Before Read online

  Jiri shrugs his shoulders to release tension, turns his head from the winter window.

  He has files here, spread across one of the long wooden tables, photographs taken by the precise SS to document their extermination of the inferior races of the world. He has gone through the photographs methodically from June 1942 on, a project so far of ten months, hoping against hope for a miracle, that he shall see his mother and sister somewhere, have, finally, an answer to how they perished. For he believes they are gone now, that somehow, with all of his searching, he would have found them. He is searching for himself, and for his father, to have answers.

  Below him, a crime unfolds near the Baltic Sea: An SS trooper aims his rifle at a woman huddling with her child while frantic peasants dig a grave a few feet away. The huddling is efficient for the SS man; the woman and child can be killed with one shot. Jiri leans forward with the glass, looking carefully at the anguished faces of the peasants behind; there are some women, but none remotely resembling Jana or Helena. Soon enough, the mother and child are dead—a moment of the mother’s body recoiling, the child falling, arms outstretched—the bodies quickly pulled and shoved into the grave, buried by the others. Then the peasants are shot as well. In another series Einsatzgruppen men sit and stand casually with rifles and pistols at the edges of death pits, where beneath them naked arms and legs are splayed, akimbo, in moments after shootings, some victims still alive. In a Russian city, an Einsatzgruppen killer beats a Russian woman savagely with a stick; the photograph catches the German with a grimace on his face as he delivers the death blows. Jiri goes over the faces of other prisoners watching nearby. Three women—none his mother or sister. A boy looks up in horror at his father, who strokes his head as the beating goes on. As hardened as he is, Jiri still catches himself full of emotion, and sometimes he can suddenly swear, especially seeing the children, their last moments on the earth visited by such horrors.

  Here in a new set of prints women near the Baltic Sea lie naked on a knoll, a gentle sea of flesh. One of the Einsatzgruppen men who soon will kill them stands in the foreground, a dark figure with a rifle, a violent intrusion on the curving forms. Then he and other dark figures are firing, and there is blood from the women, some trying to run, and at the crest of the hill one woman has her arm protectively over another. Jiri looks carefully, but none of the faces in the foreground that he can make out belong to him; the women at the top of the hill are silhouettes against a white sky. Furious wind gusts at the window, a sudden drumming. Jiri looks up, and the glass is shuddering. He stands and walks to the window, and below in the street a prostitute is taking the arm of a man, and they huddle beneath an umbrella. The spokes of the umbrella are bending with the force of the wind.

  Jiri goes on to the next file, marked Ukraine. After spending another futile hour with his magnifying glass, keeping careful note of those files he has looked through (a notebook now almost completely filled with identifying numbers and descriptions in his heavy pen), he takes his raincoat and shuts off the lights.

  He has only a short journey home on the Autobahn, just outside the city, but he watches his speed; it feels idiotic, with other Germans speeding by him, but the MPs have lately been enforcing the 55 mph speed limit on cars with U.S. government plates to save fuel. He tries to push the dreadful SS images away from him—to leave them in that room, and to think only of the cardboard boxes he must ask his landlady for, for a neat job of packing the three Christmas coats—to think of Anna’s eyes lighting at his attention to her family. He shall listen to his radio this evening, Sinatra and Benny Goodman; he shall wrap his presents. He plays the music every night; he needs the trumpet voice of Sinatra, the silk notes of Benny’s clarinet to keep the horrific SS images at bay, just enough to sleep. Perhaps he will need, as he does sometimes, to drug himself with aspirin. The rain is letting up, and the night fog makes the trees here at the sides of the highway look like ghostly etchings. A moon is emerging from behind the clouds.

  * * *

  The moth insists at the screen. Jiri is on the St. Martin’s roof over Lidice. He is working with Emile Hodja. In the street below Helena is riding her bicycle. It is fall. You cannot see her flesh, for she wears gloves and she is dressed in black, with a wide hat that hides her face, but Jiri is certain it is his sister, for he sees the bracelet on her wrist—the only color on her body. He is calling to her but she does not see him. She just keeps gliding over cobblestones, soundlessly, through a very empty Lidice. Behind him, Emile Hodja is whispering, fiercely, Jiri.

  “Jiri.”

  Jiri wakes. It does not make sense that the light is on at night, for the Nazis will see it, and there will be a harsh knocking at the door, terrible reprisals. Amazingly bright light. Everything is too immediate. The vinyl tablecloth—roosters set in a beige crosshatched pattern—why in the hell hadn’t he and Anna, in all of their years of marriage, gotten something a little more artistic to put on their table?

  “Jiri!” Anna gently lifts his head from where it lies, on the book, the smell of the paper still in Jiri’s nostrils, the pen still in his hand. The moth is trying for the light, bumping the screen. The light is too goddamn bright. He is not sure where his magnifying glass has gone to. It was here in his hand a moment ago.

  “I’ve been looking,” he says.

  Anna sits next to him in her robe, staring at him through her glasses. She rubs his cheekbone, holds his jaw.

  “I’ve been looking,” Jiri repeats. Just a moment ago he saw those ghostly trees reaching through the fog.

  “Are you all right?” Anna says. “Should we go to the hospital?”

  Jiri thinks of nurses probing for his veins, the sharp pin of the needle going in. He hates the goddamn needles. Sitting in bloody waiting rooms, going into dimly lit bathrooms that smell of urine and antiseptic and men’s sweat. The forced cheer of nurses, the occasional sharp arrogance of one doctor or another. He seems all right, for Christ’s sake. He says so.

  “Who is the president of the United States?” Anna says.

  “I wish I didn’t know,” Jiri says.

  “Jiri, who?”

  “Daddy’s boy. George W.”

  “What state are you in?”

  “Massachusetts. We saw the fire performers this afternoon.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway,” Anna says. “You gave me a scare.” She strokes his cheek. “I’ll put on some soup,” she says.

  And this is good now, better. He pushes his writing aside. What the hell was he thinking, writing like a madman? It happens sometimes now, that when he starts to feel he is recovering some function of brain or body, he immediately overdoes it. He needs to take it easy, breathe the cool evening, listen to the sound of his wife’s voice.

  Anna moves in her kitchen, speaking to him, as Jiri tries to collect his thoughts. It is September 2001, he tells himself. Many things are long past. Markéta is all right; she is in Seattle, and there is always a chance that she might come home with her job and husband—if he can find work here—in a year or so. Tika is on a date with Jesse, and he’s a good kid, he’s serious enough, he’ll look after her. It seems Tika was here for dinner tonight but Jiri is a little uncertain of this. On the radio recently—tonight?—the NPR people were talking about that Washington intern who has disappeared. He feels for the poor damn parents. Hell, if it were Markéta or Tika, he would be on a crusade of no mercy. He would shake that congressman’s neck until the guy spilled it. The son of a bitch.

  They sit at the table with the lentil soup. Jiri tries to concentrate on the light conversation of his wife, tries not to think of the world of the dead, this place he hovers in now sometimes. He looks down to where his car is, is just beginning to form the words I hope I’ll be driving again soon to Anna, when Anna suddenly is saying, “Wait, Jiri, I hear something. I just heard something.” Her hand touches his forearm to silence him, and Jiri waits and then, through the night, they hear a woman scream.

  THIRTEEN

  Alison Tine
r has left her door open, and Ghost-Man puts his groceries down on the outdoor step and takes out his legal package with the knife and unties the twine and goes right in after her.

  The dark wood hallway smells of Alison: aloe and oils and glues, and of long days spent thinking about the position of things on canvas. There are tongue-and-groove thin-stained boards on the ceiling and walls here. A sharp smell of flowers, in a vase on the hall table. The meth seems to make his thighs sing, his shoulders float. He hears her in the kitchen, follows. She is turning on an overhead light, the grocery bag crackling as she sets it down on the counter. The kitchen is wide, with a butcher-block table, and Alison Tiner has turned—realizing that someone is directly following her. She drops the white bag she is holding and she is screaming, the rice splitting on the wood floor, hissing white and thin, and Ghost-Man is looking at it with horror, then holding up one hand as if in surrender, trying to explain.

  “Just listen,” he says as calmly as he can, in the midst of that female bellowing, that face contorting, lips drawn back away from teeth.

  She screams, “Get out get out of my house, oh my God get out—”

  The sound of Alison Tiner seems to explode through the room. He couldn’t tell her about Christ before, about what it must have been like to have had a Roman soldier with his knee holding down your elbow, driving a spike through your wrist. To tell her about how if you took your lover to Brazil you would see the blood on the statues and maybe that would be good for you, to see reality instead of your little fucked-up yuppie Cambridge. It is hard to express everything, now that he’s actually speaking to her; he finds that his voice is shaking. He is staring from her to that rice.

  She is drawn back against the counter, yelling, “Fire! Oh God, fire—”

  “Just listen to me,” Ghost-Man says, beginning to shout also. “I’ll tell you just one fucking thing and then I’ll fucking go, all right? Fuck. Just fucking listen.”

  But she is bunched against the corner where the microwave is, looking at him and screaming the torrent of words, and Ghost-Man tucks his package close to his side and purses his lips, feeling the muscles of his face quiver, and he walks by her and out the kitchen door to the backyard, down steps, behind the two garages and through a thicket of heavy-smelling sumac and into the shadows of buildings on Irving Street. He hears his breathing, looks down at his steady trousers, shoes, at bubblegum wrappers, a newspaper, a used condom, some tinfoil caught in the rusting old fence here where the chain link is bent back, the dark path going straight through. She is still screaming. Crazy bitch. In a minute he hears the blipping sirens of police cars coming onto Trowbridge; they glance through the trees. He walks onto the Irving sidewalk. Light blinks on in a brownstone above, and some people are coming out of the building to see what all the commotion is. He looks, too; through the foliage the buildings of Trowbridge Street are a march of windows, squatting beneath trees and telephone lines, lights coming on; he feigns curiosity. He looks just long enough to make it believable, shakes his head with some of those who have gathered—What craziness is in the world now?—then goes steadily toward the brightness of Kirkland Street, holding his package tightly.

  The goddamn groceries are on the front step. Because I completely lost myself and didn’t think. The goddamn soy milk bottle, the plastic on the Poland Spring six-pack with my fingerprints all over them. The police might overlook it at first, thinking she left it there; a helpful neighbor will bring it in for her, while the police are interviewing her, unload the soy milk and Poland Spring, the chili and apples, smudge up the prints maybe a little. And Alison will say, Those aren’t mine, and the neighbor will say, But, dear, they were on the doorstep, and Alison will look alarmed and say, That’s right, when he was beside me at the travel agency he had a grocery bag. Soon they will know I am alive. They will then know about the other neighborhoods and the other women. Oh, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

  In his mind Ghost-Man can still hear Alison Tiner shouting, a sound that was unreal, deafening. The terrified white of her face. There is sweat at the sides of his throat, the small of his back. What had happened to his quickness and courage? Why hadn’t he been prepared? It wasn’t supposed to be like this! It was such a simple thing! Fuck! He just wanted to talk to her. To straighten a few things out!

  * * *

  He has recovered himself somewhat by the time he reaches the car. It is a year-old Mazda sedan, and it waits here beneath a spread of oaks on Summer Street next to a meter. The left front fender is dented and this embarrasses him—it happened in the city a few days ago, when he was parked, and of course nobody left a note. He should have gotten it fixed right away but he was lazy about it and now it is something that someone could identify him with. Things are falling apart, small things that will add up to very big problems. He needs to think. He ducks quickly into the car, puts his head back on the headrest, sits there in the darkness.

  He might drive back to his small apartment in the bloodred brick building on George Street, in Medford, where he can turn on his computer, clutch himself through his pants, watching a film he has downloaded to his RealPlayer—this would be the smart thing to do. The film is short, all of two minutes: A man is naked, on his knees, his body bent forward. He is in an odd, dark room of shimmering curtains, a single door beyond him. A woman comes through the door wearing a long black leather dress, a black cape. It is hard to make out her movement, that strange, quirky streaming video that reminds Ghost-Man of images from the moon all those years ago: bodies moving through another gravity. The woman comes forward, and it is terribly, exquisitely quiet, and you hear the rustle of her dress, the click of her heels, feel her bristling presence in that room. She kicks the man, just once, hard, and pushes him with her shoe onto his side. She says, You’ll keep waiting. She raises the cape with one arm and turns, walks from the room. The door closes.

  Ghost-Man is clutching himself. He can go and relieve this, be in this protected, exalted simplicity, get away from the world. He can lie in his bed after and listen to college girls walk beneath his window, the lightness of their voices. A police car turns onto the street before him, lights wash through the glass, and he ducks away as if to check something on the seat. He takes his hand from his pants, starts the car, puts it into gear, and the police car whooshes by.

  This is how it will be now. In his rearview mirror, the police car is at the intersection, brake lights flickering, turning harmlessly onto Cambridge. Ghost-Man drives in the opposite direction, starts moving down Kirkland Avenue. Past Gary’s bar, then the spaghetti place with the neon display of fettuccine in the window, to the rise into Union Square, most of these stores darkened. A commuter train sparks over the bridge and then is gone into the night. The clock above the Somerville bank has its hands set at one forty-five. He swings left beneath the bridge, checks in the rearview mirror. No police. But this is how it will be now.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Once, in a desert battle, Simon held the head of his friend Harvey Stocker in his lap. But half of the head wasn’t there. There was an eye, and then there was wet, bloody darkness. The other guys were saying, C’mon, Simon, he’s fucking gone, let them take him. There was a smell of cordite everywhere. The desert was like a weird ocean, tinted red, the sky red. Simon’s M-16A2 was beside him and he wanted to pick it up and jam it into the gut of every Iraqi he could find and fire and fire. Simon, Simon, Simon. Hey, Simon. Jesus Christ, Simon, let him go. In the distance, Saddam’s burning came from the throat of the earth, black-twisting clouds rising into the red.

  Ghost-Man rolls up onto the highway, thinking of Harvey Stocker, Harvey tough and firing into that red horizon, saying, Simon, man, holy shit oh fuck—in that moment before the bright white light, the crack of explosion, the screaming everywhere.

  FOURTEEN

  Fuck. These potholes, all over the goddamn place. Ghost-Man hurtles down Route 38, thinking, With all the goddamn taxes everyone is paying someone should work on these. He is angry that the fucking rice
spooked him, now as all of it is coming back, that he lost his nerve. He has a lot to tell the woman, and he shouldn’t have let her hysterics affect him that way.

  Now over the bridge, wheels sounding like thunder on the grating, by malls, lights out, swinging left with the highway, running parallel to Route 93. It would be easy to go north, to 95 and to Maine. He remembers Jenna kayaking with him near Kittery, her eyes delighted as the sea rose with her, and at the shore behind her white fans of spray.

  Ghost-Man turns in at the Burger King, across from the Century Bank, pulls the Mazda swiftly into the S-curve drive-through, waiting behind a rusting white van to order. There is a mother with her children in the van; Ghost-Man sees silhouettes through windows against the bright orange neon. It takes a while for them to order, the mother turning back to admonish and request and plead and snap, then turning to the monitor again, and Ghost-Man hears, “Three number twos, um, can I have a Diet Coke and two milks and two Crispy Chicken Meals and one Whopper Junior.” He looks up at the Burger King sign above, a circular medallion of red and orange—an American fire cartoon set against the autumn night. Ghost-Man is remembering. In a helicopter above the desert there are just the other guys with him now and no Harvey Stocker, hard to believe no fucking Harvey, and far below them charred corpses and war machines and buses and cars are scattered on the highway, mile after mile, and someone says, Holy shit, you guys, it’s like the end of the fucking world, and on the horizon Saddam’s oil fires are burning and burning. Father Bush is pulling America out of the war, leaving those who have defied the dictator, Shiite and Kurds, to be butchered. The flames lick the sky with impunity, like they will burn forever.

  Ghost-Man eases the car forward to order. In the windows of the restaurant are slate blue plastic tubes that children can crawl through while parents are wolfing down late night dinners. What’s the world coming to when children stay up so late and parents don’t even think twice about it? Ghost-Man orders a Diet Coke and a BK Broiler without mayonnaise, for lately he has been trying to lose weight. You hit forty, the jowls start to sag with the belly, and it’s murder to try to keep it off, even with all the walking he does. He motors up to window two and pays four dollars and eighteen cents, the sunshade dropped over his face, hoping that the cheery Hispanic woman there does not see much of him or his dented car as it slides past her window.