The Storyteller

by Antonia Michaelis

  At that very moment, the woman Micha had spotted seemed to notice that she was getting dangerously close to the shipping canal, where dark water was coming through the thin layer of ice. She stood there for a moment, as if undecided, then turned and went back toward the beach, the way she’d come, pushing the stroller in front of her. Two children, about two and three years old, were running around her in circles, like young dogs, pushing and shoving each other. The woman herself was wearing a coat and a head scarf; she looked a little like people in those photographs from 1945, fleeing from the Russians, walking over the ice. But probably, she was just part of the curious crowd that had gathered by the police tape on the beach.

  “I think,” Abel said as he looked into his empty cup, “it’s time to go home. Anybody need to go to the bathroom before we head out?”

  Micha nodded, and, when she’d left, Abel leaned forward, closer to Anna.

  “Mrs. Ketow,” he whispered. “Micha didn’t recognize her, but I’m pretty sure it was her.”

  “Now we’ve got everyone gathered here,” Anna said. “Everyone who’s got anything to do with the fairy tale. Apart from the haters, but they don’t live anywhere near, do they? Apart from them, everyone’s here.”

  “No,” Abel said in a low voice. Then he took something from his pocket and put it on the table in front of her. It was a bank statement. “You were right.”

  Anna’s eyes scanned the paper. The amounts of money going in and out of the account were ridiculously low, not much more than a child’s pocket money. Only at the very end, there was a bigger amount. One hundred euros, drawn from a cash machine in Eldena.

  “That wasn’t me. I didn’t take that out,” Abel said. “That was her. Now she’s starting to take our money.”

  “Michelle,” Anna said.

  Abel nodded. “She’s the only other person who can use this account. I wonder if I should close it. Or change the password. But I probably can’t even do that because I’m still not eighteen. She’s the only one who can do that. In any case … she hasn’t gone off to God-knows-where to start a new life.” He looked around, looked over the heads in the café and outside at the people walking over the ice, at the harbor, at the beach of Eldena. “She’s here. Somewhere close. I just haven’t spotted her yet.”

  Anna went home with Abel and Micha. It just happened. Or maybe the little queen had decided that she should; maybe she had scratched words into the dirt on some invisible windowpane: TAK HER HOM WITH YOU, like K IS EacH Oth ER.

  Abel made spaghetti. And that night, Anna almost believed that Linda was right. That everything would turn out okay. Abel was standing in the tiny kitchen, humming a melody to himself, wearing a makeshift apron like some backyard chef; Micha was painting a picture for school in the living room, a “what I did this weekend” picture; and Anna was cutting up tomatoes. From time to time, she went into the living room to look at Micha’s artwork. First, a flute appeared; then, a piece of cake seemed to grow out of the flute; then, a red tulip was growing out of the cake; then, red police tape was slung around the tulip … and then Anna discovered someone who Micha said was Abel and someone she said was Anna—the two of them discernible only by the color of their hair—and, in the end, a green square filled the rest of the paper. On the square, she’d written “Hop” and drawn a yellow triangle: a green ship with a yellow rudder. A gray animal was flying in the middle of the picture—it might have been a dog, but it might just as well have been an elephant. Abel and Anna kissed in the kitchen for too long, forgetting the boiling tomato sauce, which spilled over the rim of the saucepan and onto the stove. They wiped it away and laughed. How absolutely, wonderfully all right everything was!

  “How can I be so happy,” she whispered, “when there’s a murderer walking free somewhere out there?”

  “Go on being happy,” Abel said as he painted a circle on her cheek with some tomato sauce. “Maybe it’s contagious. I hope so.”

  They ate the spaghetti at the small living room table, and Abel didn’t say anything when Micha decided that it was easier to eat it with her fingers. “Now there’s only one last thing to do before you go off to bed,” Abel finally said. “Remember what we wanted to do today?”

  Micha twirled a blond strand of hair around her finger. “Cut my hair.” She produced a tragic sigh.

  “Yep,” Abel said. “Today is hair-cutting day. If there weren’t any hair-cutting days, we’d all end up running around like wild people and nobody would recognize us anymore. Just imagine, you come to school one day and your teacher asks, ‘And who might this wild child be?’”

  “She wouldn’t ask that,” Micha giggled. “Mrs. Milowicz only asks when she can talk to Mama, but she asks that all the time.”

  “Soon,” Abel said. “Tell her, soon, Micha.”

  Then he fetched sharp scissors and a comb from the little bathroom, and Anna watched as he combed Micha’s blond hair. “Snow hair,” he said. “Polar bear hair. When she runs around in the sun in summer, it turns even lighter … nearly white.”

  Anna saw his hands slide through that snow hair, saw them handle the scissors. She imagined those hands in her own hair, imagined those hands doing things that had nothing to do with hair cutting. Tonight, she thought, tonight when everything’s all right, maybe … maybe I won’t go home tonight. Will he leave after Micha’s gone to bed? Does he have to meet someone in town? Or will he stay? Does he want what I want?

  “Hold still,” Abel said. “You know these scissors are sharp. So sharp you could cut someone’s neck with them and kill him.” The scissor blades reflected the light of the ancient living room lamp hanging from the ceiling. Micha was fidgeting on the sofa, fed up with holding still. “Stop it!” she demanded. “You’re tickling me, and you’ve cut off enough! It’s my turn! Give the scissors to me …” She half-turned to snatch them from Abel, and that was when it happened: Abel’s hand slipped. He cried out; Micha screamed; Anna saw the glittering metal of the blades sail through the air and land on the floor. She looked at Abel’s fingers. There was blood on them.

  “Fucking hell!” he shouted. “Micha, are you crazy? What was that about?”

  “You cut my neck!” Micha cried out. “Now I’ll die and it’s your fault!”

  Abel found a handkerchief and pressed it to the place where the blood came from. It was just a tiny cut on Micha’s neck, a scratch made by the scissor tip when it grazed her skin. It was nothing really, but Micha kept on crying, and Abel pulled her into his arms and hugged her while pressing the handkerchief against her neck.

  Anna breathed again. Suddenly dizzy, she had to sit down in one of the armchairs. Nothing had happened, and still the whole scene seemed symbolic—blood on a person’s neck, blood like the blood from a bullet wound—and she thought of Rainer and of Sören Marinke in his ice-cold grave beneath the sand and snow.

  “Just a tiny little pain,” he sang softly, “three days of heavy rain … three days of sunlight … everything will be all right …” He held her like a much smaller child, the child she’d once been.

  She stopped crying and finally freed herself from his arms. “Am I still bleeding?”

  “No,” Abel said. “The singing’s done the trick. It always does. You know that.”

  Micha nodded. “When I was small,” she explained to Anna, trying to sound very grown-up, “and I fell and hurt my knees, we always sang that song.” She wiped the last tears from her face. “And it always, always stopped the bleeding, didn’t it? Can I get one of those teddy-bear Band-Aids?”

  Abel lifted her up—another gesture from former times, from when she’d been smaller—and carried her to the bathroom to find the Band-Aid. Suddenly, Anna thought: she’s growing up. One day, she’ll be too big to be carried around like that. One day, he won’t be able to hold onto her, she’ll move on, and he’ll be left all alone. Maybe the responsibility for Micha is more of an anchor than a burden. A lifeboat. A wooden plank to hold onto so you don’t drown. She shook her head to rid i
t of these thoughts. She could hear Abel and Micha laughing in the bathroom; she heard water running, the accident with the scissors already forgotten, and everything was all right again, just as the song said. When Micha came back to the living room to say good night, she was wearing turquoise pajamas, stamped with a lopsided Mickey Mouse, who obviously had trouble focusing his eyes. She proudly showed Anna the green Band-Aid with the teddy bear, which was stuck to her neck. A trophy. And then the door of her room shut behind her, and Abel flopped down onto the sofa.

  Anna put Magnus’s bottle of wine on the table. “Let’s drink away that scare.”

  He nodded his head, went to the kitchen, and came back with a corkscrew and two water glasses. “Looks like we don’t have wineglasses.”

  “I’d drink it from the bottle with straws,” she said. “But I do need some of it now.” She sat cross-legged in the armchair and held out her glass. The wine hadn’t turned to vinegar yet. Fortunately.

  “Bad luck seems to really feel at home here lately,” Abel murmured. “Since Michelle left, it’s settled in like it wants to stay forever. It follows us out the door, sticks behind us like a dog. You can run as quickly as you want to, but it’s always quicker.” He picked something up that had fallen under the table and looked at it, a small thing resembling a shaver.

  “Is that a … hair trimmer?” Anna asked doubtfully.

  Abel nodded. “Hair-cutting day. I’m wondering what will happen when I switch this thing on.”

  “Buzz cut,” Anna said.

  He nodded again. And then Anna stood up and took the trimmer from his hands and set it aside. “If I promise not to stab and kill you with them, and to stop drinking till I’m done,” she began, “would you give me those scissors? I don’t want you to look like someone you’re not. Ever again.”

  “Tell me … where’s that sweatshirt of mine?”

  She reached into her backpack, grinning. “Linda washed it. I only realized when it was hanging on the line.”

  He shook his head. “Just be careful, Anna Leemann,” he said seriously, “that you don’t try to change me into someone I’m not.” But he gave her the scissors anyway, and she stepped behind the sofa, took the comb, and started pulling it through his hair, like he’d done to Micha’s before. Snow hair, ice hair, was it white in summer, too? She couldn’t remember—she hadn’t looked at him once last summer. He’d been there, at school, but not existing. The sound of the cutting blades made her shiver.

  “Magnus asked me to tell you something … from him,” she said. It was just as well he had to keep still now, she thought, because then he also had to listen to her. “My father … We’ve been talking about a few things. Not about everything, not about Sören Marinke, for example. But about the fact that your mother left … and that money isn’t exactly raining down from the sky. I know you don’t want charity. Don’t move, I’m dangerous with these scissors. But he said he’d like to offer you something. He’d lend you the money, and later, when you’ve finished school, when you have a job … you can pay him back. He’d be in no hurry to get the money. You could pay it back, slowly, no matter how long it took. It would be a loan without interest, not like a bank … that would be the advantage …”

  Abel didn’t say anything. For a while, there was only the sound of the scissors. Outside, cars were racing by. Anna heard her own breath. She heard the pounding of her heart. Finally, she put scissors and comb on the table. “That’s it. Done. Not a buzz cut but still shorter than before.”

  “Thanks,” he said. She followed him into the bathroom and looked into the mirror from behind him. He was smiling. “You should think about becoming a barber. I mean … I know that’s why you’re taking finals. Ha! Look, I’m not sure about your father’s offer. I mean, I don’t know him.”

  “No,” Anna said. “Me neither, to be honest. I just know that he likes feeding the birds in our yard and that he loves my mother. That’s all.”

  “More than I’ll ever know about my father,” Abel said. “I don’t even know his name. About university … I told you we only have that one account. Well, that’s not quite true. We do have another one. One that was opened a long time ago. For school. I don’t work only so that we have something to live on. I also work to be able to put money into that account, so that, later, everything can be different … for Micha … that’s what matters most, that things will be different for her than from how they’ve been for me. It’s not enough, of course, the money in that account, not yet. I’ll think about your father’s offer. Give me some time.”

  “Okay.” She put her arms around him and kept looking into the mirror, looking at the two of them. “Do you have to go out tonight?”

  “No.” He looked down at her arms slung around him. She thought he’d remove them, but he didn’t. “The only thing is … I’d like to go out to the beach,” he said. “People say they come back, don’t they?”

  “Who?”

  “Murderers. They come back to the site of the murder. Now, at night, when nobody else is at the beach … maybe we’ll meet someone there. Maybe not … maybe it’s crazy. Probably it is.”

  “It is,” Anna said. “But I’ll go with you. And you know what else we’ll take along? That bottle of wine. If we don’t meet a murderer, we can sit in the snow and drink wine. I feel like doing something stupid tonight.”

  The beach lay in the light of a vague half-moon, long and gray. Up in the night sky, clouds chased each other. It was windy and ice-cold. Anna wore one of Abel’s sweaters under her coat. They walked along the beach side by side. Abel had stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his military parka. Anna knew that she wasn’t allowed to touch him now. There were too many unwritten rules. She carried the wine bottle in her backpack. She would try to change these unwritten rules, to rewrite them, to loosen their hold … The police tape, senseless in the night, was singing in the wind like a violin out of tune, a strange, unreal sound. The square separated from the rest of the beach by the tape was like a grave. They stood there for a while, at the rim of the pit that no longer held a body. How long would they leave the tape there? What was it good for now? The snow had long since covered old footprints, and now there were new ones—dozens, hundreds of new ones. Maybe the police were hesitant to remove the tape out of respect, respect for the dead, as if his death would become a fact only when this last reminder of him had vanished—the senseless tape between the senseless metal poles stuck in the sand. The taped-off grave was at the far end of the beach, near the little hut where the university surfing program kept its boards in the summer. One of the two official entrances to the beach was behind it. In the summer, you had to buy a ticket to enter. Right behind the entrance gate, the woods—the Elisenhain—used to begin, its high beech trees towering over the farthest sand dunes. Now there weren’t many beeches left, and instead a tarred driveway led through tidy yards to a new housing development, the one where Gitta lived. The woods had receded and now began behind the development, on the far side of Wolgaster Street.

  Anna wondered if the murderer had come from the woods. If he had walked through the neighborhood, past the sterile, modern block in which Gitta lived, past its huge glass windows, past the few trees leftover from former times … if he had walked through the gate in the fence that was open to everyone in winter, had hidden behind the surfers’ hut to wait for his victim … “At night,” she said. “I imagine it happened at night. Or someone would have seen it.”

  She let her eyes wander along the beach, and, for a moment, she thought she saw someone at the other end. But there was no one.

  She must have been mistaken. And if there was someone lurking behind the surfers’ hut right now, someone with a weapon …? And if someone was waiting in the dark shade under the trees, behind the fence …? If someone was standing near the houses closest to the beach, holding a pair of binoculars, looking their way …? The island of the murderer was empty. He was close, very close. It was as if she could feel his eyes on her.

&
nbsp; “Abel,” she whispered. “What are you thinking about?”

  He had clenched his fist around the police tape and was staring down into the pit from which they’d pulled Sören Marinke’s body. “I’m wondering if he had children,” Abel said. “Strange. I didn’t think about that before.”

  “They didn’t say anything about children on the news. So I think probably not.”

  “Or a wife. A girlfriend. Anybody. Anybody who cared about him. I wonder who’s crying for him.” He shook his head. “Let’s go. There’s nobody here. It was a stupid idea to come.”

  Black shadows filled their footprints in the beach like puddles, the blackness grabbing their ankles as they walked. At the other entrance, closer to the mouth of the river, Abel took Anna’s hand. Their bicycles stood next to the lonely little ticket counter, but they left them there and walked on, over to the small fishing harbor off the bank of the river. In summer, a few sailing boats were docked near the fishing boats, and it was here that Anna had met Rainer when he’d lured Micha onto a boat that wasn’t his. Now there were only a few stray cats tiptoeing along the docks; maybe some of them were blind. Where the wind had cleared the dark ice of snow, the half-moonlight was reflected in the frozen river.

  “Sometimes I can’t tell the difference anymore,” Anna whispered, “between beauty and desolation. Isn’t that weird? Sometimes I don’t even know if I’m extremely happy or extremely sad. It happens a lot when I think of you.”

  They sat on one of the benches along the shore and drank Magnus’s wine from the bottle. It was too cold not to be close to each other, so the unwritten rules were softened. They sat, huddled together like winter birds on a branch. The wine warmed them a little, from inside.

  “When these final exams are over, I’m going to write,” Abel whispered. “About everything. Not just a fairy tale for Micha. About the beauty and the desolation. About the cold of these nights. There are words for everything … you just have to find them. I want to sit at a writing desk that is so big I could sleep on it, and I want to see the sea from there. I’ll have it one day … it’s going to be so big that Micha can sit on it and watch me write. Or she could draw a picture to go with the words.”