ashes

Ashes

Eduardo Halfon

I was sitting on a plush red-velvet sofa waiting to talk to the dead.

A girl who knew of such things had made the appointment for me and then scribbled down the address of the penthouse apartment located on the top floor of an all-brick building in one of Guatemala City’s richest neighborhoods. Sensing my nervousness, if not my outright trepidation, she then proceeded to give me a few warnings.

Don’t arrive late, she said, but don’t arrive early, either. Don’t wear jewelry of any kind—no chains or rings or even a watch. Don’t offer money. Don’t ask questions, just let her do the asking. And don’t ever, under any circumstances, she almost pleaded, look her in the eye.

The living room, although luxurious, was sparse in its decor. There were no paintings or mirrors on the chalk-white walls; only a large antique crucifix made of two heavy slabs of dark wood, possibly pillaged long ago from some unsuspecting monastery or church. Nor were there any strange objects lying around—at least none that I could see. No black candles. No tarot cards or amethyst crystals. No hanging chicken bones.

I suddenly heard the rustle of steps on the parquet flooring and stood up from the red sofa just as I saw an old white-haired woman moving gingerly through a doorway and into the living room.

*

A few weeks earlier, my Polish grandfather, a survivor, had been curled up on his deathbed, dying.

He’d survived the German invasion of Poland as a teenager, in September of 1939, while still living with his parents and three younger siblings in Lodz. He’d survived being beaten and captured by Nazi soldiers less than two months later, one night, as he and some friends played a game of dominos out on the street. He’d survived six years—that is, the entire war—imprisoned in various concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme and Buna Werke and Auschwitz, where his left forearm was tattooed upon arrival. He’d survived Block 11 of Auschwitz, where prisoners were sent to be tried and then executed in front of the infamous Black Wall—gnadenschuss, the Germans called it: one shot to the back of the neck. He’d survived extreme hunger and malnutrition and torture and several diseases and he’d even survived being liberated in August of 1945—some of his fellow prisoners, he once told me, after years of starvation, ate themselves to death. He’d survived the strange and elliptical journey which took him from Berlin to France, to Cuba, to New York, and eventually, improbably, to Guatemala. He’d survived another war, this time a civil war, which raged around him and all Guatemalans for the next thirty-six years. He’d survived two gunmen who stopped him on Avenida de las Américas while he was on one of his morning walks—they made out with his wallet and his gold chain and the precious black-stone ring he’d bought for forty dollars on his way to Guatemala in 1945, at some pawn shop in Harlem, and worn on his left pinky finger as a sign of mourning for his murdered parents, Shmuel and Masha, and two sisters, Raquel and Raizel, and youngest brother, Zalman. He’d survived a series of strokes and heart attacks, after the last of which his doctor ordered him to stop smoking (he did) and to drink a glass of whisky per day (he more than did, stocking crates filled with Red Label in a closet). He’d survived all of that. But now, finally, curled up like a small child on his own bed, my grandfather was dying.

He’d been awake for two or three days straight talking in Yiddish to his dead mother.

She was standing right in front of him, he kept telling us, at the foot of the bed. We tried to reason with him, to tell him there was no one there, but he continued talking to her in Yiddish. What’s more—we couldn’t understand what he was saying. No one in the family spoke Yiddish and so we just looked at each other with both concern and bewilderment. It seemed to me that my dying grandfather was like the sole survivor of some ancient civilization about to take with him the last remaining unintelligible words. The doctors ignored his outbursts—deliriums, they called them—and kept giving him stronger pain medication and also stronger sleeping pills. None worked. They told us there was nothing to worry about. Hallucinations, they said, were normal in his present state. But by the look of certainty on my grandfather’s face, and by the tone in which he was speaking in Yiddish, I knew that he was absolutely convinced that his dead mother was right there in the room with us.

The following day—the third or fourth of almost no sleep—my grandfather started speaking to a Nazi officer in German, a language that, at least according to my mother, he didn’t know. Had he learned it in the camps and then refused to speak it during the last sixty years, in the same way that he’d refused and repudiated all things German? Or had it just come back to him now, under his current distress, as had done so many other details and images and stories from his time in the camps which he’d forgotten or suppressed for decades? No one in the family spoke German either, and we couldn’t make out what he was saying. But his tone and behavior when addressing the Nazi officer were markedly different. He stammered with fear and obedience. His lips seemed to tremble. His eyes darted around the room as if he was desperately searching for a way to flee. Once, clutching the bedsheets as if he were clutching for his life, he whispered to us that the officer at the foot of the bed was there to take him away. I kept looking at the same spot at foot of the bed and squinting and then opening my eyes wide and then squinting again, as if the Nazi officer was a hidden figure in one of those magic eye posters—and I just needed to focus. Nothing to be concerned about, the doctors repeated as they brought in bigger and stronger pills (I remember a light purple one, which they handled with gloved hands or a pair of tweezers). Just another hallucination, they said.

When I came to see him again, days later, my grandfather was speaking in German to a group of Nazi officers.

He was even more dazed. His words were now muffled and slurred. His midnight-blue eyes were bloodshot and glassed over. We couldn’t understand how many Nazi officers were in the room, circling the bed as they waited—he insisted—to take him away. But take him where? I wanted to ask. Back to the camps? To Sachsenhausen, outside of Berlin, from where he was ultimately liberated? To his tiny cell in the basement of Block 11, where a Polish boxer had taught him, over the course of one night, how to save himself using words instead of fists? To the afterlife? His dead mother was also there, apparently, but we just assumed this because from time to time his expression would soften and he’d utter some gentler words in Yiddish.

My grandmother was on the edge of the bed, sitting very still next to my grandfather. Her left knee was bandaged up (I would subsequently learn that she’d banged it on something). She looked lost. She was crying in silence as she held one of my grandfather’s hands in both of hers. And so I just sat with her for a while, also very close to my grandfather’s frail and shrunken body, listening to his heavy breathing and his jumbled ramblings and wondering about all the other people in the room which only he could see.

Fritz, I thought I heard him mutter once or twice.

That’s what he’d started calling me not too long ago—Fritz. It never occurred to me that it was a bizarre nickname or term of endearment; nor did it occur to me to ask him why he started calling me that. Now, years later, I know that Fritz, short for Friedrich, was one of the derogatory nicknames given to German soldiers during the war (along with Heinie and Kraut), and it isn’t at all difficult for me to imagine that that was where my grandfather picked it up: in the war, in all the concentration camps where he’d been a prisoner. But it’s still impossible for me to understand what pirouettes of language and memory had led him to use it with me, his eldest grandson, who was neither a German nor a soldier, much less his enemy. An odd nickname—dark and loving and also somewhat mischievous, for my grandfather always smiled a little when he said it to me. Hello, Fritz, smiling at me from his bed. You want one, Fritz, smiling at me as he shook the plastic box filled with orange TicTacs, ever-present in his pants’ pocket. Come in, Fritz, smiling at me from the old couch in the living room as he watched some cheap Mexican variety show on an increasingly louder television set. How are you, Fritz, smiling at me from the head of the dining room table while drinking his instant coffee with a small metal spoon, slowly, spoonful by meticulous spoonful, as if it wasn’t really coffee but a cup of soup, or as if drinking coffee that way—unhurriedly, diligently—was also something he’d picked up in the concentration camps.

Some days later, during Shabbat, my grandfather died in his sleep.

We went through the normal rituals. The washing of the body. The prayers for the dead. The lighting of candles and covering of mirrors. The throwing of handfuls of dirt on top of the casket. The tearing of shirts. The seven long days of mourning sitting on some shabby mattresses placed on the floor. But all the while I couldn’t stop thinking about my grandfather’s visitations or hallucinations or whatever they’d been, during the last days of his life. I said nothing to anyone, of course—I knew that talking with the ghosts of the dead was forbidden in the Torah. Specifically, in the fifth book, Deuteronomy, which I later looked up: Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord.

Weeks passed, perhaps even a month or two of not being able to shake the thought of my grandfather’s haunted expression as he saw or believed he saw his last visions, before I mustered up the courage to wander past the safe confines of my own world and walk into the ritzy apartment of the old white-haired woman that could supposedly talk to the dead.

*

She went by Señora Martina.

I never knew if that was her first or last name or maybe the moniker she used when doing such things. I didn’t ask for her full name. But even if I had, and even if I remembered it all these years later, I’d still say that I never knew it in order to protect her and her family.

She was sitting across from me on a matching red-velvet sofa positioned on the other side of a wooden coffee table. I had found it strange that, upon entering the living room, she’d walked straight toward that sofa without greeting me or looking in my direction, and proceeded to sit down awkwardly, as a kid would, sitting down on someone else’s oversized furniture (later I would recall the image of her feet dangling just above the floor). I was also surprised by her appearance—very nondescript, almost grandmotherly, dressed in a light-beige sweater and dark-brown slacks. Not at all, I’m embarrassed to have to admit, the black cloak and black hat I was expecting.

She immediately placed her pale, bony hands on her lap and leaned back and asked me in a wispy voice how she could help.

I was about to answer her when an old chambermaid dressed in a navy-blue uniform walked in carrying a silver platter. It was the same gray-haired woman who had opened the front door a few minutes earlier and then lead me through a long corridor and into the living room. Now I just watched her as she reached the coffee table, bent down listlessly, left the silver platter there, and walked back out of the room—all in silence. Even her steps were nearly inaudible.

There were four things on the silver platter, perfectly aligned atop an embroidered white cloth: a small ceramic bowl that was possibly an ashtray, a slim gold-plated knife, a carafe of tepid water, and an empty shot glass—only one. But I wasn’t sure if these things were meant for me, for Señora Martina, or for some illicit ceremony.

I sat up, a bit nervous.

After thanking her for agreeing to see me, I went on to explain in detail everything that had transpired during the last days of my grandfather’s life. His anxiety and lack of sleep and the endless stream of pills given to him by his doctors. The apparitions or hallucinations, first of his murdered mother, then of the Nazi officers surrounding the bed—memories from his time in the camps that had come to him as an onslaught, following sixty years of silence; sixty years of him telling us with a wry smile that the five-digit number on his left forearm was his phone number, and that he’d had it tattooed there in case he forgot it; sixty years of him not wanting to speak about anything that had happened to him during the war.

Señora Martina, her glance always downcast, her clasped hands resting calmly on her lap, listened without interrupting me until I was finished.

So why are you here? she asked in a whisper.

I remained silent for a moment, doing my best not to look her in the eye.

I guess I’d like to understand what was going on with my grandfather, I said. I’d like to know if he was really hallucinating, as his doctors insisted, probably due to all the pain medication and the sleeping pills, or if he was maybe visited by ghosts.

That last word made her glance up. At least that’s how it seemed to me from across the table and without looking at her eyes.

Tell me, young man, do you believe in ghosts?

I was a bit taken aback by her question, or rather by the directness of her question, but finally managed to stammer that I wasn’t sure.

I see, she said. So, if you’re not sure ghosts exist, what does it matter if your grandfather was visited by apparitions or delusions or figments of his own imagination? Would it change anything?

I remained silent, thinking that I shouldn’t be there—that I wanted to leave.

You may go anytime you desire to, she said, maybe having guessed my thoughts, maybe having read my posture or quite conceivably my facial expression. Be that as it may, she went on, I’ll ask you again. Does it really matter anymore what it was that your grandfather saw or thought he saw from his deathbed, on the last days of his life?

She appeared to smile, though almost imperceptibly.

I’ll ask it another way, she said. Do you need to find out something specific?

I said that I did not.

Some crucial information, perhaps?

No.

Some missing evidence?

No.

Then why bother the ghosts of the dead?

I had no answer.

Señora Martina, in a tone that I judged less confrontational, asked me if I knew what the Berakhot was. I told her that I had no idea.

The Berakhot, she said, is the name of the first tractate of the Talmud. Of your Talmud, she insisted, and then continued. In it, the rabbi and scholar Abba Benjamin states that if the eye had the power to see all the demons and spirits and ghosts—mazikim, is the Hebrew word he uses—no creature would be able to endure them.

She paused long enough to let the idea of all the demons sink in.

And Rav Huna, she proceeded, who lived in ancient Babylonia, says in the same Berakhot that every one of us has a thousand demons on his left hand (she raised her left hand, as if to show me the thousand tiny demons that lived there), and ten thousand on his right hand (she lowered her left hand and raised her right hand with its ten thousand tiny demons). And you do believe your own Talmud, do you not?

I assumed it was a hypothetical question and remained silent.

I thought so, she went on, clasping her hands again and placing them on her lap as if in prayer. But let’s just assume for a minute that you do believe, she said. The Talmud gives one very easy instruction to those who want to find out if they’re being visited by ghosts. She waited a few seconds, and asked: Would you like to hear it?

I said that of course I would.

Only then did I realize, as I sat up on the edge of the sofa, that I’d been looking directly at her eyes for some time, and she directly at mine. And so I knew. By the way in which her entire face seemed to sparkle with a sort of contained frenzy, I knew that I’d done or said something wrong.

Have you ever seen the footprints of a rooster?

The what? I mumbled.

The footprints of a rooster, she repeated, enunciating each word.

Confused, I said that I had not.

Well, she said, if you want to know if you’re being visited by ghosts, the Talmud advises that you must wait till nighttime and take sifted ashes and sprinkle them all around your bed, and in the morning, when you wake, you will see there something like the footprints of a rooster.

Señora Martina began to struggle up from the sofa.

You don’t need me, she said with a sigh as she stood, and that was all she said.

I saw her amble slowly across the living room and disappear through the same doorway from which she’d come in, as if it wasn’t really a doorway, but some threshold to another dimension.

I just sat there. I didn’t know what do to. I didn’t understand what had happened, or not happened, and couldn’t decide if I felt more puzzled or disappointed—a bit of both, undoubtedly. And I was still sitting on the red-velvet sofa, trying to figure out what to do, when suddenly the same chambermaid came back into the room, dressed in her pristine navy-blue uniform.

She was walking toward me with steps as quiet and lethargic as Señora Martina’s. Watching her, it occurred to me that the two women, although very different, were also the same. They were of similar age, of similar build and demeanor. And they both had the exact same way of moving—they glided soundlessly across the room.

She reached the coffee table and stood there in front of me, stoically, expressionless, with her chin raised and her shoulders hunched over and her hands placed behind her back.

I’ll see you to the door, she said in a raspy voice, as she warily stretched out one of her hands and offered me a small glass urn sealed with a champagne cork and filled with gray powderlike ashes.

Traduit de l'anglais par David Fauquemberg.