The Storyteller (47 page)

I was so distracted that the
Hauptscharführer
asked if I had a headache. I did, but I knew it would get worse when I returned to the block at the end of the day.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The sister and a fourth girl had been hanged just after the sun set, before
Appell.
I tried not to look as I passed by, but I could hear the creak of the wood as their bodies twirled, macabre ballerinas, with skirts that sang in the bitter wind.

 • • • 

One night it grew so cold that we awakened with frost matting our hair. In the morning, when we were being given our rations, the
Blockälteste
took a tin cup of coffee from one of the women and threw it into the air so that it froze instantly, a great white cloud. The dogs that patrolled with the officers now whined and pawed at the icy ground with their tails between their legs as we stood at
Appell
losing feeling in our extremities. When we walked to work afterward, we had to wrap our scarves around our heads or risk frostbite on any skin that was exposed.

That week the temperatures dipped so low twenty-two women in our block died. Another fourteen who were assigned to outside labor fell to the ground and froze to death. Darija brought me tights and a sweater from Kanada, so that I would have an extra layer. The price of a blanket on the black market at the camp quadrupled.

I was never so grateful for my office job with the
Hauptscharführer,
but I knew that Darija, in the unheated barracks of Kanada, was still in danger of freezing. So as I had done a few times before, when the
Hauptscharführer
left to get his lunch, I hurriedly typed a note on a stolen piece of his letterhead requesting that prisoner A18557 report to his office. Bundling myself into my coat and hat and mittens and scarf, I hurried across the camp to Kanada to deliver the message and bring my best friend out of the cold, if only for a few minutes.

We huddled together, arm in arm, and Darija slipped into my mitten a small piece of chocolate she had squirreled away during her work. We didn’t talk; it took too much energy. Even after we had entered the building, we had to keep up the pretense that Darija had been summoned by the
Hauptscharführer.

We passed SS officers and guards and kept our eyes averted. By this point I was known to them, nothing suspicious. As was my habit, when I reached the office door, I turned the knob first and peeked inside, just in case I had miscalculated and the
Hauptscharführer
had returned.

There was someone in the room.

Behind the
Hauptscharführer
’s desk was a safe. In it was the money that was found at Kanada, which was shipped out daily under lock and key. Each time the
Hauptscharführer
made his rounds of Kanada, he would empty the box that sat in the center of the barracks where valuables were kept. The smaller items, like bills and coins and diamonds, were brought to his office. As far as I knew the only person who had the combination to the safe was the
Hauptscharführer
himself.

But now, as I saw the
Schutzhaftlagerführer
standing in front of its open door, I realized I was wrong.

He was slipping a stack of currency into the inside breast pocket of his coat.

I saw his eyes widen, as he stared at me as if I were a ghost.

An
upiór
.

Something that was supposed to be dead.

I realized that he had assumed I was killed last week when the
Oberführer
from Oranienburg had come and systematically liquidated all the Jews working in office jobs.

I started to back out of the room, panicked. I had to get out of there, and I had to get Darija out of there. But even if we were able to break through the fence and escape to Russia it would not have been far enough. As long as I knew that the
Schutzhaftlagerführer
was stealing, and as long as I worked for his brother, I could turn him in. Which meant he’d have to get rid of me.

“Run,” I yelled to Darija as the
Schutzhaftlagerführer
’s hand closed over my wrist. Darija paused, and that was just enough time for the officer to grab her by the hair with his other hand and drag her into the office.

He closed the door behind us. “What do you think you saw?” he demanded.

I shook my head, looking at the ground.

“Speak!”

“I . . . I saw nothing, Herr
Schutzhaftlagerführer.
”

Beside me, Darija slipped her hand into mine.

The
Schutzhaftlagerführer
saw the slight movement, the rustle between our dresses. I don’t know what he thought at that moment. That we were passing a note? That we had some kind of code? Or simply that if he let us go, I would tell my friend what he had done, and then there would be
two
people who knew his secret.

He pulled his pistol out of its holster and shot Darija in the face.

She fell, still holding on to my hand. The plaster wall behind us exploded in a rain of dust. I started to scream. My best friend’s blood spattered my face and my dress; I couldn’t hear anything after the blast of the gunshot. I fell to my hands and knees, rocking, hugging what was left of Darija, waiting for the bullet that was destined for me.

“Reiner? What are you doing in here, for the love of God?”

The
Hauptscharführer
’s voice sounded like it was coming through a
tunnel, like I had been wrapped in layers of cotton batting. I looked up at him, still screaming. The
Schutzhaftlagerführer
pulled me upright by the throat. “I caught these two stealing from you, Franz. It is a good thing I happened to come in when I did.”

He held out the wad of currency that he had been tucking into his coat.

The
Hauptscharführer
set down a tray of food on the desk and looked at me. “You did this?”

It didn’t matter what I said, I realized. Even if the
Hauptscharführer
believed me, his brother would be watching me at every moment, waiting for a chance to do to me what he had done to Darija so that I would not tell the
Hauptscharführer
what I had seen.

Oh, God, Darija.

I shook my head, sobbing. “No, Herr
Hauptscharführer.
”

The
Schutzhaftlagerführer
laughed. “What did you think she would say? And why would you even bother to ask?”

A muscle jumped along the
Hauptscharführer
’s jaw. “You know there are procedures,” he said. “The prisoner should have been arrested, not shot.”

“What are you going to do? Report me?” When his brother didn’t respond, the
Schutzhaftlagerführe
r
’s face went as red as it did when he was drunk. “I
make
the procedures. Who would contest what I did? This prisoner was found stealing property from the Reich.”

It was the same infraction that had brought me to this office in the first place.

“I stopped her, in the commission of the crime. The same should be done with her accomplice, even if she is your little whore.” The
Schutzhaftlagerführer
shrugged. “If you do not punish her, Franz, then I will.” To underscore his point, he cocked the trigger on his pistol again.

I felt something warm run down my leg, and realized to my dismay that I had urinated. A small puddle spread on the floor between my wooden shoes.

The
Hauptscharführer
stepped toward me. “I did not do what he says,” I whispered.

Tucked inside my dress was the journal with the ten pages I had written last night. Aleksander, locked in a prison cell. Ania, breaking into the jail to see him the morning before his public execution.
Please,
he begged her.
Do one thing for me.

Anything,
Ania promised.

Kill me,
he said.

If this had been any ordinary day, the
Hauptscharführer
would be settling down to hear me read that aloud. But this was not any ordinary day.

In the four months I had worked for the
Hauptscharführer,
he had never laid a hand on me. Now, he did. He cupped his hand around my cheek, so gently that it brought tears to my eyes. His thumb stroked my skin the way one would touch a lover, and he met my gaze.

Then he hit me so hard that he broke my jaw.

 • • • 

When I couldn’t stand up anymore, when I was spitting bloody saliva into my sleeve to keep from choking, when the
Schutzhaftlagerführer
was satisfied, the
Hauptscharführer
stopped. He stumbled away from me, as if he were coming out of a trance, and looked around his ravaged office. “Clean up this mess,” he ordered.

He left me under the supervision of another guard, who was ordered to take me to the prison cells as soon as I was finished. I gingerly righted the furniture, wincing when I twisted or moved too quickly. I swept up the plaster dust with my hands. My eyes kept drifting to where Darija lay on the floor, and every time I looked at her I felt like I was going to be sick. So I took off my coat and wrapped her upper body in it. She was already stiffening, her limbs cold and rigid. I started to shake—with cold, with grief, with shock?—and forced myself to go to the janitorial closet and find cleaning supplies, rags, a bucket. I scrubbed the floor. Twice, I passed out from the pain caused by the exertion, and twice the guard poked me with his boot to nudge me back into consciousness.

When the office was clean again, I lifted Darija into my arms. She weighed nothing, but neither did I, and I staggered at the additional
burden. With the guard directing me, I carried my best friend—still wrapped in my coat—from the administration building in the frigid cold to a wagon that stood at the outskirts of Kanada. In it were other bodies: people who had died overnight, people who had died during the workday. With all the strength I had I lifted her into the wagon. The only thing that kept me from climbing in there with her was knowing she would hate to see me give up.

The guard grabbed my arm, pulling at me to leave her. I tugged away from him, risking more punishment. I unwrapped the coat from around Darija’s torso and slipped into it. There was no body heat left in her to transfer to me. I reached for her hand, flecked with red measles spots of her own blood, and kissed it.

Before she was hanged, the girl who had come back to our block after being imprisoned had whispered wildly of the
Stehzelle,
the starvation cell you had to enter through a tiny door like a dog kennel. The cell was built narrow and tall, so that you could not sit down at all. Instead you had to stand, overnight, with mice running across your feet, until you were released the next morning and expected to carry on through your workday. By the time I was brought to one of these, in a building I had never entered in the months I’d been here, I was numb. The cold had robbed me of feeling in my hands and feet and face, which was good, because it kept my jaw from aching. I could not speak without tearing up from the pain, and that was fine, because I had nothing left to say.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, I imagined that my mother was here. She wrapped her arms around me and kept me warm. She whispered in my ear:
Be a mensch, Minusia
. For the first time I realized what that really meant. As long as you put someone else’s welfare in front of your own, it meant you had someone else to live for. Once that was gone, what was the point?

I wondered what would become of me. The
Kommandant
might issue a decree for my punishment: a beating, a whipping, death. But the
Schutzhaftlagerführer
might not even bother to follow rules, and could simply take me out of here himself and shoot me. He might say he caught me escaping, another lie, one impossible to believe with me locked up
in this cell, and yet . . . who would stop him? Who would really care if he killed another Jew? Only the
Hauptscharführer,
possibly. Or so I had thought, until today.

I was asleep on my feet, dreaming of Darija. She burst into the office where I was working and told me I had to leave immediately, but I could not make myself stop typing. With every key I struck, another bullet exploded into her chest, her head.

Herr Dybbuk, that was what I had called him before I knew his rank and name. Someone whose body had been taken over, unwillingly, by a demon.

I could not tell you which man was the real one—the officer who would beat an employee to the point of losing consciousness, or the officer who went out of his way to see a prisoner as a fellow human being. He had tried to tell me during all those lunchtime literary sessions that there is good and evil in all of us. That a monster is just someone for whom the evil has tipped the balance.

And I . . . I had been naïve enough to believe him.

 • • • 

I woke with a start when I felt a hand on my ankle. I gasped, and the hand gripped me tighter, willing me into silence. The grate that opened the cell scraped open, and I lowered myself through it. Standing there was a guard who tied my hands behind my back. I assumed it was morning—I had no idea, as there were no windows in here—and that it was time for him to take me to work.

But where? Was I expected to go back to the
Hauptscharführer
? I did not know if I could stand to be in the same small space as him. It was not the beating I’d received that made me feel this way—after all, I had been hurt by other officers and had continued to see them day after day; it was simply the way of life here. No, it was not the
Hauptscharführe
r
’s brutality but rather the kindness that had come before it that made it so hard for me to understand.

I started to pray that maybe, instead, I’d be placed on one of the penal gangs that had to work in the brutal cold, moving rocks for the next twelve hours. I could accept the harshness of the elements. Just not that of a German I had been stupid enough to trust.