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role, too …
    Some roles were more dangerous than others.
    Anna lifted her head and looked in his direction; he hid his face behind a newspaper like an amateur detective. He’d stay invisible for a little while longer …

 
    “ TELL ME ABOUT THE ISLAND,” MICHA SAID. “TELL me what it looks like.”
    “I’ve told you a hundred times.” Abel laughed. “You know exactly what the island looks like.”
    “I forgot. The last story was so long ago! A thousand years ago! You told me about the island when Mama was still here. Where’s she now?”
    “I don’t know, and I’ve told you that a hundred times, too. The note she left only said that she had to go away. Suddenly. And that she loves you.”
    “And you? Didn’t she love you, too?”
    “The island,” Abel said, “is made of nothing but rocks. Or should I say, it
was
? The island
was
made of nothing but rocks. It was the tiniest island anyone can imagine, and it lay far, far out at sea. On the island, there lived a single person, a very small person—and because her favorite place was the cliffs, the very top of the cliffs,where she could look out over the sea—because of that, they called her the cliff queen. Or, actually, it was only she who called herself that, for there was no one else.
    “The birds had told her about other islands. They had also told her about the mainland. The mainland, the birds said, was an unimaginably huge island, over which you could wander for weeks on end without ever reaching the shore on the other side. That was something the little cliff queen couldn’t picture. To walk around her own island took only three hours, after which you’d be where you started. And so, for the little queen, the mainland remained a faraway, unreal dream. In the evening, she told herself stories about it, about the houses that had a thousand rooms each, and about the stores in which you could get everything you longed for—you had only to lift things down from the shelves. But actually the cliff queen didn’t need a thousand rooms, nor did she need stores full of shelves. She was happy on her tiny island. The castle in which she lived had exactly one room, and in this room, there was nothing but a bed. For the little queen’s playroom was the island’s green meadows and her bathroom was the sea.
    “Every morning, she braided her pale blond hair into two thin braids, put on her pink down jacket, and ran out into the wind. Mrs. Margaret, her doll with the flower-patterned dress to whom she could tell everything, lived in the pocket of the down jacket. And in the middle of the island, in a garden of apple and pear trees, a white mare grazed all day long. When she felt like it, the little queen raced across the island on the horse’s back, quicker than a storm, and she laughed out loud when the mane of the white mare fluttered in the breeze and her scarf was carried away by the wind. The mare’s scarf, of course. The cliff queen didn’t need a scarf;she had a collar made of artificial fur on her pink jacket, but she had knitted a scarf for the white mare. She had learned to knit at school.”
    “But there isn’t anyone living on the island! Did you forget? How can I go to school?”
    “Surely there must have been a school,” Abel said. “There was exactly one teacher. She was the cliff queen herself, and one headmistress, who was also the cliff queen, and one pupil, who was the cliff queen, too. She had taught herself how to knit, and for the mare’s scarf—it was green—she had given herself the best grade possible. And …”
    “That’s silly!” Micha giggled.
    “Well, who is the cliff queen, you or me?” Abel asked. “It isn’t my fault if you’re giving yourself grades! By the way, it was always summer on the island. The little queen was never cold. When she was hungry, the cliff queen plucked apples and pears from the trees, or she fetched her butterfly net and climbed to the top of one of the cliffs to catch a flying fish,