The Storyteller (20 page)

Abel shook his head. “No. She just slipped into the fairy tale.”

Anna wasn’t sure she believed him. Something about the Michelle story was strange. That day, when he hadn’t let her in … who had been in the apartment with him? Was Abel hiding his own mother? Protecting her? But from whom?

He let go of her hand. “Time to go home,” he said. “Take care of yourself, rose girl. They say it’s going to get even colder.”

He watched them ride away on their bikes, ride away in separate directions. And he remembered the day he had seen them together
for the first time, in the student dining hall. He smiled. Their outlines seemed to radiate light, seemed to sparkle. Like something dipped into liquid gold. How long had it been since he’d been part of a story outlined in gold? Except when he read literature? Too long. He remembered one golden story, the last one. He remembered the smell of her hair, the intoxicating smell of cheap shampoo; he’d bought her nice, expensive shampoo and later missed the smell of the cheap one … he remembered talking about things she hadn’t understood, things that had meant too much to him … he remembered the music from the old, scratched LPs. Dancing in a tiny living room. An old sofa and dreams that had broken into pieces, later.

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born

Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn

Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in

Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove

Dance me to the end of love …

And for a moment, he wished he were back there, young again, or younger—a little—so he could do everything over again and make different decisions … Faust. But no, no … no Gretchen questions … please, no.

And then, as they left the market square, Abel and Micha taking one street and Anna taking another, he saw their shadows. He
hadn’t noticed them before; he’d only seen the bright shining gold … their shadows were long and black. Of course, that was because of the setting sun; it didn’t mean anything. But suddenly he felt afraid. Afraid for these two young people.

He didn’t have children. But if he had, he thought, they’d be Anna and Abel’s age now. And he’d worry about them. He wouldn’t sleep at night; he’d lie in bed, sleepless, worrying. He’d yell at them when they came home late, or maybe he wouldn’t; maybe he’d be silent and lose them in silence. It just wasn’t possible, he thought, to do right by your children.

Better to be alone.

Abel and Anna weren’t his children. They were only his students. Damn. Yet he still carried his fear for them home with him.

Who’s that? That’s the lighthouse keeper
.

The lighthouse keeper? Why was he a lighthouse keeper? Which lighthouse did he keep, and what was it that kept him there?

THAT NIGHT, ANNA SLEPT WITH THE FAIRY-TALE TELLER
.

Not in reality. In her dreams. She lay in her bed, in the house of blue air, and dreamed a pocket of time into Abel’s fairy tale, a time pocket that would never be told. It was night on the deck of the green ship. The little queen was dreaming, too, between her polar bear skins in the cabin below, Mrs. Margaret in her arms, the asking man and the answering man, who had finally come in to get some sleep, beside her. And the lighthouse keeper. The lighthouse keeper slept in his boots and his glasses, which were pushed up into the graying hair on his head. The little queen was smiling in her sleep. Maybe she dreamed of the reality beyond her fairy tale, of turquoise ice cream on a snow-covered market square, of letters in the dirt on a window.

Anna was standing on the deck all alone, watching the stars. She found the Big Dipper and Ursa Major and Minor, but Ursa Minor looked like a dog, Ursa Major, like a wolf. She found Perseus, but he
looked like a hunter with a long robe, and he wasn’t alone; there were five hunters altogether—four of them, she thought, are still on the black ship. Four of them are still following us. Four of them want to catch us before we reach the mainland. She stepped to the rail and saw the moonlight on the waves. Small pieces of ice danced within it. The sea would freeze. Maybe soon. From one of the waves, a head appeared, the head of the sea lion. She wanted to reach out her arms to pull him on board. And suddenly the sea lion lifted himself out of the water and flew across the waves in a spray of small drops; in the next instant, the wolf was standing next to Anna. But no, she was mistaken. It was the silver dog with the golden eyes—but no, no, it wasn’t the silver dog either. It was a human being. It was Abel, and yet, not Abel. His eyes were the wrong color; they were golden. He wore black, but not the black Böhse Onkelz sweatshirt she hated so much. He wore an ironed black shirt that looked strange on him; it was the kind of black shirt you wear to a funeral. She wanted to ask him whose funeral it was, and if he’d just come from it or was he headed to it later, but before she could ask, he had pulled her into his arms. It was like a weird ballet.

The white sails that the red hunter had torn to pieces with his rapier were still heaped on deck. Anna saw that someone had started to mend them, probably she herself, the rose girl, who had also made clothes for everyone. She felt the red velvet on her skin. She felt the red velvet slide down. She was naked. For a moment she stood like that, in the moonlight, but she wasn’t cold. She undid the buttons of his black shirt—it was easy, like removing one’s own clothes—and the black material slid down, too, and got entangled with the red velvet; black and red like night and blood. She looked at Abel. She tried to smile. She was a little afraid.

The round burn on his upper arm was shining like a second moon, or an eye.

“Don’t look at it,” he whispered, as he pulled her down onto the deck, between the white sails that closed around them like a tent. It was completely dark in that tent; there was nothing to be seen, only to be heard and to be felt and to be tasted.

“It’s a dream,” Anna whispered.

“It’s a time pocket in the fairy tale,” Abel whispered. “That is what you wished for, isn’t it?”

In a dream, in a fairy tale, nothing has to be explained, everything happens of its own accord. That night, Anna knew everything and understood everything and was familiar with everything; she thought of Gitta and had to laugh because Gitta didn’t understand anything—she only talked like she did. The tent made of sails became a cocoon and moved over the deck, rolling to and fro in the rhythm of the waves, an artwork by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, a package whose contents were no one’s business. Anna felt blood on her fingers; she wasn’t sure whose blood it was … maybe her own, maybe blood from the wound on Abel’s temple, or maybe just a memory—or the blood of a third person? No, she thought, there is nobody here. Just the two of us.

And the cocoon, the artwork, the tent rolled over the deck, rolled over the rail, and sank into the icy waters of the night ocean, with Anna and Abel inside it. The white cat, who was lying on deck, silently shook her head at the sight.

When Anna awoke, it was five o’clock in the morning, and she was out of breath. The white cat, she suddenly thought—wasn’t the white cat blind? She sat up in her bed and realized that she was shivering. Her bed seemed vast, and she was very alone in it.

• • •

“Check out our Polish peddler,” Gitta said on Monday, looking out the window. “If he keeps standing there, he’ll be covered in snow like a statue. I don’t get it. He’s been standing there since early morning; he wasn’t in French class—he’s just been standing out there with plugs in his ears.”

“White noise,” Anna said.

Gitta looked at her. “Excuse me?”

“Maybe he hasn’t earned his daily wage.” Hennes laughed. He pushed his red hair back and nudged Gitta in a friendly way. “Hey, physics is over, and the math test tomorrow is the last one before finals … shouldn’t we celebrate? Tomorrow night … we could ask him if he’s got some weed. Or does he only sell pills?”

“He’s a peddler.” Gitta put a suggestive hand on Hennes’s arm. “I’m guessing he can get almost anything. But if you ask him for weed, he’ll laugh. Weed’s easy—it’s for children. I’m sure he makes more selling other stuff.”

“Today, I’m feeling generous,” Hennes said, grinning. “I actually feel like tipping. What do you think, does our Polish peddler take tips?”

He slipped into his ski jacket, and a moment later was walking across the yard, through the gently falling snowflakes. Gitta sighed and said, “Those snowflakes really look good in his hair. You could put that guy in a frame, hang him up on the wall …”

“If he really wants to party … maybe he’ll let you hang him on the wall. You never know,” Frauke said and laughed.

“Depends on what he arranges with the Pole,” Gitta said, “… and what he plans to smoke. Anna, do you want to come tomorrow?”

“I’ll think about it,” Anna said.

She saw Hennes standing at the bike rack next to Abel. She saw Hennes’s bright-colored ski jacket, his glowing red hair, his upright posture; she saw Abel beside him, hands dug deep into the pockets of his old parka, hat pulled down low, back bent—a dark lump of a human being, almost totally holed up in himself, nearly invisible, an ugly blotch in the immaculate white snow. She saw Hennes talking to Abel, who didn’t take the plugs out of his ears.

“You know, it’s possible to party without weed,” Bertil said. Anna jumped. She hadn’t seen him there. He looked at her.

“What do you think?”

“I’m thinking,” Anna replied in a low voice, “that I don’t like Hennes von Biederitz.”

The math test went well. At first, Anna thought she would be too distracted. All the words Abel hadn’t said to her since Monday were filling her head. She saw him sitting at his desk, his test in front of him. Halfway through, he pulled off his black sweatshirt and sat there in his T-shirt; she forced herself not to look at him too closely, not to search for the round scar, not to think of her dream. In the end, she managed to solve most of the test problems. She remembered Bertil’s patient explanations, the look behind his glasses, and his voice—the voice of an indulgent professor—and it was like Bertil was there, taking the test for her. She didn’t want to think that; she didn’t want to think of Bertil; she hated the way he kept sneaking up on her, seeming to appear out of nowhere, without a sound.

But during lunch, there he was, all by himself, as usual. He hadn’t had to take the math test since he wasn’t in the basic class—he was in the intensive—and suddenly, Anna felt sorry for him. Bertil,
who understood all numbers and integrals and statistics, and whose glasses were always sliding down his nose, and whose soap bubble was fogged up from inside. She went over to him and thanked him again for his help, and he smiled.

“We’re all getting together tonight to celebrate before finals,” she said. “Why don’t you come too?”

“Me?” Bertil asked.

Anna nodded. “Yes, you,” she said. “Just do me a favor. Don’t appear out of nowhere.”

“I’ll try and walk like an elephant,” Bertil promised, grinning. She’d never seen him look so happy.

Linda didn’t ask where Anna was going to celebrate with the others. All she said was, “Be careful on your bike; the streets are slippery.”

“Just imagine! Your last test!” Magnus said.

“Only for Hennes,” Anna replied. “We’ve still got our last history test on Friday. And then finals.”

Magnus shook his head. “God, it seems like only yesterday you were in kindergarten.”

Before she left to meet the others, he bent down—he was still so much taller than she was—and said in a low voice, “What of the world has been on your mind lately? Has it passed? Or … is it possible … that you’ll meet whatever it is tonight, when you’re out celebrating with the others?”

“No,” Anna said. “The others are absolutely unworldly.”

Magnus watched her smile. “One day you’ll tell us, won’t you? Linda’s worried, you know. Because lately, you’ve been … she says you’ve been acting so different.”

“One day I’ll explain,” Anna said. “But tonight is just a perfectly
normal night at the bar, with Gitta and the others. It’s got nothing to do with anything.”

But Anna was wrong.

They met at the Mittendrin, opposite the dome. The Mittendrin was one of the few bars where you could still smoke. In the tiny side room, separated from the bar by a heavy black curtain that extended from ceiling to floor, a cigarette machine blinked.

Anna always felt like she’d stepped onto a stage when she passed through the curtain. Magnus had told her that in his day there had been a table made of an old door, complete with the handle and everything, and that the armchairs had been more comfortable. The Mittendrin had been renovated a dozen times since then, but the only real change was that there were more smokers. The air in the bar was 70 percent cigarette smoke, 28 percent alcohol and slightly strained coolness, and 2 percent the smoke of something that wasn’t cigarettes. It was also dark, and Anna wasn’t sure whether this was because of the absence of light or the presence of smoke, which prevented the light from passing through.