A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

On the day of the explosion Richard first blames the French. He opens his window, hangs out, looks for biplanes overhead. But only the paltry winter sun is visible in the clear sky.

  And yet there’s a cloud. It’s black in color, cumulous in shape. It scuds along, fast, but along the ground. It’s emerging from a crumpled wall of the laboratory.

  A bomb. What else can Richard conclude? Mystery solved: his father is building a new kind of bomb for the army, and someone did something wrong and it’s gone off. What else can it be? The thunderation was so unprecedented he not only heard it, he felt it in his bones and his teeth. His eardrums are still reverberating. He feels as though he’s been broken to pieces by a jackhammer.

  He continues to watch, riveted, as the cloud sails through the garden. It drops cinders on the flowers and lawn. Prinz barks and bites at it, his chain taut and choking. Young men in white coats or in suits run out of the lab as if chasing it, as if trying to encircle it and coax it back inside. Their faces are smudged black. They’re coughing, crying, shouting for help. Richard yells down to one of them, and the student stops for a moment, looks up.

  Herr Professor is unharmed, the student shouts. But an assistant’s hand has been blown off, and Theo Meyer is dead.

  Later Richard will learn that his mother was in the room at the other end of the lab, where they keep the animals. He won’t be surprised. It’s a new cause of hers. She’s always been fond of animals. The ducks, the birds, their own cowardly Prinz. If he wishes to know the truth, she has said more than once in the dark, she can’t bear to think about the kinds of deaths those animals in the lab endure. The only thing worse, she says, are the lives they endure until those deaths. There have been complaints about her, Richard knows. His parents scream about it over dinner as Richard sits at the end of the table, holding his chin up with the palm of one hand, stabbing his meat with his fork. He doesn’t like sausage as much as his father does—his mother has told him all about sausage—but there’s satisfaction in feeling the tines puncture first the resisting casing, then the meat itself. He makes his dinner spurt yellow juice as, over his head, his parents shout about white mice and cats.

  It’s unnerving, the staff has told Herr Professor Alter, to watch Frau Doktor Alter interact with the animals as if they were pets. It puts the staff in an uncomfortable position, to be made to witness one of the condemned cats standing on her lap, reaching up, touching her cheek with its paw, touching its pink nose to her nose. It’s bad for morale. It creates an unprofessional environment. It’s as if the farmer’s wife were giving affectionate names to the lambs they’ll soon be asked to slaughter.

  Lenz can’t abide the petty complaints of his workers. Farmers’ children give names to lambs and calves all the time, he has told them, and yet they all manage to sit down for supper. But he has also ordered Frau Doktor to stop visiting the cages.

  When Iris hears the blast at the other end of the hall, she drops the orange cat she was explaining things to and runs toward the explosion. In the damaged lab she finds her husband standing over Theo Meyer. Lenz is rigid, helpless, staring.

  “I was in this room not sixty seconds ago,” he mutters. “Moritz called me into the hallway. If he hadn’t, I’d have been here when it happened.”

  She kneels beside Theo, loosens his necktie, listens to his stuttering breath. His eyes are closed, not even a flutter behind the lids. She presses her hand to his heart, feels nothing but the heat of blood warming her fingers. It doesn’t revolt her or make her dizzy. She’s dealt with blood before: she’s a cook; she’s a woman; she’s a mother.

  She looks up for a moment. Her husband is still gazing around. He says, “I was in this room not sixty seconds ago. Moritz called me into the hallway.”

  When she looks back down, Theo is dead. She feels tears on her cheeks. She strokes his hair, forgetting how bloody her hands are. The strands of his hair become red and wet. Or, really, redder and wetter; it isn’t as if he was pristine when she arrived. She wipes her hand on her skirt. Someone says quite matter-of-factly, “First the cats, now this. She’s a ghoul.”

  She looks up to see who has said it. It’s the young man who lost his hand. He’s sitting in a chair in a corner. At his wrist is a tourniquet made from someone’s shirt. Not Lenz’s. Lenz is still dressed and clean, his tie still knotted.

  “He’s in shock,” she says of the man with the tourniquet. “Keep him warm.”

  His calling her a ghoul—she honestly isn’t offended. He said it without judgment or rancor. He was just making an observation, as scientists do. By ghoul, she believes he simply meant that she’s a human being who isn’t deterred by death, a woman who doesn’t avoid attachments to animals slated to die, a woman who doesn’t cower or faint when confronted with the bloodied corpse of a friend. Does he know she also believes that all living things continue to be, even after so-called death? She’s written as much to the late Richard Lehrer just the other day. “We are energy,” she wrote, “and energy doesn’t simply disappear.”

  And because she never said it herself, we have to say it for her. There she stood, among these men, these scientists who daily let loose fumes that strangled cats to death, tweaking and perfecting, cheering and backslapping when they got it right, and yet she was the ghoul.

  Richard spends Christmas and New Year’s Eve sneezing and sulking. His parents refuse to tell him what caused the explosion. Then it’s 1915, and still no one will tell him. In fact, no one talks about the explosion anymore. It’s wartime; prolonged grieving is indecorous. When a loved one is lost, one is meant to shed tears at the funeral, then grit one’s teeth and gird one’s loins and get on with it. Only in the dark can Richard say to his mother, “Do you miss Herr Meyer?”

  “If you want to know the truth, I very much do,” she says. Her voice is brandy-thick, brandy-lazy, a muddy river. “He was my classmate at university. He worked with Richard Lehrer. I helped get him his position here. He was one of my only friends.”

  He’d asked the same question when Richard Lehrer died. That time, in the same muddy-river voice, she said, “I miss him every time I take a breath. And yet—listen, this is important—I still go on. The worst happens, and people go on. It may hurt to breathe, but that’s no excuse to stop breathing. No matter what, you inhale and exhale. Your heart keeps beating. It may also harden, but never mind that. Hard hearts can keep beating. Do you understand?”

  He said that he did. He thought that he had. But as it turned out, he hadn’t. He thought she was talking about her breath, her heart. Only later would he realize she was talking about his.

  “Also,” she’d said, “I feel Herr Professor Lehrer is not really gone.”

  “You mean you think he’s in heaven?”

  “No.” She became a little crisp. “No,” she said again, softening. “I don’t mean that at all. Someday when you’re not so tired, I’ll explain your uncle Albert’s theories to you.”

  It was one of those times he’d become resentful. He wasn’t all that tired, and he had a handle on relativity. He wished she would just come out and tell him things.

  He feels the same way now. He longs for clear messages. Save the mice! Free the cats! Messages like that he can understand.

  Although now, a full month after the explosion, he realizes he no longer agrees. This is another recent change in his relationship with her: he no longer admires the things she says, the beliefs she holds. Free the cats? Then what would you have? A town full of feral cats and a reputation for mawkishness instead of a secret weapon to win the war.

  He tries to trick her into giving him details by feigning certitude. “Everyone,” he says, “knows that Papa is working on something that will end the war quickly.”

  “Do they?” she says.

  “Everyone says it’s a new kind of bomb.”

  “Everyone has a lot to say. Maybe everyone should focus on his own problems.”

  “Well, everyone’s just guessing. But I’m almost positive he’s right.”

&
nbsp; “Are you?”

  “I’m curious about it from a scientific point of view.”

  She laughs.

  “I’m his son. Shouldn’t I know the details?”

  “The details won’t make you happy.”

  “I’m not a baby. I can keep a secret.”

  “Oh, Richard,” she says. “What do you want from me?”

  He says, “If you want to know the truth, I want to know the truth.”

  There’s a pause. She sighs. “Richard,” she says, “if I knew, I’d tell you.”

  They have no mechanism for crying foul, for penalizing a player who out-and-out lies. Also, she never cried foul when, a year ago, he was a child making up lies about poor little Eduard Einstein and ducks. So he returns the favor. He doesn’t challenge her either.

  April 1915

  Here’s the thing about the manna process: a little tweak here, a little tweak there, and instead of food for the starving, you’ve got yourself the first truly effective chemical weapon.

  Once upon a time, our mother used to tell us, there lived a great German patriot who invented a weapon so powerful and, yes, so terrible, he was sure it would bring the Great War to a swift and just conclusion.

  A little bit of whitewashing there, but isn’t that how family stories go? “Once upon a time,” said our mother, propped up in her bed, the three of us sitting cross-legged by the footboard, and “Once upon a time” made whatever she said next—the truth, a lie, a wish—something to remember and repeat and pass on.

  We listened avidly. Our mother rambled, occasionally stopping to sip her Tab, blow her smoke. She told us that at first the German military rejected the great patriot’s new weapon. The German generals wanted to stick to the old ways of war. They cared more about the rules of conduct than they cared about winning. They were gentlemen.

  And so the great patriot went to the kaiser directly.

  That’s how great and important the patriot was: the kaiser received him in private.

  “Tell me,” the patriot said with great and persuasive logic, “how is being dead different if it’s caused by chlorine gas rather than by flying pieces of metal?”

  “When you put it like that, we’d be foolish not to use it,” the kaiser no doubt never said, though our mother asserted that he had. “And surely, once France sees what the giftgas can do, they will surrender at once. After experiencing a weapon like that a single time, no one will want to encounter it ever again. We may just end war forever thanks to you.”

  Even back then we were suspicious. After school, when she was still at work, we’d take one of the biographies from the living room bookshelf and skim the index.

  Wilhelm II, discussion of chlorine gas with

  Lady would find and read the passage out loud. It was like discovering the unexpurgated Brothers Grimm version of a fairy tale you’d known only as a Disney cartoon. You thought the wicked stepsister merely tried to squeeze her big fat feet into the delicate slipper? Oh no—not so. She’d actually cut off her toes to manage it.

  Our mother told us the army used the gas to win the Second Battle of Ypres. She never told us that Lenz stood on a hill in Belgium alongside the reluctant generals—the gentlemen—and, at 5:00 p.m., personally tested the wind. We tried to imagine it: our great-grandpa holding a wet finger skyward. Our great-grandpa personally releasing the yellow-gray fumes.

  Other things our mother never mentioned: that he raised his binoculars and watched French and Algerian soldiers fall to their knees in the face of the advancing, visible wall of gas. That he watched the same soldiers eat handfuls of mud and tear off their shirts, stuffing the material down their throats in a futile effort to quell the unfathomable and theretofore unimaginable searing produced by something once likened to manna from heaven.

  She did tell us that within minutes of the gas’s release, all gunfire ceased. But only the books told us that when the guns fell silent, so did the German troops. Instead of cheering their victory, they held their positions and looked into one another’s eyes as they silently listened to the howling enemy and to another ghastly moaning they couldn’t identify until a farm boy mouthed, “Milk cows.” Decades later a private who’d been there that day would say he didn’t know why, but this was what he heard in his nightmares: not the agonized shrieking of dying men but the anguished lowing of dying cows.

  April 22, 1915, 5:20 p.m.: French soldiers retch yellow sputum. Their alveoli rupture and their faces turn yellow-green and they die in the fields on their backs. Or if they don’t die, if they’re one of the few who manage to get to a medical tent, they writhe on the ground beneath the canvas. The yellow-green cast to their skin turns a deep violet red, save for their ears and fingernails, which turn blue, and the mucus they cough up is green and so is the blood they spit. They lie on the ground a day or two more, delirious and gasping. Then they die.

  Of course our mother didn’t omit what for her was the best part: on April 24 he’s given the title of captain by the kaiser himself. It’s a remarkable honor for a civilian and, above all, for a Jew. Although our great-grandfather quibbled with the latter. “You know I’m not a Jew,” he said to the officers who’d been with him at Ypres. “I became a Lutheran years ago.”

  “Ah,” teased a duke, “clever and cunning and baldly duplicitous . . . but no, not Jewish at all.”

  Lenz no doubt laughed at that. Maybe he came up with a witty couplet. Schooled and baptized, even christened / Still, once a Jew, you’re never Christianed. All right, that’s us, not him. But he was known to be a good sport. He was in a good mood those days, and why not? There’d have been cigars and women and invitations to join certain clubs that had previously been unavailable to him, and all because of his manna process. Our mother took one lesson from the story: we were all descended from greatness. We took another: plucking life from the sky or raining death from the sky—it was all the same thing to Lorenz Otto Alter.

  May 1915

  Ten days after the gas is deployed in Ypres, Iris, at Lenz’s insistence, gives a dinner to celebrate his promotion. Lenz will be leaving for the Russian front soon, Captain Alter reporting for duty, Captain Alter here to personally teach the generals in the east how to measure air currents, determine exactly when they should let the gas fly toward the Cossacks and Tatars and Slavs. He wants the dinner to take place before he goes, wants his friends to see him with his new insignia: tassels, braids, pips.

  Iris schedules the party for the night before the trip to Russia. The day of the party she wakes up sick. (“Or so she says,” says our mother.) In any case, she wants to cancel. Lenz slams his fist down on the breakfast table. She jumps. Richard keeps his eyes on his skittering plate. No, not cancel, Iris says. Postpone. When he comes back from Russia, there will be time enough to celebrate his teaching yet another set of generals how to suffocate boys.

  Lenz puts his foot down figuratively, throws his newspaper literally. He doesn’t wish to hear her politics. He uses the word treason. He uses the word cruel. It’s bad enough, the things men have to do for their countries during wartime, but for her to speak to him as if he enjoys it, as if he relishes what takes place on the field of battle . . .

  Richard leaves the table without bothering to ask permission. Iris raises both hands, surrenders. During the day she prepares the meal, sets the table. She presses and lays out his uniform. She chooses the wines. When all is ready, they have half an hour before the guests arrive in which to resume screaming at each other.

  The first couple to arrive on the front step can hear everything and will later say that they stood at the grand door to the villa and exchanged worried glances, that the husband, a young chemist in Lenz’s lab, leaned over and whispered to his wife, “They haven’t seen us yet; should we run?”

  But when the couple brace themselves and ring the bell, Iris opens it, appearing relaxed and welcoming and looking pretty despite the woolen dress that seems to have swallowed all but her head. Many years later the husband will tell Richard A
lter that his father had been a lion and his mother a mouse, that this was the trouble with their marriage, and the wife will say, “Yes, that’s all true, but she was a very nice mouse; everyone liked her.”

  Despite the unpromising prologue, the party’s a success. None of the other guests have any idea that the host and hostess despise each other. The host, these other guests will say, was as gregarious and charming as ever, the hostess as sweet and attentive. She gave the first toast, spoke of her husband’s genius. Later they’ll find out she wrote a letter to the Supreme War Command that same day, a letter that described her husband’s work with words such as perversion and barbarity, but tonight she gives no indication that she doesn’t find poison gas to be a fine addition to the world’s smorgasbord of armaments.

  Grete Rosenthal, a secretary at one of the men’s clubs Lenz has recently joined and the woman Iris and several biographers believe to have been Lenz’s mistress, attends with an escort, a loud man nobody knows or wishes to know.

  “She heard about it and asked if she could come,” Lenz says when he finds himself alone with Iris for a brief moment. “What was I to do?”

  “Did I say anything?” she says.

  He says, “She’s a relentless, exhausting woman.”

  He means this sincerely; he will believe it still when a few years later he marries her; he will cite it endlessly when a few years after that he delegates Richard, now grown, to break the news to her that she’s being divorced.

  Iris smiles at him. “Poor man,” she says. “The things you have to put up with.”

  After the meal and the toasts, after the dessert and the brandy and the singing of patriotic songs, after a final extemporaneous couplet from the witty host and the guests’ more mundane farewells, the last to leave being the now-morose Grete and her talkative escort, Lenz takes his usual barbiturate with a fresh glass of brandy.

  “Thank you,” he says to his wife, “for a lovely evening.”

  Iris is drinking brandy too. “What did their faces look like?” she says.