The Storyteller

“You said someone’s been following you,” Bertil said. “Are you sure about that? Did you see anyone?”

“Yes. No. When I turned around, there was no one … What do you think? That I imagined the whole thing?”

“I don’t know. I think I should stay close. The safety net.”

“Thanks,” said A

“Ha,” Bertil said.

She flung her arms around him and hugged him very tight for a very short second, thinking, I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry, Bertil, but it will never be the way you want it to be. And she turned around quickly, walked toward the door of the restaurant, and leaned her bike against some patio chairs. She lingered in the waiting area of the restaurant until she heard the Volvo leave. She counted to a hundred. The warmth in that tiny room was seductive—a part of her wanted to stay, wanted to sit down, wanted to order hot tea, wanted to call Magnus and ask him to come pick her up. She didn’t stay. She stepped out into the cold again, out into the snow. She ran the whole way over the bridge, skidding, slipping, nearly losing her balance twice. She ran along the river, to its mouth, ran till she reached the café, her wet pants sticking to her legs. She saw the lights inside as she approached it—pale, white lights—it wasn’t open anymore, probably they had closed at six, maybe they’d just locked the doors now. She ran even faster.

The chairs on the terrace, chained together, were hardly perceptible under the snow. The glass window was towering over them like a glacier. And there, on the lee side of this glacier, someone was cowering. She saw the tiny orange glow of a cigarette. A single bike stood in front of the stairs that led up to the café. A

It was no one else.

It was Abel.

He didn’t say anything. He ground out his cigarette and stood there, waiting until she caught her breath. He looked away, out over the ice lit by the floodlight on the side wall of the café.

“If we lose each other, we’ll meet where it’s spring,” she said, finally. “How long have you been waiting for me out here?”

“Since Monday,” he replied. “I’ve been waiting every afternoon since Monday.”

“Since … Monday,” she repeated. “Every single afternoon?”

He nodded. “It was cold.”

“And … Micha?”

“She was with me the first two days. Sliding over the ice, watching other people ice-skating. Now she’s got this idea in her head that she needs ice skates, too. Today, she’s visiting a friend she knows from school. I … I didn’t let her go anywhere for a long time, because I was afraid somebody else would come for her and take her away … but first graders do have to visit their friends, don’t they? You can’t forbid it forever … I’m going to pick her up now. It’s just about time.”

He hadn’t looked at her while he spoke. His voice said, I’m talking about other things so that I don’t have to talk about this one thing. But to find each other again, A

“What happened …” she began.

“What happened can never be undone,” he said. “I wrote that to you. I don’t know if you’ve read the letters …”

She shook her head.

He nodded. “That’s good. They were stupid letters. Stupid words. Useless.” And at last he did look at her. There was snow in his eyebrows. He must have been waiting a very long time, here in the cold, where spring existed only behind the glass window of the café. “I don’t ask you to forgive me. What happened is unforgivable. It’s the worst … the worst of all things. It’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen.”

She found his hands and for a moment she pulled back from the touch, her body remembering the danger of touches. But then she took them in hers. He wasn’t wearing gloves. How many hours had he been here, waiting? How many ice-cold, endless hours?

“So let’s not forgive,” she whispered. “Nor forget. The night will remain there. Behind us.”

“But still you’re here.”

“But still I’m here.”

She opened her arms to him, but he shrank back. “I’d rather not,” he said. “You shouldn’t touch me.”

But she took his hands in hers again and held them for a long time, and the wind blew through the cloak of torn love and she was cold, very cold. They were cold together, inside all the impossibilities of the world. Behind the window of the café, the tulips were blooming in the dark.

“I didn’t tell anybody about that … night,” she said and felt how he nodded.

“I kind of concluded that from the fact that I’m still alive. Your father hasn’t killed me.”

Together, they wandered back. He pushed his bike along with one hand. She said nothing about Bertil, nothing about her insane walk in Ludwigsburg, nothing about the talk she’d had with Knaake, nothing about being followed. What she said, after a long time of silence, was, “Let’s go skating. Tomorrow, after school. With Micha.”

And then they got onto the bus, with their bikes, because it was still impossible to ride them. The bus moved so slowly that they could have walked. It didn’t matter. They stood there, holding their bikes, without talking, and A

When he got out, she stayed in the bus, singing to herself silently. There was no pain in her any longer, nowhere. The cloak she had put back on had covered everything like snow.

“My God,” Linda said when A

“Everything,” A

“Yes.” Linda sighed. “Whatever you want.”

“Okay,” A

THE ICE WAS SMOOTH AND WIDE, AND IT LAY HIDDEN under the snow like a secret thought.

Where the sea met the beach, the waves had piled the ice floes on top of each other, exactly as they had been piled on the opposite side of the bay, in Ludwigsburg, forming strange figures you couldn’t take apart, like a puzzle or a riddle. The three of them had climbed over the piles of ice floes to reach the plain, smooth ice behind them, but somehow A

“A

“Yeah,” A

“But can we start now? You’ve got the skates with you, haven’t you? The ones I can wear?”

She nodded and kneeled down to open her backpack. Abel had walked ahead of them and was standing near the orange buoy, a relic from summer. He was looking out at the horizon. Maybe he had to be alone for a moment.

A

And Abel had looked at her, questioning, but she’d just shaken her head. She would tell him later. Maybe.

The strange thing was that Gitta had said something similar after Abel had disappeared into class. “Good to see the two of you together again,” she said. “Though it’s weird. Neither of you seems happy about it. Bertil told me he plucked you out of that snowstorm yesterday.”