Later, she lay on her bed and looked out the window, down into the backyard garden. The rose was still in bloom.

She had just walked out. She had made the comment about the hat and walked out. She hadn’t even said good-bye to Micha; she had behaved like some stupid girl in a chick flick.

But she had been so angry that he thought she was like the others. Of course, she was like the others—a little. Surely everybody was, at eighteen. But how could she avoid telling Gitta …

She grabbed the phone off the antique nightstand she had once, on a too-gray day, painted green. She dialed Gitta’s number—to get it over with.

“Gitta?” she said. “Remember we were talking about Abel?”

“Who?”

“Tannatek. Abel is his first name … whatever. And you said maybe it’s not true that he has a little sister and everything was a lie …”

Gitta, stuck in the middle of a formula she was trying to understand or at least learn by heart for a physics test, was slow to react. “Yeah … I remember,” she said finally. “Your fuck buddy.”

Anna wasn’t going to let Gitta annoy her, not this time. Gitta was ridiculous. She had something to tell Gitta, and she was going to tell it. “You were right,” she said. “He doesn’t have a sister. It was a lie.”

“Excuse me, what? How do you know?”

“Never mind,” said Anna. “You were right about something else. You said I was in love with him … it’s true. Was true. But now I am in love with someone else.”

“That’s good,” Gitta said. “Little lamb, you know I’d love to talk longer, but physics is calling …”

“Sure.” Anna cut her off and hung up. She covered her face with her hands and sat like that for a while, in self-made darkness. She would have to invent a crush now, for Gitta. But on whom? Bertil, Anna thought. But if Gitta told Bertil, he would be happy about it, and it wouldn’t be fair to him. One of the university students maybe. She got up and took her flute from the music stand. When she held it to her ear, just to check, she heard the white noise, like the sound of a radio between channels. She lifted the flute to her lips and played the first notes of “Suzanne” into the white noise, or from the white noise, or entwined with the white noise: “Suzanne takes you down—to her place near the river—you can hear the boats go by—you can spend the night beside her …”

What an old song. Where did someone like Abel’s mother get a cassette of Leonard Cohen? Michelle—he’d called her Michelle. How had Michelle, who didn’t speak a word of English, who at most learned Russian at school—like they did back then—how had she come by that particular cassette? And where, Anna wondered all of a sudden, was Michelle?

Anna was standing in front of the glass door leading out to the fading light of the garden when her mother came home. She’d been staring at her own figure reflected in the glass: the outline of her narrow shoulders, her long dark hair—a see-through person full of winter shrubs. People told her she was pretty; grown-ups said it with the approving tone they seemed to reserve for young girls whom they also considered “nice” and “well-bred.” Adults were always quick to tell her how much she looked like her mother, and how little like her father. Though Anna thought that on the inside she was much more like him … there was this strong, unbreakable will in her to fight for something … somewhere … but where? For what? And against whom?

She knew that her mother was home only because she heard the key being turned in the lock, very gently. Linda was a gentle person, a quiet person; you could easily overlook her, and she was often overlooked. She was an assistant professor at the university, where she taught literature. She was neither very popular with her students nor very unpopular; they hardly noticed her. They went to her lectures and later only remembered her words, not who had spoken them. Maybe that was the best and purest kind of a lecture. Or the worst.

Linda walked up behind Anna without a sound. But Anna felt her silent, unobtrusive presence. She thought of Abel’s words: “If you have known someone your whole life, you can see them in the dark.” She smiled involuntarily.

“You’re thinking about something,” Linda said.

Anna nodded. “I’m always thinking about something.”

For a while, they just stood there looking out into the small world of the garden, where a robin was hopping around under the rosebush and pecking at the seeds Anna’s father put there for the birds. Magnus loved the birds. Maybe as much as he loved his daughter and his gentle, quiet wife. It was easier for him, Anna thought, to talk to the birds, though. They didn’t think about things too much or try to be invisible … He would stay in the garden all day if he could. Just to watch the birds.

“Lately I seem to be thinking about everything at the same time,” Anna said. “Just now, I thought about Papa and his robins. And about you … and me … it sounds silly, but it isn’t. We … we live in a world in which only we exist and … other people live in a different world … but ours … it’s so … I don’t know … pretty? Maybe too pretty.”

“Too … pretty,” Linda repeated, confused.

“Do you realize that the light inside this house is always blue?” Anna asked. “It’s as if there’s a filter—maybe the garden—and when the light passes through the filter, it turns soft and blue before it gets into the house. Or maybe the filter is you … or Papa …” She turned and looked at her mother and saw that Linda didn’t understand. “Have you ever been to the elementary school in the Seaside District, behind the pasture, near the Netto market? Next to all those concrete tower blocks?”

Linda shook her head. “No, never. Why? I know which school you’re talking about, though. I’ve seen it many times; I’ve driven past it on Wolgaster Street …”

“Exactly.” Anna nodded. “That’s what I mean. You drive past it. You look at it and think: my, what an ugly block; it should be torn down, like all these blocks should, and then you drive on and forget all about it because in our pretty blue world with the robins and the rosebush that school doesn’t exist. But it does. All the concrete blocks do, as do the people living in them and …” She fell silent. She couldn’t find the right words. Abel had more words in his head, better words—how astonishing that it was Abel Tannatek who had the right words.

“When you got to know Papa,” she said, “what was the first thing you thought? The very first thing?”

Linda thought about it for a moment. “It was at a dance for the medical students,” she said. “At the end of college. You know the story. Someone had dragged me along; I had even bought a new dress. The dance was horrible. It was noisy; it was full of cigarette smoke—those were the days when you were allowed to smoke just about everywhere … you couldn’t see anything, really, because of all the smoke. The first thing I thought about your father was that he noticed me. Even with all those people and all that smoke, even though nobody ever notices me … he came toward me, a big, slightly too-broad-shouldered man whom I had never seen before … and he said he didn’t know how to dance and asked if I would like to ‘not dance’ with him.” Her gaze slipped into the past, her gray eyes sliding behind a golden veil, and Anna nodded. But inside, she shook her head. All of this was of little use. A new dress. A dance for the medical students. Linda and Magnus had been living in the same world from the very start.

All weekend long, Anna’s thoughts circled back to the blood-red sea and the ship with black sails. The frost on the trees outside looked like a gown made from the feathers of the birds that talked to little girls about the mainland, and the shadows of the bushes in the evening resembled the waves of an endless sea. To distract herself, Anna practiced her flute more than usual, but the flute had a strange new sound to it. She couldn’t say if she liked it or if it made her afraid.