The Storyteller

He looked around, reached into the pocket of his parka, and took out a small plastic bag. She leaned forward, expecting some sort of powder; she didn’t know much about these things. She had tried Google, but Google Drugs hadn’t been invented, a problem that Google would certainly rectify soon … He took something out of the milky-white plastic bag with his thumb and forefinger. A blister pack. A

“You said it’s for celebrating?” he asked, his voice low. “Like … staying awake, dancing, having a good time?”

A

Ta

She took a twenty-euro note out of her purse and put away the blister pack quickly. There were ten tablets. The price didn’t seem high to her.

“You know how to use that stuff?” Ta

“I don’t,” A

He nodded again, put the money away, and grabbed the earplugs of his old Walkman.

“White noise?” A

She didn’t expect Ta

What floated through the earplug into her head was not white noise. It was a melody. As if someone had heard A

She gave the earplug back, perplexed.

“Cohen? You’re listening to Leonard Cohen? My mother listens to him.”

“Yeah,” he said, “so did mine. I don’t even know how she got into him. There’s no way she understood a word. She didn’t speak English. And she was too young for this kind of music.”

“Was?” A

“Died?” His voice turned hard. “No. Just disappeared. She’s been gone for two weeks now. It doesn’t make much of a difference anyway. I don’t think she’ll come back. Micha … Micha thinks she will. My sister, she …” He stopped, looked up from the ground, and leveled his gaze at her.

“Have I lost my mind? Why am I telling you this?”

“Because I asked?”

“It’s too cold,” he said as he pulled up the collar of his parka. She stood there while he unlocked his bike. It was just like when they had first spoken—words in the ice-cold air, stolen words, homeless-seeming, between worlds. Later, one could imagine that one hadn’t said anything.

“Doesn’t anybody else ask?” A

He shook his head, freed his bike. “Who? There is no one.”

“There are a lot of people,” A

Nonsense.

He managed to free his bike. He pulled the black woolen hat down over his ears, nodded—a good-bye nod, maybe, or just a nod to himself, saying, yes, see, there is no one. Then he rode away.

Ridiculous—to follow someone through the outskirts of town on a bicycle on a Friday afternoon. Not inconspicuous either. But Abel didn’t glance back, not once. The February wind was too biting. She rode along behind, down Wolgaster Street, a big, straight street leading into and out of town to the southeast, co

Leaving the endless stream of cars behind, Abel crossed the Netto supermarket parking lot and turned through a small chain-link gate, painted dark green and framed by dead winter shrubbery. Once inside, he got off his bike. A chain-link fence surrounded a light-colored building and a playground with a castle made of red, blue, and yellow plastic. On the NO TRESPASSING sign on the gate, the ghost of a black spray-painted swastika skulked. Someone had crossed the nasty image out, but you could still see it.

A school. It was a school, an elementary school. Now, long after the bell had rung to a

At first, she thought Abel was here on business: Ding-dong—the Polish peddler calling! The frame of the big modern front door was made of red plastic; someone had taped a paper snowflake to the window. An attempt to make things nicer, friendlier: it felt strained somehow; like forced cheerfulness, it belied the desolation A

A

And then something strange happened. The desolation broke.

Abel started ru

“It’s true,” A

Abel put down the pink child as A

They didn’t see her. Abel rode by without looking left or right, and A

“Meatballs Königsberg,” a high child’s voice repeated. “I like meatballs. We could take a trip to Königsberg one day, couldn’t we?”

“One day,” Abel replied. “But now we’re on a trip to the students’ dining hall and …”