“Read it,” Josef said. Kristoff peered over her shoulder and saw the lettercard said Konzentrationslager Mauthausen at the top. Underneath that were typed instructions for communicating and corresponding with the prisoner. The prisoner? But Mrs. Faber had done nothing wrong other than living her life, being Jewish in Austria. The right side of the lettercard was addressed to Josef, and it was franked with one of Kristoff’s very own Stephensdom stamps—the authentic German-sponsored ones.
“The stamp,” he said, and he felt overwhelmed with despair to think that it had been used by Mrs. Faber, like this, as a prisoner.
Elena turned the card over. On the back there was a note to Josef, and Elena traced the letters, as if by tracing her mother’s handwriting she could feel her, imagine her again as real, breathing. She read the words out loud: “Dear Josef, I am writing to ask you about my girls. I am well and a good worker. I am eating and the weather is not too cold yet. My daily spirits are good. But I think and pray all day every day about my girls, that they are safe. Please tell me that they are. Please write me back when you get this. Yours, Minna Faber.”
Elena held the lettercard to her chest, inhaled deeply. Her mother was alive, and she was all right, for now. “I’ll write her today,” Elena said.
“You can’t,” Josef said. “They censor all the mail and the Germans think you’re gone. You can’t write her.”
“But I have to,” Elena exclaimed. “I have to let Mother know that Miri is in England, and that Father is alive and in America, and that I’m here. I’m still fighting for her. For Austria.”
She looked to Kristoff for support, but he agreed with Josef. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Josef is right.”
“I’ll write her,” Josef said. “I’ll tell her you and Miri left for London. That you’re both safe.”
“But that’s a lie! And what about Father? She thinks he’s dead.”
“It’s better for all of us, better for her if the truth about your father stays our secret for now. The Germans believe him to be dead,” Josef said. “It’s better they keep on believing that.”
Josef put his arm around her shoulders in a way that bothered Kristoff, but he didn’t move. “Look,” Josef said. “She’s alive. She says she is strong. That is all good news.”
“Yes,” Elena tentatively agreed.
“I’ll write her back today and tell her not to worry, to keep herself safe,” Josef said. “That is the most important thing, for all of us. Staying safe.”
For once, Kristoff agreed with him.
“Tell me a story about our future,” Elena said to Kristoff a few nights later. They lay in his bed, in the darkness. Elena’s naked thigh tangled around his; her skin felt cold, and he pulled the blanket tighter around them both. The air was getting chillier in the attic now that it was fall.
“Well,” Kristoff said. “We’ll go to America, find your father. We’ll get a little house. Smaller than this one, maybe, but it will be all our own.”
“Near the water,” Elena said, her voice soft, dreamy. “I’ve always wanted to be near water.”
“Near the water.” Kristoff did not know the geography of America well enough, but he vowed to study a map the next day to find a location Elena would love. He kissed the top of her head, inhaling her apricot hair.
Elena curled into him and her body relaxed a little. “We’ll be reunited with Mother and Miri, too. And then we’ll have a baby, a little girl,” she said. “Or maybe two. A girl and a boy.”
“A girl and a boy,” Kristoff murmured, trying to imagine what it would be like not to feel this constant weight in his stomach. This continual overwhelming dread. He tried to imagine feeling light, free. He tried to picture Elena the same, as a mother, with their children. And what would their children look like? He saw them both with Elena’s pear eyes and light brown waves. Two beautiful little people running amidst the skim of the sea, throwing shiny pebbles into the waves. Elena’s laughter would echo in the rush of the water.
Neither one of them said anything else for a while, both lost in their own dreams. Kristoff realized he had never wanted anything more than he wanted this vision he’d said out loud for Elena.
“I want you to love someone else,” Elena finally said, her voice lolling, half asleep. “If something happens to me, you’ll have all of that with someone else.”
“I’ll never love anyone else,” Kristoff said. “I don’t want to. I only want it with you.”
But Elena didn’t say anything more. Her breathing evened. After nights of staying up late, working, she was finally sound asleep.
Los Angeles, 1989
IF BENJAMIN’S RIGHT, that it can’t be a coincidence that my father has this stamp in his collection, then he must’ve known about Gram and Grandpa Gid’s connection to Frederick Faber, somehow. And it must be something still ingrained in his memory. A piece of the past that comes through the sieve, even as so much else falls away. Why else would he have put the edelweiss in his own artwork?
I’m driving to the Willows, armed with the picture Daniel brought me, the unfamiliar woman with the edelweiss hidden in her hair. I’m hoping my father will tell me something today. I’m hoping that maybe he holds the key, somewhere deep in his mind, the knowledge of what happened to Kristoff and Elena.
“Oh good, you got it.” Sally points to the picture under my arm when I walk in. “I gave it to your husband when he was here last week.”
“Ex-husband,” I say. It feels freeing to tell the truth, and Karen was right, I do feel better now that it’s final.
Sally only acknowledges my correction with a nod and doesn’t ask me any more about it. Really, why would she? “Ted’s pretty good this morning,” she says instead. I exhale, shaking off some of the nervousness I’d felt on the drive over here. It feels crazy to always be so nervous coming to see him, my own dad. But I don’t know that I’ll ever get over the uncertainty of never knowing how terribly our visit might go. “Oh.” I realize Sally is still talking. “I have half a dozen more of those if you want them, too?” She points again to the picture I’m holding.
“My dad’s drawings?”
She nods. “They’re all the same, though. Every time he’s been going to art class lately he draws your mom,” she says. “It’s really very sweet.”
“This isn’t my mom.”
“Really? Oh . . . I. Well, that’s why I saved them all for you.”
“Why did you think it was my mom?” I ask, curious. It’s strange that she and Daniel both had the same incorrect reaction to the picture.
She hesitates for a minute. “He just kept telling me that he was drawing ‘his love.’ I just assumed . . . But maybe . . .” She stammers a little like she’s dug herself into a hole and she’s not sure how to get out of it. She smiles sadly at me. “You should go on back,” she says. “I’ll get the other pictures out of the storage closet and you can decide if you want them before you leave.”
As I walk down the hallway toward his room, I look again at the picture I’m carrying. His love. Is he really so far gone that he can’t remember my mother’s face? I’m kind of heartbroken that it’s just me and Gram keeping her alive, with our own foggy memories of her. Or is it possible that my father, this man I’ve always loved, always respected and trusted, had an affair? Loved an entirely different woman?
“Kate the Great!” He spies me in the doorway. His voice is boisterous. The man I’ve known forever. He’s still here.
“Hi, Dad.” I try to force some cheer as I walk into his room, but my voice comes out flat, like the cardboard Christmas ornaments hanging in the hallway just outside his room.
“What’s wrong, honey?” he asks. I want to tell him everything. In this short moment where he seems to be himself I want to tell him the entire story of the last few months of my life: Daniel leaving and all the things Benjamin and I discovered. For some reason, most
of all I want to tell him about the color of the bricks at Oxford, the way the air smelled like mud, and the way Benjamin has become as attached to the stamp and its story as I have.
But I simplify. “Daniel and I got divorced,” I say.
He nods. This news doesn’t surprise him. I try to judge whether Daniel told him when he was here (and whether he would actually remember this a week later) or whether he just always thought this would happen. That it was inevitable. “You’re okay?” he finally says.
“I think so,” I answer truthfully. “Maybe I’m just meant to be alone.”
My father puts his hand on my shoulder, and I realize this is the most real conversation we’ve had in months. I want to savor it, breathe it in, stretch it out and make it last for days.
“You know, honey,” he says, “you’ll find someone else.” I shrug. “There’s not just one true love for every person. I never believed that. You can fall in love, and then that ends. And then you can fall in love all over again, with someone new.”
“Like you did with Mom?” I unravel the picture from under my arm and push it toward him. “Your love?” I point to the woman he drew. “You fell out of love with Mom once, and in love with her?”
He frowns, reaches his finger out, and traces the woman’s face on his painting. “This was a long time ago,” he finally says. “There are things you never knew about me. Things that happened long before you.”
I’m trying to process what he’s saying, and it all feels so obvious, and yet so unexpected. It never really occurred to me to consider a life of his, a love of his, before me, before my mom. That he was once a person other than my dad. A long time ago. No wonder he has been reliving it lately as his short-term memories have begun to fade away. As his disease progresses, he’s moving back into the past, living there. “What things?” I ask him. I want to know his stories while he still grasps them. I want to understand him before he’s completely gone. It was why I took the stamps to be appraised in the first place. I’m just not ready to let him go yet.
“There are things you don’t know about me, Rissa,” he says, his voice breaking a little on my mother’s name. I don’t correct him, because I want to listen, want to know what he’s remembering. “I was a different person once,” he says.
Gram told me that she never knew Frederick Faber, she only knew Charlie. He was a different person here, she said.
“And you can’t be mad about that.” Was she mad? Did he tell my mother about this other woman once, and she got upset?
“I’m not mad,” I say. My father’s fingers linger on the woman’s hair. He traces every line, every detail, the petals I’d noticed last night. “An edelweiss?” I say tentatively.
“Proof of unusual daring,” my father says.
Proof of unusual daring, my father used to say, Miriam had told me and Benjamin in her depressing room in Raintree. “What did you say?” I ask him.
He attempts to clarify: “Proof that I loved her.”
Elena loved Kristoff, Miriam had said. And the only woman Kristoff ever noticed was Elena . . . The stamp could’ve been Kristoff’s.
It can’t be a coincidence, Benjamin had insisted last night.
I look at him again, this man I’ve known my entire life. My father. Ted. What if everything I thought I knew about his past, before me, was wrong? How old was he in 1939? I try to do the math quickly in my head. Twenty. Twenty-one? He stares at his picture with longing, with loss, with . . . love? I was a different person once. And then I don’t see my father at all.
“Kristoff?” The name escapes me with disbelief, even as I say it. I don’t honestly expect any reaction. My father was born in Germany, Bremen, Gram thought. My father was a history teacher who collects stamps, not engraves them.
But he looks up, meets my eyes, and smiles a little, as if he’s been waiting for me to say it forever.
Austria, 1939
BY THE BEGINNING OF NOVEMBER, Elena and I had forged nearly twenty sets of papers. When Josef brought our most recent six to the workshop after being printed, I admired our work.
Parts of Poland had just been annexed by Germany, and everything felt like it was slipping away. We were losing ground. The French and British had not stopped Hitler as I’d hoped. Elena and I were working harder, working faster. I knew it would all come crashing down on us; we’d be captured, sent to a camp, murdered. I was always waiting for it. Knowing it was coming. Though maybe I didn’t fully believe it. Maybe that was why I kept doing the work, kept going to bed every night and waking up each day and making papers, all side by side with Elena. Or maybe it was just that I loved her so much, I didn’t know how to leave her, how to let her go, how to save her.
“And I have these for you, too.” Josef reached into his satchel that night, and he handed me the papers I’d asked him to print for me, for us. Elena’s papers and mine. Amata Marsch’s and Theodor Laurenz’s papers. Amy and Laurie would be together, just like in Elena’s favorite book.
“What’s this?” Elena plucked them from my hands. “Kristoff?” She turned to me and scowled. “I’m not—”
“I know,” I said. “I just want to be ready. In case we have to leave quickly.” The truth was, I planned to convince her later, when we were alone, that we needed to go as soon as possible. Her mother was okay, but also out of our reach. She’d said in her letter that more than anything she wished for her girls’ safety, and I hoped her words would be enough for me to convince Elena that it was time for us to let go, to leave Austria.
“Elena, he’s not wrong,” Josef said. “We have been playing a game, winning for a while. But eventually the Germans will notice the stamp, they’ll come for Kristoff.”
Elena sat down on the stool and looked up at me, offering a small sigh, then a nod. It was too easy, the way she’d agreed to leave on the Kindertransport that day in the woods, what felt like ages ago now. I didn’t believe we’d changed her mind that fast, but I didn’t want to discuss it any more in front of Josef. I would talk to her later, when we were alone.
Josef put down his satchel and pulled our forged stamps from their hiding spot in the floor, to take out what he needed for six more letters. He pulled out the stamps, looked them over, frowned. “What is it?” I asked him, wondering if he noticed some imperfection in the stamps.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
“Are you sure?” I asked him. “Is there something wrong with them?” Those stamps. It was the first time, the only time, I felt pride in a stamp I made. It belonged so much to both of us. Me and Elena. That was our beautiful creation.
“No. There’s nothing wrong with them.” He pulled out the six he needed and put the rest back into the hiding space in the floor.
We planned to mail the six new letters out at separate times, sorted in among other regular mail, lest Josef look too suspicious carrying a pile of letters all with fake stamps into the post. Josef wanted him, Schwann, and me to each take two letters at separate times.
“I’ll take one, too,” Elena said. “Kristoff and I will split up.”
“No,” I said. As far as the Germans knew, Elena was gone. And even if they weren’t to recognize her, I didn’t like the idea of her going into town all alone.
“Jews are still allowed to mail letters,” Elena said in a huff. “Last I checked.”
Jews had lost so much; everything. They were being evacuated, isolated, deported, put into work camps. They had a curfew. Though Elena was right Jews were still allowed to mail letters. Josef or Elena wouldn’t be arrested simply for that.
“It’s no more dangerous for her than it is for me,” Josef said. “And you are the engraver of this stamp, are you not? You might arouse the most suspicion.”
“It’s dangerous for all of us all of the time,” Elena said, matter-of-factly.
I nodded, but the danger was so palpable, the worry, the fear.
It left a particular metallic taste in my mouth.
We put our letters into the floor space for the night, and Elena left the workshop to go into the kitchen and prepare supper. Josef gathered his things to leave, too, but at the doorway he turned back, spoke to me: “You have your papers now. If anything happens to the rest of us you save yourself, all right, Kristoff?”
“I would never leave her,” I told him.
“Don’t be stupid,” Josef said.
Inside the kitchen, Elena had heated some broth and we ate it with stale bread, in silence. Josef’s words haunted me, and I wanted to get Elena to leave with me, now. “I have almost enough reichsmarks saved to buy tickets to America for both of us,” I said to her as we did the dishes in the kitchen. “We should talk about a plan to leave as soon as possible. It’s what your mother wants for you. You read what she wrote.”
“Okay,” she said. “But let’s talk about it more in the morning. I’m tired.” She put the last dish down, turned toward me, and reached her hand out for mine.
I took her hand. “I know what you’re doing,” I said. She shook her head. “Don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me what I want to hear and then do something stupid on your own.” Stupid, the same word Josef had used.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid.” She held my gaze, unflinching, so for a second, I almost believed her. “I promise. Kristoff,” her voice softened. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said.
She tugged on my hand, and we went up the stairs together, to the attic.
The air was frigid, but that didn’t stop Elena from taking off her clothes. Nothing frightened her. Not even the bitter almost-winter chill.
She slipped into bed with me, the way she had so many nights, and she kissed me, almost forcefully. I ran my hand against her back. Her bare skin felt icy, and she shivered a little as I touched her. “I’ll get another blanket,” I said.
The Lost Letter Page 21
