The Ghost Keeper

  Friedrich looks at Josef awhile, then off down the pier, at the grey sea that heaves beneath a grey sky. “I won’t bring it up,” he says at last. And then he turns to Josef to add, “I suspect it will still be there when you come back.”

  And though he smiles, Josef thinks, with a start: So, that is the future! A return to Vienna. Someday, he thinks—if there is a time after the Reich, if his country is free again. And how could this be? Impossible to know, but there it is: like a range of mountains in the far distance, a boundary to this greyish place of fleeing, even if for now it remains abstract. Josef thinks: First, my family. But then, someday: home.

  Part II

  1

  THE OCEAN I CROSS FROM EUROPE IS A BLACK ARC FROM sunrise to sunset. In my cabin, where I lie green with sick, I fix on the image of Leviathan asleep in the sea beneath us, pitching us up and down with his snoring.

  I have also an image of children running on the deck, their mother calling after them. They stand near the prow, and the horizon beyond them lifts and falls, lifts and falls.

  And also, a dream of a drowned man: his white puckered flesh, the wounds of fishes’ mouths around his eyes. He walks towards me and I wake suddenly, slick with my own cold sweat.

  THEN THIS: THE port at New York, customs officials and immigration officers and all manner of officiated chaos. Children with tags and parents craning their necks like birds. Memories of papers handed over to a man at a desk, of dull panic, of a language I can’t speak, green walls, a European fellow beside me on a bench saying (I think), “They don’t always like the way we smell.”

  Then an American stranger, Rudy Steiner, who appears at my side and knows my name; he is a fat, chuckling angel from God. He commands, I nod; I speak, he translates. My name is Tobak again, he tells me. Germans want to kill me: that’s all I need to say. I say a few words and he translates them into foreign eloquence, adds gestures and pitiful expressions. Immigration officials glance back and forth between us and tap their pencils.

  Once, Steiner says to me, still chuckling, as if it’s all a tricky sports match: “I thought you were a goner there. That agent’s had it up to here with refugee claimants.” He makes a gesture at throat level as he says it. And then he nudges me in the side and says, “But Mr. Tobak has friends in high places!”

  Next—what I believe is quarantine: a brick building and a chain-link fence; people stacked close in bunks. I listen to the chatter, but as origins slip farther from central Europe the conversation, to my ears, becomes babbling.

  There is for a time a Russian named Lev, who talks to me for hours. Always he starts a sentence in rough German but by the end of it has slipped into Russian, and I lose all sense of his meaning. He makes shapes with his long brown fingers when he talks; his eyes are wide and black with revelation. In a day or so he’s gone. I don’t know where.

  Then: my name called out, papers signed and stamped, congratulations from Steiner in German; my bags handed to me, my portfolios from the train, and all plastered with stickers I can’t read.

  Winter air; a car; Steiner driving. The name of a Jewish host family with cousins in Germany (and Steiner so proud to have found them for me). Buildings higher than I thought possible (am I dreaming again? is this sickness?), and the roads like rivers cutting through deep canyons, and bridges, and the names Manhattan, Long Island, Brooklyn, Queens. Friedrich Zimmel’s name as well is held out once or twice by Steiner like a pledge, but at this I can only nod.

  Grey water beneath the bridge. The sudden thought: That water reaches as far as Europe.

  Cars, carts, bicycles. Boys in the street chasing a ball. Houses smaller and farther apart as we drive. Trees. Quiet.

  At last: a two-storey house, painted brown. A woman and a man step out, waving. They are both roundish, dark-haired, kind-looking.

  “That is Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz,” Steiner says as the engine chokes into silence. “Their German is okay. You can say hello to them.”

  The woman, Mrs. Schwartz, smiles. She comes down the steps that lead from her door, she walks up to me, says, “Welcome, Mr. Tobak!” in beautiful, English-sounding German.

  I explode into tears; there’s no helping it.

  But she hugs me, and Mr. Schwartz comes and pats me on the back. He says, “You are very welcome, very welcome,” and Steiner chuckles. He is saying, “Well, well, well.”

  They tell me I’m thin, and that their cousin, a doctor, will be by. They lay their soft hands on my shoulders. They say, “Thank the Lord, thank the Lord.”

  Mr. Schwartz says, “This will make the young folks grateful for what they have in America!” and Steiner says, “Yes, yes.”

  A brown American house folds me into its warmth. I can’t know, then, that for eight years I will have to make-believe that this is home.

  2

  THERE BEGINS THIS COMMERCE IN LETTERS.

  Dear Josef,

  writes my wife.

  You’ll be shocked to hear that this letter stood the chance of never being written. I must confess that the villain in this drama is your son. Did you know that paper is considered a delicacy in Shanghai? I didn’t, but Tobias knew better and indulged in perhaps five or six pages’ worth before I reminded him that he’d need to save some room for dessert. I think I saved about three sheets; the rest are no doubt becoming a slightly larger little boy.

  Is she feeding herself? She tells me:

  I was feeling perfectly incompetent until I saw the neighbour trying to turn a coat for her grown-up son. Aha! I remembered—yes, I know how to turn coats. I had it done for her by the following evening and she brought us dinner as payment (nothing paper-based, thankfully). It made me happy: I feel like my father is still looking after us, even now. Mr. Aizenberg in the next house is a tailor with some good clients, and he said he might have work for me. Maybe he’ll send patterns, and then Tobias can help me go over them.

  Does she think of me? She writes:

  Here, we have old buildings, but not too old—ours at home are older. It’s very loud and busy, but we stay in such a small part of town that the city feels tight and small to me. Really, it goes on for miles and miles—who knows? Perhaps it goes on forever, and somewhere becomes Vienna and New York too. Maybe there’s a streetcar route that would take you here. We could meet for lunch. I’ll make you chicken soup.

  And my son? Yes, my son—she tells me:

  Tobias is as tall as the hem of my blue skirt when we’re both standing (and I haven’t let it down at all). He weighs about as much as a sack of potatoes (not a big one, a medium-sized one). His favourite word is “Spinne,” which does not bode well, if you ask me. We had a spider making a big web in the window and he watched it for hours; now every little crawling thing is die Spinne.

  I tell him about his Vati every day. Sometimes he points to people in the street and says, “Vati,” and sometimes he calls his toy mouse “Vati” when he’s playing. It’s ridiculous for a person to cry as much as I want to cry, so I give myself about fifteen minutes every afternoon while Tobias is napping and that just about does it.

  And his son signs a scribble, loops that set a father’s heart awhirl.

  These pages come from across the world. So a man in a quiet home, in a country not at war, writes to his love:

  There are parts of Manhattan where the buildings are so many times taller than the streets are wide that you almost never see the sun. Then again, there are neighbourhoods on Long Island where the houses are far apart and there are trees in between, and there are cemeteries and parks and gardens. There are the richest people in the world, driving cars like you wouldn’t believe, and buying clothes and jewellery that are probably just the sort of shiny whiteness your cinemas show. There are parts of the city so slashed by poverty that one can hardly believe this is really America: the children are like refugees of a long war. There’s also a Chinatown in Manhattan, and I have gone there a few times and tried to imagine that it’s like where my family lives. Is it, I wonder? Someday
I’ll take you there and you can tell me.

  I haven’t been quite well the whole time I’ve been here. I begin to see this illness as a chronic companion—weakness in my nerves or shortness of breath; I’m not sure what to call it, but it won’t leave me. There are so many kind doctors among my hosts’ friends that I’m quite over-diagnosed. I’m so fortunate to be among people who speak German. You know my Yiddish isn’t very good, and even if I thought I might understand a few words of English, people here speak it so quickly that I might as well be deaf for all I understand. But I have learned a few good phrases, so I can ask for directions to the train or a telephone if I get lost. And if I am getting lost, then I must be exploring, and if I’m exploring, then I must not be too sick.

  I wish that streetcar you imagined were real. I would spend everything I have to be where you are, Anna. I don’t have anything, really, but I would spend the nothing I have and I would work my way there, serving coffee to tourists or scrubbing the windowpanes. I hope you wouldn’t be ashamed of me, covered in soot or coffee-stained. Would you kiss me when you saw me? Would you recognize me? I will be the unwashed fellow at the station who is hugging your son.

  He draws a cat for his son—pencilled soft and blunt-faced, eating tuna from a can. Means it all as consolation. But then, in his weakness, this refugee tells his wife:

  I can’t explain how much I miss you. This sickness, the situation, all of it is enough to drive me completely mad; still, the Lord let it happen, and so I must believe He has some intention for us. I try to believe this, and difficult as it is, it helps to think that your father certainly would have believed it. Someday before too long, my love, we will be back together and this whole ridiculous period of time will be as if it were nothing. And when that happens—I won’t describe what I’ll do, because it will make your neighbours blush if they find this paper lying around.

  He goes on like this, working for Herschel Schwartz’s firm—accounts, sums (such things as have no language)—and meanwhile hoping and writing his letters, from the autumn of his arrival to the autumn three years later. He pays his hosts from his salary, he saves what’s left, and they don’t let him speak of leaving. In September before the first year is up, Germany invades Poland, and now half the world is at war (and it’s good, they all say, it’s good: at last someone does something). The next summer, Germany invades France, and then he must stay home sick several days. He writes a letter to Paris that won’t receive an answer. But Giorgio will look after them, he tells himself.

  Two of the teenaged nieces want to learn German, and he tutors them three evenings a week for an hour at a time, teaches them (besides “How do you do” and “When will the next train leave for Graz?”) to drink strong coffee with whipped cream and to read German poetry aloud. The girls swoon over Rilke, and wonder between themselves, in private, if this foreigner is flirting with them. (He isn’t, but he imagines sometimes that if he teaches them well enough, these American-born girls might remember Vienna.)

  But then it is December of 1941, and his last letter from Anna is almost a month old. He wakes up on the morning of the seventh to find Herschel and Edith Schwartz conferring in hushed voices beside the radio, and Herschel’s friend Leon sitting at the breakfast table and tutting to anyone who will listen. The newspaper is on the table, and Josef picks it up before anyone thinks to warn him.

  If he didn’t know English well enough by now, the size of the headlines would have spoken to him—or perhaps the photograph of an aircraft carrier, American, burning into nothing might have explained everything. But it is a simple fact, a faraway fact but so suddenly close, because Japanese-occupied China was not, in the end, far enough away from Europe.

  He sits staring down at this table as if blind as Herschel explains that it’s a good thing, it’s good; that this spells the end for Hitler and that the war in Europe is about to turn. But, for this horrible moment, he would trade it all, all of Europe, everyone, for a woman and a little boy in Shanghai whom he has suddenly, today, failed utterly to protect.

  3

  Anna:

  Tell me you are all right. I don’t know what to think. I never imagined as many airplanes could exist as I see in the newspapers. Sometimes it seems there will be no one left at the end of this. But I mustn’t think that way; after all, I know you are being brave. You’re always brave, my Anna. Keep being brave. Find a way to live through this, and tell Tobias I want him to look after you. He will be brave to protect you, I know he will. But he must also be sensible.

  The Lord bless and protect you both, my loves. I am troubling Him constantly to look after you, so He can’t pretend to forget, not for a second, no matter what calamities are happening in the world. He’s numbered the stars in the heavens, they say, and so I suppose He has done for the hairs on your head, my darling. I wish I had thought to do that. I regret everything I don’t know about you.

  The war does not turn so fast as they had hoped, and there is the draft now, though it does not affect the Schwartz family so personally, right away, as it does others. Herschel is too old, and Josef himself too ill. He is called in to an office in Manhattan, once, for a long interview—he is an enemy alien here, say the men in suits—but the refugee claim is a strong one, and this thin, quiet man staring through spectacles at them is no threat to the United States, they deem. He is sent home with new papers, stamped and signed, to be renewed each month.

  The girls stop coming for German lessons. German is right out.

  F—

  Have you heard from A? From Z? Or anyone? Send word of any kind, please.

  J

  Darling,

  I pray that this one will make it to you. I won’t say a thing about the war, and maybe that will help. I will just say that I miss our baby’s soft little head and his breath that smells like bread, and it hurts to think that that baby doesn’t exist anymore but that there’s a wild and thoughtful little boy for me to love, instead. Tell him I do love him, though I don’t know him. I have kept a space in my heart for him, so big and so liberal, that he can’t possibly outgrow it in any dimension of his personality. As soon as I meet him I will nestle it more closely around him, his real self. Oh my love, I do try to do this.

  Sometimes I wonder whether there might be some kind gentleman in Shanghai who wants to look after you and Tobias, who would take you in and have you for his own. What would I do? What could I say? It makes my breath stop, just thinking about it. My mouth goes dry. But Anna, I mean this: if things are terrible, if you are desperate, I will forgive you anything. Only please live.

  But my love! Please, if you can, please wait for me. There will never be anyone else for me.

  There is snow outside my window. Is there ever snow where you are? Tell me anything, but please write.

  Here, the man Josef is lost in a dream. He wanders up and down and through his life, and the neighbourhood children tolerate him when he comes up to them and pats their heads and asks their ages.

  “Five years old,” says a boy, and the man says, “My son also is five years old!” And he gives the boy a penny, and the other boys say, “I’m five too,” or, “I just turned six,” and penny, penny, penny from his pocket to each boy. They laugh at all his misused words and hold their fingers up as rings around their eyes, peer at him through the holes; but he likes to see them laugh, and he laughs too. They get tired out by the way he clasps his hands and looks at them with that strange, starved intensity. They run off shouting down the street. The soles of their shoes in the sun flash up like the tails of deer.

  He has a pile of old letters in his room beside his bed, and every night he reads them before he sleeps. The pile is not so big as he would wish it, but not so small that he has yet memorized every word. Sometimes he falls asleep before the last page, and the papers are scattered across his bed in the morning like fallen leaves. Sometimes he reads them through and cannot sleep, and then reads them through again and then lies staring at the ceiling, or out the window at the flat gr
ey sky with so very few stars—he could number them on two hands, the stars of New York.

  He works on Schwartz’s numbers, day by day, tallies and figures and papers spread across his desk at the office, with rulers and tables and with ink on his fingers. He works and he squints, and he works when he is weary and when he feels ill. Sometimes, though—once or twice a month, perhaps—for a few days he is too sick to go in to work. He stays in bed and he cannot read. He holds on to handfuls of bedding. Edith Schwartz brings him his soup in bed, and shakes her head as she leaves his room. But on the days he is well, he works hard.

  Dear Zilla, Mutti, Papa—

  If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you’ve escaped Paris and gone somewhere better—England, maybe, though no place in Europe seems quite safe. Dear Zilla, I love you, and if I can do anything to help you and Giorgio to get out of danger, please find a way to tell me.

  Josef also prays during this time. He isn’t a holy man, he is no mystic, and it does not come easily to him, this communion with God. God is a great white silence, he feels, and the certainty he felt as a youth is just a memory now. When he is praying, there is a space in him that reaches back forever, to the first moment he knew himself, and then again forward into that blankness.

  And in the midst of that: Anna, Tobias, like a seal on his heart, and like a weight around his neck. When he prays, their faces are light and oil, painted colour and calligraphy behind his eyes; but it isn’t how he wants them. He wants them, flesh and blood, fingernails and knit stockings, here, in his arms.

  4

  DURING THESE YEARS HE THINKS ALSO, IT’S TRUE, OF Friedrich Zimmel. In Josef’s mind are two pictures of his friend, and either one could keep him up at night.

  In the first, a man Josef used to know, having saluted for too many years, forgets himself in the maelstrom of propaganda and becomes exactly who he is pretending to be. How proud this man must be of his factory, manufacturing his Party’s munitions. How it must disgust him, if he remembers it, to think he wasted so many years pining after a Jewish girl and supporting her feeble brother. They ask him for information on the Jewish community in Vienna and he gives it to them. He remembers, perhaps, a Czechoslovakian woman whose safety he deigned to care about awhile. He can send them after her. Josef imagines he gets some satisfaction from it. He says a word, and they’re taken: power like that. And meanwhile his compatriots are pleased to help him forget who he was.