The Lost Letter by Jillian Cantor

Author:Jillian Cantor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-24T10:46:03+00:00

Wales, 1989

GIUDITTA,” MIRIAM SAYS, snapping her fingers, as if it has just come to her again. “That was the name of the opera we saw that night in Vienna.” Her expression is far away. Maybe she’s remembering that night, exactly as she once wished to, whole, perfect.

“So you listened to Elena?” Benjamin asks her, not tuning in to her quiet moment of nostalgia. I nudge him a little; I don’t want him to make her angry. I don’t want her to stop talking, to ask us to leave. I want to hear the rest of her story.

“Yes,” she says. “I listened to Elena. I took the train all the way across the Netherlands and Belgium. Then I boarded a ship to Harwich. I was taken in by the Winslows, who lived in Bristol, and they let me stay with them until the end of the war. I was one of the lucky ones.”

“And Elena?” I ask, feeling a sinking dread for Miriam’s sister, the actual recipient of this letter, so Miriam says.

She shakes her head. “After that day on the train, I never saw my sister again.” She wipes at her eyes. This poor woman. She was forced out of her home as a teenager, sent to England, abandoned by her sister on a train. And all these years later, we just barged into her depressing room in Raintree and unearthed it all again.

“What happened to Elena?” Benjamin is asking. “Where did she go?”

“Presumably she went back to Grotsburg. She probably would’ve said she was going back to fight the Germans.” She laughs, bitterly. “But I think she really went back for Kristoff. She was in love with him, you know. And love makes us do the stupidest things.” Then she adds, “She loved him more than she loved me.”

“I’m sure that wasn’t true,” I say. Benjamin looks at his shoes, and I wonder if he’s thinking about his wife. Daniel and I never had the kind of love that made us do anything even remotely stupid, and maybe that was half our problem.

“I went back to Austria, once. Years after the war. In the sixties. My Herbie went with me. But it was all gone by then.” She folds her hands in her lap and looks down at them. I nod, remembering the differences between the old map and the modern-day one Gram pointed out to me. “I searched after the war, and eventually found my mother died in Mauthausen. But my father, Elena, Kristoff, even Josef. I was never able to find out what happened to them.” She shrugs. “It’s why I’ve been looking for my father’s stamps all these years. I always thought if Elena had made it, survived the war, if she was alive, somewhere, then certainly she’d be looking for pieces of our father, too. And she’d be looking for me, don’t you think? But every collector I’ve talked to has never heard of her or gotten any inquiries from anyone like her.”

“And this wasn’t one of your father’s stamps?” Benjamin asks, handing the letter back to her once again.

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