The Ghost Keeper

  He would like his hopes to press past this wall, but it’s high and wide and it doesn’t give. He shuffles past train compartments with cramping legs and a heart that bruises itself against a wall of no.

  The air on the platform is cold and sharp. Coal smoke bitter in the air; stone walls blackened. His fingers around the suitcase handle are numb. When he enters the station lobby, his glasses fog up. He stands aside by the wall and takes them off, and he cleans them without looking around him.

  Somewhere beneath this dark vault of space, he knows, if the world could conspire to let such a thing be, Anna and Tobias may already be waiting. Their train was meant to arrive half a day before his. True, he hasn’t heard from them since they left Shanghai; true, their journey would have been even longer and more harrowing than his when he came from America. Anything and everything, ordinary or unprecedented, might have happened to prevent or delay their arrival. And yet, Josef Tobak thinks, one must dare to act as if they’ll be here.

  He carries his bag through the mass of people. This mass of people! Gazes slide off one another instead of locking. Here is an old man’s face turned topographical with weariness, and this woman with a look that says nothing, nothing; she is arm in arm with one who must be her sister, who stares at the floor, who does not look up as she walks. That boy leaning by the wall—the darting alertness to his eyes that makes Josef Tobak think, There are likely pickpockets here. He does not have much money, this man Tobak, but this makes him all the more anxious not to lose it: he has it tucked in his breast pocket. He has considered stitching this pocket shut. But sometimes (and now) another part of him reaches out to say, But you escaped!—and at this he wants to hand his money out to these people until it’s gone, every coin.

  He crosses the lobby again; he scans these strange faces. That little family, with a small girl in a yellow sweater. Another family: a teenaged girl with her two brothers’ hands in hers (the parents are speaking quickly to one another, brandishing passports between them). And there, a man with his wife leaning on his shoulder, and there, a woman checking the station clock while her son reads a book, and there, eight red-haired children tugging at the coat of an old man (their grandfather?), and there, a group of children who don’t look related, huddled round a grey parrot in a birdcage—they call, “Good day! Good day!” at it over and over, and after a minute the bird squawks, “Day!” and they all fall silent.

  A man there missing a leg; a youth there with his eye bandaged; a man there whose mouth hangs open at an angle (his hand held up against it); and a girl, and a girl, and a man and a woman and a man—face after face after face.

  “Josef!”

  His first thought, when he hears this, is: there are many men named Josef.

  “Josef Tobak!”

  It’s a woman’s voice, behind him. Turn, says his heart, turn! He must. He does. He turns.

  There: the woman who was checking the station clock. Her face under the brim of a hat, her mouth ovaled in a half cry, her eyes wide and round and filled with garnet light—there.

  “Anna!”

  He has her arms. He has his arms, and around her, and her, here, her lips: his lips on hers, her love. Her taste. Her breath. And here. Tears on someone’s cheek, and everything, and the world, and her, and here—he says, “Anna!” and kisses her again. She laughs and cries at once; her husband is laughing and crying as well.

  He pulls back, and he looks at her (at her!), and he turns because the boy is there beside her. Back a few paces, with a book held against his chest. His eyes so bright and full beneath his very black hair.

  Anna says, “Tobias recognized you first. From the photo you sent.”

  Josef bends his knee. (If the boy could know his father’s shyness! The whole abyss of potential failure that opens up beneath the heights of love.) The boy is tall for his age, but Josef goes down to him. He holds out his hand. Tobias steps forward and places his right hand in his father’s.

  “I am very happy to meet you, Vater,” the boy says. Voice like trembling glass.

  Josef begins to say, “Tobias—” but his tongue fails him. He lifts a hand to this boy’s cheek, to his soft, browned skin—this face he knows he knew once and (his mind says, Yes!) will know now, again.

  He had leaned forward to kiss his son’s cheeks. But now this boy’s arms are around his neck. He holds him. He says, “Tobias!” and the boy says, “I saw you!” And he’s laughing.

  And now he can stand again and wind his arm around his wife, around Anna (she a pillar of light in the bend of his arm!), and this boy there so close and not yet embarrassed by their love. A man is peering at them, and a woman—he realizes there must be many people looking at them. But he will not yet look up, except inwardly. Inwardly he seems to see it: a fox, red flame, that alights at the top of a high wall, and the fox dances among the wires and glass, and he is not hurt, and he is not afraid.

  Part III

  1

  TWO WEEKS AT FRIEDRICH’S VILLA IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, strange land. He says to us: “Please use everything as if it’s yours,” and then he disappears into a den whose walls once were dense with hunting trophies; he emerges at mealtimes smelling of tobacco and drink.

  This place is new to us: an eighteenth-century estate in the green-brown hills east of the mountains. There is a farmer couple who occupy the opposite wing, who took up residence there after the war, and whom Friedrich has not evicted; they glare and pace and mutter in rural dialect as if we were foreign invaders. There are the three coveted chickens who are not allowed to wander, who are kept in the vestibule of the house in a pen made from bits of an old tin roof. There is Andreas, the groundskeeper, who sleeps in a hut with a loaded rifle in his cot. There are we three, and there is Friedrich.

  In this new place, my friend tells Anna and Tobias that for a while the locals would raid these houses, armed with guns or scythes. Starved, he said. Or freezing. This was mostly before he arrived. The place now is stripped and bare. In the countryside one must walk a long way to find a tree, so many have been pulled down for firewood.

  There is not much food, but there is enough. The nights are cold, but not unbearable.

  In the daytime, Tobias runs everywhere. He comes back with things he should not have been able to find. (Old bottles of wine, knives and buckles in the fields and apples, somehow.) Once, Friedrich mentions that there might be unexploded shells in the ground, and Anna takes Tobias aside to warn him of this, and then for days Tobias seems determined to find one. (“I won’t touch it, I promise.”) I walk the grounds myself to try to find any first and forbid him from going near—as if I might be better at this than he is—but we’re fortunate, and there are none to be found.

  Tobias I love almost too much. I think he senses this. He acts a bit like a cat towards me, the first while. He glances at me sidelong and walks at angles around me, not without kindness, but as if my love were a field around me that his body glances off. I have to be still and not look at him, pretend I’m doing something else (writing a letter, or poking at the garden, or mending a sock), and then sometimes he will come and stand by my shoulder and speak very naturally, very freely, about a thing he’s seen or a thing he wonders about. And then I must try not to look up, try not to attack him with my gaze, which betrays me always: “I love you!” it screams. “I don’t know you at all, but I love you.” No: look down at my work, and listen to him talk about a litter of kittens, or the axle of a rusted car, or the way rain comes over the hills. And say only, “Yes, I see. That’s marvellous.”

  THIS TIME WITH Anna is another thing entirely. The first time we are alone, the first evening in our bedroom, she seems to turn her body away from mine and I have to go to her, stroke her through her dress with the backs of my fingers. And I want to touch her as I did when we were first married, but I am not certain she is the same as she was then, or that our love is the same.

  In the dark, she says, “I can’t help feeling I should be in mourning.” And I rest my mouth against
the angle of her neck because I have felt that too—and yet, and yet. The smell of her, her soap like a spice and then a richness that speaks of earth and musk. I know she can feel me pressed against her through our clothes, but I say, “We can wait as long as you need to,” and try to mean it.

  But here is the way her muscles slide beneath her skin, the softness and the give and then the gathering. She turns to me. Here is the whole world in the whites of her eyes, only a moment from mine.

  She says, “Please, now.” There is a creak to her voice like ice on a rooftop, melting.

  Everything of us that was once familiar, now suddenly remembered, or changed. These clothes that slide away from us like old skins. Her chest thinner, her breasts lower and less full (but then also the same—the way to caress her into tenderness, and her scent). The hollow beneath her ribs, deeper than before, and the darkness filling more of the space between our bones (but no, but see, there need not now be space between us). And I am a stranger to myself, my blood is a stranger to me, the way it rushes to my skin and leaves me light-headed. And she is here, and she is she, and everything of her is warmth and tenderness and fullness, a jug of hot wine poured through me in the night.

  When I’m spent, she’s still clinging to me, her breath hot on my ear, and so I caress her and murmur and move in her until she shudders beneath me like a little boat come to ground on a pebble strand. And this small cry that she seems to make in spite of herself—oh, everything of you, my Anna, I would bottle up, I’d keep forever.

  I am half-asleep, curled into her in the dark, when she whispers, “Shall we have another baby, Josef?” And though my tongue feels too thick to speak with and I’m sinking into a sleep too sweet for words, I say to her, “Hmm,” and nuzzle her hair. And I feel as I drift off that she must understand everything I could mean by that sound, all of it, the world of us two made suddenly simple in the fullness of everything yes.

  2

  IN A VILLA IN THE AUSTRIAN COUNTRYSIDE, A MAN ASKS his wife where in Vienna she would most like to live. She answers, “I don’t think I ever really thought of anyplace besides the Leopoldstadt.”

  Friedrich has confirmed Josef’s suspicion that the second district, now in the Soviet-occupied quarter of the city, is not the right place. Find a place in the third district, Friedrich says, or the ninth. Josef wonders, though, whether his friend has things wrong, as regards the Soviet occupiers: Josef and Anna were never the enemy, after all.

  Still, the other neighbourhoods are ones he’s walked through, and they do seem safe; and so Josef writes a letter to a contact of Friedrich’s in Vienna.

  It has occurred to Josef many times—and he wonders at it—that Friedrich kept a lot of friends after the war. These can’t, Josef thinks, be every one of them the type of man who wears his Party arm band now in secret against his skin. And if his friends are men and women who were not disappointed to greet the early end of the Thousand-Year Reich, then it must be that they knew Friedrich was not, at heart, what he seemed to be in public. But if this is true, then the question of what it is that makes him condemn himself surfaces implicitly in every encounter—for he does condemn himself. Josef sees this; Anna softens to their friend in response to it; even Tobias, who trusts this man more than Josef dared hope, leaves him little gifts that seem to suggest concern (a bright-backed beetle, the rusted rim of a helmet from the Great War, a snake’s skin three feet long). But this, to his discredit, is not a question Josef Tobak is eager to dwell upon.

  A little more than a week, and then a letter comes back: there is a suitable flat for rent in the ninth district, the top floor of a little row house, owned by a middle-aged widow who lives by herself on the main floor. Josef asks Anna, what about schools for Tobias? But she answers, “He’s bright enough, and very adaptable. There are schools everywhere. Don’t worry about it.” And Tobias echoes her. He adds only, “Mutti said I could have a dog when we got a house.”

  “Ah.” His mother glances at Josef.

  Josef shrugs. “I’ll ask if that’s all right.”

  He decides that if the widow doesn’t want dogs in her house, they won’t take the flat—simple. This is something he can tell Anna. He can tell her too about his worries regarding work. Friedrich has said that he will hire Josef, but it isn’t clear to them exactly what this means.

  But there are also things he can’t tell her. This knowledge that his city will makes its silent demands on his heart—the Seegasse and Währing cemeteries, and all the dead who seem to wait in thundering muteness. How it tears him one way and then the other, across water, over walls—and in the ninth district, if they are to live there, will he bear up under it? These strange new points on his mind’s compass. He does not know, he can’t ask.

  THE WIDOW IN Vienna writes back before the week is up: she welcomes a family with a dog! Her late husband loved animals, she tells them, and there are several parks near the house where people walk their pets. She admits that she prefers male dogs to female, but says she will not make a point of this.

  ANNA HAS TOBIAS read books in German, tries to have him sit and study and be ready for school again, but Tobias cannot stay still here. He appears and disappears, comes home muddy or scraped, and seems not to notice the difference. Once, he finds an old nest of squirrel kittens, dead and mummified, in a hole in one of the upstairs walls of the villa. Anna makes sympathetic noises when he shows her, even as she shoos him outside with it. But Friedrich, when he sees it, slips into paleness like a sudden disease and says, “Really, I ought to burn this place to the ground.” He retreats to his den and does not come out for lunch or supper. When Anna goes to him in the evening she finds him asleep on the carpet, and can only cover him with a blanket, and stoke the failing fire in the hearth.

  NOT LONG AFTER this, Tobias comes home with his dog. In his arms it’s curled small as a melon: a brown, skinny mutt with a mangled ear. Three other dogs were chasing it, he says. He scared them off, throwing rocks. Pulled this pup out of the ditch where it lay shaking, wrapped it in his coat and carried it home. He’ll feed it, he says, and wash its ear.

  “But I don’t have any camomile,” Anna says—automatically, and then she touches her mouth and laughs; for it’s a thought that trips them backwards through the years to a time when it was easy to think of themselves as Austrian. Tobias gives her a puzzled look.

  He names the puppy Peng. When Tobias speaks to his dog, he speaks in Shanghainese.

  ON AN AFTERNOON with Josef in his sitting room, Friedrich produces an envelope and says, “Go to this address at nine o’clock on your first day. Give them the letter. It shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Josef, after a pause, says: “Why don’t you come back to the city with us?”

  But Friedrich coughs, and looks away, and raises his newspaper between his face and Josef’s. It’s a French paper, printed a week ago. And all Josef can see now are his friend’s discoloured hands, fingers gripping this yellow paper, and the space between them stretched and crowded by columns of text. (He thinks suddenly—he can’t say exactly why—of a shadow box full of tiny insects, perhaps ants, arranged in rows and on pins fine as hair.) He leaves Friedrich alone.

  ON THE MORNING they are to leave, the whole world is erased to white: snow, fine as dust, almost an inch thick. Tobias steps out into it as if trying not to wake it. Turns to watch his footprints blacken and melt into the mud. The puppy winds in loops around him and licks up mouthfuls of snow, tail flapping, and Josef and Anna watch them from the doorway.

  Anna says, “He’s never touched snow before.”

  And Josef almost says, before catching himself: But he was born in winter.

  The sun is already up, already wetting with melt this perfect coat of white. Tobias picks up handfuls of it, touches his tongue to it.

  Josef scoops up his own ball of snow and packs it between his hands. This cold, this good sting—something from his boyhood. He suddenly sees a possibility: that he might shout Tobias’s name, and see the boy turn, eve
n as Josef hurled the snowball at him, catching him in the chest. That look of surprise, and sudden delight—and the boy would throw one back, and another. And they’d play together. It would be freedom between them, the years of exile erased and undone, the way this snow undoes the details in the world.

  But he feels a welling of shyness. He cannot believe that the father in this fantasy could ever be him. He pats the snowball in his hands once more before he drops it, and Tobias wanders out across the field with the puppy frisking at his heels.

  “So beautiful,” Anna says, to Josef and out at the white hills. “It helps me remember that I loved this country.”

  Josef draws her close against him in the doorway. He says, “Will he like Vienna?”

  “Ah.” Anna pauses. (Her cheek against his shoulder, scent of her hair in the cold air.) “He will after a while. He’s very willing to be happy.” And then glances at Josef, seeming with her eyes to apologize—but no, my Anna; Josef says it with a kiss to her forehead: I too can be happy, dear love.

  Friedrich will not be awake for a few hours yet. Meanwhile there is such a small amount of packing to be done that everything gets checked over three times. Andreas checks in the house now and then, grunts at them when he sees them with suitcases still not gathered.

  The car is pulled up near the house; the chickens in their tin pen by the doorway skitter and squawk. The farmer woman who lives in the wing opposite them steps outside with her broom, muttering a little, and sweeps the snow from her steps and then from her garden.