The Storyteller (63 page)

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Authors: Jodi Picoult

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“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.

Graebe, Hermann. “Evidence Testimony at Nuremberg War Crimes Trial.” November 10 and 13, 1945. Nuremberg Document PS-2992.
www.holocaustresearchproject.org/einsatz/graebetest.html.

Klein, Gerda Weissmann.
All but My Life
, expanded ed. 1957. New York: Hill & Wang, 1995.

Michel, Ernest W.
Promises Kept.
Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2008.

———.
Promises to Keep.
New York: Barricade Books, 1993.

Salinger, Mania.
Looking Back.
Northville, MI: Nelson Pub. and Marketing, 2006.

Trunk, Isaiah.
Łód
Ghetto: A History.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Wiesenthal, Simon.
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness
, rev. and expanded ed. 1976. New York: Schocken Books, 1998.

JODI PICOULT
is the author of twenty-one novels, including the #1
New York Times
bestsellers
Lone Wolf, Between the Lines, Sing You Home, House Rules, Handle with Care, Change of Heart, Nineteen Minutes,
and
My Sister’s Keeper.
She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children. Visit her website at
www.jodipicoult.com.