Characters
Anna Kessler
Lower Elbe emergency manager who has known Lena thirteen years
Anna Kessler studied geoscience and then went into emergency management. For fifteen years she has been calculating how many people won’t get out in time. Together with four counties, she plans evacuation times for the Lower Elbe, and for four years she has spent a session once a quarter at the Haus Deichblick nursing home in Wilhelmsburg. She has known Lena for thirteen years. She walks in without knocking, takes a mug from Lena’s cupboard, and tucks her legs under her on the visitor’s chair. Her hair is dyed dark red, and her lipstick stays put even in the rain. Where Lena needs certainty before she says anything, Anna has to act before she has it. A new evacuation plan takes her eighteen months.
First encounter
- First noticed: wet shoulders, the dyed dark-red hair even darker from the rain, “Her lipstick had held up anyway.”
- Speaks: no greeting, straight into the matter (“You called”), questions without question marks (“And what does that mean.”); “I just can’t work with silence.”
- Object: a file folder with no file in it, only a map of the Elbe estuary with the dike line in red; and her handwritten list of the fourteen nursing homes
Connected to
- Lena VossOceanographer at the ICRU in Hamburg, following a falling line
- MarcoEmergency physician who stops by with bratwurst after his shift
- The Lower Elbe and the DikeThe land behind the dikes between Hamburg and the estuary
- ICRU HamburgLena’s institute in Hamburg, looking out over the Elbe
Spoiler-free. This describes the starting point of the book named, without its major twists or resolutions.