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 come 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