The Storyteller Read Online Free PDF

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 announce the weekend, it was bereft of life and human breath. Anna pushed her bike into the dense shrubbery near the gate, stood beside it, and tried to make herself invisible.
    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 Anna saw. It made the cold February wind seem harsher.
    Anna watched as Abel walked across the empty schoolyard; she wondered whether there was a limit to desolation or whether it grew endlessly, infinitely. Desolation with a hundred faces and more, desolation of a hundred different kinds and more, like the color blue.
    And then something strange happened. The desolation broke.
    Abel started running. Somebody was running toward him, somebody who had been waiting in the shadows. Somebody small in a worn, pink down jacket. They flew toward each other, the small and tall figures, with arms outstretched—their feet didn’t seem to touch the ground—they met in the middle. The tall figure lifted up the small one, spun her around through the winter air, once, twice, three times in a whirl of light, childish laughter.
    “It’s true,” Anna whispered behind the bush. “Gitta, it is true. He does have a sister. Micha.”
    Abel put down the pink child as Anna ducked. He didn’t see her lurking. Talking to Micha, he turned and walked back to his bicycle. He was laughing. He lifted the little girl up again and placed her on his bike carrier, said something else, and got on the bike himself. Anna didn’t understand any of his words, but his voice sounded different than it did at school. Somebody had lit a flame between the sentences, warmed them with a bright, crackling fire. Maybe, she thought, he was speaking a different language. Polish.If Polish burned so brightly, she would learn it. Don’t fool yourself, Anna, Gitta said from inside her head. You’d probably learn Serbo-Croatian if it helped you talk to Tannatek. Anna replied angrily: his name is Abel! But then she remembered that Gitta wasn’t there and that she’d better hunker down if she didn’t want to be spotted by Abel and Micha.
    They didn’t see her. Abel rode by without looking left or right, and Anna heard him say, “They’ve got Königsberg-style meatballs today; it’s on the menu. You know, the ones in the white sauce with capers.”
    “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 …”
    And then they were gone, and Anna couldn’t hear any more of what they said. But she understood that it was not a different language that illuminated Abel’s sentences, neither Polish nor Serbo-Croatian. It was a child in a pink down jacket, a child with a turquoise schoolbag and two wispy, blond braids, a child who clung to her brother’s back with gloveless little hands, red from the cold.
    To the commons. We’re on a trip to the student dining hall.
    The university dining hall was in the city, near the entrance to the pedestrian area. Anna went there from time to time with Gitta. The dining hall was open to the public, had inexpensive cakes, and Gitta was often in love with one of the students.
    Anna didn’t follow behind Abel. Instead, she took the path along the Ryck, a little river running parallel to Wolgaster Street.