The Storyteller

A

“I … gotta go now,” she said and pulled free from Rainer a second time, this time for good. “I’ll look at the cabin another day. Good-bye.”

“Wait!” Rainer shouted, but Micha was racing along the deck, quick as a weasel; she bounded out of the ship like a small rubber ball, and took the hand A

“Let’s run together,” A

And then they ran. A

“A

“Yes,” A

“But the ship,” Micha said, already perched on the carrier of the bike. “A

“Exactly,” A

Secretly she wondered if Michelle would come back. Abel didn’t think so. Rainer didn’t think so. Did they know more about Michelle’s whereabouts than they cared to admit?

A

Instead, she said, “Is it okay if I come up with you and make lunch?”

The blocks with entrances 18, 19, and 20 were on one side of a huge courtyard, where dead grass had turned to winter mud. A

“Can you do that?” Micha asked. “Make lunch?”

A

Micha frowned as she unlocked the main door of tower number 18. “Mama couldn’t … she couldn’t make lunch. She always forgot, anyway; or she had other things to do or other places to go.” Then she added hastily, “But she was nice. She should come back.”

“She’ll come back,” A

The staircase was dark and narrow, the concrete steps old and gray and full of muddy footprints. The banister didn’t look like anything anyone should touch. Micha didn’t touch it. There was no elevator—seven floors without an elevator! Good exercise, A

Micha and Abel lived on the fourth floor. There were windows in the staircase; on the second floor, the window had broken—or been broken by somebody. On the fourth floor, there was a dead potted palm on the windowsill, the kind of houseplant that doesn’t belong to anybody in particular, a stray plant, so to speak, dead of thirst in the end without anybody noticing. When A

“Yeah, it’s me!” Micha called back, and to A

“Your mother come back?” Mrs. Ketow bellowed.

A fat arm in a striped tracksuit top, draped across the banister on the ground floor, was all that A

“No,” Micha said. “This is A

“And who is A

Micha didn’t answer. She hurried and unlocked the door of the apartment. A

“You have to put your shoes here,” Micha said. “See that picture? I made that. That one, too.” The wall was covered with her artwork. Micha could draw apple trees but not horses. She could draw houses with only one room but not canopy beds. She could do sea lions but not men. “This one here in the kitchen, I just drew it yesterday,” she said proudly, pulling A

“That’s the diamond,” Micha explained. “The heart, remember? The heart of the little cliff queen.”

The kitchen was tidy, yet it made A

“Abel,” she said, “always flips them in the air.”

“And today,” A

“Those will get burned,” Micha cautioned, leaning forward. “Doesn’t matter, though. When I’m alone, I eat bread and butter. A

“That means …” A

“I see,” Micha said. “That he fucked her?” Then she quickly put her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell Abel I said that word,” she whispered. “He pretends that I don’t know it.”

“Do you know what it means?” A

“Well … not really.”

“You’ll learn eventually,” A

“Strawberry,” Micha offered.

They sat in the living room, which was as tidy and dreary as the kitchen, at a tiny, dark table, on a gray corduroy couch leftover from the sixties or seventies, probably scavenged. Next to the couch there was a huge old TV. The wallpaper was bubbling. The pattern of mustard-colored flowers was typical of the German Democratic Republic. Probably worth something by now, A

The strawberry jam was 110 percent chemicals and 2 percent artificial sweetener. Micha ate three pancakes, black edges and all, and, in the process, managed to distribute the jam over most of her gri

A