The House of Lost Spirits: A Paranormal Novel

by Einat Shimshoni

  “Find a new place for ourselves? Why? Where are you going?” Benny asks, looking expectantly at Oved like a small pitiful child begging his big brother to allow him to join him and his friends to the movies and not leave him home alone. It arouses my pity.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Oved answers smugly. “It’s best to take care of yourself.” However, it is clear that Benny does take care of himself, and Oved certainly enjoys the position of strength that this weakness gives him. I despise such people.

  “I can’t go out. I tried. Don’t you remember? I can’t do it,” Benny says in a weak voice, arousing even more pity.

  “You will have no choice,” Oved declares. “The moment they tear down the walls, you will be thrown out of here in all directions. You would be well advised to find a place in advance and not wait ’til the last minute. Otherwise, you may find yourself in a miserable hovel with crazy people who will drive you completely out of your mind.” He turns his chin up at the sound of Helen’s screams that have not yet calmed down.

  “Where are you planning to go?” Benny asks.

  Oved keeps silent for a few moments before answering, and I suspect he is enjoying Benny’s curiosity and apprehension.

  “There is a house in the north, near Tzipori, an old flour mill that is smaller than this house. I doubt there is room for everyone.” He wants Benny to beg to be allowed to join him as if he owns the mill. I want to punch him in his arrogant face. Sadly, I can’t because of the intangible existence of his face, like the invisible existence of my fist. It’s not that if I had a real fist, I would do something with it. I often feel a strong desire to throw someone a punch, especially smug types like Oved, but in reality, I never do.

  “And Milka, she’s going with you, right?” Benny asks apprehensively.

  Oved shrugs.

  “I suppose she is.”

  “So, is that what you do when you go out?” I interrupt him, principally to channel my anger somewhere. “Do you search for alternative dwellings?”

  Oved ignores my question and turns to Leah.

  “You should also begin thinking about it. It’s high time you got out of here, anyway.”

  Leah shakes her head slowly.

  “I can’t leave her,” she says, mostly to herself, “I simply cannot.”

  Upstairs, Helen continues yelling.

  Helen’s screams haven’t stopped, but when they start appearing at longer intervals, I decide the situation is safe enough for me to go up to her. Just like the time before, she greets my visit with grumbling, heavy breathing, a raised chin, and a demonstration of fury.

  “What do you want, this time?” Helen asks to conclude her greeting.

  “Just asking if you’re all right,” I reply. I feel hurt for Helen.

  “All right?” Helen’s eyes almost pop out. “How am I supposed to feel alright when uncivilized hooligans break into my house and threaten to demolish it?” That’s a good question.

  “I suppose it’s not easy to see the destruction of the house you love,” I say.

  Helen huffs in contempt and screams again. “Loved? Ha, I never even liked this house. No, I hated it from the first moment I saw it.”

  Her response is surprising.

  “So why…?”

  “The uncivilized people here were impressed, but I immediately saw what it was—it was a trick. That’s what this house was. Jacob thought that he could hide the fact with the help of expensive furnishings, crystal chandeliers, and carpets, but what is all that worth when there is no running water in the house? ‘I built you a palace,’ Jacob wrote to me. Hah! A palace! Although the apartment in France was smaller, without a doubt, it was more comfortable and better than this stone ruin.”

  If not for the pain, hidden behind the anger of her words, I would remind her that only a few minutes ago, she blew her mind when someone dared to call her house a wreck.

  “If my mother had seen the primitive wooden structure in the corner of the yard that served as our toilet, she would surely have had a fit,” Helen continues, angrily. “For two years, I heard promises of running water, but it took the ignorant workers of the Holy Land two years to build the miserable reservoir that was supposed to provide us with water here. Can you imagine the awful sight of the wagon-owner coming each week with his stinking barrels to remove the contents of the outhouse to the cesspool on the periphery of the settlement?”

  I have to admit that I have no idea what it is like to suffer the lack of running water, but I can identify with her disgust. What isn’t clear to me is that if she hated the house so much, why does she still choose to remain in it. When I ask her, she grows silent for a moment, something she does each time I ask her a question she isn’t expecting.

  “I did not plan to stay so long,” she replies in a weak voice. “I didn’t think this is what would happen.”

  “But why did you return? Why didn’t you move on?” Leah told me that the others moved forward.

  “The tea,” Helen replied pensively, “tasted strange. And a paralyzing heaviness filled my head. Perhaps I realized what was happening too late, but I understood. I just wanted to be certain, so I returned, just to make sure. I followed Jacob everywhere he went; I stuck to him like his shadow. It was awful because, for a great deal of the time, it meant following after Sophie, as well.” Helen stops for a moment as if suddenly noticing that she is permitting herself to reveal something of the fragile soul behind the mask of the proud Madame, and perhaps, to cover it up, she quickly resumes her ill-tempered tone.

  “Everyone thought that Sophie sought closeness to Jacob to find consolation on my death—the death of a beloved sister—and share their mutual mourning. Ha! She fooled everyone with her delicacy and beauty. They did not see what I did, what one can only see in privacy behind closed doors, where no one sees. But I saw it. Everything I suspected about him was true.”

  And then, I see her. A betrayed young woman, rejected and alone, who returns for the negligible chance of discovering, that in spite of all her suspicions, and the reality she sees, someone did love her.

  “There are things that it is better not to know,” I say, and can hardly believe that I have said that. I always claim that it is better to be wise and miserable than foolish and happy. Only now, I realize that I never completely understood the possible depths misery can reach.

  “It was torture, but I could not stop. I wanted to hear the two own up, at least between themselves, and admit their wicked deed, but Jacob and Sophie never spoke of me, not even once. In all their conversations, they never mentioned my name, as if I had never lived. As if I had never dwelt in this house.”

  ***

  A few weeks after Helen’s death, Sophie returned to France, not before Jacob repeatedly promised her that he would follow her home soon and marry her. Possibly, Sophie would have remained but for worrying news that reached her of the failing health of Moshe Leon that had begun to deteriorate on learning of the death of his older daughter. It was not love that made Jacob promise Sophie that he would come. It was a cold and calculated decision.

  Helen had already become aware of her husband’s ways. His role in the settlement was not a success. Although the Baron was pleased with Jacob’s assertive management at the start, as the complaints of the peasants of his heavy-handed hard-heartedness grew, and willingness to work under his tyrannical rule waned, the Baron’s faith in Jacob began to falter. It was only a question of time before Jacob would be ousted, and in that situation, he preferred to initiate his departure rather than face dismissal. Helen’s death provided him with an excellent excuse, and Jacob submitted a request to end his mission and return to France, due to sad family circumstances. At the same time, he sent a lengthy, moving letter to Helen’s parents, informing them of his intention to return to honor Helen’s memory by caring for her family. Most nobly, he declared his intention to take care of Moshe Leon
’s diamond business until he regained his strength and ensure that the family would not suffer more as a result of the father’s incapacity than it already had. His move was a very ingenious way of getting a foothold in the Mendes family business and, at the same time, pave his way to the hand of the younger daughter, and from now, its sole heir.

  The response that arrived from Helen’s father showed that Jacob had made a wise wager. The letter lay open on his desk, so Helen could read over and over again the emotional words of her father, who expressed gratitude to his good fortune for sending him such a decent and noble son-in-law as Jacob. Helen could not read Sophie’s letter that was attached to her father’s, which was probably a good thing. Jacob left it still folded after only briefly glancing at it.

  That same evening, Jacob took out a large envelope containing a single document from one of the drawers in his desk. The envelope bore a large label marked ‘LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.’ Helen stood, looking over Jacob’s shoulder, and read the document. He was unaware of her presence. According to the name of the lawyer noted on it, the will had been drawn up earlier in France. Jacob wished to bequeath his assets to his still unborn, eldest son. If he died without issue, his assets would benefit the Sorbonne University, where he had studied economics and the law, with the provision that the university would install plaques dedicated to his memory. A small amount was set aside as a meager annual allowance for his mother for the rest of her life. Helen’s name was not mentioned in his will at all. Helen read the document three times, and each time, her fury grew more intense.

  Jacob’s mother’s visit to their apartment echoed in her memory. His treatment of her had been so off-hand and heartless that Helen could not understand how he refused to see her as part of his life. Yet, he included his mother in his will, while he made no mention of Helen, his wife. Could it be that he had planned to get rid of her even before his trip to the Holy Land?

  Jacob picked up his pen and dipped it in the inkpot that stood open on his desk, and added in his meticulous handwriting, ‘I bequeath my house in Zichron Ya’akov to Sophie Mendes-Disraeli.’ He stared at the page for a few seconds, then changed his mind and erased the name ‘Disraeli.’ “I had better not make rash predictions,” he whispered to himself and put the will back in its place in the drawer.

  But it was she! Helen! Jacob had forced her to leave her home and live in this house. She, who suffered the heat and the dust and the primitive way of life, she, who in spite of the intolerable conditions, managed her home and saw that it was fit to receive visitors. She was his wife! And he was bequeathing the house to her sister.

  During the whole period since her death and her spiritual return to the house, Helen said not a single word. She did not know if the other inhabitants of the house could hear her, but out of caution that she might reveal the fact of her presence, she preferred to keep her silence and, perhaps, because Helen feared she might discover that they could not hear her. Now her rage completely overwhelmed her, and all the insults that had accumulated inside her burst out and overflowed. She screamed as she had never done before. She followed him everywhere and yelled. She stood beside him and yelled as he peacefully ate his dinner. She was beside him in his bed when he went to sleep and carried on shouting all day long, throughout the night and on to the following morning. And he did not hear her.

  ***

  When evening falls, I see Oved leaving the house again. The fact that he doesn’t wait for complete darkness, as he usually does, surprises me. Benny and Leah speak in hushed voices in the kitchen. Being in their presence is so depressing that I don’t even attempt to join in their conversation. Helen’s screaming has quietened down meanwhile, and only Milka has shown no sign of whether the ongoing drama affects her. I presume that, like Oved, she does not consider moving to another place to be such a big deal, or, perhaps, she isn’t even aware of what is going to happen. As far as I know, she is very old, which may have implications regarding her level of awareness of her surroundings. I have no idea if such things affect you when you become a spirit.

  The truth is, I have never been close to anyone old, certainly not thousands of years old like some I have met here. There are people like my grandfather and grandmother and all kinds of uncles and aunts. My father hails from a large family. He has four older siblings (“all boys” as Grandpa Moshe boasts). He and Grandma Shoshanna bring with them a respectable tribe of brothers and sisters, who, in my extended family, is a vast number of uncles and aunts, who could be defined as old people, though, I never regarded them as such.

  The aged are withered people who sit silently in wheelchairs in neglected old aged homes and dribble all over themselves. I have only seen them in depressing reports on the “condition of the aging in Israel”. However, my fleet of uncles and aunts on my father’s side are a joyous and lively bunch of people, who busy themselves organizing and eating noisy meals. They always treat Grandpa Moshe as their little brother. How can one possibly think of someone as old, when five people still call him ‘my little brother?’ Besides which, a man who gets up every morning to collect eggs from the chicken coop and then works in the orchard is not old.

  My mother’s side of the family is much smaller. Her father died even before I was born, and Grandma Dorit is an exact copy of her daughter, just twenty years older. She, herself, is a clinical psychologist and has spent her later years writing sharply worded critiques of self-help books, which she defines as belonging in the “intellectual trash can.” She fires insults at my mother’s “horribly shallow” columns that she religiously reads so that she can judge them as being “an insult to the honorable profession of researching the psyche,” and “make Freud turn over in his grave.” It is terrific, because it means that I don’t have to meet her more than once a year, at most, even though she lives a distance of a half-hour ride from us. I prefer a three-hour journey to the agricultural village in the north, where I am always welcome and loved, over a short trip to the museum-like apartment, where everyone has to measure up to her demanding scale of achievements and performance.

  Unlike my father, my mother is an only child. Is that the reason she always wanted to have a large family in spite of not having any success in achieving this? Father’s family never really accepted her with open arms, and all her attempts to integrate have been futile. It’s not that they are unfriendly toward her, or anything like that. They are always pleasant to mother, but they don’t love her, certainly not like their other daughters-in-law. My mother is too different, in every sense. If in her home court, my mother is the know-it-all manager who rules with a firm hand, at the family meetings, she doesn’t know how to handle herself. In fact, in her private domain, things haven’t always worked out as she expects. My parents waited ten years until I was born. Ten years of fertility treatments made her accept that she would never have a large family. While all her contemporaries were busy dealing with piles of polluting disposable diapers, and raising families, my mother was nurturing a career in theorizing about families. Almost comically, she was becoming a carbon copy of her mother, a woman, forever stuck in menopause, who refuses to release her grip and let go. Unlike Grandpa Moshe and Grandma Shoshana, Grandma Dorit does not have gray hair—she colors hers, exactly like her daughter. She also has no wrinkles, because she takes the trouble to invest in anti-aging treatments. Just like her daughter. She entertains no thoughts of retirement and pensions. If loss of memory and a diminished ability to concentrate accompany old age, then Grandma Dorit is also amazingly young. I don’t understand old people, certainly not those aged two thousand and five hundred. So, I go upstairs to update Milka on what is happening and also get some answers from her.

  There is still a little light in the house, but the attic is completely dark. I call Milka’s name twice, and when there is no reply, I assume she isn’t there. I don’t like roaming around the house in the dark, mainly because I fear going outside unintentionally as it is impossible to know where the
walls are. So, I spend the night in the attic. The nights in the house are always depressing and boring, though this night has an additional strange sensation that I cannot define.

  When morning illuminates the attic, it is still empty except for me. I saw Oved go out the previous evening, and I also noticed that he did not go up to her during that day, so she could not have gone out with him. I wait for her for an hour, perhaps. I find it difficult to estimate times after this whole period because I expected she would soon return. I never see her roaming in any other room in the house. When I get fed up with waiting, I go downstairs, not through Helen’s room but through where I think the corridor is. Benny has just passed there, humming some song I don’t recognize.

  “Have you seen Milka?” I ask. He thinks for a moment as if trying to recall something.

  “Not since you arrived. Milka spends most of her time up in the attic.”

  “She’s not there now,” I say. Benny looks at me in surprise. I think he is surprised that she went out of the attic, but no, maybe that too, but not only that.

  “Did you go up to her?” he asked in a mixture of shock and amazement.

  “Yes, why, what’s the problem?” Although I think I know the answer, and it doesn’t take long coming.

  “Milka doesn’t like to be bothered.” It’s beginning to get on my nerves. Milka doesn’t like being bothered, Leah doesn’t want people to talk about Helen, Helen doesn’t like it when people raise their voices, enter her room, throw cigarette butts in the yard, and remind her that the house isn’t legally hers. Everyone is busy all the time with what the others don’t like. Even Oved, who doesn’t bother to respect any of these wishes, plays this game. So, I don’t intend to pretend. The demolishers are going to pull down this house, and I want answers.

  “Do you have any idea where she could be?” I ask, flagrantly disregarding his last comment. He just shrugs