The Book of Ghosts by Reed Farrel Coleman

Q ueens, New York, 2011
    Having survived three years in five concentration camps, Jacob Weisen knew death as one twin knows another. But that period of his schooling had come to a close seventy years ago. Now there remained but one last thing to learn of death, and that lesson would come soon enough. Weisen neither feared death—he had seen it in all its permutations so that he understood there was a kind of peace in it—nor welcomed it—he had fought too hard to live during his years in hell to give into it simply because he was a tired old man.
    â€œWhat are you thinking about, Zaydeh?” asked Leah, Weisen’s granddaughter, noticing the sour expression on his face.
    â€œDying.”
    â€œOy, not this again.”
    â€œOne day, Totty, the rain will come. It will lift me up like an oil spot off the gutter and wash me into the sewer. One day I will be here, then I will be gone. No one should mourn an oil spot and that is all we are … less, maybe.”
    â€œZaydeh, please stop it. I hate it when you get this way,” she said, as she drove out of Kennedy airport and onto the Van Wyck Expressway.
    â€œYou hate that I talk the truth?”
    â€œYour truth, Zaydeh, not everyone’s.”
    He pushed back the arm of his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeve, and tapped his gnarled index finger to the sagging skin of his forearm and the faded numbers tattooed there. “No, Totty, not my truth, the truth. I have seen the truth of oil spots and ashes: here one day, gone the next, and then forgotten. And once you’re forgotten … there is no return.”
    â€œNot all are forgotten,” she said, her voice impatient. “There’s you and your friend Isaac Becker. You two won’t be forgotten. The both of you will be tied to The Book of Ghosts forever.”
    The Book of Ghosts, indeed! What a load of dreck, he thought. While Leah was correct about them being bound together, Jacob Weisen had no more been a friend to Isaac Becker than a spider to a fly. It was then, for fear of letting the endless years of pent-up bile and guilt pour out of him in one furious rush, that he decided to keep his mouth clamped shut until they reached the auction house. Many, many, decades had passed since he’d been forced to learn to hold his tongue in the face of unrelenting atrocity. In a world where speaking up got you nothing but a bullet or “delousing,” self-imposed silence was an essential survival skill. Lying, too, became second nature. Lying was a particularly effective skill at Birkenau in the anteroom of the gas chamber.
    â€œRemember your hook numbers so you can collect your clothing after your shower, ” was a lie he had learned to utter quickly and with conviction in many different languages: Yiddish, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Dutch … the list was long. Jacob still woke up some nights with that polyglot lie on his lips.
    One of the guards, Heilmann, a real bastard with coal for a heart and a face like a plane crash, used to repeat the same joke to Jacob after each group of the dead was carted to the ovens. “You Jews must have such terrible memories. Your people never come back for their clothes. I wonder where they have all gotten to?” And each time, Heilmann would laugh—each laugh a little stab wound. He wondered why he should be thinking of Heilmann after all these years. Would he finally start bleeding from the thousand little stab wounds?
    So it was no small irony that Jacob Weisen’s failure to just keep his mouth shut and that his most foolish and unnecessary fabrication had caused his life after the war to be haunted by Isaac Becker and his accursed book, the book for which the idiot Becker—with Jacob’s complicity—had sacrificed his life. And as Weisen grew older, the taste of irony grew more bitter in his mouth—so bitter that he could have choked on it. He was choking on it now as