The Storyteller

  "I'll be there," Herr Dybbuk vowed, laughing.

  He was talking to the SS officer who oversaw Appell. The man in charge of the women's camp. The one with the tremor in his hand.

  The one who was not inhabited by an evil spirit. He was just evil, period. He had ordered Agnat's beating and ran hot and cold when it came to overseeing Appell. Either he seemed bored and the count went quickly, or he was on a rampage and took his fury out on us. Just that morning, he had raised his pistol and shot a girl who was too weak to stand upright. When the girl beside her jumped in response, he shot her, too.

  These officers were related?

  There was a passing similarity, I supposed. They both had the same jaw, the same sandy hair. And tonight, after they had beaten and starved and demeaned us, they would go share a beer together.

  I had paused, thinking about this, and the guard who was watching me sift through the suitcases and satchels shouted at me to get to work. So I reached into the pile that never seemed to get any smaller and pulled out a leather valise. I tossed away a nightgown and some brassieres and underwear, a lace hat. There was a silk roll with a string of pearls. I called to the officer, who was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the wall of the shack, and handed it over to him to record and inventory.

  I lugged another piece of luggage out of the heap.

  This one, I recognized.

  I suppose several people might have had the same overnight case as my father, but how many of those would have had the handle repaired with a length of wire, where it had broken after I used it, years ago, as part of a pretend fort to play in? I fell to my knees, turning my back on the guard, and opened the straps.

  Inside were the candlesticks that had come from my grandmother, wrapped carefully in my father's tallith. Beneath that were his socks, his undershorts. A sweater that my mother had knit for him. He'd told me once that he hated it, that the sleeves were too long and the wool too itchy, but she had gone to so much trouble, how could he not pretend that he loved it more than anything?

  I could not catch my breath, could not move. No matter what Agnat had said, no matter what evidence I was confronted with daily as I marched past the crematoria and the long line of new arrivals waiting blindly to go inside, I had not believed my father was truly dead until I opened this suitcase.

  I was an orphan. I had nobody left in the world.

  With shaking hands I took the tallith, kissed it, and added it to the pile of trash. I set the candlesticks aside, thinking of my mother saying the prayer over them at Shabbat dinner. Then I lifted the sweater.

  My mother's hands had worked the needles, looped the yarn. My father had worn it over his heart.

  I couldn't let someone else wear this, someone who didn't know that every inch of it told a tale. This yarn lived up to its second meaning--a tale--with every knit and purl part of the saga of my family. This sleeve was the one my mother had been working on when Basia fell down and hit her head on the corner of the piano bench, and needed stitches at the hospital. This neckline was so tricky she had asked for help from our housekeeper, who was a much more accomplished knitter. This hemline she had measured against my father's midsection, joking out loud that she had not meant to marry such a long-waisted gorilla of a man.

  There is a reason the word history has, at its heart, the narrative of one's life.

  I buried my face in the wool and started to sob, rocking back and forth, even though I knew I was going to attract the attention of the guards.

  My father had trusted me with the details of his death, and in the end, I was too late.

  Wiping my eyes, I started to pull the hem of the sweater, so that the weave unraveled. I rolled the yarn up around my arm like a bandage, a tourniquet for a soul that was bleeding out.

  The guard closest to me approached, screaming, jerking his gun at my face.

  Do it, I thought. Take me, too.

  I kept pulling on the yarn, until it lay in a nest around me, crimped and rust-colored. Somewhere, Darija was probably watching me and too afraid for her own welfare to tell me to stop. But I couldn't. I was unraveling, too.

  The commotion attracted some of the other guards, who came over to see what was happening. When one leaned down to grab the candlesticks, I snatched them in one hand and then took the scissors I had used to cut up fur coats and opened their legs wide, pressing the blade against my throat.

  The Ukrainian guard laughed.

  Suddenly a quiet voice spoke. "What is going on here?"

  The SS officer in charge of Kanada pushed through the crowd. He towered over me, taking in the scene: the open suitcase, the sweater that I had destroyed, my white knuckles on the necks of the candlesticks.

  On his orders, just this morning, I had seen a prisoner hit so hard in the back with a truncheon that she vomited blood. That woman had refused to discard tefillin that were found in a suitcase. What I was doing--destroying property that the Germans believed was theirs--was much worse. I closed my eyes, waiting for the blow, welcoming it.

  Instead, I felt the officer pry the candlesticks out of my hands.

  When I opened my eyes Herr Dybbuk's face was only inches from mine. I could see the tic of a muscle in his cheek, the blond stubble of his beard. " Wen gehort dieser Koffer? " To whom does this suitcase belong?

  Meinem Vater, I murmured.

  The SS officer's eyes narrowed. He looked at me for a long moment, then turned to the other guards and shouted at them to stop staring. Finally, he glanced back at me. "Get back to work," he said, and a moment later, he was gone.

  *

  I stopped counting the days. They all ran together, like chalk in the rain: shuffling from one side of the camp to the other, standing in line for a bowl of soup that was nothing more than hot water boiled with a turnip. I thought I had known hunger; I had no idea. Some girls would steal tins of food hidden in the suitcases, but I had not been brave enough yet. I would dream sometimes of the rolls my father made me, the cinnamon bursting on my tongue like gustatory fireworks. I would close my eyes and see a table groaning with the weight of Shabbat dinner; would taste the fatty, crisp skin of the chicken, which I used to peel from the bird when it came from the oven, even though my mother would swat at my hand and tell me to wait till it was on the table. Then in my dreams, I would taste all these things, and they would turn to ash in my mouth--not the ash of coals but the ash that was shoveled from the crematoria day and night.

  I learned, too, how to survive. The best position for Appell, when we lined up in rows of five, was in the middle, out of reach of SS guns and whips, yet close to other prisoners who could hold you up if you fainted. When lining up for food, halfway through the queue was best. The front of the line got served first, but what they were served was the watery bit that floated on top. If you could hold out to the middle of the line, you were more likely to get something nutritious.

  The guards and the kapos were always vigilant to make sure we were not talking as we worked or marched or moved. It was only in the hut, at night, that we could speak freely. But as the days stretched into weeks, I found that it took too much energy to have a conversation, anyway. Besides, what was there to say? If we spoke at all, it was of food--what we missed the most, where in Poland you could find the finest hot chocolate or the sweetest marzipan or the richest petits fours. Sometimes, when I would share a memory of a meal, I noticed the others listening. "It's because you don't just tell stories," Darija explained. "You paint with words."

  Maybe so, but that is the funny thing about paint. At the first cold splash of reality, it washes away, and the surface you were trying to cover is just as ugly as ever. Every morning, being marched to Kanada, I would see Jews waiting in the groves until it was their turn at the crematoria. They were still wearing their clothes, and I wondered how long it might be before I found myself ripping the lining of that wool coat or digging into the pockets of those trousers. As I walked by I kept my gaze trained on the ground. If I had been looking up, they wou
ld pity me, with my shaved head and my scarecrow body. If I had been looking up, they would see my face and know that what they were about to be told--that this shower was just a precaution, before they were sent out to work--was a lie. If I had been looking up, I would have been tempted to shout out the truth, to tell them that the smell wasn't from a factory or kitchen but from their own friends and relatives being incinerated. I would have started to scream and maybe I would never have stopped.

  Some of the women prayed. I saw no point in that; since if there was a God, He would not have let this happen. Others said that the conditions at Auschwitz were so horrendous God chose not to go there. If I prayed for anything it was to fall asleep quickly without concentrating on my stomach digesting its own lining. So instead I went through the motions: line up for Appell, line up for work, line up for food, line up for work, march back to the barrack, line up for Appell, line up for food, crawl into my bunk.

  The work I did was not hard, not compared to what some of the other women had to do. We got to step inside from the cold, into the sorting sheds. We hauled suitcases and clothing, but not stone. The most difficult part of my job was knowing that I was the last person who would touch the clothes this person had worn, who would see his face in photographs, who would read the love letters his wife had written. The hardest, of course, were the possessions of little boys and little girls--toys, blankets, pretty patent leather shoes. No children survived here; they were the first to be sent to the showers. When I came upon their belongings, I sometimes started to cry. It was devastating to hold a teddy bear, because its owner never would again, before tossing it into a pile to be destroyed.

  I began to feel a great responsibility, as if my mind was a vessel, and I had the duty of keeping a record of those who were gone. We had ample opportunity to steal clothing, but the first thing I stole from Kanada was not a scarf or a pair of warm socks. It was someone else's memories.

  I had promised myself that even if it meant getting a clout on the head from a guard, I would take that extra moment to look at the trappings of a life that was about to be obliterated from existence. I would touch the spectacles with reverence; I would tie the pink ribbons on the knit baby booties; I would memorize one of the addresses in a small leather-bound book of business contacts.

  The photographs, they were the hardest for me. Because they were the only proof that this person, who had owned these undergarments and carried this suitcase, had been alive. Had been happy. And it was my job to obliterate that evidence.

  But one day, I didn't.

  I waited for the guard to walk away from the row where I was working, and opened up a photo album. Written carefully beneath each picture was a caption, and a date. In the photos, everyone was smiling. I saw a young woman who must have been the owner of this suitcase, smiling up into the face of a young man. I looked at their wedding picture, and at some vacation abroad, with the girl mugging for the camera. I wondered how many years ago this had been.

  Then came a series of photos of a baby, carefully captioned. "Ania, 3 days." "Ania sits up." "Ania's first steps." "First day of school." "First tooth lost!"

  And then, the pictures stopped.

  This child had the same name as the character in my story, which made her seem even more compelling. I could hear the guard yelling at one of the women behind me. Quickly, I popped one of the photos out of the little corner reinforcements that had held it in place. I slipped it up my sleeve.

  I panicked when the guard came back, certain that he had seen what I did. But instead, he just told me to speed up my work.

  That first night, I went home with pictures of Ania, of Herschel and Gerda, of a little boy named Haim missing his two front teeth. The next day, I was bold enough to take eight photographs. Then I was put on a different detail, loading clothes into carts and transporting them to sheds. As soon as I was reassigned to sorting the belongings, I went back to tucking various photos up my sleeve and squirreling them in the straw of my bunk.

  I didn't see it as stealing. I saw it as archiving. Before I went to sleep I would take out these photos, this growing deck of the dead, and whisper my way through their names. Ania, Herschel, Gerda, Haim. Wolf, Mindla, Dworja, Izrael. Szymon, Elka. Rochl and Chaja, the twins. Eliasz, still wailing after his bris. Szandla, on her wedding day.

  As long as I remembered them, then they were still here.

  *

  Darija was working next to me, and she had a toothache. I could see her shoulders shaking with the effort of not moaning. If you showed illness, you were an even bigger target than usual for the guards, who took a tiny snag of weakness and ripped it wide open.

  From the corner of my eye I saw her lift up a small autograph book with a sequined cover. When we were little, Darija had had one just like it. We would stand outside the theater and fancy restaurants sometimes, and wait for glamorous women in white fur coats and silver heels to exit on the arms of their handsome beaux. I have no idea if any of them were actually famous, but they seemed that way to us. Darija glanced furtively toward me and slid the book across the bench. I buried it beneath a coat whose lining I was ripping to shreds.

  The book was filled with ticket stubs from films and sketches of buildings; the wrapper from a mint candy; and a little poem that I recognized as a hand-clapping game. A hair ribbon, a swatch of tulle from a fancy dress. A winning ticket from a bakery giveaway. Written inside the back cover were two words: "NEVER FORGET." Inside the front cover a photo had been glued, of two girlfriends. "Gitla & Me," the caption read. I didn't know who "Me" was. There was no identifying information, and the handwriting, careful and loopy, belonged to a young girl.

  I decided I would call her Darija.

  I looked over at my friend and saw her wipe away a tear with her sleeve. She could have been wondering what became of her own sequined autograph book. Or of the happy girl who had once owned it.

  If I had not seen the transformation myself, I would not have recognized Darija. The long, lithe dancer's body of which I had been so jealous was now a bag of bones. Beneath her clothing, the knobs of her spine stood out like fence posts. Her eyes were sunken, her lips chapped dry. She now bit her nails to the point where they bled.

  I'm pretty sure I looked just as awful to her as she did to me.

  I ripped out the page with the photograph and tucked it into my sleeve, a move that I now had down to a science.

  Suddenly a hand reached over my shoulder and picked up the autograph book.

  Herr Dybbuk stood so close to me that I could smell the pine of his aftershave. I did not turn my head, did not speak or acknowledge him. I heard him rifling through the pages.

  Surely he would notice the spot in the front where something had been torn out?

  He moved away, throwing the book onto the heap of items to be burned. But for at least another quarter of an hour, I could feel the heat of his stare on the back of my neck, and that day I stole nothing else from Kanada.

  *

  At night Darija couldn't sleep, the pain was so bad. "Minka," she whispered, shivering against me. "If I die, you won't have a picture of me to save."

  "I won't need one, because you're not going to die," I told her.

  I knew her tooth was infected. Her breath smelled as if she was rotting from the inside out, and her cheek was swollen to twice its size. If the tooth didn't come out, she wasn't going to survive. I hugged her back to my front, giving her whatever body heat I still had. "Say them with me," I begged. "It will distract you."

  Darija shook her head. "It hurts . . ."

  "Please," I said. "Just try." I did not even need the photos anymore. Ania, Herschel, Gerda, Majer, Wolf. With each name I spoke, I imagined the face in the picture.

  Then the thinnest thread of Darija's voice responded. "Mindla?"

  "That's right. Dworja, Izrael."

  "Szymon," Darija added. "Elka."

  Rochl and Chaja. Eliasz. Fiszel and Liba and Bajla. Lejbus, Mosza, Brajna. Gitla and Darija.

>   By then she had stopped reciting with me. Her body went lax.

  I checked to make sure she was still breathing, and then I let myself fall asleep.

  *

  The next day Darija woke with a swollen, red face, her skin on fire. She couldn't drag herself out of bed so I had to do it for her, bearing her weight and hauling her to the toilets and then back to the bunk to make our bed. When the Beast came in, I was waiting to volunteer to get the gruel, because hauling the pot entitled me to an extra ration. I gave it to Darija, who was too weak to even lift the bowl to her mouth. I tried to coax her to open her mouth by singing the way Basia had sung to Majer, when he refused to eat.

  "You can't sing," she croaked, smiling the tiniest bit, and it was just enough for me to get some of the liquid inside.

  I hauled her upright during Appell, praying that the head officer--the one with the shudder in his arm, whom I thought of now as Herr Tremor--didn't notice she was ailing. Herr Tremor might have had some kind of condition that led him to quiver like that, but it wasn't severe enough to keep him from meting out brutal punishment with his own hands. Last week, when a new girl turned left instead of right at his command, he disciplined the whole block. We had to do calisthenics for two hours in a cold, driving rain. Needless to say, with so many women starving, at least ten collapsed, and when they did, Herr Tremor walked through the mud and kicked them where they lay. But today he seemed in a rush; instead of making an example of us or singling women out for punishment, he hurried through the counting and dismissed the kapos.

  I was on a mission. Not only did I have to cover for Darija and do twice the work but I had to find something in particular that I could steal. Something sharp and small, something capable of knocking out a tooth.

  I managed to set Darija beside me at the sorting bench and paced myself so that every time she had to bring a valuable to the locked box in the center of the barracks, I had to go, too. By the end of the day, though, I had not found a single item that would work. Three pairs of false teeth, a wedding gown, tubes of lipstick, but nothing pointed and strong.