The Ghost Keeper

  The Währing cemetery he tears down, of course.

  The other picture: A red band tightens round his arm like a blood pressure cuff, so he tears it off. I can’t support this, he says—though he can’t say it to many. Once they see he’s serious: To prison with you, to the prison camps; or perhaps right away he’s hanged. His former workers who thought they might go to him if in peril are suddenly without answers. Without his protection, a Czechoslovakian woman and her family are rooted out and deported. Who is left to speak a word or sign a paper or find money for food or lodging or escape? Vienna is a desert of unsympathy.

  The Währing cemetery, naturally, they tear down.

  AND FORGIVE ME, forgive me as I can’t forgive myself, that the cemetery merits inclusion in this; for still, every time I think of it, after the thought of every person makes me faint with helplessness, this quiet green space with broken stones sinks heavy into my heart. This feels already like mourning. The rest of it brings panic; the graveyard makes me weep.

  All my clothes ought to be torn, I know this. But it’s all mystery during those years, you see. How strange to set it down and live it all again. Recall it: I didn’t know then that a man like Friedrich could find or lose himself in a thousand ways, not two.

  5

  SNOW, AND RAIN, AND HOT SUN, AND COUSINS AND neighbours off to war; aunts and nieces to the factories; blue stars and gold in the windows, a blood star worn in the heart, invisible, and two bright stars over China and so many, so small, blinking over Europe. This is how the world goes.

  A man comes to them from Montreal, from Canada. His name is Samuel Grubler; he is Schwartz’s cousin, according to some formula. He’s in New York for business, but Josef could not say what this might be. When the family sits at the table together, they talk about the news and of family who are or are not accounted for. Grubler is young; he has a daughter just Tobias’s age, or a few years older. He was almost in the navy, he tells them. He appeared for training, but before they could ship him over, they discovered his secret: he could not move his right hand.

  Schwartz laughs when he hears this. “You didn’t last through a day of training, if that’s the case. How could you even get drafted?”

  “Look!” Grubler holds both his hands up high. They look normal, Josef sees. Grubler picks up his knife with his hand and it’s fine, it’s fine—except that if you look closely, how the fingers aren’t really clasped, and the knife rests balanced on his middle finger.

  “Perhaps it didn’t take them so long,” he says. “But I thought, if I could go over, I could do some good.”

  “You could endanger someone’s life, you mean, with hands like that,” Edith Schwartz says. “Better to stay at home and work from here. Make the things we can send overseas.”

  “Ah.” Samuel Grubler shrugs and looks down into his dinner. Josef’s heart moves out towards him: this picture of his safer self.

  Later, they sit together on the front steps. The evening hangs indigo above the trees. Samuel Grubler pops the joints on his paralyzed hand, pulling the fingers one by one.

  “You ever come to Montreal?” Grubler asks.

  “No,” Josef says. “I haven’t really left New York.”

  “Well, you come visit, when you can,” he tells Josef. “Maybe it’s not so different from this place, compared to where you’re from, but it’s a different flavour. And people speak French!”

  Josef listens to the pop, pop, pop of the man’s fingers. “I can speak a little French,” he says. “Not so well, but my English isn’t great either.”

  “It’s fine.” Grubler waves his good hand. “Everybody’s an immigrant here.”

  Josef stuffs his hands into his pockets. Still the evenings aren’t warm, this time of year. It’s early in May.

  “Were you born in Canada?” he asks.

  “No, I was born in a little town near Hamburg. But my family moved to Canada when I was three. I don’t remember Germany.” He sighs. “I’m glad. I’m ashamed of it!”

  Josef’s heart twists. “Not everyone over there is a Nazi,” he says. Grubler gives him a look that says, Let’s not kid ourselves. Josef says: “I think of my country, and it confuses me too. But think of all those people who are suffering! They’re Austrians too.”

  “The Jews, you mean,” Grubler says. “But will they still want to be Austrian, after all of this?”

  Josef stares across the street. The twilight blurs the trees and doorways into shadow. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know anything.”

  Grubler sits and chews this thought for a while, popping his fingers. He says, “You have a little boy, then.”

  “Yes,” says Josef, “his name is Tobias. He is seven years old.”

  The other man nods. “He’s with his mother?”

  “In Shanghai. Yes. We had to leave Vienna separately.”

  “Ah.” A noise of compassion, and Josef knows he doesn’t have to explain further. Grubler asks, “Do you have a photo of them?”

  “Anna sent me one when Tobias was two.” Josef has it in his wallet, folded in his pocket: the little boy on his mother’s lap, big dark eyes shining at a photographer, not quite smiling but with a readiness to smile. And Anna is quiet humour, smallness and light—that gentleness! How much of that warmth did she give, at the time, for me?—Josef has wondered it daily.

  Grubler takes the photo and nods at it. “Very handsome. Very beautiful family,” he says. “But this must be old.”

  “This is from—yes, four years ago.” Josef sighs. Receives the photo back and tucks it into the wallet in a practised way that stops the corners from bending. “I haven’t had anything from them since the war in the Pacific started.”

  Grubler peers at him awhile after he says it. Josef knows that in the space between them hangs all the possibility this statement entails. He turns his face away and towards the end of the street, where a gang of children are playing tag. Their shadows are living creatures in the twilight.

  Grubler coughs. “My little Sarah,” he says, “is nine, and she can’t talk about anything but horses.”

  A smile he can’t help—and Josef tilts his ear back to this man. “You have a horse?” he asks.

  “Lord, no! We live in the city. She hardly even sees them, except in her books. We stop and look at the horse-drawn carts whenever they go by, and she tells me everything about each one of the horses: how big he is in hands, what his colour is called, everything. And she makes things up too, like his name and his favourite food and the sort of friends he has.” Grubler’s cheeks are red and his good hand clasps his bad. “You know, I think, if I had a bit of money, there is nothing in the world that would make me happier than to get her one of her own.”

  Josef smiles—thinks of another Sarah, the one in Austria, and her daughter. “There were horses everywhere when I was a boy,” he says. “I hardly ever thought about them. Perhaps sometimes in the rain or the snow, or if they were pulling a very heavy cart, I pitied them.”

  Samuel Grubler laughs. “Yes, it was the same with me.”

  And Josef would like to say, My son talks about airplanes, or, He reads his comic books over and over, or anything like that, specific and individual—but he doesn’t know.

  Night comes, and the children at the end of the street disappear into houses. Josef and Samuel Grubler sit awhile in the new quiet, through the dark, before turning back to the house, and to sleep.

  THE NEXT DAY, the war in Europe ends.

  Josef is in Schwartz’s office, working on the accounts, when it comes over the radio: unconditional surrender of all the German forces. All these people around him shouting, hugging, running into the streets. Someone has put a drink in his hand, someone is singing. A moment ago they were huddled around the radio; now they are out on the street, and people are hugging strangers, waving bright American flags. A woman in her doorway collapses altogether; Josef thinks, without knowing if it’s true, Now her son will come home.

  The man at the corner
store is handing every person he sees an ice cream cone. Boys weave their bicycles through the crowds; they let their bells sing out.

  Josef meanwhile does not know what sort of face he is wearing. A string tied to his heart is vibrating, a violin string, or a fishing line.

  Today the air is alive, today even grief is sweetened with joy. He cannot find the words to ask his questions. So he puts the questions away. He sings instead, in English, with strangers: Bring them home, bring them home!

  6

  GRUBLER LEAVES FOR CANADA THAT AFTERNOON. HE says, laughing, “I wish I could have been home for this! Oh, my heart, my girls!” He dances to the car; he swings his suitcase in wide arcs.

  When for a moment the house is quiet—the Schwartzes visiting neighbours—Josef sits and thinks about Shanghai. The war in the Pacific has not ended. Josef thinks, They can have no hope, the Japanese. Perhaps it will be tomorrow. Perhaps it will be in a week. Perhaps in two. And when could one hope to hear word from China? He makes the calculations in his head, makes them more generous as he considers the administrative chaos that would follow the end of hostilities. His hope stretches out from him to follow the projected date.

  Of course it is possible too that the Japanese forces will become more terrible, more violent; they might take everything down with them. Or the Allies might pound them too hard, Josef thinks; there could be more civilian casualties.

  And now he stops thinking of this. If you have to think, pray, says his mind, and he bends his head a moment to let his longing speak.

  THE FIRST TIME there are photographs in Life magazine—it could be Victory in Europe has not even been declared before it happens—Josef finds Mrs. Schwartz and her friend huddled over a copy of it, whispering—and when they see him, they fold it and pull it aside. “No, no—don’t look at this right now, Mr. Tobak. Wait a little while, have a drink.”

  He feels his face go white. Theirs are almost sick-looking and his first thought is: Shanghai! “Please show me,” he says, holding out his hand. “I must see it.”

  “Sit down first, sit down.” Mrs. Schwartz pulls out a chair for him and he settles into it with his knees already starting to tremble. “It’s about the camps, Josef. They printed pictures.”

  He thinks: Camps in China? But then realizes, with his stomach shrunk suddenly to the size of a pea, that they mean Europe.

  “The prison camps,” he says.

  “And worse,” says this friend of Mrs. Schwartz. “You see, they just meant to kill everyone. Really, kill them!”

  “Show me the pictures.”

  (It isn’t as if I hadn’t heard, like everyone, that things were much worse in the camps than they had been in 1938, or that there was torture and murder and sadism and hate. Over the weeks since the beginning of April, with more and more of Europe coming out from under the Nazi heel, we heard stories. But always I thought: This is an exaggeration, of course. This information is second-hand, and they already hate the Germans, so of course the story comes out this way.)

  And now this man I was, safe in New York, sits looking at a picture of the bodies laid out in a row beside the road, and he is very calm, peering at one indistinct face after another and trying to see if he recognizes any of them. When the faces become too little and grainy to make out, he starts back at the beginning of the row, to be sure.

  “The journalist says that’s not the worst of it, either,” says this woman.

  “Hilda, be quiet awhile,” says Mrs. Schwartz.

  At some point that day, he looks up to find a bowl of lukewarm soup by his elbow and doesn’t know how it got there. But it doesn’t matter, he thinks. He goes back to the pictures. When he looks up again, someone has taken the soup away.

  IN THE LONG heat of the last day of July, and with warplanes still flying over the Pacific, there comes a letter from Vienna. From Friedrich Zimmel, in fact. Mrs. Schwartz wears a wide-eyed expression when she hands it to Josef in the kitchen, as if she doesn’t know whether to rejoice or curse with him. He receives the envelope and sits with it awhile; he runs his fingers over the address, the strange stamp.

  After he opens it, while he’s reading it, Schwartz and his friends come into the kitchen. Tom and Jens. Josef knows them, though he doesn’t look up—and they pour coffee from the pot on the stove and talk to each other.

  Jens asks, over his coffee, “What’s that letter, Tobak?”

  Josef swallows and glances up. “It just came from Vienna.”

  “From who?” Tom picks up the envelope. They all look at it.

  “Aha! From your Nazi friend!”

  “What’s he want now?”

  “Probably some help getting out of trouble, eh?”

  “Here’s what I would do,” says Tom. “I’d shit in a box and send it back, airmail.”

  Jens waves his hand. “Ah, it wouldn’t clear customs.”

  “Anyway, a bomb is better.”

  “That must be a shock, Josef,” is all Herschel Schwartz says. Josef looks up at him, and nods, and goes back to reading.

  “I wish they’d round them all up,” says Jens, “and shoot them.”

  “And then what?” says Schwartz. “Then half of Europe’s dead. That’s what you want?”

  “He probably was at these camps himself, your damned patron,” Jens says to Josef.

  Josef leans farther over the letter, forehead crinkled, and he tells them: “He says he hid a Jewish girl in his house. My cousin. She survived the purges.”

  They gather around behind him, trying to peer down at the pages, but Josef hunches so deeply into the text they can’t see past him.

  “Maybe there were others like that,” says Schwartz, quiet.

  “Probably he kept her for his amusement,” says Tom, but Jens hits his arm.

  Jens says, “If it’s true, then Herschel is right: there might have been others.”

  “And meanwhile, this man perpetuated their horrors by churning out weapons. Who knows if the war would have ended sooner, if he hadn’t?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. They would have replaced him.”

  “But why shouldn’t they all have refused? It takes a willing population, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Schwartz rubs his forehead. “Anyway, he helped Josef and his family, and now this girl—who knows what else he might have done?”

  Josef has left them to their discussion. He reads; he tries to pull together this sudden truth.

  Josef:

  You will be surprised to receive this letter, I suspect. I write to you from Vienna, from my same old house: as of yesterday, it’s now part of the American-occupied quarter. I am thankful—the Soviet occupation was something I will not soon forget, though I would like to. But it seems impossible that my house should still be standing, and that I should be writing to you at all! Dear Josef, I hope with all my heart that this will reach you. Please reply, if it does.

  I don’t know what you’ve heard about us and our situation. There was a great deal of bombing, and then when the Soviets came there was fighting in the streets. The factory was hit in the campaigns over the winter, and there was then some suggestion of my leaving the city, but I found a way around that. Then in the last days of fighting I was nearly conscripted (how desperate they were, Josef—they were enlisting everyone; it was a death sentence), but it was chaos by then and I gambled on the hunch that I had a better chance hiding out here as a deserter than being ground to mincemeat in the retreat. I was right: the Soviets took the city almost the next day.

  I must tell you that there has been a Jewish girl staying hidden in my house these past several years: your relation Lena Kostner, Mrs. Sarah Kostner’s daughter. She is now nineteen. I was worried about her, as some in the second wave of Soviet soldiers were said to be raping Austrian women. When they came to my house they didn’t find her, but they beat me and took me to jail. There they beat me further, but I was not surprised, really. I was happy they did not kill me. When the Russian
officer came to question me he was lenient and let me send a message back to my home, where Lena could find it. Later some American officers questioned me, and let me take them to see my house: when they met Lena she told them about how she hid there for so many years, and these officers took this as a sign of good faith and let me stay in my home. What I told them about you, and about Anna and the others, was also helpful. Still, they watch me carefully. They can arrest me any time they like, and that is, I know, as it should be.

  Lena has left. It is what I expected; she hasn’t been outside the house these six years. Her mother, alas, was deported, and I harbour no hope that she lived. Lena is staying with some American Red Cross nurses, who seem very kind. She talks about emigrating. I will try to help her, if I can. I don’t know if I will be allowed, but for now I am hopeful.

  There was also, at the beginning of the war, some business I had with visas for other Jews—that fact helped me too. I suppose it was much like the situation with you and Anna. (Though I never escorted anyone to his ship again, it’s true.) Anyway, the occupiers know it now, and it makes them sympathetic.

  It is very, very difficult to get anything in this city and the black market is thriving. Food is scarce, and very bad. German money is worth basically nothing. The Soviet soldiers more or less stripped my house so now I have very little to trade with. I don’t think I’ll starve; still, it’s distressing.

  I decided to write to you immediately in case you were planning on coming back right away. I would say to you: wait awhile. Wait until the supply chains have improved, until there is food to be had and more of the roads are made safe. I have been thinking of going to my father’s old villa in the western countryside, if I am allowed; perhaps conditions are better there. I will write to you and you can plan to join me when you get word. Please write to let me know how long you can wait, and when Anna and Tobias might join you.