The Storyteller

by Antonia Michaelis

  “If I could get my thoughts in order,” she said aloud, “if only I could get my thoughts in order … Maybe I have to talk so I can think. What happened? And what does it mean?”

  She looked around; there was no one who could hear her.

  “I’m afraid,” she said to herself. “I’m afraid again. I have to bring the right questions and answers together. It’s a puzzle. And the first question is, who is Abel Tannatek?”

  A swan waddled over the ice. Dirty and white, swans aren’t beautiful, Anna thought; they’ve never been beautiful, and I wonder who first used that adjective to describe them. It’s the same with the putrid, slimy sunsets over the sea. “If I could flick a switch and turn on a light,” she went on, “then what happened yesterday might be clearer. Then again, maybe it already is clear. Maybe the light was already turned on, on the beach, in the snow … the murderer always returns to the place of the murder. So who went to the beach last night? Who was standing there, right beside me? The wolf in the fairy tale killed his victims by creeping up from behind and cracking their necks. He never looked into their eyes. For had he seen their eyes, he might have pitied them, and he knew that. The wolf knows himself very well.”

  She still felt that warm, heavy weight on her. She felt the creature’s breath on her neck and the pain, and suddenly she felt sick. She crouched down, holding onto the railing of the pedestrian bridge, but her stomach was too empty. The wolf knew himself very well; he had warned her … it had been her fault. It had been her fault. But had it?

  No, said the reasonable part of her. Of course not. Don’t you remember—you have heard men say this about girls, read it in cheap newspapers, and always thought, how stupid and how wrong: she asked for it, wearing those things, drinking too much, flirting … she asked for it, she wanted it. Don’t you remember how you talked about these things with Gitta once and how you both agreed …

  But I did want it, said unreasonable Anna to reasonable Anna.

  Not this, said reasonable Anna. You wanted to have sex with him, that’s all. It would have been the perfect place, a dry place, no snow, no Micha around … a perfect night, too. How could you have known what would happen? You couldn’t. All you saw and felt was your love for him. You were wearing this love like a cloak, safe and warm, you thought … and he tore it apart.

  But he did try to warn me, interrupted unreasonable Anna, realizing how much she sounded like a hardheaded child, trying to change the truth by the sheer force of her will.

  There’s no talking away what happened, said reasonable Anna. Don’t even try it. It happened and it is horrible and you remember what Gitta said, way back when on the leather sofa.

  She remembered, of course. And you’d probably catch something nasty, too. And if she was right? Anna wondered if she should have a blood test or something done, somewhere, anonymously, but she couldn’t come up with the right thing to say. For even if the test was anonymous, a nonanonymous person would draw the blood.

  What happened, Miss Leemann? Was this a … “No,” she said, aloud. “No. What you want to say is the wrong word. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking rape.”

  “And that’s what it was,” whispered reasonable Anna.

  “Who, Miss Leemann?” the person drawing blood would ask. “Who did this to you? Do you know the guy?”

  “He is … he was my …”

  “He’s your boyfriend?”

  “No,” she answered. “Not anymore, and maybe he’s a murderer, and it’s all over anyway. It’s over.”

  She noticed that she was kneeling in the snow on the bridge. She was kneeling again.

  “And I wonder,” she whispered, still caught up in conversation with a nonexistent person taking her blood in a nonexistent clinic, “I wonder … thinking about it now … he’s got a little sister, and I wonder how much he loves her really and in what way.”

  When she heard her own words, the air became colder by a few degrees. “Maybe that,” she continued, “is why he doesn’t let anybody come near Micha. What if Sören Marinke suspected the same thing? And what if that was the reason he had to die?”

  She thought of Micha in her pink down jacket with the artificial fur collar, of her pale blond braids, of Abel’s fingers running through her hair. She thought of Micha’s bed. There’s room on it for the two of us, Micha had said to her, or something like that. There’s room for Abel and me. Was Abel doing what he had said Rainer Lierski would do?

  Was he … another hard word … hurting … horrible … was he abusing Micha?

  She stood up. “I have to do something,” she said, but she said it in such a very low voice that she could barely hear the words herself. “I have to find the truth. I have to talk to somebody about all of this, somebody who exists, somebody real. Possibly the police, the ones who are trying to find Marinke’s murderer …”

  Before she left the bridge, she closed her eyes for a moment and saw the picture of Micha’s schoolyard again: how Abel flew across that yard, meeting Micha in the middle, swirling her around in the clear winter air. And she felt again how he’d hugged her tight in their literature class, in the tower made of newspaper pages. No. She couldn’t talk to anyone. And least of all to the police.

  She just couldn’t. Part of her—unreasonable Anna—still loved him. Maybe she would never stop loving him.

  Anna hadn’t only lost her hold on reality, she’d lost her flute as well. She’d had the flute with her that night, in her backpack. Stupid enough in the cold. The flute had borne silent witness to what had happened in the boathouse. After, she’d wrapped it in Abel’s dark-blue knitted sweater and stashed it in her closet. She’d called her teacher and told her she couldn’t make it to this week’s lesson.

  It had been a long time since she’d played the piano in the living room. She had stopped piano lessons a while back, deciding to concentrate on the flute instead. The final music exam only required you to play one instrument, but on that instrument you had to be pretty perfect. Now she went back to the piano. The piano seemed safer somehow, something neither Abel nor Micha had touched with their presence. She practiced her flute pieces on the piano. That was crazy, of course; she couldn’t hide the flute in her closet forever.

  She no longer felt a part of the small, domestic scenes in her everyday life. She saw Magnus feed the robins. She saw Linda cut vegetables in the kitchen. She contemplated them from the outside, like painted scenes. She, Anna Leemann, was on the other side of these pictures, with no real connection to any of the things happening within.

  On Tuesday morning, there was another white envelope on the floor in the hall that someone had pushed through the mail slot. White as snow, white like white noise … with her name on it. She tore it up into tiny white flakes and let it snow into the trash. She returned to school. She saw Abel walk through the schoolyard outside. He looked up—maybe he sensed her there—she looked away. She felt dizzy all of a sudden.

  In her head, Gitta, who wasn’t there, whispered … words, angry words: Don’t you start thinking that rubbish again, blaming yourself, little lamb. You know what they ought to do with guys like that? I’ll tell you. I’ve got some disgusting ideas for how to punish them …

  Anna tried to avoid the student lounge during break time, but Frauke, whom she’d met in the corridor, pulled her inside. She was afraid Abel would be there. And he was. He was sitting on the radiator, at the back of the room, rolling a cigarette he would have to smoke outside. He looked up when she came in, just for a second, and then turned away. He couldn’t run away—he was trapped in that corner by the amorphous mass of other students—and Anna couldn’t turn on her heels and leave either, without Frauke asking her what was the matter. It was an impossible situation.

  Anna managed to hold herself together. She managed to drink a cup of horrible coffee from the broken coffee machine with Frauke and to talk about nothing for five whole minutes, or rather, to let Frauke talk and pretend she was listening. She’d turned her back on Abel bu
t felt his presence.

  At lunchtime, he was standing at his usual place near the bike racks. Anna saw him from the window—black hat down over his ears, hands in pockets, earplugs in his ears. He’d shut out the world. At one point he talked to two guys—maybe he sold them something; she didn’t see.

  He wasn’t Abel anymore. He’d turned back into Tannatek, the Polish peddler, whose presence at school was a riddle to everybody and whom most people were a little afraid of.

  She wondered if that was it. If things had turned back to an earlier point, if everything was now as it had been before, and if she could just act as if she’d never known him.

  No. Things weren’t how they’d been before. Rainer Lierski was dead. Sören Marinke was dead. And a small girl with pale blond braids and a pink down jacket was wandering over the ice, in a fairy tale, helpless in wind and weather. The weather forecast said there would be a snowstorm.

  “Little lamb,” Gitta said, turning up at Anna’s door in the afternoon, very real now, not just a voice in her head. “Little lamb, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m poring over my books,” Anna replied, standing in the doorway, refusing to let Gitta in. “Why should anything be wrong?”

  “Oh, come on,” Gitta said. “Something’s happened. Between you and Abel. You’re not talking anymore. Do you think we’re all blind? We’re worried about you.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” Anna asked.

  Gitta brushed the question aside with her hand and searched for her cigarettes. “If you won’t let me in, then I’m going to smoke,” she said. “And the smoke will get into the house through the door.”

  Anna shrugged.

  “But you won’t get rid of me so easily. So things didn’t work out, did they? With Abel? The whole thing has run up against a brick wall.”

  “So what?”

  Gitta blew a smoke ring into the cold air. “What do you know about him?”

  Anna narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, what do I know about him?”

  “I mean it just as I said it. What do you know about Abel Tannatek?”

  “Maybe,” Anna said, “the question is what do you know about Abel Tannatek? Is there something you want to tell me? Is that the reason you came?”

  Gitta smoked in silence for a moment. “No,” she said finally. And then, “Sometimes I find myself thinking about that police tape on the beach. It pops into my head that …”

  “Oh, does it,” Anna said, suddenly defensive, “and do you know what sometimes pops into my head? Hennes von Biederitz. And Bertil Hagemann. One of them bragging about what a good shot he is, the other trying not to talk about the fact that he’s probably a good shot, too. Hunting. Bertil was out there on the beach both days before Marinke’s death. He said so himself. As to where Hennes was … I guess you’d know better than I would. Or maybe you wouldn’t?”

  Gitta stared at her, perplexed. “What do these two have to do with anything?”

  “That,” Anna said, “is exactly what I’m wondering.” And she closed the door.

  • • •

  On Wednesday, there was a third white envelope in the hall. When she touched it, it wasn’t glowing like the first one. She would tear it up like the two other envelopes. She would … she saw her fingers opening the envelope, knowing these were the fingers of unreasonable Anna. The paper was filled with tiny haunted letters. There was her name.

  Anna. Anna, are you reading this? I’m not going to stop writing to you.

  I have nothing, only words. I am a storyteller.

  I want to explain something to you. But I can’t. Later, maybe later.

  The words that I will have to find for that explanation will be sharp and they will hurt, much worse than the thorns of roses. There is a reason for what happened. I can’t be forgiven so I am not asking you for forgiveness. We lost each other, and we will never find each other again. Rose girl, the sea is cold and …

  She put the letter back into the envelope and tore it up, into even smaller pieces than the other envelopes. The icy wind took the scraps from her fingers and carried them away with it, high up into the sky like snowflakes falling up instead of down. There were tears burning in her eyes. We will never find each other again. No, she thought, we won’t. Ever.

  The situation at school grew even more impossible. Anna forced herself to go to her literature intensive class. Abel seemed to have forced himself, too. He was even on time and was already sitting at his desk when she came in. Who’d had the bright idea to shape the desks into a U? They sat opposite each other but didn’t look at each other; they looked everywhere else. There were three yards between them, three yards of glass splinters, fleeing footsteps, pain, blood, a hand covering someone’s mouth, the weight of a body, the breathing of an animal. There were two dead bodies between them.

  Once, she looked at him. He’d taken off his sweater. He was sitting there in his T-shirt, and she saw the two circular scars on his upper arm. But now there weren’t just two. There were three. The third one was bigger, or actually longer—a broad line. She looked away, looked again. The line was not a line. It was a row of single, circular wounds so close to each other that they melted into one. She tried to count them, but Abel turned his head, and she lowered her eyes.

  The pain, she thought. The pain is the same as mine, just in a different place.

  After the unbearable double lesson, she waited until everybody had left. Abel was the first to go. Knaake still sat at his desk. Then he looked at Anna, stood up, closed the door, and sat down again. He didn’t say anything. He took a thermos full of tea from his bag and poured tea into a cup. He was in no hurry.

  “I have to talk to someone,” Anna said. He nodded.

  “Let’s just assume something happened,” Anna began. “Something … bad, between Abel and me. Something that has to do with … trust …” She put her hands to her cheeks and felt a feverish heat there. She hated herself for the fact that she blushed. “Something I can’t talk about … let’s assume it was my fault, in a roundabout way.”

  “Let’s not assume that,” he said softly. Did he know what she was talking about? No, he couldn’t.

  “Okay, let’s assume it was not my fault … I mean, I did trust him,” Anna said in a low voice, without looking at Knaake. “But I don’t know what to think anymore. You know … about the two murders … Lierski … he was Abel’s little sister’s father. Abel hated him. He was afraid that he would … that he would do something to Micha. I think he was kind of known as … for being a pedophile. Maybe it wasn’t true, but Abel was sure. They’ve arrested someone for Lierski’s murder, someone who owned the right kind of weapon and who knew him, but I don’t know if it really was him after all … and then Sören Marinke, at the beach … you heard it on the radio. He was the social worker who’d turned up at Abel and Micha’s apartment … Abel isn’t eighteen yet—you know that—so in theory, he shouldn’t have custody of Micha. She should go live with relatives or a foster family, but Abel refuses to let that happen … their mother, Michelle … whom you don’t know …”

  She looked up. He was shaking his head. “No, Anna. I don’t know her.”

  Yeah, right, Anna thought. And where did Michelle get those old Leonard Cohen cassettes … How many people in town listened to stuff like that? She knew of only three: Michelle, Linda … and Knaake.

  “Michelle disappeared,” Anna said, “a few weeks ago. She just up and left. But she can’t be far. She’s drawn money from the household account. From an ATM in Eldena.”

  Knaake was staring into his cup, as if he could find Michelle Tannatek in there, if he only looked hard enough. Like he knew exactly what the woman whom he was searching for looked like.

  “There is this fairy tale,” Anna whispered. “A fairy tale Abel is telling his little sister. Sometimes there are people in it who really exist. Sometimes I recognize them too late. I recognized Sören Marinke too late. He also died in the fairy tale. The bad guys all die. But who decides that they’re bad
? I’m … I’m afraid … afraid that someone else will be found dead beneath the snow. Someone else who’s been shot in the neck.”

  “But you haven’t gone to the police.”

  “No. I …” She didn’t say, I love him. It would have sounded so trite.

  Knaake got up and went over to the window, cup in hand. “There are many possibilities,” he said. “An infinite number of possibilities. I’m no detective. But maybe there are more possibilities than you’re seeing.”

  She lifted her head. “Yes?”

  “Possibility number one is the simplest,” Knaake said. “Abel Tannatek shot both men, the first because he hated him and the second because … tell me, why would he have shot the second one? Does it make sense to kill a social worker? A social worker is just a government agent … if you shoot one, another will take his place.” He laughed grimly. “It’s like a computer game.”

  “And the second possibility?”

  “Possibility number two: Somebody else shot them. And here we have two possibilities again. Somebody did it to help Abel. Or … somebody did it to make people think that Abel did it. But that all sounds a bit too much like an old black-and-white Mafia movie.”

  “But are there other possibilities?”

  “Sure. Dozens. For example, why do we think that it was the same murderer? Because of the shot in the neck? A nasty way to kill someone, by the way. The Nazis were known for this practice. Executions.”

  Anna caught her breath. “You think … you think it might have been two different people?”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it? The second murderer copied the handwriting of the first.”

  “You are a detective.” Anna smiled. She stood up and went over to the window to stand next to him. Knaake smiled, too.