The Ghost Keeper

  Josef finds himself searching for her face. It is so hard to make his eyes settle on her. There are spaces between the words, and a silence she isn’t speaking into. He is certain of this. He feels it.

  “I think about my mother, what she wanted for me, and it seems like—perhaps—that is exactly how things worked out,” Lena says. “Every so often I pause, with my babies, or when we’re eating dinner, or even on some silly errand—the experience of life is so immense, despite everything—and I think, Mama, here I am. You gave me this. You chose well.”

  “In trusting him, you mean,” Tobias says—and the words are a knife in his father that he doesn’t see.

  “In giving me up, in choosing him. Everything. I don’t think I could have done the same for my own children. I can barely stand to be apart from them, even like this.”

  Anna says, “I don’t imagine I could have done it either. Thank God I never had to find out.”

  But the next thing Lena says makes Josef want to clutch his chest:

  “So Friedrich never had his own family, then. No children.”

  “Well, not that he knew of,” Anna cracks, and now Josef feels his stomach like a marble, but though he sees it as if through shadow, Lena only smiles down at her hands.

  “Oh, dear,” Anna says. “I shouldn’t have said that. Shame on me.”

  “Well—isn’t it so?” Lena says to them. “He didn’t consider it properly, I suppose, but I think he did want that. A family, I mean. I believe he did. Or perhaps I imagine it.”

  “I think he did,” Anna says.

  “I remember that—the loneliness,” Lena says. “My own, yes, but also his. There was such loneliness in that house. I wonder if—and this isn’t fair at all, I know—I’m sorry to bring it up to you—but I wonder if, maybe, he died of that loneliness.”

  “That loneliness,” Josef says. And here, just beyond the dimness in him, is his friend who says to him, It’s only that I never had anyone, Josef. Not really.

  “My husband,” Lena says, “would not have me think about Mr. Zimmel too much. He believes Friedrich was too lucky in the treatment he received. He’s right, I know. And I have enough love to spend on memories of my mother and my grandmother—everyone. But my daughter asks me about the occupation, and what can I do? I think about it always. He’s there, you see, just like a ghost. In my own house, despite everything.”

  It makes Josef raise a hand to his throat, this word ghost. The word seems to stir the air around him.

  “I have trouble speaking about these things with my husband,” Lena tells them. She rubs her stomach with her hand. Glances around at the strangers with their coffees and cakes.

  And in her silence, when Anna says, “It’s very hard,” the words are like pebbles dropped into a still pond.

  “Mr. Tobak,” Lena says at last, turning to Josef, “I wonder if you would take a walk with me. Outside. I would be able to speak better, I think.”

  BENEATH UNLIT STREET lamps, in the shadow of these old imperial streets, Josef walks arm in arm with this woman. Her softness, just here, and the smell of lavender on her. His wife and his son walk behind them, far enough not to hear.

  “I was so grateful for your letter,” Lena says to him, “but I can see that discussing these things is painful to you. I suspect I’m asking you to remember things you don’t want to remember.”

  “No,” he says. He means this. “Please. It’s better to say it.”

  She goes silent, and the world flows around them. She guides him gently by the arm. The light off the windows makes him feel as if he might see everything, see clearly at last, but for now the swirl and haziness will not cease.

  “It still makes me sick, being indoors,” Lena says. “After all this time. You’d think it would pass. I have a doctor, and he’s very helpful. But there are things they can’t do, after all.” She pauses. “Your son will be a doctor, then.”

  “He says so,” Josef says. And then: “We are very lucky.”

  “I miss my children,” Lena tells him. They step down off the curb, cross cobbles, step up again. “My husband gets frustrated with me. I have such a hard time when they’re born. Darkness, you understand? Like I am not a part of my own life. And I’m afraid to touch them.” Another silence. “But after a few weeks it’s better, and then I’m afraid instead to let them go.”

  And then she adds, as if responding to someone, “But it’s true, I have a good life.”

  And in the silence that follows, they each of them reflect on the depth of things unsaid.

  “It is difficult to leave your children, then,” Josef says to her.

  “Yes. Yes, it’s hard.” She holds his arm tighter; he is certain she doesn’t notice that she does it. “But I had to. You understand. I had to. It was that or . . . or tear myself apart.”

  He feels it, the truth of her words, the very literal truth, and it chills him. “Because Friedrich died?”

  “Yes.” She squeezes him again. “And in that room. I thought so many times . . . I had envisioned myself . . .” She takes two deep breaths. A tension to her speaking that threatens to snap the air between them, and a rock set into Josef’s middle, terrible weight.

  And at last, in so small a whisper: “Did he tell you that there was a child?”

  “Oh—he did,” he says. “Yes.”

  In the air, the smell of water. This shadow that opens up in front of them, the canal stretching off in either direction. They arrive at a bench beside it. Josef knows Anna and Tobias will keep their distance, and is grateful for it. Both he and Lena sit beside the water.

  “So he spoke of her,” she says.

  “Just once,” Josef tells her. “At the end.”

  She shivers. “I named her after my mother—Sarah. I named her before she was born. That whole time, I dreamed—I was so lonely—to have her . . .” Her voice fades, and she says, “She was stillborn, though.”

  “Yes,” Josef says.

  “And my husband doesn’t understand why I won’t name a daughter of ours after my mother,” she says. “I haven’t told him. I’ve wanted to tell him. It’s such . . . such a burden.” Her voice small as she tells him this, and as she goes on it shrinks almost to nothing. “But in my heart it’s as if I cast her aside. Same as he did.”

  He holds her arm tight. He has been braced, all this while, for interrogation, to beg forgiveness or to let her destroy him, but now he finds himself in quite another role.

  “I suppose he burned the body,” Lena says. “I never could ask him.”

  “He buried her.” Josef finds himself lifted in saying it. “Under a tree behind the house. And then—” It may be his mind only, but it seems that one of the faces from his darkness has come to peer at him from Lena’s eyes. “—and then later in the Währing cemetery.”

  She is watching him. “I don’t understand. You’re sure of this?”

  He nods.

  “He told you? He went into the cemetery with her body?”

  Her hands on his arm, and he finds—this mercy—that he can say it.

  “No—he asked me to do that. I did that. I buried her there.”

  Nearby is the water, which shimmers, green and gold, carrying shadows down through depths. All colours clear and bright. A simple beat to his heart, like a clock ticking in the next room. You could fall asleep to it.

  At length, he feels her leaning into him.

  “All this time,” she says, in a voice he hasn’t heard until now, “do you know—and it was a thorn in me—I’ve imagined her completely alone, and forgotten.”

  The voices behind them, the cars that grumble and spurt, colours flying by on both sides of the water, and a light held in the man’s heart, a red glow.

  When she sits straight at last, and she says to him, “What a strange chance it is to find you, Mr. Tobak,” already he is holding between his ribs a heat he’d half-forgotten in the dark.

  He is looking into her eyes, lights amber and bright. He says, “Well, sometimes—
these things—” And whatever he meant to add (something that sounds, to his inward ear, almost rabbinical) is muted by the pain in his throat, and he only nods, lays a hand on her arm.

  The canal is very green. There is light everywhere, late-afternoon light, and a richness as of gold. Windowpanes glinting like stars.

  “I could not have guessed I would ever be allowed to know that,” Lena tells him.

  “Oh.” Josef swallows. His whole self is saying, I am glad, and he hopes she can understand it.

  But now place yourself in it, Tobak. Understand that this man is your very self. So: I sit beside her. And listen: she says, “If I could tell my husband, so many things might be better.”

  “Could you tell him?” I ask her.

  She peers at the water. “I don’t know. Perhaps I could,” she says at last. And: “What a relief that might be.”

  And I think, holding her small weight against me—this so-innocent weight: Yes, indeed. Such a relief to set a burden down, if one is, at last, permitted.

  Soon Tobias and my Anna will come to us. I am certain the new posture of my body invites them. But while there is time, I ask Lena if she would like to visit the Währing cemetery with me, to see the place where I buried the child. And while she sits beside the water, contemplating something beyond my understanding, it occurs to me that regardless of what she answers, her words become a blessing, and I am free to receive it.

  16

  ANOTHER DAY, SOME TIME AFTER THIS MEETING (Lena at home in London; Vienna mild in the months before the winter), I am with Tobias in the Seegasse cemetery. I know the timing is muddled in my mind. I must place myself in history—here, I suppose: about a decade and a half into peace, and five years since the new occupiers left us; four years since our Hungarian neighbours poured in, and three since a Soviet satellite first blinked by. A year, still, before an American president and a Soviet premier will arrive in our city to talk and talk and talk, and a year also before a wall in Germany cuts another city in two. And of all of this I’m only half-certain. You find yourself in it, you try to hold a place.

  So begin with a sure fact: I am with my son Tobias in the Seegasse cemetery. We are poking about in the earth, since there are gravestones buried here, and we would like to know how deep. (All this while I have been piling other unhewn stones in the Währing cemetery for our families. I have been thinking of so many families. I have been looking for ways to hold it all.) I am surprised at how much the digging disturbs me. I dig with a little trowel and when, only a foot beneath the earth, I uncover carved stone, it is like bearing bones to the light. It is unearthing the dead, it seems to me, and I must resist the urge to ask forgiveness.

  The air has a little of the spice of autumn in it, and digging makes me breathe heavier, so my throat has something of that good, raw hurt. It has become, since Lena came, easier to pray. I can recite psalms as I did as a young man. It isn’t so much a feeling of being heard as a rootedness in prior knowing, and this like a stone foundation is, I think, a surer base than the transported feelings of my youth. In this confidence, and despite fear, I can come here with Tobias, scrape and dig a little.

  I remark on my discomfort to Tobias, and he falls thoughtful. He says, after a pause, “It is strange, isn’t it, since they’re only markers. But perhaps they begin to stand in for what they mark. I can see that.”

  I scrape at soil, cool clay under my nails, and I hold these words of his. The distance between a marker and the thing it marks collapsing into nothing, and then separating again as I note the collapse. Collide and come apart: body and stone, spirit and bone. And it strikes me that I had better know which it is that I am caring for, and what I am carrying, or else it’s all nonsense.

  “It’s terrible to think that people might forget these were here,” I say to my boy, and I pat soil back down overtop this worn stone. Because of course no one sets markers up for buried gravestones. So how would you know?

  “But someone would find them eventually,” Tobias says, “even if by accident.” He is not looking at me; he is prying at the soil. A squirrel bounds and springs against the brick beyond him. If the people behind the windows that look onto this courtyard are watching us, we cannot see them. “And whoever it was would know what it all meant.”

  “By the text, you mean?”

  “They’re gravestones, Vater—people understand.” My son shrugs. Wipes his hands on his trousers. “It’s all very clear. Right there on the stone.” Back to digging, and he adds: “That’s why people set it all down this way, isn’t it?”

  I dig awhile. Set it down, he says. Is it his German? (Still coloured by China, perhaps—I wonder about it.) I know what it is to want to set a thing down: some things so heavy, and yet one has to bear them. But to connect that longing to this memorial—I am looking for the link. I ask Tobias, “How do you mean, set down?”

  “Recorded, I meant,” he says. “It’s all recorded. So even if I forget, or you forget, or everyone forgets, still it’s written there.”

  He goes on digging. He’s not watching me, and he does not see. But in this sharp air there is some invisible light that penetrates. That there is a fish buried here, and a stone that remembers him. That there are hundreds of years between us and these dead. So understand, Tobak: nothing you have carried of these souls have you ever carried on your own.

  In the Seegasse cemetery, the stones lie sleeping, but they do not forget. Here is a prayer rising up from a man who forgot, for a while, what was asked of him. And the question he was afraid of is no longer a question: Come alongside, it says. You are not the only one who holds these things. Nothing need be carried alone.

  17

  NOW I WOULD LIKE THIS TO BE FINISHED, BUT I SEE IT is not so simple. I am within it and apart from it, am watching a man who is and is not myself. Perhaps now that he is all laid out in front of me, I can pity him more gently. I suppose it might be so.

  A thousand things I’ve neglected: about my mother, my father, my sister, the smell of winter, candlelight through frosted windows, foxes in the snow—all this begs pardon. There is time and space yet; I may still find the words to carry everything. If I reflect awhile longer, if I wonder deeper, will it all come at last? Everything accounted for—each piece with its marker. But it’s never been so, of course. It slips away, and this (a part of me can grasp) is not always an evil.

  So you would say to me, “Find the ending, Josef, the true ending”—but I don’t know the ending; I am still waiting for it.

  18

  THERE ARE TIMES IN THE WÄHRING CEMETERY, WHEN the weather is fine and my knees are not stiff, when to chase the thieving fox away is no challenge. There may even be times when it seems I can be on him so fast as almost to brush his fur with my fingertips. How he drops his little bone then—quick as anything, preferring to save his life. (Though I wouldn’t hurt him, I know; and wonder, sometimes, whether he knows.) And I can bury the bones he leaves behind, though between the tree roots and the animals, a man’s bones might be spread over a half acre in this walled garden, if they haven’t left the grounds completely.

  But there are times, too, when the wind is high, and there is a bite of autumn to the air, or a scent of spring, and the fox’s coat shimmers in the wind as he trots; and then it has been that as I hobble along behind him, he looks back at me, full in the eyes, and I am arrested.

  So he holds that bone in his mouth; so he flicks his tail; so he peers at me awhile, to say: Will you chase me?

  I suppose my eyes must give an answer. For then he is off again, little flicker of flame, under the wall with the pieces he carries.

  I think, Fine, then. You have somewhere to take them. I will follow you there someday—someday, but not yet.

  Acknowledgements

  THANKS, FIRST OF ALL, TO RHEA TREGEBOV, WHO READ sections of this book during its earliest stages of development while I was studying at UBC, and without whose help I doubt I would have had the confidence to undertake this project or the insight to do
it justice. Thanks also to Annabel Lyon and Ruth Daniell, both of whom provided feedback on the manuscript at key moments

  Thanks to Rachel Letofsky and everyone at the Cooke Agency. Thank you to Jane Warren for understanding this book before I did, for believing in it and for steering it in the right direction. Many thanks to Patrick Crean, who stepped in at a critical moment and compelled me to make the book what it ought to be, despite my protests. It really is a better book now.

  Thanks to a series of patient roommates who shared my life in Vancouver, Sudbury and Ottawa while this book was being written, and to all the friends who encouraged me in writing it.

  My family, to whom this book is dedicated, have been a lifelong support in my writing life. Thanks to each one of you for believing this book would be real someday. I hope you love it. Special thanks to my grandmother Holly Martin, as enthusiastic and patient a supporter as I could ever hope to find. Biggest thanks to my biggest fans, Jane Morrill, Keith Morrill and André Morrill: for stories, for the graveyards of Vienna and for your love.

  About the Author

  NATALIE MORRILL holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Canadian journals and included in The Journey Prize Stories anthology. She lives in Ottawa.

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  Copyright

  The Ghost Keeper

  Copyright © 2018 by Natalie Morrill.

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