Epilogue

VENICE

EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER

INEVER WON AN Oscar. But Sienna did. Femme Fatale: The Lena Browning Story won for Best Director, Best Leading Actress in a Drama, and Best Film. I watched her win the triple-gilded victory from the prison’s TV room, surrounded by my new friends, guards, and even the warden.

The televised murder of Armand Arias/Lukas Müller has taken on urban legend status, especially here at Casa di Reclusione Femminile, the jailhouse for women in Venice, located behind the high walls of what, ironically, used to be a convent. My new home far away from home.

I am the only convict here who everyone witnessed commit her crime in real time; a justice killing before millions of viewers. Basically, I am a goddess on the prison hierarchy, and silver lining, my Italian has improved immeasurably.

Mealtime discussions here are lively and philosophical. Is it a crime to murder the murderer? A crime to slay your rapist? A crime to avenge your abuser? We discuss these moral issues at length in the dining hall, in therapy, and late at night on our cots with our own consciences.

I have no regrets. Murdering Müller was not an option—it was a mandate. I accomplished everything I set out to do in one fell swoop: exposure, vengeance, payback, and most of all, I sent a powerful message to those Nazis still living free and easy among us: You can hide, but you will be hunted. Even an old lady with barely there brows can take out a Nazi on national television.

Would I do it again? my new friends ask over lunch. In a heartbeat.

Sienna, however, is not convinced. She visits me regularly and is working with an A-list team of defense lawyers both here and in Los Angeles on an appeal to get me extradited back home, to receive the appropriate medical care, and ultimately be set free.

Not possible, I tell her. In addition to Müller’s murder, our film exposes the truth behind Hollywood’s greatest on-set “accident.” I admit my guilt on camera. But Sienna is determined to keep up the good fight. I repeatedly tell her that she is wasting her precious time on me, when she can be out enjoying her life, her youth, her talent, her beauty, her superstardom. I also tell her that she may have won three Oscars, but I won her. She likes hearing that, and I like watching her face when I say it. The soft blush fanning her flawless skin—a motherless girl likes to hear those things.

“Bina,” the prison guard calls out, interrupting lunch. Yes, I’ve gone back to Bina, insisting that everyone here call me by my real name. “You have a visitor.”

I ENTER THEVisiting Room and I stop abruptly in my tracks. My breath puddles in my chest. I want to turn around and run back to my cell and hide, but my worn-in shoes are glued to the linoleum floor. I can’t feel myself. The guard walking too closely behind me bumps into me, but I don’t feel that either.

Aleksander.

My heart tears straight down the middle at the sight of him after so many years. I never asked him to come. But he’s here anyway, sitting in the far corner of the large, cold room, hands cupped, facing the stained cinder block wall with the other visitors.

Our eyes lock and I am untethered. Heat cloaks my body. In a matter of seconds, time stops, starts, and disappears. Aleksander’s hair is now silver, still thick, too long for a man almost ninety. His neck, visible in his royal-blue crewneck sweater, is sun-kissed. I try desperately to find my equilibrium as he takes me in. My hands are cuffed, and I wish, for the first time in the nearly eighteen months that I’ve been locked up, that I was wearing makeup, that I was still beautiful, that my lips were glossed a pearly pink, and my body was still taut and lithe. That I’m not this, but still that.

“Aleksander,” I say as I slowly walk toward him. Not as a word, or a whisper, or a poem, but a breath.

He smiles. And there it is. The stars, the moon, the sun, up close.

“Bina.”

He stands as I slowly sit across from him. The guard takes his leave, plants himself in the corner where he can watch me. Aleksander sits and places his hands over my cuffs, and I see the guard’s stern gaze—knowing, without him shouting at me, the prison’s no-touching policy. Our eyes barter silently. He can touch you for one minute, but I want an autograph for my mother. Done, my eyes transmit back. The language of prison life is all about silent gestures, favors, quid pro quo exchanges.

Aleksander speaks first. God, he is still breathtaking. His weathered, handsome face is lived in, crinkled in all the right places. “I wanted to come sooner,” he explains in heavily accented English, neutral territory. Polish is the past for both of us. “I saw what you did. I didn’t see it that night, but I heard about it, and then watched it.” He looks away briefly, and then his eyes return. I lose myself in the bottomless jade, the color of the sea at its most tumultuous. “I watched it repeatedly, dozens of times.” His voice trails softly. “You landed the bullet in the same spot where he shot Jakub.” He knows. An eye for an eye. “I can sleep now, Bina.”

“Yes,” I say, never having slept better in my life than I have in the months I’ve been incarcerated.

“I should have come sooner,” he whispers, as I melt inside him, dancing across the scratched-up table while not moving an inch.

“You’re here now,” I say, trembling. “Tell me, I must know, Aleks, how did you— When did you—”

He sighs hard, folds his arms. “I escaped with Eryk and Tosia through the sewers. No one was left. Everyone was dead, Bina. Smugglers helped us get to the forest—not by choice, of course, but with guns pressed to their heads. We fought with the Polish resistance for a while, and then Eryk was murdered, and Tosia was wounded badly in the leg.” His hardened gaze is faraway, back there. “She had a limp for the rest of her life. We decided it was time to stop fighting and find a way to escape the war alive.” His jaw remains clenched. “Through a series of events, I returned to Warsaw and held the owner of my art gallery hostage at gunpoint. Do you remember Daneusz? Well, that bastard made a fortune during the war off my paintings. I threatened to murder his whole family if he didn’t help us find a way out of Poland. He knew I was serious, because”—Aleksander looks away, over my shoulder—“I held a gun to his daughter’s head. I’m not proud of that, but Daneusz understood that I was not backing down. He used his contacts and got us out of Warsaw to Switzerland hidden inside large art crates. In Geneva, Tosia and I met with members of the Israeli Haganah. We decided to join them and settle in Israel.” His eyes soften. “Aside from enduring more wars, more battles, I’ve had a good life there. I married Tosia...” He searches my face for the hurt he knows this admission will cause. But I already know all this, already felt the debilitating pain. I reel in every muscle I own to hide it.

“Tosia was a bomb maker until the end. Only on a much larger scale. She was one of the founders of Israel’s aerospace industry and helped design advanced missile defense systems. Her work and legacy are immeasurable.” I see love and pride written all over Aleksander’s face, and the jealousy swelters savagely inside me. And I’m just a movie star. But I stamp it out, determined to prevent the green-eyed monster from consuming my face in front of him.

“She passed away three years ago. We have been blessed with two children, a son who is a highly respected physicist and a daughter who is a wonderful pediatrician, four grandchildren. We live in Ein Hod, an artist’s colony in northern Israel. It is gorgeous and peaceful. I am a farmer and an artist.” He smiles. Teeth still white; a smile that trumps any leading man’s I have ever encountered. Aleksander has lived a good life. Family. Love. Births. Weddings. Without me. My chest pounds. “Tell me more about your children,” I say to buy myself time, buy myself breath.

His face colors slightly. “Yakov and Zizi. Redheads like their mother.”

Named for Jakub and Zelda.

“Oh, Aleks.” It’s as if someone is pulling apart every organ I own, tugging at my heart, kicking my stomach, clasping my throat, stomping on my lungs.

His voice chokes now too. “I traveled here to thank you for what you did and... I wanted to come many times before. I knew you were alive. I saw your films.” A flush begins to spread from his neck to his cheeks. Mine too.

“You’re here now.”

His eyes change color, the golden flecks begin to dominate the jade pupils. He clears his throat, shifts in his chair. “I also brought you something. Something I’ve kept with me all these years... something I could not leave behind.”

He places a neatly folded piece of paper on the table. It is so delicate that it looks like rice paper. He smooths it open and pushes it toward me.

I stare at it and then look up at him, as I once did across a bunker, seeing and feeling nothing else around me but his presence. My cuffed hands prevent me from clutching the fragile paper with both hands. Instead, I run my fingertip slowly along its worn edges before I allow myself to fully imbibe the image. Every inch of my body is on fire as Aleksander gauges my reaction. A body too old to feel this young and lusty once again.

It’s a sketch. I can see that he has gone over it recently, preserved it. The image is of a young woman bathing. Her eyes are closed as she takes a small precious bar of lavender soap and lightly dabs it to her droplet-glazed skin, knowing that the bar must last for three people, knowing that she traded her body for this little piece of luxury and a handful of potatoes to keep her family fed. The woman’s waterfall of golden hair is pinned up like a cameo, exposing her long, lithe neck. The arch in her back emphasizes the fullness of her breasts tipped with erect rose-tinted wet nipples, her tummy is flat, nearly concave from malnutrition. But it doesn’t matter. She is beauty personified, a woman deeply in love.

My breath dissolves. My heart stops. Aleksander spied on me as I bathed just as I secretly watched him through that broken hinge on the kitchen door. Jakub wanted to fix that door, but I insisted that he leave it as is, and Aleksander had surprisingly backed me up and now I know why.

A tsunami rises behind my eyes, presses relentlessly against the old folds of practically lucid lids, demanding once and for all to be set free. And then suddenly, without warning, the trapdoor opens, and the tears imprisoned for decades leak out through my lashes, spill down my cheeks and onto my lips. I taste the unfamiliar salty wetness, and it’s heavenly.

Aleksander’s voice is a deep whisper now. “Tosia was a wonderful wife, brilliant, loving, and brave. A perfect mother to our children and grandchildren. I was blessed twice, Bina.” He closes his eyes, and I see what he sees: curvy, dimpled, fun-loving Karina and their baby girl. “But I saw you, too, that very first time at the school social. I knew you pretended not to see me, that you were playing hard to get.” He breaks out into a nostalgic grin at our shared memory. “I also knew that Karina would be a better, wiser choice. With her, my life would be happy. You were too wild, too restless, so full of drama and dreams. Stubborn, selfish, creative, exciting. I saw it in your eyes. You wanted it all and more. You were too much like me.” His voice totters. “It was a split-second decision. And then while I was deciding, I saw how my brother looked at you, how Jakub’s studious face lit up. And I thought, she will bring life to him. Two artists are too volatile. We would have destroyed each other. But”—he looks away, then turns back shyly—“I felt everything you felt. You weren’t alone, Bina. I loved you, too, from that first moment. And that night we shared together...” His voice halts. “And then, Jakub came back from the dead. Who escapes Treblinka? My scholarly brother whose head was always buried in his books managed to outsmart the enemy and escape. He was alive, and I slept with his wife. There was no bigger sin of betrayal. I knew that whatever I allowed myself to feel about you had to die. And then Lukas Müller murdered everything with one bullet. You, me, and Jakub.”

Our fingertips touch now, both gentle and electric, filled with everything we lost and found. Aleksander’s revenge was living a life built with love, creating a family, a legacy, proving that those monsters couldn’t destroy all that was good. My path was the opposite. I built a meteoric career—rising so high that I could use my vantage point to topple those who destroyed everyone I loved. Our loss, the river of pain running through us, is the same. He chose love. I chose hate. Look at him, look at me.

Which way is better, his or mine?

The answer, I now know, lies in the gray. Somewhere between Zelda and Jakub. My husband wanted the world to witness our history, exactly as it unfolded. Zelda wanted the world to know that we stood up, fought against our fate, determined to change the outcome no matter the consequences. Revenge wins battles, but love wins wars. What did I win in the end?

Peace of mind, perhaps. And yet... Aleksander is here at last, and just the two of us remain. Can he see through the part of my fortified heart that is defenseless, putty—that belongs solely to him?

I glance over at the guard pointing toward the large overhead clock. I know, I know. Five-minute warning. This is it, closing time, all I’ve got left. My fingertips loll against Aleksander’s elegant veiny hands for what most likely will be the very last time. “I love you,” I say, feeling the mighty resonance of my own voice, as though a packed theater were listening in. “I have always loved... only you.”

Aleksander’s eyes don’t veer away this time. Reaching across the table, he wipes away the tears free-falling down my face, and holds his hand there, tender skin matted against the wetness. Forbidden love tore us apart. And yet, it was a true love all the same. It was ours. Once.