The Ghost Keeper Read online

  But these, we’ve learned, are proud cousins: sensing our judgment, Sarah Kostner now refuses to see us. Zilla, with her natural affinity for anyone who makes Papa nervous, has already penetrated these defences and made a friend of Sarah; but when I propose to go with her to spend New Year’s Eve with the Kostners, we hear back, “No, thank you; my mother isn’t well and Lena is just getting over a cold.”

  How it shames me, this answer. I feel all the barbed indignation of a single mother aimed at me, and it’s too easy to believe I deserve it. But Zilla says, “Never mind, little Josef, you’ll come out with my friends and have a wild time for once.”

  And I do dress for it, wool cap and scarf and jacket over my suit, and I walk along the old streets behind Zilla, who has her arm on that of a fellow I’ve never seen before. He’s wearing imperial military dress in a size too small for his shoulders, which, because Zilla seems to put up with him, I can only assume is a joke. Friedrich is behind me, and has his arm around a shapely blond girl with a country accent whom I believe he is sleeping with but whose name I can never remember. There are others of Zilla’s and Friedrich’s friends with us too, but I find myself quiet tonight, and still a little ashamed. I listen to the way my feet crunch over refrozen slush. My mind replays a phrase of fiddle music, over and over, until I start to hum it to myself without thinking.

  The air is sharp and thin, well below freezing, and the seasonal scents of chestnuts roasting in barrels and of hot spiced wine make this moment seem outside of time and eternal. Boys are lighting firecrackers on the side streets, snaps sounding sharp through the din and flavouring the air with hints of sulphur. People buy little model pigs at the stands by the roadside. Zilla searches every year for the most obscene figurines and makes her boyfriends buy them for her, and then she names the pigs after the men. It seems they always take it as a compliment in the moment.

  And perhaps I would have stayed the whole night with them, drifting through the sounds and smells and into whichever apartment or club cupped the dregs of their laughing as the sky turned morning grey. I don’t know what that other path would have been. But the fellow in the military coat finds a waxy-looking resin pig and hands it to Zilla. She starts when she first sees it, and this makes me pay attention—but then she throws back her head and laughs.

  “You really know how to charm a girl, Franzi.” Slaps his arm and makes as if to throw the figurine on the ground, and he cackles and snatches it.

  “Let me buy it for you, ugly darling, let me buy it for you.” He talks in a little-boy voice. It makes my blood boil. I know that Zilla despises him, as she always despises this kind of man, but she lets her admirers traipse around after her, making fools of themselves, as if it is the best kind of amusement she knows. I want to beat this fool, though, and make him stop laughing, make him kiss her feet through tears.

  “My ugly, ugly darling,” he coos, and she only laughs more, and they make hideous faces at each other. I see that Friedrich’s blonde is trying to show him something, but his eyes are on Zilla and he looks as I feel, full of that static level rage that seems tranquil until the moment it explodes.

  So I say, “What is it, Zilla?”

  And, “Nothing,” she says, “just a stupid pig.”

  The man behind the counter, the man selling the pigs, has a grin like a slug. Half his display is an open box, a case he can snap shut and thrust under the table, I know from years previous, if a police officer comes sniffing. He looks as if he’s waiting for someone to catch his meaning, though he hasn’t said anything.

  Friedrich strides over to the pigs in the box, lifts one into the light.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” he says. “Worse and worse every year.” But his girlfriend shrieks, and he half-grins at her sharp, strong country laugh.

  “You’re digging your own grave,” Zilla tells this fellow, this Franzi, “but buy it if you must. If it’s what you like.”

  “You know it’s what I like,” he says, and nudges her shoulder.

  And now I expect Zilla to laugh, with and at this man so far beneath her, as she always does; but instead she glares at him for a moment, her face like flint.

  I go over to the pig stand as Zilla is moving away from it, reach out towards a little figurine with Friedrich saying, behind me, “Don’t bother; don’t humour him, Josef”—but too late. I’ve got one in my hand. And of course it’s pornographic, crude—I was expecting that: the creature’s waxen trotter wrapped improbably round its little mushroom penis, eyes buggy in what I assume is meant to be ecstasy but which looks like rage. But beyond the pornographic aspect, it’s not just a pig; it’s a Turkish pig, or the stall man’s vision, at least, of a Turkish pig, which means fez, moustache, black-lined eyes and red vest.

  The stall man chortles to himself. “She liked one of these ones, over here.”

  At this point I know what it’s going to be—because a stall keeper, in Vienna, at the cap of 1932, who sells masturbating Turkish pigs couldn’t possibly fail to sell masturbating Jewish pigs. But it’s more than that—and at the first one I almost want to laugh: another rage-faced hog, with a broad black hat and sidelocks, but this one is mounting a piggy bank from behind. The piggy bank’s face is blithe and innocent, but there are cracks painted on its pink back end, cracks radiating from its assailant. I half-think, At least it’s kind of clever; but then the fellow, this stall keeper, says, “No, these—these are even better.”

  He’s showing me female pigs, half-female pigs, pig threesomes and pigs licking each other, all furious-looking, their Jewishness indicated by a yarmulke or (in cases of what must be laziness on the part of the sculptor) a Star of David painted on the rump. It’s so absurdly juvenile, so completely unoriginal in its crudeness, that I glance up at the stall keeper and say, “And these sell?”

  “Oh, certainly they sell,” he says. “Who doesn’t like them? Your friend, the little whore, you could tell: she’s a Jew, but she wants it. Just like animals, you know? Fuck like pigs.”

  He starts to rearrange the creatures on the table. He’s done paying attention to me.

  And that feeling, now, as Friedrich is drifting away from me, even as he’s calling, “Come on, Josef,” and as Zilla finds something new to laugh at and as the night breathes cool on me: Come! But I can’t do it. And certainly it’s not the first time I’ve seen Vienna’s ugly underbelly—so what, then? A finishedness, maybe; a tiredness, along with the anger. I’ve had enough.

  Teenagers in the alley are screaming; the air is cold like peppermint. It’s an hour before midnight. Enough, now.

  As I’m walking away, Zilla calls, “Where are you going, Josef?”

  “Just home, I think,” I call back. “I’m tired.”

  They yell after me, “Happy New Year!”—and I raise a hand to them, but they won’t miss me now, I know.

  I am tired, and I do mean to go home, but so tired at first that I drift down the street past screaming women dangling off their men, people hanging out of bar doors, singing, and an accordion playing through one window, a trumpet through another.

  When someone grabs my arm, my whole body tenses to shake him off and run—but then: “Tobak! Typical! You’re the only fellow on the street who isn’t smiling.”

  I turn towards Jakob Dükmann, this man, my friend. I take him by the hand. And, “Thank God,” I say, “I thought you were going to murder me.”

  It makes him laugh. He slaps my arm. He invites me along with him: “Come back to my house,” he says. His whole family’s there, he tells me, and some friends too. “Vati will be glad to see you. You’re his favourite son.”

  It’s a joke, of course, but it changes the colour of the night. Tobias Dükmann is Jakob’s father, and so different from my own father that it baffles me. From a distance and with a child’s heart, I love Tobias Dükmann. And I love Jakob and his brother, and though I’ve hardly ever seen her, I love their mother, Ella, too.

  Jakob adds: “My sister’s there tonight. I’ll let you dance
with her, if you’re good.”

  5

  BUT WAIT—I MUST EXPLAIN HOW TOBIAS DÜKMANN came into my life. I told you that there was little religion in our family, and this is true. Still, it’s next to impossible to escape it in Vienna, for better or for worse. And I do sometimes go into synagogues, it’s true, even as a boy—none of Papa’s efforts can prevent that. When my cousin Ben is thirteen, Oma and Opa keep asking when his bar mitzvah will be, and my father finds it impossible to explain that he doesn’t want us to attend. In the end he tells them Zilla will find out, which of course she does immediately, purely to make Papa crazy. On the day, I sit in the synagogue and watch my older cousin who is for a moment like a creature turned to gold and a pillar of song, and my ears seem to close off the rustling and breathing around me. I feel as if a conversation has begun; but although I sense that I have met someone’s eyes and smiled, the first word is still hanging over us and I can’t seem to remember who it is I’m talking to.

  Mutti’s brother Tomas, my uncle, is not an especially pious man, but he is good friends with the cantor at the Turkish synagogue, and he keeps kosher and observes the Sabbath and holy days. He imports coffee and chocolate and runs a shop by the canal; still, Papa can hardly stand to see him and tells Mutti he is a rat. Sometimes Tomas takes me to spend the day with him, and this is sometimes wonderful and sometimes terribly boring: it depends whether he is running errands in his buggy or stopping somewhere to drink with his friends, which usually lasts for hours and seems to let him forget I’m there.

  Once, when I am eleven years old, Tomas takes me to the Turkish synagogue while he visits his friend. It’s a sweltering day, the middle of summer, and the air inside is thick and still. He has left me alone in a pew while he and Mr. Zawady sit a ways away, talking quietly. The Turkish synagogue is beautiful inside, burnished gold. In the heat it seems the air itself is golden, and that this is what gives it weight. It strikes me for the first time then that a great deal of effort and money went into making this space, and still goes into keeping it up. And I think about how many seats there are around me, and how much space for people and how it is built to house a multitude—not for work and not for amusement, nor even simply for community, but for a community in prayer. For the first time I understand the fact that there are adults who sincerely believe in God.

  I ought to be roasting in my skin, but the thought sends a chill through me. It seems ridiculous that Tomas and Mr. Zawady have not heard me think it, that they don’t turn and stare at me. And then the fact that they don’t, and that I’m still sitting here and that no one knows what has happened, makes me feel terribly small and alone. I peer all around me, at the ceiling and the walls and the pews and my own hands on the polished wood beside me. I am realizing something that I never realized before: that what the people who built this synagogue believed either is true or is not true. If it’s not true, what a pity for them; but if it is true, and if a person could shuffle through his life never realizing it—well, pity wouldn’t begin to account for it.

  When Tomas is coming back towards me, I am still sitting in this new understanding, wide-eyed in it as I never am otherwise, except perhaps when I’m alone in the graveyard. Tomas is nearly beside me and I know that there is something I need to do before he speaks and a door shuts on this moment. And it seems then that I know what word has been hanging over me since that day at my cousin’s bar mitzvah: it’s what I have to say—it is, “I’m listening.”

  Tomas pats my shoulder as my mind says it and, like a switch, I feel my own sweat on my skin for the first time in what seems like hours.

  At my own bar mitzvah, two years later (my mother’s family having proven instrumental in overriding my father’s disapproval), as I stand in front of a hundred faces who all look, for an instant, like candles flickering, there is a moment like the moment in the Turkish synagogue, but also different from it—a realization, both terrifying and wonderful, that in that earlier moment I had already decided what I believed.

  AFTER THAT, WHEN I walk to the Seegasse cemetery (as I often do, no longer needing my sister to take me there by the hand), when I touch the gravestones and when I sit by the stone fish—in all those moments, this knowledge is a lamp and a hunger. I feel as if there is a direction I’m headed in now, but I don’t yet know how to move my feet. I have not told anyone what I have become—a young man who believes in God—and I hold this secret inside me. This is the state I’m in when the Dükmann family first finds me, when I’m sixteen.

  The two boys, one older than me and one younger, follow me when I leave the graveyard one day, run up after me and make me jump before I realize they’re not looking for someone to punch. Chaim is a tall young man with a hard face and strong arms, and right away I defer to him; Jakob is small and grinning, healthier-looking than I am, but also more of a boy. Chaim introduces himself and his brother and then asks me if I would like to come to a meeting with them.

  I suspect I know what kind of meeting he means. There are all kinds of youth movements in the second district, secular and religious, would-be militant and pacifist. I have never gone to any of their meetings, perhaps because of the many choices and a fear of choosing the wrong one. So I ask Chaim, “What group?”

  He shakes his head. “Not a group,” he says, “not like that. My father is having a meeting this afternoon at his shop. There’s a Hebrew scholar from Poland in town. He’s going to give an informal lecture.”

  “There will be food,” Jakob adds.

  I have a vision of a Polish scholar, a white-bearded man with hawkish eyes, quizzing me in Hebrew. “Thank you very much,” I say, “but your father hasn’t invited me.”

  “He told us to invite you,” Chaim says. “He said, ‘Go see if that young ghost of the Seegasse cemetery might be interested.’”

  I suspect I go ghost-white when he says it. There are sometimes people in the cemetery when I visit, but I have always thought myself more or less invisible. That there may have been someone noticing me—observing me—fills me with a trespasser’s guilt.

  “I think he wants to meet you,” Chaim says.

  “But I’m not very interesting,” I tell him. “Really, I’m not. And I don’t know anything.”

  Jakob says, “More reason to come, then.”

  “You really ought to,” says Chaim. “This isn’t an everyday opportunity.”

  It’s by some miracle of courage, I think, that I follow them, all the while thinking of excuses to leave suddenly. They talk mostly to each other, mostly about their personal concerns, names I don’t recognize, schedules that sound important. Eventually, perhaps because this all seems so ridiculous and mysterious, I ask them, “Is your father a rabbi?”

  They laugh, and Jakob says, “He’s a tailor.”

  “But,” Chaim says, in a quieter voice, “he’s a very holy man.”

  I have never heard a teenaged boy say such a thing about his father, and it keeps me quiet, wondering, for the rest of the while we walk together.

  We come to the tailor shop, a large-windowed shop on a street corner, with a suited mannequin in the display. Chaim holds the door open, and immediately there’s the low grumble of male voices from the back room. We head towards the sound, and Jakob says, as we pass into the far room, “We brought him, Vati.”

  I will not remember in detail what the Polish scholar said in his lecture; he speaks mainly in Yiddish and about things I’ve never heard of before. All the same, it doesn’t feel alien so much as deep, as if it were something I could fall into without completely understanding it, rather than something I had to think my way through—more like a river, perhaps, than an algebra problem.

  I remember Tobias Dükmann, though. To me, as a sixteen-year-old, he is a strange new kind of man: one who smiles as much inwardly as outwardly, and who (above everything, and strangest of all) approaches every person here with the same quiet, steady attention. He seems older than my father, though perhaps it is because of his beard and glasses. Chaim introduc
es me by name, and Dükmann greets me with, “At last, young man,” and grips my shoulders, smiling. He seats me by the wall, near the radiator, where I have a good view of everything and don’t feel everyone’s eyes on me.

  Halfway through the lecture (which is indeed very informal, with this or that old fellow in the audience volunteering an anecdote or asking a question every few minutes), there’s a knock on the door and a woman who must be Mrs. Dükmann enters, carrying a covered basket wafting scent that makes my mouth water. Dükmann stands and calls for an intermission, which the lecturer seems to welcome as much as anyone.

  I eat with them—I hardly know, then, what it is, though I remember, I think, the squish of pastry. The people talk to me and I say Yes, and Pleased to meet you, and I’m Josef Tobak, I’m in school, and My father is an accountant. At one point Tobias Dükmann takes me by the arm and leads me to a corner, out of the way of the others, and he says, “What hope you give me, Tobak! What hope.”

  “Oh,” is all I can say.

  “Do you know,” he goes on, “no one, unless he’s mourning someone, looks the way you do in the cemetery. But even then—even the mourners, it’s simpler: one soul, and you wish them back, or you wish you could have done more, you know, missed less. With you—ah. With you, Tobak.”

  He stares straight in my eyes, and I want to flinch. I want to look at the wall or his hairline or anywhere but back into his eyes. He says, “You didn’t know those people, did you?”

  “No,” I say. “No, not one of them.” Does he know how old the gravestones are?

  “That’s what I mean.” I don’t know yet that his eyes are always moist like that, and I think for a moment that he might weep. “But you don’t look like a tourist. I wonder if you feel, sometimes, as if you’re remembering all of them?”

  I open my mouth to contradict him, but—nothing. Part of me thinks, It is something like that; but then again, not quite.

  “Isn’t it right—I ask myself this—isn’t it right, in some sense, that we’re all completely forgotten, eventually? By men, I mean. All but a few, the few of the few, who do something terrible or very, very good. It’s right.” He shrugs. “It keeps a man small, you see? It makes him mindful. ‘Vanity of vanities!’ But Tobak—” Now he leans into me, and I smell on his breath tobacco and his wife’s cooking. “I persist in believing, you see, that there has to be someone to bear the memory of us.”