The Storyteller (15 page)

“
What?
” Anna asked and thought, this isn’t the moment to feel happy, but she couldn’t help it. Micha was crying now; she could hear her. She also heard more things breaking or being thrown or falling into the winter sea. She tried one last time. “Micha,
who is there in the apartment with you?
Has your mother come back?”

“No,” Micha sobbed. “She hasn’t, and she never will. She’s gone for good. He said that. He said that I have to live with him now; he doesn’t have a red gown, but still … Anna …”

“I’m on my way,” Anna said.

For a moment, she considered calling the police. But the note on the bathroom mirror didn’t say
Emergency
and the number of the police, it said
Emergency
and
Anna
—and surely not because Abel thought Anna would put the police on his trail. The police would ask questions: questions about Michelle Tannatek, questions about who was looking after Micha, questions about custody. And even if Rainer Lierski didn’t get custody of Micha, even if they locked him up, which didn’t seem likely … even then, Anna thought while struggling to get her coat on, even then they’d take Micha from Abel. And there wouldn’t be fairy tales anymore or hot chocolate at the pier or meals in the student dining hall … gotten with a fake ID.

And no pink down jacket flying across the schoolyard on Friday afternoons, eager to be caught in someone’s arms and whirled about.

By the time she had arrived at this thought, she was riding down Wolgaster Street, which seemed endless today, like a steadily growing plant. No matter how fast Anna rode, the street, with its bike lane and its cars and its traffic signs, just got longer and longer. The wind was blowing single icy snowflakes into her face. She had forgotten to put on gloves, and the cold bit into her fingers, the pain causing tears to well up in her eyes until finally she didn’t feel it anymore—neither the pain nor her frozen fingers.

The whole way she tried to convince herself that nothing had happened, that everything was fine, that Micha had been exaggerating, that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that you couldn’t believe everything a six-year-old child said— Amundsen Street was deserted in the halfhearted snow flurry. The door of block number eighteen was wide open. Anna didn’t lock her bicycle—why bother, if anybody could pick the lock. The staircase smelled of a mixture of beer, times past, and vomit. On the ground floor, an overweight woman with greasy hair stood inside her door with a small child in her arms, shaking her head. Her eyes were tired and without a spark of life; they reminded Anna of a fish’s. She scrutinized Anna, obviously curious who she was. But Anna didn’t have time for explanations. In the apartment behind the woman, two children screamed at each other. Mrs. Ketow, Anna thought, she’s got three small children, but they are not her children … Anna was running up the stairs now. Her heart pounded. What are you planning to do? You don’t have anything to defend yourself with, yourself or anybody else … on the fourth floor she stopped, listening. From an apartment down the hall, she heard the voice of a radio; from another one, shots sounded. She started, but the shots were accompanied by loud, dramatic music, and Anna nearly
laughed: TV. Maybe a western. She went on, slowly now. Behind the door with a white nameplate that said “Tannatek,” it was very quiet. Micha had called from home, hadn’t she? Or … had she called from Rainer Lierski’s house? From somewhere else?

Anna took a deep breath. Then she pressed the bell.

And then Abel opened the door.

His fist was raised, and she ducked instinctively.

“Anna,” he said, as if she was the last person he had expected to see. “I …”

“Yeah, me too,” Anna said, incoherently and very relieved. “Has he gone?”

Abel nodded. “Can I come in?” He nodded again. Anna shut the door behind her. She turned on the light in the hall and saw that Micha was hugging Abel’s leg like a small creeper.

“You can let go of me now,” Abel said. “Micha, hey! It’s all right! It’s just Anna; he hasn’t come back! I can’t walk with you hanging onto me like that! Let go, will you?”

“If I absolutely have to,” Micha said, and Abel laughed.

Anna looked at him. She almost wished that she hadn’t turned on the light. “Shit,” she said. “Abel.”

The hall looked as if a search or a bombing or possibly both had taken place there. Jackets had been pulled down from their hooks, and, on one side, the coatrack had been ripped out of the wall entirely. The floor was covered with toys, shattered plates, pieces of a broken glass bottle. Abel stepped over all of this and led Anna to the kitchen. “I’m making hot chocolate,” he said. “Do you want to have a cup, too?”

“Hot chocolate?” Anna repeated, her voice strangely dull.

The kitchen looked like the hall. One door of the wall cupboard above the sink had been pulled from its hinges; a pot of basil was lying on the floor in front of the window, the plant crushed, the soil scattered; and, in one corner, there were the pieces of what had once been the contents of a whole cupboard. The word
rage
had new meaning here, Anna thought. And in the middle of the chaos, Abel stood at the stove stirring milk in a pot, completely calm. No,
calm
was the wrong word. His hand was shaking.

Abel didn’t look much better than the apartment. His left eye was starting to swell, and his right temple was covered with blood, as if he had fallen from his bike—or maybe from an accelerating car—onto a gravel path. “What …?” Anna began, finally.

Abel nodded toward the heap of broken plates and cups in the corner. “I took a fall.”

“I hope you didn’t fall alone?”

“Oh no,” Abel said, not without pride, adding chocolate powder to the milk. “Believe me, there’s someone else who looks just as bad as I do.”

She realized that he was stirring with his left hand. When he had opened the door, he had raised his left fist. He held the right one awkwardly.

“Micha,” he said, “you two could clean up the living room a bit, what do you think?”

Micha grabbed Anna’s sleeve and pulled her into the living room, where the two ragged old armchairs and the couch had been turned over and books had been thrown onto the floor. They righted the armchairs and put the books back on the shelves in silence. Anna found several packages of pills scattered in the floor. Not Children’s Tylenol. In any case, the pills weren’t what the person who’d been
raging here had wanted. Anna and Micha put the jackets back on the hooks as best they could, and Micha whispered, “He just came in. The hunter with the red coat. I was nice to him because I thought that maybe then he’d go away. And somehow, I felt sorry for him, too … he seemed so lonely. Abel had gone down to get some things at the store … we just talked, on the couch, and he said again that I could come live with him, but then Abel came home and told him that he should leave … and he didn’t want to leave, and they started shouting at each other, and then they were fighting … and the red hunter started breaking things; he just opened the cupboards and pulled stuff out … and he said that everything in this apartment is old and broken anyway, that we don’t own anything but garbage … it’s my fault, isn’t it? It’s all my fault. Abel is angry with me. I should never have opened the door and let the red hunter in …”

Anna held Micha in her arms, in the middle of the chaos in the ravaged living room. “Don’t cry,” she said. “Oh, hell, just go ahead and cry. It’s not your fault, Micha. And Abel isn’t angry with you. I’m sure of it. He’s angry with your father. Abel just wants to protect you.”

“He doesn’t have to,” Micha said, sniffling.

“Yes he does,” Anna said.

“And from what, anyway?” Micha asked, wiping her nose on Anna’s sleeve.

“You know what,” Anna replied. “The red hunter wants your diamond heart.”

Five minutes later, the three of them were sitting at the living room table. The table was missing a leg now. They were drinking their chocolate from water glasses because there weren’t any unbroken mugs left.

“Abel,” Anna began, “we’ve got to do something about that wound of yours. Your face. I can see at least three glass splinters in there. We’ve got to …”

“Later,” said Abel.

“But getting that treated is more important than hot chocolate.”

“No,” he said, and Anna nodded; his eyes allowed for no disagreement. “Now it’s important that everything goes back to normal and everybody calms down,” he said. “And that is why I’m going to tell you a three-minute piece of the fairy tale.”

Micha lay down on the sofa, exhausted from fear and crying and relief, her head on Abel’s knee; and Anna remembered how she herself used to lie like that when she was a small girl, her head on her mother’s knee, her mother reading a book to her.

“You remember that white cat we saw yesterday?” Abel asked. “When we were walking at the harbor in Wieck? The white cat you wanted to take home with you?”

“I remember,” Micha whispered and yawned, “she was all dirty and disheveled, but she didn’t want to be petted by me … I remember.”

“That’s good. The green ship sailed through the waves for a long time, and day by day, the little queen and the rose girl became colder. The wind was bringing snow now, real snow.

“‘Your roses are already starting to wilt,’ the sea lion said to the rose girl. ‘Not only where I tore them but everywhere else on your body, too. They will wither. And you will freeze in the cold wind.’

“But the rose girl wasn’t the only one to feel the cold. Mrs. Margaret and the little queen were shivering, too, now that they were standing on deck.

“‘Maybe it’s the black ship,’ the little queen said. ‘It brings the
cold with it! It comes closer and closer without ever reaching us. Isn’t that weird? I almost wish it were here and something would happen at last!’

“‘Something is happening,’ the sea lion said, lifting his head out of the waves as far as he could. ‘Look there! There’s the next island.’

“‘It’s all covered in snow,’ the rose girl said. But she was mistaken.

“A little later, they anchored the ship, and there on the shore of the island stood an information board.

“‘Island of the Blind White Cats,’ read the lighthouse keeper, and he scratched his head with his glasses. ‘It is forbidden for strangers to hum ashore.’

“‘That’s a spelling mistake,’ the rose girl said. ‘They must have meant that strangers are forbidden to
come
ashore.’

“The little queen began to hum a tune, the first one that came into her head, just to test things out. And, instantly, a white cat appeared and came racing toward her like a living snowball, shouting, ‘Quiet! It’s forbidden to hum ashore! Can’t you read? You’re startling our weavers and spinstresses, and that leads to the most awful mistakes in the fabrics they’re producing.’

“The little queen and her friends followed the white cat inland, where many white cats were sitting at spinning wheels and handlooms, or, in their case, paw looms. They seemed to have been spinning threads and weaving fabric all day long. The threads were made out of their own white fur, which clearly grew rapidly. But because the white cats were blind, they couldn’t see where their pieces of fabric began and where they should have ended. They just spun and wove, on and on. The white layers covered the whole island, poured into the sea, and floated on the waves in huge white drifts.

“‘Oh, could you spare some of that lovely white material?’ the little queen asked excitedly. ‘Just a little bit, so that we can make a few warm clothes?’

“‘Well, you’ll have to pay for it, of course,’ one of the cats said.

“‘Our fabric is the best and most durable,’ another of them added.

“‘It protects against the rain, snow, and fire,’ a third one remarked.

“‘Everything has its price,’ all three said.

“‘Oh, but we don’t have anything we could give to you,’ the little queen sighed. ‘You see, our clothes aren’t made for the icy winter here. Don’t you see how urgently we need your fabric?’

“‘How could we see that?’ an elderly cat asked crankily. ‘We are blind. Visitors tell us our fabric is beautiful, though. They say that if you look at it for a long time, rainbows spring from its folds. But we have never seen that ourselves.’

“‘Oh, you poor creatures!’ the little queen exclaimed.

“They sat down to take a closer look at the fabric that covered the island; and, indeed, after a while, a rainbow shot up in front of them, gleaming and sparkling in all the colors of the world. A second one followed, and then a third. The rainbows began to swirl into each other, as if they were threads themselves. They danced and spun around; they formed spirals and knots up there, in the clear, cold winter air—blue, green, yellow, orange, pink, red, violet—and everyone got a bit dizzy looking at them.

“‘How beautiful!’ the little queen said finally. ‘Isn’t it so sad the cats are blind?’

“‘Glasses,’ the lighthouse keeper murmured. ‘Maybe they aren’t blind after all; maybe glasses are all they need. I left my own glasses on the ship …’

“‘I’ll go and get them!’ the little queen said. She picked up one of the white cats to carry it with her, for the cats looked so soft and nice, but the cat complained. ‘Come on, you can warm my hands till we reach the ship,’ the little queen said. ‘Like a muff made of white fur.’

“‘If you insist,’ the cat said begrudgingly.

“On the beach, the silver-gray dog with the golden eyes was pacing to and fro nervously.

“‘Just imagine … this fabric can create rainbows!’ the little queen shouted, out of breath. ‘Oh, if only we had clothes made of such fabric!’

“The silver-gray dog just growled. ‘Don’t put that fabric on,’ he said. ‘Little queen, don’t do it! Ever! Whoever wears that cloth sees nothing but rainbows and forgets about danger!’

“‘Oh, you! You just don’t like
anything
!’ the little queen said. ‘Think of the rose girl … you wanted to bite her when she first joined us!’

“‘I will go and see what the others are doing,’ the silver-gray dog snarled. ‘So we don’t lose them to rainbows.’

“The little queen climbed aboard the ship and put the cat down on the deck, where it curled into a ball on the planks and fell asleep instantly. She looked for the lighthouse keeper’s glasses everywhere, but she couldn’t find them. At last, when she was on her knees searching under one of the benches, someone knocked on the rail very politely. The little queen looked up, and there was a man there, clad from head to toe in glittering white fabric.