The Ghost Keeper

  (But he remembers, sometimes, that back when he was nineteen, when he was just starting work, Tobias Dükmann met him one day and said, “Have you considered the rabbinical academies?” And Josef for a moment felt a thrill of openness, carried that thrill into the Währing cemetery and walked it around for a while under the trees. But then in his mind a hundred strange faces asking impossible questions started to press in, and his heart went tight; the faces followed him home, and he lay awake hours in the dark. He woke the next morning with a sore throat, and told Dükmann that he did not think he was called to that life. The questions, ones no one had yet asked and ones he couldn’t answer, bore down on him like the weight of packed earth. He had not put it that way to Dükmann, though: to the older man he’d said, “I like my work, and I need time for the cemeteries.” And now that door stays closed, and he tries not to let himself look back at it.)

  But Dükmann now is not well, and it’s a pull on Anna, always. Her father has difficulties with his digestion. Jakob does some of the work at the shop, as does Dükmann’s apprentice Albert, and Anna helps with the sewing. She stays home most evenings to help her mother look after her father. When Dükmann is very ill, Josef suspects his own presence only irritates Anna. She sleeps less, and though she doesn’t become angry, she talks in a lower, level tone, and seems always to be tired.

  TENSION, OF COURSE, in Austria as well—one starts to feel it, though it’s impossible to know yet what one senses exactly. In February of 1934, members of the Austrian governing party’s Home Guard invade the Hotel Schiff in Linz, which belongs to the leftist Social Democrat Party—like an act of civil war, it seems. For a day afterwards there’s fighting even on the streets in Vienna. Blackouts and roadblocks, tension electric in the air, guns popping blocks away, and all parties except the ruling Christian Socials crushed down into ineffectiveness or into hiding. “Wait it out,” Josef says to his hands when they shake, and most of his neighbours think it too. Two days later the chancellor orders the army to shell a new tenement house in the nineteenth district in Vienna, occupied mainly by unarmed workers and their families.

  Zilla, in the middle of the night, tells Josef about it before the newspapers do—Zilla with her arm bruised and scraped, speaking fast and with a tightness in her voice he’s rarely heard.

  “I hate this country,” she says to her brother, and she sucks a cut on her hand and rocks back and forth in her seat. “I hate these people. Liberality when it tastes nice, sure—but when they might have to think, when they might have to change, forget it.”

  In the nineteenth district the Karl-Marx-Hof stands shelled to pieces by our own army, gaping like a smashed mouth, teeth broken, and the families stand outside with still faces. Their clothes smell of ash.

  IN JULY OF 1934, members of the illegal Austrian Nazi Party assassinate the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. A radio cry goes out: Rise up, National Socialists—the hour for coup is now! But though pulses run rapid in the capital, and though there are fights in the provinces, and in Salzburg, still it fizzles out like a firework: conspirators jailed and executed, and the established Austrian brand of fascism under the Christian Socials reaffirmed. Josef, in his bedroom in the dark, prays without words, and he wonders as he watches himself: is this thanks, or is this pleading?

  IN SEPTEMBER OF that year, Josef Tobak gets a raise at work—a small one, but he holds the news close against his chest, carries it to Anna and brings up marriage again, half-frightened she’s decided otherwise in the months that have passed. But Anna kisses him, and she leans into him, and she says, “Soon, so Vati can come.”

  They are married in November: November the sixth, a Tuesday, in the evening. Her father sits beside her mother, and they both weep; his father sits beside his mother, too, and though Daniel Tobak does nothing but stare straight ahead from the moment he walks into the synagogue until the moment he leaves it, Josef’s mother slips her arm under her husband’s, and she dabs her eyes on a handkerchief and says, louder than she means to, “Little Josef!”

  Anna is beautiful as nighttime, beautiful as light. Her husband sees in her eyes a glow as if from candles in a dark room. She says, “My beloved is mine,” and her voice is like warm honey.

  On the first morning he wakes beside her, he finds her holding his hand in both of hers, uncurling his fingers against the sheets.

  “I find I barely know what a man is like,” she whispers, seeing him awake. “I’m figuring it out. This part is for blessings.” She squeezes his hand. And then, kissing him: “Now! Bless me very well, dear husband.”

  (Ah! Blessings, be quiet, be secret—see my hand dance as I write it; let that be enough.)

  THEY ARE MARRIED in November 1934, and in October of 1935, Tobias Dükmann dies. The first year of their marriage unfolds with this impending sadness hanging over it. The doctor has Dükmann shave his beard. Not until it’s gone does Josef see how thin the man’s face has become, how carved out it is, down almost to the bone. But Dükmann only laughs in his bed: “I look like a boy again. Ella will like it.”

  He talks to his sons quietly. He tries to talk peace to Chaim, who is angrier and warier every month, who has learned to use a gun. He talks seriousness and duty to Jakob, who even in his fear of death tries to laugh and to make his father laugh—and Dükmann does laugh; he is happy to laugh. To Josef he says, “If you are always the man you are today, Josef, I can fall asleep happy and dream good dreams.”

  When he dies, quietly, in his sleep, the burial society arranges his funeral while Anna and her family keep their vigil beside his bed. They bury him in the Zentralfriedhof, in the treeless Jewish section, and the earth thumping down onto the pine casket is almost like a heartbeat. Josef, with his arm around his wife who is so small today, so thin, feels suddenly that he could slide down into the earth with his father-in-law, and that it wouldn’t be frightening: it would be home. He squeezes Anna closer to himself, anchors himself to her life with his eyes shut tight.

  After the week of mourning at her mother’s house, when Anna and Josef are home again, Anna cries and cries; for days she can’t stop crying. She tells Josef one night, “When I finished school, he didn’t let me go to university. He didn’t think girls should go, and I was so angry at him. I blamed him for years and years, almost until the very end. I never told him.”

  Her husband takes in this new information, he lets it shock him silently, while he holds her at the kitchen table and rocks her and says, “You loved him so well, my darling.”

  She answers, “Oh, Josef, I tried.”

  It’s in these months that Zilla meets Giorgio Repaci at one of Friedrich’s parties, and Friedrich begins to regret forever whatever mad impulse had him introduce her to the Italian music professor. Zilla tells Josef about Giorgio the next day, how wrong he is about everything, and that she “certainly couldn’t imagine putting up with that kind of man.” But she talks on and on about his work, and his family, and his cream-coloured shirt and his brown jacket, and the way his black hair curls against his eyebrow, and the concerts he means to go see.

  “But he’s moving to Paris,” Zilla tells her brother, “so I won’t go to any concerts with him. That’s that.” At this statement her lips go tight, and she tugs at the cuffs of her sleeves, humming.

  So Josef is not so surprised when, a month later, he gets a telegram from Zilla, from a train station in Frankfurt, saying she’s heading to France with Giorgio: Could not be helped, she writes; this poor fool loves me. But he is surprised, and torn between laughter and a twinge of heartbreak, when, two weeks after that, he receives a card from his sister and Giorgio, announcing that they were married in Paris, with two new French friends as witnesses.

  On that night Friedrich appears at Josef and Anna’s door, weeping and almost blind drunk. Anna helps Josef lay him out on their sofa, tucked under an old pink quilt. He sobs until he vomits into a pot.

  “I think they let people divorce in Paris,” Friedrich tells Josef, “so maybe she didn�
�t really mean it.”

  Anna gathers all the knives in the kitchen and tucks them into her underwear drawer in the bedroom. Josef sits beside Friedrich until he’s snoring, and in the morning they all wake with headaches. Friedrich goes off to his father’s country villa for a few weeks after that.

  A COLD JANUARY, 1937. A cold and wet February, wet and muddy March, but the crocuses bloom in the graveyards, spikes of green and purple reaching up. A man loves his wife, and it is no remarkable thing; like a jeweller and a jewel, his love and her body, her love and his—but no journalist visits, no newspaper tells it. In July the papers tell, “Japan invades China,” but not, “Already their child has been growing three months.” They have known since May, and the whole world is being born, in the man’s heart: the whole world stirring and growing and awakening, but not yet a thing you could take hold of, not yet something known.

  The happiest summer, and the best autumn—though twice Anna seems seriously sick, and in each case her sudden fear sends the both of them, separately, into a world of silent, pleading prayer. The trouble passes, and the universe breathes deep again; it shines brighter, too. Anna names herself Flowerpot and Jam Jar, smiling and swaying as she walks. He calls her Little Melon. He kisses her neck, the soft pink place where it tilts into shoulder.

  She tells him things he’s never imagined: Somewhere in the smell of fish is the smell of German paper mills. The colour of sky in August makes her taste butter on her tongue. When she lies in bed with her eyes closed, the whole world tilts to the north, and she holds on to the sheets to stop herself rolling out. The tiny scar on his chin reminds her, for some reason, of bare trees, early spring.

  On the last day of December, while on the streets the people pour wine and sing songs, and the men with the pig stalls set out clay pigs, wooden pigs, little resin pigs with painted faces, the woman is in a hospital bed, and the man waiting outside her door. All the roots of his heart are rearranged and knotted up in that one room. When he first sees the baby—little loaf of bread, raisin face—his heart sings a song he’s never heard, a song with one high note that makes the world go quiet.

  WE NAME HIM after Anna’s father. It makes her cry, but it makes her happy, and she tells me it is like shutting a box she’s kept open for years.

  Sometimes I wish, years later, that there could have been a way to name him after everyone who ever lived, everyone who ever died. But then a part of me wonders—not how he’d write it out or remember it all—but whether anyone could ever carry so much history in them and bear it. Not for my son, I pray. For him: the things to come, every beautiful thing.

  7

  I AM IN LOVE, ABSURDLY IN LOVE, WITH MY WIFE AND WITH this little boy, and the rest of the country is like a paper model of the world. That there’s all this politicking right now is ridiculous. The baby wakes us up in the middle of the night, every night, but despite the weariness this drapes over his parents, his cry aches like homesickness, pain drawn from love. I stand in the dark and rock Tobias, sing to him. He’s a beautiful, strong baby, dark, with bright, searching eyes that very early on in his waking hours learn to lock on to things, lights and movement.

  In the daytime I sit with them sometimes as Anna nurses him. She says her father never did that, that her mother thought men shouldn’t see it, but our apartment is so small that to avoid her and the baby in these moments seems laughable. The intimacy between them and the peace they have in it—it strikes me that I will never know that with any child of mine, and I wonder if I know it even with Anna. Her face is so serious when she watches him, but so still, and with just the hint of a smile.

  I don’t see Friedrich often in those days, and this is perhaps to my discredit; Friedrich’s father, Hans Zimmel, died around the same time that Anna’s father did, and I know that he and his mother are grieving. But now Friedrich has, as well, his new life: his life as co-owner of his father’s company, and his meetings with his business partner, Otto Geisman. So perhaps we would both like to see each other more; perhaps we both feel a little regret at the separation.

  Still, I confess I have a hard time remembering that or anything outside our little family. Our radio stops working, but neither Anna nor I seem to mind, and I try only half-heartedly to fix it when Anna mentions she hasn’t listened to the news in almost a week. Chaim comes sometimes, and he rocks Tobias for a little while, bumps him and pats him. But it isn’t the baby he’s thinking of, nor even really us. He wants to talk about Schuschnigg, the chancellor; about whether he will stand up to Hitler.

  “Nobody wants them here,” Anna says to him when we all sit at the table, and the baby is asleep against her shoulder. “The Party is still illegal, remember.”

  Her brother raps the table with his fingers and shakes his head. “You know they’re not gone, Anna. Don’t be naive. It’s a thing balanced on a knife edge.”

  “It isn’t so bad as that,” I tell him. “You must have hope.”

  “The edge of a knife,” he says again, and points at me. “You ask your upper-crust friends what they think. They wear the state crosses today, but in the back of their drawers they’ve got their Nazi arm bands folded and waiting.”

  “You really think they’re the ones who want this?” Anna says. “You look at the parties in this country, and you look at their leaders. They’ve stood up and said they’re not Germans. They know they wouldn’t be allowed to make an about-face under Hitler if they’ve spoken against him in front of all the world.”

  “Not the party leaders, maybe. And maybe the rich have less to gain from it, though I maintain that they have a lot less to lose than you think. But the young folk, the workers—look at them. They don’t care what party is illegal. They just want someone to blame.”

  “England and France would never let Hitler get away with taking Austria,” I tell him. “If he’s too greedy, he’ll bring war to Germany. No one wants that, not even the National Socialists. They can’t afford it.”

  “I’m not putting my faith in foreign gods,” Chaim says, and there’s that anger in him, the sort that made his father speak so soft and sad to him before he died. “Don’t forget that you’re vermin to them. Don’t imagine Germany is so different from Austria. We have to look after our own now.”

  Anna sighs. “Oh, Chaim,” she says. “Couldn’t you keep this madness away from us till your nephew is out of diapers?”

  And then he looks at her and smiles, shakes his head and takes Tobias in his arms.

  ON THE TWELFTH of February I go for a walk in the Augarten park with Anna and Tobias, and we show the baby the trees and the sparrows. He drifts in and out of sleep in his pram, cocooned in knitting. His cheeks are red kisses, and a wisp of black hair curls down across his forehead from beneath his cap. Anna tucks her arm into mine and we watch two little boys kick a ball down the path.

  On the twelfth of February too, Chancellor Schuschnigg meets with Hitler in Obersalzberg. Schuschnigg takes a Nazi sympathizer on as secretary of the interior, as a compromise. As if to permit a little leak will stop the dam from breaking, it seems then. And I think we all feel somehow, in those days, that perhaps this is really how one is meant to put things right.

  And a few weeks later, on a day when Anna bleaches diapers and I make shadow animals on the wall for the baby to watch, the Social Democrats try to throw their support behind Schuschnigg against Germany. He will not take it, not from them nor from any illegal party, whether on the left or the right. Zilla would have blamed him terribly—and probably, off in Paris, she still does. Chaim certainly blames him. But for me—to my discredit—it’s another paper headline in a paper world, while in the world of flesh my son gurgles on the blanket spread out over the floor. The head of a dog on the wall with my hand, and the tail of a fish.

  THE GRAFFITI IN those weeks is all Kruckenkreuze—the corporate state crosses under the Christian Socials—and the pamphlets handed out on the streets are for a “free, social, Christian” Austria. If the country is going to explode, I think
then, it will explode in a fire of patriotism. Whoever is against these Austrian nationalists stays in the shadows. At my work, things continue as always. Sums and differences have a misleading constancy about them: though the economy seems crippled, the numbers that prove it stay calm and reasonable. I take consolation in that, and I remark on it to Lars Schreckenberger, who shares my office. He laughs. We can still laugh together then.

  But then in March it is as if this thing that has stayed in the shadows starts to uncoil. The corporate state crosses are still spattered across buildings and streets, and yes, the Communist and socialist parties align themselves for once with the Christian Socials; but even so, while half the crowd shouts, “Heil Schuschnigg!” there is a gathering multitude on the opposite side of the Rotenturmstrasse screaming Nazi slogans. Where do they come from, I can’t help but wonder, and how is it there can be so many?

  Even fathers in love can’t ignore the storm now, and I find myself to be one of those who stand on the side of a free Austria—literally, one side of the street. I am not a slogan-shouter; in fact, in the midst of this screaming, with the police keeping the two crowds from getting at one another, my throat is completely closed. The man next to me is shouting in Czech, and it makes the situation all the more unreal. On this corner there is a young priest all in black and men who seem to be the staff of a Communist printing press, shouting together at the young shaven-headed men across the street, and on the next corner there are four young blond women wearing dirndls, their hair up in braids, singing Austrian folk songs so loud and high that their music sounds like soldiers’ song on the march.

  But I am just a number in that crowd, I am one count added to the one side and subtracted from the other. I don’t have a voice today and I have no words for which to use it—unless those were Go home, everyone. That’s all I can think of wanting: peace, home, family. Everything the way it has always been.