The Storyteller (23 page)

“This Anus Mundi,” I say. “I’ve never heard of it.”

Josef laughed. “That was just a nickname. You speak some Latin, yes? It means ‘Asshole of the World.’ But you,” he said. “You probably know it as Auschwitz.”

He could hear every beat of her heart. It was almost in time with her boots, as she ran. She should have known better, he told himself. This was all her fault.

When she rounded the corner, he hit her from behind. She landed hard on the stones as he reached for the neck of her dress, tearing it halfway down her body while he rolled her onto her back. One arm pressed against her collarbone was all he needed to keep her steady. She begged, they always did, but he did not listen. Her heart was racing now, and it was driving him mad.

The first bite was the most gratifying, like a blade cutting through clay. Her pulse fluttered like an aspen leaf in the hollow of her throat. The skin was soft; it took only a gentle tug to peel it back so that he could see the exposed muscle, the veins throbbing. He could hear the blood, too, rushing like a swollen river, and it made saliva pool in his mouth. With years of dexterity he carved through the muscle, snapping sinew and tendon like bowstrings as he shredded the flesh, dissecting until the sweet copper blood burst from the artery onto his tongue. It dripped down his chin like the juice of a melon as she went limp beneath him, as her skin shriveled. When his teeth struck her spine, he knew she was of no more use. Her head, connected only by a strip of ligament, rolled a short distance away.

He wiped his mouth clean. And wept.

SAGE

Even though Josef has spoken so much of death that it darkens his lips like a berry stain; even though I cannot get the images out of my head of a little girl singing and a young man pointing to himself and reciting his age, what I find myself thinking about are the others. The ones Josef hasn’t told me about. The ones who didn’t even leave a mark on his memory, which is infinitely more horrible.

He was at Auschwitz, and so was my grandmother. Did she know him? Did they cross paths? Did he threaten her, beat her? Did she lie awake at night in her fetid bunk and redraw the monster in her story with features that matched his?

I have not mentioned Josef to my grandmother for good reason. She has spent over six decades keeping her memories bottled up. But as I leave Josef’s house, I cannot help but wonder if my grandmother is one of the ones he doesn’t recall. And if
he
is one of the ones she has worked so hard to forget. The inequity there makes me sick to my stomach.

It is pitch dark and raining when I leave Josef’s house, shaking beneath the responsibility of his confessions. What I want is someone I can run to, someone who will hold me tight and tell me that I’m going to be okay, someone who will hold my hand until I fall asleep tonight. My mother would have done that, but she’s not here anymore. My grandmother might, but she would want to know what has upset me so deeply.

So I drive to Adam’s house, even though I have told him I don’t want to see him, even though it is nighttime—the portion of the pie chart of his life that belongs to someone other than me. I park at the curb and look in the fishbowl window of the living room. There is a boy watching television,
Jeopardy!
And beyond the couch a girl sits at the kitchen table reading. Buttery light spills over her shoulders like a cape. The kitchen sink faucet is running, and Adam’s wife is washing dishes. While I watch, he appears with a fresh dish towel and takes a salad bowl from her soapy hands. He dries it, sets it on the counter, and then wraps his arms around Shannon from behind.

The sky opens overhead, which is surely a metaphor and not just a low-pressure system. I start to run and make it to my car just as the night is cleaved by a violet streak of lightning. I peel away from the curb, from this happy family, and drive too fast to the divided highway. The puddles on the asphalt are vast and black. I think of Josef’s image, the ground welling up with blood, and I am so distracted that at first I do not see the doe fly from the woods at the edge of the road to leap in front of my car. I veer sharply, struggling to control the wheel, and hit the guardrail, smacking my head against the window. The car comes to a stop with a hiss.

For a moment, I black out.

When I open my eyes, my face is wet. I think I might be crying, but then I touch my cheek and my hand comes away bloody.

For one horrible, heart-stopping moment, I relive my past.

I look at the empty passenger seat, and then peer through the shattered windshield, and remember where I am and what has happened.

The deer is lying in the road, screened by the white veil of the headlights. I stumble out of the car. In the pouring rain, I kneel down and touch its face, its neck, and I start to sob.

I am so distraught that it takes me a moment to realize that there is another car illuminating the night, a hand gentle on my shoulder. “Miss,” the policeman asks, “are you all right?”

As if that were an easy answer. As if I could reply with a single word.

 • • • 

After the cops call Mary, she insists on getting me checked out at a hospital. When the doctor puts a butterfly bandage on my forehead and tells her I ought to be watched for signs of concussion, she announces I will be staying overnight at her house, and does not allow me to argue. By then my head hurts so much I am in no condition to put up a fight, which is how I wind up in Mary’s kitchen drinking tea.

Mary’s hands are covered with dried purple paint—she’d been working on a mural when she was contacted by the police. The painting surrounds me, on the walls of the breakfast nook: a half-finished dreamscape of the apocalypse. Jesus—I’m guessing it’s Jesus, anyway, because he’s got the long hair and the beard but his face looks suspiciously like Bradley Cooper’s—is holding out his hand to those tumbling toward Mephistopheles—who is female, and resembles Michele Bachmann. The poor souls who are falling are in various states of undress, and some are still just roughly sketched, but I can make out the features of Snooki, Donald Trump, Joe Paterno. I touch my finger to a spot on the mural just behind my back. “Elmo?” I say. “Really?”

“How long has he been a toddler?” Mary asks, shrugging as she passes me the sugar. “He never gets old. Clearly he made a deal with the Devil.” She holds my hand across the table. “It means a lot to me, you know. That you called me.”

I choose not to point out that the police were the ones who called.

“I thought you were angry at me, because I told you to take time off. But really, it’s for your own good, Sage.” She smiles a little. “Sister Immaculata used to say that to me all the time when I was a kindergartner in parochial school. I never stopped talking. So one day she put me in the trash can. I was short enough that I fit. Every time I complained, she kicked the can.”

“I’m supposed to be grateful that you didn’t throw me in the Dumpster?”

“No, you’re supposed to be grateful that someone cares enough
about you to help you get back on track again. You know it’s what your mother would have wanted.”

My mother. The reason I had gone to grief group in the first place. If she hadn’t died, I might never have cultivated a friendship with Josef Weber.

“So what happened tonight?” Mary asks.

Well, that’s a loaded question. “You know. I hit a deer, and my car swerved into the guardrail.”

“Where were you headed? The weather was
awful.
”

“Home,” I say, because that isn’t a lie.

I would like to tell her all about Josef, but she already dismissed me once when I tried to confide in her. It is like he said: we believe what we want to, what we need to. The corollary is that we choose not to see what we’d rather pretend doesn’t exist. Mary can’t accept the thought that Josef Weber might be a monster, because that implies that she was duped by him.

“Were you with him?” Mary asks tightly.

At first I think she is talking about Josef, but then I realize she means Adam. “Actually I told Adam I didn’t want to see him for a while.”

Mary’s jaw drops. “Amen!”

“But then I drove to his house.” When Mary buries her face in her hands, I grimace. “I wasn’t going to go inside. I swear it.”

“Hello? Why didn’t you come here?” Mary asks. “I have enough herbal tea and Häagen-Dazs to compensate for any breakup, and I’m more emotionally available than Adam ever was.”

I nod. “You’re right. I should have called you. But instead, I saw him with his wife and kids. I got . . . rattled, I guess. And I was distracted, which is why I hit the deer.”

I realize that I’ve crafted this entire story without even mentioning Josef’s name. I have more in common with my grandmother than I originally thought.

“Nice try,” Mary says. “But you’re lying.”

I blink at her, my breath caught in my throat.

“I know you. You were driving to see him because you wanted to tell
him you’d made a mistake. If you hadn’t Peeping Tommed the whole happy family scene, you probably would have climbed a trellis and thrown pebbles at the window until he came outside to talk to you.”

I scowl at her. “You make me sound like such a loser.”

Mary shrugs. “Look, all I’m saying is that it wouldn’t hurt you to hold a grudge longer than a single breath.”

“Isn’t that a little Old Testament for a nun?”

“Ex-nun. And let me tell you, that serenity crap from
The Sound of Music
? Bullshit. Inside the cloister, the sisters are just as petty as people on the outside. There are some you love and some you hate. I did my share of spitting in the Holy Water font before another nun used it. It was totally worth the twenty rosaries I said for penance.”

I rub my left temple, which is throbbing. “Can you get me my phone?”

She gets up and rummages through my purse to find it for me. “Who are you calling?”

“Pepper.”

“Liar. The last time you talked to your sister she hung up on you because you said tutoring a four-year-old to get into an exclusive preschool made as much sense as hiring a swim coach for a guppy. You wouldn’t call Pepper if you were trapped in the car and it was about to catch fire—”

“Just let me check my messages, will you?”

Mary thrusts the phone at me. “Go ahead. Text him. By tomorrow morning, you’re going to be begging him to forgive you anyway. It’s your M.O.”

I scan my contacts for Leo’s number. “Not this time,” I promise.

 • • • 

Apparently even Nazi hunters take a breather. Although I leave three voice mails for Leo that night and the next morning, he does not answer, and he does not call me back. I fall into a fitful sleep in Mary’s guest bedroom, where an elaborate carving of Jesus carrying his
cross hangs over my head. I dream that I have to drag a crucifix up a Sisyphean hill, and look down from its peak to see the bodies of thousands of naked men, women, children.

Mary drives me home on her way to the bakery, even though I insist that it would just be better for me to join her there. Once I’m back in my house, though, I am restless. I don’t think I can handle another session with Josef today; I don’t want to talk to him until I have connected with Leo, anyway.

I want to get my mind off Josef, so I decide to bake something that requires my undivided attention: brioche. It’s a bread that is an anomaly—50 percent of it is butter, yet instead of being a brick of a loaf, it is melt-in-your-mouth, sweet, airy. To make it on a hot, humid day like this is an added challenge, because it requires all ingredients to be cold. I even refrigerate the mixing bowl and the dough hook.

I begin by beating the butter with a rolling pin while the dough is mixing. Then I add it, in small portions, to the mixer. This is my favorite part about brioche. The dough doesn’t quite know what to do with all that butter, and begins to come apart. But with enough time, it manages to bring itself back to center, to a satin consistency.

I turn off the mixer and rip off a hunk of dough the size of a plum. Holding it between my hands, I pull it slowly to see if it sheets—growing transparent as it stretches. I set the dough into a container and cover it tightly with plastic wrap, then place it on my counter and begin to clean up the kitchen.

The doorbell rings.

The sound startles me. I’m not home during the day, usually, and no one ever rings the doorbell at night. Even Adam, when he comes, has his own key.

I am expecting the mail lady or the UPS guy, but the man standing on my porch is not in uniform. He’s wearing a rumpled suit jacket and a tie, even though it’s easily eighty-five degrees out. He has black hair and beard stubble and eyes the color of polished walnut. And he’s easily six foot three. “Sage Singer?” he says, when I open the door. “I’m Leo Stein.”

He is not what I anticipated, in more ways than one. Immediately, I shake my bangs forward to cover my face, but I can tell I’m too late. Leo is staring at me, as if he can see through the screen of hair. “How did you know where I live?” I ask.

“Are you kidding? We’re the Department of Justice. I know what you had for breakfast this morning.”

“Really?”

“No.” He grins, and it takes me by surprise. I would think a person like him doesn’t smile very often. I would think, given all he’s heard, that he’s forgotten how. “Could I come in?”

I don’t know if there’s a protocol here. If I’m even allowed to turn him away. I wonder if I’ve done something terribly wrong; if there have been hidden cameras focused on me and Josef; if I am in trouble.

“Okay, the first thing you have to do is breathe,” Leo says. “I’m here to help you, not arrest you.”

I turn in profile, so that he can’t see the bad side of my face.

“Um,” he says. “Is something wrong?”

“No. Why?”

“Because you’re twisted the way I was when I fell asleep at my desk last month. I couldn’t straighten my neck for a week.”

I take a deep breath and meet his gaze, challenging him to look at me.

“Oh,” he says softly. “Well, that’s not what I expected.”

I don’t know why I feel like I’ve been slapped. Most polite people do not say anything at all when they see my scars. If Leo had done that, at least I could have pretended he didn’t notice.