On Sunday she had free time to do as she pleased. Yet there was something in the spaciousness of a day off that made Anna feel like she was submerged in a vat of molasses. It was during those empty hours that the endless dead pursued her, even in this far-flung landscape. Just when she began to think she had eluded the ghosts they would step out into the open, startling her with their presence. Sometimes, looking at herself in the mirror, she felt dizzy with longing as her mother’s reflection emerged like an echo, pulsing with youth.
Today the dead seemed to have decided to leave her alone. She had promised to show the Yiddish poet around – but after a quick lap of the town, they ended up climbing back up the water tank, where they had met only a day earlier. The sky had turned grey that morning for the first time in months. All around them trees gripped the clouds, refusing to release them back to the sky, but the ruthless wind blew up and snatched them away again.
‘Tonight is erev Rosh Hashone, the eve of Jewish New Year, when we celebrate the creation of the world. But it’s also a Day of Judgement. The wicked are condemned to eternal damnation, while those who have been good are granted yet another year to roam the earth.’ He turned and smiled at her, to lighten the mood.
‘Jews like me,’ he went on, ‘who sit on the fence about both religion and the existence of God, are given another chance to repent for our sins over the next ten days – Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe. And then comes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when we fast and our fate is finally sealed in the Book of Life. That’s the time for Yizkor, a prayer for remembrance, where we call out the names of our dead.’
‘It’s a nice custom to acknowledge the presence of those we’ve lost,’ she reflected.
‘You think so? To my mind it’s ridiculous. Do you really think the dead are listening, or that anyone can see them?’
‘I guess you need to know how to look,’ she answered thoughtfully.
‘So how long does it take for them to appear then?’
‘They never disappear.’
‘I, for one, would rather pay attention to people who are right here in front of me.’
He felt deprived he had no direct line to his grandparents, Bubbe Fruma or Zeyde Shepsl. They would probably be broyges with him by now, furious he hadn’t made more of an effort to bring them back from the dead. How he would love them to visit him in this world. But what would they say if they saw him so far away from home, flirting with a woman of whom they would never have approved? The work of the eyes was overrated, he decided. He didn’t need to see them to hear their voices in the air, tormenting him over this almost-transgression. He was breaking with tradition, the weight of guilt imposed on the living by the dead.
‘Oy vey!’ Bubbe Fruma would wail. ‘A shikse is not enough for him. No, no. This one has to go and find a German gentile woman as well, nokh. And on erev Rosh Hashone too, a high holy day. What a wonderful way for him to start a New Year, with a sin.’
‘Why do you always have to get so hysterical, Fruma? He’s only talking to the woman. He hasn’t done anything wrong.’ Zayde Shepsl interrupted her tirade.
‘Not yet. Aza shande, it’s such an embarrassment for the family. At least he has until Yom Kippur to atone.’ She spat three times. ‘Tfoo, tfoo, tfoo. My own grandson is killing me.’
‘He can’t kill you, Fruma. We’re dead, remember?’ Zeyde Shepsl said.
‘Akh, dead shmead. Altsding lozt zikh oys mit a gevayn.’
‘No! Not everything has to end in tears, Frumaleh.’ He put his arms around her as she cupped her face in her hands.
Alter always thought that ghosts were canny inventions to remind children not to entertain thoughts of going astray. His mother used to tell him that spirits of the dead possess the living, because they still have a reckoning to make with those they left behind. If that was true, he wondered why the chicken feet poking over the rim of the pot of soup didn’t simply climb out and scratch his mother’s face before they ran away. As a child, he thought he possessed magical skills to bring the dead back from wherever it was they went to hide. He embellished them with supernatural powers: the milkman’s horse, who had died the week before, returned sporting two heads instead of one, each with an extra pair of eyes looking backwards. When he shared the stories he invented with his mother, she would forbid him from telling Father, who was a pious and brooding man.
No, there was good reason for a boundary to exist between the living and the dead. Alter knew it would be impossible to flourish in love under his dearly departed’s watchful lingering, always so judgemental in their mistrust of mortal transgressions. He felt a sudden wave of nausea rising, his heart pounding. He closed his eyes and swayed a little. He thrust his arms forwards to clutch the edge of the tank before collapsing with a thud. He lay there in a crumpled heap. Anna had never seen anyone faint before. It wasn’t as poetic as she had imagined. She propped his head up.
‘Thank you. I’m fine,’ he muttered, holding his hand on top of hers for a moment.
‘Let’s get you down from here.’ She peered over the edge and saw Johnnie, one of the Yangman elders, a fine cattleman from Elsey Station, standing over to one side, smoking a cigarette.
She called down to him and within moments he had clambered up the ladder and helped Alter down, his arm around him as they hobbled back to the hotel.
‘Come,’ she said to Alter. ‘You should put your feet up for a while. My room is closer.’
She led the poet inside, towards her fuggy little room, which was not much more than a nook behind the kitchen. A wooden bedside table stood beside the metal cot, pushed up against one wall. He lay down on the bed.
‘Are you feeling any better?’
‘Yes, thank you. I’ll be fine. I don’t know what came over me. I just felt very dizzy. Maybe the long journey is finally taking its toll.’
He looked up at a rickety shelf from which Anna’s dolls stared down at him.
‘You have a lot of toys.’
‘Dolls,’ she answered with a faintly mocking smile. ‘They are my collection, not my toys.’
‘Dolls, yes. Of course. They look like a little family.’ He sat up. ‘This bigger one at the end has the same eyes as you.’ He reached up to take Lalka down from the shelf.
‘Don’t touch her!’ she shouted. ‘That’s Lali. She’s special,’ she added quietly, embarrassed by her outburst.
‘My apologies.’ He lowered his arm. ‘But if I may be honest, she’s no beauty queen.’
‘You don’t need to be perfect to be loved.’
He folded his arms in front of him.
‘You know, I was never allowed to play with toys as a child,’ he said. ‘My mother lined them up on a shelf, out of my reach, because she didn’t want me to break them.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘One day,’ he continued, ‘when mother had gone to the fish market, I climbed up and reached the Do Not Touch shelf. The tin soldier wobbled and teetered over the edge. Before I could catch it, it plummeted to the ground and lay there, its head twisted, body split open. I jumped back down and held it like a surgeon, keen to see its soul now that the toy’s secret life was open to inspection. I still remember the melancholy seeping through me as I was robbed of the belief that the toy soldier had a life.’
The man was full of stories. She had her own that she longed to share, but she kept them to herself.
‘Why do you collect dolls?’ he asked.
‘Because I love them. Dolls are a way to recapture the innocence of childhood. They hold our memories.’
A doll was a confidante, following its owner around, dragged from place to place like a loyal servant. From the first awakening soon after birth to the loneliness and abandonment felt in the crib, a doll accompanied the smallest of humans across feverish nights and terrifying dreams, patrolling the edges of childhood. Listening without hearing, falling to the floor without protest – all the while bearing witness. Their inert bodies were a receptacle for sadness and secrets.
‘And dolls never die,’ he said.
There was a pause in the conversation. Like a giant wave, frozen mid-air.
‘Please tell me your story, Anna. I would very much like to get to know you.’
‘There is no story. Nothing to tell.’
Her previous life coiled up inside her like a snake. Anna tried to make herself small in this place, going about her chores, cleaning the pub after the evening’s indulgence, during which the men drowned all their sorrows in beer. Her story was hers alone and would remain a secret, hidden only inside memory, or midnight hauntings. She wanted to lose her old language in the new one. Until this stranger turned up, comical in his sola topi, bow tie and high-waisted trousers, her life had been divided into before and after. Just as she was ready to completely let go of the old world, he arrived along a dusty track, emerging from the scrub.
‘Each of us has a story,’ he said. ‘Granted, some more interesting than others.’
‘Indeed. But we are both small characters, inserting our own absurd tales into this land. I grew up in Germany. That part of my life is thankfully over. That’s all there is. I am embarking on a new story.’
‘You must have witnessed some pretty dreadful scenes there as a young girl. Is that what made you leave? Just because something has happened in the past doesn’t mean it’s over, especially in the part of the world we have come from. History has a habit of washing up like a tide onto the shores of the present. And we can choose to bathe in these waves, swim through them – or else risk drowning. But I do agree, we must look to the future – that is where I live.’ Alter pointed to the horizon. ‘Over there, where I have never been, is where I long to go.’
Beneath every secret lay shame. That is why a secret was kept in the first place. Anna tried to swallow her past, but it stuck in her throat – everything she had seen with a child’s eye refused to disappear. She could walk through the rooms of their apartment in Munich, stand by her bedroom window again looking out onto the huge plane tree. In her mind’s eye she could trace her way to her parents’ room, padding along the rug in the hallway, and pull out the secret drawer in the armoire in which Mutti hid her personal trinkets – a silver thimble, a crochet hook and a tiny gold star on a chain. Memory had frozen everything in its place, unmoving, even the basket of unfinished knitting.
But there were times when a memory hit her like a lightning strike – a child stranded in grief, confused by the smoke and mirrors of the adults who surrounded her. She pictured young men marching through the streets wearing crisp, brown uniforms perfectly ironed by their doting mothers. Anna could not bury history, try as she might. It lived inside her, always slightly blurred and out of reach. And that space held so many questions, waiting for the clarity of some answer to appear.
‘You can rest here for a while, Mr Mayseh,’ she said.
‘Please, call me Alter.’
‘Of course, Alter. I’ll go make some tea. If you need me, I’ll just be next door in the kitchen.’
She boiled the kettle. Placing a cup and saucer and some biscuits onto a tray, she made her way back to her room. Alter was gone, the linen on her bed smoothed out. An ink-smudged note rested on her pillow. It was a poem, written in German:
I am a passing stranger
do not know the names
of all the chambers in your heart
your eyes dip like swallows
drinking from the tide of souls
invisible paths left behind through clouds
I try to read your secret map of grief
find my way one heartbeat at a time
an ancient tale lies hidden in those bones
ghosts watch over you through sleep
moon eyes darting wildly in your dreams
an injured bird to cradle in night’s arms
She folded the piece of paper in half and hid it in a drawer, then sat on the edge of the bed and drank the tea herself. It was getting late. She did a round of the hotel to check the doors were locked and headed off to bed.