The Storyteller

by Antonia Michaelis

  “‘Wait!’ the little queen said. ‘Maybe they want to come with us.’

  “The man shook his head. ‘No,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘I think it’s much nicer with just the two of us. They’d only disturb us.’

  “‘Jump out, little queen!’ the rose girl shouted, and the lighthouse keeper shouted, ‘Come back!’

  “‘She’s my passenger now!’ the man shouted back. ‘You don’t have any say in the matter!’

  “The little queen saw the rose girl take a deep breath before the girl shouted, even louder than she had shouted before, ‘Do you remember what the white mare told you?’

  “‘The white mare?’ The little queen thought about that. ‘She said that I must run … as fast as I can … to the highest cliff … and if I meet a man wearing my name …’ The man still had his sleeves rolled up and, suddenly, the little queen saw the tattoo on his right bicep. When he saw where she was looking, he quickly pulled the sleeve down, but she had already read the letters there. And her heart turned ice-cold from fear. ‘Who are you?’ she asked the man.

  “‘You can call me father,’ the man said.

  “‘I’ve got to go now,’ the little queen said, and then she jumped overboard and started swimming toward the shore. But the water was as ice-cold as her heart. Even colder. The waves, she thought, are beautiful, but they are dangerous … They will devour me … Then she felt somebody lift her out of the water and carry her to the beach. It was the rose girl. The roses that she wore seemed to fend off the cold and protect her slender body. She put the little queen down on the beach, and the lighthouse keeper shook his head and pointed at the rowboat. The man in it was removing his fleece-lined vest and his old sweater; underneath he wore a red gown. A diamond was embroidered onto the sleeve of the blood-red material in exactly the same place the man had his tattoo—a tattoo of the little queen’s name.

  “He turned his boat and slid away, without a sound, toward a dark shadow in the water beyond, back to where he’d come from. Toward the black ship with its black sails.

  “‘Oh, let’s stay here!’ the little queen cried. ‘This is the only place where I am safe from him and the other hunters on the ship!’

  “‘If you really want to stay,’ the rose girl said, ‘take this necklace.’ And she put a garland of fresh, blooming roses over the little queen’s head. When the little queen turned her head, the thorns of the stems cut into her skin, and a trickle of blood ran down her neck and dyed the artificial fur collar of her jacket red. And the little queen was afraid.

  “‘I worried this would happen,’ the rose girl sighed as she took the necklace away. ‘Go back to your own ship, little queen. Only the rose people can live on Rose Island.’

  “She accompanied the little queen and the lighthouse keeper back to the pier, and the lighthouse keeper, from sheer nervousness, was already smoking his third pipe.

  “‘Rose girl … how did you know what the white mare said to me?’ the little queen asked.

  “‘When your island sank, the wind carried her words over the sea,’ the rose girl answered. ‘The others didn’t hear them, but I did. I heard the breaking of the trees, the bursting of the rocks, and the last words of your white mare. And I knew you were in danger, and I was worried about you even then, though I didn’t know you. But now I know you. And now, I’m even more worried.’

  “The rose girl laid her pale hands on the little queen’s shoulders, and the two looked at each other for a long time. On the rose girl’s nose there were five tiny freckles, which distinguished her from the other rose people.

  “‘I am fed up with seeing nothing but roses, day after day,’ she whispered. ‘Can’t I sail with you and take care of you, little queen?’

  “‘You can,’ the little queen said, ‘but I don’t know what will happen to us. Maybe we will die out there on the blue sea.’

  “‘Maybe,’ the rose girl said, smiling.

  “The lighthouse keeper helped the rose girl aboard. The little queen helped Mrs. Margaret, who was a little vain and had donned a rose petal for a hat. But all of a sudden, the silver-gray dog was standing on the pier barking. He jumped over the green railing of the ship, bared his teeth, and ripped the branches from the rose girl’s arm, and the roses covering that arm withered instantly.

  “‘What are you doing?’ the little queen shouted angrily. ‘She has just saved me! The hunter with the red gown wanted to take me away in his rowboat, but she took me back to the shore! You just didn’t see it because you were here, on this side of the island …’

  “The silver-gray dog dove back into the water with an angry snarl and disappeared. The green ship sailed on, though, and the little queen worried that maybe she would never see the sea lion or the dog again. And she felt a prick of pain in her diamond heart.

  “But in the morning, there was a bouquet of white sea roses next to the bed in the cabin, where the rose girl had slept. They were the kind of sea roses that grow only far out in the sea and only in winter. Somebody must have plucked them from the froth on the waves. Possibly a sea lion. The rose girl smiled. But there, behind the green ship, were black sails, very close, much too close, and the little queen was cold in spite of her down jacket.”

  Abel looked down into his cup. He drank the last bit of hot chocolate, which was long cold. He gazed out at the sea in the February dusk. Silently. Maybe he had used up all his words. Micha tore a little corner from the paper napkin and put it on Mrs. Margaret’s head, like a white rose petal.

  “I think I … I’ll be back,” Anna said and got up. “Too much tea. Rose-hip tea …”

  Anna was alone in the tiny room that led to the ladies’ room. She stood in front of the mirror, combed her dark hair behind her ears with her fingers, and leaned forward, over the marble counter with the two built-in sinks, so far that the tip of her nose nearly touched the tip of her reflection’s nose.

  It was true. She had five tiny freckles there. You couldn’t see them unless you were really close. She took a deep breath and splashed her face with cold water. “Thank you,” she finally whispered. “Thank you for the sea roses. It doesn’t matter that you destroyed the roses on my arm with your teeth. They were unnecessary anyway.” And then she smiled at her mirror image. It seemed beautiful all of a sudden.

  Abel and Micha weren’t talking about the story when Anna returned to the table. They were talking about school, Micha’s school, and about a picture she had painted there. And about Micha’s teacher with the blond curls: Mrs. Milowicz, whose name Micha never managed to spell correctly and who’d been wanting to talk to Micha’s mother for a long time now.

  “She can talk to you instead, can’t she?” Micha said, shrugging. “I told her that. Like she did on the first day of school, back then.”

  “Yes,” Abel answered, but he looked away, out at the sea.

  “Didn’t your mother come on that first day?” Anna asked, and then was immediately sorry that she’d asked.

  “Mama doesn’t like school,” Micha said to Anna. “She always has other things to do. And sometimes she has to sleep in really late in the morning, if she’s been out the night before. Abel, what I wanted to tell you before was we had to draw a fish, and I made one with a whole lot of colorful scales, and you know what I can write now? X. Even though you never need it. It’s strange what you learn in school, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, strange.” Abel laughed. “Why don’t you tell Anna about the time you had to learn about the inner parts of the eye, and nobody understood a thing …”

  He didn’t want to talk about Michelle. Anna was getting the impression, more and more, that Michelle just happened to live in the same flat as Abel and Micha, who also just happened to be her children. It sounded like Abel had been taking care of Micha for a long time, even before Michelle had disappeared. Maybe since Micha was born.

  How old had he been then? Eleven? When Rainer was living in that small apartment, too … and then they had thrown Rainer out.

  A
nna tried to pay the bill, but Abel’s eyes turned cold once more, and she let it be. “We don’t need charity, but thanks,” he said quietly. She nodded.

  Outside, in front of the café, it was difficult to say good-bye. Anna couldn’t find the right words. She wanted to say “see you tomorrow,” but she didn’t know whether Abel would talk to her tomorrow or whether he would go back to behaving as if he didn’t know her. Abel stood beside her smoking. Micha jumped up and down in the snow, her pink down jacket with the artificial fur collar bouncing, her boots making as many weird footprints as they could.

  “The problem is, we don’t get full social services,” Abel said all of a sudden. “Not without Michelle. She has to go in and sign for it herself. We get the children’s allowance. That’s something, at least.”

  “How many bank accounts do you have?” Anna asked.

  “Just one.”

  “And you said you’re getting the children’s allowance, so I take it you’re drawing from that account, right? Michelle’s not the only one who can, right?”

  “Of course. I’m the one taking care of the fucking household.” He laughed. “I’ve been doing that for a long time now. Michelle, she … well, she had problems. Drinking, for example. Not only that, though.”

  Anna nodded. “If that’s the only account, you can check to see if anybody else is withdrawing money. And from which ATM. Maybe that’s the way to find out where she is. I mean, she has to live on something. She’ll need money.”

  Abel didn’t say anything for a moment. “She hasn’t taken out any money,” he murmured finally.

  “You’re sure? Did you check?”

  He nodded. “Nothing’s been taken out.” But Anna wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. She wanted to say, You know where she is! Why don’t you tell someone? Don’t you want her to come back … even a little bit? Or are you protecting her? From what? From whom?

  “If I can do anything,” she began, and then she realized how stupid she sounded. “I mean, I could lend you something … it wouldn’t be charity then …” He shook his head, smoking in silence. Micha made baby footprints in the snow, using the sides of her fists, and Anna remembered doing the same thing when she was a child. Linda had showed her how.

  “Where I live everything is so different,” she said. And suddenly she heard herself telling him things. About the blue light; about Magnus; about Linda, who was nearly invisible; about the single rose in the garden; the robins; England; Gitta’s glass wall, through which you couldn’t see anything worth seeing; and the easy-to-clean furniture—and when she mentioned Gitta’s mother disinfecting the white sofa, Abel started laughing.

  He ground out his cigarette in the snow with his foot and looked at her. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s … it’s good to not always be doing the talking.” He unlocked his bike, helped Micha onto the carrier, and pulled the black woolen cap down over his ears. “About charity,” he said, before he rode away. “You know … you could donate the eighteen euros. The ones I owe you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Abel turned around to look at Micha, who was busy stuffing Mrs. Margaret deeper into her pocket and whispering to her that she’d be cold otherwise. Micha wasn’t listening.

  “You gave me twenty,” Abel said quietly. “Two is what that blister pack was worth.”

  “I … I don’t understand …”

  “I was afraid you’d really take some of that stuff. You looked so determined.” And he smiled, his smile gliding past her, out to sea. “Lucky nothing was written on the back of the package. Tylenol. I sold you Tylenol. Children’s Tylenol.”

  Then he rode away, and Anna stood there alone, in the snow. She felt an absurd, sparkling laugh creep up her throat and shake her whole body.

  “Young lady,” said an elderly gentleman, who had just come down the staircase of the café with his wife on his arm, “young lady, can I offer you my handkerchief? You’re crying.”

  “Oh,” Anna said. “Really? I thought I was laughing. Stupid mistake.”

  It didn’t matter that she had canceled their date.

  He told himself that it didn’t matter. Why should it? He stood on the beach alone and looked out over the ice. It was nearly thick enough to walk on. No. He wasn’t alone. There was the dog—the dog that probably wondered why, over the past few days, Bertil had taken it out so often.

  Bertil made a snowball and threw it as far as he could, out onto the ice, by now surely thick enough to bear the weight of the dog. He watched the silver-gray flash run over the frozen sea.

  He was lucky they let him have the car so often. It had surprised him in the beginning, but with the car, he was less conspicuous; he became a part of the traffic, and she didn’t realize that he was following her, didn’t have the slightest idea how close he was. He knew even now where she was. He could have thrown a snowball over the Ryck and hit the window of the café, where she was sitting at the table. She couldn’t escape him. She would come to understand how much she needed him. His presence. His care. She didn’t understand it now, but in time she would.

  He wrote her name in the snow and knew he was being childish, ridiculous. But hers was such a beautiful name, a name that sometimes filled his whole head—and nearly burst it. ANNA.

  THE STUDY DATE WITH BERTIL GOT POSTPONED TO Saturday, and Gitta said that she would come, too. Couldn’t they work on math and physics? She could definitely use a little help with physics before the test next week, and Frauke, from Anna’s literature class, said that she could use some help as well—and in the end, they met at Anna’s house, which was in town and easier for most of them to get to.

  “So, Bertil, it looks like you’re the rooster in the henhouse,” Gitta said, and Bertil grinned.

  “I guess the hens aren’t clever enough to help each other out with math and physics,” he said good-naturedly, and he patiently answered their questions for three full hours. Anna watched him get absolutely lost in his role as professor (and rooster), and she tried to listen and to understand what he was saying. But that turned out to be difficult. Her mind was elsewhere.

  Abel hadn’t spoken to her all week. On Wednesday, she had tried to catch his eye in literature class because he wasn’t sleeping for a change, but she didn’t have any luck. Had the rose girl left the ship again, disembarking on an unknown, bare, and rocky island, where she could do nothing but watch the white sails disappear behind the horizon?

  “My God, Anna.” Bertil shook his head, and his glasses slid down his nose. “You really don’t get this, do you? Musicians shouldn’t have trouble with math—they say the parts of the brain that process math and music are next to each other! Where’s your head today?”

  Anna saw the friendly, indulgent professorial look in his dark eyes. But his look wasn’t just friendly, it was also curious; and she wondered if he really had followed her on Tuesday after all.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever understand things like integrals,” she replied. “And to be honest, I don’t believe anyone in our class really does; they just act like they do. Let’s take a break.”

  “Oh yes, please,” Gitta said. “Freaks like Bertil can go for three hours without oxygen, but I can’t. Who wants to join me in Anna’s perfect garden for a smoke?”

  On the rosebush, in front of the wall with the winter-brown honeysuckle, a second rosebud had opened. The flowerbeds were covered in snow. Gitta’s voice was too loud for the robins, which fled deeper into the entangled branches. Anna, freezing in her sweater, thought, “If I were standing here with Abel, the robins would stay. Maybe even more of them would come. Robins from all over town. They would perch on the branches quietly, their little heads inclined thoughtfully, listening to his fairy-tale words …”

  Magnus joined them and bummed a cigarette from Gitta. “Bertil,” he remarked, “you’re the rooster in the henhouse, today.” And everybody laughed, because this time, Bertil rolled his eyes.

  “So what are all of you doing after graduation?” Magnus asked. />
  “I’ve got no idea,” Gitta replied. “My mother wants me to go to university, of course, but I’m not going to go just because she wants me to.”

  “Well, it’s too bad, isn’t it, if you can’t do things that you might enjoy simply because you’ve got to be rebellious,” Magnus said, grinning.

  “I’m going to stay here and study business administration,” Frauke said. Frauke’s parents had rebelled against their parents when they were young. Frauke had grown up in the chaos of a communal farm, and the most rebellious thing that she had ever done was to not be rebellious and to iron her shirts instead. Anna sighed.

  “What about you, Bertil?” Anna asked, just to be friendly and also because she realized that she had never bothered to ask him before. “What are you going to do?”

  “Army,” Bertil said as he blew a smoke ring into the winter air. All these people and all their strange reasons for doing things, Anna thought. Bertil, for example, probably smokes only because nobody expects him to.

  “Come on, Bertil,” Gitta said. “The army? That’s not the place for you! You’ll be trampled to death there, poor lamb.”

  “And have fun in Afghanistan,” Frauke added. “What was it someone said? All soldiers are murderers …”

  “Tucholsky,” Bertil nodded. “He was right. Back then. In Germany. But you can’t compare now to then, Frauke. German soldiers are in Afghanistan to protect the civilians and to bring order to the chaos.”

  “Oh, are they …,” Frauke said.

  Magnus put out his cigarette in the ashtray that Anna had made of clay when she was a little girl and given to him for his birthday. It was supposed to be a bird, but it looked more like a hippopotamus. She loved her father for still using it. “You go ahead and solve the world’s problems without me,” he said, smiling on his way to the door. “I’m too old for discussions like this.”

  “Seriously, Bertil,” Gitta said when Magnus had gone. “Do you really want to join the army? You wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone aim a weapon at someone.”