The Storyteller

  “Where did you come from?” she whispered. “What are you doing in this room? Who lost you here?”

  She was still sitting on the floor when a group of students came rushing in, and, for a moment, she had the odd sensation that she should protect the doll from their eyes. Of course it was nonsense. As she stood, she held the doll up. “Does anybody know whose this is?” she asked, so loudly that the doll seemed to start at the sound. “I found it under the sofa. Has anybody lost it there?”

  “Hey,” Tim said. “That’s my favorite doll. Man, I’ve been searching for her for days!”

  “No, stupid, it’s mine!” Hennes laughed. “I take her to bed with me every night! Can’t sleep without her!”

  “Hmm,” Nicole said, nodding, “well, there are people who do it with dogs, why not with children’s dolls?”

  “Lemme see, maybe it’s mine,” Jörg said, taking the doll from Anna. “Ah, no, mine had pink panties. And look, this one doesn’t have any panties at all … very unseemly.”

  “Give it to me!” someone shouted, and suddenly the doll was flying through the air. As Anna watched them toss the toy around, she laughed about it. Though something inside hurt. She clenched her fists. It was like she was six and this was her doll. Once more, she sensed fear in the worn blue eyes.

  “Stop it!” she yelled. “Stop it! Now! She belongs to some little kid and you can’t … what if she falls apart … she belongs to someone! You’re behaving like you’re in first grade!”

  “It’s the stress of finals,” Tim said apologetically. But he didn’t let go of the toy. “See if you can catch her,” he challenged, and then he really sounded like he was six. Anna didn’t catch the doll when he threw it again. Bertil did.

  Bertil with his too-thick glasses. He gave her back to Anna, without saying a word. In silence, she gave him the worksheet he’d wanted to copy. And the others forgot about the doll.

  “The janitor,” Bertil said gently, before he left. “Maybe the janitor has a child … it’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “It’s possible,” Anna said, smiling. “Thanks.”

  But as soon as he turned to go, she knew she shouldn’t have smiled at him. Behind his glasses, he had pleading puppy-dog eyes, and she knew exactly what their expression meant.

  When the others had gone—to their afternoon classes, to the coffeeshop, into town—when the student lounge was empty and quiet, Anna remained, sitting on the sofa, alone, with the doll perched on her knee. Outside, the day was still blue. The frost in the trees glittered like silver. Surely by now the ocean was freezing over.

  She looked at the row of trees outside the window. She saw the branches, heavy with ice crystals, wave in the breeze—and then she caught sight of the figure perched on the radiator by the window. She jumped. Had he been there the whole time, sitting motionless?

  It was Tannatek, the Polish peddler, and he was staring at her. Anna swallowed. He was still wearing the black knit cap, even indoors. Under his open military parka she could see the logo of Böhse Onkelz, the skinhead rock group, on his black sweatshirt. His eyes were blue.

  At the moment, she couldn’t remember his Christian name. She was all alone with him. And she was afraid. Her hands gripped the doll.

  He cleared his throat. And then he said something surprising. “Be careful with her.”

  “What?” Anna asked, taken aback.

  “You’re holding her too tightly. Be careful with her,” Tannatek repeated.

  Anna let go of the doll, which fell to the floor. Tannatek shook his head. Then he got up, came over to Anna—she froze—and he bent over to retrieve the doll.

  “It was me,” he said. “I lost her. Understand?”

  “No,” Anna said honestly.

  “Of course not.” He looked at the doll for a moment; he was holding it—her—like a living being. He tucked her into his backpack and returned to the radiator. He pulled out a single cigarette, then, obviously remembering that he was not allowed to smoke in the lounge, shrugged and put it back in his bag.

  Anna got up from the sofa. “Well,” said Anna, her voice still sounding much too timid. “Well, if the doll is really yours … then I guess everything’s fine. Then I can go now, can’t I? No more classes for me anyway, not today.”

  Tannatek nodded. But Anna didn’t go. She stood in the middle of the room as if something kept her there, some invisible bond … and this was one of the moments she couldn’t explain later on—not to herself or to anyone else. What happened just happened.

  She stood there until he had to say something.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you for what?” she asked. She wanted an explanation. Any kind of explanation.

  “Thank you for finding her,” he said and nodded to his backpack, from which the hand of the doll seemed to be waving.

  “Well, hmm, oh,” said Anna. “I …” she tried to produce a laugh, the small, insignificant kind of laugh necessary to rescue a conversation in danger of drying up before it even starts.

  “You look as if you were planning to rob a bank,” she said, and when he looked puzzled, she continued, “with that hat, I mean.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “In here?” Anna asked, and managed a smile in place of the insignificant laugh, although she wasn’t sure it was convincing.

  He was still looking at her. And then he peeled off the hat, very slowly, like a ritual. His hair was blond and tousled. Anna had forgotten it was blond. He’d been wearing the hat for a while—a month? Two? And before that he’d had a thug’s buzz cut, but now his hair almost covered his ears.

  “The doll, I figured … I figured she belonged to a little girl …,” Anna began.

  He nodded. “She does belong to a little girl.” And suddenly he was the one to smile. “What did you think? That she’s mine?”

  The moment he smiled, Anna remembered his first name. Abel. Abel Tannatek. She’d seen it last year on some list.

  “Well, whose is she?” Anna inquired. The great interrogator, Anna Leemann, she thought, who’s asking too many questions, who’s persistent and nosy.

  “I’ve got a sister,” said Abel. “She’s six.”

  “And why …” Why are you carrying her doll around with you? And how did you manage to lose her under a sofa in the student lounge, the great interrogator Anna Leemann longed to ask. But then she let it be. Great interrogators aren’t especially polite.

  “Micha,” said Abel. “Her name is Micha. She’ll be glad to have her dolly back.”

  He glanced at his watch, stood up, and slung the backpack over his shoulder.

  “I should get going.”

  “Yeah … me too,” Anna said quickly.

  Side by side, they stepped out into the blue, cold day, and Abel said, “I suppose you don’t mind if I put my hat back on again?”

  The frost on the trees glittered so brightly now one had to squint, and the puddles in the schoolyard reflected the sun—gleaming, glaring.

  Everything had become brighter, almost dangerously bright.

  A chatting, giggling group of ninth graders was gathered next to the bike rack. Anna watched as Abel unlocked his bike. She still had so many questions. She had to ask them now, quickly, before this conversation ended. Before Abel Tannatek turned back into the anonymous, hunched figure with the Walkman, back into the Polish peddler, whose nickname others had supplied and that he wore like a protective cover.

  “Why didn’t you say it was your sister’s doll … when they were throwing it around?” she asked. “Why did you wait until everyone had left?”

  He pulled his bike out backward, from the tangle of other bicycles. He was almost gone, almost somewhere else. Almost back in his own world. “They wouldn’t have understood,” he said. “And besides, it’s nobody’s business.” Me included, Anna thought. Abel took the ancient Walkman out of the pocket of his old military jacket and untangled the wires. Wait! Anna longed to call.

  “Do you really listen to the On
kelz?” she asked, looking at his sweatshirt.

  He smiled again. “How old do you think I am? Twelve?”

  “But the … the sweatshirt …”

  “Inherited,” he said. “It’s warm. That’s what matters.”

  He handed her an earplug. “White noise.”

  Anna heard nothing but a loud rustle. White noise, the sound emitted by a radio without reception.

  “It helps keep people away,” said Abel as he gently pulled the earplug from her ear and got on his bike. “In case I want to think.”

  And then he rode away. Anna stood there.

  Everything had changed.

  White noise.

  She didn’t ask Gitta for the old sled with the red stripe. She rode out to the beach by herself later, as it was getting dark. The beach at twilight was the best place to get her thoughts in order, to spread them out over the sand like pieces of cloth, to unfold and refold them, again and again.

  It wasn’t even a proper ocean. It was only a shallow bay, no more than several meters deep, nestled between the shore and the isle of Rügen. Once the water was frozen over, you could reach the island on foot.

  Anna stood on the empty beach for a long time, gazing out over the water, which was beginning to get a skin of ice. The surface was so smooth now, it looked like the wooden floor at home, waxed and polished by time.

  She thought about her “soap bubble” life. The house Anna and her parents lived in was old, its high-ceilinged rooms from another, more elegant, time. It was in a nice part of town, between other old houses that had been gray and derelict in times of socialism and were now restored and redecorated. Earlier today, when she’d arrived home from school, she had found herself looking at the house differently. It felt as if she were standing beneath its high ceilings with Abel Tannatek by her side. She looked at the huge bookshelves through his eyes, at the comfortable armchairs, the ancient exposed-wood beams in the kitchen, the artwork on the walls—black-and-white, modern. The fireplace in the living room, the winter branches in the elegant vase on the coffee table. Everything was beautiful, beautiful like a picture, untouchable and unreal in its beauty.

  With Abel still next to her, she had climbed the wide, wooden staircase in the middle of the living room, up to her room, where a music stand was waiting for her next to the window. She tried to shake Abel Tannatek out of her head: his wool cap, his old military parka, his inherited sweatshirt, the ragged doll. She felt the weight of her flute in her hand. Even her flute was beautiful.

  She caught herself trying to blow a different kind of sound from her instrument, a tuneless, atonal sound, something more scratchy and unruly: a white noise.

  Outside her window, a single rose was in full winter bloom on the rosebush. It was so alone that it looked unbearably out of place, and Anna had to suppress the desire to pluck it …

  Now, as she stood on the beach, the air above the sea had turned midnight blue. A fishing boat hung between ocean and sky. Anna smashed the thin layer of ice with the tip of her boot and heard the little cracks and the gurgling of the brine beneath. “He doesn’t live in a house like mine,” she whispered. “I know that for sure. I don’t know how somebody like that lives. Differently.”

  And then she walked into the water until it seeped into her boot, until the wetness and the cold reached her skin. “I don’t know anything!” she shouted at the sea. “Nothing at all!”

  About what? asked the sea.

  “About the world outside my soap bubble!” Anna cried. “I want to … I want …” She raised her hands, woolen, red-blue–patterned gloved hands, a gesture of helplessness, and let them drop again.

  And the sea laughed, but it wasn’t a friendly laugh. It was making fun of her. Do you think you could get to know somebody like Tannatek? it asked. Think of the sweatshirt. Are you sure you’re not getting involved with a Nazi? Not everyone with a little sister is a nice guy. What is a nice guy, by the way? How do you define that? And does he even have a little sister? Maybe …

  “Oh, be quiet, will you,” Anna said, turning to walk back over the cold sand.

  To her left, behind the beach, there was a big forest, deep and black. In spring there would be anemones blooming underneath the tall leafy-green beeches, but it would be a long, long time till then.

  “DO YOU THINK YOU COULD ACTUALLY GET TO know somebody like Tannatek?” Gitta asked. “Think of the buzz cut …” She pulled up her legs onto the couch; Anna suddenly remembered the times they had used this couch as a trampoline, when they were little. The couch sat in front of a wall made entirely of glass, beyond which lay the beach. Though from here, you couldn’t see the sand, you couldn’t see the water; half the housing development lay between the house and the sea. Gitta’s house, a geometric cube, was modern but of a failed kind of modernity.

  Everything about it was too tidy, even the garden. Gitta was almost positive her mother disinfected the leaves of the box hedge when no one was looking.

  Gitta didn’t get along well with her mother, who worked as a surgeon at the hospital where Anna’s father used to work; but he hadn’t gotten along with Gitta’s mother either and had run away to the less orderly, more comfortable rooms of a private practice.

  “Anna?” Gitta said. “What are you thinking about?”

  “I was thinking … about our parents,” Anna said. “And that they are all doctors or whatever.”

  “Whatever …” Gitta snorted as she put out a forbidden cigarette on a saucer. “Exactly. What’s that gotta do with Tannatek?”

  “Nothing.” Anna sighed. “Everything. I was just wondering what his parents do. Where he comes from. Where he lives.”

  “In one of those concrete tower blocks between here and the city. The Seaside District. I’ve always thought it was such an ironic name … I see him riding there every day.” She leaned forward and peered at Anna. Gitta’s eyes were blue. Like Abel’s, Anna thought, but still different. How many shades of blue are there in this world? In theory, it must be an infinite number … “Why d’you wanna know all this stuff?” Gitta asked suspiciously.

  “Just … so.” Anna shrugged.

  “Oh, just so. I see,” Gitta said. “I’ll tell you something, little lamb. You’re in love. No need to turn red like that; it happens to everyone. But you’ve chosen the wrong guy. Don’t make yourself crazy. With someone like Tannatek, all you’ll get is a relationship based on fucking, and besides, you’ll probably catch something nasty. There’s nothing in it for you.”

  “Shut up!” Anna said. There was an edge of anger to her voice that surprised her. “We’re not talking about a relationship, or about … about that… Did you ever consider that maybe my worldview is not as limited as yours? That maybe I think about other things besides sex and the next time I’m going to get laid?”

  “The next time?” Gitta asked, grinning. “Was there a first? Did I miss something?”

  “You’re impossible,” Anna said, getting up, but Gitta pulled her back down onto the white leather couch, which looked as if it was easy to disinfect. Probably came in handy, Anna thought, considering her daughter’s lifestyle.

  “Anna,” Gitta said. “Calm down. I didn’t mean to upset you. I just don’t want to see you unhappy. Can’t you fall in love with someone else?”

  “I am not in love,” Anna said, “and stop trying to persuade me that I am.” She looked out the huge window, across the development and its too-modern houses. If she squinted, she might be able to render the houses invisible and see the ocean beyond. It was a question of sheer determination. And maybe, if she tried really hard, she could discover something about Abel Tannatek. Without Gitta. Why hadn’t she just kept her mouth shut? Why did she have to tell Gitta that she’d talked to Abel? Maybe because it had been two days and they hadn’t exchanged a single word since then. The soap bubble had closed around Anna again, and the cold wall of silence had closed around Abel. Inside the soap bubble, though, something had changed. There was a sparkle of light. Curiosity.
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  “Listen, little lamb,” Gitta said as she lit a fresh cigarette. Did her life consist of cigarettes? She made Anna nervous fiddling with them, lighting them, putting them out all the time. “I know that you’re smarter than I am. All those good grades you get, the music … you’re thinking about things other people don’t think about. And of course it’s stupid that I call you little lamb. I know that. But this one time, you really should listen to me. Forget Tannatek. That doll … why does he run around with a child’s doll? A little sister? Well, I dunno. But maybe you should have looked at that doll more closely. Didn’t he say you should be careful with it? Don’t you ever read crime novels? I know you’re always reading books! I mean, it’s none of my business where he gets the stuff he sells, but once he said something about knowing people in Poland. He’s gotta bring the stuff over somehow …”

  “You’re saying he’s using this doll …”

  Gitta shrugged. “I’m not saying anything. I’m just thinking aloud. I mean, we’re all glad he’s there, our Polish peddler. He still has the best products … don’t look at me like that. I’m no junkie. Not everybody who likes beer is an alcoholic, is she? I just wouldn’t believe everything our dry-goods merchant tells you. He’s just looking out for himself. But aren’t we all?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Gitta laughed. “I’m not sure. It sounded good though, didn’t it? Kind of like philosophy. Anyway, that story about the doll and the little sister is really touching. And the white noise … maybe he’s a little weird, our Polish friend. But maybe he just invented all that stuff to get your attention. You’re good at school. And he definitely needs help if he’s going to pass exams. So maybe he invented something to get you interested.”