The Storyteller

  "When are you talking to him again?" Leo asks.

  "Tomorrow. We're going to grief group."

  "All right," he says. "Call me."

  As I hang up I realize I've missed the turnoff to my house. And more to the point, that I already know where I am headed.

  *

  The word babka comes from baba, which in Yiddish and Polish means "grandmother." I cannot think of a single Chanukah celebration that didn't include these sweet loaves. It was an unwritten assumption that my mother would buy a turkey the size of a small child, that my sister Pepper would get to mash the potatoes, and that my nana would bring three loaves of the famous babka. Even as a little girl I remember grating the bittersweet chocolate, terrified I was going to shred my knuckles in the process.

  Today, I send Daisy home early. I've told her I am here to bake with my grandmother, but really, I wanted the privacy. My grandmother butters the first loaf pan as I roll out the dough and brush the edges with an egg wash. Then I sprinkle some of the chocolate filling inside, and start to roll the dough tight as a drum. I twist the logs quickly, five full turns, and brush the top with egg again. "Yeast," my grandmother says, "is a miracle. One little pinch, some water, and look at what happens."

  "It's not a miracle, it's chemistry," I say. "The real miracle is the moment someone looked at fungus for the first time and said, Hmm, let's see what happens when we cook with it."

  My grandmother passes me the loaf pan so that I can put the dough inside and press the streusel topping down. "My father," she says, "used to send messages to my mother through babka."

  I smile at her. "Really?"

  "Yes. If the filling was apple, it was meant to tell her the bakery had had a sweet day, lots of customers. If it was almond, it meant I miss you bitterly."

  "And chocolate?"

  My nana laughs. "That he was sorry for whatever had gotten him into trouble with her. Needless to say, we ate a lot of chocolate babka."

  I wipe my hands on a dishcloth. "Nana," I ask. "What was he like? What did he do, when he wasn't working? Did he ever call you a special nickname or take you somewhere unforgettable?"

  She purses her lips. "Ach, again with the biography."

  "I know he died in the war," I say softly. "How?"

  She makes a big production of furiously buttering the second loaf pan. Then finally, she speaks. "Every day, after school, I would come to the bakery and there would be a single roll waiting for me. My father called it a minkele, and he only made one a day. It had the flakiest crumb to it, and a center of chocolate and cinnamon so warm it slid down your throat, and I know he could have sold hundreds, but no, he said that this was special just for me."

  "He was killed by Nazis, wasn't he?" I ask quietly.

  Nana turns away from me. "My father trusted me with the details of his death. Minka, he would say, when my mother read me the story of Snow White, make a note: I do not want to wind up in a glass case with people looking at me. Or: Minka, make a note: I would like fireworks, instead of flowers. Minka, make sure I do not pass in the summertime. Too many flies for the mourners to deal with, don't you think? It was a game to me, a lark, because my father was never going to die. We all knew he was invincible." She takes one of her canes from where it is hanging on the counter and walks to the kitchen table, sitting heavily on one of the chairs. "My father trusted me with the details of his death, but in the end, I couldn't manage a single one."

  I kneel down on the floor in front of her and rest my head in her lap. Her hand, small and birdlike, nests in the crown of my hair. "You've held this inside you for so long," I whisper. "Wouldn't it be better to talk about it?"

  She touches the scarred side of my face. "Would it?" she asks.

  I pull back. "That's different. I can't pretend this never happened, no matter how much I want to. It's written all over me."

  "Exactly," my grandmother says, and she pushes up the sleeve of her sweater to reveal the numbers on her forearm. "I talked once about it, when I was much younger, to my doctor, who saw this. He asked if I would come to speak at his wife's class. She was a history professor at a university," she says. "The talk went well. I got over my stage fright enough to deliver it without throwing up, anyway. And then the teacher, she asked if there were any questions.

  "A boy stood up. Truth be told, I thought it was a girl, there was so much hair, down to here. He stood up and he said, 'The Holocaust never happened.' I did not know what to do, what to say. I was thinking, How dare you tell me this, when I lived it? How dare you erase my life just like that? I was so upset that I could barely see straight. I muttered an apology and I walked right off that stage, out the door, with my hand pressed up against my mouth. I thought if I didn't hold it there, I would start to scream. I went to my car and I sat inside until I knew what I should have said. History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?" She shakes her head. "All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination. There are young people like that foolish boy in the history class. I thought for sure that the reason I survived was to make certain something like that would never happen again, but you know, I must have been wrong. Because, Sage, it still happens. Every day."

  "Just because you had some neo-Nazi stand up in that classroom doesn't mean that it's not important for you to tell your story," I say. "Tell it to me."

  She looks at me for a long moment, then silently stands with her cane and walks out of the kitchen. Across the hall, in the first-floor study she has converted into a bedroom so that she doesn't have to climb stairs, I hear her moving things around, rifling through drawers. I get up, slip the loaves into the oven. Already, they're rising again.

  My grandmother is sitting on her bed when I come in. The room smells like her, like powder and roses. She is holding a small leather-bound notebook with a cracked binding.

  "I was a writer," she says. "A child who believed in fairy tales. Not the silly Disney ones your mother read to you, but the ones with blood and thorns, with girls who knew that love could kill you just as often as it could set you free. I believed in the curses of witches and the madness of werewolves. But I also mistakenly believed that the scariest stories came from imagination, not real life." She smooths her hand over the cover. "I started writing this when I was thirteen. It is what I did when other girls were fixing their hair and trying to flirt with boys. Instead, I would dream up characters and dialogue. I would write a chapter and give it to my best friend, Darija, to read, to see what she thought. We had a plan: I would become a bestselling author and she would be my editor and we would move to London and drink sloe gin fizzes. Ach, we didn't even know what sloe gin was back then. But this is what I was doing, when the war came. And I did not stop." She hands the volume to me. "It is not the original, of course. I don't have that anymore. But as soon as I could, I rewrote from memory. I had to."

  I open the front cover. Inside, in small, tight cursive, words crawl across the page, packed end to end without any white space, as if that were a luxury. Maybe, back then, it was. "This is my story," my grandmother continues. "It's not the one you're looking for, about what happened during the war. That's not nearly as important." She meets my gaze. "Because this story, it's the one that kept me alive."

  *

  My grandmother, she could have given Stephen King a run for his money.

  Her story is supernatural, about an upior--the Polish version of a vampire. But what makes it so terrifying is not the monster, who's a known quantity, but the ordinary men who turn out to be monsters, too. It is as if she knew, even at that young age, that you cannot separate good and evil cleanly, that they are conjoined twins sharing a single heart. If words had flavors, hers would be bitter almonds and coffee grounds. There are times when I'm reading her story that I forget she was the one to write it--that's how good it is.

  I read the notebook in its entirety, and then I reread it, wondering i
f I have missed a single word. I try to absorb the story, to the point where it is one I can play back to myself syllable by syllable, the way my grandmother must have done. I find myself reciting paragraphs when I am showering, washing the dishes, taking out the trash.

  My grandmother's story is a mystery, but not in the way she intended. I try to pull apart the characters and their dialogue to see the skeleton beneath that must have been her real life. All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

  I read about Ania, the narrator, and her father and hear my grandmother's voice; I imagine my great-grandfather's face. When she describes the cottage on the outskirts of Lod, the town square crossed by horse-drawn carts, the forest where Ania would walk with moss sinking beneath her boots, I can smell the peat burning and taste the ash on the bottom of their bread. I can hear the footsteps of children striking the cobblestones as they chase each other, long before they ever had anything or anyone to really run from.

  I am so engrossed in the story that I am late to pick Josef up for grief group. "You slept well?" he asks, and I tell him yes. As he sits down in the car, I think of the parallels between my grandmother's story--the monster that hunts villagers and kills Ania's father--and the SS, who came into my grandmother's life unannounced and destroyed her family. My grandmother's childhood--those little rolls baked just for her, the long, lazy afternoons when she and her best friend dreamed of their future, even the walls of her family's apartment--unfolds in a parallel line beside Josef's tale of the Hitler Youth. Yet they are inching closer; I know that they are destined to cross.

  That makes me hate Josef, right now.

  I bite my tongue, though, because Josef does not even know I have a grandmother, much less one who survived the genocide in which he was involved. I am not sure why I want to guard this information from him. Maybe because he'd be thrilled to hear he was one step closer to finding the right person to forgive him. Maybe because I think he doesn't deserve to know.

  Maybe because I do not like the idea of my grandmother and someone like Josef still coexisting in this world.

  "You are very quiet today," Josef muses.

  "Just thinking."

  "About me?"

  "Don't flatter yourself," I say.

  Because I was late picking Josef up, we are the last ones to arrive at grief group. Stuart immediately approaches, looking for my ever-present bag of baked goods--but I don't have anything today. I was too busy reading my grandmother's journal to bake. "I'm really sorry, "I tell him. "I came empty-handed."

  "If only Stuart could say the same," Jocelyn murmurs, and I realize he's brought his wife's death mask in again.

  Minka, make a note, I think, remembering my great-grandfather. When I die, no mask, okay?

  Marge rings the little bell that always makes me think we are at a yoga class, instead of a grief therapy group. "Shall we get started?" she asks.

  I don't know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it's the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now . . . if she is somewhere. It's the question mark that comes with death that we can't face, not the period.

  All of a sudden I realize there is one empty chair. Ethel is missing. I know, even before Marge tells us the news, that her husband, Bernie, has died.

  "It happened on Monday," Mrs. Dombrowski says. "I got the call from Ethel's oldest daughter. Bernie's in a better place now."

  I look over at Josef, who is picking at a thread on his pants, undisturbed.

  "Do you think she'll come back here?" Shayla asks. "Ethel?"

  "I hope so," Marge says. "I think if any of you would like to reach out to her, she'd appreciate it."

  "I want to send flowers or something," Stuart says. "Bernie had to be a pretty good guy, to have a lady like that who took care of him for so long."

  "You don't know that," I say slowly, and everyone turns to me, shocked. "None of us ever met the man. He could have beat her every day for all we know."

  "Sage!" Shayla gasps.

  "I don't mean to speak ill of the dead," I add quickly, ducking my head. "I imagine Bernie was a great guy who used to go bowling every week and who loaded the dishes into the dishwasher after every meal Ethel cooked. But do you think that only good guys wind up with people like us, left behind? Even Jeffrey Dahmer had a mother."

  "That's an interesting point," Marge says. "Do we grieve because the person we lost was such a light in the world? Or do we grieve because of who he was to us?"

  "Maybe a little of both," Stuart says, his hand running over the contours of his wife's death mask as if he were blind and learning her features for the first time.

  "So does that mean we shouldn't feel bad when someone horrible dies?" I ask.

  I can feel Josef's gaze boring into my temple.

  "There are definitely people who make this earth better by leaving it," Jocelyn muses. "Bin Laden. Charlie Manson."

  "Hitler," I say innocently.

  "Yeah, I read this book once about a woman who was his personal secretary and she made him out to be like any other boss. Said he used to gossip about the secretaries' boyfriends with them," Shayla says.

  "If they didn't regret killing people, why should anyone regret when they die?" Stuart says.

  "So you think once a Nazi, always a Nazi?" I ask.

  Beside me, Josef coughs.

  "I hope there's a special place in Hell for people like that," Shayla says primly.

  Marge recommends a five-minute breather. While she talks quietly to Shayla and Stuart, Josef taps my shoulder. "May I speak to you privately?"

  I follow him into the hallway and fold my arms. "How dare you?" he hisses, stepping so close to me that I retreat a step. "What I told you was in confidence. If I wanted the world to know what I used to be, I could have turned myself in to authorities years ago."

  "So you want absolution without any of the punishment," I say.

  His eyes flash, the blue nearly obliterated by the black of his pupils. "You will not speak of this in public anymore," he orders, so loudly that several others in the adjacent room turn toward us.

  His anger rushes at me, a rogue wave. Even though my scar is on fire, even though I feel as if I have been caught by the teacher passing a note in class, I force myself to look him in the eye. I stand rigid, nothing but breath between us, an empty truce.

  "Don't you ever speak to me that way again," I whisper. "I am not one of your victims."

  Then I turn on my heel and walk away. For just a moment, when Josef let his own death mask slip, I could see the man he used to be: the one buried beneath the kindly exterior for so many decades, like a root growing slow beneath pavement, still capable of cracking concrete.

  *

  I cannot leave grief group early without drawing attention to myself, and since I brought Josef to the meeting, I have to take him home or else face Marge's inquiry. But I don't speak to him, not when we are saying our good-byes to the others or walking to the parking lot. "I am sorry," Josef says, five minutes into our drive.

  We are stopped at a red light. "Well. That's a loaded statement."

  He continues to stare straight out the window. "I mean about what I said to you. During the break."

  I don't respond. I don't want him thinking he is off the hook. And no matter what he said to me, I can't just drop him off at the curb and walk away forever. I owe it to my grandmother. Plus, I promised Leo I wouldn't. If anything, hearing Josef snap like that makes me even more determined to get enough evidence to have him prosecuted. This is a man, clearly, who at one point in his life could do whatever he wanted without fear of retribution. In a way, by asking me to kill him, he's just doing more of the same.

  I think it's about time he got what he really deserves.

  "I am nervous, I suppose," Josef continues.

  "About what?"
I ask, feeling my scalp prickle. Is he onto me? Does he know that I plan to string him along, and then turn him in?

  "That you will listen to all I have to say to you and still not do what I've asked."

  I face him. "With or without me, Josef, you're going to die."

  He meets my gaze. "Do you know of Der Ewige Jude? The Wandering Jew?"

  The word Jew makes me shudder, as if such a term should not even be allowed to take up passing residence on his lips. I shake my head.

  "It is an old European story. A Jew, Ahasuerus, taunted Jesus as he stopped to rest while carrying his cross. When the Jew told Jesus he should move quicker, Jesus cursed him to walk the earth until the Second Coming. For hundreds of years there have been sightings of Ahasuerus, who cannot die, no matter how much he wants to."

  "You do realize the great irony here in comparing yourself to a Jew," I say.

  He shrugs. "Say what you will about them, but they thrive, in spite of"--he glances at my face--"everything. I should have died, several times now. I have had cancer and car accidents. I am the only elderly man I know who has been hospitalized for pneumonia and still survived. You believe what you like, Sage, but I know the reason I am still alive. Like Ahasuerus--every day I am here is another day to relive my mistakes."

  The light has turned green, and there are cars behind me honking, but I haven't put my foot on the accelerator. Josef seems to retreat into himself, lost in thought. "Herr Sollemach, from the Hitler-Jugend, used to tell us Jews were like weeds. Pull out one and two more grow in their place . . ."

  I press down on the gas, and we jolt forward. I'm disgusted with Josef, for being exactly who he professed to be. I'm disgusted with myself for not believing him, at first; for being fooled into thinking that this man was a grandfatherly Good Samaritan, like everyone else in this town.

  ". . . but I used to think," Josef says quietly, "that there are some weeds that are just as beautiful as flowers."

  There was something behind me. It was a sixth sense, a chill on the back of my neck. I had turned around a dozen times since entering the woods, but saw only the bare trees standing like sentries.

  Still, my heart was racing. I walked a little faster toward the cottage, clutching my bread basket, wondering if I was close enough for Aleks to hear me if I screamed.