RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Jillian Cantor
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cantor, Jillian, author.
Title: The lost letter : a novel / Jillian Cantor.
Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039408 | ISBN 9780399185670 | ISBN 9780399185694 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3603.A587 P76 2017 | DDC 813/. 6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039408
p. cm.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Grandma Bea and Grandpa Milt: I remember.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Austria, 1939
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1938
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1938
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1938
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1938
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1938
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1938
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1938
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1938
Cardiff, 1989
Austria, 1938
Wales, 1989
Austria, 1938
Wales, 1989
Austria, 1939
Oxford, 1989
Austria, 1939
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1939
Coronado, 1989
Austria, 1939
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1939
Los Angeles, 1989
Austria, 1939
Los Angeles, 1989
Los Angeles, 1990
Germany, 1990
Austria, 1939
Germany, 1990
Los Angeles, 1990
Los Angeles, 1991
Austria, 1939
Los Angeles, 1991
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
(The edelweiss) is an alpine plant . . . that is said to grow on the line of perpetual snow,—in fact under the snow. . . . Only the boldest alpine goatherds and hunters venture to pick the hardy little plant from its native soil. The possession of one is a proof of unusual daring.
—Berthold Auerbach, in Edelweiss: A Story
Austria, 1939
SHE CLUTCHED THE LETTERS tightly in her hands, careful not to damage the stamps. It was snowing and her toes were freezing, wet through the worn soles of her boots, but she kept walking through the woods toward town, shielding the letters underneath her coat to keep them dry. Only a few steps more, she kept telling herself. It was a lie, but she kept on walking.
Only a few steps more. Just a few more.
All she had to do was make it into town, drop the letters at the post on Wien Allee. All she had to do was mail the letters, and everything was going to be all right.
That was a lie, too, of course. But she kept on walking through the snow.
At the edge of the woods, she reached the clearing, and through the swirl of snowflakes, the pink-blue onset of dawn, she could see the remaining red-roofed buildings in town, up ahead.
Wien Allee. She was almost there.
The sudden cold butt of the gun against her temple surprised her. She didn’t even let out a cry before the man grabbed her arm, and the letters fell from her hands, onto the unblemished snow.
Los Angeles, 1989
THE FIRST TIME I show up at the stamp dealer’s office, I consider not even getting out of the car. It’s an unusually cold morning in LA, I don’t have a sweater with me, and I’m fairly sure all I’m doing here is wasting my time.
But my hatchback is filled to capacity with the former contents of my father’s hobby room: pages and pages of books filled with stamps under plastic, large clear boxes filled with thrift shop finds, mostly yellowed letters, unsent or unopened but adorned with a stamp from some other era. If I don’t unload it all here, I’ll have to find somewhere to put it back at my house. And besides that, I feel like I owe it to my father to at least try to do something with his collection. At that thought, I get out of my car and open the trunk.
When I was a kid, I used to accompany my father to thrift shops and yard sales and estate sales on the weekend, sifting through other people’s trash, looking for an old letter, or maybe a deceased collector’s newly unwanted collection. I would ask him what he was looking for then, and he would turn to me and smile, and say, a gem. That’s what stamps are to him, gems. Or were, anyway. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds. He saw himself as a jeweler who could determine flaws and beauty in what looks average to all the rest of us. Once, after we took a family trip to DC and saw the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian, he turned to me and said: That’s what I’m looking for, Kate. Though I doubted my father would ever find it in the thrift stores of Southern California.
According to my father, the Hope Diamond of stamps will be one that is a mistake. One that will be rare because it was issued too early or too late, because it was printed wrong. And I guess that’s what all these boxes stacked up in the back of my car really signify: his search for some kind of accidental greatness amidst thousands of little paper squares.
All I see when I look at stamps are paper and ink. Stamps are a means to an end, a utility. They get my mail from one place to another, pay my bills, take my letters to my best friend, Karen, who moved to Connecticut last summer. And most recently they’ve sat staring at me, three little flowers in a row, pasted on the manila envelope from Daniel that I’ve left unopened on my kitchen counter. The end of everything. I hate the finality of it and that’s why I haven’t actually opened the envelope yet.
I’m certain that my father, who never much liked Daniel, would’ve been altogether annoyed by the choice of flowers for such a correspondence. But my father doesn’t know. And even if he did, now I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t remember.
The stamp dealer’s office is a nondescript one-room tucked into a strip mall, just near where the 405 meets the 101, on the edge of Sherman Oaks. Not a place I’d expect to find or unearth any kind of gem. But I’m already here; I have an appointment. I take the first armload of boxes out of my car and walk inside.
The dealer, Benjamin Grossman, sits behind his desk, which is covered in a disorganized mess of papers and has a small black-and-white TV perched on the corner. He’s watching the noon news, and the newscaster is talking about the protests yesterday in East Berlin.
He looks away from the TV when I walk in, but he doesn’t turn it off. He’s younger than I’d been expec
ting after talking to him over the phone. Stamp collecting always felt to me like an old man’s hobby, and I’d expected an elderly dealer. But Benjamin looks like he’s my age, mid-thirties, possibly early forties. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and has a full head of curly light brown hair. “Mrs. Nelson?” he asks.
I’m still unsure what I’m supposed to do with my married surname. “You can just call me Katie,” I tell him.
“Okay, Katie,” he says, absentmindedly. He couldn’t care less what he calls me. He reaches up and fiddles with the antenna on his television, adjusting the picture to his liking, and I get the feeling I’m intruding, interrupting something by showing up here, even with an appointment.
“Um . . . what should I do with these?” I shift the boxes. They’re heavy.
“Oh, sorry. Here. Just put them on my desk.” Benjamin lets the antenna be and sits back down. I glance at the mess surrounding him. “Anywhere you’d like,” he says, and I put the boxes down on top of some papers. He leans forward and riffles through carefully for a moment, and I wonder how he became a stamp dealer, what one even majors in in college to get on such a career path. History? I majored in English and work for a lifestyle magazine, where I review movies. It’s not a very well-paying job, but until recently it was, at least, a fun one.
“I’ll go through this,” I realize Benjamin is saying. “And then I’ll give you a call, let you know what I find.” I’ve already told Benjamin over the phone about my father, his failing memory, his inability to keep up his collection, and his continued insistence that there are gems in here. He used to tell me all the time that when he got older the collection could be all mine. And he reiterated that when I moved him into the Willows a few months back. But I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. And that’s really why I’ve brought it all here.
I walk back out to my car to grab another pile of boxes, and when I walk back in, Benjamin looks away from the news again, raises his eyebrows. “There’s more?” I nod. “Sorry. I’ll help you carry it in.” He gets up and follows me back out to the parking lot. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“It’s fine,” I say, not in the mood for small talk.
But Benjamin keeps talking. “I just didn’t realize how much your father had when we spoke over the phone.” He peers into my trunk.
“He’s seventy-one,” I say, and it comes out sharper than I meant it. “It’s just . . . it’s been a lifelong obsession for him.” Though even as I say it out loud, seventy-one doesn’t sound as old as it should. Many people at the Willows are older than him, and I’m constantly angered by how unfair it is; the disappearance of his memory feels like a punch, something that takes my breath away, again and again.
“It usually is,” Benjamin says kindly, as if he understands, as if he, too, shares this obsession with stamps. As if I am the weirdo who doesn’t get it. Maybe I am.
After the last box is unloaded, Benjamin Grossman simply says, “Give me a week. Maybe two. I’ll let you know what you have here.”
But I hesitate for a moment before leaving, wondering how my father would feel about this, me leaving his most treasured possessions with this man I found in the yellow pages under “Stamp Dealers.” I’d called and left messages for all three dealers listed. And Benjamin Grossman had been the first one to call me back. “Do I need a receipt or something?”
Benjamin shakes his head, pulls a business card from underneath a pile on his desk, and presses it into my hand. “I’ll call you when I’m done,” he says. Then he adds, “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of them.” As if the stamps are flowers, something that need to be nurtured, tenderly.
“I’m not worried,” I say. I’ve let something go that wasn’t really even mine to begin with. But as I get into my car, pull out of the parking lot and back onto the 405, I can’t shake this unexpected feeling of emptiness.
Austria, 1938
AT FIRST, Kristoff didn’t understand the power of the burin. He didn’t know that the one small simple-looking engraving tool could eventually save them. Or get them killed. All he knew, in the beginning, was that the burin was impossible to use precisely, and that he was not naturally suited for metal, the way he’d always been for canvas.
He didn’t like the way it felt in his hand either. Oddly heavy, hard to maneuver. He felt it should create lines with the agility of a brush, or even charcoal, and yet his hand kept getting stuck, and he became repeatedly frustrated at his inability to achieve the perfect lines and grooves in the metal the way Frederick showed him. He worried that Frederick would fire him as his apprentice, and then he would have to find not only another job, but also another place to live. As Frederick’s apprentice, Kristoff had been receiving room and board with the Faber family in their beautiful home on the outskirts of Grotsburg, as well as five schilling a week. But most important, the opportunity to learn the trade that Frederick Faber was known for throughout Austria: engraving. His greatest creation was the country’s most popular—and, Kristoff would argue, artistically perfect—postage stamp, the 12 Groschen Edelweiss. The stamp was a stunning replica of the pure white flower, and Frederick had both designed and engraved it himself in 1932.
Kristoff remembered placing that stamp on a letter he’d written to his mother once, but had never sent. He could not mail a letter to someone who didn’t exist, or whose existence and location he could never determine in spite of his best efforts. But even as a young boy of thirteen, Kristoff had admired the artistry of that stamp, the perfect bows of the petals. He’d always wanted to make a living as an artist. So when he’d heard the rumor last fall from another street artist in Vienna, that Frederick Faber, the Frederick Faber, was searching for a new apprentice, Kristoff had packed up his art supplies and spent most of his small savings to hire a ride to take him the two hundred kilometers out to Grotsburg. And when he’d arrived, he’d convinced Frederick to give him the job after he showed Frederick some of his charcoal sketches of Vienna.
“You have a good eye,” Frederick had said, staring at what Kristoff thought was his most noteworthy sketch: Stephansdom, elaborate in all its detail of the two wide turrets in the front. Frederick had raised a thick gray eyebrow. “But what do you know of metal, my boy?”
“I’m a quick learner,” Kristoff had promised, and that had seemed enough to convince Frederick to take him on. Though, so far, this had turned out not to be true, at least where engraving was concerned.
Though he didn’t master the burin right away, Kristoff did learn two things in his first few weeks working for Frederick. One, Frederick was older than Kristoff had initially thought, and sometimes his hands began to shake when he tried to teach Kristoff how to use the engraving tools. Frederick had told Kristoff he needed an apprentice because there was business enough for two master engravers to work on his stamp assignments for Austria, but now Kristoff suspected the real reason was that Frederick might not be able to continue on with his trade much longer. And Frederick didn’t have any sons.
That was the second thing Kristoff learned. Frederick had two daughters: Elena, who was seventeen, a year younger than Kristoff, and who reminded Kristoff of the edelweiss with her snowy skin, waves of long light brown hair, and bright green eyes. And Miriam, who was thirteen. If Elena was a flower, then Miriam was the buzzing bee who wouldn’t leave the flower alone. Or, as Mrs. Faber called her with an exasperated roll of her green eyes, a flibbertigibbet. But Kristoff still found her amusing, even when her family did not.
Kristoff quickly became accustomed to life in Grotsburg, where the world was green and very quiet, and instead of buildings and throngs of people, he woke up each morning to a view of the forest and rolling hills. But even more, Kristoff reveled in the warmth of the Fabers’ dining room, of the fragrant smell of Mrs. Faber’s stews, of the bread they broke on Friday nights in the glow of their candles. The challah was a savory bread, and Kristoff had never tasted anything like it growing
up in the orphanage in Vienna, where the nuns had led him to believe there was only one religion anyway. Not that he was necessarily a believer. Kristoff was much more drawn to the Fabers, the light and wholeness of their family, than he had ever been to God or the institutional church.
“Miriam, sit still,” Mrs. Faber chastised, one night a few weeks after Kristoff had begun his apprenticeship. Almost a month in, Kristoff was still failing miserably at the metalwork. Though earlier that day he had impressed Frederick with his sketch of the hillside, and even hours later, he was still basking in Frederick’s compliment that it was “not half bad.”
“I’m sitting still, Mother,” Miriam said in a singsong voice, bouncing slightly in her chair and casting a sideways smile at Kristoff.
Kristoff hid his own smile in his spoonful of soup. He glanced at Elena, but she refused to look at him. He had yet to determine whether she was shy or rude, whether she acted so standoffish around everyone, or whether it was just around him.
“Elena, dear. Go fetch another log or two for the fire. It’s chilly in here,” Mrs. Faber said. It was the deepest, coldest part of winter, and the Fabers’ three-story wooden house was drafty. Kristoff’s room in the attic had a small woodstove, but he had to huddle under two blankets to stay warm at night. Still, it far surpassed the orphanage, his bed in a row of ten others in a large cold room, and only a thin blanket to cover him. And Mrs. Faber’s cooking was much better than the nuns’.
Elena put her soup spoon down and stood. Kristoff tried to meet her eyes again, but she wouldn’t look up.
“I can help.” Kristoff stood, before he lost his nerve, and Elena turned toward him. At least he’d caught her attention.
Her beautiful face sunk into a frown. “It’s not—” she began.
Mrs. Faber spoke over her: “Thank you, Kristoff. I’m sure Elena would appreciate that.”
He smiled at Mrs. Faber and followed Elena. They went wordlessly through the kitchen, out the back door, toward the woodpile, which rested across the Fabers’ sprawling yard in front of Frederick’s workshop. The earth was frozen, and the ground crunched beneath their feet; the night air was biting and neither Kristoff nor Elena had grabbed a coat. Elena shivered, and her hair fell into her eyes as she reached down to grab the wood. Kristoff resisted the urge to pull her hair back, and instead reached down and took the log from her hands.
The Lost Letter Page 1