“I think I can manage to read the numbers on the doors.” Anna smiled. “Which school does she go to?” she asked slyly. “I mean … what if she realized she hasn’t got the key and is waiting at school, because she thinks maybe you’ll come get her or …”

He frowned. “Maybe you’re right. You know that school near the old stadium? Behind the Netto market? You have to make the turn across from the gas station on Wolgaster Street. She’ll be somewhere between her school and number 18 Amundsen Street. Just give her the key; she’ll manage the rest by herself.”

“Hurry up,” Anna said. She saw him walk across the white layer of snow that had fallen on the schoolyard. When she was already perched on the too-high seat of his bike, he turned. He shouted something she didn’t understand. Maybe it was “Thank you.”

Neither Anna nor Abel saw Bertil. He was standing at the window of the student lounge, watching them.

Anna went to Micha’s school first. She wondered how she’d explain her absence from music class. Magnus would write something for her. I mean, he was a doctor, wasn’t he? But how would she explain to Magnus why she had to miss class?

The supermarket parking lot and the elementary school looked different in the snow—cleaner, friendlier, and more peaceful somehow. A lot of small children were running around in the schoolyard, throwing snowballs at each other. Nobody was in a hurry to go home. Anna looked around, searching for a pink down jacket with an artificial fur collar, but she didn’t see one. She spotted a young woman with curly blond hair, who looked as if she might be a teacher, and made her way toward her, through the screaming, laughing, snowball-throwing children in their bright-colored winter clothes.

“Excuse me,” she began. “I’m looking for Micha … Micha Tannatek. Her brother sent me to pick her up. She forgot her key.”

“Oh, Micha,” the young woman said. “Yeah, Micha’s in my class. Does she have to walk home alone?”

That’s none of your business, Anna wanted to say. Abel would have said that. She didn’t.

“Most days,” she answered. “Except Fridays.”

The young woman nodded. “Are you her sister?”

“No,” said Anna. “Her cousin. Has she left already?”

“Yeah. Yeah, she has,” the woman said thoughtfully, and Anna felt that the teacher had as many questions as she did. “She said she has to go out to the village of Wieck,” the teacher said. “To where the Ryck flows into the sea and all the ships are moored. Has to. So serious. She told me that she has to look at the ships. Today she was going on and on about ships in class … there was a green ship with yellow sails that she talked about.”

“Rudder,” Anna corrected. “With a yellow rudder. Thank you. Then I’d better go and see if I can find her in Wieck.”

“Well, you might meet her uncle out 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 flags waving tiredly behind the falling snow. The railing of the old drawbridge was freshly painted with the white of the snow. On the bank of the river where Anna stood there was a path leading to the village of Eldena. It wound past the housing development where Gitta lived, in the house with the glass wall through which she couldn’t see the sea.

Anna leaned Abel’s bike against the fence outside a sleepy-looking restaurant, a place caught in a limbo between open and closed. She followed the river, past fishing boats, looking for a pink down jacket. And then she saw it. Micha appeared from behind a pile of plastic boxes used to ship fish, stood there for a moment, apparently not sure what to do. It took Anna a while to figure out what the little girl was looking at: a sailboat, a single leftover pleasure craft still docked among the fishing boats. It was big and a bit clumsy looking. And dark green. Micha shook the braids so they fell down her back, and seemed to be talking to someone on board, to be calling out to someone … she was too far away for Anna to hear what she said. When the little girl stepped onto the rickety gangplank that connected the boat to the dock, Anna started running. She skidded and fell—snow on fish scales is a slippery combination, snow on dirt is, too, and there was snow in her eyes as well—got up, and ran on.