The Storyteller Read online

  "When are you talking to him again?" Leo asks.

  "Tomorrow. We're going to grief group."

  "All right," he says. "Call me."

  As I hang up I realize I've missed the turnoff to my house. And more to the point, that I already know where I am headed.

  *

  The word babka comes from baba, which in Yiddish and Polish means "grandmother." I cannot think of a single Chanukah celebration that didn't include these sweet loaves. It was an unwritten assumption that my mother would buy a turkey the size of a small child, that my sister Pepper would get to mash the potatoes, and that my nana would bring three loaves of the famous babka. Even as a little girl I remember grating the bittersweet chocolate, terrified I was going to shred my knuckles in the process.

  Today, I send Daisy home early. I've told her I am here to bake with my grandmother, but really, I wanted the privacy. My grandmother butters the first loaf pan as I roll out the dough and brush the edges with an egg wash. Then I sprinkle some of the chocolate filling inside, and start to roll the dough tight as a drum. I twist the logs quickly, five full turns, and brush the top with egg again. "Yeast," my grandmother says, "is a miracle. One little pinch, some water, and look at what happens."

  "It's not a miracle, it's chemistry," I say. "The real miracle is the moment someone looked at fungus for the first time and said, Hmm, let's see what happens when we cook with it."

  My grandmother passes me the loaf pan so that I can put the dough inside and press the streusel topping down. "My father," she says, "used to send messages to my mother through babka."

  I smile at her. "Really?"

  "Yes. If the filling was apple, it was meant to tell her the bakery had had a sweet day, lots of customers. If it was almond, it meant I miss you bitterly."

  "And chocolate?"

  My nana laughs. "That he was sorry for whatever had gotten him into trouble with her. Needless to say, we ate a lot of chocolate babka."

  I wipe my hands on a dishcloth. "Nana," I ask. "What was he like? What did he do, when he wasn't working? Did he ever call you a special nickname or take you somewhere unforgettable?"

  She purses her lips. "Ach, again with the biography."

  "I know he died in the war," I say softly. "How?"

  She makes a big production of furiously buttering the second loaf pan. Then finally, she speaks. "Every day, after school, I would come to the bakery and there would be a single roll waiting for me. My father called it a minkele, and he only made one a day. It had the flakiest crumb to it, and a center of chocolate and cinnamon so warm it slid down your throat, and I know he could have sold hundreds, but no, he said that this was special just for me."

  "He was killed by Nazis, wasn't he?" I ask quietly.

  Nana turns away from me. "My father trusted me with the details of his death. Minka, he would say, when my mother read me the story of Snow White, make a note: I do not want to wind up in a glass case with people looking at me. Or: Minka, make a note: I would like fireworks, instead of flowers. Minka, make sure I do not pass in the summertime. Too many flies for the mourners to deal with, don't you think? It was a game to me, a lark, because my father was never going to die. We all knew he was invincible." She takes one of her canes from where it is hanging on the counter and walks to the kitchen table, sitting heavily on one of the chairs. "My father trusted me with the details of his death, but in the end, I couldn't manage a single one."

  I kneel down on the floor in front of her and rest my head in her lap. Her hand, small and birdlike, nests in the crown of my hair. "You've held this inside you for so long," I whisper. "Wouldn't it be better to talk about it?"

  She touches the scarred side of my face. "Would it?" she asks.

  I pull back. "That's different. I can't pretend this never happened, no matter how much I want to. It's written all over me."

  "Exactly," my grandmother says, and she pushes up the sleeve of her sweater to reveal the numbers on her forearm. "I talked once about it, when I was much younger, to my doctor, who saw this. He asked if I would come to speak at his wife's class. She was a history professor at a university," she says. "The talk went well. I got over my stage fright enough to deliver it without throwing up, anyway. And then the teacher, she asked if there were any questions.

  "A boy stood up. Truth be told, I thought it was a girl, there was so much hair, down to here. He stood up and he said, 'The Holocaust never happened.' I did not know what to do, what to say. I was thinking, How dare you tell me this, when I lived it? How dare you erase my life just like that? I was so upset that I could barely see straight. I muttered an apology and I walked right off that stage, out the door, with my hand pressed up against my mouth. I thought if I didn't hold it there, I would start to scream. I went to my car and I sat inside until I knew what I should have said. History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?" She shakes her head. "All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination. There are young people like that foolish boy in the history class. I thought for sure that the reason I survived was to make certain something like that would never happen again, but you know, I must have been wrong. Because, Sage, it still happens. Every day."

  "Just because you had some neo-Nazi stand up in that classroom doesn't mean that it's not important for you to tell your story," I say. "Tell it to me."

  She looks at me for a long moment, then silently stands with her cane and walks out of the kitchen. Across the hall, in the first-floor study she has converted into a bedroom so that she doesn't have to climb stairs, I hear her moving things around, rifling through drawers. I get up, slip the loaves into the oven. Already, they're rising again.

  My grandmother is sitting on her bed when I come in. The room smells like her, like powder and roses. She is holding a small leather-bound notebook with a cracked binding.

  "I was a writer," she says. "A child who believed in fairy tales. Not the silly Disney ones your mother read to you, but the ones with blood and thorns, with girls who knew that love could kill you just as often as it could set you free. I believed in the curses of witches and the madness of werewolves. But I also mistakenly believed that the scariest stories came from imagination, not real life." She smooths her hand over the cover. "I started writing this when I was thirteen. It is what I did when other girls were fixing their hair and trying to flirt with boys. Instead, I would dream up characters and dialogue. I would write a chapter and give it to my best friend, Darija, to read, to see what she thought. We had a plan: I would become a bestselling author and she would be my editor and we would move to London and drink sloe gin fizzes. Ach, we didn't even know what sloe gin was back then. But this is what I was doing, when the war came. And I did not stop." She hands the volume to me. "It is not the original, of course. I don't have that anymore. But as soon as I could, I rewrote from memory. I had to."

  I open the front cover. Inside, in small, tight cursive, words crawl across the page, packed end to end without any white space, as if that were a luxury. Maybe, back then, it was. "This is my story," my grandmother continues. "It's not the one you're looking for, about what happened during the war. That's not nearly as important." She meets my gaze. "Because this story, it's the one that kept me alive."

  *

  My grandmother, she could have given Stephen King a run for his money.

  Her story is supernatural, about an upior--the Polish version of a vampire. But what makes it so terrifying is not the monster, who's a known quantity, but the ordinary men who turn out to be monsters, too. It is as if she knew, even at that young age, that you cannot separate good and evil cleanly, that they are conjoined twins sharing a single heart. If words had flavors, hers would be bitter almonds and coffee grounds. There are times when I'm reading her story that I forget she was the one to write it--that's how good it is.

  I read the notebook in its entirety, and then I reread it, wondering i