The Lost Letter

by Jillian Cantor

  Herr Bergmann smiled, revealing a gold bottom tooth, and then he turned and left as swiftly as he’d come.

  Kristoff watched him walk away and disappear around the side of the house, but he waited, listening carefully for the motor of the car before he called to Elena, telling her it was safe.

  “Heil Hitler?” she hurled at him, as she pulled herself up out of the ground, dusting off her clothes. Miriam had once called the floor space a tomb, akin to her own grave. Elena, though, didn’t seem upset about that. Instead, she folded her arms across her chest and glared at him.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.” He walked to her, put his hand on her shoulder, but she yanked away. “Elena, I had to say it or he wasn’t going to leave.” He couldn’t tell whether she was truly mad at him or she just hated the futility of their situation.

  Kristoff handed her the envelope that Herr Bergmann had handed him moments earlier. “What’s this?” She looked inside, her delicate fingers riffling through the reichsmarks. She made a small sound of disgust and handed the envelope back to him. “I don’t want their money.”

  “Put it toward your father’s ticket to America,” he said, handing it back to her again. “What better way to get back at them than to use their money to help your father out?”

  “I could think of better ways,” she huffed, but she accepted it and stuffed the envelope into the pocket of the old pair of her father’s pants she was wearing. She’d been wearing her father’s clothes to work in each day, and he wasn’t sure whether it was because she didn’t want to get her own clothes dirty or because she felt her father’s clothes, silly as it seemed, might make her a better engraver. Even dressed in these old clothes, stray bits of her hair falling out of her braid, dirt from the floor space smudged across her cheek, she looked so beautiful.

  They’d never spoken about that night when she’d crawled into his bed, when he’d slept with his arms around her, her apricot hair just inches from his nose, and she’d never visited his bedroom again. The past few weeks they’d tiptoed around each other, each living in the house, working side by side in the workshop, but they spoke only casually or in passing or about the papers they were making.

  Kristoff longed to touch her, pull her toward him. But he didn’t move. “It’ll be dark soon,” he said, instead. “It’s Friday.”

  “It’s not your Sabbath.” Her tone sounded accusatory. She was still mad.

  “Well, what if I think it is now?” Why couldn’t it be? He was an orphan, after all. Who knew what his true past, his true heritage was?

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Elena said. “You can’t just decide to be a Jew, and besides, why would you want to . . . here?” She held her hands up, and it looked like she was gesturing to the cozy space of the workshop, but he knew she meant Grotsburg. Austria. Europe. Here and now. Where being a Jew was the most reviled and dangerous thing on God’s earth. Jews were no longer allowed to own businesses, attend German schools, not to mention the billion-mark fine Hitler had levied against them for the property destroyed during die Kristallnacht.

  Kristoff wanted to tell her that no place had ever felt like his home the way this place had. No family had ever felt like his family the way the Fabers had. But instead he said, “I want you to understand, I’m not one of them.”

  “But you’re not one of us either,” she said. Then she walked out of the workshop and walked into the main house.

  As the winter darkness overtook the yard that evening, Kristoff stood at the workshop’s door, and he could see the glow of two small candles flickering on the other side of the house’s kitchen window.

  Kristoff stayed in the workshop for a while that night, trying to reproduce his Stephensdom drawing into the metal, but Elena was right. His drawing had so many small lines, and he couldn’t force the burin to behave with the preciseness that he wanted. After a few hours he grew frustrated, gave up, and went back into the house.

  Elena had left him some bread in the kitchen—not challah, because eggs were too scarce and too expensive these days. A dry flat brown bread that she had baked this morning, a poor replacement. But she’d left some out here on a plate for him, a small peace offering. He took the plate of it from the counter, smeared it with a bit of the apricot jam they’d been rationing, and took it into the dining room. He added another log to the fire to warm it up, and looked around the room, and under the table, making sure Elena wasn’t hiding in earshot. She wasn’t.

  And before he ate his bread, he said the Shabbat prayer quickly, quietly, to himself.

  A few hours later, Kristoff paced in the attic, unable to sleep. He worried about how he was ever going to make his engraving plate look right and stay in Herr Bergmann’s good graces.

  Suddenly, Elena opened the door to his room without knocking, much the way Herr Bergmann had barged into the workshop earlier. She walked in and sat down at the edge of his bed. “Kristoff.” She said his name gently. She was no longer angry.

  Kristoff stopped pacing and stood in one spot, close enough to her that he could almost reach out and touch her, but not quite. “Thank you for the bread,” he said. “It was good.”

  “It wasn’t,” she said, matter-of-factly. “But it was the best I could do with what I had to work with.” She folded her hands in her lap, twisting her fingers together. “I couldn’t sleep. I shouldn’t have been so cross with you earlier, in the workshop. You’ve done so much to help us, my father.” She looked down at her hands. “I know you’re not one of them, that you have no choice but to work with them.”

  Kristoff took another step forward, and they were close enough that they practically had to touch. “You know I would never do anything to hurt you.” He reached out for her, put his hands on her shoulders. She shivered a little, stood, and before she could leave, run from his room back down the stairs, he pulled her to him. He wrapped his arms around her, holding on tightly. If there was ever one perfect moment in his life, this was it. The feel of Elena in his arms, the smell of her, the warmth of her cheek against him.

  “We’re going to fight them,” Elena said. “And we’ll win. Together.”

  To Kristoff it sounded like she was saying they would be together, that she wanted to be with him, that whatever they would do, they would do together. Though he knew that wasn’t exactly what she said, he heard himself saying back to her, “I want to always be together, you and I.”

  She stood up on her toes, leaned her face in close to him, and kissed him.

  At the first touch of her lips, he couldn’t breathe. He’d thought of this moment, over and over, since that day in the woods, in the snow, when they’d shared a goodbye kiss. I don’t like goodbyes, she’d said. That had been a kiss of desperation, filled with the overwhelming sadness that he might never see her again. But this kiss was slower, softer, sweeter. A beginning, not an ending.

  Kristoff moved his hands to the top of her nightgown and fumbled with the button. She put her hand up, on his, he thought, wanting him to stop. So he did. He moved his hands to his sides, stopped kissing her, and took a step back. He was breathing hard, and her cheeks were flushed. “I’m sorry,” he said. He wasn’t sorry.

  She unbuttoned her nightgown quickly, efficiently, pulled it over her head, and let it fall in a heap on the floor. She’d been completely naked underneath the gown. And seeing her like this, all the pale beautiful skin, the gentle slopes of her bare breasts, he gasped a little. “You don’t like what you see?” She had that edge to her voice that she always had, that toughness that made her stubborn and stupid and brilliant and beautiful. That made her want to fight. She was stunning like this. Every line and curve of her body a perfection that he was certain he could never achieve should he try to draw her sometime later, from memory.

  He reached his hand out again, placed his thumb on her collarbone and traced it gently across, the way he would draw the line if his thumb were charc
oal, her skin the white paper of a sketch pad. He traced from her shoulder to the top of her chest, and then he paused before continuing down. He had never touched a woman like this before. And yet his hand kept moving, as if he knew how, as if somehow touching her were as effortless as drawing her. “You’re so beautiful,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  He lifted her up on the bed, and he felt her body relax against his arms. He didn’t think about anything else. Not the Germans, the stamps, the imminent danger all of them were in. Only of Elena. The smooth texture of her skin against his hands.

  “Kristoff.” She spoke his name not as a command nor a question, but as a certainty. This was what she wanted, as much as he did.

  Oxford, 1989

  THE TRAIN RIDE TO OXFORD is a blur of green across the English countryside. I sit by the window and watch rolling hills and tiny towns go by, while Benjamin sits next to me with a Dodgers cap low enough to shield his eyes. He was gone from my room when I woke up this morning, but he’d left a note that he’d called and there was a train we could take at 9:00, that I should meet him in the lobby at 8:30. Neither one of us mentioned the events of last night nor spoke much on the cab ride to Cardiff Central. He’s a little hungover, I’m guessing, so I let him be, and we don’t talk much for the two-hour train ride either. I stare out the window, transfixed by all the greenery.

  By the time we reach Oxford it’s drizzling again, but we walk the short distance from the train. Despite the rain, I’m in awe at the beauty of the campus. The buildings are a pale brick, with domes and towers and spires. I feel like I’m on the set of a fairy tale, not a university, and I half expect King Arthur or Sir Gawain to come riding by on a horse any moment. But I see only the usual-looking college students milling around, dressed in sweatshirts and jeans tight-rolled at the bottom, girls with perms and teased-up bangs. They could be the UCLA students I see walking around in Westwood all the time.

  Benjamin raises his hat a little and tells me that Dr. Grimes was Sara’s thesis advisor, many years ago. He walks next to me, but he seems careful not to stand too close, to accidentally brush up against my shoulder, much less take my hand the way he did last night.

  “So your wife studied World War Two history?” I’m still trying to picture Benjamin married, much less to a scholar.

  He nods, pulls a piece of paper out of the pocket of his brown leather jacket, and looks down to double-check the address. “This way,” he says. “On George Street.”

  I follow him toward a triangular building, which looks more like a church than a university office building, but a sign in the hallway as we walk inside indicates that we’ve reached the right place, home to the faculty of history.

  Dr. Grimes’s office is up a set of stairs, on the second floor, and Benjamin walks ahead of me, taking the steps slowly. Is Benjamin thinking of Sara as he walks these steps, thinking about the way her feet must’ve traced them many years ago? I am. I create this picture of her in my head—she’s small, with brown hair, an angled bob, and shocking green eyes.

  “Ben Grossman, how the hell are you?” Dr. Grimes has walked out of his office, to meet us at the top of the stairs, as if he’d been expecting us, and I guess Benjamin told him which train we’d be on. He’s older and much more rotund than I’d imagined him. He’s balding and wears a tweed jacket that looks about two sizes too big. He reaches out to shake my hand.

  “I’m Katie,” I tell him.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Katie.”

  “This is the client I was telling you about over the phone,” Benjamin says, and Dr. Grimes invites us into his office. Inside, the light is dim, the space overcrowded with too many bookshelves covered in what appears to be a disorganized mess of thousands of books. He moves a few off two chairs across from his desk. We sit, and I pull Elena’s letter out of my bag and hand it across the desk to him.

  “I brought him up to speed over the phone,” Benjamin says to me as Dr. Grimes grabs a pair of glasses off his desk and examines the letter and the stamp carefully.

  “The flower.” He traces his stubby finger gently across it through the plastic. “It’s remarkable the way they snuck it in there, isn’t it? Barely even visible at all.” He stands to get a book off one of the shelves behind his desk. Though it all appears such a mess to me, he seems to know exactly where, and what he’s looking for.

  He lays the book on his desk, finds the right page, and then points to what he wants us to read. “See here,” he says. The top of the page reads “Nazi Stamp Conspiracy,” and there’s a picture of a German stamp, with an unfamiliar man’s profile.

  I skim over the words, but he begins to explain before I can get a sense from the book.

  “During the war, people were trying everything to fight the Germans. You couldn’t fight them with force, see. So you fought them with things just beneath their noses. At first people used letters to send secret messages. They’d alter the words in poems or such, but then the Germans caught on. So they started finding other ways to send messages using letters.”

  “Stamps?” I ask, wondering if Benjamin knows any of this. It’s kind of mind-blowing to a total stamp amateur like me.

  “Yes, stamps,” Dr. Grimes says, putting his finger back on the book. “This one you see here on this page was part of a plot to overthrow Hitler dreamed up by the SOE—the Special Ops—here in Great Britain. They had thousands of fake stamps printed up with Himmler’s face on them, instead of Hitler’s. Himmler was a Nazi, very high up. Everyone knew he wanted to overthrow Hitler, become Führer himself. So someone in the SOE came up with the idea to make fake stamps with his picture. They smuggled them into circulation in Germany and thought it would create infighting in the regime. Hitler would think Himmler was trying to overthrow him—they thought they could bring the entire regime down.” He pauses and flips to something else in the book. “Only problem was, nothing happened. No one noticed.” He puts his finger on a different page, and I see an image of the Hitler stamp I’d seen in my own philatelic guide I’d checked out of the library. Only in this version, Hitler’s face looks like a skeleton. “Then there was Operation Cornflakes,” he says. “These beauties were attached to letters of propaganda, inscribed with the words Futsches Reich—ruined Reich, instead of the usual Deutsches Reich. Thousands of them were dropped out of planes in an effort to garner support for the resistance movements. Create an uprising on the ground.”

  “So our stamp?” I ask him. “Was that a part of all this?”

  Dr. Grimes shrugs. “I have never seen your particular stamp before. But to create a fake in Europe during—”

  “So you think this is fake?” I interrupt him.

  He nods. “And in my opinion, there were only a few good reasons to create a stamp like this there and then.” Benjamin and I both stare at him, unmoving, wanting to hear what he’s about to say next. “If you had something to say and no other way to say it. If you were fighting the Germans and you didn’t want them to know it. What better way to do it than to mail an innocuous letter with a hidden message embedded in the stamp? It’s brilliant, really.”

  “But a flower?” I ask. “On a love letter?”

  “Sure,” Dr. Grimes says. “It all seems so very innocent. But I suspect this isn’t a real love letter. The upside-down placement of the stamp, perhaps that was a message, too. And maybe they tried to pass it off as a silly love letter—because who would question that?”

  Miriam claimed her sister loved Kristoff, that she left her chance at safety, a new life in England, to go back and be with him, and I want Dr. Grimes to be wrong. I want this to really be a love letter. I want Elena and Kristoff to have found each other again, to have loved each other. I want this stamp, this letter, to be proof of that.

  I glance at Benjamin, and he’s grinning, looking more animated than I’ve ever seen him. “Of course,” he says, his voice rising with excitement. “That all makes sense.”

&n
bsp; “So what could the flower have meant?” I’m still skeptical. “It’s just a flower.”

  Dr. Grimes holds up his hand. “It is not just any flower, my dear. It’s an edelweiss. A symbol of love and purity in Germany and Austria, but it’s also a nearly impossible flower to attain. It only grows in the scraggiest, rockiest terrain. Men used to die climbing up mountains to try to get them for their lovers. And the ones who didn’t? The flower became a symbol of overcoming adversity.”

  I lean across his desk and look at the stamp again, observing the flower the way Dr. Grimes just described it. A symbol of overcoming adversity. Miriam told us yesterday that it was proof of unusual daring. “And what about Kristoff Mueller, Frederick Faber’s apprentice?” Benjamin asks. “Have you ever heard of him?”

  Dr. Grimes leans back and folds his arms across his wide stomach. “I’m afraid not.” He thinks for another moment. “But the Nazi-issued stamps were issued by the ministry, not necessarily accredited to particular engravers, artists, the way they are today or were before the war. And I haven’t heard of him since, have you, Ben?”

  “No,” Benjamin says. “He most likely wasn’t still engraving stamps after the war.”

  “He very well may have created many stamps for the Nazis,” Dr. Grimes says. “Or he might not have. Perhaps this was his only one.” He lowers his voice. “If he was forging stamps, working for the resistance, there’s a fair chance he was caught at some point. Killed.”

  “But if he wasn’t?” I say, wanting both Benjamin and Dr. Grimes to be wrong.

  “I like your optimism, Katie,” Dr. Grimes says, somewhat grimly. “But if he wasn’t, well, then I suppose anything could’ve happened to him. He could be anywhere at all by now, dead or very much alive.”