The Storyteller

by Antonia Michaelis

  Anna’s stomach hurt from laughing so hard. She had snow in her hair, snow in her mouth, snow in her shoes … what did it matter? In her head, the sun was shining so brightly she could barely see. Later, she would think that these days—this one and the next—had been their best. She would always remember the light playing in Abel’s and Micha’s pale blond hair. She’d always hear their laughter. It was such happy and unburdened laughter, laughter from a world without dead bodies or social services, a world in which no one ever disappeared.

  And then they were lying on the ice next to each other, flat on their backs, the three of them, and Abel said, “In summer, you know … in summer, I want to swim with you, right here. We’ll lie in the water just like this, only the sky will be a different color then. And the water will be warm and blue, and the sailors will pass us on their way out to the island of Rügen.”

  “And we’ll eat loads of ice cream,” Micha added.

  “Definitely.” Abel rolled onto his stomach. “And then we’ll lounge around on the beach all lazy, and we’ll build sandcastles …”

  “With sea grass for decoration and pinecones for inhabitants,” Anna said.

  Abel nodded. “When summer comes, there’ll be no more black ship. And no problems. When summer comes, I’ll be eighteen.”

  “The thirteenth of March …” Anna began.

  “That’s the day we’re going to reach the mainland,” Abel said, smiling.

  “And we’re gonna celebrate,” Micha said. “We’re gonna celebrate Abel’s birthday. On that day, he’ll be a grown-up. Just like that, bang … and then he can be my father for real. It won’t be long now, Anna. Next Wednesday.”

  Anna wanted to say that she wasn’t at all sure about the laws and that it was probably a lot more complicated than Abel and Micha imagined. But she didn’t say so. She said instead, “There’s hot chocolate in the thermos in my backpack.”

  “Oh yeah, and we brought cookies!” Micha jumped up, and they started pushing and pulling and shoving Abel back toward the beach. And then they got rid of their skates and had a picnic between the piled-up ice-floe puzzles.

  “Be a bit careful with that hot chocolate,” Abel said to Micha. “Better close that jacket again. We don’t want to wash another sweater. Remember, the washing machine is broken …”

  “You said we can still wash things by hand,” Micha said.

  “Yeah, we can.” He sighed. “Tomorrow is washing day, like in the olden days, in the days of real fairy tales. But washing takes time, Micha. It takes time. And we’ve already got enough washing.”

  “Can’t you get someone by to … repair your machine?” Anna asked.

  Abel shook his head. “The thing is old enough for a museum. We’ll have to buy a new one. And I will, some day … but for that, I’d have to use our savings for school, and it’ll take me a while to bring myself to do that.”

  Anna thought about the house full of blue air and the washing machine in the basement, which would just be replaced if it broke. When you were ironing shirts on the big old wooden table down there, you could hear the robins at the window.

  “While you’re waiting to buy a new machine,” she said, “you could just do your laundry at my house. It won’t take long. We’ve got a dryer, too. You could come by tomorrow afternoon and bring your clothes; we’ll put them in the machine; and in the evening, you can take everything home with you, clean and folded. It would save a lot of time … time that you could use to get some studying done.”

  “Oh, please, let’s do that!” Micha exclaimed. “I can look at Anna’s books again and blow into her flute and watch the fire in the fireplace and …”

  “And your parents?” Abel asked.

  “They might be home,” Anna answered. “And will bite no one.”

  She looked at him, and he avoided her eyes. Finally, he covered his face with his hands, breathed in heavily, and then lowered his hands again. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, we’ll come.” He stood up and shook the snow off of his jeans. “I’m doing a thousand new things in spite of myself,” he said. “It’s not easy, you know, to jump over your own shadow.”

  “As long as you’re better at it than skating …,” Anna said and stood up too. She wanted to say more, but that wasn’t possible because he was kissing her. Reasonable Anna wanted to draw back: the danger of touch. But unreasonable Anna welcomed the kiss like happiness. Maybe, she thought, it’s better to take these moments when you get them—there might not be too many in life.

  • • •

  The most wonderful days. There were only two of them. The day on which Abel didn’t learn to ice-skate and the day on which the laundry didn’t dry.

  They went to pick up Micha from school together that Friday. The teacher Anna had talked to before was standing in the yard with Micha when Abel and Anna came skidding through the snow on their bikes. It was still snowing, and the streets were as bad as they’d been the day before. “Abel Tannatek,” the teacher said to Abel. “My name is Milowicz. I’m Micha’s teacher. And you’re her brother, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s me,” Abel answered, “and we’ve got something we’ve got to do.”

  “Wait.” She reached out for him but didn’t dare detain him physically. “I’d really like to talk to your mother. I’ve been trying to reach her for a long time …”

  “Are there problems?” Abel asked. He’d taken Micha’s little hand. “Problems in class?”

  “No, that’s not it, it’s just … Micha told me her mother has gone on a trip, and it seems to be such a long trip … is it true she’s away, traveling?”

  “Yes,” Abel said. “Yes, that’s true.”

  “And who looks after Micha?”

  “Santa Claus,” Abel growled and helped Micha onto the carrier of his bike. Mrs. Milowicz was still staring after them when they left the schoolyard, her face puzzled.

  “How can she understand?” Anna asked. “You’re being unreasonable. I mean, it’s not her fault, is it? She hasn’t done anything wrong … she’s just a teacher and she’s worried.”

  “She’s too curious,” said Abel. “Maybe she put the social worker onto us. Maybe it wasn’t Mrs. Ketow after all. By the way, we’re still waiting for the next social worker to turn up. It looks like no one’s taken over Marinke’s cases yet … who knows, we might get lucky and they won’t remember us until after the thirteenth of March.”

  Anna had hoped that Magnus and Linda would be late, like they were last Friday, but Fridays weren’t regular days in the house of blue air, and both of them were already home. She had warned them, of course, because of the laundry. She wondered if that was the reason they were there. They both said they’d just happened to finish work early. Naturally.

  Anna saw Abel flinch as he hung his jacket on the coatrack in the hall and heard Magnus’s voice from the first floor. He flinched like a frightened dog. Anna put a hand on his arm. “Stay,” she said, as she would to a dog, and felt stupid. She thought of the dog that belonged to Bertil’s family, in the backseat of the Volvo, the dog that bore an uncanny resemblance to the animal in the fairy tale. She could still hear his whining in the snowstorm.

  “How nice to have visitors,” Linda said. “I thought we could have lunch together …”

  Abel was sitting at the table like an animal ready to jump up and run. Everything he said was distilled, ice-cold politeness, and Anna was close to kicking him under the table, but she didn’t. Micha had no trouble with the situation. She told Linda everything about her school and the friend she’d visited on Wednesday … that they’d built an igloo together … that she wanted a dog when she got older, or actually, a dog and a white horse. The horse had to stand in the middle of a garden full of apple trees, of course.

  “Yes, I agree,” Linda said. “That’s where white horses belong.”

  Toward the end of their lunch, Abel was sitting in his chair, a little calmer, and his eyes had stopped darting around the living room as if it were a trap he ha
d to escape.

  “And now it’s probably best if you just throw your clothes into the machine,” Linda said, “and I’ll see to it that they get cleaned and folded. I think I’ve already been introduced to one of your sweatshirts …”

  “Then Linda has a lot to do for her university classes,” Magnus said, throwing a glance at Linda. “And I’m very busy with a mountain of patient files.”

  Anna had to keep herself from grinning. But listen you will, she thought, oh, you will, despite all your efforts to melt into the background. Well, go ahead and listen …

  “We got something important, too,” Micha said. “We’re going to hear the next part of a certain fairy tale …”

  Anna led the two of them up to her room. All you could see from the window now was a strange and distant memory of the garden. The roses had completely disappeared under the snow, and a single lonely robin was waiting for Magnus on top of the birdhouse.

  They sat on the floor with their backs against the big bookshelf, watching the snowflakes gently floating down from the sky outside, and Abel said, “Let’s see … the fairy tale … In the fairy tale, the little queen and her crew are just now starting to walk over the ice. The ice is smooth and wide, lying beneath the snow like a secret thought. But at the shore of the murderer’s island, the waves have piled the ice floes on top of each other. The secret thought had broken into big splinters, interlinking with each other and forming strange figures you couldn’t take apart, couldn’t sort, like a puzzle or a riddle.”

  He put one arm around Micha and then, after a moment’s hesitation, one around Anna, and, although it was quite uncomfortable, Anna left the arm there. “It was difficult to walk over the ice. They kept slipping, losing their balance, falling, standing up again, walking on. When the ship had shrunk to the size of a child’s toy behind them and then become nothing more than a tiny green spot, they stopped again and looked through the binoculars, one after another. It had started to snow.

  “‘Aren’t those our pursuers over there?’ the asking man asked.

  “‘Under the beeches, where the anemones bloom in spring,’ the answering man answered, and the rose girl had the distinct feeling she’d heard that answer before. Possibly, she thought, the pool of answers was limited. There are fewer answers in the world than questions, and if you ask me now why that is so, I must tell you that there is no answer to that question.’

  “The little queen saw their pursuers had reached the green ship. The black ship was also stuck in the ice, and now the fat diamond eater and the two haters were on foot as well. But there was another person with them, a young woman who had pulled her blond hair back in a very serious, grave way … like a teacher. She was wearing teacher’s glasses.

  “‘Who’s that?’ the little queen wanted to know and held the binoculars down to the golden eyes of the dog.

  “‘That’s the gem cutter,’ the dog answered. ‘Do you see the tools sticking out of her coat pocket? Take good care, little queen; the gem cutter, too, wants to own your diamond heart. She wants to grind and polish and form it after her own ideas. But if she manages to do that, you won’t recognize your own heart …’

  “‘Look! There!’ the little queen exclaimed. ‘They are climbing aboard our ship! Do they think we’re still there?’

  “But shortly after that, from the deck of the green ship, a colorful balloon drifted up into the cold air. A gondola hung beneath it, a gondola designed only for emergencies, and in the gondola, sat the two haters and the diamond eater.

  “‘They’re fleeing!’ the little queen said and started to dance in the snow, jumping up and down happily. ‘They’re afraid of the endless ice! Look, the wind is blowing them away from us! They gave up! I guess they will return to their own islands!’

  “‘They will,’ the lighthouse keeper said gravely, ‘and I can tell you why. They don’t think we’ll make it. They think the diamond is lost anyway, lost in the eternal ice of this story. There’s only one person who believes that the diamond will survive. One single person who is not aboard the gondola.’

  “‘The cutter,’ whispered the rose girl.

  “The silver-gray dog nodded. ‘She will keep following us,’ he said. ‘We should hurry.’

  “That was when the rose girl remembered something. She reached into her backpack and took out a pair of skates. And then another pair and another pair … the whole backpack had been full of skates.

  “Only there weren’t any skates for the blind white cat. ‘And all the better,’ said the cat. ‘Cats are not made for ice-skating. It’s much too undignified. Who’s going to carry me?’

  “The asking man asked the answering man if he would like to take turns carrying the cat, and the answering man answered: ‘In the box on top of the bathroom cupboard.’ Another answer, the rose girl thought, that she had heard already.

  “So they started skating, and the gently falling snow covered their traces. The silver-gray dog was running next to them, on foot. When he had tried to skate, his four legs had gotten into such confusion that he almost couldn’t sort them out again. And any way, he preferred being a tragic character as opposed to a comic one.

  “They skated over the ice for a long time; they skated a long way; they skated through a snowstorm, holding onto each other so as not to get separated. They skated through clear weather and drank hot chocolate from a thermos the rose girl had found in her backpack. After that, the backpack was empty and she wanted to leave it behind, but the silver-gray dog shook his head. ‘An empty backpack would be a trace,’ he said. ‘And all our traces must be wiped out so the cutter can’t find us.’

  “And so when the snow had stopped falling and covering their traces, they wiped them out very thoroughly themselves. Still, every time they looked back through the lighthouse keeper’s binoculars, there was a tiny, stubborn figure following them with jewel-cutting tools sticking out of her coat pockets. The cutter. She didn’t seem to have binoculars of her own. So how did she know the right way?

  “‘Let’s wait for her!’ the little queen begged. ‘Maybe she’s cold. Maybe she’s afraid of being on the ice all by herself. She is only one, and we are many …’

  “‘If she finds us, she will be more than one,’ the silver-gray dog said. ‘Little queen, haven’t I told you about the ocean riders?’

  “‘Never,’ answered the little queen. ‘Mrs. Margaret, do you know about the ocean riders?’

  “Mrs. Margaret shook her head and lifted her arms, patterned with white and blue flowers, helplessly.

  “‘But me, I know about them,’ the lighthouse keeper said. ‘I saw them race by from my window up there in the lighthouse once; I saw them on their horses. Their horses are green like sea grass and white like shells and as fast as the night. They gallop over the water; they fly over the ice. The ocean riders guard the seven seas and see to it that everything is in order there. They never sleep, and when they’re called for, they follow the call … over the waves, through the white foam, through the storm …’

  “‘Yes,’ the silver-gray dog said, and he bared his teeth when he said this. ‘Yes, they see to it that everything is in order on the seven seas. But what order means, what the rules are, what is right and what is wrong … that is decided by the ones paying the ocean riders. The red hunter has been paying them, the diamond trader has been paying them, and the gem cutter is paying them as well. But us, little queen, we have never paid them. What could we have paid them with? An apple from the garden on your island?’

  “‘A splinter of the diamond,’ the white cat remarked, stifling a yawn, and the little queen started, frightened.

  “‘But if we had paid them with a splinter of my heart, my heart would have a missing piece!’ she exclaimed. ‘And I …’

  “‘Don’t worry, little queen,’ said the silver-gray dog. ‘Nobody’s going to break a splinter off your heart. For the ocean riders, traveling over the ice is forbidden, and fleeing is against their law. As long as the cutter doesn’t call t
hem, you have nothing to fear. And she will only call them when she is absolutely sure that she’s following the right wanderers. When she’s caught up with us.’

  “They skated on all day long. When evening came, the distance between the cutter and them had grown smaller. She wasn’t near enough yet, but just the same, she was much too near.

  “‘Could I borrow the binoculars again, please?’ the rose girl asked, but the lighthouse keeper said that he had misplaced them somewhere and couldn’t find them.

  “‘I’ve got pretty good eyes,’ the silver-gray dog growled. ‘I don’t need binoculars.’ He narrowed his golden eyes and stared a hole into the thickening dark. ‘All day long … I wasn’t sure whether I was only imagining it, but now I’m sure … red threads. We’re all wearing red coats. One of us has left red threads in the white snow to show the cutter the way. One of us is a traitor.’”

  Abel fell silent.

  “And? Who is it?” Micha asked, out of breath. He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “It can’t be the cat,” Micha said. “She doesn’t have a red coat, only her fur. Or do you think … she might have pulled some threads out of someone else’s coat? She’s probably got sharp claws … The silver-gray dog can’t be the traitor either, for the same reason. And he was the one to discover the thing …”

  “The asking man and the answering man are too dumb,” Anna said. “And apart from that, they’re just made up.”

  Abel lifted his arms. “But it’s all made up!”

  “No,” said Anna. “No. That’s not true. There are only two people who could be the traitor. The lighthouse keeper … and the rose girl.”

  Abel stood up. “We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see what happens and how the story goes on. I can’t tell you yet. I guess it’s going to be sometime till our laundry is dry, even with the dryer … tell me, what would you be doing now … if we weren’t here?”