The House of Lost Spirits: A Paranormal Novel

by Einat Shimshoni

  “I didn’t know you had a son,” I say. It seems my father doesn’t know everything about his idol.

  Benny shrugged.

  “Most people did not know. Honestly, there were times where even I forgot I had a son. That’s the shit of a dad I was.”

  “Is that who Michael is?” I ask. Benny nods and looks away.

  “It was Devorah who wanted to call him Michael, because of some poem she loved. I wanted to give him an American name. What use would an Israeli name be to him? I said, let’s call him Mick. But Devorah had no wish to be ‘international,’ she wanted to bring the child up in Israel, she wanted us to go back home.”

  Benny delves further into the story without explaining very much. I have no idea what he is talking about, and who Devorah is, but it is impossible to make him stop.

  “She arrived without prior warning, Devorah. She just knocked on the door of my apartment in Los Angeles one day. Like that, with her backpack and sandals, is if she had landed straight from the kibbutz. I didn’t even recognize her, at first, only after she reminded me. You see, she was from our neighborhood in Haifa, Devorah. We also went to the same school, but she was two years younger than me. So, she says, ‘I’ve been traveling around America for three months already, starting on the East Coast and now I’m here.’ So, what could I do? I invited her in, and she came inside as if the place belonged to her. That’s what she was like, Devorah. At any rate, she knew how to turn an apartment into a home, something I knew nothing about. Not ever.”

  Benny’s stories sound like a string of insights rather than a chain of events, and there is something distanced and detached about the way he is telling them, as if he is reading a prepared script that he has rehearsed many times. And yet, the stories are revealing to the extent that they cause me discomfort. But really like the previous time, when Benny begins telling me his story again, he can’t be stopped.

  “She had another month until she had to go home because she had registered at the university. At first, she planned to stay in Los Angeles for only three, four days, but in the end, she spent the whole month with me. Where didn’t I take her? To the best restaurants and clubs, as well as the best parties in town, and that was that.”

  “What was what?” I ask.

  “That was that. The month went by, and Devorah went to her university,” he says, but I know that it isn’t the end of the story.

  “You know,” Benny continues. “Only after she left, I understood what she meant to me. I asked myself, ‘How could you let her go? Why didn’t you try and convince her to stay?’ It’s not that there weren’t other women. There were plenty. As many as you want—starlets, models, singers, and waitresses. Americans, Europeans, Asians. You understand I was in my prime, and I had money. I could get whoever I wanted. But no one was like Devorah. So, I wrote to her. I told her to come back, told her to forget about the university. I would give her whatever she wanted.”

  “And did she come?” I ask when Benny stops the flow of his words again.

  “Sure, she came,” he said with a smile. “If she had known then, she would have stayed.”

  “Known what?” I ask.

  “Known that she was pregnant. She only told me that after she returned to Israel. She said that, at first, she didn’t think of telling me, ever, because I hadn’t asked her to stay. She told herself, ‘if he calls, I’ll tell him.’ She was testing me. Perhaps it was the only test in my life that I ever passed.” Benny grants me another one of his bitter smiles. He moves to the doorway, and a moment before departing, adds, “It’s not that I didn’t know what was waiting for me here. Perhaps I didn’t fully understand, but that investigator told me. He told me that it wasn’t my place anymore. But what could I do, ha? What else could I have done? I had no choice.” Without waiting for an answer, Benny leaves the room, like an actor, who has finished playing a scene and leaves the stage.

  ***

  The wedding of Benny and Devorah was a small, modest affair at the Beverly Hills community synagogue because that was what Devorah wanted. It seems that her conservative parents were happy to avoid the scandal that a marriage ceremony featuring a bride boasting a pregnant belly would arouse. Benny didn’t care; he just wanted Devorah at his side, but his parents responded in their typical way. They delighted in their son’s happiness and rejoiced that they were to be blessed with a grandchild, though they regretted not being able to participate. His mother added the snapshots Benny sent of the wedding ceremony to the others she kept in the shoebox.

  The first year with Devorah was the best year of his life, and that is how he would remember her for eternity. Each time depression enveloped him, he tried to escape to the memories of that time. Pregnancy suited Devorah, and even with her huge round belly, she looked radiant and full of life. But everything changed after their son was born. Devorah lost interest in the parties and glittering events they used to attend together, insisted that the newborn not be exposed to the limelight, and stressed her desire to give him a healthy life.

  “I want him to enjoy a simple childhood like ours,” she said. But Benny’s childhood did not seem simple to him, not at all, and he couldn’t understand why he shouldn’t give his son all that he, himself, sought after.

  When Devorah spoke of her childhood, she meant it, and very soon, she began seeking the company of Israeli families to spend time with to enable Michael to be with Hebrew-speaking children. When her parents sent their grandson a T-shirt with “Haifa is in my Soul,” emblazoned on it, Devorah was overjoyed. She spoke only Hebrew to him, played records of Israeli songs and, despite Benny’s objections, insisted on people addressing the child as Michael pronounced with a marked Israeli accent as if to emphasize his difference from his surroundings. The more Benny attempted to close the door on his origins and his past, the more Devorah’s determination grew to push it wide open.

  For years, he told himself that it was unavoidable. Benny even wondered how he had not seen it coming. He believed their love was genuine and that only circumstances were against them. In a different reality, he and Devorah could have had a beautiful life together, but she was homesick, and with time, found more and more fault with Los Angeles. She saw fakeness and pretentiousness everywhere. The people, the language, the weather, and even if she did not say it openly, Benny knew that she found that in him, too.

  His career didn’t help either. Work offers and audition calls grew fewer, and with them, the admiration of the media and the public also lessened. People lost interest in musicals. He tried to conceal their worsening financial situation from Devorah by taking out loans that he hoped to repay as soon as the audiences would rediscover him, but that didn’t happen.

  Devorah suggested that they go back home to Israel.

  “We have nothing to look for here, anymore,” she told him, not understanding that he had already found what he was looking for in America, and didn’t want to give it up. In the end, Devorah packed up her things, and just as she arrived, so she left, taking Michael with her. This time, Benny didn’t ask her to come back.

  Once a year, Devorah sent him a photograph of Michael, inscribed on the back with, ‘Michael, aged two,’ Michael, aged three,’ or ‘Michael, aged seven.’ In response, Benny would send dazzling and expensive gifts, like those you only found in America. In reward, he would get a telephone call with his son that mostly lasts ten minutes, half of which passes in embarrassing silence. He met him again for the first time, when the boy was about five years old. Benny came to attend the funeral of his father, who was finally overcome by cirrhosis of the liver. He was surprised to discover how much his mother had aged since he last saw her. Michael is the spitting image of Devorah. It seemed that nothing of him had passed on to his son—not his features, nor his personality. Benny couldn’t decide whether that saddened or pleased him.

  “Are you planning to come back soon?” Devorah asked him before he got in the cab that
would take him to the airport at the end of the seven days of mourning. Benny did not reply.

  “Your mother needs you,” she admonished him, “and so does Michael.” Of herself, she said nothing. Perhaps, he would have stayed if she had. Maybe, he persuades himself that might have happened.

  Nothing awaited him in America. Only his debts had grown, and there was no work coming in, not even small roles in minor movies.

  He tried his luck in business and investment and failed time after time. His lack of personal initiative always made him follow others, and they were still the wrong people. The luck that illuminated his way a decade earlier had dimmed, and now knocked on the doors of others.

  When he does come home in the end, it’s for lack of choice. When he left Israel and turned to America, he did so to find refuge from the shadows that haunted his childhood. Now, he returned to those same shadows to escape the much darker ones in the shape of really tough people, to whom Benny owed a great deal of money.

  His dream was to return as a conquering hero. But he came back with his tail between his legs. He gets the publicity he longed for, but it was more like gloating at his expense. The paparazzi surround him, but they are not the admirers who once crowded him on leaving Broadway theaters. They are bloodthirsty beasts of prey lurking in wait of a convicted felon exiting a detention center. When one of them pushes a microphone in Benny’s face and asks him how his family feels, Benny does not reply, but the answer that echoes in his head is that he has disappointed them all.

  ***

  My next stop after Benny is Helen. I notice the other inhabitants avoid talking to or approaching her, mainly because every attempt to do so invites a wave of screaming. In my case, she does manage to speak, even though it sounds more like a monologue of anger and accusations than a conversation, and especially after the shouting match yesterday, that I undoubtedly won, her temper tantrums no longer frighten me so much. When I reach her room, I understand that Helen fears me. The second she sees me at the entrance to her room, Helen exits through the wall into the adjacent room, which is occupied by Leah. I follow Helen, but she goes below to the study. When I get there, Helen is no longer in the study. It seems that she has also decided to flee my presence.

  “I shall start screaming,” I cry out. Within a second, Helen appears in front of me.

  “Don’t you dare,” Helen hisses as if she fears that if she screams, I will start yelling immediately after her.

  “Why are you running away from me?”

  “I’m not running away from you or anyone else,” she replies, insulted, and I can see how much effort she invests in trying to keep the volume of her voice within a reasonably normal range.

  “Yes, you are running away from me,” I point out. “You have moved through three different rooms in thirty seconds.”

  “Me. Run away? From you?” she spat out with an enormous effort to keep control of herself. “This is my house to roam around in as I wish.”

  “Good, then you won’t mind if I wander around it with you, right?”

  “I mind very much,” she replied with almost manic aggression. “I have neither the time nor the patience to suffer a little girl getting under my feet.”

  Okay, I have already said that I have no wish to anger anyone, but that remark is so senseless. I know that I risk upsetting Helen, but I cannot ignore her failed logic.

  “I can understand your lack of patience; you excel at being impatient. But you don’t have time? How can you be short of time? You have all of eternity!”

  That certainly annoys her.

  “Get out of here! Out! Out! Out with you! I won’t talk to you,” she yells.

  “But you don’t even know what I want to ask,” I try.

  “And, I’m not interested in knowing,” she loses control, and her decibels start to rise. “I won’t submit to all these interrogations. From the moment you arrived, you haven’t stopped bothering everyone with your questions. Right away, I knew you were going to be trouble. Anyway, it’s too crowded here. Get out!” My attachment to Milka probably scares and threatens her more than I estimate.

  “You can’t throw me out,” I reply. Helen’s screaming no longer impresses me.

  “This is my house, and don’t you dare question the legality of that,” she clenches her fists and waves them in the air.

  “It’s not a legal matter, and it has nothing to do with your husband’s will, or your sister or anything else. It’s purely technical. You cannot throw me out; you have no practical way of doing so.”

  I don’t understand the main reason behind her expression of horror. Is it the mention of the will, and all that it means? Is it that I even know about it, or is it the mere mention of her helplessness to make a difference to what happens?

  “Anyway,” I remind her, “the demolishers are going to pull it down soon.”

  Helen opens her mouth to begin another barrage of screaming, but immediately shuts it again.

  “What do you want of me?” she asks, this time, almost weeping. It is the first time that I hear her natural voice, the one that hides beneath her screams, poisonous hisses, and stingingly superior tone. It is the tired voice of a young woman who does not feel like one.

  “I want to know how you got here. How did you know how to get back here, exactly?”

  Helen stares at me, looking puzzled, and I attempt to explain myself. “After leaving that reception room, where I woke up, and after deciding to return to this world and not move on, I found myself here, and not back at my home, not where I died. I don’t know how or why. You returned here, to your house, to the place where you died. I just want to understand how this whole thing works.”

  Helen looks at me for a few moments, wondering whether to answer or not. Finally, she says, “He asked me where I was going. I told him that I was going home. That’s all.”

  “Who is ‘he’?” I ask, but Helen refuses to answer, just like she refused to describe the place where she found herself after her death. And, maybe, it was not really important. Helen elected to return to her home. She wanted to come here, and here is where she found herself. It was the same with Leah, who knew that Helen was in the house and felt obliged to join her. They chose to come home to this house. But I didn’t. Nor did Benny, it seems.

  The questions just go on multiplying in my mind. Why am I here? Why are the others here? Is it possible to go back to that receiving office with the receptionist and tell her I have changed my mind, that I want to make a different choice, and move on to wherever the way leads? How?

  In all my short life, I have never felt I belonged where I was. Not to any group or clique. I am always the onlooker. It infuriates me when my mother says that our lives are the result of the choices we make. When she repeatedly claims on her radio program that miserable people choose their miseries, I get even more exasperated, but now I understand she is right. Standing aside has been my choice, even if it has been a rather feeble one. But the very fact of having such an option used to give me a sense of power and control. Now, I don’t even have that illusion. I have become a disembodied spirit, observing life from the side, without any ability to participate, and there is no feeling of control or choice to be had in this case.

  I am unsure how Milka will respond to me this time, whether she will try to avoid me or, perhaps, she already understands that it is pointless. The truth is that there are not too many places to hide in a double-story house. When I get upstairs, I find Oved there with her. They both clam up the moment I enter.

  “Hi. I didn’t know you were back,” I greet Oved, who looks most surprised to see me but tries to disguise it behind a pleasant tone and a wink.

  “I heard you had a chat there with Helen.”

  “The truth is, yes, and it is the first time we had something like a two-way conversation.”

  Oved looks amused by my answer. Milka, though, does not react.
It’s as if she was expecting me to come and has prepared herself.

  “So, what brings you to us?” Oved asks in his playful tone. I have already learned to recognize the tension that lies behind his light-hearted manner. I ignore him and turn to Milka.

  “I have a few more questions.” Oved seems surprised, Milka doesn’t reply. She remains expressionless and just stares at me. I interpret it as an invitation to ask, or at least her agreement to hear me out.

  “You communicate with spirits, don’t you?” Milka nods in affirmation. “Is it like a séance? Do you speak to the spirits?” I ask, and this time, she shakes her head in denial.

  “I don’t know what a séance is, precisely, though I have heard the term,” Milka replies. “And I don’t communicate with souls, except very occasionally. Mostly, I invite them for those who request my services. I used to raise souls, but I no longer do that… in my current situation.”

  I hold onto her words, like someone grabbing at a life-line.

  “So, is it possible to move between the worlds, between the world of the souls and this world? Is there an opening, a way through, or something like that?”

  “In a certain way, there is.”

  Milka’s reply is hesitant. She chooses her words carefully, perhaps sees how desperate I am to get an answer that will give me hope.

  “How does it work?” I ask.

  Milka’s expression hardens, at once.

  “It isn’t something I can do anymore, and even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

  Oved interrupts the conversation, “Believe me; you don’t want to bring anyone from there.”

  I ignore this remark. I have no desire to raise any souls. As Helen says, the house is too crowded, anyway. I was interested in moving in the opposite direction.

  “The souls that you called up come from there and return afterward. Can they move in both directions?”