The Storyteller Read online

  We are afraid. Wir haben Angst.

  My mother came into my bedroom and sat down beside me. "Do you think he's alive?" I asked, the one question that no one had spoken out loud.

  "Ach, Minusia," my mother said. "That imagination of yours." But her hands were shaking, and she hid this by reaching for the brush on my nightstand. She turned me, gently, so that I was sitting with my back to her, and she began to brush out my hair in long, sweeping strokes, the way she used to when I was little.

  *

  What we learned, from information that leaked through the community in tiny staccato bursts, like rapid gunfire, was that the SS had rounded up 150 people from the Astoria that afternoon. They had taken them to headquarters and had interrogated the men and women individually, beating them with iron bars, with rubber clubs. They broke arms and fingers and demanded ransom payments of several hundred marks. Those who didn't have the money with them had to give the names of family members who might. Forty-six people were shot to death by the SS, fifty were freed after payment, and the rest were taken off to a prison in Radogoszcz.

  Josek had been one of the lucky ones. Although I hadn't seen him since that afternoon, my father told me he was back home with his family. Chaim, who like my father had Christian clients as well as Jews, had somehow made the arrangements for money to be brought to SS headquarters in exchange for his son's freedom. He told everyone who would listen that if not for the bravery of Minka Lewin, they might not have had such a happy ending.

  I had been thinking a lot about happy endings. I had been thinking about what Josek and I were speaking of, moments before Everything Happened. Of villains, and of heroes. The upior in my story, was he the one who terrorized others? Or was he the one being persecuted?

  I was sitting on the steps that led to the second floor of the school building one afternoon while the rest of the students had Religious Studies. Although I was supposed to be crafting an essay, I was writing my story instead. I had just started a scene where an angry mob beats at Ania's door. My pencil could not keep up with my thoughts. I could feel my heart start to pound as I imagined the knock, the splinter of the wood against the weapons the townspeople had brought for the lynching. I could feel sweat breaking out along Ania's spine. I could hear their German accents through the thick cottage door--

  But the German accent I heard was actually Herr Bauer's. He sank down beside me on the step, our shoulders nearly bumping. My tongue swelled to four times its normal size; I could not have spoken aloud if my life depended on it. "Fraulein Lewin," he said. "I wanted you to hear the news from me."

  The news? What news?

  "Today is my last day here," he confessed, in German. "I will be going back to Stuttgart."

  "But . . . why?" I stammered. "We need you here."

  He smiled, that beautiful smile. "My country apparently needs me, too."

  "Who will teach us?"

  He shrugged. "Father Czerniski will take over."

  Father Czerniski was a drunk, and I had no doubt the only German he knew was the word Lager. But I didn't need to say this out loud, Herr Bauer was thinking the same thing. "You will continue to study on your own," he insisted fiercely. "You will continue to excel." Then Herr Bauer met my gaze, and for the first time in our acquaintance, he spoke Polish to me. "It has been an honor and a privilege to teach you," he said.

  After he walked downstairs, I ran to the girls' bathroom and burst into tears. I cried for Herr Bauer, and for Josek, and for me. I cried because I would not be able to lose myself daydreaming about Herr Bauer anymore, which meant more time would be spent in reality. I cried because when I remembered my first kiss, I felt sick to my stomach. I cried because my world had become a raging ocean and I was drowning. Even after I splashed my face with cold water, my eyes were still red and puffy. When Father Jarmyk asked if I was all right during math, I told him that we had received sad news the previous night about a cousin in Krakow.

  These days, no one would question that kind of response.

  When I left school that afternoon, headed directly to the bakery as usual, I thought I was seeing an apparition. Leaning on a lamppost across the street was Josek Szapiro. I gasped, and ran to him. When I got closer, I could see the skin around his eyes was yellow and purple, all the jewel tones of a fading bruise; that he had a healing cut through the middle of his left eyebrow. I reached up to touch his face, but he caught my hand. One of his fingers was splinted. "Careful," he said. "It's still tender."

  "What did they do to you?"

  He pulled my hand down. "Not here," he warned, looking around at the busy pedestrians.

  Still holding my hand, he tugged me away from the school. To anyone passing by, we might have looked like an ordinary couple. But I knew from the way Josek was holding on to me--tightly, as if he were drowning in quicksand and needed to be rescued--that this wasn't the case.

  I followed him blindly through a street market, past the fishmonger and the vegetable cart, into a narrow alley that ran between two buildings. When I slipped on cabbage rinds, he anchored me to his side. I could feel the heat of his arm around me. It felt like hope.

  He didn't stop until we had navigated a rabbit warren of cobbled pathways, until we were behind the service entrance of a building I did not even recognize. Whatever Josek wanted to say to me, I hoped that it didn't involve leaving me here alone to find my way back.

  "I was so worried about you," he said finally. "I didn't know if you'd gotten away."

  "I'm much tougher than I look," I replied, raising my chin.

  "And as it turns out," Josek said quietly, "I'm not. They beat me, Minka. They broke my finger to get me to tell them who my father was. I didn't want them to know. I thought they would go after him, and hurt him, too. But instead they took his money."

  "Why?" I asked. "What did you ever do to them?"

  Josek looked down at me. "I exist," he said softly.

  I bit my lip. I felt like crying again, but I didn't want to do it in front of Josek. "I'm so sorry this happened to you."

  "I came to give you something," Josek said. "My family leaves for St. Petersburg next week. My mother has an aunt who lives there."

  "But . . ." I said stupidly, wanting only to unhear the words he had just spoken. "What about your job?"

  "There are newspapers in Russia." He smiled, just a little bit. "Maybe one day I will even be reading your upior story in one." He reached into his pocket. "Things are going to get worse here before they get better. My father, he has business acquaintances. Friends who are willing to do favors for him. We are traveling to St. Petersburg with Christian papers."

  My eyes flew to his face. If you had Christian papers, you could go anywhere. You had the so-called proper documents to prove that you were Aryan. This meant a free pass from all restrictions, roundups, deportations.

  If Josek had had those papers a week ago, he would never have been beaten by the SS. Then again, he would never have been at Astoria Cafe, either.

  "My father wanted to make sure that what happened to me never will happen again." Solemnly, Josek unfolded the documents. They were, I realized, not for a boy his age. They were instead for a teenage girl. "You saved my life. Now it's my turn to save yours."

  I backed away from the papers, as if they might burst into flame.

  "He couldn't get enough for your whole family," Josek explained. "But, Minka . . . you could come with us. We would say you're my cousin. My parents will take care of you."

  I shook my head. "How could I become part of your family, knowing I had left mine behind?"

  Josek nodded. "I thought you would say that. But take them. One day, you may change your mind."

  He pressed the papers into my hand, and closed my fingers around them. Then he pulled me into his arms. The papers were caught between our bodies, a wedge to drive us apart, like any other lie. "Be well, Minka," Josek said, and he kissed me again. This time, his mouth was angry against mine, as if he were communicating in a language I hadn't