The Storyteller Read online

  I couldn't see, at first. It was as if I'd walked into a cloud. But then, when my vision cleared, I noticed my grandmother on the other side of the shower glass, sitting on a little plastic stool. She had turned off the water, but on her head was a shower cap that looked like a cartoon mushroom, red with white dots. Draped over her lap was her towel. With her good hand, she was patting powder on her body.

  I had never seen her naked. I had never seen my mother naked, for that matter. So I stared, because there were so many differences between her body and mine.

  The skin, for one, which sagged at her knees and her elbows and belly, as if there wasn't enough to fill it. The whiteness of her thighs, as if she never ran around outside in shorts, which was probably true.

  The number on her arm, which reminded me of the ones that the grocery clerk scanned when we were buying food.

  And of course, the scar where her left breast had been.

  Still angry and red, the puckered flesh covered a cliff, a sheer wall.

  By then my grandmother had seen me. She opened the shower door with her right hand, so that I nearly choked from the smell of talcum. "Come closer, Sagele," she said. "There's nothing about me I want to hide from you."

  I took a step forward, and then I stopped, because the scars on my nana were much scarier, even, than Oscar.

  "You notice that something's different about me," my grandmother said.

  I nodded. I did not have the words, at that age, to explain what I wasn't seeing, but I understood that it was not what should have been. I pointed to the wound. "It's missing," I said.

  My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. "Yes," she said. "But see how much of me is left?"

  *

  I wait in my nana's room while Daisy gets her ready for bed. With tenderness, her caretaker stacks her pillows the way she likes and tucks her into the covers before retiring for the night. I sit down on the edge of the bed and hold my grandmother's hand, which is cool and dry to the touch. I don't know what to say. I don't know what there is left to say.

  The skin on my face tingles, as if scars can recognize each other, even though the ones my grandmother has revealed this time have been invisible. I want to thank her for telling me. I want to thank her for surviving, because without her, I wouldn't be here to listen. But like she said, sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them.

  My grandmother's free hand dances over the edge of the sheet, pulling it up to her chin. "When the war ended," she says, "this was what took getting used to. The comfort. I couldn't sleep on a mattress, for a long time. I'd take a blanket and sleep on the floor instead." She looks up at me, and for a second, I can see the girl she used to be. "It was your grandfather who set me straight. Minka, he said. I love you, but I'm not sleeping on the ground."

  I remember my grandfather as a soft-spoken man who loved books. His fingers were always stained with ink from receipts he would write customers at his antiquarian bookstore. "You met in Sweden," I say, which is the story we had all been told.

  She nods. "After I recovered from typhus, I went there. We survivors could travel anywhere in Europe, then, for free. I went with some other women to a boardinghouse in Stockholm, and every day, I ate breakfast in a restaurant, just because I could. He was a soldier on leave. He said he had never seen a girl eat so many pancakes in his life." A smile creases her face. "He came every day to that restaurant and sat next to me at the counter until I agreed to let him take me out to dinner."

  "You swept him off his feet."

  My grandmother laughs. "Hardly. I was all bones. No breasts, no curves, nothing. I had hair that was only an inch long all over my head--the best style I could fashion after the lice were gone. I barely looked like a girl," she says. "On that first date, I asked him what he saw in me. And he said, My future."

  Suddenly I remember being young, and taking a walk around the neighborhood with my sisters and my grandmother. I hadn't wanted to go; I was reading a book, and strolling without a destination in mind seemed pointless. But my mother pressured all three of us girls, and so we traipsed at my grandmother's snail pace around the block. She was horrified when we wanted to dart down the middle of the street. "Why stay in the gutter," she said, "when you have this fine sidewalk?" I thought, at the time, she was being overly cautious, worried about cars on a residential street that never saw any traffic. Now, I realize, she could not comprehend why we wouldn't use the sidewalk simply because we could.

  When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.

  "When we first got to America, your grandfather suggested I join a group with others who were like me; who'd been, you know, in the camps. I dragged him with me. We went to three meetings. Everyone there talked about what had happened, and how much they hated the Germans. I didn't want that. I was in a beautiful new country. I wanted to talk about movies, and my handsome husband, and my new friends. So I left, and instead I went on with my life."

  "After what the Germans did to you, how could you forgive them?" Saying the word out loud makes me think of Josef.

  "Who says that I did?" my grandmother replies, surprised. "I could never forgive the Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer for killing my best friend."

  "I don't blame you."

  "No, Sage. I mean I couldn't--literally--because it is not my place to forgive him. That could only be done by Darija, and he made that impossible. But by the same logic, I should be able to forgive the Hauptscharfuhrer. He broke my jaw, but he also saved my life." She shakes her head. "And yet I can't."

  She is quiet for so long that at first I think she has fallen asleep.

  "When I was in that starvation cell," my grandmother says quietly, "I hated him. Not for fooling me into trusting him, or even for beating me. But because he made me lose the compassion I had for the enemy. I no longer thought of Herr Bauer or Herr Fassbinder; I believed one German was the same as any other, and I hated them all." She looks at me. "Which means, for that moment, I was no better than any of them."

  *

  Leo sees me close the bedroom door behind me after my grandmother falls asleep. "You okay?"

  I notice he has cleaned up the kitchen, rinsed out the glasses we used for our tea, swept the table clear of crumbs, washed down the counter. "She's asleep now," I reply, not really answering his question. How can I? How could anyone be okay, after hearing what we've heard today? "And Daisy's here if she needs anything."

  "Look, I know how hard it must be to hear something like that--"

  "You don't know," I interrupt. "You do this for a living, Leo, but it's not personal for you."

  "Actually, it's very personal," he says, and immediately I feel guilty. He's dedicated his whole life to finding the people who perpetrated these crimes; I didn't care enough to push my grandmother to open up to me, even as a teenager, when I found out that she was a survivor.

  "He's Reiner Hartmann, isn't he?" I ask.

  Leo turns off the lights in the kitchen. "Well," he says. "We'll see."

  "What aren't you telling me?"

  He smiles faintly. "I'm a federal agent. If I told you, I'd have to kill you."

  "Really?"

  "No." He holds the door open for me and then makes sure it is locked behind us. "All we know right now is that your grandmother was at Auschwitz. There were hundreds of SS officers there. She still hasn't identified your Josef as one of them."

  "He's not my Josef," I say.

  Leo opens the passenger door of his rental car for me, then walks around to the driver's side. "I know you have a vested interest in this, and I know you want it finished yesterday. But in order for my department to follow through, we have to dot all the i's and cross all the t's. While you were in with your grandmother, I called one of my historians in Washington. Genevra's working up an array of photographs and FedExing it to me at the hotel. With any luck tomorrow, if your grandmother's