The Storyteller Read online

  "I'll be there," Herr Dybbuk vowed, laughing.

  He was talking to the SS officer who oversaw Appell. The man in charge of the women's camp. The one with the tremor in his hand.

  The one who was not inhabited by an evil spirit. He was just evil, period. He had ordered Agnat's beating and ran hot and cold when it came to overseeing Appell. Either he seemed bored and the count went quickly, or he was on a rampage and took his fury out on us. Just that morning, he had raised his pistol and shot a girl who was too weak to stand upright. When the girl beside her jumped in response, he shot her, too.

  These officers were related?

  There was a passing similarity, I supposed. They both had the same jaw, the same sandy hair. And tonight, after they had beaten and starved and demeaned us, they would go share a beer together.

  I had paused, thinking about this, and the guard who was watching me sift through the suitcases and satchels shouted at me to get to work. So I reached into the pile that never seemed to get any smaller and pulled out a leather valise. I tossed away a nightgown and some brassieres and underwear, a lace hat. There was a silk roll with a string of pearls. I called to the officer, who was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the wall of the shack, and handed it over to him to record and inventory.

  I lugged another piece of luggage out of the heap.

  This one, I recognized.

  I suppose several people might have had the same overnight case as my father, but how many of those would have had the handle repaired with a length of wire, where it had broken after I used it, years ago, as part of a pretend fort to play in? I fell to my knees, turning my back on the guard, and opened the straps.

  Inside were the candlesticks that had come from my grandmother, wrapped carefully in my father's tallith. Beneath that were his socks, his undershorts. A sweater that my mother had knit for him. He'd told me once that he hated it, that the sleeves were too long and the wool too itchy, but she had gone to so much trouble, how could he not pretend that he loved it more than anything?

  I could not catch my breath, could not move. No matter what Agnat had said, no matter what evidence I was confronted with daily as I marched past the crematoria and the long line of new arrivals waiting blindly to go inside, I had not believed my father was truly dead until I opened this suitcase.

  I was an orphan. I had nobody left in the world.

  With shaking hands I took the tallith, kissed it, and added it to the pile of trash. I set the candlesticks aside, thinking of my mother saying the prayer over them at Shabbat dinner. Then I lifted the sweater.

  My mother's hands had worked the needles, looped the yarn. My father had worn it over his heart.

  I couldn't let someone else wear this, someone who didn't know that every inch of it told a tale. This yarn lived up to its second meaning--a tale--with every knit and purl part of the saga of my family. This sleeve was the one my mother had been working on when Basia fell down and hit her head on the corner of the piano bench, and needed stitches at the hospital. This neckline was so tricky she had asked for help from our housekeeper, who was a much more accomplished knitter. This hemline she had measured against my father's midsection, joking out loud that she had not meant to marry such a long-waisted gorilla of a man.

  There is a reason the word history has, at its heart, the narrative of one's life.

  I buried my face in the wool and started to sob, rocking back and forth, even though I knew I was going to attract the attention of the guards.

  My father had trusted me with the details of his death, and in the end, I was too late.

  Wiping my eyes, I started to pull the hem of the sweater, so that the weave unraveled. I rolled the yarn up around my arm like a bandage, a tourniquet for a soul that was bleeding out.

  The guard closest to me approached, screaming, jerking his gun at my face.

  Do it, I thought. Take me, too.

  I kept pulling on the yarn, until it lay in a nest around me, crimped and rust-colored. Somewhere, Darija was probably watching me and too afraid for her own welfare to tell me to stop. But I couldn't. I was unraveling, too.

  The commotion attracted some of the other guards, who came over to see what was happening. When one leaned down to grab the candlesticks, I snatched them in one hand and then took the scissors I had used to cut up fur coats and opened their legs wide, pressing the blade against my throat.

  The Ukrainian guard laughed.

  Suddenly a quiet voice spoke. "What is going on here?"

  The SS officer in charge of Kanada pushed through the crowd. He towered over me, taking in the scene: the open suitcase, the sweater that I had destroyed, my white knuckles on the necks of the candlesticks.

  On his orders, just this morning, I had seen a prisoner hit so hard in the back with a truncheon that she vomited blood. That woman had refused to discard tefillin that were found in a suitcase. What I was doing--destroying property that the Germans believed was theirs--was much worse. I closed my eyes, waiting for the blow, welcoming it.

  Instead, I felt the officer pry the candlesticks out of my hands.

  When I opened my eyes Herr Dybbuk's face was only inches from mine. I could see the tic of a muscle in his cheek, the blond stubble of his beard. " Wen gehort dieser Koffer? " To whom does this suitcase belong?

  Meinem Vater, I murmured.

  The SS officer's eyes narrowed. He looked at me for a long moment, then turned to the other guards and shouted at them to stop staring. Finally, he glanced back at me. "Get back to work," he said, and a moment later, he was gone.

  *

  I stopped counting the days. They all ran together, like chalk in the rain: shuffling from one side of the camp to the other, standing in line for a bowl of soup that was nothing more than hot water boiled with a turnip. I thought I had known hunger; I had no idea. Some girls would steal tins of food hidden in the suitcases, but I had not been brave enough yet. I would dream sometimes of the rolls my father made me, the cinnamon bursting on my tongue like gustatory fireworks. I would close my eyes and see a table groaning with the weight of Shabbat dinner; would taste the fatty, crisp skin of the chicken, which I used to peel from the bird when it came from the oven, even though my mother would swat at my hand and tell me to wait till it was on the table. Then in my dreams, I would taste all these things, and they would turn to ash in my mouth--not the ash of coals but the ash that was shoveled from the crematoria day and night.

  I learned, too, how to survive. The best position for Appell, when we lined up in rows of five, was in the middle, out of reach of SS guns and whips, yet close to other prisoners who could hold you up if you fainted. When lining up for food, halfway through the queue was best. The front of the line got served first, but what they were served was the watery bit that floated on top. If you could hold out to the middle of the line, you were more likely to get something nutritious.

  The guards and the kapos were always vigilant to make sure we were not talking as we worked or marched or moved. It was only in the hut, at night, that we could speak freely. But as the days stretched into weeks, I found that it took too much energy to have a conversation, anyway. Besides, what was there to say? If we spoke at all, it was of food--what we missed the most, where in Poland you could find the finest hot chocolate or the sweetest marzipan or the richest petits fours. Sometimes, when I would share a memory of a meal, I noticed the others listening. "It's because you don't just tell stories," Darija explained. "You paint with words."

  Maybe so, but that is the funny thing about paint. At the first cold splash of reality, it washes away, and the surface you were trying to cover is just as ugly as ever. Every morning, being marched to Kanada, I would see Jews waiting in the groves until it was their turn at the crematoria. They were still wearing their clothes, and I wondered how long it might be before I found myself ripping the lining of that wool coat or digging into the pockets of those trousers. As I walked by I kept my gaze trained on the ground. If I had been looking up, they wou