The Storyteller

by Antonia Michaelis

  “And me?” Anna asked. “Is there a place on that desk reserved for me, too?”

  “You’ve got your own place in the world,” Abel answered. “You’ll go away and forget us. Aren’t you planning to go to England as an au pair? You don’t need us. You’ve got your music and … everything … there isn’t any room for us.”

  “Crap,” Anna said. “I don’t even know if I want to go to England anymore. Maybe I’ll stay here. Will you build a drawer in your writing desk so that I have somewhere to sleep when it’s raining?”

  She put the bottle down and kissed him; she pushed the unwritten rules far, far away; she undid the buttons of her coat, the zip on his sweater she was wearing; she wanted to take his hand in hers, again, as she’d done on her parents’ sofa.

  He freed himself and stood up. “Let’s go back to the bikes. It’s getting late.”

  But they walked arm in arm. They walked slowly, taking a detour around the huge boathouse where the university sailing-club boats were dry-docked in winter. Anna let her fingers glide along the fence. And then she stopped. “The door,” she whispered. “The door is open. The door of the boathouse. See that? Do you think someone’s in there right now?”

  They stood in the darkness, listening intently. There was nothing.

  “Somebody forgot to lock it up,” Abel said. Anna pulled him with her. “Come on!” she whispered. “We can have a look at the boats! Maybe there’s a green one with a yellow rudder …”

  “There are just small boats in there,” Abel said. “Why do you want to go in? We …”

  “Come on,” Anna begged. “Let’s do something stupid! It’s not every day you find an open boathouse full of sailboats!” She let go of him, took a few steps toward the entrance, and spun around once, twice, three times—her open coat flying, whirling around her like a dress. She spun and spun, her face turned up to the night sky, until she felt dizzy. She laughed. She felt reckless, wild. When she stumbled, Abel caught her in his arms and laughed, too, a little hesitantly. “You’re drunk.”

  “And what if I am?” She led him to the open door, pulling him into the boathouse.

  “We can’t …” he began, but she put a finger on his lips.

  “Nobody’s watching us. I want to see the boats. Maybe I’ll learn how to sail one day … do you know how?”

  “No.”

  “There must be a light switch somewhere …”

  “Oh, great … switch on the light, and everybody will know for sure that we’re here. I don’t need any more trouble than I’ve already got. Please, forget about the switch. If you insist on looking at these boats … I’ve got a flashlight …”

  The white light appeared in the darkness. Abel had been wrong. There weren’t just small boats; there were yachts as well, one obviously being worked on. There was a short ladder beside it, a mess of cables on the floor, and next to them, a portable sander. Maybe it was this boat’s owner who’d forgotten to lock up. They wandered among the sleeping boats for a while, Anna touching the curves of plastic and wood with her hand.

  “I’d like to sail on this one once,” she said, “or on that one over there … but none of them are like the little queen’s ship … am I right?”

  Abel shook his head. Then he put a finger to his mouth and switched off the flashlight. Anna listened. Had there been a noise? The noise of running feet? She felt cold all of a sudden. The island of the murderer was empty. She had forgotten all about him. He was close, very close … She stepped closer to Abel, holding onto him like a child, as if she had changed into Micha, a panicky, six-year-old Micha. She felt her heartbeat mixing with his.

  “Abel, we’re not alone in here,” she whispered, “are we?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered back. The running feet were coming closer now, someone was running behind the boats. There was a loud clattering noise … Anna held Abel even tighter. And Abel switched the light on again. Anna closed her eyes.

  A second later, she heard him laugh, relieved. “You can open your eyes,” he said. “It’s not our murderer. It’s a rat.” Anna saw it now, too, a big brown rat sitting under one of the boats next to the bucket it had knocked over, blinking into the light, confused.

  But Anna still felt Abel’s heart beating rapidly in time with her own. She didn’t let go of him, not this time. Instead, she put down her backpack and unzipped his parka. Maybe this was the opportunity she’d needed. The one opportunity she’d get. She wished it was summer. Summer is generous with opportunities, with warm evenings, with beautiful starry nights … with places like beaches or park benches and soft grass on pastures full of flowers. But in this story, all there seemed to be was winter, eternal ice-cold winter. And a boathouse full of sailboats, she thought, was at least free of snow …

  She kissed him again and saw him put the flashlight on the boat next to them. Her hand crept under his sweater, under his T-shirt, and lay on his warm, bare skin—innocent at first—over his heart. She felt its rhythm, and she felt his hand, too; his hand had caught hers and held it captive, but she pulled it free. She had closed her eyes … it was easier to feel with closed eyes …

  Now, she thought, a little dizzy, maybe from the wine. Yes. Now. I’ve got to do it now before courage leaves me. Right now, I’m not Anna Leeman but someone else, someone much more daring …

  They were still locked in a kiss, and Anna’s hand made its way, as if on its own … it found a belt, opened it, found more and livelier body warmth … her coat had fallen from her shoulders. She thought about practical things … that they could use her coat to lie on, that this concrete floor was damned hard, but then, not only the floor … Her other hand discovered one of his hands, somewhere, and pulled it under her own clothes—and then the kiss ended abruptly. She realized that Abel was whispering her name.

  “Anna, please,” he whispered. “Please, don’t do this. It’s not gonna work out … you want to have an adventure … a little girl who wants to have an adventure, but it won’t end well …”

  “Sure it will.” Her lips were so close to his that she brushed them while speaking. “Don’t worry …”

  She let go, but just to get rid of her sweater, the T-shirt … it was a single smooth movement, easier than she’d thought it would be. She unfastened her bra, and then stood there, naked down to her waist. She wasn’t cold. She’d never been warmer. Heavens, she really was drunk. Somewhere in her head a tiny voice said, what are you doing here? This is so not Anna Leemann—what has gotten into you? She ignored the voice.

  She saw that the light of the flashlight painted strange patterns on her breasts—she was a work of art, art of the night. Look, she wanted to say, look, this is all part of the fairy tale. But he averted his eyes.

  “Why are you worried?” she whispered. “Don’t you know more about this than I do?”

  “No,” he whispered, and there was despair in his voice. But she ignored it. He was still looking away.

  “Stop it. I don’t want this, I …”

  Stop it? I’m just starting, she thought with a smile. I’m just starting to live. I’m just starting out in this world. She released his fingers and her hands returned to his body, to depths not yet fully explored, where she found proof that his body did want what hers did. It was obvious. His breathing, close to her ear, was strangely irregular. She smiled at that, too. His breathing was out of rhythm, strained, as if he was holding something back, something violent. He was talking to her again, through clenched teeth, words she didn’t grasp the meaning of. “This … for me … This has nothing to do with … with tenderness, only with … violence … don’t force me …”

  She wasn’t forcing him, was she? Her fingers closed around his erection very gently, as if around something new that only belonged to her, something she was taking possession of. She didn’t know anything, she was just learning, she wasn’t forcing him, no …

  And then, there was something like a click. Like the flick of a switch. All of a sudden. Abel’s passivity left.
His hands tore her hands away, he freed himself, and she thought he’d push her away. But instead, he grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her so fast she couldn’t react.

  “Wait!” she said. His warm body was very close to hers, almost too close now, and his hands weren’t gentle, weren’t careful. She still wanted what he wanted, but it was happening too fast … or did it have to be like this? She wasn’t sure; she didn’t know much about this. He knew better, of course, but … “Wait!” she begged again. “Can’t we … please … you’ve gotta show me, how …”

  It was as if he didn’t hear her. Not anymore. He pushed her down to the floor; she fell onto her knees, painfully, landing on the concrete. She didn’t understand what was happening. But she knew it was wrong. Later, in her memory, she would relive the scene again and again: she tries to get to her feet, but his whole weight is on top of her, and his hands, his hands hold her tight. He is too strong for her. “No!” she whispers, struggling to get free. “Stop it! Not like this … it wasn’t meant to be like this … if it has to be like this, I don’t … please … forget about the whole thing … Stop it! Stop it! I’ll scream …”

  She doesn’t scream. She can’t. He is pressing one hand over her mouth. And that is the moment she knows, there is no going back. That she has lost. All sense of romance is gone. The only thing left is fear, fear of something she doesn’t have any control of. All human glands stop their secretion … this can’t work. Too much raw, dry skin. No liquids to make things slippery, to glide into.

  She thrashes like a trapped animal, trying to hurt him with her fists, but they don’t even touch him. She is helpless, a bundle of stupid, helpless fear, kneeling on the concrete floor of an empty boathouse like in absurd prayer. Everything has happened so quickly, much too quickly. She presses her legs together; he forces them apart with his knee; and then, the sharp pain, the penetration of a foreign body. Violence also works without secretion. That thing behind her, it is not Abel; it is no one she knows; it is something that only makes her afraid, something that hurts her, and, worse, something that wants to hurt her. An animal. The pain tears her apart in the middle. It is everywhere. It was turning her inside out. The light of the flashlight is pale and unearthly. She sees the vague shapes of the boats; she watches the shadows to distract herself from the pain. It doesn’t work. She feels the animal deep, deep inside her. It moves. It pushes her down onto the cold floor, again and again, and the worst thing about it all is its hand, covering her mouth, keeping her from screaming. She closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to see the concrete floor anymore. That doesn’t help either. The pain grows when she can’t see anything anymore; it is grinding her up like the stones in a mill. She won’t survive this; she will give up; she will just give up, she thinks, and die. She only wants it to be over.

  And then it is. It only took seconds. The hand isn’t covering her mouth anymore; the weight on her back is gone. She doesn’t move. She crouches on the floor, on her knees, bent over, with her head on her arms. There is a noise like the breaking of dishes in a kitchen. Glass breaking.

  When she lifts her head, everything is dark. The flashlight. It must have been the flashlight that broke. She hears footsteps running, running away, fleeing. Then everything is quiet.

  She wasn’t sure how long she’d been cowering on the floor. A long time. She’d heard the rat again. Apart from that, she’d heard nothing. There was nobody in the hall. She was alone. No hidden murderer. Just herself … and the memory of what had happened.

  She was bleeding. The blood trickled out of her, together with time. Of course, it wasn’t only blood—it wasn’t only time. There was something else she didn’t want to think about now, a part of an animal—a person—that she didn’t know. She tried to think “Abel,” but the name wouldn’t form inside her head, the letters refusing to get into any order that made sense or was even pronounceable.

  She didn’t cry. Not this time. And finally, she got up, found a tissue, and wiped away the blood between her legs. There wasn’t as much as she’d thought. She put her clothes back on. She realized she was shivering. Her fingers were ice-cold, and she could barely button up her pants. When she walked over to the door of the boathouse, the pain came back. She was limping.

  On the way to her bike, she tried to think the pain away. By sheer willpower. To walk normally so that no one would notice anything was wrong. There was no one around, of course, but there would be tomorrow … Magnus … Linda … people at school. When she thought about school, she felt sick. She would never, ever tell anyone about this. Not even—especially not—Magnus and Linda. And because she couldn’t tell anyone, she told herself.

  “Stupid little girl,” she said to herself, spitting out the words, disgusted. “Stupid little girl; you wanted to have an adventure. There you go. You’ve had your adventure now.”

  And then, as she unlocked her bike, she started humming, a ridiculous old children’s song.

  Just a tiny little pain,

  Three days of heavy rain,

  Three days of sunlight,

  And everything will be all right...

  He’d lost her!

  Damn, he’d lost her. He knew she’d been here, on the beach. He’d seen her with him; they hadn’t seen him of course. The shadows behind the surfers’ hut were deep and dark. But now he didn’t know where to look for her. And he would creep home, sneak past his parents’ room, secretly, like a thief in his own house—something he’d gotten used to doing the last few weeks. The dog wouldn’t give him away. The dog was sleeping deeply. He’d seen to that.

  He’d lost her.

  Somewhere between the beach and the place where the sailboats were docked in summer. He’d been too timid, too bent on not being discovered. The white snow made the nights too bright; it had become more and more difficult to follow her without being seen. He’d given them too much of a lead, and they’d grabbed it like a present and disappeared.

  He returned to the beach, saw the rectangle of the police tape in the distance, heard it crackle in the night breeze. He realized he was shivering. He didn’t want to think of that police tape now, didn’t want to think of the dead body that had lain there, didn’t want to think of the blood slowly trickling down from the wound, dyeing the snow red. He didn’t want to wonder what Sören Marinke’s last thought had been. Of whom he’d been thinking. Maybe Sören Marinke had loved, too.

  He found himself standing on the ice. He walked out, far out. It didn’t matter when he got home—either they would realize he’d been gone or they wouldn’t—and if they did, he could still tell them a story about bar-hopping with friends. He could try to look guilty and hungover. Bar-hopping with friends? He didn’t have friends.

  Not even she wanted to be his friend. Not even Anna.

  He took off his gloves, kneeled down, and burrowed his bare hands into the snow that covered the frozen bay. The snow was very cold. Sometimes he couldn’t fight the thought that it would feel good to lie down in it and to never have to move again. Just to lie there, in the whiteness. Forever.

  ON MONDAY MORNING, THE BLUENESS OF THE LIGHT in the Leemanns’ house had changed. Something had cracked, and a dirty color had seeped through, the color of dried blood.

  “It is my fault,” Anna whispered, sitting on the side of her bed. “I have destroyed the blue light.”

  But there was another voice, a tiny little voice of reason, whispering to her. Your fault? asked this voice. Oh no. It wasn’t you who has destroyed anything. It was …

  Please, said Anna, don’t say that name.

  She took a long, hot shower and washed her hair several times. She hadn’t taken a shower the night before. If she had, Linda would have known that something had happened.

  She’d been afraid she’d find Linda waiting up for her, in the living room, which would have been the end of her; Anna would have dissolved in tears in her arms. For a moment, she’d longed for that. But Linda hadn’t been there. Anna had heard her tossing in bed, next to Ma
gnus; she knew that her mother would sleep only when she was home safe and sound. What was Linda afraid of? Was she afraid of exactly what had happened?

  Anna hadn’t slept. She had lain in her bed silently, staring at the ceiling, waiting for morning to come. Now she sat at breakfast very quietly. She didn’t eat.

  “Is something the matter?” Magnus asked.

  She shook her head. She nodded. She shrugged.

  “Did the two of you fight about something?” Linda asked.

  “Yes,” Anna said, relieved at this chance to explain things. “Yes, I guess you could say we did. I need a little time to think about it.”

  On the floor in the hall, beneath the mail slot in the door, she found a white envelope with her name on it. Abel’s writing. When she touched the envelope, it burned hot in her hands, like the glowing, smoldering tip of a cigarette. She tore it up into very tiny pieces and threw them into the trashcan outside.

  She got onto her bike and rode to school like she did every day: there were two more weeks of classes before the reading period before finals. She still was in pain. On the bicycle seat, it came back, tearing at her insides. She rode past the turnoff to school. She couldn’t go there. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Abel. She didn’t want to see his ice-blue eyes. His eyes would be her undoing. She wondered what she could have read in them last night, in the boathouse. She rode to the city, got off her bike, and wandered the streets aimlessly. She’d lost her hold on reality.

  It had happened once before, after she’d been in Abel and Micha’s apartment the first time, but this time was different. Now it was really gone, and it felt as if it was gone for good. What was reality good for, anyway?

  At some point, she found herself on the pedestrian bridge that led over the river. In summer, this part of the river, the city harbor, was full of big ancient ships. Now it was frozen, too; only the narrow path in the middle, which they kept open for the ships, was glistening like a trickle of unidentified body fluid. She rested her arms on the railing of the bridge and looked over at the restaurant-ship.