The Storyteller (14 page)

“Josef Weber. The same Josef Weber I know? The one who always leaves a twenty-five-percent tip and who gives half his roll to his dog? The Josef Weber who was given the Good Samaritan award last year by the chamber of commerce?” Mary shakes her head. “This is exactly what I’m talking about, Sage. You’re overtired. Your brain is firing on the wrong cylinders. Josef Weber’s a sweet old man I’ve known for a decade. If he’s a Nazi, honey, then I’m Lady Gaga.”

“But, Mary—”

“Have you told anyone else about this?”

Immediately, I think of Leo Stein.

“No,” I lie.

“Well, good, because I don’t think there’s a novena for slander.”

I feel as if the whole world is looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and I am the only one who can see clearly. “I’m not accusing Josef,” I say desperately. “He
told
me.”

Mary purses her lips. “A few years ago some scholars translated an ancient text they believed was the Gospel of Judas. They said the information, told from Judas’s point of view, would turn Christianity on its ear. Instead of Judas being the world’s biggest traitor, he was apparently the only one Jesus trusted to get the job done—which is why Jesus, knowing he would have to die, picked Judas to confide in.”

“So you believe me!”

“No,” Mary says flatly. “I don’t. And I didn’t believe those scholars, either. Because I’ve got two thousand years of history telling me Jesus—who incidentally was one of the good guys, Sage, just like Josef Weber—was betrayed by Judas.”

“History’s not always right.”

“But you’ve got to start there anyway. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, how in Heaven’s name will you ever figure out
where you’re going?” Mary folds me into an embrace. “I am doing this because I love you. Go home. Sleep for a week. Get a massage. Hike up a mountain. Clear your head. And
then
come back. Your kitchen will be waiting for you.”

I feel dangerously close to sobbing. “Please,” I beg. “Don’t take this away from me. It’s the only thing in my life I haven’t screwed up.”

“I’m not taking anything away from you. It’s still your bread. I made Clark promise that he’ll use your recipes.”

What I’m thinking about, though, is the scoring.

Back in the days of communal ovens, people would bring their own dough from home to bake en masse with the rest of the village. So how could you tell the loaves apart, when they came out of the oven? The way they were cut, by the individual bakers. When you score the outside of the dough, it does two things: it tells the loaf where to open, and helps the interior structure by giving it a place to expand. But it also allows the baker to leave his or her brand. I always score a baguette five times, for example, with the longest cut at one end.

Clark won’t.

It’s a silly thing, one that our customers probably don’t even notice, but it’s my signature. It’s my stamp, on each loaf.

As Mary walks down the Holy Stairs, I wonder if this is yet another reason Josef Weber picked me as his confessor. If you hide long enough, a ghost among men, you might disappear forever without anyone noticing. It’s human nature to ensure that someone has seen the mark you left behind.

 • • • 

“I don’t know what got into you today,” Adam says as I roll off him and stare up at the bedroom ceiling. “But I’m sure as hell grateful.”

I wouldn’t call what we just did lovemaking; it was more like trying to crawl beneath Adam’s skin, dissolve by osmosis. I wanted to lose myself in him, until there was nothing left.

I trail my fingers along his rib cage. “Do I seem different to you lately?”

He grins. “Yes, especially in the last half hour. But I’m fully in favor of the new you.” He glances at his watch. “I need to get going.”

Today Adam is presiding over a Japanese Buddhist funeral, and he’s been doing research to make sure that he gets all the customs just right. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the Japanese are cremated, including the deceased he will be taking care of today. Yesterday was the wake.

“Can’t you stay a little longer?” I ask him.

“No—I’ve got a ton to do,” Adam says. “I’m terrified I’m going to mess it up.”

“You’ve cremated hundreds of people,” I point out.

“Yeah, but there’s a whole
process
for the Japanese. Instead of grinding down the bone residue like we usually do, there’s a ritual. Family members pick up the bone fragments together with a special pair of chopsticks and put them into the urn.” He shrugs. “Besides, you need your beauty sleep. You’ve only got a few hours before it’s time to make the donuts again.”

I draw the covers up to my chin. “Actually, I’m taking a few days off work,” I say, as if it were my idea all along. “Testing new recipes. Reevaluating stuff.”

“How’s Mary going to keep her bakery open, if you’re here?”

“I have a guy filling in for me,” I reply, again amazed at how smooth a lie feels in my throat, and how much of an aftertaste is left behind. “Clark. I think he’ll do all right. But it also means I get to live like a normal person, with normal hours. So, you know, maybe you’ll be able to stay the night. It would be really nice to fall asleep with you.”

“You fall asleep with me all the time,” Adam points out.

But it’s different. He waits until I’m out like a light, and then takes a shower and tiptoes out of the house. What I want is what other people take for granted: the chance to feel the night tighten around us like a noose. To ask,
Did you set the alarm?
To say:
Remind me that we are running out of toothpaste.
To have our time together not be so romantically charged but instead, just plain boring.

I wind my arms around Adam and bury my face in the curve of his neck. “Wouldn’t it be fun to pretend we’re an old married couple?”

He disengages himself from my embrace. “I don’t have to pretend,” he says, and he gets up from the bed and walks into the bathroom.

As if I needed any reminder of that. I wait until I hear the shower running, and then I throw back the covers and wander into the kitchen. I pour myself a glass of orange juice and sit down at my laptop. On the screen is a spreadsheet I’d used to make a poolish when I first came home from the bakery. Just because I’m not working at Our Daily Bread doesn’t mean I can’t refine my recipes in my own home test kitchen.

The poolish is fermenting on the counter—it’s got a few more hours to go before it’s usable, but the yeast has frothed at the top, like the head on a beer. I close out the spreadsheet and open YouTube in my browser.

I am like many twenty-five-year-olds in this country, I imagine. My knowledge of World War II was shaped by high school history classes, my understanding of the Holocaust a combination of assigned readings: Anne Frank’s
Diary of a Young Girl
and Elie Wiesel’s
Night.
Even knowing that there was a personal connection to my grandmother—or maybe
because
of that—I tended to view the Holocaust in the abstract, the way I viewed slavery: a series of horrors that had happened a long time ago in a world markedly different from the one I lived in. Yes, those were bad times, but really, what did they have to do with me?

I type “Nazi Concentration Camp” into the search bar, and my screen floods with thumbnail images: of Hitler’s pinched face, of a tangle of bodies in a pit, of a room crammed to the rafters with shoes. I pick a video that is a newsreel from 1945, after the liberation. As it loads, I read the comments underneath.

THE HOLOCAUST WAS A HOAX. FUCK KIKES.

FAKE SHIT HOLOCAUST WAS A JEWISH LIE.

My uncle’s farm was there and the Red Cross praised the camp conditions. Read the report.

FU you Nazi pig. Stop whining and start admitting.

I guess the witnesses were liars too?

This is still happening all over the world while we look the other way like the Germans did 70 years ago. We have learned nothing.

I click somewhere into the middle of the fifty-seven-minute film. I have no idea what camp I am watching, but I see bodies stacked outside the crematoria, so horrific that it’s virtually impossible to believe this wasn’t just a Hollywood rendering, that these are real people I am seeing, with their bones protruding so clearly you could map the skeleton beneath the skin; that the face with the eye blown out of it belonged to someone who had a wife, a family, another life. Here are the body disposal facilities, the voice-over tells me. Ovens capable of burning more than a hundred bodies per day. Here are the litters, used to slide a body inside, the way I use a peel to slip an artisanal loaf into my wood-fired oven. I see a fleeting image of a skeleton inside the cavern of one of the ovens; another of a pile of bone fragments. I see the plaque of the proud furnace manufacturers: Topf & Söhne.

I think of Adam’s clients, picking the bones of their beloved from the ash.

Then I think of my grandmother and I feel like I’m going to be sick.

I want to close my computer, but I cannot make myself do it. Instead I watch parades of Germans in their Sunday finest being led into the camps, smiling as if they are on holiday. Their faces change, darkening, some even crying, as they are led on the tour of the facility. I watch Weimar businessmen in suits being pressed into service to relocate and rebury the dead.

These were the people who might have known what was going on but didn’t admit it to themselves. Or who turned a blind eye, so that
they wouldn’t have to get involved. The kind of person I’d be if I ignored what Josef has told me.

“So,” Adam says, walking into the kitchen with his hair still damp from the shower and his tie already knotted. He starts to rub my shoulders. “Same time Wednesday?”

I slam my laptop shut.

“Maybe,” I hear myself reply, “we should take a break.”

He looks at me. “A break?”

“Yeah. I need some time alone, I think.”

“Didn’t you ask me five minutes ago to act like we were married?”

“And didn’t you tell me five minutes ago you already
are
?”

I consider what Mary said, about how being with Adam might bother me more than I want to admit. I think about being the kind of person who stands up for what she believes in, instead of denying what’s right before her eyes.

Adam looks stunned, but he quickly smooths away the surprise. “Take as much time as you need, baby.” He kisses me so gently that it feels like a promise, like a prayer. “Just remember,” he whispers. “No one else will ever love you like I do.”

It strikes me, as Adam leaves, that his words could be taken as a vow, or as a threat.

I suddenly remember a girl in my World Religion class in college, a foreign student from Osaka. When we were covering Buddhism, she talked about corruption: how much money her family had to pay a priest for her dead grandfather’s
kaimyo,
a special name given to the deceased that he would take with him to Heaven. The more you paid, the more characters were in your posthumous name, and the more prestige your family accrued.
Do you think that matters in the Buddhist afterlife?
the professor had asked.

Probably not,
the girl had said.
But it keeps you from coming back to
this
world every time your name is called.

In retrospect, I realize I should have shared this anecdote with Adam.

Anonymity, I guess, always comes at a price.

 • • • 

When the phone rings, I am having a nightmare. Mary is standing behind me in the kitchen, telling me I am not working fast enough. But even though I am shaping loaves and slipping them into the oven so quickly that I have blisters on my fingers and blood baked into the dough, every time I take out a finished loaf there are only bones, bleached white as the sails of a ship.
It’s about time,
Mary scolds, and before I can stop her she picks one up with chopsticks, and bites down hard, breaking all of her teeth into tiny pearls that fall to the floor and roll beneath my shoes.

I am in such a deep sleep, in fact, that even though I reach for the receiver and say hello, I drop it and it rolls underneath my bed.

“Sorry,” I say, after I retrieve it. “Hello?”

“Sage Singer?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“This is Leo Stein.”

I sit up in bed, suddenly awake. “I’m sorry.”

“You said that already . . . Did I . . . You sound like I woke you up.”

“Well. Yeah.”

“Then I’m the one who should be apologizing. I figured since it was eleven o’clock—”

“I’m a baker,” I interrupt. “I work at night and sleep during the day.”

“You can call me back at a more convenient time—”

“Just tell me,” I say. “What did you find out?”

“Nothing,” Leo Stein replies. “There are absolutely no records in the SS membership registry for Josef Weber.”

“Then there’s been a mistake. Did you try spelling it differently?”

“My historian is very thorough, Ms. Singer. I’m sorry, but I think you might have misunderstood what he was telling you.”

“I didn’t.” I push my hair out of my face. “You’re the one who said the records aren’t complete. Isn’t it possible that you just haven’t found the right one yet?”

“It’s possible, but without that, we really can’t do anything else.”

“Will you keep looking?”

I can hear the hesitation in his voice, the understanding that I am asking him to find an invisible needle in a haystack. “I don’t know how to stop,” Leo says. “We’ll run checks in two Berlin records centers and our own databases. But the bottom line is if there’s no valid information to run with—”

“Give me till lunchtime,” I beg.

 • • • 

In the end, it is the way I met Josef—at a grief group—that makes me wonder if Leo Stein is right, if Josef is lying. After all, he lived with Marta for fifty-two years. That’s a damn long time to keep a secret.

It is pouring when I reach his house, and I don’t have an umbrella. I’m drenched after running to the covered porch, where Eva barks for nearly half a minute before Josef comes to the door. I am seeing double—not a blurriness of vision but a superimposition of this old man with a younger, stronger one dressed in the uniform of the soldiers I have seen on YouTube. “Your wife,” I say. “Did
she
know you’re a Nazi?”