The Ghost Keeper

  I could see the swelling on her cheekbone, from up close, going purple already. It was a fellow from the university who did it; not a boyfriend, she said—he’d got the wrong idea. I told her I’d beat him up, and I meant it, though I was small for twelve and the last time I’d fought a boy in my class he’d pressed my nose into the sidewalk and kicked me so that I couldn’t sit properly for two weeks.

  Zilla had a cut of beef out from the icebox by then (Mutti must have been in the parlour, or out), and she was holding it on her eye, and she sighed and told me not to bother: someone was likely calling a doctor for the bastard already, she said. Friedrich had broken his nose and probably a few of his ribs and told him he’d murder him if he ever laid eyes on him again.

  And I don’t know—perhaps my pride hurt a little, for my sister’s sake as much as for mine; but through and within whatever I was feeling right then, I loved Friedrich Zimmel to tears and I told Zilla she should marry him.

  My sister laughed a little, and looked at her feet. Then she looked up at me with her one good eye and she told me she could never marry Friedrich. He was her brother, she said.

  “He’s who you would be for me, if you could,” she said to me, and even peering out from under a red flank steak she was hazel and gold, shining. “You’d be just the same for me, if you were older. I know you would.”

  I went red, and I kissed her on the cheek. I suppose it was the kindest thing she’d ever said to me.

  9

  IN THE BRIEF TIME BEFORE FRIEDRICH’S FUNERAL, I SPEND a lot of time walking Tobias’s dog in the park. (I take my mind for a walk, and Peng pulls me.) On my own too, I walk once towards the Seegasse cemetery, meaning to visit; but instead I walk past the old doors without turning my head, and around the block and then off on another errand, and home. The Währing cemetery I do not venture near.

  Still. I can walk and retrace the city’s streets, repeat and reorder the route so often it seems unfamiliar, like a word worn out to the point of meaninglessness, but I cannot shake the hook in me. It tugs and teases.

  Under the sun of an afternoon, on a bridge over the canal, listening to the clap of my own feet as I walk, it occurs to me: I am the only one now who knows what he wanted.

  The canal under the bridge is deep green, like bottle glass, and my shadow an emptiness in its middle. Sunlight spearing colour, scaffolding of gold in the green.

  ANNA COMES WITH me on one of these walks. She holds my arm. She has been so quiet since she and Tobias told me my friend was dead. I have felt it as kindness. And now I walk with her on a street near our home. It’s mid-afternoon, warm. The sidewalks under our feet are uneven, and we have to part arms now and then to negotiate a hole in the pavement. (But most of these have been repaired, it occurs to me; not nearly so bad as it once was.)

  Anna says to me, after some minutes, “I’ve been thinking.”

  This could be anything, I think. So: “Yes?” I say. “Go on.”

  “It’s about the Währing cemetery,” she says.

  (How to describe this feeling? Something cool that starts beneath the collar and trickles down the back; it makes me want to twitch away from my own clothing.)

  “Almost no one goes there,” she says. “And barely anyone seems to care what goes on there. It’s terrible, I know—and I do feel terrible about it. But also—and Josef, just listen to me for a moment, that’s all I’m asking—doesn’t it mean that one could, if one wanted, set up a small memorial there? Without having to ask, I mean.”

  I stop and stare at her. Has a curtain been pulled back, does my wife hear everything that happens in my brain?

  “What are you talking about?” I ask her.

  She sighs and gazes off down the road, then at her hands clasped in front of her. “For our families, I meant, Josef. Or—if you didn’t think it felt quite right—for my family, then.”

  This is a cut to my heart, and it lets the heat pour out. I take Anna’s hands (although another part of me still is watching this situation, saying, How very strange. And so . . . ?).

  “You’ve been thinking about this a long time,” I say.

  “Of course. And yet—” Fixing her eyes on mine. Her hat shades the knot in her brow, but I can read it. “Now I’ve been thinking about Friedrich being buried. Don’t misunderstand—I begrudge him nothing. But his friends will always have a place to go. And even when they’re gone, strangers will walk by it and see, and they’ll know about him. But my mother doesn’t have that. My brothers don’t have that. Your family. Every—”

  She stares off down the street again. She will not cry, this wife of mine. But my chest aches. My eyes prickle.

  “I have been thinking about it,” she says at last.

  I take her arm. We walk again. Walking is like a mother stroking one’s back, like rocking a child. I have been walking so much these days.

  “One could do it,” I say. My throat is tight, but it comes out soft. “No one would be particularly bothered by it, I imagine.”

  She is quiet. Listening, I know. She doesn’t look at me.

  “Although,” I say, “almost no one will see it. Not a marvellous memorial, Anna. A secret one. I don’t know. Is it what’s needed, I wonder.”

  Anna sighs. She squeezes my arm, makes me stop and look at her. “Listen, Josef— It is— Listen. Tobias was speaking to me once.” I can barely tell now whether it’s her eyes brimming with wet or mine. “He said, ‘Mama, we don’t know. It could be that someone was kind to them at the end. Or that someone tried to remember them. We don’t know.’” She is almost smiling when she says it—but oh, it’s a smile like a wound, and I wish I could heal it. “Such a good boy, my Tobias. And he’s right, it’s true, we’ll never know. But Josef—I know. And these people”—nodding at the windows that look onto the street—“they know. We’re all too old now to tell each other fairy tales. So you’re right, yes, it isn’t what we need. But understand that I am surviving on every small, poor scrap of justice or truth that’s afforded to me. So I am asking—” She touches my cheek—which, yes, is wet; but so, I think, is hers. “Just for now. A little place. Some stones. A word. It’s not enough, you’re right; but still—it’s good.”

  NEITHER ANNA NOR I sleep regularly through the night, and this is not so strange—but on the evening before we bury Friedrich I am awake at all hours, bartering with the dark. There is something I do not want to offer. But it will not stop tugging, I know, no matter whether I dismiss it or try to forget it or watch it tear me apart. This is not fully sane, says a sober part of me, from some high and solid place, but in the silent dark I can barely hear. It occurs to me at length that I am free to end this. I am free to offer anything.

  I can roll towards my dear wife in the dark; I can speak into the curve of her neck, a little rough with sunburn, and say, “You see everything so clearly, dear love.” So that teeth and tongue brush this spot of skin—so that I have touched this piece of her with affirmation. And she will not wake; but I will stroke her arm and call her wise, wise. So: her family, and mine, and that of a woman who once trusted me—it is not so very many to have to care for. Consider the shadows, consider the numberless dead—see how few my special charges, and how light they are to carry.

  For my Anna has made me face this fact: that my friend buried his crime under an apricot tree in the dark, and it’s there, I know, that this hook is tugging me, regardless of whether I consent to look where I am going.

  10

  THERE’S A BRIGHT SUN AND A COOL BREEZE ON THE DAY Friedrich’s body is buried. His mother, Katrin, is very elderly and worn through by life, and she stands, tiny creature of bark and air, by her son’s grave without a word. That he was refused a Catholic funeral seems to have shaken her more than anything, though the fact that her priest has come with her today and is standing beside her now, and that he promises to offer a Mass for Friedrich on Friday morning, seems to help her stay rooted in the moment. She doesn’t sob, but from the first moment I see her, tears run in a
steady stream from her eyes to her chin and she doesn’t try to wipe them.

  Tobias and Anna are with me, of course, at the burial, as are so many strangers. They are silent when the coffin is being lowered, but in the other moments they talk in earnest whispers to one another, tutting and conferring and consoling.

  One woman with a feather in her grey hat wrings my hand and tells me what a terrible misunderstanding it’s been, the fact that some people would have his death taken for a suicide when he was such a pillar of the community, so noble and so good. I pat her hand and say, “He was very good to his friends,” and she says with eyes full of heartbreak, “Yes, yes; and you know, he did even more for the Jews than they deserved.”

  And another man tells me that he’d known for years that Mr. Zimmel’s resolve was failing, but that Friedrich would never take his advice and see his psychologist, who would have cured him within a month.

  “The point is to get to the root of things. You have to remember the things you’ve repressed, the root traumas.” He leans in closer to me and my eyes catch on his one silver tooth. “It’s because of things his father did to him before he was at school, I’d bet my life on it. It always is.” And he shakes his head at the grave. “Shame.”

  And another man, an old fellow two heads shorter than me, just barely grunts out as I walk by, “And finally we know what sort of man he was all along.” For a moment my mouth goes dry, but the man’s wife says to him, “He had a hard time of it, dear,” and he replies, “The war ended years ago, but everyone’s still talking about it. I’ve managed not to kill myself. He was a coward.”

  Anna, when I come back to her, is pressing the hand of Katrin Zimmel, who is talking in low tones and cannot seem to meet my wife’s gaze. Tobias is standing a stride off from her, arms crossed across his chest, staring down at the freshly turned earth. He is red around the eyes, and it surprises me: it’s not that I doubt his affection for Friedrich, but that he seems always so capable of hiding his heart. I did not think he would cry.

  When I come up beside him I lay my hand on my son’s shoulder, almost at the level of my cheek. He looks at me out of the corner of his eye, and he nods. The air smells like summer.

  Anna turns from Katrin to me at last, takes my hand, and says, “Mrs. Zimmel has just told me the most incredible thing.”

  I have never been able to predict the changes coming; I have never once been prepared. I am like a blind man before stepping into traffic, saying simply to my wife, “What is it?”

  Anna points across the turned earth, points to a woman I’d barely noted—brown-haired, perhaps as many years older than Tobias as she is younger than me. Something familiar to her face, though I can’t place it. This woman is looking at the new grave. She does not turn to greet anyone. Her expression is strained, almost anxious.

  “That woman,” Anna says, “is the young woman Friedrich protected all those years. Your little cousin—what’s her name—Lena something.”

  I can set this down sincerely: not since years and years earlier, not since I was a creature forced to eat grass on the grounds of the Prater, have I felt the feeling drain so suddenly from me. It must show on my face, it must, and yet my wife carries on:

  “Mrs. Zimmel says she’s married to a London banker. She moved to England a few years ago. Her husband has been in touch with Mrs. Zimmel a time or two. It seems Lena’s health has been poor—or something like that, I didn’t quite follow.” Anna is patting my hand, not looking at me, and so she does not remark on what I look like as the feeling goes out of my feet; as I become a man whose spirit is fighting to escape his own body. “So Mrs. Zimmel sent them notice of Friedrich’s death, and here, you see—she took the train all the way to Vienna, all by herself. She arrived just this morning. We must say hello to her.”

  “Vater,” says a voice, “are you all right?”

  Tobias puts a hand on his father’s shoulder and almost makes the man collapse. He can’t know the nightmare that fills Josef’s whole world: the possibility that this woman will turn, will see him—see on him the mark of decades of failed responsibility—and it is a blow to the gut; it is blindness come like murky water from alien thunderclouds. There was a sparrow perched on the gravestone only a moment ago, he thinks, but it is the last thing he sees clearly before he all but faints against Tobias.

  “Vater, you’re not well—”

  “Oh, Josef, I’m sorry—I didn’t think—”

  Thank the Lord his son is taller than him now, can bear up against him, help him back towards the street. They had meant to take the tram home. Tobias says he will find them a cab.

  Anna sits with her husband on a bench, his body slumped into her like one pulled out of charred rubble on a bombed street.

  “Dear Josef,” she says, stroking his hair. “I didn’t think how it might shock you. I didn’t guess. I’m sorry.”

  He would like to say, “I am sorry,” but there isn’t any connection now between desire and doing, and so he sits there dumb and blind.

  THEY TAKE HIM home, sad man, and put him to bed in the dark.

  Understand that he’d meant to go that very night to Friedrich Zimmel’s house to reinter the buried child. Before the funeral, early in the morning, he’d gone to see the place: saw the front door open, men beyond the door shouting, sounds of moving furniture. Josef Tobak, untried grave robber, had gone to get a sense of the risk, but had found himself wondering instead whether a new resident could stand to know what had happened in that attic (or even a small part of that story, true). If someone died in a house, Josef thought, he might be there forever: huge and formless, filling the emptiness under the eaves.

  But now all the ghosts are here, in his bedroom, crowding in on him and clouding his vision. So Lena is here. Real. With that look on her face—like her mother in a doorway out of the cold, and Josef Tobak responsible for everything that happens next.

  Anna lies beside him for a while on the bed. She says, “Mrs. Zimmel said Lena was planning to be in town a few days, if it would help you to speak to her.” And at his silence: “But if it would make things worse, love, never mind, never mind.”

  That evening, when Josef’s vision is a little clearer, when the world seems quiet around him, he breathes deep, and he imagines what petition he would like to make to God. He is sure he has an argument. He is not sure what its object is. To be freed, he supposes. To be no longer responsible. Responsible, guilty—he realizes the concepts have twined together in him like old roots. Take an axe to them, then, he prays.

  He can shuffle down the stairs in front of their house, and he can look up at blurred clouds, and he can say this in prayer—but the world will still shadow over, come night, and there will be no word sent back, and his own dry mouth filling with silence.

  11

  You are listening to me, Tobias?

  The light’s so dim.

  I think you’re listening. Stay there a moment. I was telling you:

  This man Simeon, he goes out to the river before sunrise, remember—almost no one is awake. His fishing rod is over his shoulder, and he praises the Lord for the coming morning—

  Mama said you ought to get some rest, Vater.

  I have to go wash up.

  You can stay with me a minute.

  I was saying—and you know, this is a real story, Tobias. If you go to the Seegasse cemetery, right there, you could find the fish’s grave.

  I know, Vater. You’ve shown me the place.

  But let me tell this right—I don’t think I’ve told it right yet.

  Vater, I have to—

  It was the early morning—the sun just starting to come up, and he goes to the river, a special place he knows, just outside the city: bend in the water, there, and the shore sloping down as sand. And he casts his line—whish, like that—far out into the water, just as it starts to glint in the morning—

  Vater. For goodness’ sake, you weren’t there.

  Shh, Tobias. Where was I—

 
Oh, yes. So the line flicks out into the water, and the whole world is beautiful in the new light, and he prays to the Lord: “I shall praise your power and kindness at dawn, for you have been a place of refuge to me.”

  A very pious fisherman.

  What do you want? He was a good Jew; it was the Middle Ages; the Lord was very near to earth then.

  I’ve heard it another way, to be honest.

  You don’t know so much, my boy.

  Anyway, he’s praying. And then all of a sudden, poof—a great strong pull on the line, like a man in the water has grabbed hold of the hook, is pulling with great strong arms.

  So he pulls and he pulls, this Simeon—he reels and he reels, fighting this strong man in the water. He teases the line back and forth, he lets it go, he pulls it in, battle and battle, will against will, and then, at last, in the beautiful morning light—

  Watch your arm, Vater. You’ll knock over the lamp.

  It’s all right.

  As I said—this fish: he flops out of the water, he’s huge. Made absolutely of silver, scales like armour—shining—beautiful. He’s big as the man’s arm. His muscles—he’s thrashing, he isn’t dead, only panting, like the fisherman.

  But Simeon, here, he’s won the battle—and so he heaves this fish into his net, thinking, I hope it holds—and it does, thank the Lord. He carries the great big fish in his net all the way back to the city, smiles at the other folk who are awake now, all pleased with himself, with his good catch that morning. How good a fisherman he is, how good the Lord has been to him.

  And which is it—that he’s a good fisherman, or that God is good?

  Tobias, you don’t really ask that.

  You know these things. Be sincere.

  So he’s got this fish.

  He has the big fish, yes, and he carries it in his net back to his house, and there his children are waiting, all awake now. They gather around him there to watch him kill it.