The House of Lost Spirits: A Paranormal Novel

by Einat Shimshoni

  “And Oved, do you know where he is?” I inquire based on the supposition that if Oved returned, then it’s reasonable to assume that she is with him. At least, from what I understand, he’s the only one who has conversations with her.

  “He has not returned since he left last night.” Well, that was not especially surprising if you take into account the task of finding a new home.

  I peep into Leah’s room. She isn’t there. The room next door to hers is also empty. I check out a small room at the end of the hallway. As I enter it, I see the hem of Milka’s gown disappear into the ceiling. I immediately go up again, but just as my head pops out of the floor of the attic, Milka disappears in the other direction to Helen’s room. By the time I follow her down, she is no longer there. She is playing hide and seek with me, and I have already decided that I am not playing games. I stand in the middle of the staircase. It’s the place I calculate is more or less the center of the house, and I yell with all my might,

  “Milka, I want to talk to you.”

  The anticipated reaction comes after two seconds, when Helen descends from her room in an outburst of angry screams, complaining of my audacity to raise my voice in her house. I let her carry on screaming and go back to calling out again.

  “Milka! I will carry on calling you and looking for you until you agree to speak to me.”

  Helen augments the power of her decibels, firing volleys of fragmented sentences in her rage that claim that the right to raise one’s voice in this house is solely hers. But I don’t give up and continue launching promises into the air to keep disturbing the peace of the tenants until Milka agrees to talk to me.

  Leah observes us anxiously from her room at the top of the stairs; Benny, standing beside her, looks unusually curious for a change; and the two of us, Helen and I, are in the midst of an insane shouting match. I yell at Milka and, in response, Helen fires all her arsenal of curses at me.

  My father is a lawyer. Not the kind who appears in American movies, making emotional pleas to the jury and fighting for his client in the halls of justice. He’s also not a lawyer who appears on the news to declare his client’s innocence of all the ‘false’ charges facing him. My father is a contractual attorney, an employee of a financial company, who produces piles of paperwork for corporations and banks. Sometimes he brings thick files of papers home, like whole books, and he works on them in the evenings on the sofa in the living room in front of the TV, broadcasting the news, the summary of the day’s events or some financial program. It always amazes me how he manages to focus on the contract he is reading, make notes on it, and also function as an active partner in the discussion taking place on the screen by fencing remarks, cries of encouragement, or grunts of disgust here and there. Perhaps, it is his remarkable ability to pay attention to one thing and simultaneously hold a conversation with someone else that makes it possible for him to live in peace with my mother for so many years. It also explains his expertise at surviving long and obscure texts.

  Once, I asked him why a contract had to be so long.

  “So that the legal representative of the other party can justify his salary,” he replied without raising his eyes from the document, and also managed to respond with “Feh, really!” directed at the politician who had just spoken on TV. But my father’s answer did not satisfy me. On wakening early in the morning, I quietly went down to the living room. The thick folder was on the coffee table, where my father left it in the evening. I took it with me to the table in the kitchen and began reading. I didn’t understand that much. As a ten-year-old, perhaps, there were too many words I didn’t know, but when my father woke up three hours later and came downstairs to make himself some coffee, I put the contract in front of him and summed up my thoughts.

  “You repeat things too many times and use such a lot of unnecessary words. Why work so hard, when you could shorten it by at least a half?” I showed him all the places where he could edit where I crossed them out with a purple marker. My father looked at me in amazement. He picked up the contract and paged through it.

  “I didn’t manage to go over all the attachments,” I pointed out, as he looked for my purple markings toward the end. Just then, my mother walked into the kitchen, telling us it was already twenty past seven, and that I should get dressed.

  “The child read the whole contract I prepared for the acquisition of Talenext,” my father told her as if he were blaming her.

  “Not all of it,” I pointed out again. “I got as far as the attachments.” Unlike my father, who somehow found the whole matter somewhat troubling, my mother did not get at all excited.

  “She noted her remarks,” he cried in a voice that was much higher and shriller than usual when he saw no sign of interest from Mother.

  “Noga, don’t write remarks on Dad’s documents without his permission,” my mother calmly asked as she inserted a capsule of decaffeinated coffee in the coffee machine. As far as she cared, the discussion was over. My father stood dumbstruck in the middle of the kitchen, still holding the contract and ignoring the cup of coffee (with caffeine) that my mother served him.

  “Does it strike you as normal that a ten-year-old child reads legal contracts for fun?”

  My mother took a deep breath, as she always did before having to explain many kinds of things for simple people of limited understanding, rested the cup with the caffeine on the table and said with her psychologist’s tone of voice, “It’s normative and appropriate for a girl at Noga’s stage of development to display an interest and a desire to participate in the professional lives of her parents. Why not share what you do with Noga?” My father looked as if he had something stuck in his throat. The thought of having me participate in drawing up conglomerate acquisition agreements seemed utterly unrealistic to him. To me, it sounded boring. What I managed to read was enough for me, and I had no interest in getting any deeper into it.

  Mother continued to fix her psychologist’s stare on him. Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead.

  “What exactly do you want me to share with her?” He sounded almost terrified.

  My mother turned to me and continued in her therapeutic tone, “Noga, do you have any questions for your father about his work?”

  “Yes. Why is the contract so long?” It wasn’t that I was purposely trying to make him miserable, but I found a lack of logic he needed to clear up. My father inhaled deeply and nervously scratched the back of his neck.

  “The thing about contracts is like this—we want to leave ourselves as many ways out if the deal isn’t to our satisfaction. In such cases, it is important to create escape routes that make it possible for our side to pull itself out of the obligations without violating the agreed terms.” He paused and looked at me to see if I understood what he said. His expression was a mixture of supplication and apprehension.

  “So, you confuse the other side with as many words as possible,” I said.

  “More or less,” my father replied.

  “So, you’re cheating them.”

  “No, no, no. We’re not cheating.” The nervous stroking of the back of his neck accelerated. “We’re just covering all the possibilities.”

  “Also, the possibility that the other side will miss something.”

  “That’s the preferred one,” he said, and great relief spread over his face when I rose from the table to go and get dressed.

  That same day, I learned two important things. The first, that I had to listen with rapt attention to everything my father told me each time he began using long sentences. The second, if I wanted to weaken the defenses of the other side, I needed to flood it with words.

  And I do precisely that when I stand in the middle of the staircase and call Milka without a stop, varying the wording each time.

  “I want to talk to you; I’m interested in having a conversation with you, I’d be so happy if we could speak to one another, I need a
few minutes of your time…” The characterization of me as “a verbal child with a rich vocabulary” proves to have advantages. I don’t know exactly how long I stand there. At some stage, even Helen gives up and goes off to grumble in her room about my insufferable audacity.

  The house begins to darken when my insistent and stubborn invitation to speak is interrupted by a cracked and weak voice, “I will talk to you. Come up.” I turn back and see Milka standing before me. She is older and more shriveled than I recall from my first evening in the house, and certainly weirder and more intriguing. Before I manage to reply, she soars up to the attic through the ceiling. I follow in her wake.

  The attic is even darker than the rest of the house, and the sun is about to set. I can barely discern the expression on Milka’s face when she gazes at me through the wrapping of fabrics and scarves that cover her head.

  “So, what do you want to know?” she asks and stares at me in quiet concentration. There is something about her that arouses uneasiness in me. Not fear, more like disgust and withdrawal, but I don’t intend on giving up this opportunity.

  “First of all,” I say, “I want to know where everyone is, where are all the people who are dead? Leah says they moved on, but on to where? And those who didn’t continue, like us, where are they?”

  Milka looks at me intently. She doesn’t sigh, or shrug or look away. She speaks directly to me.

  “A few of us wander around this world, but most are in their world, the world of the spirits.”

  “In heaven?” I ask, and the question sounds stupid to me, even before I get the words out of my mouth. But, in the absence of a better store of words to describe eternal reality, I use the ones I have.

  “Heaven is a concept on which people tend to impose their heart’s desire. If your idea of heaven is a place where one can find rest and attain a sense of wholeness, then yes, some do get there.”

  “And what of those who don’t? Because if there is heaven, then there must also be hell, mustn’t there?” Myths about people whose bodies boil in oil flash through my mind.

  “Unlike here, the world of souls is a broad one. Concepts like time and space don’t exist there, but it is multi-layered. Some find eternal peace and rest from their previous lives, and there are others who roam it like a perpetual exile, and they will never know peace. If you like, call it hell, but the names aren’t important.”

  When she speaks, she doesn’t take her eyes off me, and I feel as if she is examining my responses, no less than I am observing her.

  “There are those who have not yet found their place. They fluctuate between this world and that. Lost souls,” she adds.

  She has already said that to me. ‘We are spirits. Lost souls. Just like you,’ is what she said. But we don’t waver between worlds, we are here, in this world, in this house, which, at least Helen, Leah, and Benny have never left since they died.

  “The place where I woke up after falling off the chair, is it that world?” I ask.

  “Not exactly,” Milka replies, and I could not but wonder what shape that world wore for her.

  “That was the crossing point. Had you passed through it, you would have continued to the world of the souls.”

  “And then?” I ask, in spite of already having guessed the answer.

  “Each person is judged for his actions,” Milka says sharply.

  The words of the receptionist I met right after I awakened from my attempted suicide ring in my head again and again.

  “But not everyone is judged for his deeds,” I say. “Not those who choose to turn around, look for the door, and go back to where they came from.”

  Milka doesn’t say a word, only continues staring at me.

  “Then, that is what we all have in common. We did not face trial, and we did not move on,” I say quietly, as somehow the pieces of the puzzle come together and begin to form a plausible picture in my head.

  The house is completely dark. I cannot see Milka’s face, not even the outline of her figure, but I know she is there, sharply staring at me. Now, I understand the strange, upsetting sensation that flooded me the previous evening. It was Milka’s presence. She was there all night, just hiding from me.

  Her silence confirms that I am right. Had I understood the significance of what the receptionist was saying, would I have moved on? Would I have crossed to the world beyond? Yes, I have no doubt about it. But I didn’t understand or, perhaps, I refused to understand. And what about the rest? Helen returned because she wanted to spy on her husband; Leah came back because she felt it was her duty to accompany Helen. But what of me, Benny, and Oved? Was it fear of the trial? Are they like me, and simply do not understand their situation?

  “But why didn’t you move on?” I ask.

  Milka does not reply, even when I repeat the question. In the dark that enfolds me, I understand that the conversation is over and no demonstrations and screaming will help now.

  “I’ll be back,” I say before I leave the attic. She doesn’t answer.

  The conversation with Milka gives me enough food for thought to pass the night. When the first rays of light filter in through the cracks in the boards covering the windows and the outlines of the house become visible, I start looking for Benny. I find him in the study.

  “So, you talked to her, eh?”

  He asks how I entered her room. “Wow, I thought only Helen could yell like that. You’re stubborn, aren’t you?” Benny said, half indignant and half smiling.

  “So, what did you discuss? The world of the spirits and reincarnation?”

  There was none of Helen’s disdain and scorn in Benny’s speech, but there is a slight reluctance when he mentions Milka’s expertise.

  “Did you also have her explain those things to you?” I ask.

  Benny lets out a short, nervous laugh.

  “I have never had a conversation with her. Oved explained the things she says to me.”

  I am somewhat amazed. Is it possible that all these years, both Benny and Milka have never left the confines of the house, and haven’t had even one conversation?

  “I told you,” Benny responds. “Milka doesn’t like being disturbed.”

  “Then you’re one very considerate guy,” I say, and sound more cynical to myself than I intend. Benny’s face goes blank when he hears my remark.

  “Why do I have to talk to her? To hear that I am stuck here for eternity in this house, in this world? That I am a lost soul? That I don’t belong here? I already know all that.”

  There is a moment of silence. I should have given more thought to framing my question because I don’t want to infuriate Benny. Many times, people think that I ask questions aimed at arousing anger. That’s not so. I have never tried to enrage anyone on purpose; I just try to understand. It’s not my fault that people tend to get annoyed at my wanting to understand things. There are so many senseless and inexplicable things in the world that don’t bother some people. They don’t even try to reconcile the contradictions and sort things out in a reasonable way. I can understand that. I sometimes wish that I could protect myself with such a layer of indifference, but the need to understand is stronger than me. It’s that simple. Perhaps this is also why I often skip the testing phase of the wording of my question and just shoot it out as it comes into my head, as I have just done now.

  “Why did you come back?”

  Benny looks at me and inquires, “Come back to where?”

  “Here. To this world. Why didn’t you move on? Why didn’t you go on trial?”

  Benny doesn’t answer.

  “You say that you reached the interrogation room, where a police investigator tells you to prepare for the trial, isn’t that so?” I press him. Benny still doesn’t reply.

  “He tells you that they are about to begin. But you don’t appear for the trial. You look for the door out and find yourself here, correct
?”

  Benny continues to keep his silence, but I know I’m right.

  “You think you can come back to life, ha?”

  “How can I come back to life? I’m dead. I killed myself with a whole bottle of pills down my throat. Does it look as if anyone can carry on living after that? There’s no way back from what I did that evening. Do you think I don’t understand that?” There is something rebellious and a little violent in the way he says it.

  “So, why not move on?” I urge him again, “If you want to be dead, why come back here?”

  “Because I do want to be dead. To die, to die! I want it all to end, for there to be nothing, and suddenly they tell me that ‘it’s only just beginning now,’ and what am I to do there? Ha? It’s without masks. There, you can’t pretend to be something else. There it’s who you are that matters.”

  I remain silent. I don’t know how to react, but Benny doesn’t need my response.

  “What is a trial? Do you know what a trial is? Have you ever thought about that word? I know, I’ve been there. They call it a trial because they are trying to see if your soul can survive being tried and tested in front of everyone. They put all the dirt from inside you on the table. And who is there to watch and look at it? Father, his parents and all of his family, who died at the hands of the Germans. Every one of them will hear about all the things I did while I was alive, how I frittered away everything I received, how I ruined my mother instead of taking care of her as I should have.”

  Benny points his finger at me as if blaming me for what he is about to tell me or charge me with the responsibility of making him reveal it.

  “You know I stole all her savings from her. From my mother! Do you understand? And, for what? To buy a life that didn’t belong to me. I abandoned my son. Just like that, without even putting up a fight. She, his mother, said she was leaving, and she left, and I didn’t go after her as I should have done. And, for what?”

  A heavy silence pervaded the room, steeped in violent pain that was erupting from Benny. His words vibrated around me, and I was too scared to move.