“I think it went—” he started.
“I heard it,” I told him, leaving the front door open, and ushered him down the hall, pushed against Teresa’s door with my fingertips.
“What’s that smell?” the boy said.
Teresa’s room was as scattered as it had been, just me and the boy’s dim outlines in the mirror, but, in the direct center of the bed, like the bed was a nest, was a baseball, the curtains in the now-open window rustling like it could have come through the window, sure.
“If anything’s broke, my dad will . . . I’m sorry,” the boy said, about to cry.
“No worries,” I told him, “it happens,” my hand to his shoulder, and guided him in like Teresa had to be wanting, held the door open just long enough for him to get to the edge of the bed, look back to me once. And then I let the bungee cord snick the door shut, collected the bat from the front porch and settled back into my chair. There wasn’t even a muted scream from down the hall. Just the sound of forever.
I aimed the gun into my mouth, pulled the trigger.
The readout said I was still alive, still human.
As far as it knew, anyway.
Against memory one must always remain vigilant . . .
The Rag-and-Bone Men
Steve Duffy
Whispering creeps through the roofs and ridges . . . a faraway wind in tall trees, the devil in the chimney. Overhead, a cold and bony moon shines on the depopulated shtetl; as you wander these deserted streets, you may take its blankness for indifference. There are no lights in the windows of the houses, nothing but the gleam of moonlight on the snow. This must be the dark time, a black year fallen on the children of Israel. Everywhere darkness holds. In the great house of the rabbi, darkness; darkness in the villas of the tradesmen, in the shanty of the gravedigger Jew far out in potter’s field. Darkness in the synagogue, and only the memory of illumination, the scent of extinguished candles, so rich and immediate on this ice-cold winter’s night.
It used to be said that after midnight, the dead would come to pray in the empty synagogues. And here they come now: a band of strangers from far outside the village, tatters and bones and hollows for eyes, filing in quietly, standing at the back, self-conscious, uneasy, waiting to be noticed. What do they want here? What do they say to you? Stumbling, incoherent; they tell of a field that wells with thick dark blood, of a mountain of wedding rings, of a column of smoke by day and a column of fire by night, of an Angel all in white . . . is this Padernice? they ask, uncertainly. Have we come at last to Padernice? Listen to us, they say; listen. And then they are silent, for they cannot speak.
It snowed in the night: soft like a magic, stealthy, transformational. From my window I look out on the London suburbs silent and unmoving, over roads untracked in the unreal light of dawn. Nothing prepares one for this wizardry, the invasion of the city by the blank and gelid gods of frost. Across the capital thick with winter and baffled by drifts is laid a charm, and who may look on unchanged, unaltered? The British, of course. Depend on the British. They will queue in a huddle of stamping and breathsteam for buses that do not come, wait phlegmatically on the platforms of deserted railway stations, and all the time invoke their famous Dunkirk spirit. Perhaps it takes a foreigner to see the magic and appreciate it properly, to understand the triumph of the exceptional over the everyday. A child of snow and ice, of the Northern forests and the Northern seas: one who speaks their secret language, in secret, to himself. I grow whimsical with age and solitude, I know, perhaps overly so, but still I think there is at least a metaphoric truth in the old tales. What race does not make a legend, the better to define itself, to understand its essential character?
So presumably even the British dream. If they do, perhaps it is of Lyonesse, the sunken lands of eternal summer, the island gone down in the West. Their dream would be the memory of warmth and sun. Of course, I dream in a different language . . . For me, there is far frozen Ultima Thule, the ice realm at the top of the world; gateway to the land of Hel, to Niflheim where the dead dream of Ragnarök. All the mythologies of my birth conspire to this end, just as all magnets point North, to whiteness, to blankness, to Arktos and the Pole. Stark and unforgiving, but also a cleansing, a strength, a purity of essence. From the mystic vigor of the North sprang our nation’s soul, our destiny. And at break of day on this winter solstice, I think now of those bright spring mornings in Europa, when the streets were filled with songs and banners, and a thousand years of destiny beckoned. A great cause, an entelechy; what the world was waiting for.
Last night I sat in my attic room listening to the wireless, while outside beyond the curtains fell the soft and secret snow. There was a discussion—civilized, cautious, pedantic, so British—between veterans of the late struggle, soldiers and philosophers, priests and politicians. Twenty years ago, now. But even the ones who were there, who spoke from their own knowledge, even they failed to see the absurdity. The victims, the liberators, the judges and their hangmen; what is missing? No one really understood. This is wrong. It was not enough simply to have observed, from a distance; most of all, one had to feel it, become the instrument of a Power so great, so intense . . . Einfühlung; perhaps it would be easier in the language of my birth. I dare not speak this language out loud any more, but sometimes I hear it—I hear it in my dreams, hollow echoes from the bottom of a well. At Christmas-time especially I remember, when I am on my own here in this dark deserted building. The radios from my youth, the flawlessness and simplicity of the lieder, the Valkyries singing, the great voice of the people: all now forbidden.
So my own tongue, my secret tongue, is forbidden to me, except in my dreams, and now I am Jonathan Glatzy, DP, displaced person from Lithuania, school caretaker. All the children are dismissed, and school is finished for the year, but the caretaker must stay on and discharge his duty. Today the snowfall need not be cleared away; I will check the building for leaks, attend to the boilers, and my work will soon be done. Afterwards, perhaps, I will sit at my window and watch the woods, Epping Forest in the snow, and think of those forests along the Baltic coast, where I walked so many years ago. In London no one knows of Memel by the northern seas, stronghold of the Teutonic Knights: Memel, the city of my birth, home of the family Wageknecht since generations. Through those lands the Knights once rode, forging myths for us to follow; there also lay the path of the Black Corps, and mine too. Dangerous memories, dangerous dreams; but against them there is no defense.
The city Jews, the Viennese and the Berliners, will tell you that dreams are nothing but fairytales, a droll and engaging method of relating the stories of our past, of things done and finished with. But here in the shtetl they know that some dreams belong to the future, and that in them we may see our fate, that which will come to pass and which cannot be evaded. In the shtetl, dreams are a tribunal, a court before which one dissembles in vain.
Now there are stirrings in the loosened soil; now wraiths and dybbuks hold dominion in this empty village. Now the night lies breathless, fraught with apprehension . . .
Snow all yesterday, and at intervals through the night. Today passed largely without incident, with one disturbing exception which I shall note at the appropriate place. Some children got on to the school grounds, probably through the woods, and played at snowballs in the yard; a slide makes the sloping drive down towards the main gates treacherous. I have spread it with salt. My grandmother used to leave dishes of salt on the windowsill against evil spirits, though my father laughed at her. “That’s the true child of the North,” he said to me, when I looked at him in surprise: “spends half her life calling on the ghosts, and when they come to her she won’t even let them in.”
So many memories. They come at this time of year, perhaps because there is little else to occupy my mind. As I said, in the holiday time my duties are light, and I speak with no one, except that I go for shopping, newspapers and food, a trip to the library. The high street is no more than five minutes’ walk from here, due south, an
d beyond that London, by Central Line or bus. To the north beyond the school fence stretches Epping Forest, in summer a pleasant place to walk; I am reminded of the woods around Lake Havel, in Berlin. In the winter I go from preference into town.
There is a public house, The Woodsmen, on the roundabout near the tube station and the shops. I visit this place infrequently in the daytime, and in the evening hardly more often, but this lunchtime after shopping I felt the cold—my arthritis, the old man’s curse—and stopped in for a glass of brandy, medicinal. It is small and cramped, but thankfully there were at most half-a-dozen people inside, most of them in the main bar, called the saloon. Here I sat, close to the frosted glass partition that divides off a smaller area to the side, called the snug. This serves mostly the pensioners. A few of them know me by sight, will greet me vaguely in the street; but in the saloon I am left for the most part to myself. Today when I entered the pub there was only one customer in the snug, an old man whose face is gray and much sunken. I do not know his name, but though he is largely deaf he attempts always to make a conversation with me. There is probably no harm in this, but one can never be too careful, and so I chose the saloon.
The talk was naturally of the snow: disagreements, too vague to be called arguments, about which past winter brought the heaviest falls; rumors of delays and disruption elsewhere in the country; a general agreement that the Government should do something about it. I took no part in any such discussion, and sipped my drink. The taste of brandy on a snowy day brings to mind certain memories, and had I thought more carefully I might have chosen differently.
I had finished my first glass, and been brought another, when the frosted glass to my side became briefly luminous with the leaden light of outside. Evidently, a customer had come into the snug from the snowy high street. From my position conversations in the snug may be overheard; without great interest I listened, but at first heard nothing. A shadow came level with the glass partition, waiting for service. Eventually the slow barman abandoned his game of dominoes with a sigh and tramped over to take the order. This I did not catch; however, the voice from the snug, what I heard of it, sounded oddly foreign. Always worth noting.
“Won’t get rich off him, will I?” This from the barman, addressing me as he ran a glass of water from the tap. I smiled and shook my head; the barman chuckled, and slid the pint-glass along the counter, out of sight beyond the partition. Silhouetted on the screen of milky glass a shadow-figure raised it to his lips, then set it down again.
The barman returned to his table in the far corner. One of his comrades said something I could not catch, but I heard the answer: “One of them gippoes, from up in the woods there. Glass o’ bleedin’ water, he wanted.”
“Took the pledge, has he?” This brought a ripple of laughter from the dominoes players. “It’s all right, but they’re all as rich as stink, aren’t they? I thought?”
“They could buy and sell the likes ’o you, don’t you worry.” The barman is reckoned by his comrades to be an expert on all matters, and is commonly deferred to in the manner of an arbiter. “Pegs and lucky heather and rabbits’ foots and suchlike . . . rag-and-boners, these ones’re s’posed to be. Totters, and that. Mind you, I don’t know about this one—he’s a right scruffy sod. Proper bleedin’ scarecrow, he is; all skin an’ bone, dirty clothes, worse than a tramp. Shouldn’t be servin’ ’im, really—lets the tone of the place down. I ask you. Glass o’ water? He’s like a bleedin’ drink o’ water himself. Foreign, too.” This last in lowered voice.
“Foreign?” Here the barman, I think, indicated in my direction, or in that of the newcomer in the snug; whichever, the conversation did not continue along those lines. “No—all’s I’m sayin’ is, watch out. Get these lot hangin’ around the place, no tellin’ what they’ll be up to. Lock up nights, get my drift? Keep your eyes peeled.”
It amuses me, that the English consider themselves a tolerant people. They went to war for Gypsies, Poles, and Jews in faraway lands, but at home they will not have them near, and mistrust them as they mistrust all foreigners. The hypocrisy would be hard to take, was there not also protection for me in it.
The barman and his cronies resumed their game of dominoes. For a while there was peace in the saloon; and then came a voice from the snug. It was the old pensioner, who had shuffled to the counter with his empty glass of bitter. “Ernie! Ernie! When you’re ready, me old son.”
The barman rose wearily to his feet once more, and tramped around to the pumps. “Last of the big spenders, is it? Won’t even keep me in bleedin’ shoe-leather, this won’t; up an’ down, up an’ down like a bleedin’ yo-yo just to pull ’alves for the likes o’ you. Have a pint and be done with it?”
“Eh? It’s me bladder,” said the pensioner resentfully. “You know I can’t drink pints, not in my state.”
“Well, that’s your fourth bleedin’ ‘alf,” said the barman. “ ’Ow many was four ’alves, when you was in school?” Turning to me, he said under his breath, “Assumin’ they ’ad fractions, back then.”
“What?” The old man had not heard. “Speak up—I can’t ’ear as well as I used to.”
“Nothin’, Orris; just an observation, that’s all. There you go—don’t drink it all at once, will you, ’cos it’s gettin’ very dicey with the bones over there. See if you can’t give us a rest for a few minutes, there’s a good ’un.” Winking at me, he returned again to his game.
The old man grumbled to himself for a minute, and eventually I realized he was addressing the other man, the Gypsy who had asked for the glass of water. “It’s all the same these days. No respect, no one’s got the time o’ day for an old man. Thinks ’e’s funny, ’e does. What—I’m goin’ to start drinkin’ pints, in this cold? What with my bladder?”
The other man made no response. I could see him still in silhouette, unmoving, the glass of water just visible at the edge of the partition as I leaned slightly forward. I did not wish to be conspicuous: but something about that other, about the voice, unsettled me. The old man continued, “Mind you, I couldn’t be drinkin’ cold water neither, not on a day like today. Goes straight through you, that does. Don’t you feel the cold, then? What’ve you got on—that’s only pyjamas under your coat there, looks like. Come from the ’orspital, ‘ave you? Sneaked out for a quick one?”
Still the other said nothing. The old man pursued his point, with the querulous persistence of the aged. “I say—are you from the ’orspital? You don’t look well. Are you—” in those slow precise tones the English reserve for the foreign and feeble-witted—“are you from the ’orspital?”
The other man seemed about to speak, and then coughed, huskily and painfully. He reached for his water on the bar counter, where I could see it beyond the partition; a hand, smoke-gray and thin as sticks, settled around the glass. At the wrist there was the cuff of a dirty black overcoat, and beneath it some striped material. He raised the glass to his lips, gulped, and then spoke, seeming out of breath, or unused to speaking. “Padernice,” he said, and though his voice was little more than a whisper I was attentive in an instant. “From Padernice.” I am certain that was the word, unlikely though it seems. He set back the glass on the counter, and beneath the dirty clothes he wore I saw something on his forearm—a bluish smudge, as of ink. Once, clearly, it had been a tattoo, fresh and sharp; numbers, tattooed on his gray skin.
It speaks much for my presence of mind, for my preparedness, that I made no sound, nor betrayed myself in any other way. Instead, I drained my glass of brandy as casually as might any man, and got up from my stool, while next door in the snug the foolish old man prattled on.
“Where? Where? Foreign, is that? I been abroad once, in the war—the Great War, not the ’Itler thing, they wouldn’t ’ave me, see? In the trenches, I was; trench-foot, trench-cock, gassed, you name it. Long time ago, that was; that’s where me bladder first started playin’ up. You sure you’re not from the ’orspital? You don’t look well, you don’t. Like someone dug
you up. Where you from, then?”
I stepped quietly towards the door, adjusting my overcoat. Still I heard the other man’s answer, and this time with no shadow of a doubt. “From the woods,” he said; “we come out of the woods.”
“Off, are you, Mr. Glatzy?” The barman looked up from his dominoes and saw me in the doorway. “Wrap up warm, now; take care on these pavements an’ that. Oh, just one more thing before you go—” he beckoned to me, and I had to step back inside to catch his confidential undertone—“watch out for these gippoes or whatever they are, in the woods. Camped up by your way they are, and they’re a right dodgy lot, I’m tellin’ you. There’s one just come in there, now—proper Belsen ’orror, ’e is. Make sure it’s all locked up round the school—you don’t want that crowd ’angin’ round the place, there’s no tellin’ what they’re up to. Make off with anythin’, they would. Remember, now—”
Trying not to let my voice carry, I thanked him briefly yet politely. Before he could continue I slipped outside into the freezing, already-dim afternoon, closing the door carefully so as not to make a noise. I risked one glance into the window of the snug as I walked by; there was the pensioner, and alongside him at the bar a hunched, disheveled figure with its back to me. It looked familiar—how shall I put it?—as a type rather than as an individual, and I dared not look any closer, but hurried off along the treacherous pavement. Once across the road by the roundabout I looked back towards the pub; the door to the snug was ajar, and someone, I could not tell who, was watching. Several buses came past at that moment, and when I looked back again from the shelter of a shop doorway, the snug door was once more closed, and I could see no follower. And yet I felt myself followed; all the way back.
Looking back at the incident now, I acknowledge it as nothing more than an inconvenience; an unwelcome reminder of what is past and done with. It is after all unrealistic to assume that, even if the stranger had seen me, he would be able to recognize me. One face out of thousands, millions; these are not realistic odds. Still I shall limit my visits into town for a while, and make use of my scarf and the high lapels of my overcoat. I shall also take extra care that the gates be locked, and all the doors. One forgets one’s situation at one’s peril; this is melodramatic, perhaps, but no less than the truth.
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 21