The Storyteller Read online

  "Amen," Leo says finally.

  I don't believe in God. But sitting there, in a room full of those who feel otherwise, I realize that I do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds. I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for--even if it's just a better tomorrow--is the most powerful drug on this planet.

  The rabbi gives the closing prayer, and when he lifts his face to the congregation, it is clear and renewed: the surface of a lake at dawn. If I'm going to be honest, I feel a little like that myself. Like I've turned the page, found a fresh start.

  "Shabbat shalom," the rabbi says.

  The woman sitting next to me, who is about the same age as my mother and who sports a gravity-defying spiral of cherry-red hair, smiles so widely I can see her fillings. "Shabbat shalom," she says, clasping my hand tightly, as if she has known me forever. A little boy in front of us, who has been wiggling most of the time, bounces onto his knees and holds out his chubby starfish fingers, a toddler's high five. His father laughs. "What do you say?" he prompts. "Shabbat . . . ?" The boy buries his face in his father's sleeve, suddenly shy. "Next time," the man says, grinning.

  All around us the same words are being spoken, like a ribbon that sews its way through a crowd, a drawstring pulling everyone together. As people begin to drift away, milling into the lobby where Oneg Shabbat--tea and cookies and conversation--has been set up, I stand. Leo, however, doesn't.

  He is gazing around the room, with an expression on his face I cannot quite place. Wistfulness, maybe. Pride. Finally, he looks at me. "This," he says. "This is why I do what I do."

  *

  At the Oneg Shabbat, Leo brings me iced tea in a plastic cup and a rugelach that I politely decline, because it's clearly store-bought and I know I could do better. He calls me a pastry snob, and we are still laughing about that when an older couple approaches. I start to turn away, instinctively trying to conceal the bad half of my face, but a sudden thought of my grandmother flashes through my mind, explaining her mastectomy scar years ago and today, her memories of the Holocaust. But see how much of me is left?

  I lift my chin and directly face the couple, daring them to comment on my rippled skin.

  But they don't. They ask us if we're new in town.

  "Just passing through," Leo tells them.

  "It's a nice community for settling down," the woman says. "So many young families."

  Clearly, they assume we're a couple. "Oh. We're not--I mean, he isn't--"

  "What she's trying to say is that we're not married," Leo finishes.

  "Not for long," the man says. "Finishing her sentences, that's the first step."

  Twice more we are approached and asked if we've just moved here. The first time, Leo says that we were going to go to the movies but nothing was playing so we came to temple instead. The second time, he replies that he is a federal agent and I'm helping him crack a case. The man who's been chatting with us laughs. "Good one," he says.

  "You'd be surprised how hard it is to get people to believe the truth," Leo tells me later, as we walk across the parking lot.

  But I'm not surprised. Look at how hard I fought Josef, when he tried to tell me who he used to be. "I guess that's because most of the time we don't want to admit it to ourselves."

  "That's true," Leo says thoughtfully. "It's amazing what you can convince yourself of, if you buy into the lie."

  You can believe, for example, that a dead-end job is a career. You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to potentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.

  Maybe it is because Leo is a professional keeper of secrets; maybe it is because I have been so emotionally bruised today; maybe it is just because he listens more carefully than anyone else I've ever met--for whatever reason, I find myself telling him things I have never before admitted out loud. As we drive north again, I talk about how I was always an outsider, even in the confines of my family. I tell him that I worry my parents died wondering if I'd ever be able to support myself. I admit that when my sisters come to visit, I tune out their talk of carpools and Moroccanoil treatments and what Dr. Oz has to say about colon health. I tell him that once, I went for a whole week without speaking a word, just to see if I could, and if I would recognize my voice when I finally did. I tell him that the moment bread comes out of the oven, when I hear each loaf crackle and sing as it hits the cool air, is the closest I've come to believing in God.

  It is nearly eleven o'clock when we pull into Westerbrook, but I'm not tired. "Coffee?" I suggest. "There's a great place in town that stays open till midnight."

  "If I drink coffee now I'll be bouncing off the ceiling till dawn," Leo says.

  I look down at my hands in my lap, feeling impossibly naive. Someone other than me would have been able to pick up on social cues, would know that this camaraderie between us is forced by the case Leo's investigating, and not an actual friendship.

  "But," he adds, "maybe they have herbal tea?"

  Westerbrook is a sleepy town, so there are only a handful of people in the cafe, even though it is a Friday night. A girl with purple hair who is absorbed in a volume of Proust looks annoyed when we interrupt her to place an order. "I'd make a snide comment about the youth of America," Leo says, after he insists on paying for my latte, "but I'm too impressed by the fact that she's reading something other than Fifty Shades of Grey."

  "Maybe this will be the generation that saves the world," I say.

  "Doesn't every generation think they'll be the one to do it?"

  Did mine? Or were we so wrapped up in ourselves that we didn't think to look for answers in the experiences of others? I had known what the Holocaust was, of course, but even after learning my grandmother was a survivor I had studiously avoided asking questions. Was I too apathetic--or too terrified--to think such ancient history had anything to do with my present, or my future?

  Did Josef's? By his own account he had believed, as a boy, that a world without Jews would be a better place. So does he see the outcome, now, as a failure? Or as a bullet that was dodged?

  "I keep wondering which is the real him," I murmur. "The man who wrote college recommendations for hundreds of kids and who cheered a baseball team to the state playoffs and who shares his roll with his dog--or the one my grandmother described."

  "It might not be an either-or," Leo says. "He could be both."

  "Then did he have to lose his conscience to do what he did in the camps? Or did he never have one?"

  "Does it even matter, Sage? He clearly has no sense of right and wrong. If he did, he would have turned down the orders to commit murder. And if he committed murder, he could never develop a conscience afterward, because it would be suspect--like finding God on your hospital deathbed. So what if he was a saint for the past seventy years? That doesn't bring back to life the people he killed. He knows that, or he wouldn't have bothered to ask you for forgiveness. He feels like there's still a stain on him." Leo leans forward. "You know, in Judaism, there are two wrongs that can't be forgiven. The first is murder, because you have to actually go to the wronged party and plead your case, and obviously you can't if the victim is six feet underground. But the second unforgivable wrong is ruining someone's reputation. Just like a dead person can't forgive the murderer, a good reputation can't ever be reclaimed. During the Holocaust, Jews were killed, and their reputation was destroyed. So no matter how much Josef repents for what he did, he's really striking out on two counts."

  "Then why try?" I ask. "Why would he spend seventy years doing good deeds and giving back to his community?"

  "That's easy," Leo says. "Guilt."

  "But if you feel guilty, that means you have a conscience," I point out. "And you just said that's impossible fo