Shadows & Tall Trees (10 page)

The new owners didn’t mind Theo visiting, as long has he didn’t come knocking on the door for water. The bat cave was empty. Theo could see his own footprints in the dirt floor, and the broom marks from the last time he’d tidied up. Guano still decorated the walls and the rocks, and the smell of smoke, and the walls were dark from the fire. He lay on the ground and tried to imagine them back again, alive, generations of them coming and going and his family with no guilt on their heads.

It was there he decided. Imagine not caring anymore. Imagine not carrying this guilt, this sorrow. And this pain.

Theo couldn’t eat or sleep that night. In the morning, he dressed carefully. A casual suit, a fresh, pale mauve cotton shirt, clean shoes, underwear he wasn’t embarrassed by. Clothes he’d be happy to be buried in, if it came to that.

He felt as if the atmosphere at the Dusseldorf Café was charged, as if they were all watching him with envy.

The waiter brought him a carrot juice he didn’t order. “On the house!”, patting him on the back as if congratulating him.

Just the smell of it made Theo feel sick. He’d never been so nervous, so terrified, in all his life.

Jason came to his table after half an hour. “Come on through,” he said. The other regulars all held their breath, it seemed to Theo. As if they could bring the magic to themselves by not breathing. He wiggled his fingers goodbye.

They walked through the gladiator door.

Jason said, “Did you manage to see anyone yesterday?”

“There’s not really anyone I wanted to see. My family . . . we’re not really in touch. Nothing in common.”

Jason nodded, smiled, as if this was ordinary, something he heard all the time. “It’s the people left behind who suffer when someone dies, so a loner leaves less grief than a father of three.”

“But I’m still worthy. That’s part of why I’m here,” said Theo. “I want time to make a family of my own, one I choose and have a chance to mould.”

“Most people don’t like being moulded.”

“I want a second chance, to make people care.” Theo thought for a moment, then amended it to, “To find someone to care for. I don’t want to die alone. This will give me the chance, it’ll help me to find someone. It’ll be different this time.”

“How different?”

“I’ve made my money. I won’t have to focus on that.”

“You won’t have much, though. Financially, it’ll be like starting again.”

“But I don’t care now. I’ve done that. I want something else.”

Jason touched his shoulder. “Good. That’s very good. Now, the last thing we need to do is to get you to handwrite a letter. To cover us. It’s a farewell letter of sorts.”

“Who do I make it out to?”

“It needs to be to someone who knows you very well as you are now. You really have no one?”

Theo thought of his managers, his staff. “I’ve got people.” He made it out to his vice-president.

He had little to say; he’d long since dealt with the business side of things, anticipating his own death.

“And then there’s this.” It was a promise of complete secrecy. “Do not tell others what happens. You may, if you are absolutely certain they are suitable, recommend someone, but do not bring them in yourself.”

They walked.

They passed through a bullet-scarred door to a long hallway. “One of Ben Hall’s gang died in front of this door. Shot to death.” Jason poked a finger through one of the holes.

“There is a bat cave where that gang holed up,” Theo said. “No one really knows where. Or they do but they want to protect the bats.”

“So many connections,” Jason said. “Now, what we have back here is a series of rooms. We’re going to have a look at them, and you’ll choose the one which suits you.”

“How will I know?”

“You’ll feel an empathy. Feel it physically, almost as if you could pick it up. One of these rooms will resonate with you. You’ll feel a grieving, a sense of loss. One of these rooms will make your heart beat faster, or bring a lump to your throat. You don’t need to know why; you need to listen to your body.”

The door on Room One looked like it had come from a ship. Inside was a small children’s room.

“A child died behind this door. It was so airtight and heavy, when the ship sunk he couldn’t get out. He suffocated.”

“Oh, God.” Theo closed his eyes. He thought he sensed movement which made him dizzy. He reached out to balance himself on Jason.

“Let’s look at the others before you make up your mind.”

They walked. “What’s . . . actually going to happen in the room?” Theo asked. “Once I’ve chosen it?”

“There will be some relaxation exercises. We always start with that.”

Theo thought,
I’m an idiot. No one knows I’m here. Who knows what the fuck these people are doing. I’m insane. I should go.

“Everyone feels nervous at this point, but I don’t like to pre-discuss too much. It’s better this way. Tell me about what you might do with your second chance. Your questionnaire wasn’t big on helping others, Theo. Would you address that, perhaps?”

“I would,” Theo said. “Because it makes sense.” He wasn’t sure that was true.

“You might be asked to do more good than you have done before. The universe may ask this, I mean.”

Theo was silent. No one had expected him to do good before. “Of course,” he said. “Whatever it takes.” He had an absolute terror of death, after his experience with the bats, and with his mother’s passing. He wanted to avoid it for as long as possible; until he was deep in dementia and didn’t notice his own dying, if possible.

The door on Room Two was narrow, with inlaid wood. It seemed Asian in influence.

“This is a popular one. Behind this door a Chinese prostitute was beaten to death over a hundred years ago.” Theo leaned toward the door, wanting to touch the detail.

“This one?” Jason asked. He pushed the door open. The smell was overwhelming; incense, and perfume, as if both were present in living form.

Theo shook his head.

Room Three was a toilet with an opaque glass door.

“He died in the toilet. Fat and lazy. Heart attack at 42, lay on the floor, paralyzed, blocking the door. They couldn’t get him out for four hours. Everything in the rooms is recreated precisely.”

Theo shuddered. Stepped away. Put his hand over his face.

“Not that one, then. People do choose it, you’d be surprised. Smell and all.

The door to Room Four was a studded, shiny one.

“He slept through the hotel fire alarm and died of smoke inhalation. No one realized he wasn’t safe.”

Jason looked at Theo.

“This one could be for you.”

He opened the door and they stepped inside. It was a typical, dull hotel room. The fan overhead spun slowly, slightly off kilter, and there was a sound to it like flapping bat wings.

Theo felt his throat constrict, his veins swell. He could hear them; the bats calling out, as they did when he was a child. Calling out to him, making him feel as if he belonged amongst them.

“It sounds like bats flying. Can you hear it?

“Everybody hears something different. We all see the same thing, though.”

On the bed; it looked like a man, but there was no substance to him.

“We all see it,” Jason said, comforting him.

The ghost on the bed shifted onto his side. His shirt tail hung out; it was crinkled.

“What I’m going to do now is to help you into a state of deep sleep. This will help us assess your physicality, now that we understand your mentality. It’ll be comfortable, and you’ll wake up with a sense of calm.”

Theo felt a moment of panic. He looked for cameras, for some evidence that this was weird and wrong.

“Theo, really. It’s okay. You’ve seen the others; you know it’s okay. You really, absolutely know that. Let go of your fear and allow it to happen.”

Theo closed his eyes. He thought he could hear the calling of the bats, but he often did. It was a memory. A guiding force. He felt himself slipping into sleep and wondered if this was all he was meant to do.

He shivered; it was cold. The ghost was gone, though there was a smell in the air of whisky, and aftershave, and soap. It was night outside, and that darkness with the flapping of the fan brought the bats to mind again. He curled up and wept with grief for those bats, lost generations, and for his father, who had killed them, and his grandfather, and for himself, because he had been a child.

He slept.

He dreamed his mother was burning the dinner and the smell woke him. There was smoke in the room, it was full of smoke and he could hear sirens and screams and he was hot, now. Flames licked under the door. He wrapped the sheet around his waist and ran to the window. It was bolted shut, double glazed. He found his shoe and hammered the window, coughed, coughed, his eyes streamed and his lungs burnt, he choked and coughed and collapsed, he could not draw breath and he could feel his eyes clouding, feel the heat leaving his body, then all was black.

He awoke feeling nothing. He wore his own clothing again and he felt cool, as if a breeze washed over him. He curled up, enjoying the comfort of the bed.

He curled up.

He had not been able to do that for some time; he felt flexible. He stretched out his arms, lifting them high.

“How do you feel?” Jason said. Theo had forgotten his existence, had not heard him enter the room, or, even, knew if he’d left.

“I don’t know,” said Theo. There was no guilt, he did know that. And the grief was gone, the sorrow for the death of the bats. There was room for something else.

It seemed the ache in his stomach was gone, and his veins didn’t hurt.

“Give it a few days.”

“I thought I died. There was a fire . . . did someone put it out? Is everyone all right? What about Cameron, is she okay?”

“There was a fire,” Jason said. “We discovered that if we trick the body into believing it has died, it will recover from any fatal disease. We’ve had particular success with cancer. So we placed you behind a death’s door, and we physically, in actuality, re-created the death. You DID die. You took some of the suffering of those who have passed before you, especially him.”

“I feel as if the world must have changed,” Theo said. “I feel so different, the world must have changed.”

“You are a poetic man. But yes. This will suck the spiritual energy from all surrounds. You’ll notice everyone around will be feeling lethargic for a day or two. We like to complete the process on Sunday evenings best. People pass off their reaction as Mondayitis.”

Jason handed Theo a wallet with $500. “To get you started. Good luck. I’ve put my card in there. You’re welcome to come back if and when you need to. We don’t encourage debauchery of the body, but . . . well, this gives you the freedom to explore without the concerns others have. You will need to consider the financial element. For each visit we require at least double the last. Obviously, all you possess, but it needs to far exceed the amount you paid this time.”

He led Theo to the back door.

“Could I say goodbye? I feel as if I know them all so well. And thank the waiters. They’re so kind. And to Cameron.”

“Best not,” Jason said. “Not all of them will pass through the door. It’s best for them not to know for sure until . . .”

The air outside smelt good; someone was cooking onions. He suddenly felt hungry. “A hamburger,” he said to himself. “No, a steak.”

He felt better the next day, and the next, then he saw his doctor.

“I’d call it a miracle if I believed in them,” said the doctor. “But I don’t. Good luck. Make the most of your second chance.”

Theo did. He met and married a recovering drug addict who never needed another drink or another drug. He didn’t invite any of his family to the wedding; as far as they were concerned he had disappeared.

He didn’t miss them.

There were times, though, when a spinning fan made a light flicker, or when his ears picked up conversations he shouldn’t hear, that he thought of the bat cave and its cold comfort and he did miss that, with an ache he could not ease.

I
nto the clay she pressed her loneliness. She made a man in the image of her father, whom she did not love, and used a needle to poke letters into his back. She hollowed out his cheeks so that they were as hard and wolf-like as her father’s; with her nails she made crosses in the eyes. Clara stretched the clay and pummeled it; she feasted on her tears and ignored Cornelius when he knocked.

“Papa’s awake.” He was dying.

She slipped the figure into her apron pocket and went downstairs.

They sat as they always sat: in silence. Papa, wheezing, up on the pillows. Cornelius in glory at their father’s right hand. Mama twisting her fingers in her lap, trembling. Clara in darkness at the other end of the room. The shutters were closed; the electricity flickered. Cobwebs trailed up and down the bedposts. Clara could not breathe.

Papa reared up; Mama flinched. Papa kissed Cornelius on both cheeks and whispered a blessing Clara could not hear as she hollowed out her father’s heart with her thumbs.

Cornelius was the anointed one; he was the hope of Leopoldstadt. He was the branch of David and he was the remnant. He was the child who had been born in darkness, and he was the boy who had survived. Women often stopped in the streets to gather him into their arms and weep, because he reminded him of the ones they had lost. In the brightness of his eyes he bore the promise of renewal. He was studying to be a rabbi. God had spared him. God had chosen him.

Papa had told them the story over and over again, the story of the childless officer’s wife over whom the toddler Cornelius had once tripped in the Prater, who had poured out the fervent instincts of her motherly heart, and when the calamity had started had used her influence to spare the whole family from those railway cars. It was a miracle of God in a time without miracles, for God had singled Cornelius out as the rod and as its flower, to feed on curds and honey, and to survive.

God had not chosen Clara, who had been born three years after it was all over, colicky and pale, and raised in silent, spinsterish seclusion in her father’s house. She was unfavoured; she polished the picture-frames. She turned away visitors at the door—Papa refused to face the ones who came to call. She cooked dinner; she helped Frau Moritz with the silver. She crept out at lunchtime, volumes of Papa’s Talmud hidden in her satchel, and sat alone among the roses of the Volksgarten to read them, ecstatic with the thrill of transgression. She received Papa’s curses with downcast eyes, and when he blessed Cornelius she turned away, swallowed, and reflected on the darkness outside God’s wings.

God’s hands had saved Cornelius, but Clara’s hands worked in her lap, kneading as they had kneaded for nineteen years. Clay was the only thing she was good at. Twenty or thirty copies of her father lined her bedroom wall. Forty or sixty crossed and unloving eyes stared down at her when she went to sleep at night. She did not complain. She did not make a fuss. She only kneaded the clay, and leavened it with her hate.

“My son,” Papa closed his eyes. “You have the voice of an angel. You have the mind of a scholar. You are beautiful and you have never suffered.” His hands shook as he raised his fingers to the paintings. “You see what belongs to you. You see what you must do. You see what you will take from me when I am gone.”

The paintings glared down at them. These were Papa’s favourites, the ones Clara was not permitted to touch, the few Papa had not sold when he closed his gallery. The greatest collection in Vienna, Papa had said. They were Papa’s legacy; they were Cornelius’ inheritance.

“May you be righteous, my son.” Papa coughed up spittle and blood. “May you be wise. You will redeem us all.”

When she did not know better and her father had not told her better, Clara had wanted to be righteous, to be wise. She’d wanted to trace her fingers along the great scrolls, and to read the signs of holiness in the seasons, and to press beneath her palms the name of God. But God had chosen Cornelius, and Papa had chosen Cornelius. God had been stolen from her. God did not want her, and so she hated Him as she hated her father, and her brother, and this too she twisted into her clay.

Cornelius knelt before their father and received the blessing; Mama sobbed roughly into her handkerchief, and Clara worked her clay in silence. Her father did not call for her, and she did not answer him. She rose and went to her room, and when Cornelius knocked an hour later to tell her that her father was dead she did not reply.

“You’re a fool.” He quoted to her verses about fishhooks, about cows of Bashan about his God who was a vengeful God. He blazed with the righteousness of prophets and called her names of faithless women. His voice was high like a eunuch’s and his cheeks were bright with his kingship and he did not even lower himself to cross her threshold. He named her adulteries and his words brought color to her cheeks. She listened to it all without blinking, and when he had finished she calmly put her figurine on the shelf to dry.

“That’s it?” Cornelius leaned against the doorframe, and his hair gleamed golden in the lamplight.

“That’s it.” She did not look at him.

“
Three friends, said the Rabbis, has man.
God, his father, and his mother.”
He smoothed the sleeves of his coat, as he always did when quoting the Talmud, and Clara imagined clawing out its many-colored thread.

“I have no friends.” Her blasphemy thrilled her. Her father was dead, and with him God had vanished from the stars outside the window. The streets of Vienna were empty of shadows, of signs and words of holiness.

When he had gone Clara locked the door and put her head in her hands. She did not cry—she
would
not cry. She would be stronger than Cornelius, stronger than God who had chosen him, stronger than the justice which she despised as injustice, stronger still than Papa who had cast her out, stronger than the dead. She would rage against God; she would fight His angel and win.

The idea appeared to her. She would seize hold of her birthright—she would smash open her father’s desk and grab handfuls of schillings, grab the books which she was not allowed to read, overturn the paintings and fling wide the doors of the house onto Czerninplatz and invite the neighbors into their dark and festering halls. She would pack her suitcase full of clay men and sacred books, and then she would take the train to Budapest, and onwards to Jerusalem, and there she would stare into the face of God until she
made
Him listen to her, until He quelled her rage, until He brought her justice.

Mama was still wailing, and Cornelius was reciting the mourners’ prayers, but she would not listen to them now. She forced her way past the cobwebs, through the dust, into her father’s study where the mould crept at the wallpaper and the termites nipped at the wood.

Clara sat at her father’s desk. Her palms trembled as she pressed them to the handles. She forced them still and then she pulled open the drawers, one by one, flinging them back, delving deep into them, overturning papers, snatching at documents, at coins and paper notes, at anything of value that she could use to buy a ticket, a night in a hotel room, a way out. She threw the drawers on the floor; she slid open the hidden compartments; she plunged her hand up to the wrist in her father’s secrets.

She had trespassed; it was delicious. Papa could not stop her now—Cornelius could not stop her now! God Himself could not stop her!

She sliced her thumb open on a stack of papers; she sucked the blood from her fingers, and in that pause she caught sight of the contents.

It was an appraisal of Werner Kronenberg’s
David
. She’d heard of it before, of course. It was one of the paintings that had hung in the Siebermayer ballroom before the war. Every Jew or Gentile of note in Vienna had danced there in the last days of the Hapsburg Empire. But the house was abandoned now, and the Siebermayers were all dead, and the painting—like all the rest—had been taken.

She tore through the papers. Each one was like the last—a receipt, an appraisal, bearing the dates that made her flinch.
1939. 1943.
Her father’s careful signature. Valuations, analysis, details about paintings that had been taken, information invaluable to those who held them. Information worth several thousand German
reichsmarks
—or a little boy’s life.

“My father is a betrayer.”
She whispered it aloud; it gave her strength. “I was born because my father is a betrayer.”

The miracle of the officer’s wife—the miracle of Cornelius’s bright blue eyes—the etiology of their salvation—all nothing more than stories—

“Cornelius is alive because my father is a betrayer.”

This was Cornelius’s birthright. This was Cornelius’s inheritance. This was the shame that shuttered their windows; this was the stain that kept visitors from the door. Everything around them was ash, and bone, and
after
, and their father had picked at the carrion of Israel like a vulture. He had crouched at the door of his brothers and waited for them to be dragged out, one by one, and watched their houses as they burned. He had saved his only son.

She knew she should weep. But Clara could not weep. There was only joy.

“Because my father is a betrayer. Cornelius was not chosen by God.

“God has not chosen him.”

God had not forgotten her. God had not cast her out. God had folded His wings around her; God had set His hand on her hand, and she was the first-born of Israel, and the hope of Leopoldstadt. She was the daughter of God who was forged in the very beginning, and would be there in the end, and she rejoiced in the whole world.

She was wild with joy; she breathed the breath of God. She flung open the shutters, drew in the moon; she aired the house of its shame.

Then came the rage.

She thought of her tears, and of the hatred she had nursed at her breast, of the darkness that was the darkness of her father, and the stain that was the birthright of her brother, of the times she’d felt God’s wrath crawling up and down her skin and longed to tear it off in strips, with fishhooks, until she was clean again.

She returned to her room and took down another hunk of unformed clay. She kneaded another pair of arms, another pair of legs, another square, flat head with crosses for the eyes. She stretched and pressed the clay; she clawed at its limbs, and as she worked she murmured the secret name of God.

“Let there be truth.” Her lips swelled with whispers. “Let there be truth.”

She carved the letters into its back, the
aleph, mem, tav
which signified truth, and which God Himself had bound to life.

“Let there be justice. Let there be truth.”

She closed her eyes and felt it stir beneath her fingers. She listened for the hum of life in her hands.

Clara knew what would happen next. She had read the words of the rabbis. She knew that God had formed man, and man had formed mud, and from that mud once in Prague there had risen a defender, who had shaken the evildoers like grain in a sieve, and that this defender could rise again, formed by the palms of those whom God had blessed.

She heard its first, wordless cry and she knew what she had done.

She rose quickly; she left suddenly. She swallowed down the beating of her heart and from across the Czerninplatz she saw the shadow that hulked through the house, and saw the first explosion, and the first few flames.

She understood. She understood why a voice, crying out in the wilderness, would cry out for the justice of the Lord. She understood the wail of Babylon, and the demand for scorched earth, for a reckoning. Her God was a vengeful God, and he punished unto generations.

Behind her, the hope of Leopoldstadt blazed and gave light to the first spike of morning. She walked onwards to the Danube, and from there to Jerusalem.