The Ghost Keeper

  His “us” makes the corner of my lip twitch. I scratch the side of my head. “Yes, sir.”

  “I have seen,” he says, “what happens when everyone forgets, and I’ll show it to you. But it’s more than that, you see. You know that, Josef.” He is pleading for my yes, but I am still trying to understand what we’re doing, the two of us, here in this corner. He goes on: “More than the stones, Josef, more than the grass and the trees, and more even than the bones—it’s deeper than that, what’s lost.”

  I try to mouth the yes he wants from me, but my mouth opens and shuts like the jaw of a fish. There is a hand on his sleeve now, and someone speaking to him—and that’s all. Our conversation ends. He turns to walk back towards his friends, but at the last moment he reaches out towards me and he says, “I’ll show you what I mean. This Sunday.”

  THERE IS THE rest of the evening, but it hardly matters; and the rest of the week, but it flies by without a thought. And on Sunday I meet with Tobias Dükmann in front of his shop. It’s a white-grey day, overcast and cool; it smells like rain. The streets are quiet. He wears a dark wool coat and a black cap, and his beard reminds me of pipe smoke. We take the tram together, don’t talk much, and then another tram into the nineteenth district. Then we walk.

  As we get off the tram and as we are walking down Gymnasiumstrasse, with the beech trees hanging over the fences and the druggist’s sign shining clean and green, Apotheker, I say to him: “My friend lives near here,” meaning Friedrich.

  Dükmann smiles at me. “You have friends everywhere, I imagine.”

  “No, not at all.” I’m not a popular boy, but not hated either—just unremarkable. “My sister has all the friends.”

  “She’s a good girl, your sister?”

  What am I meant to say to that? “She’s lovely,” I say, and then, because my heart and my pride are shouting it: “And she’s good. A little wild. But good.”

  He asks me more about Zilla, and I answer as I think I should. This man, I imagine, would not approve of my sister’s style of living. And yet: see the way his blue eyes shine. He is looking for the truth, I think, and perhaps he already knows it. I sense he does know it. He knows my mind all the way through. Why else would I be here?

  A dribble of rain, and a bird singing—and in my heart, a tendril twining outwards.

  The locked gate in the park is like this: heavy dark wood, framed in concrete, with shallow cobbled steps leading up to it. The steps are rubbed round with earth, and the wall on either side of the gate is brick and rises higher than my head towards grey sky, nearly to the lintel of the gate. Paved into the brick, into the top of the wall, are shards of broken glass. People in the park don’t see this gate, I sense now: their eyes slide over it, and we, because we stand beside it, are invisible too.

  Tobias Dükmann has a key in his pocket. He twists it in the lock and the metal grates, squeals as it gives. We slip through the gate into green.

  The vines and the trees are deep and dark like water, the branches and the ivy draped over the stone. And of course the stone is cut, and you would see the angles and the words carved in, and sometimes the two carved hands—except that over everything, over all the stone and the earth and the walls and, yes, even over the sky: this green netted blanket of life, heavy and muting.

  Dükmann beside me touches a stone with his foot, and it is a moment before I see the curl of script, just there, beside his toe. “Watch your step,” he says.

  Everywhere I step, I step on bodies. I am waiting for them to cry out; I feel at the base of my skull their wincing and the way the patient bones twist out from under my weight. As if the earth weren’t enough heaviness. The stones are toppled this way and that, chipped and broken, with plaques held up by wire, hugged against pillars and to headstones, and all of it under the trees and the vines that are making this park theirs alone.

  There are birds here, too—the little songbirds with high voices, invisible in the trees, and in this moment it does not feel impossible that the trees might themselves sing to one another here. Behind a thick-trunked, vine-choked chestnut I surprise a pheasant. As she flees, she raises her tail feathers a half second: flash of white down, flash of light.

  Dükmann crouches in a hollow, nearly invisible in his dark coat under the shadows of trees. He touches the ground with his hand.

  “Here, Josef,” he says. “See what the rabbits and foxes dig up.”

  He holds it up and I think, A little stone: a little winged stone, yellow-brown. But as he places it in my hand, and I feel how it sits against my skin and how the dirt is rubbed into the hollows of it, I understand.

  “You can’t imagine how many bones there are, turned up around here.” His hands are back in his pockets, but I can’t take my eyes off the bone. A human vertebra—a man’s, or a woman’s? My mind’s eye traces some absent back, the curve of a nineteenth-century spine under silk, skin and flesh; a person who turns to me to laugh, but I cannot see their face. Dükmann says, “You can’t even be sure where the rest of the body is. Bones all mixed up in a heap. Dry bones.” He laughs once when he says it, and he shakes his head at the ground.

  He has told me about this cemetery, a nineteenth-century Jewish burial ground, though when I first stand here, in the mid-twenties, no new bodies have been buried for fifty years. This makes it a much newer cemetery than the one on Seegasse, but it feels older: no windows look onto it, no people see into it, and the trees grow broad and wild. The religious community, he said, looks after the grounds.

  “But most of their families are forgetting,” he told me on our way here. “Not many people still living knew the people buried here. Only a few come anymore. You have to really want to.”

  And now with this bone in my hand I ask him, “Do you want me to help look after it?”

  Dükmann peers up through the trees, and he breathes out deep, and he says, “What do you want to do, Tobak?”

  What do I want?

  A little bird chips above my head. With a short, sharp stick I dig into the earth. It’s wet, hard, cold soil and it doesn’t break easily. I hear Dükmann wander off through brush and twigs as I pry at the ground. In five minutes I have a hole a bit deeper than my fist; in ten minutes, nearly twice that, but the earth gets harder, the deeper I go.

  When it is nearly up to my elbow, I lay the bone at the bottom of the hole, and with both hands I bury it again, press the earth down firm. From behind me Dükmann says, quiet, “May His great Name be blessed forever and to all eternity, blessed,” and I mouth the word, “Amen.” I hear the pheasant chucking beyond the bushes, by the wall, and she sounds like the key in the locked gate.

  WE TAKE THE tram home. This streetcar rattles around us. Neither of us speaks for a while.

  “You needn’t come more than once a month or so.” He says it to me after the long pause. “There are other people who go. Just check for damage, pull some weeds if you can. Sometimes vandals sneak in, so if someone’s made a mess, you just tell me.”

  I have my sleeves pulled down over my knuckles, so dirty are my hands, and I sense the woman across from me is pursing her lips at the sight of them.

  “It’s an old lock, so if the key doesn’t work, we can oil it,” he says.

  And it’s such a beautiful fact: this chink of metal he’s given me, this cemetery key—how it rests in my pocket, little weight. In all my life I’ve never owned anything so beautiful.

  AND SO, YEARS later, on a New Year’s Eve, I walk with Dükmann’s son towards his home. Jakob has orange-red hair and it peeks out from under the corners of his cap, glows bright like low-burning fire under the street lamps as we walk.

  The building, when we reach it, is bright and merry, yellow light shining through the frost on the windows. There is music muffled by the windows and walls that just barely carries onto the street, and which is like a burst of laughter when we open the door. So it seems to me; and perhaps it is the contrast with what I’ve just left that makes it seem wonderful, but I am so grat
eful it hurts. Mrs. Dükmann meets us at the door and takes my coat, calls me “sad old fellow,” and gives me a kiss.

  Upstairs in her sitting room, there is an older man playing a fiddle and a young man on an accordion, and a thin middle-aged woman with thick glasses at the piano, her fingers popping over the keys like effervescence. Tobias Dükmann is laughing at them from the sofa, half-singing as if he remembers only the first two words of every line, and he has his arm around Chaim, who wears a half smile tonight. When Dükmann sees me, he pushes himself up with his cane and holds his arms out to me, embraces me and kisses my cheeks.

  “Now we are all here,” he says, and I laugh almost to hide my love. He sits me beside him on the sofa, on the opposite side from Chaim.

  And I do wonder about the way I see them: would they glow so bright if I hadn’t grown up so lonely? I don’t know, I can’t guess, and it doesn’t matter. But I know that it opens a door, the state I’m in—that when the auburn-haired girl with a guitar comes in to sit next to the pianist on the bench, and she smiles, in that moment I’m molten, and I’m lost.

  Chaim goes to her and for a wild moment I think, She’s his girlfriend, and I’ll have to kill him. But he drums on her head like a child with a toy and she bares her small, straight teeth at him. Beside me Tobias Dükmann leans in and says, “Make my son introduce you to little Anna.”

  When I stand beside the piano bench I feel my pulse in my ears, and I only smile at her, though Chaim says polite things about me, calls me “Vati’s favourite.”

  She shakes her head and says, “No, I’ve decided Jakob’s his favourite. Despite my history of complaints aimed at innocent bystanders.” And then she smiles at me to acknowledge this as an old joke between us—her garnet eyes make me idiotic—and I feel I’m falling forward; I’m certain I’m going to lean in and kiss her. She says, “Don’t take it too hard, Josef. You can join us runners-up.”

  Later we sit together on the couch, and when midnight comes, she kisses her father first, and then her mother and brothers, and then me. Perhaps she kisses another person after that, but I stand grinning by the door and watch the lights spin. She doesn’t dance more with me than with any other man, but when her hand is on my shoulder, I feel like gold, solid all the way through. Her hair smells like apples. I want to kiss her so badly, I could scream.

  When at three in the morning Jakob walks with me back towards my home, he says, “You like Anna, yeah?”

  I blush and I say, “She’s lovely. I thought once . . . I wondered if she had a bad opinion of me.”

  Jakob laughs. “That letter, huh? She’s a funny kid.” He whistles for a minute, and then he says, “You could take her out.”

  My heart catches. “I don’t know if she—”

  “Tobak,” he says, “don’t be an idiot.”

  I TAKE HER to the zoo. I buy her a Hungarian pastry and we look at the buffalo. It’s terribly unromantic, I’m sure, and in the back of my mind a voice is saying, What must she think of you? What a joke you are! But she laughs, and she makes me laugh, and when she smiles at me I’m a balloon on a string.

  Afterwards we sit in a café, and she makes circles on the tabletop with the wet bottom of her coffee cup. “Next time,” she says, “can you take me to your cemetery?”

  (This girl, soft-cheeked and slender—how my mouth goes dry at her smile. Is it improper to write this? Forgive me: When she reaches back to pull on a jacket, my eyes are caught in the pooling of shade at the base of her neck, and the madman in me would lean in and drink from her. I settle for an arm around her waist and hope that she can’t feel my trembling.)

  Zilla teases me: “You’ve got a little Jewish girlfriend, Josef. Such a Josef Tobak kind of girl, so proper, such a sweet thing. Boring as hell, no doubt. At least Papa won’t like her—there’s something a little rebellious in you yet, I believe.”

  With Anna, the Währing cemetery is a different place. I feel I’m seeing everything through her eyes, and a part of me thinks, You haven’t pulled those weeds! What must she think?

  She doesn’t say much, just touches stone, touches trees, runs her fingers along the top edge of the wall. She is wearing a brown hat and a dark green coat. When she crouches down to read an inscription, and her lips part as she reads, inwardly I see her stretching out on the fallen leaves, see the two of us making love then and there—but then I remember where we are, and I have to turn away.

  She asks me later, “Do you love anyone alive as much as you love them?” And I can see, in her eyes, that she isn’t teasing me—and the answer is so easy it makes me blush.

  I know her almost a year before I dare to ask her father’s permission to marry her, though I’ve known, I think, since that first New Year’s Eve. And even then, he says it first: “Tobak! Aren’t you ever going to marry my little Anna?” Yes, Mr. Dükmann. I am going to marry your little Anna, if she will have me.

  I take her to the Augarten, near dusk, and we walk and we talk, and then we sit together on a bench and I ask myself the question, silent; and she with her eyes on the trees asks herself the question too. When I ask it aloud I’m almost tempted to apologize, but she peers up at me and she nods, and she says, “That would be perfect.”

  Her lips that evening taste like new wine, and her breath on my cheek is velvet. Her body tight against mine, and my heart bigger than my whole body.

  6

  THE WAY OUR STORY BEGINS, WE COULD BE ANYWHERE, Anna and I, and at any time. This is 1933, and for me that’s what 1933 is: the year I fell in love with Anna. It is also the year, of course, that in Germany the National Socialist Party is declared the only legal party, but at the time this feels so unreal; I have to make myself remember it now.

  Love makes my world huge in that it widens my heart, but at the same time it makes everything else smaller. Certainly there are evils in my own country even at this time. Certainly there are reasons to be wary. But where are the roots of my heart? In Anna, in her family, in Friedrich, in Zilla, in my parents, and in the Seegasse and Währing cemeteries. They are rooted in a question of faith too, but that’s less a ground for rooting and more a web netted over everything else. And anything that doesn’t threaten these roots is in a way unreal to me.

  This is his world, this man I was: In November of 1933 he’s engaged, and meaning to marry very soon, as soon as can be. He lives with his parents (his mother’s parents having passed away); he is looking for a cheap apartment. He is twenty-four years old and a low-level clerk in Geisman–Zimmel’s accounts department, where his father has worked for years and years and still works, despite the ongoing financial crisis, though in a different office. The two don’t talk much at work. They have not talked much in years.

  The father, Daniel Tobak, is thinner, with a face drawn down and weathered. His doctor warns him about his blood pressure. After the Great War thousands lost their jobs; thousands became poor, and Vienna has not been since then the bright metropolis it was when his children were born. But Geisman–Zimmel did not flounder. By their fingernails Otto Geisman and Hans Zimmel clung to the eroding market. The factory stayed open, the offices stayed open and (though we can be almost certain it was because Hans Zimmel’s son loved Daniel Tobak’s daughter) Hans Zimmel told his chief accountant, Werner Nussbaum, that there would be work enough for that fellow Tobak, if perhaps at a reduced wage.

  But the threat of poverty still hovers over Daniel Tobak, and the smoke-and-fish smell of the Leopoldstadt that greets him every evening as he steps off the tram is a species of curse. His skin takes on a grey tinge, around the lips and eyes especially.

  Josef Tobak now is the kind of quiet, thin man one imagines dissolving away in the rain—except that there he is, in the rain, traeading among gravestones, picking up twigs and pulling weeds. He spends a good deal of time with Friedrich Zimmel, especially in between Friedrich’s girlfriends, who tend to last about three weeks if they last overnight. With Anna in the picture now, he sees Friedrich less, though the man invites the couple ov
er for almost weekly dinners in his apartment.

  “You must read these things Josef likes,” Friedrich tells Anna once, over his dining room table. “Poetry, mainly. I can barely follow it. Who’s that girl you like, Josef?” Which for a moment makes Josef’s head snap round towards him (Girl? How could you! No girl but this one!), but: “The poet—Henriette Something.”

  “Oh—Henriette Hardenberg,” says Josef. “Yes, I like her poems very much.”

  Anna says, “You read woman poets! I approve of you more and more, Mr. Tobak.”

  And Friedrich beams with pleasure, peering between his two guests as if admiring the work of his hands.

  In these days, too, Josef tries more than once to make amends with his Czechoslovakian cousins, but the word he hears always from Sarah Kostner is, “We can’t see you, thank you, we’re busy,” and he does not feel he has the right to press the matter. He hears about them through Zilla. He wears this rejection like a garment under his shirt and imagines he deserves it. He does not bring it up with Anna.

  What prevents Josef Tobak and Anna Dükmann from marrying as soon as they’d like is, first, Josef’s income and, second, her father’s health. Josef does not make much money in his current position, and until he thinks of providing a home for Anna it doesn’t bother him. But when he considers the life he’d like to give her, and the possibility of a child, he tells her, “Wait three months, and I’ll have a raise.” He is content at Geisman–Zimmel, content among numbers and other people’s money; the job isn’t a vocation, to him, but something comfortable, something quiet and more or less useful: it feels as if he’s helping to keep someone’s walls from falling down.