The Book of Ghosts Read online

  The Book of Ghosts

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  Contents

  The Book of Ghosts

  Queens, New York, 2011

  Having survived three years in five concentration camps, Jacob Weisen knew death as one twin knows another. But that period of his schooling had come to a close seventy years ago. Now there remained but one last thing to learn of death, and that lesson would come soon enough. Weisen neither feared death—he had seen it in all its permutations so that he understood there was a kind of peace in it—nor welcomed it—he had fought too hard to live during his years in hell to give into it simply because he was a tired old man.

  “What are you thinking about, Zaydeh?” asked Leah, Weisen’s granddaughter, noticing the sour expression on his face.

  “Dying.”

  “Oy, not this again.”

  “One day, Totty, the rain will come. It will lift me up like an oil spot off the gutter and wash me into the sewer. One day I will be here, then I will be gone. No one should mourn an oil spot and that is all we are … less, maybe.”

  “Zaydeh, please stop it. I hate it when you get this way,” she said, as she drove out of Kennedy airport and onto the Van Wyck Expressway.

  “You hate that I talk the truth?”

  “Your truth, Zaydeh, not everyone’s.”

  He pushed back the arm of his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeve, and tapped his gnarled index finger to the sagging skin of his forearm and the faded numbers tattooed there. “No, Totty, not my truth, the truth. I have seen the truth of oil spots and ashes: here one day, gone the next, and then forgotten. And once you’re forgotten … there is no return.”

  “Not all are forgotten,” she said, her voice impatient. “There’s you and your friend Isaac Becker. You two won’t be forgotten. The both of you will be tied to The Book of Ghosts forever.”

  The Book of Ghosts, indeed! What a load of dreck, he thought. While Leah was correct about them being bound together, Jacob Weisen had no more been a friend to Isaac Becker than a spider to a fly. It was then, for fear of letting the endless years of pent-up bile and guilt pour out of him in one furious rush, that he decided to keep his mouth clamped shut until they reached the auction house. Many, many, decades had passed since he’d been forced to learn to hold his tongue in the face of unrelenting atrocity. In a world where speaking up got you nothing but a bullet or “delousing,” self-imposed silence was an essential survival skill. Lying, too, became second nature. Lying was a particularly effective skill at Birkenau in the anteroom of the gas chamber.

  “Remember your hook numbers so you can collect your clothing after your shower,” was a lie he had learned to utter quickly and with conviction in many different languages: Yiddish, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Dutch … the list was long. Jacob still woke up some nights with that polyglot lie on his lips.

  One of the guards, Heilmann, a real bastard with coal for a heart and a face like a plane crash, used to repeat the same joke to Jacob after each group of the dead was carted to the ovens. “You Jews must have such terrible memories. Your people never come back for their clothes. I wonder where they have all gotten to?” And each time, Heilmann would laugh—each laugh a little stab wound. He wondered why he should be thinking of Heilmann after all these years. Would he finally start bleeding from the thousand little stab wounds?

  So it was no small irony that Jacob Weisen’s failure to just keep his mouth shut and that his most foolish and unnecessary fabrication had caused his life after the war to be haunted by Isaac Becker and his accursed book, the book for which the idiot Becker—with Jacob’s complicity—had sacrificed his life. And as Weisen grew older, the taste of irony grew more bitter in his mouth—so bitter that he could have choked on it. He was choking on it now as Leah drove down the Long Island Expressway, the skyline of Manhattan and the prospect of the rare book auction looming before him. And as they did, he asked himself the same question he had asked himself a thousand, ten thousand, a million times in the wake of the camp’s liberation at the hands of the Red Army. Why? Why: three letters, one syllable, a single sound, but the most complex question in the universe when it came to the human heart. Why didn’t he just keep his trap shut when the Jewish resettlement agency people came to interview him in the hospital? Why spin the tale of Isaac Becker and The Book of Ghosts when he might have gotten to America anyway?

  He was not without answers, reasonable answers, ones that sometimes let him sleep the whole night through. He wanted no part of the Soviets. He had witnessed their barbarity first-hand and thought them not much better than the Nazis. He had no desire to build a new life in the ruins and gloom of a bloodsoaked Europe, nor did he have the zeal to fight the British for a homeland in Palestine. America. He wanted a new world in which to make something of the shreds of whatever remained of himself. Jacob Weisen thought if he could just make himself seem heroic—the Americans, he knew, had a weakness for heroes—he might stand a better chance of making it across the Atlantic. So he took the facts and spliced them with lies and embellishments to create the myth of his salvation. Only now, with Manhattan but minutes away, it felt much more like damnation.

  “Your name is Jacob Weisen.” The raven-haired American woman from the agency had read from his request form. She was actually quite beautiful, delicate, and spoke passable Yiddish. “It says here you want to be resettled in the United States or Canada.”

  “United States only. See, I wrote the United States there for my second choice too, but they crossed it out and made me write Canada.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. “Why America only, Jacob?” she asked, giving him the opening he’d been hoping for.

  And thus Weisen told the story of how his brave childhood friend, Isaac Becker, the storyteller—” Even the SS men called him that”—had written a book during his year and a half in Birkenau and the other Auschwitz satellite camps. That Becker’s book was a novel featuring a protagonist known only as the Gypsy.

  “You see, in the book,” Jacob explained to the American woman, “the Gypsy is visited by the ghosts of the people he knew in the camps before they were gassed. The ghosts tell their stories to the Gypsy who commits them to memory to tell to the world if he himself should survive. Isaac never told me the book’s title, but I came to think of it as The Book of Ghosts.”

  “This is fascinating, Jacob, but I don’t see how this relates to you or your request for resettlement in the United—”

  Weisen cut her off, continuing his tale. “You see, because Isaac was such a wonderful storyteller, he sort of became the personal property of Oberleutnant Kleinmann. He was Kleinmann’s pet and it was Kleinmann who gave Isaac the writing tablet and pen in the first place so he could write down his stories. What that bastard Kleinmann didn’t know was that Isaac was really using the tablet to write The Book of Ghosts. He only pretended to be reading stories from the book to placate the Nazi pig. In exchange for the stories, the lieutenant kept Isaac from the showers. The charade worked until Isaac told a story Kleinmann was so taken with that he demanded to have the tablet back from Isaac and to keep it for his own. Isaac protested for a time, but what choice did he have, really? In the end, he gave the book to Kleinmann who just glanced at it, saw that the first page had some Hungarian on it, and locked it in his desk drawer.”

  “Still, as captivating as this all is, I don’t understand how it helps your cause,” she said, although the quiver in her voice betrayed her words.

  “Poor Isaac came to me, frantic, explaining the situation and how he feared our whole barracks might be punished for his indiscretion. ‘If they think you all knew a
bout the book and didn’t tell them,’ he said, ‘who knows how they will punish you?’”

  The woman was hooked, so much so that she reached across the table for Jacob’s hand. “Please, tell me what happened next?”

  “Under cover of darkness, Becker and I snuck back to Kleinmann’s little office where the book was hidden. We were prying open the lock when Kleinmann caught us in the act. I stabbed the monster through the neck with a piece of sharpened glass. Here,” Jacob whispered, reaching out and touching the soft white skin of the American’s neck, “but not before he had wounded Isaac in the leg. I wanted to stay, to help my friend, but he wouldn’t hear of it. All he could think about was the book. ‘Save yourself,’ he said, ‘and smuggle the book out of here no matter what it takes. The world must know what happened in this place.’ I did as he asked. I wrapped the book in some fabric and rubber sheeting I had bartered for with one of the guards. The next morning I slipped the package into a wagon of ashes headed for one of the nearby farms I heard was owned by a man in the Polish resistance. Did you know the Poles used our ashes as fertilizer? We were no use to them alive, but dead …”

  “Oh, my God!” she gasped, tears running down her cheeks. “And Becker, what happened to Isaac Becker?”

  “Tortured, then crucified. Took him three days to die and they left his body for everyone to see as the birds gnawed at him.”

  “The book. What became of the book?” She wanted desperately to know.

  Jacob Weisen shrugged his broad shoulders. “It could be plowed beneath the soil in some Polish farmer’s field or it could be anywhere. I fear we will never know.” Jacob could have left it at that, but didn’t. He was so encouraged by the woman’s touch, her tears, and her beauty, that he took one step too far. “So you see—I’m sorry, I have been impolite. What is your name?”

  “Ava, Ava Levinsky,” she said, blushing slightly.

  “So you see, Miss Ava Levinsky, I must go to America and tell this story to our people. They will see pictures of the camps, but they will never know the horrors like us few surviving Jews of Europe. The book is gone, but our people in America must know we did not all die like sheep, that some of us kept our pride. They must know of poor Isaac’s bravery and his book. Remember, he told me before I left him there next to Kleinmann’s body, ‘The world must know what happened in this place.’”

  And so was born the legend of Isaac Becker and the myth of The Book of Ghosts. The truth of it was something else altogether, but there was no one left to dispute Weisen’s version of history. The last member of his barracks died of typhus the day before the Red Army marched into the camp and none of the SS henchmen who managed to avoid justice or death in the aftermath of the war was apt to come forward to set the record straight. So Jacob Weisen was granted his wish and only a few months later had his new American life.

  Settled into a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a Victorian house on Foster Avenue in Brooklyn, commuting to 32nd Street in the city where he worked as a cutter in the schmatte trade, the garment business, he might very well have lived out a quiet, productive life as a simple man. Maybe he would have taken a wife, had some children, but maybe not. To put more distance between himself and his past, he had begun to call himself Jack Wise and had even gone to a lawyer to start the process of legally changing his name. It all could have turned out very differently had someone else interviewed him at the hospital after the war.

  When he was lonely, which was all the time, he had thoughts of the beautiful American girl with the passable Yiddish and the silken black hair who had been instrumental in making his new life a reality. He remembered the warmth and softness of her hand as she caressed his and the feel of her lovely white skin when he brushed his fingers against her neck. Sometimes he repeated her name in his head like a lullaby as he rode the noisy, crowded subway to work and then home to his spare apartment. Miss Ava Levinsky … Miss Ava Levinsky … Miss Ava Levinsky … There were weak moments when he considered hiring an investigator to track her down. But no, he thought, little good would come of it. Whatever they might’ve had would have been built on the wet sand of his lies.

  Then one glorious spring Sunday morning, as he did every Sunday morning, Jack Wise went fishing off the pier in Coney Island, the Parachute Jump shooting up into the cloudless blue skies at his back. Fishing was something he did without regard to the weather. The camps had hardened him to the weather: hot and cold, wet or dry. He would get up with the sun, ride the subway into Sheepshead Bay or to the end of the line at Coney Island, and drop his line. Fishing was his only indulgence, the solitary joy he allowed himself that remained beyond of reach of his sometimes suffocating guilt and the horrors he had left behind in Poland. Sunday mornings were the only times he could ever fully get the stink of burning human flesh out of his head and nostrils.

  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.