The Storyteller (33 page)

“Stupid little girl,” she said to herself, spitting out the words, disgusted. “Stupid little girl; you wanted to have an adventure. There you go. You’ve had your adventure now.”

And then, as she unlocked her bike, she started humming, a ridiculous old children’s song.

Just a tiny little pain,

Three days of heavy rain,

Three days of sunlight,

And everything will be all right...

He’d lost her!

Damn, he’d lost her. He knew she’d been here, on the beach. He’d seen her with him; they hadn’t seen him of course. The shadows behind the surfers’ hut were deep and dark. But now he didn’t know where to look for her. And he would creep home, sneak past his parents’ room, secretly, like a thief in his own house—something he’d gotten used to doing the last few weeks. The dog wouldn’t give him away. The dog was sleeping deeply. He’d seen to that.

He’d lost her.

Somewhere between the beach and the place where the sailboats were docked in summer. He’d been too timid, too bent on not being discovered. The white snow made the nights too bright; it had become more and more difficult to follow her without being seen. He’d given them too much of a lead, and they’d grabbed it like a present and disappeared.

He returned to the beach, saw the rectangle of the police tape in the distance, heard it crackle in the night breeze. He realized he was shivering. He didn’t want to think of that police tape now, didn’t
want to think of the dead body that had lain there, didn’t want to think of the blood slowly trickling down from the wound, dyeing the snow red. He didn’t want to wonder what Sören Marinke’s last thought had been. Of whom he’d been thinking. Maybe Sören Marinke had loved, too.

He found himself standing on the ice. He walked out, far out. It didn’t matter when he got home—either they would realize he’d been gone or they wouldn’t—and if they did, he could still tell them a story about bar-hopping with friends. He could try to look guilty and hungover. Bar-hopping with friends? He didn’t have friends.

Not even she wanted to be his friend. Not even Anna.

He took off his gloves, kneeled down, and burrowed his bare hands into the snow that covered the frozen bay. The snow was very cold. Sometimes he couldn’t fight the thought that it would feel good to lie down in it and to never have to move again. Just to lie there, in the whiteness. Forever.

ON MONDAY MORNING, THE BLUENESS OF THE LIGHT
in the Leemanns’ house had changed. Something had cracked, and a dirty color had seeped through, the color of dried blood.

“It is my fault,” Anna whispered, sitting on the side of her bed. “I have destroyed the blue light.”

But there was another voice, a tiny little voice of reason, whispering to her. Your fault? asked this voice. Oh no. It wasn’t you who has destroyed anything. It was …

Please, said Anna, don’t say that name.

She took a long, hot shower and washed her hair several times. She hadn’t taken a shower the night before. If she had, Linda would have known that something had happened.

She’d been afraid she’d find Linda waiting up for her, in the living room, which would have been the end of her; Anna would have dissolved in tears in her arms. For a moment, she’d longed for that. But Linda hadn’t been there. Anna had heard her tossing in
bed, next to Magnus; she knew that her mother would sleep only when she was home safe and sound. What was Linda afraid of? Was she afraid of exactly what had happened?

Anna hadn’t slept. She had lain in her bed silently, staring at the ceiling, waiting for morning to come. Now she sat at breakfast very quietly. She didn’t eat.

“Is something the matter?” Magnus asked.

She shook her head. She nodded. She shrugged.

“Did the two of you fight about something?” Linda asked.

“Yes,” Anna said, relieved at this chance to explain things. “Yes, I guess you could say we did. I need a little time to think about it.”

On the floor in the hall, beneath the mail slot in the door, she found a white envelope with her name on it. Abel’s writing. When she touched the envelope, it burned hot in her hands, like the glowing, smoldering tip of a cigarette. She tore it up into very tiny pieces and threw them into the trashcan outside.

She got onto her bike and rode to school like she did every day: there were two more weeks of classes before the reading period before finals. She still was in pain. On the bicycle seat, it came back, tearing at her insides. She rode past the turnoff to school. She couldn’t go there. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Abel. She didn’t want to see his ice-blue eyes. His eyes would be her undoing. She wondered what she could have read in them last night, in the boathouse. She rode to the city, got off her bike, and wandered the streets aimlessly. She’d lost her hold on reality.

It had happened once before, after she’d been in Abel and Micha’s apartment the first time, but this time was different. Now it was really gone, and it felt as if it was gone for good. What was reality good for, anyway?

At some point, she found herself on the pedestrian bridge that led over the river. In summer, this part of the river, the city harbor, was full of big ancient ships. Now it was frozen, too; only the narrow path in the middle, which they kept open for the ships, was glistening like a trickle of unidentified body fluid. She rested her arms on the railing of the bridge and looked over at the restaurant-ship.

“If I could get my thoughts in order,” she said aloud, “if only I could get my thoughts in order … Maybe I have to talk so I can think. What happened? And what does it mean?”

She looked around; there was no one who could hear her.

“I’m afraid,” she said to herself. “I’m afraid again. I have to bring the right questions and answers together. It’s a puzzle. And the first question is, who is Abel Tannatek?”

A swan waddled over the ice. Dirty and white, swans aren’t beautiful, Anna thought; they’ve never been beautiful, and I wonder who first used that adjective to describe them. It’s the same with the putrid, slimy sunsets over the sea. “If I could flick a switch and turn on a light,” she went on, “then what happened yesterday might be clearer. Then again, maybe it already is clear. Maybe the light was already turned on, on the beach, in the snow … the murderer always returns to the place of the murder. So who went to the beach last night? Who was standing there, right beside me? The wolf in the fairy tale killed his victims by creeping up from behind and cracking their necks. He never looked into their eyes. For had he seen their eyes, he might have pitied them, and he knew that. The wolf knows himself very well.”

She still felt that warm, heavy weight on her. She felt the creature’s breath on her neck and the pain, and suddenly she felt sick.
She crouched down, holding onto the railing of the pedestrian bridge, but her stomach was too empty. The wolf knew himself very well; he had warned her … it had been her fault. It had been her fault. But had it?

No, said the reasonable part of her. Of course not. Don’t you remember—you have heard men say this about girls, read it in cheap newspapers, and always thought, how stupid and how wrong:
she asked for it, wearing those things, drinking too much, flirting … she asked for it, she wanted it.
Don’t you remember how you talked about these things with Gitta once and how you both agreed …

But I did want it, said unreasonable Anna to reasonable Anna.

Not this, said reasonable Anna. You wanted to have sex with him, that’s all. It would have been the perfect place, a dry place, no snow, no Micha around … a perfect night, too. How could you have known what would happen? You couldn’t. All you saw and felt was your love for him. You were wearing this love like a cloak, safe and warm, you thought … and he tore it apart.

But he did try to warn me, interrupted unreasonable Anna, realizing how much she sounded like a hardheaded child, trying to change the truth by the sheer force of her will.

There’s no talking away what happened, said reasonable Anna. Don’t even try it. It happened and it is horrible and you remember what Gitta said, way back when on the leather sofa.

She remembered, of course.
And you’d probably catch something nasty, too.
And if she was right? Anna wondered if she should have a blood test or something done, somewhere, anonymously, but she couldn’t come up with the right thing to say. For even if the test was anonymous, a nonanonymous person would draw the blood.

What happened, Miss Leemann? Was this a … “No,” she said,
aloud. “No. What you want to say is the wrong word. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking
rape
.”

“And that’s what it was,” whispered reasonable Anna.

“Who, Miss Leemann?” the person drawing blood would ask. “Who did this to you? Do you know the guy?”

“He is … he was my …”

“He’s your boyfriend?”

“No,” she answered. “Not anymore, and maybe he’s a murderer, and it’s all over anyway. It’s over.”

She noticed that she was kneeling in the snow on the bridge. She was kneeling again.

“And I wonder,” she whispered, still caught up in conversation with a nonexistent person taking her blood in a nonexistent clinic, “I wonder … thinking about it now … he’s got a little sister, and I wonder how much he loves her really and in what way.”

When she heard her own words, the air became colder by a few degrees. “Maybe that,” she continued, “is why he doesn’t let anybody come near Micha. What if Sören Marinke suspected the same thing? And what if that was the reason he had to die?”

She thought of Micha in her pink down jacket with the artificial fur collar, of her pale blond braids, of Abel’s fingers running through her hair. She thought of Micha’s bed. There’s room on it for the two of us, Micha had said to her, or something like that. There’s room for Abel and me. Was Abel doing what he had said Rainer Lierski would do?

Was he … another hard word … hurting … horrible … was he abusing Micha?

She stood up. “I have to do something,” she said, but she said it in such a very low voice that she could barely hear the words herself.
“I have to find the truth. I have to talk to somebody about all of this, somebody who exists, somebody real. Possibly the police, the ones who are trying to find Marinke’s murderer …”

Before she left the bridge, she closed her eyes for a moment and saw the picture of Micha’s schoolyard again: how Abel flew across that yard, meeting Micha in the middle, swirling her around in the clear winter air. And she felt again how he’d hugged her tight in their literature class, in the tower made of newspaper pages. No. She couldn’t talk to anyone. And least of all to the police.

She just couldn’t. Part of her—unreasonable Anna—still loved him. Maybe she would never stop loving him.

Anna hadn’t only lost her hold on reality, she’d lost her flute as well. She’d had the flute with her that night, in her backpack. Stupid enough in the cold. The flute had borne silent witness to what had happened in the boathouse. After, she’d wrapped it in Abel’s dark-blue knitted sweater and stashed it in her closet. She’d called her teacher and told her she couldn’t make it to this week’s lesson.

It had been a long time since she’d played the piano in the living room. She had stopped piano lessons a while back, deciding to concentrate on the flute instead. The final music exam only required you to play one instrument, but on that instrument you had to be pretty perfect. Now she went back to the piano. The piano seemed safer somehow, something neither Abel nor Micha had touched with their presence. She practiced her flute pieces on the piano. That was crazy, of course; she couldn’t hide the flute in her closet forever.

She no longer felt a part of the small, domestic scenes in her everyday life. She saw Magnus feed the robins. She saw Linda cut vegetables in the kitchen. She contemplated them from the
outside, like painted scenes. She, Anna Leemann, was on the other side of these pictures, with no real connection to any of the things happening within.

On Tuesday morning, there was another white envelope on the floor in the hall that someone had pushed through the mail slot. White as snow, white like white noise … with her name on it. She tore it up into tiny white flakes and let it snow into the trash. She returned to school. She saw Abel walk through the schoolyard outside. He looked up—maybe he sensed her there—she looked away. She felt dizzy all of a sudden.

In her head, Gitta, who wasn’t there, whispered … words, angry words:
Don’t you start thinking that rubbish again, blaming yourself, little lamb. You know what they ought to do with guys like that? I’ll tell you. I’ve got some disgusting ideas for how to punish them …

Anna tried to avoid the student lounge during break time, but Frauke, whom she’d met in the corridor, pulled her inside. She was afraid Abel would be there. And he was. He was sitting on the radiator, at the back of the room, rolling a cigarette he would have to smoke outside. He looked up when she came in, just for a second, and then turned away. He couldn’t run away—he was trapped in that corner by the amorphous mass of other students—and Anna couldn’t turn on her heels and leave either, without Frauke asking her what was the matter. It was an impossible situation.