“Come in, Leah, my dear, don’t pay attention to her,” she said, as she drew Leah inside and nodded her head in the direction of the second floor. “Barking dogs, don’t bite.”
The trembling of Leah’s knees did not stop when Esther led her inside. The splendid furnishing of the house was the complete antithesis of the simple little wooden hut in which Leah’s family lived. The only time she had ever seen a house like it was on the day her father had taken her and her brother to receive the blessing of the Rabbi in Rumania, before their departure for the Holy Land. But that house had been filled with a pleasant warmth, while this house had an icy edge in spite of the heat of the month of June. Esther led Leah to the kitchen. There was a great stone oven, a ceramic sink, two primus stoves on a stone ledge and a large wooden kitchen table. A narrow bed stood in the corner. Leah was filled with an empty sense of self-pity. She knew that her work would necessitate her sleeping in the manor house during the week, and that she would only go home to her parents for the Sabbath, but the presence of the bed lent finality to what had been only a vague awareness.
Esther noticed her sad expression and hastened to embrace her shoulders to encourage her.
“Go on, sweet child. Put your belongings in this little dresser, and I will present you to the Madame.” Then Leah noticed that the screaming had ceased.
The routine of daily life in the manor house was so hectic that sometimes Leah was surprised to discover that Friday had come round again, and another week had passed. Each morning, she would awaken with Esther’s purposeful entrance into the kitchen. Leah would help her prepare the dough for the day’s bread and then turn to the rest of the never-ending chores. There were always rooms to be swept, furniture to dust, bedding to launder and dishes to wash. Often, important and honorable guests would come to stay at the manor and then there was additional work to help Esther and double the cleaning to do.
Leah worked diligently and tried with all her might to please Madame Disraeli, but it seemed that nothing in the world could. She complained incessantly and turned up her nose at almost everything, starting with the weather and concluding with the tuning of the pianoforte, which was imperfect in her opinion. Mostly, these were quiet complaints she would mumble to herself, but sometimes they would reach the high pitch of temper tantrums, accompanied by outbursts of uncontrollable shouting. These outbursts horrified Leah, especially because they were so unexpected. If she could have foreseen them, she would have taken care to be in a different room, or even in the yard, just not in the Madame’s presence. When Esther found herself beside the Madame when she suffered an attack of anger, she would tell her calmly as if she were talking to a young child, that she would be in the kitchen if the Madame needed her. Her facial expression when she said this would be full of sadness and pity.
Leah could not understand how she managed to keep her cool in the face of the raging fury that burst out of the Madame’s mouth like molten lava. Leah would freeze up, fixed to the spot, and unable to move when she found herself in the eye of the storm.
The only person who displayed utter indifference to Madame Disraeli’s barrage of shouting was her husband. He spent most of his time at his office, but if he happened to be home during one of her rages, he simply withdrew to his spacious study and closed the door behind him. He remained and slept there many nights. Leah never saw him touch his wife affectionately or even smile at her. Snippets of their conversations that she witnessed when serving their meals or clearing away the dishes, were always practical and revolved around Jacob’s work, the household, or news from Paris.
Leah, although young, knew how to deduce one thing from another, and in those days, she knew that Jacob wanted only two things from his wife: that she be the perfect hostess for the many guests who visited his home, and that she’d bear him a male child. She was an undoubted success in the first challenge, wearing a mask of gaiety and frivolity for their guests, and amusing them with her piano playing. As for the second challenge, she failed miserably, as witnessed each month on the bedding Leah laundered in the tub in the yard. Many more months passed until Leah understood what else Jacob Disraeli wanted from his wife.
***
All night long, Helen wandered around restlessly. Nights had always been difficult for her, even before she died. She never found anything to love about the night. The silence and the dark filled her with anxiety. As a child, she woke up many times in the course of the night and shouted for her nanny, who slept in the adjacent room, to come and sit beside her bed. The nanny waited until Helen fell asleep before she left the room, but Helen would wake up again and be alarmed if she found herself alone in the darkened room.
The first nights in Zichron Ya’akov were even worse. In Paris, some streetlights shone through her bedroom drapes. But here, on the dismal settlement, the nights were wrapped in total darkness and a heavy silence, disturbed only occasionally by the mooing of a cow or a distant jackal’s howls.
In his letters, Helen’s husband had promised her that the clean air and quiet of the settlement would help her sleep better. Whoever was able to read between the lines could see the hope expressed in Jacob’s words that the magical qualities of the climate in Zichron Ya’akov would cure other ills, as well.
But the thick and heavy darkness only made it worse. Indeed, she no longer woke up screaming as she had in her childhood, but she always had difficulty falling asleep and would often be aroused during the night for no apparent reason, while Jacob slept soundly in his room. He vindicated his decision not to sleep beside Helen in the wide four-poster bed with the claim that he did not want to disturb her shallow sleep. Helen knew this was not the real reason, but she said nothing.
The days on the pioneering settlement were no better than the nights. Helen hated Zichron Ya’akov from the moment she set foot on its harsh, dry earth. She hated it long before that. Helen was accustomed to a life of comfort in the wealthy intellectual society of Paris. Her father, Moshe Leon Mendes, was a successful and well-connected diamond merchant, and, as his eldest daughter, Helen was educated in the spirit of the Enlightenment Movement. The teachers her father hired taught her music, literature, Latin, and geography, but not Hebrew. She went to synagogue on the New Year and the Day of Atonement; visits whose only rewarding qualities for her were the stares of admiration and envy of the festive clothes she and her younger sister Sophie were turned out in.
The double-story house on the settlement, indeed, seemed like a palace compared to the wretched shacks of the pioneer farmers, but it was simple and small compared to the spacious and luxurious Mendes home. Nothing could hide her disappointment at the house’s appearance, especially after the exaggerated praises in Jacob’s letters, which like all his other descriptions of the Holy Land, turned out to be lies for the whole purpose of convincing her to follow him.
Very soon, Helen learned that Jacob hated the Holy Land and its inhabitants as much as she did. He despised the farmers and their religious faith just as much as he hated the Arab peasants and their primitive habits. He detested the heat, the filth and the smell of the animals that stuck to everything, and he yearned for the vibrant social life of Paris. But for him, life on the settlement was an opportunity for advancement and status. Unlike Helen, Jacob came from a common family. His father was a ritual slaughterer, a fact that Jacob zealously tried to hide. His education was acquired through hard work, and thanks to his sharp wit and determination, he was able to get a post as a junior clerk at the Rothschild Bank. When Baron Rothschild decided to accede to the entreaties of the pioneers in the Holy Land, he asked his personal secretary to find suitable people who would be responsible for managing the settlements. Jacob did not hesitate when he was offered the management of the Zichron Ya’akov settlement. All he had to do was convince his young wife and her parents that this was the right step.
Jacob departed. Helen sourly recalled her feelings when he left. Not sorrow or yearning, only anger and
bitterness.
She joined him only six months later, when his letter arrived informing her that the palace built in her honor was ready. The palace turned out to be just a stone house, the magical and exotic country was just a deserted tract of land, and the great opportunity and promise expressed in Jacob’s words disappointed Helen because the reality held the sour taste of deception. If Jacob regarded the settlement as an opportunity to accumulate power and influence, to Helen, it represented a miserable mixture of poverty, primitivity, and flies.
In spite of his disgust, Jacob knew how to make the best of his stay in the settlement. He amassed power and gained total control over the lives of the farmers. His progress reports on the settlement impressed the Baron, who valued the organizational ability and assertive decisiveness of his esteemed clerk. Life in the settlement was much cheaper than in Paris, and Jacob could save the generous salary paid by Bank Rothschild.
But, in spite of his success, it was difficult to say that his new role enhanced Jacob. Helen noticed how absolute control over the lives of others intensified her husband’s passion for power and revealed his hard-heartedness. The very qualities that had fascinated her when she first met him—determination, ambition, and charisma, now made him appear arrogant, aloof and greedy for power. But the toxic effect of life on the settlement not only made its mark on Jacob. Her anger that had begun to simmer when Jacob left Paris, had now reached boiling point and spilled over. Even as a child, her servants and teachers described her as being capricious, spoilt, and bad-tempered. She often heard her mother taking issue with her father for spoiling his daughter. Now, the settlement women spoke in hushed voices of the insufferable behavior of Jacob’s wife, and of her noisy outbursts of fury that were heard from afar. When all who were close to her abandoned her, all she had left was her rage. It was anger that even one hundred and thirty years of death had not dulled.
***
I admit it—I’m not especially brave, and not really adventurous. Even when I decide something, I always back out at the last minute. My failed attempt at suicide proves this. If not for the unsteadiness of the chair that suddenly slipped on the coffee table, I’d be sitting with one of mother’s colleagues trying to explain why I wanted to commit suicide at all. But I must try and see how to get out of the here, even if only because the thought of spending a whole eternity in this rotting abandoned house is too discouraging. So, while I do the exercise to liberate fixed perceptions and free my thoughts, I go through the floor to the story below, straight on to the rotting escritoire in the study, and from there, I march over to the front door. Of course, I can make my exit anywhere. I could have gone straight out from Leah’s room, but habit draws me to the door, and I also prefer not to make my exit in Leah’s presence for the reasonable fear that I might regret doing so at the last minute. I take an airless breath and step forward through the door.
The sensation is awful. It’s like being torn apart and dispersed in millions of fragments. Just like the freezing cold that has enwrapped me since last night, there is no physical sensation, no pain, prickling or burning, but it is worse than any torment I have ever suffered. I want to scream, but I have no voice. I want to hug and grab hold of myself, but my hologram body disappears and there’s nothing to hang on to. In panic, I leap back into the house. I have no idea how Leah managed to reach the end of the path, or how Oved does this on a regular basis. I am not sure I want to discover how it’s done.
Yesterday’s feeling of amazement and confusion is turning into frustration. This is how it’s going to be from now on. An endless eternity of unspeakable boredom. This is why people are afraid of death. It’s because somewhere murky and repressed in our subconscious awareness, we realize what awaits us. Until this moment, I have never understood all those alchemists, shamans, vampires and Peter Pans, who constantly seek the road to immortality. As a not particularly happy teenager, I have completely scorned the yearning for eternal youth. Now, I understand. It doesn’t matter how depressing my life seemed, death is even more miserable. But, what about all the myths about the Garden of Eden? About life after death? It’s impossible that this is all that awaits us in the end.
The clerk in the reception room with the folders, the trial she spoke of, her warning me not to go home,
“You’re likely to regret it. They all do…” Yes, they definitely do regret it. I race up the stairs and reach the top, just as Helen stands there, so that I almost collide with her, which I avoid at the last moment, to my relief, because I do not want to see what happens when two ghosts bump into one another. Helen opens her eyes wide in fury and begins shouting that she won’t tolerate such wild cavorting around the house.
I try to ask her where everyone is, but she is having a hysterical fit that all hell is being let loose and crossing the boundaries of what is acceptable.
I would have gone past her, but she is blocking the way, so I ask again, “Where are they all?”
At this point, Leah has already come out of her room, and stands with Benny behind Helen. Oved also appears from behind, but the gathering only encourages Helen’s screaming until I have no choice and yell, “Where’s everyone?”
Helen is silent. Her mouth drops open and her eyes stand out like golf balls, but she does not utter a word. It seems that no one has ever yelled back at her. She just doesn’t know how to respond in such a situation. Oved is the first to collect himself.
“Milka is upstairs. We are all here, but for her, and there are no more tenants in this house.”
“No, not you. Where are all the others?” Four pairs of eyes stare at me, but not even one answers.
“In World War One, seventeen million people died, in World War Two, fifty million were lost, Stalin murdered seventy million, Mao killed another seventy million, twenty-five million people died of AIDS and fifty-five million succumbed to the Black Plague. That’s approximately three hundred million human beings, and that’s not even counting all those who died of cancer, Ebola, road accidents, alcohol abuse, street fights, air pollution… Where are they? What has become of them? Where have they gone?”
“How do you know all those statistics?” Benny asked.
“I told you that I know too many things.”
“What’s AIDS?” Oved wanted to know.
“A disease,” I reply impatiently. I mean, what difference does it make?
“They went on their way.”
“Their way to where?”
No one replies and then we all jump at the sound of wheels skidding.
I may be a newcomer to the house, but I seem to have been here long enough to become accustomed to the silence that predominates the area. There are no roads or houses close by. No sounds of cars, echoes of music or TV, and in the house there are no sounds of scraping legs, banging doors or flushing toilets. To sum it up, there are sounds of life. There is the chatter of our voices and Helen’s screaming, but only now I realize how different they are from all the other voices I have known. When the grinding of braking tires, heard outside, disturbs the deafening silence (a self-contradictory expression I have never understood) that reigns ever since my question, all of us are immediately alerted. A second skid, a little gentler this time, follows the first one, followed by the sound of three car doors shutting. We all scurry across to Leah’s room. From there we can better observe what is happening outside. Two cars are parked beside the house, a shiny black jeep and next to it, a silver Mercedes. Three people stand beside the cars, one tall and slim, wears a light blue cotton shirt, carefully inserted into neatly pressed dark trousers. I assume that he is the owner of the Mercedes. The other two belong to the jeep. The first is broad-shouldered with a small belly pushed into his jeans. I give him a black mark in my heart for his black leather jacket. I have never understood the strange habit of wearing dead animals. The second man from the jeep is a carbon copy of the first, only ten percent smaller and balding. He pulls a cigarette out of the
pocket of his dead jacket and lights it. The other two men gesticulate as they speak but we can’t hear what they’re saying. Oved is the first one to drop below and we all follow him, except for Benny, who prefers the stairs.
Oved grabs the window to the right of the front door, and I stand beside the one on the left. I can see the three men through the cracks between the boards. The man with the tummy speaks.
“I have plans ready for everything, as I showed you in the office. This will be the main structure, something classic, high-class. Behind it, there will be a yard surrounded by four three-storied buildings, with a total of four hundred rooms. It will all be old-style, reminiscent of the past, and special. Here, on the right side, there will be a spa area with a swimming pool, Jacuzzi, sauna and massage rooms, and all that goes with that. On the other side, we will have the sports complex with a tennis court, gym, all with the best equipment, just like the presentation I showed you. We plan to call it the ‘Baron’s Estate.’ It will be the crowning achievement of the hotel industry, Hilton standard.” The skinny man from the Mercedes stands with his arms folded and looks at the house, openly skeptic. He doesn’t appear to have a well-developed imagination like the fellow from the jeep.
“The place is falling to pieces. You won’t be permitted to do anything here without an engineer’s approval of the structure.”
Behind me, Helen huffs and puffs angrily.
“So, we’ll bring in an engineer,” the guy from the jeep replies.
“And what if he doesn’t approve?”
The House of Lost Spirits: A Paranormal Novel Page 6
