“Okay,” I said. “I promise. We’ll go together.”
She didn’t say anything else, and she turned so she wasn’t looking at me any longer. She reached for my hand, and I held on to her. Our fingers laced tightly. When I was a little girl, Mother always had Elena hold on to my hand whenever we went anywhere. Her fingers were always so much bigger than mine, except now, they were exactly the same size. Elena still saw me as a little girl. But I wasn’t.
The train began to move, slowly pulling out from the station, and Elena let go of me. “Elena,” I said, but I already knew what she was doing, already understood what was happening. “Don’t!” I cried out.
But she didn’t turn back. She pushed her way through all the children and made it to the door we’d come on at.
I blinked, and then she was gone.
Wales, 1989
GIUDITTA,” MIRIAM SAYS, snapping her fingers, as if it has just come to her again. “That was the name of the opera we saw that night in Vienna.” Her expression is far away. Maybe she’s remembering that night, exactly as she once wished to, whole, perfect.
“So you listened to Elena?” Benjamin asks her, not tuning in to her quiet moment of nostalgia. I nudge him a little; I don’t want him to make her angry. I don’t want her to stop talking, to ask us to leave. I want to hear the rest of her story.
“Yes,” she says. “I listened to Elena. I took the train all the way across the Netherlands and Belgium. Then I boarded a ship to Harwich. I was taken in by the Winslows, who lived in Bristol, and they let me stay with them until the end of the war. I was one of the lucky ones.”
“And Elena?” I ask, feeling a sinking dread for Miriam’s sister, the actual recipient of this letter, so Miriam says.
She shakes her head. “After that day on the train, I never saw my sister again.” She wipes at her eyes. This poor woman. She was forced out of her home as a teenager, sent to England, abandoned by her sister on a train. And all these years later, we just barged into her depressing room in Raintree and unearthed it all again.
“What happened to Elena?” Benjamin is asking. “Where did she go?”
“Presumably she went back to Grotsburg. She probably would’ve said she was going back to fight the Germans.” She laughs, bitterly. “But I think she really went back for Kristoff. She was in love with him, you know. And love makes us do the stupidest things.” Then she adds, “She loved him more than she loved me.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t true,” I say. Benjamin looks at his shoes, and I wonder if he’s thinking about his wife. Daniel and I never had the kind of love that made us do anything even remotely stupid, and maybe that was half our problem.
“I went back to Austria, once. Years after the war. In the sixties. My Herbie went with me. But it was all gone by then.” She folds her hands in her lap and looks down at them. I nod, remembering the differences between the old map and the modern-day one Gram pointed out to me. “I searched after the war, and eventually found my mother died in Mauthausen. But my father, Elena, Kristoff, even Josef. I was never able to find out what happened to them.” She shrugs. “It’s why I’ve been looking for my father’s stamps all these years. I always thought if Elena had made it, survived the war, if she was alive, somewhere, then certainly she’d be looking for pieces of our father, too. And she’d be looking for me, don’t you think? But every collector I’ve talked to has never heard of her or gotten any inquiries from anyone like her.”
“And this wasn’t one of your father’s stamps?” Benjamin asks, handing the letter back to her once again. “You’re certain?”
“Yes. I’ve never seen it before,” she says. “And it’s a Deutsches Reich stamp. So it couldn’t have been him.” Couldn’t have been him because her father was a Jew, and he wouldn’t have been allowed to engrave stamps anymore after Hitler took over Austria. “It could’ve been Kristoff,” she says. “But I don’t know. He was only an apprentice when I lived there. I’m not sure he could’ve pulled this off.”
“Kristoff wasn’t Jewish, then?” She shakes her head, and her face turns, like she might start to cry. “I can’t imagine how terrible this must have all been for you,” I say.
“I suppose it was,” she says. “But I don’t remember it that way. We had a very nice life. We were always happy. Right up until die Kristallnacht.” She pauses, lost in the recollection of it. “Then I was only in Austria for a few more weeks after that. And in England, the Winslows doted on me. They were never able to have children and here a teenage girl fell into their lap. They were my second parents for many years. God rest their souls.” She laughs a little. “It’s funny you showed up to see me here, of all places. This place is like my penance, you know?”
“Penance?” I raise my eyebrows, not understanding.
“I spent so many pounds buying up my father’s stamps all these years. Then I fell and broke my bloody hip and the surgery went all wrong. Doctor said I might never walk again. And because I spent so much of our savings on stamps, we just really couldn’t afford any private care at home to help with the rehabilitation. So here I am, public health’s finest.” Her words come out in a rush, and for a second, it seems like she really might cry, but then she smiles instead. “Poor Herbie is just all broken up about it. I’m the tough one of the two of us. I’ll muddle through it.” She laughs. “And besides, I won’t be here forever.”
I smile at the idea of her poor broken-up Herbie, and at her insistence that this place is only temporary. Thank god.
“So here you are.” Miriam hands me back the letter. “I can’t buy it from you. One, because I really don’t have the money to do it. And two, because it isn’t mine. It was never meant for me.”
“But are you sure?” Benjamin asks. “You wouldn’t want to open it up and see? Be certain?” He seems impatient, the way I have for weeks, to know what’s written inside. But I can’t believe he’s actually asked her to open it and diminish any possible value of the stamp, which has been his concern all along. I shoot him a look.
“Oh, I’m quite certain,” Miriam says. “It’s not mine. No one would’ve been sending me a love letter in Grotsburg in 1939.” She pauses. “The edelweiss is an expression of love, you know. Proof of unusual daring, my father used to say. That’s how you proved you loved a girl. You ventured to the most dangerous mountaintops to find an edelweiss to give her.” She sighs. “And the only Fräulein Faber who Kristoff Mueller ever noticed, ever loved, was my sister.”
On the cab ride back to the hotel, Benjamin and I are both quiet. Before we left Miriam, she told us that if we had any more luck finding out what happened to Elena or the rest of her family than she ever had, that we must contact her immediately. I gave her my card, and I also promised her that we would keep in touch, but deep down I feel that Elena is most likely long dead. That we’ve come all this way to deliver this letter, to learn about this stamp, and we’ve found nothing but a spunky old woman with a broken hip, in debt from chasing too hard after her past. At least she has Herbie. At her age, I’ll be divorced and all alone.
“You hungry?” Benjamin asks as we get out of the cab at the hotel. The rain has slowed to a drizzle. Not enough to need Benjamin’s umbrella any longer, but just enough for my hair to get even puffier. I fluff my bangs a little with my fingers, but the effort’s futile at this point. I’m not hungry, but I don’t want to go back to my room yet either, so I nod. In all the singularity Daniel’s departure has brought me—cups of coffee, glasses of wine, and king-size beds for one—somehow none of it has seemed as lonely as staying in a hotel room alone.
Instead of going into the hotel, we walk around the block to a small restaurant, go inside, and grab a booth. Benjamin orders a rarebit sandwich, and not being certain what that is and thinking it sounds too close to rabbit, I stick with the Glamorgan sausage again.
“You know that’s not really sausage,” Benjamin says, after the waitress ta
kes our orders. I don’t say anything, not willing to admit that I don’t. “Leeks,” he says. “And cheese.”
“Well, I had some last night from room service, and it was delicious.”
Benjamin looks genuinely puzzled at the fact that anyone could enjoy leeks in a sausage form, and I don’t know if I’ll like it again now that I’m not starving. But I do.
Benjamin’s rarebit looks good, too, once I realize that a rarebit sandwich is something akin to a grilled cheese. Everything I have ever thought about British food is wrong. Where are the bangers and mash? The stale bread and dark ale? Wales seems like a beautiful world unto itself, and I wish I were here on vacation, with Daniel. No, don’t think about him. He’ll soon be walking up his mother’s bougainvillea-lined front path without me, going inside her beautiful estate in Hidden Hills, sitting around her big dining room table with all his cousins, aunts, uncles . . .
Stop it, I tell myself. I want to erase all the images of Daniel from my head. All the Thanksgiving pasts. And I raise my cup of tea, which has been served ever so delicately in flowered china, despite the fact that this restaurant has a distinct dive-diner atmosphere. “Happy Thanksgiving,” I say to Benjamin. That’s what this is, our Thanksgiving meal. A rarebit sandwich, Glamorgan sausage, and tea.
Benjamin ignores me, and takes another bite of his sandwich. He’s told me multiple times that he hates Thanksgiving. That’s why he wanted to come here, this week. And I feel like an idiot.
“Sorry,” I say. “How about Happy Rainy Day in Cardiff, then?”
“Isn’t that just every day?” But he smiles a little, and raises his cup of tea to clink mine.
“I’m sorry you wasted your airline miles on this,” I say, after I drink a little more tea.
“So that’s it, then?” He finishes off his sandwich and wipes his hands with a thin paper napkin from the dispenser on the side of the table. “You’re done? Giving up?”
I shake my head. “Poor Miriam doesn’t know what happened to her sister. I can’t give up. I’m just not sure what to do next.”
Elena took Miriam all the way to safety and then she jumped off a train just on the precipice of being safe herself. I could never do anything like that. I’d be terrified of jumping, of the ground moving beneath my feet. Of the Germans who would’ve made my home unsafe. But from Miriam’s description, Elena was nothing like me. She was fearless, beautiful, unapologetic. So what happened to her, then? Did she make it back to Grotsburg, to her father’s apprentice, Kristoff, whom she loved? Or did the Germans arrest her before she ever got back there?
Benjamin and I split the check and then walk back to the hotel, in silence. It’s no longer raining, the sun is almost out, and once we hit the lobby Benjamin grunts a goodbye and darts off. Running away from me again. But he was acting even more distant than usual on the walk back. And I’m glad to be rid of him.
I don’t feel like going upstairs yet, and I decide to go back out and explore Cardiff instead. I’m here, why not? Why do I need Daniel, any man for that matter, to explore a new city?
I meander through the streets, taking in the beautiful lush greenery, the dank, earthy smells, all the way to the university: beautiful brick and ivy buildings. And then on the way back, I walk toward the giant stone-walled Cardiff Castle, which sits atop a grassy hill, and I climb what feels like a hundred steps to wander inside the castle.
I explore for a long time, reveling in the thick damp air that clings to me, in the feeling of my own silent steps, the weight of my aloneness. I walk and I walk until my feet are sore and blistered, and I don’t make it back to the hotel until it’s nearly dark.
Austria, 1938
KRISTOFF STARED at the flames of Mrs. Faber’s Shabbat candles on the dining room table: two little flickers of light. That was all. And yet if Herr Bergmann were to choose this moment to return, Kristoff knew he could be arrested, killed. Still, he spoke the prayer aloud, defiantly: Baruch atah, Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olom . . .
“You’re saying it wrong.” Her voice came out of the darkness, softly, and at first, Kristoff thought he imagined it. So he kept on reciting the prayer until he finished with a shel Shabbat. “It’s not ‘me-like,’ it’s ‘mellick.’” Her voice was louder this time.
“Elena?” He whispered her name into the darkness, afraid if he spoke it any louder she would disappear, a figment of his imagination, a ghost. Because she couldn’t be here. She’d gone on the Kindertransport with Miri last week.
He heard a noise, the dining chairs were moving, and she crawled out from underneath the table. “I heard someone come into the house, and I wasn’t sure whether it was you, until I heard you butchering our prayer.” She stood, waved her cupped hands in front of the candles, and whispered the prayer herself once, quickly. Then she turned to face him and she raised her eyebrows a little. “So . . . what? You’re a Jew now, Kristoff?”
“Elena?” He said her name a little louder, as loud as he dared, and he reached out to put his hand on her face, if only to feel that it was really her, that she was real. Her skin was just as soft, almost as cold as it had been that day in the snowy woods when he’d kissed her. His lips grew warm, at just the memory of it. “Why are you here?” he asked her. “You’re not supposed to be here.” He moved his hand from her face, to her shoulder, so glad to touch her, to feel her close, but he was afraid for her, too. “You’re supposed to be in England.”
“I got Miri on the train. She’ll be safe.”
“But what about you?”
“I told you. I don’t care about myself.” She pulled away from him, lest she might feel from the warmth of his hand on her shoulder that he cared, that she should care, too. “Someone has to fight, Kristoff. If we all run away, who will be left to fight them?”
“Me,” he said, though even as he spoke the word it felt like a lie. What was Elena going to think of the sketches he’d already done at Herr Bergmann’s request?
“But I don’t want to run away,” Elena said. “This is my home.” Her voice broke a little on the word home, as if realizing the possibility that this house, the place she’d spent her entire life, and Kristoff had spent the best year of his, might never truly be home again. Frederick was hiding in squalor, Miri on her way to England, Mrs. Faber missing.
“There has to be another train out,” Kristoff said. “You’ll get on the next one. I’ll take you to Vienna myself.”
She laughed a little and folded her arms across her chest. She would do whatever she pleased. She always did. She turned and began to walk toward the back door.
“Elena, wait,” he called after her, and she stopped for a moment and turned back toward him. “Where are you going?” She didn’t answer, and kept walking toward the door. “The Germans have been here. They’re coming back. I’m supposed to be designing some new Österreich stamps for them.”
“The Germans,” she spat back at him. “And if they could only see you now, with your Shabbat candles.” She walked out the back door, letting it slam hard behind her. Her words hurt him, a new physical pain in his stomach that he hadn’t been expecting.
It took him a moment to recover. He grabbed a lantern, used a Shabbat candle to light it, and blew out the candles (though he knew that you were not supposed to do that). He fanned the smoke with his hands to make sure they were out, and he took the lantern and ran out after her.
At first he could see her footsteps in the snow. He followed them, into the woods, past the turnoff for the small cabin where Frederick was. He lost track of her footsteps, as snow was coming down, filling in her tracks, but he knew if she hadn’t gone straight to her father, she must’ve gone to Josef first. At least he hoped she had. He hoped she wasn’t stupid or defiant enough to walk into town.
He reached the edge of the Bauers’ property, and he could see that inside the house, the lights were on. He saw the shape of Josef’s back, reaching down, scoopi
ng Elena up in a hug, and, feeling somewhat disgusted, and embarrassed, Kristoff turned and went back toward the house.
He lay awake in bed for a long time, listening for the sounds of the back door or the steps creaking, but he never heard them, and eventually, he fell asleep.
He awoke sometime later, his room filled with darkness. The middle of the night. But Elena was back; he could sense that she was here, in his room. He felt his bed shift as she climbed in and lay down next to him. Her face was close enough to his that he could feel the warmth of her breath on his earlobe. She was real. He was afraid to speak, afraid to move. Elena was in his bed.
“Can I just stay here? Just tonight?” she asked.
“Yes.” The word escaped him hoarsely, barely audible.
Her body sighed against the mattress, and she shifted closer into him. He moved his arm, put it around her tiny shoulders, pulled her even closer, and she lay her head against his chest. Her warm cheek rested against his heart. When she fell asleep, her body went limp and her breathing evened, but he didn’t let her go. He wouldn’t ever let her go again. He promised himself.
When he awoke the next day, sunlight streaming in through his window, he was all alone. Was Elena being in his bed a dream? Had he willed Elena here by sheer force of his imagination, his wanting? But he could still feel the weight of Elena’s cheek on his chest, conjure the slight scent of apricots in her hair. He had not imagined her.
He got dressed and walked out to Frederick’s workshop, where he found Elena sitting at the table, flipping through the sketches he’d made in anticipation of Herr Bergmann’s imminent return.
“These are very good,” she said, not looking up to acknowledge his presence, or to explain her visit to his bed last night. Not that she needed to. He was glad she had come to him. Though he felt shy around her now. “But do you think your metal skills are good enough to engrave them? All this detail . . .” Elena’s finger gently traced the many intricate details, the small windows and arches he’d sketched from memory on the Opera House.
The Lost Letter Page 14
