The Storyteller Read online

  And then.

  In one leather satchel, slipped into a torn silk lining, was a fountain pen.

  My hand closed around it with an ache. Holding a pen felt so normal that my past, which I had surgically separated from the current state of my existence, came rushing back. I could see myself curled in the window of my father's bakery, writing my book. I could remember chewing on the tip of a pen as I heard the dialogue of Ania and Aleksander in my head. The story flowed like blood from my hand; sometimes it seemed that I was simply channeling a film that was already playing, that I was only the projector instead of the creator. When I wrote, I felt untethered, impossibly free. And right now, I barely remembered what that was like.

  I hadn't realized how much I'd missed writing in the weeks I'd been here. Real writers can't not write, Herr Bauer had once told me, when we were discussing Goethe. That is how you know, Fraulein Lewin, if you are destined for the life of a poet.

  My fingers itched, curling around the instrument. I did not even know if there was ink inside. To test it, I pressed the nib against the numbers that had been burned into my left forearm. The ink flowed, a beautiful black Rorschach blot, covering up what they had done to me.

  I slipped the pen into my jacket. This was for Darija, I reminded myself. Not for me.

  That night I enlisted the help of another girl to prop Darija up at the evening Appell. She could barely stand by the time we were sent back to the block, two hours later. She wouldn't let me even touch her cheek, so that I could open her lips and see how bad the infection had become.

  Her forehead was so hot it blistered against my hand. "Darija," I said, "you have to trust me."

  She shook her head, near delirium. "Leave me alone," she wailed.

  "I will. After I knock out that stupid tooth."

  My comment cut through whatever haze she was in. "Like hell you will."

  "Shut up and open your mouth," I muttered, but when I went to grab her chin, she reared away.

  "Is it going to hurt?" she whimpered.

  I nodded, looking her right in the eye. "Yes. If I had any gas, I'd give it to you."

  Darija started to laugh. Faintly at first, and then a loud bark, one that made the other girls turn around in their bunks. "Gas," she wheezed. "You don't have any gas?"

  I realized how silly this was, given the mass extermination that was going on just yards away from our hut. Suddenly I was laughing, too. It was inappropriate and awful gallows humor, and we could not stop. We collapsed against each other, snorting and hooting, until everyone else got disgusted with us and looked away.

  When we finally could control ourselves, we had our emaciated arms around each other, the gangly limbs of two tangled praying mantises. "If you can't anesthetize me," Darija said, "then distract me, okay?"

  "I could sing," I suggested.

  "You want to cause more pain, or prevent it?" She looked at me, desperate. "Tell me a story."

  I nodded. I took the pen out of my pocket and tried to clean it as best I could, which wasn't easy given that my clothes were filthy. Then I looked at my best friend, my only friend.

  I couldn't tell her a memory from our childhood, because that would be too upsetting. I couldn't spin a yarn about our future, because we barely had one.

  There was really only one story I knew by heart: the one I'd been writing--the one Darija had been reading--for years.

  "My father trusted me with the details of his death," I began, the words rising, rote, from some deep cave of my mind. " 'Ania,' he would say, 'no whiskey at my funeral. I want the finest blackberry wine. No weeping, mind you. Just dancing. And when they lower me into the ground, I want a fanfare of trumpets, and white butterflies.' A character, that was my father. He was the village baker, and every day, in addition to the loaves he would make for the town, he would create a single roll for me that was as unique as it was delicious: a twist like a princess's crown, dough mixed with sweet cinnamon and the richest chocolate. The secret ingredient, he said, was his love for me, and this made it taste better than anything else I had ever eaten."

  I opened Darija's mouth gently and positioned the pen at the root of her swollen gum. I lifted a stone I had pried from the latrines. "We lived on the outskirts of a village so small that everyone knew everyone else by name. Our home was made of river stone, with a thatched roof; the hearth where my father baked heated the entire cottage. I would sit at the kitchen table, shelling peas that I grew in the small garden out back as my father opened the door of the brick oven and slid the peel inside to take out crusty, round loaves of bread. The red embers glowed, outlining the strong muscles of his back as he sweated through his tunic. 'I don't want a summer funeral, Ania,' he would say. 'Make sure instead I die on a cool day, when there's a nice breeze. Before the birds fly south, so that they can sing for me.'

  "I would pretend to take note of his requests. I didn't mind the macabre conversation; my father was far too strong for me to believe any of these requests of his would ever come to pass. Some of the others in the village found it strange, the relationship I had with my father, the fact that we could joke about this, but my mother had died when I was an infant and all we had was each other."

  I looked down to see Darija finally relaxed, caught in the gauze of my words. But I realized, too, that the whole hut had gone quiet; all the women were listening to me.

  "My father trusted me with the details of his death, " I said, raising the rock directly above the pen. " But in the end, I was too late."

  Swiftly I smashed the stone into the pen, a makeshift chisel. The sound that Darija made was unearthly. She reared up as if she'd been run through with a sword. I fell back, horrified by what I'd done, as she clutched her hands to her mouth and rolled away from me.

  When she looked up, her eyes were bright red, the blood vessels having burst from the force of her scream. Blood streamed down her chin, too, as if she herself was an upior after a kill. "I'm so sorry," I cried. "I didn't mean to hurt you . . ."

  "Minka," she said, through the blood, through her tears. She grabbed my hand, or at least that's what I thought she was doing, until I realized she was trying to give me something.

  In her palm was a broken, rotted tooth.

  *

  The next day, Darija's fever had broken. I again carried the breakfast rations from the kitchen, so that I could get an extra helping for Darija to build up her strength. When she smiled at me, I could see the gap where her tooth had been, a black chasm.

  A new woman joined us in the block that evening. She was from Radom, and she had given her three-year-old to her elderly mother at the loading ramp, on the whispered advice of one of the men in striped uniforms. She could not stop crying. "If I'd known," she sobbed, choking on the truth. "If I'd known why he said that I never would have done it."

  "Then you would both be dead," said Ester, the woman who, at age fifty-two, was the oldest one in the block. She worked with us in Kanada and had a steady black market business, trading cigarettes and clothing that were pilfered from the suitcases for extra rations.

  This new woman could not stop crying. That was not an unusual phenomenon, but this particular crier, she was a loud one. And we were all exhausted from lack of food and long hours of labor. We were getting upset listening to her. It was worse than the rabbi's daughter from Lublin, who prayed out loud the whole night through.

  "Minka," Ester said finally, when this woman had been wailing for hours, "do something."

  "What can I do?" I couldn't bring back her child or her mother. I couldn't undo what had happened. To be honest, I was annoyed with the woman; that's how inhuman I had become. We had all suffered losses like she had, after all. What made hers so special that it had to rob us of our precious hours of sleep?

  "If we cannot shut her up," another girl said, "then maybe we can drown her out."

  There was a chorus of agreement. "Where were you up to, Minka?" Ester asked.

  At first I did not know what she was talking about. But th