“I was practicing last night,” Kristoff finally said. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to get better. I needed the practice.” None of that was a lie, he reasoned.
“Okay,” Frederick said. “But you need to start from the beginning, my boy. You are getting ahead of yourself with this.” He pointed again to the hillside engraving. “It’s too messy. There are many mistakes. If you want perfection you’ll learn slowly. In the daylight hours. With my help.” Kristoff nodded, relieved that Frederick wasn’t going to ask him to repeat what he had supposedly done, what Elena had done. Frederick placed his shaking hand on Kristoff’s shoulder, and he handed Kristoff the burin.
Kristoff took the tool from Frederick. “I understand,” he said.
Kristoff thought about Elena all day. His hands ached as he practiced painstaking lines with Frederick’s tools, the time passing slowly. He pondered Elena’s motives, what she was doing, why she was teaching herself Frederick’s trade, and in secret. But also her small, cold hands. The way her skin felt soft against his own. The way his aching head had felt when her finger had traced his skin, just below his hairline.
At last the sun began to fade behind the hillside, and Frederick told him it was time to stop work for the day. “It’s the Sabbath,” Frederick reminded him, and Kristoff nodded, having already learned the importance of this Friday-night ritual in his short time living with the Fabers. “I understand it’s not your religion,” Frederick said. “But it’s mine. And this is my workshop. I can’t have you in here until after sundown tomorrow night. Promise me.”
“I promise,” Kristoff said, and he meant it.
Elena wouldn’t look at him throughout the Sabbath dinner and seemed to concentrate very hard on the prayers, the candles, the breaking of the bread. Kristoff tried to concentrate, too. Because he felt still very much an outsider in this world. He listened carefully to the words of the prayer (Baruch atah, Adonai, Eloheinu . . .) as he had done each week, trying to commit them all to memory, so that one week, soon, he could say them easily along with the Fabers.
As they began to eat and Mrs. Faber chastised Miriam for tapping her spoon against the side of the soup bowl, making it into song, Elena stood to get more wood for the fire, and Kristoff jumped up to help her. This time she didn’t protest.
Once the back door closed behind them and they’d sunken into the sharp chill of the night air, Elena turned and put her fingers gently to his forehead. “Does it hurt a lot?” she asked.
“Not so much,” he lied. She went to move her hand, but he moved his hand up to catch hers. “Your father found your engraving plate. The one you made of my drawing.” Her eyes widened, and he said, “He thought it was mine. I let him believe that it was.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I . . . thank you.” She pulled her hand away and started walking toward the woodpile.
“Why are you lying to him? Teaching yourself in the middle of the night?”
“I’m not lying,” she said. “I don’t have to tell my father everything.”
“But tell me, then.”
She grabbed a piece of wood from the pile, and he did the same. “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry about your head. I am. But we’re not friends, and like I’ve told you before, we’re never going to be friends.”
She began walking back toward the house. “I disagree,” he called after her. “I think we are going to be friends.”
But she just opened the door and walked inside the house without another word to him.
Later, he lay in bed with his sketch pad and drew Elena again. This time her hair was a flower, like the edelweiss on Frederick’s famous stamp. His side table had been moved as Mrs. Faber had promised this morning, but rather than moving it back he laid his materials out on top of the sheets. His bed was his workspace, but he didn’t mind. He felt vaguely comfortable, a feeling that was strangely unfamiliar to him.
Someone rapped softly on his door. Elena? And he tried to hide the drawing, so obviously her, before he told her to come in.
But when the door opened, Miriam, not Elena, stepped inside his room. “Kristoff,” she said, her small brown eyes open wide. Her brown hair was tied back in a messy braid, and she wore a long white nightgown that was too large for her—it dragged on the ground as she walked—and Kristoff guessed it had been Elena’s once. “I’m so glad you’re still awake. I need your help.”
“What do you need?” he asked. They didn’t play Monopoly or other games on the Sabbath. So he expected her to ask him to gather more firewood or to say that the mouse was back in her room again. This was all the talk when he’d first come here—the mouse that Miriam swore she heard scratching in the walls of her bedroom at night, and Mrs. Faber’s insistence that the mouse only existed in Miriam’s too-vivid imagination.
“Elena’s gone,” she said. “And I can’t tell Mother or Father because it’s the Sabbath and they’ll get really angry. We’re not supposed to go anywhere on the Sabbath.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Kristoff pictured Elena inside Frederick’s workshop teaching herself the engraving tools by candlelight. “Maybe she’s just—” He stopped himself because he wasn’t sure what Miriam knew of her sister’s secrets.
“She’s not in the house, and she’s not in Father’s workshop either. I checked.”
“Maybe she just went out with a friend.” Kristoff didn’t know Elena’s friends. Had she snuck out to meet a boy? The thought angered him, not that he had any right. But he didn’t want Elena to have a suitor, especially not someone she would risk upsetting her parents for, running out on the Sabbath.
Miriam hesitated for a moment, and then she said, “She does go to meetings sometimes.”
“What kind of meetings?”
“People who worry about the Germans. Elena says it’ll be very bad for Austria if we agree to an annexation with Hitler.”
The breadth of little Miriam’s political knowledge, and Elena’s, surprised him, especially living all the way out here in Grotsburg, where the entire rest of the world, the city, felt out of reach to him. In Vienna, in the rush of the city, people had often spoken of political change in Europe, and in Austria. Some people thought it would be better for Austria to remain independent; some people thought it wouldn’t. Kristoff didn’t like Hitler, and he wasn’t in favor of him moving into Austria either. “Where are these meetings, Miri?”
Miriam shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know she goes. And she doesn’t tell Mother and Father because she doesn’t want them to worry about her. But she’s never left on the Sabbath before.” Miriam paused for a moment and twirled her braid in her fingers. “Sometimes she stays out all night. But tomorrow is Saturday. Father won’t be working, and he gets up so early. He’ll notice she’s not here. I don’t know what she was thinking. Everybody says that I’m the flighty one.”
It occurred to him why Miriam had come to his room. “You want me to go out and look for her, don’t you?”
“Would you?” she asked.
He hesitated. “She won’t listen to me, even if I find her. She doesn’t like me very much, you know.”
“But you like her.” Miriam reached across the bed for his sketch pad.
“Don’t.” He grabbed it back from her.
“I already saw it this afternoon.” She smirked a little. “When Mother asked me to move your table away from your bed.”
“You shouldn’t have been going through my things.” He could feel warmth creeping across his cheeks at the thought of Miriam in here, looking through his drawings. The idea that she had seen all of his most personal thoughts, his sketches, his feelings about Elena right there on paper, in charcoal, made him feel worse than if she had walked in here and caught him undressing.
“I wasn’t trying to,” she said. “But it was right there. Sitting on the table. I had to move it to move the table.” She was lying, the same way she fibbed about
not cheating at Monopoly, but it wasn’t worth arguing with her. What was done was done. “You’re a pretty good artist, aren’t you?” she said, her voice turning more serious. “I wish I could learn to draw as well as you.”
“I’m okay,” he said. Then he added, “Look, I know you want my help. But I wouldn’t even know where to search. I’m sure Elena will be fine.” He rubbed his still aching forehead. “She can take care of herself.”
“There’s a cabin in the woods, about halfway to town, just off the path.” Miriam put her hands on her hips. “You could at least check there. I know she’s gone there before and it’s not that far.”
Outside it was surprisingly light, the round moon piercing the black sky and leading Kristoff into the woods behind Frederick’s workshop. The town of Grotsburg was about a fifteen-minute walk, on the other side of these woods and at the bottom of a hilly clearing. Grotsburg was very small, much smaller than Vienna, a little village of red roofs, much like the Fabers’. But it had everything the Fabers needed: the market, the school the girls attended, and the post office. Kristoff found the bucolic walk to and from civilization refreshing after the constant bustle of Vienna for so many years. But he had only ever walked through these woods before in daylight.
At night the woods felt thicker, the path to town longer and a little steeper. He knew the cabin Miriam spoke of, but as he approached it, he didn’t want to go in. After last night in Frederick’s workshop, he didn’t relish the idea of sneaking up on Elena again, surprising her.
“Kristoff?” Elena’s voice coming through the woods toward him startled him, and he jumped.
He held up his hands and stopped walking. “Don’t hit me,” he said.
He heard the sound of laughter, a boy’s laughter. No, a man’s. And that’s when he made out two shapes in front of him. Elena was holding on to someone’s arm. Someone taller than him. A man who looked rather frightening to Kristoff in the half light of the moon.
“Who’s this?” the man asked.
“Oh, no one,” Elena answered, and Kristoff felt her words like a slap, or the crack of metal against his skull. “Just my father’s new apprentice.”
The man laughed. “Another one to go join the Hitlerjugend?” He took a step closer to Kristoff. “If you plan to go, why don’t you go right now? Don’t waste any more of Frederick’s time.”
“Josef, stop. He’s all right.” All right? Kristoff felt pleased that Elena didn’t completely despise him. “What are you doing out here?” she asked him.
“Miriam was worried. She thought your father would notice you were gone during the Sabbath and get upset.”
“I know. I’m on my way back. It just couldn’t be helped tonight.” She turned to Josef. “I’ll walk the rest of the way with Kristoff.”
“Are you sure?” Though Kristoff couldn’t really make out Josef’s expression in the dark, he guessed that Josef was eyeing him skeptically, or with annoyance.
“Yes,” Elena said. “It’s not far. We’ll be fine.”
Josef grabbed on to her arm, and Kristoff felt his senses heighten; he had the feeling that she was in danger. But Josef whispered something in her ear, Elena gave him a quick hug, and Kristoff realized she’d wanted to be pulled toward Josef.
“Come on.” Elena tapped his shoulder a moment later, and she began to walk through the woods, back toward the house.
“What were you doing out here in the woods?” Kristoff asked her, trying to keep up with her quick pace. “And why did Josef ask if I was going to join the Hitlerjugend?”
“Are you?” Elena asked.
“Why would I ever do that?” He felt hurt Elena would think he would intentionally join a group so hateful of the Fabers’ religion.
“I don’t know,” Elena spat back. “Why wouldn’t you?” Then she added softly, “My father’s last apprentice did.”
So that explained what had happened to Frederick’s last apprentice. He hadn’t been fired at all but had left the Fabers to go join the Hitler Youth movement. No wonder why Elena had mistrusted Kristoff. It wasn’t fair maybe, but suddenly it felt a little more understandable. “You know I have never had a family,” he said. “Before I moved here, to learn from your father, I spent most of my life in an orphanage in Vienna. I never had a mother or a father. Or a sister,” he added. “I never had anyone.”
“I’m sorry,” Elena said. “I didn’t know that.”
“You don’t need to be sorry. But what I’m trying to say is, I like it here. I like your family a lot. I would never do anything to hurt them. Or you,” he said.
Elena stopped walking and turned to face him. “You’re different than I was expecting when you first came to live with us,” she said.
He remembered what Miriam had told him about where Elena had been tonight. “I don’t want Austria to become a German state either.”
Elena sighed. “The German troops are already marching into Vienna. By tomorrow at this time, we’ll all be Germans.”
In the morning the entire Faber family broke the rules of the Sabbath and turned on the radio. Even Miriam sat completely still as they waited and listened. The reception was crackly all the way out here, but they understood enough: Hitler’s troops had marched into Austria and had announced the annexation of the Austrian state, just as Elena predicted the night before.
“Well, they’ll still have to vote,” Mrs. Faber said, shaking her head and moving to turn the radio off.
“Mother, don’t,” Elena said. “I want to hear what they’re saying.”
“They can’t just take over Austria without a vote.” Mrs. Faber’s voice rose, unnaturally, and she wrung her hands on her apron.
Frederick reached across her and ignored Elena’s protests and turned the radio off. “They can take Austria,” he said quietly. “But we can’t let them take the Sabbath, too.”
Los Angeles, 1989
BENJAMIN IS ALREADY waiting in a booth by the window at Frankie’s when I get there. From my parking spot, I can see his sand-colored curls near the glass. They look unruly, and I wonder if today has been as long for him as it has been for me.
I walk inside, slip into the booth across from him, and glance at the cup of coffee in my spot. “I ordered you a cup when I got one for myself,” he says. “I didn’t know if you drink coffee or not?”
“I do. Not normally this late at night.” I pick up the cup and sip. “It’s good,” I say. “I’m a bit of a coffee snob.” I’m not sure why I’m talking so much, but I feel a little flustered, out of my element, and I can’t stop myself. “This is really good coffee,” I repeat.
Benjamin ignores my nervous chatter and opens the manila folder in front of him, revealing one of the plastic sleeves from my father’s many, many stamp-filled books. He slides it across the table to me.
Inside the plastic there’s a sealed, addressed envelope, what appears to be a letter. The envelope is yellowed and crumbling with age, and it has an upside-down stamp in the right-hand corner. “This stamp is upside down,” I say. Benjamin nods. “That’s what’s unusual about it?”
“No. That’s just a message.”
“A message?”
“People used to do it all the time. Stamp placement meant something. There was a whole language of stamps.”
“A language of stamps?” I had no idea.
“Upside down meant I love you,” Benjamin adds.
“So is this a love letter?” I turn the envelope over carefully in my hands, the journalist in me caring less about the stamp and more about what the letter inside this envelope might say.
“You’re missing the point,” Benjamin says, running his hand through his hair. He reaches across the table and points to the stamp. “This stamp is not something I’ve ever seen before.”
I turn the envelope upside down to inspect the stamp more closely. It’s a black-and-white steeple, prin
ted on an orange background with an eight in each corner, partially covered by the words Deutsches Reich. “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“The top of the steeple,” Benjamin says, his voice edgy. He seems impatient with what he probably sees as my incompetence, my total lack of understanding.
I hold it up, closer to my eyes, and now I see at the very top of the steeple there’s an outline of what appears to be a minuscule flower. It’s barely visible. “The flower?” I ask.
He nods. “After Hitler took over Austria, they did a series of stamps to commemorate Austrian buildings, landmarks. This stamp is St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in Vienna. But it’s not supposed to have a flower in the steeple.”
“So what does that mean?” I ask him. “Someone made a mistake when they made this particular stamp?” Is this my father’s Hope Diamond? A tiny, barely visible flower on an Austrian steeple? Upside down on a love letter?
Benjamin takes a sip of his coffee. “I doubt it was a mistake. The way everything was done back then, it was all painstaking work, transferring an illustration to metal. Stamp engravers were highly skilled. You wouldn’t just, ooops, slip and throw in a flower.” He chuckles, and I feel silly for having made the suggestion.
“So then how did the flower get there?” I ask.
“Exactly,” Benjamin says. But he shrugs. He doesn’t have the answer.
The Lost Letter Page 4