The Storyteller (18 page)

I open the front cover. Inside, in small, tight cursive, words crawl across the page, packed end to end without any white space, as if that were a luxury. Maybe, back then, it was. “This is my story,” my grandmother
continues. “It’s not the one you’re looking for, about what happened during the war. That’s not nearly as important.” She meets my gaze. “Because
this
story, it’s the one that kept me alive.”

 • • • 

My grandmother, she could have given Stephen King a run for his money.

Her story is supernatural, about an
upiór
—the Polish version of a vampire. But what makes it so terrifying is not the monster, who’s a known quantity, but the ordinary men who turn out to be monsters, too. It is as if she knew, even at that young age, that you cannot separate good and evil cleanly, that they are conjoined twins sharing a single heart. If words had flavors, hers would be bitter almonds and coffee grounds. There are times when I’m reading her story that I forget she was the one to write it—that’s how good it is.

I read the notebook in its entirety, and then I reread it, wondering if I have missed a single word. I try to absorb the story, to the point where it is one I can play back to myself syllable by syllable, the way my grandmother must have done. I find myself reciting paragraphs when I am showering, washing the dishes, taking out the trash.

My grandmother’s story is a mystery, but not in the way she intended. I try to pull apart the characters and their dialogue to see the skeleton beneath that must have been her real life. All writers start with a layer of truth, don’t they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

I read about Ania, the narrator, and her father and hear my grandmother’s voice; I imagine my great-grandfather’s face. When she describes the cottage on the outskirts of Łód
, the town square crossed by horse-drawn carts, the forest where Ania would walk with moss sinking beneath her boots, I can smell the peat burning and taste the ash on the bottom of their bread. I can hear the footsteps of children striking
the cobblestones as they chase each other, long before they ever had anything or anyone to really run from.

I am so engrossed in the story that I am late to pick Josef up for grief group. “You slept well?” he asks, and I tell him yes. As he sits down in the car, I think of the parallels between my grandmother’s story—the monster that hunts villagers and kills Ania’s father—and the SS, who came into my grandmother’s life unannounced and destroyed her family. My grandmother’s childhood—those little rolls baked just for her, the long, lazy afternoons when she and her best friend dreamed of their future, even the walls of her family’s apartment—unfolds in a parallel line beside Josef’s tale of the Hitler Youth. Yet they are inching closer; I know that they are destined to cross.

That makes me hate Josef, right now.

I bite my tongue, though, because Josef does not even know I have a grandmother, much less one who survived the genocide in which he was involved. I am not sure why I want to guard this information from him. Maybe because he’d be thrilled to hear he was one step closer to finding the right person to forgive him. Maybe because I think he doesn’t deserve to know.

Maybe because I do not like the idea of my grandmother and someone like Josef still coexisting in this world.

“You are very quiet today,” Josef muses.

“Just thinking.”

“About me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I say.

Because I was late picking Josef up, we are the last ones to arrive at grief group. Stuart immediately approaches, looking for my ever-present bag of baked goods—but I don’t have anything today. I was too busy reading my grandmother’s journal to bake. “I’m really sorry, “I tell him. “I came empty-handed.”

“If only Stuart could say the same,” Jocelyn murmurs, and I realize he’s brought his wife’s death mask in again.

Minka, make a note,
I think, remembering my great-grandfather.
When I die, no mask, okay?

Marge rings the little bell that always makes me think we are at a yoga class, instead of a grief therapy group. “Shall we get started?” she asks.

I don’t know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it’s the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now . . . if she
is
somewhere. It’s the question mark that comes with death that we can’t face, not the period.

All of a sudden I realize there is one empty chair. Ethel is missing. I know, even before Marge tells us the news, that her husband, Bernie, has died.

“It happened on Monday,” Mrs. Dombrowski says. “I got the call from Ethel’s oldest daughter. Bernie’s in a better place now.”

I look over at Josef, who is picking at a thread on his pants, undisturbed.

“Do you think she’ll come back here?” Shayla asks. “Ethel?”

“I hope so,” Marge says. “I think if any of you would like to reach out to her, she’d appreciate it.”

“I want to send flowers or something,” Stuart says. “Bernie had to be a pretty good guy, to have a lady like that who took care of him for so long.”

“You don’t know that,” I say slowly, and everyone turns to me, shocked. “None of us ever met the man. He could have beat her every day for all we know.”

“Sage!” Shayla gasps.

“I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead,” I add quickly, ducking my head. “I imagine Bernie was a great guy who used to go bowling every week and who loaded the dishes into the dishwasher after every meal Ethel cooked. But do you think that only good guys wind up with people like us, left behind? Even Jeffrey Dahmer had a mother.”

“That’s an interesting point,” Marge says. “Do we grieve because the person we lost was such a light in the world? Or do we grieve because of who he was to us?”

“Maybe a little of both,” Stuart says, his hand running over the
contours of his wife’s death mask as if he were blind and learning her features for the first time.

“So does that mean we shouldn’t feel bad when someone horrible dies?” I ask.

I can feel Josef’s gaze boring into my temple.

“There are definitely people who make this earth better by leaving it,” Jocelyn muses. “Bin Laden. Charlie Manson.”

“Hitler,” I say innocently.

“Yeah, I read this book once about a woman who was his personal secretary and she made him out to be like any other boss. Said he used to gossip about the secretaries’ boyfriends with them,” Shayla says.

“If they didn’t regret killing people, why should anyone regret when
they
die?” Stuart says.

“So you think once a Nazi, always a Nazi?” I ask.

Beside me, Josef coughs.

“I hope there’s a special place in Hell for people like that,” Shayla says primly.

Marge recommends a five-minute breather. While she talks quietly to Shayla and Stuart, Josef taps my shoulder. “May I speak to you privately?”

I follow him into the hallway and fold my arms. “How dare you?” he hisses, stepping so close to me that I retreat a step. “What I told you was in confidence. If I wanted the world to know what I used to be, I could have turned myself in to authorities years ago.”

“So you want absolution without any of the punishment,” I say.

His eyes flash, the blue nearly obliterated by the black of his pupils. “You will not speak of this in public anymore,” he orders, so loudly that several others in the adjacent room turn toward us.

His anger rushes at me, a rogue wave. Even though my scar is on fire, even though I feel as if I have been caught by the teacher passing a note in class, I force myself to look him in the eye. I stand rigid, nothing but breath between us, an empty truce.

“Don’t you ever speak to me that way again,” I whisper. “I am
not
one of your victims.”

Then I turn on my heel and walk away. For just a moment, when Josef let his own death mask slip, I could see the man he used to be: the one buried beneath the kindly exterior for so many decades, like a root growing slow beneath pavement, still capable of cracking concrete.

 • • • 

I cannot leave grief group early without drawing attention to myself, and since I brought Josef to the meeting, I have to take him home or else face Marge’s inquiry. But I don’t speak to him, not when we are saying our good-byes to the others or walking to the parking lot. “I am sorry,” Josef says, five minutes into our drive.

We are stopped at a red light. “Well. That’s a loaded statement.”

He continues to stare straight out the window. “I mean about what I said to you. During the break.”

I don’t respond. I don’t want him thinking he is off the hook. And no matter what he said to me, I can’t just drop him off at the curb and walk away forever. I owe it to my grandmother. Plus, I promised Leo I wouldn’t. If anything, hearing Josef snap like that makes me even more determined to get enough evidence to have him prosecuted. This is a man, clearly, who at one point in his life could do whatever he wanted without fear of retribution. In a way, by asking me to kill him, he’s just doing more of the same.

I think it’s about time he got what he really deserves.

“I am nervous, I suppose,” Josef continues.

“About what?” I ask, feeling my scalp prickle. Is he onto me? Does he know that I plan to string him along, and then turn him in?

“That you will listen to all I have to say to you and still not do what I’ve asked.”

I face him. “With or without me, Josef, you’re going to die.”

He meets my gaze. “Do you know of
Der Ewige Jude
? The Wandering Jew?”

The word
Jew
makes me shudder, as if such a term should not even be allowed to take up passing residence on his lips. I shake my head.

“It is an old European story. A Jew, Ahasuerus, taunted Jesus as he stopped to rest while carrying his cross. When the Jew told Jesus he should move quicker, Jesus cursed him to walk the earth until the Second Coming. For hundreds of years there have been sightings of Ahasuerus, who cannot die, no matter how much he wants to.”

“You do realize the great irony here in comparing yourself to a Jew,” I say.

He shrugs. “Say what you will about them, but they thrive, in spite of”—he glances at my face—“everything. I should have died, several times now. I have had cancer and car accidents. I am the only elderly man I know who has been hospitalized for pneumonia and still survived. You believe what you like, Sage, but I know the reason I am still alive. Like Ahasuerus—every day I am here is another day to relive my mistakes.”

The light has turned green, and there are cars behind me honking, but I haven’t put my foot on the accelerator. Josef seems to retreat into himself, lost in thought. “Herr Sollemach, from the Hitler-Jugend, used to tell us Jews were like weeds. Pull out one and two more grow in their place . . .”

I press down on the gas, and we jolt forward. I’m disgusted with Josef, for being exactly who he professed to be. I’m disgusted with myself for not believing him, at first; for being fooled into thinking that this man was a grandfatherly Good Samaritan, like everyone else in this town.

“. . . but I used to think,” Josef says quietly, “that there are some weeds that are just as beautiful as flowers.”

There was something behind me. It was a sixth sense, a chill on the back of my neck. I had turned around a dozen times since entering the woods, but saw only the bare trees standing like sentries.

Still, my heart was racing. I walked a little faster toward the cottage, clutching my bread basket, wondering if I was close enough for Aleks to hear me if I screamed.

Then I heard it. The crunch of a twig, a break in the surface of the snow.

I could run.

If I ran, whatever was behind me would chase me.

Once again, I picked up my pace. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes, and I blinked them back. Abruptly I ducked behind a tree wide enough to conceal me. I held my breath, counting as the footfalls came closer.

A doe walked into the clearing, swiveling its head to stare at me before nibbling at the bark on a birch a few feet away.

Relief turned my legs to jelly. I leaned against the trunk of the tree, still trembling. This was what happened when you let the idle prattle of the villagers seep into your mind like poison. You saw shadows when there were none; you heard a mouse and imagined a lion. Shaking my head at my own stupidity, I stepped away from the tree and started toward home again.

It attacked me from behind, covering my head with something hot and dank, some sort of fabric or sack that kept me blind. I was pinned by my wrists, with weight on the small of my back so I could not stand up. My face was shoved into the ground. I tried to yell, but whatever was behind me pushed my head down so that my mouth filled with snow instead. I felt heat and blades and claws and teeth, oh, the teeth, sinking into a half-moon on my throat and stinging like a thousand needles, like a swarm of bees.