by Thaisa Frank
Nothing. What makes you ask?
You seem angry with her, said La Toya.
I’m not.
They say you knew her at Freiburg, said La Toya. He pointed to the sky. It was blue, filled with the cottoned traffic of clouds.
Would you have seen this at Auschwitz? he asked.
I have no idea. Why?
Because Elie saved your life.
That’s not true. Lodenstein did.
Then why do I think she fought for you?
I don’t know what you mean.
Then I’ll tell you, said La Toya. She was going to find a way to go to Heidegger and tell him where you were. She thought his wife would get you out.
Elfriede never liked her.
We’ve all heard the business about the bundkuchen, said La Toya. But Elie is persuasive. Where do you think we get fresh bread? And good sausages? How come there’s always cashmere for people who want blankets? Or plenty of schnapps? Do they fall from the sky? No. They come from the shit Elie puts up with and the favors she does.
Maybe they do. But we hardly knew each other.
That’s not what people say.
What then?
You can imagine. People know everything, just the way they know about the camps.
But they keep asking about chimneys. Why can’t they stop?
Because, said La Toya. There’s a difference between knowing something and believing it. They know about the chimneys but don’t believe in them until they’ve talked to someone who’s seen them.
They’d come to the shepherd’s hut without spilling a drop of water. La Toya said it was a job well done, and Asher said at Auschwitz you learned not to waste anything. But he wasn’t thinking about water. What La Toya had said stayed with him long after he returned to the Compound, and late that afternoon he walked up to Elie’s desk. She slammed her dark red notebook shut and looked at him as if she expected someone else—no one in particular, just not him.
I want to thank you, he said.
Elie didn’t hear him because someone had created a word for Dreamatoria the Scribes found hilarious.
What? she said, while the laughter closed in around them.
Asher felt embarrassed by his own gratitude, as if it could destroy a shell he needed around him. He told her he needed more typewriter ribbon.
I don’t know why you need it when all you do is read detective stories, said Elie.
Oh, I’ll get around to using it. The dead can’t wait to read my answers.
Spare me. Elie smiled at him, making him remember the first time he’d met her at Freiburg—at a party at the Heideggers, over an impressive table of desserts. He went back to his desk and remembered how his wife disappeared without a trace, telling him she was going to Berlin to help a piano student, kissing him, hugging Daniel, racing down the steps.
After Asher had gotten a ribbon he didn’t need, he began to think about what would have happened if he’d stayed with Elie. He imagined different lives—one in which they’d taught at Cambridge and taken long walks on village greens. And another where they escaped to Argentina and set up a dry goods store. Yet another where the boat to Argentina sank. Parallel lives, he scribbled on a piece of paper, a hat trick that makes life and death reversible. It was the first thing anyone had ever seen him write.
Gitka said: That corpse is beginning to lighten up.
Abella,
At night, a guard and I make small talk. He says he loves me. And gives me extra food and makes sure to look out for my parents. I think he’s trying to find out more about the insurrection. Please come to the edge of your cellblock. No one is watching very closely.
Leticia
Asher proposed a new phrase for Dreamatoria—infinitely reversible. It reminded him of fresh snow at Auschwitz that covered pools of blood and corpses and nooses as well as the old snow that melted and revealed everything. It reminded him of himself as well: how he’d been given a life, denied it, and given part of that life back again. The Scribes applauded, and Asher won two cigarettes. He offered one to Elie.
Oh no! she said. You won it fairly.
Then smoke one with me, he said.
Well, maybe a fourth of one, said Elie.
They went to the hall and sat on a wrought-iron bench. Asher said it was nice that dead people could get answers in such a charming atmosphere.
You haven’t lost your sarcasm, said Elie. You don’t even sound glad you’re here.
I am, said Asher. Especially for Daniel—even if all he does is take typewriters apart and sleep with Maria.
But aren’t you glad for yourself?
Asher took a long drag on the cigarette. He was wearing a shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Elie looked at the blue numbers on his arm and said they nearly matched his eyes. He shook his head, remembering the morning when he’d been tattooed by a fellow prisoner—the needle embroidering numbers that became his only name at the camp. Elie noticed and said:
Maybe those add up to a lucky number.
Are you into that occult garbage too?
It was just a funny idea, said Elie.
Asher added the numbers, and they came to nine, the number of sacrifice.
Maybe there’s something to it.
Maybe, said Elie. She began to sew the quilt she’d been mending and kept her eyes on it in such a deliberate way Asher was sure she knew he was looking at her.
Elie, he said. They say you saved me and Daniel.
Through a lot of bungling. That’s how it is these days.
He took her hand: Thank you.
The mineshaft began to groan. Elie startled and got up.
So, still a secret, said Asher.
Nothing’s secret here, said Elie. I’m not sure anything needs to be.
Dear Eliza,
You would never guess what I heard, but I must tell you in person. Meet me at the barracks.
Love,
Andreas
Even though Daniel slept with the Scribes, Asher Englehardt still slept in the storage room, impervious to Sonia Markova and Sophie Nachtgarten, who made it clear they’d enjoy sleeping there too—although not at the same time.
Daniel sometimes brought typewriters to Asher’s room, and one day set a typewriter on the bed and took it apart, until it was a mere shell, and the floor was filled with pieces of dull metal. Then he explained every mechanism—how it worked, what could go wrong with it, how things fit together, where they belonged. It was the first time Daniel had explained anything to him, and Asher was proud and astonished. He was even more astonished when Daniel showed him how a typewriter could be reassembled from random pieces into something whole again. This was far better than infinitely reversible.
Now and then, Asher brought typewriters to his room, took them apart, and reassembled them. He memorized gears, springs, the order of keys—metal with a special power because it could produce any combination of words in the world. He loved going to sleep, surrounded by the smell of ink.
Once, he had brandy with Elie, Lodenstein, and the Solomons and made everyone laugh by telling Mikhail that once he’d owned a car, and Mikhail could have used it as an example in his letter to Heidegger about the mysterious Being of machines. The laughter, the presence of Elie—and the Solomons, who knew about everything—all of it transported him to the time before the war. The evening pushed him against everything he’d lost and made him miss his wife. So he never wanted to have brandy with the four of them again. When he ran into Elie on the street, they always nodded quickly and hurried on. Except for once, when they both said good night at the same time.
For a while, then, he was able to live in relative silence—a silence he craved because even the smallest gesture or manner of speech could unnerve him. A loud voice reminded him of roll call. Scribes rummaging for coats reminded him of inmates scrambling for bowls of food. When he was by himself, he could read or invent words for Dreamatoria. When he was with other people, he felt a minefield inside him that could detonate at any moment.
Bu
t his pristine silence was disturbed when Dieter Stumpf broke his glasses. He’d put them on his chair while he was labeling a box of letters, sat on them, and heard a crunch. Stumpf was nearsighted. Without his glasses, he couldn’t drive to his brother’s farm near Dresden to bury unanswered mail. So he brought Asher his broken glasses.
What do you want me to do with these? said Asher.
I was hoping you could fix them, said Stumpf.
With both lenses broken?
What if I get equipment?
Stumpf, who still wore his SS jacket, reminded Asher of the most obnoxious of the Auschwitz guards, as well as Mengele, who once barely gestured to the right when he’d decided Asher’s fate and often had crates of bleached bones outside his door. Asher was tempted to say no. Nonetheless, he agreed. Making glasses could be a distraction.
Stumpf asked Elie to get optometry equipment from the outpost, and she said she would, even though she didn’t care whether Stumpf got glasses or not. It would be a chance to look around, to discover if there were more rumors about fugitives, and find out why they hadn’t received any letters.
She asked Lodenstein to tie the red ribbon around her wrist.
Marianne,
You wouldn’t think anything could grow in a place like this—but there’s grass where the red snow used to be.
Love,
Patrice
It was the time of feverfew. Before Elie went to the outpost, she picked a large bouquet from the forest. The feverfew grew in clusters, far apart, and Elie took her time. Without the weight of snow, the pines seemed buoyant, free of burdens. The first winter after the winter of Stalingrad had passed, and it seemed as though the world had come a full cycle. Elie sat beneath a pine—hidden, protected, smelling the bare earth. She remembered playing house with her sister under trees. The wooden sticks were dolls. The boughs were their dresses. Her sister Gabriela named her dolls after friends she had at school, and Elie named hers after characters she loved in fairy tales. One spring, they found a wild rabbit. They fed it carrots. It kept them company under the trees.
By the time Elie emerged, it was late afternoon. She brought the feverfew to her jeep and drove through the slanted light, still looking for people in the woods. Yet she felt a giddy sense of release and didn’t care that she hadn’t heard from Goebbels in months.
The houses in this village in Northern Germany were still clean, orderly, not yet bombed. Elie drove to the outpost and walked across the field, milkweed brushing against her shoes. She knocked twice, no one answered, and she let herself in. The place was more of a jumble shop than ever. Chairs on top of chairs, a sofa filled with filing cabinets. The officer was shoving clothes into a suitcase.
What are you doing here? he said. You must know there isn’t any mail.
Lodenstein sent me, said Elie, handing him half the flowers. People need to amuse themselves.
The officer threw the flowers on an ottoman.
What could be amusing here?
Elie pointed to more playing cards. Then she pointed to some rusty metal instruments, polishing stones, and an eye chart. She’d wanted to find a box of cast molten glass from the lens manufacturer Saegmuller and Zeiss. But she only found glass from a manufacturer she didn’t recognize. One of the optometrist’s chairs was still against the wall. She pointed to it.
How can optometry equipment be amusing? said the officer.
Stumpf broke his glasses.
That bumpkin, said the officer. He throttled sheets from the bed he once tried to get Elie to sleep in. A revolver fell to the floor, and he crammed it in his suitcase.
Has Stumpf been bothering you? said Elie.
No, said the officer. And I wouldn’t give a damn if he was. I don’t care about Goebbels either.
Elie smiled. Then your neck is safe.
I don’t care about my neck. The whole thing’s going to hell. Look at Ardennes, and the damn Allies past the Rhine. No one’s safe, and I’m getting out of here. Take whatever the fuck you want.
Elie watched while he dragged a duffel bag to his Kübelwagen and found herself alone in the outpost. The blackout curtains flapped. A few beams from the roof were on the ground. And the floor was littered with papers. Elie looked through all of them. Each detailed shipments of confiscated goods except for a note that read: NO MORE FUCKING PIECES OF FURNITURE. SOMEONE IS BOUND TO FIND THEM.
Elie pulled out everything from the wall: the polishing stones, the metal, the eye chart, the box of molten glass, and the playing cards. She took rations of flour, dried milk, sausage, knäckebrot, cheese—whatever food she could find. The food was in heavy cumbersome boxes, and she had to carry them one at a time across the milkweed-covered field. Last was the optometry chair, which she lugged in fits and starts. She set it down and paused to look at the sky.
It was almost night—too early to see anything but the evening star, a soft beacon in the sky. She shoved the chair into her jeep and drove off in the spring evening. A half moon lit green rhododendrons by the side of the road, and Elie’s fear of the dark disappeared—as though every mote of dark evaporated in the moonlight. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw that no one was following her.
Enough, she thought.
Dear Dinka,
You have asked when I may be back and I can only tell you that every day we hear the end is coming. Yet it recedes, a frontier that’s always breathing in and out. May it come soon.
Love,
Piero
Asher had wondered, with some irony, whether he’d be getting back his own optometry chair from Freiburg. But this chair was light brown, and there were three bullet holes in the back. To make sure the chart was illuminated, he made Stumpf create a tent from black merino cloth Elie brought from the outpost almost a year ago. It was a haphazard structure with a large opening, and that made Stumpf even more of a public spectacle. Scribes watched while he held a patch over one eye and whined Besser and Nicht Besser for different lenses. Since Elie hadn’t been able to find the best materials, Asher struggled to make them work. He polished rusty instruments, ground cheap glass until the lenses were right, and made the earpieces twice because Stumpf’s chins rose around his face like a ruff. When he finally produced the glasses, Stumpf said he could see better with these glasses than any he’d ever had. The Scribes wanted glasses too, whether they needed them or not.
Asher made glasses whenever he felt like it. No one could object, least of all Stumpf, who was abjectly grateful because it meant he could drive to his brother’s farm—a visit he kept postponing since now he was drawn to a psychic named Hermione Rosebury, who said she’d known Madame Blavatsky. Hermione was the only Scribe in the Compound from England, although she spoke perfect German. Her sense of isolation made her willing to ignore the fact that Stumpf slunk around the Compound obsequiously, forsaken by Sonia Markova who had taken up with Parvis Nafissian. He had long since been deprived of any authority, including the right to make people imagine Goebbels. Also, with no more letters coming to the Compound, he’d given up insisting the Scribes answer them. He stored them in his office and answered them himself, or—more often—thought about answering them, since he only understood the German.
In the midst of the craze about glasses, Lars Eisenscher paced the small round room of the shepherd’s hut. He hadn’t received a letter from his father for almost three months and didn’t know whether his father was back in jail, had gone to another country, been shot, or didn’t want to cause trouble by writing him. Twice Lars had gone to the post office in town and was told the postal system barely functioned. Germany was exhausted, and the war had taken all of her resources, even the simple ability to send a letter. Paper, ink, people one loved—all were forsaken by the war.
Lars, who was lost in worry, looked up when he heard a Kübelwagen rumble into the clearing. It drove quickly, flattening flowers, making deep cuts in patches of new grass. A short, dark officer got out and asked for Obërst Lodenstein. If Lodenstein hadn’t spent time with Goebb
els in his odious office, he might have thought the officer was Goebbels himself, paying his mythical visit. Lodenstein kept the officer at the door while Lars stood at a distance. He was weighted with medals—more than Mueller, almost as many as Goebbels. Lars looked at him warily. So many medals signaled power.
That guard of yours needs a haircut, said the officer.
He’s on duty more than seventeen hours a day, said Lodenstein.
I can’t quibble about hours, said the officer. I can only point out standards.
He reached into his pocket and handed him a memo from the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda. The paper was thick, strong, unblemished. It read: The Office requests a roll call of all Scribes.
