The Ghost Keeper

  His first—his physical—reaction to this is a kind of revulsion. He would like to rinse his mouth out; he would like to take a long and scalding shower. But then this feeling softens to guilt, and he turns back and kisses her. “Happy birthday, my love,” he says. But still she doesn’t turn to him. So he says good night to her, and she says good night to him, and he finds himself, as he traipses back towards his bed, wishing he hadn’t let go of Eva von Rathsburg’s hand when she tried to lead him out towards the darker corners of his garden.

  BUT IN THE morning, when he’s sober, and his head is clear and aching, he thinks of her loneliness and is ashamed. He considers buying her a dress, but can’t think of a good-enough excuse for anyone who might ask what he wanted it for. He takes one of his mother’s rings—these ones she left at the mansion, ones she doesn’t wear now on account of her arthritis—and sets it aside. Buys pastries in the afternoon, makes a little tray of cakes and opens a bottle of champagne, and when he takes her to him, he plucks her up in his arms and carries her into his bedroom—and she laughs—and he sets her down against the bed, in the midst of the picnic he’s set on the floor.

  He kisses and caresses her while they lie there together, and then he takes his mother’s ring out of his pocket and slips it onto her right ring finger. She stares at it awhile, and he says, “I am going to marry you, Lena, as soon as I can.”

  She looks up at him now, eyes like jewels—says, “I hoped you would, Friedrich. I hoped so much that you would.” And takes his face in her soft, thin hands. And kisses him. And is so tender with him in bed, so tender he is drunk on love, and declares to himself in the throes of his bliss: I will defy them all, I’ll marry her now; we’ll run away and to hell with them if they catch us, I am not afraid to die.

  So for a while again between them it is this happiness. He rocks her in his arms, and he listens to her tell their fantasies to the night every evening in his bedroom—the future they’ll have together, their house in a country far away, their friends and their children. He has not found a way to marry her yet, it’s true; but he feels it’s good to be prudent, and every night with her he feels new courage. And after some time has passed, he thinks, After all, they’re already married, as one might say, in the eyes of God—isn’t it so?

  THERE IS A night when he hosts another party. His guests spill out from the conservatory into the garden, the summer air is hot but lifting with the evening, and a lithe if intense little Bavarian woman, Clara, is dancing up against him, making him laugh with her boldness, making him reel—and the whole world is laughing, he could believe. The whole world powerful and young and beautiful. His eyes rise up on his giddiness, up through the apricot branches, along the back wall of his house, the tall windows dark, reflecting dusk and starlight. But there: in his bedroom window, you can see it, if only just—against the inner dark, another darkness, the shape of a woman’s head and shoulders at the window, looking out.

  “Excuse me,” he says to Clara, who sighs as he squeezes her hand and says to him, “Don’t take up with anyone else. I’m paying attention.”

  He pushes past friends without faces, he bumps through them all with a pulse pounding in his ears, louder and louder, a throb that out-thunders the whole world and the taste of fear so bitter in his throat that when he bursts into his room, and finds Lena crouched there in the dark, he cannot rightly hear the words he says, and he cannot discern the taste of them on his tongue, and through the dark can barely see the face of the girl who cowers and cowers and cries. He has her arm gripped tight in his hand all the way down the hallway and up the little stepladder; he flings her back into her cubby, spit flying now between them as he curses her. When he comes out, when he’s coming down the stairs, he finds his legs shaking so badly he can’t walk, and folds down onto the step behind him, his face in his hands. It’s five minutes before he can stand and go back to his guests.

  His blood still hot in him when Clara brings him a fresh drink, and whispers, almost into his mouth, “I want to show you my husband’s new car.”

  Down the street, in the dark, he is rough and fierce with this woman in the back seat of her husband’s Mercedes. She grips him and moans with him and, when he’s finished, takes his lower lip between her teeth, and later says, “When can I see you again, Mr. Zimmel?”

  In the days after this he brings Lena food, but he does not speak to her. And she is so wounded by this, so frightened—he finds in his anger that her attempts to coax him back to her nauseate him. Her tears and the way she offers herself to him: A child with no self-respect, he thinks. I was mad to begin this. He meets Clara in a hotel near his work, where his anger becomes a roughness she seems to translate as passion: she talks about going into the country with him, spending a week together, just the two of them.

  And in this time, too, he begins to see the world as a beast hungry for his life—sees it in every resistance member accused and condemned, every old man beaten to death and every family shipped off on trains that seem to steam straight out of the land of the living. Hangings and shootings. Executions by the dozen. The very munitions his factory manufactures: churning up the earth, shredding bone and flesh and the mess of it roiling its way towards him like the crest of a flood. He feels strapped to the ground; he wakes gasping from nightmares in which a creature comes to devour him and he cannot move to escape it.

  Then, late in the summer of 1941, this news comes: in occupied Paris any Jew who registers with a foreign passport will be detained and interned. When Friedrich hears this, it’s already too late to warn anyone. He wonders, for a little while, if perhaps Zilla has escaped already—but she seemed so confident, he remembers, that her connection to Giorgio would protect her. Or could he make a special petition, he wonders, to have her freed?—but he knows what this would look like, and knows too that his influence only extends as far as the Party authorities like it to. And he knows better than most (and, standing on a street corner near his office, is suddenly paralyzed by) what the intention is for any person interned.

  At home he lies on his couch, his face in the cushions. He does not weep; he finds he can’t. He feels hollowed out and filled again with yellow-grey fog. When he brings Lena her supper he doesn’t think about her one way or the other, and she sees this change in him: she goes to him, touches his cheek with her hand. He stands a moment under this touch, and then he melts into her. He cries out into her shoulder; he screams muffled and wordless into her flesh, and all the while this girl holds him, and rocks him, and lowers him onto the musty sheets of her little bed. Kisses him until he softens and relaxes into her arms. She whispers as she strokes him, loosens his shirt and trousers (he won’t resist it now; he forgets being mad at this girl, forgets almost who she is). There is her touch and her kiss and the smell of this room, which is mothballs and sweat and old flowers. He lies in her bed with his eyes shut, these unwashed sheets rough against his skin but her lovely mouth so tender and warm and wet. Lets her comfort him any way she likes. Rolls in towards her when at last she puts her arms around him and tucks her blanket around them both. Falls asleep against her breast with Lena humming softly to him in the dark, some strange, wild song.

  A NIGHT IN December when she asks him if he could find a prayer book for her: “My mother always said the prayers on Fridays,” she tells him, and, “When did you become so Jewish?” he asks her.

  She only shrugs and says, “I miss it.”

  Of course, there are no prayer books to be had; he tells her this. “Why don’t you just make it up? Some people just talk to God,” he says, “like He might understand what you’re saying.”

  She looks at him awhile, and then she says, “You’ve got a strange kind of faith, Friedrich.”

  He laughs. They’re in his bedroom, and the clock reaching towards one o’clock in the morning. “I don’t have one, you mean,” he says.

  She shrugs, and nestles into her pillow. “If you say so.”

  He tells her he could probably find her a Christian
bible with the Old Testament written in Hebrew.

  “It’s not like it would make much difference anyway.” She sighs. “I don’t read Hebrew very well.”

  “Well, tell me if you’ve got something better to do than practise,” he says, and she laughs a little, and he wonders, as he sinks into sleep beside her, whether this is what marriage would be like: a softening of passion, perhaps, but a laughter that might flow in to take its place.

  She is a bit sick the next day, though—and then strange with him. And stranger still the day after, and seems for the entirety of the following week to be distracted and withdrawn from him. He asks her for the first little while if there’s anything the matter, and then, when she doesn’t explain, decides to leave her alone until she comes around: he brings her food and lets her use his bathroom to wash up, but they hardly speak and he doesn’t kiss her.

  Then, after almost two weeks, he finds her sitting waiting up for him in the evening, her face streaked with the tracks of tears, and she tells him, in a thick, strange voice, “I’m worried I might be pregnant.”

  The first thing he feels is a fizzle of fear: a kind of bubbling up his back and into his brain that almost makes him giggle. And his first advice to her: “Perhaps not, though. Let’s wait and see.” He goes back downstairs. He finds his hands are shaking when he holds his book. He tries to think back about whether there was any time they didn’t take proper precautions or if these might have failed, but this thinking makes him feel faint. He mixes two very strong drinks and lets these dull him out of his wondering and to sleep.

  But he finds, soon, that her “I’m worried” meant something closer to “I’m nearly certain.” She’s almost a month late on her cycle, she tells him. She’s been sick into her chamber pot most mornings. And each time she mentions something she apologizes so profusely, often with tears, that he has no trouble thinking this is her fault, that this is something she’s done to him.

  And still for the first few months his strategy remains: do nothing. Willed ignorance, he realizes, is like a well-worn suit for him at this point. The shaking in his hands he attributes to political stress, or his drinking too much these days. He lives his life as usual, he goes to Lena in the evenings and brings her supper and, as often as not, takes her to bed. He says to her look of concern, “Never mind, my dear, it’s nothing.” And sometimes laughs to himself when he says this—a feeling like drunkenness, or dreaming.

  When she becomes visibly swollen, and pretending becomes harder for him, he begins to take her to bed less often. He calls on Clara and meets her many evenings after work. He begins to join in her talk about a holiday in the countryside (“If it weren’t for this damned war,” she says).

  He tells himself he’ll get a doctor to come deal with Lena—any day now, he thinks. But knows, behind that thought, that it’s impossible. There is no one he can trust. So he tells Lena to drink herbal teas he brings her, and to exercise in ways that seem unfriendly to pregnancy, and all the while feels as if he’s watching a crazed, detached version of himself instruct the girl in this way. She tries to obey him for a little while, until one evening she bursts into tears and says, “I’m sorry, Friedrich, I can’t. Please don’t make me.”

  Without really being aware of it, he brings her less and less to eat.

  At the same time circumstances in the city are becoming harder: the war intensifying, all resources directed towards the two fronts, where the Reich seems only to expand and expand. Friedrich is terrified and amazed by it; he sits with his colleagues and watches the newsreels, the spread of the empire like water spilled across a floor. Dizzying, he thinks. And in the midst of this there is the sense that the new declaration of war with the Americans is only exciting, and inevitable, and that—perhaps—the patriotic mania that gripped the first, sincerest Party members was not only reasonable, but prophetic.

  Friedrich thinks about these things to make himself stop thinking of the girl. In a corner of his heart that he hardly dares examine, he hopes that she might, somehow, simply disappear. He knows that if he were to climb up to her attic one day and find her gone, with no explanation, he would dance. He would laugh like a madman. He would thank God, whose existence he’d confess, willingly, in his delirium. But he cannot bring himself to tell her this is what he wants. He senses that she would leave, if she believed he really wanted it. But then, he knows, it would be his fault: it would be he who killed her.

  Almost without thinking, and without letting his mind fix fully on the things he fears, he finds that he’s defending himself against practical dangers. The sight of the girl growing bigger and less comfortable triggers it. He is afraid that she will go into labour suddenly, and make a lot of noise, and that someone on the street, or someone who happens to be visiting, might hear it. He starts to gauge how soundproof her little room is. He stacks newspapers all around her walls (paper that, he knows, he ought to keep for kindling). He wonders if he could make her bite onto a stick to keep from screaming. More than once, in the worst, the darkest moments—ones that come upon him unannounced, when he’s opening a window or reading a book—he fantasizes about killing her. When these moments pass he fantasizes still more vividly about killing himself.

  Now, walking down the sidewalk towards his office, or sitting in his living room, or at dinner with friends, he finds he exists in such a perfect state of terror it’s like a novel kind of calm. This detachment, he senses (but cannot make himself address), might be a species of insanity. He has never imagined what might become of Lena, or her baby, but he sees constantly before his eyes his own show trial, his prison cell, the hangman’s noose framing a teardrop of pale morning sky.

  Without mentioning it to Lena beforehand, in the first week of June he locks up the house, and he goes with Clara to her cottage outside the city. He drinks with her until the days blur and he forgets how long they’ve been there. Here he finds in Clara the same kind of detached terror that cripples him. Their affair does nothing to bring them back into a state of calm; he realizes one night that he knows nothing about her beyond her wealth and her name and certain ways to please her in bed. Still he tries to fling himself into this passion, in a faith that it can sometimes be a stirring in the present that lets one forget the future.

  He returns home in tatters after five days away. If he had hoped to find Lena gone, he is disappointed: she’s there, in hysterics, weeping that she thought he’d left her, or died suddenly. She’s trembling from weakness; she’s hardly eaten all week. (He left the kitchen almost empty, he realizes.) She nearly faints as she’s crying to him and though he himself can barely walk, he drags his feet beside her to get her back into bed.

  “There isn’t any food,” he tells her the next morning. “I’ll bring some to you as soon as there is any. Don’t come downstairs again.”

  He will wonder, later, if it might have made a difference if he’d still pretended to love her. Here in front of him she dissolves into a state almost animal, starved and frightened. Her belly strikes him as grotesque beneath her bony face with its wide, hungered eyes.

  There is then the night she sneaks downstairs to find food, but he hears her (her steps on the staircase, the banister that squeaks when she grips it), and he follows her and catches her in his kitchen. She’s seen already that his pantries are not empty, as he’s told her. Now he grabs her wrist. He raises his fist as if to strike her, and she looks up at him. Then she collapses—without a cry, without protest. He has to carry her, half-conscious, back up to the attic.

  He has no idea until he comes to find her the following evening that she’s gone into labour, and by this time it’s already over. In the sitting room, on the main floor, he didn’t hear a sound.

  There is a mess, and the smell of blood and filth. She will not move. She won’t look at him, or at anything, and she doesn’t speak. He takes her sheets and uses them to sop up the mess on the floor, concerned at first that something might seep through the ceiling of the floor below. He cannot now make himself
look at the curled, stillborn body beside her.

  She doesn’t look at him through all of this. It is not, this erasure, a thing simply done. He has to leave and go back down for more sheets; he comes back up looking for a stain on the ceiling. At last he gathers everything up in his arms and brings it all downstairs.

  The sheets he burns on a hot fire in his hearth. He sees it will take more wood, and he doesn’t have much. Still by his feet there’s the little body wrapped in sheets soaked through with blood, cut from the afterbirth with kitchen shears. He decides to carry it into the backyard. He takes a baking tin from the kitchen, which the cook will miss, but it doesn’t matter. He goes to the very back corner of the garden, into the dark under the apricot trees near the high fence, and he digs a hole as deep as he can manage in the hours before the world awakes. He lays the bundle in it with the baking tin on top (to keep the foxes from digging it up, he thinks) and he covers it over with soil, and pats it down, and sets atop a stone or two, and see, it’s done.

  IN THE YEARS before the war ends, there is less and less to live on. The winters are colder, and Friedrich’s colleagues less and less confident. Before the end of 1944, one knows. Some men have talked of leaving the country. Friedrich has withdrawn from most of them. Still he smiles sometimes, but less and less often is invited to visit friends (and it’s all right, the world seems to say, because this isn’t the proper time for parties).

  He has decided that the girl in his attic must survive this war, and that she must go free. And this is all there is for him.

  There are nights when the bombs fall on Vienna, he says to me, when you can hear the crack of them and, far away, the buildings centuries old disintegrating into rubble, vomited across streets; nights when he sees again in his mind the flood of churned earth rushing towards him. Only now it doesn’t scare him. Only now he sometimes wishes, tucked into his great, dark, lonely house, that such a flood could sweep up everything, and wipe away the stars from above his home and every other light from his eyes, and in the dark make the world over, everything once again new.