The Storyteller (10 page)

“You hardly ever talk about your parents,” I say.

Her hand trembles the slightest bit where she holds the knife, so slightly that had I not been watching so carefully, I might never have noticed. “What’s there to say?” She shrugs. “My mother, she kept house, and my father was a baker in Łód
. You know this.”

“What happened to them, Nana?”

“They died a long time ago,” she says dismissively. She hands me a piece of bread, no butter, because if you’ve made a truly great challah you don’t need any. “Ah, look at this. It could have risen more. My father used to say that a good loaf, you can eat tomorrow. But a bad loaf, you should eat now.”

I grasp her hand. The skin is like tissue, the bones pronounced. “What happened to them?” I repeat.

She forces a laugh. “What is with these questions, Sage! All of a sudden you’re writing a book?”

In response, I turn her arm over and gently push up the sleeve of her blouse so that the blurry edge of her blue tattoo is exposed. “I’m not the only one in the family with a scar, Nana,” I murmur.

She pulls away from me and yanks down the cotton. “I do not wish to talk about it.”

“Nana,” I say. “I’m not a little girl anymore—”

“No,” she says abruptly.

I want to tell her about Josef. I want to ask her about the SS soldiers she knew. But I also know that I won’t.

Not because my grandma doesn’t want to discuss it, but because I am ashamed that this man I’ve befriended—cooked for, sat with, laughed with—might have once been someone who terrified her.

“When I got here, to America, this is when my life began,” my grandmother says. “Everything before . . . well, that happened to a different person.”

If my grandmother could reinvent herself, why not Josef Weber?

“How do you do it?” I ask softly, and I’m no longer asking just about her and Josef but about myself as well. “How do you get up every morning and not remember?”

“I never said I do not remember,” my grandmother corrects. “I said I prefer to forget.” Suddenly, she smiles, cutting the ribbon between this conversation and whatever comes next. “Now. My beautiful granddaughter did not come all this way to talk about ancient history, did she? Tell me about the bakery.”

I let the
beautiful
comment slide. “I baked a loaf of bread that had Jesus’s face in it,” I announce; it’s the first thing to come to mind.

“Really.” My grandmother laughs. “Says who?”

“People who believe that God might show up in an artisan boule, I guess.”

She purses her lips. “There was a time when I could see God in a single crumb.”

I realize she is extending an olive branch, a sliver of her past. I sit very still, waiting to see if she’ll go on.

“You know, that was what we missed most. Not our beds, not our homes, not even our mothers. We would talk about food. Roast potatoes and briskets, pierogi, babka. What I would have given my life for back then was some of my father’s challah, fresh from the oven.”

So this is why my grandmother bakes four loaves every week, when she cannot finish even one herself. Not because she plans to eat it but
because she wants to have the luxury of giving the rest away to those who are still hungry.

When my cell phone begins to ring, I grimace—it’s probably Mary, giving me hell because Robena’s arrived to start the night’s baking instead of me. But as I pull it out of my pocket, I realize that the number’s unfamiliar.

“This is Detective Vicks, calling for Sage Singer.”

“Wow,” I say, recognizing the voice. “I wasn’t expecting you to call me back.”

“I did a little digging,” he replies. “We still can’t help you. But if you want to take your complaint somewhere, I’d suggest the FBI.”

The FBI. It seems like a massive step up from the local police department. The FBI is the organization that captured John Dillinger and the Rosenbergs. They found the fingerprint that incriminated the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr. Their cases are high-profile matters of immediate national security, not ones that have languished for decades. They will probably laugh me off the phone before I finish my explanation.

I look up and see my grandmother at the kitchen counter now, wrapping one of the challah loaves in tinfoil.

“What’s the number?” I ask.

 • • • 

It’s a miracle that I make it back to Westerbrook without driving off the road; that’s how tired I am. I let myself into the bakery with my set of keys and find Robena asleep, sitting on a giant sack of flour with her cheek pressed to the wooden countertop. On the bright side, though, there are loaves on the cooling racks, and the smell of something baking in the oven.

“Robena,” I say, gently shaking her awake. “I’m back.”

She sits up. “Sage! I just dozed off for a minute . . .”

“It’s okay. Thanks for helping me out.” I slip into an apron and tie it around my waist. “How was Mary, on a scale of one to ten?”

“About a twelve. She got pretty worked up because she’s expecting a lot of traffic tomorrow, thanks to the Jesus Loaf.”

“Hallelujah,” I say flatly.

I’d tried the number of the local FBI office while driving home, only to be told that the division I
really
needed to talk to was part of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. They gave me a different number, but apparently the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section keeps bankers’ hours. I got a voice recording telling me to call another number, if this was an emergency.

It is hard to justify this as an emergency, given the length of time that Josef had kept his secret to himself.

So instead, I have decided to finish up the baking, load the loaves into the glass cases, and be gone before Mary arrives to open the shop. I’ll call back from the privacy of my own home.

Robena walks me through the timers that she’s set around the kitchen, some measuring bake times, some measuring dough that’s proofing, some measuring shaped loaves left to rest. When I feel like I’m up to speed, I walk her to the front door, thank her, and lock up behind her.

Immediately my gaze falls on the Jesus Loaf.

In retrospect I won’t be able to tell Mary why I did it.

The bread is stale, hard as stone, with the variegations of seed and pigment that created the face already fading away. I take the peel I use to slide bread in and out of the wood-fired oven and toss the Jesus Loaf into the yawning maw of the kiln, onto the red-hot flames in its belly.

Robena has made baguettes and rolls; there are a variety of other breads to be finished before dawn. But instead of mixing according to my usual schedule, I alter the day’s menu. Doing the calculations in my head, I measure out the sugar, the water, the yeast, the oil. The salt and the flour.

I close my eyes and breathe in the sweet wheat. I imagine a shop with a bell over the window that rings when a customer enters; the sound of coins dropping like a scale of musical notes into the cash
register, which might make a girl look up from the book in which her nose is buried. For the rest of the night, I bake only one recipe, so that by the time the sun simmers on the horizon, the shelves of Our Daily Bread are packed tightly with the knots and coils of my great-grandfather’s challah, so much that you could never imagine how hunger might feel.

I kept dozing off in the market. I had not slept since I buried my father, not with any of the bells and whistles and fanfare he had joked of but in a small plot behind the cottage. My insomnia was not born of grief, however. It was out of necessity.

I had no money for taxes. We had no savings, and our only income came from the market where we sold our daily loaves. In the past, my father baked while I trekked into the village square. But now, there was only me.

I found myself living around the clock. At night, I would roll up my sleeves and shape mounds of dough into boules; I would mix more while those rose; I would take the last loaves out of the brick oven as the sun spilled, like an accident, over the horizon in the morning. Then I would fill my basket and hike to the market, where I found myself struggling to stay awake while I hawked my wares.

I did not know how long I could continue this. But I wasn’t going to let Baruch Beiler take away the only thing I had left—my father’s home and his business.

However, fewer customers were coming into town. It was too dangerous. My father’s body had been one of three found this week around the outskirts of the village, including a toddler who had wandered into the woods and had never returned. All had been disfigured and devoured the same way, as if by a ravenous animal. Frightened, the townspeople were opting to live off their own gardens and canned goods. Yesterday I had seen only a dozen customers; today there had been only six. Even some of the merchants had chosen to stay safe behind their locked doors. The market was a gray, ghostly space, the wind whistling over the cobblestones like a warning.

I opened my eyes to find Damian shaking me awake. “Dreaming of me, darling?” he asked. He reached past me, brushing my face, and ripped the neck from a baguette. He popped the bread into his mouth. “Mmm. You are nearly the baker your father was.” For just a moment, compassion transformed his features. “I’m sorry about your loss, Ania.”

Other customers had told me the same. “Thank you,” I murmured.

“I, on the other hand, am not,” Baruch Beiler announced, coming to stand behind the captain. “Since it greatly diminishes my chances of ever receiving his tax revenue.”

“It is not the end of the week yet,” I said, panicking.

Where would I go if he turned me out into the streets? I had seen women who sold themselves, who haunted the alleys of the village like shadows and who were dead in the eyes. I could accept Damian’s offer of marriage, but that was just a different kind of deal with the Devil. Then again, if I were homeless, how long would it be before the beast that was preying upon the people of our village found me?

From the corner of my eye I saw someone approaching. It was the new man in town, leading his brother on the leather leash. He walked past me without even glancing at the bread, and stood in front of the empty wooden plank where the butcher usually set up his wares. When he turned to me, I felt as if a fire had been kindled beneath my ribs. “Where is the butcher?” he asked.

“He isn’t selling today,” I murmured.

I realized he was younger than I’d first thought, perhaps just a few years older than me. His eyes were the most impossible color I had ever seen—gold, but gleaming, as if they were lit from within. His skin was flushed, with bright spots of color on his cheeks. His brown hair fell unevenly over his brow.

He was wearing only that white shirt, the one that had been beneath the coat he traded the last time he’d been in the village square. I wondered what he had been willing to barter with today.

He didn’t say anything, just narrowed his eyes as he stared at me.

“The merchants are running scared,” Baruch Beiler said. “Just like everyone else in this godforsaken town.”

“Not all of us have iron gates to keep the animals out,” answered Damian.

“Or in,” I murmured beneath my breath, but Beiler heard me.

“Ten zloty,” he hissed. “By Friday.”

Damian reached into his military jacket and pulled out a leather pouch. He counted the silver coins into his palm and flung them at Beiler. “Consider the debt paid,” he said.

Beiler knelt, collecting the money. Then he stood and shrugged. “Until next month.” He stalked toward his mansion, locking the gates behind himself before vanishing into the massive stone house.

From their position in front of the empty meat stall, I could see the man and his brother watching us.

“Well?” Damian looked at me. “Didn’t your father teach you any manners?”

“Thank you.”

“Perhaps you’d like to
show
your appreciation,” he said. “Your debt to Beiler’s paid. But now you owe one to me.”

Swallowing, I came up on my tiptoes, and kissed his cheek.

He grabbed my hand and pressed it against his crotch. When I tried to push away from him, he ground his mouth against mine. “You know I could take what I want anytime,” he said softly, his hands bracketing my head and squeezing my temples so hard that I could not think, could barely listen. “I am only offering you a choice out of the goodness of my heart.”

One minute he was there, and the next, he wasn’t. I fell, the cobblestones cold against my legs, as the man with the golden eyes yanked Damian away from me and wrestled him to the ground. “She already chose,” he gritted out, punctuating his words with blows to the captain’s face.

As I scrambled away from their fight, the boy in the leather mask stared at me.

I think we both realized at the same time that his leash was dangling, free.

The boy threw back his head and started to run, his footsteps echoing like gunshots as he raced across the deserted village square.