I study Mary’s profile as she speaks. “The priest said, ‘What he did was wrong. He doesn’t deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it’s choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you.’ I was thirteen, and I didn’t know very much about the world, but I knew that if there was that much wisdom in religion, I wanted to be part of it.”
She faces me. “I don’t know what this person did to you, and I am not sure I want to. But forgiving isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. It’s saying, You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me. It’s saying, You don’t get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.”
I think of my grandmother, whose silence all these years had accomplished the same goal.
For better or for worse, Josef Weber is part of my life. Of my family’s story. Is the only way to edit him out of it to do what he’s asked; to excuse him for his actions?
“Does any of that help?” Mary asks.
“Yeah. Surprisingly.”
She pats my shoulder. “Come on down with me. I know a place you can get a good cup of coffee.”
“I think I’m going to stay here for a little bit. Watch the sun set.”
She looks at the sky. “Can’t blame you.”
I watch her move down the Holy Stairs until I cannot see her anymore. It is dusk now, and the edges of my hands look fuzzy; the whole world seems like it’s unraveling.
I pick up Mary’s gardening gloves, which are draped over the edge of the bucket like wilted lilies. I lean over the railing of the Monet garden and cut a few stalks of monkshood. In the pale palm of Mary’s glove, the blue-black petals look like stigmata—another sorrow that can’t be explained away, no matter how hard you try.
• • •
There are so many ways to betray someone.
You can whisper behind his back.
You can deceive him on purpose.
You can deliver him into the hands of his enemy, when he trusts you.
You can break a promise.
The question is, if you do any of these things, are you also betraying yourself?
I can tell, when Josef opens the door, that he knows why I’ve come. “Now?” he asks, and I nod. He stands for a moment, his hands at his sides, unsure of what he is supposed to do.
“The living room,” I suggest.
We sit opposite each other, the chessboard between us, set neatly for a new game. Eva lies down, a donut at his feet.
“Will you take her?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He nods, his hands folded on his lap. “Do you know . . . how?”
I nod, and reach for the backpack I’ve worn while biking here in the dark.
“I have to say something first,” Josef confesses. “I lied to you.”
My hands still on the zipper.
“What I told you earlier today . . . that was not the worst thing I ever did,” Josef says.
I wait for him to continue.
“I did speak to my brother again, after. We had not been in contact after the investigation, but one morning, he came to me, and said we had to run. I assumed he had information that I didn’t, so I went with him. It was the Allies. They were liberating the camps, and any officers who were lucky managed to escape instead of being shot by them, or killed by the remaining prisoners.”
Josef looks down. “We walked, for days, crossing the German border. When we reached a city, we hid in the sewers. When we were in the country, we hid in barns with cattle. We ate garbage, just to stay alive. There were those who sympathized with us, still, and somehow, we managed to get false papers. I said we needed to leave this country as soon as possible; but he wanted to go back home, to see what was left.”
His lower lip begins to quiver. “We had picked sour cherries, stealing from a farmer who would never notice the handful missing from his crops. That was our dinner. We were arguing as we ate, about which route we would take. And my brother . . . he started to choke. He fell to the ground, grabbing at his throat, going blue,” Josef says. “I stared at him. But I did nothing.”
I watch him pass a hand over his eyes, wiping them dry. “I knew it would be easier traveling without him. I knew that he would be more of a burden to me than a blessing. Maybe I had known that my whole life,” Josef says. “I have done many things of which I am not proud, but they were during a time of war. The rules don’t apply, then. I could excuse them, or at least rationalize, so that I stayed sane. But this, this was different. The worst thing I ever did, Sage, was kill my own brother.”
“You didn’t kill him,” I say. “You chose not to save him.”
“Is it not the same?”
How can I tell him it isn’t, when that’s not what I believe?
“I told you some time ago that I deserve to die. You understand that, now. I am a brute, a beast. I killed my own flesh and blood. And that is not even the worst of it.” He waits until I meet his gaze. “The worst of it,” he says coldly, “is that I wish I had done it sooner.”
Listening to him, I realize that no matter what Mary says, what Leo claims, or what Josef wants, in the end absolution is not mine to give away. I think about my mother in her hospital bed, pardoning me. Of the moment the car spun out of control, when I knew it was going to crash, and I was powerless to stop it.
It does not matter who forgives you, if you’re the one who can’t forget.
In the anecdote Leo told me before he left, I realize that I will be the one looking over my shoulder forever. But then again, this man—who helped murder millions, who killed my grandmother’s best friend, and who reigned in terror; this man—who watched his brother choke to death before his eyes—has no remorse.
There is an irony to the fact that a girl like me, who’s actively struggled against religion her whole life, has turned to biblical justice: an eye for an eye, a death for a death. I unzip the backpack and remove one perfect roll. It has the same intricate crown at the top, the same dusting of sugar as the one I baked for my grandmother. But this one, it’s not filled with cinnamon and chocolate.
Josef takes it from my hand. “Thank you,” he says, his eyes filling with tears. He waits, hopeful.
“Eat it,” I tell him.
When he breaks it open, I can see the flecks of monkshood, which has been chopped finely and mixed into the batter.
Josef tears off a quarter of the roll and places it onto his tongue. He chews and swallows, chews and swallows. He does this until the bread is gone.
It’s his breathing that I notice first, labored and heavy. He starts fighting for air. He slumps forward, knocking several pieces from the chessboard, and I take him in my arms and settle him on the floor. Eva begins to bark, to pull at his pants leg with her teeth. I shoo her away as his arms stiffen, as he writhes before me.
To show compassion would elevate me from the monster he was. To show revenge would prove I’m no better. In the end, by using both, I can only hope they will cancel each other out.
“Josef,” I say, leaning over him and speaking loudly, so that I know he hears me. “I will never, ever forgive you.”
In one last desperate effort, Josef manages to grab my shirt. He bunches the fabric in his fist, pulling me down so that I can smell death on his breath. “How . . . does . . . it end?” he gasps.
Moments later, he stops moving. His eyes roll back. I step over him and retrieve my backpack. “Like this,” I answer.
• • •
I take a sleeping pill when I get home, and by the time Leo slips into bed beside me, I am long gone. I’m still groggy, in fact, the next morning when I wake up, which is probably better.
Genevra, the historian, is not at all what I was expecting. She’s young, just out of college, and she has a tattoo up one arm that is the entire preamble to the Constitution. “It’s about time,” she says, when she is formally introduced to me.
“I suck at playing Cupid.”
We drive to Josef’s in the rental car, with Genevra sitting in the backseat. I must look like a zombie, because Leo reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “You don’t have to go in.”
I had told him yesterday that I wanted to. That I thought Josef might be more likely to cooperate if he saw me. “I may not have to, but I need to.”
If I was at all worried about Leo thinking I am acting strange, I shouldn’t have been. He is riding on such a high I’m not sure he even hears me respond. We pull into Josef’s driveway, and he turns to Genevra. “Game on,” he says.
The point of having her here, he has explained, is so that if Josef panics and starts fudging details to make himself less culpable, the historian can point out the inaccuracies to the investigator. Who can, in turn, call Josef on his lies.
We get out of the car and walk to the front door. Leo knocks.
When he opens the door, I’m going to ask him if he’s Mr. Weber, Leo told me this morning as we were getting dressed.
And when he nods yes, I’ll say, But that’s not your real name, is it?
However, no one answers the door.
Genevra and Leo look at each other. Then he turns to me. “Does he still drive?”
“No,” I say. “Not anymore.”
“Anywhere you think he might be?”
“He didn’t say anything to me,” I reply, and this is true.
“You think he flew the coop?” Genevra asks. “Wouldn’t be the first time . . .”
Leo shakes his head. “I don’t think he had any idea she was wearing a wire—”
“There’s a key,” I interrupt. “In the frog, over there.”
I walk numbly to the corner of the porch, where the frog sits in a potted plant. It makes me think of the monkshood. The key is cold in the palm of my hand. I open the door, and let Leo enter first. “Mr. Weber?” he calls, walking through the foyer toward the living room.
I close my eyes.
“Mr.—Oh, shit. Genevra, call 911.” He drops his briefcase.
Josef is lying exactly the way I left him, in front of the coffee table, chess pieces scattered around him. His skin has a tinge of blue to it; his eyes are still open. I kneel down and grab his hand. “Josef,” I yell, as if he can hear me. “Josef, wake up!”
Leo holds his fingers to Josef’s neck, feeling for a pulse. He looks at me across Josef’s body. “I’m sorry, Sage.”
“Another one bites the dust, boss?” Genevra asks, peering over his shoulder.
“It happens. It’s a race against the clock, at this point.”
I realize I am still holding Josef’s hand. Around his wrist is the hospital bracelet that he never removed.
JOSEF WEBER, DOB 4/20/18, B+
Suddenly, I can’t breathe. I drop Josef’s hand and back into the foyer, where Leo threw down his briefcase when he saw the body lying on the living room floor. Grabbing it, I slip away from the front door, just as the local police and EMTs arrive. They start speaking to Genevra and Leo as I walk down the hall to Josef’s bedroom.
I sit on the bed and open the clasp on Leo’s briefcase, take out the SS file that he had not let me read just days before.
On the first page is the photo of Reiner Hartmann.
An address in Wewelsburg.
The birthday, which was the same as Hitler’s, Josef had once said.
And a different blood type.
Reiner Hartmann had been AB. This was something that the SS would have known, and reflected not only in his file but also in the Blutgruppe tattoo, the one Josef said he had carved out with a Swiss Army knife after the war. However last week, when Josef had been admitted to the hospital unconscious, phlebotomists had drawn his blood and typed it, B+.
Which meant Josef Weber was not Reiner Hartmann after all.
I think of my grandmother, telling me about the Schutzhaftlagerführer and the pistol that shook in his right hand. Then I visualize Josef sitting across from me at Our Daily Bread, holding his fork in his left hand. Had I been too stupid to notice the discrepancies? Or had I not wanted to see them?
I can still hear voices down the hall. Gingerly, I pull open the nightstand on Josef’s side of the bed. Inside there is a packet of tissues, a bottle of aspirin, a pencil, and the journal that he always carried with him to Our Daily Bread, the one he had left behind that very first night.
I know what I am going to find before I open it.
The small cards, with their scalloped edges, have been carefully taped at the corners to affix them to the page, picture side down. The tiniest, most careful handwriting—handwriting I recognize, with its precipitous spikes and valleys—fills each square. I cannot read the German, but I don’t have to in order to know what I have found.
I carefully peel the card away from the yellowed paper, and turn it over. There is a baby in the photograph. Written in ballpoint pen along the bottom is a name: Ania.
Each of the cards is a picture, labeled. Gerda, Herschel, Haim.
The story stops before the version that my grandmother gave me. The version she re-created when she was living here, and thought she was safe.
Josef was never Reiner Hartmann, he was Franz. This is why he could not tell me what he did all day long as an SS-Schutzhaftlagerführer: he never was one. Every story he had relayed to me was his brother’s life. Except for the one he had told yesterday, about watching Reiner die before his eyes.
The worst of it is that I wish I had done it sooner.
The room spins around me, and I lean forward, resting my forehead against my knees. I had killed an innocent man.
Not innocent. Franz Hartmann had been an SS officer, too. He might have killed prisoners at Auschwitz, and even if he didn’t, he was a cog in a killing machine, and any international war tribunal would hold him accountable. I knew he had beaten my grandmother, as well as others, badly. By his own admission he had intentionally let his brother die. But did any of this excuse what I had done? Or—like him—was I trying to justify the unjust?
Why would Franz have gone to so much trouble to paint himself as the more brutal brother? Was it because he blamed himself as much as his brother for what had happened in Germany? Because he felt responsible for his brother’s death? Did he think I wouldn’t help him die if I knew who he really was?
Would I have?
I’m sorry, I whisper now. Maybe it is the forgiveness Franz had been seeking. And maybe it’s just the forgiveness I need, for killing the wrong man.
The book falls off my lap, landing splayed on the floor. As I pick it up I realize that although the section written by my grandmother ends abruptly, there is more toward the back of the journal. After three blank pages, the writing picks up in English, in more uniform, precise penmanship.
In the first ending Franz has created, Ania helps Aleks to die.
In the second, Aleks lives, and suffers torture for the rest of eternity.
There is one vignette where Aleks, nearly drained of his own blood, is resurrected with Ania’s and becomes good again. In another, even though she transfuses him back to health, he cannot shake the evil that runs through his veins and he kills her. There are a dozen of these scenarios, each different, as if Franz could not decide on the outcome that fit the best.
How does it end? Josef had asked. Now I realize he lied twice to me yesterday: he knew who my grandmother was. Maybe he had hoped I’d lead him to her. Not to kill her, as Leo has suspected, but for closure. The monster and the girl who could rescue him: obviously, he was reading his life story into her fiction. It was why he had saved her years ago; it was why, now, he needed to know if he would be redeemed or condemned.
And yet the joke was on him, because my grandmother never finished her story. Not because she didn’t know the ending; and not because she did, as Leo had said, and couldn’t bear to write it. She had left it blank on purpose, like a postmodern canvas. If you end your story, it’s a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don’t, it belongs
to anyone’s imagination. It stays alive forever.
I take the journal and slip it into my bag beside the re-created version.
There are footsteps in the hall, and suddenly Leo is standing in the doorway. “There you are,” he says. “You okay?”
I try to nod, but don’t quite succeed.
“The police want to talk to you.”
My mouth goes dry as bone.
“I told them you’re basically his next of kin,” Leo continues, glancing around. “What are you doing in here, anyway?”
What am I supposed to say to him? To this man who might be the best thing that has ever happened to me, who lives within the narrow boundaries of right and wrong, of justice and deceit?
“I-I was checking his nightstand,” I stammer. “I thought he might have an address book. People we could contact.”
“Did you find anything?” Leo asks.
Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets, lies, stories. We all tell them. Sometimes, because we hope to entertain. Sometimes, because we need to distract.
And sometimes, because we have to.
I look Leo in the eye, and shake my head.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Readers who want to learn more might be interested in the following resources, all of which were instrumental to me while writing The Storyteller:
The Chronicle of the Łód Ghetto, 1941–1944. Edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1986.
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