The Storyteller (28 page)

I fidgeted with my teaspoon. “So you don’t think it’s crazy? For a girl to write something like this?”

Josek leaned closer. “I think it’s brilliant. I see what you’re doing. It’s not just a fairy tale, it’s an allegory, right? The
upiory
, they are like Jews. To the general population, they are bloodsuckers, a dark and frightening tribe. They are to be feared and battled with weapons and crosses and Holy Water. And the Reich, which puts itself on the side of God, has commissioned itself to rid the world of monsters. But the
upiory
, they are timeless. No matter what they try to do to us, we Jews have been around too long to be forgotten, or to be vanquished.”

Once, in Herr Bauer’s class, I had made an error during an essay and substituted one German word for another. I was writing about the merits of a parochial education, and meant to say
Achtung,
which meant “attention, respect.” Instead, I used
Ächtung,
which meant “ostracism.” As you can imagine, it completely changed the point of my essay. Herr Bauer asked me to stay after class to have a discussion about the separation of church and state, and what it was like to be a Jew in a Catholic high school. I wasn’t embarrassed at the time, because mostly I didn’t even pay attention to what made me different from the other students—and because I got to spend a half hour alone with Herr Bauer,
talking as if we were equals. And of course it was a mistake, not a stroke of brilliance, that had led me to make the observation in my paper that Herr Bauer thought was so insightful . . . but I wasn’t about to admit to that.

Just like I’m not going to admit to Josek, now, that when I was writing my story I never in a million years was thinking of it as a political statement. In fact, when I imagined Ania and her father, they were Jewish, like me.

“Well,” I said, trying to make light of Josek’s explanation. “Guess I can’t put anything past you.”

“You’re something else, Minka Lewin,” he said. “I’ve never met another girl like you.” He threaded his fingers through mine. Then he lifted my hand and pressed his lips to it, suddenly a courtier.

It was old-world and chivalrous and made me shiver. I tried to remember every sensation, from the way all the colors in the café suddenly seemed brighter to the electric current that danced over my palm like lightning in a summertime field. I wanted to be able to tell Darija every last detail. I wanted to write them into my story.

Before I could finish my mental catalog, though, Josek wrapped his hand around the back of my head, drew me closer, and kissed me.

It was my first kiss. I could feel the pressure of Josek’s fingers on my scalp, and the scratchy wool of his sweater under my palm. My heart felt like fireworks must, when after finally being lit, all that gunpowder has somewhere to go.

“So,” Josek said after a moment.

I cleared my throat and looked around at the other patrons. I expected them all to be staring at us, but no, they were tangled in their own conversations, punctuating the air with gestures that cut through the haze of the cigarette smoke.

I had a brief flashing image of myself and Josek, living abroad, and working together at our kitchen table. There he was, his white shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows as he furiously typed a story on deadline. There I was, chewing the top end of a pencil as I added the final touches to my first novel.

“Josek Szapiro,” I said, drawing back. “What’s gotten into you?”

He laughed. “Must be all this talk of monsters and the ladies who love them.”

Darija would tell me to play hard to get. To walk out and make Josek come after me. To Darija, every relationship was a game. Me, I got tired of figuring out all the rules.

Before I could answer, though, the doors of the café burst open and a swarm of SS soldiers exploded into the room. They began to smack the patrons with their truncheons, to overturn chairs with people still in them. Old men who fell to the floor were trampled or kicked; women were thrown against the walls.

I was frozen in place. I had been near SS soldiers when they passed, but never in the middle of an action like this one. The men all seemed to be over six feet tall, hulking brutes in heavy green wool uniforms. They had clenched fists and pale silver eyes that glittered the way mica did. They smelled like hatred.

Josek grabbed me and shoved me behind him through the swinging kitchen doors. “Run, Minka,” he whispered. “Run!”

I did not want to leave Josek behind. I grabbed on to his sleeve, trying to pull him with me, but as I did a soldier yanked on his other arm. The last thing I saw, before I turned and sprinted, was the blow that spun Josek in a slow pirouette, the blood running from his temple and broken nose.

The soldiers were dragging out the café patrons and loading them into trucks when I climbed through the window of the kitchen and walked as normally as I could in the opposite direction. When I felt I was a safe distance away, I started to run. I twisted my ankle in the kitten heels, so I kicked them off and kept going barefoot, even though it was October and the soles of my feet were freezing.

I did not stop running, not when I got a stitch in my side or when I had to scatter a group of little beggar children like pigeons; especially not when a woman pushing a cart of vegetables grabbed my arm to ask if I was all right. I ran for a half hour, until I was at my father’s bakery. Basia was not at the cash register—shopping with Mama, I assumed—but the
bell that hung over the door rang, so that my father would know someone had entered.

He came out from the kitchen, his broad face glistening with sweat from the heat of the brick ovens, his beard dusted with flour. His delight at seeing me faded as he noticed my face—makeup streaked with tears—my bare feet, my hair tumbling out of its pins.

“Minusia,” he cried out. “What happened?”

Yet I, who fancied myself a writer, couldn’t find a single word to describe not only what I had seen but how everything had changed, as if the earth had tilted slightly on its axis, ashamed of the sun, so that now we would have to learn to live in the dark.

With a sob, I threw myself into his arms. I had tried so hard to be a cosmopolitan woman; as it turned out, all I wanted was to stay a little girl.

But I had grown up in an instant.

 • • • 

If the world hadn’t been turned inside out that afternoon, I would have been punished. I would have been sent to my room without dinner and barred from seeing Darija or doing anything but my schoolwork for at least a week. Instead, when my mother heard what had happened, she held me tightly and would not let me out of her sight.

Before we walked home, my father’s arm tightly anchored around me and his eyes darting around the street as if he expected a threat to leap out of an alley at any minute (and why should he think any differently, after what I had relayed to him?), we went to the office where Josek’s father worked as an accountant. My father knew his father from
shul
. “Chaim,” he said gravely. “We have news.”

He asked me to tell Josek’s father everything—from the time we arrived at the café to the moment I saw a soldier hitting Josek with an iron rod. I watched the blood drain from his father’s face, saw his eyes fill with tears. “They took people away in trucks,” I said. “I don’t know where.”

An internal battle played over the older man’s face, as hope struggled with reason. “You’ll see,” my father said gently. “He’ll come back.”

“Yes.” Chaim nodded as if he needed to convince himself. He looked up then, as if he was surprised to see us still standing there. “I have to go. I must tell my wife.”

When Darija came after dinnertime to find out about my date with Josek, I told my mother to make an excuse and say I wasn’t feeling well. It was the truth, after all. That date seemed unrecognizable now, so badly tarnished by the firestorm of events that I couldn’t remember what it used to look like.

My father, who picked at the food on his plate that night, went out after the dishes were cleared. I was sitting on my bed, my eyes squeezed shut, conjugating German verbs.
Ich habe Angst. Du hast Angst. Er hat Angst. Wir haben Angst.

We are afraid.
Wir haben Angst.

My mother came into my bedroom and sat down beside me. “Do you think he’s alive?” I asked, the one question that no one had spoken out loud.

“Ach, Minusia,” my mother said. “That imagination of yours.” But her hands were shaking, and she hid this by reaching for the brush on my nightstand. She turned me, gently, so that I was sitting with my back to her, and she began to brush out my hair in long, sweeping strokes, the way she used to when I was little.

 • • • 

What we learned, from information that leaked through the community in tiny staccato bursts, like rapid gunfire, was that the SS had rounded up 150 people from the Astoria that afternoon. They had taken them to headquarters and had interrogated the men and women individually, beating them with iron bars, with rubber clubs. They broke arms and fingers and demanded ransom payments of several hundred marks. Those who didn’t have the money with them had to give the names of family members who might. Forty-six people were shot to death by the SS, fifty were freed after payment, and the rest were taken off to a prison in Radogoszcz.

Josek had been one of the lucky ones. Although I hadn’t seen him since that afternoon, my father told me he was back home with his family. Chaim, who like my father had Christian clients as well as Jews, had somehow made the arrangements for money to be brought to SS headquarters in exchange for his son’s freedom. He told everyone who would listen that if not for the bravery of Minka Lewin, they might not have had such a happy ending.

I had been thinking a lot about happy endings. I had been thinking about what Josek and I were speaking of, moments before Everything Happened. Of villains, and of heroes. The
upiór
in my story, was he the one who terrorized others? Or was he the one being persecuted?

I was sitting on the steps that led to the second floor of the school building one afternoon while the rest of the students had Religious Studies. Although I was supposed to be crafting an essay, I was writing my story instead. I had just started a scene where an angry mob beats at Ania’s door. My pencil could not keep up with my thoughts. I could feel my heart start to pound as I imagined the knock, the splinter of the wood against the weapons the townspeople had brought for the lynching. I could feel sweat breaking out along Ania’s spine. I could hear their German accents through the thick cottage door—

But the German accent I heard was actually Herr Bauer’s. He sank down beside me on the step, our shoulders nearly bumping. My tongue swelled to four times its normal size; I could not have spoken aloud if my life depended on it. “Fräulein Lewin,” he said. “I wanted you to hear the news from me.”

The news? What news?

“Today is my last day here,” he confessed, in German. “I will be going back to Stuttgart.”

“But . . . why?” I stammered. “We need you here.”

He smiled, that beautiful smile. “My country apparently needs me, too.”

“Who will teach us?”

He shrugged. “Father Czerniski will take over.”

Father Czerniski was a drunk, and I had no doubt the only German
he knew was the word
Lager.
But I didn’t need to say this out loud, Herr Bauer was thinking the same thing. “You will continue to study on your own,” he insisted fiercely. “You will continue to excel.” Then Herr Bauer met my gaze, and for the first time in our acquaintance, he spoke Polish to me. “It has been an honor and a privilege to teach you,” he said.

After he walked downstairs, I ran to the girls’ bathroom and burst into tears. I cried for Herr Bauer, and for Josek, and for me. I cried because I would not be able to lose myself daydreaming about Herr Bauer anymore, which meant more time would be spent in reality. I cried because when I remembered my first kiss, I felt sick to my stomach. I cried because my world had become a raging ocean and I was drowning. Even after I splashed my face with cold water, my eyes were still red and puffy. When Father Jarmyk asked if I was all right during math, I told him that we had received sad news the previous night about a cousin in Kraków.

These days, no one would question that kind of response.

When I left school that afternoon, headed directly to the bakery as usual, I thought I was seeing an apparition. Leaning on a lamppost across the street was Josek Szapiro. I gasped, and ran to him. When I got closer, I could see the skin around his eyes was yellow and purple, all the jewel tones of a fading bruise; that he had a healing cut through the middle of his left eyebrow. I reached up to touch his face, but he caught my hand. One of his fingers was splinted. “Careful,” he said. “It’s still tender.”

“What did they do to you?”

He pulled my hand down. “Not here,” he warned, looking around at the busy pedestrians.

Still holding my hand, he tugged me away from the school. To anyone passing by, we might have looked like an ordinary couple. But I knew from the way Josek was holding on to me—tightly, as if he were drowning in quicksand and needed to be rescued—that this wasn’t the case.

I followed him blindly through a street market, past the fishmonger and the vegetable cart, into a narrow alley that ran between two buildings. When I slipped on cabbage rinds, he anchored me to his side. I could feel the heat of his arm around me. It felt like hope.

He didn’t stop until we had navigated a rabbit warren of cobbled
pathways, until we were behind the service entrance of a building I did not even recognize. Whatever Josek wanted to say to me, I hoped that it didn’t involve leaving me here alone to find my way back.

“I was so worried about you,” he said finally. “I didn’t know if you’d gotten away.”

“I’m much tougher than I look,” I replied, raising my chin.

“And as it turns out,” Josek said quietly, “I’m
not
. They beat me, Minka. They broke my finger to get me to tell them who my father was. I didn’t want them to know. I thought they would go after him, and hurt him, too. But instead they took his money.”