Wolf by Wolf

“It was this part of his face she always focused on when he spoke. The gap. The not-quite-fullness of his soft words. The single break in his paternal mirage.” 

As little Yael comes to know Geyer and his capacity to cause pain, she begins to understand his true nature. Geyer appears solicitous of her physical health but actually isn’t. Yael keys on the gap in his teeth to represent the gap between appearance and identity. 

“Take all the colors and feelings and human inside. Drain, drain, drain until nothing was left. Just a ghost of a girl. A nothing shell. Progress.”

Yael is describing Geyer’s exultation as he observes her basic physical characteristics slipping away. She is becoming his chemical creation. As he gains more of what he wants from her, she loses what was left of herself. 

“Even at their most basic function, needles do two things: They give and they take away. The tattoo artist’s needles took white skin and numbers, gave her wolves. Dr. Geyer’s needles had taken so much more. But what they gave.” 

Yael is drawing a conscious parallel between tattoo needles and Geyer’s injection needles. Both are painful, yet both are transformative. Paradoxically, Geyer’s far more painful needles gave Yael a greater gift: the ability to shapeshift.

“The Führer was known for his speeches. His voice turned words into living, breathing things that snaked under skins, lit fires inside even the dullest minds.” 

Yael admits the charismatic power of Hitler’s voice. At a later point in the story, she describes him as physically ordinary. Only his words carry the hypnotic power to move minds, hearts, and nations.

“Her self-reflection was no reflection at all. It was a shattered mirror. Something she had to piece together, over and over again. Memory by memory. Loss by loss. Wolf by wolf.” 

This quote offers insight into the tactics Yael uses to reconstruct her identity. Her pocket talismans and wolf tattoos are the only connections she maintains to her past. Because she has no capacity to see herself, the people from her past have become her only mirror. 

“Not alone. It was a cruel irony that this was the message she had been chosen to deliver. She, the loneliest of all. The girl without a people. Without a face. The girl who was no one. Who could be everyone.”

Yael has been tasked with executing Hitler publicly so that those he has oppressed can view his destruction and know the resistance will help them. They are not alone. The grim paradox of Yael’s nature is that her ability to become anyone has riven away her ability to become herself. She is utterly alone. 

“‘Sometimes people have to die to make things better. It’s a sacrifice for the good of everyone else. Do you understand?’ Yael understood these were easy words to say when you’re the one standing over the altar. Plunging the knife.” 

Dr. Geyer’s nurse tries to explain the cruel experiments in words that a child can understand. Yael understands a good deal more than the nurse expects. She has already achieved the cynical awareness that those who call for sacrifice are never on the receiving end of the blade. 

“‘If a single territory tried to secede on its own, the Reich would crush it,’ Aaron-Klaus said. ‘Everyone is afraid. No one wants to die.’ ‘What if someone killed the Führer?’ Yael asked. ‘Do you think that would change things? Make people less afraid?’” 

Yael is only eight years old when she offers this suggestion. Neither she nor Aaron realizes that both will come to an identical conclusion years later. Both will attempt to kill Hitler to make life better for everyone else.

“At least when she was someone like Mina or Adele, she had papers, a backstory (no matter how cobwebby). But when she was this… a bit of every stranger in the street…What was left, besides the wolves? Apart from memories and pretending? Emptiness.”

This quote offers insight into Yael’s elusive inner nature. Because of Geyer’s chemicals, she doesn’t believe it exists. She was too young to have formed an identity when his experiments began. She can only construct a self from the reactions of her wolves toward her. 

“She thought she was ready for this mission. Ready for anything. But not this. Not relationships. This wasn’t something she could fake.” 

The distinction between appearance and identity is nowhere more apparent than in Yael’s interactions with Felix and Luka. Both men have had strong personal relationships with the real Adele. Yael may look like her, but she has no idea who the inner Adele is. 

“It was so easy to pretend she was normal. Not special. Not marked. But she wasn’t. She was. She was. Memories, words, numbers, monster. All just under her sleeve. Tucked inside her skin. Hiding. Her own leviathan. So, so large.” 

Yael is still a young teenager when she makes this remark after hearing Aaron talk about another cattle car of Jews being sent to a camp. She hasn’t yet met Vlad or learned how to master her past. It looms so large in her consciousness that Yael’s only strategy is to deny its existence. 

“Not for the first time Yael wished that Valkyries were real. That one would blast through the windows of the Chancellery—all skin, fury, and feathers—and wing the Führer away. Choose one final death.” 

Yael feels the same attraction toward Valkyries as she does toward wolves. Both are predators, and Yael longs to be one of them instead of prey. In making this casual wish, she does not know that she will one day fulfill her own fantasy and choose death for Hitler.

“A choice. Was it ever a choice? When every turn and bend of her life twisted to it? When the Babushka told her she would change things? When death let her walk away, time and time again? When the stars gave her sandstorms? When she could be anyone, felt like no one?” 

Yael is pondering Felix’s comment about the resistance offering her a choice in killing Hitler. Her words suggest that Yael views the assassination as her destiny. She also believes that she is the only person capable of carrying it out. 

“‘Volchitsa.’ The officer repeated it in a way that Yael, even with her flawless Russian, could not imitate. With the same crusting lilt her old friend used to use, with the love of a mother tongue. ‘She-wolf. An interesting choice.’ ‘I didn’t choose it,’ she told him. ‘It chose me.’” 

In making this comment about her nickname, Yael is echoing the attitude of the preceding quote. She views her she-wolf role as destined. Yael remains blind to the fact that both the nickname and the assignment to kill Hitler are indicative of her true nature. She has a will of iron that others can see, in spite of her protests that she has no identity at all. 

“—SAVE WHAT YOU CAN— I can save them all, Yael thought back. Against herself.” 

Common sense dictates that Yael should hop aboard the transport and abandon the racers who can’t reach the truck. Her past losses say otherwise. The wolves on her arm make her want to save everyone, and so she does. 

“It wasn’t just becoming strong. It was about becoming not weak. And this process was something else entirely.” 

Despite three years of training with Vlad, Yael has yet to learn the one skill that is more critical than all the rest. She continues to allow her past to defeat her by not acknowledging its existence. When Vlad shows her how to look at the tattoo on her arm without flinching, she finally learns to be not weak. 

“I’d become a man who wouldn’t walk into rooms with mirrors. Who wouldn’t use polished spoons or look through windows at night, when I might see myself staring back. By pretending the pain was not there, I had let it root. I’d given it power over me.” 

This comment echoes the preceding one. Vlad is explaining the need to confront one’s painful past. Until he accepted his own traumatic losses, he couldn’t become truly strong. He now wants to impart this same lesson to Yael. 

“Just leave him, then? The way Aaron-Klaus had left her—wordless, hanging on an edge she never really could climb back from. That was the best option. But it felt so wrong to just disappear.” 

Yael has developed real feelings for Felix and is debating what to do when she must inevitably slip away. Although she felt betrayed herself when Aaron went to his death without a word to her, Yael can’t see any way out of her dilemma. Her appearance has gotten in the way of her true identity.

“‘We’re Wolfes,’ Felix pleaded. ‘We have to stick together.’ But the iron in Yael’s blood did not bind her to Felix. No. She was bound to so much more: a people, a world. All must not be lost.” 

Felix is referring to his father’s comment that the Wolfe family has iron in its blood. Once again, Yael’s appearance as Felix’s sister undermines her real identity. Though she shares the trait of iron blood with Felix, she is a resistance assassin, and one who feels attracted to a man who is supposed to be her brother.

“She’d wanted for so long to be the hunter. The predator. The Valkyrie—chooser of life and death—above it all. But not like this. What was she doing? Dancing between the lines, forgetting them altogether.” 

In making this comment, Yael is grappling with the problem of how her pursuit of Hitler is changing her fundamental decency as a human being. She is thinking about deliberately killing Katsuo to win the race. Does the end justify the means? For the most part, Yael acts as if it does, but she seems to retain enough conscience to stop just short of murder. 

“If he’d let go, if he hadn’t pulled back so hard, he wouldn’t have lost his balance. I did not choose his death. But I caused it.… And the voice that whispered loud, louder, loudest—the oldest whisper of all—said only a single word: Monster. She feared it was right.” 

After Katsuo dies, Yael reproaches herself for his accident. Even though she fights for a just cause, she runs a very real danger of becoming as much a monster as her opponents are. Throughout the novel, Yael struggles with where to draw the line.

“The truth was inside. Always inside. (And it made Yael wonder, if she unfolded herself, what she would find. The monster of Dr. Geyer’s making? Or the Valkyrie of her own design?) She did not know.” 

Yael comes to this insight only after unfolding Ryoko’s paper sculptures to reveal hidden messages. Her inability to read either Felix or Luka is as great as her inability to read herself. She always finds herself distracted by appearances. 

“Remember and be rended. (You must be broken to be fixed.) Remember and be rendered. Babushka—the one who gave her purpose. Mama—the one who gave her life. Miriam—the one who gave her freedom. Aaron-Klaus—the one who gave her a mission. Vlad—the one who gave her pain. These were the names she whispered in the dark. These were the pieces she brought back into place. These were the wolves she rode to war.”

This statement becomes Yael’s battle cry. It explains her need to visibly reproduce the people she has lost as wolf tattoos. By keeping them alive, she keeps herself alive and reifies her mission to save the world.