The Storyteller

by Antonia Michaelis

  “Right,” Anna said. “He’s trying to get me interested. By not talking to me. Congratulations on your logic, Gitta.”

  “But … it does make sense!” Gitta lit up the umpteenth cigarette and gestured with it. “He plays hard to get, lets you suffer for a while, and then …”

  “Stop waving that cigarette around,” Anna said, getting up, this time not giving Gitta the chance to pull her back down. “You’re going to set your living room on fire.”

  “I’d love to,” Gitta replied. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t burn very well.”

  • • •

  She had to try. She would try. If Abel talked only to the people he sold stuff to, she’d buy something. The thought was daring and new, and she needed another day to pluck up the courage.

  A day of watching Abel, first in lit class, in which he never said a word. He was also in her biology class and math. Silent. He fell asleep during the lectures. She wondered what he did at night. She wondered if she really wanted to know.

  It was Friday when she finally decided to take the next step. Tannatek was hanging out near the bike rack, near the end, where only a few bicycles were stashed. His hands were deep in his pockets, the earplugs of his Walkman in his ears, the zipper of his military parka closed right up to his chin. Everything about him looked frozen, his whole figure like an ice sculpture in the February cold. He didn’t smoke; he just stood there staring at nothing.

  The schoolyard was nearly empty. On Fridays most people hurried home. Two guys from eleventh grade came over and spoke to Tannatek. Anna stopped dead in her tracks—standing in the middle of the yard, stupidly, she waited. She felt herself losing heart. She thought she saw Tannatek give something to one of the boys, but she wasn’t sure; there were too many jacket sleeves and backpacks in the way to see clearly. She hoped he would say, “Me? You think I’m selling dope? That’s a lot of crap!” And the whole thing would turn out to be just another Gitta story.

  The boys left, Tannatek turned and watched them go, and somehow Anna’s feet carried her over to him.

  “Abel,” she said.

  He started and then looked at her, surprise in his eyes. It was clear no one called him by his first name. The surprise retreated behind the blueness of his gaze, a blue that narrowed as it waited, as if asking: what do you want? He was a lot taller than she was, and his broad, hunched shoulders made her think of the dogs that people kept in the Seaside District. Some of them had old German runes burned into the leather of their collars … suddenly, she was afraid of Tannatek again, and the name “Abel” slipped out of her head, made itself small, and crept into a hidden crevice of her brain, out of sight. Ridiculous. Gitta had been right. From a distance, Anna had dreamed up a different Tannatek than the one standing in front of her.

  “Anna?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I … I wanted … I wanted to ask you … ask …” Now she had to go through with it. Damn. All the words in her head had been obliterated—by a broad-shouldered, threatening figure. She took a deep breath. “There’s gonna be a party at Gitta’s place,” she said—a white lie. “And we need something to help us … celebrate. What exactly do you have?”

  “When?” he asked. “When do you need something?”

  It didn’t work like this. Stupid child, she thought, of course he wasn’t carrying around kilos of the stuff; it would have to be delivered later. He was reading her thoughts. “Actually …,” he began, “wait. Maybe I’ve got something for you. Now.”

  He looked around, reached into the pocket of his parka, and took out a small plastic bag. She leaned forward, expecting some sort of powder; she didn’t know much about these things. She had tried Google, but Google Drugs hadn’t been invented, a problem that Google would certainly rectify soon … He took something out of the milky-white plastic bag with his thumb and forefinger. A blister pack. Anna saw that there were still a couple of blisters left in the bag … and they were full of pills. The ones he held out to her now were round and white.

  “You said it’s for celebrating?” he asked, his voice low. “Like … staying awake, dancing, having a good time?”

  Anna nodded.

  Tannatek nodded, too. “Twenty,” he said.

  She took a twenty-euro note out of her purse and put away the blister pack quickly. There were ten tablets. The price didn’t seem high to her.

  “You know how to use that stuff?” Tannatek asked, and it was obvious that he figured she didn’t.

  “I don’t,” Anna answered. “But Gitta does.”

  He nodded again, put the money away, and grabbed the earplugs of his old Walkman.

  “White noise?” Anna asked, but by now she didn’t really want to continue the conversation; she only asked so that she could tell herself later that she hadn’t been too scared to ask. Her heart was racing inside her chest. All she wanted to do was run away—far away from the schoolyard, from Tannatek, the fighting dog, from the white tablets in her purse, far, far away. She longed for the cool silver of her flute in her hands. For a melody. Not for white noise, for a real melody.

  She didn’t expect Tannatek to hand her one of his hopelessly ancient earplugs again. But he did just that. The whole I’ll-try-to-understand-the-Polish-peddler-thereby-turning-into-a-more-interesting-person project suddenly made her nauseous.

  What floated through the earplug into her head was not white noise. It was a melody. As if someone had heard Anna’s wish. “It’s not always white noise,” Tannatek said. The melody was as old as the Walkman. No, a lot older. “Suzanne.” Anna had known the words by heart since she was small.

  She gave the earplug back, perplexed.

  “Cohen? You’re listening to Leonard Cohen? My mother listens to him.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “so did mine. I don’t even know how she got into him. There’s no way she understood a word. She didn’t speak English. And she was too young for this kind of music.”

  “Was?” Anna asked. The air had grown colder, just now, about five degrees. “Has she … died?”

  “Died?” His voice turned hard. “No. Just disappeared. She’s been gone for two weeks now. It doesn’t make much of a difference anyway. I don’t think she’ll come back. Micha … Micha thinks she will. My sister, she …” He stopped, looked up from the ground, and leveled his gaze at her.

  “Have I lost my mind? Why am I telling you this?”

  “Because I asked?”

  “It’s too cold,” he said as he pulled up the collar of his parka. She stood there while he unlocked his bike. It was just like when they had first spoken—words in the ice-cold air, stolen words, homeless-seeming, between worlds. Later, one could imagine that one hadn’t said anything.

  “Doesn’t anybody else ask?” Anna said.

  He shook his head, freed his bike. “Who? There is no one.”

  “There are a lot of people,” Anna said. “Everywhere.” She made a wide sweep with her arm, gesturing to the empty schoolyard, the concrete block that was their school, the trees, the world beyond. But there was no one. Abel was right. It was only the two of them, Anna and him, only they two under the endless, icy sky. It was strangely unsettling. The world would end in five minutes.

  Nonsense.

  He managed to free his bike. He pulled the black woolen hat down over his ears, nodded—a good-bye nod, maybe, or just a nod to himself, saying, yes, see, there is no one. Then he rode away.

  Ridiculous—to follow someone through the outskirts of town on a bicycle on a Friday afternoon. Not inconspicuous either. But Abel didn’t glance back, not once. The February wind was too biting. She rode along behind, down Wolgaster Street, a big, straight street leading into and out of town to the southeast, connecting the city with Gitta’s sterile housing development; with the beach; with the winter woods full of tall, bare beeches; with the fields behind them; with the world. Wolgaster Street passed by the ugly concrete blocks of the Seaside District and the district of “beautiful woods.” The German Democratic Republic
had been quite ironic when it came to naming city districts.

  Leaving the endless stream of cars behind, Abel crossed the Netto supermarket parking lot and turned through a small chain-link gate, painted dark green and framed by dead winter shrubbery. Once inside, he got off his bike. A chain-link fence surrounded a light-colored building and a playground with a castle made of red, blue, and yellow plastic. On the NO TRESPASSING sign on the gate, the ghost of a black spray-painted swastika skulked. Someone had crossed the nasty image out, but you could still see it.

  A school. It was a school, an elementary school. Now, long after the bell had rung to announce the weekend, it was bereft of life and human breath. Anna pushed her bike into the dense shrubbery near the gate, stood beside it, and tried to make herself invisible.

  At first, she thought Abel was here on business: Ding-dong—the Polish peddler calling! The frame of the big modern front door was made of red plastic; someone had taped a paper snowflake to the window. An attempt to make things nicer, friendlier: it felt strained somehow; like forced cheerfulness, it belied the desolation Anna saw. It made the cold February wind seem harsher.

  Anna watched as Abel walked across the empty schoolyard; she wondered whether there was a limit to desolation or whether it grew endlessly, infinitely. Desolation with a hundred faces and more, desolation of a hundred different kinds and more, like the color blue.

  And then something strange happened. The desolation broke.

  Abel started running. Somebody was running toward him, somebody who had been waiting in the shadows. Somebody small in a worn, pink down jacket. They flew toward each other, the small and tall figures, with arms outstretched—their feet didn’t seem to touch the ground—they met in the middle. The tall figure lifted up the small one, spun her around through the winter air, once, twice, three times in a whirl of light, childish laughter.

  “It’s true,” Anna whispered behind the bush. “Gitta, it is true. He does have a sister. Micha.”

  Abel put down the pink child as Anna ducked. He didn’t see her lurking. Talking to Micha, he turned and walked back to his bicycle. He was laughing. He lifted the little girl up again and placed her on his bike carrier, said something else, and got on the bike himself. Anna didn’t understand any of his words, but his voice sounded different than it did at school. Somebody had lit a flame between the sentences, warmed them with a bright, crackling fire. Maybe, she thought, he was speaking a different language. Polish. If Polish burned so brightly, she would learn it. Don’t fool yourself, Anna, Gitta said from inside her head. You’d probably learn Serbo-Croatian if it helped you talk to Tannatek. Anna replied angrily: his name is Abel! But then she remembered that Gitta wasn’t there and that she’d better hunker down if she didn’t want to be spotted by Abel and Micha.

  They didn’t see her. Abel rode by without looking left or right, and Anna heard him say, “They’ve got Königsberg-style meatballs today; it’s on the menu. You know, the ones in the white sauce with capers.”

  “Meatballs Königsberg,” a high child’s voice repeated. “I like meatballs. We could take a trip to Königsberg one day, couldn’t we?”

  “One day,” Abel replied. “But now we’re on a trip to the students’ dining hall and …”

  And then they were gone, and Anna couldn’t hear any more of what they said. But she understood that it was not a different language that illuminated Abel’s sentences, neither Polish nor Serbo-Croatian. It was a child in a pink down jacket, a child with a turquoise schoolbag and two wispy, blond braids, a child who clung to her brother’s back with gloveless little hands, red from the cold.

  To the commons. We’re on a trip to the student dining hall.

  The university dining hall was in the city, near the entrance to the pedestrian area. Anna went there from time to time with Gitta. The dining hall was open to the public, had inexpensive cakes, and Gitta was often in love with one of the students.

  Anna didn’t follow behind Abel. Instead, she took the path along the Ryck, a little river running parallel to Wolgaster Street. There was a broad strip of houses and gardens between the street and the river so you couldn’t see from one to the other. She rode as fast as she could, for the route along the Ryck, with all its bends and turns, was longer. The gravel here clung together in small, mean, icy chunks. The thin tires of her bicycle slipped on the frozen puddles, the wind blew in her face, her nose hurt with the cold—yet something inside her was singing. Never had the sky been so high and blue, never had the branches of the trees along the river’s edge been so golden. Never had the growing layer of ice on the water sparkled so brightly. She didn’t know if this excitement was fueled by her ambition to find out something that nobody else knew. Or by the anticipation of finding out.

  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.
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br />   “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.