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everybody’s attention. The pink jacket was hanging over a chair, and there, at a small table, were Abel and Micha. Anna was lucky; Abel was sitting with his back to her. She sat down at the next table, her back to Abel’s.
    “What is that?” a student next to her asked as he contemplated her plate with suspicion.
    “Dead dog,” Anna said, and he laughed and tried to spark a conversation—where was she from, somewhere abroad? Because of the head scarf? Was it her first semester, and did she live on Fleischmann Street, where most students lived, and …
    “But you said you’d tell me a story today,” said a child’s voice behind her. “You promised. You haven’t told me any stories for … for a hundred years. Since Mama went away.”
    “I had to think,” Abel said.
    “Hey, are you dreaming? I just asked you something,” the student said. Anna looked at him. He was handsome; Gitta would have been interested. But Anna wasn’t. She didn’t want to talk to him, not now. She didn’t want Abel to hear her voice. “I’m … I’m not feeling good,” she whispered. “I … can’t talk much. My throat … why don’t you just go ahead and tell me something about you?”
    He was only too happy to oblige. “I haven’t been here for long. I was hoping you could tell me something about this town. I’m from Munich; my parents sent me here because I wasn’t accepted anywhere else. As soon as I am, I’ll transfer …”
    Anna started eating the dead dog, which was indeed potatoes (dead potatoes), nodded from time to time, and did her best to block out the student and switch to another channel, the Abel-and-Micha channel. For a while there was nothing but white noise in her head, the white noise between channels, and then—then it worked. She stopped hearing the student. She didn’t hear the noise in the room, the people eating, laughing, chatting. She heard Abel. Only Abel.
    And this was the moment when everything turned inside out. When the story that Anna would take part in truly began. Of course, it had begun earlier, with the doll, with the Walkman, with the little girl waiting in that grim, gray schoolyard. With the wish to understand how many different people Abel Tannatek was.
    Anna closed her eyes for a second and fell out of the real world. She fell into the beginning of a fairy tale. Because the Abel sitting here, in the students’ dining hall, only a few inches away, amid orange plastic trays and the hum of first-semester conversation, in front of a small girl with blond braids … this Abel was a storyteller.
    The fairy tale into which Anna fell was as bright and magical as the moment in which he’d spun Micha in his arms. But beneath his words, Anna sensed the darkness that lurked in the shadows, the ancient darkness of fairy tales.
    Only later, much later, and too late, would Anna understand that this fairy tale was a deadly one.
    They hadn’t seen him. None of them. He had disappeared, dissolved in the crowd of students; he had turned invisible behind his orange tray with the white plate and unidentifiable contents.
    He smiled at his own invisibility. He smiled at the two of them sitting over there, so close and yet at different tables, back-to-back.They were here together and didn’t know it. How young they were! He’d been young once, too. Maybe that was the reason he still went to the dining hall from time to time. It wasn’t like back then of course; it was a different dining hall in a different town, and yet here he could visit his own memories.
    He watched the two at their separate tables as if he were studying a painting. No, not two. Three. There was a child with Abel, a little girl. So here he wasn’t the school drug dealer; here he was someone else. And Anna Leemann, with her head scarf, which she thought would keep people from recognizing her; Anna, too, was a different Anna. Not the nice, well-bred girl. They were actors performing roles in a school play. And him? He had a