The Lost Letter

by Jillian Cantor

  “What are we doing here?” Elena asked when she realized they were headed toward the cabin. She stopped walking, put her hands on her hips, and grabbed on to Miri’s arm hard enough so that she had to stop walking, too.

  Kristoff didn’t want to tell her about Frederick; he wanted to show her, the way Josef had shown him. He hoped that by seeing him alive, she would focus on that and not the secret that Kristoff had been keeping from her. “Just trust me,” he said to her. She hesitated, and pulled Miri back, closer to her. “Please.” He put his hand on Elena’s shoulder, and finally she let go of Miri’s arm and followed him again, to the cabin’s door.

  Kristoff walked in first and used the glow of the candle to illuminate Frederick, still lying on the floor. He appeared to be sleeping. But he opened his eyes and he looked straight at Kristoff, Elena, and Miri. “What have you done, my boy?” His voice came out raspy, as if he were almost choking on the words.

  But Kristoff turned away, unwilling to see the disappointment on Frederick’s tired face. Instead he looked at Miri. “You are not an orphan,” he said, but she wasn’t listening to him. She was too busy shouting, jumping, hugging Frederick to her.

  “There’s a train leaving Vienna next week,” Josef told Kristoff one evening as the two of them had walked back to the house to gather supplies to bring to the cabin for the Fabers. Days had passed, then weeks. There was still no sign of Mrs. Faber, but the Germans hadn’t returned either. Josef had said the best they could hope for was that Mrs. Faber had been taken to the work camp in Mauthausen in Upper Austria, but if that was the best then Kristoff didn’t want to consider the worst. The few times he went back into town he’d heard rumors of others who’d been taken away to Mauthausen or killed in the street. He heard whispers that a German soldier shot Mr. Himmle, right on Wien Allee, as Mr. Himmle tried to run after they’d put him under house arrest. Kristoff wasn’t sure whether that was true or not, but Himmle’s shop was being run by a German, and the supplies were much less abundant than they were when Mr. Himmle owned the market.

  “A train?” Kristoff asked Josef as they walked together now, not sure what Josef was getting at.

  “The British. They’re beginning a Kindertransport, accepting children under the age of seventeen, sponsoring them to come to London. Live with foster families for a while. There was a notice from the Kultusgemeinde.” Kristoff recognized that as the name of a Jewish organization based in Vienna. Their office had been a street over from the orphanage, and he’d walked by it many times as a boy. “They’ll take both Miri and Elena.” Josef was still talking. “I already got tickets for them.”

  “You got them tickets out, just like that?” Kristoff asked.

  “They’re giving priority to orphans,” Josef said.

  “But they’re not orphans.”

  Josef stopped walking and turned to look at Kristoff sharply. He was still angry that Kristoff had brought the girls to Frederick. But would they have been safe at the house, still? Only until the Germans came back. And surely they would. “They are orphans,” Josef said. “For all intents and purposes.”

  Kristoff wouldn’t tell Josef that he couldn’t bear the thought of Miri and Elena leaving, boarding a train, and then presumably a boat, all the way to London. Because they would be better off there. He knew they would be. But he also didn’t want them to go. “Have you told Elena?” he asked Josef.

  “No. I think you should. That’s why I’m telling you.”

  “M-Me?” Kristoff stammered.

  “She likes you. She’ll listen to you.”

  “But I thought the two of you were . . .”

  “Elena?” Josef laughed. “She thinks of me as a brother.” He paused a second, enough for Kristoff to understand that Josef might not feel the same way about her. “Her and Miriam, both. My father and Frederick were old friends—they used to paint together.”

  “Your father is an artist?” Kristoff couldn’t hide his shock that a gruff man like Josef had come from any sort of artistic upbringing.

  “He was,” Josef said, but he didn’t offer anything further on what had happened to his father. “I’ve known Elena since we were little kids, running up the hillside together in the summers. Sledding down it in the winters.” He cast his eyes down. Maybe he couldn’t bear to remember happier times. Summers and winters of abundant freedoms.

  They had reached the cabin, and Josef stopped walking before going inside. “I’ll bring Miriam back to the house to gather up a bag, some things, so she’ll be ready to go in a few days. You convince Elena,” he said, as if it were just that easy.

  Kristoff asked Elena if she would walk with him in the woods, and though it was cold, snowing lightly again, she agreed. The cabin was tiny, one room, which thankfully had a fireplace to keep them all warm. But nothing else. And Kristoff could tell Elena hated being cooped up all day. He’d brought her a pile of English novels he’d found in her room and of course he’d brought them all clothing, food. But Elena was not the kind of girl who could spend her life in a tiny room, when there was so much else going on all around her.

  They walked for a few moments in silence, matching strides, matching footprints in the snow, until Kristoff made himself speak. “Josef found a way out for you and Miri,” he said, trying to keep his voice light, hopeful.

  Elena stopped walking, turned, and faced him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She tilted her face upwards, and all her features were rigid, unyielding. She shivered a little, and Kristoff took his warm hand from his pocket and put it to her cheek. Her skin was freezing. “It’s a train leaving Vienna next week,” he said. “A Kindertransport, taking orphans to London to live with foster families, just for a little while, just till all of this passes.”

  For a moment she didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. Her skin warmed beneath his hand, and she was so still it seemed she was barely breathing. “Okay,” she finally said.

  It wasn’t what he’d been expecting, and instead of feeling relieved he felt somewhat conflicted. He was happy that she’d agreed to go so quickly; sad that she’d agreed to leave him, just like that. “Good,” he said, trying to sound calm and sensible. But it was an effort to keep his voice from shaking. “I’ll figure out a way to get your father out of here, too.”

  “And you’ll help Josef,” she said. “You’ll fight them, won’t you, Kristoff?” How could an engraver, an artist, really fight a soldier? Many soldiers? The burin was no match for guns, fire, destruction. But he heard himself agreeing, telling her, of course he would. Of course he would fight.

  She looked at him. Her cheeks were so pink from cold, her lips redder than usual. She had three freckles on the bridge of her nose that Kristoff had not paid much attention to before. And he fought the urge to reach over and trace them with his finger.

  She was leaving. She hadn’t even argued with him, not really. She was going to be safe, and though he was grateful, he couldn’t move his hand from her cheek, couldn’t take his eyes away from her face, from those beautiful lips, those freckles.

  He leaned down, and he did what he’d been wanting to for months. He kissed her. Elena’s lips were cold, and she jumped back a little. He’d caught her off guard, or maybe she’d never imagined kissing him the way he’d often imagined kissing her.

  She reached her hands up, put them on his face. His cheeks were rough. He almost had a beard. He hadn’t shaved in weeks, since die Kristallnacht. As if all memory of his prior routines had been erased in the fires that destroyed most of Grotsburg.

  She ran her hands across his cheeks and then she leaned in and kissed him back. Her lips were soft but forceful. Just like her. The kiss lasted for only the briefest of seconds until she pulled away, put her hand to her own mouth. “What are we doing?” Her words came out soft, flat, lacking her usual conviction.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was . . . sayin
g goodbye, I guess.”

  She stepped back, and put her hands in the pockets of her wool coat. “I don’t like goodbyes,” she said.

  “So it wasn’t a goodbye, then,” he said. “It was a see you again, soon.”

  She didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t wait for him before she turned and started walking quickly back toward the cabin in the woods.

  Los Angeles, 1989

  I’M FREEZING MY ASS off here,” Karen complains to me over the phone a few nights later. I haven’t heard anything more from Benjamin, and I feel impatient to get Fräulein Faber’s contact information from him. But I don’t want to call and pester him about it either. So I’ve called my best friend, Karen, to catch her up instead, and she immediately launches into a diatribe about the miserable November weather in Connecticut.

  “God is punishing you for abandoning me,” I say, only half joking. I know it’s not her fault that she’s so far away, that her husband got a new job in Hartford at the same time Daniel decided he was leaving and I realized my father needed to move into the Willows. But Karen and I have been friends since kindergarten, and other than a short jaunt away from Los Angeles for separate colleges, we’ve always lived near each other until this past year.

  “So have you signed the papers yet?” Karen switches topics quickly, the way she always does.

  She’s the one person (other than Jason now, I guess) whom I’ve been honest with the entire time about me and Daniel. “Not yet.” I glance at the envelope still sitting on my kitchen counter. I haven’t touched it, moved it, opened it, much less signed anything.

  “You have to do it. You’ll feel better when it’s over. Final.”

  “Will I?” Karen is married to Mark, her high school sweetheart. They’re the kind of couple who agree on everything, who sometimes answer in tandem and dress alike, purely by accident, just because they’re that in step with each other. I used to see their sameness, their quiet domesticity as boring, when Daniel and I would revel in weekends in Napa, fancy dinners, and movie premieres compliments of the magazine. But once all that was gone, once my father’s illness consumed me, maybe we could’ve used an iota of what Karen and Mark have.

  “And once you get a new job,” Karen is saying. “You’ve been looking, right?”

  “Kind of,” I say, and I tell Karen everything, all about the unusual stamp, the love letter, how Benjamin might have located one of the Faber girls. And how Jason wants to hire me to write the story for him, once I figure it out.

  “So you’re using all this to avoid thinking about your divorce.” Karen says it matter-of-factly, not as a question. She used to work as a therapist before she had Jeffrey two years ago, and I’m used to her trying to therapy-speak me.

  “I’m not,” I insist. But maybe she’s right, and that’s exactly what I’m doing. Obsessing over someone else’s love story, to avoid thinking about what a mess my own has become.

  “So this Benjamin guy . . . Is he cute?” she asks.

  I laugh a little. “No, Kar, it’s nothing like that. He’s just helping me with this stamp, that’s all.”

  “But is he cute?”

  I remember the way his eyes looked as he sat on my couch the other night. The way he smiled a little when he thought about the possible story behind the stamp. “I mean in a nerdy sort of way, I guess so.”

  “What’s that old expression?” She lowers her voice. “The best way to get over one man is to get under another one.”

  “Karen! No! Seriously, he’s just a stamp dealer.”

  She laughs, and I know she’s joking. Or at least half joking. Then she yells for Jeffrey to stop doing whatever he’s doing in the background. “Sorry,” she says to me. “He’s supposed to be in bed and instead he’s trying to put his Halloween costume on Mittens. I have to go rescue the damn cat.”

  I laugh, too. “Of course,” I say. “Call me later this week when you can talk.”

  She promises she will, and then we hang up. But our phone calls are all like this, stilted, interrupted, faraway and half finished. It’s not just her move to Connecticut, but also the fact that she has Jeffrey, and I don’t have any kids. Daniel and I had agreed that we weren’t ready for kids, at first, and then just around the time I’d begun to think maybe it was time, my father got really bad. At night, Daniel was already asleep when I got home from my dad’s, or if he wasn’t, I was way too tired and emotionally drained to have sex, much less kids.

  I guess I should be thankful that we didn’t have kids together, although mostly I feel sadness at the idea that I might never get to be someone’s mother like Karen is.

  But I don’t dwell on it now, and I get into bed with my legal pad. I start to draft out a letter I might send to Fräulein Faber. I don’t care what Karen says about why I’m obsessing over this letter, I want to tell Fräulein Faber what she might’ve lost, what I’ve found among all the other nothingness in my father’s vast collection. I want to learn and write about her love story, and I hope that, unlike mine, it has a happy ending.

  The next morning at work, instead of doing actual work, writing my review of Driving Miss Daisy, I finish up my letter. I’m antsy to connect with Fräulein Faber, and I can’t concentrate on much else.

  At eleven, I tell Janice I’m leaving for lunch and to tell Daniel I’ll get him the review I owe him when I get back. But I’m not hungry, and I get in my car and drive out to Sherman Oaks instead.

  The sky is clear today, the air has warmed up, the traffic is remarkably light on the freeway. I park in the shopping center in the same place I did the last time, when I unloaded what felt like my father’s entire life, but this time I’m empty-handed as I walk into Benjamin’s office.

  I notice now there’s a little bell above the door, and it clangs brightly as I open it. Benjamin sits behind his messy desk but looks up when he hears the bell. His TV is on, and I recognize Erica Kane (once my mother’s favorite) on the screen.

  “All My Children?” I ask him, and I can’t help it, I laugh.

  Benjamin turns the knob and shuts it off. “It’s just whatever came on after the news. I was working, not really paying attention.”

  “Uh-huh.” I laugh again.

  “What are you doing here?” He stands up, almost defensively, and I feel a little bad that I laughed.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I was just getting impatient. I wanted to see if you’d heard from Jack yet.”

  He nods and sits back down behind his desk, riffling through one of the piles. “He gave me the contact information for the attorney they used in New York to negotiate the deal. I gave him a call this morning. But he said Mrs. Kleinfelter had recently taken ill.”

  “Mrs. Kleinfelter?”

  “Her married name.” Of course. She’s no longer Fräulein Faber. “Anyway, he said she’d recently moved into a nursing home. It sounded like maybe she wasn’t up for buying stamps any longer.”

  “But I don’t want to sell her the stamp.”

  “I know.” His voice softens as he seems to remember that this means something to me. “He’s going to get me the name and address of the home. If you still want to write to her?”

  “Did he tell you what’s wrong with her?” I ask. “Why she’s in the home?” Benjamin shakes his head. And I suddenly feel defeated. There’s not going to be a story for me to write; she’s not even going to be up for answering my letter, if she’s in any kind of shape like my dad is.

  I don’t go back to work after I leave Benjamin’s office. I know I should, that I’m going to miss the deadline on my review, but I go home instead and call Janice, feigning a bout of the stomach flu. Or is it food poisoning from my nonexistent lunch? She tells me to feel better, and I feel only a little guilty for the lie after I hang up.

  I uncork a bottle of wine, though it’s just after three p.m., shove my library books onto the floor, sit on the couch, and put my f
eet up on the coffee table. I glance through the Help Wanted ads, seeing nothing remotely promising, and I flip on the TV. General Hospital is on. I haven’t watched since college, but I sip my wine and jump right back in. Apparently Edward Quartermaine has died—I’m not sure how—and Lila converses with his ghost. Much more complicated than my own life, in the best possible way. I should probably change the channel, find something vaguely news-oriented, see what’s happening in East Berlin. Or maybe it’s just going to be Berlin again, the West and East will all be the same? But I don’t change the channel. I don’t move. I drink half the bottle of wine, and then I curl up on the couch, close my eyes, and fall asleep.

  I awake sometime later, to the sound of someone knocking on my door. It’s dark in the living room. The television is still on, bright flashes of light and sound I can’t comprehend at first. Somebody wants to buy a vowel. Wheel of Fortune.

  I hear another knock on the door, and I drag myself off the couch. I look through the peephole, and I’m surprised to see Benjamin, standing on the other side, his hands awkwardly in the pockets of his brown Members Only jacket.

  I open the door, and his hand is raised; he was about to knock again, but when the door opens, he freezes, and doesn’t lower his hand for a moment as he eyes me up and down. My hair is probably a mess, and I reach up self-consciously in a futile attempt to smooth it down. I’m wrapped in the bright orange and green blanket Gram once crocheted for me, that I was curled up with on the couch. “Are you sick?” Benjamin asks. And I try to decide whether that’s concern in his voice for me, or whether he’s worried I might give him something contagious.

  “Not really,” I say, remembering the lie I told Janice about the stomach flu. “It’s just been a long day.”

  He hesitates for a moment. “I’m sorry. It’s kind of late. I just thought . . . Well, I thought you didn’t sleep much, like me.”