The Ghost Keeper

  At last Friedrich comes down, blinking and red-eyed, and says, “You’re ready to go, then.”

  “There was snow this morning,” Tobias tells him. They look out the window: only wet now.

  Anna turns back to say, “Yes, we’re all packed.” She rubs Friedrich’s arm. “You’ve been so good to us. It’s hard to go.”

  “Well.” Friedrich shrugs. “You should have a proper home. And a proper life.” But there is something in his face: that tautness, like a readiness to scream. Josef would like to say to him: “I know you’ve been miserable, and I was a fool before, but if you need me to listen, I will listen”—but how does one say these things? Not in these moments, with Andreas tramping around outside the door and the suitcases already waiting to be hefted into the car. He decides he will write to Friedrich after they get to town.

  By ten o’clock they are all in the car, and Friedrich has been kissed goodbye and stands leaning in the doorway. The puppy sits in the back seat of the car with Tobias and Anna, panting out at the cold, wet hills. Josef calls to Friedrich, “See you soon,” and Friedrich smiles a little, and waves, and then the car twists rumbling away from the villa and out towards the road.

  This first home falls away behind them. The station is an hour away, and then there is the ride to Vienna, and then the drive to their new home, little apartment with yellow walls that (Tobias will remark) smell a bit like fried meat. In a new house, secure with the people he belongs to, a man can set aside hard questions and imagine them buried. His nights he can spend twined with a woman he loves, and his mornings on walks with his boy and a little dog, who find flowers growing on so many of these streets, and their city at war with no one.

  3

  HERE, TOBAK—DON’T REST YET. I’VE CYCLED ALMOST back, at last, to that night I first remembered, but I find my hand hesitates. Why should it be so? I haven’t come all this way to tread in circles. There’s an interval, certainly; but let me set it down lightly.

  The time between our return to Austria and the night Friedrich calls me is made up of years, understand. It’s made of Anna dancing with me in our kitchen in a green dress, Anna holding my hand on a street corner while a violinist plays Schubert, Anna burning a chicken and then conjuring a foreign recipe for stir-fried vegetables. And my son with us: Tobias with grass-stained knees, with eyes strained from studying—always with his dog Peng panting up at him, adoring.

  It is, in the dark, my wife and her tenderness. She wakes some mornings to me examining her hands on our sheets, and she laughs at me. (I discover, every day, what a woman is like.)

  These years are marked also, yes, with inexpressible grief, and by traumas that hobble each of us in unexpected moments. By betrayal and cynicism on top of that, when we see Nazi collaborators named to government posts. A long, cold public standoff between former allies while our country remains occupied; a private acceptance, as New Year’s Eves cycle past, that there will be no brother or sister for Tobias, no matter how great our love.

  Meanwhile, we make our shy observance of faith among strangers. We have a synagogue again, with a Hungarian rabbi who speaks almost no German, and a congregation that is half Russian, and not one face I knew before the war.

  Through all this, we grow older; and there is the hidden Seegasse cemetery, in its nakedness, and the forgotten Währing cemetery, hooded in green. Back among these places, I could be sixteen again, or twenty, or a young father. The weeds and the vines grow, spring after spring. The fish cries out from the dark of the earth. The fox darts along the top of the wall.

  The faces that wait don’t forget me, though the world forgets them. Who will carry us, they seem to ask, even as I am asking that same question of God, and receiving all the weight of silence, as if perhaps it is not the right question, only I don’t know the right question.

  Always, in the back of the mind: this haunted nearness. One doesn’t dare turn around, unless it’s to confront it all plainly: What? I might ask. What, after all this? Here I am. Tell me, what?

  4

  ON THE NIGHT WHEN FRIEDRICH CALLS ME, I’M SITTING in the kitchen with the newspaper while Anna finishes the washing-up. It’s dark, past eight o’clock. I am starting to read her something from an article when Tobias appears in the kitchen doorway. How quickly time has passed, see: my son is taller than me, in his teens; his body hangs loose-jointed and easy, but his forehead seems stitched tight.

  “Vater, Theresa says it’s Friedrich on the phone for you.”

  Anna is wearing a yellow dress that night. In her hand there’s a blue dish covered in soap, white puffs like clouds on a clear sky.

  “You ought to hurry down,” she says, and I say, “Of course.”

  I fold the newspaper in quarters and leave it on the corner of the table. I hear Tobias behind me, as I head out, saying to Anna, “If he needs my room, I’d be happy to stay on the couch.”

  Theresa, our landlady, waits at the base of the staircase with the telephone receiver in one hand. She hands me the phone and mouths the word, “Drunk.”

  “Friedrich,” I say into the phone.

  “Josef, thank God.”

  He is slurring his words, but it’s more than that—he’s holding back tears, I realize.

  “Are you busy?”

  “No, not particularly. We just finished supper,” I tell him.

  He sputters something into the phone. I turn closer towards the wall.

  “What is it, Friedrich?”

  “I need to speak with you. I need to speak with someone and I mustn’t . . . I mustn’t put it off any longer. Please.”

  “Over the phone?” I peer at the clock on the wall.

  “No. Please, if you can, I’d rather see you. I know it’s a long way to come. I’ll pay for your taxi if you need it.”

  It occurs to me I haven’t heard him plead like this except in old letters. A flash of nausea, but: “I’ll come. Just sit down and wait for me. I’ll let Anna know.”

  “The door’s unlocked. Let yourself in. There’s no one here but me.”

  “I’ll be about half an hour, I expect. But I’ll do my best to hurry.”

  “Thank you, Josef. Thank you. I can’t . . .”

  But he breaks down again, and I stand there with the receiver in my hand for a moment before I say, “Just stay put, Friedrich. I’m on my way.”

  I hang up as Theresa comes out from her room.

  “I can’t stand drunks,” she says. “I know Mr. Zimmel did some fine things during the war, but it’s not manly, succumbing to one’s emotions in that way. I’m almost ashamed of him.”

  I say to her, patting my pockets, “He’s ill, I think.”

  “We all went through it, you know. He wasn’t the only one.”

  And perhaps I should say more for my friend, but already she’s turned back and gone into her room, closed the door behind her.

  I tell Anna, and she says, “Stay over if you need to. I don’t like the thought of you wandering the streets this time of night.” She wraps my scarf around my neck for me.

  Tobias has taken my place at the table. He looks up at me from under a wisp of hair that’s fallen across his eyes. “I was telling Mutti that if he needs to stay here—”

  “Oh, yes, Tobias. I heard. That’s good of you. I’ll let him know.”

  “Here’s an extra twenty schillings,” Anna says. “Just in case.”

  I bend over and kiss her lips, and as I do I inhale her smell, her breath. For a moment I wish I could tell them Friedrich didn’t really need me, that I could stay home, read with my arm around my wife and call Peng in to sit with us; but instead I sigh and say, “I’ll try not to be too long.”

  I TAKE THE tram to the base of Friedrich’s street and walk up the hill to his house. The gate is open, and upstairs there’s a single window lit from inside. At the door, I knock and let myself in.

  “Up here.” Friedrich’s voice, carrying down the stairs. He sounds almost calm.

  Upstairs, in the kitchen, a ce
iling lamp casts a wedge of light into the hallway. Friedrich sits near his stove with a glass in one hand.

  He rubs his eyes as I greet him. “I haven’t been well,” he says.

  I pull a chair up to his kitchen table. “You haven’t seemed well. Have you seen a doctor?”

  “God knows I don’t need one. I know exactly what it is. It’s very simple.”

  He isn’t looking at me, and I can’t tell whether he’s talking nonsense or I’m forgetting something. “You wanted to talk to me,” is all I can think to say.

  “I did.” He shifts his weight in the chair. “It’s not that I haven’t meant to before. But I keep hearing these stories on the news, about children and men and all these terrible—these awful . . . and men who hid . . . but it never ends. I don’t know how to talk about it.”

  “You can tell me anything,” I say to him, say it because it seems the right thing to say, but my heart is a hammer and I wonder if I shouldn’t get up and find a doctor for him right away.

  “It’s all the things that happened while you were gone. During the war.”

  A rushing in and out of heat from my body. “Yes. You tried to tell me once, I think.”

  “Ah, but Lord, Josef, it’s so hard. I’ve wanted to tell you, but it makes me ill.”

  “You should let someone help you.” I’d like to reach out to him, touch his shoulder—but, Just wait, says my mind.

  I say, “Maybe I should make some coffee.”

  He shakes his head and sips from his glass.

  I tell him, “No good thing you did for me will ever be wiped out.”

  And he says, “I will understand if you change your mind about that.”

  In Friedrich’s face: a deeper species of darkness, somewhere and something I cannot reach from safety. So we sit staring at each other under the wax-yellow electric light.

  “You’re truly going to hate me,” Friedrich says.

  “I won’t,” I tell him. “Please.”

  He has his hands wrapped round his little tumbler, and his hands are thick and red, and the drink in his tumbler is the same dark as the waxy shadows in the corners.

  “You know about my Lena,” he says into his hands.

  She flashes through my mind, a girl’s face painted over Sarah Kostner’s face: sharp cheekbones, bright, dark eyes. A catch in my heart. The one who lived.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You know, perhaps, that she was fourteen when her mother brought her to me.”

  Some unknown muscle in my belly goes tight as he says it. A part of my mind floating above this room and beyond this moment begins to pray without my prompting it.

  And one must try to lay such a history down with delicacy—moreover, with justice, but compassion also. Here is the man who saved us, and here also are the things he did. And one must set them down and stare into them until the heart can accept them as truth, and ask all its questions, and see the souls behind them no less human than they were before—if it’s possible, if we can be such creatures in this life.

  5

  CONSIDER, FIRST, THAT FRIEDRICH WAS NOT ALWAYS AS he is now, and consider that this bulk and breadth and weight of him was once a young man. Consider him this way: tall—taller than me, an inch or two over six feet, at least—and with his hair thick, black, slicked smooth above his forehead. His eyes clear blue, nearly grey; his jaw strong and set. His nose in profile might have been dashed off along a straightedge. His shoulders fill out a dinner jacket, and his back is straight. Of all this picture I think there may only be his oddly soft and full lips to throw off the perfect model of Austrian manhood (though some, I suppose, might wish him fairer).

  Consider that this younger man can dance. Consider that he can speak well when he’s not cowed by that mix of envy and admiration that seem to visit him when faced with someone better educated, or more self-consciously intellectual, or more confident. Consider that he’s very wealthy, that he’s always been very wealthy, has been raised by a mother and father who were always wealthy and who have, it must be remembered, worked for their money. Consider that his clothes are expensive and simple and his voice is low, and that his friends run the gamut from artist to banker to prince. Consider his three-storey mansion in the suburbs, his flat downtown, his villa in the countryside.

  And consider, I suppose, that he’s never married. That he has a new woman every second week. But recall also the two or three months out of the year when he renounces his habits, swears off girlfriends and lovers, lives a life almost monkish, celibate (though still in his mansion, still with wine on the table)—that he swims awhile in guilt, which turns after a time into fresh energy and resolution, until after a few weeks a nice girl at a party demands his attention and then the resolution slips down towards good intentions and then into nothing at all, until the next year when he remembers again. He feels a little guilt when he slides back, I think. He spends a few weeks away from friends. But then everything is as it was before.

  But now consider the year 1939. Some force has thrown a switch on his life, sent him onto a sidetrack. His closest friends are gone, or changed; he doesn’t know them, these changed ones. Whether because they are glad at heart to see Austria annexed and the Nuremberg racial laws enacted, or whether they read in his Party arm band a heart-deep complicity and mistrust him because of it, walls have gone up around him. One does not speak plainly.

  He cannot leave Vienna, though he would like to go to Paris, see Zilla, even be French awhile. He has a duty to his factory and to the nation. He attends the proper parties, shakes the right hands and learns to salute. He drinks more than he used to. If he goes home alone, upon arriving he draws the curtains in his sitting rooms. He half-reads his books. He keeps one eye on the hearth. He falls asleep in his seat most nights.

  So then, during days between fall and winter, cold and wet, Sarah Kostner and her daughter appear at the small door by the laneway. The mother has been here before, has stood before this very door and met with her sick fugitive cousin. She comes this time at night, when there is no one else at home; Friedrich’s family’s servants no longer live with them. So they are alone. It’s raining.

  The mother is thin, hands on her daughter’s shoulders in the old servants’ entryway out of the cold, and though she holds her voice steady she is pleading with him. She’s grateful, she says, for the help he’s given her—the work, that rare security in these strange times. Only soon, she believes, it won’t be enough.

  She won’t leave Vienna, she says. Her mother is ill and can’t be moved. She doesn’t trust the Kindertransport with her daughter—nor anyone, it seems, outside the city. “England,” she says, “is much too far away, too foreign. She won’t get on. She did awfully in English lessons.” Does he glance at the daughter then? Is she blushing? And her mother adds, “Nowhere in Europe is safe for people like us. It’s no good.”

  We can imagine him there with the two of them—tall man, a couple of drinks in him already; it’s on his breath. Is he wearing his Party arm band? Is that part of the picture? We can wonder. And this mother, slight but hard-faced—she won’t cry now. She won’t allow the idea of crying. And the daughter.

  Her name is Lena. She’s fourteen. And she looks at him. The things he sees looking into her eyes, how he describes her to me later (“I had so much time to think up poetry for her, you see”): a slant of light through water; secret angle of gold in the dark. Something to the tilt of her eyes—something that reminds him of another woman, a relation of hers. She doesn’t smile.

  And he says yes to them. He says, “Very well.” Friedrich Zimmel says yes to this, and let the record show it. You can number the men and women who gave such yeses in Vienna; you wouldn’t need half a sheet of paper for the names.

  He tells the mother he can take the girl. There’s space for her in the attic. He wouldn’t arouse suspicion asking the cook to prepare a few bites’ extra food every day. He cannot take the whole family, of course. And in a little while it may be impossibl
e to keep her in this country—though of course one hopes it will not come to that, he adds.

  The mother understands. She thanks him. She breaks a little at his yes—doesn’t cry, but bends, takes his hand and kisses it. This with her daughter watching. (And what does Lena think of it? How does she see this man then?)

  He tells the mother to wait an hour before leaving, as it might be that anyone who saw them come will have stopped watching by then. But he knows it’s a worthless precaution. If they do go unnoticed it’s thanks to luck or providence.

  In the meantime he shows them both the little windowless attic room where Lena can hide. It’s a hot space, tiny and cramped, and it smells of mice and mothballs. But with the trunks piled up just so in the adjoining crawl space, it’s almost impossible to tell there’s a room there at all.

  Lena says goodbye to her mother. He gives them some privacy, waits in the next room over. He tries not to listen, and it isn’t hard—they’re quiet together. He doesn’t hear weeping.

  The mother, when she appears, has the same straight face as before. She nods.

  “That’s settled,” she says.

  He asks her if she would like to leave any contact information for him. She tells him, “Lena knows,” and shrugs. There. That’s all. He nods and escorts her down the stairs, to the old servants’ entrance, to the rain. She straightens her coat and her hat before she steps outside, and Friedrich feels suddenly as if it’s he who is stepping outside, as if the cold is about to swallow him, and the cold goes on forever and makes you into nothing and no one. But the woman just turns to him, offers him her hand, and he shakes it.

  She says, “Thank you, Mr. Zimmel.” And with her back held straight, she walks away into the night.

  So Lena is fourteen when her mother leaves her with him. And Friedrich is thirty-eight. He carries her little bag into the attic for her, and he spreads a mattress on the floor for her—sheets and blankets and a pillow that smells a little of mothballs (but perhaps there will be moths, after all, he thinks). She doesn’t say anything to him that night. He doesn’t say much to her.