by Thaisa Frank
Gabriela. You are always with me. Your loving sister, Elie.
Is she really dead? Dimitri asked.
Yes, said Elie. Why?
I don’t know. I just wondered.
Elie knew why Dimitri wondered. He lived in tenuous hope because he didn’t know if his parents were alive. It was the hope of imagined reunions, and Elie lived with this hope every day, knocking on doors, going to beer halls, looking through files and letters that would have delighted Stumpf. The dead and the missing still haunted her: except now they were above the earth. Sometimes she wondered what had happened to the crates. Sometimes she thought about the Scribes: what had happened to Dreamatoria; if Gitka and La Toya were still together; if Maria and Daniel were writing each other. She remembered the twilit room, the pounding typewriters, the kerosene lamps, the cold. But she always returned to Lodenstein.
Now she lit incense by the grave. It smelled cold and sweet, reminding Elie of childhood cathedrals in Poland, where Gabriela poked her during Mass when she fell asleep. It was unthinkable that she had been killed—something she couldn’t tell Lodenstein or even Asher. For this was the truth about her sister, told by a friend who had seen it ten years before the war:
Gabriela had been marched to a small town square near Berlin and shot almost seven years before the Reich came into office. Her head rose up again and again in a pool of her own blood, and her body had been carted off in a wagon and dumped somewhere in a field.
She had been in the earliest part of the Resistance—intercepting messages and sending them to England, starting to forge passports. You should help too, she’d told Elie more than once. As soon as she heard the news, Elie had gone to the town to look for Gabriela’s body, not believing her friend who said it was dragged off in a cart. But all she saw was a rust-colored stain in a town square surrounded by linden trees. A few months later she left Freiburg, with only a note to Asher and the university. She began to go to Party meetings. She charmed her way into the inner circle of the Party until she found Goebbels, who needed a linguist. She was driven to rescue as many people as she could—an impossible, insatiable penance for Gabriela’s death.
Are we done? said Dimitri.
Not quite, said Elie. She handed him the fresh red rose.
But she’s not my sister!
It’s for all the people you love.
What if I don’t love anybody?
I love you enough for both of us, said Elie.
She leaned down and hugged Dimitri. He hugged her back. Now give this to my sister, she said.
Dimitri put the rose on the grave.
Do you remember how you found me? he asked.
I’ll always remember, said Elie.
And how you brought me to that place?
I’ll always remember that too.
And how all those people wrote letters?
I remember.
Dimitri stepped back and looked at the grave. That guy with the chins made me write them, he said. To kids. Did you write letters too?
Only one, said Elie. But I kept it in a notebook.
As for the trunk, it began a diaspora: First to a Russian refugee camp with Daniel and Asher. Then across the Atlantic to New Jersey, where Asher’s sister taught piano lessons on a tree-lined street in Hackensack. Then to an apartment in Greenwich Village, then to one in Brooklyn, then to a typewriter shop on the Upper West Side. The trunk stayed in attics, in basements, in houses with yards, in cramped, one-room walk-ups. No one bothered to open it. The contents began to grow rife with mold. Forgotten.
Asher remarried. He refused a teaching job, saying philosophy was only an endless series of invented arguments, and set up a typewriter repair shop on Broadway in the Upper West Side. Daniel got a doctorate in chemistry. Maria, who came to New York when she was nineteen, became an art historian. In their early twenties, they were married in a small ceremony in a Brooklyn temple. They kept the trunk but argued about throwing it away.
Why not the East River? said Maria.
Or a lake in the Berkshires? said Daniel.
But throwing the trunk in the water seemed unthinkable, and one hot summer day, when they couldn’t stand the sight of it, Maria and Daniel gave the trunk to Asher, who kept it in the back of his shop. It sat among the spools and ribbons, the keys, and dull metals.
It was Daniel and Maria’s youngest child who was responsible for opening the trunk. She was a surprise, an accident, born when Maria was forty-six. Her name was Zoë-Eleanor Englehardt—everyone called her Zoë. Zoë was thin, blond, liked mathematical puzzles, accepted the adoration of her older siblings with bemusement, and was fiercely independent. At least once a month, after school, she walked into her grandfather’s typewriter repair shop with the commanding presence of someone distracted by something important.
That trunk, she’d say to her grandfather. I need to see it.
Asher never encouraged Zoë to open the trunk. But even as he tried to dissuade her, she would pry it open, breathing the smell of moldy paper, the faint aroma of tea-rose. The top was covered with Ferdinand La Toya’s handkerchief; folded and refolded so many times it looked like the bare palm of someone thousands of years old. Zoë-Eleanor saw stamps of every color and nationality, and pictures of statesmen whose names had umlauts, cedillas, tildes, and graves. She saw letters in every imaginable language. Most were on thin, brittle paper; a few typed on thick ivory stock, with deep seals and official letterhead. Some were on vellum in old-fashioned, calligraphic handwriting. Beneath the letters were green notebooks that reminded Zoë of her own diary. There was also a manuscript her grandfather said almost sixty people had written, in a language only they knew, and he’d never translate because—he said with an ironic smile—translators are traitors.
There were also numerous objects: velvet roses shredded from age, empty perfume bottles, a blue and white coffee mug, two fur coats, five fingerless gloves, a lace blouse, an ermine scarf, a black lace corset, a silver hand-mirror, a broken wool carder, black cigarette holders, two maps, a gun, photographs, and a pair of glasses marked für Martin Heidegger.
When Zoë tried on the glasses she saw the world in a blur, a place with no distinct edges, and her grandfather told her to take them off. Everything in the trunk had come from an unbelievable place, ten meters under the earth, he said. It was a place that had saved his life and the lives of her mother and father, even though none of them wanted to talk about it. And it contained an infinite number of objects. Every time he closed the shop in the evening, Asher had to pull Zoë away.
It’s a magic trunk, he said to her. There will always be one more thing left to find. And one more thing after that.
Zoë turned into a wispy teenager and majored in philosophy of science to the mixed reviews of her grandfather, who said to her, more than once: Philosophers engage in endless arguments. They have principles but never live by them.
Like Martin Heidegger? said Zoë.
Like everybody, said Asher.
Zoë was no longer interested in the trunk, and Asher never mentioned it. But when he was closing his shop, he summoned Zoë. She floated in with the same distracted authority she’d had as a child, except she had a diamond in her nose and purple streaks in her hair. Asher took her to the back of the shop and pulled out the trunk.
I want you to have this, he said.
I haven’t thought about it in years, said Zoë.
But you used to love it as a child, said Asher. Maybe you’d even like to archive this world someday.
Why didn’t you?
You know why I didn’t, Asher said. I never wanted to be another found object from the Holocaust. Neither did your mother and father.
Zoë, who’d heard all this before, didn’t say anything. She opened the trunk, was overcome by the smell of mold, closed it and took it by taxi to her Lower East Side apartment. When she opened the trunk again, she couldn’t remember what she once found so compelling. Its contents, once mysterious and totemic, now bristled with darkness,
captivity, and reproach. She picked up a letter in German—a language she could read now—and saw that it extolled conditions in the camps. She picked up a letter in Polish, which she couldn’t read, and sensed terror in the short, hurried script. She knew she was reading lies.
Besides letters there were diaries, concealing old photographs. Zoë saw the illuminated face of a red-haired man named Benyami Nachtgarten. The slightly bewildered face of a baby named Shalhevet Nafissian. The studious face of a teenager named Alexei Markova. The whimsically elongated face of a woman named Miriam La Toya, who looked like she was laughing at a party. It was clear these people had died because there were two dates on the back of the photographs. Zoë assembled them and imagined these people in a country of their own. They looked alive, curious, happy together.
She also looked at the old letters—to a 19th-century dressmaker in Alsace, a button dealer in Dresden, a coach-maker in Stuttgart. Letters from the time before the time that mattered; a time when no one ever thought about writing to make false records; a time when the dead didn’t need letters to stop the world from falling apart; a time when people didn’t depend on knowing languages to save their lives; a time when letters brought the living together, sentenced no one to live below the earth, and weren’t used as weapons to rewrite history.
Because most of the letters were just that. And, like things that one didn’t want to see but saw anyway, they reminded Zoë of the numbers on the arms of her father and grandfather. Even worse, the letters conveyed terrible news because of what they left out. They reminded her of silences she’d felt as a child when grown-ups pretended there wasn’t tension while she knew—sitting at the dinner table, at her desk at school—that something unspeakable was in the air. They even reminded her of silences now, when people hardly mentioned anything difficult—in their own lives, in the lives of other people. The last time she’d heard about anything painful was when a neighbor said that he’d told his son to see the world—meaning he should visit relatives in Italy, not join the Marines and take a piss by the banks of the Euphrates. But that, in fact, was just what he was going to do. Holy places, he’d said. Bombed to ruins.
What’s the use of talking about what’s difficult, if people aren’t going to listen? Zoë asked her grandfather when she visited his book-strewn apartment. And what good would it do to archive a trunk?
Maybe no good at all, said Asher. But don’t ever get rid of it.
When Asher died at ninety-five, Zoë was living on the Upper West Side in an apartment that had been chopped into three smaller apartments. She lived in the part that had a maid’s room, and she gave the trunk to it so she’d never have to look at it. After his memorial service, where she’d shaken hands with innumerable people, she went to the maid’s room and spent some time looking at the trunk, but she did not open it. It was the most vibrant link to her grandfather. At the very least she should look at the letters. Instead, she shut the door.
A few mornings later, she got a call from a man with a German accent who said his name was Gerhardt Lodenstein. His English was precise, and he apologized for intruding. He said he’d just read her grandfather’s obituary—they’d corresponded for a while. And he wasn’t calling from below the earth but from Germany.
It took Zoë a moment to believe she was hearing from someone who had lived in that place. And before she was able to say she was glad to hear from him, Lodenstein said he understood her grandfather had given her the trunk, and there were a few more photographs he’d like to send. He also asked if she’d consider exhibiting the contents.
Zoë knew her grandfather would like this. He’d telegraphed his desire when he gave her the trunk. And he’d always made what happened to him clear by the way he kept his shirtsleeves rolled up, even in winter—so anyone who came into the shop could see the numbers on his arm. But Zoë had come to loathe the trunk. So she told Lodenstein she would have to think about it—sure her final answer would be no—and surprised herself by bringing a few letters to the public library the same evening. People with stacks of five-by-eight cards looked curiously at the wispy woman with purple streaks in her hair. The letters emanated the dank mineral smell of the mine, as if determined to broadcast their history to the library.
That night Zoë went back into the maid’s room and opened the trunk slowly. Here was an empty bottle. She could almost smell the tea-rose. And here was a red woolen glove. She could see the ragged edges where someone had cut off the fingers. And here were Heidegger’s glasses—an object of such fascination when she was a child. She remembered putting them on, seeing the world in soft edges, her grandfather’s consternation. And here was a blue and white coffee mug.
She took each letter to the laundry room of her apartment building and hung them on a clothesline. But they still smelled of dank minerals and mold—and emanated so much reproach Zoë started to believe that the dead really did expect answers.
As if they could see her dismay, people in the library began to give her things. A man studying bonding behavior in primates bought her an eraser that glowed in the dark. A woman doing a thesis on number sequence gave her pens with red and silver ink. Zoë got arrows for marking pages, paper clips, translucent folders. She took everything, whether she needed it or not.
Lodenstein kept sending things too—more than a few photographs: He sent typewriter spools, braided candles, diaries decoded by relatives of Scribes, more velvet roses, blue cashmere wool, another red fingerless glove. German detective stories from the 1930s, a recipe for soup, a spade. There was no more room in the trunk. Zoë began to pile things on her couch. They reminded her of a jumble shop, and she covered them with blankets.
He also sent letters from raided houses—obviously interrupted while they were being written. They talked about lengthening hems on children’s clothes, vacations to the Alps. Each letter pointed to a life far back in time—a life Zoë could never reach. Sometimes she stared at the fabric on her sweater and thought she could see people from the Compound in the tufts. Sometimes she toyed with the idea of answering the letters—as if this would bring people back to life or at least would silence their voices. And once, when she was visiting her parents, she started to talk about the number of unanswered letters in the world.
Are you doing something with that trunk? Maria said.
Yes.
I knew we should have thrown it away, said Maria. It belongs at the bottom of the Hudson.
They were in the kitchen, and Maria was making dinner. Zoë watched her pour spices into leek-and-potato soup and make dressing with three different kinds of vinegar. She said that Maria shouldn’t go to all that trouble for a salad.
You might if you’d been in that place, said Maria. People worked hard to make good food. And they were always kind. I was lucky to be there during the war.
So you don’t want that trunk at the bottom of the Hudson? said Zoë.
No, I suppose I don’t, said Maria. And neither does your father. So do what you want with it.
One morning in May, over sixty years after Berlin surrendered, Zoë ran her hands along the trunk. She felt the same splintered wood on the top that she’d felt as a child—and the rough ridges on the bottom that her grandfather said didn’t exist. The trunk was finally empty.
The man who studied primates had found a small museum in Manhattan—called The Museum of Tolerance—that wanted to exhibit the contents of the trunk. The head of the museum helped Zoë catalog and found translators for the letters and diaries. Two of the translators, with numbers on their arms, said they would have given anything to have been in that place.
Zoë had annotated everything. She had even traced the origins of the Tiffany lamp and—on the promise that she’d never tell—gotten Lodenstein to confess that he’d broken the wool carder when he was angry. And now the objects and letters were ready for the exhibit. A brochure said that the Compound was one of the few places in the war that had sheltered survivors from Auschwitz. It also said the Scribes were, in a sense, bre
d for their languages. Maria and Daniel thought this was an exaggeration—as did Zoë, who had written that the Scribes were chosen at deportations because they knew languages besides German. But the head of the museum had transformed this and put it in the brochure. It was the first time Zoë noticed how someone turned her words around to make a different sentence. She remembered how deeply her grandfather distrusted newspapers and history.
Lodenstein, who knew about the exhibit, hadn’t sent anything for a month. That morning Zoë sent him the brochure and enclosed a note, asking whether he’d like the trunk back.
His answer—that he would not—came two weeks later with a package that included her grandfather’s original prescription for Heidegger’s glasses, a dark red notebook, and a photograph of a woman near a stand of trees. The woman had delicate features, penetrating eyes, and wore a white blouse with a rose pinned to the collar. Her blond hair was drawn back with a bow and a tangle of curls spilled around her shoulders. Her face was lit by sun.