“Kristoff and I will make them papers,” Elena said, before Kristoff could say anything, one way or another. “Won’t we, Kristoff?” She put her hand on his arm and gazed up at him. Her eyes were wide, excited. How could he say no to her? And how could he refuse to help Josef’s poor cousins, their unborn child?
He finally nodded and Josef sighed a little. “But these will be it,” Kristoff said. “We won’t keep on doing this. We can’t.”
No one said anything, and Kristoff’s words seemed to echo in the cabin, already sounding false, even to him.
The next morning, Kristoff awoke first. Now that it was summer, the air in the attic was warm, and they slept naked, their bodies so familiar to each other that it almost seemed stranger that they would sleep clothed. Elena’s bare leg wound around his, and he gently moved her leg to the side so he could get out of bed without waking her.
He went to the workshop to work more on Elena’s papers before she came in and questioned him. He felt a new urgency to have an escape route for her after his promise in the cabin last night to forge new papers for Josef’s cousins. Should their work be discovered, Elena would need a way out, and quickly.
He worked in quiet for nearly an hour, and when he saw Elena coming toward the workshop from the kitchen, he hid his progress in the workbench drawer.
Elena walked into the workshop barefoot, wearing one of Kristoff’s shirts, which was much too long and hung over her tiny body like a dress. She had two cups of coffee in her hands and put one down on the workbench in front of Kristoff. He leaned down and kissed her as a thank-you. And she kissed him back, slowly, deeply.
“Let’s leave now.” Kristoff grabbed Elena’s hand, impulsively. “We’ll go to America and find your father and we can live there and get married.”
Elena laughed a little; she thought he was joking.
“Really,” he said. “I’m serious.”
She let go of his hands. “I can’t leave Austria without my mother. And besides, who would I be if we ran away? Who would we be?”
“I don’t care,” he said, frustrated. Her face turned, and she looked down at her feet. “All right, I do care,” he said, trying to keep his tone even. “But I just want you to be safe. I want us to be together.”
She looked back up, her face softened. Her eyes were the color of ripe pears. “We will,” she said. She reached up and touched his cheek with her forefinger; he hadn’t shaved in days, and her finger bristled against tiny hairs. “Someday.”
“Someday,” he echoed back, realizing how much weight this one word held, the most they’d promised each other. A future.
He took her hand from his cheek and kissed it softly, rubbing his lips across her knuckles, then opening her hand, kissing her palm.
“I should get dressed,” she said. “Then we can get to work on the new papers for Josef’s cousins.”
He wanted to stop her. He wanted to show her how Amata Marsch’s papers were almost finished. The Führer could be an ocean away from them; they could be safe in America. Everyone else in Austria be damned. But he remembered Frederick’s sad voice, the way he’d looked when he’d said Mrs. Faber’s name. Josef’s poor cousins who were going to bring a baby into the world soon. The image of the smoking ruin of the synagogue in Grotsburg. If they abandoned Austria now, he knew Elena was right, they were giving up on Mrs. Faber and all the people in trouble here, needing help. They were giving up on their country. And deep down Kristoff knew Elena might never sail across the ocean and abandon her mother, her home.
Coronado, 1989
BENJAMIN HAS NEVER BEEN to Coronado before, and as I pull onto Gram’s street, he remarks about how quaint it is, how New England it feels. “So different from LA,” he says, and I kind of wish we were here just to hang out and have a drink by the water.
Gram does a double take when she opens the door and sees Benjamin standing next to me. She raises her eyebrows, and I realize she has the wrong idea. “This is Benjamin Grossman. The stamp dealer who’s been helping me figure everything out,” I say before she can comment. Then I lean in and kiss her cheek, giving her a second to process and hoping she doesn’t say anything too embarrassing.
“Oh, Mr. Grossman, pleasure to meet you.” Gram holds her hand out to shake, and Benjamin takes it and offers her a slight smile. “Come on in, both of you. I was just having a cup of tea. Either of you want one?” We both shake our heads. “Oh, I forget who I’m talking to, Miss Coffee Snob over here. Want me to make a pot of coffee, sweetheart? Or I did buy wine, as promised.” She shoots me a somewhat mischievous grin and casts another look at Benjamin. “Grossman?” she muses. “Where is your family from?”
“Coffee would be great,” I say quickly.
“Lithuania,” Benjamin answers her. “My grandparents came over when they were very young, so I don’t know too much more than that.”
She nods, pleased that he’s indulged her with an answer. “We’re all from Germany. Back when Germany was still a country of Jews. I suppose Katie has told you?”
“A little,” I say. In the car I’d given Benjamin only the Reader’s Digest version of my grandparents’ past. Not that I know much more myself.
“Mr. Grossman, some coffee for you, too?”
“Please,” he says. “And call me Benjamin.”
Gram smiles at him and makes her way into her tiny galley kitchen, where she pours water into her Mr. Coffee. “So after you left, Katie, I kept thinking about your letter. Something was gnawing at me. Something familiar.”
“About Grotsburg?” I ask. “She helped me find their town on the old Austrian map,” I tell Benjamin.
“No,” Gram says. “The woman’s name on the letter. Faber. I just kept thinking I’d seen it somewhere before.” She adds the coffee grinds, turns the pot on, and wipes her hands on a dish towel. She walks over to her tiny kitchen table and grabs a plastic box that appears to be filled with papers. “I went up to the attic last week. I keep a bunch of your grandfather’s correspondence up there I didn’t want to part with after he died. Letters his mother had sent us from Germany before the war, things like that.” She pulls a letter out of the box and hands it to me.
The envelope is old, yellowed, crumbly in my fingers. It’s addressed to my grandfather, and has several canceled German (I think?) stamps on the top. “Third Reich airmail stamps,” Benjamin says, pointing. “1939.”
“This is from his mother?” I ask Gram, trying to conjure a mental picture of her and failing. My grandfather never talked to me about his family, his history, his life before he’d come to America, and now I regret that I’d never asked. But it just wasn’t something we talked about. And I realize I’m not even sure what my German great-grandmother’s name was.
“Not that one, no,” Gram says. “But it was in the box with her letters. Go ahead, open it up.”
Benjamin peers over my shoulder as I gingerly take out the crumbling letter from inside. “It’s written in German?” It looks indecipherable to me.
Gram pulls her reading glasses up to her eyes. “Your grandfather went to art school in Berlin.”
“I never knew that,” I say.
“Well, his time there was cut short when we moved to America, and it seemed his passion for drawing went away once we got here, too. After we left I never heard him speak of it again. Until this letter came for him, years later. A friend of his from art school got trapped in Austria after the Nazi occupation and his daughter wrote to Gid, wanting his help in getting her father out.”
I’m trying to piece together everything she’s telling me about my grandfather long before I ever knew him, long before he was mine. He went to art school in Berlin, as a young man? A friend of his got trapped in Austria by the Nazis? Though I knew they were born in Germany, I always thought of my grandparents as American Jews, untouched by the war, since they were here long before it started. But Gram told me h
er entire town in Germany had burned, and now I think of the people they must’ve left behind. “I guess I don’t really know much of anything about your lives before you came here,” I say. “I feel bad that I never asked.”
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Gram says. “He never talked about it. Neither one of us did. We wanted it that way.” She reaches up and touches my hair, the way she has since I was a little girl, and she smiles at me, in that way that a grandmother loves her granddaughter, with a pure and blind sort of perfection, the way she has always loved me and still does, even now that I’m a grown woman, newly unemployed, and nearly divorced.
Her hand moves from my hair, and her curling forefinger traces down the letter to the bottom. “Here, look at the signature on the letter, sweetheart.” It reads, Hochachtungsvoll, Elena Faber. “Respectfully yours, Elena Faber,” Gram says.
My hands shake as I put the letter down on the table. “So Grandpa Gid knew Frederick Faber? That was his friend from art school?” I ask.
At the same time, Benjamin says, “So did you help him get out?”
“Yes and yes,” Gram says, looking at me, then Benjamin. “Only Herr Faber changed his name before he got here. I don’t know, I guess they forged his papers so he could get out of Austria. When he came here, I just knew him as Charlie. I don’t think I ever saw this letter before. Your grandfather just told me about his friend, and I’m sure he called him Frederick or Faber back then, but when he got here, to me, he was Charlie Darnay.” She walks back into the kitchen to get mugs for the coffee. “That’s why I didn’t immediately connect everything when you showed me your letter a few weeks ago.”
“So Frederick Faber didn’t die in Austria?” Benjamin’s eyes are open wide, his voice filled with excitement, discovery. “Frederick came here? He was living in California under a different name?” Gram nods, and Benjamin turns to me. “I bet that’s how your father got the letter in his collection,” he says. “From Frederick—or Charlie—himself.”
“No,” Gram says. “Poor Charlie wasn’t in very good shape when he got here. He passed away only a year or so later. Before we ever knew your father,” she says to me. “Marissa was just maybe a freshman in high school when Charlie passed. And she didn’t meet your father until just after she graduated, a few years later. Your father never met Charlie.” The coffee finishes brewing, she pours two mugs, and hands one to me and one to Benjamin.
“But maybe your dad found the letter here,” Benjamin says. “Otherwise it seems like such a coincidence for him to have this in his collection, only to have what . . . found it in a thrift shop, randomly?”
“We didn’t see Charlie much. I really didn’t know him well, to tell you the truth,” Gram says. “He was Gid’s friend, and Gid found him a place to live and went to see him from time to time during that year. I had Charlie over for dinner a few times when he first got here, but then . . .” She holds her hands up in the air and her voice trails off. She isn’t sure why she didn’t know him. And it was all so long ago. Maybe she can’t even remember.
“What about Elena?” I ask. “Did you ever hear from her again?”
“No,” Gram says. “Like I said, I didn’t think of her or the name until you showed me your letter a few weeks ago. And that’s the only one I found from her among Gid’s things. If there were others, they’re gone now.”
“So she never came here, after the war?”
“Maybe she did,” Gram says. “But I never knew anything about it.”
Benjamin and I are quiet on the car ride back. The sky is growing dark, but there’s still traffic, and I’m concentrating hard on the freeway. I’m thinking about Elena’s letter, and not just the one I’ve been carrying around for weeks, the one intended for her, but also the one she wrote, to my grandfather to try to save her father. I’ve been picturing Elena as this beautiful stranger, trapped by the Nazis, but she’s not that different from me, not that distant. I just had the good fortune of my grandparents making it to America before the Nazis rose to power. Of being born a little later, in a safe place.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Benjamin finally says when we are almost back, through Orange County. The traffic slows, and ahead of us, I see the glow of a million orange taillights on the 5, bumper to bumper, heading right into LA.
“What do you mean?”
“Your father having this letter in his collection. Your grandfather knowing Frederick Faber, helping him come to America. I mean maybe our letter was in your grandfather’s stash of things, too, and your father got ahold of it at some point. Or maybe your grandfather told him about Frederick.”
I’d just assumed my father had found the letter in a thrift shop, by chance, the way he’d collected so many of his stamps. But given what Gram just told us about my family’s connection to the Fabers, Benjamin might be right. “Maybe that’s why he got so upset when I showed him the letter a few weeks ago. It meant something to him, or to my grandfather. And he was talking about my grandfather the other day,” I say. “Maybe it’s all connected in his mind somehow.” I just wish I knew how.
“Could you ask him?” Benjamin says. “Would he remember?”
“I don’t know.” Before he moved into the Willows, my father was spectacular when telling me about the past. “He’s been so edgy lately. And he got so upset the one time I showed him the letter that I’m almost afraid to bring it up again.”
“Yeah,” Benjamin says. “Your father was worried you would get in trouble for having the letter?” I nod. “Maybe he took it from your grandfather without his permission.”
“That doesn’t sound like him. He loved my grandfather like a father. His father died when he was very young, so Grandpa Gid was all he had. I can’t imagine he would’ve stolen anything from him.”
We approach the exit for my house, and I consider inviting Benjamin to come over, have a drink. I enjoyed our breakfast early this morning, so many hours ago that it almost feels like days. And I can’t stop thinking about the easy way we fell asleep that night in Wales, holding hands.
“Thanks for bringing me with you today,” Benjamin says. “I haven’t been south of LA in a while. I’ve been avoiding this part of the freeway since . . .” His voice trails off, and he turns to look out the window. But he doesn’t have to finish his thought, I know he means since the accident that killed his family.
“Thanks for coming,” I say, and I drive right past my exit, without bringing up my house, the drink. It’s a stupid idea. Benjamin is still grieving for his wife; he’s only here with me now for the stamp. I drop him back at his office and then I head home, alone.
Austria, 1939
THE COMFORT Josef and Schwann found in guns, Kristoff found in charcoal, paints, paper, and even the burin, so it wasn’t a terrible job to work day in and day out, drawing up and engraving plates for papers with Elena, as long as he didn’t let himself think about what would happen if Herr Bergmann were to find out.
When the new papers were nearly finished, almost ready for Josef to take to his printer friend, they discussed at their meeting how they would deliver them to Robert and Elisa in Vienna. It was too dangerous to mail them when the Germans opened and censored so much mail, too dangerous to hand deliver them either. Like all the remaining Jews in Vienna, they were no longer allowed to be tenants, and they’d been forced into a Jewish home, where they were closely watched by soldiers, ready to arrest them for the smallest reason.
“Everything is too dangerous.” Elena held her hands up in the air, sounding frustrated, though Kristoff realized not with them, but with their situation. He sketched an edelweiss, and thought again about the promise he’d made to Frederick, that he would give her this flower, but that he would not be stupid doing it.
Kristoff stared at his sketch, his flower, as the others continued to talk. It resembled Frederick’s stamp, the stamp Kristoff had admired as a boy. Frederick, weak in the cabin, had
said that this was his way of showing his love. His proof of unusual daring. The only way to fight the enemy is to become them, Frederick had said to him.
And then Kristoff had an idea. They had the means to send Robert and Elisa a message that their papers were ready, a way right here in front of him the entire time.
“The stamps,” he said out loud. They were all still talking over him, arguing, really, about what was dangerous and what wasn’t. “Stamps,” Kristoff said louder, loud enough so they stopped bickering to look at him.
“What about them?” Josef asked, folding his arms in front of his chest.
“The Stephensdom stamp is already in circulation. What if I altered it a little, put a message in the picture to let them know their papers are ready? You could mail them a boring letter talking about the weather, so even if the Germans read it, they’d have no idea what we’re doing. The key would be the stamp. And the cathedral. You could take the papers there to give to them. The Germans won’t be watching a church.”
Elena looked at him. Her face turned in surprise, then delight. She reached out and laced her fingers through his. Kristoff thought she hadn’t wanted Josef and Schwann to know of their affection. But she pulled him closer to her, wrapped her arms around him in a hug. He put down his sketch pad so he could hold on to her. Josef glanced between them, but he didn’t say anything for a few moments. Finally he said, “You would be risking everything. If the Germans notice the alteration in the stamp, they’ll know for certain that it’s your work.”
“I know,” Kristoff said.
“They’ll kill you,” Josef said.
“Yes.” Kristoff swallowed hard. He remembered the way Josef had looked at him that morning he’d vomited in the snow, after Josef had handed him a gun, the way Josef had continued to look at him since, as if he were a liability, a child. I should’ve put you on the Kindertransport, he’d said then, disgusted. But now he looked at Kristoff differently, as if he were seeing him, for the first time, as a man.
The Lost Letter Page 19
