Caraliza

by Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick

  Evan stood in the doorway of the closet, and did not move for an hour. She forced them all to stand utterly still with the story she wove into the air all about them, and into their hearts. While she spoke and told of the lovers forging a bond across the street, lovers hidden in secret, and the awful danger it brought them, the light in the mirror rose, too slowly to be noticed. She told her family how they found the clues to the grave in the back, the clues to the horrors across the street. Yet, no clue could be found why the murderer haunted there, or what had become of Yousep, or of Caraliza, that she could put her spirit so woefully into every camera Papa would hold. They could find no answer to the sorrowful question, where were Yousep and Caraliza?

  As Shelly neared the end of her tale, and recounted the awful night of murder, which had broken Papa’s mind, Caraliza was blazing behind her as if the sun had entered the room. Shelly stepped away, and the crowd took in the beauty, until their eyes cleared and the illusion parted. As the light in the frame began slowly to fade once more, family realized what had been done to the poor girl; there was silence.

  Many were weeping.

  Shelly returned to the spot under the mirror where she began the tale, and told the family the horrible ghost in the attic seemed to have been forced to leave them forever, but she hoped Caraliza and Yousep might remain with them, to be loved until the family utterly faded away. Papa - it was certain, still haunted with vigor, and the family seemed relieved to have some smiles cross their faces.

  The affect of the image was profound, and they did not recover for some time. But time they had, the rest of the evening was for visiting and walking the building. Many times, Evan saw someone walk to the great mirror, and simply touch the frame. Below it, they reverently beheld the images, and the notebook, which gave life to the tale. They saw something there they could not lose again, but they hoped could be healed; it was legend no more - loved ones had died. Shelly brought the family a triumph, and they loved it. Every time her eyes met his, she beamed at Evan, and told him she loved him.

  It would be hours before the door would open and Reismans would begin to find their way to their homes. Shelly and Evan would spend much of the time in small groups, prevented from getting very close to one another, answering endless questions. The wait staff was eagerly sought; nearly to a person they all knew some terrifying event to recount. Mostly, they told about encounters with Papa. His family was terribly amused he did not bother them at all, but the staff was genuinely haunted. As Evan would overhear these tales and discussions he wondered, what would change if the keys from the cigar tin could open the locks in the shop? What would Papa do if his secret were discovered? Who would be haunted then? It was time for Evan to find out.

  The garden was opened, the lights were on and guests were moving through the studio, to see the new garden patio. For the first time, they all knew the new basement had been dug, replacing a grave, and it was causing a lot of interest. The door to the porch stood open for them. Evan could tinker with the door and hardly be noticed at all. The three keys in his pocket, taken from the tin, were waiting to be tried. He removed them, and held them in the palm of his hand as he stood by the door. Either this would be uneventful, or the building might crumble from the rage of the old man, haunting at his secret shelf under the front window. Evan prayed they would hear nothing.

  The first key he took to the lock, slipped inside the slot with ease. That lock was unused for more than a generation, but the key did not hesitate. Evan grasped it and expected to turn it with some force to test it. Hardly any was required, the bolt flipped out. The very first key was at some time in the hand of Toby Hoath. Evan did not need to try the other keys; it made no matter to him whatever.

  He realized what that single key meant to the entire story of Papa and his troubled mind. The brute had been an employee, just as Yousep had been. The brute under the stoop collected the rents, and delivered them to the back of the shop, likely letting himself in and leaving them for Papa. Menashe Reisman could never let any living person know he employed that man; it would have forced questions about the missing girl.

  Evan imagined a surprise at the doorway, a grief fueled revenge, a dead man at the bottom of the stair. Just lift the roses and put them back after the body was hidden. It was just another part of the mystery. Where had the two lovers and their murder gone? Papa lost his sanity from hiding part of the truth under those roses.

  There were sudden screams from the front of the shop.

  Evan was part of a crowd rushing to the store from the studio. His surprise was not lessened that he had expected some reaction from the remaining spirit in the building. He did not want trouble for Shelly, but ghosts in that place were not always kind to the living. This might ruin the night. Evan prayed no one was hurt. Too many people were standing in the doorway; he could not get through.

  But he heard laughter, and it seemed impossible. He doubted the building ever felt that much laughter in its entire lifetime. From the middle of the great room, he heard relieved and amused laughter, and Shelly’s aunt Dannie was cursing a streak of profanity into the crowd around her. Shelly came into the knot of people preventing Evan, and fished him out with a devilish, and very satisfied grin upon her face. She pulled him to the closet, where Dannie entered, moments before, to peek at the forbidden space.

  “She was warned, silly cow!” Shelly turned to speak unseen over his shoulder and shuddered against him with uncontrollable giggles.

  Dannie was disheveled, and fuming, claiming she was obscenely groped in the dark closet. Hands felt under her dress. She demanded they produce the person hidden there who was instructed to do such a thing. Several people looked in passed Shelly and Evan, but no one would take a step closer at all. There was no one inside the small space.

  “Dannie, if you were really groped, go back in. You probably need the attention.”

  Grandma Sareta stood in the front of the room under Caraliza’s hiding place and smiled back at the crowd who erupted into cheers.

  The night was utterly complete. Shelly was in tears from the giggles and the relief, but also for another emotion. She pulled Evan close and kissed him sweetly, then stepped into the closet, smiling as she closed the door.

  Hardly anyone but he noticed her slip inside. He stood at the door for several minutes and wondered at the silence, there might be very good reason to worry. But she appeared a bit later, and she was deeply flushed, more tearful than when she stepped in. She bent to Evan’s ear and breathed very sweet words she knew he would want to hear.

  “There is someone who wants to see you.”

  She pulled him closer and pushed him back into the space, and her smile was wonderfully wicked as she closed him into the darkness. He did not need to turn around.

  “Mag ik je kussen?”

  Opening night, and it was impossible to get to the front door. They filled every table in ten minutes, but took reservations for the rest of the week. Hardly a breath of the play was changed, but the treasured plates in the studio were removed and the dinner tables put back. Shelly had been thinking ahead. The first week, she offered the full menu, it might cause a wait, but the time would be filled with the history and tales of the ghosts. Each reservation after was made with a diner choice in mind. Shelly would have a fixed menu each night. The food was always secondary to her intent, though her family raved at the skills of her chef and his crew.

  The throng they turned away the first hour must have taken it to be just the novelty of the place, and accepted the terms. She knew they would not care, for a great while, what they put in their mouths when they sat down in that magnificent old haunt, and heard the stories it kept so secret for those many years. The newly opened window seemed full of faces peering in from the sidewalk all evening. The hostess was continually busy explaining the seating, the reservation system and the menu, someone would walk in every few minutes and she simply parked herself at the door.

  But the opening night had an incident, very late
into the evening. Shelly had wondered how the public would react to a personal experience, when Papa might be offended by guests so near his window. Her cautions were the same; the red roses warned guests they might not be left in peace. The distress at the very front table, just feet from Papa’s hidden shelf under the display, was sudden and fierce. Her staff knew Shelly would hear nothing, even sitting upon the display platform; they rushed to the aid of the shouting guests.

  The room was in an uproar that all the guests could hear in seconds, with weeping, cursing, and cries they should not touch the keys, and the entire table of diners was forced to the back of the room, until the haunting faded away. There were instant cries of fraud from another table, but Shelly did not have to answer it. One of the haunted guests herself walked directly to the man with the complaint of fakery, and she slapped him full force in the face for his stupidity. Shelly bit her lip to stop the gleeful laughter she could barely control.

  Naturally, the man with the sore cheek was provided champagne, and the offended guests returned, after several false starts, back to the screaming table. It finally settled into silent once more. Evan, who had been asked to provide quiet help, in such an event as protests that hauntings were staged, simply whispered to the gentlemen with the champagne to follow him, for a private moment in the closet.

  The gent was informed spirits sometimes visited the closet, a male and a female, and they were…playfully familiar; to be prepared it might still be unpleasant. The gent took his time satisfying himself the closet was completely empty and when the door closed, Evan prepared for the poor man to come screeching back out. He was in a full minute. He had to be removed, as he had fainted when the door closed and collapsed in a heap upon the floor, and spilled his drink all over himself. When he awoke on the floor outside the closet, under the laughing faces of his friends, he became cross and refused to admit, yes or no, if the spirit scared him or he had scared himself.

  Shelly changed very little of the dialog in her play, but she changed something else of profound significance. The public was not allowed a glimpse of Caraliza, long enough, to find the hurt under the spell she cast. Caraliza would be a beauty forever in their eyes, an angel who but lacked her wings, and nothing more than that happy lie would be told. If their hearts told them differently, and they saw the truth, it might remain a secret still, it was always a shock that could hush.

  By eleven in the evening, the first day was done, and Shelly went to the center of the room to pirouette, and cry. Evan was sought by the hostess, to come from the studio where he was locking up, and was taken to the great room where Shelly knelt, wracked with shuddering sobs. He could not make her speak and helped her to the divan, then thanked the staff and let them out. He could tell they mostly understood…she never hid the depth of the desire she held for the place; but her milestone was passed, the goal in hand. She was weeping for the journey, one no longer under her feet. Evan sat down next to her, pulling her into his arms and waited until she poured all the sorrow away. It seemed to take an endless time.

  “This nearly killed you, Evan,” she finally said through her tears. “You helped me make this all real, and you died out there. I don’t know what brought you back.” He was suddenly unsure if he really knew that answer. “So many times this place tried to take you away from me, if you died, I would have burned it.”

  She needed to wipe her nose, and Evan almost laughed when she just used the hem of her dress.

  “What? So you have a fucking tissue every time you need one? Jerk!” she laughed and he could tell the worst of the sorrow was passed. “Please tell me, Evan. Were you leaving with her? Is that why she pulled me to you, to keep you from following?”

  Evan could see nothing in his mind of those moments; his eyes had been veiled, but his skin held the memory; he could still bring the fragrance of cedar dust to his mind. The only breaths he could take, were the ones she exhaled into his mouth, refreshing his spent soul. There had never been a thought of leaving, while she held her lips to his, only of begging her to stay.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  She tensed under his arms and gazed at her hands.

  “She is an angel, Shelly. It is no secret, how she makes us feel when she touches us. But I wanted to come back. I needed to come back so much more than I needed to follow her.”

  “What does she taste like, when you kiss her?”

  “That’s and odd question. Honey. She tastes of warm honey.”

  “Yousep tastes like roses. You taste like sunshine.”

  He smiled. She stopped crying but still looked very sad.

  “What do I taste like when you kiss me?”

  “Shelly, you taste like fine cedar dust and shattered glass.”

  She looked up at him with the most amazing smile. He always loved how creepy she was.

  “Ooh, god, I like that. Real broken glass?”

  “Yes, like shattered glass. It burns every time.”

  “Cool!”

  It was simply a waste of money for Shelly to advertise, it was not needed. Too many people had waited and watched while she built it, and were patient for their turn. Within half a year, they began to see return guests, some quite regular. Each evening, someone on the street would have the pleasant surprise of an instant table, and there was usually a crowd at the door, hoping to be taken in. Evan called them ‘the beggars’.

  The Studio was settling into a comfortable pattern and dance and never knew a vacant table. Shelly adored it. She never failed to pirouette every night before locking up. She never wept doing it again, it was always filled with promise, but now another sort of dance, in the darkroom closet, followed it.

  Evan would slip inside while she spun her bare feet on the boards, and would lift her inside for her turn when he was done. Sometimes they would only be a minute; sometimes they would be an hour. Often, they went in together with a smile and exit a very long time afterward, weary and satisfied.

  There was no other place in the shop Yousep and Caraliza could be felt, but for the divan. Shelly understood now why it was more passionate to love Evan there. It had been the very first place the two young lovers had found their own ecstasy. It was never exactly the same dance each time in the closet, and it never, ever troubled them, the lips they found in there had been dead all those years.

  Evan spent a hundred hours with the hidden documents, three times as many hours in the Times archives. He was always in the museum down the street, searching for any clue, which would give their beloved ghosts their rest. They could not dance forever; Evan and Shelly both knew that. But the family desired graves and stones to remember the two poor youths.

  Shelly forbade it. She could not mark a spot where they never were buried, with the love they deserved. It was starting to grow into another kind of sadness altogether for her, the sadness of constant failure to do that one last thing. Evan beginning to notice, the evenings she would tell her family’s legend, and say the two lovers could never been found; she would lose a tear. Shelly Reisman never only promised to love the building and the ghosts, and to keep them. She always promised someday to set them free of the place. Evan wondered if they would really choose to leave, and might not remain anyway.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  In Evan’s extensive searches, he found pages and pages of news, in different papers after the fire in the slum. It changed the face of that block, and the music in the voices living there. Papa exhausted funds with legal attempts to free himself of the burden of the building, and its squalid, pitiful tenants just outside his window. A large sum of his first rents surely went to beating against corrupt sellers who seemed to have escaped justice.

  A belated delivery from Sareta, of a few extra heirloom boxes, produced some legal documents her husband held quietly, all those years. She told Evan she regretted they were not found earlier; there were certainly clues in plenty now, Papa suffered a swindle and never found relief. Evan listened to her apologies, hardly paying any real attention, as he looked
into the cardboard boxes.

  One of them contained a half dozen Ritmeester cigar tins, all given to Papa’s eldest son when he was a child, to keep childish treasures in. His son apparently kept them all.

  All the documents she brought were surrendered to the estate upon Papa’s death, and into those tins they had gone, to hide. Papa tried many lawyers, but remained a slumlord, and was resigned to it. But it was not the only action solicitors performed at his instruction. Papa tried to contact families in Amsterdam, who lost or gave a child named Caraliza.

  For the two years he lay dying, agents turned no trace of anyone who knew the child. Evan suspected, if they were contacted, they never would have admitted doing such a thing as sell a child; if they survived the famine during the Great War. Many did not.

  Amsterdam suffered a potato rebellion in 1917; thousands of starving people rioted and broke into supplies meant for troops, people killed others to obtain food. Even as late as 1918 after the armistice, food rotted in Dutch harbors, the Allies refused to allow it to soothe German morale. Hunger became a weapon and life grew desperate, and it produced untold sorrows.

  After the loss of Yousep and Caraliza, four other buildings on the street would be lost to fire. But at their end, surrounding the Reisman Portraits, nothing at all changed but the grate, which was added to prevent anyone descending that stair. Evan grew accustomed to seeing guests, bent with some age, walking in to have dinner, and keep their smile the whole evening. His Shelly captured a moment in time, and kept it breathing. The neighborhood loved the place now. It never became an eyesore in more than a hundred-twenty years of life, and it was not an embarrassment now. It was a grand spot, with a pulse, ages old. It could not be less than perfection; a Reisman still owned it.