The Storyteller

by Picoult, Jodi

  “Yeah, but there’s a whole process for the Japanese. Instead of grinding down the bone residue like we usually do, there’s a ritual. Family members pick up the bone fragments together with a special pair of chopsticks and put them into the urn.” He shrugs. “Besides, you need your beauty sleep. You’ve only got a few hours before it’s time to make the donuts again.”

  I draw the covers up to my chin. “Actually, I’m taking a few days off work,” I say, as if it were my idea all along. “Testing new recipes. Reevaluating stuff.”

  “How’s Mary going to keep her bakery open, if you’re here?”

  “I have a guy filling in for me,” I reply, again amazed at how smooth a lie feels in my throat, and how much of an aftertaste is left behind. “Clark. I think he’ll do all right. But it also means I get to live like a normal person, with normal hours. So, you know, maybe you’ll be able to stay the night. It would be really nice to fall asleep with you.”

  “You fall asleep with me all the time,” Adam points out.

  But it’s different. He waits until I’m out like a light, and then takes a shower and tiptoes out of the house. What I want is what other people take for granted: the chance to feel the night tighten around us like a noose. To ask, Did you set the alarm? To say: Remind me that we are running out of toothpaste. To have our time together not be so romantically charged but instead, just plain boring.

  I wind my arms around Adam and bury my face in the curve of his neck. “Wouldn’t it be fun to pretend we’re an old married couple?”

  He disengages himself from my embrace. “I don’t have to pretend,” he says, and he gets up from the bed and walks into the bathroom.

  As if I needed any reminder of that. I wait until I hear the shower running, and then I throw back the covers and wander into the kitchen. I pour myself a glass of orange juice and sit down at my laptop. On the screen is a spreadsheet I’d used to make a poolish when I first came home from the bakery. Just because I’m not working at Our Daily Bread doesn’t mean I can’t refine my recipes in my own home test kitchen.

  The poolish is fermenting on the counter—it’s got a few more hours to go before it’s usable, but the yeast has frothed at the top, like the head on a beer. I close out the spreadsheet and open YouTube in my browser.

  I am like many twenty-five-year-olds in this country, I imagine. My knowledge of World War II was shaped by high school history classes, my understanding of the Holocaust a combination of assigned readings: Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and Elie Wiesel’s Night. Even knowing that there was a personal connection to my grandmother—or maybe because of that—I tended to view the Holocaust in the abstract, the way I viewed slavery: a series of horrors that had happened a long time ago in a world markedly different from the one I lived in. Yes, those were bad times, but really, what did they have to do with me?

  I type “Nazi Concentration Camp” into the search bar, and my screen floods with thumbnail images: of Hitler’s pinched face, of a tangle of bodies in a pit, of a room crammed to the rafters with shoes. I pick a video that is a newsreel from 1945, after the liberation. As it loads, I read the comments underneath.

  THE HOLOCAUST WAS A HOAX. FUCK KIKES.

  FAKE SHIT HOLOCAUST WAS A JEWISH LIE.

  My uncle’s farm was there and the Red Cross praised the camp conditions. Read the report.

  FU you Nazi pig. Stop whining and start admitting.

  I guess the witnesses were liars too?

  This is still happening all over the world while we look the other way like the Germans did 70 years ago. We have learned nothing.

  I click somewhere into the middle of the fifty-seven-minute film. I have no idea what camp I am watching, but I see bodies stacked outside the crematoria, so horrific that it’s virtually impossible to believe this wasn’t just a Hollywood rendering, that these are real people I am seeing, with their bones protruding so clearly you could map the skeleton beneath the skin; that the face with the eye blown out of it belonged to someone who had a wife, a family, another life. Here are the body disposal facilities, the voice-over tells me. Ovens capable of burning more than a hundred bodies per day. Here are the litters, used to slide a body inside, the way I use a peel to slip an artisanal loaf into my wood-fired oven. I see a fleeting image of a skeleton inside the cavern of one of the ovens; another of a pile of bone fragments. I see the plaque of the proud furnace manufacturers: Topf & Söhne.

  I think of Adam’s clients, picking the bones of their beloved from the ash.

  Then I think of my grandmother and I feel like I’m going to be sick.

  I want to close my computer, but I cannot make myself do it. Instead I watch parades of Germans in their Sunday finest being led into the camps, smiling as if they are on holiday. Their faces change, darkening, some even crying, as they are led on the tour of the facility. I watch Weimar businessmen in suits being pressed into service to relocate and rebury the dead.

  These were the people who might have known what was going on but didn’t admit it to themselves. Or who turned a blind eye, so that they wouldn’t have to get involved. The kind of person I’d be if I ignored what Josef has told me.

  “So,” Adam says, walking into the kitchen with his hair still damp from the shower and his tie already knotted. He starts to rub my shoulders. “Same time Wednesday?”

  I slam my laptop shut.

  “Maybe,” I hear myself reply, “we should take a break.”

  He looks at me. “A break?”

  “Yeah. I need some time alone, I think.”

  “Didn’t you ask me five minutes ago to act like we were married?”

  “And didn’t you tell me five minutes ago you already are?”

  I consider what Mary said, about how being with Adam might bother me more than I want to admit. I think about being the kind of person who stands up for what she believes in, instead of denying what’s right before her eyes.

  Adam looks stunned, but he quickly smooths away the surprise. “Take as much time as you need, baby.” He kisses me so gently that it feels like a promise, like a prayer. “Just remember,” he whispers. “No one else will ever love you like I do.”

  It strikes me, as Adam leaves, that his words could be taken as a vow, or as a threat.

  I suddenly remember a girl in my World Religion class in college, a foreign student from Osaka. When we were covering Buddhism, she talked about corruption: how much money her family had to pay a priest for her dead grandfather’s kaimyo, a special name given to the deceased that he would take with him to Heaven. The more you paid, the more characters were in your posthumous name, and the more prestige your family accrued. Do you think that matters in the Buddhist afterlife? the professor had asked.

  Probably not, the girl had said. But it keeps you from coming back to this world every time your name is called.

  In retrospect, I realize I should have shared this anecdote with Adam.

  Anonymity, I guess, always comes at a price.

  • • •

  When the phone rings, I am having a nightmare. Mary is standing behind me in the kitchen, telling me I am not working fast enough. But even though I am shaping loaves and slipping them into the oven so quickly that I have blisters on my fingers and blood baked into the dough, every time I take out a finished loaf there are only bones, bleached white as the sails of a ship. It’s about time, Mary scolds, and before I can stop her she picks one up with chopsticks, and bites down hard, breaking all of her teeth into tiny pearls that fall to the floor and roll beneath my shoes.

  I am in such a deep sleep, in fact, that even though I reach for the receiver and say hello, I drop it and it rolls underneath my bed.

  “Sorry,” I say, after I retrieve it. “Hello?”

  “Sage Singer?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “This is Leo Stein.”

  I sit up in bed, suddenly awake. “I’m sorry.”

  “You said that already . . . Did I . . . You sound like I woke you up.
”

  “Well. Yeah.”

  “Then I’m the one who should be apologizing. I figured since it was eleven o’clock—”

  “I’m a baker,” I interrupt. “I work at night and sleep during the day.”

  “You can call me back at a more convenient time—”

  “Just tell me,” I say. “What did you find out?”

  “Nothing,” Leo Stein replies. “There are absolutely no records in the SS membership registry for Josef Weber.”

  “Then there’s been a mistake. Did you try spelling it differently?”

  “My historian is very thorough, Ms. Singer. I’m sorry, but I think you might have misunderstood what he was telling you.”

  “I didn’t.” I push my hair out of my face. “You’re the one who said the records aren’t complete. Isn’t it possible that you just haven’t found the right one yet?”

  “It’s possible, but without that, we really can’t do anything else.”

  “Will you keep looking?”

  I can hear the hesitation in his voice, the understanding that I am asking him to find an invisible needle in a haystack. “I don’t know how to stop,” Leo says. “We’ll run checks in two Berlin records centers and our own databases. But the bottom line is if there’s no valid information to run with—”

  “Give me till lunchtime,” I beg.

  • • •

  In the end, it is the way I met Josef—at a grief group—that makes me wonder if Leo Stein is right, if Josef is lying. After all, he lived with Marta for fifty-two years. That’s a damn long time to keep a secret.

  It is pouring when I reach his house, and I don’t have an umbrella. I’m drenched after running to the covered porch, where Eva barks for nearly half a minute before Josef comes to the door. I am seeing double—not a blurriness of vision but a superimposition of this old man with a younger, stronger one dressed in the uniform of the soldiers I have seen on YouTube. “Your wife,” I say. “Did she know you’re a Nazi?”

  Josef opens the door wider. “Come in. This is not a conversation for the street.”

  I follow him into his living room, where the chess game we were playing days earlier remains, unicorns and dragons frozen at my last move. “I never told her,” Josef admits.

  “That’s impossible. She would have wanted to know where you were during the war.”

  “I said I was sent by my parents to study at university in England. Marta never questioned it. You would be surprised at the lengths you will go to to believe the best about someone if you truly love him,” Josef says.

  That, of course, makes me think of Adam. “It must be hard, Josef,” I say coolly. “To not get tangled up in your lies.”

  My words land like blows; Josef shrinks back in his chair. “This is the reason I told you the truth.”

  “But . . . you didn’t, did you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I can’t very well tell him that the reason I know he’s been lying is that a Nazi hunter from the Department of Justice checked out his false story. “It just doesn’t add up. A wife who never stumbled over the truth, not in fifty-two years. A history of being a monster, without any proof. Of course the biggest inconsistency of all is why, after over sixty-five years of keeping a secret, you’d blow your own cover.”

  “I told you. I want to die.”

  “Why now?”

  “Because I have no one to live for,” Josef says. “Marta was an angel. She saw good in me when I couldn’t even look in a mirror. I so badly wanted to be the man she thought she had married, that I became him. If she knew what I had done—”

  “She would have killed you?”

  “No,” Josef says. “She would have killed herself. I did not care about what happened to me, but I couldn’t stand thinking of what it would be like for her, to know she had been touched by hands that would never truly be clean.” He looks at me. “I know she is in Heaven now. I promised myself that I would be who she wanted me to be until she was gone. And now that this is the case, I have come to you.” Josef folds his hands between his knees. “Dare I hope this means you are considering my request?”

  He speaks formally, as if he has asked me to dance with him at a mixer. As if this is a business proposition.

  But I string him along. “You understand how selfish you’re being, right? You want me to risk getting arrested. Basically, I give up the rest of my life, just so you can leave yours.”

  “This is not the case. No one is going to think twice if an old man turns up dead.”

  “Murder isn’t legal, in case you’ve forgotten in the past sixty-eight years.”

  “Ah, but you see, this is why I have been waiting for someone like you. If you do it, it’s not murder, it is mercy.” He meets my gaze. “You see, before you help me die, Sage, I need one more favor from you. I ask you to forgive me first.”

  “Forgive you?”

  “For the things I did back then.”

  “I am not the one you should be asking forgiveness from.”

  “No,” he agrees. “But they are all dead.”

  Slowly, the cogs turn, until the picture lines up clearly for me. Now I see why he turned to me for his grand confession. Josef does not know about my grandmother; however, I am the closest thing to a Jew he can find in this town. It is, I realize, like the victim’s family in a death row case. Do they have the right to seek justice? My great-grandparents had died at the hands of Nazis. Did that make me, by proxy, the next best thing?

  I hear Leo’s voice, an echo in my mind. I don’t know how to stop. Is his work vengeance? Or justice? There is the finest line between the two, and when I try to focus on it, it becomes less and less clear.

  Repentance might bring peace to the killer, but what about the ones who’ve been killed? I may not consider myself a Jew, but do I still have responsibility to the relatives of mine who were religious, and who were murdered for it?

  Josef confided in me because he considers me a friend. Because he trusts me. But if Josef’s claims are legitimate, the man I befriended—and trusted—is a shadow puppet, a figment of the imagination. A man who has deceived thousands of people.

  It makes me feel dirty, as if I should have been a stronger judge of character.

  In that moment I make myself a promise: I will find out if Josef Weber was an SS soldier. Yet if he does turn out to be a Nazi, I will not kill him the way he wants. Instead, I will betray him the way he betrayed others. I will pump him for information and feed it back to Leo Stein so Josef will die somewhere in a prison cell.

  But he doesn’t have to know that.

  “I can’t forgive you,” I say evenly, “if I don’t know what you did. Before I agree to anything, you’re going to have to give me some actual proof of your past.”

  The relief that floods Josef’s features is palpable, almost painful. His eyes fill with tears. “The photograph—”

  “Means nothing. For all I know it’s not even you. Or it came from eBay.”

  “I understand.” Josef looks up at me. “So the first thing you will need to know,” he says, “is my real name.”

  • • •

  If Josef thinks it is strange when I jump up moments later and ask to use his bathroom, he doesn’t say so. Instead he directs me down the hall to a small powder room that has wallpaper blooming with cabbage roses and a little dish of decorative soaps still in their plastic wrap.

  I run the water in the sink, and then take my cell phone out of my pocket.

  Leo Stein answers on the first ring.

  “His name isn’t Josef Weber,” I say breathlessly.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me, Sage Singer.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Because I’m hiding in Josef’s bathroom,” I say.

  “I thought his name wasn’t Josef . . .”

  “It’s not. It’s Reiner Hartmann. With two n’s at the end. And I have a birth date for him, too. April twentieth, 1918.”

  Same as
the Führer, he had said.

  “That would make him ninety-five,” Leo says, doing the math.

  “I thought you said it’s never too late to go after them.”

  “It’s not. Ninety-five is better than dead. But how do you know he’s telling you the truth?”

  “I don’t,” I say. “But you will. Stick it in a database and see what happens.”

  “It’s not quite that easy—”

  “It can’t be that hard. Where’s your historian? Ask her to do it.”

  “Ms. Singer—”

  “Look, I’m hiding in an old man’s bathroom. You told me that with a name and a birth date records are easier to find.”

  He sighs. “Let me see what I can do.”

  While I am waiting I flush the toilet. Twice. I am sure that Josef or Reiner or whatever he wants to be called now is wondering if I’ve fallen in; or maybe he thinks I’m taking a sponge bath in the sink.

  After about ten minutes, I hear Leo’s voice. “Reiner Hartmann was a member of the Nazi Party,” he says.

  I feel oddly euphoric, knowing that there’s been a hit, and also leaden, because it means that the man on the other side of that door was involved in mass murders. I let out the breath I’ve been holding. “So I was right.”

  “Just because his name turned up in the Berlin Document Center doesn’t mean he’s a legal slam dunk,” Leo says. “This is just the beginning.”

  “What happens next?”

  “That depends,” Leo replies. “What more can you find out?”

  It felt like a blade along the side of my neck.

  I heard the rip of my own skin; felt the blood, sticky and hot, dripping down my chest. Again he dove toward me, snapping my vocal cords. All I could do was wait for the razor of his teeth, know that it was coming again.

  I had heard the stories of upiory who rose from the dead and ate through their linen shrouds in search of the blood that would sustain them, because they no longer had any of their own. They were insatiable. I had heard the stories, and now I knew they were true.

  This was no piercing of fangs, no draining. He gorged on me and brought me to the edge of death, the brink he skated on for eternity. So this was what Hell was like: a slow, silent scream. No strength to move, no voice to speak. Just my other senses heightened: touch and smell and sound, as he shredded my flesh. He banged my head against the ground: once, twice. My eyes rolled back; darkness dropped like a guillotine . . .