The Lost Letter

by Jillian Cantor

  “Yes. Well, I didn’t want to make a thing of it.” She takes another quick drag on her cigarette and then extinguishes it. “I am quitting these,” she says. “Actually, I have already quit.”

  “I can see that,” Benjamin says, and she frowns at him.

  “You go everywhere with her?” Elena asks, looking from him to me, then back at him. It sounds like she’s scolding him.

  “No.” Benjamin’s face turns a little red. But recently, he has.

  “You should,” she says. “You two are a very cute couple.” She rubs her fingers together. She clearly really wants another cigarette, but she doesn’t reach for one. She quit. “I saw my sister last month,” she says, turning back to me.

  “You went to Cardiff?” I remember the foggy steps I took there, what have come to feel like the first steps I took toward digging my way out of my old life.

  “Yes,” Elena says. “I went to Cardiff. Miri says to tell you both hello.”

  “How is she?” I ask tentatively.

  “Her hip is on the mend, and she is back at home with her husband.”

  “Oh good.” I’m glad Miriam left the depressing Raintree.

  “It was so wonderful to be reunited with her, to know she is good and happy and safe. After all this time. You did that.” She looks at me, then Benjamin again. “You found her. You found me.” She clears her throat. She’s trying not to cry. She blinks her eyes and looks away for a moment. But she regains her composure quickly, turns back to me and continues talking. “Miri asked about you, about the letter you gave me. She wanted to know what it said. The truth was, I hadn’t opened it. I thought I never would. But she wouldn’t let it go. She said I was crazy not to read it. Not to come here. Now that I could.”

  “So you read it?” Benjamin asks.

  She nods, and pulls it from her purse. She pulls out a pair of reading glasses, too, puts them on, opens the envelope, and unfolds the letter inside.

  Austria, 1939

  THE MORNING ELENA DISAPPEARED Kristoff couldn’t warm up. He shivered for hours, his teeth chattering, even after he lit a fire, dressed in warmer clothes, huddled under blankets.

  He had found a letter in the snow, just at the end of the woods before the clearing, and he clutched it still in his fingers hours later—the last thing Elena had touched. He held on to it until the dampness soaked through the envelope, turning the paper into bits. It was unsendable now. He’d wasted a precious stamp. But he didn’t care. He didn’t care about Austria. The Nazis. Their stamps. The recipient of this letter, a woman they had made new papers for. He didn’t care about anything but Elena. Eventually he threw the letter into the fire, burning it all, even the stamp.

  He searched and searched for her. He walked through the woods in the snow for hours at a time, until his toes were too numb to walk anymore. Each time he’d walk back to the house, hoping he’d made a mistake, hoping he’d come back and simply find her there, kneading bread in the kitchen, laughing. He imagined her saying, Silly Kristoff, I was here all along! But every time he returned, the house was empty. She was gone.

  He went to the Bauer farm and tried to enlist Josef’s help, but he found the place seemingly abandoned. All the lights were on inside, the front door unlocked, but no one was home. Josef, too, was gone. And Kristoff feared that he’d also been taken by the Germans. Kristoff knew it was only a matter of time before the Germans realized what he had done, before they came for him, too. But he didn’t care any longer. Without Elena it was hard to feel.

  Two days and two empty nights passed, and Kristoff dreamed of Elena. He would awake and feel like she was so close. That she was still here, somewhere. He started to believe that Elena was still alive. It is Elena, he told himself. She was so tough. If they had only taken her to a work camp, she might escape, she might find her way back to him. He wouldn’t leave the house. He would wait for her here. He would.

  But then, there was banging on the door in the middle of the night, and Kristoff heard Herr Bergmann shouting for him to open up, his voice rough and angry. Kristoff knew he had to leave right now, or he, too, was going to die. He remembered what Josef had told him, not to be stupid. And he didn’t want to die.

  He ran out the back door and into the workshop, opened the floor space, and hid inside. A few minutes later, he heard muffled sounds from above. Elena must’ve been so frightened all the times she’d done this, though she never admitted it to him. The thought of her, scared, alone . . . He wanted to howl. But he couldn’t make a sound. Above him he heard Herr Bergmann’s boots, Herr Bergmann calling Kristoff’s name. Someone else saying, “Er ist weg.” He is gone. Kristoff huddled into himself under the floor, daring himself not to move, not to breathe. It got quiet, and he thought they gave up, they left. But he didn’t dare crack open the floor, until he began to smell smoke. When he stood, he saw flames shooting from the roof of the house.

  Kristoff grabbed only the stamps, his forged papers, and his envelope of reichsmarks and he ran toward the woods. He didn’t dare go back into the house for a change of clothes, a slice of bread, his sketch pad from the attic.

  He had promised Elena he’d go to America, find Frederick, even without her. They would meet there. They would. He told himself this over and over again, the words echoing in his head like a chorus as he walked.

  He didn’t have Schwann to drive him, so he walked and walked. He eventually hitched a ride with a farmer for part of the way and then took a train. He wasn’t Jewish, and no one knew he’d plotted against the Nazis, and it still took him two weeks to get to Bremen. Once he made it there, he spent nearly all of his money on a ticket for the next boat to America in two weeks’ time and then the rest on a room near the port.

  He slept restlessly, still dreaming about Elena. Dreaming her here with him, and then he awoke, devastated to remember again and again that he was all alone.

  He decided to write a letter to Elena that he would mail with their stamp before he left. Just in case she came back to the house to find it burned down, to find him gone, the letter should be waiting for her at the post.

  My dearest love,

  I am writing this from Bremen, where I will do as you wished for me and board a boat to America next week. When I get there, I will find Gideon Leser, and your father, and I hope that you will be able to do the same soon. That I will see you in America and we can be together as we talked about. Live in a little house by the water. I want to spend all the rest of my days with you—no, all my hours, my minutes. It has been torture not seeing you these past few weeks, and I make it through only by closing my eyes and imagining you are with me still. You will always be with me.

  I hope you are safe, and that you read this letter soon. I hate that I am leaving without you, but I couldn’t stay. They are onto us. They came looking for me and destroyed the house. It was too dangerous there. We should have left weeks ago. I feel like I’m betraying you by leaving without you, and yet, I don’t know what else to do. I know this is what you wanted for me.

  I wish you had woken me that last morning before you left. So I might’ve said goodbye. Kissed you one last time.

  But then, I know you don’t like goodbyes.

  I will never say goodbye to you. Only see you again soon. I know I will.

  With all my love,

  Kristoff

  Kristoff walked to the post to mail his letter before he boarded the ship to America, but when he got there, he couldn’t bring himself to go inside.

  He thought about his letter being read by the Germans, destroyed. If they had Elena, if she was still alive, would this letter only make things worse for her should they read it?

  And so he tucked it in the pocket of his jacket and promised himself he would send it once he got to America, once the war was over.

  Los Angeles, 1991

  WHEN ELENA FINISHES reading the letter, translating into English for us, we ar
e all in tears. I’m picturing my father, so in love with her. I was a different person then. He was Elena’s person, and he had loved her so much.

  “He could not say goodbye,” she repeats. “Only see you again soon.”

  “And that’s why you came here?” Benjamin asks.

  She nods. “When you said his memory was failing, I didn’t think I should come. But then Miriam called me a fool, and I read the letter. And he’s right here. Alive, after all this time. The wall is down. I sold some furniture to get money, and I got a passport and plane ticket, just like that. And now I’ve finally made it to America.” She pauses and takes a sip of the coffee the waitress has just plunked down in front of us. “He might not remember me. But I remember him,” she says. “And Miriam was right. You were right. I have to see him again.”

  At eight o’clock we walk across the street to the Willows and Gretchen lets us all go back. I walk ahead of Elena, and Benjamin walks behind her. From the hallway I can see my father has just gotten up. He’s shaving in the small mirror in his bathroom with his electric razor and humming an old show tune to himself. I wait a moment before going in, uncertain if this will shatter his world, or if it won’t even crack it. The latter seems worse to me.

  I take a deep breath. “Dad,” I call into the room, and I knock gently on the open door. “It’s me. Katie.”

  He turns the razor off, puts it down on his sink, and peeks his head out of the bathroom. “Kate the Great,” he says. “To what do I owe this surprise? And so early in the morning.”

  I walk into his room, nervously. “Dad,” I say. “I don’t know if you remember, but you’ve been drawing someone in art class.” He frowns, looks at his feet. He’s not wearing shoes yet. Only white socks. “Someone from your past, from back when you were a different person. You told me about her. We talked about this, do you remember?”

  He doesn’t answer, but he opens up his nightstand drawer. He had apparently stowed a drawing in there and he unrolls it now. He stares at the picture, traces the face with his finger. Elena is watching all of this from the hallway behind me, and I hear her sigh. Then I hear her footsteps approach closer, into the room.

  He looks up, sees her, and takes a quick step back, dropping the picture, as if he’s seeing a ghost.

  I take the picture from the floor, roll it back up. “I found her,” I say. “Actually, Benjamin and I both did.” Benjamin walks into the room, too, when I say his name, and he takes my hand.

  Elena steps forward. She and my father are staring at each other as if they have stared at each other already for a thousand years and also as if they are only seeing each other for the first time. “Hallo, Kristoff,” Elena says.

  I hold my breath, waiting to see if he’ll recognize her, if he’ll know her. He doesn’t say anything at first, but he reaches his hand up, brings it to her chin, her cheek, like he’s feeling the lines, the way he drew them, activating some sort of muscle memory that’s lain dormant for fifty years and has survived in spite of his insidious disease. “Perfect lines,” he says.

  “You know who I am?” She’s asking a question, but she says it with certainty. She already knows the answer.

  He considers it for a moment. “The stamp engraver’s daughter,” he says. True to his disease, he probably can’t remember Frederick’s name right now, or maybe even Elena’s, but I can see it in his face, he can remember the joy of loving this woman, the pain of losing her. “I loved you for a long time,” he says. His voice has a dreamlike quality. He’s remembering her in another time, another place. He seems to understand the wonder at finding her here.

  “Yes,” Elena says. “We lost each other long ago. But then your daughter found me again.”

  He lets out a small sob and pulls her toward him; he wraps her in a hug. He rests his cheek on her hair, and he whispers something that sounds like, “Apricots.”

  “Maybe we should go,” Benjamin says to me. “Give them a little time.”

  “We’re going to go wait out in the lobby,” I say, but neither one of them seems to notice us anymore.

  “You won’t leave me again,” I hear my father saying as Benjamin and I begin to walk away.

  Elena answers him: “I will never say goodbye to you. Only see you again soon.”

  Author’s Note

  I keep a letter in the top drawer of my writing desk that I wrote to my grandparents as a child. The envelope has a twenty-cent U.S. flag stamp, postmarked 1983, and the letter is written in my five-year-old handwriting, telling my grandparents how much I missed them after they returned home after a recent visit. My grandmother must have saved it, because twenty-five years later, when she moved into a memory care home (much like the one Katie’s father lives in), my mom found the letter in a drawer in her house and mailed it back to me. I have kept it in my own drawer ever since. And every time I catch a glance of it, I remember how letters used to mean something and how we’re missing some of that now in the digital age.

  My grandmother passed away a few years ago, but before she did, most of her memory left her first, and like Katie and her father, every time I spoke to her, I felt I was speaking to her in the past. She would often tell me she could picture my face when she heard my voice on the phone, and I imagined her picturing five-year-old me, the one writing that letter. And though she could never tell me what she had for breakfast or what she’d done that morning, she could often recount episodes that had happened when she was younger, in spectacular detail. She’d also tell me about the hotel she was staying in and wonder when she’d be going home from vacation, or ask me where her plane tickets were. The idea for Ted and the fictional memory care facility, the Willows, came first from my relationship with her.

  All of the characters in this novel, Ted included, are fictional, but many ideas in the book are rooted not just in my own personal experience with watching my grandmother’s memory decline, but also in real historical events.

  Though all the stamps and the engravers in this book are fictional, there were real engravers who took part in the resistance. Czesław Słania was one real such engraver who forged documents for the Polish resistance. And stamps and stamp plots also played a real role in the resistance. The ones my fictional Dr. Grimes recounts in the book are all real. I read that after the Anschluss, the Germans really did create stamps depicting Austrian scenes, though the stamp Kristoff creates in this novel came from my imagination.

  Though Elena also is fictional, I was inspired by the real women who risked their lives and worked with the resistance, notably Sophie Scholl, whom I first discovered while visiting the powerful resistance exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Also true was the fact that concentration camp prisoners were allowed to send (and receive) mail, on preprinted camp letter cards, with specific rules and limitations. This seemed remarkable to me. Though I also read that incoming mail was censored, and often had the stamps removed to look for any messages underneath.

  The Kindertransport that saves Miriam was a real rescue effort that came about just after Kristallnacht, taking thousands of refugee children on trains and then boats to Great Britain between 1938 and 1940. Many of the children, like Miriam, lived out the rest of their lives in Great Britain and never saw their families again.

  The events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 are also based on fact. The details of Elena’s life in East Germany and the reunified Germany that Katie visits in 1990 are based on my research, down to the Palasthotel, which was not open to East German guests before the wall fell because the hotel didn’t accept the local currency, and which was reportedly filled with all brown decor. The group that Elena is a part of in Germany is loosely based on what I read about the real group, Women for Peace, where women in both the East and the West organized and tried to stage protests against the GDR and nuclear armament.

  Before I started writing this book, I knew almost nothing about st
amps or philately. I never thought about the people who made stamps, designed them, or even collected them. I showed up one day at the Postal History Foundation library in Tucson with only a very rough outline of this book, and I told the librarians there that I was writing a novel about stamps. They very kindly gave me books, articles, pictures, and guides (organized by year, country, and engraver, like the ones Katie takes out of the library), and started me on the journey toward understanding the importance of stamps. Like Katie, I used to see stamps as only paper and ink, as a way to get my mail from one place to another. But by the time I finished writing this book, I came to see them also as gems.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the wonderful team at Riverhead Books, my publishing family: Geoff Kloske, Kate Stark, Jynne Dilling Martin, and especially my amazing editor, Laura Perciasepe, whose careful eye and remarkable dedication make her a continual joy to work with. Thank you also to the fabulous Penguin Random House and Riverhead sales, marketing, and publicity teams, with special thanks to Lydia Hirt, Mary Stone, Michelle Giuseffi, and Alexandra Guillen.

  I am deeply indebted to my agent, Jessica Regel, whose support, brilliance, and kindness always keep me going. It was a conversation with her that first sparked the idea for Kristoff and Elena’s story, and another conversation that made me believe I could actually pull this off. Thank you, Jess, for everything! Thank you also to the wonderful team at Foundry Literary and Media.

  Thank you to all my writer friends, who offer ideas, read drafts, and lend support on a daily basis. I’m so grateful for your friendships: Maureen Leurck, Tammy Greenwood, and Laura Fitzgerald. And thank you to my family and extended family, my biggest cheerleaders and best publicists, especially Gregg, who also understands and takes over when I’m absorbed in a fictional world.