The Storyteller (50 page)

So I staggered outside, where the air was cooler against my skin. I pulled the blanket tight around me, and I collapsed on the ground.

I knew I was saving someone the trouble of carting my body out in the morning. But for now, I shook in the throes of my fever, and I looked up at the night sky.

There had not been many stars in Łód
. It was too big and dynamic a city. But my father had taught me the constellations when I was a girl and we had traveled to the countryside on vacation. There would be just the four of us, staying at a rented cottage by a lake, fishing and reading and hiking and playing backgammon. My mother always beat the rest of us at card games, but my father always caught the biggest fish.

At night, sometimes, my father and I would sleep on the porch, where the air was so fresh that you drank it instead of simply breathing. My father taught me about Leo, the constellation directly overhead. Named for yet another mythical monster, the Nemean Lion, a giant, ferocious beast with skin that couldn’t be penetrated by knives or swords. Hercules’ first task was to slay it, but he realized quickly that the lion couldn’t be shot with arrows. Instead, he chased the monster into a cave, stunned it with a blow to the head, and strangled it. As proof of his victory, he used the lion’s own claws to skin its pelt.

You see, Minka,
my father would say.
Anything is possible. Even the most terrible beast might one day be a distant memory.
He would hold my hand in his, tracing my finger along the brightest stars in the constellation.
Look,
he would say.
There is the head, and the tail. There’s the heart.

 • • • 

I was dead, and I was looking at the wing of an angel. White and ethereal, it swooped and dove in the corner of my vision.

But if I was dead, why did my head feel as heavy as an anvil? Why could I still smell the horrible stench of this place?

I struggled to sit up and realized that what I had imagined as a wing was a flag, a strip of cloth fluttering in the wind. It was tied to the guard tower that stood across from the barracks where I’d been housed.

That guard tower was empty.

So was the one behind it.

There were no officers walking around, no Germans, period. It was like a ghost town.

By then, some of the other prisoners had begun to figure out what had happened. “Get up!” one woman yelled. “Get up, they are all gone!”

I was swept in a tide of humanity toward the fence. Had they left us here to starve to death? Were any of us strong enough to tear down the barbed wire?

In the distance were trucks with red crosses painted on the sides. At that moment, I knew it didn’t matter if we weren’t strong enough. There were others, now, who would be strong
for
us.

There is a picture of me from that day. I saw it once on a PBS documentary about April 15, 1945, when the first British tanks approached Bergen-Belsen. I was shocked to see my face on the body of a skeleton. I even bought a copy of the video so that I could play it and stop it at the right moment, and make sure. But yes, that was me, with my pink hat and mittens, and Sura’s blanket wrapped around my shoulders.

I’ve told no one that this was me, in someone’s camera footage, until now.

I weighed sixty-seven pounds on the day the British liberated us. A man in a uniform approached me, and I fell into his arms, unable to stand any longer. He swung me up and carried me to a tent that was serving as an infirmary.

You are free,
they said over the loudspeakers, in English, in German, in Yiddish, in Polish.
You are free, be calm. Food is coming. Help is on the way.

 • • • 

You will ask me, after this, why I didn’t tell you this before.

It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable to write yourself free.

You would think bearing witness to something like this would make a difference, and yet this isn’t so. In the newspapers I have read about history repeating itself in Cambodia. Rwanda. Sudan.

Truth is so much harder than fiction. Some survivors want to speak only of what happened. They go to schools and museums and temples and give talks. It’s the way they can make sense of it, I suppose. I’ve heard them say they feel it is their responsibility, maybe even the reason they lived.

My husband—your grandfather—used to say,
Minka, you were a writer. Imagine the story you could tell.

But it is exactly
because
I was a writer that I could never do it.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused.
Love,
for example. I could write the word
love
a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet?

Love
isn’t the only word that fails.

Hate
does, too.

War.

And
hope.
Oh, yes,
hope.

So you see, this is why I never told my story.

If you lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it.

And if you didn’t, you will never understand.

PART III

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

—Anne Frank,
Diary of a Young Girl

He was faster than me, and stronger. When he finally caught me, he clamped a hand around my mouth so that I could not scream and dragged me into an abandoned barn, where he tossed me down in a dusty bed of hay. I stared up at him, wondering who he really was, how I had not seen it. “Will you kill me, too?” I challenged.

“No,” Aleks said quietly. “I am doing what I can to save you.”

He reached through the broken glass of the window to scoop a handful of snow. Rubbing it into his arms, he then wiped himself dry with the shreds of his shirt.

It was easy to see the fresh wounds on his shoulders and chest and back. But there were at least a dozen others, narrow cuts that ran down the inside of his arm, over his wrist, into his palm. “After he attacked you, I started doing it,” Aleks said. “Baking the bread.”

“I don’t understand
 . . .
”

In the moonlight, the scars on his arm were a silver ladder. “I did not ask to be who I am,” he said tightly. “I try to keep Casimir locked up and hidden. I feed him raw meat, but he’s always hungry. I do what I can to keep him from letting his nature win. I try to keep a rein on it myself, too. Most of the time, I can. But one day, he got away when I was out trying to find him food. I tracked him into the woods. He had gone after your father, who was cutting wood for the oven, but your father had the advantage of an ax. When I ran in, trying to distract Casimir, it gave your father a chance to fight back. He managed to land a blow to Casimir’s thigh. I went to grab the ax away. I don’t know if it was the smell of the blood or the adrenaline in his system
 . . .
.” Aleks looked away. “I don’t know why it happened, why I couldn’t control myself. He is still my brother. That’s my only excuse.” Aleks raked his hand through his hair, making it stand like a rooster’s comb. “I knew if it happened again, even once, it would be too much. I had to find a way to protect others, just in case. So I asked to work for you.”

I looked at his scars, and I thought of the roll he had been baking me each day, the way he begged me to eat it all. I thought of the baguettes that I had sold this week, the customers who told me that the mere taste of them was a religious experience. I thought of Old Sal, saying that the only way to be immune to an
upiór
was to consume its blood. I thought of the rosy tint to the dough, and I understood what Aleks was telling me.

He was literally bleeding himself dry, to save us all from himself.

SAGE

My grandmother was a survivor two times over. Long before I knew she had any connection to the Holocaust, she battled cancer.

I was tiny, maybe three or four. My sisters were in school during the day, but my mother took me to Nana’s house every morning when my grandfather left for work, so that she would not be alone during her recovery. My grandmother had a radical mastectomy. During her recuperation, she would lie on the couch while I watched
Sesame Street
and colored at the coffee table in front of her, and my mom cleaned and did her dishes and cooked her meals. Every hour, she would do her exercises, which consisted of crawling her fingers up the wall behind the couch and stretching as high as she could—a way to rebuild the muscles damaged by the surgery.

Each morning after we arrived, my mother would help Nana into the bathroom for her shower. She would close the door and unzip my grandmother’s housecoat, and then she would let my grandmother rinse herself off under the steaming water. Fifteen minutes later, she would knock softly and enter again, and the two of them would come out: Nana smelling of talcum powder, dressed in a fresh housecoat, the hair at her nape damp but the rest of it mysteriously dry.

One day, after my mother got Nana settled in her shower, she went upstairs with a stack of folded laundry. “Sage,” she told me, “stay here till I come back.” I didn’t even turn away from the television; Oscar the
Grouch was on, and I was scared of Oscar. If I looked away, he could sneak out of his garbage can when I wasn’t looking.

But as soon as my mother was out of sight and Oscar was offscreen, I wandered to the bathroom. The door was unlatched, so that my mother would be able to get in. I pushed it open just a crack, and immediately felt my hair curl as the steam surrounded me.

I couldn’t see, at first. It was as if I’d walked into a cloud. But then, when my vision cleared, I noticed my grandmother on the other side of the shower glass, sitting on a little plastic stool. She had turned off the water, but on her head was a shower cap that looked like a cartoon mushroom, red with white dots. Draped over her lap was her towel. With her good hand, she was patting powder on her body.

I had never seen her naked. I had never seen my mother naked, for that matter. So I stared, because there were so many differences between her body and mine.

The skin, for one, which sagged at her knees and her elbows and belly, as if there wasn’t enough to fill it. The whiteness of her thighs, as if she never ran around outside in shorts, which was probably true.

The number on her arm, which reminded me of the ones that the grocery clerk scanned when we were buying food.

And of course, the scar where her left breast had been.

Still angry and red, the puckered flesh covered a cliff, a sheer wall.

By then my grandmother had seen me. She opened the shower door with her right hand, so that I nearly choked from the smell of talcum. “Come closer, Sagele,” she said. “There’s nothing about me I want to hide from you.”

I took a step forward, and then I stopped, because the scars on my nana were much scarier, even, than Oscar.

“You notice that something’s different about me,” my grandmother said.

I nodded. I did not have the words, at that age, to explain what I wasn’t seeing, but I understood that it was not what should have been. I pointed to the wound. “It’s missing,” I said.

My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing
the scar, and to recognize her again. “Yes,” she said. “But see how much of me is left?”

 • • • 

I wait in my nana’s room while Daisy gets her ready for bed. With tenderness, her caretaker stacks her pillows the way she likes and tucks her into the covers before retiring for the night. I sit down on the edge of the bed and hold my grandmother’s hand, which is cool and dry to the touch. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what there is
left
to say.

The skin on my face tingles, as if scars can recognize each other, even though the ones my grandmother has revealed this time have been invisible. I want to thank her for telling me. I want to thank her for surviving, because without her, I wouldn’t be here to listen. But like she said, sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them.

My grandmother’s free hand dances over the edge of the sheet, pulling it up to her chin. “When the war ended,” she says, “this was what took getting used to. The comfort. I couldn’t sleep on a mattress, for a long time. I’d take a blanket and sleep on the floor instead.” She looks up at me, and for a second, I can see the girl she used to be. “It was your grandfather who set me straight.
Minka,
he said.
I love you, but I’m not sleeping on the ground
.”