“Shit,” he says, unapologetically. “I’m sorry, Katie. I had no idea or I would’ve given you a call.”
“Thanks.” But I don’t want to talk any more about myself, so I launch into the reason I really called. “I want to find somebody,” I tell him. “A family, actually. Two Jewish girls, sisters who were probably living in Austria in 1939.”
“Where’s this coming from?” he asks. I tell him briefly about my father’s collection and the letter with the unusual stamp addressed to Fräulein Faber. “Wow,” Jason says. He’s quiet for a minute, thinking. Then he says, “If you knew the city or the village they were living in in Austria, you could start with the archives there. That’s what I’d do.”
“But how would I access the archives? Do you think I’d have to go, in person?” The idea sounds preposterous as I say it out loud. Flying halfway across the world to Austria for a silly stamp and a letter that could still just be a piece of junk?
“Well, it depends. Maybe,” Jason says. “I mean, were they in Vienna—in which case, maybe you could find the archives office there and give them a call? Or were they in some little village that doesn’t exist anymore?” He pauses for a second, and I try to wrap my head around the gravity of that. Little villages that existed fifty years ago that are totally eradicated. “But say they got out.” Jason is still talking. “Maybe they made it to the U.S., and in that case, maybe you could find an immigration record?”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I say, meaning that they got out of Nazi-occupied Austria, not the ease of finding them now. Though, of course, that would be nice, too.
“I know of a few organizations that have started up to help people search for family members, too. They’re trying to create databases for people looking for loved ones. You could give them a call. Maybe they could help.”
Jason sounds so confident that this is all doable, and I revel in his optimism. The idea of finding out what happened to these girls feels something close to exciting, the way I used to feel when I was younger, when I wrote a story I was really proud of and honed my reporter skills on a source.
“Hey, do you want to meet for a drink later?” Jason asks. “We could catch up and I’ll go back and look through my notes, bring all the numbers I have for these organizations.”
“Sure,” I say, and it feels kind of nice to be making plans with an old friend, to have somewhere to go tonight after work.
After I hang up with Jason, I decide to head back to the library to see if I can figure out where exactly the Fabers lived in Austria. The address on the letter could be a start to finding them—I just have to figure out what it’s saying.
I peek my head into Daniel’s office before I leave. The TV’s still on, and Daniel, Janice, and Rob, who does our copyediting, are all standing there, transfixed. On the screen, a man is juggling on top of the Berlin Wall, and someone is holding up a boom box below him, blasting American music. Bruce Springsteen? I think it is. “Heading out to work on a story,” I lie, but no one seems to notice.
“You’re back,” the librarian says to me when I walk up to the main desk. “Becoming a philatelist after all, are we?”
I’m surprised she remembers me, but maybe not too many people, or not too many women my age, frequent this part of the library in search of philately books. Benjamin Grossman notwithstanding, I still think of stamp collecting as an old man’s hobby.
I take the plastic sleeve from my bag and show her the letter, wishing my German and knowledge of prewar Austrian addressing conventions were good enough to decipher exactly what the address means. “I need to find this address, on the letter.”
“So we’re not interested in stamps anymore?” She frowns; I’ve confused her.
“No, I am, but I’m trying to find out about this specific stamp. This letter. I want to know where it was going, where this woman lived. I think this stamp is from around 1939, so maybe a map of Austria from that time?”
“Give me a few minutes.” She walks over to the card catalog, searches for a bit, and then disappears. A little while later she returns with an armful of books, old dusty-looking monstrosities that it seems no one but me has asked after in a long time. “European geography, maps, and atlases pre–World War Two,” she clarifies. “Maybe you’ll be able to locate your address in one of these.” I thank her and hand over my library card so I can check them out. “You know your letter was never sent, right?” she says. I nod, though I’m not sure whether I know that or not, or how she does. “No postmark,” she adds.
“Of course,” I say, feeling like an idiot. Benjamin must’ve noticed this, and he probably just assumed I did, too.
But as I walk out of the library, my arms piled high with the books, I think, maybe I can send it now. If I can just find out what happened to the Fabers.
A few hours later, I wash my hair, shape my unruly curls with mousse, and put on a dress and even a little lipstick before going to meet Jason. It’s not because I think this is a date, in any possible way, or that I want it to be. But more because I haven’t left the house for anything other than work or seeing my father or this whole stamp thing in a few months. I remember that I can make myself look vaguely pretty, if I try. And it’s kind of a nice feeling.
Jason is already there when I get to the Beverly Hilton, where we’d agreed to meet. And after I order a glass of wine and he orders a beer, I pull the letter out of my bag and show it to him. “It’s a love letter,” I say, explaining what Benjamin told me about the placement of the stamp and also about how the stamp is unusual, because of the tiny, nearly undetectable flower.
He glances at it. “I’ll admit, I had an ulterior motive for inviting you out for a drink.” He smiles at me. He has a nice smile, though his front two teeth are just slightly crooked.
“What’s that?” I ask, my voice teetering a little. Maybe I shouldn’t have put on lipstick.
“There’s a story here.” He’s staring at the letter; he hasn’t noticed my lipstick. He traces the stamp beneath the plastic with his forefinger before handing it back to me. “I don’t think I told you, I got promoted. I’m in charge of features now.”
“Wow, that’s great.” I raise my wineglass in a toast. “Congratulations.” I hope I don’t sound bitter. I’m not. I’m happy for Jason, but we both started in the same place at the Tribune years earlier, and now he seems light-years ahead of me.
“When you figure this story out,” he says, “I want you to write a piece on it. For me.” So that was his ulterior motive? He wants me to work for him?
I haven’t considered this a story I could write. Nor had I considered asking Jason for a job, working for him. I feel a weird sense of déjà vu to when Daniel asked me to come work for him. We’d been dating for only a few months, but I was so tired of the day-to-day boredom of the city beat that entertainment stories sounded like the holy grail, and working with Daniel felt like a bonus. I didn’t let myself worry about what would happen if things didn’t work out. Anyway, I knew they would. And they had. Until recently. “You don’t have to do that just because I told you about me and Daniel,” I say to Jason now.
“I’m not,” Jason says. “It would be fun to work with you again. And besides, I’m only hiring you once you figure this story out.”
Jason isn’t Daniel, I remind myself. And Voice would be a huge step up for me from LA Lifestyles. “Well, who knows if there actually is a story here,” I say. “Or if I’ll be able to find out what happened to this family, these girls.”
“There is,” Jason says. “And you will.” He pulls a folder out of his briefcase and hands it to me. “Here’s a list of all my contacts, people you could call to help you locate the Fabers, maybe.” He lifts his beer bottle and clinks it to my wineglass. “Here’s to new beginnings,” he says. “And all good things in the future.”
Or endings, I add silently in my head. And all bad things in the past.
THE NEWSPAPER WOULD CALL the events of the night they lost Frederick die Kristallnacht. Night of crystal. Night of broken glass. But to Kristoff it seemed that in Grotsburg, Feuernacht or Tränennacht, night of fire—or tears—would’ve been more appropriate.
The morning after that terrible night it began to snow heavily in Grotsburg. It snowed and snowed for days. Frozen tears, gefrorene Tränen, Miriam said without an iota of her usual joyfulness, as she watched the bitter flakes fall outside the kitchen window. It snowed so much that for a few days Kristoff couldn’t even make it from the house to the workshop because the kitchen door wouldn’t open from all the snowdrifts. He would feel certain, years later, that it was the snow that saved the Fabers’ house and workshop from being destroyed during die Kristallnacht, too. The woods were too thick; the snow was too deep. The Germans gave up and turned toward Vienna, where they continued their destruction.
And yet it almost didn’t matter that their visit to Grotsburg was short-lived at first: so much of the town was obliterated by the fire that the Germans had started in the synagogue. The buildings in town were all close together and made of wood. The fire had spread and burned until the falling snow finally put it out. And overnight, so many families were without homes, businesses, lives. Nearly everything that remained was charred, ruined. And now covered in snow.
The next time Kristoff walked into town, weeks later, he would think of it as a village of ashes and ghosts. One of the only buildings entirely intact was the post office, on Wien Allee, and Kristoff didn’t think this was a coincidence. The Germans would still need mail, after all.
Cooped up inside their house with Mrs. Faber’s sobs, which shook her entire body every hour or so, Kristoff felt helpless for days. Lost. At least they had a large supply of canned food, which Mrs. Faber had stockpiled last summer in preparation for the snowy winter, so they weren’t about to starve anytime soon.
When Frederick left, Kristoff never thought it would be forever, and he knew Mrs. Faber, Elena, and Miriam hadn’t either. What would Frederick want them to do now? He paced back and forth in his attic bedroom. He paced and he paced, until he heard a knock at his door, and Elena barged into his room, without waiting for him to answer.
“You’re wearing out the floor.” She frowned at him, put her hands on her hips. She wore a brown baggy pair of pants and a raggedy-looking button-down shirt that Kristoff was pretty sure were Frederick’s. Her hair was pulled back into a braid, and yet she still looked beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but he didn’t stop pacing.
“Kristoff!” She grabbed his sleeve. And finally he stopped. Not because she’d asked him, but because she was touching him. He could feel the warmth of her fingers through his shirt, to his skin.
“I’m trying to think,” he said. “I can’t sit still and think.”
She let him go, walked over to the edge of his bed, and sat down. Before he could stop her, she picked up his sketch pad, and she began flipping through it. “All these of me? What makes me such an interesting subject?” He shrugged, and he felt his cheeks turning red. She continued to flip. “You’ve been drawing me . . . for months?” She laughed a little and closed his book. “You could’ve been practicing for stamps, and you’ve been wasting all this time on my ordinary face.”
Kristoff sat down on the edge of the bed next to her. “There’s nothing ordinary about it,” he said, and before he could really think through what he was doing, he put his hand gently on her cheek, stroked it with his thumb. “Perfect lines,” he said, and he didn’t care whether Josef killed him or not. He did not want to take his hand from Elena’s face.
She moved first, tilted her head down, and looked at the floor. “I can’t,” she said quietly.
“Because of Josef?” he asked awkwardly. He’d been wanting to ask Elena for months if she was in love with Josef.
Elena didn’t answer right away. “The only thing I care about now is getting Austria back, the way it used to be. Getting the Germans out,” she finally said. “I don’t have time for anything, or anyone, else.”
And then, for whatever reason, it occurred to Kristoff exactly what Frederick would want for his family. He’d want them to leave Austria behind. All of them. Even Elena. Their country was no longer safe for them. Austria could no longer be the Fabers’ home.
The first person to make it out to the Fabers’ house after the snow began to melt a week later was not a German soldier but Josef, and when he found Kristoff in the workshop, this time he asked Kristoff to walk with him through the woods. He didn’t ask about Elena, and though Kristoff knew she was inside the house helping her mother scrounge up a supper, he didn’t offer to get her.
“They need to go away,” Kristoff said to Josef as sternly as he could muster as they walked through the woods. The snow was deep, up to Kristoff’s knees, and his legs were cold and damp as he walked alongside Josef. “Mrs. Faber and the girls. They need to go somewhere safe. The Germans will come back when the snow melts. I’ll be fine, but they might not be.” As he said it, he wasn’t sure he would be fine. Or what fine meant anymore.
“You’re smarter than I thought,” Josef said gruffly. And Kristoff supposed that was his version of a compliment, though it didn’t exactly sound like one. “The town is almost all destroyed. You’re right. There’s nothing left for them here.” Josef veered off the path toward town. “Many men are missing. Killed in the fires, or imprisoned. Arrested or murdered . . .” Josef’s voice trailed off, and Kristoff realized they were headed toward the small shack—or tiny cabin, whatever the structure was—where he’d found Elena coming from that night last March when Austria was still Austria and their biggest worry had been that Frederick would find her gone on the Sabbath. That seemed so far away now, as if years, decades, had passed, not mere months. And Kristoff felt a numb sort of shock that this tiny little wooden thing in the middle of the woods still stood, when so much else around them was gone.
“What are we doing here?” Kristoff asked. Had Josef brought him out here to kill him, as he’d threatened once? Not that he truly believed Josef would do that. And besides, they had just seemed in agreement about the girls.
Instead of answering, Josef made his way toward the door. It didn’t have a lock, nothing to keep the Germans out. “The Germans don’t know this place exists. It’s not on any map,” Josef said as he fiddled with the handle, as if he could read Kristoff’s mind. “You know they say an old woman lived here once, but that at night she took the form of a Tatzelwurm, scared everyone off.”
“A Tatzelwurm?” Kristoff shook his head in disbelief, remembering how Soren, an older boy at the orphanage, used to intentionally try to scare Kristoff with stories of the mythical half-cat, half-serpent creature.
“Anyway,” Josef said, finally getting the door to open. “It doesn’t have an address. It’s not officially a real place. Nothing that anyone would know was here unless they were coming through these woods and then went off the beaten path looking for it. And why would they? They’ve already destroyed half the town,” he said bitterly.
“But what are you saying? About this place?” Kristoff was confused. “That the girls could hide here?” It seemed almost too easy, too close. If they were just here, a short walk from the engraving workshop, the Fabers’ house, Kristoff could walk to see them anytime he wanted. He wouldn’t have to let them go.
“No,” Josef said quickly. “They wouldn’t all be safe here.”
“But you just said . . .”
Josef opened the door and walked inside. He motioned for Kristoff to follow. It was dark, and it smelled damp, musty in the cabin. But Kristoff followed Josef anyway.
“Not the girls,” Josef said after a moment, and then he stepped aside so Kristoff could see what was inside the darkened room. Or rather, who.
Lying on the floor, covered by a torn blanket, was Frederick.
Los Angeles, 1989
ON SATURDAY MORNING I load up my hatchback with all the research books I’ve checked out of the library, and I make the two-hour drive down I-5 to Coronado to visit Gram.
I’m going partly because it’s been a while, because she was so excited about the Berlin Wall coming down last week and I want to share this moment with her. We can go out for brunch, sip celebratory mimosas at the grand Hotel del Coronado just a few blocks from her house the way we did when I visited her just after Daniel and I got engaged.
But partly I’m also going for selfish reasons. Gram knows German, and most of the books of maps the librarian gave me, along with the address on the letter, are indecipherable to me. I’m hoping she can help me figure out where the Fabers were and maybe where they might have gone.
I leave my house really early, five-thirty a.m., to try to beat any weekend freeway traffic. I get to the large open bridge to the island before eight but I know Gram will be awake. I feel a little bad I don’t get down here more often. The last time I was here was months ago—my father was still living by himself, in his house, and Daniel and I were still blissfully married. Well, maybe not blissfully, but I was somewhat blissful in my ignorance that he wasn’t blissful.
I hate driving over the bridge—it has no sides, and I have to train my eyes to stay straight ahead, to not think about the bay lurching so precariously below me. I can see why Gram doesn’t drive anymore, why she never leaves the island. Not that she needs to. Though it’s only a short drive to downtown San Diego, the little village of Coronado has everything she needs within walking distance for her.
The Lost Letter Page 8