The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

  "What am I supposed to say to him?" I ask.

  "Nothing," Leo advises. "Let him talk to you. See if he says something detailed either that matches what your nana told us or that we can ask her about."

  It isn't until I've hung up and am standing in the shower with the hot water streaming down my back that I realize I have no transportation. My car is still at the service station waiting to be fixed after the accident. It's too far to walk to Josef's house. I towel off and dry my hair and throw on a pair of shorts and a tank top, even though I would bet a hundred dollars that Leo will again be wearing a suit when he shows up. But if, as he said, appearances are part of this game, then I have to wear what I've worn in the past to Josef's house.

  In my garage I find the bike I last used when I was in college. Its tires are flat, but I unearth a hand pump to get them reasonably inflated. Then I quickly whip up a batter in the kitchen and bake streusel muffins. They are still steaming when I wrap them in foil, stick them gently in my backpack, and start pedaling to Josef's house.

  As I bike up these New England hills, as my heart races, I think about what my grandmother told me yesterday. I remember the story of Josef's childhood. They are two speeding trains coming at each other, destined to crash. I am helpless to stop it, yet I cannot turn away.

  By the time I reach Josef's house I am breathing hard and sweating. When he sees me, he frowns, concerned. "You are all right?"

  That's a loaded question. "I rode my bike here. My car's in the shop."

  "Well," he says. "I am glad to see you."

  I wish I could say the same. But now, when I see the lines in Josef's face, they smooth before my eyes into the stern jaw of the Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer who stole, lied, and murdered. I realize, ironically, that he has gotten what he hoped for: I believe his story. I believe it so much I can barely stand here without being sick.

  Eva darts out the door and dances around my feet. "I brought you something," I say. Reaching into my backpack, I pull out the package of freshly baked muffins.

  "I think that being your friend is very bad for my waistline," Josef says.

  He invites me into the house. I take my usual seat across from him at the chessboard. He puts up the kettle and returns with coffee for both of us. "Truthfully I was not sure you would come back," he says. "What I told you last time . . . it was a lot to take in."

  You have no idea, I think.

  "A lot of people, they hear Auschwitz and they immediately assume you are a monster."

  His words bring to mind my grandmother's upior. "I thought that was what you wanted me to think."

  Josef winces. "I wanted you to hate me enough to want to kill me. But I didn't realize how that would make me feel."

  "You called it the Asshole of the World."

  Josef takes a shallow breath. "It is my turn, yes?" He leans forward and knocks away one of my pawns with a Pegasus knight. He moves slowly, carefully, an old man. Harmless. I remember my grandmother talking about how his hand shook, and I watch as he lifts my pawn from the inlaid wooden chessboard, but his movements are too unsteady in general for me to be able to tell if he has a particular lasting injury.

  He waits until my concentration is focused on the board before he begins to speak. "In spite of the reputation Auschwitz has now, I found it was a good assignment. I was safe; I wouldn't be shot by a Russian. There was even a little village in the camp where we could go for our meals and drinks and even concerts. When we were relaxing there, it was almost possible to believe there wasn't a war going on."

  "We?"

  "My brother, the one who worked in Section Four--administration. He was an accountant who added numbers and sent the tallies to the Kommandant. My rank was much higher than his." Josef brushes the crumbs from his napkin onto his plate. "He reported to me."

  I touch my finger to a dragon-bishop, and Josef makes a sound low in his throat. "No?" I ask.

  He shakes his head. Instead, I place my hand on the broad back of a centaur, the only rook I have left. "So you were the head of administration?"

  "No. I was in Section Three. I was SS-Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer of the women's camp."

  "You were the head honcho at a death factory," I said flatly.

  "Not the boss," Josef said. "But high in the chain of command. And besides, I did not know what was happening at the camp when I first arrived in 1943."

  "You expect me to believe that?"

  "I can only tell you what I know. My job wasn't at the gas chambers. I oversaw the prisoners who were kept alive."

  "Did you get to pick and choose?"

  "No. I was present when the trains arrived, but that task fell to the camp doctors. Mostly I just walked around. I was an overseer. A presence."

  "A supervisor," I say, the word bitter in my mouth. A manager, for the unmanageable.

  "Precisely."

  "I thought you were injured on the front line."

  "I was--but not so badly that I couldn't do this."

  "So you were in charge of the female prisoners."

  "That was left to my subordinate, the SS-Aufseherin. Twice a day, she oversaw roll call."

  Instead of moving my rook, I reach for my white queen, the exquisitely carved mermaid. I know enough about chess to realize that what I am about to do defies the odds, that of all the pieces to sacrifice the valuable queen is the last one I should consider.

  I slide the mermaid to an empty square, knowing full well that it stands in the path of Josef's Pegasus knight.

  He looks up at me. "You do not want to do this."

  I meet his gaze. "Guess I figure I'll learn from my mistakes."

  Josef captures my queen, as I'm expecting.

  "What did you do?" I ask. "At Auschwitz?"

  "I told you."

  "Not really," I say. "You told me what you didn't do."

  Eva lies down at Josef's feet. "You don't need to hear me say it."

  I just stare at him.

  "I punished those who could not do their work."

  "Because they were starving to death."

  "I did not create the system," Josef says.

  "You did nothing to stop it, either," I point out.

  "What do you want me to tell you? That I am sorry?"

  "How am I supposed to forgive you if you're not?" I realize I am shouting. "I can't do this, Josef. Find someone else."

  Josef's fist crashes down on the table, making the chess pieces jump. "I killed them. Yes. Is that what you want to hear? That with my own two hands, I murdered? There. That is all you need to know. I was a murderer, and for this, I deserve to die."

  I take a deep breath. Leo will be angry at me, but he of all people should understand how I feel right now, listening to Josef talk about the joy of officers' meals and cello concerts when my grandmother, at the same time, was licking the ground where soup had spilled. "You do not deserve to die," I say tightly. "Not on your own terms, anyway, since you didn't give that luxury to anyone else. I hope you die a slow, painful death. No, actually, I hope you live forever, so that what you did eats away at you for a long, long time."

  I slide my bishop across the board into the position no longer protected by Josef's knight. "Checkmate," I say, and I stand up to leave.

  Outside, I straddle my bike and turn back to see him standing at the open door. "Sage. Please, don't--"

  "How many times did you hear those words, Josef?" I ask. "And how many times did you listen?"

  *

  It isn't until I see Rocco at the espresso machine that I realize how much I've missed working at Our Daily Bread. "Do my eyes deceive?" he says. "Look at what the cat dragged in. / One long-lost baker." He comes around the counter to give me a hug and without even asking, starts to make me a cinnamon latte with soy.

  It is busier than I remember it being, but then again, at this time of the day, I'm usually on my way home to go to bed. There are mothers in jogging clothes, young men typing furiously on their laptops, a cluster of Red Hat ladies sharing a single chocolate c
roissant. That makes me glance at the wall behind the counter, the baskets filled with expertly browned baguettes, buttery brioche, semolina loaves. Is this newfound popularity due to the baker who took over for me?

  Rocco can read my mind, because he nods in the direction of a plastic banner hanging on the wall behind me: HOME OF THE JESUS LOAF. "We get foot traffic / But just because you're holy Don't mean you're hungry," he says. "All I pray for now Is that you'll come back, or else / Mary gets raptured."

  I laugh. "I miss you, too, Rocco. Where is the blessed boss, anyway?"

  "Somewhere in the shrine. / Crying 'cause Miracle-Gro / Isn't Heaven-sent."

  I pour my latte into a takeaway cup and cut through the kitchen on my way to the shrine. The kitchen is spotless. The containers of poolish and other pre-ferments are organized neatly by date; different tubs of grains and flours are labeled and arranged alphabetically. The wooden counter where I shape the dough has been wiped down; the bulk mixer rests like a sleeping dragon in the corner. Whatever Clark has been doing here, he has been doing well.

  It makes me feel like even more of a loser.

  If I'd been naive enough to think that Our Daily Bread was nothing without me and my recipes, I now realize that this isn't true. It may be different, but ultimately, I'm replaceable. This has always been Mary's dream; I'm just living on the fringes.

  I walk up the Holy Stairs to find her kneeling in the monkshood. She is weeding, wearing rubber gloves pulled high up her arms. "I'm glad you came by. I've been thinking about you. How's your head?" She glances at the bruise from the car accident, which I've covered with my bangs.

  "I'm fine," I tell her. "Rocco says the Jesus Loaf is still getting you business."

  "In iambic pentameter, I'm sure . . ."

  "And it seems like Clark's got the baking under control."

  "He does," Mary says bluntly. "But like I said the other night: he isn't you." She gets to her feet and gives me a big hug. "You sure you're all right?"

  "Physically, yes. Emotionally? I don't know," I admit. "There's been a little drama with my grandmother."

  "Oh, Sage, I'm sorry . . . Is there anything I can do?"

  Although the thought of an ex-nun getting involved with a Holocaust survivor and a former Nazi sounds like the punch line to a joke, it is actually what drew me to the bakery today. "As a matter of fact, that's why I'm here."

  "Anything," Mary promises. "I'll start to say a rosary for your grandma today."

  "That's okay--I mean, you can if you want to--but I was hoping to borrow the kitchen for about an hour?"

  Mary puts her hands on my shoulders. "Sage," she says. "It's your kitchen."

  Ten minutes later, I have an oven warming, an apron wrapped around my waist, and I am up to my elbows in flour. I could have baked at home, true, but the ingredients I needed were here; the sourdough itself would have taken days to prepare.

  It feels strange to be working with such a tiny amount of dough. It feels even stranger to hear, just outside, the cacophony of the lunchtime crowd coming in. I move around the kitchen, weaving from cabinet to shelf to pantry. I chop and mix bittersweet chocolate and ground cinnamon; I add a hint of vanilla. I create a small cavern as deep as my thumb in the knot of dough, and twist its limbs into an ornate crown. I let it proof, and in the meantime, instead of hiding in the back room, I go into the cafe and talk to Rocco. I work the cash register. I chat with customers about the heat and the Red Sox, about how pretty Westerbrook is in the summer, not once trying to cover my face with my bangs. And I marvel at how all these people can go about their lives as if they are not sitting on a powder keg; as if they don't know that when you pull back the curtain of an ordinary life, there might be something terrible hidden behind it.

  "The second time," Aleks told me, as I lay beside him after we made love, "it was a prostitute, who had stopped to pull up her stockings in an alley. It was easier, or so I told myself, because otherwise, I would have had to admit that what I'd done before was wrong. The third time, my first man: a banker who was locking up at the end of the day. There was a teenage girl once, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And a socialite I heard crying on a hotel balcony. And after that I stopped caring who they had been. It only mattered that they were there, at that moment, when I needed them." Aleksander closed his eyes. "It turns out that the more you repeat the same action, no matter how reprehensible, the more you can make an excuse for it in your own mind."

  I turned in his arms. "How do I know that one day you won't kill me?"

  He stared at me, hesitating. "You don't," he said.

  We did not speak after that. We did not know that someone was outside listening to everything we had said, and to the symphony of our bodies. So while Damian slipped away from where he was eavesdropping and went to the cave to capture a frantic, frightened Casimir, I rose over Aleks like a phoenix. I felt him move within me, and I thought of not death, but only resurrection.

  LEO

  My cell phone rings when I have just spread the photo array from Genevra across the expanse of the hotel bed. "Leo," my mother says, "I had a dream about you last night."

  "Really," I say, squinting at Reiner Hartmann. Genevra used the photograph from his SS file, which is now propped up against a pillow that was decidedly uncomfortable and that has left me with a crick in my neck. I look at the first page of the file, with his personal information and the snapshot in uniform, trying to compare this picture with the one I am planning to present to Minka.

  HARTMANN, REINER

  Westfalenstrasse 1818

  33142 Buren-Wewelsburg

  DOB 18 04 20

  Blutgruppe AB

  You can't see his eyes very well in the photograph; there is a strange shadow in the grain. But the reproduction in the suspect array isn't shoddy, as I had first thought; it's just that the original isn't in the best shape.

  "I was with your son and we were playing at the beach. He kept telling me, 'Grandma, you have to bury your feet or nothing will grow.' So I figured, he wants to play a game, fine. And I let him pile the sand up to my ankles and pour water over them from a bucket. And then guess what?"

  "What."

  "When I shook off the sand there were tiny roots growing out of the bottoms of my feet."

  I wonder if Minka will not be able to make an ID because of the quality of the photograph.

  "That's fascinating," I say absently.

  "Leo, you're not listening to me."

  "I am. You had a dream about me that I wasn't in."

  "Your son was in it."

  "I don't have a son--"

  "You have to remind me?" my mother sighs. "What do you think it means?"

  "That I'm not married?"

  "No, the dream. The roots growing out of the soles of my feet."

  "I don't know, Ma. That you're deciduous?"

  "Everything's a joke to you," my mother says, miffed. I can sense that if I don't take a few minutes to focus on her, I'm going to have to field a call from my sister, too, telling me that my mom is angry. I push the photographs away.

  "Maybe that's because what I do for a living is so hard to understand, I need a way to let it go at the end of the day," I tell her, and I realize that this is true.

  "You know I'm proud of you, Leo. Of what you do."

  "Thanks."

  "And you know I worry about you."

  "Believe me, you make that patently clear."

  "Which is why I think it's important for you to take a little time to yourself."

  I don't like where this is going.

  "I'm working."

  "You're in New Hampshire."

  I scowl at the phone. "I swear to God, I'm hiring you. I think you're a better tracker than anyone I've got in the office--"

  "You called to ask your sister for a hotel recommendation and she told me you were on the road for business."

  "Nothing's sacred."

  "Anyway, maybe you want to get a massage when you're back at the hotel at the
end of the day--"

  "Who is she?" I ask wearily.

  "Rachel Zweig. Lily Zweig's daughter. She's getting a degree in massage therapy in Nashua--"

  "You know, the cell phone service really stinks up here," I say, holding the phone away from me at arm's length. "I'm losing you."

  "Not only can I track you, I can tell when you're feeding me a load of BS, Leo."

  "I love you, Ma," I laugh.

  "I loved you first," she says.

  As I gather the photo spread together into its file, I wonder what my mother would make of Sage Singer. She'd love the fact that Sage could keep me well fed, since always I look too skinny to my mother. She would look at her scar and think of her as a survivor. She would appreciate the way Sage still grieves for her own mom, and her close attachment to her grandmother--since to my mother, family is the carbon atom at the base of all life-forms. On the other hand, my mother has always wanted me to marry someone who is Jewish, and Sage--a self-professed atheist--doesn't qualify. Then again she has a grandmother who survived the Holocaust, which has to earn her a few points--

  I break off in my thoughts, wondering why I'm thinking of marrying a woman I met yesterday--one who is simply a means to a witness for me, and one who clearly, as evidenced by last night, is in love with someone else.

  Adam.

  A guy who stood about six four and had shoulders you could use as a Thanksgiving banquet table. Goyishe, my mother would call him, with his sandy hair and aw-shucks smile. Seeing him last night, and watching Sage react as if she'd been electrocuted, brought back every acne-riddled middle school post-traumatic flashback--from the cheerleader who told me I wasn't really her type after I published a sonnet to her in the school literary magazine, to my junior prom date, who started dancing with a soccer jock when I was getting her a cup of punch, and wound up going home with him.

  I've got nothing against Adam, and what Sage wants to do to screw up her life is her own business. I also know that it takes two to make a mistake of that magnitude. But . . . Adam has a wife. The expression on Sage's face when she saw the woman made me want to put my arm around her and tell her she could do so much better than this guy.

  Like, maybe, me.

  Fine, okay, I have a little bit of a crush on her. Or maybe her baking. Or her husky, raspy, incredibly sexy voice, which she doesn't even realize is sexy.