The Storyteller (10 page)

His arm was still bared, and Anna saw him flex his muscles under his tattoo. And then she knew. She knew what it was she had to say. She found the ace up her sleeve.

“Micha,” she said, “do you remember what the white mare told you? Before the island sank?”

She saw Rainer’s expression glide into incomprehension. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked angrily. “What is this? Some kind of stupid code?”

“The white mare?” Micha asked. “She said I’d die … oh, that part was horrible … and that I must run fast, to the highest cliff … and if I meet a man who’s wearing my name …”

Anna pointed to Rainer’s bicep. The word “Micha” was tattooed across it in big, dark blue letters. Micha understood. For someone who was only six years old, she understood quickly.

“I … gotta go now,” she said and pulled free from Rainer a second time, this time for good. “I’ll look at the cabin another day. Good-bye.”

“Wait!” Rainer shouted, but Micha was racing along the deck, quick as a weasel; she bounded out of the ship like a small rubber ball, and took the hand Anna held out to her.

“Let’s run together,” Anna said. “Whoever gets to the bridge first wins. One, two …”

And then they ran. Anna let Micha win. She didn’t turned around until they had reached the drawbridge. Rainer wasn’t following them.

“Anna?” Micha asked, trying to catch her breath. “Is it true? Did Abel send you?”

“Yes,” Anna said. “He lent me his bike. And you shouldn’t believe a word of what that man said, do you hear me? Michelle … your mother … she will be back soon, I’m sure of it. I know it, because … because Abel told me. I’ll take you home.”

“But the ship,” Micha said, already perched on the carrier of the bike. “Anna, the ship … it was nice, wasn’t it? And, actually, he was nice, too. Maybe he would have given me candy, down there in the cabin. He looked like someone who would have candy.”

“Exactly,” Anna said, shivering. “That’s what he looked like.”

Secretly she wondered if Michelle would come back. Abel didn’t think so. Rainer didn’t think so. Did they know more about Michelle’s whereabouts than they cared to admit?

Anna could have just dropped off Micha at the right tower block. Given her the key. Waved good-bye. Gone back to school for the second half of music class. Or gone home. She could have said, “Don’t let anybody in” and “Abel will be here in a moment,” or a thousand other things.

Instead, she said, “Is it okay if I come up with you and make lunch?”

The blocks with entrances 18, 19, and 20 were on one side of a huge courtyard, where dead grass had turned to winter mud. Anna felt hundreds of pairs of eyes watching her through hundreds of curtained windows around the courtyard as she waited for Micha to answer. Hundreds of pairs of eyes and hundreds of minds wondering what she was doing here, where she so obviously didn’t belong.

“Can you do that?” Micha asked. “Make lunch?”

Anna laughed. “I am guessing you have something I can make lunch with, right? It can’t be too hard.”

Micha frowned as she unlocked the main door of tower number 18. “Mama couldn’t … she couldn’t make lunch. She always forgot, anyway; or she had other things to do or other places to go.” Then she added hastily, “But she was nice. She should come back.”

“She’ll come back,” Anna said softly. “Definitely. Just not today.”

The staircase was dark and narrow, the concrete steps old and gray and full of muddy footprints. The banister didn’t look like anything anyone should touch. Micha didn’t touch it. There was no elevator—seven floors without an elevator! Good exercise, Anna thought sarcastically, cheaper than a gym.

Micha and Abel lived on the fourth floor. There were windows in the staircase; on the second floor, the window had broken—or been broken by somebody. On the fourth floor, there was a dead potted palm on the windowsill, the kind of houseplant that doesn’t belong to anybody in particular, a stray plant, so to speak, dead of thirst in the end without anybody noticing. When Anna passed the plant, a door downstairs opened, and someone called up, “Micha? Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me!” Micha called back, and to Anna, in a low voice, she said, “That’s Mrs. Ketow. I don’t like her. She has three little kids … they’re not really her kids. They’re always crying and screaming, and then she starts screaming, too, and it’s very loud in her place.”

“Your mother come back?” Mrs. Ketow bellowed.

A fat arm in a striped tracksuit top, draped across the banister on the ground floor, was all that Anna saw of Mrs. Ketow.

“No,” Micha said. “This is Anna.”

“And who is Anna?” Mrs. Ketow shouted. “Is she taking care of you now?”

Micha didn’t answer. She hurried and unlocked the door of the apartment. Anna followed behind her and stepped into the odor of old damp carpets and ancient gas heating.

“You have to put your shoes here,” Micha said. “See that picture? I made that. That one, too.” The wall was covered with her artwork. Micha could draw apple trees but not horses. She could draw houses with only one room but not canopy beds. She could do sea lions but not men. “This one here in the kitchen, I just drew it yesterday,” she said proudly, pulling Anna into a room that wasn’t much bigger than a bathroom. Above the gas stove, there was a picture of some kind of round thing with a lot of confusing pencil lines inside, lines that didn’t seem to know where they wanted to go.

“That’s the diamond,” Micha explained. “The heart, remember? The heart of the little cliff queen.”

The kitchen was tidy, yet it made Anna sad. There was the same desolateness she felt in Micha’s schoolyard on Friday, after everyone had gone home. The pictures, obvious attempts to overcome the bleakness, only served to emphasize it. The thin veneer of the cupboards on the wall was peeling at the edges, exposing the bare chipboard beneath. A handful of faded photos were stuck to the door of the wheezing fridge. They couldn’t possibly be as old as they looked. Anna glanced at a picture of a boy, probably about twelve years old, holding a small girl in his arms, stubbornly looking away from the camera. There were more pictures of the girl, on a playground, as a pink-clad baby in a carrier, standing in line with some other kids from a kindergarten group. There were no photos of their mother. Anna turned away. She located flour and eggs and a
pan; she found sugar and oil. She ended up making pancakes on the gas stove while Micha sat on top of the counter watching her. Legs pulled up and back bent, she was perfectly formed to fit under the overhanging cupboard.

“Abel,” she said, “always flips them in the air.”

“And today,” Anna said, “he nearly missed a test. But I didn’t let him.”

“Those will get burned,” Micha cautioned, leaning forward. “Doesn’t matter, though. When I’m alone, I eat bread and butter. Anna, I’m still thinking about Rainer. Is he really my father or isn’t he? ‘Biological,’ you said. What’s that mean?”

“That means …” Anna scraped the blackened pancake off the pan, “that your mother and he …”

“I see,” Micha said. “That he fucked her?” Then she quickly put her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell Abel I said that word,” she whispered. “He pretends that I don’t know it.”

“Do you know what it means?” Anna asked.

“Well … not really.”

“You’ll learn eventually,” Anna said. “Someday. When I learn how to make proper pancakes. If I ever do. Do you have jam?”

“Strawberry,” Micha offered.

They sat in the living room, which was as tidy and dreary as the kitchen, at a tiny, dark table, on a gray corduroy couch leftover from the sixties or seventies, probably scavenged. Next to the couch there was a huge old TV. The wallpaper was bubbling. The pattern of mustard-colored flowers was typical of the German Democratic Republic. Probably worth something by now, Anna thought, if you could get it down in one piece.

The strawberry jam was 110 percent chemicals and 2 percent
artificial sweetener. Micha ate three pancakes, black edges and all, and, in the process, managed to distribute the jam over most of her grinning face. “You can make those more often,” she said approvingly.

Anna smiled. “If you want me to.” And she thought of Linda’s pancakes at home, in the blue air, beneath the old wooden beams: pancakes served with salmon and crème fraîche and a flowering branch from the garden on the table and Mahler’s symphonies on the old record player, which stood on the antique chest with its colored knobs. She balled up the blue universe and its flowering branches and Mahler symphonies and swallowed it with the last bite of burned Anna pancake. And suddenly, there was a lump in her throat so big she barely could breathe.

“You look so sad,” Micha said. “Is something wrong?”

“N-n-no. I just thought of something sad, that’s all.”

“Oh,” Micha said. “I sometimes think of something sad, too. I know something to bistract you.”

“Do you mean …
dis
tract me?”

“I think that’s what I mean.” Micha leaned forward and whispered secretively, “Do you want to know what happens in the fairy tale with the little cliff queen?”

“I do,” Anna answered.

Micha nodded. “Me, too. He didn’t tell me anything last night. He told me he’s got to think it up first. But I know he wrote something down. I think I know where he keeps the paper. We could take a peek, what do you think?”

“Maybe,” Anna whispered.

So Micha got up and ran to the back of the apartment. Anna washed the plates while Micha searched for the secret pages. She
also did the dishes stacked next to the sink. The water wasn’t draining properly—the sink was blocked. Anna recognized the pattern on the light, cheap cutlery, another relic, like the wallpaper, from DDR times. She wondered how old Michelle had been then.
Had been?
Had she really thought that?

“Got them!” Micha exclaimed in triumph from the hallway, where she stood like Joan of Arc, holding a few white sheets triumphantly above her head—her own tricolor. Anna smiled. “Come to my room with me,” Joan of Arc commanded. Anna felt honored. Micha led her into a small room almost completely filled by a loft bed. Under the bed was a makeshift desk: a piece of chipboard over two sawhorses. There was no window.

“Abel built the bed,” Micha explained. “Come on. There’s room for the two of us; there’s room for Abel and me, too. Be careful … the third step is a little loose …” She handed Anna two sheets of paper, both of which were covered with tiny handwriting. “You read. Mrs. Margaret and me, we’ll listen. She’s in the story, too, remember? That’s why she wants to know what happens …”

“Of course,” Anna said. “I remember.”

“The green ship with the yellow rudder sailed northwest for three days. The wind pushed it steadily forward; the little cliff queen stood at the bow, holding Mrs. Margaret, whose blue dress with the white flowers on it fluttered in the wind. Sometimes the sea was clear for hours, like blue glass, and then they could see far into the deep, where there were violet jellyfish with silver patterns and long ruby-red tentacles more beautiful than all the summer flowers in the world.

“‘Yes, they are beautiful,’ the sea lion said, ‘but they are also dangerous. They can burn you with their beauty.’

“The sea lion swam beside the ship; from time to time he disappeared, but when the little cliff queen started thinking that the sea was too big and that she was too small and lost, he would reappear all of a sudden. At night, the little queen and Mrs. Margaret slept in the cabin of their ship. There was a broad bed there, covered in polar bear fur. Where the polar bears used to live, the sea lion explained, the ice was melting. So they had come ashore and become politicians, but before that they were forced to get rid of their coats so as not to be recognized. The sea lion collected their fur from the waves …

“One night, the little queen went up on deck to see the stars. She spotted the Big Dipper, but she also saw the outline of an apple tree and a mare and a canopy bed, all made of stars. ‘So this is where you have gotten to!’ she exclaimed in surprise. ‘How beautiful you are! The nights out here are so beautiful …’

“‘Yes, they are beautiful,’ the sea lion whispered from the black night sea. ‘But they are also cold. They can freeze you with their beauty if you look at them for too long.’

“And the little queen crawled back under the polar bear coats as quickly as she could. In the morning, the early sun was dancing on the water in red and orange sparkles, and the little cliff queen looked at the waves. ‘Maybe,’ she said to her doll, ‘it would be nice to swim next to the ship for a while like the sea lion does. The waves are so beautiful …’

“‘Yes, they are beautiful,’ the sea lion said, popping his head out of one of the froth-covered swells. ‘But they are also greedy. They can devour you if you’re not careful.’

“‘Oh!’ the little queen said. ‘Isn’t there anything that is just beautiful and not also dangerous?’

“‘Maybe we’ll find something on our journey,’ the sea lion replied. ‘But we can’t waste too much time searching. Look behind you, little queen. There is something very dangerous and not at all beautiful.’

“The little queen turned, and she saw that the black ship had come closer.

“‘Last night I swam to it,’ the sea lion told her. ‘When I reached the ship’s bow, a hunter with a robe as red as blood was standing at the wheel. He had a blond mustache and eyes the same color as yours, little queen. And on the right sleeve of his gown, a diamond was stitched—the aim of his search: your heart.’

“‘But what does he want my heart for?’ the little queen asked.

“‘He just wants to own it,’ replied the sea lion. ‘That is enough. He wants to look on its beauty and know that his hands alone can touch it.’

“‘How can you be sure of that?’ the little queen wanted to know. ‘You’re making that up, aren’t you?’

“‘I wish I was,’ the sea lion sighed. ‘But the red hunter is not unknown in these waters. He has stolen many jewels. He keeps them on his own island, far from here, for a while. One day, however, they lose their sparkle, and he grows tired of owning and touching them. So he throws them back into the sea. Your heart, little queen, is the biggest jewel in all the world. And he’s been searching for it for a long time.’