The Ghost Keeper

  He, refilling his glass again: “Well, you know. It’s the company too. Because we’ve had to—we’ve had to make clear . . . our position. On these things.”

  A white blank in my mind, at these words. “What?”

  “What do you expect me to do?” (This man gone ragged as he turns to me.) “They’ve got their war going. They wouldn’t let us keep on making faucets and shower heads, would they? And—Jesus—do they let non-partisans head their munitions factories? Does that sound likely to you?”

  “You joined the Party.” I’m on my feet again; my hat is on my head. My throat is thick with cotton. “I see. I didn’t— Well. If that’s how it is, I’ll go.”

  “Josef—please—”

  “No, I’ll go. You can’t have me here. I understand.”

  And I’ve already turned to leave before he catches my shoulder.

  “Josef.” He looks now as if he might weep. “It’s not like that. I’m not one of them.”

  I want to shove him back onto the sofa; I want to take a swing at his face. His sadness, his drunkenness, makes me by one turn despise him and by the next want to put my arms around him.

  “And what about Geisman?” I ask.

  Friedrich falls back on the couch. After a moment I sit beside him.

  “Geisman’s left the company,” he says. “They’re emigrating. The whole family. To London, I believe.”

  “Friedrich,” I say, “he built the company with your father.”

  “I know that!” Spilling brandy on his shirt. “I know. But it was his choice. I had nothing to do with it. He told me months ago: ‘If Germany invades, we’re getting out.’ He’s made arrangements. They have money in England; they’ve been making transfers for a long time. They’ve got family too. So it’s me in charge now.” He wipes his nose on his shirt cuff. “Me and the board.”

  I stare at my hands. They’re balled into fists, knuckles all bone.

  “You could have stepped down too,” I say—just loud enough for the two of us.

  “No, Josef”—and now his voice is fierce again—“no, I couldn’t. If it hadn’t been me, they had someone else lined up—some shit in Munich, did the Führer a favour. Exemplary in all respects. No—this is the compromise. I am the compromise.”

  “The lesser evil.”

  His eyes glisten anew. “You don’t really think that, do you?”

  I can’t look at him. This face saying, Pity me; tell me I did right. This same face fresh from simpering at a man who’d have spit on me, if he’d only known me. I can’t look.

  “Please.” He says it with his hand on my shoulder. “Tell me you don’t hate me. I couldn’t—I couldn’t bear it, Josef.”

  “I don’t know where I’ll work now.” I speak down at my hands.

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll drop by tomorrow. We’ll talk.”

  I swallow. “And the rest of the company?” I stop myself shrugging out from under his hand. “You’ll drop by their houses too?”

  “Josef—”

  “Fine,” I say. “Tomorrow.”

  He follows me to the hallway, where Kurtz is waiting—perhaps listening, I realize—and he says, “At least tell me you don’t despise me.”

  I sigh. “I don’t.” It’s true. “But I don’t think I’d have believed you could be so cold.”

  He looks as if I’ve hit him. It strikes me then for the first time that my judgment of Friedrich is something that could keep him up at night.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say, and Kurtz leads me to the door.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING arrives quiet and overcast, and I sit at our kitchen table while Anna rocks the baby in her arms. I find my mind saying, Enjoy this. The baby is asleep, but Anna still rocks him. She was singing a song I thought I recognized; now the song is nothing I know, just little noises.

  “I can hold him, if you like,” I say to her.

  But she sings a lullaby. “I need to do something with my hands.”

  All our dishes are clean because of this, and the counters spotless, and the floor shining. I say to her, “Sit awhile.”

  “Not yet.” Shaking her head at the sleeping baby. “Not yet, I couldn’t stand it yet. Let me move a little longer.”

  “Maybe I’ll make coffee.”

  “There are clean cups,” she sings, “everywhere.”

  By the time the knock on the door comes, she is laying the baby down in another room, and I am pouring coffee. Then, rap rap rap on the door, and it makes me jump.

  “It’s Friedrich.” His voice. I edge the door open, and he peers through.

  “Just me,” he says. “Really.”

  At the table across from him, until Anna comes back, I let my gaze rest like a dead weight on the Party arm band sewn to his jacket sleeve. He touches his hand to it. “Please, I don’t like it any more than you do.”

  Anna knows, of course. She tilts her lips without parting them when she appears—this quiet smile for our friend. “Good to see you,” she says.

  He leans into her words as if starved. “And you! You look lovely, as always.”

  “I think Josef made coffee.”

  Friedrich’s face is pale, sickish—perhaps a hangover, I suspect; and yet there’s a part of me that is willing to allow, even now, that my friend is in a difficult position, and that he would like to put things right.

  “You got here without trouble?” I ask.

  “Yes, I think so.” And such relief in his voice, now that I’m speaking to him, that it almost makes me ashamed. “I took the car downtown and then I walked. I tried to hurry through this part of town. I hope I didn’t worry your neighbours.”

  I can’t help but snort. “Of course you worried them,” I tell him. “Unless they recognized you. Or perhaps especially, in that case.”

  “Something to eat, too, Friedrich?” Anna sets a roll down on a plate for him. I help her with coffee and Friedrich squirms for a moment at the table, alone.

  When we sit, he says, “Josef, I’m going to get you a job.”

  “Oh.” I sip my coffee. Friedrich grips his cup in both hands.

  “Something out of the office,” he says. “Perhaps with the art collections.”

  “Art collections?” Anna glances between us.

  “That was a side project, wasn’t it? Of your father’s? And Geisman’s?” Yes, he flinches at the name, but I can’t stop myself and it’s hard to feel sorry.

  “They collected and sold paintings on the side,” he tells Anna. “Quite a few very nice ones are still in the collection. I haven’t seen all of them. But we need to get the records organized. Some of them need to be sold. For Geisman, actually.” This he says to me. “I can hire you without going through anyone. I could even have you under a false name.”

  “I see.”

  “It’ll pay the same as your old job. If I can find more, I’ll pay you more. There will have to be a new round of hires anyway, the way they’re letting half the company go. It won’t attract notice. And if you need anything, you’ll be able to let me know.” He’s speaking quickly, leaning forward, seeming to beg with his eyes: Say yes!

  I take a drink from my cup as I think. We are all quiet. Then: “My father’s job—”

  “I don’t—I can’t hire everyone.” Friedrich waves his hand. “Please, Josef. It’s time your father retired, anyway.”

  “And his pension?” I want to say: Everyone’s pension? Everyone’s job?—but it’s useless, I tell myself. Could it be that you’re angry at the wrong person? I feel my mind ask. I don’t know what answer to give it.

  “I’ll make sure his pension goes through,” Friedrich says. “If I have to personally drop off a cheque each month—”

  “Friedrich, you can’t keep coming here. Not with the way things are now.” Anna touches his arm. “If they know you spend time here, they’ll ask questions. You’ll lose your alibi.”

  The way he looks at her then—gratitude for her mercy, as though he were a man condemned—and I understa
nd. Alibi, she said. You are the same man underneath, she means.

  “You’re right,” he says. “I know. You’re right. It will take some getting used to.”

  With the window closed, the noise from the street just makes it through to us—a car, a man calling to a friend. I want to say, You could have done better. And I want to tell him we would have stood beside him. If I asked him what Zilla would think—would that be too cruel? I think: But there are families now who can’t buy bread. And again I think: But could he have saved them from this, even if he’d said no? I watch the inside of my coffee cup as I tilt it, and I don’t say anything.

  “I hope you will remember that we love you,” Anna says to him.

  And for a moment he seems about to cry, squeezes his eyes shut and touches his face with his hand. But then he says only, “Yes, I know.” And forces a smile. “I can meet you tomorrow, Josef. I’ll write down the address. Say, nine in the morning?”

  When he leaves, I stand beside Anna at the sink, my hand on her lower back as she runs hot water for the dishes. Her hands move more slowly than they did this morning, less busily. And when she turns the faucet off, she says, “So you’ll work for him?”

  I watch the corner of her eye, her cheek, the near-invisible hairs that catch the light. “Don’t you want me to?”

  “Chaim won’t speak to you.”

  I press my lips into her neck, against the collar of her blouse. “I don’t have to do it.”

  “He’ll probably have to fire you soon, anyway,” Anna says, and starts wiping out a coffee cup. Then she adds, after she turns to kiss my forehead: “And I’ll still talk to you.”

  IN THE FIRST few days we hear stories of people driven into the canal in crowds, of beatings and murder on the street. Of others committing suicide. I don’t want to believe that it is so bad already; or else, if it really is so, then I must imagine it will all blow over quickly and things will go back to the way they were. At the time, such a thought doesn’t seem so foolish.

  Meanwhile, I work on the art catalogue. The rooms where many of these works are kept make up a small rented office, a bit removed from the centre of town. No one else works here. A few of the paintings I like very much. A portrait of a girl and her baby brother, dressed in frills, neither of them smiling but both peering out at the painter with anxious looks that seem to demand explanation: Why are we sitting here? And another, a blurry kind of landscape, hills and a pond—smudge and mist and colour. It makes my eyes go unfocused; it makes me start to believe I can smell rain. Probably Zilla would like these, I think, and in the evenings I try to describe them to her in letters, and to Anna in our bed.

  But very soon I’m ill—feverish, weak on my legs, mind dull—and I tell Friedrich I can’t come in. He asks if he should send a doctor and I tell him, gently, that his survival instincts aren’t very good (and perhaps this fact alone makes me forgive him more).

  Anna leaves Tobias with her mother, in her house a few blocks away, while I’m home sick. It’s a world of chicken broth and camomile tea in our house, with noises too loud and Anna’s voice tinny to my ears. She’s out often to feed Tobias, but the echoes seem never to cease. Once, I think I hear Chaim’s voice in the kitchen and I call out, “You came after all!”—but I don’t see him and Anna doesn’t mention he was there. She brings home a compound from the apothecary. She says, later, “If you’re not a little better tomorrow, I’ll call the doctor.”

  The day after she says it, I am a bit better, as it turns out. I can sit up and speak normally, and though I feel weak and nauseated, the world around me looks and sounds the way it should. Anna feels my forehead and smiles. She says, “I’ll have to pick up the baby soon. It’ll break Mama’s heart.”

  My clothes are damp and sticky. I change them and lie on the couch, stare out the window. “Have things improved at all?” I ask Anna.

  She sits beside me, reading. “Things?”

  “You know.” I gesture at the grey spring sky. “Out there.”

  Anna puts down her book and feels my forehead. “Maybe I should call a doctor after all.”

  I feel my throat tighten. A swallow darts across the grey, too fast to be anything but a spot of black. I tell her, softly, “Well, I’m only hopeful.”

  10

  THE THING THAT HAPPENS HAPPENS THIS WAY: SOME weeks into the occupation, on a Saturday, a man walks from the Leopoldstädter temple towards the little apartment where his wife and his son are waiting. He is feeling a bit light-headed from this fever he still hasn’t kicked. His chest hurts. But it is necessary, he feels, to try to frequent the synagogue as long as one can, as long as they don’t stop you and you’re on your feet. The effort of going in these times feels to him at once childish and heroic, but many things in his life, he reflects, have made him feel that way—the cemeteries, for one. He hasn’t been to the Währing cemetery this month. Perhaps later today, he thinks, or tomorrow. Depending how the streets look.

  He didn’t allow Anna and Tobias to come with him today. Anna didn’t object this time. At other times, certainly, she’s told him she can’t stay in. He doesn’t like to think of her hurrying through the streets to look after her mother, but she does it; nor of the baby in his little pram in the park, vulnerable to the world, but on safer days they take him anyway. They buy milk and bread and meat, they pay their rent, and Anna sings songs to the baby, the same ones her mother sang when she was young.

  At the intersection with Wallensteinstrasse, a familiar face: here is Jakob Dükmann, reddish under his cap and handsome, young-looking in his coat. He is walking quickly towards Josef, and before he stops, he is saying already, “I wonder if you’ve heard from Chaim at all.”

  Josef pauses. “No,” he says. “Have you asked Anna?”

  Jakob has just come from asking her, he says. He shifts his weight, begins to whistle, and Josef says, “Wouldn’t he be at a friend’s house?”

  Jakob clicks his tongue. “He heard something this morning about some shitheads bullying old women. I’m sure he went to find out. I meant to go with him. I was going to meet him at the bridge.”

  “And he didn’t come,” Josef says. His brother-in-law is tense, though his face is set. He peers over each of Josef’s shoulders in turn, as if expecting to see someone farther down the street.

  “I’ll just keep looking,” Jakob says. “He’s probably nearby.”

  “He might have gone inside,” Josef says.

  “He might have.”

  But Jakob is leaning forward as if urging himself to go, and something at the back of Josef’s mind prods him and makes him speak: “Why don’t I go with you?”

  Jakob meets his gaze, big-eyed. “You don’t have to. Anna will be upset.”

  Josef shrugs, although already a wave of heat runs through him, saying, You’re not quite well. “She’d be more upset if I let you go alone. She’d say you need a chaperone.”

  He grins, kicks the ground. “And you need a bodyguard.”

  And so they go together. The streets are quiet. Josef follows Jakob, lets him pick the route, and finds that in trailing him by a pace he can imagine that he really is only here as a chaperone, a looker-on keeping another man out of trouble.

  But as they are about to turn towards the canal, a man comes around the corner in front of them and holds up his hand. Josef stops on instinct—a police officer, he thinks. This man has the confidence of authority and his clothes are a uniform. But Jakob hunches his shoulders and keeps walking, and Josef sees that this isn’t an officer, but a man dressed in his Party uniform, red arm band sewn over his sleeve and a club in his hand.

  This man yells at them to come clean up the mess they’ve made. Jakob yells back at him, “I haven’t made any mess. Piss off.”

  He walks towards them now, this man, with his club raised, and Josef is hurrying to walk beside his brother-in-law so that Jakob won’t crash alone into their accuser. But then from around the corner there comes a mob of men, some dressed as the first is, some in or
dinary spring coats, and some drunk. They are pointing at the two of them. They are yelling at them to come clean up this mess.

  “Just ignore them,” Josef tries to tell Jakob—but it’s pointless: the strangers grab Josef by the coat, grab Jakob by the coat, and though they try to shake them off, the strangers drag them back around the corner and into the street. One of them hits Josef on the shoulder—whether with a fist or with a club, he doesn’t know. It sends a spasm of numbness through him so that he almost goes down on one knee. Jakob grabs him by the sleeve and they hold each other upright.

  They are to scrub the last remaining Austrian nationalist graffiti off the streets and walls. Already there are two dozen men and women, young and old, on their hands and knees in the street, up to their elbows in lye solution and struggling to wash white crosses off the pavement. The crowd standing around them is men and boys, and a few young women too. The men dressed in the Party uniform have made themselves mob leaders, and they kick whoever stops scrubbing, or stand over them with a club. All of them retch hate: Fucking Jews! Dogs! Scrub up your shit! Josef is on his knees and scrubbing beside the others before he knows how it has happened. His hat has fallen off somewhere. He feels he is watching himself, that this Josef Tobak is another man, a man in a dream.

  This man Josef starts to scrub in his coat sleeves but then stops to take off his coat, and the man with the club comes to kick him. Through a wave of nausea he manages to throw off his coat and roll up his shirt sleeves. There is a motherish-looking middle-aged woman kneeling beside him; her soft flesh jiggles as she moves, and her eyes are wide and fearful. Two men in the crowd are yelling obscenities at her, and Josef works to scrub faster, beside her—to help her, he thinks; to draw attention away from her, he hopes. The crowd only laughs, makes animalistic panting noises at them to the rhythm of their scrubbing. The woman beside Josef is crying. The paint does not come off easily. The lye rips bare skin raw before it makes the pavement clean.

  Everything is slippery. Slime gets in through the skin. It covers everything, everyone: it’s in the hate of the mob, it’s in the loathing and fear and shame of the men and women on the ground, it’s in their clothing and hair, and the taste of it is in their mouths, bitter.