The next afternoon we get to the Neue Synagogue just before three. Gram says she wanted to see it again anyway, that she remembers being here as a little girl with her grandparents. “Someone had a bar mitzvah,” she says. “A distant cousin.” She says it like the details are just coming back to her.
But once we walk inside, we realize that the building is in the process of being restored. It doesn’t appear to be a place of worship at the moment, only a construction site. “I’ll ask for the rabbi,” Gram says, and she approaches one of the construction workers, and speaks to him confidently in German. He laughs, shakes his head, says something back.
“What did he say?” I ask.
She frowns. “He says all the rabbis are in the West. The West has the rabbis. The East only has the cemeteries.”
We walk back outside. Gram examines the plaque that Benjamin and I looked at yesterday. “They can’t be meeting here,” I say to Benjamin.
“No,” Benjamin agrees.
“Maybe we misunderstood the picture?”
Benjamin turns and scans the street. A girl rides by on a bike, but she’s young, a teenager, maybe on her way home from school. Too young to be involved in a subversive women’s movement, and she rides past the synagogue anyway. She stops her bike across the street, and goes into what appears to be a café. “Over there,” Benjamin says, at the same time the thought occurs to me. “I bet they’re meeting in there.”
The inside of the café is crowded, and Gram offers to order for us in German while Benjamin scouts a table in the corner and goes to save it. I wait in the long line with Gram. “They didn’t have coffee here in the East, for many years,” Gram says to me. “They drank chicory instead.”
“No coffee?” It is a small thing, but it seems a larger symbol for how bad it must have been for the people living here.
There’s coffee now, thankfully, and I carry the cups to our table for me and Benjamin while Gram holds on to her mug of tea. We sit down, drink our drinks, look around.
“This is all very exciting,” Gram says, blowing on her tea, then taking a sip. “I haven’t had such an adventure since . . . Oh, I can’t even remember when.” She contemplates, takes another sip of her tea. “Maybe the sixties, when Gid and I went to Jerusalem.” I vaguely remember when Gram and Grandpa Gid went to Israel. I was maybe ten or eleven and they brought me back a Star of David necklace, with a pretty blue stone in the middle. It was, for many years, the fanciest piece of jewelry I owned. “Thank you two for letting me come along,” Gram says.
I squeeze her hand under the table, and Benjamin thanks her for coming with us, for translating with Herr Jacobs yesterday. Then he excuses himself to find a restroom.
“He’s wonderful,” Gram says, once he’s left the table. “I really like him.”
“Do you?” I smile a little and sip my coffee.
“He’s very real, very honest.” She keeps talking. “There’s no pretension, like with . . . well, you know.” I nod. She’s not wrong about him. “He’s such a nice man, too. And he likes you a lot, Katie.” I laugh a little. But I wonder if there’s any way she’s right? Benjamin is walking back toward our table. Gram notices, too, and doesn’t say any more.
“They’re in the back,” he says to me, a little breathless. “A whole table of them.”
“What? How do you know it’s them?”
Benjamin motions for me to come with him, and Gram offers to stay and hold our table. She winks at me as I stand up, but I pretend not to notice, and I follow Benjamin to the back of the café.
I see the table Benjamin is pointing toward, the group of women, their heads huddled together as they drink coffee. The sound of their laughter floats through the café. I’d been picturing this group of women as a severe bunch of communists, dressed in brown as drab as our hotel room, frowning as they got together to plan. But instead, they remind me oddly of Gram’s bridge club, having a friendly get-together over coffee.
“I don’t think—” I start to say, but Benjamin interrupts me by grabbing on to my hand. The feel of his fingers on mine, again, here, is jarring and I stop talking. He’s trying to get my attention, that’s all, but I think about what Gram just said. He likes you.
“It’s her,” Benjamin says. His voice comes out hoarse, raspy. He clears his throat. “The woman from your father’s painting.”
“That can’t be.” But I look at where he’s looking: the woman at the head of the table, her hair in long gray waves that fall against her shoulders, the unmistakable upturn of her wrinkled cheeks, the arch of her forehead.
I walk up to the table, and Benjamin follows behind me, still holding on to my hand. “Elena?” I say. All the women stop talking, turn, look at me. My heart is pounding. I start to sweat; it suddenly seems excessively hot in here.
The young woman whom I saw riding her bike speaks up. “You have wrong table,” she says in stilted English, and she frowns deeply.
“Elena Faber?” I say, a little louder this time.
“No one here with that name.” The young girl (maybe she is older than I first thought? twenty?) makes a shooing motion with her hand. I am a fly, or at the very least a stupid American tourist who has no business approaching their group.
The woman Benjamin spotted, the one I called Elena, stands. She is clearly in charge, and she says something to the group in German. I wish Gram were standing here so she could translate, but I judge it to be something along the lines of I will deal with the stupid American tourists because I catch the words amerikanischen Touristen.
“Ignorie sie, Amata!” one of the other women says to her.
“Amata . . . Amy?” I whisper to Benjamin, remembering what my dad told me, that his and Elena’s new names were Germanized versions of characters from Little Women. Benjamin laces his fingers tighter with mine and we hold on to each other. “Amy March?” I say, louder, and all the women stop talking, turn and look at me, with a new curiosity, a fascination. Then they look back at their leader. I am certain now that it is her. I am certain and yet I can’t believe it. It can’t be true. She’s here? She’s alive. The same artist, Herr Jacobs said. The same lines. Elena had known the stamp, the edelweiss drawing, as well as my father.
“Come on, we will talk outside,” she says in nearly perfect English. She walks toward the front of the café, and Benjamin and I follow her.
“If you are from the CIA, I already told them. I have nothing to say.” She walks briskly down Oranienburger Strasse, in the direction Benjamin and I walked yesterday when we went to the wall. The air is cooler out here, and I stop walking for a second to catch my breath, but she keeps going and I have to jog to keep up.
“We’re not from the CIA,” I say. “We’re not here to question you or hurt you. We’ve been looking for you.” She keeps walking briskly, and Benjamin and I are practically running. “Miriam has been looking for you,” I say.
She stops, spins on her heels, and looks at me, then Benjamin, then back at me. “Miriam?” Her face turns. Her toughness falls away for a moment, and she looks as though she might cry. “She’s alive?”
“Yes, she lives in Cardiff. Wales.” I leave out the part about the depressing Raintree, her broken hip. After all, she’d said it was only temporary and I’m hoping she’s long home and healed and back with Herbie by now.
“Oh,” Elena says. “Oh . . . all these years. My Miri . . .” There’s a bench just down the street, and she walks toward it, holds on to it for a moment as if she might fall if she doesn’t, and then she sits down. She pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her bag, and holds them toward Benjamin and me, a peace offering. We both decline, and she lights one for herself, slowly inhales, exhales. “Miri hired you to find me?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “We’ve been looking for you and we found Miriam, first. Last year.”
She takes a drag on her cigarette, then squashes it under her
boot and stands. She doesn’t trust us. She’s going to start running again. “The letter,” Benjamin says, tugging on my bag, and I pull it out.
“We have something that belongs to you,” I say. “We’ve been wanting to give it back to you.”
“I am an East German woman,” she says dryly. “I don’t have anything to pay you.”
“But you used to be an Austrian girl,” I say. “And we don’t want your money.” I hold out the letter, and she looks down at it. She gasps and turns white, as if I am holding a ghost.
“Where did you get this?” she says.
“My father,” I say. “Kristoff.”
Austria, 1939
I CLUTCHED THE LETTERS TIGHTLY in my hands, careful not to damage the stamps. It was snowing, and my toes were freezing, wet through the worn soles of my boots, but I kept walking through the woods toward town, shielding the letters under my coat to keep them dry. Only a few steps more, I kept telling myself. It was a lie, but I kept on walking.
Only a few steps more. Just a few more.
All I had to do was make it into town, drop the letters at the post on Wien Allee. All I had to do was mail these letters, and everything was going to be all right.
At the edge of the woods, I reached the clearing, and through the swirl of snowflakes, the pink-blue onset of dawn, I could see the remaining red-roofed buildings in the town up ahead.
Wien Allee. I was almost there.
The sudden cold butt of the gun against my temple surprised me. I didn’t even cry out before the man grabbed my arm, and the letters fell from my hands, onto the unblemished snow.
I was going to be killed, and I knew all of a sudden that I didn’t want to die. I did care about staying alive. I didn’t want to leave this earth and Austria and my mother and Kristoff. Not like this.
I struggled and out of the corner of my eye I could see the man holding the gun to my head. “Josef?”
He lowered the gun, stepped back, and went to pick up the letters.
“Josef, you scared me half to death. What are you doing?”
“I had to get your attention. Stop you from going into town. German soldiers are everywhere. They’re already at your house,” he said.
“So? They’ve probably just come to pick up Kristoff’s newest stamp plate.”
I’d left Kristoff at the house, sleeping, so peacefully. I’d kissed him on the cheek, whispered to him how much I loved him. He’d stirred a little. He’d felt my love, even in his sleep, but he hadn’t awoken.
Last night I’d promised him that we would leave for Bremen soon. I promised him that I wouldn’t do anything stupid. But I had no intention of going to America with him now, not when we were doing so much good work and when we finally knew where my mother was. Josef had been trying to convince me to get Kristoff out of the country for months. I was good enough to engrave the papers on my own. And we both knew Kristoff wasn’t cut out for the kind of work we were doing. Josef kept telling me the only way to save Kristoff was to let him go. He was right, I knew he was. But still. I hadn’t been able to do it just yet. I’d thought I’d deliver the letters this morning, go back to the house, and then get Kristoff to Bremen. I wanted to take him there myself, be certain he made it to safety, the way I had with Miriam.
“No,” Josef said sharply. “They’re on to us.” I shook my head. I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t. “I know what you did,” he said. “They do, too.”
“No one is going to notice a girl with a stack of mail, even a Jewish one. And Kristoff is a mess. He’s much too nervous to go to the post.”
“No,” Josef said. “Not these letters. The stamp. You sent one to your mother, didn’t you?”
Josef was right. I’d mailed a letter to my mother a few weeks ago with one of our stamps. Josef raised his gun, and for a second, I thought he might shoot me. “I . . . I didn’t,” I said, without conviction.
“Dammit, Elena, don’t lie to me. One was missing. I counted them last night. And I thought to myself, where could it have gone? What could Kristoff have possibly done with it? But then I realized, it wasn’t Kristoff. It was you.”
He was right. There was no use lying about it. “It was just one letter, one stamp,” I admitted. “And I didn’t write anything in the letter that the Germans could make any sense of. I just quoted my father’s favorite book about the edelweiss. That was all. But she’ll know. She’ll look at the stamp and read my words, and she’ll know we’re all safe.”
“We’re done. The second that letter hit the camp and the German censors looked at it they noticed that stamp. They’ve come for Kristoff already, and they’ll be coming for us, too.” Josef was trying hard not to raise his voice, but his face turned an alarming shade of red.
“No.” I shook my head. “It was just one letter. Just one stamp,” I repeated meekly.
“Come on,” Josef said. “Schwann is at my house. He can drive us. The Germans might not know I’m involved yet. So we might be able to get out. But we have to go. Now.” Josef grabbed on to my arm and pulled me toward him, not all that gently.
“I can’t leave Kristoff.” I yanked out of his grasp and began walking quickly back toward home. I couldn’t leave him like this. I couldn’t let the Germans take him, hurt him. I had to save him.
“Elena, stop or I’ll shoot you,” Josef said gruffly. I stopped walking, turned around, and he was pointing the gun straight at me again.
“You wouldn’t dare.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest, defiant. Josef had known me my whole life. We’d practically grown up together. But if anyone had it in him to shoot me, regardless, it would be him.
“If I have to shoot you in the arm to save your life, so help me God I will.” He said it so sternly, so forcefully. I believed he would.
I tried to judge how fast I could run, toward the house. Toward Kristoff. If I could outrun Josef, Josef’s gun . . .
“Elena,” Josef said. “Don’t be stupid. The Germans might not kill Kristoff, but they will definitely kill you if you go back there now.”
I was certain Josef was wrong; they would kill Kristoff. I had the sudden image of Kristoff, my beautiful Kristoff, his tall lean body, torn apart by a bullet hole, blood pouring from his chest. He was all alone. He would die all alone. And it was my fault. I wanted to stop them, to save him, but if the Germans were already at the house, then it was too late. And going back would be suicide for me. I let out a cry that I muffled into the sleeve of my coat.
“Come on,” Josef said more gently. He lowered the gun and put a hand on my shoulder. “What would Kristoff want you to do? He would want you to save yourself.”
Josef was right. I knew he was. It sunk into my bones, a cold chill that would not leave me for a very long time.
Josef hooked the gun in his waistband and held on to my arm. I walked with him through the woods, to his house. I got into the car with him and Schwann and we drove away, abandoned our home.
Germany, 1990
THAT WAS THE LAST MORNING I ever saw Kristoff,” Elena says. “A few weeks later Josef and I went back to Grotsburg at my insistence, and everything was gone. My family’s house, his family’s farm . . . It was all burned to the ground.” She pulls another cigarette out of her bag and lights it with shaking hands.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “My father didn’t say anything about the Germans coming for him that morning. He said he found a letter in the snow at the edge of the woods that he thought you’d dropped when you didn’t come back. He thought you were taken by the Germans.”
She takes a drag on her cigarette and looks off, toward the direction of the wall.
“Did Josef lie about seeing the Germans at your house that morning?” Benjamin asks.
“Yes,” Elena says after a moment, and another drag on her cigarette. “If Kristoff is still alive, as you say . . . then I suppose he must have.” I would expe
ct more of a reaction from her, this woman my father described as so fearless, this woman still fighting for peace in Germany, all these years later. But she already seems resigned to this conclusion that Josef lied to her. Why isn’t she angrier?
“What happened with the rest of your letters, your stamps?” Benjamin asks her.
“Josef and I mailed them in Vienna, all except the one we accidentally left behind in the snow in Grotsburg. But we got all the papers we’d made to the proper people with a little finagling. Not too long after that the British SOE came to us, and then Josef and I worked with them for a few years. We helped them with some of their stamps, distributed propaganda within Germany.” I remember the stamps Dr. Grimes showed us in his textbook. Did she have a hand in those? “And then the war was over,” she says. “And Josef and I settled in Berlin.”
“Together?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “At first we were just working together, as we always had. But then the years passed, and I believed Kristoff to be dead. And I began to see Josef differently.”
That’s why she hadn’t reacted as I’d expected a few minutes ago. She fell in love with Josef. She moved on. The way my father did when he fell in love with my mother. I want to be angry that Josef lied to her, that they left my father behind, but he probably saved my father’s life and maybe Elena’s, too. If my father hadn’t thought Elena was dead he never would’ve left Austria, come to America to look for Frederick, or married my mother. I wouldn’t be sitting here now. The enormity of all of it hits me, of the way these tiniest movements and choices so very long ago have decided so much about my own life. I sit down on the bench, next to Elena.
“Things were good for a little while. We were happy,” Elena says. “And then one day the wall went up in Berlin, just like that. We were in the West for a party one day, and then the next day there was no going back.” She grinds her second cigarette under her boot and then she doesn’t know what to do with her empty hands. She twists her fingers together a little. “Josef and I were doing everything we could to get the wall down. But Josef was arrested in the seventies for ‘spreading subversive propaganda.’ The Stasi carted him off, and he died in Hohenschönhausen a few years later. It was a terrible East German prison, worse than Auschwitz, some said. The GDR denied it ever existed. You won’t find it on any maps. But that’s where they took him, where he died. I am certain.”
The Lost Letter Page 24
