The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

  I did what came naturally. I kicked her away from me.

  As the Reichsfuhrer-SS had said at Wewelsburg that day: Blood tells. It was not that I wanted to hurt this Jewish woman. I wasn't really thinking of her, at all. I was protecting myself.

  In that instant I realized what this night had been all about. Not violence, not riots, not public humiliation. These measures were a message, to let the Jews know they had no hold over us ethnic Germans--not economically or socially or politically, not even after that assassination.

  It was nearly dawn by the time the convoy headed back to Wewelsburg. The boys dozed on each other's shoulders, their clothes glittering with the pixie dust of broken glass. Herr Sollemach was snoring. Only Franz and I were awake.

  "Did you see him?" I asked.

  "Artur?" Franz shook his head.

  "Maybe he's gone already. I hear a lot of them have left the country."

  Franz stared at Herr Sollemach. His blond hair fell over one eye as he shook his head. "I hate that man."

  "Shh," I warned. "I think he can hear through his pores."

  "Arschloch."

  "He probably hears through that, too."

  My brother smiled a little. "Are you nervous?" he asked. "About going away?"

  I was, but I would never admit that. It wasn't officer-like to be afraid. "It will be fine," I said, hoping I could convince myself, too. I shoved against him with my elbow. "Don't get into trouble while I'm gone."

  "Don't forget where you came from," Franz said.

  He talked like that, sometimes. Like he was a wizened old man in the body of an eighteen-year-old. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  Franz shrugged. "That you don't have to listen to what they say. Well, maybe that's not true. But you don't have to believe it."

  "The thing is, Franz, I do." If I could explain to him how I felt, maybe then he wouldn't stick out like such a sore thumb at the HJ meetings when I was not around. And God knows the less he stuck out, the less likely he was to be bullied. "Tonight wasn't about hurting Jews. They were collateral damage. It was about keeping us safe. Us Germans."

  "Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to." He turned to me. "Do you remember that mouse in our bedroom, years ago?"

  "What?"

  Franz met my gaze. "You know. The one you killed," he said. "I forgive you."

  "I didn't ask for your forgiveness," I told him.

  My brother shrugged. "That doesn't mean you didn't want it."

  *

  The first person I ever shot was running away from me.

  I was no longer working at a concentration camp. In August 1939, we had been mobilized from Sachsenhausen and sent to follow the German troops as part of the SS-Totenkopfstandarte. It was now September 20. I remember this, because it was Franz's birthday and I did not have the time or the resources to write to him that day. We had crossed into Poland seven days earlier, trailing behind the army. Our route was from Ostrowo, through Kalisch, Turek, zuki, Krosniewice, Kladava, Przedecz, Wloclawek, Dembrice, Bydgoszcz, Wirsitz, Zarnikau, and finally Chodziez. We were to annihilate any form of resistance we found.

  On that particular day, we were doing what we'd been dispatched to do--conducting house searches, rounding up insurgents, and arresting those who were suspicious: Jews, Poles, activists. Another soldier, Urbrecht--a boy with a face like risen dough and a sensitive stomach--had accompanied me to this enclave of homes. It was a miserable, rainy day. We did a lot of shouting; my voice was stripped raw from telling the stupid Poles, who did not understand my German, to get out and join the others. There was a mother, a girl of about ten, and a teenage boy. We were looking for the father, who was one of the leaders of the local Jewish community. But there was no one else in the house, or so Urbrecht said, after canvassing it. I screamed in the face of the woman, asking her where her husband was, but she would not answer. As the rain drenched her, she fell to her knees and started sobbing and pointing back to the house. It was giving me a headache like no other.

  Nothing the son said could soothe her. I poked her in the back with my rifle, indicating where they should march, but the woman remained kneeling in a muddy puddle. As Urbrecht hauled her upright, the teenage boy started to run back to the house.

  Now, I had no idea what he was after. For all I knew, it was a weapon that Urbrecht had overlooked. I did what I had been told to do: I shot.

  The boy was running, and the next instant, he wasn't. The sound of the bullet was deafening, hollow. At first, I couldn't hear anything because of it. And then, I did.

  The cries were soft and hitched together like train cars. I stepped over the broken body of the boy and walked into the kitchen. I have no idea how that idiot Urbrecht might have missed the baby who had been lying in the laundry basket, the one who was now wide awake and shrieking her head off.

  Say what you will about the inhumanity of the SS-TV during the invasion of Poland, but I gave that woman her baby before we marched her off.

  *

  We started with the synagogues.

  Our commander, Standartenfuhrer Nostitz, explained the Judenaktion we would be undertaking in Wloclawek. It was much like what we had done with Herr Sollemach in Paderborn almost a year earlier, but on a bigger scale. We rounded up Jewish leaders and forced them to clean lavatories with their prayer shawls; we made them dig ditches in pools of water. Some of the soldiers beat the old men who couldn't work fast enough, or bayoneted them, and others took pictures. We made religious leaders shave off their beards, and throw their holy books into the mud. We had dynamite, and we used it to blow up the synagogues and set them on fire. We broke the windows of Jewish shops and rounded up masses of Jews to be arrested. Leaders of the Jewish community were lined up in the street and executed. The scene was chaos, with glass raining through the air and burst pipes spilling water onto the street, horses rearing back from the carts they pulled; blood turning the cobblestones red. The Polish civilians cheered us on. They didn't want the Jews here any more than we Germans did.

  Two days into the Aktion, the Standartenfuhrer ordered two Sturmbanne within the battalion to splinter off and perform a special task. There were lists of names recorded by the SD and the police, names of intellectuals and resistance leaders in Poznan and Pomerania. We were to find and eliminate these people.

  It was an honor to be chosen. But it wasn't until we reached Bydgoszcz that I came to understand the scope of this exercise. The "death list" wasn't a sheet of names. It was eight hundred people. A tome.

  True, they were easy to find. They were Polish teachers, priests, leaders of nationalist organizations. Some were Jews; many were not. They were rounded up and gathered. A small group was singled out to dig a ditch--they believed it was an antitank trench they were creating. But then the first group of prisoners was led up to the ditch and it was our job to shoot them. There were six of us trusted with this task. Three were to aim at the head, three at the heart. I picked the heart. Our shots rang out, and there was a fireworks display of blood, of brains. Then the next group of prisoners stepped up to the edge of the ditch.

  The ones at the end of the line, they saw what was happening. They must have understood as they turned toward us soldiers that they were facing their death. And yet for the most part they did not run, they did not try to escape. I do not know if this meant they were very, very stupid or very, very brave.

  One teenage boy stared at me as I lifted the rifle to my shoulder. He lifted his hand and pointed to himself. In perfect German, he said, neunzehn. Nineteen.

  After the first fifty, I stopped looking at their faces.

  *

  My fortitude in Poland got me sent to SS-Junkerschule Bad Tolz, an officers' training school. Before shipping out, I was given three weeks' leave, and I went back home.

  Only a year had passed, but I was markedly different. When I left, I was still a child; now I was a man. I had pulled
a screaming baby out of the arms of its mother. I had killed boys and girls my own age--and much younger, too. I had gotten used to taking what I wanted, when I wanted it. Being in the home of my parents chafed; I felt too big for the space, too full of electricity.

  My brother, on the other hand, saw our little home in Wewelsburg as a haven. He was at the top of his class at Gymnasium, expecting to head to university. He wanted to become a writer, still, and failing that, a professor. He did not seem to understand the simplest logistical fact: Germany was at war; nothing was as it had been. Any childhood dreams we had had were long gone, sacrificed to the greater good of our country.

  Franz had received a document stating that he needed to report to recruitment headquarters, but he had thrown it into the fire. As if that might be enough to keep the SS from finding him and forcing him to do it.

  "They don't need people like me," he had said at dinner.

  "They need every able-bodied man," I had told him.

  My mother feared Franz being singled out as a political opponent of the Reich, instead of being recognized as indifferent. I did not blame her. I knew what happened to those who were political opponents of the Reich. They disappeared.

  The first day after I came home, I woke to find sunlight streaming through the windows and my mother sitting on the edge of my narrow bed. Franz was already gone to Gymnasium; I had slept till nearly noon.

  I drew the covers up to my chin. "Is something the matter?"

  My mother tilted her head. "I used to watch you sleep when you were a newborn," she told me. "Your father thought I was crazy. But I believed that if I turned away, you might forget to take the next breath."

  "I'm not a baby anymore," I said.

  "No," my mother agreed. "You're not. But that doesn't mean I don't worry about you." She bit her lip. "They are treating you well?"

  How could I explain to my own mother the things I had done? The Jews whose doors I had kicked in, so that we could seize radios, appliances, valuables, and anything else that might help the war effort? The elderly rabbi I had beaten for staying out to pray after curfew? The men, women, and children we herded up in the middle of the night and killed?

  How could I explain how I drank to drive away the images I had seen all day? That I would be so drunk that sometimes, the morning after, my hangover would be so violent I couldn't stand. How I would sit on the edge of the pit with my legs dangling, my shoulder sore from the recoil of the gun, between groups. I'd smoke a cigarette and I'd wave the nose of the gun to direct the next line of victims so they knew where to lie down. Then I'd shoot. Precision wasn't necessary, although we learned to be economical. Two bullets to the head was too much. The sheer force would almost tear it from the body.

  "What if you get hurt in Poland?" she asked.

  "I could get hurt in Germany," I reminded her. "I'm careful, Mother."

  She touched my arm. "I don't want any Hartmann blood spilled."

  I could tell, from the look on her face, that she was thinking about Franz. "He will be all right, too," I told her. "There are special forces groups headed by men with doctorates. There's room for scholars in the SS, too."

  This made my mother brighten. "Maybe you can tell that to him."

  She left, promising to make me a lunch fit for a king, since I had slept through breakfast. I showered and dressed in my civilian clothes, aware that even the way I carried myself now made me look like a soldier. By the time I was finished with the plate of food my mother had prepared for me, the house was quiet. My father was at work, my mother at her church volunteer group. Franz was in classes until two o'clock. I could have walked into town, but I didn't feel like being sociable. So instead, I went back to the bedroom I had shared with my brother.

  On his desk was a small block of wood, roughly fashioned like a werewolf. Lined up along the blotter were two more, in various stages of precision. There was also a vampire, with its arms crossed and its head thrown back. In my absence my little brother had become quite the craftsman.

  I picked up the vampire and was testing the points of its sharp teeth against the ball of my thumb when I heard Franz's voice. "What are you doing?"

  I whirled around to find him staring down at me. "Nothing."

  "That's mine," he snapped, grabbing the carving from my hand.

  "Since when did you take up whittling?"

  "Since I decided I wanted to make a chess set," Franz said. He turned away and began to search his bookshelves. Franz collected books the way some people collect coins or stamps. They overran his desk and his shelves; they were piled up beneath his bed. He never donated a book to a church rummage sale because he said he never knew if he'd want to read it again. I watched him pull a stack of horror stories from the narrow space between his desk and the wall, and I scanned the titles. The Wolf of Crimea. Blood Lust. The Haunting.

  "Why do you read that stuff?" I asked.

  "Why is it any of your business?" Franz emptied his book bag on the bed and replaced his school textbooks with the novels. "I'll be back later. I have to walk Otto. The Muellers' dog."

  It didn't surprise me to hear that Franz had taken on this odd job, just that the Muellers' dog was still alive after all this time. "Are you planning on reading to him, too?"

  Franz didn't reply, just hurried out of the house again. Shrugging, I settled on my narrow mattress with one of his books and cracked the spine. I read the same sentence three times before I heard the front door close, and then I went to the window and watched my brother cross the street.

  He strode right past the Muellers' house.

  I walked downstairs and slipped outside, using my tactical military training to follow Franz for several minutes to a house I did not recognize. I didn't know the residents, but it looked as if nobody was home. The shutters were drawn, the house in a state of disrepair. Yet when Franz knocked, the door opened to admit him.

  I waited for about fifteen minutes, hiding behind a hedge, until my brother reappeared, his book bag slack and empty against his hip.

  I stepped out from behind the shrubbery. "What are you up to, Franz?"

  He pushed past me. "I'm bringing books to a friend. As far as I know that's not a crime."

  "Then why would you tell me you're walking a dog?"

  My brother didn't say a word, but two bright spots of color appeared on his cheeks.

  "Who lives here that you don't want me to know you are visiting?" I raised my brows, grinning, suddenly wondering if my little brother had become a ladies' man in my absence. "Is it a girl? Has something other than poetic meter finally got you twitching?" Playfully, I cuffed him on the shoulder, and he ducked away from me.

  "Stop it," he muttered.

  "Ah, poor Franz. If you'd asked me I would have told you to bring her chocolates, not books--"

  "It's not a girl," Franz blurted out. "It's Artur Goldman. That's who lives here."

  It took me a moment to place the name. The Jew from Franz's class at Gymnasium.

  Most of the Jews in our town had left. I didn't know where they'd gone--to the big cities, maybe Berlin. I had not given any thought to it, really. But obviously, my brother had. "Jesus. Is this why you won't join the SS? Because you're a Jew-lover?"

  "Don't be an idiot--"

  "I'm not the idiot here, Franz," I said. "I'm not the one fraternizing with enemies of the Reich."

  "He's my friend. He misses school. So I bring him books. That's it."

  "You have a brother who is an SS officer candidate," I said quietly. "You will stop fraternizing with a Jew."

  "No," my brother replied.

  No.

  No.

  I could not remember the last time someone had told me that.

  I grabbed him by the throat. "How do you imagine it will look when the Gestapo finds out? You would ruin my career for this, after all I've done to protect you?" I released my hold on his neck, and he choked and jackknifed, coughing. "Be a man, Franz. For once in your miserable life, be a fucking man."
r />   He stumbled away from me. "Who the hell have you turned into, Reiner?"

  I fumbled a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it, took a drag. "Perhaps I came on too strong," I admitted, softening my voice. "Perhaps all you really need to hear from me is this." I blew a ring of smoke. "Tell Artur you can no longer visit him. Or else I will make sure no one is there for you to visit."

  The composure on my brother's face cracked; he turned to me with an expression I had seen so often this past year I had grown cold to it. "Please," Franz said. "You wouldn't."

  "If you really want to save your friend," I told him, "then stay away from him."

  Two nights later I was awakened by my brother's arm, pressing hard on my windpipe. "You lied," he hissed. "You said you wouldn't do anything to Artur."

  "And you lied," I said. "Or you wouldn't have known that they left."

  It had not been difficult to sew the seeds of intolerance, to let the family know they were not welcome here. I didn't make them leave town, really. That was pure instinct: self-preservation, on their part. I had done it because I knew I was strong where my brother was weak, that he would continue to visit Artur--and here was the proof that I had been right to take action. If it was books today, tomorrow it would be food. Money. Shelter. That, I could not let happen.

  "I did you a favor," I gritted out.

  My brother released the pressure on my throat. In the moonlight I saw an expression on his face I had never seen before. His eyes were black and flat; his jaw wired with rage. He looked like he was capable, in that instant, of killing me.

  I knew then my mother could stop worrying. Even if Franz were dragged to the recruitment center; even if he never set foot in university and was shipped off, like me, to officer training; even if he had to fight on the front lines--he would be able to survive this war.

  We never spoke of Artur Goldman again.

  *

  In the months I spent at Junkerschule, I studied Mein Kampf, I played war strategy games in sandboxes, and I took endless exams, which weeded one out of every three cadets from the program. We had classes in tactics, terrain and map reading, combat training, current events, weapons training. We studied weapons technology, went to the shooting range, and learned about the administration of the SS and the police. We were taught how to maneuver a tank, how to survive in the wild, and how to fix a broken vehicle. We were groomed into soldiers who were above average in knowledge, determination, and endurance. I graduated in 1940 with a commission as a second lieutenant in the Waffen-SS, an Untersturmfuhrer. I was posted to the Government General in Poland, until April 24, 1941, when the 1.SS Infantry Brigade was formed.