The Ghost Keeper

  So he takes the fish, and he takes his great big knife, you know—

  Like a cleaving knife.

  Yes, precisely. He raises his big knife over the fish, and he swings it down hard to cut off the fish’s head—but just before the blade makes contact, in the moment before it dies, the fish screams out, in a voice like a man: Shema Ysrael!

  Oof.

  Yes, “oof.” So Simeon, now, he’s terrified, and his children are terrified, and the fish is dead, and no one understands why a fish should scream so, like a man, in the moment before it dies. So he runs up to his wife, who is nursing the baby—

  So many kids.

  Well, what do you want. They’re blessed.

  Are you still blessed if you have only one child?

  Ah, go on. If he is good, he’s worth ten.

  “If he’s good,” he says.

  You are good, Tobias.

  Well. Finish quick, Vater—I said I’d help Mutti.

  So the mama, Simeon’s wife, she tells him, You take this fish to the rabbi, and he’ll tell you what to do. And so he goes.

  Good man.

  And you know, Tobias, he’s carrying this fish through the streets, through the busy morning crowds, all wrapped in a sheet, and he feels, now, so ashamed. To be carrying this thing, or to have killed it—whatever it is, that he has done his part so wrongly.

  He is so ashamed.

  Why?

  Well, because—it’s so natural, you see. Because he is so ignorant and small, and he doesn’t know how to proceed. And he has done something, maybe, very wrong, because he didn’t know. Like you might feel, as a child, when you’ve broken something by accident, and you have to go tell your papa, and you think, Oh, he’ll see how bad I am.

  Or you tell your mother.

  Or—yes.

  Anyway, he goes to this rabbi’s house. And they look at the fish, and they discuss and discuss . . . and then at last this rabbi tells Simeon, It was a dybbuk, you have to bury it.

  So they bury it.

  That’s the story.

  All right, Vater, I’m going to go wash up.

  Tobias, just wait a moment—I want to say something, but I don’t know what.

  Well, tell me later.

  No, just this—I didn’t get along so well with my father, and now he’s gone, and it’s awful, Tobias. Not to have had that. I want you to have that.

  Yes . . . well.

  Who knows how long I’ll be around.

  I wish you wouldn’t say that.

  Well, it’s true.

  Think of Mutti, Vater. Think how you’d hurt her, saying that.

  I don’t want to hurt her! I want to not hurt her. But you go on now. Go wash up. Only bring me my slippers before you go. My feet are frozen. Thank you, Tobias. You’re a good boy. Tobias—

  (But the room, this man Josef Tobak will find, is empty, and his son doesn’t hear him. He sits alone in his soft chair. His boy’s dog sleeps at his feet. The walls creak, and the haunted world grows strange and grey.)

  12

  JOSEF’S BOY, IN THE DAYLIGHT, IS A SHADOW IN THE canal. Here is a green-grey deepening into black, and the lampposts and bridges like figures in it. Elsewhere the father, bundled and blanketed at home, still stricken, cannot know his boy’s thoughts, nor exactly what pull the lonely city has on his son. It may be (and wouldn’t we like to imagine it) that the young Tobias can feel his father’s childhood in footprints beneath his feet, somehow preserved in cobblestone and concrete. Mystery and hope that crept beside this water, just there, on the far side. That massive Ferris wheel leaning over everything, only a short walk from here.

  Is he thinking of his father? Tobias is a lamp cupped in the palm of his family’s sorrow. He can lean over the canal and dream of peace.

  But it isn’t only dreams that draw Josef’s son this day. He has been holding a particular grief to his heart, through everything, despite and within his father’s crumbling. He is peering into a persistent evil, Josef’s son. He is making his feet lift as if heaving himself through a bog.

  He has an idea in mind, as if it could fix something. (Scrape the mud off his feet and leave him light again.) He has felt his family’s grief, felt it thickening around him and moulding him in its own image. Yet here, adamant, in his centre, is a part that says: We are survivors, aren’t we? And he would like for that to mean more than shell-shocked hauntedness—he would like it to mean victory.

  Because he is a young man with a future, this Tobias Tobak. And his family, he has decided, has a future as well.

  IN THE EVENING, Tobias asks Josef to take a walk with him and Peng. It’s such a rare offer that Josef, half-asleep on the sofa, stirs almost at once and asks for his jacket. Anna doesn’t say anything, and though one might catch her glancing at Tobias for the shortest of instants, otherwise her gaze is steady on her book, open in front of her. Peng pants up at his master by the door as he dances in and out from between human legs.

  Tobias takes his father’s arm, and they walk in quiet for the first block. Josef keeps swallowing, blinking; Tobias stoops once or twice to pet his dog and Peng runs back and forth across the sidewalk in front of them, claws like tap shoes on the pavement. When a man in a cap pulled low over his forehead passes them going the other way, Tobias raises a hand to greet him, and the man startles as if he wonders if he is supposed to know these two.

  As they pass under a street lamp, Tobias says, “I wanted to talk to you about Friedrich.”

  God, no, Josef pleads—but: “What is it, Tobias?” He tugs his jacket closer around his neck. It isn’t at all cold, but he wants something wrapped round him.

  Tobias sighs. “I just keep thinking there might have been some way we could have known.”

  And now a shiver down the back, a cold sickness. Josef says, “Known . . . you mean, that he meant to kill himself.”

  His son nods. “I wonder if a person would try to . . . try to warn someone, even against his intentions. You know. Subconsciously.” He holds Josef’s arm steady by his side. “Is it possible that Friedrich said something, or did something, I mean, and we missed it?”

  Josef coughs. “Tobias—I wouldn’t want you blaming yourself. Or anyone. When someone wants to . . . to do that, they’ll do it, and you can’t stop them unless they want to be stopped.”

  A moment of silence before Tobias says:

  “But say he did want to be stopped.”

  “He didn’t, Tobias. We can be sure of that,” Josef tells him. But is this what he’d dare tell the ghosts that trail him? He doesn’t know, but he finds himself insisting: “He went somewhere where he was sure no one would find him until it was too late. He didn’t leave a note. He made very certain that no one would stop him.”

  Tobias stares down at the sidewalk, and his fist clenches and unclenches. His father can feel the muscles move in the young man’s arm. Tobias’s pace has quickened a little and Josef breathes a little heavier, keeping up with him.

  “But he had so long,” Tobias says. “You don’t know what he was thinking, all that time.”

  (It is suddenly before this poor man’s eyes—Friedrich falling through all those years, those nights alone, the darkness and the poison of it—but Josef Tobak can’t guess what his son is thinking, how much he knows.)

  Tobias says, “I can’t imagine how he must have suffered, all alone.”

  “You can’t heal someone who won’t let you see how he’s wounded”—Josef’s voice hoarse to his own ears, and strange.

  Tobias glances at his father. “I meant in the attic, Vati.”

  At this, Josef says nothing.

  “Mrs. Zimmel’s priest,” Tobias says, “at the burial, he was trying to tell her that Friedrich might have decided he wanted to live, after he did it. I didn’t realize his hands weren’t bound, but of course they weren’t. They couldn’t be. And of course he couldn’t have broken his neck—such a short drop. The ceiling was about seven feet at the peak. His toes must have almost brushed the floor.
” The words are falling out of his mouth and Josef wants to stop him, wants to reach up and clap a hand over Tobias’s mouth, but he can’t. Josef rubs his throat, swallows hard. So it’s this grief that cracks Tobias open like an egg; but all the father can feel now is sickness, not a bit of what’s precious in this moment.

  Tobias is still telling Josef, as if he can’t not say it: “I think you must have your instincts at that moment. You must try to live. You must. He would have tried to pull himself up on the chain, or on the wall, to stop it, but he couldn’t. He would have tried to call for someone, but . . . he couldn’t. God. I wish . . . Vater.” Josef squints up at Tobias and sees the young man’s face like a monument, a stone soldier’s face, his sister, Zilla, resurrected as a young man. But there is water in his son’s eyes. “I wish someone could have helped him.”

  And how much more beautiful a story, in Josef’s mind, is the one where someone bursts into that room and cuts Friedrich Zimmel down, rushes him to a hospital; the story where Josef sees his friend again, weeping and humbled, broken-throated but alive.

  “I just wonder if that part of him—that part that wanted to live—might have made him say something, or do something, when you were with him.” His voice trembles, and he turns his face from Josef as if glancing up at the houses. “Maybe when he called you, that night.”

  Shut up, you damned boy, shut up, shut up, say the gut and the throat, but Josef’s lips say, “I don’t think he said anything about meaning to kill himself, if that’s what you mean. I wouldn’t have left him there if he had.”

  “I know you couldn’t have done anything, Vater, but I wish . . . God. I wish he’d asked for help.”

  Josef lays a hand on his boy’s arm, though it is as much to hold himself steady as to comfort.

  “Of course you do, Tobias. We all do.”

  “I think I want to do something for people like him,” Tobias says now, “to help them. Perhaps I would like to be that kind of doctor.”

  “Oh,” says his father. New information. “A psychiatrist, you mean.”

  “Whatever it is,” Tobias says. “There must be something. If there is that reflex to survive at the last moment, perhaps it’s there earlier on. Perhaps you can detect it. Maybe no one’s tried.”

  Josef wants to think of Tobias in a white coat, he wants to let his chest swell for this son who means to be a doctor, but the street lights are yellow haze above them and here is Friedrich’s face before him, a mass of puckered, ruined flesh, and he says Do this for me as Josef turns away from him.

  “I wouldn’t want you to think you could really stop someone who was determined,” Josef says. “I wouldn’t want you to take that burden on yourself. It’s too much. It would crush you.”

  Tobias swallows. “But you have to fight, Vater.”

  Peng has stopped to sniff a tree and they wait, not speaking, not looking at each other. The faces of the buildings don’t see them; these windows are blind. It is occurring to Josef that perhaps—just perhaps—there is something more to this conversation than he’d realized.

  “There was a man in Shanghai, I remember, who killed himself,” Tobias says as they start walking again. “I’ve been thinking about him, on and off, the last few years. I don’t know if Mutti told you about him.”

  Josef shakes his head. She never did.

  “He was a tailor. He lived in the building next to ours. I don’t know what I thought of it when I was five,” Tobias said, “but lately I keep thinking of him. How he fought so hard to survive—he ran away from people who wanted to kill him. He made it to China.” (While Josef’s son talks, Peng ruffs and trots against a fence with his ears pricked. Perhaps there’s a rat.) “He beat them. He’d survived. But then he gave it all up. He handed them just what they wanted. And why? Why let them win in the end?” Josef is listening for the judgment in Tobias’s tone, but it’s only the question he hears, the pain of it. “I just can’t imagine why. Can you?”

  In the soup of Josef’s thoughts he isn’t sure who it is he’s speaking with, the little boy who is somehow sure his father will have the right answers, or the man who wants to pick over an idea with an equal intellect. Or even, perhaps, a healer trying to probe a wound—could it be?

  But Josef says only, “Perhaps he wanted death on his own terms, then.”

  “I’ve wondered that,” Tobias says. “It’s an idea. But he didn’t seem strong in it. He seemed defeated, like he had no other way out. Not that I remember him very well. But I thought the same thing with Friedrich. That he wasn’t himself, in the end. Do you think it feels like being driven over a cliff?”

  Such a strange thing to say, but Tobias is peering at his father and Josef observes with a gaze that so often fails that his son has Anna’s deep eyes. And Josef’s mind is asking, Do you think that is how he felt, Josef?

  Josef says, “I don’t know,” because it’s all his throat can manage, but he wants to say no, no; like you’re drowning and you would grab on to anything that might pull you out of it.

  “It’s horrible.” Sharp now; Tobias sounds almost angry (and Josef’s own blood too is going hot, as if he is fighting some jeering someone). “That a person could fight so hard against something so evil and see it driven out, and then run back into it willingly. It’s like they keep getting what they wanted. Friedrich survived; we survived. So why now, after all these years—why do what they would have done to us?”

  And before Josef can think: “But he was one of them, Tobias. Friedrich was a Nazi.”

  And immediately he takes it back, in his mind, but it’s too late. Tobias is silent. Peng is panting and bouncing along in the dark, and Josef’s stomach is a lead weight.

  “He never was,” Tobias says, even-voiced. “He wasn’t really.”

  Josef coughs. “Well. You’re right—not really.”

  Tobias says, “You can’t think . . . You don’t think he deserved it.” He swallows. “I know you don’t think that.”

  Josef barely knows what he thinks. But a moment ago he was wishing Friedrich were still alive, and so he says, quiet, “No. Of course I don’t think that.”

  “And if there had been anything you could have done, you would have done it,” Tobias tells his father.

  “Yes.” Josef Tobak takes these words into himself, places them at the centre, tries to make a lamp of them. “If there had been anything I could have done in good conscience, I would have done it.”

  They walk the rest of the way side by side, silent.

  IN HIS BED, in the dark, Josef Tobak feels his boy’s words stir inside him. All these others, these faces that have haunted him since his childhood, have gathered around him, but he will not meet their eyes. He is looking for the face of an angel who can carry a message to God, but whatever angels there are must hang back in darkness.

  But he has read before that should one run to the ends of the earth, or crawl to the depths of hell, yet would the Lord be there. And so he knows he can speak now, in his heart of hearts, and be heard: I am so tired, says this man’s old heart. I have so little left of good to offer. I can do, perhaps, one further thing, he tells the night, but that is all, and I am not strong, so help me—and in the silence trusts that the message has echoed upwards, outwards, into the knowledge of one who hears.

  I DON’T KNOW how disease affects the mind, or why the body, so fragile, reacts the way it does. But I can tell you this about the man I was: when he awakes the next morning, there is a clarity to the air like purified water. He holds his hands before his face, lying in bed, and prays, Very well, Lord. I will use this.

  13

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT IS AS DARK AS CITY NIGHTS EVER are. I am certain when I tell Anna (“I need to visit the Währing cemetery.” She says: “So late?”) that she knows I have something unusual in mind, but she lets me go. I have a prayer book, a small torch and an old key tucked in my coat pocket; I have a wide, fringed shawl the weather doesn’t demand draped round my neck, hidden under my coat. By our landlady Theresa’
s front door I pick up a garden trowel I left in her umbrella stand. I don’t know what Anna guesses. I hardly know what to think myself.

  My eyes are clear, and my stomach is all but settled. The streets are quiet. I take the bus from our home and climb the hill towards Friedrich’s old house. Trees a deeper black against an overcast sky—street lamps every few houses. Myself perhaps suspicious-looking, I think: thin fellow in a long coat, hunched, striding quickly. But there is no one to see or guess.

  All the windows of Friedrich’s house are dark. His gate is locked. The fence is iron and spiked, but I have already decided I might climb over it. Halfway over I realize this was foolish: my arms might be strong enough to pull me over, but then the stretch and the tension of getting both legs over the top—and I am not as young as I need to be. I gouge my ankle half-tumbling down the far side of the fence, pull a muscle in my groin, hunch in the shadow at the base of the fence in determination not to moan or curse. A sad sight, I’m sure. I can see this man, his face hidden in dark, small in his muffled pain and his heart a kick drum pounding—how ridiculous he is. And whether this makes his foolishness more or less maddening, I can’t rightly judge.

  The pain feels somehow correct, though, like a form of reverence. I ought never to have proceeded without it, some part of me decides.

  Limp into the backyard. The air here is rich with summer—greenery and black soil, and last lingering perfume of flowers asleep for the night.

  The apricot trees are in the back corner of the yard. Their fruit is young and green. Here I will test, for the first time, my dead friend’s faith in me: for there is no way I will know where to look unless he thought to show me somehow.

  It isn’t hard to admit that I half-hope to be foiled at this point. If I have come here in good faith, and if it proves impossible to proceed, then, I’m sure, I can take my freedom and leave in peace. The torch beam finds roots in the hard soil, the creased and cracked bark like old skin. Two tired men, I think: myself and this tree, facing each other in the dark.