The Ghost Keeper

  In the beginning he finds himself trying to pretend she isn’t there. Sometimes he goes a day without bringing her food, and then he tells her when he does go up that it was impossible, that there wasn’t enough food, or that there were guests downstairs. And she trusts him. He sees that she trusts him. She doesn’t complain. Sometimes she asks to go downstairs or to step onto the balcony at night, but, “No,” Friedrich says, “no, it’s impossible.” Suicidal, he tells her. She doesn’t argue.

  A very, very few times, though, in those early days, he lets her come down. And he walks with her, hand low on her back as he escorts her through unlit rooms and up to half-opened windows where the air comes in fresh and cool, and she breathes it as if swallowing cold water after a desert passage. He finds himself surprised always by the materiality of her: her thin fingers on the windowsill, the chewed stubs of her fingernails, and the smell of her unwashed hair in the apricot breeze.

  But up in the attic she doesn’t exist. There’s the whole top floor between her and the rooms where he entertains, and no sound reaches through either way. So he doesn’t stop entertaining; he keeps everything the way it always has been: he hosts friends from the old days, Rudolph Steyer and Franz Blinne, and with them a new type of person—Neubacher’s wife, and Bürckel, and some of the other occupiers. They’ve grown friendly with him. The Gauleiter comes once or twice too, when he visits Vienna, and he sits on Friedrich’s sofa and drinks wine Hans Zimmel laid down when Germany was still a democracy. He talks openly about the plans for transports to Poland, and Friedrich’s head nods up and down on instinct, his whole will pitted against this latent hysteria, terror that wells up from his bowels.

  The Gauleiter’s jackets are tailored tight across his belly, and the whole front of his body seems to jerk up and down when he says, “You see how much trouble it is, smoking the rats out of Germany.” And they nod or stretch or stare at walls, his guests, and drink their wine. A tug, now, at Friedrich’s nerves, a tug upwards through ceilings and rugs and rafters and to the place where the Jewish girl is hiding, above all of them, through all of this. He takes a long drink.

  These days of hiding are, he knows, dull for Lena, perhaps sickeningly so. For Friedrich, at first, they are only terrifying. This fear clings to him, slips into him and seems to grey his skin. He is afraid she will do something to draw attention to herself. That someone will go upstairs and hear her moving about. That his cook will begin to wonder, or that there will be something that makes her flee the attic. This last fear hooks him, snares his mind and makes him stare sometimes at the divide between the main attic room and the crawl space where she hides—is there a way to block it? A way to keep her locked in?

  A poison drip in his mind—the idea of stacking bricks, sealing the space permanently, forgetting about all of it forever. And if the house should burn down, or if a bomb should fall on it . . .

  But when he snaps to, he splashes cold water over his face. Later he tells Lena that if there’s ever a fire, she must use the old servants’ stairway to escape, and never run into the street.

  Once, when he comes to her, he finds her drawing on the wall with a pencil: ladies in party dresses, gentlemen in tailcoats, the swirl of the dance, everyone slender and dark-haired. She’s shy of her drawings and starts to smudge them with the heel of her palm when he peers at them.

  She says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have, not on the walls.”

  He sets down her supper and he says, “I’ll bring you more paper.” He heads downstairs with her swimming in his mind and he sits without reading, a long while, by the fire.

  He starts to lend her his books. Some of them she can’t possibly understand—those written in Russian, or in English, or those propounding philosophies so abstruse that there aren’t likely a half-dozen minds in the world that could make something of them. But she thanks him, she thanks him over and over, and she reads them almost as quickly as he can pick them out for her. Philosophy, history, science—“It ought to be novels, for someone your age,” he says once to her, but, “No, no,” she says, “this is what I want.” Nose-deep in a volume on Heidegger, and her knees folded together under her skirt; her hair up in braids, these days.

  He has, as well, a collection of monographs and works by friends in his psychoanalyst circles: ancients in translation, contemporary theses, texts that capture a moment in an ongoing debate among the city’s leading psychologists. He’s reluctant, at first, to lend her these texts. Some of these are books that make even him—him, with his instruction, his experience—mistrust his body or his mind or that of his fellow man. He senses, holding a stack of them and peering down at long titles written in German and French, that they require context and explanation, and that the loan of these texts would demand an investment of time on his part.

  A few evenings like this; a few evenings with her wet eyes staring out of the dark of his mind, the charcoal ladies that dance by candlelight.

  He says to her at last, “What if I were to help you with these ones?” as he hands them to her.

  She doesn’t look at the monographs; she looks at him. “But you don’t have time.”

  He shrugs. “I might have time.”

  Now in the evenings she sits with him in the music room overlooking the garden, with the curtains pulled shut, and just one light between them. She reads and she asks him questions: questions she’s spent days asking herself, turning them over and over and feeling them out with her mind—nothing shallow or obvious. He thinks: What if I had had a daughter? Would she be like this? The glow of amber warmth in him, like candlelight.

  She prefers Adler to Freud, but he and she agree that neither doctor captured the full complexity of the human individual. Their agreement is like strong spirits racing to his brain, and he sees by her eyes, he hears in her voice, that for her it’s the same. He thinks: I am a capitalist and a capitalist’s son and it was not for me to be counted among geniuses—but see here: alone with a fugitive child, I am at last becoming a man of original insight. When he looks at the girl through this feeling she glows like rows of candles at the feet of a painted saint.

  The other things he tries not to notice about her then: her blouses growing tight across her chest. The way her fingers run over and over through her hair. The smell of his bathroom after he’s let her bathe in it, the dark hairs on his towel. He leans towards his half-steamed mirror with the towel in his hands and tells his reflection: She’s not one of your dancing girls.

  He writes letters to Zilla in this period. He greets her as “Jacqueline” out of fear or fantasy, and says, “Don’t write back, I’m in a silly state.” Writes narratives of Mr. Zimmel and His Wife Who Isn’t. The wife is a little woman full of spark, dark-haired and laughing. In his letters he’s with His Wife Who Isn’t in Egypt, in Tibet. They ride camels, they fall off camels and are rescued by Bedouin herdsmen; they climb mountains and kiss in strange temples. Zilla writes back only rarely, and then on unsigned postcards (a cartoon of a cancan girl, or a monkey with an accordion); says, “I wish there were such a wife for you and I wish I could meet her. Giorgio sends his love along with mine.” He keeps these postcards in a drawer by his bed, but he seldom reads them.

  One night, after they have read together and Lena is padding away towards the stairs, he sees that she’s left a folded piece of paper on the table. (The outside of it covered in sketches, a lady bent down her middle, her left leg amputated by the crease.) He almost calls the girl back—“You forgot something,” he nearly says. But she is walking quickly. She’s already gone. He picks up the paper and unfolds it. He reads the words on the reverse. Words meant, he sees, for him.

  He thinks right away, reading it: I must have done something to invite this. She is so shy of me, she wouldn’t dare, otherwise. He folds it back, touches his face. Watches the fire flickering and thinks of tossing the note into the flames: it would be gone. It would be nothing, it never happened. (“The maid must have swept it up,” he could say, if she were to ask if he saw
her note—and then of course he would have to be very stern.) He could do this, but instead he folds the paper over and over until it’s smaller than the palm of his hand, and then he tucks it into his pocket and goes to pour himself a drink.

  In his bed that night he opens it again. He reads and rereads it. Before he sleeps, he knows each sentence by heart.

  In the morning he brings her breakfast but does not say a word to her. In her face then (though he glances at her sidelong, though he hardly lets himself see it): that terrible flush of mortification. It twists in him like nausea. He runs from her, almost, back down to his quiet rooms with their tall windows.

  All day it follows him, to work, with friends, over his meals. I have wounded her, he thinks. I could have behaved like an adult. I am the adult in this situation. Why not be gentle? Why not acknowledge that, of course, she has nothing else to do with her affections?

  After work, in the evening, he laughs at his friends’ jokes over beers and he leans back in his chair like a man surveying a thriving empire and he shrugs at disasters. And feels through all of it the worm that gnaws his belly. When he comes home he climbs the steps to his front door as if through thick mud.

  Later, when he has almost reached the narrow stepladder he will use to access the attic, he hears a sound like swallows in the eaves. It’s her crying, he realizes. And the first thing that seizes him is a yellow rage: he grips the thin railings and is ready to tear her cubby apart, throw her out on the street—“It could have been someone else coming up! And if they’d heard you . . . !” But his grip on the railings trembles, and he finds his breath slowing; he hasn’t lifted a foot to climb in over a minute. He rubs his forehead. He goes to her without anger.

  She is lying on the floor when he finds her. She hasn’t touched her breakfast: toast curls at the corners, and the jam sizzles with flies. She turns her face away from him. Shakes as if she expects him to be violent.

  He sits against the wall—these beams now decorated, every square inch, in charcoal or pencil drawings that will (he is certain, but doesn’t especially mind) rub off on his jacket. He gazes at his hands awhile, and then he tells her, as gently as he can, “I’m so sorry, Lena.”

  Her trembling is quieter, but still she’s crying. He wonders if it’s all about him; perhaps she’s thinking of her mother, it occurs to him. And this makes his heart twist with a deeper grief.

  He tells her it doesn’t matter what they feel for each other: she’s a young girl, and he is old enough to be her father. Besides, he says, he’s responsible for her. It wouldn’t be right.

  It’s only as he hears himself say it that he admits it to his own mind: she was not alone in wanting this. But he has never dared speak of it, or even hope for it consciously. And now she is rolling over, meeting his eyes, peering at him out from the shadows (soft little creature, like a fawn curled among fallen leaves—something found by accident that would leave one feeling blessed). He can’t find a way not to look at her. And she reaches out and touches his knee with her fingers.

  “But you shouldn’t feel guilty,” she says. “You wouldn’t be taking advantage. I asked you.”

  She tells him that she thought about it for a very long time before writing the note. Friedrich feels his tongue thick in his mouth. He can’t speak. He is suspended in warm water. It’s a minute before he finds he can lift his hand and brush her fingers from his leg. He says, “Still, you’re much too young.”

  She swallows and then she says, “It’s true I’ve never been with a man. But I’m not a little girl. And you’ve loaned me so many books, I think I must know more about these things than many women twice my age.”

  His head swimming at this: Did I mean for this to come about, all along? Impossible not to wonder now. He stands slowly and says, “It can’t happen, Lena.” And he adds, as he picks up her breakfast dishes, “Come down and have something to eat.”

  He makes her camomile tea and an egg on toast. Sits with his drink, across from her, and neither of them says anything. He cleans up after her. Doesn’t say good night as she goes.

  He still brings her books, and he still lets her come downstairs now and again to read with him—hopes, perhaps, that by reverting to the way things were she’ll forget her infatuation. But she sits nearer to him now than she used to, and gazes at him while he speaks to her, even if he points to lines in a book, even if he hasn’t looked at her in half an hour—and at the end of the evening she says always, in her voice like cool water over stones: “I love you, Friedrich.”

  He nods and swallows. Says good night and stands. And she goes.

  But he knows, when he finds himself, at work, lost in dreaming about the soft tendrils that curl up against the back of her neck, with her hair up in braids—and the dimple under her lips, above her chin—that he’s lost. And he floats through it, like secret joy, like agony: I am in love, he thinks. At last, when it’s most impossible, and most foolish—in love. The sound of her voice in everything, and the silhouette of her little body: perfect. When he sits beside these big blond Viennese women at dinners, he smiles at them and sees their delight, but he thinks inwardly, and with sparks of exultation: They’re nothing, compared to her.

  Still, it is a few weeks before he lets it become anything. A while before, at her “I love you” (grown a little sadder with every day he resists it), he turns to her and cups his hand against her cheek, presses his mouth so hard against hers he knows (through the heat and the rush) that it must hurt her neck to bear back against him. He lays her on the couch and kisses her chest through the thin cotton of her blouse, and then (her voice, as she clutches at his hair and his shoulders, crying, “Friedrich, oh, I love you”) through her brassiere, and then nothing. But he stops then, pulls back, gasping, and says, “Lena, it’s too much.”

  She reaches towards him, but he stands—he says, “Please, I can’t.” Everything in him shaking. She goes. He sinks back into the couch, and then later into bed, caught up in swells of fantasy in the dark.

  He buys her roses before he makes love to her. He thinks, If this were under more ordinary circumstances, I would be buying her a house. No—asking her to live with me. Forever, he thinks. This is that kind of love. Her cubby is so small it smells like a garden of roses, with the little vase standing in it. He sees the way her eyes invite him, even then: here, on her little mattress, she would like to be his. But now he finds himself disgusted by the cramped little space, the smell of sweat under the rose perfume, and the heat. He takes her to his bedroom and pours a little wine for both of them. Tells her it’s very important that they always take precautions. But now already (as if no minutes have passed in between, as if time is moving in fits and starts) here she is beneath him, and he is afraid at watching his own hunger, how it finds or makes a way to move in her through everything tensed and tight and she so small in his arms.

  He kisses her afterwards, all up and down her belly, saying, “Oh, love, I wasn’t gentle,” but she only strokes his hair and says, “I don’t mind. I don’t mind.” He lets her spend the night there, finds her curled into him in the morning, awake but absolutely still. And embarrassed, after, by how she’s bled on his sheets, but he tells her, with a tenderness he’s never known until he finds himself now putting it to use, that it’s normal, and it won’t always happen. He kisses her before he sends her upstairs. Thinks then of the shame of it, that she can’t walk hand in hand with him in the park—but who knows, perhaps someday, he thinks. When all of this is over.

  Now work is like sleep, and he feels every part of himself tugged back towards home, and upstairs, to this girl (this woman) who is so suddenly everything. She is eager, always, to see him, and so tender with him, and so free. He buys her little things, little treats and jewels, reads her love poetry. (He writes his own, too, in moments of insanity, and she doesn’t laugh at it.) She wants him to show her everything he likes to do with a woman. She looks up at him with angled amber eyes and some part of him finds itself consoled. Her every gesture
pierces him with its solemnity. He believes that, for her, he could be a better kind of man.

  But still sometimes he must host Party members or colleagues or friends, and he must have parties, and in all this Lena must not exist. He dances with tall women who wear diamonds, who have husbands, and who have affairs, and who smile at him in a way his body makes him understand. One night after all of this, when the guests have gone home and he goes to Lena (a little drunk on champagne, and happy), she seems quiet. She does not turn towards him when he kisses her.

  When he asks her what’s wrong, she says, “You never think of inviting me to your parties.” And he laughs without thinking. She starts as if stung, and her eyes grow wetter.

  He puts his arms around her and kisses her cheeks and says, “Love, you know it’s not possible. It’s not that I don’t want you there, but it’s impossible! You must understand that.”

  “You could disguise me,” she says, and wipes her eyes on the back of her hand. “No one would know I live with you. I could be anyone.”

  “Oh, darling, you know I can’t. They know everyone in town.” He strokes her tangled black hair with the back of his fingers. “I have to keep up appearances, you know. To keep us both safe.”

  “For how long?” She peers at him.

  He opens his mouth, but then closes it again. Says, after a moment, “I don’t know.”

  She seems to curl tighter into herself. “I see.”

  “Come down to my room for a while,” he says to her. “There’s plenty left over from the party. See if I don’t make it up to you.”

  Without making eye contact, she says, “No, thank you,” softly. And it takes him a while to grasp this; she’s never said no before.

  But he pulls away, and shrugs, and says, simply, “All right.” And he stands to go.

  Before he goes he hears her behind him, with a kind of solemn dignity, say (to him or to the night, he doesn’t know): “Today I am sixteen.”