The Storyteller (42 page)

“I’m sorry,” Bertil said, “for what I’ve done. Maybe it wasn’t the right way to … I just wanted the truth to be known.”

“I want the truth, too,” Anna said, and suddenly, she felt light, weightless even. “And I know the truth now. I know who didn’t shoot Lierski and Marinke.”

“Excuse me?”

“Was it you?”

“Me? Have you lost your mind completely?”

“That description better suits someone else in this conversation,” she said. “Just tell me if you shot them.”

“Sure, I run around at night shooting people I don’t even know,” Bertil replied with a weird laugh. “Now, that’s logical.”

“How did you know that Marinke was shot at night?”

“I just assumed he was. In daylight, it would have been too hard to shoot someone at the beach of Eldena without a witness, wouldn’t it? But, Anna. I have nothing at all to do with this mess. The only person I know who’s connected to all three of them is Tannatek.”

“Three,” said Anna. “So you know it’s three …”

“Knaake’s accident … it’s all over school. Everyone’s talking about it.”

“He fell through the ice.”

“He did?”

“Bertil.” She nearly laughed. “Isn’t it strange? Everything you do achieves the exact opposite of what you intend. That car ride in the snow, for instance … you wanted to prove to me that I need you to save me, but you made me afraid of you. And now … now I know that Abel hasn’t shot anybody. I wasn’t sure until now, but now I am.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re talking to me at this very moment. Because you’re still alive after what you’ve done.”

She hung up on him and unlocked the front door.

There were voices coming from the living room. She stood there, listening. One of the voices was Linda’s, but the other one didn’t belong. It was the high-pitched voice of a young woman … Anna recognized it, but she couldn’t remember where from. She put away her coat and shoes and followed the voices.

Micha’s teacher with the unpronounceable name was sitting on the sofa, next to Linda.

“Anna,” Linda said. “This is my daughter.”

“I know.” Mrs. Milowicz managed a strained smile. “We’ve already met.”

The hand she reached out to Anna was smooth and cool. “What happened?” Anna asked.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Linda said.

“No!” Anna felt panicked. “I want to know what happened!”

Then she sat down, or rather dropped down into one of the armchairs, and stared at Micha’s teacher. She was so young, so blond, her light green blouse so springlike, and, all of sudden, Anna wondered what Michelle had looked like. She’d never seen a picture of her.

“Why don’t you say something?” Anna asked. “Say something! Please! Where … where are they?”

“Where are who … what?” Mrs. Milowicz asked.

“Micha told her she lives here,” Linda explained. “It sounds like a white lie. Mrs. Milowicz has been asking her for her address so she could speak with Micha’s mother, and this is where she’s ended up.”

“That’s … all?” Anna asked.

Mrs. Milowicz nodded and blew a crumb from her spring-green blouse. “I’m worried about her. Her brother, who seems to take care of her, well he’s … well, he’s a little scary, to be honest. I find him a bit threatening. And the way he shields his little sister from … everyone … from me, for instance … in private, I mean … that is … I don’t know. It’s strange. But you’d know more. You know him. Your mother told me that … he might just make a bad impression … and that my worries are unnecessary.”

Anna looked at Linda. Thank you, she thought. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The light-green spring blouse wriggled into a light-green spring coat in the front hall. There was even a light-green spring hat made of felt and adorned with a blue flower. Micha’s teacher was pretty in her spring clothes. Anna would’ve liked to have had such a teacher, back then, when she’d been six years old. Not anymore, though, she thought.

“I also planned to talk to Abel’s teacher,” Mrs. Milowicz said. “We had an appointment. But he didn’t show up.”

“No,” said Anna.

And then the door shut behind her, behind the burst of light-green spring.

“Thank you,” Anna said to Linda, aloud now. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“And what,” Linda asked, “is going on now?”

It took her all afternoon to explain. The words were too hard to say. She almost wished that Gitta were there so that she could tell Linda; Gitta had no problem with hard words.

“Gitta would say …” she whispered in the end, “that he’s a hustler.”

“I’d use another word,” Linda offered. “In the movies, he’d be known as a gigolo …”

“No,” Anna said and looked down at the floor. “A gigolo is someone you call if you’re a woman, someone who provides a service in a professional way and doesn’t have a problem doing it … someone who may even have fun with you … especially in the movies. It’s not so negative, is it? This is different. It’s only guys, older guys. And we’re talking about someone who’s not gay. And I don’t know when he started the whole thing. It’s possible that he’s been doing it for a long time … He’s seventeen, Linda, like me … it’s all so wrong. It’s not so difficult to clench your teeth, he said, it’s not so difficult …”

Linda tried to pull her into her arms, but Anna got up and stepped back. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But please, don’t touch me. Not now. I have to find him, Linda. I have to find him, but I don’t know where to look anymore.”

She stood at the window of her room for a long time and watched the drops fall outside. Right now, in the forest, she thought, the first anemones would be blossoming in the melting snow. She hadn’t told Linda anything about the boathouse, and she never would. She’d never tell anybody.

When it was dark, Linda came in, silently as always, nearly invisible. “Anna,” she said. “Just one thing. Your father … I’m not going to tell him anything about this. And maybe it’s better if you don’t either.”

“Okay,” Anna said. “Okay. Thanks. Linda, I … I’ll go now. I
don’t know how many bars there are in the city, but I have to at least try to find him. He must be somewhere …”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Linda asked. She was serious.

Anna shook her head. “Tell Magnus that I’ve gone out with Gitta.”

Strange, she thought, when she left the house. Hadn’t it always been the other way around? Tell Linda that I’m fine … tell Linda that she doesn’t have to worry … let’s not tell Linda about it, she’ll just be alarmed. Nothing seemed to stay the way it had been since she had met Abel. He still didn’t answer the phone.

He wasn’t there. He was nowhere. He’d vanished, dissolved, disappeared into thin air, melted away like the snow in the thaw. She’d never been in so many bars in a single night. She hadn’t known that there were so many. Students’ town, she thought. She wouldn’t study here; she hadn’t ever planned to, but today it had become an impossibility. She had to leave this place as soon as possible. She had to leave it and go far, far away.

After a while, she got better at walking into a bar and looking over the heads in the crowd as if searching for someone. Well, she was … she was searching for someone. She forced herself to ask. People knew him, of course. Some of them gave her a smile of pity.
Poor little girl
, was written in their faces,
you’re searching for that guy? You don’t think he’s waiting for you, do you? What kind of adventure do you think you’re having?
She wondered how many of them knew. Did the whole city know more than she did? The part of the city that existed
beyond well-lit school desks … beyond the blue air and the robins in nice little backyard gardens … far away from the freshly painted, sleek fronts of old, renovated houses?

It was after two when she reached the student dining hall. The student dining hall offered music on Thursday and Saturday nights, but today was Monday … still, she heard music spilling out onto the street. Obviously, there was some kind of party going on down there, some kind of unscheduled event. She was tired. She wanted to go home. She would have just walked past the dining hall, but somebody called her name. Gitta. And suddenly, she was thankful for Gitta’s presence. She drifted through the darkness toward her, as if she were a safety buoy.

Gitta was standing in the black night in her black clothes, smoking. Next to her were a group of other smokers whom Anna didn’t know. Gitta said something to them, put an arm around Anna’s shoulders, and walked her a couple of paces away.

“Little lamb,” she said. “I fucked up. I was too late. I’m sorry.”

Hadn’t she lost Gitta? Or had Gitta forgiven her for not letting her in, for shutting the door in her face, for hardly talking to her anymore …?

“I should have been faster,” Gitta went on. “He’d just said his last insane sentence when I got to the secretary’s office. I was so mad, I knocked him down. Don’t you ever get mad?”

“Yes,” Anna said. “Often. Much too often. You knew about it already, didn’t you?”

“About Abel?” She drew on her cigarette. “Possibly. Is that important?”

“Yes,” Anna said. “It’s important because you didn’t tell me.
Gitta … thank you. But it doesn’t change anything. I’m here because I’m looking for him. To tell him it doesn’t change anything.”

“Don’t you go and say ‘I love him’ now or I’ll start crying,” Gitta said. Then she hugged Anna, her cigarette in her outstretched hand, and her face seemed indeed to be wet.

“You haven’t found him, have you?” she asked, her voice a little hoarser than usual.

“No.”

Gitta pointed to the black hulk of the student dining hall with her cigarette. “Try in there, my little lamb.”

At first, they didn’t want to let her in. The bouncers wanted to see her ID. Anna didn’t have it with her, of course, but she was eighteen … This was ridiculous … She was looking for someone, damn it … Could she just take a look to see if he was there? No, she didn’t have any beverages in her bag that she planned to consume inside the club. What was all the fuss about? She covered her face with her hands for a moment, took a deep breath, went up to one of the bouncers, stood on her toes, and kissed him … on the cheek, but still. “Thank you so much,” she whispered. “Thanks for letting me in.”

She felt his eyes following her. He hadn’t planned to let her in. She disappeared into the crowd of sweating bodies trying to get rid of—or get into—jackets and coats near the door. There was a single room in which you could dance; chaos ruled the long bar; the old tables and benches along the wall were filled with sweaters, glasses, beer bottles, and more bodies. It took her a while to get used to the darkness, which was pierced and flecked by the shimmering light of a disco ball. The music was as loud as a construction site. She felt
the bass in the soles of her feet, in the tips of her fingers, in the roots of her hair. The outlines of the bodies around her melted into one another; black light interrupted, broke, shattered the images into a thousand tiny pieces of a puzzle she would never complete. On one bench, she saw a couple kissing, but she couldn’t find them again moments later. Had it just been two jackets? It was impossible to find anyone in this confusion. Why had Gitta told her to look in here? Was he here? Had she seen him? Why hadn’t Gitta joined her?

Because, she thought, if I find him, I have to find him on my own.

And then she did. She found him.

He was sitting in the far corner, on a bench behind a table stacked with jackets and sweaters. It was stupid, but the thing that caught her eye was his black woolen hat. First, she hadn’t thought it was him. There were dozens of people with black woolen hats like his. But when she squeezed her way through people and chairs around the table and sat down next to him, she could see that it was him. He was sitting there, leaning against the wall behind him. For a moment, she thought he was asleep. He wasn’t. His eyes were open, staring at the blob of bodies on the dance floor. It looked as if the earplugs of his Walkman had just slid out of his ears, as if he’d tried to listen to white noise even in here—or maybe to the incomprehensible words of the old Canadian—but then given up. He was still wearing his military parka, despite the unbearable heat, and holding a half-empty bottle of beer.

She put her hand on his, and only then did he take note of her and turn his head, with unnatural slowness. Something like a smile appeared on his face. It was a bitter smile, bitter like his voice on Bertil’s recording.

“So?” he said, and she leaned over to hear him through the noise. “So, did you come to talk to the outlaw?” Something was wrong with his voice … it wasn’t just bitter. “That’s what it is, right?” he went on. “A … a beautiful story. The princess and the outlaw. The underdog. The pariah.” He spat the words into her face, and now he was laughing. “How come the best … the best descriptions come from India, country of castes?”

“It’s you who knows about words, not me,” Anna answered. “And right now, you’re talking nonsense! Abel! I’ve been searching for you! I’ve been searching for you all day!”

“Search … for someone else,” Abel said. His voice was still strangely slow, and then Anna saw that there was something wrong with his eyes as well. The ice in them had eaten up the pupils; the thaw had set in everywhere, she thought; the hole in the ice had grown bigger and bigger, but here, in Abel’s eyes, the opposite seemed to have occurred. The dark windows of his pupils were nearly frozen over.

“Shit,” she said. “What did you take?”

His hand moved through the air, a gesture meaning nothing and everything. He put his beer bottle on the table, an exercise that seemed to require maximum concentration. “Is that … important?”

Anna grabbed his shoulders and started to shake him, and he just let her. There was no tension under her hands; he was a bundle of clothes. “You said you don’t take the stuff you’re selling!” she shouted against the noise of the music. “You said …”

“Let go of me, princess,” he said with a weird smile that she didn’t like. “Said, said. Did you actually believe me?”

“Yes!” Anna shouted. “I did! I did believe you, you idiot!”

“It was true, too,” he said, and suddenly, he found enough strength to slap away her hands. He knocked the beer bottle over in the process, and the beer leaked out onto the table. He seemed not to realize, and he put his arms in the puddle on the table and his head on top of them as he’d done on the mornings he’d slept through literature class. Finally, he turned his head to face her, his changed eyes meeting hers. “True,” he repeated. “It was true. I told you … I can’t afford to lose my head … with Micha … but now it doesn’t matter anymore. Not one bit.”