The Book of Ghosts (2 page)

That Sunday was particularly beautiful—a light breeze off the ocean, the scent of Nathan's fries mixing with the salt air, the sound of children laughing—and he would have remembered it even if he hadn't snagged a shark and attracted a crowd when he yanked it out of the water. He posed for pictures, holding his catch, for what seemed an hour, but was only a few minutes. Then, when he tossed the beast back to King Neptune, the crowd evaporated and the other fishermen went back to their own poles. Jack went back to his.

And then he heard her voice. “Jacob Weisen!”

He fought very hard to ignore it, to pretend it was his mind playing tricks, but he knew it was her. He squeezed his eyes shut and prayed—it was the first time he'd prayed since God went deaf in 1933—for her to go away. His heart had a very different prayer.

“Jacob,” she repeated, only this time she grabbed his bicep.

He could not fight the fight any longer. His heart's prayer was answered because its petition was made to a flawed and lonely man, not to an aloof God.

“Miss Ava Levinsky,” he said, turning to see the face he had dreamed of for three years. For a brief moment, his heart sank. “It is still
Miss
Levinsky, yes?”

“Yes, but not for long, I hope.”

“We will just see about that, young lady,” he said, leaning over and kissing her softly on the mouth.

And with that kiss, he reopened the door to Isaac Becker,
The Book of Ghosts,
and a life of haunting. He knew that instead of explaining his name change and about how he had so quickly moved from the sweatshop floor to the showroom of Beckerman & Sons Fine Menswear, that he should have confessed his sins to her right then and there. Even as he stared at her, disbelieving his good fortune, he recited the confession in his head.

Listen, Miss Ava Levinsky, let me tell you something about the man you just kissed. He's a liar, a murderer, a hypocrite. Remember that story he told you about his friend and the book? Well, some of it was true. There was a book, and this liar had known Isaac Becker since they were children in the same tiny German town on the Polish frontier, but they were enemies, not friends. They hated one another, fiercely, from the moment they met. He always thought Becker was a dreamer and a fool. Becker thought him artless and calculating. When they found themselves in the camp together, their mutual loathing only intensified. This man you're going to marry, he was the barracks' enforcer and murdered men with his bare hands for stealing rations or informing for the SS. On the other hand, he facilitated with his lies the deaths of more of his own people than half the Nazis they hung at Nuremberg. Oh, Becker was no saint, either, Miss Levinsky. He was a gifted storyteller, yes, but to escape work on the ash heap, he made a deal with Kleinmann. For each story he would tell Oberleutnant Kleinman, Becker got time off and extra food rations. Those extra rations had to come from somewhere. Some days, it meant a little less for everybody else. More often, it meant one or two additional dead Jews.

The bit about Kleinmann keeping the writing tablet
—
that much was true as well. But this man, this liar standing before you, he didn't go with Isaac Becker to retrieve the book. That would have been an act of insanity. No, Becker went on his own. It was Becker, not the liar, who stabbed Oberleutnant Kleinmann in the liver, not in the neck, with the sharpened glass. This man you just kissed, you know what he did? He turned Becker in for some extra crusts of bread and rat meat soup. And yes, there was a Gypsy, but he was not the hero of Becker's book. The Gypsy was a prisoner from another barracks who kept himself alive by consorting with the SS, by smuggling things in and out of the camp. It was the Gypsy who put the book in the ash cart. As to the actual contents of the book, this liar, this murderer, he has no idea. It could have been a book of recipes or poetry or Hungarian curse words for all he knew. The Book of Ghosts! There were so many ghosts they couldn't have fit in all the books in all the world. And yes, Becker was tortured and crucified and the birds did eat his eyes out.

He told her none of it, instead feeding her a line about how he'd been wrong back in Poland, that he found he had no taste for talking about his time in the camps. “That's why I changed my name, why I am working so hard to become an American,” he said. “The past is gone. Let it remain buried with the dead.”

Ava seemed satisfied with his explanation. She had certainly dealt with enough survivors during her time overseas for the agency to know that very few people were anxious to tell their stories. She never once mentioned Becker or the book during their abbreviated courtship. It was only after too many glasses of champagne that she finally let something slip. Ava was talking to Jack's boss, Mr. Beckerman, at the wedding reception when the other shoe dropped.

“A survivor! Jackie! Who knew?” asked Beckerman. “He doesn't say to me a word about it.”

“He never told you about
The Book of Ghosts
?”

“Never a word.”

“It's what we talked about the first time we met. He was still in the hospital over there,” she said. “His name was Jacob then and …”

Even from across the reception hall, seeing the look on Mr. Beckerman's face, Jack knew he was screwed. Two days after he returned from his honeymoon in Niagara Falls, Jack Wise was summoned into the boss' office.

“Listen, Jackie, your wife told me already the story about the book and I told it to my rabbi and you shouldn't know from his reaction. He was on
shpilkes,
on pins and needles,” old Beckerman said in his heavily accented English. “He's a wise man, Jackie, my Rabbi Greenspan. He says you must share the story of your friend and the book. He says no matter how much pain it brings you to talk about it, to not share it with your people is a scandal, a
shanda.
The rabbi asked me to talk sense to you. He has called a special meeting of the temple brotherhood for a week from Sunday and he wants you to speak to us to tell us the story.”

Jack didn't bother protesting. He had known this day would come sooner or later and there was a practical part of his decision. Mr. Beckerman put a roof over his head and food on his table. If surviving the camps taught him anything at all, it was never to be cavalier about shelter and food. To disappoint his boss would also be professional suicide. Besides, he loved the old man. So he went and he spoke but, to his relief, it pretty much stopped there. Over the course of the next year, he had the occasional request from this Jewish group or that to repeat the myth and he did. It wasn't until the
Forward
got hold of the story that the legend of the heroic storyteller Isaac Becker, his boyhood friend Jacob Weisen, and
The Book of Ghosts
spread. It didn't take long for the New York tabloids and the
Times
to run with it.

What could Jack Wise do? He couldn't unscramble the eggs of his lies. And having once been caught in the momentum of history, he understood there was no swimming against its tide. So, he figured, if everyone else was going to swim with the tide, he would swim with it too, as far as it would take him, which, as it happened, was very far. Playing it for all it was worth, he went back to using the name Jacob Weisen and accepted every paying speaking engagement he could land, including ones in Argentina and the newly established state of Israel. The money helped because Ava was pregnant with their first child and they were saving to buy a house on Long Island. Even Mr. Beckerman cooperated, giving Jacob all the time off he needed. But by 1952, with no witnesses to corroborate or challenge his story and with no book unearthed, his life settled back into a happy and largely uneventful routine. Ava was again pregnant. David, their three-year-old, was a terror. They had their ranch house in Wantagh and Jacob rode the Long Island Railroad to work five days a week instead of the subway.

Oswiecem (Auschwitz), Poland, 1946

Bronka Kaczmarek had nothing to lose and everything to gain in trying to get the hell away from the family farm outside Oswiecim. The Nazis, as kind of a farewell to the neighborhood, had murdered her parents and older brother while she lay hidden in the hayloft, listening to the
pop, pop, pop
of the Walther. Not a week later, a squad of Red Army soldiers had filled the void left by the fleeing Germans and announced their arrival by stealing Bronka's last cow—a pathetic-looking animal—and by raping her more or less continuously for two days running. If their treatment of her was any indication, it seemed to Bronka that the Russians hated the Poles almost as much as they hated the Germans. In any case, she had had enough of them both. One monster, she thought, but for tailoring, was much like another.

Over the course of the last eight months, she had sold everything that wasn't nailed down to neighboring farmers or on the black market. She had taken her time so as not to arouse suspicion. It was probably an unnecessary precaution because now that Poland had been swallowed up by the Bolsheviks and private property was deemed a capitalist folly perpetrated by the masses, everyone was scrambling to survive. Desperation, not wheat, was the biggest cash crop in Poland after the war. The only thing Bronka hadn't sold was the thing she wished she had never seen: the little package wrapped in the tatters of striped pajamas, a Jew's striped pajamas. How did she know? Because although the yellow star was missing, its six-pointed silhouette remained. She didn't much like Jews nor did her father, but her father was a superstitious man. He had pulled her aside one day shortly after the ash cart had come from the camp and shown her the package.

“What is it, Papa?”

“It is one of
their
secret things,” he whispered as if the animals were listening.

“Maybe it's money or some of their diamonds. Let me have it. I will untie the knot and look.”

He pulled it to his chest. “No, Bronka, never!” He crossed himself and spit on the ground. “Now that I have taken it, we will be cursed if we do not protect it. Yes, they killed Christ, but they are God's Chosen. They have powers.”

She laughed at her father. “Powers! Power to what, to make blue smoke out of the sky? Chosen for what, to be slaughtered like cattle?”

Her father slapped her so hard across the face that the imprint of his thick fingers marked her left cheek for days. She hated that the slap was now her most enduring memory of her Papa, but because the package meant so much to him, it had become her only way to hold onto her father. Since she possessed neither the inclination toward deep thought nor the time to ponder the universe, Bronka Kaczmarek sewed the package into the lining of her coat and left Oswiecem forever under cover of darkness in the rear of a potato truck.

As it wasn't in Bronka's nature to let irony take purchase in her thoughts, she didn't waste time worrying about the fact that she found herself, two years later, in West Berlin, married to a British man named Daniel Epstein. Daniel, a wiry, handsome man who worked for the BBC World Service, was nominally Jewish and didn't ask Bronka to convert. In fact, he didn't ask much of her at all. She was more a housekeeper than a wife to him—a kiss farewell in the morning and one when he arrived home in the evening—and that suited her well enough. After those two days with the Russians, the thought of a man—handsome and well-mannered or not—inside her made her break out in a cold sweat. And so it went for three years until the morning Bronka was crushed beneath the wheels of a potato truck outside the local market. Wherever her eternal soul might be, even Bronka must have appreciated the irony in her deliverance.

When Daniel was going through his wife's things, he found the coat Bronka had worn the night she left Oswiecem buried in the back of a closet. If he hadn't patted down the pockets to see if she had left anything of value in them, the remainder of Jacob Weisen's life might have been spent in relative peace. But Daniel Epstein
did
pat down the pockets and he
did
find the tatter-wrapped package sewn into the lining of the threadbare coat. Although he had no idea of what to make of it, he knew someone who might. Yes, he knew him quite well.

After several years back in the States, Max Baumgarten, an army intelligence officer during the war—translating captured documents, mostly—had been assigned to Berlin as a correspondent for the
Herald Tribune.
He loved everything about the job, including his ability to scratch a particular kind of itch out of the sight of prying eyes. Unlike Daniel, Max felt no need to take on a bride for cover, but the British had that peculiar need to keep up appearances. Hell, Daniel even played the dutiful husband in the aftermath of Bronka's death, refusing to “see” Max until a proper and respectful period of mourning had been observed. So it was a surprise, a happy surprise, when the week after the Polish peasant was buried, Max picked up the phone and Daniel was on the other end.

They set a time to meet at “their” flat. They kept this place for their trysts, renting it under a false name and paying monthly in cash. Even seven years after the war, pounds or dollars talked loud and kept questions to a minimum. They had the place until the end of the month. After that, Max didn't see the need to keep it any longer, not now that Daniel's Polish peasant was dead. Max arrived early: setting up candles, icing down a bottle of pre-war vintage Veuve Cliquot, and setting out an iced tin of pearl black caviar, sour cream, and thinly sliced and toasted pieces of baguette. When Daniel showed up carrying a package wrapped in pajama tatters, Max's lustful intentions evaporated. Max could barely contain himself. “Holy shit! It's
The Book of Ghosts.
”

Daniel crooked his head like a confused puppy. “What?”

“Did Bronka tell you where she was from in Poland?” Max answered the question with his own.

“Well, at first, no. I suppose even she was embarrassed. But one night after one too many vodkas, she confessed to me that she grew up on a farm—”