The House of Lost Spirits: A Paranormal Novel

by Einat Shimshoni

  “I know lots of things. Too many, in fact,” I say. I’m not trying to boast or anything like that. It’s just the truth. From early on, my parents noticed my accurate memory and ability to retrieve information rapidly. Both these talents are associated with my less successful trait of lacking social skills. And the result is many hours spent reading and memorizing pages from Wikipedia. I even participated in a Trivia Quiz on television and won the first prize. In addition to ten minutes of fame, there was a ticket for two to the amusement park and a column entitled “Coping with a Gifted Child,” by my mother. It was rather sad because I don’t even like amusement parks.

  The house is intentionally distant from the rest of the settlement’s houses and so it turns out that it is outside the judicial district of the Zichron Ya’akov local council. While the other historical buildings of the Baron were preserved and turned into heritage sites, the mansion of his chief representative remains abandoned and uncared for.

  As we prepare to go out of the kitchen, Oved enters through the exterior wall.

  “A bright morning to you, Miss Noga!” His voice is cheerful, but there is something somber in the expression on his face.

  “It’s morning already,” Benny remarks.

  “Yes. I lost my sense of time a little,” Oved replies absent-mindedly. He looks so different from the light-hearted and amused character I met the day before. I wonder whether there is some kind of time schedule or system ghosts are obliged to follow. Perhaps spirits, like vampire bats and trolls, aren’t supposed to go out during the day.

  “Any news?” Benny asks without much interest.

  “No,” Oved replies thoughtfully as he pushes his thumbs into his broad leather belt. “I didn’t go far from the fields.” And even before I manage to invite him to join us on our tour, he floats up straight through the ceiling.

  “Oh, not again” sighs Benny and shakes his head.

  “What’s happened again? What’s happened?”

  “It’ll happen in a second,” Benny replies. “Count to three.”

  But I don’t have to count to three, because I immediately hear the bloodcurdling screeching, and an outburst of screams, “I refuse to put up with this anymore! Damn it! It’s gone too far already. I have had enough. I won’t tolerate it anymore. No, I won’t!” And all the other expressions of anger fired in volleys of horrendous decibels. Even without Benny’s explanation, I understand that located precisely above the kitchen is Helen’s room, which Oved has spectacularly entered through the floor.

  “He enjoys doing that, doesn’t he?”

  Benny shrugs. “He just doesn’t care.”

  “So why did he go up to her room?”

  “He only goes via her room on his way to Milka. He always goes to Milka after he goes out.”

  Benny comes out of the kitchen and begins walking in the direction of the rotting staircase. Unlike Oved, he prefers to use the regular passages and entrances rather than walk through walls or objects.

  “Does he do that often?” I ask.

  “Do what?”

  “Go out.” The idea has something frightening about it that isn’t clear.

  Benny shrugged. “Certainly, more often than I do.”

  “How often do you go out?” He didn’t look at me when he replied, “Since I got here, zero.”

  “And how long have you been here?”

  Benny hurried his steps and began to climb up the stairs. Nevertheless, I was able to hear his weak response.

  “Since I died.”

  I make a quick calculation. He hasn’t been out of this house for thirty years. That alone is enough to kill a person.

  The tour of the uppermost floor is brief. It has a narrow corridor with five doors. Two on either side and three along its length. The doors are all open. Two of them don’t have doors, at all. Helen’s screams can still be heard coming from the last room on the left side in a babble of fragmented syllables, “Uncivilized… disgraceful, intolerable… I won’t put up with… insolence… in this house…”

  Two of the rooms are completely empty, and signs of mold are visible on the wall. I’m pleased that my ghostly status prevents me from having the dubious pleasure of smelling. In the third room, I find Leah sitting on a wooden crate in the corner. The plywood slats that seal the windows are spaced further apart on the upper floor, making it less gloomy than the lower one. The rising sun casts a stronger light now, sending out rays, illuminating millions of swirling grains of dust. Leah’s eyes are shut, but she opens them as I enter the room and smiles warmly at me.

  “The first night is difficult.” Her voice is quiet, calm and full of empathy. I want to ask if the nights that follow are easier, but I sense that the answer won’t be pleasant. After a few minutes of silence, I tell her what bothers me. It isn’t exactly a question, but I know that Leah will answer me.

  “Benny says that he has never gone out of this house.”

  Leah sighs. A few long seconds pass until she replies.

  “It’s difficult.” The wrinkles on her face look more ingrained.

  “Why?”

  Again, she pauses.

  “We are bodiless, but our souls are still here, and they require containment. Without being contained, souls feel detached.”

  I think about Oved’s face when he entered the kitchen this morning. Unhinged. He looked indifferent and distant.

  “Oved went out in the night,” I point out.

  Leah smiled.

  “Yes, he does that from time to time. Oved likes testing the limits and it’s a little easier at night. At night, the boundaries are blurred, anyway.”

  “And you?”

  She pauses again before answering.

  “I tried once. I wanted to see my daughter, but I came back inside immediately, even before I reached the end of the path.”

  I peep out between the slats covering the windows. There is no path to the house, only thorns, wild grass, and some garbage that must have been blown there by the wind.

  As if reading my thoughts, Leah offers.

  “Once there was a path, also a garden.” Going by the level of neglect I see through the window, Leah’s ‘once,’ must be a very long time ago. I presume that if I ask Leah how long she has been in this house, I will get the same answer Benny gave.

  “So, have you been here many years?” I ask.

  Leah’s reply surprises me.

  “I was here when the house was built.”

  “I thought this was Helen’s house,” I say and Leah nods.

  “Indeed, it was Helen’s house.” I am totally unable to match up this quiet simple woman who is sitting before me, with the hysterical Madame I met yesterday in the dusty drawing room. Leah senses my confusion and invites me to sit beside her on the large crate.

  “I still remember the day they began building the manor house. There was such great excitement in the air. An expert engineer arrived from Damascus and spread out his plans on a table in the empty plot, right here.” She rose from the crate and gazed through the slats over the window, as if looking for the engineer and his plans.

  “All the children in the settlement gathered round. They all wanted to look at the blueprints, but the engineer’s assistants rudely chased us away, as if we were a swarm of flies gathering over a puddle of filthy laundry water. Since we were not permitted to watch, we resorted to speculation. Some decided they were building a palace, saying that Baron de Rothschild himself was coming to live there.”

  “Were you here as a child?” I ask. I try to imagine this grey-haired woman tearing around the building site, as a little girl.

  “Not really a little girl, anymore,” she replied. “At least not in my parents’ view. My father was angry when I told him what the children were saying about the structure that was to be built, and said that we would all be better off if I helped my
mother with the housework and didn’t run around outside like a little girl. But then, there were not many girls of my age on the settlement.”

  I want to ask her what she means by ‘then’ so as to place Leah on some kind of timeline, but she is caught up in her narrative, and it is interesting enough to make me disregard the strange, undefinable chill that is still scorching me from within.

  “My father wasn’t a difficult man, but, in those days, his mood was bad, and that was closely connected to the construction of the new building. My family’s circumstances, like that of the other farmers, was desperate. The wheat harvest of the previous year had been poor, both in size and quality, and we could not compete with the agricultural productivity of the Arab peasants, who were more knowledgeable and skilled. The settlement men were not natural farmers, they were the sons and daughters of minor merchants, craftsmen, and Talmudic scholars, who had left their lives in the Rumanian diaspora to settle in the Holy Land.”

  The timeline begins to take shape. Leah is the daughter of people of the First Aliyah; the first wave of Jewish immigration from Europe.

  “My father wanted to redeem the Holy Land,” Leah says, “but the Holy Land that had been abandoned for many years, did not easily submit to those who came to redeem it. What didn’t they have to suffer? Drought, fever, and poverty. Many of those who came with us, left and joined the town-dwellers, where they lived in poverty off the handouts that came from Europe, and those that remained on the settlement dug more graves than seedbeds. My two young siblings, Aaron and Miriam, both died of fever. Aaron was four when he passed away after suffering a fortnight of raging fever and lapses of consciousness, and Miriam, aged one year, died in her sleep.”

  Leah falls silent. It’s as if she has returned to her little siblings, who died so long ago. As an only child, I envy those who have brothers and sisters. I envy their quarrels, their teasing and the possibility of sharing the burden of their parents’ expectations, a load I have to bear alone. But it seems to me that Leah bore a much heavier burden.

  “At last, salvation came in the image of Baron Rothschild, who agreed to take the settlement under his wing. He dispatched experts who examined the soil and the climate and determined what the farmers themselves had already concluded—the region was unsuitable for cultivating wheat. Instead, they suggested planting vineyards. The Baron sent money for vine saplings, the construction of a winery and more funds to finance the construction of suitable housing for the settlers. Until then, many of them lived in wooden huts. In my mind’s eye, I imagined that the Baron would be like a powerful monarch wearing a red velvet cloak and a golden crown, like the picture I once saw in a storybook belonging to a boy who sailed with us on the ship from Rumania to the port in Haifa. However, even before they started building the houses for the farmers’ families, they began building this manor house.” Leah ends her tale and returns to sit beside me on the crate.

  “So, you didn’t actually live here,” I say, trying to sort out the details of her story. Leah pauses a little and then replies,

  “The house was occupied by Jacob Disraeli, the official the Baron sent here as his representative to take charge of life on the settlement, his wife Helen, and me.”

  ***

  Leah’s conversation with Noga aroused old memories that had languished for many years in the darkest and most forgotten corners of her mind. Leah spent most of her time thinking of her children and husband, who had made her last days so comfortable and pleasant, and were recollections she preferred to those of the early years of the settlement, which now floated up, as if rising from the abyss.

  Leah saw the Baron’s representative, Jacob Disraeli, several times before the house was built. He and his entourage lived in the large officials’ residence, which was also built with the Baron’s money, and there were those who said that it was the most splendid house in all the settlement. But it did not suffice Disraeli, who wanted to build another home for himself and his wife, one that would be removed from the remaining houses of the settlement. The officials’ residence would continue to serve the many guests who would begin visiting the place. Experts in expensive suits and black top-hats; doctors, who came to examine the settlement children and the sanitary conditions; a delegation of Alliance personnel, which had been asked to make an offer to establish a school; and Turkish officials, who came to collect their regular payoffs.

  Jacob communicated with everyone in French, which rolled smoothly off his tongue under his carefully cultivated mustache. Filled with curiosity, the settlement children would gather around the various delegations, but neither they nor the adults understood their conversations. When the settlers approached the representative, they spoke to him in Yiddish. He refused to reply and approached one of his French assistants to translate what he said to them. Leah noticed that he never required the translator to explain what the settlers were asking for into French. He understood their language perfectly well, even though he refused to speak it.

  When the news of the Baron’s agreement to patronize the settlements first arrived, Leah’s father was the leader of the celebrations. Words like “salvation,” and “redemption,” flew around their crowded kitchen. It was as if all the hardships of the previous months ceased to burden him and the enthusiasm with which he inspired all around him from the moment he came up with the idea of settling in the Holy Land, had returned in even greater strength.

  “We shall live to sanctify the wine from the grapes we cultivate with our own hands,” he cried in jubilation.

  Mother just nodded her head wearily, and mumbled, “As we got to bless the bread from the wheat we were hoping to raise with our own hands.” But father did not allow her remarks to lower his confidence.

  “The time will come when you will see what gold this land will bring forth for us.” But their great hopes were dashed when Jacob Disraeli and his clerks arrived.

  “They want to take our land and turn us into farm laborers and crush our honor.” His words were heard whispered through the cloth partition that separated her parents’ bedroom from the rest of the hut, where the rest of the family slept. But Leah, who lay awake in bed beside her younger siblings, discerned the suppressed anger that lay behind them.

  After a tense silence, she heard her mother’s begging murmur, “We need the money.”

  “There will be plenty of money when we sell our crops. We need loans, not handouts. We aren’t beggars.”

  “If you don’t sign, we won’t get anything,” her mother begged. She was not as strong as her husband, and the death of her children had broken her spirit.

  On the morrow, Leah’s father went to Disraeli and signed an agreement, whereby he would accept the monthly stipend from the Baron and, in return, would comply in full with the instructions of his representative. When he came home that evening, his stooped posture reminded Leah of the appearance of the old Jews in her childhood village, who would gather each evening at the baker’s shop to beg for bread that had not been sold that day.

  The construction of the grand house took a few months. Only when it was complete, did Disraeli send for his wife, who had been residing in her parents’ home in France. Together with her, Jacob ordered the transportation of the furnishings, household equipment, and clothes that were to make it a home. Even the synagogue that was to be built. The Baron ordered it as a compensation to the peasants. It bore the name of the Baron’s father. It was not as sumptuous as the new house, but it seemed that the clerk’s wife was not impressed with its relative splendor. Even the untouched Carmel landscape and the bright sun did not work their magic on her, nor did the pioneering achievements of the peasants inspire her. Unlike the other visitors, who would frequent the settlement, the wife of the Baron’s representative found fault with everything she laid her eyes on. Most of her time was spent incessantly berating the stifling heat, the dust, and the absence of running water in the house. When one of the settlement women poin
ted out her good fortune that she at least had a kitchen with a sink and plumbing, which was very helpful for cleaning and laundry, she exploded angrily at the young woman, telling her that she had no intention of spending her time cleaning and laundering. That same day, Jacob Disraeli turned to the settlement council and asked that a young woman be found to be responsible for his housekeeping.

  Initially, Leah tried to protest. The Alliance school for girls was being built and Leah dreamed of attending the school with the few girlfriends she had there. But her father protested vehemently, and he was not the only one. Many of the settlement folk feared the modern world concept of Alliance and the “French” spirit, as they called it, that they had brought with them. The offer of work at Disraeli’s home would put Leah’s dreams of education to rest and improve the family’s meager income. Indeed, her father objected to Jacob Disraeli and the idea of receiving help from him, but at least this was about work, not charity.

  Leah was fourteen years old. In her parents’ view, she was old enough to go out and work.

  The manor house stood at the edge of the settlement, a clear distance from the peasant houses, yet everyone there had already heard the voice of Jacob’s wife. This time, too, while she walked along the path to the manor house, holding a small bag containing her meager possessions, hairbrush, and the prayer book she had received on the occasion of her bat-mitzvah, she could hear Helen’s screams coming from the upper-floor window. She did not understand the words since they were yelled in French, but the volume of the screaming was sufficient to make her knees tremble.

  Leah tapped softly on the door, praying that by some sudden miracle, she would be informed that her services were not required. When, after a few minutes, the door was opened, she was welcomed by Esther, one of the village women, who served as a cook in the representative’s house. Esther and her husband were the oldest of the group of pioneers and were childless. The story was told in the settlement, that their decision to set off for the Holy Land arose from their faith that their prayers for a family would be answered, but it turned out that that was not the only thing the Holy Land failed to bear. Nevertheless, Esther was a pleasant-tempered woman, who was always welcoming. This time, her plump and smiling appearance was in complete contrast to the screams that continued echoing in the air.