Magnus raised an eyebrow. He didn’t say anything.

“When I was your age,” he started, “I also …” Then he stopped.

“Thank you,” Anna said, getting up. “And, Magnus.” She was already standing in the door.

“Yes?”

“The wine’s turned.”

The next day the white snow turned into brown mud. Anna asked Bertil if he had time to study math with her that afternoon. Gitta had a study date with Hennes.

“Unfortunately not just Hennes,” she complained, “but some other people too … rats …”

Abel came to school late and slept through geography class—they didn’t have literature that day. During break, Anna sat in the student lounge by herself. Through the window, she saw Abel talking to Knaake outside, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. All day she’d felt like she was swimming … her feet weren’t touching the ground and her head wasn’t in whatever she was doing. Somewhere on the steps of the old concrete tower block, she had lost her grip on reality, as if a veil of tears was streaming over everything she saw. Knaake took off his round glasses and scratched his head with them. A single snowflake fell onto his nearly gray beard. And suddenly, Anna sat up.

The lighthouse keeper. The lighthouse keeper looked exactly like Knaake. The glasses, the dark blue woolen sweater, the beard—everything was right. Abel had written the literature teacher into his fairy tale. He’d come aboard to help the little queen. Knaake had promised to look for a job for Abel. Knaake was one of the good guys. She nearly smiled—but only a little. The world of fairy tales was easy: good and bad, cold and warm, summer and winter, black ship and white sails.

At lunchtime, she left Gitta and wandered alone to the bakery, the one farther away from school. When she got there, she wondered why she had come. The gleeful signs for colorfully wrapped treats with Ikea-like names made her nauseous. She wasn’t even hungry. Next to the bakery, there was a kebab stand with several tall white plastic tables in front, empty despite the lunch hour. Anna felt drawn to its loneliness, compelled by the kebab seller shivering in his thin jacket. She bought a cup of lukewarm coffee from him and stood at one of the tables to drink it. His coffee was even worse than the coffee from the machine in the student lounge. She started sketching patterns into a coffee stain left on the table.

“Anna,” somebody said. “Anna, I’m sorry.”

She started and knocked over her cup, and when she looked up, she felt coffee trickling down her sleeve. It was Abel. “Ex-excuse me?” she said.

He took a paper napkin from a plastic holder and handed it to her. “I’m sorry I made you leave,” he continued. “I didn’t know that Rainer … Micha told me. You didn’t want to leave her alone. I … I didn’t want … see, it’s not anyone’s business how we live and … I’m sorry, really.”

She had never heard him search for words before. She smiled and fell back into reality with a bang, the veil of tears ripped; her sleeve felt very wet indeed.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re right. It’s not my business how you live. But, for the record, my room isn’t half as tidy.”

“Did Micha take you on a tour of the ‘villa’?”

She shook her head. “Don’t worry, I didn’t see the decaying dead bodies under the bed.”

His face broke into a grin. “What about the suitcase full of stolen money or the smuggled uranium in the closet?”

“No,” she said. “Though I did wonder what the gold ingots and the machine gun were doing in the drawer with the forks and knives.” It felt good to talk nonsense. It felt good to laugh about meaningless things with Abel, like uranium in the closet.

“About the story … I’m sorry about that,” she said quickly. “We shouldn’t have read it by ourselves.”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” Abel said, but he was smiling. “Rainer …,” he went on, and stopped smiling. “Micha’s father. He … he was gone for a while … out of town … at least I haven’t seen him for a long time. And now … you met him. You understand why I don’t want him to turn up, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“Think a little more and then take the square of the result and you’ll have the truth. He’s known around here … in the cheap bars … Michelle was a departure for him. Usually his girlfriends are more like fifteen, sixteen. If they are even that old.”

“Micha is six. That’s something different.”

“Exactly.” He picked the used napkin up off the table and scrunched it up in his fist.

“Do you really think he would … That’s a horrible accusation. If there was proof he did something like that, he would go to prison …”

Abel looked up from the napkin. His eyes glowed with a blue fire. “If there was proof,” he repeated, “he would go to prison. People are talking. I know some things. I know very well. When I …” He stopped. “Would you take the chance?”

Anna shook her head. “But there are agencies that could help, judges, court orders … custody rights … if he isn’t allowed to see her, he isn’t allowed to see her, and that’s that … there are institutions set up to protect children!”

“Anna,” he said in a very quiet voice. “You didn’t understand a thing I said.”

“No?”

“I’m not eighteen. I don’t have custody rights. If Michelle really doesn’t come back, Micha is his. Like a piece of … flotsam. Like a stray dog. Like …”

“Like a lost diamond,” Anna said.

“And that’s why it is important that you keep your mouth shut,” Abel whispered. “Do you get that? We’re living with our mother in that apartment, everything’s fine, we don’t have any problems. Do you get that? Do you get that?” He grabbed her wrist, sounding as desperate as a helpless child. And somewhere in Anna, there was, for an instant, the sense that this was what he had once been, living in the same small apartment with Rainer, and she pushed the thought far, far away—to the dark side of the moon.

“I get it,” she whispered. “I’ve never been in the apartment. And if I was … then I had a really nice talk with your mother. She and my mother listen to the same music, so that was what we talked about …”

He let go of her wrist. Suddenly he seemed embarrassed about having touched her. He looked around, but there was no one who had seen. The lonely, cold kebab seller was leaning against his stand, playing with his cell phone, lost in a world of SMS emoticons.

“I’m going to walk her home from school now,” Abel said.

“You’re not going to math class?”

“I’m going to pick up Micha,” he repeated. “This afternoon … around five … we’ll be in Wieck. Sometimes we sit in that café, out by the water, and have hot chocolate. When we have extra cash. We’ve got to do something with that stuff, don’t we?” The grin returned to his face. “And there is a green ship there that has to sail on … another island has appeared on the horizon …”

“Around five,” Anna said.

She didn’t remember Bertil’s existence till after math.

“Anna,” he said with a smile in his too-narrow, earnest face. “You’re not looking as if you understood much.”

“I did,” Anna murmured. “A few things … what?”

“We could go over the rest at my place,” Bertil said. “I’ll try to explain a few more things to you, if you can explain that last formula … you’re looking at me like I’m a ghost.”

“Yes,” Anna said. “Oh no. Shit. Bertil, I can’t come over today.”

He hunched his shoulders, which were as narrow as hers. He was too tall for those shoulders. Anna liked Bertil with his dark, unruly hair and thoughtful expressions, but today she had no time for him. Or math formulas.

“This was your idea,” he said. “You wanted to go over the formulas, not me.”

“I know, and I still do.” Math was one of the things she really didn’t understand, and she was too Anna Leemann to accept getting a bad grade on a big test without putting up a fight. “But, Bertil, not today. It’s just not going to work today. Something’s come up.”