“White noise,” Anna said.
Gitta looked at her. “Excuse me?”
“Maybe he hasn’t earned his daily wage.” Hennes laughed. He pushed his red hair back and nudged Gitta in a friendly way. “Hey, physics is over, and the math test tomorrow is the last one before finals … shouldn’t we celebrate? Tomorrow night … we could ask him if he’s got some weed. Or does he only sell pills?”
“He’s a peddler.” Gitta put a suggestive hand on Hennes’s arm. “I’m guessing he can get almost anything. But if you ask him for weed, he’ll laugh. Weed’s easy—it’s for children. I’m sure he makes more selling other stuff.”
“Today, I’m feeling generous,” Hennes said, grinning. “I actually feel like tipping. What do you think, does our Polish peddler take tips?”
He slipped into his ski jacket, and a moment later was walking across the yard, through the gently falling snowflakes. Gitta sighed and said, “Those snowflakes really look good in his hair. You could put that guy in a frame, hang him up on the wall …”
“If he really wants to party … maybe he’ll let you hang him on the wall. You never know,” Frauke said and laughed.
“Depends on what he arranges with the Pole,” Gitta said, “… and what he plans to smoke. Anna, do you want to come tomorrow?”
“I’ll think about it,” Anna said.
She saw Hennes standing at the bike rack next to Abel. She saw Hennes’s bright-colored ski jacket, his glowing red hair, his upright posture; she saw Abel beside him, hands dug deep into the pockets of his old parka, hat pulled down low, back bent—a dark lump of a human being, almost totally holed up in himself, nearly invisible, an ugly blotch in the immaculate white snow. She saw Hennes talking to Abel, who didn’t take the plugs out of his ears.
“You know, it’s possible to party without weed,” Bertil said. Anna jumped. She hadn’t seen him there. He looked at her.
“What do you think?”
“I’m thinking,” Anna replied in a low voice, “that I don’t like Hennes von Biederitz.”
The math test went well. At first, Anna thought she would be too distracted. All the words Abel hadn’t said to her since Monday were filling her head. She saw him sitting at his desk, his test in front of him. Halfway through, he pulled off his black sweatshirt and sat there in his T-shirt; she forced herself not to look at him too closely, not to search for the round scar, not to think of her dream. In the end, she managed to solve most of the test problems. She remembered Bertil’s patient explanations, the look behind his glasses, and his voice—the voice of an indulgent professor—and it was like Bertil was there, taking the test for her. She didn’t want to think that; she didn’t want to think of Bertil; she hated the way he kept sneaking up on her, seeming to appear out of nowhere, without a sound.
But during lunch, there he was, all by himself, as usual. He hadn’t had to take the math test since he wasn’t in the basic class—he was in the intensive—and suddenly, Anna felt sorry for him. Bertil, who understood all numbers and integrals and statistics, and whose glasses were always sliding down his nose, and whose soap bubble was fogged up from inside. She went over to him and thanked him again for his help, and he smiled.
“We’re all getting together tonight to celebrate before finals,” she said. “Why don’t you come too?”
“Me?” Bertil asked.
Anna nodded. “Yes, you,” she said. “Just do me a favor. Don’t appear out of nowhere.”
“I’ll try and walk like an elephant,” Bertil promised, grinning. She’d never seen him look so happy.
Linda didn’t ask where Anna was going to celebrate with the others. All she said was, “Be careful on your bike; the streets are slippery.”
“Just imagine! Your last test!” Magnus said.
“Only for Hennes,” Anna replied. “We’ve still got our last history test on Friday. And then finals.”
Magnus shook his head. “God, it seems like only yesterday you were in kindergarten.”
Before she left to meet the others, he bent down—he was still so much taller than she was—and said in a low voice, “What of the world has been on your mind lately? Has it passed? Or … is it possible … that you’ll meet whatever it is tonight, when you’re out celebrating with the others?”
“No,” Anna said. “The others are absolutely unworldly.”
Magnus watched her smile. “One day you’ll tell us, won’t you? Linda’s worried, you know. Because lately, you’ve been … she says you’ve been acting so different.”
“One day I’ll explain,” Anna said. “But tonight is just a perfectly normal night at the bar, with Gitta and the others. It’s got nothing to do with anything.”
But Anna was wrong.
They met at the Mittendrin, opposite the dome. The Mittendrin was one of the few bars where you could still smoke. In the tiny side room, separated from the bar by a heavy black curtain that extended from ceiling to floor, a cigarette machine blinked.
Anna always felt like she’d stepped onto a stage when she passed through the curtain. Magnus had told her that in his day there had been a table made of an old door, complete with the handle and everything, and that the armchairs had been more comfortable. The Mittendrin had been renovated a dozen times since then, but the only real change was that there were more smokers. The air in the bar was 70 percent cigarette smoke, 28 percent alcohol and slightly strained coolness, and 2 percent the smoke of something that wasn’t cigarettes. It was also dark, and Anna wasn’t sure whether this was because of the absence of light or the presence of smoke, which prevented the light from passing through.
Gitta leafed through the drink menu, happily taking a drag, when Anna joined her and the others. The list of cocktails seemed endless.
“Sex on the beach,” Gitta said.
“In this weather?” Hennes asked.
“That’s the drink I’m gonna order, stupid.”
Bertil was sitting with a beer, trying to look relaxed, which he wasn’t; Frauke threw Anna a glance, cursing her for inviting him. Anna shrugged and ordered a glass of vodka.
“You don’t even like vodka,” Gitta said. “Have a cocktail with us, little lamb. They have the weirdest things—I’ll find something pretty for you, something nice and colorful, with a lot of fruit … we’re celebrating math after all …”
“Why don’t you let her have what she wants,” Bertil said.
“I get it.” Gitta looked over at Frauke and winked. “I know why she brought him. He’s her bodyguard. Come on, Bertil, don’t look so stricken; it was a joke, all right? Relax. So, what I wanted to say was … once these final exams are over, we’ll …”
Anna leaned back and watched Gitta, who was, simultaneously, planning their futures, gesturing wildly, smoking, drinking something that looked like a cross between a palm tree and a swimming pool, and trying to move closer to Hennes. Anna thought about how much she liked Gitta and about how little Gitta actually knew of the world, even though she always acted like she knew everything. She felt a strange disconnect from her old friend, and from Frauke and Hennes and Bertil, too. She sat there and heard them talking but didn’t listen; she watched them but looked through them, like she was watching a movie. She was sitting on the other side of the screen with her vodka, and she was a thousand years old. None of them had ever seen an island sink into the sea; none of them had ever removed as many splinters from a wound as she had—the splinters from what seemed like half a cupboard full of plates. None of them had ever been in the stairwell of 18 Amundsen Street. And then it came to her, all of a sudden, like the crack of a shotgun: they’re the ones inside a soap bubble. Not me.
She talked to them without even listening to herself, talked to them about unimportant things; she saw that glasses were emptied and refilled with more brightly colored liquids, with different flower-shaped fruits; she passed the joint that Hennes gave her without touching it; she saw the time go by but wasn’t there. She was on a ship; she was out on the ocean; she was walking with Abel between the winter chestnuts, his hand in hers. At one point, she realized that Bertil was no longer drinking a beer but instead sharing a cocktail with Frauke—the two of them drinking out of the same glass with two straws. Anna thought this was cruel of Frauke because she knew that Frauke didn’t take him seriously. No one took Bertil seriously. And she wondered if Bertil had shared Hennes’s joint. Probably. Just to be cool. But she was too far away to give it more thought.