Little King December by Axel Hacke is a timeless story for all ages.  Published this month by Bloomsbury in a beautifully illustrated miniature version, you can read the first chapter of this enchanting story, illustrated by Michael Sowa, below.

In the world of December II you are born big, knowing everything you will ever know.  And every day you get a little bit smaller and you forget a little bit more, so that at the end of your life you are tiny, and you spend your days forgetting things and chasing shadows in the garden...

For some time I’ve been getting visits, every now and again, from December II, the little pot-bellied king. He’s about three inches tall, and so fat that he can’t button up his tiny red velvet coat with its magnificent ermine trim.

The little king adores jelly bears. To eat them he has to hug them with both arms, only just managing to lift them up, because each one is about half his size. The little king sinks his teeth into the soft jelly bear, taking big bites out of it, and asks the same thing he asks me every time:

‘Will you tell me about your country?’

The first time he came, I told him:

‘Where I come from, you are born little, and then you get bigger and bigger, sometimes as big as a basketball player. Once you stop growing, you start getting a little bit smaller again. Until finally you die, and disappear.’

‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ said the little king, biting off his jelly bear’s right paw. ‘You should start out big, and then get smaller and smaller and finally disappear — simply because you become so tiny you are invisible.’

‘I think the Guild of Funeral Directors might have a problem with that,’ I say to him.

‘But that’s how it is where I come from. My father, King December I, got so little that one morning his servant couldn’t find him anywhere in his bed. That very same day, I was crowned king.’

‘All right — but how can you be born big?’ I ask. ‘Everyone must come out of their mummy’s tummy! And a mummy can’t be smaller than her own baby!’

‘Their mummy’s tummy!’ exclaimed December. ‘Well I never! Me, one morning I woke up in my bed and went to work at the princes’ office. That’s all there is to it. Their mummy’s tummy! Absolute nonsense! You wake up, and off you go!’ ‘And how exactly do you get to be in the bed?’

‘Wait a minute,’ said the king. ‘I think…um…a king…a queen…well…what happens again?… Oh, I don’t know! I’m already very small you know. I’ve forgotten. I only remember that it’s awfully nice.’ He gave a little chuckle and bit once more into his jelly bear.

I said to him: ‘Here, when a child is born, it knows nothing. It has to learn to eat and to walk, to read and to write. You wipe its nose clean, and by playing Ludo it learns not to be unbearable. It always has grown-ups to guide it, to turn its head from one side to the other, to lift its chin…’

The king burped loudly and was briefly convulsed with laughter. In the meantime, he had swallowed his jelly bear’s head.

Chewing, he looked at me steadily and cried: ‘And then?’

‘Then, you get big,’ he replied.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘It happens very slowly. Well, that said, some children grow two centimetres in a single night, and if you put your ear to their arms and legs you can hear them creak.’

‘It’s the same for us, except it’s the other way round,’ December declared. ‘You notice that you’ve got smaller only every now and again. Like the other day: in the evening I could still put my teacup on the table, and the next morning I had to climb up on to a chair to reach it. Is it good to get bigger, do you think?’

‘Until now, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was an alternative.’

‘But now you know,’ he said.

‘Tell me a bit more,’ I asked. ‘What do you know already when you are born and what do you learn later?’

‘Almost everything,’ announced the little pot-bellied king. ‘You wake up, you lie there for a bit, you get up and you can write, do higher mathematics, write computer programs, you go to work and to business dinners. No problem! Only gradually you forget. The smaller you get, the more you forget. If someone can no longer participate in business dinners, it’s pointless going to the office: there’s no need for them there any more. Then you have to stay at home and you carry on forgetting more and more things. Your head becomes completely empty, with lots of room. Others have to cook for you, and afterwards you’re allowed to go and see your friends. Or watch shadows in the garden and pretend they’re ghosts. Or give names to the clouds. Or torture your teddy bear. Or…’

I interrupted: ‘Unless the grown-ups tell you not to.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with the grown-ups!’ retorted the king. ‘The smaller you are, the more authority you have, because… because you have more experience of life. Ho ho! And the grown-ups have to answer all your questions: Why does a house have corners? Why are there only six numbers on a dice? Why does it rain? As soon as you have the answer, it’s your prerogative to forget it immediately. And because the little ones are in charge, our escalators all have tiny steps, and our toilets are minute so we don’t fall into them. While you’re still big, it’s not so good, but that’s how it is.’

He stood up with a quick, proud movement, put what was left of his jelly bear on the floor and set about buttoning up his coat. An impossibility because his stomach is so-o-o-o-o big. He sat down again with a sigh.

‘If I understand it,’ I said, putting his jelly bear back in his hands, ‘where you come from, childhood happens at the end of life?’

‘Of course!’ the king replied. ‘Think about it: that way you have something to look forward to!’ He looked at me for a long time. ‘Do you know what I think?’

‘No.’

‘I think it’s not really that you get bigger. It just seems that you do.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think that you start out big too. Well, that is if what you’re telling me is true…This is how I see things: you start out with everything at the beginning; and each day, something is taken away from you. You have a lot of imagination when you are small, but really you know very little. As a result, you have to think about things all the time: How does the light get into the lamp, and the image into the television? Why do dwarves live under the roots of trees, and what is it like to find yourself standing in the palm of a giant’s hand? Then, you grow up, and those who are bigger than you explain to you how the light and the television work. Then, you learn that there are neither dwarves, nor giants. Your imagination shrinks as your knowledge grows. Am I wrong?’

‘No,’ I whispered, then added, even quieter still, ‘but it’s not so bad to grow up, to learn, to understand the world, to…’

He continued: ‘You get old. At first, you want to be a fireman or something, a nurse or whatever. And then one day you are a nurse or a fireman and not something else. It’s too late to change your mind. That too in a way is to grow smaller, isn’t it?’ ‘Oh yes. Yes!’ I say with a sigh.

‘It’s so much better for us,’ Continued the little pot-bellied king, taking a last bite out of his jelly bear. ‘I feel sorry for you: well, for all of you, of course.’ He got up, squeezed his tummy through the gap between my bookshelf and the wall and, as is his wont, disappeared once again from the room without saying goodbye, just a tiny bit smaller.

First published as Der kleine Konig Dezember © Axel Hacke 1993
This translation copyright © 2002 Rosemary Davidson

引用來源：http://www.bloomsbury.com/Authors/microsite.asp?id=483&section=1&aid=1182