The Storyteller Read online

  The blood drained from the Hauptscharfuhre r's face. He started to walk briskly in the direction of the camp village, breaking into a run as he turned the corner.

  My fingers flexed on the bottle of aspirin, still tucked inside my pink mitten. I walked back to the administration building and let myself into the office. I took off my coat and my hat and mittens, and set them to dry on the radiator. Then I sat down and began to type.

  I worked through lunch. This time, there was no reading; there was no extra ration for me. It was not until twilight that the Hauptscharfuhrer returned. He dusted the snow off his coat and hung it up with his officer's cap, then dropped down heavily behind his desk, steepling his hands together.

  "Do you have a sibling?" he asked.

  I faced him. "I did."

  The Hauptscharfuhrer met my gaze and nodded.

  He scribbled a message on a piece of stationery and folded it into an envelope. "Take this to the Kommandant's office," he said, and I blanched. I had never been there before, although I knew where it was. "Explain that the Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer is indisposed with illness and will not be present at Appell."

  I nodded. I pulled on my coat, still wet, and my mittens and my hat. "Wait." The Hauptscharfuhre r's voice called me back as I started to turn the doorknob. "I do not know your name."

  I had been working for him, now, for twelve weeks. "Minka," I murmured.

  "Minka." He looked down at the papers on his desk, dismissing me. It was, I realized, the closest he could come to giving me his thanks.

  He never called me by name again.

  *

  The items that were seized from Kanada were shipped to various places in Europe, along with meticulous lists of what was included in the shipments, which had been typed by me. From time to time, there was a discrepancy. This was usually blamed on a prisoner stealing an item, but more likely, it was an SS officer. Darija said she often saw junior officers slip something into their pockets when they thought no one else was looking.

  When the lists did not match the contents, a phone call would be placed to the Hauptscharfuhrer. It would be up to him to mete out the necessary punishment, even though it had been weeks since the actual looting.

  One afternoon, when Herr Hauptscharfuhrer was retrieving his lunch from the village, I answered such a phone call. As always in my precise German, I said, "Herr Hauptscharfuhrer Hartmann, guten Morgen."

  The man on the other end of the line introduced himself as Herr Schmidt. "I'm sorry. Herr Hauptscharfuhrer has stepped away from his desk. May I take a message?"

  "Yes, you may tell him that the shipment arrived intact. But before I go, I must say, Fraulein . . . I am having the hardest time placing your accent."

  I did not correct him when he called me Fraulein. " Ich bin Berlinerin, " I said.

  "Really. Because your diction puts mine to shame," Herr Schmidt replied.

  "I attended boarding school in Switzerland," I lied.

  "Ah yes. Perhaps the only place left in Europe that has not been completely ravaged. Vielen Dank, Fraulein. Auf Wiederhoren."

  I placed the receiver in its cradle, feeling as if I'd been through an interrogation. When I turned around, the Hauptscharfuhrer was back. "Who was that?"

  "Herr Schmidt. Confirming the shipment."

  "Why did you say you were from Berlin?"

  "He asked about my accent."

  "He was suspicious?" the Hauptscharfuhrer asked.

  If he was, did that mean my time as a secretary had run its course? Would I be sent back to Kanada, or worse, fall prey to another selection?

  "I don't think so," I said, my heart racing. "He believed me when I said I'd studied abroad."

  The Hauptscharfuhrer nodded his agreement. "Not all would look kindly on your position here." He sat down, arranging his napkin and slicing into a platter of roast chicken. "Now. Where did we leave off?"

  I turned my wooden chair away from the typewriter to face him and opened the leather journal. I had written my requisite ten pages the night before, but for the first time, I did not think I could share it out loud.

  "Go on, go on," the Hauptscharfuhrer urged, waving his fork at me.

  I cleared my throat. "I had never been so aware of my own breathing, or my own pulse." That was as far as I got before heat flooded my face and I looked into my lap.

  "What is it?" he asked. "Is it no good?"

  I shook my head.

  He reached across the desk and grabbed the book from me.

  *

  "Of course, there was no heartbeat to hear. Just an emptiness, an understanding that we would never be the same. Did that mean that he had not felt the way I did as he moved between--"

  Suddenly, he broke off, blushing just as deeply as I was. "Oh," the Hauptscharfuhrer said. "Perhaps this bit is better read silently."

  He kissed me as if he were poisoned, and I was the antidote. Maybe, I thought, that was true. His teeth nipped at my lip, making it bleed again. When he sucked at the wound, I arched in his embrace, imagining him drinking from me.

  Afterward, I lay against him, my hand spread across his chest, as if I were measuring the void inside. "I would do anything to have my heart back," Aleksander said. "If only so that I could give it to you."

  "You are perfect like this."

  He buried his face in the curve of my neck. "Ania," he said, "I am far from perfect."

  There is a magic to intimacy, a world built of sighs and skin that is thicker than brick, stronger than iron. There is only you, and him, so impossibly close that nothing can come between. Not the enemy, not your allies. In this safe haven, in this hallowed place and time, I could even ask the questions whose answers I feared. "Tell me what it was like," I whispered. "Your first time."

  He did not pretend to misunderstand. He curled onto his side, his body spooned around mine, so that he would not have to look me in the eye as he spoke. "It felt as if I had been in a desert for months, and would die if I couldn't drink. But water, it did nothing. I could consume a lake and it would not have been enough. What I craved was what I could smell through the skin, rich as cognac." He hesitated. "I had tried to fight the urge. By then, I was so hungry, so faint, that I could barely stand. I crawled into a barn, wishing for death again. She was carrying a bucket of chicken feed, scattering it in the coop, and I could see her from where I crouched in the rafters. I fell like an archangel, covered her scream with the fabric of my cape, and dragged her into the hayloft where I had been hiding.

  "She begged me for her life. But mine was more important. So I ripped out her throat. I drank her dry and chewed on her bones and peeled away her flesh until there was nothing left, consumed by my hunger. I was disgusted; I could not believe what I had become. I tried to clean myself, but her blood left a stain on my hands. I stuck my finger down my throat but could not purge. Still, for the first time in a long time, I wasn't hungry; and because of this I could finally sleep. The next morning, when her parents came searching for her, calling her name, I awakened. Beside me was all that was left of her: that head, with the thick blond braid, that round mouth frozen in terror. Those marble eyes, staring back at the monster that was now me. I sat beside her, keeping vigil, and I sobbed."

  *

  The Hauptscharfuhrer looked up at me, surprised. "The Donestre," he said, and I nodded, pleased that he had caught the reference to the mythical beast he had told me about.

  *

  "The second time, it was a prostitute who had stopped to pull up her stockings in an alley. It was easier, or so I told myself, because otherwise, I would have had to admit that what I'd done before was wrong. The third time, my first man: a banker who was locking up at the end of the day. There was a teenage girl once, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And a socialite I heard crying on a hotel balcony. And after that I stopped caring who they had been. It only mattered that they were there, at that moment, when I needed them." Aleksander closed his eyes. "It turns out that the more you repeat the same action, no