The Storyteller (2 page)

He kneels down in front of her, on the clean floor, takes her hands in his. He whispers a question, a single word, “Where?”

And he reads the answer in her cold hands.

Do you remember? The woods? It was spring, and under the beeches, small white flowers were blooming … we were walking hand in hand and you asked me the name of the flowers … I didn’t know … the woods. The woods were the only place we had to ourselves, a place just for us … back in the only time we had together, just the two of us … do you remember, do you remember, do you remember?

“I do,” he whispers. “I remember. The woods. Anemones. I know what they’re called now. Anemones …”

He lifts her up in his arms like a child. She is heavy and light at the same time. His heart is beating in the rhythm of fear as he
carries her outside, into the night. Hold onto me so I don’t drop you. Hold on, will you? Why won’t you help me? Help me! Please … just this once!

The cold envelops him like an icy robe; he smells the frost in the air. The ground hasn’t frozen yet. He’s lucky. A strange thought … that he’s lucky on this February night. The woods aren’t far. They are too far. He looks around. There is no one. No one knows … no one will remember what happened tonight.

There aren’t any small white flowers blooming in the woods. The ground is muddy and brown, and the gray beeches are bare, leafless. He can’t make out the details … it is too dark. Just dark enough. There aren’t streetlights here. The earth gives way, reluctantly, to the blunt spade. He swears under his breath. She still won’t look at him. Propped against a tree, she seems far away in her thoughts. And suddenly, anger wells up in him.

He kneels in front of her for the third time. He shakes her, tries to pull her up, make her stand on her feet; he wants to shout at her, and he does, but only in his head, silently, with his mouth open wide.

You’re the most selfish, thoughtless person I’ve ever known! What you’ve done is unforgivable. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? You knew it all along. But you didn’t care. Of course not. All you thought about was yourself and your small, pitiful world. You found a solution for yourself, though not a solution for me … for us. You didn’t think about us for a second … and then he’s crying, crying like a child, with his head on her shoulder.

He feels her stroke his hair, her touch light as the breeze. No … it is only a branch.

THE DAY THAT ANNA FOUND THE DOLL WAS THE
first really cold day of winter. A blue day.

The sky was big and clear, like a glass dome over the town. On her bike, on her way to school, she decided she would ride to the beach at noon to see if the ocean was frozen at the edges. It would ice over—if not today, then in a few days.

The ice always came in February.

And she breathed in the winter air with childish anticipation, pushing her scarf away from her face, slipping her woolen hat off her dark hair, inhaling the cold until she felt drunk and dizzy.

She wondered which of the many boxes in the attic held her skates, and if it would snow, and if her skis were sitting in the basement. And if she could persuade Gitta to get out her heavy old sled, the one with the red stripe. Gitta would probably say they were too old, she thought.

My God
, Gitta would say,
do you want to make a complete fool of
yourself? You’re
graduating
this summer, little lamb
. Anna smiled as she parked her bike at school. Gitta, who was only six months older, always called her “little lamb.” But then Gitta behaved like a grown-up—or like someone who believed herself to be grown-up—unlike Anna. Gitta went out dancing on Friday nights. She’d been driving a scooter to school for two years and would trade it in for a car as soon as she had the money.

She wore black; she wore thongs; she slept with boys.
Little lamb, we’re almost eighteen … we’ve been old enough for a long, long time … shouldn’t you think about growing up?

Gitta was leaning against the school wall now, talking to Hennes and smoking.

Anna joined them, still breathing hard from the ride, her breath forming clouds in the cold air.

“So,” Hennes said, smiling, “it looks like you’ve started smoking after all.”

Anna laughed and shook her head, “No. I don’t have time to smoke.”

“Good for you,” Gitta said and put her arm around her friend’s slender shoulders. “You start, you can’t stop. It’s hell, little lamb, remember that.”

“No, seriously.” Anna laughed. “I don’t know when I’d find the time to smoke. There are so many other things to do.”

Hennes nodded. “Like school, right?”

“Well,” said Anna, “that too.” And she knew Hennes didn’t get what she meant, but that didn’t matter. She couldn’t explain to him that she needed to go to the beach to see if the sea had started to freeze. And that she’d been dreaming about Gitta’s sled with the red stripe. He wouldn’t have understood anyway. Gitta would make
a show of not wanting to get the sled out, but then she would, finally. Gitta did understand. And as long as no one was watching, she’d go sledding with Anna and act like a five-year-old. She’d done it last winter … and every winter before that. While Hennes and the other kids at school were sitting at home studying.

“Time’s up,” said Hennes, glancing at his watch. “We should get going.” He put out his cigarette, tilted his head back, and blew his red hair off his forehead. Golden, Anna decided. Red-gold. And she thought that Hennes probably practiced blowing hair from his forehead every morning, in front of the mirror. Hennes was perfect. He was tall, slender, athletic, smart; he’d spent his Christmas vacation snowboarding somewhere in Greenland … no, probably Norway. He had a “von” of nobility in his last name, a distinction he left out of his signature. That made him even more perfect. There were definitely good reasons for Gitta to hang out smoking with him. Gitta was always falling in love with somebody—and every third time, it was with Hennes.

Anna, however, could not stand the slightly ironic smile that he gave the world. Like the one he was giving now. Right now.

“Should we tell our Polish peddler?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the bike stands, where a figure in a green military jacket was hunched over, a black knit cap pulled low over his face, the plugs of an old Walkman in his ears. The cigarette in his bare hand had almost burned down. Anna wondered if he even noticed. Why hadn’t he come over here to share a smoke with Gitta and Hennes?

“Tannatek!” Hennes called out. “Eight o’clock. You coming in with us?”

“Forget about it,” said Gitta. “He can’t hear you. He’s in his own world. Let’s go.”

She turned to hurry after Hennes as he strode up the stairs to the glass front doors of the school, but Anna held her friend back.

“Listen … it’s probably a silly question,” she began, “but …”

“There are only silly questions,” Gitta interrupted good-naturedly.

“Please,” Anna said seriously, “explain the ‘Polish peddler’ to me.”

Gitta glanced at the figure with the black knit cap. “Him? Nobody can explain him,” she said. “Half the school’s wondering why he came here in the eleventh grade. Isn’t he in your literature class?”

“Explain his
nickname
to me,” Anna insisted. “The Polish peddler? Why does everyone call him that?”

“Little lamb.” Gitta sighed. “I’ve really gotta go. Mrs. Siederstädt doesn’t like people being late for class. And if you strain that clever little head of yours, you’ll guess what our Polish friend sells. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not roses.”

“Dope,” Anna said and realized how ridiculous the word sounded when
she
said it. “Are you sure?”

“The whole school knows,” Gitta replied. “Of course I’m sure.” At the entrance she turned and winked. “His prices have gone up.” Then she waved and disappeared through the glass doors.

Anna stayed outside. She felt stupid. She wanted to think about the old sled with the red stripe, but instead she thought “soap bubble.” I live in a soap bubble. The whole school knows things I don’t. But maybe I don’t want to know them. And fine, I’ll ride out to the beach by myself, without Gitta. I’m sick of being called “little lamb,” because compared to her, I know what I want. It’s much more childish to walk around in black clothes believing that they make you look smarter.

• • •

And then, after sixth period, and a deadly boring biology class, she found the doll.

Later she often wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t found it. Nothing, probably. Everything would have stayed as it was. Forever. Anna living inside her soap bubble, a beautiful and stubborn soap bubble. But does anything stay the same when you’re almost eighteen? Of course it doesn’t.

The older students had their own lounge, a small room cluttered with two old tables, too-small wooden chairs, old sofas, and an even older coffee maker that usually didn’t work. Anna was the first to arrive at lunch break. She’d promised to wait there for Bertil, who wanted to copy her notes from their literature class. Bertil was an absentminded-professor type. Too busy thinking great thoughts behind his thick nerdy glasses to pay attention in class. Anna suspected that he lived inside his own soap bubble and that his was fogged up from the inside, like his glasses.

She’d never have found the doll if she hadn’t been waiting for Bertil.

She’d never have found the doll if she hadn’t taken all her stuff out of her backpack to search for the worksheet … and if a pencil hadn’t rolled under the sofa in the process … and if …

She bent down to retrieve the pencil.

And there was the doll.

Lodged in the dust beneath the sofa, it lay among gum wrappers and paperclips. Anna tried to push the sofa away from the wall, but it was too heavy. Beneath its old cushions, it must be made of stone, a marble sofa, a sofa made of black holes of infinite weight. She lay
down on the floor, reached out, gripped the doll, pulled it out. And for a moment, she was alone with her prize.

She sat on the floor in front of the sofa, holding the doll in her lap. As Anna looked at her, she seemed to look back. The doll was about as big as Anna’s hand, lightweight, made of fabric. Her face, framed by two dark braids, was embroidered with a red mouth, a tiny nose, and two blue eyes. She was wearing a short dress with a faint pattern of blue flowers on a field of white, so pale that the flowers had nearly vanished, like a fading garden eaten up by time. The hem was ragged, as if someone had shortened it or torn a piece from it to use for some other purpose. The hand-stitched eyes were worn. As if they’d seen too much. They looked tired and a little afraid. Anna brushed the dust from the doll’s hair with her fingers.

“Where did you come from?” she whispered. “What are you doing in this room? Who lost you here?”

She was still sitting on the floor when a group of students came rushing in, and, for a moment, she had the odd sensation that she should protect the doll from their eyes. Of course it was nonsense. As she stood, she held the doll up. “Does anybody know whose this is?” she asked, so loudly that the doll seemed to start at the sound. “I found it under the sofa. Has anybody lost it there?”

“Hey,” Tim said. “That’s my favorite doll. Man, I’ve been searching for her for days!”

“No, stupid, it’s mine!” Hennes laughed. “I take her to bed with me every night! Can’t sleep without her!”

“Hmm,” Nicole said, nodding, “well, there are people who do it with dogs, why not with children’s dolls?”

“Lemme see, maybe it’s mine,” Jörg said, taking the doll from
Anna. “Ah, no, mine had pink panties. And look, this one doesn’t have any panties at all … very unseemly.”

“Give it to me!” someone shouted, and suddenly the doll was flying through the air. As Anna watched them toss the toy around, she laughed about it. Though something inside hurt. She clenched her fists. It was like she was six and this was her doll. Once more, she sensed fear in the worn blue eyes.

“Stop it!” she yelled. “Stop it! Now! She belongs to some little kid and you can’t … what if she falls apart … she belongs to someone! You’re behaving like you’re in first grade!”

“It’s the stress of finals,” Tim said apologetically. But he didn’t let go of the toy. “See if you can catch her,” he challenged, and then he really sounded like he was six. Anna didn’t catch the doll when he threw it again. Bertil did.

Bertil with his too-thick glasses. He gave her back to Anna, without saying a word. In silence, she gave him the worksheet he’d wanted to copy. And the others forgot about the doll.

“The janitor,” Bertil said gently, before he left. “Maybe the janitor has a child … it’s possible, isn’t it?”

“It’s possible,” Anna said, smiling. “Thanks.”

But as soon as he turned to go, she knew she shouldn’t have smiled at him. Behind his glasses, he had pleading puppy-dog eyes, and she knew exactly what their expression meant.

When the others had gone—to their afternoon classes, to the coffeeshop, into town—when the student lounge was empty and quiet, Anna remained, sitting on the sofa, alone, with the doll perched on her knee. Outside, the day was still blue. The frost in the trees glittered like silver. Surely by now the ocean was freezing over.