The Lost Letter

by Jillian Cantor

  I park on the street in front of her small gray and white cottage, and when I get out of the car, I take a deep breath. Coronado Island really isn’t far from LA but it seems worlds apart. I feel like I’ve been transported to a small Victorian town, with fresh sea air. No smog! And only the rumble of a military plane landing not too far in the distance, at the base on the end of the island where my grandfather once worked, many years ago.

  I gather up my pile of books from the backseat and walk up the front path toward the white picket fence, but Gram already has the front door open and is coming out to greet me before I reach the door.

  “Katie, sweetheart.” She reaches around my full arms, to lean up and kiss my cheek. Then she looks behind me to the car. “Where’s your other half?”

  I turn around and look behind me, at my empty car, as if I’m really as surprised as she is that Daniel’s not here, if only because I’m not sure how to answer her. But anyway, Daniel hasn’t come down here with me for years. And she doesn’t wait for me to answer before she notices the books in my arms and asks about those.

  As I follow her inside her cottage, I tell her a little bit about the letter, about Jason’s suggestion that I start with where the Fabers were from originally to figure out where they are now. About the maps the librarian gave me. “So much of this is in German,” I tell her as I set the pile of books down on her antique dining room table, which she keeps protected with a thick plastic tablecloth. I run my fingers against the plastic and remember happier times at this table, Thanksgivings and Passover Seders of my childhood when both my parents were still here, physically and mentally. And my grandfather, of course, who died of a stroke just a few months after my mother passed away from cancer.

  I push all those memories aside and pull the letter, still in the plastic sleeve, from my bag and hand it to Gram so she can see it. She puts her reading glasses, which she wears on a thin gold chain around her neck, up to her eyes, and she examines the letter, and the stamp, closely. “Marissa never understood it,” she says as she carefully traces the stamp beneath the plastic with her arthritic finger. “Ted’s obsession with these things.”

  My father had said almost the exact same thing, standing by the window in his room at the Willows, mistaking me for my mother. He wasn’t wrong when he said it. Only about where he was, who he was with. “I know,” I say to Gram. “And I guess I never really did either.”

  “So why this? Why now, sweetheart?”

  I shrug. I’m not sure I know or understand the answer myself. “My father always told me he was looking for a gem in his collection. As a kid, I thought he meant something valuable, something that would make us rich.” She laughs a little, and I smile sheepishly. As a little girl, I believed he would. That we would become the kind of millionaires who lived in a Malibu mansion, high up on the cliffs. “But maybe that’s not what he meant at all.” I pause and take the plastic sleeve back from her. “Maybe he saw value in their stories.” I have no idea if this is true or not, or if I’m just superimposing my own thoughts, Jason’s insistence that there is a story here, in this particular oddity of a stamp, in the family behind it.

  “It must be hard to see your father now,” Gram says. “Him forgetting so much.” The last time she saw my father, I drove down here with him. It was her birthday. Two years ago, I think. Pieces had already begun slipping away from him, and she, thirteen years older than him, had still been sharp as ever. He’d asked the same questions several times in the span of an hour, forgetting he already knew the answers. But she’d brushed it off then. He was tired. It was a warm day and he hadn’t drunk enough water.

  She pulls her reading glasses back down, letting them rest against her chest. And she rubs her watery eyes. “You’ll drive me up to LA to visit him one of these days, won’t you?” Her voice sounds wistful.

  “Of course,” I tell her, but I don’t think I really will. He was so awful the last time I saw him, when he yelled at me, told me I could never come back. Why upset her like that? It seems better she remember him as he was the last time she saw him, here. When he was still mostly himself.

  “Come on. Let’s go get breakfast,” she says. “And we’ll look at your German maps there.”

  Gram and I sit at the beachfront restaurant at the Del and sip our mimosas, staring off at the cool blue water. The morning fog has mostly burned off already, and the sun is shining, but the air is chilly, and Gram has wrapped her tiny body in a thick wool sweater. My jean jacket is much too thin for the cold breezes coming off the water, and after one mimosa I order a cup of coffee to warm me.

  We don’t talk much more, about my father. About the fall of the Berlin Wall. About the letter. But Gram pores over the maps in the library books, and every once in a while she murmurs something, a memory that has startled her, right there, in German, just like that.

  “See this,” she says, after a little while, her finger circling on the name of a city, or a village.

  She pushes the book across the table to me, and I see she’s looking not in Austria, but in Germany. “Hertzscheimer.” I read the name out loud, probably mispronouncing it, but Gram doesn’t correct me.

  “That’s where your grandfather and I were born. Where we grew up.”

  “Is that where my dad was born, too?” I ask her. Though I know it was what initially drew my parents together, their common German background, beyond that, it wasn’t something either one of them had ever spoken much about to me.

  She shakes her head. “No, sweetheart. Your dad was born in Bremen, I think. Our town was very small. We knew everyone. Once . . . You can’t find it on a map anymore. They burned it down, after we left.” Her hand shakes a little just from her talking about it. “And I haven’t seen it written out like this in so many years. On a map. A real place!”

  I pat her wrinkled hand, but she doesn’t say anything else as she keeps flipping through the book, eventually moving away from her home. Toward Austria.

  I always knew that my grandparents grew up in what eventually became communist East Germany, but it was something Gram always spoke of in general terms, with a fleeting look of sadness. Not something she’d ever shown me specifically on a map, until this morning. And aside from her slight accent and her delicious apple strudel, which she’d bake for Rosh Hashanah dinners when I was a kid, I never really gave her German heritage, or mine for that matter, much thought. “They really burned down your entire town?” I ask her, wondering about friends, relatives, she must’ve left behind. “You never told me that.”

  “I don’t like to talk about it,” she says, and she doesn’t offer anything else as she keeps paging through the maps. “Ah, this is what it’s referring to,” Gram says.

  “What?”

  “The address, on your letter.” Her curled finger is over another circle, with the word Grotsburg. The way the address had been written on the letter, I’d assumed Grotsburg was the name of the street, but here, on this map, it appears to be the name of a town. “In the smaller villages, we didn’t put the street names on letters,” Gram says, seemingly understanding my confusion. “No need back then.” She clears her throat and closes the books. “We went to Austria, once. Did I ever tell you?”

  “Grotsburg?” I ask. “You knew of it?”

  “Oh, no. Vienna,” she says. “I was a little girl, and my parents took me there on a holiday. We went to see an opera. Die Frau ohne Schatten. The Woman Without a Shadow. Terribly beautiful. I’ll never forget it.” The irony of her words sinks in, in light of my father. And I hope she’s right. That she won’t. That she’ll live many more years, her memory completely intact. “It was destroyed during the war, you know. The Opera House.” I shake my head. I didn’t know. I probably should’ve, and maybe I did learn that once, but I’ve forgotten it, if I did. “They rebuilt it, but I bet it was never the same. Nothing ever was.”

  Gram finishes off her mimosa and stares off, tow
ard the ocean. I look at her, sitting here like this. She got out of her town in Germany before it was destroyed, before the region fell under the iron curtain. She’s as much a Southern Californian as I am, brunching by the beach, bundling up in wool when the temperature falls to a blustery, wintry sixty-five. She has a cottage and a life here. And I’m wondering if the Faber girls do, somewhere, too.

  Later that night at home, I pull out the map where Gram found Grotsburg and a current World Atlas that Daniel left behind, sitting on the shelf in what was once our mutual home office. I’m neither a geography nor history buff like him or my father, the only things they had in common, that they could discuss with ease. But now I’m happy to see the atlas still here. At least it saves me another trip to the library.

  I compare the prewar map to the current one and find Vienna, still in the exact same spot, though with what Gram said about the Opera House, I consider how different it is on the ground, off the map. I trace with my finger to the west, but where Grotsburg is located on the map dated 1932, it simply doesn’t exist on the current map. Just like Gram’s home of Hertzscheimer in East Germany.

  My eyes skip back and forth between the two maps, comparing the differences. Other tiny towns have disappeared, too. And as I look at the two maps, side by side like this, it feels like tangible evidence of the horrors in these countries during World War II and beyond. It hits me in a way I’ve never quite been able to conceptualize before. The dots on the map represent homes, businesses, people. Wiped off the map. Just like that.

  Jason’s suggestion to search the archives for the Fabers seems futile. There will be no archives for a town that is long gone. The Faber girls, and all records of them, were probably destroyed with the town. But somehow, was it possible they got out before then?

  As I get into bed, Benjamin’s words haunt me about how nothing good could’ve happened to the Faber girls at that time, in Austria. I fall into a deep and restless sleep, my dreams filled with towns burning, women whom I don’t even know disappearing, their bodies turning to smoke.

  Austria, 1938

  FREDERICK?” Kristoff rushed to him, wanting to be sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. Frederick didn’t answer, but as Kristoff stood just above him, Kristoff could see that he was breathing, his chest rising slowly up and down, though his beard appeared singed, and his left hand was wrapped in what seemed to be a makeshift bandage.

  “I found him in the woods,” Josef said quietly. And Kristoff felt a quick flash of jealousy that Josef, not he and Elena, had been the one to find Frederick. Then guilt, for even thinking that. Frederick was here. He was alive!

  “He burned his hand in the fire?” Kristoff asked, trying to determine what kind of shape Frederick was in.

  “No, frostbite,” Josef said. How long had poor Frederick been out in the snow, the cold? He felt even guiltier. He and Elena had given up too easily on their own search. They should’ve kept looking.

  “He asked for you,” Josef said. “He kept asking for you.” Josef cleared his throat and turned away. “As soon as I could make it back through the woods to come get you, I did.” Elena had said Josef had a good heart. Maybe she was right.

  Frederick stirred a little and Kristoff went to him, kneeled down beside him. “My boy?” Frederick said. He reached his good hand out, and Kristoff took it. “My home? My family?”

  “Everything is fine,” Kristoff said. “They’re all safe. They’ll be so happy to know you’re alive.”

  “You can’t tell them yet,” Josef said.

  “Of course I’ll tell them.” Kristoff couldn’t let Mrs. Faber, Elena, and Miriam go on grieving for Frederick when he was right here.

  “It would only put them in danger now,” Josef said. “The Germans will come looking for him when the snow melts, and Minna will tell them what she believes is the truth, that Frederick is dead.” Josef paused. “And besides, Minna and the girls would never leave without him, and we need a plan to get them away from here.” Kristoff had said it himself, only a few minutes earlier: the girls needed to get out. He knew there was some truth to what Josef was saying, but it still felt unnecessarily cruel.

  “He’s right,” Frederick said, and Kristoff looked back to him, amazed that he was here. Breathing. Talking.

  “But you can’t let them believe that you’re dead,” Kristoff said. He wanted to tell Frederick how Mrs. Faber’s kind face seemed permanently puffy from crying; how Miriam had spent days just sitting still; and how Elena’s face was carved with stoicism, but underneath, in her eyes, Kristoff could detect a new, ingrained sadness. But he didn’t want to upset Frederick more, so he kept that to himself.

  “We’ll get them out of the country,” Josef said. “And then Frederick will join them in a little while. When he’s a bit more healed. They’ll all be together soon enough. This is only temporary.”

  “But the Germans will never let Frederick go just like that—”

  Josef cut him off. “We will make him new documents.”

  He thought about his conversation with Elena in the workshop the other night, the work she and Josef wanted to do, the uses she said they could have for the engraving tools. “You and Elena will forge them?” Kristoff asked.

  “No!” Frederick shouted, and Kristoff and Josef both jumped, not expecting such force out of him, when he’d seemed so weak only moments earlier. “Elena can’t!”

  Josef shot Kristoff a dirty look that seemed to say: This is why I don’t trust you. Or like you. Elena had taken so much care to hide her engraving endeavors from her father. She hadn’t wanted him to know anything of her involvement in anything like this. By we Josef must’ve meant himself and Kristoff. Josef didn’t want Elena to know that Frederick was alive, so how could she be involved in forging his papers? Josef wanted Kristoff to forge the papers, and perhaps that was really why he’d brought him here.

  Josef kneeled down again to Frederick’s level and put his hand on Frederick’s shoulder, gently. “We’ll get the girls and Mrs. Faber out of Austria first, and after you get a little stronger, Kristoff and I will get you out, too.”

  Kristoff felt Josef’s words sink in. Out of Austria. Their country was no longer safe for them. Austria could no longer be the Fabers’ home.

  That night, Elena came up to the attic. Miriam and Mrs. Faber had long been asleep, and it was late. The only light came from the moonglow slanting in through Kristoff’s tiny window. Kristoff had been trying to sleep, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Frederick, injured but alive, hidden, lying on the cold floor of the secret cabin in the woods. He’d gotten out of bed, to think, and it wasn’t until Elena came into his room that he realized he’d been pacing again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as she entered the room and walked toward the window to stand next to him. She would think he meant for the pacing, for keeping her awake. But really he meant it for so much more. Your father is alive. He wanted to tell her the truth so badly. But he kept his lips shut. Not because Josef had told him to, but because it was what Frederick wanted.

  “The snow has melted enough to get to town,” she said. “Father has a friend from art school who lives in America. I’ve written him a letter and asked if Mother and Miriam can come to live with him for a while. I’ll go in the morning to the post.”

  “Elena,” Kristoff said. “You can’t go to town.”

  “I’m not afraid of the Germans. What will they do to me? Simply for mailing a letter?”

  “You should be. Afraid, I mean.” Josef had said the town was destroyed, so many men missing. The German soldiers had left behind a trail of death and destruction. Kristoff had read the newspaper that Josef had also given him earlier when he’d come to the workshop: thousands of Jews across Austria and Germany had been arrested the morning after die Kristallnacht. Their only crime, he surmised, was being Jewish.

  “But what is there really to be afraid of but death?” Elena as
ked. “And I’m not afraid of that.”

  He was. He didn’t want to imagine the world, his world, without Elena’s bright voice, her pink cheeks and pale skin as white as the edelweiss petals. “I’ll mail your letter in the morning. Okay? I’ll take it to town for you,” he said.

  “And what would make you any safer?” She folded her arms in front of her chest. She was wearing a long white formless nightgown, but her defiant stance gave it shape, so Kristoff could envision the curves of her body underneath.

  He looked away. “I’m not a Jew,” he said. The words sounded shameful, awful, and as he said them out loud he wished he could take them back. Though they were undeniably true.

  Elena didn’t respond for a few moments, until finally she relented with a reluctant, “All right.” But she didn’t immediately move to leave his room. She looked out the window, and Kristoff tentatively moved his hand over and reached for hers. He expected her to push him away again, to run out of his room the second he touched her. But this time, she didn’t. She let him take her hand. She didn’t let go; she didn’t move.

  They stood there together for a long time, holding hands, staring out the window into the night sky, into a new Austria that neither one of them understood nor would recognize for very much longer.

  In the morning, Kristoff set off through the woods for town with Elena’s letter. It was addressed to Mister Leser, Frederick’s friend, Kristoff assumed, though he had never heard of him before now. Elena had stamped it with both Austrian and German postage for the airmail, a dual franking, the way they had been doing since the occupation. The Austrian stamp was her father’s most recent design, an Austrian hillside in the springtime. And Kristoff looked at it with sadness. Though the hill still existed, just beyond the Fabers’ property, the stamp was a reminder to Kristoff of everything else that did not.