The Storyteller Read online

  For a while, people disappeared from the ghetto like fingerprints on a pane of glass--ghosting into vision one moment, and the next, gone as if they'd never been there. Death walked next to me as I trudged down the street, whispered into my ear as I washed my face, embraced me as I shivered in bed. Herr Fassbinder was no longer my boss; instead of working in an office, I was reassigned to a factory that made leather boots. My hands shook even when I wasn't sewing; that's how hard it was to force the needle through the tough hides. We lived expecting to be deported at any minute. Some ladies in the factory had the diamonds from their wedding rings implanted as fillings by the dentist. Others smuggled small pouches of coins in their vaginas, and came to work this way, in case the roundups happened there. And still, we went on living. We worked and we ate and we celebrated birthdays and gossiped and read and wrote and prayed and we woke up each morning to do it all over again.

  One day in July 1944 when I went to collect Darija to stand in line for rations, she was gone. I hardly had time to grieve, though. By then, it was almost expected to lose the people who meant the most to you. And besides, three days later, my father and I found ourselves on the list for deportation.

  It was hot, the kind of heat that made it impossible to believe that months ago we could not get warm no matter how hard we tried. The Fabrik had been blistering, windows closed, the air so thick it felt like a sponge in your throat. Walking outside for the first time in twelve hours, I was grateful for the fresh air, and in no great hurry to go home, where my father and I would sit up the whole night wondering what would happen the next morning, when we were to assemble in the town square.

  Instead, I found myself picking a convoluted path through the narrow streets and twisted alleys of the ghetto. I knew Aron lived somewhere around here, but I had not seen him in several weeks. It was possible that he, like Darija, had already been deported.

  I stopped a man on the street and asked if he knew Aron, but the man just shook his head and moved on. I was doing the unthinkable. We didn't talk of those who had been taken from us; it was like those cultures who don't name the dead, for fear that they will haunt us forever. "Aron," I asked an old woman. "Aron Sendyk. Have you seen him?"

  She looked at me. I realized, with a shock, that she was not much older than I was, but her hair was white and there were bare patches on her scalp; her skin draped from her bones like fabric too heavy for its hanger. "He lives there," she said, and she pointed to a door further down the street.

  Aron answered the door with terror on his face, and why wouldn't he? When we heard a knock, it usually was followed by a soldier barging in. Upon his seeing me, though, his features softened. "Minka." He reached out his hand to me, to pull me inside. It was like an oven in there.

  "Is anyone here?"

  He shook his head. He was wearing an undershirt and trousers, which had been pinned to keep from falling off his skinny hips. His shoulders were slick with sweat, shiny, like the knobs of a brass flagpole.

  I reached up on my tiptoes and kissed him.

  He tasted of cigarettes, and the hair at the nape of his neck was damp. I pressed my body along the length of his and kissed him even harder, as if I had been dreaming of this moment for years. I suppose I had been, too. Just not with Aron.

  Eventually Aron must have realized he was not hallucinating, because his arms caught me around the waist and he started to kiss me back, tentatively at first, and then wildly, like a starving man given access to a banquet.

  I stepped away from him, and looking him straight in the eye, unbuttoned my blouse. Let it hang open.

  I was nothing to look at. My ribs were more prominent than my breasts. There were circles under my eyes that never went away. My hair was dull and tangled, but it was still long at least.

  It took me a moment to recognize the look in Aron's eyes. Pity. "Minka, what are you doing?" he whispered.

  Suddenly embarrassed, I pulled the edges of my blouse together to cover myself. I was too ugly, even, to get this boy who had once been interested in me to take the bait. "If you can't figure that out, I'm doing a very bad job," I said. "I'm sorry I disturbed you--"

  I turned my back, hurrying to the door as I fastened my buttons, but was stopped by Aron's hand on my arm. "Don't go," he said quietly. "Please."

  When he kissed me again, I thought that if I'd had the time, and maybe a different life, I could have fallen in love with him after all.

  He laid me down on the mat where he slept, which was in the center of the one-room apartment. There was no need to ask why now, why him. I didn't want to give the answer and he wouldn't have wanted to hear it. Instead, he just sat down beside me and held my hand. "You're sure about this?" Aron asked.

  When I nodded, he peeled the clothes from my body and let the sweat dry on my skin. Then he pulled off his undershirt and shucked off his pants and covered me.

  It hurt, when he moved between my legs. When he pushed inside of me. I didn't understand what all the fuss was about, why the poets wrote sonnets about this moment, why Penelope had waited for Odysseus, why knights rode off to battle with ribbons from their lovers wrapped around the hilts of their swords. And then, I understood. My heart, batting like a moth under my rib cage, slowed to match the beat of his. I could sense the blood in his veins moving with mine, like the inevitable chorus of a song. I was different, with him, transformed from ugly duckling to snowy swan. I was, for a minute, the girl of someone's dreams. I was a reason to stay alive.

  Afterward, when I was dressed again, Aron insisted on walking me back home, as if he were a real boyfriend. We stopped outside my apartment. My father was in there, I knew, packing for our deportation in the single suitcase each of us was allowed. He would wonder where I'd been. Aron leaned down, right there in public, with neighbors passing on the street, and kissed me. He seemed so happy that I thought I owed him a grain of truth. "I wanted to know what it was like," I whispered. Because this may be my last chance.

  "And?"

  I looked up at him. "Thank you very much."

  Aron laughed. "That seems a little formal." He bowed, an exaggeration of manners. "Miss Lewin, may I call for you tomorrow?"

  If I had any love for him, I owed him more than that grain of truth. I owed him the comfort of a lie.

  I curtsied and forced a smile, as if I would be here tomorrow to be courted. "Of course, kind sir," I said.

  That was the last time we ever spoke.

  *

  If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase--not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been--what would you take? The last photograph you had of your mother? A birthday gift from your best friend--a bookmark embroidered by her? A ticket stub from the traveling circus that had come through town two years ago, where you and your father held your breath as jeweled ladies flew through the air, and a brave man stuck his head in the mouth of a lion? Would you take them to make wherever you were going feel like home, or because you needed to remember where you had come from?

  In the end I took all of these things, and the copy of The Diary of a Lost Girl, and Majer's baby shoes, and Basia's wedding veil. And, of course, my writing. It filled four notebooks now. I tucked three of them inside my case and carried the other in a satchel. Into my boots, I wedged my Christian papers, beside the gold coins. My father was silent as he held the door to the apartment that was not ours open for the last time.

  It was summertime, but we were wearing our heavy coats. This is how you know that even then, even in spite of the rumors we had heard, we were still hopeful. Or stupid. Because we continued to imagine a future.

  We were not put into wagons. Maybe there were too many of us--it seemed like hundreds. As we marched, soldiers rode alongside on horseback, their guns glinting in the sunlight.

  My father moved slowly. He had never gone back to being himself after my mother was taken, and losing Majer and Basia left its mark as well. He could not follow a wh