The Ghost Keeper Read online

  We step off and turn onto Seegasse, towards the cemetery, and then I can’t tell you what the world looks like. Zilla leads me by the hand through wide hospital doors. There are people murmuring all around us, and a tile floor against which our shoes tap out clear and sharp. At a desk she asks how to access the graveyard. A male voice rumbles above me then, and next come footfalls, which we follow. Then down a few stairs, and then the far doors. A key turning in a lock. Dark earth and grass underfoot, and the sharp, damp air in my mouth.

  I can’t look up at first. I can’t stand to see it. This little world is a place I don’t dare to meet with my eyes, perhaps because it’s real, it’s here, finally, when it was too deep and too powerful to be real before. There’s this trembling in my middle, in the deepest place, where feelings meet my body and become real. In that place I am Simeon with the fish; I am he, with his shame or his fear pressed against his heart, not yet knowing how to lay it down.

  But Zilla squeezes my hand. “We’re here.”

  I lean closer against her. “I can wait here,” I just manage to say, just barely manage to say.

  Zilla snorts. “There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just a graveyard. There’s no one here.”

  I peek up and see stone. First it is a wall, it has to be a wall, but then everything falls back into depth and no, it’s row after row of headstones, all grey, some more or less straight but all weathered, chiselled and patterned with marks that mean nothing to me. In between them, the grass. Above us is the sky, and the sky is crossed with branches, and the trees are old, deep, dark. There are the birds, and the light, and the smell of earth and the noise on the street far away and muffled by these buildings. There’s no one accusing me. There is no one.

  “Let’s find your fish.” Zilla gives my hand a tug.

  I patter after her, but my heart and my eyes are caught on every stone as we go past it. A person, another person, a soul, a soul, a soul. This is the feeling I don’t know how to hold. The patterns on the headstones look like music, and they look like question marks. Every one is a person and there are too many of them to hold on to.

  It’s row on row on row, not neat, but labyrinthine, medieval; a dwarf forest of stone. Tall and short and tilted and fat and hunched and broken. There is a question that hangs over them, all of them, and it’s a question for me, but I can’t quite hear it to answer it. Zilla is walking and walking and I can’t stop, not to ask or to explain.

  And then Zilla says, “There it is! I see it.”

  I don’t know how I have room left to feel more, but there’s something particular for the prospect of the fish. I’m frightened. It’s a wicked thing, I think, the thing that died, this fish. But the man killed it; he killed it with a single stroke and it did nothing to defend itself but cry holy words aloud, and too late. They put it to rest with relief, I remember, and with an amen for the rightness of it. Here is a place things were put right, I make myself remember.

  My eyes are on the grass just in front of my feet because I’m afraid to see it. Zilla has stopped walking and drops my hand. “Well, here it is,” she says.

  As I lift my eyes, it is as if the monument drops slowly down into the grass from above. Just stones, first. Round stones piled together in a column, to about the height of my chest. And then a kind of stone table on top of that, and then—it’s not frightening, the stone fish. It’s arced like a letter U, tail to the sky, mouth to the sky. Its lips are opened wide as if to shout the words my grandmother said with such agony—but to me then it seems as if this is another fish, or perhaps the fish at another time, not at the hour of its death. It looks to me as if it’s singing.

  “There’s nothing written, but this must be it,” says Zilla. She walks around the stone fish, looking at the different sides of the monument. I just stand and stare. The moment is a flavour I can hold on my tongue and not have to swallow. I’m rinsed out inside, hollow and clean.

  Zilla crosses her arms and looks around us. “I wish Papa could see us now,” she says, more to herself than to me. It’s hard to understand her sometimes. I am so glad our father can’t see us. If Papa knew, I would be a coward again; I’d freeze up and be nothing.

  “I’m going to walk around.” My sister says it and stretches her ankles as she walks, one foot pointed straight in front of her, then the other. Away from me and into the garden of gravestones. I stay meanwhile by the fish. Whatever word is on its fat, gasping lips is a silent one, said forever—as if it’s a word that only the fish knows, and God. And in this moment I feel that it’s a joke between the two of them.

  It’s so easy to slip down onto my knees in the grass. My knees are bare and the ground is cold, damp, but not hard. I press my palms into the earth and watch the way the fish’s stone column meets the earth, like a finger pressed hard into the ground, and the ground pushing back. I squeeze my own fingertips into the earth. I can get earth underneath my fingernails and in the lines on my fingertips. I can rub my knees green on the grass. I can take a part of it upon me, just a little bit.

  Zilla, somewhere, is singing to herself, and the birds are singing and the earth is quiet.

  A breeze in the trees.

  And a bit of rain now beginning to fall, just a breath of it, a wet breath. This little boy I was is lying on the ground now, sinking into it. His eyes are closed, have been closed he doesn’t know how long. He might be in bed. He might be dreaming.

  Zilla shakes my jacket. “Get up, dummy. It’s raining.”

  After pressing into the earth for so long, to sit up feels like floating. My front is muddied and greened, and my face must be too, my cheek on the side the earth pressed into me. Zilla just shakes her head and says, “You’re a funny one.”

  The fish is exactly as it was, and this for some reason is the deepest comfort I can imagine. Nothing new but the spots of wet from the rain, speckling it darker and darker.

  “Come on,” says Zilla. “I’m freezing.”

  Though she makes me wipe my hand on the back of my short pants first, she takes my hand in hers and walks us through the rain, through the hospital lobby, out to the street. I drift beside her, watching my feet, not noticing the road or the people who pass. We stop beside a man roasting chestnuts in a steel barrel and Zilla pays him for a packet.

  “The boy’s going to be in trouble with his mama,” says the chestnut vendor, from somewhere high above. I’m watching my knees, the way the mud is crusted on them, breaking and cracking and dark here, lighter there, like paint.

  “I’ll brush him off if I can. He’s a little silly,” says Zilla to the chestnut man, and he laughs.

  Zilla gives me a chestnut and at first I only hold it, warming my hands. The day is cold and wet, after all, though I haven’t felt it until now. There’s a fire in the man’s barrel, mainly charcoal, burning low. The same fire is in my chestnut, just enough of it. I press it hard between my hands and up against my chest.

  Zilla says, “Eat it before it gets cold. I’ve got a whole bag.”

  And so I pull apart the shell with my thumbs, revealing the thing that looks like a little dried plum, or, in that moment, a shrivelled yellow heart, something long dead, and that makes my heart catch. I put it in my mouth as much to hide it as to taste it. It burns me when I chew, but I don’t mind, it’s all warmth, and tastes like winter and potato and sweetness. There is a heat in the middle of me, a glowing coal.

  Zilla is still talking to the chestnut man, and there’s another gentleman, someone dressed in a good coat, with a scarf wrapped tight around his neck, smiling at her from a few feet away. I stand very close to my sister and as tall as I can manage. The heat is still there in the middle of me and I won’t shy away while I have this fire inside me. It makes me into a stronger boy. It makes me into someone who doesn’t run.

  WHEN WE GET home, outside the building, Zilla does a good, fierce job beating the dirt off my clothes and my knees, and she wipes my face clean with her handkerchief. When we go inside, my mother is reading a lette
r on the sofa in the parlour, with her feet tucked up under her and her head propped against her knuckles, the light falling on her from the lamp on the wall making her face very beautiful. She doesn’t look up right away as we walk in.

  “Well, we’re back,” says Zilla to our mother, and our mother sighs and stretches one leg, like Babka’s cat, still not quite looking at us.

  “Oh, good. Make sure you wash up before supper.”

  She hasn’t even seen the dirt on me, and this makes me feel suddenly as if she knows everything. Her un-smile, her soft catness on the sofa is a power, a secret. I try to find the chestnut warmth in me. Zilla starts to press me out of the room, towards the stairs.

  Then Mutti asks, “Where were you again, Zilla?”

  And then I know, I know she knows. God! It’s awful; it freezes my heart and pulls my forehead down.

  But Zilla just says, “At the Prater, Mutti.”

  And my mother says, “Ah,” and then nothing. And Zilla pushes her hands into my shoulder blades, up, up, because I’ve stopped walking on the stairs and she needs me to walk up, up. I find my feet, a thousand miles below me and heavy as lead, and lift the one, the other, up and up.

  I go to my room, and under the soft light coming in through the window and the rain I curl up on my bed and close my eyes. I try to find in my heart the people across the canal. I can see them through rain but only barely, just barely. In the rain there is a fish swimming, laughing. There is a man who holds a bundle to his heart. There is the earth and the green grass and grey stone, and somewhere up above the clouds the sky is blue. And I am here in my own heart, pulling a shell back around the warmth in me.

  I dream that night that everyone I ever knew is carved out of stone.

  4

  SO MUCH ONE DOES NOT WANT TO REMEMBER, AND YET, stirred up like mud in the riverbed, all of it comes back and stops me seeing clearly. I have felt this so often. But consider: I have felt also at times as if this might be a gift held out to me, something so prodigiously good I hardly dare receive it. And could it be that the way into some darker truths is through joy? I was a mud-covered child beside a fish’s grave, but I was also a young man, and a young woman whose father first led me to my calling once wrote me a letter.

  I haven’t yet met my Anna when this happens; I’m about twenty, I think. I know her name because her father, who first saw me among the gravestones, sometimes mentions her.

  (What a muddle this is, for I have so much left to explain, and I’m fitting the pieces as they come to hand. Wait, Josef; how did you become what you are—a graveyard keeper? And a man of faith? These matters still need to be set down plainly.)

  Let me dwell a moment here, though—for before there is Anna’s voice or her eyes or the bend of her small waist, there are her words on a sheet of paper her brother gives me:

  Dear Josef Tobak,

  My father likes you, and it’s making me crazy.

  Her brother Jakob Dükmann called to me near their father’s shop: “Josef, my kid sister has some complaint with you,” and passed this folded paper into my hand—and imagine it, I thought only, How can this girl be upset with me, she’s never met me, as I tucked the page in my pocket and strode towards the canal to catch a tram. Now I read it while I ride the streetcar:

  Don’t you know what kind of ship he runs? A watertight one, Mr. Tobak—not the jolly sort, this man. And when I’ve committed some sin, do you know what he tells me? “That boy Tobak is so kind to me, and he is not even my flesh, but you . . .” And oh Mr. Tobak, the guilt, the guilt; he can spread it on thicker than butter. I can’t stand it. It makes me tear my hair out. My father’s daughter will be bald. Serves her right.

  And so: will you please say something rude to him, Mr. Tobak? For our household’s sake, understand. It’s either that or help me be more patient with him, but this is impossible, and after all you’re so busy with work and the cemeteries and good-boy things like that. How I envy you your work! If I were a boy, would you take me as your apprentice? Forget it, actually—if I were a boy, I’d be halfway to New York by now.

  So please promise me one thing, Mr. Tobak: someday we must meet. I’m so sick of hearing about you, and I would like some argument besides, “I don’t believe this person exists.” What satisfaction I’d get to find out you were some oily sycophant, and that I was the deserving one all along.

  Until then, Mr. Tobak, I wish you rash judgment and offensiveness. Be a rude fellow, please, and I’ll be the sweet one; or else who knows what scene there will be when we meet. Don’t even consider it, Mr. Tobak—I won’t spend a moment’s thought on it, I’m sure.

  Yours in perfect sincerity,

  Anna Dükmann

  I miss my stop, I’ll set that down; I’m twenty minutes late for work because of her letter. Oh, fool that I am, I don’t dare write back; the idea, then, makes my heart beat wildly so that I nearly consider misunderstanding her cheek, taking her at her word and insulting her poor father for her supposed benefit.

  It’s foolishness, it’s ridiculous; I haven’t said a word about how I met these people, and I am getting so ahead of myself. Patience, Josef. Anna, dear heart: there is so much that is hard to set down, and I must concentrate, since I have set myself a task. But your words are part of it, and your mind is part of it; therefore it’s not so silly to head down this road—because so little of our lives make sense apart from this, and despite this meandering I am trying to make sense, I promise you.

  FIND A WAY down that road from our first path, then, Josef:

  That same year I first hear from Anna Dükmann—around 1930, I imagine—there is an evening when I stand with Friedrich Zimmel on the balcony at the back of his parents’ house in the nineteenth district, and he says to me, “I don’t think I’ve ever had especially good justification for being alive.”

  This is Friedrich, then: he is taller than me, and broader, with dark, slicked hair and a tall forehead. He has a way of holding his mouth, I think unconsciously, so that his lips look soft and womanish. Tonight he is wearing a waistcoat over his white shirt, and his trousers are dark grey, expensively tailored in a way I wouldn’t understand except for the fact that my clothes hang off me so oddly in comparison.

  (This is all years before circumstances really try us, understand; years before any man, least of all myself, would call Friedrich collaborator, far less murderer. And forgive me if by setting down his darkness in this way I seem to suggest his guilt in advance. How can I say what I mean? That darkness is his innocence as much as it is his guilt, and that’s all I can puzzle out now.)

  But on the balcony that night, I don’t say anything right away. It’s possible he’s had too much to drink. Behind us, beyond the glass doors, in the living room and throughout the house, Friedrich’s and his mother and father’s friends are laughing and talking and pouring drinks. Friedrich leans against the stone banister and looks out into the dark, at the apricot trees in the corner of the yard where it is almost completely black.

  So I ask him, “Did you do something wrong?”

  He shrugs and rubs his forehead. “No, that’s not what I mean. It’s just that . . . Well. A man wants his work to be meaningful, you understand?”

  I scratch my wrist. It’s very thin between my fingers—too thin, Babka would say. Babka is still alive, will still be alive even until I flee this city. I have trouble eating, sometimes. I get ill more often than a young man should.

  “My father was certainly very grateful to have work after the war,” I tell him, and it’s true, though I don’t think I’ve yet discussed it with Friedrich in such clear terms. It’s understood that Friedrich was instrumental in keeping Papa employed when the economy was at its weakest. He did it for Zilla, I’m sure. But it’s ridiculous. Zilla isn’t interested in him; she’s having an affair with a French painter (married, I believe, though I don’t like to think about it), and the young women who would love to have Friedrich love them are probably lined up beyond the balcony doors, just there, a pa
ne of glass away from us.

  “I’m glad,” he says, and he opens his mouth, wants to say more, but he doesn’t. He stands straight and he stretches his arms. He turns towards the doors, and he looks as if he’s about to walk back inside, but then he sets his drink down on the banister, and he swipes it off into the night as if flicking a bit of dirt off a tabletop. There’s a shattering and a clinking on the stone patio below.

  Friedrich stares after it a second or two, then says, “Oh, well.”

  He goes inside. I stand for a moment, and then I walk up to the banister and peer into the pool of light pouring onto the patio from the ground floor. Friedrich’s glass is like a firework frozen on the stone, little shards of glass sparkling like stars. The night smells like earth and apricot blossoms, it’s getting cold and a part of me is very much aware that I’m not at home here.

  AND IT IS the same feeling, I think, on the night I meet Anna. It’s New Year’s Eve, 1932, and I am out with Zilla and her friends, for imitation-champagne toasts in the downtown streets and to visit the merchants, with their little stands, who sell the New Year’s pigs made of tin or clay or wood.

  But—think of it! how we’d meant to spend that night—I have to go back and re-examine the memory. (Considering it now, it seems almost portentous, in what way and when our paths intersect in life.) For Zilla and I had intended to meet with some Czechoslovakian cousins of ours who’d just moved to Vienna: my father’s first cousin on his mother’s side, her daughter Sarah Kostner, and Sarah’s daughter, Lena.

  Understand, my father was not close with them; he called them superstitious country folk and neglected to answer their letters. Mutti told Zilla our father had a bourgeois horror of Sarah’s illegitimate daughter. Zilla saw it another way: “They’re not assimilated,” she told me. “They’re like Babka. They embarrass him.”