The Storyteller Read online

  *

  For five days, the farmer's wife came to me with meals. Breakfasts of fresh eggs and rye toast and gooseberry jam, lunches of sliced cheese on thick hanks of bread, suppers of chicken thighs with root vegetables. Slowly, I grew more alert, stronger. The blisters on my feet healed; my jaw stopped aching. I was able to pace myself so that I did not stuff my face with the food as soon as she set it in front of me. We did not speak about where I'd come from, or where I would be going. I tried to convince myself that I could stay here, in the barn, until the war was over.

  I was once again at the mercy of a German, but like a dog that has been kicked so often it shies away from any kind hand, I was slowly being coaxed into believing that I might be able to trust.

  In return, I tried to show my gratitude. I cleaned out the chicken coop, a job that took me hours, because I had to keep sitting to rest. I collected the eggs, and had them neatly piled in a pail when the farmer's wife arrived each afternoon. I cleaned cobwebs from the rafters and swept the hayloft so that you could see the wooden floor beneath the bales.

  One night, the woman did not come.

  I felt a pang of hunger, but it was nothing like what I'd experienced in the camp or on the march. I had gone without for so long that missing a single meal now almost didn't register. Maybe she was ill; maybe she had taken a trip. The next morning, when the barn door slid open, I crawled down the ladder quickly, aware that I had missed her company more than I even let myself know.

  The farmer's wife stood with the sun silhouetting her, so it took me a moment to realize that her eyes were red and puffy, that she was not alone. A man wearing a flannel shirt and suspenders, who leaned heavily on a cane, stood behind her. With him was a member of the police force.

  The light leached from my smile. I was rooted to the barn floor, gripping the ladder so hard the wood bit into the skin beneath my fingernails. "I'm sorry," the farmer's wife choked out, but that was all she said, because her husband gave her a firm shake. The police officer bound my hands together, then pulled the barn door wide and led me to a truck that was idling in the driveway.

  My mother used to say that sometimes if you turn a tragedy over in your hand, you can see a miracle running through it, like fool's gold in the hardest shard of rock. This was certainly true of the deaths of my family--if only because they did not live to see me in this state, to see the world in this state. The murder of another woman had yielded me a pair of sturdy boots. If not for the march from Neusalz, I would never have found this barn and had nearly a week of three square meals in my belly.

  And if the farmer had indeed discovered his wife's secret stowaway, and he had called the police to turn me in, at least it meant that I would travel to this next camp in the back of a truck, conserving strength I would never have had if I'd walked the entire distance. Which is why, when we arrived at Flossenburg on March 11, 1945--the same day, ironically, as those who had begun the march from Neusalz--more than half of those women were dead, but I was still alive.

  *

  A week later we were put onto trains and taken to another camp.

  We arrived at Bergen-Belsen the last week of March. In the cars we had been stacked like cans on a grocery shelf, so that shifting even a little meant a foot in your face or a grunt from someone else, and everyone was trying desperately to get away from the overflowing bucket we used as a latrine. When the train stopped, we staggered out, holding on to each other as if we had been drinking heavily. I managed only a few steps before I sank down.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell. I couldn't describe it, even if I tried. The burning flesh of Auschwitz was nothing compared to this, the stink of disease and piss and shit and death. It got into your nostrils and throat, and left you breathing shallowly through your mouth. Everywhere, there were stacks of the dead, some haphazard, some neatly arranged like building blocks or a house of cards. Those healthy enough to move were hauling the bodies away.

  Everyone at this camp had typhus. How could they not, when there were hundreds of people crammed into barracks meant for fifty, when the latrine facility was a hole outside, when there wasn't enough food or fresh water for the thousands of prisoners who had been trucked in?

  We did not work. We rotted. We would curl like snails on the floor of the barracks, because that was the only way we could all fit. Guards would come in to dispose of the dead. Sometimes they would take the living, too. It was an honest mistake; we didn't always know which was which. All night long there would be soft moans, skin blistering with fever, hallucinations. Then we would shuffle outside in the morning for Appell, lining up to be counted for hours.

  I became friendly with a woman named Tauba, who, with her daughter Sura, used to live in Hrubieszow. Tauba had a prized possession, one she held on to as fiercely as I had once held on to my leather journal. It was a threadbare, lice-infested blanket. She and Sura had used it on the march that brought them here, braving the snow and the elements and surviving the nights when others died of the cold. Now, Tauba used it to warm Sura, who fell sick just days after arriving at the camp. She would wrap her daughter in the blanket and rock her back and forth, singing lullabies. When it was time for Appell, Tauba and I would hold Sura upright between the vise of our bodies.

  One night, in her dream-state, Sura begged for food. Tauba held her closer. "What would you like me to cook for you?" she whispered. "Maybe a roast chicken. With gravy and candied carrots and whipped potatoes." Her eyes were bright with tears. "With butter, a big dollop, like snow on the top of a mountain." She hugged Sura more tightly, and the girl's head snapped back on its delicate stem. "In the morning, when you are hungry again, I will bring you my special pancakes, stuffed with cottage cheese, and sprinkled with sugar. Baked beans and eggs and brown bread and fresh blueberries. There will be so much food, Surele, that you will not be able to finish it."

  I knew that some of the stronger women had managed to get to the kitchens and find food in the waste bins. I don't know why they weren't punished--it was either because the guards didn't want to get too close to us and risk illness or because no one cared anymore. But the next morning, after making sure Sura was still breathing, I followed a small contingency to the kitchen. "What do we do?" I asked, nervous about standing around in broad daylight. But then again, it wasn't as if we were skipping a work detail. There was nothing for us to do at this camp but wait. Did it matter if we were here, underneath a kitchen window, instead of in a barracks?

  The window opened, and a sturdy woman tossed a pail of scraps out. Potato peels, ersatz coffee grounds, rinds from sausages and oranges, the bones from a roast. The women fell to the ground like animals, grabbing what they could. In my moment's hesitation, I lost out on the most valuable bits of refuse, but I managed to get a wishbone from a chicken, and a handful of potato peels. I slipped these into my pocket and hurried back to Tauba and Sura.

  I handed the potato peels to Tauba, who tried to coax her daughter into sucking on one. But Sura had slipped into unconsciousness. "Then you eat it," I urged. "When she gets better, she'll need your strength."

  Tauba shook her head. "I wish I could believe that."

  I reached into my pocket for the bone I'd taken. "When I was little and my sister, Basia, and I both wanted something very badly--like a new wagon or a trip to the country--we would make a deal," I told Tauba. "When Mama cooked her Shabbat chicken, and we got the wishbone, we'd wish for the same thing. That way, it couldn't help but come true." I held up the bone, curling my fingers around one side of its slingshot neck, letting Tauba curl her fingers around the other. "Ready?" I asked.

  The bone broke in her favor. But it would not have mattered either way.

  That night, when the kapo came to sort through the dead, Sura's body was the first one taken.

  I listened to Tauba keening, turned inside out by loss. She buried her face in the blanket, all she had left of her daughter. But even muffled, her cries turned into shrieks; I covered my ears and still could not block t