The Storyteller (27 page)

I know Darija was remembering that sign on the restaurant, too, because she said, “In our world, there will be no Germans.” Then she laughed. “Ah, poor Minka. You look like you’re going to be sick at the very thought. But then, a world without Germans is a world without Herr Bauer.”

I put aside the notebook and inched closer to Darija. “Today, he called on me three times. I’m the only one he picked more than once to answer a question.”

“That’s probably because you raised your hand every time.”

That was true. German was my best subject in school. We had a choice
of taking French or German. The French teacher, Madame Genierre, was an old nun with a giant wart on her chin that had hairs growing out of it. On the other hand, the German teacher, Herr Bauer, was a young man who looked a little like the actor Leon Liebgold if you squinted or just daydreamed excessively, as I was wont to do. Sometimes when he leaned over my shoulder to correct gender agreement on my paper, I would fantasize how he might take me in his arms and kiss me and tell me we should run away together. As if that would ever happen between a teacher and a student, or a Christian and a Jew! But he was easy on the eyes, at the very least, and I wanted him to notice me, so I took every class he offered: German Grammar, Conversation, Literature. I was his star pupil. I met with him during lunch, just to practice.
Glauben Sie, dass es regnen wird, Fräulein Lewin?
he would ask. Do you think it’s going to rain?

Ach ja, ich denke wir sollten mit, schlechtem Wetter rechnen.

Oh yes, I think we should expect bad weather.

Sometimes, he would even share a private joke with me in German.
Noch eine weikere langweilige Besprechung!
Yet another boring meeting, he would say in passing, smiling pleasantly, as he marched beside Father Jankowiak down the hall, knowing that the priest could not understand a word he was saying, but that I did.

“Today I made him blush,” I confided, smiling. “I told him I was writing a poem and asked him how you might say, in German, ‘He took her in his arms and kissed her breath away.’ I was hoping maybe he’d
show
me, instead of
tell
me.”

“Ugh.” Darija shuddered. “The thought of a German kissing me makes my skin crawl.”

“You can’t say that. Herr Bauer, he’s different. He never talks about the war. He’s far too much of a scholar for that. Besides, if you lump them all together because they’re German, how does that make you any different from the way they lump us all together just because we’re Jews?”

Darija picked up a book from my nightstand. “Oh, Herr Bauer,” she cooed. “I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. To Berlin. Oh wait, that’s the same thing, isn’t it?” She mashed the book up against her face and pretended to kiss it.

I felt a flash of annoyance. Dariya was lovely, with her long neck and her dancer’s body. I didn’t make fun of her when she strung along several boys at once, who’d flock around her at parties and vie for the honor of getting her some punch or a sweet.

“It’s just as well,” she said, tossing the book aside. “If you start running around with the German professor, you’re going to break Josek’s heart.”

Now it was my turn to blush. Josek Szapiro was the one boy who didn’t look twice at Darija. He’d never asked me to take a walk with him or complimented me on a sweater or how I fixed my hair, but the last time we had gone on a picnic to the lake near the factory, he had spent a whole hour talking to me about my book. He had recently been hired by the
Chronicle
to write and was almost three years older than I was, but he didn’t seem to think it was foolish to believe I could one day be published.

“You know,” Darija said, pointing to the pages she had been reading, “this is really just a love story.”

“So what’s wrong with that?”

“Well, a love story, that’s no story at all. People don’t want a happy ending. They want conflict. They want the heroine to fall for the man she can never have.” She grinned at me. “I’m just saying that Ania’s boring.”

At that, I burst out laughing. “She’s based on you and me!”

“Then maybe
we’re
boring.” Darija sat up, crossing her legs. “Maybe we need to make ourselves more cosmopolitan. After all, I could be the kind of lady who’d drive to a restaurant in a car with a radio.”

I rolled my eyes. “Right. And I’m the queen of England.”

Darija grabbed my hand. “Let’s do something shocking.”

“Fine,” I replied. “I won’t hand in my German homework tomorrow.”

“No, no. Something
worldly.
” She smiled. “We could have schnapps at the Grand Hotel.”

I snorted. “Who is going to serve two little girls?”

“We won’t
look
like little girls. Can’t you steal something from your mother’s closet?”

My mother would kill me if she found out.

“I won’t tell her if you don’t,” Darija said, reading my mind.

“I won’t
have
to tell her.” My mother had a sixth sense. I swear, she must have had eyes in the back of her head, to be able to catch me sneaking a taste of the stew from the pot before dinner was served, or to know when I was working on my story in my bedroom instead of doing my homework. “When she has nothing else to worry about, she worries about me.”

Suddenly, from the living room, there was a shriek. I scrambled to my feet and ran, Darija at my heels. My father was clapping Rubin on the back, and my mother was embracing Basia. “Hana!” my father crowed to her. “This calls for some wine!”

“Minusia,” my mother said, using her pet name for me. She looked happier than I had ever seen her. “Your sister is having a baby!”

It had been strange when my sister moved out after her wedding, so that I had my own room. It was stranger now to think of her as somebody’s mother. I hugged Basia and kissed her on the cheek.

“Oh, there’s so much to do!” my mother said.

Basia laughed. “You have some time, Mama.”

“You can never be too prepared. We’ll go out shopping tomorrow for yarn. We must start knitting! Abram, you’ll make do without her at the cash register. Which, you know, is not a good job for a woman who’s expecting. Standing there all day long with her back hurting and her feet swollen—”

My father exchanged a look with Rubin. “This could be a vacation,” he joked. “Maybe for the next five months, she’ll be too busy to bother complaining about me . . .”

I glanced at Darija. Who smiled, and raised her brows.

 • • • 

We looked like two children playing dress-up. I was wearing one of my mother’s silk dresses and a pair of Darija’s mother’s pumps, and the kitten heels kept getting stuck between the cobblestones on the street. Darija had done up my face with makeup, which was supposed to make us look older but which made me feel like a painted clown.

The Grand Hotel rose above us like a wedding cake, with tiers upon tiers of windows. I imagined the stories going on behind each one. The two people in silhouette on the second floor were newlyweds. The woman staring out from the third-floor corner suite was remembering her lost love, whom she would meet for coffee later that afternoon, for the first time in twenty years . . .

“So?” Darija asked. “Aren’t we going in?”

As it turned out, it was even more difficult to actually go into the hotel pretending to be someone else than it was to gather enough bravery to walk there in our fancy clothes. “What if we see someone we know?”

“Who are we going to see?” Darija scoffed. “The fathers are all getting ready to go for evening prayers. The mothers are home getting dinner ready.”

I glanced at her. “You first.”

My mother thought I was at Darija’s, and Darija’s mother thought she was at my house. We could easily get caught, but we were hoping our adventure would compensate for whatever punishment we might incur. As I hesitated, a woman swept up the stairs of the hotel past me. She smelled strongly of perfume and had nails and lips painted fire-engine red. Her clothes were not as fine as those of the clientele of the hotel—or the man she was with, for that matter. She was one of Those Women, the ones my mother pulled me away from. Women of the night were more common in Bałuty, the poorer section of the city—women who looked like they never slept, their shawls wrapped around their bare shoulders as they peeked from their windows. But that didn’t mean there was a lack of loose women here. The man walking behind this one had a tiny mustache, like Charlie Chaplin, and a walking cane. As she sailed through the hotel doorway, he cupped his hand on her bottom.

“That’s disgusting,” Darija whispered.

“That’s what people are going to think we are if we go inside!” I hissed.

Darija pouted. “If you weren’t going to go through with this in the first place, Minka, I don’t know why you said—”

“I never said anything!
You
said that you wanted—”

“Minka?” At the sound of my name, I froze. The only thing worse than my mother discovering I was not at Darija’s house was someone recognizing me and running back to tell my mother.

Grimacing, I turned around to see Josek, dapper in his coat and tie. “It
is
you,” he said, smiling, and he didn’t even steal a glance at Darija. “I didn’t realize you came here.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, guarded.

Darija elbowed me. “Of course we come here. Doesn’t everyone?”

Josek laughed. “Well, I don’t know about everyone. The coffee’s better elsewhere.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He lifted a notebook. “An interview. A human interest piece. That’s all they let me do, so far. My editor says I have to earn breaking news.” He looked at my dress, pinned in the back because it was too big, and the borrowed shoes on my feet. “Are you going to a funeral?”

So much for looking sophisticated.

“We’re headed out on a double date,” Darija said.

“Really!” Josek replied, surprised. “I didn’t think—” Abruptly, he stopped speaking.

“You didn’t think what?”

“That your father would let you go out with a boy,” Josek said.

“Clearly that’s not the case.” Darija tossed her hair. “We’re not babies, Josek.”

He grinned at me. “Then maybe you’d like to come out with
me
sometime, Minka. I’ll prove to you that the coffee at Astoria puts the Grand Hotel to shame.”

“Tomorrow at four,” Darija announced, as if she was suddenly my social secretary. “She’ll be there.”

As Josek said his good-byes and walked off, Darija looped her arm through mine. “I’m going to kill you,” I said.

“Why? Because I got you a date with a handsome boy? For goodness’ sake, Minka, if I can’t have fun, at least let me live vicariously through you.”

“I don’t want to go out with Josek.”

“But Ania needs you to go out with him,” Darija said.

Ania, my character, who was too boring. Too safe.

“You can thank me later,” she said, patting my hand.

 • • • 

Astoria Café was a well-known hangout on Piotrkowska Street. At any given moment, you might find Jewish intellectuals, playwrights, composers arguing the finer points of artistic merit over smoky tables and bitter coffee; or opera divas sipping tea with lemon. Even though I was dressed in the same borrowed outfit I’d worn the day before, being in close quarters with these people made my head swim, as if I might become enlightened simply by breathing the same air.

We were sitting near the swinging doors of the kitchen, and every time they opened, a delicious smell would waft over us. Josek and I were sharing a platter of pierogi, and drinking coffee, which was—as he had promised—heavenly.
“
Upiory,
”
he said, shaking his head. “That’s not what I expected.”

I had been telling him—shyly—of the plot for my story: of Ania, and her father the baker; of the monster who invades their town by masquerading as a common man. “My grandmother used to talk about them when she was still alive,” I explained. “At night, she would leave grain on the wooden table at the bakery, so that if an
upiór
came, he would be forced to count it until the sunrise. If I didn’t go to bed when I was supposed to, my grandmother said the
upiór
would come for me and drink my blood.”

“Pretty grisly,” Josek said.

“The thing is, it didn’t scare me. I used to feel bad for the
upiór
. I mean, it wasn’t
his
fault he was undead. But good luck getting someone to believe that, when there were people like my grandmother running around saying otherwise.” I looked up at Josek. “So I started to daydream a story about an
upiór,
who may not be as evil as everyone thinks. At least not compared to the human who’s trying to destroy him. And certainly not
in the eyes of the girl who’s starting to fall for him . . . until she realizes he may have killed her own father.”

“Wow,” Josek said, impressed.

I laughed. “You were expecting a romance, maybe?”

“More than I was expecting a horror story,” he admitted.

“Darija says that I have to tone it down, or no one will ever want to read it.”

“But you don’t believe that . . . ?”

“No,” I said. “People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don’t, how will they ever come to appreciate safety?”

A slow smile spread across Josek’s face. In that moment, he looked handsome. At least as handsome as Herr Bauer, if not more. “I didn’t realize Łód
had the next Janusz Korczak in its midst.”