“The doll, I figured … I figured she belonged to a little girl …,” Anna began.

He nodded. “She does belong to a little girl.” And suddenly he was the one to smile. “What did you think? That she’s mine?”

The moment he smiled, Anna remembered his first name. Abel. Abel Tannatek. She’d seen it last year on some list.

“Well, whose is she?” Anna inquired. The great interrogator, Anna Leemann, she thought, who’s asking too many questions, who’s persistent and nosy.

“I’ve got a sister,” said Abel. “She’s six.”

“And why …” Why are you carrying her doll around with you? And how did you manage to lose her under a sofa in the student lounge, the great interrogator Anna Leemann longed to ask. But then she let it be. Great interrogators aren’t especially polite.

“Micha,” said Abel. “Her name is Micha. She’ll be glad to have her dolly back.”

He glanced at his watch, stood up, and slung the backpack over his shoulder.

“I should get going.”

“Yeah … me too,” Anna said quickly.

Side by side, they stepped out into the blue, cold day, and Abel said, “I suppose you don’t mind if I put my hat back on again?”

The frost on the trees glittered so brightly now one had to squint, and the puddles in the schoolyard reflected the sun—gleaming, glaring.

Everything had become brighter, almost dangerously bright.

A chatting, giggling group of ninth graders was gathered next to the bike rack. Anna watched as Abel unlocked his bike. She still had so many questions. She had to ask them now, quickly, before this conversation ended. Before Abel Tannatek turned back into the anonymous, hunched figure with the Walkman, back into the Polish peddler, whose nickname others had supplied and that he wore like a protective cover.

“Why didn’t you say it was your sister’s doll … when they were throwing it around?” she asked. “Why did you wait until everyone had left?”

He pulled his bike out backward, from the tangle of other bicycles. He was almost gone, almost somewhere else. Almost back in his own world. “They wouldn’t have understood,” he said. “And besides, it’s nobody’s business.” Me included, Anna thought. Abel took the ancient Walkman out of the pocket of his old military jacket and untangled the wires. Wait! Anna longed to call.

“Do you really listen to the Onkelz?” she asked, looking at his sweatshirt.

He smiled again. “How old do you think I am? Twelve?”

“But the … the sweatshirt …”

“Inherited,” he said. “It’s warm. That’s what matters.”

He handed her an earplug. “White noise.”

Anna heard nothing but a loud rustle. White noise, the sound emitted by a radio without reception.

“It helps keep people away,” said Abel as he gently pulled the earplug from her ear and got on his bike. “In case I want to think.”

And then he rode away. Anna stood there.

Everything had changed.

White noise.

She didn’t ask Gitta for the old sled with the red stripe. She rode out to the beach by herself later, as it was getting dark. The beach at twilight was the best place to get her thoughts in order, to spread them out over the sand like pieces of cloth, to unfold and refold them, again and again.

It wasn’t even a proper ocean. It was only a shallow bay, no more than several meters deep, nestled between the shore and the isle of Rügen. Once the water was frozen over, you could reach the island on foot.

Anna stood on the empty beach for a long time, gazing out over the water, which was beginning to get a skin of ice. The surface was so smooth now, it looked like the wooden floor at home, waxed and polished by time.

She thought about her “soap bubble” life. The house Anna and her parents lived in was old, its high-ceilinged rooms from another, more elegant, time. It was in a nice part of town, between other old houses that had been gray and derelict in times of socialism and were now restored and redecorated. Earlier today, when she’d arrived home from school, she had found herself looking at the house differently. It felt as if she were standing beneath its high ceilings with Abel Tannatek by her side. She looked at the huge bookshelves through his eyes, at the comfortable armchairs, the ancient exposed-wood beams in the kitchen, the artwork on the walls—black-and-white, modern. The fireplace in the living room, the winter branches in the elegant vase on the coffee table. Everything was beautiful, beautiful like a picture, untouchable and unreal in its beauty.

With Abel still next to her, she had climbed the wide, wooden staircase in the middle of the living room, up to her room, where a music stand was waiting for her next to the window. She tried to shake Abel Tannatek out of her head: his wool cap, his old military parka, his inherited sweatshirt, the ragged doll. She felt the weight of her flute in her hand. Even her flute was beautiful.

She caught herself trying to blow a different kind of sound from her instrument, a tuneless, atonal sound, something more scratchy and unruly: a white noise.

Outside her window, a single rose was in full winter bloom on the rosebush. It was so alone that it looked unbearably out of place, and Anna had to suppress the desire to pluck it …

Now, as she stood on the beach, the air above the sea had turned midnight blue. A fishing boat hung between ocean and sky. Anna smashed the thin layer of ice with the tip of her boot and heard the little cracks and the gurgling of the brine beneath. “He doesn’t live in a house like mine,” she whispered. “I know that for sure. I don’t know how somebody like that lives. Differently.”

And then she walked into the water until it seeped into her boot, until the wetness and the cold reached her skin. “I don’t know anything!” she shouted at the sea. “Nothing at all!”

About what? asked the sea.

“About the world outside my soap bubble!” Anna cried. “I want to … I want …” She raised her hands, woolen, red-blue–patterned gloved hands, a gesture of helplessness, and let them drop again.

And the sea laughed, but it wasn’t a friendly laugh. It was making fun of her. Do you think you could get to know somebody like Tannatek? it asked. Think of the sweatshirt. Are you sure you’re not getting involved with a Nazi? Not everyone with a little sister is a nice guy. What is a nice guy, by the way? How do you define that? And does he even have a little sister? Maybe …

“Oh, be quiet, will you,” Anna said, turning to walk back over the cold sand.

To her left, behind the beach, there was a big forest, deep and black. In spring there would be anemones blooming underneath the tall leafy-green beeches, but it would be a long, long time till then.

“DO YOU THINK YOU COULD ACTUALLY GET TO know somebody like Tannatek?” Gitta asked. “Think of the buzz cut …” She pulled up her legs onto the couch; Anna suddenly remembered the times they had used this couch as a trampoline, when they were little. The couch sat in front of a wall made entirely of glass, beyond which lay the beach. Though from here, you couldn’t see the sand, you couldn’t see the water; half the housing development lay between the house and the sea. Gitta’s house, a geometric cube, was modern but of a failed kind of modernity.

Everything about it was too tidy, even the garden. Gitta was almost positive her mother disinfected the leaves of the box hedge when no one was looking.

Gitta didn’t get along well with her mother, who worked as a surgeon at the hospital where Anna’s father used to work; but he hadn’t gotten along with Gitta’s mother either and had run away to the less orderly, more comfortable rooms of a private practice.

“Anna?” Gitta said. “What are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking … about our parents,” Anna said. “And that they are all doctors or whatever.”