“Then you didn’t get my message,” Benjamin says. This is just dawning on him. “I think maybe you were right. To connect the stamp to Faber. You have a good eye.” He clears his throat as if the compliment has surprised him, caught him off guard, as if he is not used to anyone having a good eye, other than himself. “I noticed the Faber connection right away, too, when I saw the name on the letter,” he quickly adds. “Except I knew this stamp couldn’t have been issued until 1939 and Frederick Faber died in 1938. And this is a Deutsches Reich stamp, a Nazi stamp, and Faber was a Jew.” Benjamin says it with such a certainty, an uncanny acceptance, but it takes a moment for his words to fully sink in, for me. Frederick Faber couldn’t have engraved the stamp even if he was alive then because a country run by Nazis would never have allowed a Jew to do such work.
“So he couldn’t have been the engraver,” I say. “So much for my ‘good artistic eye.’”
“No, but I think it was connected to him. Somehow. I was at the library all day, searching through old microfilm. Faber had a family. A wife and two daughters. Two Fräulein Fabers.”
“You speak German?” I know just a few phrases from Gram, but nowhere near enough to read articles in German.
“I found English articles. British newspapers. Faber was pretty well known in Austria before the occupation. In Europe even.”
I try to imagine them, Frederick Faber’s daughters. Did someone address this letter to one of them? Someone who’d admired their father’s work? A love letter. Just after their father died? Were his daughters close with him? Did they love him the way I love my father? Did they miss him the way I already missed my father?
“So what happened to them?” I say. “His daughters?”
“I don’t know,” Benjamin says. “Jewish girls in Austria, after the occupation.” He pauses for a moment and then speaks a little softer. “Probably nothing good.”
Austria, 1938
KRISTOFF LEFT JOSEF OUT in the workshop and ran back to the main house. He stopped for a moment in the kitchen to catch his breath, and he stared at the half loaf of challah, still sitting out on the counter from supper. Only a few hours ago, when Frederick had most certainly still been safe. He could still be safe, Kristoff told himself. Maybe he made it out of the temple or maybe he hadn’t arrived yet when the Germans set fire to it? Kristoff was sweating, though the air in the kitchen was cold; the fire in the dining room hearth had already dissipated into meek yellow and blue embers.
He tiptoed up the stairs, praying he wouldn’t wake Miriam or Mrs. Faber, and have to explain to them, in the middle of the night, what Josef had told him. Maybe Josef was mistaken, he thought as he rapped softly on Elena’s door.
Elena opened the door immediately. She couldn’t have been sleeping. She looked at Kristoff and she frowned. “What?” she hissed. “It’s the middle of the night.” As if he didn’t already know that.
He wanted to tell her to go to sleep, and while she slept and dreamed peaceful dreams, he would go into town, find Frederick safe and unharmed, and by morning all of this would be nothing more than a terrible mistake. She would never be the wiser. But he couldn’t leave her and Miriam and Mrs. Faber here all alone. And it would be crazy to go into town, if the Germans had arrived, as Josef claimed. “Josef is here,” he said instead, before he could lose his nerve.
“What?” Her tone changed. She was no longer annoyed with him for coming. “Now? Kristoff?” She grabbed on to his shirtsleeve, holding tight to a sliver of fabric. “Is something wrong?”
He swallowed hard, unable to say the difficult words to her. “Get dressed and come out to the workshop,” he said quietly. “We can talk out there.”
Back in the workshop, Josef sat in Frederick’s armchair by the fire.
“What is it?” Elena demanded as soon as they walked inside. “What’s happened?”
Kristoff shut the door behind them, and Josef spoke, his voice unwavering. He told Elena about the fire at the temple the same way he’d already told Kristoff.
“But Father got out,” Elena said. “Right? He must’ve gotten out before the fire. I’m sure he did. Father’s so resourceful.”
“He’s probably walking back here now,” Kristoff said, and Elena shot him a grateful smile. Josef glared at him, stood, and went to Elena. He wrapped his arms around her, and Kristoff turned away and walked toward the fire. Josef had added wood when Kristoff had gone into the house, and the flames roared. Kristoff pretended to warm his hands, but really he stared at the fire just so he didn’t have to stare at them as they embraced.
Josef whispered something to Elena, words Kristoff couldn’t make out.
“Who cares about that. My father could be in danger still,” Elena said.
“But, Elena.” Josef’s voice rose. “This only makes our work more important now. They’re burning things.”
“What work?” Kristoff turned back to look at them, and Elena had separated herself from Josef. She leaned against the worktable, her arms folded in front of her chest.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Josef said. “In fact, I’m not sure why you’re still here.”
“Josef, don’t,” Elena said.
“What work?” Kristoff repeated, this time his question aimed squarely at Elena.
But Elena ignored him. She turned back toward Josef. “We have to go find my father. We’re wasting time even talking about any of this now.”
Josef nodded, briefly put his hand on Elena’s shoulder. “All right,” he said. “I’m going.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“No,” Josef said. “You stay here in case your father makes it back before I find him. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He turned to Kristoff, looked him solidly in the eye. “If anything happens to her while I’m gone,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t mind Josef,” Elena said, just after he left. “He’s a little gruff. But he has a good heart.”
“Right,” Kristoff murmured. “That’s why he threatened to kill me.”
“He didn’t mean it like that.”
Kristoff felt certain Josef meant what he said. But Kristoff had no intention of letting anything happen to Elena. Or Miriam. Or Mrs. Faber. He’d promised Frederick, after all. But even if he hadn’t, he would do anything to keep the Fabers safe.
“What work was Josef talking about?” Kristoff asked her. “What do you do together?” Elena had finished school last spring, and though there had been some talk about her enrolling in university in Vienna—Frederick wished for her to continue her academic studies, to broaden her reading even further—that had been put on hold after the annexation. Kristoff wasn’t sure what she did all day, but he assumed she helped her mother with the household duties while Miriam was at school.
She hopped up and sat on top of the worktable. Her booted feet dangled down next to him, and Kristoff shifted a little, careful not to touch her. “We’ve been talking about ways to stop the Germans,” she said. “And to help Jews get out of Austria. It’s not safe here anymore. They’ve already taken everything as their own, and now they’re setting it on fire, too.” She sighed. “We have all the engraving tools here.” She ran her hands across the worktable. “We’ve been talking about how we could use them to forge papers. Documents . . .”
“That’s why you didn’t want your father to know you were practicing in here?” Kristoff didn’t think Frederick would approve of her learning to engrave only to do illegal things with the trade.
Elena nodded and jumped down from the table. “Father must be freezing. I should take a blanket, see if I can catch him in the woods. I wouldn’t want him to have escaped the fire only to freeze to death.” She pulled the old blanket from atop the armchair and gathered it in her arms.
“You can’t go now,” Kristoff said. She walked toward the door. “Josef said to wait. And, the Germans—”
“I don’t care about the Germans,” Elena said. “I know these woods better than they do. I’ll be fine. And I can’t just sit here and talk to you when my father is out there. I don’t care what Josef said.”
She opened the door, ran out into the freezing night before Kristoff could stop her. And he had no choice but to grab the lantern and run after her.
Elena and Kristoff walked through the woods in silence, and it seemed even the owls and the deer could detect the danger in the town just beyond. Kristoff had never felt a night this quiet, this still. This cold. The only sound he heard as they walked was the crunch of their boots against dead leaves and twigs. But the faint smell of smoke invaded his nose. He tried to come up with a plan for what he would do if the German soldiers found them here, walking in the woods at night like this. Josef’s threat didn’t scare him. Losing Elena scared him, and he took her arm as they walked, a silly attempt to hold on to her, to keep her close, safe. Should the Germans find them, his arm holding on to hers would mean nothing. But fortunately, there were no soldiers in the woods; they were all in town.
At last they reached the end of the woods, and Elena pulled away from him and ran to the edge, just in front of him. The town spread out before them, down the hill, at the bottom of the clearing. They could see it all stretched out ahead of them, even in the darkness. The entire town glowed orange and red, towers of flame and smoke.
Elena put her hand to her mouth and gasped. “It’s not just the temple. It’s all burning,” she said. Perhaps she hadn’t truly believed Josef until she saw it with her own eyes. “They’ve destroyed everything.”
Kristoff wanted to say something, but his eyes and his throat began to burn from the smoke. He instinctively reached for her hand, worried she might run toward the town, the fire . . . her father. But she stayed perfectly still.
He wanted to look away from the orange waves of flame that catapulted into the night sky. He wanted to look away but for a long while, he could not.
Kristoff didn’t sleep that night. After he convinced Elena to walk back to the workshop, to wait there for Frederick and any news from Josef, he and Elena sat in the workshop together, in silence. They didn’t touch the tools or practice with the plates the way they had before in the middle of the night.
Elena sat by the fire and watched the flames, saying nothing at all, and Kristoff wondered if in the flames she kept seeing the image of the town burning in her head, over and over again, the way he was.
Eventually, Kristoff picked up his sketch pad and drew her, almost by instinct, his fingers twitching for the charcoal. What he knew. What he loved. She was still here. Still perfect. The lines he made on the white paper made her safety feel real, made him feel calmer.
The fire in the workshop died down to embers, and the sun began to rise above the hill. Outside it had begun snowing; soft white flakes fell across the yard and they seemed out of place.
Elena stood at last. Her hair was unkempt, her dress rumpled and dirty, ripped at the bottom. She had circles under her eyes from lack of sleep. The temple was only a twenty-minute walk from here. If Frederick had made it out, certainly he would’ve gotten back here by now. “I have to tell Mother,” Elena said.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Kristoff asked.
Her face remained expressionless as she jutted out her chin. Her stoicism was remarkable, beautiful in its own right. Kristoff wished he could get this across in his drawing of her, which, on second glance, seemed flat.
“Elena.” He stood and reached for her hand the way he had the previous night, at the edge of the woods. He felt on the brink of tears, and he willed himself not to cry in front of her.
“No.” She pulled away from him. “You stay here and wait for Josef. I’ll go talk to her alone.”
Los Angeles, 1989
THE PHONE RINGS and wakes me out of a surprisingly deep sleep. My bedroom is still dark, and my clock says it’s just after six a.m. I get out of bed and fumble for the phone on the other side, on what used to be Daniel’s nightstand, and I pick it up, filled with panic, dread. There are no good phone calls at this time of day.
“Honey, turn on the TV,” Gram says as soon as I say hello.
I’m surprised to hear her voice. We usually talk once a week, on Saturday mornings, and I go to visit her a few times a year. Everything set up in advance. Gram doesn’t like surprises. For that matter, neither do I. “Is everything okay?” I ask her.
“Just turn on the TV, Katie. The wall is coming down. Finally!”
I tell her to hold on as I go in the other room, and I yawn as I walk to the living room and switch on the television. Every channel is focused on the news. The Berlin Wall—people are dancing on top of it. East Germans and West Germans together, the newscaster reports.
“I’ve been watching it all night,” she says when I pick up the phone in the living room. Gram grew up in East Germany, but she and my grandfather immigrated to the United States before the war, when she was pregnant with my mother. My mom always told me that it was their common German immigrant background that first drew her to my father on the tiny island of Coronado, where they met one night when my mom was working as a waitress at Mexican Village and my dad had come in for dinner. Though my father came over here from Germany as a small boy and my mother was actually born an American citizen, they had an immediate shared connection. My father—and Gram and Gramps—became citizens years before I came along. But even at age eighty-four, a part of Gram still thinks of Germany as her home. As her last remaining family member, I guess she felt compelled to share her joy with me this morning. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she asks now.
“It is,” I tell her. I’m happy that she’s happy, and I know it’s a good thing in a global sense that the wall is coming down. But it still feels very far removed from my own life.
“You know so many years I’ve wanted to go back,” she’s saying. “And I thought I’d be dead before I’d ever have the chance.”
At eighty-four she isn’t exactly spry, but she still lives on her own in her little cottage on the island, where my mother grew up. She stopped driving last year, and she pays someone to come help her out around the house. But her mind is perfectly intact. Though she’s years older, she seems a lot better off than my father. She’s well enough to travel, certainly, but the wall, the iron curtain, had made such a trip unthinkable for many years.
“I didn’t wake Daniel, did I?” Gram asks, as if it just occurred to her.
I hesitate for a moment. “You know him. He sleeps through everything.” I word it in a way where I tell myself I’m not lying. He does sleep through everything. She wouldn’t have woken him, had he been here, sleeping next to me, the way Gram assumes he was. I kind of hate myself for not having already told her the truth. But I’m not going to tell her now, when she seems so happy. The problem is, what would I even say? I don’t fully believe what’s happened to us myself.
The office is all abuzz about the news out of Germany when I get there. Judging from the television coverage on every station, the entire world is buzzing this morning. Daniel has a black-and-white television sitting on top of the metal filing cabinet in his office, and he and a small group of my coworkers stand crowded around it, watching, listening. I’m glad to have already watched the news, processed, discussed, and been happy about it with Gram so I don’t feel compelled to go into Daniel’s office with the others, and I sit down at my desk instead.
I still have the plastic sleeve with the Faber letter in my bag. I’ve been carrying it around with me all week, unable to let it go. Unable to get Benjamin’s answer about the Fräulein Fabers out of my head. What if they left Austria before the Nazis got to them? My own family made it out of Germany, after all. Granted, it was much earlier, well before this letter was stamped in 1939. But what if the Fabers also made it out? What if this letter would mean something to them, or their children, so many years later? So
me connection to the father they lost, or the life they used to live?
Before I’d hung up with Benjamin the other day he said he still wanted to find out about the stamp, its origins, its value. He said he was going to a philatelic conference in the Bay Area this weekend and he was taking a Polaroid of the stamp with him, in hopes of getting some feedback. Just give me another week, he’d told me on the phone, and if it’s nothing, then we can give up. I’d neither agreed nor disagreed but told him I’d give him a call next week to arrange a time to pick up the rest of the collection.
I grab my Rolodex from my bottom drawer and flip through it until I find my contact card for Jason Hirsch. Before I took this entertainment job at LA Lifestyles, before I married Daniel, I used to work the city beat with Jason at the Tribune. I’d hated the drudgery of it, reporting on city council meetings, mayoral races, and I’d been more than happy to leave that behind to review films. Jason left shortly after me and had become a rising star writing for the national publication Voice. He’d recently written a piece on Holocaust survivors living in LA, and maybe he’d be able to help me figure out how to find the Fabers.
“Katie! How’ve you been?” Jason asks when he picks up the phone. I haven’t talked to him in months. I try to remember when we last saw each other. At a media party last winter, maybe. I was with Daniel; we were still together. But I haven’t seen or talked to Jason since.
I’m tempted to say fine now, to lie to him the way I’ve been lying to everyone else. But we’ve known each other too long, and Jason is good at reading people. “I’ve been better,” I say instead, almost surprised by my admission, the way the truth actually sounds. I tell him that Daniel and I are splitting up, that my father has had to move into a memory care home, and life feels strange at the moment.
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