The Storyteller

by Picoult, Jodi

  Only a year had passed, but I was markedly different. When I left, I was still a child; now I was a man. I had pulled a screaming baby out of the arms of its mother. I had killed boys and girls my own age—and much younger, too. I had gotten used to taking what I wanted, when I wanted it. Being in the home of my parents chafed; I felt too big for the space, too full of electricity.

  My brother, on the other hand, saw our little home in Wewelsburg as a haven. He was at the top of his class at Gymnasium, expecting to head to university. He wanted to become a writer, still, and failing that, a professor. He did not seem to understand the simplest logistical fact: Germany was at war; nothing was as it had been. Any childhood dreams we had had were long gone, sacrificed to the greater good of our country.

  Franz had received a document stating that he needed to report to recruitment headquarters, but he had thrown it into the fire. As if that might be enough to keep the SS from finding him and forcing him to do it.

  “They don’t need people like me,” he had said at dinner.

  “They need every able-bodied man,” I had told him.

  My mother feared Franz being singled out as a political opponent of the Reich, instead of being recognized as indifferent. I did not blame her. I knew what happened to those who were political opponents of the Reich. They disappeared.

  The first day after I came home, I woke to find sunlight streaming through the windows and my mother sitting on the edge of my narrow bed. Franz was already gone to Gymnasium; I had slept till nearly noon.

  I drew the covers up to my chin. “Is something the matter?”

  My mother tilted her head. “I used to watch you sleep when you were a newborn,” she told me. “Your father thought I was crazy. But I believed that if I turned away, you might forget to take the next breath.”

  “I’m not a baby anymore,” I said.

  “No,” my mother agreed. “You’re not. But that doesn’t mean I don’t worry about you.” She bit her lip. “They are treating you well?”

  How could I explain to my own mother the things I had done? The Jews whose doors I had kicked in, so that we could seize radios, appliances, valuables, and anything else that might help the war effort? The elderly rabbi I had beaten for staying out to pray after curfew? The men, women, and children we herded up in the middle of the night and killed?

  How could I explain how I drank to drive away the images I had seen all day? That I would be so drunk that sometimes, the morning after, my hangover would be so violent I couldn’t stand. How I would sit on the edge of the pit with my legs dangling, my shoulder sore from the recoil of the gun, between groups. I’d smoke a cigarette and I’d wave the nose of the gun to direct the next line of victims so they knew where to lie down. Then I’d shoot. Precision wasn’t necessary, although we learned to be economical. Two bullets to the head was too much. The sheer force would almost tear it from the body.

  “What if you get hurt in Poland?” she asked.

  “I could get hurt in Germany,” I reminded her. “I’m careful, Mother.”

  She touched my arm. “I don’t want any Hartmann blood spilled.”

  I could tell, from the look on her face, that she was thinking about Franz. “He will be all right, too,” I told her. “There are special forces groups headed by men with doctorates. There’s room for scholars in the SS, too.”

  This made my mother brighten. “Maybe you can tell that to him.”

  She left, promising to make me a lunch fit for a king, since I had slept through breakfast. I showered and dressed in my civilian clothes, aware that even the way I carried myself now made me look like a soldier. By the time I was finished with the plate of food my mother had prepared for me, the house was quiet. My father was at work, my mother at her church volunteer group. Franz was in classes until two o’clock. I could have walked into town, but I didn’t feel like being sociable. So instead, I went back to the bedroom I had shared with my brother.

  On his desk was a small block of wood, roughly fashioned like a werewolf. Lined up along the blotter were two more, in various stages of precision. There was also a vampire, with its arms crossed and its head thrown back. In my absence my little brother had become quite the craftsman.

  I picked up the vampire and was testing the points of its sharp teeth against the ball of my thumb when I heard Franz’s voice. “What are you doing?”

  I whirled around to find him staring down at me. “Nothing.”

  “That’s mine,” he snapped, grabbing the carving from my hand.

  “Since when did you take up whittling?”

  “Since I decided I wanted to make a chess set,” Franz said. He turned away and began to search his bookshelves. Franz collected books the way some people collect coins or stamps. They overran his desk and his shelves; they were piled up beneath his bed. He never donated a book to a church rummage sale because he said he never knew if he’d want to read it again. I watched him pull a stack of horror stories from the narrow space between his desk and the wall, and I scanned the titles. The Wolf of Crimea. Blood Lust. The Haunting.

  “Why do you read that stuff?” I asked.

  “Why is it any of your business?” Franz emptied his book bag on the bed and replaced his school textbooks with the novels. “I’ll be back later. I have to walk Otto. The Muellers’ dog.”

  It didn’t surprise me to hear that Franz had taken on this odd job, just that the Muellers’ dog was still alive after all this time. “Are you planning on reading to him, too?”

  Franz didn’t reply, just hurried out of the house again. Shrugging, I settled on my narrow mattress with one of his books and cracked the spine. I read the same sentence three times before I heard the front door close, and then I went to the window and watched my brother cross the street.

  He strode right past the Muellers’ house.

  I walked downstairs and slipped outside, using my tactical military training to follow Franz for several minutes to a house I did not recognize. I didn’t know the residents, but it looked as if nobody was home. The shutters were drawn, the house in a state of disrepair. Yet when Franz knocked, the door opened to admit him.

  I waited for about fifteen minutes, hiding behind a hedge, until my brother reappeared, his book bag slack and empty against his hip.

  I stepped out from behind the shrubbery. “What are you up to, Franz?”

  He pushed past me. “I’m bringing books to a friend. As far as I know that’s not a crime.”

  “Then why would you tell me you’re walking a dog?”

  My brother didn’t say a word, but two bright spots of color appeared on his cheeks.

  “Who lives here that you don’t want me to know you are visiting?” I raised my brows, grinning, suddenly wondering if my little brother had become a ladies’ man in my absence. “Is it a girl? Has something other than poetic meter finally got you twitching?” Playfully, I cuffed him on the shoulder, and he ducked away from me.

  “Stop it,” he muttered.

  “Ah, poor Franz. If you’d asked me I would have told you to bring her chocolates, not books—”

  “It’s not a girl,” Franz blurted out. “It’s Artur Goldman. That’s who lives here.”

  It took me a moment to place the name. The Jew from Franz’s class at Gymnasium.

  Most of the Jews in our town had left. I didn’t know where they’d gone—to the big cities, maybe Berlin. I had not given any thought to it, really. But obviously, my brother had. “Jesus. Is this why you won’t join the SS? Because you’re a Jew-lover?”

  “Don’t be an idiot—”

  “I’m not the idiot here, Franz,” I said. “I’m not the one fraternizing with enemies of the Reich.”

  “He’s my friend. He misses school. So I bring him books. That’s it.”

  “You have a brother who is an SS officer candidate,” I said quietly. “You will stop fraternizing with a Jew.”

  “No,” my brother replied.

  No.

  No.

>   I could not remember the last time someone had told me that.

  I grabbed him by the throat. “How do you imagine it will look when the Gestapo finds out? You would ruin my career for this, after all I’ve done to protect you?” I released my hold on his neck, and he choked and jackknifed, coughing. “Be a man, Franz. For once in your miserable life, be a fucking man.”

  He stumbled away from me. “Who the hell have you turned into, Reiner?”

  I fumbled a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it, took a drag. “Perhaps I came on too strong,” I admitted, softening my voice. “Perhaps all you really need to hear from me is this.” I blew a ring of smoke. “Tell Artur you can no longer visit him. Or else I will make sure no one is there for you to visit.”

  The composure on my brother’s face cracked; he turned to me with an expression I had seen so often this past year I had grown cold to it. “Please,” Franz said. “You wouldn’t.”

  “If you really want to save your friend,” I told him, “then stay away from him.”

  Two nights later I was awakened by my brother’s arm, pressing hard on my windpipe. “You lied,” he hissed. “You said you wouldn’t do anything to Artur.”

  “And you lied,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t have known that they left.”

  It had not been difficult to sew the seeds of intolerance, to let the family know they were not welcome here. I didn’t make them leave town, really. That was pure instinct: self-preservation, on their part. I had done it because I knew I was strong where my brother was weak, that he would continue to visit Artur—and here was the proof that I had been right to take action. If it was books today, tomorrow it would be food. Money. Shelter. That, I could not let happen.

  “I did you a favor,” I gritted out.

  My brother released the pressure on my throat. In the moonlight I saw an expression on his face I had never seen before. His eyes were black and flat; his jaw wired with rage. He looked like he was capable, in that instant, of killing me.

  I knew then my mother could stop worrying. Even if Franz were dragged to the recruitment center; even if he never set foot in university and was shipped off, like me, to officer training; even if he had to fight on the front lines—he would be able to survive this war.

  We never spoke of Artur Goldman again.

  • • •

  In the months I spent at Junkerschule, I studied Mein Kampf, I played war strategy games in sandboxes, and I took endless exams, which weeded one out of every three cadets from the program. We had classes in tactics, terrain and map reading, combat training, current events, weapons training. We studied weapons technology, went to the shooting range, and learned about the administration of the SS and the police. We were taught how to maneuver a tank, how to survive in the wild, and how to fix a broken vehicle. We were groomed into soldiers who were above average in knowledge, determination, and endurance. I graduated in 1940 with a commission as a second lieutenant in the Waffen-SS, an Untersturmführer. I was posted to the Government General in Poland, until April 24, 1941, when the 1.SS Infantry Brigade was formed.

  We were a special Waffen-SS unit, part of the Kommandostab of the Reichsführer-SS, and we were deployed in shooting situations against civilians. As an Untersturmführer, I led one of the fifteen companies that made up the 8th SS Infantry Regiment, which fell under the umbrella of the brigade. We moved through northern Ukraine, from Dubno to Równo to Zhytomyr. What we did was just what I had done years earlier in Poland—except there were fewer Jewish leaders and political prisoners left.

  My supervisor, Hauptsturmführer Voelkel, had given us our orders: round up all political undesirables, and all racial inferiors—Gypsies, for example, and all Jews—men, women, and children. We were to collect their valuables and clothes, to march them to open fields and ravines on the outskirts of towns and cities that had been conquered, and to kill them.

  The Reinigungsaktionen went as such: we would require the Jews to report at a given site—school or prison or factory—and then take them to a place that had been prearranged. Some of these places were natural ravines, some were dugouts built by the prisoners themselves. After they’d given up their clothing and valuables, we would drive them into the pit and make them lie facedown. Then, as the commanding officer of the regiment, I would give the order. The NCOs and volunteers, Waffen-SS men, would lift their Karabiner 98ks and shoot the prisoners in the back of the neck. Then some soldiers would haul in a load of dirt or lime before the next group was driven into the pit.

  I would walk among the bodies, find the ones that were still moving, and deliver the coup de grâce with my pistol.

  I did not think about what I was doing. How could I? To be stripped naked, shouted at to move faster and faster toward the pit with your children running beside you. To look down and see your friends and your relatives, dying an instant before you. To take your place between the twitching limbs of the wounded, and wait for your moment. To feel the blast of the bullet, and then the heaviness of a stranger falling on top of you. To think like this was to think that we were killing other humans, and to us, they could not be humans. Because then what did that say about us?

  And so, after each Aktion, we got drunk. So incredibly drunk that we drove from our nightmares that unholy image of the ground bleeding, the red runoff swelling like a geyser after all the bodies were in the pit. We drank until we could no longer smell the shit that coated the corpses. Until we did not see, printed on the backs of our eyelids, the occasional child who clawed his way to the top of the tangle of limbs, shot but not dead, and who ran around the pit bleating for his mother or father until I put us out of our misery and killed him with a single bullet.

  Some of the officers went crazy. I feared I might, too. There was another second lieutenant who had one of his men get up in the middle of the night, walk out of camp, and shoot himself in the head. The next day the second lieutenant refused—simply refused—to shoot anyone. Voelkel had him transferred to the front lines.

  In July, Voelkel told us there would be an Aktion on the road between Równo and Zhytomyr. Eight hundred Jews had been rounded up.

  Although I had given the men explicit orders about how they were to conduct themselves and when to shoot, when the third group of prisoners stood naked at the edge of the pit, shaking and weeping, one of my enlisted men began to fall apart. Schultz put aside his rifle and sank to the ground.

  I ordered him to stand down and picked up his weapon. “What are you waiting for?” I barked at the soldiers who were responsible for bringing the next group of prisoners forward. This time, I was the first to fire my weapon. I would set the example. I did this for the next three sets of prisoners, and as blood and gray matter sprayed onto my uniform, I set my jaw and ignored it. As for Schultz, he would be posted behind the front. The SS did not want anyone on the front lines who might not be able to shoot.

  That night, my men went carousing at the local tavern. I sat outside under the stars and listened to the glorious silence. No crackerjack of bullet shots, no screams, no cries. I had a bottle of whiskey that was nearly empty after two hours of nursing it. I did not go into the tavern until my men left, staggering down the street and balanced precariously on each other like a child’s wooden blocks. At this hour, I expected the tavern to be unoccupied; but instead, there were a half dozen officers gathered, and in a corner, Voelkel stood in front of one of the tables. Seated before him was Annika Belzer, the support staff who traveled with the Hauptsturmführer. An executive secretary, she was much younger than either Voelkel or his wife back home. She was also an abysmal typist. Everyone in the 8th SS Infantry Regiment knew exactly why she’d been hired, and why the Hauptsturmführer needed secretarial support even when his unit was mobile. Annika had hair that was an unearthly platinum blond, wore too much makeup, and was currently sobbing. As I watched, Voelkel jammed the barrel of his handgun into her mouth.

  The others in the bar were not paying attention, or at least they were pretending not to, because
you didn’t mess with the leader of the infantry brigade.

  “Well then,” Voelkel said, cocking the trigger. “Can you make this come?”

  “What are you doing?” I blurted out.

  Voelkel looked over his shoulder. “Ah, Hartmann. So you think just because you got an enlisted man to listen to you, you can boss me around?”

  “You can’t get it up, so you’re going to shoot her?”

  He turned to me, his lips curling upward. “Why should you have all the fun?”

  It was different. A Jew was one thing, but this girl, she was German. “If you pull that trigger,” I said calmly, although my heart was hammering so loud I could feel it move the heavy wool of my uniform jacket, “the Obersturmbannführer will hear about it.”

  “If the Obersturmbannführer hears about it,” Voelkel said, “I will know who to blame, hmm?”

  He removed the gun from Annika’s mouth and smacked her across the cheek with it. She fell to her knees, then scrambled upright and ran out. Voelkel strode toward a group of SS officers and began to drink shots with them.

  Suddenly I had a headache. I didn’t want to be here; I didn’t want to be in the Ukraine at all. I was twenty-three. I wanted to be sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, eating her homemade ham soup; I wanted to be watching pretty girls walk down the street in high heels; I wanted to kiss one of them in the brick alley behind the butcher’s shop.

  I wanted to be a young man with his life ahead of him, not a soldier who walked through death every waking day, and scraped its entrails from his uniform each night.

  I staggered out of the tavern and saw a flash of something bright from the corner of my eye. It was the secretary, her hair catching the light of a streetlamp.

  “My knight in shining armor,” she said, holding out a cigarette.

  I lit it for her. “Did he hurt you?”

  “No worse than usual,” she said, shrugging. As if she’d conjured it, the door to the tavern opened, and Voelkel stepped into the cold. He gripped her chin and kissed her hard on the mouth. “Come, my dear,” he said, smooth and charming. “You aren’t going to be angry with me the whole night, are you?”