The Storyteller

“Don’t stay out too long,” Knaake said as she left.

A big storm? Actually, a thaw had set in. Outside, drops were quietly falling from the trees and the sun shone warm and bright.

The hardest thing always is to forgive yourself …

He doesn’t mean me. He means Abel. But Abel already told me that that’s not possible, he said so in that letter, and maybe in every letter he wrote.

Abel wasn’t standing by the bike racks anymore. It was as if he, too, had melted away. A

She walked between the wind-bent pines down to the beach. Out on the ice, white swans and black bald coots were huddled in weird lumps. You could walk across the bay to Wieck—the café lay exactly opposite. Today, there was no one on the ice.

She wandered along the beach, the wind at her back. She stepped over ice floes the sea had stacked, one on top of another, into strange works of art. She realized she’d stuffed her hands into the pockets of her coat and pulled her hat down low on her face. As if she was him, she thought. All she lacked now were the earplugs of the old Walkman, full of white noise. But no, she didn’t need those—the wind produced its own white noise, and she was at the very center of it.

The coastline turned to the right, away from the bay, leading out toward the open sea, and she followed it until the sand became too narrow. When she could walk no farther, she forced herself to climb up the short slope through the trees. There was a path up there, a path that led back through the pine forest. But she didn’t want to go back, not yet. She found a bench between the trees, a cold, snow-covered bench. She sat and looked out over the ice.

She had come to think, but her head felt empty.

When she closed her eyes, summer crept out of the trees around her. She could feel it enveloping her, feel the sunlight on her skin. The snow long gone, a thin line of beach lay beneath her, golden yellow. The pines waved fresh green needles, the beach grass swayed in the summer wind. And there someone was building a sandcastle, a castle with towers decorated with shells and sea grass, with flags made of colored paper, with pinecones for inhabitants—the builder was a small girl with blond braids, dark and wet from swimming, a girl in a pink bikini bottom and a large knitted dark-blue sweater with the sleeves rolled up on top. A

The beach lay silent under the snow.

But all this, she thought, this summer scene … if it happened, it would mean I’ve forgiven him. That I’ve forgiven what happened in the boathouse. The hand. The pain. The sound of ru

No, thought reasonable A

I could mend it, said unreasonable A

Abel knew that, Rose girl, the sea is cold.

She realized that the temperature had dropped suddenly. The thaw had stopped; the wind was icy, and it was bringing new snowflakes, only a few at first, but there was a dense white wall closing in, slowly consuming the sky. For a moment, she still felt the sun of the daydream on her skin, and then she noticed she didn’t feel anything at all. It had been an illusion. The cold had rendered the skin on her cheeks numb. There was no feeling in them anymore, and her fingers in the gloves seemed to belong to someone else. How long had she been sitting here? How long had she been dreaming of summer? She’d thought it was only seconds, but now she wasn’t sure. Evening was creeping in, the sky was darkening. Stiff with cold, she had trouble standing up. She had to go back, back to her bike, back home, back to where it was warm.

The moment she stepped onto the path leading back through the pines, the snowstorm reached Ludwigsburg. The wind threw handfuls of snow into her face; she ducked down, crouching low; she heard the pines creak and moan; and somewhere, a big branch broke with a loud crack. It sounded like a shot. She hunkered down deeper, trudging as best she could, but she wasn’t really getting anywhere. The storm was filling the path with snow, making it disappear. Snow found its way into A

And then she saw that someone was following her. Someone was there, a dark figure in the swirling snow between the dark tree trunks. She could only see it out of the corner of her eye. She turned around. There was no one. She must have imagined it. It must have been something else—a bent tree, a thicket, a shadow. She fought her way on, step by step, and the shadow returned to the edge of her field of vision, a flexible shadow, hunched like herself. Again she turned, and again there was no one.

She knew, though, that the figure would reappear once she turned her back to it.

And suddenly, fear gripped her with icy claws. Absolute, sheer terror.

Fear of the storm that was too strong for her, fear of the shadow behind her, fear of the cold and the dark that would inevitably come, fear of being alone. Was the figure behind her just something bred and born of this fear? A creature sprung from her own imagination? What if it wasn’t? She stood, holding onto the trunk of a pine, her breath unsteady; she was freezing, shivering. She could almost feel the metal at her neck, the metal of a weapon pressed against her skin. It was only her wet scarf, of course. I’m afraid, she’d told Knaake, afraid that another dead body might be found in the snow.

But never, not even for the blink of an eye, had she thought this body might be hers. She forced herself to walk on, but she still didn’t seem to be moving forward; she looked back, far too often, in vain; the figure following her melted into the forest every time she turned her head. She thought of Linda and her insane fear that something might happen to her only daughter.

How sensible Linda’s worries seemed now!

All the worst things, the things at the mention of which you would just shake your head and laugh, all those things were coming true. Stop worrying, I’ll be home on time, I’m not go