The Ghost Keeper

  The snow is greying in the gutters. We pass checkpoints where the driver offers papers, speaks loudly in English or bad French. He’s American, our driver. He’s not from New York, I can tell, and yet to hear him speak makes me feel for a disorienting moment as though we’re back on the other side of the Atlantic.

  We are to meet with diplomatic authorities about Friedrich’s role in the city’s restoration. To my bewilderment, they are proposing that he take over a new Austrian manufacturing company. It is something I dare not protest to Friedrich’s face. When he brings it up, he tells me freely: “Of course, there’s the question of my reputation. It must be clear I’m not what I was.” But what can one do, I wonder, to erase all that in the public eye? Can the world forgive and forget so quickly? Impossible, surely—but Friedrich has presented it as a route by which to ensure he can bring my family here. (To show he’s no anti-Semite, it occurs to me—as if sponsoring one small family might prove this.) I don’t argue.

  At the café, I follow Friedrich to a table where two men sit waiting for us. Under dim lights we shake hands, say hello in German, though Mr. Henderson is American and Mr. Magnin French. I will not be called upon to speak much, Friedrich has told me. It’s quickly clear he’s right. These men are here to speak to Friedrich. The waiter brings us a litre of bad wine and then there is nothing for me to do for a while but drink it and listen.

  Henderson is near fifty, trim and handsome, in a good suit. He speaks German poorly and switches often to French, sometimes to English. He is talking about Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Magnin, thinner and more soft-spoken, with slick black hair, interjects occasionally in clear French that I nonetheless strain to follow. Their talk is political, though framed in terms I can’t fully grasp.

  “I’m under a lot of pressure about this,” Henderson says, after a while, in German. “Austria—you understand—our government sees it as a Western country. We like Mozart, you know? We understand you people. You understand democracy—yes, perhaps within limits.” (Laughs once at this.) “We can work with Austria.”

  “I’m glad,” Friedrich says. They have been talking for ten minutes and he has not mentioned my family yet. He barely looks at me.

  “It won’t be easy right away,” Henderson says. “There’s the matter of the German occupation, yes. But we understand how it was. For you, Mr. Zimmel, and for the country—none of it was freely chosen.” He goes on in English: “Seen in the proper light, really, it’s all very forgivable.”

  None of them seems shocked by this statement. How small I’ve become, all of a sudden.

  “I appreciate your understanding,” Friedrich says, still in German. “It has not been easy for us.”

  “Nor is it easy now,” this man carries on. “There isn’t much to live on in this country, is there, and that’s putting it lightly.”

  “All over Europe, this is how it is,” Magnin says, and shrugs.

  “We’re concerned,” Henderson tells my friend. “The people are not easy. The workers especially. You understand what I mean.”

  Friedrich looks at the window a moment, and I follow his gaze, watch the shadow of an old woman pass by with shoulders hunched, face invisible.

  “I understand,” Friedrich says, quiet. “Ten years ago National Socialism looked like a solution, and now . . .”

  He trails off, and Mr. Henderson says, in English: “The Soviet army liberated this city, I appreciate, and it’s true that they’re allies of ours—”

  Friedrich speaks to him then in English for the first time: “The people here did not feel it so much as liberation, what they did.”

  A strange thing, to hear my friend speak English, when now it’s a language I know well—for his accent is thickly Austrian, coloured with something British, and in that moment he sounds foreign, even to my ears. It strikes me that my English is better than his.

  “You understand this. There is the risk,” Henderson says quietly, now in German again, “that the workers will be . . . how do I say . . . vulnerable.”

  Friedrich nods. For a moment it seems as if the conversation has carried on among the three of them in silence, with a vague sense of understanding settling over the table, though I myself am excluded from it.

  (There are things that, now, I think I understand a little: In these postwar years, any money that comes into Austria is aid money, and aid money comes in from East and West by different avenues. When there are food riots—and food riots there are, with the crops failing, and the people starved—we hear from Western news sources that they were incited by Communists. Do I believe this? I don’t know. I recall now a strike at a factory, not Friedrich’s; in the newspapers there were photos of smashed windows. Some of those men, it was said, invoked the East. So it could be that these foreigners, Henderson and Magnin, were sent to recruit anti-Communist Austrians to keep our country from tilting towards the Kremlin. But could a man like Friedrich Zimmel ever quell a workers’ movement?—he, who was so much a stranger to a hungry factory worker. Yet in all his endeavours, it’s true, he knew how to make friends. There were perhaps a host of such men in our country. And after all, I admit it: the Soviets did eventually leave.)

  “And yet it may be hard to justify to our chiefs,” Magnin says, “this recommending a former Party member to oversee a major manufacturer.”

  “I appreciate the difficulty,” Friedrich says. “I am ever humbled by the generosity I encounter.”

  Something about what he says, or the tone of it, sounds to me like a line in a play.

  “But as I say,” Henderson says, “we appreciate that you were not exactly free. And given your record of resistance, the ways you used your influence”—and here for the first time he nods at me—“there is a strong argument to be made. And the people respect you. You’re—how do I say—a real Austrian.”

  “Mr. Zimmel understands what the people want,” Magnin says. “And how they see themselves, yes?”

  Friedrich shrugs. I feel he is about to say something of significance, but instead: “I expect I do,” is all.

  Henderson regards him for a while, and then looks at me. “So you were in America, I take it,” he says to me in English.

  “That’s right.” I am glad, absurdly, that I can answer him so readily in his own language, as if it is proof of something. “It is a wonderful country. I was treated very well.”

  “And yet you come running back here,” he says, one eyebrow raised—and for a moment it occurs to me that I have insulted him, except that I recognize, thank the Lord, the accent of dry humour in his tone.

  “You understand,” I say, and open my palms to them, “my family, my sister, my parents, my in-laws—they had to stay here. From across the ocean, it was impossible to know anything. I had to find out if they were waiting.”

  “But your friend tells us you want to settle here again,” Henderson says. “Bring your family back and everything. You’re the first Jew I’ve heard of who wanted back in after all this. Smells funny to me.”

  And indeed, as he says, to me too it has the scent of madness. But the earth revolves around this place for me. It has reeled me back in. I cannot explain this, neither in English nor in German.

  I say instead, “I was a guest in America, but I am a citizen here.”

  The American likes this, I can tell. He nods to himself, smiles a little. “Your friend here, too, he’s a citizen,” he says after a while. “And he was a Nazi. That doesn’t bother you?”

  But I sense this isn’t about me. From Friedrich’s posture, the way he sits so still, and with no attempt to enter the exchange, it’s clear his own future is what we’re discussing. And yet it’s clear to me too that before this meeting Friedrich had already discussed with this man the matter of my family’s migration to Vienna. So I am not as conflicted as I might have expected. It is easy to reply.

  “Certainly it bothers me,” I tell this American. “But there are other things to consider. I have always trusted Friedrich Zimmel, and he has always prov
en himself trustworthy. As you put it, he used his influence for the good, and in the midst of a situation where good was all but dead. This is what I care to remember.”

  “He helped you escape,” Mr. Henderson offers. “You and your family.”

  “Yes, indeed. And others, I understand. And there is the matter of the girl he protected.” I feel suddenly as if everything has led to this moment: not just this conversation, but the entirety of my friendship with Friedrich Zimmel. “She was my cousin. Before I escaped, I told that girl’s mother that he was a man she could trust. I meant it then. I would repeat it now with a clear conscience. He is a righteous man. He is an honourable man. I am grateful to him.”

  Despite all this greyness, a feeling almost of elation at saying these words; as if with them I’ve come to testify against despair. I can feel my cheeks flush. I don’t smile at Mr. Henderson, but he can feel, I am certain, the heat in me. And he nods. “That’s very good. Very good,” he says.

  I turn to peer at Friedrich. I’m not certain what I expect. And perhaps I’m not certain even what it is I see; for who could say how this man now experiences gratitude, or humility, or relief. His face, though, is very white. His eyes are wide, but he is looking at nothing. He is hunched in on himself. He does not seem capable of speech.

  Henderson says to Magnin, “I understand your people could help arrange for passage from Shanghai.”

  “It is likely. The settlement, well . . .” Magnin shrugs. “The East is another world now. Many people are leaving. Migration, a berth on a vessel for the passage—these things can be managed.”

  “But my family isn’t French.”

  “Ah.” Magnin smiles at Henderson. “Monsieur Henderson, he has let me know that there will be funds available. To be covered by Monsieur Zimmel in good time, of course—for Monsieur Zimmel, he will soon be back at work, and better able to help you with such matters. So. It all looks very well, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, now. I’d call that a productive meeting,” Mr. Henderson says in English. And then, in German: “Here, Mr. Zimmel, are you feeling well?”

  Friedrich looks up at him. “Quite well, thank you,” he says in English. He reaches for his wineglass. Sips from it with a hand that barely trembles.

  OUR DRIVER STEERS us back through streets a little darker than before, snow still falling on roads and windshields. I am watching out the window; I have my Anna and Tobias in mind; I am conjuring them to me, telling them, One last long trip and we’ll be together—only please do reach me.

  From beside me, Friedrich says, “You were too generous back there.”

  He’s spoken it into silence; we haven’t said anything these last five minutes. I tell him, “About you, you mean?” He is looking at his knees. He nods, and I say, “Not at all. I meant every word.”

  “You don’t know how it was,” he says.

  He has barely spoken about the war since I arrived—always statements made in the vaguest terms: it was awful, but we know this. He has told me none of the things I expected he might, and in this moment it strikes me that I might at last be able to offer him a listening ear.

  “You might try to explain it,” I tell him. “I would do my best to understand.”

  He does not reply right away. He looks out the window on his side of the car, and after a moment I look out mine. We are climbing the hill to his house, other people’s windows through snow beginning to glow like candles, when he says at last:

  “You told Lena Kostner’s mother she ought to trust me.”

  Perhaps it is a taste of something lingering; perhaps I am ill. There is the feeling of bile rising. But I say, “Of course I did. She needed some convincing.”

  “I am glad she trusted me.” He sits there awhile, lips parted, before he adds, “Only I wish you understood that it was not all so . . . simple.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The car is stopping, the driver pulling over to the curb. He peers at us in the rear-view mirror, and Friedrich nods at him, says, in English, “A moment, please.”

  He leans in closer to me. “I just wish I had done better for her daughter,” he tells me, quiet.

  “That’s all?” At this I might smile. “Think of what awaited her without you. What expectations do you imagine she had?” And, because he is still hovering there, in a lower voice I ask: “What is it you’re so troubled by, then?”

  He leans in closer. This whole time he has not really looked at me. But now he stares into my eyes, his own quite blue, wide, beseeching. He puts a hand on my shoulder, and after a moment in which it seems his breath is blocked, he whispers, “Josef—consider me. What you know of me.”

  All this while (weeks, years; since the Anschluss, perhaps), so much of everything terrible I’ve kept just barely at bay: I have striven to manage it. And now, when my friend says this to me, I don’t know why—there breaks through some still-unarticulated horror, shadow without shape. I don’t know what he means, but there is in my unknowing the form of things I haven’t let myself think.

  I am not proud of it. I do not set this down with pleasure. But in the moment my friend asks me to consider him as he is, an attack of nerves comes on me so desperately that I turn from him, fumble for the door handle and all but throw myself out into the evening air.

  Here winter trees hang black; here is the cold with its tender sting. For a minute I stand gulping breaths beside the car, face turned up to receive the snow. Relief from nausea followed so quickly by shame.

  And after a minute or two his door opens, and he gets out.

  “Please, excuse me,” is all I can say.

  But his face is very quiet, almost blank. He says, “Never mind.” He waves at the driver. I step onto the curb and the car pulls away.

  “Honestly, Friedrich, if you want to tell me—”

  “It’s quite all right,” he interrupts. “It was nothing.” And he smiles at me. I would like to trust that smile.

  I follow him to his house with a weight of something in me, and—yes—a little of a half-ashamed relief.

  “I was quite pleased with that meeting,” he says, unlocking his front door with a key from his pocket. “You’ll see Anna and Tobias in the spring, I don’t doubt.”

  And this is enough to put all other thoughts out of my head, and enough to make me put my hand on my friend’s back as he opens his door, and mean it as nothing but thanks.

  13

  IN THOSE DAYS, IN THE WÄHRING CEMETERY—A LITTLE more smashed than before, but saved, perhaps, by its own obscurity—there is work enough to keep me busy. Here is a forgotten corner where the gravestones lie in heaps like the unburied dead. Alone but for the foxes, the rabbits and the birds.

  My fox doesn’t imagine the last fear of the voles he eats, and in this respect he is innocent. In the shrubs pawing earth, dripping rain, brush-tail chewed through with wet and a rodent body still warm in his teeth, he is good. As he should be. And he doesn’t imagine beyond his own last fear, beyond the hound or the fisher chasing him down; he doesn’t know yet that his legs will go stiffer, that he won’t be so nimble always. He does his shopping and he puts it in his larder, to keep. He imagines it’s my larder, filled with my dinner, that I’ve buried here—because why else guard it, why chase down thieves?

  Under the trees in the cemetery, the fox will live forever, in his mind.

  FORGIVE ME FOR lapsing again into abstraction, but I find I must set this down. More and more it seems to me that a world to come, unless it is more than a story told to children, unless it is somehow a good big enough to make up for the evil we do in this life, is only an insult to our suffering here and now. There are answers I want, but I can ask and ask forever and the questions just dig deeper into an earth that has no bedrock.

  If I can put in a request for perfect justice, if you’ll listen to me, if it counts for anything, this is what my heart demands: When we die, that we would know each other human person perfectly, in every detail, every fear, every minute victory of coura
ge and every act regretted. That we would see each other’s lives, and know one another’s minds, better than we could ever know our own in this life. And if our afterlife could consist of nothing beyond this perfect and infinite intimacy, then I know what it would be: for every moment we had loved another person in life, it would be ecstasy, unburdening and communion; and for every moment we’d failed to love them, the keenest possible torment and the most just condemnation.

  14

  CONSIDER THE HAUPTBAHNHOF IN SALZBURG, EARLY spring of 1947, and the man approaching in a train from the east. He sits with his suitcase on his lap, a seat removed from the window in a crowded compartment. A sickly-looking fellow; since 1938 he has never been really well. The landscape beyond the glass, since he left the city, has blurred by in green-brown and grey: the fields are bare of crops, the trees still stand naked in winter blacks, and the pines in the higher places are blackish, cold in their prickly coats. In every town or city they pass there is the shock of mangled buildings, holes in storefronts made all the more ghoulish by the way they appear suddenly between untouched neighbours. The train rattles by these scenes without pause.

  Already the train is grinding down into its platform at the Hauptbahnhof. Josef Tobak takes his suitcase by the handle; he stands when the passenger across from him stands.

  He is meant to meet his wife and child in the station. They are going to stay with Friedrich in his father’s villa for a little while. (When Friedrich requested to leave the city for the winter, no one, not even his friend Josef, protested too much.) In the countryside it’s (one could argue) a little less devastated—though, really, they’re meeting here because Friedrich has invited the family with such transparent yearning, and Josef feels he can deny Friedrich nothing.

  He follows the other passengers down the aisle towards the door and tries to feel hope—but it is as if in his heart a wall has been built between the realms of reasonable and unreasonable hope. Reasonable: to get here, to Austria, safely; to make inquiries; and now to make one’s way unmolested to a country villa. Reasonable: to make plans to find an apartment in some strange Viennese neighbourhood, safe enough, surrounded by unknown but benign faces. Unreasonable: to see the people one loved before, alive. To see a wife and child, in the flesh, nearly a decade older than they were when last one saw them.