Free The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

offended by this photograph of him in an SS uniform?
    And why does it make me sick to hear him label me; to think that, after all this time, Josef would still feel that one Jew is interchangeable for another?
    In that moment, a tide of disgust rises inside me. In that moment, I think I could kill him.
    “There is a reason God has kept me alive for this long. He wants me to feel what they felt. They prayed for their lives but had no control over them; I pray for my death but have no control over it. This is why I want you to help me.”
    Did you ask any Jews what they wanted?
    An eye for an eye; one life for many.
    “I’m not going to kill you, Josef,” I say, pushing away from him, but his voice stops me.
    “Please. It’s a dying man’s wish,” he begs. “Or perhaps the wish of a man who wants to die. They are not so different.”
    He’s delusional. He thinks he’s some kind of vampire, like the king in his chess set, who is trapped here by his sins. He thinks that if I kill him biblical justice will be served and a karmic debt will be erased, a Jew taking the life of the man who took the life of other Jews. Logically, I know that’s not true. Emotionally, I don’t even want to give him the satisfaction of thinking I would consider it.
    But I can’t just walk away and pretend this conversation never happened. If a man came up to me on the street and confessed to a murder, I wouldn’t ignore it. I’d find someone who knew what to do.
    Just because that murder occurred nearly seventy years ago doesn’t make it any different.
    It is still a complete disconnect for me—looking at this photo of anSS officer and trying to figure out how he became the man standing in front of me. The one who has hidden, in plain sight, for more than half a century.
    I had laughed with Josef; I had confided in Josef; I had played chess with Josef. Behind him is Mary’s Monet garden, the one with dahlias and sweet peas and stem roses, hydrangea and delphinium and monkshood. I think about what she told me weeks ago, how sometimes the most beautiful things can be poisonous.
    Two years ago, the John Demjanjuk case was in the news. Although I hadn’t followed it, I remember the image of a very old man being removed from his home in a wheelchair. Clearly someone, somewhere, is still out there prosecuting former Nazis.
    But who?
    If Josef is lying, I need to know why. But if Josef is telling the truth, then I have unwittingly just become a part of history.
    I need time to think. And I need him to believe I’m on his side.
    I turn back and hand him the photograph. I think about young Josef in his uniform, lifting his gun and shooting at someone. I think about a picture in my high school history book, an emaciated Jewish man carrying the body of another. “Before I decide whether or not to help you . . . I have to know what you did,” I say slowly.
    Josef lets out a breath he has been holding. “So it is not a no,” he says cautiously. “This is good.”
    “This is not good,” I correct, and I run down the Holy Stairs, leaving him to fend for himself.
     • • • 
    I walk. For hours. I know that Josef will come down from the shrine and try to find me in the bakery, and when he does, I don’t want to be there. By the time I get back to the shop, all heaven has broken loose. A trickle of the frail, the elderly, the wheelchair-bound snakes out the front door. A small knot of nuns kneeling in prayer havegathered by the oleander bush in the restroom hallway. Somehow, in the short time I’ve been gone, the word about the Jesus Loaf has gotten out.
    Mary stands beside Rocco, who has pulled his dreadlocks into a neat ponytail and who is holding the bread on a platter covered with a burgundy tea towel. In front of them is a mother pushing her twenty-something son in a complicated motorized wheelchair. “Look, Keith,” she says, lifting the loaf and holding it against his curled fist. “Can you touch Him?”
    Seeing me, Mary