The Storyteller

by Antonia Michaelis

  He nodded. “The thaw.”

  “The wild boars have been digging there, in the mud.” Why did she tell him? To gain time? Time to do what? “She never called. She never withdrew money. She’s been lying in the earth out there the whole time.”

  “Of course. I told you. The white cat is sleeping.”

  He was still playing with the weapon. “Micha …,” she began.

  “Is asleep, too, by the way,” he answered. “I just looked in on her. She fell asleep reading. That book about the dog.” He smiled, and it wasn’t a mean smile. It was a smile that she still liked a lot. The lines of a song appeared in her head, a song from Linda’s LP collection:

  … it’s written in the scriptures, it’s written there in blood

  I even heard the angels declare it from above

  There ain’t no cure

  there ain’t no cure There ain’t no cure for love …

  All the rocket ships go flying through the sky

  The doctor’s working day and night

  But they never ever find a cure for love …

  “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me the whole story. If you’re going to shoot me, I at least want to know the story first.”

  “Are you crazy?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You think I’d shoot you?”

  “I do. I haven’t believed any of this for a long time … but now I do.”

  He looked at the gun. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Of course I am,” Anna said. “Of course I’m afraid. But that doesn’t help.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t help to be afraid. Bad things happen anyway. You’re right.” He took a step toward her, into the bathroom, and she wanted to step back, but there was nowhere to go. There was a single chair in the tiny room, next to the shower; they’d thrown towels and clothes over the back of it. He sat down, heavily, weapon still in hand, his eyes on its shiny black.

  “Back then, when Lierski was living here with us, it was the same,” he said. “I was ten when he moved in—that was before Micha was born. I always knew he’d get me one day when I was alone. I was afraid, but it didn’t help to be afraid. Michelle didn’t believe me. She’d finally met a man who wanted to stay … Strange, next to nothing has changed in the apartment since then. The first time anything happened was here, in the bathroom. In this exact spot. On some days I find it hard to believe that the bathroom just went on existing afterward. As if nothing had happened …”

  “What he did to you, I mean, did he …?”

  “Of course. You don’t have to say it. It doesn’t help to call a spade a spade. She still didn’t believe me afterward. She said I was making things up. It took her a long time to throw him out. When he left, I was twelve.” He looked up, only for a second, and then averted his eyes. “Do you understand? Do you understand why I shot him? It wasn’t revenge. It was because of Micha. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to her. I don’t think he cared whether he had boys or girls—as long as they were young. There were so many people who knew about him … there was a lot of talk … you can go and ask at the Admiral … but nobody had any proof, and nobody did anything. And maybe a few of those guys at the Admiral even know it was me who killed him, but they’ve kept their mouths shut. We know each other … out there.”

  She leaned back against the wall. The wall was colder than anything else had been this winter. The wall had been here back then, too. Tiles, she thought, easy to wipe clean, to sterilize. All the misery of the world focused in a tiny bathroom on the fourth floor. So that was what the night in the boathouse had been about.

  “You said something about clenching your teeth, to Bertil …”

  “Does that make sense to you? It’s got something to do with the inhibition threshold, I think. If Rainer Lierski hadn’t already done what he did to me, I’d never have said yes later … one night at a club, a guy propositioned me. It was a long time after Lierski. I don’t know how old I was. Maybe fifteen? Don’t ask me now what I was doing in a club at fifteen. I guess the ID wasn’t mine. You might not believe it now, but I was quite a pretty boy then. Blue eyes … blond curls. My hair was longer then … that was before the buzz cut.” He laughed. “That night, I suddenly understood that you could get money for doing it. That you didn’t have to suffer without payment. It was a revelation. What happened to me had already happened—there was no way to undo it—and I’d survived. I’d survived two years in this apartment with Lierski. And I knew that I would survive anything else, too. I mean, I did survive. Later on, it wasn’t clubs anymore. There are different places, places everybody knows about … they drive out to the parking lot at the B109, in the woods, when they want to hook up … damn far on a bike, but it’s not such a bad job after all, doing this from time to time. It’s …” He stopped. He did what he always did: he covered his face with his hands. But to do so, he had to put the gun down. It lay next to him now, on the chair he was sitting on.

  That was Anna’s chance. All she had to do was to step forward, to snatch the gun. She didn’t. She stayed where she was.

  “I hate them,” Abel said, his face still behind his hands. “I hate all of them. Every single guy.”

  He looked at her again, picked up the gun. Chance squandered, Anna Leemann.

  “I thought Marinke was someone I could offer a deal to,” he said. “I followed him … Jesus. I mean, who goes for a walk on the beach in Eldena at night? It was as if he wanted something to happen. Maybe he was looking for adventure, something different from his life at the office. There he was, with his leather jacket and his I-understand-you, you-can-call-me-Sören look … he looked so gay. But I was mistaken. I offered to go with him, to do it for free, to do whatever he wanted, if he’d just forget about Micha and Michelle. I misjudged him. He gave me a look of contempt, spat out in front of me. So this is how it is, he said. Forget it, boy, and while we’re talking about fucking … what about your sister? Am I wrong, or do you love her a little too much? That’s when I decided he had to die. He really believed that. That I would do that to Micha. It was easier the second time. Like it was with the other thing. The inhibition threshold drops. If you shoot one person, the second one is a game. He was a coward, by the way. He turned voluntarily …” He shook his head. “No, that’s not true. That’s a lie. It wasn’t easier.”

  He rolled up his left sleeve. Anna counted three circular scars next to the long one. One more than last time.

  “One for each of them,” Abel whispered. “These are scars of pity. I had to do something afterward. Something I’d feel … maybe not even out of pity but more for me, so I’d know I still exist in spite of everything … ridiculous, isn’t it? Like a child pounding its head against a wall. This is Lierski. And Marinke. And that is Knaake.”

  “Knaake,” Anna repeated, her voice flat. “Why, Abel? Why did you do that?”

  “He was finding out stuff,” he replied. “He was following me. I told you that. He took a step back, onto the ice in the shipping channel, to escape the bullet that I hadn’t even shot. I saw him fall through the ice … I called the fire department from a pay phone—it was the only number I could think of to call. I suddenly felt I just couldn’t do this anymore. I didn’t want him to die. He was a traitor, but I liked him. I … I really hope he makes it … I wish …”

  For a moment, it was silent, the silence echoing and reechoing from the tiled walls of the bathroom, like the pain and fear of a small boy a long time ago.

  “Bertil?” Anna asked.

  “What about Bertil?”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Of course he’s alive. Why would I do anything to Bertil?”

  “After what he did yesterday …”

  “You don’t get it, Anna. This is not about me. It’s about Micha. Bertil’s a different story. He’s never been any threat to Micha. If he’d started figuring out the truth about the murders … then, well … but he wasn’t even interested. He was onl
y interested in this other thing, and that he figured out—as the whole school knows. I was stupid to talk to him. But I’m tired, Anna. I’ve had it.”

  “And … Michelle?”

  “Michelle. Michelle. Everything started with her.”

  “But there’s no scar on your arm for Michelle. Or is she the long one? But that one came later, didn’t it …?”

  “The long scar,” Abel said and smiled again, “that’s you, Anna. What happened in the boathouse was worse than anything else. I did to you what Lierski did to me. I didn’t want to. I just … how do you say it? I just lost control. It happens. Some things are just too much. But I don’t have a scar for Michelle because I didn’t kill her. That’s simple.”

  “You didn’t? Then who did?”

  He stood up without letting go of the gun. He stood in front of her and looked down at her … he was taller than she was. “There was so much blood,” he said. “Blood everywhere. On my hands, on her hands, on my shirt, her face, on the tiles, smeared in streaks, on the small round blue carpet … I threw it away later, that carpet … I hadn’t known that blood was that red, that light red: big, fallen, burst droplets of blood … the color of poppies. A sea of blood, a red endless sea, purple waves, carmine froth, splashing color … I remember that I thought all of this back then. Micha was still sleeping. I was the one who found Michelle.

  “She’d slit her wrists … long, deep cuts in both arms … she’d wanted to make sure. Blind white cat. Self-centered beast. She never thought of us, not for one minute. She ran away from her own problems, her fucked-up life … the wrong guys, booze, unemployment, drugs. We have an old bike trailer in the basement … we used it to transport furniture and stuff we found in the trash … I put her into the bike trailer and took her to the Elisenhain. She loved the anemones so much. We used to go for walks there when I was little, before Rainer Lierski … I was sure someone would see me, stop me. I almost wanted somebody to. But nobody did. That was the day the island sank, and the sea was red.”

  He fell silent. He lifted the gun and put it in his pocket.

  “You really thought that I did it, didn’t you?” he whispered. “That I shot my mother? That I’d shoot you?”

  “What are we going to do now?” Anna whispered.

  “I don’t know. You tell me. Everything’s ending.”

  “No!” she whispered. “No. Not for me. Everything’s just beginning. We’re seventeen.”

  She put her arms around him and hugged him as tightly as she could.

  “Are you trying to tell me that you’ll stay? In spite of everything?” he whispered. “Anna, I’m a murderer. I’m a murderer and a hustler and a dealer. I’m everything that’s unthinkable in your world.”

  “I am not staying with the murderer,” she said, her words muffled by his jacket. “I am not staying with the victim Abel Tannatek or the culprit Abel Tannatek. I am staying with the storyteller.”

  She pulled him out of the bathroom, into the living room. She pulled him down on the sofa. She realized that she was crying again. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t know who started to kiss whom, but it was a desperate kiss, a kiss in front of the sharp edge where the ice had broken and the water was rushing by in an unpassable stream, separating them from the mainland.

  “We’ll find a solution,” Anna whispered. “There is one. There must be one.”

  But first, something else seemed more important, and it happened as if it had to happen. The most improbable of all the things that could have happened. Maybe it happened because there was nothing standing between them anymore—no more secrets, no more lies, no mistrust, nothing. The torn, invisible cloak of pain was enveloping them both as it had done in that night in the house where the air was too blue. Anna felt Abel’s hands under her T-shirt, careful, timid, hesitating, and she didn’t force these hands to do anything this time. She gave them time. She thought about the white sails on the deck of the green ship whose name they’d only found out late in the story.

  Everything was different from the dream. Much more complicated. Much more real.

  She tried to get out of her clothes, got all tangled up in them, and laughed. And that, she knew, was all unreasonable Anna, as reasonable Anna had never done any of this. Reasonable Anna had left for good. Finally, they were sitting on the sofa naked, the two of them. She was on his lap, and she really, really did hope that Micha was sleeping. And this, she thought, was the moment to say something about a condom, but she didn’t … the inhibition threshold had dropped. K IS EacH Oth ER, she thought … letters on a window … she let her hands wander down, and she guided him, and it was surprisingly easy now … it was a gliding movement like skating over the ice … everything was easy … there was no pain … there was a rhythm they both shared, and she was leading … it was different from dancing, when the man leads the woman. She led his fingers to the right spot. And with her eyes closed, she saw the color green, not blue like his frozen eyes, but green … green like the ocean beneath the ice. She hadn’t known sex had a color. The color created waves … foaming, frothing, whirling up, and everything was good, everything was right, and maybe, Anna thought, this color would cover everything else—the not-good, not-right things that had happened. The pain held in the tiles of a bathroom. The running footsteps in a boathouse. Bertil’s announcement and its contents, the frantic fear that the same could happen to Micha. The wave of green, ocean color would break … right now, she could feel it …

  “Anna,” said Abel. She opened her eyes and looked at him, frozen in her movement.

  “If something … if I can’t be here anymore,” he whispered, and Anna thought of the cold walls of court buildings and penal institutions and didn’t want to think further, not now. “If I can’t be here anymore … what will happen to Micha? She seems to love your mother …”

  “My parents would adopt her,” Anna said. “On the spot.”

  He nodded and closed his eyes, and she closed her eyes again, too, and seconds later, the green wave broke and washed over them. Not exactly at the same time—exactly at the same time is always a lie—but the waves of the ocean in which they swam together followed one after the other. They stayed like this for a long time, sitting there, breathing each other’s breath, in and out. They kept each other warm in the last cold of the winter. There was a solution, Anna thought again, a way out … if this became possible, then everything else was, too.

  “Of course,” Abel whispered. “Of course, there’s a way out. I know it now.”

  And she wondered if he could feel her thoughts through her skin.

  I am completely happy, she thought, hoping that he would feel this thought, too. At this moment, I’m completely happy, isn’t that strange? Actually, it isn’t strange at all. Ah, linger on, thou art so fair.

  A car stopped in front of the house; they heard the engine and then voices, those of Mrs. Ketow and several men … hurried voices. There was something sharp in their voices, something dangerous—the edge of the ice and a raging current.

  They stood up and went over to the window, still naked.

  “Shit,” Abel said in a low voice, “I didn’t think they’d be that quick.”

  Two cars were parked in front of the house. One belonged to Magnus, the other to the police … a green and white police car, Anna thought—the ocean riders. Everything in Abel’s fairy tale made sense.

  She’d never gotten into her clothes faster. Everything was happening too fast now.

  Abel hugged her again, for a very short moment. “There is a way out,” he repeated, and she didn’t understand … she understood nothing. She ran after him, into the hall … Micha emerged from her room with sleepy eyes, the book about the dog in her hand. She saw Abel rush out of the apartment … he didn’t turn back to look at Micha. There were policemen on the stairs, she could hear their steps … maybe someone shouted something, shouted for her to stand still, stay where she was … for Abel to stand still.

  She stood by the front door, pressi
ng Micha against her with one arm. Abel wasn’t running down the stairs, he was running up the stairs … the stairs leading to the door of the attic that no one ever used. There was a narrow landing in front of the attic door, where Abel came to a halt.

  Out of the corner of her eyes, Anna registered other people on the stairs behind the policemen: her parents … and Bertil. She didn’t look down at them, she looked up at Abel. The policemen had stopped on the fourth-floor landing, where Anna and Micha were standing. They were looking up as well.

  “Abel Tannatek?” one of them called.

  “Yes,” said Abel very calmly. “Yes, that is me.”

  “Get down here,” the policeman said. “We’re here to arrest you for murder. Everything you say from now on …”

  “My God,” Abel said with half smile, “you actually say that in real life?”

  He looked at Micha. And then he looked at Anna. She saw that he was holding the gun. She heard the release of the safety catch.

  “Anna,” he said. And he lifted the weapon and took aim.

  She was too surprised to react.

  Or, maybe she wasn’t surprised at all.

  She didn’t hear the shot. The world became strangely silent. That was how she saw the storyteller for the last time—in an absolutely silent world, in a staircase. He’d hit his target.

  When she fell into darkness, she knew that she would never see him again.

  She’d loved him to the very end.

  “THEY STOOD AT THE EDGE OF THE ICE, YOU KNOW, and looked over at the mainland. It was so close and yet so far away that they could never reach it. And behind them, the cutter came closer and closer. They could hear her golden skates scratching over the ice.

  “‘So I will drown,’ the little queen said. She jumped into the ice-cold water headfirst, and the blind white cat, whose absolute blindness several people had begun to doubt, shook her head. ‘Tz-tz-tz,’ the cat hissed, and then she rolled into a ball on the ice and fell asleep. The asking man and the answering man put their hands in front of each other’s faces so as not to see the little queen drown.