The Ghost Keeper

  I am glad for the clattering in the kitchen, I am glad for the voices all around us and the sounds from the street. I look down at the lines in my hands, the white mountains my knuckles make through thin skin.

  In October, there was the letter from the embassy in Paris:

  Dear Mr. Tobak:

  Given the number of inquiries received in recent months, we are unable to devote a great deal of time to individual cases. I regret to inform you that we cannot at this time provide any information on the persons named in your letter.

  Sincerely, etc.

  I tell Schwartz, “I don’t know that it’s anything more or less than a compulsion.”

  And he sighs and waves his hands and says, “Ah, well . . .”

  I don’t mean to sound hopeless.

  Friedrich wrote it in his letter, early in the autumn. He also wrote:

  I don’t write what I write out of despair or to cast my own morbid shadow across the world. I only mean to tell you the truth, Josef. I hate that I must insist on this. Your hope is like a knife in me. Understand, please: they tried so hard to take everyone. They tore houses apart. It was systematic.

  I wrote back:

  But remember, you were able to save someone.

  He said:

  But see how much freedom I had, and how little even I did.

  Is it about what you did? I didn’t do enough, either, while I was there. If we’d all done enough, perhaps this would never have happened. For your sake, for everyone’s sake: be a better man now, but don’t despise yourself.

  And his next letter, dropping this line of conversation (or perhaps, in his way, hammering a full stop on the end of it), said only,

  I spoke to a man who said he knew Anna’s family. He believes her mother, her aunt and Jakob were deported several years ago, most likely to Mauthausen. It seems most probable that Chaim died in police custody.

  I send my most heartfelt condolences to your family, and to Anna especially. There is no kind way of delivering this news, but I felt obliged to tell you. If I hear anything more, I will let you know right away.

  And then, how to pass this on to Anna—how to write it?

  My darling,

  Friedrich has written with some terrible news.

  Anna,

  I need to tell you at the start that this letter bears bad news.

  Anna, my love,

  This letter, I am so sorry to say, will contain very sad news.

  I had to keep throwing out the letters I began to write; in the end, I tossed my pen in the bin. My mind unable to fix on its task: reaching east to argue with Friedrich. Who was this person who claimed to know them? How could he have known? How did he remember? Perhaps, I wanted to cry, they lived, they’re recovering, they’re making do in refugee camps and awaiting the day they’ll be able to find us, or that we’ll find them.

  I wrote it again and again: Anna, I’m so sorry, but I must tell you—

  But now that’s passed; now it is December, and I am with Schwartz in the delicatessen in the city, and he is telling me that he understands why I have to go back to Vienna.

  “Everything I hear tells me there’s barely any hope,” I tell him. “When I think of what we know, I could run away from everyone, everything.”

  Schwartz peers at me through squinted eyes. “Still, there’s some chance, isn’t there?”

  My hands rise and fall again into my lap. “I have to act as if there is.”

  A month earlier Friedrich wrote, in a scrawl that seemed to speak of grief or drink:

  Josef, I have held back writing this. I have no right to say it. But I wish so desperately that you were here! You can’t imagine this terrible, soft hell: everyone is excused, but no one is forgiven. I need you to look at me, Josef, and see me, and understand the person I am and decide whether you can forgive me or not. I don’t know who is left to do this besides you.

  Do you know that no one goes to your graveyards anymore? I think of you every time I walk by the walls in the park. I haven’t told you: those walls were partially damaged, but not destroyed, and though I think more of the trees and branches have fallen, I don’t think anyone went to dig up the graves, thank God. And I don’t think I would really notice or care about this—that’s the kind of person I am, you see—unless it all made me think of you.

  Josef, I wish you were here! I will go to my villa if they let me, I can’t stand the city any longer. Please write to me. Let me know when you might be able to come back to Austria. I am sure I could help somehow with the paperwork. I could expedite things.

  Tell me soon what you want. There is nothing to do here but wait.

  I wrote to Anna: I can look for our families in Austria, and Friedrich can help me. It was as true as anything I’d ever put into words. But there was behind all this, also, that tug from across the water, almost enough to drive me mad in my helplessness—the tug that hardened into pain when I read “no one goes to your graveyards anymore.” Faces filling from ghostly almost into flesh. Already Edith has caught me twice in the hallway with my hand clenched against my chest, my body bent partway to the floor, and asked me if she should call a doctor. No, no, I told her, no, I’m all right, it’s just faintness, it’s nothing. (A barbed hook through my heart, but it’s true, it’s nothing.)

  Dear Josef,

  Lena does not want to be in touch with you right now. That’s all I could gather. She wrote back to me, “No, thank you—not yet.”

  I know this must be hard for you, but it’s what she thinks she needs. I know you’ll honour that. I made sure she knew she could ask for help here if ever she needed it. Perhaps someday she’ll be ready to talk to you, but not now.

  I recall her mother’s message to me from a decade ago, which said, No, thank you; which seemed to say, You failed me, all of you. I tell myself: That’s not what Lena said. It’s not that. But the ache still comes. I carry it along with everything else.

  Anna has said, in her letters: I had thought we might meet you in America. And I wrote to her: Of course you will, certainly. But first, does it not make sense . . . And then a foolish rush of words, whatever I thought of saying: repeated rumours of refugees reunited in Red Cross camps, or the things Friedrich’s said to me, or what I imagine, or things only half-true, or things truer than what I ought to know. I crossed out half of it before I sent it to her; I wrote “I’m sorry” in the margins.

  But she wrote back: Perhaps you understand it better than I do. And later she wrote again: Perhaps you are right.

  I have sent her a photo of myself and the Schwartzes. Herschel’s and Edith’s faces in it are kind and broad, if shy. My own face always looks odd to me: pale, pointed, somehow embarrassed, and with eyes that might be either childish or suspicious—through glasses, in black and white, it’s hard to tell which. But when our friend took the photo, I tried to imagine it was Anna and Tobias behind the camera, and I looked into the lens as I wished I could look at them. Could they understand that?

  Then, in Friedrich’s last letter to me:

  I want you to know that this isn’t a beautiful place right now, nor am I beautiful, nor lovable, nor half-respectable. I have heard someone say that this is when people need love the most, and I would agree with him—only I hate myself for being this way, and I can hardly hope that you might feel differently.

  Josef, I want you to come. I will be terrible company when you arrive, but I will be better for you being here, and after a while I’ll be well again, you’ll see.

  Now Schwartz says to me, “You wouldn’t think of doing it if it weren’t for the good.”

  The sadness in his eyes—I want to meet him in it, take his hands and say, Herschel Schwartz, I know it too! I know it too! But instead I say, “It’s still very surreal. And anyway, the whole continent’s in crisis right now. They can barely feed themselves. I imagine I won’t stay for long.” (Do I imagine that? Do I believe it?)

  Schwartz sighs; he leans forward onto his elbows. The human rumble all around us i
s American and English and beautiful as things in a film are beautiful, and also foreign. “Well, a man will fight for his family,” he says. “And his home, if he can find one.”

  10

  SO MUCH CAN BE CONDENSED INTO SO LITTLE, AS I recall it. It must have been a long trip back to Vienna. I remember it as dark sea, cramped passenger cars, terrible food and not much of it. Anxiety that swelled inside me as my train wormed deeper into Europe; a thought that someone would grab me by the arm and arrest me for nothing. An instinct that I should not tell anyone my name.

  A real passport with my real name tucked into my coat: that I do remember—the trouble getting it, the fear of showing it. But see, little Tobak: it’s all right, they don’t care much anyway. They stamp it with very few questions. They let you through.

  In the train station, in my city, there’s dirt and rubble, true, but at this threshold I encounter also the shock of recognition. The arches in the high walls (three above each lower set of two), the shallow angle of iron beams in the roof—all the same. These places kept existing; the city went on all these years. It strikes me at first as a cruel joke.

  Friedrich Zimmel, when he meets me, is not the same. When I step off the train, he’s twenty feet from me, and I see him at once. We stare at each other a long time without moving. He’s so much heavier-set than I remember. His hair is thinning. There’s a ruddy puffiness about his cheeks and eyes. I feel, all of a sudden, so very tired.

  “My God,” Friedrich says then, “you’re exactly the same.”

  Later, when I go with him to see about ration cards, a man in line with us misunderstands and takes me for an American. He tells me, “It’s a shame you’ve come to the city now. We’ve had a terrible time since the invasion.”

  “Since thirty-eight, in fact,” Friedrich corrects him.

  “Yes, that’s what I meant,” the man says, and peers at me a moment with narrowed eyes.

  I remember the weather in those months as variations on grey. What we get as rations leaves me feeling always empty.

  IN THE FIRST while, and then over time, certain things become clear.

  I learn that Friedrich’s source on Anna’s family is a man who lived on their street, a Gentile who was the only man in his building for all of 1943. Anna’s mother and Jakob were taken to Mauthausen, where Ella died and Jakob, having survived the first two years there, was taken on a train to the death camps in the east. Chaim was arrested earlier on. Executed, perhaps by hanging, perhaps at gunpoint. My Babka also has vanished, with no record to be found. And I pray, and cling to some small hope, that she died peacefully in her apartment with her cats. Is it fair to believe this?

  In Paris, it seems Zilla and my mother and father were arrested by the French gendarmes in 1941 and sent to the Drancy internment camp and then to the eastern reaches of the Reich by train. Certainly there is no record I can find of them alive after this year. Of Giorgio Repaci, we can find nothing—whether because he too is dead or simply vanished to another corner of the world, there’s no hint.

  Sarah Kostner and her mother were taken on the transports to the east. From Lena Kostner, the girl who survived, I hear nothing. She’s emigrated, Friedrich says. I try to make peace with this. It’s good that she’s free—free to separate herself from all of this, if she chooses. Believe that, Josef Tobak. Put away that old shame.

  I have folded in a book a list of family and friends who are gone, and I go through it sometimes, or add to it, or make notes as things become more clear, but I hate this list. I walk in the old cemetery on Seegasse, where the earth lies naked, and the bones that remain, unmarked. During the occupation, the community buried the stones to stop them being destroyed, so now, in this courtyard, or perhaps in a secret place in the Zentralfriedhof, Simeon’s stone fish lurks in darkness. And I find I prefer the memory of these stones (stones that are real; could be unearthed in a moment, like a magic trick, ball beneath a silk handkerchief) to my list in black ink that seems to murder each name as I write it. There is another kind of information I would rather receive about each person, the types of things we rarely spoke about, but individual and beautiful, blessed.

  In the Seegasse cemetery, and in the Zentralfriedhof, the headstones await their resurrection. Under the earth, Simeon’s fish still curls up at the clouds. But I am alone here, as I usually am. The squirrels make their nests in the trees up above, the grass is green, and the earth under everything is cold, and dark, and still.

  11

  Anna,

  I write, in the autumn of 1946.

  Anna, my love, how do I say this to you? Here is the simple truth: I believe that the easiest and fastest way for us to be together is to be here, in this new Austria. Would you come back to Vienna? My love, it’s so strange here, but stranger by far without you. Yet more and more I feel it to be still my home, though changed—like anything is, after a long time away. I know you would feel the same. And I can’t help thinking that if (by some miracle) some person we knew were living, he might seek us out here. It may be that someone would come back.

  Is that sensible? Oh, it’s unlikely—my mind’s all muddled, Anna. But I feel rooted here, despite everything. I thought we’d been uprooted, really and completely, and all the dirt shaken off; but I see now that it wasn’t so. I find myself fairly fluent in this city, changed though it is. Would you come back here? Would Tobias want to live here? There are children here, young children, despite everything.

  Josef, you crazy fellow—Are you sick again? Are you insisting, or are you only pondering it?

  I won’t insist. If you hate the thought, write to me and tell me, and I’ll kill this yearning with a word. (Bad, silly heart.) But really, it isn’t so terrible, love. I know this city. I know the roads and the language. You understand the difference it makes—not to be a foreigner in a place.

  I think you would really feel at home.

  (But there is always New York, or perhaps Canada. There are ways of getting us all there. It wouldn’t kill me. It could do me good, perhaps.)

  (But please consider.)

  I wish I understood.

  I wish I could explain.

  We want to be with you, Josef. My Josef, I want to be with you.

  Come be with me. Here I am, right here. It needn’t be forever. But for now.

  For now. All right, then, Josef. For now.

  12

  IN THAT TIME, I AM STAYING WITH FRIEDRICH ZIMMEL. His old house is changed: all the upstairs and most of the rooms he used for entertaining are closed off, and we eat together in his kitchen. It is because he can’t afford to heat it all, he tells me, and also because the new occupiers took most of his furniture. In this new way of experiencing old things, so much is overturned—for now I’ve walked in on my friend brewing black market coffee, or heating canned beans on the stove. It hadn’t occurred to me before that I’d never seen him, even in my mind’s eye, cook anything.

  My friend is a man like the bombed-out parts of our city. I don’t know how else to see it. The hammocks of skin beneath his eyes, his trembling hands: this is his very self.

  Since I arrived in Vienna, Friedrich has told me next to nothing of his experiences during the war, has in fact avoided me in his own house. I thought, from his letters, that he meant to unburden himself as soon as he could. That he’d sit with me long hours and tell me everything that made him doubt himself. (And: “Friedrich,” I’d tell him, “you were only a man. Only a man.”—I’m sure I would.) But he doesn’t say anything. Or—he cannot, I conjecture. The way he looks at me, that slow glance from odd angles: I sense it is a door in his loneliness nudged open, barely, but he does not press it further.

  About my friend, how the war has changed him, there remains much to be said. And I will lay these things out; I will find a way and a place. But in that time, it was not my first concern; and now, in writing it, I find I have to gather myself to examine it. I will; indeed, I must. But a little while longer. For now: the business of his help, and my wife and chi
ld who must be brought from so far away.

  Friedrich does not, in those days, have much money at his disposal. When, seated in his kitchen, I tell him I have persuaded Anna and Tobias to join me, but that I must now find a means to help them get here, he says, “Just think how simple that would have been a decade ago.”

  My heart falls a little at this. Without considering it seriously, I’d come to count on the promises in his early letters—that he could help us reunite. “You don’t think it’s possible?”

  “That’s not it. It’s quite possible.” He offers me a smile that seems to strain against heaviness. “But not by the same means. We’ll have to speak with the authorities, that’s all. I’m sure I can put it to them in a way that makes sense.”

  As I sit considering this, he says, “Here, Josef—don’t worry. It’s exactly the right thing. I promised I would help you come back. I don’t say such things idly. I still have some leverage here.”

  He says it so simply—he doesn’t doubt it. I don’t see how this could be, and yet consider: despite everything, he is allowed to live in his old house, and host guests; and in the time since I joined him, I’ve seen him leave for meetings with French, American, British police officers and diplomats. No large proportion of these meetings interrogations, either, from what I can tell.

  “Yes, don’t worry.” He reaches out to rap his knuckles on the table, and in his eyes some light of purpose such as I haven’t seen in him since I arrived here. “We’ll sort it out. They’ll be here before you know it.”

  SNOW ON THE roads when we meet Friedrich’s contacts in a café downtown. Despite the gasoline rationing, they have sent a car. I can’t ride through this city with Friedrich, on a day late in the year, without reflecting on a previous time we made such a drive—when I was leaving Vienna, when I still had no sense of what would be lost or saved.