She was right. On each of the tables in the café, a single red tulip stood in a narrow white vase. “Yeah, it’s spring in here,” Abel said. “I wonder if it’ll ever be spring out there.”
Outside, in the eternal winter, Knaake was walking out onto the pier with thoughtful steps. He stood at the green pole with the light on top, and it looked as if he were listening to some long-forgotten melody still hanging in the air at the end of the pier. Then he reached into his pocket and took something out, which he held to his eyes—a small pair of binoculars.
“Didn’t you say that’s the lighthouse keeper?” Micha asked. “He’s looking for the ship. The black one. He’s looking for the last person on it, I mean, apart from Mrs. Ketow and the haters, Uncle Rico and Aunt Evelyn. For, you know, I don’t think those three are really dangerous. Uncle Rico—definitely not—he doesn’t even want to have me. He might have to take me in because he’s my only close relative. If another guy from shells and sisters comes and says …”
Micha kept on talking about the ship and about “shells and sisters,” which by now sounded like the name of a grocery-store chain to Anna, but she wasn’t listening very carefully. She saw Knaake turn around with his binoculars. He wasn’t scanning the horizon anymore. Instead, he was looking at the beach of Eldena, opposite the pier, on the other side of the mouth of the river. Was he able to see the police tape from where he was standing? Could he make out the faces of the curious people who were prowling around like stray cats on the lookout for food? Next, Knaake aimed his binoculars at the café. Maybe he saw them. What else did he see? What else did he expect to see?
Anna followed his gaze to the café terrace, where people were giving up and starting to leave—it was just too cold out there. Someone with a big gray dog walked past. Anna put a hand on Abel’s arm and pointed.
The person with the dog stopped at the beginning of the pier, looked out over the frozen sea for a few moments, turned, and walked his dog back along the river. He was pushing a bicycle, too, with one hand.
“Bertil,” Anna said. Abel nodded. Had he seen them? He’d seen Knaake, who was still standing out there at the end of the pier … that much was sure—he had seen him and turned the other way.
“So did the sea stay thick?” Micha asked, gently stroking the red tulip on their table with her index finger. “Or did it turn more liquidy again? Did they find out which one of them was the murderer?”
Abel sipped a little of his hot chocolate, covered his face with his hands, and took a deep breath. “That sea …,” he said after lowering his hands, “… that sea stayed thick and green. Worse, it became thicker and thicker. And, finally, it stood still. The waves weren’t moving anymore. The ship had stopped.
“Then, there was a cracking sound right in front of the green ship. One of the motionless waves broke like glass, and, in a rain of splinters, the sea lion heaved himself out of the ocean, onto its rigid, shining green surface.
“‘The sea,’ he declared—and the tone of his voice had something very final to it—‘the sea has frozen.’
“‘But how … how can we go on?’ the little queen asked in despair.
“‘On foot,’ the rose girl answered. ‘We’ll have to walk.’
“So they all climbed over the rail, one after the other: the asking man, the answering man, the lighthouse keeper, the rose girl, the little queen with Mrs. Margaret in her arms, and the blind white cat. They walked a little ways away from the ship; then they stood, hesitating, a pitiful cluster of figures in the middle of shining, dark green endlessness.
“‘What will we do if we get lost in this eternal winter?’ the little queen asked timidly. ‘If we lose each other? Where will we find each other again?’
“‘We’ll meet wherever spring is,’ the rose girl replied.
“And then they started wandering over the ice. Just once, they turned to look back at their green ship with the yellow rudder; the lighthouse keeper got out a small pair of binoculars, the existence of which he had forgotten until that moment, and he looked through them.
“‘Now I can see it!’ he exclaimed. ‘I can see the ship’s name! It’s painted on her bow, right above the waterline; we just didn’t realize it was there!’
“He gave the binoculars to the little queen, and she, too, saw the blue letters on the green hull of the ship.
“‘What’s she called, then?’ the asking man asked.
“‘Thanks, same to you,’ the answering man answered.
“‘She’s called Hope,’ the little queen said. ‘Our ship is called Hope.’
“The rose girl sighed. ‘And now we’re leaving her behind,’ she whispered.”
Abel took hold of his cup and leaned back in his chair.
“Is that all?” Micha asked.
“For today, yes. Before I can go on telling you what happens, the little queen’s crew has to continue on foot for a while over the ice.”
“But look! Out there, they are walking over the ice, too, just like in the story!” Micha called out. “See? Over there? I want to do that, too! There’s even a woman with a stroller!”
At that very moment, the woman Micha had spotted seemed to notice that she was getting dangerously close to the shipping canal, where dark water was coming through the thin layer of ice. She stood there for a moment, as if undecided, then turned and went back toward the beach, the way she’d come, pushing the stroller in front of her. Two children, about two and three years old, were running around her in circles, like young dogs, pushing and shoving each other. The woman herself was wearing a coat and a head scarf; she looked a little like people in those photographs from 1945, fleeing from the Russians, walking over the ice. But probably, she was just part of the curious crowd that had gathered by the police tape on the beach.
“I think,” Abel said as he looked into his empty cup, “it’s time to go home. Anybody need to go to the bathroom before we head out?”
Micha nodded, and, when she’d left, Abel leaned forward, closer to Anna.
“Mrs. Ketow,” he whispered. “Micha didn’t recognize her, but I’m pretty sure it was her.”
“Now we’ve got everyone gathered here,” Anna said. “Everyone who’s got anything to do with the fairy tale. Apart from the haters, but they don’t live anywhere near, do they? Apart from them, everyone’s here.”
“No,” Abel said in a low voice. Then he took something from his pocket and put it on the table in front of her. It was a bank statement. “You were right.”
Anna’s eyes scanned the paper. The amounts of money going in and out of the account were ridiculously low, not much more than a child’s pocket money. Only at the very end, there was a bigger amount. One hundred euros, drawn from a cash machine in Eldena.
“That wasn’t me. I didn’t take that out,” Abel said. “That was her. Now she’s starting to take our money.”
“Michelle,” Anna said.
Abel nodded. “She’s the only other person who can use this account. I wonder if I should close it. Or change the password. But I probably can’t even do that because I’m still not eighteen. She’s the only one who can do that. In any case … she hasn’t gone off to God-knows-where to start a new life.” He looked around, looked over the heads in the café and outside at the people walking over the ice, at the harbor, at the beach of Eldena. “She’s here. Somewhere close. I just haven’t spotted her yet.”
Anna went home with Abel and Micha. It just happened. Or maybe the little queen had decided that she should; maybe she had scratched words into the dirt on some invisible windowpane: TAK HER HOM WITH YOU, like K IS EacH Oth ER.
Abel made spaghetti. And that night, Anna almost believed that Linda was right. That everything would turn out okay. Abel was standing in the tiny kitchen, humming a melody to himself, wearing a makeshift apron like some backyard chef; Micha was painting a picture for school in the living room, a “what I did this weekend” picture; and Anna was cutting up tomatoes. From time to time, she went into the living room to look at Micha’s artwork. First, a flute appeared; then, a piece of cake seemed to grow out of the flute; then, a red tulip was growing out of the cake; then, red police tape was slung around the tulip … and then Anna discovered someone who Micha said was Abel and someone she said was Anna—the two of them discernible only by the color of their hair—and, in the end, a green square filled the rest of the paper. On the square, she’d written “Hop” and drawn a yellow triangle: a green ship with a yellow rudder. A gray animal was flying in the middle of the picture—it might have been a dog, but it might just as well have been an elephant. Abel and Anna kissed in the kitchen for too long, forgetting the boiling tomato sauce, which spilled over the rim of the saucepan and onto the stove. They wiped it away and laughed. How absolutely, wonderfully all right everything was!