The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

  Zebras don't change their stripes, and war criminals don't repent.

  It doesn't surprise me that Josef Weber, who confessed to being a Nazi, isn't one. After all, it's what I expected. What surprises me is how much I really wanted Sage Singer to prove me wrong.

  When you can prolong the inevitable, it's always better.

  That's why, for a predator, the wilding begins with a chase. It's not toying with food, as some people think. It's getting the adrenaline level to match your own.

  There comes a point, though, where waiting is no longer possible. You hear the prey's heart beating inside your own head, and it is the last conscious thought you will be able to hold. Once you give in to the primeval, you are an observer, watching another part of you feast, shredding the flesh to find the ambrosia. You drink in the victim's fear, but it tastes like excitement. You have no past, no future, no sympathy, no soul.

  But you knew that before you even started, didn't you?

  SAGE

  When I show up for work the next night, someone else is baking in my kitchen. He is a behemoth of a man, six-foot-something, with Maori-style tattoos on his upper arms. When I walk in, he's cutting slabs of dough and tossing them with incredible precision onto a scale. "Hey," he says, in a squirrelly voice that doesn't match his body. "Howyadoin."

  My mind is a colander, and all the words I need to have this conversation are funneling fast through the sieve. I am so surprised I forget to hide my scar. "Who are you?"

  "Clark."

  "What are you doing?"

  He looks at the table, the wall, anywhere but at me. "The dinner rolls."

  "I don't think so," I say. "I work alone."

  Before Clark can respond, Mary enters the kitchen. She was no doubt alerted to my arrival by Rocco, who had greeted me in the front of the bakery with this cryptic observation: "Dreamed of traveling? Maybe taking up knitting? Now may be the time."

  "I see you've met Clark." She smiles at the giant who is now shaping loaves at a blistering speed. I wonder if he's poked through my pre-ferments and pored over my spreadsheets. It makes me feel as if someone has been rifling through my underwear drawer. "Clark used to work at King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vermont."

  "Good. Then he can go back to them."

  "Sage! Clark's just here to help you out. To relieve some of the stress."

  I take Mary by the arm and turn her away, so that Clark can't hear what I say. "Mary," I whisper, "I don't want any help."

  "Maybe so," she says. "But you need it. Why don't you and I take a little walk?"

  I'm fighting tears, and the uncontrollable urge to throw a tantrum; I'm equal parts angry and hurt. Yes, I took the night off without telling my boss, but I found my own replacement. And maybe I changed the menu without running it by her, either, but that challah I baked was moist and sweet and perfect. But mostly I'm upset because I thought Mary was my friend, not just my boss, which makes her zero-tolerance policy even more devastating.

  She leads me past the last few customers in the shop, who are being rung out by Rocco. As we pass the register, I turn away from him. Did Mary tell Rocco she was getting rid of me? Is he her new confidant about this business, the way I used to be?

  I follow her through the parking lot and the shrine gates, up the Holy Stairs, until we are standing in the same grotto where Josef told me he was a Nazi.

  "Are you firing me?" I burst out.

  "Why would you think that?"

  "Oh, I don't know. Maybe because Mr. Clean's in my kitchen baking my dinner rolls. I can't believe you'd replace me with some drone from a factory . . ."

  "King Arthur Flour's hardly a factory, and Clark's not a replacement. He's just here to give you a little flexibility." Mary sits down on a granite bench. Her eyes are a piercing blue, with all that monkshood behind her. "I'm only trying to help, Sage. I don't know if it's stress or guilt or something else, but you're not yourself lately. You've become erratic."

  "I'm still doing my job. I've been doing my job," I protest.

  "You baked two hundred and twenty loaves of challah last night."

  "Did you try any? Trust me, no customer could find a better one anywhere else."

  "But they would have to go somewhere else if they wanted rye bread. Or sourdough. Or an ordinary wheat loaf. Or any of the other staples you chose not to make." Her voice grows soft as moss. "I know you were the one who got rid of the Jesus Loaf, Sage."

  "Oh, for God's sake--"

  "I prayed about it. That loaf was a call to save someone, and now, I realize that person is you."

  "Is this because I played hooky?" I ask. "I had to see my grandmother. She wasn't feeling well." It is amazing, I realize, how quickly lies compound. They cover like a coat of paint, one on top of the other, until you cannot remember what color you started with.

  Maybe Josef had actually begun to believe he was the person everyone thought him to be. And maybe that was what finally made him tell the truth.

  "Look at you, Sage, a million miles away. Are you even listening to me? You're a hot mess. Your hair looks like there are birds nesting in it; you probably haven't showered today; you have circles under your eyes that are so dark it makes me think of kidney failure. You're burning a candle at both ends, working here all night and then committing adultery during the day with that trollop." Mary frowns. "What's a male version of trollop?"

  "Shimbo," I say. "Look, I know you and I don't see eye to eye about Adam, but you didn't get all up in Rocco's grille when he asked you the best fertilizer for a cannabis crop--"

  "If he'd been stoned on the job, I would have," Mary insists. "You may not believe this, but I don't think you're immoral for sleeping with Adam. In fact, I think it bothers you deep down, just as much as it bothers me. And maybe that's why it's taking over your life in a way that's affecting your work."

  I start to laugh. Yeah, I'm obsessed with a man. He just happens to be a nonagenarian.

  Suddenly an idea lights in my mind, delicate as a beating butterfly. What if I told her? What if this burden I've been carrying around--this confession from Josef--wasn't only mine to bear? "Okay, maybe I have been a little upset. But it's not Adam. It's Josef Weber." I look her in the eye. "I learned something about him. Something terrible. He's a Nazi, Mary."

  "Josef Weber. The same Josef Weber I know? The one who always leaves a twenty-five-percent tip and who gives half his roll to his dog? The Josef Weber who was given the Good Samaritan award last year by the chamber of commerce?" Mary shakes her head. "This is exactly what I'm talking about, Sage. You're overtired. Your brain is firing on the wrong cylinders. Josef Weber's a sweet old man I've known for a decade. If he's a Nazi, honey, then I'm Lady Gaga."

  "But, Mary--"

  "Have you told anyone else about this?"

  Immediately, I think of Leo Stein.

  "No," I lie.

  "Well, good, because I don't think there's a novena for slander."

  I feel as if the whole world is looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and I am the only one who can see clearly. "I'm not accusing Josef," I say desperately. "He told me."

  Mary purses her lips. "A few years ago some scholars translated an ancient text they believed was the Gospel of Judas. They said the information, told from Judas's point of view, would turn Christianity on its ear. Instead of Judas being the world's biggest traitor, he was apparently the only one Jesus trusted to get the job done--which is why Jesus, knowing he would have to die, picked Judas to confide in."

  "So you believe me!"

  "No," Mary says flatly. "I don't. And I didn't believe those scholars, either. Because I've got two thousand years of history telling me Jesus--who incidentally was one of the good guys, Sage, just like Josef Weber--was betrayed by Judas."

  "History's not always right."

  "But you've got to start there anyway. If you don't know where you've come from, how in Heaven's name will you ever figure out where you're going?" Mary folds me into an embrace. "I am doing this because
I love you. Go home. Sleep for a week. Get a massage. Hike up a mountain. Clear your head. And then come back. Your kitchen will be waiting for you."

  I feel dangerously close to sobbing. "Please," I beg. "Don't take this away from me. It's the only thing in my life I haven't screwed up."

  "I'm not taking anything away from you. It's still your bread. I made Clark promise that he'll use your recipes."

  What I'm thinking about, though, is the scoring.

  Back in the days of communal ovens, people would bring their own dough from home to bake en masse with the rest of the village. So how could you tell the loaves apart, when they came out of the oven? The way they were cut, by the individual bakers. When you score the outside of the dough, it does two things: it tells the loaf where to open, and helps the interior structure by giving it a place to expand. But it also allows the baker to leave his or her brand. I always score a baguette five times, for example, with the longest cut at one end.

  Clark won't.

  It's a silly thing, one that our customers probably don't even notice, but it's my signature. It's my stamp, on each loaf.

  As Mary walks down the Holy Stairs, I wonder if this is yet another reason Josef Weber picked me as his confessor. If you hide long enough, a ghost among men, you might disappear forever without anyone noticing. It's human nature to ensure that someone has seen the mark you left behind.

  *

  "I don't know what got into you today," Adam says as I roll off him and stare up at the bedroom ceiling. "But I'm sure as hell grateful."

  I wouldn't call what we just did lovemaking; it was more like trying to crawl beneath Adam's skin, dissolve by osmosis. I wanted to lose myself in him, until there was nothing left.

  I trail my fingers along his rib cage. "Do I seem different to you lately?"

  He grins. "Yes, especially in the last half hour. But I'm fully in favor of the new you." He glances at his watch. "I need to get going."

  Today Adam is presiding over a Japanese Buddhist funeral, and he's been doing research to make sure that he gets all the customs just right. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the Japanese are cremated, including the deceased he will be taking care of today. Yesterday was the wake.

  "Can't you stay a little longer?" I ask him.

  "No--I've got a ton to do," Adam says. "I'm terrified I'm going to mess it up."

  "You've cremated hundreds of people," I point out.

  "Yeah, but there's a whole process for the Japanese. Instead of grinding down the bone residue like we usually do, there's a ritual. Family members pick up the bone fragments together with a special pair of chopsticks and put them into the urn." He shrugs. "Besides, you need your beauty sleep. You've only got a few hours before it's time to make the donuts again."

  I draw the covers up to my chin. "Actually, I'm taking a few days off work," I say, as if it were my idea all along. "Testing new recipes. Reevaluating stuff."

  "How's Mary going to keep her bakery open, if you're here?"

  "I have a guy filling in for me," I reply, again amazed at how smooth a lie feels in my throat, and how much of an aftertaste is left behind. "Clark. I think he'll do all right. But it also means I get to live like a normal person, with normal hours. So, you know, maybe you'll be able to stay the night. It would be really nice to fall asleep with you."

  "You fall asleep with me all the time," Adam points out.

  But it's different. He waits until I'm out like a light, and then takes a shower and tiptoes out of the house. What I want is what other people take for granted: the chance to feel the night tighten around us like a noose. To ask, Did you set the alarm? To say: Remind me that we are running out of toothpaste. To have our time together not be so romantically charged but instead, just plain boring.

  I wind my arms around Adam and bury my face in the curve of his neck. "Wouldn't it be fun to pretend we're an old married couple?"

  He disengages himself from my embrace. "I don't have to pretend," he says, and he gets up from the bed and walks into the bathroom.

  As if I needed any reminder of that. I wait until I hear the shower running, and then I throw back the covers and wander into the kitchen. I pour myself a glass of orange juice and sit down at my laptop. On the screen is a spreadsheet I'd used to make a poolish when I first came home from the bakery. Just because I'm not working at Our Daily Bread doesn't mean I can't refine my recipes in my own home test kitchen.

  The poolish is fermenting on the counter--it's got a few more hours to go before it's usable, but the yeast has frothed at the top, like the head on a beer. I close out the spreadsheet and open YouTube in my browser.

  I am like many twenty-five-year-olds in this country, I imagine. My knowledge of World War II was shaped by high school history classes, my understanding of the Holocaust a combination of assigned readings: Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl and Elie Wiesel's Night. Even knowing that there was a personal connection to my grandmother--or maybe because of that--I tended to view the Holocaust in the abstract, the way I viewed slavery: a series of horrors that had happened a long time ago in a world markedly different from the one I lived in. Yes, those were bad times, but really, what did they have to do with me?

  I type "Nazi Concentration Camp" into the search bar, and my screen floods with thumbnail images: of Hitler's pinched face, of a tangle of bodies in a pit, of a room crammed to the rafters with shoes. I pick a video that is a newsreel from 1945, after the liberation. As it loads, I read the comments underneath.

  THE HOLOCAUST WAS A HOAX. FUCK KIKES.

  FAKE SHIT HOLOCAUST WAS A JEWISH LIE.

  My uncle's farm was there and the Red Cross praised the camp conditions. Read the report.

  FU you Nazi pig. Stop whining and start admitting.

  I guess the witnesses were liars too?

  This is still happening all over the world while we look the other way like the Germans did 70 years ago. We have learned nothing.

  I click somewhere into the middle of the fifty-seven-minute film. I have no idea what camp I am watching, but I see bodies stacked outside the crematoria, so horrific that it's virtually impossible to believe this wasn't just a Hollywood rendering, that these are real people I am seeing, with their bones protruding so clearly you could map the skeleton beneath the skin; that the face with the eye blown out of it belonged to someone who had a wife, a family, another life. Here are the body disposal facilities, the voice-over tells me. Ovens capable of burning more than a hundred bodies per day. Here are the litters, used to slide a body inside, the way I use a peel to slip an artisanal loaf into my wood-fired oven. I see a fleeting image of a skeleton inside the cavern of one of the ovens; another of a pile of bone fragments. I see the plaque of the proud furnace manufacturers: Topf & Sohne.

  I think of Adam's clients, picking the bones of their beloved from the ash.

  Then I think of my grandmother and I feel like I'm going to be sick.

  I want to close my computer, but I cannot make myself do it. Instead I watch parades of Germans in their Sunday finest being led into the camps, smiling as if they are on holiday. Their faces change, darkening, some even crying, as they are led on the tour of the facility. I watch Weimar businessmen in suits being pressed into service to relocate and rebury the dead.

  These were the people who might have known what was going on but didn't admit it to themselves. Or who turned a blind eye, so that they wouldn't have to get involved. The kind of person I'd be if I ignored what Josef has told me.

  "So," Adam says, walking into the kitchen with his hair still damp from the shower and his tie already knotted. He starts to rub my shoulders. "Same time Wednesday?"

  I slam my laptop shut.

  "Maybe," I hear myself reply, "we should take a break."

  He looks at me. "A break?"

  "Yeah. I need some time alone, I think."

  "Didn't you ask me five minutes ago to act like we were married?"

  "And didn't you tell me five minutes ago you already are?"
<
br />   I consider what Mary said, about how being with Adam might bother me more than I want to admit. I think about being the kind of person who stands up for what she believes in, instead of denying what's right before her eyes.

  Adam looks stunned, but he quickly smooths away the surprise. "Take as much time as you need, baby." He kisses me so gently that it feels like a promise, like a prayer. "Just remember," he whispers. "No one else will ever love you like I do."

  It strikes me, as Adam leaves, that his words could be taken as a vow, or as a threat.

  I suddenly remember a girl in my World Religion class in college, a foreign student from Osaka. When we were covering Buddhism, she talked about corruption: how much money her family had to pay a priest for her dead grandfather's kaimyo, a special name given to the deceased that he would take with him to Heaven. The more you paid, the more characters were in your posthumous name, and the more prestige your family accrued. Do you think that matters in the Buddhist afterlife? the professor had asked.

  Probably not, the girl had said. But it keeps you from coming back to this world every time your name is called.

  In retrospect, I realize I should have shared this anecdote with Adam.

  Anonymity, I guess, always comes at a price.

  *

  When the phone rings, I am having a nightmare. Mary is standing behind me in the kitchen, telling me I am not working fast enough. But even though I am shaping loaves and slipping them into the oven so quickly that I have blisters on my fingers and blood baked into the dough, every time I take out a finished loaf there are only bones, bleached white as the sails of a ship. It's about time, Mary scolds, and before I can stop her she picks one up with chopsticks, and bites down hard, breaking all of her teeth into tiny pearls that fall to the floor and roll beneath my shoes.