The Lost Letter

by Jillian Cantor

  This morning was the first time he’d actually gone to town since die Kristallnacht, when he and Elena had stood at the edge of the woods and watched the fires. And now when he made it through the woods, past the clearing, into town, he saw that Josef was right. What was left was an ashy mess. A few buildings remained: Wien Allee, where the post office still stood, near the edge of town, was relatively untouched. But most of the rest of the town appeared to be destroyed. Buildings were missing windows, walls, roofs even, and debris littered the sidewalks. Broken glass cracked further under Kristoff’s boots as he walked, and with each step he felt more and more like he wanted to scream over all the loss and destruction that surrounded him. It was all such a waste. All the beautiful buildings, lives, businesses that were broken, for no good reason.

  As Kristoff approached the post office, he noticed a German soldier walking up and down the street, his boots clicking back and forth, his right hand resting easily on his gun in his holster. He’s patrolling, Kristoff thought, but he wasn’t sure for what. The town felt too empty to need any patrolling. Kristoff didn’t see any other people, citizens of the town, with the exception of a few men out cleaning the sidewalks, picking up debris. He recognized Mr. Himmle, the shopkeeper who owned the market. Himmle looked up, his eyes met Kristoff’s in recognition, and he quickly looked down, went back to work cleaning up. Kristoff began to feel nervous, though he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Simply mailing a letter. Even in Österreich this was still legal.

  He walked inside the post office, but instead of the girl who normally worked inside, a German soldier stood behind the counter. Kristoff wondered what had happened to the girl, but maybe it was better not to know. Probably nothing good. Was she Jewish? Kristoff couldn’t remember. In fact, he wasn’t sure of her name, just that she had always been here, working here, for as long as Kristoff had been coming. And Elena had mentioned once that they had been schoolmates until she’d left school to go help her ailing father at the post.

  Kristoff’s hands shook as he gave his letter to the soldier. The man looked at him, seeming surprised that he was here, that anyone was here. Who would be mailing a letter at a time like this? His raised stern black eyebrows seemed to be asking.

  He handed the letter back to Kristoff.

  “I would like to mail this, please,” Kristoff heard himself saying, his voice sounding too high, reminding him of the stupid mouse in Miriam’s bedroom wall.

  The soldier handed him a booklet, the official gazette of the Reichspostministerium. He opened it up for Kristoff to read what he guessed was the important line: from the 31st October 1938 Austrian postage stamps would no longer be valid. Kristoff’s eyes skimmed over the rest about how unused stamps could be exchanged for German ones at a three-to-two rate.

  “I’m sorry.” He heard himself apologizing to the soldier, and he hated the way his voice sounded, as if he truly were sorry. Not angry. Not filled with hate. “I’ll purchase the correct postage, then? My mistake.”

  The soldier took Kristoff’s money and covered up Frederick’s beautiful stamps with German ones, Hitler’s face. And Kristoff worried the soldier would question him more. What the letter said, whom it was being sent to and why. But after franking it correctly, he took the letter from Kristoff’s hands without giving it any more notice.

  As Kristoff walked back toward the house, the sky was graying into dusk, and he thought about the new curfews the Germans had enacted for Jews. What would the soldier patrolling the streets have done if Elena had been out mailing the letter too late? Kristoff shivered as he crossed the clearing and escaped back into the unpatrolled woods. He felt an odd safety in their denseness, amidst the snowy trees, and he remembered what Josef had said about the cabin. No one knew it was there. The Germans wouldn’t even know how to find it.

  The Germans. It made him terribly sad to think of all of Frederick’s hard work creating the stamps, engraving the plates, and how just by the new German decree they were suddenly worthless. He wouldn’t tell Frederick (or Elena) about the stamps, though Elena would figure it out soon enough.

  But as he reached the house, he forgot all about the stamps. Something was wrong: The front door was ajar. It was much too cold out, winter, nearly night. No one would’ve intentionally left the door open.

  He ran inside the house, yelling for Mrs. Faber. Then Elena. Then Miriam. But no one answered him.

  A teakettle boiled over on the stove, and Kristoff turned it off.

  But the house was empty. The Fabers were gone.

  Los Angeles, 1989

  ON SUNDAY, I have an unremarkable visit with my father. I don’t mention his stamp collection, nor the letter, nor my visit with Gram. My father knows it’s me again, and seems to have no recollection of my evening visit earlier in the week. Of his warning that I could never come back. We talk about the weather—it feels chilly this November for Los Angeles. We talk about the movie I’m supposed to go see tonight for work, Driving Miss Daisy, and how it stars Jessica Tandy, and how we both enjoyed her in Cocoon a few years earlier. We talk about Thanksgiving, which is coming up before we know it, and then my father asks if we’ll be back home before then. If I’ve found our plane tickets, to know when it is exactly we’ll be flying back.

  “I’m looking,” I tell him, the way I always do now. I lean down and kiss his balding head, and I tell him I’ll be back next Sunday.

  “I know,” he says, and as I leave I hope that maybe he does.

  When I get home, there’s an unfamiliar car parked in my driveway, a white Ford. I park on the street, and walk up the driveway, where I see Benjamin sitting inside the car. I knock on the driver’s side window, and he jumps, and rolls it down halfway. “You weren’t home,” he says, sounding sheepish. “So I thought I’d wait till you got back.”

  “How long have you been sitting here?” I ask. He shrugs, and I guess it’s been a while. “And I thought you were in San Francisco at a conference?”

  He gets out of his car and then he follows me up the front path to the house. “I was in San Francisco. Just got back this morning,” he says. “And I found something.”

  “Something?” I open the front door, and Benjamin follows me inside the house. It’s a mess, in a way it never was when Daniel, who’s a neat freak, lived here. My library books are all over the coffee table in the living room, and there’s a pile of laundry on one end of the couch that I haven’t put away yet. At least it’s clean laundry. I shuffle the books into a pile and carry the laundry into the kitchen, where I set it on the counter, out of his sight.

  “Nice house,” Benjamin says, not seeming to notice the mess.

  “Thanks.” Benjamin is right—it’s a beautiful house, my mess notwithstanding, a renovated craftsman that the previous owners had stripped down and rebuilt to look like a new modern eighties version of its former self. But I don’t tell Benjamin that I’ve been thinking about selling it ever since Daniel left and then graciously handed it over to me.

  “Coffee?” I ask Benjamin instead. He’s made himself comfortable on my couch and is eyeing my library books, my maps of Austria.

  “Sure,” he says, and I put up a fresh pot before walking back into the living room and sitting down next to him. I’m suddenly aware of our closeness, and I shift down the couch a little, so our legs don’t accidentally touch.

  “So tell me about this something you found in San Francisco,” I say.

  “I showed your stamp around the whole conference,” he says, but he’s still glancing at my books, not looking at me. “No one had ever seen it before, with the flower, in the steeple like that, I mean.” This does not sound like something. It sounds like nothing. He turns his attention away from the books and looks at me, and his face is more animated than usual. He’s excited about whatever it is he found. “But then I started asking around about Faber, if anyone had a collection of his stamps, if anyone knew what happened to him after the
Anschluss.”

  “He died,” I say, remembering the dates for him in the philatelic handbook I’d checked out of the library.

  “Right, but then how did his flower get into this steeple?”

  “Well, it wasn’t his,” I say, which seems obvious. But Benjamin shrugs as if he isn’t sure, and I wonder if it’s possible that this stamp was made earlier than Benjamin thought. “Hold on, let me grab the coffee.” I walk into the kitchen, fill two mugs, and bring them back into the living room. Benjamin takes his and thanks me.

  “Anyway,” he says. “I met this guy who’s a really big World War Two–era collector. He actually had the original St. Stephen’s Cathedral stamp in his collection. The one without the flower. Remember, I told you about it.” He pulls a Polaroid out of his bag and shows me the picture he must’ve taken in San Francisco of the original stamp. This stamp looks so similar to the stamp on my letter, in my bag, that I almost wouldn’t know it was different at all. Except I do. This one is missing the small flower petals at the top of the steeple.

  “So what does this all mean? My father’s stamp is a special edition or something?”

  Benjamin takes a sip of his coffee. “I don’t know about that yet. But that’s not even the part that’s interesting. This collector said a few years ago a woman contacted him. She was looking for Faber stamps. She wanted to know what he had, offered to buy them from him at a pretty steep cost. More than they were worth.”

  Benjamin speaks quickly; he’s overly excited. But nothing he’s saying means anything to me yet. “I don’t understand,” I say. “Why does that matter?”

  “The woman who contacted him, she said she was Faber’s daughter.”

  “Fräulein Faber?” I try to imagine this girl, now presumably an old woman and, very possibly, no longer a Fräulein at all. But she’s alive, and she must’ve gotten out of Austria, somehow. “Where is she? Do you know?”

  “Well, he said a few years ago she was in Cardiff.”

  I’d just driven by Cardiff-by-the-Sea, on the way to see Gram. “San Diego?” The thought of her here, so close, feels almost unbelievable.

  “No, Cardiff in England. Wales.”

  And suddenly she’s far away again. Across the country and then an ocean. I’d have to put so much postage on this letter to get it to her if I sent it today. And I’m not sure I could do that, just buy some airmail stamps and toss it carelessly in the mail, letting it wing its way across the world. What if it got lost?

  “Jack’s going to look up her contact information in his files when he gets home and said he’d get it to me next week. I want to write to her, ask her about this particular stamp, this letter you have.” He finishes off his coffee and sets the mug down on my coffee table, next to my library books. “If that’s okay with you, that is?” I nod. “If it’s particularly valuable, she might be willing to pay good money for it. And, well, even if it’s not, Jack said she way overpaid for all of his Fabers.”

  A gem, my father had always said. That’s why I went to Benjamin in the first place. If there was just the slightest chance, I’d wanted to know. I was thinking about my father, the expense of his continued care, after all. But I can’t sell this letter to this woman, for whom it was possibly originally intended, years ago. Even if she offered to pay top dollar for it, I couldn’t take her money for a letter addressed to her.

  Jason was so certain there’s a story here. But is it possible the story isn’t in the stamp at all, but in this old woman, living in Wales, who once was younger, in love, a girl living in Austria? How did she get from there to Wales, and what happened to the man she loved?

  “I can’t sell it to her if it’s rightfully hers,” I finally say to Benjamin. “I’ll return it to her, but I’d like to write her a letter myself, ask her about her story. When you get her contact information from this Jack guy, can you give it to me?”

  “Sure,” Benjamin says, more affably than I would expect considering I’ve probably wasted his time, sent him on a fruitless chase for which he won’t ever get paid. “But you’ll ask her about the stamp, too? About the flower?” he insists.

  “Why do you care, if I’m not going to sell it?” I’m not saying this unkindly, just matter-of-factly. What’s in it for him now?

  “I just want to know. I just want to understand it.” For the first time, he meets my eyes. His eyes are deep blue, almost black, like the ocean in Santa Monica. They’re both beautiful and a little sad, filled with more emotion than I would expect from him. And it strikes me that I don’t really know him at all, that he’s got a life outside of stamps and I’m a little curious what that is. “You know,” he adds. “In case I ever come across something like this again.” He offers me a half smile.

  “Of course,” I tell him. “Of course I’ll ask her about the stamp.” And I wonder if Benjamin wants to unravel the history, too. If, like me, he’s suddenly more interested in her story.

  Austria, 1938

  THE TEAKETTLE WAS BOILING OVER, and Kristoff grabbed it off the stove. Hot water splashed onto his hand, burned his skin a little, but he barely felt it as he set the kettle down on the counter.

  Where were the girls?

  He ran through the house calling for them, up and down all three stories, but his voice echoed through empty halls, rooms. No one answered. He ran back to the front door and examined it again. Had it just blown open, from the wind, maybe? But no, there was a footprint in the center, a large booted footprint, and he imagined a German soldier kicking down the door, dragging Mrs. Faber, Miriam, and Elena away.

  He sat down against the front door, out of breath, defeated. The skin on his hand had already blistered a little, and he stuck it in the snow to cool the burn. The girls were gone. But they couldn’t be. Elena would never let that happen.

  Maybe they ran when they heard the Germans coming? But where would they go? Where would Elena take them to stay safe? The secret cabin in the woods, where Frederick lay on the floor? Elena would kill him if she found out he knew that Frederick was there—that is, if Josef didn’t kill him first for not keeping a closer watch over the girls, for leaving to go into town in the first place. Or maybe they were just in the workshop? Kristoff hadn’t checked there yet.

  He stood, ran through the house, then out the back door across the snowy lawn. “Hallo?” he called into the workshop as he opened the door.

  But inside, it was dark, empty. And he sat down in Frederick’s old armchair, his whole body shaking with fear, with regret. “No, no, no,” he said to himself. His voice echoed again, in the empty space.

  He had no choice but to go to the cabin in the woods, to Frederick, and pray the girls were already there. Because the alternative, he realized, was having to tell Frederick that the girls were gone, that he didn’t know where to find them, that there was a footprint in the shape of a German boot on his front door.

  Kristoff heard a sound, a small squeak. He heard it again, but what was it? A hiccup? Was that . . . Miriam?

  He lit a candle and gazed around the workshop, examining every inch of it with his eyes and the candlelight. But he didn’t see them. “Miri, Elena?” he called out. “Are you here?” They didn’t answer, so he tried again. “The Germans are gone. It’s only me. Kristoff. I’m all alone. I promise. Are you here?”

  Everything was silent and still for another moment, until he heard the creak of a floorboard, and the earth shifted below him slightly. The piece of flooring just next to him moved, Elena slid it back, and she and Miriam climbed out from under the ground. He’d had no idea there was a crawl space beneath the workshop. “Father used to store engraving plates under here,” Elena said, brushing herself off, wiping away dust and cobwebs and god knows what else. “It’s not very big, but it was big enough to hide in.”

  “It was like being in our own tomb,” Miriam said. She was a mess, her face streaked with dirt and tears.

  Elena l
ooked down at the floor, and didn’t say anything else for a moment, as if Miri’s words had rendered her mute. The thought of her own tomb. She had said just last night that her own death didn’t scare her. But Miri’s death? Kristoff knew that was another story.

  “They took her away, didn’t they?” Elena’s voice trembled when she finally spoke, and she still didn’t look up at him. “They were asking Mother for Father and I heard her say he was dead. But then I grabbed Miri and ran out here and we hid before I could hear anything else.” She finally looked up. Kristoff could see every bit of her face in the glow of his candle. She wasn’t crying, like Miri. Her green eyes were stoic, resolute. “But they took her, didn’t they?”

  “I don’t know.” Kristoff swallowed hard, feeling pretty certain that Elena was right, that they did. “The house was empty when I came back from town. The front door was still open. The stove was still on. The teakettle boiling over . . .” His voice trailed off. They all knew, with certainty, that Mrs. Faber wouldn’t allow that to happen, if she was still here.

  “Mother and Father both are gone. In just an instant.” Miriam’s voice rose. “We’re all alone in the world. We’re orphans.”

  “No.” Kristoff held out his hand to Miri. “You’re not. Come with me.”

  Kristoff didn’t think about Frederick’s worry, or Josef’s rage, as he walked through the woods with the girls toward the cabin. He thought only about Miriam and Elena, and how they needed to know their father was actually alive. It had been stupid to keep it from them in the first place. Josef had said it was to protect them, should the Germans come, but it had protected Mrs. Faber from nothing. The worst of it was, they’d taken her anyway and she still believed her husband was dead. Kristoff would never forgive himself for not telling her the truth, and he wasn’t going to keep Frederick from Miri and Elena any longer.