by Thaisa Frank
Love,
Kacper
Elie held Lodenstein until he drifted into a restless sleep. When he began to breathe calmly, she eased into the covers but was beset by an image of his boots: mud, dirt, and splinters of bone. She closed her eyes, and the boots became more vivid. She moved toward Lodenstein and smelled earth. No sleep tonight, she thought.
But when she opened the door, she wasn’t sure she could stand the silence of the Compound. It was pristinely, uncharacteristically silent without typing, lovemaking, night cries. She wanted to speak to Asher again. She sensed that something terrible had happened in the Compound, and Asher, who’d lived through shootings and hangings, would probably sense it too. She remembered he had a way of listening with great calm. He had listened to her this way in Freiburg when she started to worry about the war. And even though his own wife had disappeared, he could listen with an ineffable sense of peace.
Elie walked to the crates on the wall that dead-ended into the tunnel. The shadows of the large boxes were almost solid on the floor—light from the stars mere pinpricks. She traced her hands over the arched trompe l’oeil and knew, beyond any rational knowledge, that a dead officer was in the tunnel beyond her. It was why Lodenstein had cried. It was why his boots were caked with mud and bone. It was why the Compound was silent. She heard a door open. Asher came over and stood beside her.
How’s Lodenstein? he asked.
You heard him, said Elie. He says I’ve turned him into a murderer. She sat on the cold floor and moved a crate over to make room for Asher.
People don’t say what they mean when they come apart. And they usually put themselves back together again, said Asher.
He sat next to her by the crates. No one’s a murderer here, he said.
I don’t know what I think anymore, said Elie.
Asher took out a cigarette.
I’ve never heard this place so quiet, he said. The Scribes aren’t even fucking.
They have a lot to think about.
At least they’ve stopped with their questions. And their typing. A few of them just went to sleep, and a few others talked about their families. I don’t even know what happened to most of mine. I’m just grateful Daniel’s here.
You must miss your wife, Elie said.
All the time, Asher said. My mother too.
I have no idea what’s happened to my parents, said Elie.
And your sister?
Elie waited, listening to pulleys and gears creak so the moon could rise. Then she said:
You met Gabriela more than ten years ago.
Yes, said Asher. He looked at her directly, and his blue eyes took her back to Freiburg. Do you remember the time we went to that coffeehouse? he said. Gabriela was imitating Hitler. She was a great mimic. We laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe.
I don’t want to remember, said Elie.
She would want you to, said Asher. You were so close.
Elie lit a cigarette and leaned back against a crate. You’re the only person I know who remembers her, she said. Maybe that’s why I think of her whenever I see you.
You’ll find her again, said Asher. People will come together when this war is over.
Elie began to cry. She cried without moving, as though she imagined Asher wouldn’t notice. Asher had seen people cry this way at Auschwitz: the slightest movement attracted attention, so they cried as if they were not.
He didn’t try to hold her. Talking about her sister, stuck in this place, the crates around them filled with letters to the dead—everything overwhelmed him. All he did was offer another cigarette.
Elie rested against one of the crates, the wooden and ghoulish links between the dead and the living. She finished her cigarette and went back to the rosewood bed. Lodenstein had fallen into a deep, deep sleep. She touched him again—his hair, the scar on his forehead—and tried not to think about what he had done. Instead she thought about what Asher said and then about Gabriela, long ago, before the war. She remembered their childhood in Krakow, skating, swimming, playing street games on summer evenings—wild games where boys chased them. She remembered their decision to study in Germany and the night they told their parents they wanted to leave their house. She remembered Gabriela’s first piano recital and the way she looked after she’d finished—illuminated, joyful—holding white roses. Gabriela had been married to a man near Berlin just after the war began. For the concert, he and Elie had given her bunches of white roses.
She’d always believed the reason she’d never told Gerhardt about Gabriela was to keep her past secret so he wouldn’t know too much if he were ever questioned. But now she realized it was because she was afraid he wouldn’t understand her relentless sense of heartache. Asher had a particular way of understanding—a way that absorbed pain so unflinchingly it made it bearable. This made her feel unfaithful to Lodenstein, and she held him more tightly. He still smelled of earth. There was a shovel against the door—rough wood leading to smooth, dull metal. She shifted to see its outlines, and this woke Lodenstein up. He began to shake.
Gerhardt, she said, almost a whisper. It will pass.
He sat up and kept shaking—a violent rocking Elie had never seen. She persuaded him to get up and make tea. She led him into the kitchen.
It was still quiet in the Compound—although now the quiet seemed comforting. And the tea was warm and familiar. Elie rubbed Lodenstein’s neck and kept telling him to drink more, holding the mug for him. They heard the mineshaft open, and Lodenstein rushed into the hall holding his gun.
But it was only Lars, coming to check on Mikhail. He looked at Elie, not certain what she knew.
Are you okay? he said to Lodenstein.
I’m okay.
Elie poured Lars a mug of tea, but he shook his head no. He took an apple and peeled it the way his father had taught him—a single, perfect spiral, as if he were removing skin. Then he said:
There isn’t any point in pretending we’ll win this war. We should all just walk into the forest.
From the mouth of babes, said Lodenstein.
It’s safer here, said Elie. Because we’re together.
Lars shook his head and handed them soft slices of apple. Fruit had become rare.
Do you know what my father once told me? he said. If you go to the heart of a city at night, you should know the safest way out before you start.
I wish more people had thought of that, said Elie. She looked as though she was about to cry again.
I should comfort her, Lodenstein thought. I shouldn’t let her dwell on this. Yet he was drained from what he’d been through and kept looking at the rose-colored street that had become his world. It looked comfortingly soft with its flickering lamps, as though it might be a real street from a time that was still safe. The Solomons’ house was lit. Everything felt bundled up inside him: He had to talk about what he’d been through. The murder, the dreadful room, his need to protect Elie, who must never hear the things he needed to say. But Mikhail might listen. Mikhail might understand.
When Mikhail answered the door, he stared at Lodenstein’s rumpled trench coat and long underwear.
We’ve been worried about you, he said. And judging from the way you’re dressed, we should be worrying.
I’m not sleeping at all.
Then why don’t you come in? said Mikhail.
Lodenstein came in and looked through the thick window at the frozen sky. Mikhail watched him quietly. Lars had told him it was too dangerous to climb the watchtower to see the stars tonight. He and Talia had spent the entire evening sequestered in the house. When they’d heard him crying, Talia said again, This place is as bad as Lodz.
After a moment, Mikhail said:
Lars said it was best not to go out tonight.
He was right, said Lodenstein. You won’t see the stars for a while. No one should go out except to the well.
I know, said Mikhail.
I’m sure everyone knows something about what happened, said Lodenstein. But there a
re things I don’t want to talk about. Terrible things.
He paused. Mikhail waited. Then he told Mikhail about the room with the bones.
For a moment Mikhail closed his eyes. Then he went to the tiny kitchen for brandy and two glasses.
It’s unbelievable what happens, he said. Maria under those floorboards. Aaron shot in a town square. And now that room.
There’s more, said Lodenstein. It was full of furniture.
I understand, said Mikhail. But try not to think about it too much. I would go mad if I thought about Aaron bleeding to death.
I didn’t think about it. I broke it apart. I buried everything.
I mean don’t think about it now. If I thought about Aaron every night, I’d go crazy.
He poured Lodenstein another glass of brandy and sat next to him.
You should never think you have blood on your hands, he said.
You’ve never killed someone, said Lodenstein.
I never had the chance to, said Mikhail. He looked toward Aaron’s picture, taken a year before his death. Aaron was smiling straight at the camera. Mikhail still imagined him looking in the direction of his death.
Terrible things go on all the time, said Mikhail. They’re atrocities. Most of them are unbearable. But what you did wasn’t one of them. People will thank you. You should thank yourself.
Lodenstein put his face in his hands then touched the scar on his forehead.
Did I ever tell you I got this from running into a fucking sled? he said. Wouldn’t it be better if I got it from dueling?
Mikhail smiled: I think you’re getting a little drunk. Which might be the best thing to do.
Maybe I am, said Lodenstein. He looked out the window and asked Mikhail if he had ever heard any noises in the tunnel. Any gunshots. Any clattering.
No. And we hear everything. Talia has ears like a fox. Were you thinking of that room for a hiding place?
Yes. Until I saw it.
It would work in a pinch, said Mikhail. No one else has to know what you found.
They talked about Daniel, Asher, and Dimitri, and how they could hide them in the earthbound room. But Mikhail kept coming back to what Lodenstein had done and how he should always remember that everything he did was to save people. His voice was comforting, almost melodious, as though he was telling a bedtime story to a child. Lodenstein fell asleep, his head against a velvet chair.
Stefan,
I am still here, but I can’t come to the barracks anymore.
Someone is bringing you this letter. I see you everywhere.
D.
At four in the morning, Lodenstein woke up on the Solomons’ velvet chair and raced out of their house to look for Elie. He’d dreamt he was walking in a city with narrow, labyrinthine streets and couldn’t find her. But he saw her right away, sleeping at a desk near the main room. Elie had brought this desk from the outpost so Dimitri could pretend he was at school. But it was for the fifth form, much too big for him; so she’d moved it near the main room, defying Ewigkeit’s vision of a city park. Now, with her head on the desk, she looked like a child kept inside for breaking a rule while the other children were allowed to play outside. Lodenstein edged onto the seat and nudged her awake.
Why are you sleeping out here? he said.
I’ve been thinking about when I was a kid, said Elie. Annoying nuns. Playing under the pine trees. This reminds me of being at school.
Did you have a desk like this?
Yes.
Did you ever fall asleep at it?
No. I was too busy bothering the nuns.
Lodenstein said he’d had a desk like it too. And even though this particular desk was set so incongruously in the hall, and even though it came from a school where children had been deported, it seemed to him as though everything—even light from the gas lamps and the crescent moon—was part of a world they’d once lived in above the earth. He took out his knife and began to carve their initials on the inside of the desktop.
What are you doing? Elie said.
Remembering us, he answered.
Elie said they could remember themselves, but he said they wouldn’t necessarily remember themselves this way—not in the Compound, not so late at night, not so alone. He carved ES + GL inside a heart, and the time—4:35. Then he carved: I love you.
Elie traced the heart quietly. Everything seemed tilted in the light, as though it were cast in sepia and framed by the sheer certainty of having happened. Lodenstein allowed this sense of certainty to extend into the future and imagined a time when the murdered officer and the room with the bones would become smaller than the white stars above the watchtower receding at high tide. He could even imagine a time when the war was over, and he and Elie woke to an ordinary morning in a house with many windows. He felt capable of grand gestures, reckless proclamations—about where they would live after the war and how many children they would have and how they would read books to these children and play games with them in the snow and go through season after season, every one of them filled with happiness.
But all he did was lift Elie in his arms and carry her to Mueller’s old room. He set her down, opened the door, and picked her up again. She’d been smoking while they talked, and her cigarette became a point of light that moved close to him, then far away. She threw it on the floor. He ground it out with his foot. Then he set her on the bed and pulled the covers over both of them.
Are we safe? she asked.
We’re safe for now, he said.
Lizavita,
The better weather has made work easier—nothing is harder than lifting stones in the cold. And people have found a way to sneak into the officers’ kitchen, and put letters in the bread dough and throw them over to the next barrack. I’ll give you one the next time we see each other. You would think everything would be better, but the ovens have been blown up and there is more and more talk of death marches. Can you believe I’ve come to love this strange border because this is where I hear your voice?
Krill
After he murdered the officer, Lodenstein took turns with Lars keeping watch at night. Goebbels’s office was silent, and there were no investigations about the Compound or the missing officer. Perhaps Goebbels had ordered the officer to ask for roll call and got distracted by Germany’s losses. Or maybe Goebbels would send someone to investigate when they least expected it. And there was always the chance that the officer had come on a whim of his own, and not under the orders of the Reich. The Scribes took a gun when they went to the well and surrounded Dimitri while he was outside. Asher hardly went out at all.
Late spring came, then summer. Feverfew and milkweed spilled to the path, and purple flowers bordered the edge of the forest. Long ago they’d planted a winter garden, but now, because there was hardly any food, they planted one in summer as well. Since no one must know that anyone lived in the hut, they planted the vegetables far apart—in the clearing, in the forest, among wild flowers. Rations were fewer and fewer. Lodenstein wouldn’t let Elie go to the nearest town, but sent Lars, who came back with a paltry array of boxes. Even ersatz coffee was scarce. La Toya planted chicory to make the brew stronger.
In early autumn, some nightwalkers arrived with news that the Russians were closer to Berlin. The Compound celebrated with a feast—except for Stumpf, who sat uneasily at the end of the table polishing the glasses Asher had made him. There was excitement about the Germans and Allies getting closer to Berlin. People lifted their glasses often—even Dimitri, who sat next to Elie with a glass of water. But whenever Stumpf heard the word defeat, he closed his eyes. All during the feast—comprised of a few cans of tinned ham, a few root vegetables, and watered down wine—he stayed close to Hermione Rosebury. But after the meal, when people were still toasting, Stumpf asked for her help with another séance, saying: the dead must never be forgotten.
Hermione got up with reluctance, and they walked up the spiral steps to the shoebox of a watchtower, now crowded with crates of letters. Stumpf didn’t b
other with the seven latches on the door, but Hermione moved slowly, lighting candles strewn about the crowded space. Hermione was expert at channeling letter writers from every century. She had channeled the button makers, coach makers, furriers, boat makers, wheelwrights, printers, illusionists, and artists. She had channeled letters from old warehouses, government offices, and dusty, forgotten shops.
And although he wanted to talk to someone whose letter came from the camps, Hermione told him to proceed slowly so the dead could assemble peacefully. It was best to start with someone long before the war, she said, perhaps the button merchant in Dresden who never answered three letters from Frau Weil, a dressmaker in Alsace, who wanted jet buttons for a faille dress. Or better yet, Herr Rahm in Köln, who had ordered a barouche coach from Herr Dichter, the famous coach maker in Stuttgart.
