The Storyteller

  The path was muddy and brown. In some places, she sank up to her ankles, her boots getting caught in the marsh, and she laughed. Winter was over.

  She left the path. She walked into the mud, into where it was the deepest, and spun around beneath the trees with her arms outstretched. She saw the hem of her winter coat fly like the hem of a dress … She had Linda’s old Cohen LPs in her backpack. And the flute. She had plans. She had great plans.

  Micha could learn to play the flute if she wanted to. Or the piano. The house of blue air was too big and the apartment at 18 Amundsen Street too small. They could move. And once Micha was settled in … maybe Abel would leave town with Anna, go somewhere, anywhere, to study. Someplace nobody knew him and nobody knew her, and they could visit Micha, all the time. But now that the snow was melting so fast, maybe he’d see certain things in a different light. And tomorrow, he’d be eighteen. From tomorrow on, he wouldn’t have to fear that someone could take Micha away. She hoped it would be as he thought. She could have asked Magnus. Magnus knew about things like that, law-related things, but she hadn’t asked. She’d feared his answer. No, she told herself, Abel is probably right. From tomorrow on, everything will be all right. We’ll reach the mainland. It’s so close already.

  She passed a hunting blind, its four wooden supports standing in the mud like the legs of a giant creature stuck fast, and suddenly she thought of Bertil. These were the grounds where his father hunted. Maybe he’d been sitting in this blind not long ago, a gun propped up next to him. Did his father allow him to shoot, even though he didn’t have his license yet? Now that the ground was thawing, the deer were sure to come out of their hiding places. She saw their footprints in the mud; here, the animals weren’t shy. Gitta had told her that sometimes the deer and wild boar crossed Wolgaster Street and wandered into the yards in her housing development, where they ate the young sprouts off the bushes.

  Something was rustling behind her, and she turned around. She didn’t feel like meeting a wild boar out here or, worse, a sow—when did they have their young? Now everything was quiet again. Probably just a bird looking for worms among the dry leaves. She could hear the first blackbirds and tomtits. It must have been a bird.

  She returned to the path, the one she’d run along with Abel and Micha. She ducked and slipped through the still-bare branches of the hazelnut bushes, their buds almost green at the tips, about to open, to spill new life, new leaves into the world. Here … here was the fork in the path. Behind it, there weren’t any invisibles now, in spring.

  Last spring, she’d picked flowers with Gitta here, in this very spot. Really. With Gitta, who’d never admit now that she picked flowers in the forest like a little girl. This was the best place in the whole of the Elisenhain. Anna parted the thicket. The narrow path was covered in deer tracks: deer and wild boar. She came out on the other side and stood in front of a vandalized stretch of mud. There weren’t any anemones left here, not this spring. The wild boars had really done a good job. She smiled. There would be enough anemones elsewhere in the forest.

  But why, she wondered, why had they searched for food here, where there weren’t even many beeches? Strange. She wanted to walk around the trampled earth … and then she saw that the wild boars had been trying to unearth something. Something was there, in the mud, something multicolored—red and blue, fabric. There was the rustling sound again, a ways off, but still uncomfortably close. She looked up. Hadn’t the branches of that tree over there just moved? No. She was beginning to imagine things. Her imagination was still caught somewhere in Ludwigsburg, between the pines, in the middle of a blizzard. “But that was in the winter,” she whispered, “that was ages ago. Because now … now, spring is here. Back then, I was scared … but now …”

  Now, all of a sudden, she was scared again. She stepped toward the hole the wild boars had made. Clothes. There were clothes under the mud, clothes someone must have thrown away … a red shirt, a blue raincoat … she kneeled, close to the pit, too close. Hair, there was hair in the mud, long strands of tangled hair. A doll, she prayed … please, God, I haven’t prayed since I was a child in church on Christmas, but please, please … listen to me … please, let it be a doll.

  She realized that she was shivering. Her teeth shattered uncontrollably, as if she had a high fever. She forced herself to take a branch, to free the clothes of leaves and sticks with it, to scrape the earth away. Look, look … don’t look away … you’ve got to look now. There weren’t only clothes. Of course not. Not only. There, under the earth, lay the body of a woman. It might have been lying there a long time or might have been buried hours ago. She couldn’t see it that clearly; everything was smeared with mud. And she was thankful for that, thankful that she couldn’t see the face beneath the layers of mud. The woman lay on her back—she could see that. Long blond hair … she thought of Micha’s teacher. Micha’s teacher, Mrs. Milowicz, the cutter, who wanted to form and thereby destroy the diamond—or so Abel thought. Mrs. Milowicz, with her spring-green coat. Maybe she owned a blue coat as well, or had owned one—she was the only one who’d followed the little queen to the end. She was her last threat. Everybody else had either been killed or fled. Anna leaned forward. The branch she held found a hand, though it was barely recognizable as a hand. Even in the earth beneath the snow, there were insects at work, microorganisms, time. This body had been here for more than a day. Anna averted her eyes. She felt sick and cold. There’d been something, something that had attracted her attention … she looked again. And suddenly, she knew. It was the fact that the woman had been buried on her back, as if someone hadn’t so much disposed of her as buried her. And then, she discovered something else. Something lay next to the body, something that might once have been placed on the dead woman’s breast: two thin planks of plywood, like parts of a fruit crate, held together with a simple piece of cloth, now half-decayed. It looked as if it had been ripped off something else; had it once displayed a pattern of flowers? She knew this flower pattern, blue and white … she’d seen it before … but where? The cloth held the planks together in the shape of a cross.

  Anna pulled the cross out of the hole without touching the body or the clothes. She wasn’t cold anymore, she was sweating. Her heart racing, the forest spinning around her head. Someone had written big letters onto the planks, with a black marker. Letters, words, now nearly faded away into nothingness. But that wasn’t true, of course. She could read the letters. The cold had conserved the neat block letters. They looked as if it had been very important to someone that they be readable.

  MICHELLE TANNATEK

  12.4.1975–14.2.2012

  Anna’s brain started calculating like a machine: nineteen. She hadn’t yet celebrated her nineteenth birthday when she’d had Abel. She’d died at the age of thirty-six.

  Anna closed her eyes, and what she saw among the leaves and the twigs and the mud wasn’t a dead body but a white cat. She was blind and asleep, sound asleep. One of the answers the answering man had repeatedly given came to her mind: under the beeches, where the anemones grow in spring. The asking man must have asked the right question at least once, but not at the right time: where is Michelle?

  She hadn’t ever left on a trip.

  Or maybe she had, on a very, very long one …

  “Why?” Anna whispered. “Why did you do that? Did you do that?”

  She opened her eyes, got up, realized that she was still dizzy, and staggered back. Then she doubled over and threw up. In her head, everything was tumbling into and onto each other—thoughts, words, sentences from the fairy tale. It had started with the doll, the doll she’d found under the sofa in the student lounge. Mrs. Margaret. Mrs. Margaret wore a white dress with a pattern of blue flowers. The hem of Mrs. Margaret’s dress was frayed, as if someone had torn off a piece of it. What for? For some kind of souvenir? For a greeting? And had he then tried to lose Mrs. Margaret so that he wouldn’t have to explain anything to Micha? Michelle couldn’t see that souvenir anymore, couldn’t
ever understand the greeting. She was too fast asleep to ever wake up again.

  What else had the answering man said? All these senseless answers he’d given, so a few of them hadn’t been senseless. Remember, Anna, remember, that he’s been telling you the truth all this time … without telling you the truth. There was another answer that was given again and again … in the box on the bathroom cupboard. Then she remembered the asking man’s last question, also asked seemingly out of context: where is the weapon?

  She saw Abel standing in the bathroom again, searching for a Band-Aid, the box in his hand, angry that she’d followed him there instead of waiting in the living room. “No,” she whispered. “No, I … I don’t want this. I don’t want this to be true. I … I was so sure …”

  And then she thought of Micha’s teacher. The last pursuer of the little queen. She dialed Linda’s number as she hurried back through the forest, stumbling, running.

  “Hello.”

  “Linda, it’s me. Have you got Micha’s teacher’s telephone number? Did she leave her number?”

  “No, I …”

  “Linda, you’ve gotta get it. Right now. It’s important. Call her. Tell her she has to be careful. No. Tell her not to leave her apartment. Tell her …”

  “Anna, what’s the matter? Where are you? Weren’t you going to visit Abel? Has something happened?”

  “Yes. No. I’m on my way there now. Call the teacher, Linda. Please. Do it now.”

  Her hands were shaking so much she almost couldn’t unlock her bike. You could open the lock anyway, without knowing the combination, Abel had said that. But she, she couldn’t do that. She lived in a different world, and he’d been right about everything. Go away, princess. Leave your outlaw alone. You won’t change him … go away, Anna, far away, and don’t ever come back. The fairy tale doesn’t have a happy ending. He’d warned her. He’d warned her the whole time, exactly as he’d done in the boathouse. And she hadn’t listened to him. Why had he warned her? Had he loved her despite everything? And what did that even mean, despite everything? Was a murderer able to love? She wasn’t certain. She wasn’t 100 percent certain, and she had to be certain, or else she’d never believe it. She couldn’t tell anyone if she wasn’t certain. You’re crazy, a small, reasonable voice said inside her. You’ll ride home now, little lamb … You’ll call the police, and then you’ll go home as quickly as you can. Heavens! Wasn’t that Gitta? Gitta’s voice of reason in her head. Gitta of all people! She nearly laughed.

  So what’re you gonna do, little lamb? Ask him? Just straight out?

  No. No, I’m not that stupid, Gitta. I’m going to go to the bathroom and look through the contents of the box on top of the cupboard.

  And then? When you’ve done that? When you’ve found out? What then?

  Anna didn’t answer Gitta’s last question, and Gitta wasn’t there anyway.

  Her head was strangely light when she reached Amundsen Street; her feet weren’t touching the ground, as if she were moving along in a dream. Not a nice dream.

  The door to tower number 18 was open. She kicked one of the empty beer bottles in the stairwell, to make Mrs. Ketow come to the door and stick her head out and listen, so that someone would know that she was upstairs. But how much help could she expect from Mrs. Ketow? When she rang the doorbell on the fourth floor, she was ice-cold again, shivering, her body temperature seemed to be shifting rapidly between hot and cold … maybe she did have a fever after all.

  The door opened. Anna’s heart was beating with such force that the roar filled her head completely.

  “Hi, Anna!” said Micha. “Abel isn’t here.”

  Anna breathed in and breathed out again. “Can I come in anyway?”

  “Sure,” said Micha. “I’m just reading a book. I can read a book all by myself now, or almost. It’s difficult, but it’s exciting, too. There’s this dog … Did he tell you that they’re standing in front of a stream now? I mean, in the fairy tale? I wonder how they’ll get over it. If there’s a way.”

  “I don’t know if there’s a way,” Anna replied and wrapped her arms around Micha and hugged her very tightly. “I really don’t know.”

  “Hey, you’re crushing me!” Micha said as she slipped out of Anna’s arms, laughing. “I’ve gotta go read now. About the dog.”

  And then she disappeared into her room, disappeared into the story of a dog, a different dog, one that wasn’t silver-gray. Anna remembered how Bertil had told them about a kind of silver-gray dog: a Weimaraner. It was a Weimaraner. He had become too sharp. Too dangerous. He’d attacked a jogger. He’d thought he was saving his family … Abel was that dog. If it was all true …

  “Micha?” she called, taking off her shoes in the hall. “Where is he?”

  “He went to buy something!” Micha called back. “He’ll be back in a minute! I have to keep reading!”

  Anna didn’t take off her coat. She went to the bathroom and shut the door behind her. The box was sitting on top of the bathroom cupboard. It wouldn’t mean anything, she thought, if she didn’t find something. He could have stored the weapon somewhere else, or even be carrying it with him. She had to stand on her toes to reach the box. She put it on the dresser next to the sink, a dresser Abel had painted green and Micha had decorated with a yellow flower. She opened the lid of the box.

  Packages of pills. Loads of packages. Not the ones he sold … Children’s Tylenol. Dramamine. Rohypnol … maybe that was something he sold? Teddy-bear Band-Aids. A thermometer. Cotton balls. She took a deep breath. She pushed aside a few blister packs. The box was deep. And beneath all the silvery foil of the blister packs, there was something black.

  A gun.

  Her heartbeat grew loud again. She felt it in her toes now, like she’d felt the bass in the dining hall the other night. She took the gun out of the box. She didn’t know anything about guns. About weapons in general. She stood in front of the mirror and tried to hold it the right way. It looked ridiculous in her hands. She put it back in the box. And she would have pushed the blister packs over it again.

  But at that very moment, the bathroom door opened.

  The door of the apartment must have been opened first … there must have been footsteps in the hall. Her heartbeat had been too loud for her to hear them. She took a step back.

  “Anna,” said Abel.

  Bertil hadn’t ever climbed down from a hunting blind that fast before. With each rung of the ladder, his binoculars swung against his chest. In his head, there was only one word, and that was a name: Anna. Anna, Anna, Anna. He’d given up following her around. He’d been an idiot. What he’d done in that snowstorm had been stupid—stupid and dangerous. He should never have scared her on purpose. The announcement at school had been even more stupid.

  And suddenly, he wondered why he was alive.

  If what he’d suspected all along was true, then Tannatek had no problem shooting people. He couldn’t imagine it. How it felt to shoot someone. He’d never told anyone, but whenever his father fired at an animal in the forest, he looked away. He was a coward. He knew it. The only thing he could shoot at was the bull’s-eye on a target. Hennes was different. Hennes was perfect. Hennes went hunting with his father for real, and he had a hunting license. He didn’t have glasses that slid down his nose. He could have any girl he wanted … any girl but Anna, that is. Not that Hennes had wanted Anna. But it was Tannatek, of all people, who’d got her in the end. Wasn’t that strange? Bertil’d been following her for so long—and following Tannatek, too. He’d found out so many things but not enough.

  He’d almost stopped. Now, he was glad that he hadn’t, glad that he’d followed her out here as well. He felt nauseated when he kneeled next to the pit the wild boars had made. He’d never seen a dead body before. Anna probably hadn’t either, he thought. His glasses were slipping again. He didn’t need to read the name on the wooden cross to know whose body it was, but he read it anyway. Then he dialed the police. But where would he tell them to go? Here?
>
  Where was Anna? Had she gone home? Had she gone to the police herself? He hadn’t followed her out of the thicket. He’d let her leave on her own. A mistake, Bertil, he told himself, an unforgivable mistake.

  So he’d tell them to come here first. They wouldn’t believe him anyway if they didn’t see this.

  She couldn’t say anything. She just stood there, in the middle of the tiny bathroom, motionless. She watched his blue eyes wander. Their pupils were back to their normal size, but he looked tired. Exhausted. He looked like someone finished up. He was carrying a plastic shopping bag. His eyes, his bleary ice-blue eyes, slid from Anna to the green dresser next to the sink to the open cardboard box to the shining black of the weapon inside. His movement was so fast she didn’t even really see it. He let go of the bag. Then he was leaning against the doorframe, the gun in his hand. He was playing around with it—like people do in the movies.

  He looked at the weapon. He looked at Anna.

  “So,” he said.

  She was still mute with fear. Scream, Anna, she thought. Scream for your damn life. Downstairs, Mrs. Ketow is eavesdropping … She couldn’t scream.

  He nodded as if she’d asked him something. “Yes, Anna. Yes, I know how to shoot. Self-taught, I’d say. The guy they nicked for the first murder, do you remember? The guy who was trading weapons? He’d sold me this gun, a while back. He must have forgotten he did because he didn’t tell anyone. But it explains why he had another like it.” He’d been speaking in a low voice, low enough to keep Micha from hearing his words.

  She realized that she’d kept her voice low, too. Where had she found her voice? And if she’d found it again, why didn’t she speak louder?

  “I found Michelle’s grave, Abel. The grave in the forest.”