The Storyteller Read online

  I would not tell my father, I decided. He had enough to worry about.

  The further I got into the woods, the more I could smell the peat burning in the fireplace of our cottage. In moments, I would be back home, and my father would hand me the special roll that he had baked for me. I would sit at the counter and tell him about the characters in the village: the mother who became frantic when her twins hid beneath Farouk's bolts of silk; Fat Teddy, who insisted on sampling the cheese at each market stall, filled his belly in the process, and never bought a single item. I would tell him about the man I had never seen before, who had come to the market with a teenage boy who looked to be his brother. But the boy was feebleminded; he wore a leather helmet that covered his nose and mouth, leaving only holes for breathing, and a leather cuff around his wrist, so that his older brother could keep him close by holding tight to a leash. The man strode past my bread stand and the vegetable seller and the other sundries, intent on reaching the meat stall, where he asked for a rack of ribs. When he did not have enough coins to pay, he shrugged out of his woolen coat. Take this, he said. It's all I have. As he shivered back across the square, his brother grabbed for the wrapped parcel of meat. You can have it soon, he promised, and then I lost sight of him.

  My father would make up a story for them: They jumped off a circus train and wound up here. They were assassins, scoping out Baruch Beiler's mansion. I would laugh and eat my roll, warming myself in front of the fire while my father mixed the next batch of dough.

  There was a stream that separated the cottage from the house, and my father had placed a wide plank across it so that we could get from one side to the other. But today, when I reached it, I bent to drink, to wash away the bitter taste of Damian that was still on my lips.

  The water ran red.

  I set down the basket I was carrying and followed the bank upstream, my boots sinking into the spongy marsh. And then I saw it.

  The man was lying on his back, the bottom half of his body submerged in the water. His throat and his chest had been torn open. His veins were tributaries, his arteries mapped a place I never wanted to go. I started to scream.

  There was blood, so much blood that it painted his face and stained his hair.

  There was blood, so much blood that several moments passed before I recognized my father.

  SAGE

  In the picture, the soldier is laughing, as if someone has just told him a joke. His left leg is braced on a crate, and he is holding a pistol in his right hand. Behind him is a barracks. It reminds me of photos I have seen of soldiers on the eve of being shipped out, wearing too much bravado like a cloying aftershave. This is not the face of someone ambivalent about his role. This is someone who enjoyed what he was doing.

  There are no other people in the picture, but outside the white borders, they hover like ghosts: all the prisoners who knew better than to make themselves visible when a Nazi soldier was near.

  This man in the photo has pale hair and strong shoulders and an air of confidence. It is hard for me to reconcile this man with the one who told me once that he had lost too many people to count.

  Then again, why would he lie about something like this? You lie to convince people you are not a monster . . . not that you are one.

  For that matter, if Josef is telling the truth, why would he have made himself such a visible member of the community: teaching, coaching, walking around in broad daylight?

  "So you see," Josef says, taking the picture from me again. "I was SS-Totenkopfverbande."

  "I don't believe you," I say.

  Josef looks at me, surprised. "Why would I confess to you that I did horrible things if it were not true?"

  "I don't know," I reply. "You tell me."

  "Because you are a Jew."

  I close my eyes, trying to wade through the whirlpool of wild thoughts in my head. I'm not a Jew; I haven't considered myself one in years, even if Josef believes that to be a technicality. But if I'm not a Jew, why do I feel so viscerally and personally offended by this photograph of him in an SS uniform?

  And why does it make me sick to hear him label me; to think that, after all this time, Josef would still feel that one Jew is interchangeable for another?

  In that moment, a tide of disgust rises inside me. In that moment, I think I could kill him.

  "There is a reason God has kept me alive for this long. He wants me to feel what they felt. They prayed for their lives but had no control over them; I pray for my death but have no control over it. This is why I want you to help me."

  Did you ask any Jews what they wanted?

  An eye for an eye; one life for many.

  "I'm not going to kill you, Josef," I say, pushing away from him, but his voice stops me.

  "Please. It's a dying man's wish," he begs. "Or perhaps the wish of a man who wants to die. They are not so different."

  He's delusional. He thinks he's some kind of vampire, like the king in his chess set, who is trapped here by his sins. He thinks that if I kill him biblical justice will be served and a karmic debt will be erased, a Jew taking the life of the man who took the life of other Jews. Logically, I know that's not true. Emotionally, I don't even want to give him the satisfaction of thinking I would consider it.

  But I can't just walk away and pretend this conversation never happened. If a man came up to me on the street and confessed to a murder, I wouldn't ignore it. I'd find someone who knew what to do.

  Just because that murder occurred nearly seventy years ago doesn't make it any different.

  It is still a complete disconnect for me--looking at this photo of an SS officer and trying to figure out how he became the man standing in front of me. The one who has hidden, in plain sight, for more than half a century.

  I had laughed with Josef; I had confided in Josef; I had played chess with Josef. Behind him is Mary's Monet garden, the one with dahlias and sweet peas and stem roses, hydrangea and delphinium and monkshood. I think about what she told me weeks ago, how sometimes the most beautiful things can be poisonous.

  Two years ago, the John Demjanjuk case was in the news. Although I hadn't followed it, I remember the image of a very old man being removed from his home in a wheelchair. Clearly someone, somewhere, is still out there prosecuting former Nazis.

  But who?

  If Josef is lying, I need to know why. But if Josef is telling the truth, then I have unwittingly just become a part of history.

  I need time to think. And I need him to believe I'm on his side.

  I turn back and hand him the photograph. I think about young Josef in his uniform, lifting his gun and shooting at someone. I think about a picture in my high school history book, an emaciated Jewish man carrying the body of another. "Before I decide whether or not to help you . . . I have to know what you did," I say slowly.

  Josef lets out a breath he has been holding. "So it is not a no," he says cautiously. "This is good."

  "This is not good," I correct, and I run down the Holy Stairs, leaving him to fend for himself.

  *

  I walk. For hours. I know that Josef will come down from the shrine and try to find me in the bakery, and when he does, I don't want to be there. By the time I get back to the shop, all heaven has broken loose. A trickle of the frail, the elderly, the wheelchair-bound snakes out the front door. A small knot of nuns kneeling in prayer have gathered by the oleander bush in the restroom hallway. Somehow, in the short time I've been gone, the word about the Jesus Loaf has gotten out.

  Mary stands beside Rocco, who has pulled his dreadlocks into a neat ponytail and who is holding the bread on a platter covered with a burgundy tea towel. In front of them is a mother pushing her twenty-something son in a complicated motorized wheelchair. "Look, Keith," she says, lifting the loaf and holding it against his curled fist. "Can you touch Him?"

  Seeing me, Mary signals Rocco to take over. Then she slips her arm through mine and leads me into the kitchen. Her cheeks are glowing; her dark hair has been brushed to a high s