The Storyteller (5 page)

The entrance to the dining hall was a chaos of people and bicycles, conversations and phone calls, weekend plans and dates. For a moment Anna was afraid she wouldn’t spot Abel in the chaos. But then she saw something pink in the crowd, a small figure spinning through a revolving door. Anna followed. Once inside, she climbed the broad staircase to the first floor, where the food was served. Halfway up she stopped, took her scarf from her backpack, tied it around her head, and felt absolutely ridiculous. What am I? A stalker? She took one of the orange plastic trays from the stack and stood in the line of university students waiting for food. It was odd to realize that she’d soon be one of them. After a year off working as an au pair in England, that is. Not that she’d study here—the world was too big to stay in your hometown. A world of unlimited possibility was waiting out there for Anna.

Abel and Micha had already reached the checkout. Anna squeezed past the other students, put something unidentifiable on her plate—something that could be potatoes or could be run-over dog—and hurried to the checkout counter.

She saw Abel tuck a plastic card in his backpack, a white rectangle with light blue print on it. All the students seemed to have them. “Excuse me,” she said to the girl behind her, “do I need one of those cards, too?”

“If you pay cash, they’ll charge you more,” the girl replied. “Are you new? They sell those cards downstairs. You’ve gotta show them your student ID. It’s a five-euro deposit for the card, and you can load it with money in the machine near the stairs and …”

“Wait,” Anna said. “What if I don’t have a student ID?”

The girl shrugged. “Then you’ll have to pay full price. You’d better find your ID.”

Anna nodded. She wondered where Abel had found his.

Even at full price, the cost of run-over dog wasn’t especially high. And so soon Anna was standing at the checkout with her tray, scanning the room for a little girl in a pink down jacket.

She wasn’t the only one craning her neck in search of someone; a lot of people seemed to be similarly occupied. The pink jacket had disappeared, and there wasn’t a child with thin blond braids anywhere. Anna panicked; she’d lost them forever and she’d never find them … she’d never talk to Abel Tannatek again. She couldn’t pretend to buy more pills she’d never use. She’d go to England as an au pair and never find out why he was the way he was and who that other Abel was, the one who had tenderly lifted his sister up into the air; she would never …

“There are some free tables in the other room,” someone next to her said to someone else as two trays moved past her, out the door. Anna followed. There was a second dining room, across the corridor and down the stairs to the right. And on the left, behind a
glass wall, right in the middle of the second room, was a pink jacket.

The floor was wet with the traces of winter boots. Anna carefully balanced her tray as she wove through the tables—it wasn’t that she was worried for the run-over dog, that was beyond saving—but if she slipped and fell, dog and all, it would definitely draw everybody’s attention. The pink jacket was hanging over a chair, and there, at a small table, were Abel and Micha. Anna was lucky; Abel was sitting with his back to her. She sat down at the next table, her back to Abel’s.

“What is that?” a student next to her asked as he contemplated her plate with suspicion.

“Dead dog,” Anna said, and he laughed and tried to spark a conversation—where was she from, somewhere abroad? Because of the head scarf? Was it her first semester, and did she live on Fleischmann Street, where most students lived, and …

“But you said you’d tell me a story today,” said a child’s voice behind her. “You promised. You haven’t told me any stories for … for a hundred years. Since Mama went away.”

“I had to think,” Abel said.

“Hey, are you dreaming? I just asked you something,” the student said. Anna looked at him. He was handsome; Gitta would have been interested. But Anna wasn’t. She didn’t want to talk to him, not now. She didn’t want Abel to hear her voice. “I’m … I’m not feeling good,” she whispered. “I … can’t talk much. My throat … why don’t you just go ahead and tell me something about you?”

He was only too happy to oblige. “I haven’t been here for long. I was hoping you could tell me something about this town. I’m from Munich; my parents sent me here because I wasn’t accepted anywhere else. As soon as I am, I’ll transfer …”

Anna started eating the dead dog, which was indeed potatoes (dead potatoes), nodded from time to time, and did her best to block out the student and switch to another channel, the Abel-and-Micha channel. For a while there was nothing but white noise in her head, the white noise between channels, and then—then it worked. She stopped hearing the student. She didn’t hear the noise in the room, the people eating, laughing, chatting. She heard Abel. Only Abel.

And this was the moment when everything turned inside out. When the story that Anna would take part in truly began. Of course, it had begun earlier, with the doll, with the Walkman, with the little girl waiting in that grim, gray schoolyard. With the wish to understand how many different people Abel Tannatek was.

Anna closed her eyes for a second and fell out of the real world. She fell into the beginning of a fairy tale. Because the Abel sitting here, in the students’ dining hall, only a few inches away, amid orange plastic trays and the hum of first-semester conversation, in front of a small girl with blond braids … this Abel was a storyteller.

The fairy tale into which Anna fell was as bright and magical as the moment in which he’d spun Micha in his arms. But beneath his words, Anna sensed the darkness that lurked in the shadows, the ancient darkness of fairy tales.

Only later, much later, and too late, would Anna understand that this fairy tale was a deadly one.

They hadn’t seen him. None of them. He had disappeared, dissolved in the crowd of students; he had turned invisible behind his orange tray with the white plate and unidentifiable contents.

He smiled at his own invisibility. He smiled at the two of them sitting over there, so close and yet at different tables, back-to-back.
They were here together and didn’t know it. How young they were! He’d been young once, too. Maybe that was the reason he still went to the dining hall from time to time. It wasn’t like back then of course; it was a different dining hall in a different town, and yet here he could visit his own memories.

He watched the two at their separate tables as if he were studying a painting. No, not two. Three. There was a child with Abel, a little girl. So here he wasn’t the school drug dealer; here he was someone else. And Anna Leemann, with her head scarf, which she thought would keep people from recognizing her; Anna, too, was a different Anna. Not the nice, well-bred girl. They were actors performing roles in a school play. And him? He had a role, too …

Some roles were more dangerous than others.

Anna lifted her head and looked in his direction; he hid his face behind a newspaper like an amateur detective. He’d stay invisible for a little while longer …

“
TELL ME ABOUT THE ISLAND,” MICHA SAID. “TELL
me what it looks like.”

“I’ve told you a hundred times.” Abel laughed. “You know exactly what the island looks like.”

“I forgot. The last story was so long ago! A thousand years ago! You told me about the island when Mama was still here. Where’s she now?”

“I don’t know, and I’ve told you that a hundred times, too. The note she left only said that she had to go away. Suddenly. And that she loves you.”

“And you? Didn’t she love you, too?”

“The island,” Abel said, “is made of nothing but rocks. Or should I say, it
was
? The island
was
made of nothing but rocks. It was the tiniest island anyone can imagine, and it lay far, far out at sea. On the island, there lived a single person, a very small person—and because her favorite place was the cliffs, the very top of the cliffs,
where she could look out over the sea—because of that, they called her the cliff queen. Or, actually, it was only she who called herself that, for there was no one else.

“The birds had told her about other islands. They had also told her about the mainland. The mainland, the birds said, was an unimaginably huge island, over which you could wander for weeks on end without ever reaching the shore on the other side. That was something the little cliff queen couldn’t picture. To walk around her own island took only three hours, after which you’d be where you started. And so, for the little queen, the mainland remained a faraway, unreal dream. In the evening, she told herself stories about it, about the houses that had a thousand rooms each, and about the stores in which you could get everything you longed for—you had only to lift things down from the shelves. But actually the cliff queen didn’t need a thousand rooms, nor did she need stores full of shelves. She was happy on her tiny island. The castle in which she lived had exactly one room, and in this room, there was nothing but a bed. For the little queen’s playroom was the island’s green meadows and her bathroom was the sea.

“Every morning, she braided her pale blond hair into two thin braids, put on her pink down jacket, and ran out into the wind. Mrs. Margaret, her doll with the flower-patterned dress to whom she could tell everything, lived in the pocket of the down jacket. And in the middle of the island, in a garden of apple and pear trees, a white mare grazed all day long. When she felt like it, the little queen raced across the island on the horse’s back, quicker than a storm, and she laughed out loud when the mane of the white mare fluttered in the breeze and her scarf was carried away by the wind. The mare’s scarf, of course. The cliff queen didn’t need a scarf;
she had a collar made of artificial fur on her pink jacket, but she had knitted a scarf for the white mare. She had learned to knit at school.”

“But there isn’t anyone living on the island! Did you forget? How can I go to school?”

“Surely there must have been a school,” Abel said. “There was exactly one teacher. She was the cliff queen herself, and one headmistress, who was also the cliff queen, and one pupil, who was the cliff queen, too. She had taught herself how to knit, and for the mare’s scarf—it was green—she had given herself the best grade possible. And …”

“That’s silly!” Micha giggled.

“Well, who is the cliff queen, you or me?” Abel asked. “It isn’t my fault if you’re giving yourself grades! By the way, it was always summer on the island. The little queen was never cold. When she was hungry, the cliff queen plucked apples and pears from the trees, or she fetched her butterfly net and climbed to the top of one of the cliffs to catch a flying fish, which she fried over a fire. She made flour from her field of wheat, and sometimes she baked apple cake for herself and Mrs. Margaret. The cake was decorated with the island’s flowers—blue forget-me-nots, violet bellflowers, and red and yellow snapdragons …”

“And the tiny white flowers that grow in the woods?” Micha asked. “What’s their name—anemones? Were they there, too?”

“No,” Abel said. “And now it’s time for the story. But, Micha? Do you remember all those other stories I’ve told you about the little cliff queen? The story about the empress made of froth and the one about the melancholy dragon? The story about the sunken east wind and the giggling whirlpool?”

“Of course, I remember. The cliff queen makes everything turn out okay, doesn’t she? She always does.”

“Yes,” Abel answered. “She does. But this story is different. I don’t know if she’ll manage this time. I don’t know what will happen to her. This story is … dangerous. Do you still want to hear it?”

“Of course,” Micha said. “I’m brave. You know that. I wasn’t scared of the dragon. Even though it wanted to eat me. I solved all its problems, and then it was happy and flew away and …”

“Okay … if you are sure you’re ready to listen, I will tell you the story. It will take some time.”

“How long? As long as a movie? As long as reading a book?”

“To be exact … till Wednesday, the thirteenth of March. If everything turns out all right, that is.” He cleared his throat, because all storytellers clear their throats when their stories are about to get interesting, and began: “One night, the little queen awoke and felt that something was happening outside. Something big and meaningful. She lay motionless in her bed—it was a canopy bed, the canopy being the night sky itself, for there was a big hole in the ceiling above. Usually the little queen saw the stars when she awoke at night. This night, however, the sky was empty. The stars had run away, and she felt a pang of fear in her heart. She felt a different kind of fear than she had with the melancholy dragon or the empress made of froth. And all of a sudden, she understood that her adventures up to now had been nothing but games. But this—whatever it was—was serious.

“She owned two dresses—one nightdress and one day dress—and that being so, she was the person with the most dresses on the island. Now she put the red day dress over the blue nightdress,
because if something important happens it’s better to wear warm clothes. In the end, she put the down jacket on, too, with Mrs. Margaret sleeping in one of its pockets. Then she pulled up the collar of artificial fur and stepped out into the night. It was very quiet. Not a single bird was singing. Not a single cricket chirping. Not a single branch rustling its leaves. Even the wind had died down. The little queen walked to her pasture, and there the white mare stood, looking as if she had been expecting her. Later, the little queen did not know how she could see the white mare in the starless darkness, but see her she did. If you have known someone your whole life, you can see her in the dark.