The Ghost Keeper

  6

  WHILE FRIEDRICH SPEAKS I FEEL THE SWEAT ON ME, cold, a trickle down my back and sides that seems to leach balance. He cannot tell this thing straight, nor all at once, but opens sometimes into details that seem trivial (the smell of flowers, or what the weather was like on a particular evening). He loses track of what he means and falls silent, staring into the space between us with his lip dangling, looking like a very old man. And I have to call him back, to find a context: “What happened when you told her that?” or, “Did this part happen before or after you knew?”—though I don’t want to talk, though the words in my mouth feel false.

  He sniffles. “I never told anyone. She never told anyone, as far as I know.”

  My collar is damp, and I feel feverish and strange, pasted into my own clothes. I am afraid it is the flash of heat before extreme nausea.

  “You helped her emigrate.”

  “Yes. She lived, and she left. It doesn’t count for much, but I wonder, sometimes, if she’s happy.” He wipes his nose on the back of his hand. “No matter. She’d never want to hear from me. She knows what I am.”

  “And she didn’t want to talk to me—”

  “I may—Josef.” His eyes wide, his lips hanging loose. “I was . . . I was afraid. I was afraid of you speaking to her. I didn’t want you to.”

  I press my hands over my nose and mouth and close my eyes, and I breathe slowly, in and out. My palms smell like Anna’s soap.

  “Please don’t leave me.”

  He says it so quiet, with a boy’s voice, full of fear.

  I stare at him across the table. Purple tear-stained liquor-ravaged pig face and dark shining eyes and monstrous, says a part of me. What a beast this man has become. But he blinks and a tear rolls down his cheek, and a dog barks outside, and I put that part of me aside.

  I say to him, “Friedrich—” But the words to comfort him lodge in my throat. A long hot wound runs down my heart. I can say: “But she had no other family, Friedrich.”

  “I know. I know! But she went away in safety. I can promise you that. I will be sorry forever. Josef, I’ll be sorry forever, believe it.”

  What does that matter? The word sorry drops through my mind like a shadow and impacts nothing. “And what do you want from me?”

  He sucks in a breath. “I have to put myself in your hands. I don’t know if I ought to confess publicly. I think . . . I think I shouldn’t.”

  I don’t know the answer to this. I can’t imagine what it was like to be this girl, whom I know only from Friedrich’s understanding of her (and that limited, I think, despite everything). Would she want this brought into the light? “I don’t know,” I tell him. “Perhaps it ought to be up to her.”

  “I don’t know what she wants. I don’t dare contact her. I don’t dare presume. If she accuses me, I won’t deny it. But if she has decided to forget . . . I think I’m the last person in the world with a right to remind her. This was my sin.” He swallows. “No part of it was hers.”

  I hang my head. “What a nightmare.”

  “But I had wondered, lately—” A pause. I look up. “I had hoped very much that there might be something . . . a kind of gesture . . . that you could make.” His hand extends across the table in front of me, trembling a little, as if reaching for something, but his eyes aren’t on mine. “All this time I’ve known her child was back there. In the garden.”

  I peer at him. “Where you buried it.”

  “Yes, and . . . Well. It just makes it all the more barbaric. What I did to her—to both of them, I mean.” His left hand finds his right and his fingers interlace, tremble less as they hold one another. “Like a murdered creature, hidden back there—but she’s not, Josef! I am ashamed beyond words of myself, but I can’t make myself be ashamed of her.”

  I’m not sure whether he’s speaking of Lena or their child. “What is it you want me to do?” I ask him, for it seems so strange, and I can’t imagine how I could change anything—and is it even true? A part of me now wonders. Has he made up this story to torture himself for some other real or imagined crime? If one could look beneath the earth, would anything be buried there?

  “I want—” He seems to shiver in his seat. “You could—and oh, Josef, I don’t know how I dare ask this of you—I don’t deserve it—nothing makes it right—but you could perhaps . . .” (I want to take hold of him and say: Just tell me!) At last he says: “I was hoping you could bury her in the Währing cemetery.” A silence. And then, “You know: properly.”

  My throat is dry. Strange thrill of sickness and cold. “You want me to dig up the child and . . . and rebury her?” I cough. “In the cemetery?”

  “Yes, yes—I thought of it, you know, right from the beginning. But I didn’t dare try to go there. I felt”—he coughs—“unworthy. Yes. And I didn’t know how to do it, after all. But you, Josef—you know that place so well, and no one ever goes in there. You could bury her. You could give her a little marker and say the proper prayers. I am certain you could. And perhaps it would atone—I don’t know.” His shoulders collapse. He seems to shrink before me. “For something.”

  I swallow and hold my hands on my lap so he won’t see them shaking. “I don’t know if I’m prepared to say yes to that, Friedrich.”

  “Josef, I’m very sure you could do it!” Again his voice catches in his throat. “I know how you look after the dead. You go after the foxes when they steal the little bones. You make sure those people have their dignity when everyone else forgets them.” Now my own eyes are wet, and this man’s face blurring around the edges. “I’ve asked myself, doesn’t she deserve that too? I’d never tell anyone you knew. You know I wouldn’t. Even if Lena tells the world what I did, I won’t tell them you were here. I’ll tell them I took her there. But I can’t do it. I don’t know what to do. I’m scared, Josef!” And he folds his arms on the table and buries his face in them, shaking.

  Under this light, watching him, I feel completely empty and clear inside, as if washed out after a rain. I don’t even know if it would be a crime to do what he’s asking me. But surely it would be, I think. But does that matter?

  I wish I could ask Anna what to do. I wish I could ask her father.

  I tell Friedrich, “I can’t imagine doing anything like that. And in secret!”

  “Oh, Josef, I won’t ever make you lie for me.”

  “I certainly won’t lie. But this seems like you want me to help you conceal it.”

  “No! Not to hide her. That’s not what I meant. You can put a proper marker there. Write whatever you want. ‘Stillborn daughter of Lena Kostner and Friedrich Zimmel: she lived and died because her father was a selfish man.’ It happened in forty-two. You can write that. Anything. Or—don’t even mention me. I don’t deserve it. She would have been Lena’s. I wouldn’t have deserved to kiss her feet. You could write—”

  “Friedrich, stop.” I hold up a hand. My heart is a boot kicking my ribs. “This has to stop. I can’t think straight. This is too much to take in. And you’re not in your right mind.” I look into his eyes as I say it, trying to hold on to the good in him, trying to sustain him. (I feel, watching him in this stained twilight, as if I am slipping down a steep hill into the mouth of something vile; but I swallow, and then: might this not also be the way up and out of darkness?) “I think you need something other than what you’re asking for. It seems to me you need”—I am about to say a holy man, but instead—“a doctor.”

  He stares at me, and I know somehow I am watching a light in his eyes go dimmer, dimmer, deeper, gone. He hangs his head.

  “I understand. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  I hold out a hand to him across the table, but he either doesn’t want it or doesn’t see it.

  “Listen, Friedrich. I need some time to receive all this,” I tell him. “And please reflect that I’m still indebted to you for what you did for my family. This doesn’t change that. Nothing can erase that.”

  His body so frail, so limp again; he isn’t me
eting my gaze. “Yes,” he says, weak as a man twice his age.

  “Perhaps you should stay at our house.” I make myself say it because here he is like a hospital patient in need of fluids and rest. But there is this nausea in me that threatens to bubble over, and I wish, in a deep place, that he might say no, and leave me be, and let me go out alone with all my grief.

  “No, I’ll stay.” He touches the table with his fingertips and peers into his glass.

  “Or”—I make myself say it—“I could stay here.” Though it makes me reel to imagine it.

  But Friedrich shakes his head. “I think I would like to be alone for a while. To get some sleep.”

  We sit for a moment, saying nothing. He is hunched like a stone, and the shadows on his face are like bruises. I feel my head spinning a little, a tilt across my ears. It will be hard to stand, it will be hard to walk, but I don’t want to stay here. I push myself up from my chair.

  “Well, if you can manage, I’ll see myself out.”

  Friedrich only nods, still not looking at me. It seems I should say something to console him, but my throat feels tight and the right words seem lost in the thin night air.

  “Are you sure you’ll be all right?” I ask, and again he nods, shrugs. I have one hand on the back of my chair, and from this position, standing, the room does not seem so huge, but dark and small and grubby. I tell the both of us, and I’m not sure where I find the words: “You’re my dear friend, Friedrich.”

  He puts one hand to his face, and with the other he seems to wave me away. I stand there for a few seconds, but then I turn and walk out towards the stairs.

  “Josef—”

  He says it so quiet, I might almost have imagined it. But I stop and turn.

  He is like a mound of earth under an old, dying sun, but in the same instant so small, so nothing. I have trouble finding his eyes. His cheeks are wet.

  “It’s only that I never had anyone, Josef. Not really.”

  We stare at each other for a long moment, seeing and not seeing. At last he lowers his head to the table and waves me off, one last sweep of his hand.

  I raise my hand to him because—I don’t know the because, but I do it, and I say (though my voice is cracking, useless), “I will pray for your peace.” And I turn and walk down the stairs, to the door, and out into the dark.

  AS THE NIGHT air hits me, all of this hits me anew or perhaps for the first time. I have to take hold of the gate to keep upright. Everything is tilting to the right, the vertical bars themselves tilting, turning to point downhill.

  It’s not just Lena, I know; it’s not just Friedrich. With the wind sweeping past me down the road as if it could not be bothered with what happened here, with the clouds overhead grey and blind and the whole street blue and black and grey, I can feel the countless silent faces pressing in around me, inches from me, watching, waiting, but I have no answer for them, nothing. I can walk out of the yard, down the street, down the hill. Still the world seems sometimes to tilt sideways and I have to grab a fence or a tree until it all goes level again.

  In my heart Zilla is beside me, Zilla at ten and fifteen and twenty, and Zilla the last time I saw her, blessed and in love, happy. (Zilla’s script from her last letters—Help her and Make her trust you—as if burned into the back of my eyes.) Her own eyes are the same in every season, fire and light, but now they are asking me something, and I can’t hear the question. She is holding a bundle to her chest and the blood seeps through it. And I can’t speak to tell her why or who or how, or to say I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  But right now I’m walking towards the Währing cemetery, through the dark, with things alive and rustling in the trees, leaves shaking in the wind and the air cold. My footsteps aren’t steady, but they are a solid kind of sound in a night that might otherwise feel unreal enough for me to fall straight through it.

  Through the park and up to the brick wall, to the solidness of this place. I let my body fall against it. The wind shakes the trees so that they sigh a little above me: Oh, well. I can close my eyes and press my forehead into the stone until I feel the grit scratching the rims of my glasses, biting through my skin.

  My Lord, I pray. Aren’t you done with us yet.

  A cat mewls, a block away, and then it hisses. A car backfires.

  I can lean into this wall, and it can take all of my weight, all of my grief, everything, as if I didn’t exist. Coolness and stone against me. I can beat against this stone, but some small voice is saying, deep into my heart, that the stone is the same stone whether or not I remember any of them.

  My God, why don’t you wash the earth clean. Why don’t you start over completely anew.

  The night sleeps around me. I lean there a long time.

  At a certain point, I don’t know when, a snuffling and rustling to my right makes me look up. Between the wall and a tree that hangs over it, two eyes are lights in the black and it takes me a moment to find the corners of a snout, to see the paws blacker than the wall or the earth and to see the little body hanging broken-backed from sharp teeth, somehow softer than any little body in life.

  I stare at the fox, and he stares back. I feel I ought to shoo him off. Instead I put my hands on the wall and I push myself back. Still the fox doesn’t move. I wipe my nose on my sleeve and back away.

  When I’m perhaps thirty feet back, the fox drops his snout and trots forward. He seems to sniff the earth, and then he paws at it. It’s hard to see him exactly in the dark. I didn’t know that he kept a cache outside the wall, but perhaps that’s my doing, after all. I’ve made it harder for him to depend on the cemetery.

  He drops the little creature, vole or mole or rabbit kit, into the hole, rolls it over with a flick of his snout, and starts to bury it again. It doesn’t take long, and I am amazed that he lets me watch him—though perhaps, I think, he knows he’s shooed me off for now.

  When he’s done, he sniffs the earth, then turns and looks at me for a moment, and if I understand anything from that look it’s only a sense of irritation or, perhaps, weariness. But as he trots away it’s only my own weariness I’m left with. It’s well past midnight and I have no strength left to stand watch here. I stuff my skinned hands into my pockets and I walk with my head down, slow, out of the park.

  7

  WHEN IN THE AFTERNOON OF THE FOLLOWING DAY I make myself knock at Friedrich’s door with bandaged knuckles, he doesn’t answer, and I try not to feel relief. I stand outside and look up at the windows, but I can’t see anyone. There’s nothing else to do. I go for a walk in the Türkenschanzpark. It’s a fine day, cool but sunny. The white butterflies are visiting the flowers. I stop at the bakery on the way home and buy a bag of fresh rolls.

  The next day, again, Friedrich is not there when I visit, and when I get home I make a phone call to his house, but there is no answer. I haven’t told Anna what he told me—dare not tell her, I find. The feeling is still too big to process. It would split me in two, I feel.

  The fine weather continues, and I worry about him, yes; but there is work for me to do and it’s not unlikely he’s left town without telling us, or has been visiting a friend or staying out late at a club of his. Certainly there are thoughts I almost have, and things I almost revisit, but I keep busy and breathe the good air and close certain gates in my mind. It isn’t happiness, and—though it shames me to say it, knowing what I do now—perhaps that’s what makes me so selfishly sad in some moments: that these are free, blue-skied days I have with my family and, smile as I might, I cannot be happy in them.

  But five days after I saw Friedrich for the last time, I come home and find Anna and Tobias sitting together at the kitchen table, and the moment they look up at me with that sadness and yet also with that shieldedness that would try to spare me some measure of hurt, I do not sit down with them, but go straight back out into the street without saying a word. For an hour I walk with my hands in my pockets, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing, until the sky starts to go dark. When I get home again
, Anna has made coffee and Tobias takes my coat from me. We sit together in the kitchen under a light from above the stove.

  FRIEDRICH’S FAMILY HAD servants when I was a boy, but in these days he has only the woman who comes in on Thursdays to clean house. He leaves a key for her in the mailbox on Thursday mornings. When she came this week, the key wasn’t there. This had happened before, however, and, as the neighbours in the next house knew her as Friedrich’s long-time help, they loaned her their key to his house. It seemed he’d given it to them after a girlfriend of his had left her dog locked in the house while he was out of town, and the animal had torn up his furniture while the neighbours heard it howling through the second-storey window.

  The woman let herself into his house and cleaned the two main floors without noticing anything amiss, other than that Friedrich had left some dishes unwashed for several days (but these she could dismiss as a bachelor’s simple vice). When she went upstairs, however, there was in some rooms a terrible smell, but she could not find out where it was coming from. It was strongest in the hallway, but there was nothing she could see that might be giving off such a stench. It took her several minutes to notice the ceiling hatch leading into the attic.

  She went to find a neighbour before going up into the attic, and for that I am grateful, for her sake. Even when they’d made it up there, however, it was a few minutes before they discovered the little crawl space leading into the hidden back room, a room half-filled with decades-old newspapers. It was in that little room that Friedrich Zimmel had, some days before, looped a winch chain over an exposed rafter and hanged himself.

  8

  THERE WAS A DAY WHEN I WAS TWELVE, PLAYING FOOTBALL in the street with the children in the old neighbourhood, when Zilla came home with her hat pulled down over one eye. I left the game and walked with her up the stairs, though she told me to go away. One of the boys said something rude and I swore at him.