The Storyteller Read Online Free PDF Page A

stuff?” Tannatek asked, and it was obvious that he figured she didn’t.
    “I don’t,” Anna answered. “But Gitta does.”
    He nodded again, put the money away, and grabbed the earplugs of his old Walkman.
    “White noise?” Anna asked, but by now she didn’t really want to continue the conversation; she only asked so that she could tell herself later that she hadn’t been too scared to ask. Her heart was racing inside her chest. All she wanted to do was run away—far away from the schoolyard, from Tannatek, the fighting dog, from the white tablets in her purse, far, far away. She longed for the cool silver of her flute in her hands. For a melody. Not for white noise, for a real melody.
    She didn’t expect Tannatek to hand her one of his hopelessly ancient earplugs again. But he did just that. The whole I’ll-try-to-understand-the-Polish-peddler-thereby-turning-into-a-more-interesting-person project suddenly made her nauseous.
    What floated through the earplug into her head was not white noise. It was a melody. As if someone had heard Anna’s wish. “It’snot always white noise,” Tannatek said. The melody was as old as the Walkman. No, a lot older. “Suzanne.” Anna had known the words by heart since she was small.
    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?” Anna asked. The air had grown colder, just now, about five degrees. “Has she … died?”
    “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?” Anna said.
    He shook his head, freed his bike. “Who? There is no one.”
    “There are a lot of people,” Anna said. “Everywhere.” She made a wide sweep with her arm, gesturing to the empty schoolyard, the concrete block that was their school, the trees, the world beyond. But there was no one. Abel was right. It was only the two of them,Anna and him, only they two under the endless, icy sky. It was strangely unsettling. The world would end in five minutes.
    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, connecting the city with Gitta’s sterile housing development; with the beach; with the winter woods full of tall, bare beeches; with the fields behind them; with the world. Wolgaster Street passed by the ugly concrete blocks of the Seaside District and the district of “beautiful woods.” The German Democratic Republic had been quite ironic when it came to naming city districts.
    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