The Storyteller

  And then.

  In one leather satchel, slipped into a torn silk lining, was a fountain pen.

  My hand closed around it with an ache. Holding a pen felt so normal that my past, which I had surgically separated from the current state of my existence, came rushing back. I could see myself curled in the window of my father's bakery, writing my book. I could remember chewing on the tip of a pen as I heard the dialogue of Ania and Aleksander in my head. The story flowed like blood from my hand; sometimes it seemed that I was simply channeling a film that was already playing, that I was only the projector instead of the creator. When I wrote, I felt untethered, impossibly free. And right now, I barely remembered what that was like.

  I hadn't realized how much I'd missed writing in the weeks I'd been here. Real writers can't not write, Herr Bauer had once told me, when we were discussing Goethe. That is how you know, Fraulein Lewin, if you are destined for the life of a poet.

  My fingers itched, curling around the instrument. I did not even know if there was ink inside. To test it, I pressed the nib against the numbers that had been burned into my left forearm. The ink flowed, a beautiful black Rorschach blot, covering up what they had done to me.

  I slipped the pen into my jacket. This was for Darija, I reminded myself. Not for me.

  That night I enlisted the help of another girl to prop Darija up at the evening Appell. She could barely stand by the time we were sent back to the block, two hours later. She wouldn't let me even touch her cheek, so that I could open her lips and see how bad the infection had become.

  Her forehead was so hot it blistered against my hand. "Darija," I said, "you have to trust me."

  She shook her head, near delirium. "Leave me alone," she wailed.

  "I will. After I knock out that stupid tooth."

  My comment cut through whatever haze she was in. "Like hell you will."

  "Shut up and open your mouth," I muttered, but when I went to grab her chin, she reared away.

  "Is it going to hurt?" she whimpered.

  I nodded, looking her right in the eye. "Yes. If I had any gas, I'd give it to you."

  Darija started to laugh. Faintly at first, and then a loud bark, one that made the other girls turn around in their bunks. "Gas," she wheezed. "You don't have any gas?"

  I realized how silly this was, given the mass extermination that was going on just yards away from our hut. Suddenly I was laughing, too. It was inappropriate and awful gallows humor, and we could not stop. We collapsed against each other, snorting and hooting, until everyone else got disgusted with us and looked away.

  When we finally could control ourselves, we had our emaciated arms around each other, the gangly limbs of two tangled praying mantises. "If you can't anesthetize me," Darija said, "then distract me, okay?"

  "I could sing," I suggested.

  "You want to cause more pain, or prevent it?" She looked at me, desperate. "Tell me a story."

  I nodded. I took the pen out of my pocket and tried to clean it as best I could, which wasn't easy given that my clothes were filthy. Then I looked at my best friend, my only friend.

  I couldn't tell her a memory from our childhood, because that would be too upsetting. I couldn't spin a yarn about our future, because we barely had one.

  There was really only one story I knew by heart: the one I'd been writing--the one Darija had been reading--for years.

  "My father trusted me with the details of his death," I began, the words rising, rote, from some deep cave of my mind. " 'Ania,' he would say, 'no whiskey at my funeral. I want the finest blackberry wine. No weeping, mind you. Just dancing. And when they lower me into the ground, I want a fanfare of trumpets, and white butterflies.' A character, that was my father. He was the village baker, and every day, in addition to the loaves he would make for the town, he would create a single roll for me that was as unique as it was delicious: a twist like a princess's crown, dough mixed with sweet cinnamon and the richest chocolate. The secret ingredient, he said, was his love for me, and this made it taste better than anything else I had ever eaten."

  I opened Darija's mouth gently and positioned the pen at the root of her swollen gum. I lifted a stone I had pried from the latrines. "We lived on the outskirts of a village so small that everyone knew everyone else by name. Our home was made of river stone, with a thatched roof; the hearth where my father baked heated the entire cottage. I would sit at the kitchen table, shelling peas that I grew in the small garden out back as my father opened the door of the brick oven and slid the peel inside to take out crusty, round loaves of bread. The red embers glowed, outlining the strong muscles of his back as he sweated through his tunic. 'I don't want a summer funeral, Ania,' he would say. 'Make sure instead I die on a cool day, when there's a nice breeze. Before the birds fly south, so that they can sing for me.'

  "I would pretend to take note of his requests. I didn't mind the macabre conversation; my father was far too strong for me to believe any of these requests of his would ever come to pass. Some of the others in the village found it strange, the relationship I had with my father, the fact that we could joke about this, but my mother had died when I was an infant and all we had was each other."

  I looked down to see Darija finally relaxed, caught in the gauze of my words. But I realized, too, that the whole hut had gone quiet; all the women were listening to me.

  "My father trusted me with the details of his death, " I said, raising the rock directly above the pen. " But in the end, I was too late."

  Swiftly I smashed the stone into the pen, a makeshift chisel. The sound that Darija made was unearthly. She reared up as if she'd been run through with a sword. I fell back, horrified by what I'd done, as she clutched her hands to her mouth and rolled away from me.

  When she looked up, her eyes were bright red, the blood vessels having burst from the force of her scream. Blood streamed down her chin, too, as if she herself was an upior after a kill. "I'm so sorry," I cried. "I didn't mean to hurt you . . ."

  "Minka," she said, through the blood, through her tears. She grabbed my hand, or at least that's what I thought she was doing, until I realized she was trying to give me something.

  In her palm was a broken, rotted tooth.

  *

  The next day, Darija's fever had broken. I again carried the breakfast rations from the kitchen, so that I could get an extra helping for Darija to build up her strength. When she smiled at me, I could see the gap where her tooth had been, a black chasm.

  A new woman joined us in the block that evening. She was from Radom, and she had given her three-year-old to her elderly mother at the loading ramp, on the whispered advice of one of the men in striped uniforms. She could not stop crying. "If I'd known," she sobbed, choking on the truth. "If I'd known why he said that I never would have done it."

  "Then you would both be dead," said Ester, the woman who, at age fifty-two, was the oldest one in the block. She worked with us in Kanada and had a steady black market business, trading cigarettes and clothing that were pilfered from the suitcases for extra rations.

  This new woman could not stop crying. That was not an unusual phenomenon, but this particular crier, she was a loud one. And we were all exhausted from lack of food and long hours of labor. We were getting upset listening to her. It was worse than the rabbi's daughter from Lublin, who prayed out loud the whole night through.

  "Minka," Ester said finally, when this woman had been wailing for hours, "do something."

  "What can I do?" I couldn't bring back her child or her mother. I couldn't undo what had happened. To be honest, I was annoyed with the woman; that's how inhuman I had become. We had all suffered losses like she had, after all. What made hers so special that it had to rob us of our precious hours of sleep?

  "If we cannot shut her up," another girl said, "then maybe we can drown her out."

  There was a chorus of agreement. "Where were you up to, Minka?" Ester asked.

  At first I did not know what she was talking about. But th
en I realized that these women wanted to hear the story I had written, the one I had used to calm Darija the night before. If it worked as an anesthetic, why wouldn't it numb the pain of hearing this mother weep for her baby?

  They sat like reeds on the edge of a pond, fragile and swaying slightly against each other for support. I could see the shine of their eyes in the dark.

  "Go on," Darija said, elbowing me. "You have a captive audience."

  So I started to speak of Ania, for whom the day had begun like any other. How it was colder than usual for October; how the leaves had blustered off the limbs of the trees into small cyclones that danced like devils around her boots, which was how she knew that something bad was going to happen. Her father had taught her that, as well as everything else she knew: how to tie her shoes, how to navigate by the stars, how to see a monster who was hiding behind the face of a man.

  I spoke of the people of the village, who were on edge. Some farm animals had been slaughtered; pet dogs had gone missing. There seemed to be a predator in their midst.

  I told them about Damian, the captain of the guard, who wanted Ania to marry him, and wasn't above using force to make that happen. How he told the nervous mob that if they stayed within the walls of the village, they would be safe.

  I had written that part just after moving to the ghetto. When I still believed that.

  It was quiet in the block. The rabbi's daughter wasn't praying anymore; the new woman's sobs had quieted.

  I described Damian taking the last baguette Ania had to sell at market, how he held his coins out of reach until she agreed to kiss him. How she left in a hurry with her empty basket and his eyes boring into her back. "There was a stream that separated the cottage from the house," I said, speaking in Ania's narrative voice.

  "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."

  I cupped my hands. "The water," I said, "ran red. I set down the basket I was carrying and followed the bank upstream . . . and then I saw it."

  "Saw what?" Ester murmured.

  I remembered, in that minute, what my mother had told me about being a mensch, about putting others' welfare before your own. I looked at the new woman, until she met my gaze.

  "You'll have to wait till tomorrow to find out," I said.

  Sometimes all you need to live one more day is a good reason to stick around.

  *

  It was Ester who told me to write it down. "You never know," she said. "Maybe one day you will be famous."

  I laughed at that. "Or more likely the story will die with me."

  But I knew what she was asking. For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what tales they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.

  I think, in the end, that's why I did it. Because there would be no photograph of me for someone to steal or to memorize. There was no family at home anymore to think of me. Maybe I wasn't even remarkable enough to be remembered; looking like I did these days, I was just another prisoner, another number. If I had to die in this hellhole, and the odds were very good that would happen, then maybe someone else would survive and tell their children the story a girl had told at night in the block. Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on.

  Ironically, it was the photographs that made it possible. One day, while reciting my litany, I dropped the deck of faces on the floor. Hurrying to gather them again, I realized that some were facedown. On the white cardboard of one photo I read, "Mosza, 10 mos."

  Someone had written that.

  It was a small square, smaller than what I was used to, but it was paper. And I had dozens of them, and a fountain pen.

  Having something to live for went both ways. I would play Scheherazade for the block every night, weaving a story of Ania and Aleksander until they lived and breathed the way we did. But then, I would write by the light of the moon for a few hours to the even snores and occasional whimpers of the other women. To safeguard my work, I wrote in German. If these note cards were ever found, I had no doubt the punishment would be severe, but maybe less so if the guards could read the language and recognized it as a story, instead of thinking they were secret notes to be passed between prisoners to incite rebellion. I wrote from memory, adding bits and pieces as I edited my way through the story--always elaborating on scenes where food was described. I described in the greatest detail the crumb of that delicious roll Ania's father bakes for her. The way she could taste the butter in its flaky crust; the heat that stayed trapped on the soft palate; the burst of cinnamon on the tip of her tongue.

  I wrote until the fountain pen bled itself dry, until as much of my story as possible was scratched in tiny, careful prose on the backs of over one hundred faces of the dead.

  *

  "Raus!"

  One minute I was asleep, dreaming that I had been brought to a room with a table a kilometer long, on which there were heaps of food, and that I had to eat my way from one end to the other before I would be allowed to leave. The next, the Beast was smacking the straw of the bunk indiscriminately with a metal rod, her blows landing on my back and my thigh before I managed to scramble down from the perch.

  Her back was to me, and she was yelling. Several guards filled the block and began to shove women out of the way, yanking the thin blankets off the bunks and sweeping the straw off the wooden planks. They were looking for contraband.

  Sometimes we knew about an inspection. I don't know how, but rumors would reach us, so that there was time to hide whatever you had squirreled away in your bunk on your person, instead. Today, though, there had been no warning. I remembered the novel that had been confiscated weeks ago, the one that led to the injuries that caused Agnat's death. In my bunk, buried under the straw where I had lain last night, was the deck of photos with my story written out.

  One girl was dragged outside when a guard found a hidden radio. We had been listening to it at night, to Chopin and Liszt and Bach, and once, a Tchaikovsky ballet that Darija had danced to in a recital in Lod, which made her cry in her sleep. Sometimes, there would be bursts of news in between, and from these I learned that the German offensive was not going well, that they could not reconquer Belgium. I knew that the United States had continued to advance after landing in France this summer. I told myself it was only a matter of time, surely, before this war was over.

  If I could survive the moments like this one, anyway.

  The Beast stuck her hand into the straw of the bunk below mine and pulled out what looked like a small rock wrapped in paper. She brought it to her mouth, licked it. "Who sleeps here?" she demanded.

  The five girls who crammed into the tiny space stepped forward, holding tightly to each other's hands. "Who stole this chocolate?" the Beast asked.

  The girls looked completely bewildered. It was entirely possible that someone savvier, at the last minute, had shoved her stash of contraband into the straw of their bunk to save herself. At any rate, they stood mute, staring down at the cold dirt floor.

  The Blockalteste grabbed the hair of one of the girls. Like the rest of us who worked in Kanada, we were allowed to grow ours out. Mine was about an inch long now. It was only one of the many things about that job assignment that made people jealous. The guards there called us fat swine, because we looked healthier than most of the female prisoners, since we could steal bits of food we found in suitcases. "Is it yours?" the Beast yelled.

  The girl shook her head. "I don't . . . I d-didn't . . ."

  "Maybe this will jog your memory," she said, and she swung her metal rod acros
s the front of all five of their faces, breaking teeth and noses and driving them to their knees.

  She kicked between their fallen bodies to search the straw of our bunk. My heart started up like a machine gun; sweat broke out on my temples. I saw her hand close around the deck of photographs, which I had secured with a thread pulled from the hem of my uniform dress.

  As the Beast untied the bow, Darija stepped forward. "They belong to me."

  My jaw dropped. I knew exactly what she was doing: paying me back for saving her life. Before I could speak, another woman stepped forward, too--the one who'd arrived only three nights before, the one who could not stop weeping over the loss of her son and her mother. I still did not even know her name. "She is lying," the woman said. "They're mine."

  "They're both lying." I looked at the woman, wondering about her motivation. Was she trying to rescue me? Or just die herself? "She doesn't work in Kanada. And she"--I nodded at Darija--"does not speak German."

  One moment, I was standing, drenched in bravado, and the next I was being hauled out of the block. It was pouring outside, and the wind raged like a dragon. One of my wooden shoes got stuck in the mud; I had just enough time to grab for it before it got left behind. If you did not have shoes, you would not survive, period.

  Standing in the center of the courtyard, rain pelting his wool uniform, was the SS officer I called Herr Tremor. There was no shudder in his grasp as he lifted a whip and brought it down on the back of the girl from my block who had hidden the radio. She lay facedown in a puddle. After each blow he yelled at her to get up, and each time she did, he struck her again.

  I would be next.

  An uncontrollable shiver ran down the length of me. My teeth were chattering, my nose running. I wondered if he would kill the girl who stole the radio.

  Or me, for that matter.

  It is a strange thing, to contemplate dying. I found myself thinking of the criteria I had once kept for my father, as an inside joke. I had criteria of my own now:

  When I die, please make it fast.

  If there is a bullet, aim for my heart, not my head.

  It would be good if it did not hurt.

  I'd rather die of a sudden blow than an infection. I'd even welcome the gas. Maybe that just felt like going to sleep and never waking up.