“Only the rose girl acted. She jumped into the water after the little queen, without thinking twice.
“She found her hand in the roaring stream, a small, helpless, royal hand, and they clung to each other. But they couldn’t swim against the current. It was much too strong, and the water was much too icy. And then they felt something pulling them; there was something pulling them against the current. The rose girl managed to lift her head out of the water and saw the sea lion’s head next to them. He had sunk his teeth into the little queen’s sleeve and was swimming against the stream. And suddenly, she could feel herself moving toward the shore. The rose girl saw the sea lion fighting the water. He needed all his strength to pull her and the little queen along. He was a strong swimmer, but the current was stronger. She tried to help him, tried to swim by herself, but he shook his head. ‘Hold still,’ his golden eyes begged. ‘It’s easier if you’re still. You can’t help me.’
“So she held still, and the little queen held still as well, and the cutter stood on the ice, watching them. She lifted her hand and made a barely perceptible movement, and the little queen and the rose girl both knew that the movement was a signal, that she was calling someone—the ocean riders. The ocean riders on their seagrass-green and snow-white horses, who would come to restore the order they believed to be justified.
“The current tugged at the three, trying to drag them away. It hit them and bit them and drooled on them greedily, but in the end they reached the shore. With the last of his strength, the sea lion crept onto the beach, and there he lay, limp and motionless. The rose girl got up and started patting him, to bring life back into his body; and the little queen laid her hand on his neck, so that he knew she was there and that he’d managed to get her onto land safely.
“When she did this, he lifted his head.
“And on the other side of the stream, the ocean riders dashed over the ice. At its edge, they stopped their horses, who reared and whinnied. Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe it was only a rumor that the ocean riders could gallop over the water. Or maybe the current was just too strong here, even for them.
“The cutter pointed at the little group on the mainland. ‘Do you see the sea lion?’ they heard her say. ‘He took them over there, the silver-gray sea lion with the blue eyes.’
“The rose girl looked into his eyes. They weren’t golden anymore; they’d frozen to blue ice. At this moment, one of the ocean riders lifted his rifle—they all carried hunting rifles—and a shot rang out over the water. With the sound came a bullet, and that bullet hit the sea lion between the eyes.
“‘No!’ the little queen screamed, and she jumped up. Before the next shooter could fire his deadly rifle, tears sprang from her eyes and fell down into the stream, flooding it. And it became so warm that the rest of the ocean warmed up in milliseconds. For someone who has a diamond for a heart also has tears that are as warm as the sun. The ice melted in an instant, and the ocean riders sank into the sea, together with the cutter. Then the current carried them away, along with the asking man and the answering man and the sleeping white cat and the lighthouse keeper, who had still been lying somewhere on the ice.
“The little queen and the rose girl watched them drift away. They would never find out what happened to them in the end.
“Finally, they turned and started to walk away from the sea. The rose girl had lifted the sea lion up and was carrying him with her. But he wasn’t a sea lion anymore.
“He had changed into a human being.
“‘He saved me,’ the little queen said.
“‘He saved us,’ the rose girl said.
“‘But he lost himself in the process,’ said the little queen. ‘He will never know that he saved us. And I will cry. I don’t cry now because all of my tears have fallen into the ocean. There will be more tears, though, growing inside me, and I will cry them all my life. I still don’t know what death means, but my sea lion knows it now …’
“‘Don’t cry,’ the rose girl begged. ‘Don’t cry all your life, little queen. He does know that he saved us. He will stay with us. As a memory. Do you see the house up there on the cliff?’
“The little queen swallowed the tears that had already started to grow back. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I see it. It’s beautiful. There are roses in the garden, and someone is feeding the robins.’
“‘Do you hear the music spilling from the windows as well?’ the rose girl asked. ‘Piano and flute. You could live there. You could live in that house and play music instead of crying.’
“And the little queen nodded.”
“And that’s the end of the fairy tale?” Micha asked.
“That’s the end of the fairy tale.”
“No,” Micha said and stood up. “No, that’s not the end. Because, you know, the little queen decided something else. She didn’t want that diamond heart anymore. She exchanged it for a normal heart. The diamond heart she put on the sea lion’s grave.”
“That was a very good idea.”
“So … did it end well, in some ways?”
“Yes, it did … in some ways. It was the sea lion’s greatest wish that the little queen would reach the mainland. And his wish was fulfilled, and, I think, in the end he was happy.”
She stood up, too. They’d been sitting on folding chairs in the yard, watching the robins, but when Micha had jumped up, all the robins had flown away.
“I can hear the piano,” Micha said. “Linda’s playing. I think I’ll go in and help her. I have to think of something else now, quickly, otherwise …”
“Go ahead and help Linda with the piano,” Anna replied. “I’m going to stay here a little longer.”
She closed her eyes and saw the landing on the fifth floor again.
She couldn’t help it.
She saw Abel standing there. He smiled. She saw that he was holding the gun. She heard the release of the safety catch.
“Anna,” he said. And he lifted the weapon. It was then that she understood his way out and why he’d asked her what would become of Micha. He hadn’t wanted to leave like Michelle, not without taking care of everything first. He put the barrel of the gun into his mouth. He didn’t hesitate, not for one second. She didn’t hear the shot. The world became strangely silent, and she fell into a cold darkness, dark like the ocean deep … deep under the ice.
The darkness only lasted for seconds, maybe not even that long. She opened her eyes, and, up there on the landing, he wasn’t standing anymore. She looked down the stairs and saw that Linda had buried her face in her hands. She saw that Bertil wanted to come up the stairs, saw Magnus grab his arm and hold him back, his grip as firm as steel. None of the policemen moved. She thought she should have run. But she didn’t.
It was Micha who ran.
She freed herself from Anna’s arms and ran up the stairs, and Anna followed her, climbing the steps very slowly. She saw him lying there, saw the blood in which he lay, so incomprehensibly red, light red—big, burst droplets of blood the color of poppies. A sea of blood, a red endless sea, crimson waves, carmine froth, splashing color … Micha was kneeling next to his legs and had laid her arms and her head on his knees, where there was no blood. And she was singing, very, very softly.
Just a tiny little pain,
Three days of heavy rain,
Three days of sunlight,
Everything will be all right.
Just a tiny little pain …
And Anna asked herself, were the words running out of Abel’s head with the blood, all the words he’d wanted to weave into stories later … later, always later. Words that could have been written in summer by the sea … in Ludwigsburg, in a secret hiding place between the beach grass; or in a student apartment in some faraway city; or on a journey around the world. Shouldn’t she be saving the words somehow, collecting them? All the words … the words of the storyteller. She stood there very still, next to Micha, and it broke her heart to hear Micha sing. The place in her, though, where her tears should have co
me from, was rough and dry. No, she didn’t find any tears in herself to cry for the storyteller.
The storyteller didn’t exist anymore.
They buried him a week after the thirteenth of March. After his eighteenth birthday. Anna put a bouquet of anemones on his grave, a bouquet of spring. Linda held Micha’s hand the whole time, and Micha held Mrs. Margaret’s hand … Mrs. Margaret, in her blue-and-white-flower-patterned dress. Anna didn’t hold anybody’s hand. She walked next to Magnus in silence, without looking at him.
Micha’s uncle didn’t care where she lived. He signed all the necessary papers with a resigned shrug. So she would be adopted. Micha Tannatek would change into Micha Leemann. She’d reached the mainland as Abel had wanted her to. She would never go through what he’d gone through.
And still, Anna searched for tears inside herself.
Abel’s picture was on the wall above the chimney now, the one good photo Micha had found of him. She’d insisted they have it framed and hang it there, so Abel could see what she was doing all day long. So he would stay with them. And every time Anna passed that picture, she thought she’d find her tears. But they never came. She must have used them up while Abel was alive, for now that he was dead, there were none left. They had talked for the longest time, Magnus and Linda and her. Everybody knew everything now. Or did everybody know nothing? Nobody knew anything … Nobody could know everything.
Anna still played the flute, but she didn’t practice the pieces she should have practiced. Instead, she played the simple melodies of Leonard Cohen. She still didn’t know if she’d ever be able to ask Knaake about him. Or whether he would wake up again. Finals had become irrelevant. She’d decide later whether to take them … and when. Linda and Magnus didn’t press her. Maybe, Anna thought, she wouldn’t go to university. Maybe she’d do something different altogether. She just had to figure out what. She’d talk to Gitta about that when she felt ready.
Bertil called for a while, but Anna never answered, and finally she changed her number. She felt sorry for him, but she couldn’t help him.
Leonard Cohen sang from one of the scratched LPs,
Baby I’ve been here before,
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
But love is not some kind of victory march
No it’s a cold and a very broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah …
Somewhere in a parallel world, things were different.
Somewhere in a parallel world, Abel hadn’t fired that last shot. Possibly, he hadn’t fired the one before it either, the one that killed Sören Marinke. And Knaake had never fallen through the ice over the shipping channel. And if these two things hadn’t happened … the last shot hadn’t. Somewhere in a parallel world, Abel was in prison, maybe for a long time … maybe he was in therapy … therapy that didn’t heal anything but brought some things in order. Time couldn’t change the past, but it brought peace. And parallel Anna … she waited.
She was waiting for him when he took his first step back into the normal world. She watched him walk toward her, a smile in his winter-ice eyes. She had long since grown up. They married on a February morning as clear as crystal. Micha was their only witness. They sent her postcards from their journey around the world … from the desert and several remote islands. Later, Micha often visited them, an adult Micha with a husband and two children. And in the house where Anna and Abel lived, somewhere at the end of a quiet, green lane, there were children as well. Laughing kids, badly behaved kids, dirty and loud kids, who ran through the yard, lighthearted. There were a lot of flowers in the garden, but no roses, and the only songbird to never stray there was the robin.
She told him about the garden when she visited his grave. He lay there, in the slowly stirring March earth, a piece of dead matter. But in their parallel world, they lived on, side by side. She developed each part of their parallel world in meticulous detail … the sunflowers in a vase, the late afternoon light coming in through a window, glasses he wore when he was older, a shelf full of books, a faded leather armchair.
Nothing was perfect, but everything was all right. The light was never just blue.
And the snow that fell onto the roof in winter … it fell softly … softly … and it covered the house, the armchair, the books, the children’s voices. It covered Anna and Abel, covered their parallel world, and everything was, finally, very, very quiet.
ANTONIA MICHAELIS is the author of Tiger Moon, which was the winner of an ALA/ALSC Batchelder Honor Award and was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book. In a starred review, Booklist said of her novel Dragons of Darkness, “Michaelis deftly interweaves magic and realism in an intricate, provocative story that explores the connections between people and events, the allure and dangers of uncompromising idealism, and the power of love.” She lives with her family in Germany.
This book was designed by Maria T. Middleton. The text is set in 11-point Adobe Jenson, an oldstyle typeface designed by the fifteenth-century French printer Nicolas Jenson. Redrawn in the 1990s by type designer Robert Slimbach, Adobe Jenson remains a highly legible face with a distinct calligraphic character. The display typeface is Celestia Antique.
This book was printed and bound by R.R. Donnelley in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Its production was overseen by Erin Vandeveer.
Table of Contents
At First
Chapter 1: Anna
Chapter 2: Abel
Chapter 3: Micha
Chapter 4: In Between
Chapter 5: Rainer
Chapter 6: Rose Girl
Chapter 7: Gold Eye
Chapter 8: Damocles
Chapter 9: Bertil
Chapter 10: Sisters of Mercy
Chapter 11: Sören
Chapter 12: Three Days of Sunshine
Chapter 13: Snow
Chapter 14: No Saint
Chapter 15: Thaw
Chapter 16: Truth
Chapter 17: Michelle
Chapter 18: The Storyteller
About the Author
Antonia Michaelis, The Storyteller
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