The next morning in the workshop, Elena still seemed giddy with excitement over Kristoff’s idea. She couldn’t sit still. She paced; she practically bounced. Kristoff held his sketchbook on his lap, worrying he’d made a promise he couldn’t keep. Every intricate line of Stephensdom seemed to taunt him. He wanted to hide an edelweiss in there, but it had to be hidden enough that the Germans wouldn’t notice as the letter went through the post, obvious enough so that Elisa and Robert would. He tried sketching the petals loosely, lightly, in the spirals of the turret, and he handed the sketch pad to Elena to ask for her opinion.
She stopped moving to look at it. “I don’t see . . . oh.” She reached her hand up, traced the outline of the petals. “Just like my father’s,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes.
He pulled the sketchbook from her hands and put it down on the worktable. He reached for her, pulled her tightly to him. “Your father is safe now,” he said into her hair. “And we’re going to leave soon, too.”
“Kristoff, I can never leave my mother behind. I—”
He kissed her to keep her from finishing her sentence, from protesting further. “Let me show you something.” He walked over to the shelf where he’d hidden his work on Amata Marsch’s papers, behind old textbooks of Frederick’s. “I’m making you papers, too. I’m almost finished.” As he handed the plates over to her, he felt nervous that she would get angry. But instead she started to laugh. “What’s funny?” he asked, feeling a little hurt. Was she laughing at him? At these papers he’d worked so hard on for her?
She walked to the hidden floor space, removed the board, and pulled out an engraving plate. “I’m making you papers, too.” She handed him the plate, the fake name she’d chosen for him, Theodor Laurenz, a perfect match to his Amata Marsch.
“I’m your Laurie,” he said, and for the first time, Kristoff saw a real future for them, beyond this nightmare, beyond these beautiful stolen moments they’d been sharing. “I love you,” he said, daring to say it when she wasn’t in his bed already asleep, but in the daylight, when they were both wide-awake, when he was looking straight into her eyes, which in the light of the workshop appeared a greenish silver, with the luster of coins.
She put her plate down on the worktable, stood up on her tiptoes, and put her face right next to his. She kissed him once, tenderly. He knew how she felt. She didn’t have to say it.
But then she did: “I love you, too.”
Los Angeles, 1989
THE NEXT MORNING when I first wake up, it takes me a minute to remember everything that happened yesterday: the letter Gram found, Frederick Faber’s connection to my family, and Benjamin’s insistence that he doesn’t believe in coincidences. Also, I quit my job; I don’t have to go to work today. I get out of bed, get dressed, and head into the kitchen to make some coffee, feeling both overwhelmingly relieved and terrified to be unemployed.
I want to go back to the Willows, see my dad again, talk to him about what Gram found. But he was so out of it yesterday that I can’t bring myself to do it just yet, so I start going through the files Jason gave me over drinks a few weeks ago, which have been sitting on my kitchen table ever since. I page through his notes, the various organizations he found that can help loved ones track down people lost during the war. The first one, the Holocaust Society of LA, seems closest, most accessible, so I decide to start by giving them a call.
I talk to a woman named Jackie Goldberg who says she can search the database she’s been working on for the past few years, compiling names of Holocaust victims, survivors. She tells me her database is still incomplete, but she’s happy to check for Elena and Kristoff.
“He wasn’t even Jewish,” I tell her of Kristoff. “He’s probably a long shot.”
“Well, it’s all a long shot,” she responds, and sighs. “There were so many victims buried in mass graves, and then there are survivors who still don’t want to be found or who’ve changed their names.” Like Frederick Faber, whom Gram only knew as Charlie.
“So how do you do it?” I ask her. “It must be incredibly frustrating work.”
“It is,” she says. “But how can we not do it? We have to, don’t we?”
It’s funny how she says we, and I tell her I’m not doing anything, really, just looking for the writer and recipient of one letter. Just telling one story.
“Okay,” she says. But she sounds skeptical, like she doesn’t believe me, and then she says she’ll get back to me if and when she finds something.
I barely hang up the phone before I hear a knock at my door. I glance out the front window and Daniel’s silver BMW is parked in the street.
“Katie,” he calls for me through the door. “I know you’re home. I see your car. Open up.” I remember my hastily scribbled resignation note before I left the office yesterday, and even though I’d love to run back to my bedroom, crawl back under the covers, and ignore him, I should get this over with. So I go and open the door.
Daniel looks at me, surprised, as if he hadn’t actually expected me to open up, despite what he called when he knocked. “Come on in,” I say, but he hesitates for a moment, looks inside, past me, his eyes scanning the living room, the way you might study a place that once belonged to you, but doesn’t anymore. It’s like the way I felt when I went back to my father’s house for the summer after my freshman year in college, just after my mother had died, when it was a place that looked like home but didn’t feel that way anymore.
“You changed the curtains.” He finally steps inside and points to the window, just behind the couch. Yes, I’d replaced the expensive curtains his mother had bought us for an anniversary gift with some cheap ones I’d found at Kmart. They have bluebirds on them, and they match the pale blue paint on the wall. I’d thrown the old velour curtains out, an act that had filled me with a small moment of satisfaction at the time.
“So I guess you got my resignation?” I ask, sidestepping his comment about the curtains.
He nods. His face is serious, but he doesn’t look mad. “You don’t have to resign, Katie. We can still work together.”
“I don’t think I can,” I say.
“Okay,” he says, like he gets it, but I’m not sure he does. After all, he moved on, moved out, months ago. “But that’s not actually why I’m here.” He sits down on the couch. “I was trying to get your attention yesterday, but you left before I could.” He looks down and runs his hand across the brown fabric of the couch as if it’s new, foreign, like the curtains, though he’s the one who picked this couch out at Sears. “The Willows called me last week. I guess they couldn’t get ahold of you?”
“What?” It wasn’t what I was expecting him to say. The Willows and Daniel, my father and Daniel, are compartmentalized in my mind, like they don’t even exist in the same universe.
“I guess I was on their emergency contact list,” he says.
Now I feel guilty for avoiding him yesterday if this is what he wanted to tell me. “Sorry,” I say. “I filled out the paperwork before we . . . I’ll take you off next time I’m over there.” I pause. “I went away for Thanksgiving. That’s why they couldn’t get ahold of me. Why you couldn’t either.”
“Away?” He raises his eyebrows, contemplating where I might possibly have gone. But I don’t explain. It’s not his business anymore, where I went, who I went with. “Well, I went to see him. Your dad, I mean. When they called me.”
“You did?” Now I’m surprised. “Why?”
He shrugs. “They said they couldn’t reach you, and I was next on the list. I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t sure how bad it was. I mean . . . I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him, whether we’re still married or not.” Daniel never offered to help with my father when he was still here. For a good year before he left me, he completely ignored my father, his illness, and when caring for my father became my entire life, I ignored Daniel in return. But I also k
now that no matter what has happened with us, Daniel really is a nice guy, inherently gracious. And maybe that’s why it’s been so hard for me to accept, understand, that we’re over, that our marriage fell apart.
“Thank you,” I say. “It means a lot to me that you did that.”
“You know what your dad said to me?” Daniel asks. I shake my head. He laughs a little. “He told me he let the love of his life go, and that I was an idiot to let you go.”
I walk over and sit down on the couch next to him. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying half the time. He probably wasn’t talking about you and me. He doesn’t even know about us.” I can’t say any more, because I don’t want to cry. Not for Daniel, for what we lost or let go or gave up on or how we grew apart. Because all of that already feels done, gone. But for my dad, and how he’s still here but really, he isn’t still here at all. “He’s gotten pretty bad lately,” I say. “You shouldn’t take anything he said to heart.”
Daniel nods like he understands. “He just came back from art class when I was there and he showed me the picture he made, of your mom. So maybe you’re right, maybe he was actually talking about the two of them, but still . . .” His voice trails off, and he looks at me, our eyes meet. Daniel has good eyes, a pale blue, and I remember how thrilled I felt that first night I met him, when he looked at me as if I were something special, someone important. How I told my dad I already loved him, before I really even knew him.
But that was so long ago. So much has changed for me, for us. And maybe our love wasn’t the lasting kind. Elena jumped off a train, risking her own life to save her father and to be with Kristoff. Everything must’ve been so hard, so dangerous, and yet she loved Kristoff so much, she risked everything for him. And Benjamin. Awkward, sweet Benjamin lost his family and he’s still broken, two years later. Daniel and I never had love like that. Things got a little hard; we drifted apart; Daniel left. And here we both are, not all that much worse for the wear.
“He gave me the picture he made of your mom,” Daniel finally says. “I have it. It’s in my trunk. I’ve been driving around with it all week, wanting to give it to you, wanting to talk to you about it.” He pauses, maybe waiting for me to say something else or suggest that maybe my father was right, that Daniel was an idiot to let me go, as I would’ve certainly said to him a few months ago. But I don’t say anything. I don’t really have anything more to say. “I’ll go get the painting,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”
As Daniel goes out to his car, I stand up and walk into the kitchen. I take the envelope with the silly flower stamps off the counter, slice it open, and pull out the divorce papers. I grab a pen and sign in the spots that are marked. When Daniel walks back inside, my father’s picture rolled up under his arm, I hold out the papers to him. “What’s this?” he asks, quickly followed by a flash of recognition on his face. “You don’t have to do this now. You can mail them.”
What stamps would I choose to send the papers back to him? I’m not sure exactly what’s right to signal the end of a marriage. Maybe flowers weren’t even the worst choice, as the end of our marriage is banal, ordinary, and not at all ugly, like these flower stamps themselves. “No,” I say. “Take them. I’m sorry it took me so long.”
He accepts the papers and hands me the painting. I unroll it, and a beautiful woman, who is most definitely not my mother, unfolds before me. My mom had olive skin, long brown curls, blue eyes, like me. This woman is green-eyed, with pale brown wavy hair that is nearly blonde. Their faces don’t look alike. I never would’ve mistaken her for my mother. “This isn’t my mom,” I say. “They were probably just copying a painting of some random woman in their art class.” I laugh a little.
“Well, I never met her,” Daniel says. I glance at the picture of her that’s sitting on the mantel of our—my—nonfunctioning fireplace. My favorite one. It’s black-and-white, a candid shot taken on the beach in Coronado. I’m about five years old and she’s holding on to me. That picture has sat on the mantel since the day Daniel and I moved in here together, but I guess he never paid close attention.
Daniel keeps talking; he’s apologizing for his mistake, but I’m not really listening to him anymore. Something catches my eye in the painting, the waves of the woman’s pale brown hair. It looks almost like . . . It can’t be.
I hold the painting up closer to the sunlight coming in through the front window to examine it. And it’s there; I’m not imagining it. The petals of the edelweiss unfold from the woman’s hair, hidden, secret, just the way they are on the stamp.
Austria, 1939
IN SEPTEMBER, the Nazis invaded Poland, and France and England declared war. When Kristoff heard the news from Josef, he felt oddly relieved. Because now there were other people fighting the Germans, real soldiers. Not just them.
“Maybe we can stop this,” Kristoff said to Elena, as they worked together in the workshop one morning in September. “The French and the British will defeat the Germans.” Despite Kristoff’s insistence that Robert and Elisa’s forged papers would be their last, they were currently working on two new sets of papers: one set for married friends of Josef’s cousins who’d heard about what they’d done through Robert, and the other for the Jewish friend of a student Schwann had met at Universität. And Josef had gotten fifty copies of Kristoff’s new edelweiss Stephensdom stamp printed, a bad sign that everyone but Kristoff planned to keep on forging many more papers.
In addition to the papers, Kristoff and Elena were also finishing up a new engraving plate for Herr Bergmann. He would be back any day for it, and Kristoff awoke each morning dreading his return.
“That’s wishful thinking, Kristoff,” Elena said, about his hopes for the rest of Europe to save Austria. She sighed. He knew his continual worry exhausted her. “And I told you, you don’t have to help with any of this if you don’t want to.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to.” He would like to see all the Jews get safely out of Austria. More, have all the Nazis gone, have Austria and the Fabers’ house be beautiful and full of light again. “I just don’t think Josef was wrong when he said that if we keep doing this, we’ll get caught. We’ll all be killed.”
Elena shook her head. “That was before your brilliant stamps.”
“But if a German soldier were to ever notice the edelweiss . . .” He remembered what Josef said to him. You would be killed if they found out. Kristoff took it to heart, in a literal way that gave him a perpetual ache in his chest.
“They won’t bother with the stamps,” Elena said, sounding so certain. He wanted to believe her.
“But you don’t know that. And you can’t fight the Germans if you’re dead,” he said. It was a futile argument, one they had often. Kristoff wanted to make a concrete escape plan for Elena, for both of them; Elena refused to even discuss it.
Elena put down the burin, and held out her hand to him. A peace offering. She didn’t want to fight. Outside it had turned to dusk, and the light in the workshop was growing dim. When they left the workshop at night they were no longer Elena and Kristoff, who tirelessly worked all day with the metal to help defeat the Germans in their own small way. They were just two people who loved each other. Who wanted to love each other for as long as they could.
Each time they finished forging papers and Kristoff thought he could try to convince Elena to go, Josef came to them with another request, each story sadder than the last, each person more desperate to get out of Austria. And there was no way Kristoff could say no. Instead he and Elena worked longer hours, worked later into the night, grew faster at making the papers. Each time when they were done Josef would get them printed and mail a silly letter that discussed the weather or the condition of the sheep this season on the Bauer farm, and then he would address it and put Kristoff’s edelweiss stamp in the corner. Josef would drop the letter in the post and Schwann would take the forged papers to Vienna, to Stephensdom to meet the recipien
ts there.
Kristoff often felt he was holding his breath, waiting for the Germans to come take them away, arrest them for their crimes. He considered asking Josef for the gun back, but the truth was he wasn’t sure what he would do with it, how to use it. And anyway, he was certain that he would lose in a gunfight.
One morning in October they awoke to the sounds of pounding on the front door, and Kristoff jumped up in bed, his heart nearly stopped. Germans.
Josef had told them just last week that he’d heard in Vienna that hundreds of Jews had been deported, rumored to have been sent to the Polish ghetto. Their work was even more important now, Josef had said. Or, Kristoff had thought, they were about to be caught.
The pounding came again, and Kristoff was sure. They had discovered his stamp.
Then he heard the sound of Josef’s voice, calling for Elena, and he rested on the edge of his bed for a moment, nearly collapsing with relief.
When Elena heard Josef call her name, she hastily pulled on Kristoff’s long shirt, and he threw on his pants before they ran downstairs to answer the door together.
Josef stepped inside, looked right at Elena, and she wrapped Kristoff’s shirt tighter around herself, as if suddenly she was embarrassed, too exposed. “What?” she demanded, sounding defensive.
“I got this in the post,” he said. He held a lettercard out; his hands were shaking, so unlike him, and Kristoff’s heart beat so fast, certain still they’d been exposed in some way, that it was all over. How fast could we run? he wondered. “It’s from your mother,” Josef said to Elena, his voice breaking a little.
“What?” Elena asked, taking it from him. “How?”
The Lost Letter Page 20
