenly appeared on the turtle’s shell in glowing letters.

Momo deciphered them with delight. “Yes!” she yelled, clapping her hands. “That was the name! So it is you? You’re Master Hora’s turtle, right?”

“WHO ELSE?”

“But why didn’t you answer me at first?”

“I’M EATING,” could now be seen on the shell.

“I’m sorry!” replied Momo. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I only wanted to know how I suddenly got back here?”

“YOUR CHOICE!” appeared.

“Strange,” murmured Momo. “I can’t remember that at all.

And you, Cassiopeia? Why did you come with me instead of staying with Master Hora?”

“MY CHOICE!”

“Thank you very much,” said Momo. “That’s very nice of you.”

“YOU’RE WELCOME,” came the answer. And with that, the turtle seemed to have decided that the conversation was over because it wandered off to finish looking for breakfast in peace.

Momo sat down on the stone steps, excited at the prospect of seeing Beppo, Gigi, and the children again. The music continued to ring inside her. It hadn’t ever stopped. And although she was alone, with nobody to listen to her, she began to sing the melody and the words out loud. Becoming more and more forceful, she directed her song straight at the rising sun, and she felt as though the birds, the crickets, the trees, and even the old, old stones were all listening to her.

Little did she know that it would be a long time before she had any other listeners, and little did she know that she was waiting in vain for her friends, that she had been gone for a very long time, and that the world had changed while she was away.

The gray men had a relatively easy time with Gigi the Guide.

It had begun about a year ago, shortly after Momo had suddenly disappeared without a trace. An article entitled “The Last Real Storyteller” had appeared in a newspaper. The article included when and where to find Gigi and described him as “an attraction not to be missed.”

From then on, more and more people began visiting the old amphitheater to hear him. Naturally, that was all right with Gigi. He told whatever stories happened to pop into his head and ended by doing a round with his cap, which became heavier each time. Before long, a travel company employed him, paying him a flat sum so that they alone would have the right to present him as a tourist attraction. Travelers were bussed to him in large groups, and soon Gigi had to make a strict hourly schedule so that all the people who had paid got the opportunity to hear him.

He had already begun to miss Momo by then because his stories had lost their wings, but in the beginning he still firmly refused to tell the same story twice, even when he was offered double the money.

After a few months, though, Gigi didn’t have to perform in the old amphitheater anymore. The radio stations had gotten in touch with him, as had the television providers. He now told stories three times a week in front of millions of avid listeners, and he was making a lot of money.

Nor did he live near the old amphitheater anymore, but in a completely different part of the city where all the rich and famous people lived. He had a big, modern villa right in the middle of a well-kept park, and he had dropped the nickname Gigi, calling himself Girolamo instead.

Soon he stopped inventing new and different stories. He just didn’t have time anymore. He became stingy with his ideas: he would often take one story and make up to five different versions of it. Eventually, when that too wasn’t enough to satisfy the public’s growing demands, he did something that he ought not to have done: he told one of the stories that belonged to Momo alone.

It was just as greedily devoured as all the others, and just as quickly forgotten. People kept demanding more stories, and Gigi was so consumed by the devilish tempo that, without really giving it a thought, he divulged every single one of the stories that he had originally only intended Momo to hear. When he had given away the last one, he suddenly felt empty and hollow, as if he wouldn’t be able to come up with anything else ever again.

Terrified that his fame would now desert him, he began to tell all his stories over again with different names and slight alterations. Surprisingly, nobody seemed to notice, or at least it didn’t hamper the increasing demand for more.

Gigi hung on like a drowning man clinging to a small piece of driftwood. He was rich and famous now, he told himself. Wasn’t that what he had always dreamt of?

But every so often, while lying alone at night in his satin bed, he longed to be back in his previous life with Momo, Beppo, and the children, when he had still understood the art of storytelling.

But there was no way back because Momo failed to reappear. At first, Gigi had made some serious efforts to find her, but he no longer had time. He now employed three highly efficient secretaries who finalized contracts for him, dealt with his advertisements and his appointments for him and to whom he even dictated his stories. An organized search for Momo just didn’t fit into his tight schedule. Very soon, there was barely anything left of the old Gigi.

But one day, he pulled together what little was left and decided to start fresh. He was somebody now, he told himself. His voice carried a lot of weight and he had millions of listeners. If he couldn’t tell people the truth, then who could? It was up to him to tell them about the gray men! He would tell them that it wasn’t a made-up story, and that he needed all his fans to help him take up the search for Momo.

He had come to this conclusion during one of those nights when he stayed awake, pining for his old friends, and at dawn he was already sitting at his big desk about to begin writing notes for his new plan. But before he had even written the first word, the telephone rang. He picked it up and jumped out of his chair in horror. A strange, monotone, ashen gray voice began speaking to him, and he felt as if the very marrow of his bones was turning to ice.

“Leave it be!” said the voice. “It is in your best interest.”

“Who is this?” demanded Gigi.

“You know very well who this is,” answered the voice. “I hope I’m right in thinking that we don’t need introductions. You haven’t had the pleasure of meeting us in person, but you’ve belonged to us for quite some time now.” The voice paused. “Don’t tell me you weren’t aware of that!”

“What do you want from me?” Gigi asked.

“We don’t like what you’re planning to do, so be a good boy and leave it be.”

Gigi gathered all his courage and said, “No, I’m not going to leave it be. I’m not Gigi the Guide anymore. I’m an important man now. We’ll see if you can take me on.”

The voice laughed tonelessly, and Gigi’s teeth suddenly began to chatter.

“You’re nobody,” said the voice. “We made you. You’re a marionette, and we’re holding the strings, but if you try to make problems for us, we can just as easily let go of them. Or do you honestly think that you have your own meaningless talent to thank for your success?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I think,” replied Gigi.

“Poor little Gigi,” said the voice. “You always were living in your own fantasy world. You used to be Prince Girolamo in the mask of a poor-beggar Gigi; now you’re the poor-beggar Gigi in the mask of Prince Girolamo. Still, you should be grateful. After all, it was us who ultimately fulfilled all of your dreams.”

“That isn’t true,” stammered Gigi. “That’s a lie!”

“For god’s sake!” answered the voice, laughing tonelessly again. “You of all people want to reveal the truth? You used to have so many pretty things to say about truth and falsehood. No, no, poor Gigi, it won’t go over well for you if you decide to make a living out of the truth. We helped you become famous for your fibs and lies. You aren’t qualified to tell the truth! So let it be!”

“What have you done with Momo?” whispered Gigi.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about that! You can’t help her anymore, especially not if you tell a story about us. The only thing that will happen if you tell your little story is that your lovely success will disappear just as quickly as it came. Clearly you have to make the decision yourself. We don’t want to keep you from playing the hero and ruining yourself if it’s that important to you, but you can’t expect us to keep protecting and helping you if you’re so thankless. That said, isn’t it much nicer to be rich and famous?”

“It is,” answered Gigi chokingly.

“Well there you go! So leave us out of your games and just keep telling the people the things they want to hear!”

“How can I do that now that I know the truth?” asked Gigi, straining himself to eke out these words.

“I’ll give you some good advice: don’t take yourself so seriously. You don’t really matter, and once you accept that it’ll be easy for you to keep doing what you’ve always done.”

“Yes,” whispered Gigi. “Once I accept that...”

Then he heard a click and the line went dead. He collapsed onto his big desk and buried his face in his arms. Silent sobs racked his body.

From that day forward Gigi lost all self-respect. He gave up his plan and carried on like before, but he felt like a traitor, and a traitor he was. Before, his fantastic imagination had led him down floating paths where he followed without a care in the world. But now he was a plain old liar. He had made himself into a clown, the public’s pet buffoon, and he knew it. He began to hate his work, and as a result, his stories became trite and sentimental. But even that had no negative effect on his success. Quite the opposite, it was called a new style, and many people tried to imitate him. It became extremely fashionable, but Gigi took no joy in it. He knew whom he had to thank for all of it. He had gained nothing and lost everything.

Still, he raced on from meeting to meeting in his expensive car, flew in the fastest jets, and incessantly dictated old stories dressed up in new cloths to his three secretaries. He was, as all the newspapers put it, “astonishingly prolific.”

And so it came to be that Gigi the dreamer became Girolamo the liar.

It was much harder for the gray men to get rid of old Beppo Streetsweeper.

Ever since the night of Momo’s disappearance, he had taken to sitting in the old amphitheater whenever his work permitted. He became increasingly worried and distressed with each passing day, and when he finally couldn’t take it anymore, he decided to go to the police despite all of Gigi’s reasonable objections.

“It’s still better for them to stick her in one of those homes with bars over the windows,” he told himself, “than for the gray men to keep her trapped—that is, if she’s even still alive. She escaped from one of those children’s homes once before, and she can do it again. Besides, maybe I’ll be able to make it so that she doesn’t have to go to one. But I need to find her before any of that.”

So he made his way to the nearest precinct, which was situated at the edge of the city. When he got there, he stood in front of the door for a while fiddling with his hat before taking a deep breath and going in.

“How can I help you?” asked the policeman on duty, who was in the middle of completing a long, complicated form.

Beppo took some time before he could get it out. “I think something terrible must have happened,” he said at last.

“Really?” said the policeman, still busy writing. “What’s this about?”

“It’s about our Momo,” answered Beppo.

“A child?”

“Yes, a little girl.”

“Your child?”

“No,” said Beppo, confused. “I mean yes, but I’m not her father.”

“No, I mean, yes?” snapped the policeman angrily. “Whose child is it? Who are her parents?”

“No one knows,” answered Beppo.

“Where’s she registered?”

“Registered?” asked Beppo. “Well, with us I would think. We all know her.”

“So, not registered,” determined the policeman with a sigh. “You do know that that’s against the law, right? But wait, let’s back up a second. Who has the child been living with then?”

“With herself,” replied Beppo. “In the old amphitheater. But she’s not there anymore. She’s gone.”

“Wait a second,” said the policeman. “If I’m understanding this correctly, a vagabond child has been living alone in the old amphitheater until now? And her name is... what did you say?”

“Momo,” answered Beppo.

“Momo. And what else? What’s her full name, please!”

“Momo, that’s it,” said Beppo.

The policeman scratched his nose, gave Beppo a concerned look, and then said, “It doesn’t work like this, buddy. I want to help you, but you can’t put up a notice without a full name. Now why don’t you start by telling me your own name.”

“It’s Beppo.”

“Beppo what?”

“Beppo Streetsweeper.”

“Your name, not your job!”

“They’re the same,” explained Beppo patiently.

The policeman put down his pen and buried his head in his hands.

“Christ!” he murmured with exasperation. “Why do I of all people have to be on duty right now!”

Then he sat up, stretched his back, smiled at the old man encouragingly and began to speak in a soft, patronizing voice, like someone who works at a retirement home.

“I can take down your personal information later. Why don’t you just tell me the whole story from the beginning.”

“Everything?” asked Beppo doubtfully.

“Everything that’s relevant,” answered the policeman. “I’m supposed to have this pile of forms finished by noon, I’m at my wit’s end, and I’m feeling under the weather, but forget about all that. Just take your time and tell me what’s on your mind.” He leaned back and closed his eyes like a martyr about to be burned at the stake.

Beppo told the whole story in his wonderfully circuitous way, from Momo’s sudden arrival and her uncanny abilities, to the trial with the gray men on the garbage dump, which he had seen himself.

“And in that same night,” he concluded, “Momo disappeared.”

The policeman looked at him wearily for a long time.

“In other words,” he finally said, “there once was a highly unusual little girl, whose existence no one can prove and who was kidnapped by a group of ghost-like men whose existence is similarly dubious.” He paused. “But even all of that isn’t definite because you don’t know for sure. And now the police should undertake a search?”

“Yes, please!” Beppo said eagerly.

The policeman leaned across the table. Suddenly he began to yell. “Trying to push my buttons, huh? Well go ahead, just try it!”

Beppo didn’t understand that this was just a figure of speech, so he obediently began pushing the buttons on the policeman’s jacket.

The policeman leaned back and shook his head. “You’re obviously not drunk, I can tell from your breath.”

“No,” murmured Beppo, who had gone bright red with embarrassment. “I’ve never been drunk.”

“Then why are you telling me all this nonsense?” asked the policeman. “Did you really think I’d be stupid enough to fall for your harebrained story?”

“Yes,” said Beppo innocently.

Suddenly the policeman’s patience snapped. He jumped out of his chair holding the long form clenched in his fist like a club.

“That’s enough!” he screamed, his face completely red. “Get out of here or I’ll lock you up for harassing an officer!”

“I’m sorry,” Beppo murmured demurely. “I didn’t mean it like that. I wanted to say...”

“Out!” roared the policeman.

Beppo turned around and left.

Over the next few days, he turned up at various other precincts. The scenes that transpired were hardly any different from the first. He was thrown out, asked politely to go home, or comforted only to be dismissed.

But one day Beppo came across a higher-ranking police officer who had less of a sense of humor than his colleagues. He stolidly listened to the entire story and then coldly said, “This old man is insane. We have to make sure that he isn’t a threat to public safety. Lock him up!”

Beppo had to wait in a cell for half a day. Then two policemen transported him by car. They took him across the city to a big, white building that had bars over the widows. It wasn’t a prison, though, or anything like what Beppo had thought when he first saw it from the outside. Instead, it was a hospital for the mentally ill.

Here he was thoroughly examined. The doctors and caretakers were very friendly. They didn’t laugh at him, nor did they become angry with him. They also seemed to be genuinely interested in his story because they asked him to tell and retell it. But even though they didn’t contradict him, Beppo didn’t get the feeling that they really believed what he was saying. And though they never explicitly told him why he was there, they still wouldn’t let him leave.

Every time he asked when he would be let out, he was told the same thing: “Soon, but for the moment, we still need you. You must understand that the examination is not quite done yet. We are making progress, though.”

And Beppo, who thought the progress they were talking about had to do with a search for Momo’s disappearance, waited patiently.

They had given him a bed in a large room that served as a dormitory for all the patients. One night he awoke to see someone standing next to his bed, illuminated by the emergency lights. At first he only saw the glowing end of a burning cigar, but then he recognized the round top hat and the briefcase that the stranger was carrying. When he realized that it was a gray man, a chill shot through him and he tried to yell for help.

“Quiet!” hissed the ashen gray voice in the darkness. “I was given instructions to make you an offer, so listen to me closely and don’t answer until I tell you to! Over the past few days you have gotten a small taste of how far our power already extends. Whether or not you want to see a little further is entirely up to you. Although you cannot hurt us in the slightest by running around and telling your silly story to everyone, it still isn’t something we like to see. Incidentally, you’re quite right in your assumption that we’re holding your little friend Momo captive, but you had best give up the hope of finding her—you won’t, and no one else will. Furthermore, your efforts to free her are not exactly making her time with us any more pleasant, if you know what I mean. She has to pay for every single one of your failed attempts, my friend, so be more careful about what you say and do in the future.”

The gray man blew a few smoke rings and watched the effect of his speech on Beppo with satisfaction. The old man had believed every word of it.

“To make this as brief as possible, since time is valuable,” the gray man went on, “we are prepared to make you this offer: we will give you the child back under the condition that you never again say another word about us or our business. In addition, we ask for one hundred thousand hours of saved time from you as a kind of ransom. Do not worry about how we will collect them; that’s our business. All you have to do is save time. How you do so is your business. If you agree to our conditions, we will ensure that you are released from here within the next few days. If not, you will remain here, and the child will remain with us. Think it over. We’re only going to make this generous offer once. What’s it going to be?”

Beppo gulped twice. “Fine, I’ll do it,” he croaked.

“Very sensible of you,” the gray man said smugly. “But remember: complete silence and one hundred thousand hours. As soon as we have them, you’ll get the child back. Goodbye.”

With that, the gray man left the dormitory room. The trail of smoke that remained seemed to glow feebly in the darkness like a ghost or spirit of some kind.

From that night on Beppo didn’t tell his story anymore, and when he was asked why he had told it in the first place, he simply shrugged his shoulders sadly. A few days later he was allowed to go home.

But Beppo didn’t go home. Instead, he went straight to the courtyard outside the big house where he and the other workers stored their carts and brooms. He grabbed his broom, went out into the big city, and began to sweep.

But he didn’t sweep like he used to—every step followed by a breath and every breath, in turn, followed by a broom stroke—no, now he went at it hastily and without any pleasure, because the only thing that mattered was saving time. He was tormented, though, because he knew that in accepting the gray man’s offer he was betraying his entire life up to that moment and disavowing his deepest convictions. It made him sick with self-loathing. If he had only had himself to worry about, he would have rather starved than betray his beliefs. But this was about Momo, and this was the only way of saving time that he knew of.

He swept day and night without ever going home. When he was overcome by exhaustion, he would sit down on a bench or even on the cobblestone floor and sleep a little. He slung down his meals just as hastily, squeezing them into ten-minute pauses in his workday, and he never went down to his shack by the amphitheater anymore.

He swept for weeks and months on end. Fall came, followed by winter, and still Beppo swept. Then spring came again, and then summer, but Beppo barely even noticed. He swept and swept and swept in order to save up the hundred thousand hour ransom.

The people in the big city had no time to pay attention to the little old man, and the few that did notice him made signs that he was insane whenever he walked by, panting and swinging his broom wildly as if his life depended on it. But Beppo was used to people thinking he was mad, and he barely took notice. When he was occasionally asked why he was in such a rush, he stopped sweeping for a moment, anxiously looked up at his questioner and held one sad finger to his lips...

Of Momo’s friends, the children proved most difficult for the gray men to turn. After Momo had disappeared, the children had continued to meet in the amphitheater as often as possible. They kept thinking up new games in which a few old boxes could become majestic castles and palaces or boats to carry them on extraordinary trips around the world. In short, they had continued as always, playing and telling each other stories as if Momo were still among them; and to their surprise, it had continued to seem like she really was.

The children also hadn’t doubted for one minute that Momo would return. They never spoke about it, but they didn’t have to, and the unspoken knowledge they shared bound them together. Momo belonged to them. She was their secret center, regardless of where she happened to be.

The gray men hadn’t been able to make any progress, and since they couldn’t bring the children under their control by tearing them away from Momo, they decided to do it circuitously, through their parents. Understandably, they didn’t target all of the adults, only those who were already their accomplices; but unfortunately, there were many. Worst of all, the gray men used the children’s own weapons against them: all of a sudden, the grown-ups began to remember the demonstration that their own children had held, complete with signs, placards, and chants.

“Something has to be done,” said some. “It’s just not right that more and more neglected children are running around alone in the streets. You can’t blame us—the modern life doesn’t leave parents any time to take care of their kids. It’s up to the city to make sure that they’re taken care of.”

“It’s not right,” others joined in. “We can’t have kids running around, disrupting the flow of traffic and jeopardizing the safety of this city. Accidents caused by children on the streets are costing us money that could be spent much more sensibly.”

“Children without supervision,” others declared, “become criminals because they fall into moral disrepair. The city must ensure that all of these children are apprehended. Establishments must be created that will teach them how to be useful, hardworking members of society.”

And still others said, “Children are the raw, human matter of the future. The future will be a time of commercial space travel and artificial intelligence. An army of specialists and technicians will be needed to service all of these machines, but instead of preparing our children beginning the day they’re born, we allow them to squander so much of their valuable time playing useless games and the like. It’s a disgrace to our society and a crime against the generations to come.”

All of this was exceptionally pleasing to the gray men. And since there were already so many timesavers in the big city, they easily succeeded in convincing the City Council to do something about all the neglected children.

Soon, buildings known only as “child-depots” sprang up all over the city. They were big houses where all the neglected children could be dropped off and then picked back up whenever their parents got a chance.

Playing on the streets or in parks or anywhere else was strictly forbidden, and any child caught doing so was immediately escorted to the nearest child-depot by an officer of the law. Then the parents were heavily fined.

Even Momo’s friends weren’t able to evade these new regulations. They were split up, each according to his or her neighborhood, and they were all put in different child-depots. They were never allowed to play the games they invented anymore. Everything they played was written down and selected by supervisors, and the new games all had to have some kind of useful or educational purpose. The children learned these new games, but they forgot something else, something much more valuable: they forgot how to have fun, how to be fascinated, and above all, they forgot how to dream.

Little by little, the children came to look like miniature timesavers. Sullen, bored, and hostile, they did what they were told, and when they were occasionally left to themselves, they couldn’t think of anything to do.

The only thing that they could still do just as well, even after all these changes, was make noise. But it was no longer joyful noise—no, the noise they now made was angry and baleful.

The gray men themselves never had to approach any of the children directly. The net that they had woven over the entire city was now thick and seemingly impenetrable. Even the cleverest children couldn’t make it through the mesh stitches. The gray men had accomplished their plan. The amphitheater lay empty and deserted. Everything was prepared for Momo’s return.

And now Momo was sitting on the stone steps, waiting for her friends. She had been waiting that way all day since her return, but no one had come. Not one person.

The sun was sinking in the west. The shadows grew, and it became cold.

At last, Momo stood up. She was hungry because nobody had thought to bring her something to eat. That had never happened before. Even Gigi and Beppo must have forgotten about her. It was all probably just an accident, thought Momo, some silly coincidence that would be cleared up tomorrow.

She climbed down to the turtle, which had withdrawn into its shell for the night. Momo crouched down and shyly knocked on Cassiopeia’s shell with one knuckle. The turtle poked its head out and looked up at Momo.

“Excuse me,” Momo said. “I’m really sorry if I woke you, but could you tell me why none of my friends came to visit me today?”

“ALL GONE,” appeared on the shell.

Momo didn’t ask any other questions, but she still didn’t quite understand what that was supposed to mean.

“Well,” she said to herself reassuringly, “tomorrow it’ll get sorted out. Tomorrow my friends will definitely come.”

“THEY’RE NEVER COMING,” came Cassiopeia’s reply.

Momo stared at the glowing letters for a while. “What do you mean by that?” she asked fearfully. “What happened to my friends?”

“ALL GONE.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said quietly. “That can’t be. I’m sure you’re just making a mistake, Cassiopeia. They were all still here yesterday for the big meeting that didn’t end up happening.”

“SLEPT A LONG TIME,” came Cassiopeia’s reply.

Suddenly Momo recalled what Master Hora had told her: she would have to sleep an entire revolution, like a seed in the earth. She hadn’t really thought about how much time that was when she had agreed to it, but now she began to get a sense of it.

“How long?” she asked in a whisper

“A YEAR AND A DAY.”

It took a while for Momo to understand the answer.

“But Beppo and Gigi,” she finally stammered. “They’re probably both still waiting for me!”

“NO ONE’S WAITING,” stood on the shell.

“How can that be?” Momo’s lips were trembling. “It can’t just all be gone... everything that used to be...”

One word slowly appeared on Cassiopeia’s shell: “PAST.”

For the first time in her life, Momo really felt what this word meant in all its finality. Her heart became heavier than it had ever been.

“But I... I...” she murmured, stunned. “I’m still here...” She would have gladly begun crying, but she couldn’t. After a while she felt the turtle brushing against her bare foot.

“I’M STILL WITH YOU!” said the shell.

“Yes,” Momo said with a brave smile. “You’re with me, Cassiopeia, and I’m happy about that. Come on, let’s go to sleep.”

She picked up the turtle and carried it through the hole in the wall that led down to her room. In the waning light of the sun, Momo could still see that everything was exactly how she had left it. (Beppo had cleaned up the room.) But a thick layer of dust intermingled with spider webs lay over everything.

There was a letter leaning against the lead box on the little table made of crate boards. It was also covered in spider webs.

“To Momo” was printed on the envelope.

Momo’s heart began to beat faster. She had never gotten a letter before. She took it into her hands and examined it from all angles. Then she ripped open the envelope and pulled out the piece of paper inside.

                Dear Momo! I moved to a new house. If you come back please get in touch with me right away. I’m very worried about you. I miss you like crazy. Hopefully nothing happened to you. If you’re hungry, please go to Nino’s. He’ll send me the bill and I’ll pay for everything, so eat as much as you want, understand? Nino will explain the rest to you. Don’t forget me!

                I’m always thinking of you!

                    Yours forever,

                    Gigi

It took a long time for Momo to work out the entire letter, even though Gigi had obviously made an effort to write as clearly and concisely as possible. When she was finally finished reading, the last bit of sunlight slipped below the edge of the amphitheater, leaving her in total darkness.

But Momo felt comforted.

She picked up the turtle and put it on the bed. As she wrapped herself up in the dust-covered blanket, she quietly said, “You see, Cassiopeia, I’m not all alone.”

But the turtle seemed to be asleep already, and Momo, who had clearly been able to picture Gigi standing in front of her while she was reading the letter, didn’t think about the fact that it had been lying there for nearly a year.

When she lay her cheek down on top of the paper, she wasn’t cold anymore.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Too much to eat and too few answers

The next morning Momo tucked the turtle under her arm and began to make her way over to Nino’s little pub.

“You’ll see, Cassiopeia,” she said. “Everything’s going to get sorted out now. Nino knows where Gigi and Beppo are, and then we’ll go get the children, and then everyone will be together again. Maybe Nino and his wife will even come with the others. I think you’re really going to like my friends. Maybe we’ll even throw a party tonight! I’ll tell them about the flowers and the music and about Master Hora and everything else. Oh, I’m so excited to see them all again! But now I’m just as excited for a big lunch. I’m really, really hungry!”

She chatted on that way, feeling for Gigi’s letter every now and then, which she had tucked away in one of the pockets of her big jacket. The turtle just looked at her with its big, ancient eyes, not giving anything away.

Momo began to hum while they walked, and finally she broke out into full song. It was the melody and the words from the voices in her memory, which she was able to remember just as clearly as the day before. All of a sudden she knew that she would never forget them.

But then she abruptly broke off. She was standing in front of Nino’s place, but for a moment Momo thought that she had lost her way. Instead of the old house, decorated with crumbling plaster and the small wine cellar out back, she saw an enormous concrete box with giant plate-glass windows covering the entire facade. The street itself was now made of asphalt instead of cobblestones, and there were many cars driving up and down. There was a gas station across from it, and a little farther down stood a massive office building. There were a lot of cars parked outside the new restaurant, and the sign over the entrance said, “NINO’S FAST FOOD” in big block letters.

Momo stepped inside. At first she couldn’t figure out how to move around. The many tables lining the window side of the room looked like strange, oversized mushrooms. Each consisted of a tiny surface held up by long, spindly legs. They were tall enough for an adult to stand and eat at, which was good because there weren’t any chairs.

There was a large barrier-like construction made of shiny metal on the other side room that looked like a gate of some sort. There were long glass containers behind it filled with ham-and-cheese sandwiches, hot dogs, salad, pudding, cake, and many other things that Momo had never seen before.

But she noticed everything little by little because the room was jam-packed with people and she was forced to spend most of her time trying to get out of the way. No matter what she did or where she stepped she was constantly being pushed to the side or squeezed into a corner. Most of the people were balancing trays with plates and bottles on them while scavenging around for spots at the tables. Other people stood behind the ones who were hastily slinging down their food, waiting to take their places. Here and there, the people eating exchanged unfriendly words with the people waiting, and overall, everyone seemed extremely bothered and unhappy.

A long line of bodies slowly snaked its way forward between the metal fence and the glass containers. Each person took a tray, a plate, and a bottle or a paper cup out of the containers.

Momo was astonished. They could all take whatever they wanted! She couldn’t see anyone who was stopping the people, or even collecting money from them. Maybe everything here was free! That would, at the very least, explain why it was so crowded.

Eventually Momo spotted Nino. He was sitting behind a cash register at the very end of the long row of containers. He was typing numbers into the machine while uninterruptedly collecting money and handing back change. Ah, she thought, so the people are paying him! And then she saw that the metal gate led the people in such a way that no one could get to a table without passing Nino first.

“Nino!” she yelled, trying to squeeze her way through the people. She waved Gigi’s letter, but Nino couldn’t hear her. The cash register was making too much noise and it demanded all of his attention.

Momo took a deep breath, climbed over the metal gate and forced her way through the mass of people. Nino looked up because many of the people in line had begun yelling loudly. When he saw Momo, the grumpy expression on his face suddenly disappeared.

“Momo!” he yelled, beaming like he used to. “You’re back! What a surprise!”

“Keep it moving!” yelled some of the people in line. “The kid should get in back like the rest of us. This is out of control! She cut all of us! What a little brat!”

“Just a minute,” yelled Nino, holding up his hands to calm the crowd. “A little patience, please!”

“Gigi will pay for everything, Momo,” Nino hastily whispered to her. “Just take whatever you want to eat, but do go to the back like everyone else. You can see for yourself!”

Before Momo could ask anything else, the people shoved her forward and out of the way. There was nothing left for her to do except what everyone else was doing. She went and stood at the end of the long line of people, took a tray off of the pile, and grabbed a fork, a knife, and a spoon out of a container. Then she was slowly pushed forward, step by step.

Since she needed both hands for the tray, she simply sat Cassiopeia on top of it, and as she passed by, she grabbed this and that out of the glass containers, placing everything in a circle around the turtle. The whole operation confused Momo quite a bit, so she took things at random and her food became a bizarre assortment: one piece of fried fish, one piece of bread with jam on it, a hot dog, a pastry, and a cup of lemonade. Cassiopeia, who was in the middle of it all, decided to withdraw completely into her shell and said nothing at all.

When Momo finally arrived at the register she quickly asked Nino: “Do you know where Gigi is?”

“Yes,” he said. “Our Gigi is famous now. We’re all very proud of him. At the end of the day, he’s still one of us! He’s on TV and the radio all the time, and he’s always being mentioned in the newspaper. The other day a few reporters even came to me asking how Gigi used to be. I told them about the time Gigi...”

“Move!” yelled a few people further down the line.

“But why doesn’t he come visit me anymore?” asked Momo.

“Oh, you know,” whispered Nino, who was already becoming a little anxious. “He just doesn’t have any more time. He has more important things to do, and there isn’t anything happening at the old amphitheater anymore.”

“What’s going on up there?” yelled more indignant voices from the back. “You think we like standing around here?”

“Where does he live now?” insisted Momo.

“Somewhere on Green Hill,” answered Nino. “He has a beautiful villa there, we hear, with a park surrounding it. But please keep moving now!”

Momo didn’t want to go. She still had a million questions she wanted to ask, but like before, she was simply shoved out of the way. She walked over to one of the mushroom tables with her tray, and after a little waiting, she managed to get a spot. But the table was so tall that she couldn’t really see over the edge. As she reached up and slid her tray up on top, the people waiting around stared at the turtle in disgust.

“Absolutely revolting,” said one person. “This is the kind of thing we’re expected to put up with in today’s world!”

“What more do you expect from these kids!” the person beside him growled between mouthfuls.

But they said nothing else, and Momo was left to eat her meal in peace. Eating itself turned out to be difficult enough for her, though, because she couldn’t see what was on her plate. But in the end, hunger won out and she devoured every single morsel.

Now she was full, but she still desperately wanted to find out what had happened to Beppo, so she got back in line. Because she was worried that the people would get angry again if she just stood there without a tray or anything else, she repeated the process all over, this time taking a whole array of different things from the glass containers.

When she was finally standing in front of Nino again she asked: “And where’s Beppo?”

“He waited a long time for you,” explained Nino hastily because he was afraid of a renewed onslaught of wrath from his customers. “He thought something terrible had happened to you. He kept saying something about gray men, but I’m not exactly sure anymore. Well, you know, he was always a bit out of it.”

“Hey, you two up front!” yelled someone in line. “You asleep?”

“Right away, sir!” Nino yelled back to him.

“And then?” asked Momo.

“Well, then he aggravated a police officer,” Nino went on, wiping his face nervously. “He insisted that they go searching for you. As far as I know, they finally brought him to some kind of psychiatric hospital. I don’t know any more than that.”

“Goddamnit!” screamed an enraged voice from the back. “Is this a fast-food place or what? Are you having a family reunion up there?”

“In a way, yes!” Nino yelled beseechingly.

“Is he still there?” inquired Momo.

“I don’t think so,” replied Nino. “They let him go again because he’s harmless.”

“Okay, so where is he now?”

“I have no idea. Really Momo, I don’t. But please, move on now!”

Again, Momo was shoved away by the mass of pushing people, and again, she went over to a mushroom table, waited until she found a spot and quickly slung down her meal. This time the food already tasted much, much worse, but it never even occurred to her not to eat it.

Now she needed to find out what had happened to all the children that used to visit her. She had no choice: she had to get in line again and grab a plate full of food from the containers while she walked by so that the people wouldn’t get angry.

Finally she was back at the register.

“And the children?” she asked. “What happened to them?”

“It’s all different now,” explained Nino, who had begun to sweat nervously upon seeing Momo for a third time. “I can’t explain it all to you now! Can’t you see that I’m busy?”

“But why don’t they come anymore?” Momo stubbornly persisted.

“All the neglected children are being housed in child-depots. They are not allowed to be left alone anymore... and well, to be brief, they’re being taken care of now.”

“Hurry up, you two!” yelled voices from the back of the line again. “We want to eat today, not tomorrow!”

“Even my friends?” asked Momo skeptically. “They really wanted that?”

“They weren’t asked,” replied Nino, fumbling around with the keys to the register. “Children can’t make those kinds of decisions anyway. They’re being kept off the streets, and that’s ultimately the most important thing, right?”

Momo didn’t say anything. Instead, she scrutinized Nino, which made him even more uncomfortable.

“Hello up there!” screamed another bitter voice from the back of the line. “You’ve got to be kidding me! Do you need to have your little conversation right now?”

“And what should I do now?” asked Momo quietly. “Without my friends?”

Nino shrugged his shoulders and kneaded his fingers.

“Momo,” he said, “be reasonable and come back some other time. I really can’t have this discussion with you right now. You can eat here whenever you want, you know that. If I were you, I would just go to one of those child-depots where you’ll be kept busy and where you might even learn a thing or two. But they’re going to take you to one of them anyway if you keep running around the city alone.”

Momo stared at Nino in silence again while the mass of shoving people pushed her forward. She walked over to one of the tables mechanically, and, just as mechanically, slung down her food for the third time even though it tasted like cardboard. Then she felt sick.

She took Cassiopeia under her arm and walked out without even turning around again.

“Hey Momo!” yelled Nino, who had spotted her at the last moment. “Wait a second! You haven’t even told me where you’ve been all this time!”

But then the next person pushed forward, and he began punching numbers into the machine again, grabbing money, and handing back change. The smile on his face was long gone...

“Too much to eat,” Momo said to Cassiopeia when they were back at the old amphitheater. “Much too much to eat. But for some reason I’m still not full.” A while later she added, “I couldn’t have told Nino about the flowers and the music.” And again after another pause she said, “But tomorrow we’re going to visit Gigi. You’ll definitely like him, Cassiopeia. You’ll see.”

But the only thing that appeared on the turtle’s back was a softly glowing question mark.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Lost and found

Momo woke up early the next morning and set off in search of Gigi’s house. Naturally, she took Cassiopeia with her.

Momo knew that Green Hill was a residential suburb far away from the amphitheater, and that it was situated near the part of the city where all the generic new housing projects were being built.

It was a long trek, and though Momo was used to walking around barefoot, when she finally got to Green Hill her feet were beginning to hurt. She sat down on a curb to rest for a moment.

It really was an elegant neighborhood, she thought. The streets were wide, clean, and almost completely empty. Ancient trees, their tops scratching the sky, rose out of private gardens cloistered behind walls and iron gates. The villas at the centers of these gardens were mostly modern, concrete buildings with flat roofs and glass facades. The perfectly mowed lawns encircling them looked lush and soft, inviting cartwheels and the like, but she couldn’t see anybody walking around or playing on them at all. The owners probably didn’t have time for any of that.

“If only I knew how to figure out which house belongs to Gigi...” Momo said to the turtle.

“YOU’LL KNOW SOON,” appeared on Cassiopeia’s shell.

“You think?” asked Momo hopefully.

“Hey you, dirtball,” said a voice behind her suddenly. “What are you doing here?”

Momo turned around. A man wearing a very strange striped vest was standing behind her. Momo didn’t know that rich people’s butlers wore vests like this one. She stood up.

“Hello, I’m looking for Gigi’s house,” she said. “Nino told me that he lives here now.”

“Whose house?”

“Gigi the Guide’s. He’s a friend of mine.”

The man with the striped vest looked at Momo suspiciously. A gate was standing slightly ajar behind him and Momo was able to peek inside. She saw a few greyhounds playing on a vast lawn that had a splashing fountain in the middle of it. She also saw a pair of peacocks perched on a blossoming cherry tree.

“Oh!” she yelled with astonishment. “What beautiful birds!” She started to move toward the gate to get a better look, but the man with the vest grabbed her by the collar and held her back.

“Not a chance!” he said. “What are you thinking?” He let Momo go again and wiped his hands with a white handkerchief, as if he had touched something revolting.

“Does all of this belong to you?” asked Momo, pointing through the door.

“No,” said the man with the vest, slowly growing angrier.

“Now get lost! You don’t belong here.”

“Yes I do,” Momo assured him. “I have to find Gigi the Guide. He’s waiting for me after all. Are you sure you don’t know him?”

“There aren’t any guides here,” replied the man with the vest. He turned around, walked back into the garden and began to close the gate, when something suddenly occurred to him.

“You don’t mean Girolamo, the famous storyteller, do you?”

“Well of course, Gigi the Guide, that’s what I said,” answered Momo happily. “And that’s his real name. Do you know which house is his?”

“Are you sure he’s expecting you?” the man wanted to know.

“Yes,” said Momo. “He definitely is. He’s an old friend of mine, and he’s paying for everything I eat at Nino’s.”

The man with the vest raised his eyebrows and shook his head in disbelief.

“Artists!” he said sourly. “The things they sometimes get in their heads! Well if you really think you’re that important to him, his house is the last one at the very end of the street.”

The garden gate slammed shut.

“NINCOMPOOP,” appeared on Cassiopeia’s shell, but the words quickly disappeared again.

The last house at the end of the street was surrounded by an extremely high wall, and the garden door here, similar to the one that the man with the vest had been guarding, was iron plated so that no one could see in. There wasn’t a ringer or a name to be found anywhere.

“I wonder if this is even Gigi’s house,” said Momo. “It doesn’t look like him at all.”

“IT IS,” stood on the turtle’s back.

“Why is it so... shut-off?” asked Momo. “I’ll never be able to get in.”

“WAIT,” appeared.

“If you say so,” sighed Momo, “but I might be waiting for a long time. How will Gigi know that I’m standing out here? That is, if he’s even inside?”

“HE’S ABOUT TO COME,” Momo read on the shell. She sat down directly in front of the door and waited patiently. For a long time nothing happened, and Momo began to wonder whether Cassiopeia had made a mistake this time.

“Are you positive?” she asked again after a while.

But instead of an answer, the word “FAREWELL” appeared on Cassiopeia’s shell.

Momo looked shocked. “What do you mean by that Cassiopeia? You’re going to leave me again already? What do you have in mind? Where are you going?”

“TO LOOK FOR YOU!” came Cassiopeia’s enigmatic reply.

But at that moment the gate suddenly flew open and a long, sleek limousine shot out at full speed. Momo was just able to save herself by jumping backward out of the way and tumbling to the side.

The car lurched a bit further before screeching to a halt. A door was thrown open and Gigi hopped out.

“Momo!” he cried, spreading his arms. “Is that really you? Momo! Momo!”

Momo jumped up and ran toward Gigi, who grabbed her up in his arms, showering her with kisses before dancing around the street with her.

“Are you hurt?” he asked breathlessly but didn’t even wait for a reply. “I’m sorry I scared you; I’m in a serious rush. I’m late again. Where have you been all this time? You have to tell me everything. I have to admit, I didn’t think you would ever come back. Did you find my letter? Did you? Was it still there? Good, and did you go eat at Nino’s? Was it good? Ah, Momo, we have so much to tell each other. So much has happened since you left! How are you? Say something already! And our old Beppo, what’s he doing? I haven’t seen him in ages. And the children? Ah, you know, Momo, I often think about the times when we were all still together, when I told you all those stories. Those were good times, but now everything is different, very, very different.”

Momo had tried to answer Gigi’s questions a few times, but because he couldn’t stop the flood of words from pouring out of his mouth, she just waited patiently, staring up at him. He looked different than he used to. He was well kempt and smelled good, but somehow, he seemed strangely unfamiliar.

In the meantime, four other people had gotten out of the car and walked over: a man in a leather chauffeur’s uniform, and three women with strict faces that were caked in heavy makeup.

“Is the child hurt?” one of them asked, more reproachful than concerned.

“No, no, not at all,” replied Gigi. “She’s only shocked.”

“Why was she hanging around outside the gate anyway?” demanded the second lady.

“This is Momo!” yelled Gigi, laughing. “This is my old friend, Momo!”

“Oh... that girl really exists?” asked the third lady. “I always thought you had made her up... Hey, we should tell the press and the radio hosts about this! ‘Reunion With His Fairy-Tale Princess’ or something like that. People will go nuts for it. I’ll make a call right now. This is going to be such a hit!”

“No,” said Gigi. “I don’t want that.”

“But what about you?” said the first lady, turning to Momo. “Wouldn’t you like to be on television?”

“Leave the child alone!” Gigi said angrily.

The second lady glanced at her wristwatch. “If we don’t step on it our plane is going to leave without us, and you know what that would mean.”

“My god!” said Gigi nervously. “Can’t I just have a few words with my long-lost friend?” He turned to Momo. “You can see for yourself,” he said. “They don’t even let me talk. These slave drivers won’t let me do anything!”

“No, no, no!” replied the second lady sharply. “Don’t put this on us. We’re just doing our jobs. You’re the one paying us to do all of this, m’lord.”

“Yes, of course, of course!” Gigi replied. “So let’s get a move on! You know what, Momo? You’ll just drive to the airport with us and we can talk on the way. Then my driver will bring you home on the way back. Sound good?”

He didn’t wait for Momo to reply. Instead, he pulled her toward the car. The three women sat in the back row, and Gigi sat next to the driver with Momo on his lap. Then they sped off.

“So,” said Gigi, “tell me everything, Momo! But tell it to me in order. Why did you suddenly disappear?”

Momo was about to begin telling him about Master Hora and the Hour Blossoms, when one of the ladies leaned forward and interrupted.

“So sorry,” she said, “but I just had a fabulous idea. We should introduce Momo to the film community. She would be the pitch-perfect star for the vagabond story that they’re doing next. Just think about it: Momo plays Momo!”

“Didn’t you hear me the first time?” Gigi asked sharply. “I don’t want this child getting pulled in under any circumstances! Is that clear?”

“Well, I can’t see why you wouldn’t,” replied the lady crankily. “Any other person would be licking his chops at an opportunity like this.”

“I’m not any other person!” Gigi screamed furiously. Then he turned to Momo. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This might be hard for you to understand, but I just don’t want this pack of wolves to get their hands on you as well.”

Now all three of the women looked offended.

Gigi clutched his head with a moan. Then he pulled out a little silver bottle, took out a pill, and swallowed it.

No one said a word for a few minutes.

Finally Gigi turned around so he was facing the three women. “Sorry,” he murmured meekly. “I didn’t mean you specifically. I’m just at my wit’s end.”

“Well, we all know how that can be,” said the first lady.

“And now,” Gigi went on, shooting Momo a crooked smile, “let’s talk while we still have some time.”

“Just one more question before it’s too late,” interrupted the second lady. “We’re almost there. Could you at least let me do a quick interview with the girl?”

“Enough!” roared Gigi, beside himself with rage. “I want to speak with Momo now, and I want it to be private. It’s important to me! How often am I going to have to explain this to you?”

“But you’re always telling me that I don’t do enough effective advertisement for you!” She was also getting angry now.

“That’s true!” moaned Gigi. “But not now! Not now!”

“What a shame!” said the lady. “A juicy story like this would have been a real tearjerker. But have it your way. Maybe we can do it later when we come...”

“No!” Gigi cut her off. “Not now and not later. Never! And now keep quiet while I speak with Momo.”

“Well excuse me!” answered the lady just as forcefully. “This is about your publicity, not mine! And you should consider it more carefully because you can’t really afford to waste an opportunity like this right now!”

“No!” cried Gigi desperately. “You’re right; I can’t afford to waste it! But Momo is still going to stay out of it! And now, I’m begging you, let us speak for five minutes in peace!”

The women went silent, and Gigi wearily ran a hand through his hair.

“You see... this is what’s become of me.” He let out a short, bitter laugh. “I couldn’t go back anymore even if I wanted to. It’s over for me. Do you still remember: Gigi will stay Gigi? But Gigi didn’t stay Gigi. I’ll tell you something, Momo, the most dangerous thing in life is a dream that comes true, or at least a dream that comes true the way mine did. Now I can’t dream at all anymore, and I wouldn’t be able to relearn it from you either. I’m so sick of everything.” He stared bleakly out of the car window.

“The best thing I could do would be to hold my tongue, never tell another story, go mute for the rest of my life—or at least until everyone forgets about me, or until I’m a poor beggar again. But to be poor without dreams—no Momo, that’s hell. I’d rather stay where I am now. It’s also hell, but at least this hell is comfortable.” He paused. “Oh... what am I saying? You wouldn’t understand.”

Momo just looked at him. More than anything else, she now saw that he was ill, that he had a deadly illness. She suspected that the gray men were somehow involved, but she didn’t know how she could help him since he didn’t seem to want any help.

“I keep talking about myself,” said Gigi. “Why don’t you finally tell me what you’ve been doing all this time, Momo!”

But at that moment the car pulled up outside the airport. They all got out and hurried to the terminal where two uniformed stewardesses were already awaiting Gigi. A few reporters took pictures of him and asked him questions, but the stewardesses ushered him on because the plane was already about to leave.

Gigi leaned over to Momo and looked at her. Suddenly there were tears in his eyes. “Listen Momo,” he whispered quietly, so that the people standing around couldn’t hear. “Stay with me! I’ll take you with me on this trip and everywhere else I go. You can live in my beautiful new house with me and dress in silk and satin like a real princess. You’d only have to be there to listen to me. Maybe then I’d be able to come up with real stories again, like I used to, you know? You only have to say yes, Momo, and everything else will be taken care of. Please, help me!”

Momo really wanted to help Gigi—her heart ached because of how much she wanted to help—but she felt that this wasn’t the right way, that Gigi had to become Gigi again and that it would only be worse if she weren’t Momo anymore. Her eyes also welled up with tears. She shook her head.

Gigi understood. He nodded sadly, and then he was dragged away by his three secretaries. He waved once more from the window, and Momo waved back. Then he was gone.

Momo hadn’t been able to say a single word during her entire encounter with Gigi, and there was so much she had wanted to tell him. Only now that she had finally found Gigi, did it really seem like she had lost him.

Momo slowly turned around and walked to the exit of the terminal. Suddenly she felt a wave of fear wash over her: she had lost Cassiopeia as well!

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In dire need

“So, little girl, where to?” asked the driver, as Momo climbed back into Gigi’s limousine.

She looked haggard. What should she tell him? Where did she really want to go? She had to go look for Cassiopeia, but where? Where and when had she lost her? She had been gone before the ride with Gigi, Momo was sure of that much... so in front of Gigi’s house! And then she remembered the words that had appeared on Cassiopeia’s shell: “FAREWELL!” and “I’M GOING TO LOOK FOR YOU.” Clearly Cassiopeia had known ahead of time that Momo was going to lose her, and now she was off looking for Momo. But where would Cassiopeia go looking?

“Any day now,” said the chauffeur, strumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “I have more important things to do than drive you around for fun.”

“Take me to Gigi’s house, please,” answered Momo.

The driver turned around, a surprised look on his face. “I thought I was supposed to bring you to your house. Or are you living with us now?”

“No,” replied Momo. “I lost something on the street by his house. I need to go find it.”

The driver was happy about the change of plans because he had to go in that direction anyway. As soon as they pulled up outside of Gigi’s house, Momo hopped out and began searching everywhere.

“Cassiopeia!” she called softly again and again. “Cassiopeia!”

“What are you looking for anyway?” asked the driver out of the car window.

“Master Hora’s turtle,” answered Momo. “Her name is Cassiopeia, and she always knows what’s going to happen half an hour ahead of time. She can make letters appear on her shell. I really need to find her. Will you please help me?”

“I don’t have time for stupid riddles!” he snarled. Then he sped through the gate to Gigi’s house, which clanged shut behind him.

Momo searched by herself. She combed the entire street, but to no avail. She couldn’t find Cassiopeia anywhere.

“Maybe,” she thought, “she’s already making her way back to the amphitheater.” So Momo slowly retraced her steps back the long way that she had come, all the while stopping to look for Cassiopeia in the ditches and gutters she passed. Again and again she yelled the turtle’s name, but it was all in vain.

Momo didn’t arrive at the amphitheater until very late at night, but even so, she continued to search as much as the darkness allowed. She tentatively harbored the hope that through some sort of miracle, the turtle had arrived home before her. But this was clearly impossible, considering how slowly the turtle moved.

Eventually, Momo crawled into bed. Now, for the first time in her life, she was all alone.

Over the next few weeks, Momo wandered aimlessly around the big city in search of Beppo. Since nobody could tell her anything about where he was staying, the only hope that remained for her was that their paths might randomly cross. But in such a big city, the chances of two people randomly running into each other are as slim as the chances of a message in a bottle from a shipwrecked sailor being found by a fisherman across the ocean.

By the same token, though, Momo told herself that they could just as easily be extremely close to each other. Who knew how many times Momo had passed a spot where an hour, a minute, or even just a moment before Beppo had been standing. Or vice versa: how often had Beppo passed a spot shortly before or after Momo had been standing there, looking for him? So sometimes Momo waited in one spot for many hours on end, but she would always eventually have to keep moving and the possibility that they had just missed one another continued to weigh on her.

How helpful Cassiopeia would have been! If she had still been with Momo, she might have said, “WAIT!” or, “KEEP GOING,” but without her, Momo never knew what she should do. She was afraid of missing Beppo when she waited, and she was equally afraid of missing him when she didn’t.

She also kept her eyes peeled for the children who used to visit her, but she never saw a single one. In fact, she didn’t see any children on the streets anymore, and she remembered what Nino had told her about the children being taken care of.

But because of the gray men’s secret and relentless surveillance, Momo herself was never caught by a policeman or any other adult and brought to one of the child-depots. It wouldn’t have fit their plans for Momo to be captured, but she, of course, knew none of this.

She went to Nino’s restaurant once every day, but she was never able to say any more to him than she had during their first meeting. Nino was always in the same rush and never had time.

Weeks became months, and Momo was always alone. One evening, while she was sitting on a bridge, Momo saw a hunched figure standing on the distant parapet of another bridge. He was hastily sweeping a broom back and forth, as if his life depended on it. Momo thought she recognized Beppo and began to scream and wave, but the figure never once stopped what it was doing. Momo got up and began to run, but by the time she had arrived at the other bridge it was empty.

“I’m sure it wasn’t actually Beppo,” Momo told herself in consolation. “No, it couldn’t have been him. I know how Beppo sweeps.”

On some days she stayed home in the old amphitheater because the thought would suddenly occur to her that Beppo might come by to see if she was back yet. If she wasn’t there when he came he would naturally assume she was still away, and she was tormented by the possibility that this had already happened a week, or even just a day ago! So she waited, but she waited in vain. Finally she wrote, “I’M BACK” in big letters on the wall of her room, but nobody ever read them besides her.

The one thing Momo never forgot in all this time was the vivid memory of Master Hora, the flowers, and the music. She only had to shut her eyes and listen in on herself to see the majestically glowing blossoms and hear the powerful voices. And she could sing along with the melody and the words just as easily as the day she had awoken back at the amphitheater, even though they were constantly changing. Sometimes she would sit alone on the stone steps for an entire day singing to herself with no one there to listen but the trees, the birds, and the ancient stones.

There are many kinds of loneliness, but Momo experienced one that only very few people know of, and that even fewer have experienced to the extent that Momo did. She felt like she was imprisoned in a treasure trove filled with priceless riches that continued to grow in number, threatening to suffocate her. There was no way out: nobody could push through to her and she couldn’t go out in search of help because she was buried so deeply under a mountain of time.

There were even moments when she wished that she hadn’t heard the music or seen the colors, but even in those moments there was nothing in the world for which she would have traded that memory, even if it eventually killed her. Yes, she thought about death because she had discovered something else as well: there are certain treasures that kill you if you can’t share them with others.

Every few days Momo ran to Gigi’s villa and waited, often for a long time, in front of the garden door. She hoped to see him just once more. She had come to grips with everything about him, and she wanted to stay with him, listen to him, and speak with him regardless of whether it would be the way it used to be. But the gate never opened back up.

In the end, it was only a few months that passed this way, and yet it was the longest period of time that Momo had ever lived through. Time can’t simply be measured with a clock and a calendar, just as words alone can’t describe the kind of loneliness Momo knew in these months. Maybe it’s enough to add just one more thing: if Momo had been able to find the path to Master Hora—and she often tried—she would have begged him not to give her anymore time, or to let her stay with him in the Nowhere House forever.

But she couldn’t find the way back without Cassiopeia, and Cassiopeia was gone. Maybe she had gone back to Master Hora long ago, or maybe she had gotten lost somewhere in the world. In any case, she didn’t return.

Instead, something completely different happened.

One day, while walking in the city, Momo ran into three of the children who always used to come play with her. Paolo, Franco, and Maria (the girl who had always carried around her little sister, Didi) were walking down the street together. All three of them had changed dramatically. They were wearing what looked like gray uniforms and their faces appeared strangely stark and lifeless. They barely smiled, even when Momo ran up and greeted them gleefully.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said breathlessly. “Won’t you come back to the amphitheater and play?”

The three exchanged blank looks and then shook their heads.

“Maybe tomorrow then?” asked Momo. “Or the day after?”

They all shook their heads again.

“Oh, come back already!” she pleaded. “You used to come all the time.”

“We used to,” answered Paolo, “but now everything is different. We aren’t allowed to waste our time uselessly anymore.”

“But we never did that!” Momo said indignantly.

“Yes, it was fun,” said Maria, “but that’s not what’s important anymore.”

The three children quickly began to move away, but Momo followed them.

“Where are you going?” she wanted to know.

“To game class,” answered Franco. “We learn how to play.”

“Which games?” asked Momo

“Today we’re playing punch cards,” explained Paolo. “It’s very useful, but you have to pay especially close attention.”

“How does it work?”

“Each of us makes a punch card. Each punch card has a bunch of different information on it: how big you are, how old, how heavy, and so on. Obviously you never put down exactly who you are because that would be too easy. Sometimes we’re also just serial numbers, like MUX/763/y for example. Anyway, then all of the cards get shuffled together and one person picks a card out of the pile. Then he has to ask the right kinds of questions in order to eliminate all the other kids, leaving just the one that he’s looking for. The person who does it the fastest wins.”

“And that’s fun?” Momo asked dubiously.

“It isn’t important if it’s fun,” Maria replied, looking around anxiously. “You aren’t supposed to talk that way anymore.”

“Well what is important?” Momo wanted to know.

“It’s important that the games are useful for our futures,” said Paolo.

In the meantime they had arrived in front of the door of a big, gray house. CHILD-DEPOT was printed above the door.

“I have so much to tell you guys!” said Momo.

“Maybe we’ll see each other again sometime,” Maria said sadly.

Children were everywhere now, and all of them were rushing through the doorway. They all resembled Momo’s three friends.

“It was much better with you,” Franco said suddenly. “We always came up with ideas ourselves. But they say you can’t learn anything like that.”

“Can’t you just run away?” suggested Momo.

All three of them shook their heads and looked around to make sure no one was listening.

“I already tried it a few times in the beginning,” whispered Franco. “But it’s pointless. They always find you and bring you back.”

“You shouldn’t talk that way,” said Maria. “After all, we are being taken care of now.”

They all stared sullenly at the floor. Finally Momo summoned up her courage and asked, “Couldn’t you take me with you? I’m so lonely now.”

But then something strange happened: before any of the children could so much as begin to answer, they were sucked into the house as if by a giant magnet. The door boomed shut behind them, echoing into the sudden silence.

Momo had watched it all happen with fear and astonishment. But after recovering from the shock, she approached the door again, intent on ringing or knocking and begging to be allowed to join in, regardless of what game they were playing. She had barely taken one step forward when she suddenly stopped short. A gray man had appeared between her and the door.

“Pointless!” he said with a thin smile, his smoldering cigar wedged in the corner of his mouth. “Don’t even try it! Letting you inside isn’t in our interest.”

“Why not?” asked Momo. She felt the iciness beginning to rise up inside her again.

“Because we have something else planned for you,” explained the gray man, puffing out a ring of smoke that slipped around Momo’s neck and stayed there for a long time without disappearing.

People passed by, but they were all in too much of a hurry to glance up. Momo pointed a finger at the gray man and tried to yell for help, but nothing came out of her mouth.

“Leave it be!” said the gray man with a bleak, joyless cackle. “Do you still know so little about us? Do you still not know who we are? We took all your friends away from you. No one can help you anymore. You’re at our mercy, but as you can see, we’re sparing you.”

“Why?” Momo broke in with difficulty.

“Because we want you to do us a small service,” the gray man replied. “If you’re reasonable, you’ll be able to win a great deal for yourself and for your friends. Do you want that?”

“Yes,” whispered Momo.

The gray man smiled thinly. “Then we will meet at midnight for a discussion.”

Momo nodded mutely, but the gray man was already gone. Only the smoke from his cigar still hung in the air. He hadn’t said where he wanted to meet.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A great deal of fear and even more courage

Momo was too afraid to return to the old amphitheater. Surely the gray man would come there at midnight to meet her, and Momo was horror-struck at the thought of being alone with him. No, she never wanted to meet him again, neither there nor anywhere else, because she already knew that whatever he was going to suggest to her was bad for her and her friends, regardless of how he phrased it. But where could she hide from him?

A crowded place seemed safest to her. No one had taken notice of her and the gray man before, but if he really wanted to do something to her this time she would cry for help. One person, at the very least, would see what was happening and try to save her. Besides, she would be hardest to find in the middle of a big pack of people.

So for the rest of the day Momo walked along the busiest streets and squares in the midst of crowds of pedestrians until she had moved in a big circle and was back where she had started. She continued to do this into the evening and deep into the night, walking the circle a second and third time as she let herself be pulled along by the current of hurrying bodies.

But by the time it was late she had already been walking all day, and her feet hurt from exhaustion. It grew later and later, and Momo marched on, already half asleep. On and on and on...

“I’ll just rest for a minute,” she thought to herself at last. “Just a minute, and then I’ll be able to focus better.”

Just then, Momo passed a little three-wheel pickup truck parked at a street corner. The small flatbed was loaded with sacks and boxes. She climbed on board and leaned against one of the comfortable-looking sacks. Then she pulled up her tired feet and tucked them under her skirt. She sighed with relief, pressing herself deep into the sack, and before she knew it she was fast asleep.

She was haunted by confused and muddled dreams. She saw old Beppo, swaying far above a dark abyss on a tightrope, using his broom as a balancing pole. “Where’s the other side?” she kept hearing him call. “I can’t find the other side.” And the rope did, in fact, seem to go on forever. It stretched out on both sides until it was lost in darkness. Momo desperately wanted to help Beppo, but she couldn’t get him to notice her. He was too far along and too high up.

Then she saw Gigi. He was pulling an endless strip of paper out of his mouth. He pulled and pulled, but the strip of paper didn’t end. Gigi was already standing on a huge pile of paper, and it seemed like he was pleading to Momo with his eyes, as if he were telling her that soon he wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore if she didn’t help him. She tried to run to him, but her feet got tangled in the pile of paper, and the more she tried to free herself the more tangled she became.

Then she saw the children. They were all completely flat, like playing cards, and a pattern of little holes was being punched in each of them. Every time the cards were shuffled together, they would sort themselves out and then new holes would be punched into them. The card-children cried silently, and all Momo could hear was the clattering and rattling of them bumping against one another as they were shuffled again and again. “Wait!” Momo yelled. “Stop!” But the clattering and rattling overwhelmed her voice, and grew louder and louder until she finally woke up.

At first she didn’t know where she was because it was dark all around her, but then she remembered that she had sat down on a little truck and realized that the little truck was now moving, its motor rattling and clattering along. Momo wiped her cheeks, which were wet with tears. Where was she anyway?

The truck had evidently been driving for quite some time now without her having noticed, because when she now looked up she saw that she was in a completely different part of the city. At this time of night, it looked uninhabited. The streets were empty and the houses were completely dark.

The pickup truck wasn’t driving very quickly, and Momo hopped off before thinking about what she was doing. She wanted to go back to the busy streets where she thought she was safe from the gray men, but then she suddenly remembered her dreams and stopped short.

Little by little, the sound of the motor faded into the dark streets and everything became still again.

Momo didn’t want to escape anymore. She had run away with the hope of saving herself. The whole time she had only been thinking of her own loneliness, her own fear, but it was actually her friends who were in trouble. And if there was anyone at all left who could help them, she could. If the possibility of freeing her friends existed, even if it was only very slight and even if it meant dealing with the gray men, the least she could do was try. Once she had thought it through this far, she felt a bizarre change taking place within her.

The feeling of fear and helplessness had grown so large, so all-encompassing, that it had suddenly reversed and become its opposite. She had endured it, and she suddenly felt brave and confident, as if no power in the world could harm her, or rather, as if she no longer cared what happened to her. Now she wanted to meet the gray men. She wanted to meet them at any cost.

“I have to go back to the amphitheater immediately,” she said to herself. “Maybe it isn’t too late, maybe they’re still waiting for me.”

But that was easier said than done. She didn’t know where she was, and she didn’t have the slightest clue which direction she should walk, so she chose one at random and set off.

She walked farther and farther through the dark, dead-silent streets, and since she was barefoot, she didn’t even hear the sound of her own steps. Each time she turned onto a new street she hoped to discover something, a sign, anything that she might recognize. But she found nothing, and she couldn’t ask for help because the only living thing in sight was a skinny, dirty dog sniffing for food in a garbage pile, and it quickly ran away as she approached.

Eventually Momo arrived at an enormous square. It wasn’t one of those pretty squares, decorated with trees and fountains, but a plain, wide-open surface. Only at the very edge did the outlines of houses rise against the night sky. Momo crossed the square, and as she reached its center a clock tower began to chime in the near distance. It chimed many times. It might have just struck midnight, but Momo wasn’t counting. If the gray man was waiting for her in the amphitheater, she thought, then she would never be able to get there in time. He would leave empty-handed, and her opportunity to help her friends would pass her by, once and for all.

Momo bit her lip. What should she, what could she do? There was nothing left, she thought.

“Here I am!” she yelled into the darkness as loud as she could. She had no real hope that the gray man would actually hear her, but she was mistaken.

The clock had barely finished its final stroke when lights began to appear in all of the streets leading to the big square. They were empty, expressionless lights, faint at first, but growing steadily brighter; and soon Momo recognized that they were the headlights of many cars, all of which were now slowly creeping toward where she was standing. No matter where she turned, headlights were glaring at her, and she had to guard her eyes with a raised hand. They were coming after all!

But Momo hadn’t reckoned with such a strong turnout. For a moment all of her courage disappeared again, and since she couldn’t turn and run, she curled up as far as she could inside of her oversized jacket. But then she thought about the blossoms and the powerful music, and she felt soothed and strengthened again. The cars came closer and closer, their engines humming quietly, until they finally stopped, bumper to bumper, in a closed circle whose center was Momo.

Then the men stepped out of their cars. Momo couldn’t make out how many of them there were because they remained in the darkness behind their headlights. She could feel many sets of cold eyes bearing down on her, stares that contained nothing friendly, and she became cold.

For a long time no one said a word, neither Momo nor any of the gray men.

“So this,” she finally heard a monotone voice say, “is the child whom we once thought would pose a challenge for us. Now look at this miserable little creature.” A rustling hiss followed and it sounded like many voices cackling a long way off.

“Careful!” said another, more suppressed voice. “You all know how dangerous the child can be. There’s no point in pretending otherwise.”

Momo listened carefully.

“Okay, fine,” said the first voice from the darkness behind a headlight. “Let’s just try the truth.”

Another long silence followed. Momo felt that the gray men were afraid to tell the truth. It seemed to cause them an unimaginable strain. Momo heard something that sounded like many people wheezing and gasping.

Finally a third man began to speak. The voice came from a different direction, but it sounded just as expressionless.

“Let us speak plainly with one another. You are all alone, poor child. Your friends are unreachable and there’s no one left for you to share your time with. This has been part of our plan all along. You can see how powerful we are. There’s no point in resisting us. All your lonely hours, what good are they to you now? They are a curse that crushes you, a burden that smothers you, an ocean that drowns you, a torment that sickens you. You have been isolated from every other human being.”

Momo listened carefully.

“The time will come,” the voice droned on, “when you won’t be able to take it anymore. It might be tomorrow, or a week from then, or it might even take a year—it’s all the same to us. We know that at some point you’ll come crawling to us on your hands and knees, pleading. ‘I’m prepared to do anything,’ you’ll say, ‘just free me from this pain!’ Or are you already at that stage? You only have to say it.”

Momo shook her head.

“You don’t want to let us help you?” the voice persisted coldly.

An icy breeze came crashing over Momo, but she just clenched her teeth and shook her head again.

“She knows what Time is,” cackled another voice.

“That proves that she really was with Him,” answered the first voice. And then more loudly, “Do you know Master Hora?”

Momo nodded.

“And were you, in fact, with him?”

Momo nodded again.

“Then you know... the Hour Blossoms?”

Momo nodded for the third time. How well she knew them!

There was another long silence. When the voice began to speak again, it came from a different direction.

“You love your friends, right?”

Momo nodded.

“And you want to free them?”

Momo nodded again.

“You could do it if you really wanted to.”

Momo pulled her jacket tight around her little body because she was shivering all over from the cold.

“It would cost you close to nothing to free your friends. We help you, and you help us. That seems like a fair exchange to me.”

Momo looked attentively in the direction of the disembodied voice.

“You see, we would also like to meet Master Hora in person, do you understand? But we don’t know where he lives. All we want is for you to lead us to him. That’s it.” He paused. “Pay attention, Momo, because we are being completely open and honest with you: you will get your friends back and you will be able to return to your happy, carefree life. Doesn’t that seem worth it to you!”

Now Momo opened her mouth for the first time. It was very difficult for her to speak because her lips had frozen shut.

“What do you want from Master Hora?” she asked slowly.

“We want to meet him,” answered the voice sharply. The air grew even colder. “Let that suffice for now.”

Momo waited silently. The gray men began to stir amongst themselves. They seemed to be growing impatient.

“I don’t understand you,” said the voice. “Think about your friends! Why are you worrying about Master Hora? He’s old enough to take care of himself. And besides, if he’s reasonable and if he levels with us as friends, we won’t touch a hair on his head. If he isn’t—well, then we have our ways of forcing him.”

“To do what?” she asked through blue lips.

Suddenly the voice sounded shrill and strained. “We’re sick of it all—cobbling together individual hours, minutes, and seconds. We want all of it at once. Master Hora must relinquish it to us!”

Momo stared with horror into the darkness out of which the voice had come.

“And people?” she asked. “What about them?”

“People,” screamed the voice, cracking, “have long been obsolete. They themselves have brought the world to a place where there’s no more room for them. We will rule the world.”

The cold was now so unbearable that Momo could do nothing more than painfully wriggle her lips. She couldn’t say a word.

“But don’t worry, little Momo,” the voice went on, suddenly soft and even coaxing. “You and your friends will be dealt with differently. You will be the last people left who tell stories and play games. Just steer clear of our affairs, and we will leave you alone.”

The voice fell silent but quickly picked up where it had left off, this time coming from a slightly different direction. “You know that we’re telling the truth. We will keep our promise. Now, why don’t you take us to Master Hora?”

Momo tried to speak, but the cold had nearly robbed her of her wits. After a few attempts, she finally managed to spit out: “Even if I could, I wouldn’t do it!”

“What does that mean: even if you could?” the voice asked menacingly. “You can! You were with Hora! You must know the way!”

“I can’t find the way anymore,” whispered Momo. “I’ve tried. Only Cassiopeia knows it.”

“Who is that?”

“Master Hora’s turtle.”

“Where is it now?”

Momo, who was barely conscious anymore, stammered, “She came back with me... but I... lost her.”

She could hear the buzz of agitated voices in the distance.

“Order a mass search,” she heard being yelled. “We must find that turtle! Every turtle must be checked! We must find this Cassiopeia. We must! We must!”

The voices faded away and it grew silent again. Momo slowly regained full consciousness. She was standing alone in the big square. All that remained was a cold, hard wind that seemed to be coming from some faraway void. It was a gray wind, an ashen gray wind.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When you look ahead without glancing back

Momo didn’t know how much time had passed. The clock tower chimed every now and then, but she could barely hear it. The warmth slowly began to return to her frozen limbs. She felt crippled, and she couldn’t come to a decision. Should she go back home, to the old amphitheater and sleep? Now, after all hope for her friends had evaporated? Momo was suddenly positive that things would never be right again, not ever...

She was also afraid for Cassiopeia. What if the gray men actually found her? Momo began to blame herself bitterly for having ever mentioned the turtle, but she had been so dazed that she hadn’t taken the time to think everything through.

“And maybe,” thought Momo, trying to console herself, “Cassiopeia is already back with Master Hora. Yes, hopefully she isn’t looking for me anymore. It would be good for her... and for me...”

As she trailed off, Momo felt something rub up against her bare foot. She was startled but then slowly bent down, and once she was close to the ground, she saw that the turtle was standing right in front of her nose. In the darkness she could just make out some dimly glowing letters on her shell, which said, “HERE I AM AGAIN.”

Without a second thought, Momo grabbed the turtle and stuffed it under her jacket. Then she stood back up, listened carefully, and peered around into the darkness because she was afraid that the gray men were still in the vicinity. Everything was silent.

Cassiopeia was kicking furiously under the jacket trying to free herself, but Momo held her tightly. Peeping into her jacket, she whispered, “Please stop moving!”

“WHY THE SHENANIGANS?” stood on the shell.

“I don’t want them to see you!” muttered Momo.

Now a new message appeared on the back of the shell in glowing letters: “NOT HAPPY TO SEE ME?”

“Of course I am!” Momo said with a sob. “I’m so happy, Cassiopeia.” And she kissed the turtle’s nose a few times.

The letters on the turtle’s shell blushed visibly. “TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH!” she replied.

Momo smiled. “Have you been looking for me this whole time?”

“OF COURSE.”

“And why did you find me here and now of all places?”

“KNEW AHEAD OF TIME,” came the concise reply.

Had the turtle been searching over the past few months even though she knew ahead of time that she wouldn’t find Momo? But then she hadn’t really needed to look in the first place? It was another of Cassiopeia’s many riddles, and Momo understood less and less the more she thought about it. Now was not the time to linger on the problem, so instead, Momo quickly told the turtle in a hushed whisper what had happened.

“What should we do now?” she said at the end.

Cassiopeia had paid close attention, and now some new words began to materialize on her back: “WE’LL GO TO HORA.”

“Now?” yelled Momo with horror. “But they’re looking for you all over! The only place they don’t happen to be at the moment is right here. Wouldn’t it be better to just stay put?”

But the turtle’s shell only said: “WE’RE GOING ANYWAY.”

“We’ll be walking straight into their arms.” Momo protested anxiously.

“WON’T SEE A SOUL” came Cassiopeia’s laconic reply. And if she was so sure about it, then Momo could depend on her. But suddenly Momo thought about the long, strenuous way that she had already traveled once before and which now lay ahead of her, and she suddenly felt like she didn’t have enough strength.

“Go alone Cassiopeia,” she said quietly. “I can’t go on. Go alone, and say hello to Master Hora for me.”

“IT’S VERY CLOSE,” stood on Cassiopeia’s back.

Momo read this, and looked around with astonishment. Little by little it dawned on her that they were already in the empty part of the city that led to the other part of the city with all the white houses and the strange light. If they really were this close already, then maybe she would be able to make it to the Nowhere House after all.

“Okay,” said Momo. “I’ll go with you, but can I carry you so that it goes a little faster?”

“UNFORTUNATELY NOT,” could be read on Cassiopeia’s shell.

“Why is it so important that you crawl ahead of me?”

Another mysterious answered followed: “THE PATH IS IN ME.” And with that, the turtle set herself in motion and Momo followed slowly behind, one step at a time.

The girl and the turtle had barely disappeared onto one of the off-shooting alleys, when the shadows of all the houses around the square began to come to life. A crackling rustle spread out over the whole square; it sounded like dry snickering. It was the gray men. They had overheard the entire conversation. A small group of them had secretly doubled back to watch the girl. They had waited a long time, but even they hadn’t thought that their waiting would result in such a success.

“There they go!” whispered an expressionless voice. “Should we grab them?”

“Obviously not,” muttered another voice. “We’ll let them walk ahead.”

“Why?” asked the first voice. “We need to catch the turtle at all costs.”

“True, and why do we need it?”

“So that it will lead us to Hora.”

“Precisely. And that’s what it’s doing right now. We don’t even have to force it. The creature is unknowingly showing us the way all by itself.”

A dry cackle wafted through the shadows of the square again.

“Update all the agents around the city immediately. Call off the search. Everyone should be told to join our contingent, but with utmost care and secrecy, gentlemen. None of us can get in their way. They should have complete freedom to go wherever they choose. They must not see any of us. Now, gentlemen, let us leisurely follow these two clueless guides.”

And so it came to be that Momo and Cassiopeia didn’t encounter a single one of their pursuers. Regardless of where their mysterious path led them, the gray men always managed to dodge the two, disappearing at the last moment to join their fellow followers. A fast-growing procession of gray men, always hidden by walls and house corners, was silently trailing them.

Momo was more exhausted than she had ever been in her whole life. Sometimes she thought she might keel over and fall asleep right there, but then she would force herself to take one more step, and then another and another, until she felt better again for a little while. If only the turtle didn’t crawl so terribly slowly! But there was nothing she could do about that. Momo didn’t look left or right anymore, but only down at Cassiopeia and her own two feet.

After what seemed like an eternity, she noticed that the street was becoming lighter. Momo lifted her drooping eyelids, which

seemed as heavy as lead to her, and looked around.

Yes, they had finally made it to the part of the city with the strange light that was neither quite dawn nor quite dusk, and which cast shadows that fell every which way. The white houses with their eerie black windows stood off to the side, blinding and untouchable, and there she saw the strange monument again: a giant white egg perched on a black plinth, nothing else.

Momo rallied her strength. Now it couldn’t be much further to Master Hora’s.

“Please,” she said to Cassiopeia. “Couldn’t we go a bit faster?”

“THE SLOWER, THE FASTER,” was the turtle’s only reply.

She crawled onward, even slower than before, and Momo noticed, as she had the first time, that it was precisely because they walked more slowly that they moved forward more quickly. It was almost as if they began gliding faster and faster over the street, the slower they moved their feet.

This, of course, was the secret of the White Quarter: the slower you stepped forward, the faster you moved ahead, and the more you rushed, the slower you moved. It was this that the gray men hadn’t known when they had chased after Momo in their cars, so Momo had escaped that time.

But now things were quite different. Now they didn’t even want to catch up with the girl and the turtle, so they followed the two just as slowly, and they soon discovered the secret. The street behind Momo and Cassiopeia began to fill with a hoard of gray men, and now that they had discovered how to move here, they walked even more slowly than the turtle and thus began to catch up, getting closer and closer. It was like a reverse race—a race of sloth.

The path crisscrossed through these dream streets, always leading deeper and deeper into the heart of this white part of the city until the two finally arrived at the corner of Never Street.

Cassiopeia had already turned in and was walking toward the Nowhere House. Momo remembered that she hadn’t been able to move forward on this street until she turned around and walked backward, so she did.

And now her heart almost stood still.

The time thieves were approaching like a wandering wall, row after row of them as far as the eye could see.

Momo cried out in horror, but she couldn’t hear her own voice. She walked backward into Never Street and stared with wide-open eyes at the approaching hoard of gray men.

But then another strange thing happened: as the first couple of followers pushed forward onto Never Street, they literally dissolved into thin air in front of Momo’s eyes. First their outstretched hands disappeared, then their legs and bodies, and finally their faces as well, which now displayed horror and astonishment.

But Momo wasn’t the only one to notice this. The other gray men saw it as well, and the first rows began to turn back on the mass of followers. For a moment, a kind of brawl broke out among them. Momo saw their furious faces and their threatening fists, but not one of them dared follow her any farther.

At last she reached the Nowhere House. The big copper door swung open. Momo stumbled inside, sprinted through the hall with the stone statues, opened the tiny door at the other end, slipped through it, ran across the great room to the little chamber in the middle of all the grandfather clocks, threw herself on the little, dainty sofa, and buried her face under one of the pillows so that she wouldn’t see or hear anything.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The besieged must free themselves

A gentle voice was speaking.

Momo slowly emerged from the depths of her dreamless sleep. She felt wonderfully rested and refreshed.

“The child couldn’t help it,” she heard the voice say. “But you, Cassiopeia, why did you do this?”

Momo opened her eyes. Master Hora was sitting at the little table facing the sofa. He was looking worriedly at the floor where the turtle was sitting. “Didn’t it occur to you that the gray men might follow you?”

“I ONLY KNOW AHEAD,” appeared on Cassiopeia’s shell. And then, “I CAN’T THINK BACK.”

Master Hora shook his head with a sigh. “Oh, Cassiopeia, sometimes you’re a riddle even to me!”

Momo sat up.

“Look, our little Momo is awake!” Master Hora said warmly. “I hope you’re feeling better.”

“Much better,” answered Momo. “I’m sorry I fell asleep without saying anything.”

“It’s perfectly all right,” replied Hora. “No need to apologize. Cassiopeia has brought me up to speed on everything that I didn’t already know from my Omnivision glasses.”

“What are the gray men doing now?” asked Momo.

Master Hora pulled a big, blue handkerchief out of his jacket. “They’re laying siege to us. They have surrounded the Nowhere House from all sides—that is, they are as close to it as they can safely get.”

“They can’t come in here, can they?” Momo asked, a frightened expression appearing on her face.

Master Hora blew his nose. “No, they cannot. You yourself saw that they dissolve into nothing the moment they step onto Never Street.”

“Why is that?” Momo wanted to know.

“It’s because of the time current,” answered Master Hora. “You already know that everything happens in reverse on Never Street. Time runs backward in a ring around the Nowhere House. Usually—that is to say, in the regular world—time goes into you, and because you have more and more time in you, you grow older. But on Never Street, time goes out of you. You could say that you become younger while you walk along it. Not much younger, though, only the amount of time it takes for you to move from one end of the street to the other.”

“I didn’t notice that,” said Momo with wonder.

“Well,” explained Master Hora with a smile, “it doesn’t mean much for a person because each person has much more than that amount of time inside of him or her. But it’s different with the gray men. They are made up entirely of stolen time, and it all gets sucked out of them almost instantaneously by the time current. It’s like air out of a popped balloon, only that in the case of the balloon, the rubber is left, and with the gray men, nothing remains.”

Momo thought long and hard.

“Couldn’t you just let time run backward everywhere for a while?” she asked after a pause. “Just for a very short while, I mean. Then everyone would be a bit younger, which wouldn’t matter, but the time thieves would dissolve into nothing.”

Master Hora smiled. “That would be very nice, indeed, I admit, but it’s impossible. The two currents keep themselves at equilibrium. If one were to stop, the other would stop as well, and then there would be no more time at all...”

He paused and put on the Omnivision glasses. “That means...” he murmured, trailing off. Then he stood up and began to pace up and down the small room, deep in thought. Momo watched him anxiously, and Cassiopeia followed him with her eyes. Eventually he sat back down, propped the glasses on his forehead, and scrutinized Momo. “You made me think of something,” he said. “But it isn’t up to me alone.”

He turned to the turtle at his feet: “Cassiopeia, my dear, what would you say is the best thing to do during a siege?”

“BREAKFAST!” appeared on her shell.

“Exactly!” said Master Hora. “A wonderful idea!” And in the blink of an eye, the table set itself. Or had it been set the whole time? Either way, the golden teacups were now standing in front of her again accompanied by the same shimmering breakfast as the first time: a pot-bellied kettle filled with steaming hot chocolate, a dish of honey, golden butter, and a basket filled with warm, crispy rolls.

Since the last time, Momo had often longed for these goodies, and now she immediately began to eat with gusto. This time it tasted even better than the first time, and this time Master Hora also dug in.

“They want you to give them all of human time.” Momo mumbled through stuffed cheeks. “But you won’t do that, will you?”

“No, my child,” answered Master Hora, “I will never do that. Time began once and it will end at some point, but only when people don’t need it anymore. The gray men won’t get one millisecond from me.”

“But they said that they can force you to give it to them,” Momo went on.

“Before we discuss this any further,” he said earnestly, “I want you to take a look at them for yourself.”

He took off his glasses and passed them over to Momo, who put them on. At first she only saw a swirl of colors and shapes and she became dizzy, but this time it quickly passed, and after a short while her eyes adjusted to the Omnivision glasses. Then she saw the hoard of besiegers.

The gray men were standing shoulder to shoulder in rows that stretched as far as she could see. They weren’t only standing at the entrance to Never Street, but in a wide, gapless circle whose epicenter was the Nowhere House and that bled out into the neighborhood with the white houses.

Then Momo noticed something else, something strange. At first, she thought that the Omnivision glasses were fogging over, or that she still couldn’t use them properly, because the outlines of the gray men appeared murky and indistinct. But then she realized that the haze had nothing to do with the glasses or her eyes. She saw that it was rising up from the street. In some places it was already so thick that she couldn’t see through it, and in others it was only just beginning to build. The gray men stood motionless. As usual, each was wearing his stiff round top hat, had a briefcase in hand and a slim gray cigar burning in his mouth. But the clouds of smoke coming from the cigars weren’t dispersing the way smoke usually does. Here, where there wasn’t even the slightest breath of wind, the smoke curled up into the glassy air, forming thick shrouds that looked like cobwebs. It crawled along the streets, and up the facades of the snow white houses, spanning entire blocks from corner to corner like enormous flags. It balled itself up into disgusting, blue-gray swaths that towered up, one on top of the other, slowly but surely encasing the Nowhere House in a dense, unstoppable growing wall.

Momo also saw that every now and then new gray men would come and take the place of other ones, stepping in for them. But why was all of this happening? What plan did the time thieves have now? She took off the glasses and looked questioningly at Master Hora.

“Have you seen enough?” he asked. “Then please give me back the glasses.” As he put them on, he began to speak: “You asked me if they can force me to do something. They can’t reach me directly, as you saw for yourself, but they can damage people in a much more potent and harmful way than anything they have done so far. They are trying to use this new threat to coerce me.”

“Something even worse?” asked Momo fearfully.

Master Hora nodded. “I give every person his or her time. The gray men can’t do anything about that, and they can’t stop the time that I send out. What they can do is poison it.”

“Poison time?” asked Momo, aghast.

“Yes, with the smoke of their cigars,” explained Master Hora. “Have you ever seen one of them without a little gray cigar? Certainly not, because they cannot continue to exist without them.”

“What kind of cigars are they?” Momo wanted to know.

“You remember the Hour Blossoms,” said Master Hora. “Back then, I told you that every human being has his or her own golden time-temple because every human being has a heart. If people allow the gray men to enter it, the men are able to steal more and more of these blossoms. But the Hour Blossoms that get plucked out of a heart that way can’t die because they haven’t technically withered yet—they haven’t been used. But they can’t really live either because they have been ripped away from their actual owners, and every fiber of their being longs to return to them.”

Momo listened breathlessly.

“Momo, you must understand that evil has its secrets, too. I don’t know where the gray men store the stolen Hour Blossoms. I only know that they manage to freeze them with the cold they produce until the flowers are as hard as glass; and by freezing them, they stop them from returning to their owners. Somewhere deep underground, the gray men must have a giant storage area where they keep all the frozen time. But even there, the Hour Blossoms don’t die.

Momo’s cheeks began to glow with indignation.

“The gray men constantly supply themselves with time from this storage. They tear the petals off the Hour Blossoms, dry them out until they’re all gray, and then they roll them up into little cigars. Until that moment there is still a tiny bit of life left in the petals, but the gray men have no interest in living time, so they light the cigars and smoke them. Only in the smoke is the time really and truly dead, and that’s how they nourish themselves—off of people’s dead time...”

Momo had risen to her feet. “Oh no,” she said. “So much dead time...”

“Yes, that wall of smoke they’re erecting around the Nowhere House is built entirely of dead time. There is still enough open sky above for me to send the people their time without it being tainted, but when the dark haze has made a bell jar around the house, closing us in, then every hour that I send out will become infused with some of the gray men’s ghostly, dead time. And when people receive it they will become ill, deathly ill, in fact.”

Momo stared at Master Hora in bewilderment, and then quietly asked, “What kind of sickness is it?”

“In the beginning you don’t notice much, but then, all of a sudden, you’re not in the mood to do anything at all. Nothing interests you anymore, and you begin to waste away. But this disinterest doesn’t just disappear after a while—no, it gets worse from day to day, from week to week. You feel sadder and more morose, emptier inside, and increasingly unhappy with yourself and with the world in general. Then, after a while, even that feeling goes away, and you don’t feel anything at all. You become indifferent, gray, and the whole world begins to feel foreign and strange. Nothing matters to you anymore. There’s no more fury, no more passion; you can’t feel happiness or sadness anymore; you forget how to laugh and how to cry. Then everything is cold, and you can no longer love. Once it’s come to that, the sickness is no longer treatable. There’s no more going back. You scurry around with an empty, gray face, and then you become just like one of the gray men. Indeed, then you are one of them. The disease has a name: it’s called Deadly Apathy.”

A shiver ran up Momo’s spine. “So if you don’t give them all the time,” she asked, “then they’ll make it so that everyone becomes one of them?”

“Yes,” Master Hora replied. “That’s what they are threatening me with.” He stood up and turned away from Momo. “I’ve waited until now for humans to rid themselves of these parasitic ghosts. They could have done it—after all, it was humans who brought the gray men into existence in the first place—but now I can’t wait any longer. I must do something, and I cannot do it alone.” He looked at Momo. “Will you help me?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“I am going to have to send you into immeasurable danger,” said Master Hora. “It will be entirely up to you whether the world stands still forever or begins anew. Are you sure you’re up to the challenge?”

“Yes,” repeated Momo, and this time her voice sounded firm.

“Then pay extremely close attention to what I am about to tell you,” said Master Hora, “because you will be on your own, and I won’t be able to help you anymore. Not me, and not anyone else.”

Momo nodded and stared at Master Hora with all the intensity she could muster.

“First you need to know that I never sleep,” he began. “If I were to fall asleep, time would cease and the world would stand still. If there were no more time, there would also be none left for the gray men to steal. They would be able to exist for a little longer because of their large stores, but once those ran out they would inevitably dissolve into nothing.”

“Then it’s really simple!” said Momo.

“Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as it sounds, otherwise I wouldn’t need your help, child. You see, if there were no more time then I wouldn’t be able to wake back up, and then the world would stand still, fixed in one spot for all of eternity. But it’s in my power to give you, and you alone, one single Hour Blossom. Naturally, only one because only one is blooming at any given time. So when all the time in the world has stopped, you would still have an hour.”

“Then I’d be able to wake you up!”

“That alone,” continued Master Hora, “wouldn’t get us very far because the gray men’s stores of time are much, much larger. One hour alone would force them to use only a very slight amount, and they would still exist afterward. Your task would be much more difficult than that, dear child. As soon as the gray men realize that time has stopped—and they will notice it very quickly because their new cigars won’t light—they will call off the siege and bolt back to their secret storages. You will have to follow them there, Momo, and once you’ve found their hiding place you will have to stop them from getting to their reserves. As soon as their cigars burn out they disappear as well, but you would still be faced with the most difficult task of all. When the last time-thief has disappeared, you have to free all the stolen time. Only after you’ve done that—only once the stolen time flows back to its rightful owners—will the world begin to move again; and only then will I be able to wake back up. You will have to do all of this in the space of one hour.”

Momo stared speechlessly at Master Hora. She hadn’t reckoned with so many dangers and difficulties.

“Do you still want to try it?” asked Master Hora. “It is the only option left.”

Momo was silent. It seemed completely impossible to her.

“I’LL GO WITH YOU!” she suddenly read on Cassiopeia’s shell.

But how was the turtle going help her with all of this? And yet, it was a tiny ray of hope for Momo. Her courage was bolstered by the thought of not being completely alone. It was the kind of courage that has no rational foundation, but it suddenly allowed her to reach a decision.

“I’ll try it,” she said firmly.

Master Hora looked at her for a long time and began to smile.

“Many things will be easier than you now imagine they will be. You have heard the voices of the stars, Momo. You needn’t be afraid...”

Then he turned toward the turtle and asked, “And you, Cassiopeia, you want to go with her?”

“OF COURSE!” stood on her shell. The words quickly disappeared and were replaced by: “SOMEONE HAS TO TAKE CARE OF HER!”

Momo and Master Hora smiled at each other.

“Will she get an Hour Blossom as well?” asked Momo.

“Cassiopeia doesn’t need one,” explained Master Hora, gently scratching the turtle’s neck. “She exists outside of time. She carries her own time within her. She would be able to crawl across the world even if everything else were to come to a complete standstill.”

“Okay,” said Momo, who suddenly felt anxious to begin. “What happens now?”

“Now we will say our goodbyes,” said Master Hora.

Momo gulped. “Aren’t we going to see each other again?”

“We will see each other again, Momo,” replied Master Hora. “And until then, every hour of your life will bring you a greeting from me. We will always be friends, right?”

“Right,” said Momo, nodding.

“I’m going now,” continued Master Hora. “You cannot follow, nor can you ask me where I’m going. My sleep isn’t ordinary sleep, and it would be better if you weren’t there to see it. Just one more thing: the moment I leave you, run and open the two doors—the small one with my name on it, and the big, green metal one that opens onto Never Street. As soon as time stops, everything will stand rigidly still, and even those two doors won’t move. Have you understood everything? And do you remember it all well?”

“Yes,” said Momo. “But how will I know that time has stopped?”

“Don’t worry about that. You’ll know.”

Master Hora stood up and so did Momo. He softly patted her mop of curly hair.

“Farewell, little Momo,” he said. “I thank you for listening so carefully to me. It has been a great pleasure having you here.”

“I’m going to tell everyone about you,” she replied, “when all this is over.”

And now Master Hora looked impossibly old again, the same way he had looked when he had carried her into the golden dome. As old as a mountain or an ancient tree.

He turned around and quickly made his way out of the small chamber, whose walls were grandfather clocks, and Momo could hear his steps getting farther and farther away, until they were inaudible above the incessant ticking, whirring, and chiming of the many clocks. Maybe it was into this very same ticking that Master Hora had walked.

Momo took Cassiopeia in her arms and held her tightly. Her greatest adventure had begun.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Pursuing the pursuers

The very first thing Momo did was open the small inner door with Master Hora’s name on it. Then she quickly ran through the hall with all the large statues and opened the big, copper door. It took all her strength because the massive door was very, very heavy.

When she was done with that, she ran back into the room with all the clocks and waited, Cassiopeia in arm, to see what would now take place.

And then it happened! There was a sudden quake, but it didn’t make the room shake. It was a time-quake, so to speak, and Momo found no other words to describe it. The quake was accompanied by a sound, a ringing, the likes of which had never before been heard by human ears. It was a sigh, an age-old sigh, and then it was all over.

In the very same instant, all the clocks suddenly stopped ticking, buzzing, ringing, and gonging. The swinging pendulums stood still wherever they were along their arched paths. Then the most profound and utter stillness began to spread through the room. It was a stillness that had never existed in the world until that very moment. Time had stopped.

Momo became aware that she was clutching the stem of a big, lovely Hour Blossom. She hadn’t felt it enter her hand. It had suddenly appeared as if it had always been there.

Momo gingerly took a step. She could move around just as effortlessly as always. The leftovers from breakfast were still on the small table. Momo sat down on one of the armchairs, but the cushions were as hard as marble and didn’t give in to her weight at all. There was still a gulp of hot chocolate in her glass, but the glass was impossible to move. Momo wanted to dip her finger into the dark liquid, but it too was as hard as glass. The same was true of the honey, and even the breadcrumbs on the table were completely impossible to budge. Nothing in the world, not the slightest thing, could be changed anymore now that time had stopped.

Cassiopeia began to kick and Momo looked down at her.

“YOU’RE WASTING TIME!” said the shell.

By god, Cassiopeia was right! Momo pulled herself together and got up. She ran through the giant room, slipped through the small door, kept running farther down the hall, peeked around the corner of the big door to make sure the coast was clear and stumbled backward in horror. Her heart began to race. The time thieves weren’t running away. Quite the opposite: they were walking up Never Street, which no longer contained the countercurrent of backward time. They were fast approaching the Nowhere House! This hadn’t been in the plan!

Momo ran back into the big room and hid behind one of the largest grandfather clocks with Cassiopeia tucked under her arm.

“Well, this is a great beginning,” she murmured to herself.

Then she heard the gray men’s steps outside in the hall. They squeezed themselves through the small door, one after another, until a large group of them was standing in the room. They looked around.

“Impressive!” said one of them. “So this is our new home.”

“The girl, Momo, even opened the door for us,” said another ashen gray voice. “I watched it all very carefully. A sensible child! I’m excited to find out how she got him to change his mind.”

And a third, identical voice, answered, “In my opinion, He gave himself up. The fact that he interrupted the time current on Never Street can only mean that he turned it off himself. He must have finally realized that he has to submit to us. Now let’s take care of him. Where’s he hiding?”

The gray men began searching the room when suddenly another expressionless voice said, “Something’s wrong, gentlemen! The clocks! They’ve all stopped, even the hourglass over here.”

“He must have turned them off,” another voice said, faltering slightly.

“You can’t turn an hourglass off!” yelled the first voice. “Just look gentlemen, the sand pouring from the top is standing completely still! I can’t move the clock either! What does this mean?”

Even while he was speaking, loud steps could be heard in the hall, and then another gray man squeezed through the door, waving wildly and yelling. “The news just came through from our agents in the city. The cars are standing still, so is everything else. The world is standing still. It’s impossible to steal even the slightest bit of time from anyone. All our supply lines have been cut off! There’s no more time! Hora shut off time!”

For a moment, dead silence reigned. Then one man asked, “What do you mean? Our supply lines have been severed? What will happen to us when the cigars we brought are finished?”

“You know exactly what’s going to happen to us!” screamed another. “This is a disaster, gentlemen.”

They all began shouting at once. “Hora wants to destroy us! We have to end the siege immediately! We have to try to get back to our time stores! Without cars? We’ll never make it in time! My cigar will only last me another twenty-seven minutes! Mine for another forty-eight! Then give yours to me! What, are you nuts? Every man for himself!”

All of them surged toward the little door trying to squeeze out simultaneously. From her hiding place, Momo watched them box, push, and pull each other out of the way, panic forcing them into heavier and heavier fighting. Each wanted to get out before the others, and each was battling for his gray life. They boxed caps off of heads and pulled cigars out of each other’s mouths while they wrestled to get through the door. Any man who lost his cigar seemed to suddenly lose all of his strength as well. He stood there, arms outstretched, a terrified whimpering expression on his face, and then he slowly became more and more translucent until he disappeared altogether. Nothing of him remained, not even his hat.

Eventually there were only three gray men left in the room, and they managed to escape by slipping through the little door in quick succession.

With the turtle under one arm and the Hour Blossom in hand, Momo ran out and began to follow them. Now everything depended on her not losing sight of the gray men.

When she got to the big door, she saw that the time thieves had already run back down to where Never Street began. Groups of other gray men were standing there, beneath the plumes of smoke, waving animatedly and yelling at each other.

When they saw the group running out of the Nowhere House, they also began to run, and others attached themselves to those who were already taking flight. Very quickly, the entire hoard began running, head over heels in a full-on retreat. An endless caravan of gray men rushed through that strange, dreamy district with the white houses and the multidirectional shadows on their way toward the city proper. Since time had stopped, the strange reversal of fast and slow had stopped as well.

The train of gray men ran by the giant-egg monument and kept going. They soon arrived at the first regular houses—the gray, decrepit tenements, where people lived on the very edge of time—but here too, everything was rigid and still.

Momo followed behind the last gray man, leaving a decent amount of space between her and the hoard. A reverse pursuit through the big city had begun: the gray men in full flight and a little girl with a flower in one hand and a turtle in the other following close behind.

How strange the city now looked! Long lines of cars stood fixed on the highways. Motionless drivers sat behind steering wheels, their hands on the gears or pressing the horns. Momo even saw one driver with his hand raised aggressively, just turning his head toward the neighboring car. Cyclists were poised, their arms outstretched, signaling that they wanted to turn; and on the sidewalks, everything and everyone—pedestrians, men, women, children, dogs, and cats—stood rigidly still. Even the smoke coming out of exhaust pipes was motionless.

Traffic police stood frozen in the middle of intersections, some signaling drivers with a wave, others with whistles in their mouths. A flock of pigeons hovered still in the air over a square, and high above, a plane stood equally motionless, as if it had been painted onto the sky. The water in fountains looked like ice, leaves falling from trees stood still in the air, and a small dog, who had just raised his leg over a hydrant stood motionless, like a taxidermied ornament.

The gray men ran and chased each other straight through this lifeless city, this photographic montage, and Momo cautiously followed them, always taking care not to be spotted. She didn’t have to worry, though, because the time thieves weren’t paying attention to her anyway. Their headlong flight was becoming more arduous the farther they went, and they no longer noticed anything at all.

Unaccustomed to running long distances, soon they were all coughing and struggling for air, not to mention trying to keep their little gray cigars clenched between their teeth. More than one accidentally let his fall out while running, and before he could even bend down to pick it up he had vanished into thin air.

But it wasn’t only these unavoidable circumstances that made their flight difficult. The threat of being attacked by fellow sufferers had grown exponentially and was now the greatest source of mishaps. Some, whose cigars were burning dangerously low, simply pulled others out of their companions’ mouths in despair, and their numbers steadily began to decline.

The few who had extra supplies in their briefcases had to be especially careful to conceal them because the poorer agents would throw themselves on the richer ones, maniacally trying to steal whatever extras they could find. Wild brawls broke out left and right. Piles of gray men threw themselves on each other in order to grab some of the extra supplies, and many cigars rolled out into the street where they were trampled by the tumult of bodies. The fear of disappearing from the world had made the gray men lose their heads altogether.

There was one more thing that also caused them difficulties the farther they went. In some places, the masses of frozen people were so thick that the gray men were barely able to squeeze through them. A few of them accidently ran into something as small as a rigid bit of fluff hanging motionless in the air and smashed their heads. The people were like trees in a dense forest, but Momo, who was small and thin, naturally had it much easier.

Momo had been running for a long time, and she had no clue how much longer she might have to keep chasing. She looked worriedly at the Hour Blossom, but it was still in full bloom, so for the time being she had nothing to worry about, she thought.

But then something happened that made Momo forget about everything else: she saw Beppo Streetsweeper standing on the corner of a side street.

“Beppo,” she yelled, beside herself with joy. She ran over to him. “Beppo, I looked everywhere for you! Where were you this whole time? Why didn’t you come visit me? Oh, Beppo, Beppo!”

She tried to hug him but bumped against him instead, as if he were made out of iron, and hurt herself quite badly. Her eyes quickly filled with tears. Sobbing, she stood in front of him and looked him up and down.

His small frame was even more hunched than before. His friendly face had become narrow, haggard, and very pale. A bristly beard had grown over his chin because he had no longer taken the time to shave. He was holding an old broom in his hands, which was already falling apart from too much sweeping. He stood there, motionless like everything else, looking at a dirty patch on the floor in front him through his little pair of glasses.

Now, when it didn’t matter because she couldn’t make him notice her, Momo had finally found Beppo. And it could well be the last time she would ever see him. Who knew how everything would turn out, and if it turned out badly, old Beppo would be standing here for the rest of eternity.

The turtle began to kick in Momo’s arms.

“ONWARD,” stood on its shell.

Momo dashed back to the main street and froze with a start. There were no more time thieves anywhere. Momo went a bit farther in the direction that the gray men had been running, but to no avail. She had lost their trail. She stood there helplessly. What should she do now? She shot a questioning glance down at Cassiopeia.

“YOU’LL FIND THEM, KEEP GOING!” came the turtle’s advice.

If Cassiopeia knew ahead of time that Momo was going to find the time thieves, then it was true, regardless of which direction she chose. So she just kept going, turning whenever she suddenly felt like it—sometimes left, sometimes right, and sometimes straight ahead.

She had now reached the new housing projects on the outskirts of the city where all the houses looked the same and the streets ran straight to the horizon. Momo walked on, farther and farther, but because all the streets and houses were identical, she soon felt like she wasn’t moving at all, like she was walking on a treadmill.

It was a labyrinth, a labyrinth that made you lose yourself in its organized regularity. Momo was close to giving up when she finally saw one of the last gray men turning around a corner ahead of her. He was limping, his pants were ripped, and he was missing his top hat and his briefcase; but the smoldering stub of a little gray cigar was still clenched in his tight, grim mouth.

Momo followed him along an endless row of houses until she suddenly arrived at a place where one house was missing. Instead she saw a high fence made of red boards surrounding a large construction site. There was a door in this fence, which was slightly ajar, and the last straggler slipped through it.

A sign was hanging above the door, and Momo stopped short, peering at it while she deciphered the words.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

An end and a new beginning

Momo took some time to sound out the longer words on the warning sign, and as she now slipped through the door, she saw that the last gray man had disappeared too. A giant excavation pit, at least eighty or ninety feet deep, stood gaping before her. Dredges and other construction machines were scattered around, and a few trucks had stopped midway up a slanted ramp that led all the way down to the bottom of the pit. Here and there, a handful of workers were frozen in motionless positions. But where to go now? Momo thought. She couldn’t find the entrance that the gray men must have used. She looked down at Cassiopeia, but the turtle didn’t seem to know any better. Nothing appeared on her shell.

Momo climbed down to the bottom of the pit and looked around. Suddenly she saw another friendly face. Nicola, the bricklayer who had painted the pretty flowers on the wall of her room, was standing in front of her. Obviously he was also rigid like the rest of them, but his posture seemed strange to her for some reason. He was standing there, one hand up to his mouth, as if calling to someone, and with his other hand he was pointing to a big, open pipe poking up from the bottom of the pit next to him. It just so happened that he seemed to be looking at Momo as he pointed his frozen arm down at the edge of the pipe.

Momo didn’t think for too long. She took it as a good sign, and began to climb down into the pipe. She had barely crawled in when she slipped and began to slide down a steep chute. The pipe made all sorts of twists and turns along the way, like a waterslide, and Momo was hurled back and forth all the way down. She could barely see or hear anything during her breakneck ride, and at one point, she even flipped over so that she was shooting down headfirst. But she never let go of the turtle or the flower.

The deeper she went, the colder it got. At one point she began to think about how she would ever make it back out, but before she really got to worrying, the pipe came to an abrupt end at the entrance to an underground passage. It wasn’t as dark here anymore. A gray twilight seemed to be emanating from the very walls themselves.

Momo scrambled to her feet and ran on. Because she was barefoot her steps didn’t make any noise, but she could soon hear the footsteps of the gray men echoing in the tunnel ahead of her. She followed the noise. Many different paths forked off on either side of the one she was on. The gray men’s headquarters seemed to be an underground network that was spread out beneath the entire construction site.

Suddenly she could hear the buzz of voices up ahead. After tracing them to their source, she stopped. Cautiously moving forward, she peeped around a corner. She saw an enormous room dominated by a seemingly endless conference table that stretched along its center. The gray men—or what little was left of them—were sitting in rows on either side of the table. How miserable this last group of time thieves now looked! Their outfits were in tatters, they had bumps and scratches on their bald heads, and their faces were distorted with fear. Only their cigars still burned.

Momo saw the door of a giant safe set in the back wall of the room. It was slightly ajar, and an ice-cold wind was blowing out of it. Although Momo knew it wouldn’t help, she bent down and tucked her bare feet under her skirt.

“We must be sparing with our reserves,” said the gray man sitting at the head of the conference table in front of the armed door. “We don’t know how long we will need them to last us. We must restrict ourselves to rations.”

“There are so few of us left!” yelled another. “The supplies will last for years!”

“The sooner we begin to economize,” continued the first speaker, unfazed, “the longer we’ll be able to hold out. And you know very well what I mean by economizing. It is enough if only a few of us survive this catastrophe. We have to look at this as objectively as possible! There are too many of us here now! We must significantly reduce our numbers. It’s the only sensible thing to do. Now, may I ask you to begin counting off?”

The gray men counted off. After they had finished, the chairman took a coin out of his pocket. “We’ll toss. Tails means that the men with even numbers stay. Heads means that those with odd numbers stay.”

He threw the coin up in the air and caught it.

“Tails!” he yelled. “The gentlemen with the even numbers stay. Those with the odd numbers are asked to dissolve themselves at once!”

A dull groan ran through the row of losers, but no one took a stand against the chairman. The even-numbered time thieves took the cigars from the others, and the condemned dissolved into nothing.

“And now,” said the chairman, interrupting the silence, “the same thing once more, if you please.”

The whole gruesome procedure happened a second time, a third time, and finally even a fourth time. At the end there were only six gray men left. They sat, facing each other at the head of the endless table, three on each side.

The incident had made Momo feel sick, but she noticed that every time the number of gray men was cut in half the horrible cold became noticeably less. Compared to earlier, it was now quite tolerable.

“Six is an unlucky number,” remarked one of the remaining gray men.

“Enough!” said another, from the other side of the table.

“There’s no point in reducing our numbers any more. If the six of us aren’t able to weather this catastrophe, then three of us won’t fare any better.”

“That isn’t necessarily true,” said another. “But if it becomes necessary, we can revisit the idea. Later, that is.”

They were silent for a while, and then one of the men exclaimed, “We got very lucky that the door to our storage was open when the catastrophe began. If it had been closed, we would never have been able to open it, and we would have been lost.”

“Unfortunately, you’re not completely right, my friend,” another replied. “Since the door is open, the cold will slowly escape from our refrigeration cellar, meaning that the Hour Blossoms will slowly begin to thaw. You all know that we won’t have any way of stopping them from going back to where they came from once that happens.”

“Are you saying that we can’t produce enough cold to keep our stockpiles frozen?” asked a third speaker.

“Unfortunately, there are only six of us,” replied the second man. “You can calculate our freezing potential for yourself. Personally, I think it was quite rash to keep reducing our numbers so drastically. We weren’t doing ourselves any favors in the long run.”

“We had to pick one of two courses of action,” yelled the first speaker. “So we did.”

Silence fell again.

“We’ll be sitting here like this for years doing nothing but staring at each other,” said one. “I must admit, it’s a grim thought.”

Momo racked her brains. There was definitely no point in sitting and waiting any longer. If there were no more gray men, then the Hour Blossoms would thaw by themselves. But for now, a few gray men still existed, and they would continue to exist if she didn’t do something. But what could she do? The door to the stockpiles was open, and the time thieves could help themselves to fresh supplies as often as they wanted. Cassiopeia kicked and Momo looked down at her.

“CLOSE THE DOOR!” stood on her shell.

“That’s impossible!” whispered Momo. “The door is unmovable.”

“TOUCH IT WITH THE FLOWER!” came Cassiopeia’s reply.

“I can move it if I touch it with the Hour Blossom?” whispered Momo.

“YOU WILL,” stood on Cassiopeia’s shell.

If Cassiopeia foresaw it then it had to be true. Momo carefully sat the turtle down on the ground and tucked the Hour Blossom under her jacket. It had withered quite a bit in the meantime and was missing some petals.

She got down on all fours and crawled toward the long conference table, unseen by the six gray men. Once she was underneath it, she crawled forward until she reached the far end. She was crouching between the time thieves’ feet, and her heart was beating so hard she thought it might explode. She quietly took out the Hour Blossom, held it between her teeth, and crawled between the six chairs without any of the men noticing.

She reached the open door and pressed the flower against it, simultaneously pushing it hard with her hand. The door turned silently on its hinges until it thundered shut. The sound created a very long echo in the giant room that reverberated in the thousands of underground passages.

Momo jumped up. Even in their wildest dreams the gray men hadn’t thought that any being besides them was exempt from the complete standstill, so at first they just sat motionless in their chairs, petrified at the sight of Momo.

Without a second thought, she dashed right by them and continued toward the room’s exit. Then the gray men pulled themselves together and took up the chase.

“It’s that horrible little girl!” she heard one of them yell. “It’s Momo!”

“I can’t believe it!” screamed one of the others. “How is she moving around?”

“She has an Hour Blossom!” roared a third one.

“And she was able to move the door with it?” asked the fourth.

The fifth smacked his forehead. “Then we could have moved it as well. We have more than enough Hour Blossoms!”

“We had, we had!” screeched the sixth. “Now the door is closed! There’s only one thing left for us to do: we have to get the girl’s Hour Blossom. Otherwise, everything is lost.”

Meanwhile, Momo had already disappeared down one of the branching underground tunnels, but the gray men knew these paths much better than she did. Momo ran at random, sometimes even sprinting straight into the arms of one of her pursuers, but somehow she always managed to escape in the nick of time.

Cassiopeia played her own small part in the chase. Though she could only crawl very slowly, she always knew where the pursuers would be ahead of time, so she was able reach a spot before them and place herself in such a way that when the gray men came they tripped over her and fell, sprawling onto the floor. The ones following the first man to fall, would trip over him, and thus, on multiple occasions, the turtle saved Momo from almost certain capture. Naturally, Cassiopeia was often thrown against the wall by flying feet, but that didn’t stop her from doing what she already knew she would do ahead of time...

During this wild chase, a few of the gray men—maddened by their greed for the Hour Blossom—lost their gray cigars along the way and dissolved, one after the other, into nothing. Finally only two of them remained.

Momo had doubled back to the big room with the long table. The two time thieves were following her around the table but couldn’t quite catch her. Then they split up and ran in opposite directions.

Now there was no more escaping. Momo stood, huddled in one corner of the room, fearfully watching her two pursuers approach. She pressed the flower against her. Only three shimmering petals were still attached.

The first man was reaching his hand out for the flower when the second one wrenched him backward.

“No!” he screamed. “The flower belongs to me! Me alone!”

The two began to pull each other back, and in doing so, the first one knocked the cigar out of the second one’s mouth. The second one turned around with a ghostly moan, slowly became translucent, and then disappeared altogether. The last gray man approached Momo. The tiny end of a cigar was still burning in the corner of his mouth.

“Hand over the flower!” he wheezed, but as he said it, the tiny cigar stub fell out of his mouth and rolled onto the ground. The gray man fell to his knees, searching for it with outstretched hands, but he couldn’t reach it anymore. He turned his ashen gray face to Momo, painfully picked himself half off the ground, and lifted one shaking hand.

“Please!” he whispered. “Please, child, give me the flower!”

Momo, who still stood huddled in the corner, held the flower even tighter and shook her head without making a sound.

The last gray man nodded slowly. “It’s good,” he murmured. “It’s good that... everything is over... now.”

And then he too disappeared.

Momo was staring at the place where he had been lying, a stunned expression on her face, when suddenly Cassiopeia crawled up to her. On her back, Momo read the words, “OPEN THE DOOR.”

Momo went to the door, took out the Hour Blossom, which now only had one petal left on it, pressed it against the door, and opened it all the way.

With the disappearance of the last time-thief, the cold had also finally given way.

Momo walked into the giant storage vault with wide eyes. Countless Hour Blossoms, each one more wonderful to look at than the last, were perched, frozen on endless rows of shelves. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of life-hours were stored here.

The temperature steadily began to rise until the vault felt like a greenhouse. And then, all at once, when the last petal had fallen off of Momo’s own Hour Blossom, a tempest began. Clouds of Hour Blossoms flew off of their shelves and swirled all around her. It was like a warm, spring storm, except that this storm was made entirely of freed time.

Momo looked around, as if in a dream. She saw Cassiopeia on the floor. On her back she could read the words: “FLY HOME, LITTLE MOMO, FLY HOME!”

That was the last Momo ever saw of Cassiopeia because suddenly the flower storm grew stronger, becoming so powerful that it lifted Momo up and began to carry her away, as if she were just another one of the flowers. Up, out of the dark tunnels it carried her. Up, way up, above the big city. She flew over roofs and towers in a growing deluge of blossoms. It was like an exuberant dance, choreographed to accompany the magnificent music, in which Momo floated up and down and did somersaults in the air.

Then she and the flower cloud slowly began to sink down as the blossoms fell onto the frozen world like snowflakes. And just like snowflakes, they softly broke apart and became invisible again so that they could return to people’s hearts, where they belonged.

At that moment, time began again and everything began to live and move anew. The cars drove, the traffic policemen blew their whistles, the doves flew again, and the little dog by the hydrant finished doing his business. The people hadn’t noticed that the world had stood still for an hour because no time had passed in the interval. For them, the hour had passed as quickly as the blink of an eye.

And yet something had changed. People suddenly found that they had plenty of time to spare, and they were all extremely happy. What they didn’t know was that their own saved time was now miraculously returning to them.

When Momo finally came back to her senses, she found herself on the side street where she had seen Beppo before. And there he was, just as she had left him! He was standing with his back to her, and had propped himself up on his broom to think quietly to himself for a moment, just as he had always done. Suddenly he wasn’t in a rush anymore and he couldn’t even explain to himself why. He felt soothed and full of hope again

“Maybe,” he thought, “I just finished saving the one hundred thousand hours and Momo is free again.”

At that very moment, someone tugged on his jacket. He turned around and saw little Momo standing in front of him.

It’s safe to say that there are no words to fully describe the joy of that reunion. Both of them laughed, and they both took turns crying, interrupting each other, and saying the kinds of silly things that people say when they’re drunk with happiness. They hugged each other again and again, and the people who were walking by stopped and joined in the celebration, also laughing and crying in turn because now they too had more than enough time.

Eventually Beppo put his broom over his shoulder. Clearly, he was done working for the day. Then, arm in arm, the two of them wandered back home to the old amphitheater together, telling each other countless things along the way.

It had been a long time since the city had witnessed scenes of such unbridled joy. Children were playing in the streets while waiting drivers stopped to watch. Some even got out of their cars and joined in the games. People were standing around everywhere, happily chatting with each other and genuinely interested in their neighbors’ well-being. Those who were on their way to work took time to admire the flowers in a window box or to throw some seeds to the birds along the way. Doctors, too, suddenly had time to dedicate to their patients, and workers of every kind could do their jobs calmly and lovingly again, now that the point was no longer to do as much as possible as quickly as they could. They were able to take as much time as they needed because from then on there was more than enough.

But many people never discovered whom they had to thank for all of this and what had actually transpired during that hour, that blink of an eye. Most people probably wouldn’t have believed it anyway. Only Momo’s friends knew and believed because when little Momo and old Beppo arrived back at the amphitheater that day, the children were all already there, waiting for them: Gigi the Guide, Paolo, Massimo, Franco, the girl Maria, with her little sister Didi, Claudio and all the other children. Nino was also there with his plump wife, Liliana, and their baby, as was Nicola, the bricklayer, and all the other people from the neighborhood who always used to come and visit Momo. Then there was a party—the kind of party that only Momo’s friends knew how to have—and it lasted until the old stars were far up in the night sky.

After all the celebrating and hugging and handshaking and general laughing and merrymaking had died down, everyone sat down on the overgrown steps. It grew very quiet. Momo took her place in the middle of the round stage. She thought about the star voices and about the Hour Blossoms, and then, in a high, clear voice, she began to sing.

Far away, in the Nowhere House, Master Hora was sitting on his chair at the little table. He had just been woken from his one and only sleep by all the returning time, and he was now watching Momo and her friends through his Omnivision glasses. One of his mysterious smiles was playing on his face, and though he was still very pale—he looked like he had just recovered from a serious illness—his eyes were shining.

Then he felt something nudging his foot. He took off his glasses and bent down. A turtle was sitting in front of him.

“Cassiopeia!” he said tenderly, scratching her neck. “You both did very well. You have to tell me everything, because this time I couldn’t watch.”

“LATER!” he read on the turtle’s shell. Then Cassiopeia sneezed.

“You didn’t get a cold did you?” asked Master Hora with concern.

“A BAD ONE!” came Cassiopeia’s reply.

“It must have come from the cold of the gray men,” said Master Hora. “I can imagine that you’re completely exhausted and that the first thing you want to do is rest. So go ahead, tuck yourself in.”

“THANKS!” stood on Cassiopeia’s shell.

And then Cassiopeia hobbled off in search of a quiet, dark, nook. She pulled her head and her four limbs into her shell, and then two words, only visible to those who have read this story, slowly appeared on her back...

AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT

Many of my readers may still have questions weighing on their souls, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to help them. I must confess that I wrote this entire story down from memory exactly as it was told to me. I have never personally met Momo or any of her friends. I don’t know what happened to them, nor do I know how they’re doing today, and I can only guess at what happened to the big city, because that too is unknown to me.

The only thing I would like to add is this: I was on a long journey some years ago (which I am still on), when one night, I shared my train compartment with a very strange passenger. He was strange in that I couldn’t tell his age. At first I thought I was sitting across from an old, old man, but I soon realized that I must have been mistaken because the person sitting across from me suddenly looked very young. But my second impression soon also turned out to be wrong.

Regardless, it was he who told me the whole story during that long, nighttime voyage, and when he had finished, we both sat in silence for a little while. Then the mysterious passenger added two last sentences to his tale, which I dare not withhold from the reader.

“I told all of this to you,” he said, “as if it had already happened, but I could also have told it to you as if it were to happen in the future. The two aren’t so different to me.”

He must have gotten off at the next station because, some time later, I noticed that he wasn’t in my compartment anymore.

Unfortunately I never ran into that strange man again, but if I do happen to encounter him at some other point during my journey, I will have many questions to ask him myself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Ende (1929–1995) was a German writer of literature, fantasy, and children’s books. Most famous for his novels The Neverending Story, Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, and Momo, Ende considered his works relevant for all ages. He remains one of the most popular German novelists of the twentieth century.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Marcel Dzama is an artist, born in Canada, who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Lucas Zwirner is a writer and translator. Born in New York City, he graduated from Yale University in 2013, where he studied Philosophy and Comparative Literature.

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THE EXPEDITIONERS AND THE TREASURE OF DROWNED MAN’S CANYON

by S. S. Taylor · illustrated by Katherine Roy

Computers have failed, electricity is extinct, and the race to discover new lands is underway! Brilliant explorer Alexander West has just died under mysterious circumstances, but not before smuggling half of a strange map to his intrepid children—Kit the brain, M.K. the tinkerer, and Zander the brave. Why are so many government agents trying to steal the half-map? (And where is the other half?) It’s up to Alexander’s children—the Expeditioners—to get to the bottom of these questions, and fast. (Ages 10+)