“She’d slit her wrists … long, deep cuts in both arms … she’d wanted to make sure. Blind white cat. Self-centered beast. She never thought of us, not for one minute. She ran away from her own problems, her fucked-up life … the wrong guys, booze, unemployment, drugs. We have an old bike trailer in the basement … we used it to transport furniture and stuff we found in the trash … I put her into the bike trailer and took her to the Elisenhain. She loved the anemones so much. We used to go for walks there when I was little, before Rainer Lierski … I was sure someone would see me, stop me. I almost wanted somebody to. But nobody did. That was the day the island sank, and the sea was red.”
He fell silent. He lifted the gun and put it in his pocket.
“You really thought that I did it, didn’t you?” he whispered. “That I shot my mother? That I’d shoot you?”
“What are we going to do now?” Anna whispered.
“I don’t know. You tell me. Everything’s ending.”
“No!” she whispered. “No. Not for me. Everything’s just beginning. We’re seventeen.”
She put her arms around him and hugged him as tightly as she could.
“Are you trying to tell me that you’ll stay? In spite of everything?” he whispered. “Anna, I’m a murderer. I’m a murderer and a hustler and a dealer. I’m everything that’s unthinkable in your world.”
“I am not staying with the murderer,” she said, her words muffled by his jacket. “I am not staying with the victim Abel Tannatek or the culprit Abel Tannatek. I am staying with the storyteller.”
She pulled him out of the bathroom, into the living room. She pulled him down on the sofa. She realized that she was crying again. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t know who started to kiss whom, but it was a desperate kiss, a kiss in front of the sharp edge where the ice had broken and the water was rushing by in an unpassable stream, separating them from the mainland.
“We’ll find a solution,” Anna whispered. “There is one. There must be one.”
But first, something else seemed more important, and it happened as if it had to happen. The most improbable of all the things that could have happened. Maybe it happened because there was nothing standing between them anymore—no more secrets, no more lies, no mistrust, nothing. The torn, invisible cloak of pain was enveloping them both as it had done in that night in the house where the air was too blue. Anna felt Abel’s hands under her T-shirt, careful, timid, hesitating, and she didn’t force these hands to do anything this time. She gave them time. She thought about the white sails on the deck of the green ship whose name they’d only found out late in the story.
Everything was different from the dream. Much more complicated. Much more real.
She tried to get out of her clothes, got all tangled up in them, and laughed. And that, she knew, was all unreasonable Anna, as reasonable Anna had never done any of this. Reasonable Anna had left for good. Finally, they were sitting on the sofa naked, the two of them. She was on his lap, and she really, really did hope that Micha was sleeping. And this, she thought, was the moment to say something about a condom, but she didn’t … the inhibition threshold had dropped. K IS EacH Oth ER, she thought … letters on a window … she let her hands wander down, and she guided him, and it was surprisingly easy now … it was a gliding movement like skating over the ice … everything was easy … there was no pain … there was a rhythm they both shared, and she was leading … it was different from dancing, when the man leads the woman. She led his fingers to the right spot. And with her eyes closed, she saw the color green, not blue like his frozen eyes, but green … green like the ocean beneath the ice. She hadn’t known sex had a color. The color created waves … foaming, frothing, whirling up, and everything was good, everything was right, and maybe, Anna thought, this color would cover everything else—the not-good, not-right things that had happened. The pain held in the tiles of a bathroom. The running footsteps in a boathouse. Bertil’s announcement and its contents, the frantic fear that the same could happen to Micha. The wave of green, ocean color would break … right now, she could feel it …
“Anna,” said Abel. She opened her eyes and looked at him, frozen in her movement.
“If something … if I can’t be here anymore,” he whispered, and Anna thought of the cold walls of court buildings and penal institutions and didn’t want to think further, not now. “If I can’t be here anymore … what will happen to Micha? She seems to love your mother …”
“My parents would adopt her,” Anna said. “On the spot.”
He nodded and closed his eyes, and she closed her eyes again, too, and seconds later, the green wave broke and washed over them. Not exactly at the same time—exactly at the same time is always a lie—but the waves of the ocean in which they swam together followed one after the other. They stayed like this for a long time, sitting there, breathing each other’s breath, in and out. They kept each other warm in the last cold of the winter. There was a solution, Anna thought again, a way out … if this became possible, then everything else was, too.
“Of course,” Abel whispered. “Of course, there’s a way out. I know it now.”
And she wondered if he could feel her thoughts through her skin.
I am completely happy, she thought, hoping that he would feel this thought, too. At this moment, I’m completely happy, isn’t that strange? Actually, it isn’t strange at all. Ah, linger on, thou art so fair.
A car stopped in front of the house; they heard the engine and then voices, those of Mrs. Ketow and several men … hurried voices. There was something sharp in their voices, something dangerous—the edge of the ice and a raging current.
They stood up and went over to the window, still naked.
“Shit,” Abel said in a low voice, “I didn’t think they’d be that quick.”
Two cars were parked in front of the house. One belonged to Magnus, the other to the police … a green and white police car, Anna thought—the ocean riders. Everything in Abel’s fairy tale made sense.
She’d never gotten into her clothes faster. Everything was happening too fast now.
Abel hugged her again, for a very short moment. “There is a way out,” he repeated, and she didn’t understand … she understood nothing. She ran after him, into the hall … Micha emerged from her room with sleepy eyes, the book about the dog in her hand. She saw Abel rush out of the apartment … he didn’t turn back to look at Micha. There were policemen on the stairs, she could hear their steps … maybe someone shouted something, shouted for her to stand still, stay where she was … for Abel to stand still.
She stood by the front door, pressing Micha against her with one arm. Abel wasn’t running down the stairs, he was running up the stairs … the stairs leading to the door of the attic that no one ever used. There was a narrow landing in front of the attic door, where Abel came to a halt.
Out of the corner of her eyes, Anna registered other people on the stairs behind the policemen: her parents … and Bertil. She didn’t look down at them, she looked up at Abel. The policemen had stopped on the fourth-floor landing, where Anna and Micha were standing. They were looking up as well.
“Abel Tannatek?” one of them called.
“Yes,” said Abel very calmly. “Yes, that is me.”
“Get down here,” the policeman said. “We’re here to arrest you for murder. Everything you say from now on …”
“My God,” Abel said with half smile, “you actually say that in real life?”
He looked at Micha. And then he looked at Anna. She saw that he was holding the gun. She heard the release of the safety catch.
“Anna,” he said. And he lifted the weapon and took aim.
She was too surprised to react.
Or, maybe she wasn’t surprised at all.
She didn’t hear the shot. The world became strangely silent. That was how she saw the storyteller for the last time—in an absolutely silent world, in a staircase. He’d hit his target.