The Storyteller Read online

  Darija picked up a book from my nightstand. "Oh, Herr Bauer," she cooed. "I'll follow you to the ends of the earth. To Berlin. Oh wait, that's the same thing, isn't it?" She mashed the book up against her face and pretended to kiss it.

  I felt a flash of annoyance. Dariya was lovely, with her long neck and her dancer's body. I didn't make fun of her when she strung along several boys at once, who'd flock around her at parties and vie for the honor of getting her some punch or a sweet.

  "It's just as well," she said, tossing the book aside. "If you start running around with the German professor, you're going to break Josek's heart."

  Now it was my turn to blush. Josek Szapiro was the one boy who didn't look twice at Darija. He'd never asked me to take a walk with him or complimented me on a sweater or how I fixed my hair, but the last time we had gone on a picnic to the lake near the factory, he had spent a whole hour talking to me about my book. He had recently been hired by the Chronicle to write and was almost three years older than I was, but he didn't seem to think it was foolish to believe I could one day be published.

  "You know," Darija said, pointing to the pages she had been reading, "this is really just a love story."

  "So what's wrong with that?"

  "Well, a love story, that's no story at all. People don't want a happy ending. They want conflict. They want the heroine to fall for the man she can never have." She grinned at me. "I'm just saying that Ania's boring."

  At that, I burst out laughing. "She's based on you and me!"

  "Then maybe we're boring." Darija sat up, crossing her legs. "Maybe we need to make ourselves more cosmopolitan. After all, I could be the kind of lady who'd drive to a restaurant in a car with a radio."

  I rolled my eyes. "Right. And I'm the queen of England."

  Darija grabbed my hand. "Let's do something shocking."

  "Fine," I replied. "I won't hand in my German homework tomorrow."

  "No, no. Something worldly." She smiled. "We could have schnapps at the Grand Hotel."

  I snorted. "Who is going to serve two little girls?"

  "We won't look like little girls. Can't you steal something from your mother's closet?"

  My mother would kill me if she found out.

  "I won't tell her if you don't," Darija said, reading my mind.

  "I won't have to tell her." My mother had a sixth sense. I swear, she must have had eyes in the back of her head, to be able to catch me sneaking a taste of the stew from the pot before dinner was served, or to know when I was working on my story in my bedroom instead of doing my homework. "When she has nothing else to worry about, she worries about me."

  Suddenly, from the living room, there was a shriek. I scrambled to my feet and ran, Darija at my heels. My father was clapping Rubin on the back, and my mother was embracing Basia. "Hana!" my father crowed to her. "This calls for some wine!"

  "Minusia," my mother said, using her pet name for me. She looked happier than I had ever seen her. "Your sister is having a baby!"

  It had been strange when my sister moved out after her wedding, so that I had my own room. It was stranger now to think of her as somebody's mother. I hugged Basia and kissed her on the cheek.

  "Oh, there's so much to do!" my mother said.

  Basia laughed. "You have some time, Mama."

  "You can never be too prepared. We'll go out shopping tomorrow for yarn. We must start knitting! Abram, you'll make do without her at the cash register. Which, you know, is not a good job for a woman who's expecting. Standing there all day long with her back hurting and her feet swollen--"

  My father exchanged a look with Rubin. "This could be a vacation," he joked. "Maybe for the next five months, she'll be too busy to bother complaining about me . . ."

  I glanced at Darija. Who smiled, and raised her brows.

  *

  We looked like two children playing dress-up. I was wearing one of my mother's silk dresses and a pair of Darija's mother's pumps, and the kitten heels kept getting stuck between the cobblestones on the street. Darija had done up my face with makeup, which was supposed to make us look older but which made me feel like a painted clown.

  The Grand Hotel rose above us like a wedding cake, with tiers upon tiers of windows. I imagined the stories going on behind each one. The two people in silhouette on the second floor were newlyweds. The woman staring out from the third-floor corner suite was remembering her lost love, whom she would meet for coffee later that afternoon, for the first time in twenty years . . .

  "So?" Darija asked. "Aren't we going in?"

  As it turned out, it was even more difficult to actually go into the hotel pretending to be someone else than it was to gather enough bravery to walk there in our fancy clothes. "What if we see someone we know?"

  "Who are we going to see?" Darija scoffed. "The fathers are all getting ready to go for evening prayers. The mothers are home getting dinner ready."

  I glanced at her. "You first."

  My mother thought I was at Darija's, and Darija's mother thought she was at my house. We could easily get caught, but we were hoping our adventure would compensate for whatever punishment we might incur. As I hesitated, a woman swept up the stairs of the hotel past me. She smelled strongly of perfume and had nails and lips painted fire-engine red. Her clothes were not as fine as those of the clientele of the hotel--or the man she was with, for that matter. She was one of Those Women, the ones my mother pulled me away from. Women of the night were more common in Baluty, the poorer section of the city--women who looked like they never slept, their shawls wrapped around their bare shoulders as they peeked from their windows. But that didn't mean there was a lack of loose women here. The man walking behind this one had a tiny mustache, like Charlie Chaplin, and a walking cane. As she sailed through the hotel doorway, he cupped his hand on her bottom.

  "That's disgusting," Darija whispered.

  "That's what people are going to think we are if we go inside!" I hissed.

  Darija pouted. "If you weren't going to go through with this in the first place, Minka, I don't know why you said--"

  "I never said anything! You said that you wanted--"

  "Minka?" At the sound of my name, I froze. The only thing worse than my mother discovering I was not at Darija's house was someone recognizing me and running back to tell my mother.

  Grimacing, I turned around to see Josek, dapper in his coat and tie. "It is you," he said, smiling, and he didn't even steal a glance at Darija. "I didn't realize you came here."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" I asked, guarded.

  Darija elbowed me. "Of course we come here. Doesn't everyone?"

  Josek laughed. "Well, I don't know about everyone. The coffee's better elsewhere."

  "What are you doing here?" I asked.

  He lifted a notebook. "An interview. A human interest piece. That's all they let me do, so far. My editor says I have to earn breaking news." He looked at my dress, pinned in the back because it was too big, and the borrowed shoes on my feet. "Are you going to a funeral?"

  So much for looking sophisticated.

  "We're headed out on a double date," Darija said.

  "Really!" Josek replied, surprised. "I didn't think--" Abruptly, he stopped speaking.

  "You didn't think what?"

  "That your father would let you go out with a boy," Josek said.

  "Clearly that's not the case." Darija tossed her hair. "We're not babies, Josek."

  He grinned at me. "Then maybe you'd like to come out with me sometime, Minka. I'll prove to you that the coffee at Astoria puts the Grand Hotel to shame."

  "Tomorrow at four," Darija announced, as if she was suddenly my social secretary. "She'll be there."

  As Josek said his good-byes and walked off, Darija looped her arm through mine. "I'm going to kill you," I said.

  "Why? Because I got you a date with a handsome boy? For goodness' sake, Minka, if I can't have fun, at least let me live vicariously through you."

  "I don't want to go out w