—Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
He was faster than me, and stronger. When he finally caught me, he clamped a hand around my mouth so that I could not scream and dragged me into an abandoned barn, where he tossed me down in a dusty bed of hay. I stared up at him, wondering who he really was, how I had not seen it. “Will you kill me, too?” I challenged.
“No,” Aleks said quietly. “I am doing what I can to save you.”
He reached through the broken glass of the window to scoop a handful of snow. Rubbing it into his arms, he then wiped himself dry with the shreds of his shirt.
It was easy to see the fresh wounds on his shoulders and chest and back. But there were at least a dozen others, narrow cuts that ran down the inside of his arm, over his wrist, into his palm. “After he attacked you, I started doing it,” Aleks said. “Baking the bread.”
“I don’t understand . . .”
In the moonlight, the scars on his arm were a silver ladder. “I did not ask to be who I am,” he said tightly. “I try to keep Casimir locked up and hidden. I feed him raw meat, but he’s always hungry. I do what I can to keep him from letting his nature win. I try to keep a rein on it myself, too. Most of the time, I can. But one day, he got away when I was out trying to find him food. I tracked him into the woods. He had gone after your father, who was cutting wood for the oven, but your father had the advantage of an ax. When I ran in, trying to distract Casimir, it gave your father a chance to fight back. He managed to land a blow to Casimir’s thigh. I went to grab the ax away. I don’t know if it was the smell of the blood or the adrenaline in his system . . ..” Aleks looked away. “I don’t know why it happened, why I couldn’t control myself. He is still my brother. That’s my only excuse.” Aleks raked his hand through his hair, making it stand like a rooster’s comb. “I knew if it happened again, even once, it would be too much. I had to find a way to protect others, just in case. So I asked to work for you.”
I looked at his scars, and I thought of the roll he had been baking me each day, the way he begged me to eat it all. I thought of the baguettes that I had sold this week, the customers who told me that the mere taste of them was a religious experience. I thought of Old Sal, saying that the only way to be immune to an upiór was to consume its blood. I thought of the rosy tint to the dough, and I understood what Aleks was telling me.
He was literally bleeding himself dry, to save us all from himself.
SAGE
My grandmother was a survivor two times over. Long before I knew she had any connection to the Holocaust, she battled cancer.
I was tiny, maybe three or four. My sisters were in school during the day, but my mother took me to Nana’s house every morning when my grandfather left for work, so that she would not be alone during her recovery. My grandmother had a radical mastectomy. During her recuperation, she would lie on the couch while I watched Sesame Street and colored at the coffee table in front of her, and my mom cleaned and did her dishes and cooked her meals. Every hour, she would do her exercises, which consisted of crawling her fingers up the wall behind the couch and stretching as high as she could—a way to rebuild the muscles damaged by the surgery.
Each morning after we arrived, my mother would help Nana into the bathroom for her shower. She would close the door and unzip my grandmother’s housecoat, and then she would let my grandmother rinse herself off under the steaming water. Fifteen minutes later, she would knock softly and enter again, and the two of them would come out: Nana smelling of talcum powder, dressed in a fresh housecoat, the hair at her nape damp but the rest of it mysteriously dry.
One day, after my mother got Nana settled in her shower, she went upstairs with a stack of folded laundry. “Sage,” she told me, “stay here till I come back.” I didn’t even turn away from the television; Oscar the Grouch was on, and I was scared of Oscar. If I looked away, he could sneak out of his garbage can when I wasn’t looking.
But as soon as my mother was out of sight and Oscar was offscreen, I wandered to the bathroom. The door was unlatched, so that my mother would be able to get in. I pushed it open just a crack, and immediately felt my hair curl as the steam surrounded me.
I couldn’t see, at first. It was as if I’d walked into a cloud. But then, when my vision cleared, I noticed my grandmother on the other side of the shower glass, sitting on a little plastic stool. She had turned off the water, but on her head was a shower cap that looked like a cartoon mushroom, red with white dots. Draped over her lap was her towel. With her good hand, she was patting powder on her body.
I had never seen her naked. I had never seen my mother naked, for that matter. So I stared, because there were so many differences between her body and mine.
The skin, for one, which sagged at her knees and her elbows and belly, as if there wasn’t enough to fill it. The whiteness of her thighs, as if she never ran around outside in shorts, which was probably true.
The number on her arm, which reminded me of the ones that the grocery clerk scanned when we were buying food.
And of course, the scar where her left breast had been.
Still angry and red, the puckered flesh covered a cliff, a sheer wall.
By then my grandmother had seen me. She opened the shower door with her right hand, so that I nearly choked from the smell of talcum. “Come closer, Sagele,” she said. “There’s nothing about me I want to hide from you.”
I took a step forward, and then I stopped, because the scars on my nana were much scarier, even, than Oscar.
“You notice that something’s different about me,” my grandmother said.
I nodded. I did not have the words, at that age, to explain what I wasn’t seeing, but I understood that it was not what should have been. I pointed to the wound. “It’s missing,” I said.
My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. “Yes,” she said. “But see how much of me is left?”
• • •
I wait in my nana’s room while Daisy gets her ready for bed. With tenderness, her caretaker stacks her pillows the way she likes and tucks her into the covers before retiring for the night. I sit down on the edge of the bed and hold my grandmother’s hand, which is cool and dry to the touch. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what there is left to say.
The skin on my face tingles, as if scars can recognize each other, even though the ones my grandmother has revealed this time have been invisible. I want to thank her for telling me. I want to thank her for surviving, because without her, I wouldn’t be here to listen. But like she said, sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them.
My grandmother’s free hand dances over the edge of the sheet, pulling it up to her chin. “When the war ended,” she says, “this was what took getting used to. The comfort. I couldn’t sleep on a mattress, for a long time. I’d take a blanket and sleep on the floor instead.” She looks up at me, and for a second, I can see the girl she used to be. “It was your grandfather who set me straight. Minka, he said. I love you, but I’m not sleeping on the ground.”
I remember my grandfather as a soft-spoken man who loved books. His fingers were always stained with ink from receipts he would write customers at his antiquarian bookstore. “You met in Sweden,” I say, which is the story we had all been told.
She nods. “After I recovered from typhus, I went there. We survivors could travel anywhere in Europe, then, for free. I went with some other women to a boardinghouse in Stockholm, and every day, I ate breakfast in a restaurant, just because I could. He was a soldier on leave. He said he had never seen a girl eat so many pancakes in his life.” A smile creases her face. “He came every day to that restaurant and sat next to me at the counter until I agreed to let him take me out to dinner.”
“You swept him off his feet.”
My grandmother laughs. “Hardly. I was all bones. No breasts, no curves, nothing. I had hair that was only an inch long all ov
er my head—the best style I could fashion after the lice were gone. I barely looked like a girl,” she says. “On that first date, I asked him what he saw in me. And he said, My future.”
Suddenly I remember being young, and taking a walk around the neighborhood with my sisters and my grandmother. I hadn’t wanted to go; I was reading a book, and strolling without a destination in mind seemed pointless. But my mother pressured all three of us girls, and so we traipsed at my grandmother’s snail pace around the block. She was horrified when we wanted to dart down the middle of the street. “Why stay in the gutter,” she said, “when you have this fine sidewalk?” I thought, at the time, she was being overly cautious, worried about cars on a residential street that never saw any traffic. Now, I realize, she could not comprehend why we wouldn’t use the sidewalk simply because we could.
When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.
“When we first got to America, your grandfather suggested I join a group with others who were like me; who’d been, you know, in the camps. I dragged him with me. We went to three meetings. Everyone there talked about what had happened, and how much they hated the Germans. I didn’t want that. I was in a beautiful new country. I wanted to talk about movies, and my handsome husband, and my new friends. So I left, and instead I went on with my life.”
“After what the Germans did to you, how could you forgive them?” Saying the word out loud makes me think of Josef.
“Who says that I did?” my grandmother replies, surprised. “I could never forgive the Schutzhaftlagerführer for killing my best friend.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“No, Sage. I mean I couldn’t—literally—because it is not my place to forgive him. That could only be done by Darija, and he made that impossible. But by the same logic, I should be able to forgive the Hauptscharführer. He broke my jaw, but he also saved my life.” She shakes her head. “And yet I can’t.”
She is quiet for so long that at first I think she has fallen asleep.
“When I was in that starvation cell,” my grandmother says quietly, “I hated him. Not for fooling me into trusting him, or even for beating me. But because he made me lose the compassion I had for the enemy. I no longer thought of Herr Bauer or Herr Fassbinder; I believed one German was the same as any other, and I hated them all.” She looks at me. “Which means, for that moment, I was no better than any of them.”
• • •
Leo sees me close the bedroom door behind me after my grandmother falls asleep. “You okay?”
I notice he has cleaned up the kitchen, rinsed out the glasses we used for our tea, swept the table clear of crumbs, washed down the counter. “She’s asleep now,” I reply, not really answering his question. How can I? How could anyone be okay, after hearing what we’ve heard today? “And Daisy’s here if she needs anything.”
“Look, I know how hard it must be to hear something like that—”
“You don’t know,” I interrupt. “You do this for a living, Leo, but it’s not personal for you.”
“Actually, it’s very personal,” he says, and immediately I feel guilty. He’s dedicated his whole life to finding the people who perpetrated these crimes; I didn’t care enough to push my grandmother to open up to me, even as a teenager, when I found out that she was a survivor.
“He’s Reiner Hartmann, isn’t he?” I ask.
Leo turns off the lights in the kitchen. “Well,” he says. “We’ll see.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
He smiles faintly. “I’m a federal agent. If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
“Really?”
“No.” He holds the door open for me and then makes sure it is locked behind us. “All we know right now is that your grandmother was at Auschwitz. There were hundreds of SS officers there. She still hasn’t identified your Josef as one of them.”
“He’s not my Josef,” I say.
Leo opens the passenger door of his rental car for me, then walks around to the driver’s side. “I know you have a vested interest in this, and I know you want it finished yesterday. But in order for my department to follow through, we have to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. While you were in with your grandmother, I called one of my historians in Washington. Genevra’s working up an array of photographs and FedExing it to me at the hotel. With any luck tomorrow, if your grandmother’s up to it, we could have the proof we need to get this ball rolling.” He pulls out of the driveway.
“But Josef confessed to me,” I argue.
“Exactly. He didn’t want to be extradited or prosecuted, or he would have confessed to me. We don’t know what his agenda is; if this is some delusion he’s harboring, if he just has a weird death wish—there are a dozen reasons he might want you to take part in an assisted suicide, and maybe he thinks he has to make himself seem reprehensible before you’ll consider it. I don’t know.”
“But all those details—”
“He’s in his nineties. He could have been watching the History Channel for the past fifty years. There are a lot of experts on World War Two. Details are good, but only if they can be pinned down to a particular individual. Which is why, if we can corroborate his story with an eyewitness who actually saw him at Auschwitz, we suddenly have a case.”
I fold my arms across my chest. “Things move much quicker on Law & Order: SVU.”
“That’s because Mariska Hargitay’s contract’s up for renewal,” Leo says. “Look, the first time I listened to a survivor’s testimony, I felt the same way—and it wasn’t my own grandmother. I wanted to kill all the Nazis. Even the ones who are already dead.”
I wipe my eyes, embarrassed to be crying in front of him. “I can’t even imagine some of the things she told us.”
“I’ve heard them a few hundred times,” Leo says softly, “and it doesn’t get any easier.”
“So we just go home now?”
Leo nods. “Get a good night’s sleep, and wait for my package to get here. Then we can visit your grandmother again, and hope she’s up to making an ID.”
And if she does, who are we helping? Not my grandmother, that’s for sure. She has spent years reinventing herself so that she isn’t a victim anymore; but aren’t we redefining her as one if we ask her for that ID? I think of Josef, or Reiner, or whatever his name used to be. Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.
But how can anyone exist in a world where nobody is who he seems to be?
Silence grows between us, filling all the empty space in the rental car. I jump when the GPS tells us to turn right, onto the highway. Leo fumbles with the radio. “Maybe we should listen to some music.”
He winces as rock fills the car.
“Too bad we don’t have any CDs,” I say.
“I don’t know how to work one of those things anyway. I don’t have one in my car.”
“A CD player? Are you kidding? What do you drive . . . a Model T?”
“I have a Subaru. It just happens to have an eight-track.”
“They still exist?”
“Don’t judge. I’m a vintage kind of guy.”
“So you like oldies,” I say, intrigued. “The Shirelles, and the Troggs; Jan and Dean . . .”
“Whoa,” Leo says. “Those aren’t oldies. Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee . . . Woody Herman . . .”
“I’m about to blow your mind,” I reply, and I tune the radio to a new station. As Rosemary Clooney croons to us, Leo’s eyes widen.
“This is incredible,” he says. “Is it a Boston station?”
“It’s SiriusXM. Satellite radio. Pretty nifty technology. In related news, they also now make movies that talk.”
Leo smirks. “I know what satellite radio is. I just never—”
“Figured it was worth listening to? Isn’t it kind of dangerous to live in the past?”
“No more da
ngerous than living in the present and realizing nothing’s changed,” Leo says.
That makes me think of my grandmother again. “She said that’s why she didn’t want to talk about what happened to her. That there didn’t seem to be much of a point.”
“I don’t entirely believe her,” Leo says. “Watching history repeat might be self-defeating, but there’s usually another reason that survivors keep their experiences to themselves.”
“Like?”
“To protect their families. It’s PTSD, really. Someone who’s been traumatized like that can’t switch off some emotions and leave others intact. Survivors who look perfectly fine on the outside can still be emotionally empty at the core. And because of that, they can’t always connect with their kids or their spouses—or they make the conscious decision not to connect, so that they don’t fail the people they love. They’re afraid of passing on the nightmares, or of getting attached and losing someone again. But as a result of that, their kids grow up and model that behavior with their own families.”
I try but can’t remember my father being distant. He did, however, keep my grandmother’s secrets for her. Had my nana tried to spare him by staying silent, and had he suffered anyway? Did that emotional disconnection skip a generation? I screened my face from people; I found a job that allowed me to work nights, alone; I let myself fall for a man I knew was never going to be mine, because I did not think I’d ever be lucky enough to find someone to love me forever. Had I been hiding because I was a freak, or was I a freak because I’d been hiding? Was my scar only part of it—the trigger for trauma, passed down through the bloodline?
I don’t realize I’m sobbing until the car suddenly swerves across three lanes and Leo gets off at an exit. “I’m sorry,” he says, pulling to the curb. A reflection from the rearview mirror boxes his eyes. “That was a stupid thing to say. For the record, it doesn’t always happen that way. Look at you, you turned out perfectly fine.”
“You don’t know me.”
The Storyteller Page 38
