The Storyteller

At the hospital, Leo urges Sage to help Josef convalesce so that he can receive legal justice. Josef reveals that before he asked Sage to help him die, he meant to ask her mother. They met briefly at the high school where Josef worked and she told him that she was related to a Holocaust survivor. Josef felt that it was fate—as the daughter-in-law of a survivor, Sage’s mother was the closest he could come to direct forgiveness—but she died before Josef could ask her. He once again begs Sage to help him, crying as he tells her he cannot die by his own hand and has been suffering for 70 years. Sage thinks to herself that if someone can ask for forgiveness, they cannot be a monster. She takes Josef’s hand and tells him that she will help him.

When Sage returns from the hospital Adam is waiting with a bouquet of flowers. He confesses his love to Sage and proposes, promising to divorce Shannon. Sage, whose own family has been torn apart by death, is ashamed that Adam would deliberately ruin his family life for her. She breaks up with him on the spot and sends him home. After crying for hours, she lies down for a nap but is awakened by Adam, who informs her that Minka is dead, having passed away in her sleep several hours earlier. Sage feels immensely guilty that she and Leo made Minka relive traumatic memories before her death.

At the funeral home, Sage interacts awkwardly with her estranged sisters, Pepper and Saffron. She visits Minka’s casket and carefully applies concealer to her grandmother’s wrist, hiding her prisoner number tattoo. Walking into the foyer, Sage finds Leo waiting.

In the days after Damian’s death, Aleks is brought out into the village square and tortured. Unable to bear his repeated suffering, Ania decides to kill him.

Leo comforts Sage and posits that Minka died because she was finally able to let go, knowing that everything would be okay. They attend Minka’s service together and go out to dinner afterward. Sage tells Leo the Ania story up until the point where Minka stopped writing it—Aleks is jailed and will be tortured to death unless Ania performs a mercy killing. Sage asks how Leo thinks the story will end, and he responds by kissing her. They make love in Sage’s bedroom, and afterward, she tells him the story of her accident. After her graduation, she and her mother had packed the car so full that they couldn’t see out of the back window, so Sage offered to drive. She swerved on the highway and collided with an unseen car in the other lane. Her mother was critically injured and died after a long stay in the hospital. Leo says that sometimes bad things happen for no reason. Sage is sure that because Minka is dead, there is no way to continue with the Reiner Hartmann case. Leo counters that they can have Sage wear a wire and tape Josef’s confession with identifying details to link him to Reiner.

In the final section of the Ania story, Ania poisons a guard and breaks into the jailhouse where Aleks is being held. Having killed a man, she now believes she belongs by the side of her murderous lover. Aleks holds Ania tightly and begs her to kill him.

In the three days after Grandma Minka’s funeral and before Sage’s covert mission, Sage and Leo continue to see each other, falling deeper in love. Sage’s perspective on herself begins to shift. Instead of seeing her scar first when she looks in the mirror, she starts to notice her smile. Pepper and Saffron are proud of her upcoming mission and their sisterly relationships improve slightly. Finally, Josef is released from the hospital. Wearing a recording device and microphone under her dress, Sage picks him up and takes him back home under the pretense of discussing arrangements for his assisted suicide. She tells him that if he wants forgiveness, she has to know the worst thing he ever did. Josef retells the story of Darija’s shooting and says that he would have killed Minka if his brother had not arrived and stopped him. He tells Sage that he never spoke to Franz again before his brother’s death. Sage asks if he knew she was Minka’s granddaughter when they met, and Josef says that he never knew his prisoners by name.

Leo tells Sage that the next step in the investigation is to see whether Josef will speak to the DOJ voluntarily and begin proceedings to have him deported to Germany and tried. He invites Sage to come back to D.C. with him, but Sage is fixated on Josef. It doesn’t feel right to her to let her former friend rot away in prison. She wonders if Josef’s endless remorse counts for anything, but Leo replies that his actions are all that count.

Sage meets Mary in the shrine and asks her how priests manage to live with the awful things they hear at confession. Mary tells her that she originally joined the convent after her father abandoned the family. She went to a priest, who advised her to forgive her father not because he deserved it but because if she didn’t, he would “grow like a weed in [her] heart until it [was] choked and overrun” (451). Forgiveness is not something one does for someone else, but to free oneself.

Sage goes to visit Josef one more time. He tells her that he lied to her before—killing Darija was not the worst thing he ever did. After Auschwitz, he saw his brother Franz one last time after Franz came to him to tell him the Allies had won. They escaped across the German border, hiding out in the countryside. One night, they were eating sour cherries when Franz began to choke. Knowing that traveling without Franz would be easier than the alternative, Josef watched Franz die. Meeting Sage’s eye, he tells her that the worst thing about him is that he wishes he had killed his brother sooner. Sage thinks of her car crash and realizes that all the forgiveness in the world will not save a person who cannot forget their own sins. She produces another crown roll from her backpack, into which she has baked deadly monkshood. Josef eats the bread and collapses when the poison takes effect. As Sage cradles his dying body in her arms, she tells him that she will never forgive him. Gasping, Josef asks “how does it end?” (455).

The next morning, Sage, Leo and Genevra drive to Josef’s house. As they enter the living room where she left Josef’s body, Sage pretends to be shocked and makes a show of trying to wake Josef up. Lifting his wrist, she spots his hospital bracelet, which lists his blood type as B+. Struck by a thought, she races to Leo’s briefcase and opens the Reiner Hartmann file. Reiner’s blood type is listed as AB. Sage realizes that Josef was not Reiner Hartmann. He was Franz Hartmann. The stories he told about Auschwitz were from the perspective of his brother Reiner, except the final story about the cherries. Reiner was the one who choked and died while Franz watched. Sage poisoned the wrong brother.

Rifling through Josef’s belongings, Sage finds the leather-bound journal Franz/Josef gave to Minka at Auschwitz, the same one he used to bring to Our Daily Bread. On the back, Josef has written dozens of different endings to the Ania story. Sage realizes that Josef saved her grandmother all those years ago because he saw himself in Aleks and needed to know whether his own story would end with forgiveness or condemnation. But Minka never finished her story because she couldn’t bear to put the ending in writing. Sage whispers an apology.

Leo appears in the doorway, telling Sage that the police want to speak to her. He asks if she found anything important in the room. Sage thinks of the fictions people tell others—“sometimes because we hope to entertain…[or] distract…sometimes because we have to” (460). Looking Leo in the eyes, Sage shakes her head "no".