The Storyteller (41 page)

SHE WAS SITTING IN MATH CLASS WHEN THE ANNOUNCEMENT
came on, over the loudspeaker.

Math would be her third exam, required if you’d chosen music and arts as your intensive classes. One more week of lectures she didn’t understand and that she wasn’t interested in, and after that there’d be no more classes, just sitting at home, cramming formulas into her head … she knew she should listen, but the information just drifted by her. Abel was sitting in the back of the room; he’d been late again and looked tired, like he so often did. She bore the tedium for the sake of being able to talk to him afterward. She didn’t even know about what. She just wanted to talk to him.

And then the announcement came on.

“The students’ drama group,” the disinterested voice of the secretary said, “asks for a moment of your attention.”

Anna put her pen down and leaned back. Every year there was an announcement like this at the end of the term. It was usually a
short scene from the play they were doing, a friendly advertisement for their production. A welcome interruption to the lesson. Strange, that was Bertil’s voice. She hadn’t known Bertil was in the drama group. She glanced over at Gitta. Gitta shrugged and started to doodle things on the side of a folder. And suddenly, before Bertil’s words got through to her, Anna thought with surprising clarity:
I have lost Gitta. Gitta was once my friend, no matter how different we were. But I’ve lost her
.

Only after she’d thought this did she hear what Bertil was actually saying. There was some noise in the background, people talking, music—it sounded like a club. What was playing had been prerecorded, and it wasn’t a good recording. The Bertil on the recording seemed to be repeating a question he’d already asked. “I said, ‘If I asked you, would you come with me as well?’”

“Where to?” somebody else asked. And this other person was Abel. Anna sat up.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Bertil said, “and it doesn’t have anything to do with where. To my place, to your place … I don’t know where. Or do you already have an appointment with somebody here?”

“Bertil,” Abel said and laughed a strange kind of laugh, “I don’t get what this is all about. You hate me.”

“No,” Bertil said. It all sounded amazingly honest, but was it? When had this conversation been recorded? Where? And what were they talking about? “Hatred and love lie close to each other,” Bertil said, and that was the one sentence that did sound like a school drama production.

“This is bullshit,” Abel said. “Go away.”

“I thought it was a matter of price,” Bertil said in a very low voice.

“What do they usually pay you? I’ve got money, you know. Enough. You’d be my chance to find out something about myself. If I … until now, I thought I was … you understand …”

“Yeah,” Abel said. “I understand. But I’m not interested.”

“But you do go home with guys, don’t you?”

For a moment there was nothing but the broadband noise of the recording and the background music.

“It is,” Abel said finally, “a matter of price.”

At this, Gitta got up and ran out. Anna sat there completely motionless. She’d turned to stone; she couldn’t move. She didn’t understand, yet she understood everything.

Gitta knew she should have reacted more quickly. The sheer surprise had paralyzed her. Paralyzed her like Anna, or like Abel, who’d still been sitting, frozen, at his desk when she’d raced out. Never had Gitta run down the school corridors so fast, but she knew she wasn’t fast enough. Where was the damn secretary? Had she left Bertil alone with the microphone and walked out to do something else? That was the only possible explanation … Bertil was insane … insane … he was insane! Gitta forced herself to run even faster. Why didn’t anybody else do anything? Why was she the only one running? Why had no one tried to stop this announcement? It was reverberating from all the speakers in the school, and by this point everyone knew it had nothing whatsoever to do with the school play. She stumbled, recovered her balance, and raced up another flight of stairs, along another corridor …

“Bertil,” Abel’s voice said through the speakers, blurred by the bad recording. Cell phone, Gitta thought. Bertil recorded this with a cell phone. Inconspicuously, secretly. He’s not stupid.

“Bertil, I don’t know what it is you expect. I don’t do this on a daily basis. I’m not a … how do you call it? Not a professional. To find someone like that, someone who can … help you find out about yourself … show you stuff … for that, you’d have to go to Berlin or, I dunno, Rostock. Some bigger city. What I do is something that just … it happens when the opportunity arises. When someone asks me. And it’s usually older guys.”

“What are you?” Bertil asked. “Bi?”

“That’s none of your business,” Abel said. “But no. I’m one hundred percent straight.”

“I don’t get it … you only go with guys.”

“It’s a market. And it’s a matter of price. It’s not so hard to clench one’s teeth if it means money. Even though you probably wouldn’t understand that.” Abel’s voice was bitter like bile.

“So, okay, thanks,” Bertil said. “I’m as one hundred percent straight as you. What I just said was … not totally honest, I’m afraid. It was more of a test. I just wanted to know. I mean, I did know—I’ve been watching you, but I wanted to hear it from you.”

“So you’re happy now?” Abel asked. “You know, I almost felt sorry for you. Do we understand each other? You’re not gonna tell anybody about this conversation, right?”

“Of course not,” Bertil answered. “I’m not suicidal.”

But he obviously was, Gitta thought. Even though he’d kept his promise. Technically, he hadn’t spoken to anyone about this conversation. He’d just played the recording …

When Gitta flung open the door, he was standing next to the secretary’s desk, alone, the cell phone in one hand, leaning forward and speaking one last sentence into the microphone, “I just thought,” he said, “that somebody should tell Anna.”

Then Gitta’s fist landed in his face.

But it was too late. She knew it was much too late.

Anna turned. She was the last to turn. Everyone else had turned during Bertil’s announcement—they were all looking at Abel, every single one of them. The math teacher was standing at the blackboard and looking at him, too. She seemed absolutely helpless, as if she knew she had to say something. But what could she say?

Abel stood up and left. Without a word. He walked through the aisle between the desks, his eyes lowered to the floor. He closed the door behind him very quietly, and somewhere a second door closed behind him, the school door, possibly forever. He walked across the schoolyard. They saw him walk away, leave a world he’d never really been part of. They saw him pull his hat down low and get onto his bike. He forgot the Walkman’s earplugs. Maybe, Anna thought, he didn’t need them anymore; maybe the white noise had finally made it into his head.

She stuffed her books into her backpack and stood up. She felt that she was now the one the others were staring at. Some of them were whispering. Frauke threw her a glance so full of pity she could have thrown up. She covered her face with her hands, just for a moment, and took a deep breath. Then she walked down the aisle like Abel had, but she didn’t look down at the floor. She made herself look at the others, even at the teacher, at every single person in the room. Some of them averted their eyes. She walked upright, her head held high.

She walked through the corridors of the school with her head still held high, she left the building with her head held high, she pushed her bike through the slush in the schoolyard with her head
held high. She rode out to Wieck, rode over the old bridge, rode along the harbor till she reached the mouth of the river. Near the café, she got off her bike and walked out to the pier with her head held high.

She saw that the ice was melting away. She saw that the bald coots were swimming in open water again, in the shipping channel, where the ice had first disappeared. She saw the dirty white swans. And suddenly, her legs gave way. She grabbed onto the white painted railing in order not to fall. She didn’t hold her head high anymore. She doubled up with something that wasn’t pain but was. Crouched down, she waited for the tears to come, but there weren’t any. She cried without tears.

She understood now. She understood so much.

She remembered how Abel had opened the door of the apartment, wearing a T-shirt, his hair tousled, and how he hadn’t let her in. She remembered the words he’d said. Can I come with you? No, Anna. Where I’m going now, you can’t come. I still have to go out … what I do is something that just … it happens when the opportunity arises. How often had the opportunity arisen since she’d known him? Which nights had he been standing in front of a bar, selling the fairy-tale fur of the white cats—and which nights had he been selling himself? Which mornings had he slept through literature class, with his head on his arms, because he’d gone with someone in the night, someone who’d paid the right price? She’d never thought that these things actually happened, not here, not in this tiny city. Maybe in Chicago, she heard Magnus say.

“Of all the ways to earn money,” she whispered. “Abel, why did it have to be that one? Because the opportunity arose? When? When did you start to clench your teeth and is it …? Is it a symbol? A
symbol of how far you’d go for the little queen? How far you’d go across the ice? You know, there’ll come a point … a point at which the ice will break …”

She thought of the darkness in the boathouse. Of the broken flashlight. She started to understand what had happened that night. It had been a kind of revenge, revenge for all the clenching of teeth he’d had to do. Revenge taken on the wrong person.

Maybe she’d really been the first woman … that was an amazing idea.

When she closed her eyes now she saw images she didn’t want to see, images of cheap pornography. It’s usually older guys. Usually. Could you get used to anything? Did everything become a kind of routine in the end? She opened her eyes.

Gitta, she thought. Gitta had known, right from the beginning. Gitta had kept her mouth shut. But now … now the whole school knew. And when he’d left, it looked as if he’d left for good.

She had to find him.

Bertil landed on the floor between the big desk and the wall, trapped, and Gitta stood over him for a moment, looking down on him. There was something like a delicate smile on his face. Behind them, the door opened. Gitta looked up. The secretary, who should never have left in the first place, came back in and stood there, confused and a little frightened.

Gitta turned back to Bertil. “My God, you’re sick,” she said. “Absolutely sick … insane. The only person you’ve exposed and unmasked with this is yourself.”

“I have seen to it that the truth is brought to light,” Bertil answered.

“Yeah, that’s what you did all right,” Gitta said. “And the truth is that you’re sick.” He was still lying on the floor below her—like an injured insect, fallen on its back—and rage boiled up inside her. She lifted her foot—and stopped. “No,” she said, “oh no. You’re not even worth kicking. I hope they throw you out of this school.”

She slammed the door behind her and found herself standing in front of the headmaster and a couple of teachers. “Do it,” she said to them. “Throw him out. Expel him. Save the expense of the paper on which you’d have printed his diploma.”

The headmaster grabbed her arm before she could walk away. “What’s really going on here?” he asked. “Is that story true? And whom are you talking about? Tannatek?”

“Abel?” Gitta asked and snorted. “Abel has expelled himself from school today. You’ll never see him again. Me? I’m talking about Bertil Hagemann.”

On the fourth floor of 18 Amundsen Street, nobody opened the door. Not even Mrs. Ketow came out when Anna passed her door. She’d heard her voice, amid the screaming and shouting of fighting children somewhere in her apartment. Mrs. Ketow had given up on Micha, Anna thought. She’d sailed back to her own island in a gondola beneath a balloon, that faded and worn-out island with its forest of too-orderly shelves and its pastures of colorless, cheerless, and comfortless wall-to-wall carpeting.

Behind the door with Tannatek on the nameplate, everything was very quiet.

Abel didn’t answer his cell phone. She rode back to the city, rode up and down the cobblestone streets, searching without a lead to follow. She didn’t find him. For a moment, she thought he would
be sitting on a chair next to Knaake’s bed in the ICU, but nobody was sitting there. Knaake lay still, with his eyes closed, beneath the silent green line of his heartbeat.

“Did you know?” Anna whispered. “About Abel? Was that what you’d found out and wanted to tell me?” And what if something else had happened between the two of them … between Abel and his teacher? No. Oh no, surely not. She refused to imagine it. She left the hospital to get rid of the thought.

She rode out to the Seaside District again, this time to Micha’s elementary school. The schoolyard was empty. Idiot, she scolded herself. She should have come here right away. Now, it was twelve thirty, much too late; he’d picked up Micha long ago. He still didn’t answer the phone.

“They’re on an outing,” she whispered into the thaw, into the air in the abandoned schoolyard. “On the island of Rügen. Or anywhere. They’ll be back. When they were gone last time, they came back. They’ll turn up somewhere, of course they will.”

What had also turned up back then was Marinke’s dead body. What was it Bertil had said? I’m not that suicidal.

She’d kept his number—why? She hesitated. But then she finally called him. The phone rang for a long time, and her knees went all wobbly … she reached his mailbox. She didn’t leave a message. She got back onto her bike and rode home, slowly.

When she parked her bike near the front door, her phone rang.

She grabbed it without looking at the display. “Yes?”

“Anna,” said Bertil. “You called me; I saw your number …”

“Yeah,” she said, relieved, and inhaled the warm air deeply. “I just wanted to know if you, if …” What should she say? If you’re still alive?