The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

  "In the office," I told him.

  "Ooh," he teased. "A posh job."

  I looked down at the skirt I was wearing, which was threadbare at the knees after so much use. "Oh yes," I joked. "I'm practically royalty."

  But we both knew how lucky I was--unlike my mother, who had lost most of her eyesight from sewing in the near dark; or pretty Darija, who was still cleaning at the officers' headquarters and whose graceful dancer's hands were now cracked and bleeding from lye and soap. In comparison, twelve hours at a typewriter in a warm office was a walk in the park.

  Just then Herr Fassbinder passed by. He looked from me to Aron and back to me again. Then he shooed me into the office and instructed the little ones to return to work. I had sat down at my desk to type requisition forms when I realized Herr Fassbinder was standing in front of me. "So?" he said, smiling broadly. "You have a boyfriend."

  I shook my head. "He's not my boyfriend."

  "Like I am not your boss."

  "He is just a school friend." I was nervous, wondering if Aron could somehow get in trouble with his employer for talking to me at my own job.

  Herr Fassbinder sighed heavily. "Well, then, that is a shame," he said. "Because he is very much taken with you. Ah, look, I have made you blush. You should give the young man a chance."

  After that, whenever we needed textile supplies, Herr Fassbinder would specifically request that Aron be the one to deliver them. And he would conveniently assign me to unlock the storeroom for him, although there were others at the factory who were more suited to that job than a secretary. Afterward, Herr Fassbinder would come to my desk and pepper me for details. He was, I realized, just a matchmaker at heart.

  Gradually, as we sat together in the little office, he began to confide in me. He told me of his wife, Liesl, who was so beautiful that the clouds would part when she stepped outside. She could have had her pick of any man, he told me, but she chose him because he knew how to make her laugh. His greatest regret was that they had not had a baby before she died--of tuberculosis, six years ago. I came to see that all of us in the factory, from the littlest girls to me, were his children.

  One day, Herr Fassbinder and I were alone in the office. Work for the embroiderers was halted from time to time because various raw materials had not been delivered; this time, it was thread that had not arrived. Herr Fassbinder went out for a little while, and when he came back, he was flustered. "We need more workers," he barked, more upset than I had ever seen him. I was scared of him for the first time, because I didn't know what we would do with more workers when we couldn't even occupy the girls we already had.

  The next day, in addition to our usual 150 employees, Herr Fassbinder had recruited 50 mothers with young children. The children were too young to do anything of value in an embroidery shop, so he had them sorting the threads by color. Aron came by with bolts of white fabric. The textile divisions had been employed to make fifty-six thousand camouflage suits for the Eastern Front in the summer; we would be stitching the insignia to match.

  I knew, because I processed all the orders, that we hadn't been contracted to do this, and that we had just turned into a glorified day-care center. "That's not your problem," Herr Fassbinder snapped when I asked him about it.

  That week the announcement was made: twenty thousand Jews were to be deported from the ghetto. Chairman Rumkowski had negotiated the number down by half, but lists of the ten thousand who would be leaving were made by ghetto officials. The Roma, who lived in a separate part of the ghetto, were the first. Criminals came second. Then those who didn't have jobs.

  Such as the fifty mothers who had just recently arrived.

  Something told me that if Herr Fassbinder had been able to take all ten thousand people on that list into his little Fabrik, he would have.

  The first week of January, all the people who had been put on those lists had received their summonses--wedding invitations, we called them, with irony: a party no one wanted to attend. A thousand people were taken each day to the trains that led out of the ghetto. By then, our shipment of thread had arrived. By then, our new employees had settled in and were embroidering insignia as if they'd been born to it.

  One night as I was covering my typewriter with its dust cover, Herr Fassbinder asked if my family was all right. It was the first time he had ever spoken of me having a life outside these walls, and I was startled. "Yes," I said.

  "None were on the lists?" he asked bluntly.

  I realized then that he knew far more about me than I knew about him. For also on these lists were the relatives of those who were Roma, who had no jobs, or who were criminals. Such as Rubin.

  Whatever deal Basia had made with the chairman had been a thorough one. She did not know where her husband was, or if he was still alive, but she had not been recommended for deportation because of his crime.

  Herr Fassbinder turned out the light, so that I could just discern his profile in the moonlight that spilled through the small window of the office. "Do you know where they are being taken?" I blurted, suddenly brave in the darkness.

  "To work on Polish farms," he said.

  Our eyes met in silence. That was what we had been told about Rubin, months ago. Herr Fassbinder had to know, from my expression, that I did not believe him.

  "This war." He sighed heavily. "There is no escaping it."

  "Would you say that to someone with papers?" I whispered. "Christian ones?"

  I have no idea what made me tell him--a German--my biggest secret, the one I had never even told my parents. But something about this man, and the lengths he had gone to to protect children who weren't even his, made me think he could be trusted.

  "If someone had Christian papers," he said after a long moment, "I would tell that person to go to Russia, until the war ends."

  As I left work that night, I started to cry. Not because I knew Herr Fassbinder was right or because I knew that I would still never go as long as it meant leaving my family behind.

  But because when we were locking up the factory office in the dark, where no one else could see us, Herr Fassbinder had held the door open for me, as if I was still a young lady, and not just a Jew.

  *

  Although we all had believed that the lists created in January would be a single horrible moment in the history of the war, and although the chairman's speeches reminded us and the Germans how indispensable we were as a workforce, only two weeks later the Germans demanded more deportees. By now, rumors were running as fast as fire through the factories, nearly paralyzing production, because no one ever heard again from a person who had left on one of the transports. It was hard to believe that someone who had been resettled wouldn't try to get word to his family.

  "I heard," Darija said one morning when we were waiting at one of the soup kitchens for our rations, "that they're being killed."

  My mother was too tired these days to stand for hours in the massive crowds that lined up for food. It sometimes seemed it took more time to get our rations than it did to consume them. My father was still at the bakery, and Basia was picking up the baby from his day care--they had officially been disbanded but still operated illegally at many of the Fabriken, including Basia's textile factory. That left me with the job of getting the rations and bringing them back home. At least I had Darija with me to pass the time. "How could they possibly kill a thousand people a day?" I scoffed. "And why would they, if we're working for them for free?"

  Darija leaned closer to me. "Gas chambers," she whispered.

  I rolled my eyes. "I thought I was the fiction writer."

  But even though I believed Darija was telling the wildest tales, there were parts of her story that rang true. Like the fact that now the officials were asking for volunteers and promising a free meal if you went on one of the transports. At the same time, food rations were being cut--as if to persuade anyone who was on the fence about the decision. After all, if you took what Rumkowski said at face value and could get out of this hellhole and fill
your belly while doing it, who wouldn't step up?

  But then there was the new law that made it a crime to hide someone who was on the list for deportation. Or the case of Rabbi Weisz, who had been given the responsibility of finding three hundred people in his congregation for the most recent transport. He had refused to give a single name, and when the soldiers came to arrest him, they found him and his wife lying dead on their bed, their hands linked tightly. My mother said it was a blessing that they went at the same time. I couldn't believe she thought I was stupid enough to believe that.

  By late March 1942, everyone knew someone who had been deported. My cousin Rivka, Darija's aunt, both of Rubin's parents, my former doctor. It was the season of Passover, and this was our plague, but no amount of lambs' blood would save a household from tragedy. It seemed the only blood that satisfied was that of the families inside.

  My parents tried to protect me by giving me only limited information about the Aussiedlungin, the roundups. Be a mensch, my mother told me, no matter what situation you're in. Be kind to others before you take care of yourself; make whoever you're with feel like they matter. My father told me to sleep in my boots.

  It was several hours before I collected the meager store of food that was meant to last us for the next two weeks. By then my feet were frozen and my eyelashes were stuck together. Darija blew into her mittens to warm her hands. "At least it's not summer," she said. "Less of a chance that the milk is already spoiled."

  I walked with her as far as I could until she had to turn down a different street to her apartment. "What should we do tomorrow?" I asked.

  "Oh, I don't know," Darija said. "Maybe go shopping?"

  "Only if we can stop for high tea."

  Darija grinned. "Honestly, Minka. Do you ever stop thinking about food?"

  I laughed and turned the corner. Alone, I walked faster, averting my eyes from soldiers I passed and even the residents I knew. It was too hard to look at people these days. They seemed so hollow, sometimes, I worried that I might fall right inside those empty stares and never be able to claw my way out.

  When I reached the apartment, I climbed over the missing wooden stoop step--Darija's family had burned it in December for firewood--and immediately noticed that nobody was home. Or at least, there was no light, no sound, no life.

  "Hello?" I called out, as I walked inside and set the canvas sack with our rations on the kitchen table.

  My father was sitting on a chair, holding his head in his hands. Blood seeped between his fingers from a wide cut on his forehead. "Papa?" I cried, running to him and pulling his hand away so that I could see the wound. "What happened?"

  He looked at me, his eyes unfocused for a moment. "They took her," he said, his voice breaking. "They took your mother."

  *

  It seemed that you didn't even have to be on a list to fill up the necessary quotas for deportation. Or maybe my mother had gotten her "wedding invitation" and had chosen not to tell us, so we wouldn't worry. We didn't have the whole story; all we knew was that my father had returned from shul to find the SS in his living room, screaming at my mother and my uncle. Fortunately, Basia had taken Majer out for some fresh air and wasn't home. When my mother tried to run to my father, he was knocked unconscious with the butt end of a rifle. By the time he came to, she was gone.

  He told me all this as I cleaned and dressed the cut on his forehead. Then he sat me down on a chair and knelt at my feet. I could feel him unlacing my boots. He slipped the left one from my foot and smacked the heel against the floor until it wiggled loose, then pulled it apart so that the little compartment with the stash of gold coins was revealed. He reached inside and took out the money. "You will still have the rest in the other boot," he said, as if he were trying to convince himself that he was doing the right thing.

  After he put my boot back together again, he took my hand and led me outside. For hours we walked the streets, trying to ask anyone we saw if they knew where those who had been rounded up had gone. People shied away from us, as if misery was contagious; the sun sank lower and lower, until it broke like a yolk over the rooftops. "Papa," I told him, "it's nearly curfew," but he didn't seem to hear me. I was terrified; I thought this was surely a death wish. If he couldn't find my mother, he didn't want to be here anymore. It didn't take long for us to be confronted by two SS soldiers who were patrolling. One of them pointed at my father and started yelling, "Get off the street!" When my father kept walking toward him, holding out the coins in his hand, the soldier pointed his gun.

  I threw myself in front of my father. "Please," I begged in German. "He isn't thinking clearly."

  The second soldier stepped forward and put his hand on his comrade's arm, lowering the gun. I started to breathe again. " Was ist los? " he asked. What's the matter?

  My father looked at me, his expression so raw that it hurt to stare into his eyes. "Ask them where they took her."

  So I did. I explained that my mother and my uncle had been collected from our home by soldiers, and that we were trying to find them. Then my father spoke in a universal language, pressing the gold coins into the gloved hand of the soldier.

  In the light from the streetlamp, the soldier's response had a shape. The words swelled in the space between us. " Verschwenden Sie nicht Ihr Geld, " he said, dropping the coins onto the pavement. He jerked his head toward our apartment, a reminder again that we were breaking curfew.

  "My gold is as good as anyone else's!" my father called after them angrily as the soldiers moved down the street. "We will find someone else, Minka," he promised. "There has to be a soldier in the ghetto who is willing to be paid for information."

  I knelt, picking up the coins that winked against the cobblestones. "Yes, Papa," I said, but I knew this wasn't true, because I understood what the soldier had said.

  Don't waste your money.

  *

  The day after my mother disappeared, I went to work. There were several girls missing; others cried as they embroidered. I sat at my typewriter, trying to lose myself in requisition forms but failing miserably. When I had messed up for the fifth time in a row, I finally banged my fist on the keys so that they all flew up at once, printing a line of nonsense, as if the whole world had started to speak in tongues.

  Herr Fassbinder came out of his inner office to find me sobbing. "You are upsetting the other girls," he said, and sure enough, I could see some of them staring at me through the window that separated my desk from the factory floor. "Come here." I followed him into his office and sat down the way I did when I took dictation.

  He did not pretend that he didn't know about the Aussiedlung of the previous evening. And he did not tell me to stop crying. Instead, he gave me his handkerchief. "Today, you will work in here," he announced, and he left me, closing the door behind him.

  For five days, I moved like a zombie at work and then like a ghost at home, silently picking up after my father, who had stopped eating and speaking. Basia fed him spoonfuls of broth the way she fed Majer. I had no idea how he made it through his bakery shift, but I assumed his men were covering whatever labor he could not do on his own. I was not sure what was worse: having my mother vanish in an instant, or losing my father by degrees.

  One night as I walked home from the Fabrik I could feel a shadow behind me, breathing on my neck like a dragon. Every time I turned around, though, I saw nothing but haggard neighbors trying to get home and close their doors before any misery could slip over the threshold. Still, I could not shake the feeling that I was being followed, and the fear rose, doubling, quadrupling, filling every last space in my mind the way my father's dough swelled if given enough time. My heart was pounding by the time I burst through the door of the apartment, which felt wrong now that both of my cousins were gone, as if we were squatters instead of guests. "Basia?" I yelled out. "Papa?" But it was just my dumb luck: I was alone.

  I unwound my scarf and unbuttoned my coat but left them on because there was no heat in the apartment. Then I sli
pped a paring knife into my sleeve, just in case.

  I heard something break in another room.

  The noise had come from the only bedroom in the apartment--the one that had been occupied by my cousins when we first moved in. I crept down the hallway as quietly as I could in my heavy boots and peered through the doorway. One of the windowpanes had been broken. I looked around to see if a rock had been thrown, but there was nothing on the floor but glass. Kneeling, I began to sweep it up carefully with my palms, using my skirt as a dustpan.

  There. I hadn't imagined it, that shadow that flickered at the corner of my eye.

  Leaping to my feet so that the glass spilled back onto the floor, I yanked aside the bedroom door to find the tall, thin boy who had broken the window to hide inside. Brandishing the knife from my sleeve, I held him at bay. "We have nothing for you," I cried. "No food. No money. Go away."

  His eyes were wide, his clothes torn and ragged. Unlike the rest of us, who were starving, he had visible muscles bulging beneath his shirt. He took a step forward.

  "Stop, or I'll kill you," I yelled, and in that moment, I believed that I could.

  "I know what happened to your mother," he said.

  *

  I, who had dreamed up a novel about an undead upior who fell in love with a human girl, could not believe the fantasy this boy spun with words. His name was Hersz, and he had been with my mother on the freight train that left the ghetto. The train had traveled forty-four miles from Lod to Kolo. Then, everyone was taken to another train, this one running on a narrow-gauge track to Powiercie. By the time they arrived it was late in the day, and they spent the night a few kilometers away in an abandoned mill.

  It was there that Hersz met my mother. She said that she had a daughter about the same age he was, and she worried about me. She hoped that there would be a way to get word back to the ghetto. She asked Hersz if he had family there, too. "She reminded me of my mother," Hersz said. "My parents both went with the second roundup. I thought that maybe we were being taken to the same place to work, that I would get to see them again."

  We were sitting down now, with Basia and my father, who were hanging on every word Hersz spoke. After all, if he was here, didn't that mean my mother might soon follow? "Go on," my father urged.