The Storyteller (42 page)

If I could survive the moments like this one, anyway.

The Beast stuck her hand into the straw of the bunk below mine and pulled out what looked like a small rock wrapped in paper. She brought it to her mouth, licked it. “Who sleeps here?” she demanded.

The five girls who crammed into the tiny space stepped forward, holding tightly to each other’s hands. “Who stole this chocolate?” the Beast asked.

The girls looked completely bewildered. It was entirely possible that someone savvier, at the last minute, had shoved her stash of contraband into the straw of their bunk to save herself. At any rate, they stood mute, staring down at the cold dirt floor.

The
Blockälteste
grabbed the hair of one of the girls. Like the rest of us who worked in Kanada, we were allowed to grow ours out. Mine was about an inch long now. It was only one of the many things about that job assignment that made people jealous. The guards there called us fat swine, because we looked healthier than most of the female prisoners, since we could steal bits of food we found in suitcases. “Is it yours?” the Beast yelled.

The girl shook her head. “I don’t . . . I d-didn’t . . .”

“Maybe this will jog your memory,” she said, and she swung her metal rod across the front of all five of their faces, breaking teeth and noses and driving them to their knees.

She kicked between their fallen bodies to search the straw of our bunk. My heart started up like a machine gun; sweat broke out on my temples. I saw her hand close around the deck of photographs, which I had secured with a thread pulled from the hem of my uniform dress.

As the Beast untied the bow, Darija stepped forward. “They belong to me.”

My jaw dropped. I knew exactly what she was doing: paying me back for saving her life. Before I could speak, another woman stepped forward, too—the one who’d arrived only three nights before, the one who could not stop weeping over the loss of her son and her mother. I still did not even know her name. “She is lying,” the woman said. “They’re mine.”

“They’re both lying.” I looked at the woman, wondering about her motivation. Was she trying to rescue me? Or just die herself? “She doesn’t work in Kanada. And she”—I nodded at Darija—“does not speak German.”

One moment, I was standing, drenched in bravado, and the next I was being hauled out of the block. It was pouring outside, and the wind raged like a dragon. One of my wooden shoes got stuck in the mud; I had just enough time to grab for it before it got left behind. If you did not have shoes, you would not survive, period.

Standing in the center of the courtyard, rain pelting his wool uniform, was the SS officer I called Herr Tremor. There was no shudder in his grasp as he lifted a whip and brought it down on the back of the girl from my block who had hidden the radio. She lay facedown in a puddle. After each blow he yelled at her to get up, and each time she did, he struck her again.

I would be next.

An uncontrollable shiver ran down the length of me. My teeth were chattering, my nose running. I wondered if he would kill the girl who stole the radio.

Or me, for that matter.

It is a strange thing, to contemplate dying. I found myself thinking of the criteria I had once kept for my father, as an inside joke. I had criteria of my own now:

When I die, please make it fast.

If there is a bullet, aim for my heart, not my head.

It would be good if it did not hurt.

I’d rather die of a sudden blow than an infection. I’d even welcome the gas. Maybe that just felt like going to sleep and never waking up.

I do not know when I started thinking of the mass extermination at this camp as being humane—thinking like the Germans, I supposed—but
if the alternative was to waste away to a corpse, as my mind shut down by degrees due to starvation, well, then, maybe it was best to just get this over with.

As we approached Herr Tremor, he looked up, the rain sleeting across his features. His eyes, I noticed, were like glass. Pale and practically silver, like a mirror. “I am not done here,” he said in German.

“Should we wait,
Schutzhaftlagerführer
?” asked the guard.

“I have no intention of standing around all day in this pissing rain because some animals cannot follow rules,” he said.

I lifted my chin. Very precisely, in German, I said,
“
Ich bin kein Tier.”

I am not an animal.

His gaze narrowed on mine. I immediately looked down at my feet.

He lifted his right hand, the one holding the whip, and cracked it across my cheekbone so that my head snapped to the side.
“
Da irrst du dich.”

You are mistaken.

I fell to my knees in the mud, holding one hand up to my cheek. The tail of the whip had cut a gash under my eye. Blood mixed with rain, running down my chin. The girl on the ground beside me caught my gaze. Her uniform had been flayed open; the flesh of her back was peeled back like the petals of a rose.

Behind me I could hear conversation; the guards who had brought me here were telling someone else, someone new, what my infraction was. This new officer stepped over me.
“
Schutzhaftlagerführer,
”
a voice said. “You are busy here. With your permission perhaps I can help you?”

I could see only the back of his uniform, and his gloved hands, which were clasped behind him. His boots were so shiny that I stared at them, wondering how he could walk through so much mud without getting them filthy.

I could not believe that was what I was thinking about, the minute before I was to be killed.

Herr Tremor shrugged and turned back to the girl on the ground beside me. The other officer walked off. I was hauled upright and taken across the compound, past Kanada, to the administrative building where
this officer entered. He shouted an order at the guards, and I was brought downstairs to some kind of cell. I heard a heavy lock being snapped into place after the door was sealed.

There was no light. The walls and the floor were made of stone; it was like an old wine cellar, slightly damp, with moss that made everything slippery. I sat with my back against the wall, sometimes pressing my swollen cheek to the cool stones. The one time I dozed off, I awakened to the feel of a mouse running up my leg beneath my work dress. After that, I stood.

Several hours passed. The cut on my face stopped bleeding. I wondered if the officer had forgotten about me, or if he was just saving me for punishment after the rain stopped, so that Herr Tremor could take his time hurting me. By then my cheek had inflamed so badly that my eye was swollen shut. When I heard the door being opened again, I winced at the beam of light that fell into the cramped space.

I was brought to an office.
HAUPTSCHARFÜHRER F. HARTMANN
, it said on the door. There was a large wooden desk, and many filing cabinets, and an ornate chair—the kind you always found lawyers sitting in. In that chair was the officer in charge of Kanada.

And spread out in front of him, across the green blotter of his desk and various papers and files, were all of my photographs, flipped onto their bellies to reveal my story.

I knew what Herr Tremor was capable of; I saw it every day at
Appell.
In a way, Herr Dybbuk was more frightening, because I had no idea what to expect from him.

He was in charge of Kanada and I had stolen from him and the evidence was displayed between us.

“Leave us,” he said to the guard who had brought me.

There was a window behind the officer. I watched the rain strike the glass, reveling in the simple fact that I was inside and warm. I was standing in a room where there was faint classical music playing on the radio. If not for the fact that I was probably about to be beaten to death, I would have counted this as the first moment since arriving at the camp that I felt normal.

“So you speak German,” he said, in his native tongue.

I nodded.
“
Ja, Herr Hauptscharführer.”

“And you can apparently write it, too.”

My eyes flickered toward the photographs. “I studied in school,” I replied.

He passed me a pad of paper and a pen. “Prove it.” He began to walk around the room, reciting a poem.
“
Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, / Daß ich so traurig bin, / Ein Märchen aus uralten Zeiten, / Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.”

I knew the poem. I had studied it with Herr Bauer and had once taken an examination on this very dictation, for which I received the highest marks. I translated in my head:
I wish I knew the meaning, a sadness has fallen on me. The ghost of an ancient legend, that will not let me be.

“Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt,
”
the
Hauptscharführer
continued.
“
Und ruhig flie
ß
t der Rhein
 . . .”

The air is cool in the twilight and gently flows the Rhine . . .

“Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt,
”
I added under my breath, “
im Abendsonnenschein.”

He had heard me. He took the pad and checked my transcription. Then he looked up, staring at me as if I were a creature he had never seen before. “You know this work.”

I nodded. “ ‘The Lorelei,’ by Heinrich Heine.”

“Ein unbekannter Verfasser,
”
he corrected. Anonymous.

That was when I remembered that Heinrich Heine had been Jewish.

“You realize that you stole material from the Reich,” he murmured.

“Yes, I know,” I burst out. “I’m sorry. It was a mistake.”

He raised his brows. “It was a mistake to willfully steal something?”

“No. It was a mistake to think the photographs didn’t matter to the Reich.”

He opened his mouth and then snapped it shut. He could not admit that the photographs were valuable, because that was tantamount to admitting that those who were killed had worth; but he couldn’t admit that the photos were meaningless, because doing so would dilute his
argument for punishing me. “That is not the point,” he said finally. “The point is that they do not belong to
you.
”

The officer sank back into his chair, rapping his fingers on his desk. He picked up one of the pictures and flipped it over to the side with writing on it. “This story. Where is the rest of it?”

I imagined the guards ransacking the block, trying to find more photographs with writing. When they didn’t, would they just start hurting people until someone gave them the answer they wanted? “I haven’t written it yet,” I confessed.

This surprised him; I realized he had assumed I was simply recounting a tale I’d read elsewhere. I wasn’t supposed to be intelligent enough to create something like this. “You,” he said. “
You
made up this monster . . . this
upiór
?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Well, I mean, no. In Poland everyone knows about the
upiór.
But this particular one, he is a figment of my imagination.”

“Most girls write of love. You chose to write about a beast,” he said thoughtfully.

We were speaking in German. We were having a conversation, about writing. As if at any moment he might not take out his pistol and shoot me in the head.

“Your choice of topic reminds me of another mythical beast,” he said. “The Donestre. You have heard of it?”

Was this a test? A trick? Was it a euphemism for some kind of corporal punishment? Was my treatment dependent on my answer? I knew of
Wodnik
—the water demon—and
Dziwo
ona
—dryads—but they were Polish legends. What if I lied and said yes? Would I be worse off than if I told the truth and said no?

“The ancient Greeks—which is what
I
studied in school—wrote of the Donestre. It had the head of a lion and the body of a man. It could speak all the languages of the human race, which as you might imagine,” the
Hauptscharführer
said drily, “came in handy.”

I looked into my lap. I wondered what he would think if he knew my nickname for him, Herr Dybbuk, referred to yet another mythical beast.

“Like your
upiór,
this brute killed freely and devoured its prey. But the Donestre had one peculiar trait. It would save the severed head of its victim, sit beside it, and weep.” He fixed his gaze on me until I glanced up. “Why do you think that was?”

I swallowed. I had never heard of this Donestre, but I knew the
upiór
Aleksander better than I knew myself. I had lived, breathed, birthed that character. “Perhaps some monsters,” I said quietly, “still have a conscience.”

The officer’s nostrils flared. He stood up and came around the desk, and I immediately cowered, throwing up my arm to block the blow.

“You realize,” he said, his voice practically a whisper, “for stealing, I could make an example of you. Publicly flog you, like the prisoner the
Schutzhaftlagerführer
was punishing earlier. Or kill you.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. As it turned out I was not too proud to plead for my meager life. “Please don’t. I’ll do anything.”