Free The Storyteller by Antonia Michaelis Page B

there,” the teacher said. Uncle, Anna thought. “He was hoping to find her today, too.”
    Without bothering to reply, Anna ran back to Abel’s bike and pedaled away as fast as she could.
    • • •
     
    Gitta was swearing between clenched teeth. She wasn’t doing well on this test. The French sentences formed knots in her head, knots she couldn’t untangle, as the deeper meanings behind the words escaped her. She’d screw up this test, she knew it. She hadn’t the foggiest idea what she was doing—and, come to think of it, why she was even bothering.
    She looked up, looked for a crown of red hair among the other heads, bent over their tests. When she found it, she smiled. God, she really had better things to think about than French essays. These fucking tests. She needed a cigarette. Hennes was writing; he didn’t lift his head. If she kept staring at him long enough, she thought, staring at him in a certain way, he’d notice, he’d feel his body getting warmer. All she had to do was concentrate … But it wasn’t Hennes who looked up a little later. It was someone sitting at the table next to him. Tannatek. He’d almost come too late to take the test; he’d sat down at the very last minute and been scribbling away frantically ever since. But now he stopped writing. He looked at her. His eyes were extremely blue. It wasn’t a pleasant kind of blue. Too icy.
    Gitta narrowed her eyes and held his gaze. She thought of Anna, of Anna’s words: tell me about the Polish peddler …
    It was as if they were having a conversation with their eyes, in the middle of a French test, in complete silence.
    I’m not blind, you know, Gitta said. I mean, I don’t know exactly what is going on between you two … Anna and you … I don’t know what you hope to get out of it. But you do expect something, don’t you? You’re using her; you need her to accomplish something or you would never have talked to her.
    Leave me alone, Abel said.
    You leave Anna alone. She lives in her own world. Sometimes I envy her … she’s not like us; she’s different. So … so fragile, so easy to hurt. Keep your hands off her.
    Excuse me? Have you lost it completely now? I don’t even know her.
    And
she
doesn’t know
you.
That’s the point.
    What do you mean?
    Gitta sighed. I told you. I’m not blind. I know a few things I’m definitely not gonna tell Anna.
    He lowered his head again, looked at his test; he’d ended the conversation. Had he really read what her eyes had said to him?
    After the test, she stood in the schoolyard with Hennes and the others, smoking. Hennes’s red hair tickled her neck when he bent forward and reached past her to lend his lighter to someone. Oh, come on, why did she keep worrying about Anna? Hadn’t Anna told her that she had a crush on a university student? Everything was all right.
    “Hey,” Hennes said in a low voice, “whose bike is our Polish peddler getting onto?”
    “That’s Anna’s bike,” Gitta replied in the same low voice. And, in a whisper, just to herself, added, “A student? You don’t say, little lamb.” She crushed the half-smoked cigarette in a sudden burst of anger. “Shit,” she said, a little too loudly. “This isn’t going to end well.”
    “Excuse me?” Hennes asked.
    “Oh, nothing,” Gitta said lightly and laughed. “The test. The final exams. Anything. What ends well in life? You got another smoke for me?”

 
    IN SUMMERTIME, SHIPS WERE PACKED TIGHTLY IN Wieck, where the Ryck met the sea, and the harbor was crowded with sailors and tourists. Now, in February, the village and harbor were nearly empty. Only fishing boats were left. The fish caught here were sold in Hamburg or Denmark, and the fish sold in the store a block behind the harbor came mainly from the Netherlands, delivered by trucks in the night: there seemed to be a global fish exchange.
    Little red flags on poles, markers for the fishing nets, were leaning against the boats in stacks now, the