“One day,” Abel replied. “But now we’re on a trip to the students’ dining hall and …”
And then they were gone, and Anna couldn’t hear any more of what they said. But she understood that it was not a different language that illuminated Abel’s sentences, neither Polish nor Serbo-Croatian. It was a child in a pink down jacket, a child with a turquoise schoolbag and two wispy, blond braids, a child who clung to her brother’s back with gloveless little hands, red from the cold.
To the commons. We’re on a trip to the student dining hall.
The university dining hall was in the city, near the entrance to the pedestrian area. Anna went there from time to time with Gitta. The dining hall was open to the public, had inexpensive cakes, and Gitta was often in love with one of the students.
Anna didn’t follow behind Abel. Instead, she took the path along the Ryck, a little river running parallel to Wolgaster Street. There was a broad strip of houses and gardens between the street and the river so you couldn’t see from one to the other. She rode as fast as she could, for the route along the Ryck, with all its bends and turns, was longer. The gravel here clung together in small, mean, icy chunks. The thin tires of her bicycle slipped on the frozen puddles, the wind blew in her face, her nose hurt with the cold—yet something inside her was singing. Never had the sky been so high and blue, never had the branches of the trees along the river’s edge been so golden. Never had the growing layer of ice on the water sparkled so brightly. She didn’t know if this excitement was fueled by her ambition to find out something that nobody else knew. Or by the anticipation of finding out.
The entrance to the dining hall was a chaos of people and bicycles, conversations and phone calls, weekend plans and dates. For a moment Anna was afraid she wouldn’t spot Abel in the chaos. But then she saw something pink in the crowd, a small figure spinning through a revolving door. Anna followed. Once inside, she climbed the broad staircase to the first floor, where the food was served. Halfway up she stopped, took her scarf from her backpack, tied it around her head, and felt absolutely ridiculous. What am I? A stalker? She took one of the orange plastic trays from the stack and stood in the line of university students waiting for food. It was odd to realize that she’d soon be one of them. After a year off working as an au pair in England, that is. Not that she’d study here—the world was too big to stay in your hometown. A world of unlimited possibility was waiting out there for Anna.
Abel and Micha had already reached the checkout. Anna squeezed past the other students, put something unidentifiable on her plate—something that could be potatoes or could be run-over dog—and hurried to the checkout counter.
She saw Abel tuck a plastic card in his backpack, a white rectangle with light blue print on it. All the students seemed to have them. “Excuse me,” she said to the girl behind her, “do I need one of those cards, too?”
“If you pay cash, they’ll charge you more,” the girl replied. “Are you new? They sell those cards downstairs. You’ve gotta show them your student ID. It’s a five-euro deposit for the card, and you can load it with money in the machine near the stairs and …”
“Wait,” Anna said. “What if I don’t have a student ID?”
The girl shrugged. “Then you’ll have to pay full price. You’d better find your ID.”
Anna nodded. She wondered where Abel had found his.
Even at full price, the cost of run-over dog wasn’t especially high. And so soon Anna was standing at the checkout with her tray, scanning the room for a little girl in a pink down jacket.
She wasn’t the only one craning her neck in search of someone; a lot of people seemed to be similarly occupied. The pink jacket had disappeared, and there wasn’t a child with thin blond braids anywhere. Anna panicked; she’d lost them forever and she’d never find them … she’d never talk to Abel Tannatek again. She couldn’t pretend to buy more pills she’d never use. She’d go to England as an au pair and never find out why he was the way he was and who that other Abel was, the one who had tenderly lifted his sister up into the air; she would never …
“There are some free tables in the other room,” someone next to her said to someone else as two trays moved past her, out the door. Anna followed. There was a second dining room, across the corridor and down the stairs to the right. And on the left, behind a glass wall, right in the middle of the second room, was a pink jacket.
The floor was wet with the traces of winter boots. Anna carefully balanced her tray as she wove through the tables—it wasn’t that she was worried for the run-over dog, that was beyond saving—but if she slipped and fell, dog and all, it would definitely draw everybody’s attention. The pink jacket was hanging over a chair, and there, at a small table, were Abel and Micha. Anna was lucky; Abel was sitting with his back to her. She sat down at the next table, her back to Abel’s.
“What is that?” a student next to her asked as he contemplated her plate with suspicion.
“Dead dog,” Anna said, and he laughed and tried to spark a conversation—where was she from, somewhere abroad? Because of the head scarf? Was it her first semester, and did she live on Fleischmann Street, where most students lived, and …
“But you said you’d tell me a story today,” said a child’s voice behind her. “You promised. You haven’t told me any stories for … for a hundred years. Since Mama went away.”
“I had to think,” Abel said.
“Hey, are you dreaming? I just asked you something,” the student said. Anna looked at him. He was handsome; Gitta would have been interested. But Anna wasn’t. She didn’t want to talk to him, not now. She didn’t want Abel to hear her voice. “I’m … I’m not feeling good,” she whispered. “I … can’t talk much. My throat … why don’t you just go ahead and tell me something about you?”
He was only too happy to oblige. “I haven’t been here for long. I was hoping you could tell me something about this town. I’m from Munich; my parents sent me here because I wasn’t accepted anywhere else. As soon as I am, I’ll transfer …”
Anna started eating the dead dog, which was indeed potatoes (dead potatoes), nodded from time to time, and did her best to block out the student and switch to another channel, the Abel-and-Micha channel. For a while there was nothing but white noise in her head, the white noise between channels, and then—then it worked. She stopped hearing the student. She didn’t hear the noise in the room, the people eating, laughing, chatting. She heard Abel. Only Abel.
And this was the moment when everything turned inside out. When the story that Anna would take part in truly began. Of course, it had begun earlier, with the doll, with the Walkman, with the little girl waiting in that grim, gray schoolyard. With the wish to understand how many different people Abel Tannatek was.
Anna closed her eyes for a second and fell out of the real world. She fell into the beginning of a fairy tale. Because the Abel sitting here, in the students’ dining hall, only a few inches away, amid orange plastic trays and the hum of first-semester conversation, in front of a small girl with blond braids … this Abel was a storyteller.
The fairy tale into which Anna fell was as bright and magical as the moment in which he’d spun Micha in his arms. But beneath his words, Anna sensed the darkness that lurked in the shadows, the ancient darkness of fairy tales.
Only later, much later, and too late, would Anna understand that this fairy tale was a deadly one.
They hadn’t seen him. None of them. He had disappeared, dissolved in the crowd of students; he had turned invisible behind his orange tray with the white plate and unidentifiable contents.
He smiled at his own invisibility. He smiled at the two of them sitting over there, so close and yet at different tables, back-to-back. They were here together and didn’t know it. How young they were! He’d been young once, too. Maybe that was the reason he still went to the dining hall from time to time. It wasn’t like back then of course; it was a different dining hall in a different town, and yet here he could visit his own memories.