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“She’d stay if I’d let her,” Abel said, smiling. “She’s already forgotten me, hasn’t she?”
“Bullshit,” A
“Last night,” she whispered. “Did you leave the house?”
He hesitated. “Yes,” he answered finally. “Not for long, though. I had to … deliver something.”
“And did you come to me afterward … or did I dream that?”
He stroked her hair. “You dreamed that,” he said.
“It wasn’t a nice dream,” A
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s take the laundry upstairs. We should get going, or Micha will start to think that we live here.”
“Wait,” she said on the stairs. “Did you actually think about it? About Magnus’s offer? The loan?”
“Magnus …” Abel murmured. “He’s the only reasonable person here. Do you realize that? He would rather see me gone for good. I wonder what conditions are attached to his offer. He’ll name them sooner or later. Maybe one is that I go really far away to study …”
“Nonsense,” A
When she gathered Abel’s books from her desk, her fingers felt heavy as lead. Stay, she wanted to say. Stay here, with Micha. Don’t ever leave again. Don’t ever go out at night again. Stay. You don’t have to work nights. Forget those calls, those contacts, those deliveries. Forget the white cat’s magic fur. Throw away this world of the night; fling it into the river … Her cell phone was still lying on her desk. She remembered the call she hadn’t taken yesterday and checked the mailbox, without really listening, while Abel was packing his backpack.
And then she did listen. It hadn’t been Gitta. It was Knaake’s voice.
“A
She shook her head and pressed the send key to call him back. It would be better, she thought, to walk out of the room. Abel was still standing behind her … actually, it would be better not to call back at all. Maybe she didn’t want to know what he’d found out. Her heart was racing all of a sudden.
“Fischer?” a female voice barked into the phone. She flinched.
“I … I thought … I guess I have the wrong number.”
“Or you don’t,” the voice said, a no-nonsense voice without an ounce of friendliness to it. “This is Heinrich Knaake’s phone.”
“I … but … is he there?” A
“He’s here all right. But you can’t talk to him. He’s in a coma. In the ICU. I’m the doctor.”
A
“The cell phone was in his jacket pocket. It’s a miracle it’s still working. Tell me, do you know who should be informed? Is there family?”
“No,” A
“He fell through the ice,” the no-nonsense doctor said. “They pulled him out of the river last night, in the city harbor. We don’t know how long he was in the water. He was lucky someone came along and saw him. The person who did, though, didn’t pull him out. He called the fire department from a pay phone. The fire department! Now that was a bright idea! And then he hightailed it, our anonymous caller.” She laughed a hard, rough laugh—it was really more of a cough than a laugh. If you worked in the ICU, A
She was dizzy. She sat down in the chair at her desk.
“Can we see him?”
“If you don’t expect him to talk to you, then sure. We’re on Löffler Street. We’ll be here.” The doctor hung up. Probably she had a dozen other things to do.
A
“A
She looked at him. The room was still spi
“Something has happened to the lighthouse keeper.”
The room was white like the snow outside, much too white. The beeping of the machines made it unreal. Micha groped for A
“I’m on the ice with him, don’t you remember?” she’d said. “With the lighthouse keeper! In the fairy tale!” Now, seeing him, in his white-snow bed, Micha shook her head in astonishment. “He’s not wearing skates,” she said. “We were skating, weren’t we?”
The no-nonsense doctor left them alone. She was busy with other patients. There was a mind-numbing smell of disinfectant and plastic.
They found three chairs, pulled them up to the bed, and sat down. The monitor above Knaake’s still form showed the narrow green line of his heartbeat. The face on the pillows was nearly as white as the pillows themselves. His eyes were closed. The sailor’s beard, which had turned him into a lighthouse keeper, seemed withered in a strange way. They sat there for a long time, silently.
“He liked Leonard Cohen,” A
“Yes,” Abel said. “And I know that Michelle had a fling with a teacher a long time ago. A long, long time ago. And that he was a lot older than she was.”
“He told me he didn’t know her.”
Abel nodded. “Easy for him to say. Maybe he doesn’t remember her.” He leaned forward and touched the limp hand from which an IV emerged—or, rather, into which it disappeared. He touched the hand very gently. “I wanted to ask him. Point-blank. I should have done it. Now …”
“Ask him when he wakes up.”
Abel nodded. But in his eyes, the ice was melting. A
“The story,” A
“None of them slept well that night,” Abel repeated. “For they slept on the cold ice, with a traitor in their midst. A traitor, thought the rose girl, and a murderer—was it one and the same person? Once, in the middle of the night, she’d thought she’d heard the silver-gray dog whimper … very close.
“But in the morning, the silver-gray dog was nowhere to be found. The lighthouse keeper wasn’t there either. And a thaw had set in. There were fissures, crevices, and deep clefts in the ice now—holes, through which you could make out the water, like dark, lurking eyes.
“‘Oh no!’ whispered the little queen. ‘They haven’t fallen into one of these holes, have they?’ That was when they heard the cry of a bird, and a moment later a big gray seagull landed next to them. She started pecking the ice with her beak, over and over, as if she wanted to destroy it all by herself. No, the little queen thought, the gull is writing.
“‘I found him,’ the little queen read aloud. ‘The lighthouse keeper. He must have gone away, alone at night. Come. Hurry.’
“The seagull inclined her head and nodded, and only when she rose up into the air again did the little queen realize that her eyes were golden. They followed her over the ice till they reached one of the holes full of black water. In it, the lifeless body of the lighthouse keeper was floating. The rose girl helped the little queen pull him up onto the ice. But he still didn’t move. One of his fists was closed around something: a red thread.