The Storyteller Read online

  "He gave you food?" Darija gasped.

  "Well, not exactly. But he left it behind."

  Darija tasted the muffin. Her eyes drifted shut, pure rapture. But a moment later, she fixed her gaze on me. "You can put a pig in a ball gown, Minka. That doesn't make it a debutante."

  *

  The next morning after Appell I presented myself at the Hauptscharfuhre r's office. He was not there, but a junior officer who was waiting unlocked the door for me so that I could go inside. I realized that he was probably at Kanada, patrolling the barracks where Darija and the others worked.

  There was a stack of forms to be typed on my makeshift desk beside the typewriter.

  Hanging on the back of the chair was a woman's cardigan sweater.

  *

  This is how my routine settled: every morning, I would report to the Hauptscharfuhre r's office. There would be work waiting for me while he made his rounds in Kanada. At midday, the Hauptscharfuhrer brought lunch from the main camp back to his office. Often he got a second ration of soup or a slice of bread. Yet he never finished either; instead he would leave these in the trash when he left the office, knowing full well I would eat them.

  Every day as he ate his lunch, I would read aloud what I had written the night before. And then he would ask me questions: Does Ania know that Damian is trying to frame Aleksander? Will we ever see Casimir committing murder?

  But most of his questions were about Aleksander.

  Is the love you feel for a brother different from the love you feel for a woman? Would you sacrifice one for the other? What must it cost Aleks to hide who he really is in order to save Ania?

  I could not admit this even to Darija, but I began to look forward to going to work--in particular, to lunchtime. It was as if the camp fell away while I was reading to the Hauptscharfuhrer. He listened so carefully that it made me forget that outside there were guards abusing prisoners and people being gassed to death and men pulling their bodies from the shower rooms to stack like wood in the crematoria. When I was reading my own work, I got lost in the story, and I could have been anywhere--back in my bedroom in Lod; scribbling down ideas in the hallway outside Herr Bauer's classroom; sharing a hot chocolate at a cafe with Darija; curled in the window seat at my father's bakery. I was not stupid enough to presume that the officer and I were equals, but during those moments, I felt at least as if my voice still mattered.

  One day, the Hauptscharfuhrer tilted back his chair and propped his boots on his desk as I read to him. I had reached a cliffhanger, the moment where Ania enters the dank cave looking for Aleksander and instead finds his brutal brother. My voice shook as I described her navigating her way in the darkness, her boots crunching on the hard-backed shells of beetles and the tails of rats.

  "A torch flickered on the damp walls of the cave . . ."

  He frowned. "Torches don't flicker. Firelight does. And even so, that's too cliched."

  I looked up at him. I never quite knew what to say when he criticized my writing like this. Was I supposed to defend myself? Or was that presuming that I had any say in this strange partnership?

  "Firelight dances like a ballerina," the Hauptscharfuhrer said. "It hovers like a ghost. You see?"

  I nodded, making a note in the margin of the book.

  "Go on," he commanded.

  "There was a sudden draft, and the torch illuminating my path was extinguished. I stood shivering in the dark, unable to see even a foot in front of myself. Then I heard a rustle, a movement. I spun around. 'Aleksander?' I whispered. 'Is that you?' "

  I looked up to find the Hauptscharfuhrer hanging on my words.

  "In the dark, there was a soft growl, almost a purr. The rasp of a match. A scent of sulfur. The torch blazed to life again. Crouched before me in a pool of blood was a man with wild eyes and knotted hair. More blood dripped from his mouth and covered his hands, which held a haunch of meat. I fell back, struggling to find air . . . That haunch of meat he was devouring had a hand, fingers. They were still clutching the top of a gilded cane I could not have forgotten if I tried. Baruch Beiler was no longer missing."

  There was a knock at the door; a junior officer stuck his head inside. "Herr Hauptscharfuhrer," he said. "It is already two o'clock--"

  I snapped the book shut and began to roll a new form into my typewriter.

  "I am fully capable of telling time," the Hauptscharfuhrer called out. "It will be time to go when I say it is time to go." He waited for the door to close. "You will not start typing yet," he said. "Continue."

  I nodded, fumbling with the leather journal again and clearing my throat.

  "I felt my vision fading, my head spinning. 'It wasn't a wild animal,' I forced out. 'It was you.' The cannibal smiled, his teeth slick and stained crimson. 'Wild animal . . . upior. Why split hairs?' "

  The Hauptscharfuhrer laughed.

  " 'You killed Baruch Beiler.'

  " 'Hypocrite. Can you honestly say you didn't wish him dead?' I considered all the times the man had come to the cottage, demanding tax money we did not have, extorting deals from my father that only dragged us deeper and deeper into debt. I looked at this beast, and suddenly felt like I was going to be sick. 'My father,' I whispered. 'You killed him, too?' When the upiordid not answer, I flew at him, using my nails and my fury as weapons. I raked at his flesh and kicked and swung. Either I would avenge my father's death or I would die trying."

  I continued, describing the arrival of Aleks, the torture of Ania as she tried to reconcile the man she was falling in love with, with a man whose brother was a beast. And what after all did that make him?

  I spoke of her frantic flight from the cave, of Aleks chasing after her, of her accusation that he'd had the power to keep her father from being murdered, and didn't. " 'Your father is not the only person to ever love you,' " I read. " 'And you cannot blame Casimir for his death.' He turned away so that his face was in shadow. 'Because I am the one who killed him.' "

  When I finished, my final words remained trapped in the office like the smoke of a rich man's cigar, redolent and sharp. The Hauptscharfuhrer clapped: slowly, twice, and then with sustained fervor. "Brava," he said. "I did not see that coming."

  I blushed. "Thank you." Folding the journal closed again, I sat with my hands in my lap, waiting to be dismissed.

  But instead, the Hauptscharfuhrer leaned forward. "Tell me more about him," he said. "Aleksander."

  "But I've read you all I have written up to this point."

  "Yes, but you know more than you've written. Was he born a murderer?"

  "That's not how it works with an upior. You have to be the victim of an unnatural death."

  "And yet," the Hauptscharfuhrer pointed out, "both Aleksander and Casimir suffer the same unfortunate fate. Coincidence? Or just bad luck?"

  He was talking about my characters as if they were real. Which, to me, they were.

  "Casimir died while avenging Aleksander's murder," I said. "Which is why Aleks feels the need to protect him, now. And since Casimir is the younger upior, he's not yet able to control his appetite, the way Aleksander can."

  "So in theory both of these men had normal childhoods. They had parents who loved them, and who took them to church, and celebrated their birthdays. They went to school. They worked as paperboys or laborers or artists. And then one day, due to circumstances, they awakened with a terrible thirst for blood."

  "That's what the legends say."

  "But you, you are the writer. You can say anything," he pointed out. "Look at Ania. In that one moment, she was ready to kill the man she believed had murdered her father. And yet, she is painted as a heroine."

  I had not thought about this, but it was true. There was no black and white. Someone who had been good her entire life could, in fact, do something evil. Ania was just as capable of committing murder, under the right circumstances, as any monster.

  "Was there something in their upbringing, in their history, in their genetics, that made them the way they are now?" th