As he does every day, Simeon wakes up very early in the morning, while his wife is still sleeping and the children are still in their beds. He does not light a lamp, but dresses in the dark, slips into his boots, picks up his fishing rod and tackle by the door and pads out into the still-dark morning.

  Simeon walks northward up the river towards a spot he knows, where there’s a little sloping beach and the cover of trees. He baits the hook with an earthworm plucked from the grass. He casts his line. The morning is quiet. Simeon, Babka explains, says something or thinks something about God, something I don’t understand and probably would not understand in German either.

  The man is just finishing this thought, or this sentence, when there is a fierce tug on the line, and the pole nearly shoots out from his hands. He plants his feet, grips the rod and begins to reel in the fish. Such a big fish! Fat and silvery and as long as Simeon’s arm. It takes him five minutes to land it, and when he does, it seems that both man and fish are panting with exhaustion.

  Our hero is thrilled. He plops the great fish in his net, and he struts with the net over his shoulder, struts straight back home where there’s a great, keen cleaving knife in his kitchen and a hard wooden cutting board. He slaps the fish down on the countertop. His children are awake now, and they gather round his legs, rubbing their eyes, to see the fish as big as a papa’s arm.

  Then, as a fisherman must do (although it makes me squeamish as a boy to think about it), Simeon takes the great, keen cleaving knife and raises it above the fish’s head.

  And then the most amazing thing happens. Just as Simeon is swinging his knife down to behead the fish, the fish screams out with a man’s voice, “Shema Ysrael!”

  “WHAT?”

  I ask because Babka speaks the words in her most dramatic, agonized voice, so that it seems the story is worthless without them.

  “Oh!” For a moment she looks scandalized, and I wonder if I have said something wrong. But then she clucks, leans forward and touches my cheek with her right hand. Her hand smells like hard yellow soap. She leans back in her chair and swirls a hand in the air, looking for the German words that seem, by her expression as she speaks them, to be always inadequate.

  “Like, ‘Hear, Israel!’ Except about God, and the people, and you say it also at the end, at death,” she explains, “but in Hebrew,” and I say, “Oh.” The milk and rum is bubbling, and she pulls it off the heat to pour me a cup, pan tilted over a chipped mug, and the rain still hissing against the window.

  I raise the mug to my mouth but don’t drink it, just rest my lip against the rim and let the steam rise up over my face. I am sure I must have heard someone say those words before, but I never knew them as words; I never guessed they had meaning until my grandmother placed them in the mouth of a dying fish. The fact that this fish speaks Hebrew seems to place it within the realm of the biblical, and that, as far as I understand, means history.

  AND, DO YOU know, I’m not sure why I had such respect for sacred texts at that point in my life. Papa, of course, did not send me to Hebrew school. But in the second district, surrounded by voices and bodies and smells and tastes that were something more than simply Austrian, no matter how much Papa wished it otherwise, you could not not know things.

  But the story—back to that. It’s very important that I set down the story about the fish.

  SO THE RAIN taps like idle fingertips against the glass, and I let the rum warm me up a little as Babka folds her skirts under her legs and presses on.

  Though the fish screams in Hebrew, Babka says, our hero does not have time to avert his cleaving knife and so it falls—whack!—against the cutting board, and the fish’s voice is cut off mid-scream, and its head bounces off the wood, mouth agape, one dead eye staring sightless up to heaven.

  The little children yelp. The father gasps. The family leaps back from the counter as if they themselves were pricked by the knife. The father wrings his hands and prays aloud for protection, for forgiveness, for help. He runs to get his wife, who is nursing the baby upstairs. Throughout the first few moments of his explanation she is sure her husband has lost his mind, but then the older children huddle in, some wailing, some simply wide-eyed, but all relating the same strange story about the fish.

  The parents confer over the nursing baby, with the children huddled in a semicircle around them. What is to be done? Has Simeon murdered a holy being? Was the fish a monster? At length the wife points out that they are talking in circles, the husband is still wringing his hands and the fish isn’t getting any fresher. He needs to go ask the rabbi.

  So Simeon wraps the fish’s body and head together in a cloth and carries it against his chest out into the street, where the neighbourhood is coming alive with fishermen and bakers, grocers and carpenters, wives and children running errands before the sun gets hot. His children trail behind him in a broken line. The man with the dead fish pressed against his heart feels that this bundle in the cloth, this thing in his arms, is somehow his most secret shame, and that the cloth only barely hides it and that the fish’s blood seeping through it is a testament against him. His neighbours are staring, he knows. He keeps his eyes down and does not speak to anyone.

  At the rabbi’s house, he walks in on the family having breakfast. He babbles a brief apology and a briefer explanation, which of course he is forced to repeat fifteen times before anyone quite understands what has happened. His children have diffused in among the rabbi’s many children, but each when prompted repeats the same story the father has told many times already, to the point where even the rabbi’s children, in chorus with their young guests, begin repeating the story as if they too were witnesses.

  The wife pushes the breakfast dishes to the side of the table. The fisherman places the fish on the table and unwraps the cloth. Fallen scales frame the fractured body like leaves scattered round a tree in autumn. A child is sent to fetch a string against which they can measure the fish. The rabbi picks up the head and looks in the fish’s eyes, in its mouth, straight down through the back of its throat, open now to the air. They touch the fins and the spine, pluck scales and hold them up to the light. The room is full of watchers, children and women and a pair of cats just beginning to catch the scent, mewling and weaving among the many legs.

  At last the rabbi sits in his chair at the table and gestures for his guest to do the same. They lean in close to each other. The room is silent.

  (“But the cats . . . ?”)

  (The wife has swept the cats out of the room and the mewling comes muffled through the front door.)

  And the rabbi tells Simeon:

  “It was a dybbuk.”

  I am a small boy and I have only the barest excuse for a religious formation: I could barely tell Moses from the mayor, and I hardly know what a dybbuk is meant to be. But it is certainly something frightening, because Babka leans in when she says it, whispers the word and then puts a hand to her mouth. The skin at the back of my neck seems to twist. I take a long drink of milk without blinking.

  The rabbi tells the fisherman that the fish has to be buried, like a man, and not eaten. The whole family nods, and there is a collective sigh in the room at the justness of this verdict. The fisherman bows his head, and the rabbi lays a hand on his shoulder. There is a plot of land, he says, in the graveyard in the city, where they can put the fish to rest.

  And that is just what they do.

  “AND HE WILL not bother anyone after that,” says Babka, and slaps her thigh. I jump a little in place, and Liba pulls back her paw, yawns and uncurls beside me.

  “That’s the end?” I still have half a cup of milk left, I realize, and take a deep gulp of it.

  Babka clucks at me and waves a hand. “Yes, that’s the end. They bury the fish in the graveyard. They give it a proper funeral.” She rubs her chin and peers out the window at the rain. “The grave is still there today.”

  Here again is that twist at the back of my neck, the hairs coming awake against my skin. She speaks in Yiddis
h, but I reply in German. “There’s a grave?”

  “Yes, yes. In the ninth district, in the Seegasse cemetery. In a courtyard behind a hospital, I think. It’s marked with a stone fish.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Why not? Get Papa to take you.” She picks her tooth with a fingernail. She doesn’t have many teeth left, my Babka, but she has most of the front ones so her smile is half-full, half-yellow, like a cob of dried corn.

  I don’t finish my cup of milk. I stare out the window, through the film of water beyond the glass, and I pull the blanket closer around me. Babka meanwhile takes the cup from my hands and gulps down the last of my drink, quite calmly, as if nothing at all has changed.

  3

  THE SEEGASSE CEMETERY IS NOT SO VERY FAR FROM where we lived, as I see it now, but when I am a child it is impossibly far and I despair of ever seeing the fish’s grave. I start to think about all the other graves I would like to see there, the graves that, I feel, must be there: the fisherman’s, and the rabbi’s, and the children’s graves, and those of the cats as well. I feel when I wake every morning, and when I go to bed at night, that there is someone expecting to meet me in the graveyard across the canal. With every moment I keep them waiting, it seems, the apologies I owe grow heavier and heavier.

  Zilla is the one who crosses our parents; I am so shy it seems my family can sometimes forget I’m there. But I need to ask about this; I’ll burst if I don’t. I tell Papa at the dinner table that I want to go to Seegasse to look at the cemetery. He doesn’t turn to me, but raises an eyebrow as he cuts into his chicken.

  “Why would you want to go there, Josef.” It’s not a question, the way he says it. I feel the heat bubbling up into my cheeks, but I can’t go back to eating.

  “There’s a fish,” I tell my father. Zilla looks at me, but I will not let my eyes meet hers. I feel I’ll burn up like a sheet of paper, poof, nothing. And oh, I wish I were someone else just now, someone who could speak.

  “There’s a fish pond?” Mutti doesn’t smile at me, but there is something in her tone that suggests yielding, or at the very least, real interest.

  “No. It’s not alive. It’s buried.”

  Zilla laughs at this, and Papa rubs his forehead. From down the table, Oma blinks at me, chewing slowly.

  Mutti says, “People don’t bury fish, Josef. They eat them.”

  “Not this one.” My heart is beating fast again, and I feel I can see with an inward eye a whole host of people, standing, waiting for me across the canal, people who have no notion of why I haven’t come to them yet. “This one talked.”

  Mutti frowns at me now. “Josef, I think the boys at school have been telling you stories.”

  “I didn’t hear it at school,” I say. But then my face goes red as if my cheeks have been boiled, and I hope with all my heart I won’t have to tell them that Babka is the one who told me about the fish.

  “I wonder where you did hear it, then.” Papa still hasn’t really looked at me.

  Then Oma says, “Perhaps he heard it in the market, Daniel.”

  Now Papa does look up. We all look up at Oma when she says that, even Opa, who is mostly deaf.

  My father blinks at his mother-in-law. “Why would he have heard it in the market?”

  “It’s an old legend,” says Oma, and though her voice isn’t strong, her every word makes my heart thrum harder, stronger. “I remember Helena’s aunt telling it to me once, when I was a little girl.”

  Now Papa’s forehead turns hard and rutted. “I won’t have my son traipsing about after fairy-tale creatures.”

  Oma picks up her fork. I hate the sound of eating when I’m not hungry, when no one is shouting or shushing and it feels as if the food is just there to fill people’s mouths and bury the things waiting to be said.

  “What was the story, Oma?” Zilla is leaning forward now.

  “We’re eating, Zilla. You may save the nursery-room talk for the nursery,” Papa says.

  Zilla has hazel eyes that are long and slanted and bright, and when she narrows them at my father it seems that the reason he keeps his eyes on his food is so he won’t have to meet her gaze.

  “Josef will tell us if Oma won’t,” Zilla says.

  Papa says, “Josef will finish his supper in silence, as children should.”

  “Josef,” says my sister, sitting straight in her seat, staring hard at me, “tell us about the fish.”

  I burn red again. I stare at my plate. I can’t eat or speak.

  “Zilla, listen to your father,” Mutti says.

  “I just want to learn something about local history,” Zilla says to our mother, but the words, her choice of them, are meant for Papa.

  “You may hear all you like about local history,” my father snaps, “but fairy stories aren’t adult conversation.”

  “I don’t even know if it is a fairy tale. I don’t know the first thing about it.” Zilla is on the cusp of shouting. “Besides, you didn’t mind talking about the Christkind when Fritz visited.”

  “The Christkind,” says my father, “is local history, in that it’s a notable cultural phenomenon, an interesting element of pseudo-Christian apocrypha, and worth remarking on by men and women who have anything remarkable to say.” Papa’s voice is rising with every word. “Neither Fritz Reiter, nor your mother, nor I were at all interested in the Christkind per se. But we were interested in the way Christians incorporate pagan stories into their own histories and then convert cultural phenomena into market opportunities. If you have anything intelligent to add on that topic, by all means, speak up.”

  Zilla, across the table from me, is hunched in silence, and though I don’t look at her I can feel her tension. Someone’s fork taps at a plate.

  “Maybe,” says Zilla, “I’m curious about this story of the fish as a cultural phenomenon.”

  I look up as Papa sweeps his napkin up from the table, dabs his moustache as if the little hairs pain him, his face reddening. He then presses his napkin down hard into the tablecloth. He says:

  “The damned fish isn’t a phenomenon. It’s six-hundred-year-old stupidity beloved by second-district idiots who’ve kept their heads buried since they were children.”

  Zilla says, “But Josef is a child.”

  And Papa says, “Not that kind of child, he’s not.”

  And I expect Zilla to stand up, or throw something or break something, so fierce is the tightness in her jaw and the heat in her eye—but she doesn’t, she sits still, quiet, stares at her plate. Except that now she glances up at me, and I see in the steadiness of her gaze that her fierceness is a slow-burning thing, something that need not be spent tonight.

  Papa and Mutti speak about a friend of Papa’s who is hosting a party. Oma and Opa take small bites of food, and Zilla and I sit and shift our dinner around in front of us.

  I want, just then, to fall into the river and fly away underwater. There it wouldn’t matter that I couldn’t make anyone understand me.

  THAT EVENING I cry, but in my heart I can’t muster the courage to face the silent dead who wait across the canal. I don’t apologize. I don’t say anything. I’m like I was at the supper table, unable to meet anyone’s eye, wishing I could be more invisible than a thought.

  In the morning I still have trouble eating. I sit and look at my feet in their wool socks, at the blue knit that’s ridged and grated, little Vs all the way down to my toes, V for Vater, for Verschuldung, for verboten.

  But Zilla walks me to school that morning. She walks me in silence for two blocks, holding my mittened hand in hers, and her fingers are tight and hard around my hand. I know she is angry at our parents, at Papa specifically, but in my mind it becomes me whom she can’t stand. And it’s another reason to say sorry, her walking there beside me; it’s another reason to make myself speak, but I can’t. My throat is dry and I choke on the word.

  When we reach a cross street on Pappenheimgasse, we wait for the traffic in the road to slow before we cross. A man with a ho
rse and cart has pulled over by the curb. He stands with his face towards the animal’s tail and reaches down to the horse’s muddied hoof. Before consenting to lift it, the horse makes a noise like a chair creaking under someone heavy, and lowers its lips almost down to the mud. With one hoof against its master’s thigh the horse seems to lean on the man; they prop each other up in the street.

  And as I am watching them, Zilla says into my ear, “I’ll take you to the cemetery.” And she tugs my hand to walk across the street.

  At first I trot beside and a little behind her, tugged along, chewing on words. She will take me to the cemetery. She will take me there? I splash through slush without thinking of it. Though Papa doesn’t want it? I nearly trip over an old woman’s boot as she stands in a shop doorway. Now?

  “Now?” I say.

  “No, not now.” Zilla is looking straight ahead, and her face is like a statue, a proud statue, fierce. “On Saturday afternoon, after school. I’ll tell Papa we’re going to the Prater. He won’t mind. He won’t care.” She rips up the last words in her mouth.

  Leaping along beside her, there are a thousand things I want to ask her, but I just say, “He might be mad.”

  “Let me handle that,” Zilla tells me, and finally she does look down at me, hazel eyes on fire, and her gaze is on something beyond or within me, something I’ve not yet seen. But she smiles. And she says, “Aren’t you going to thank me?”

  But “thank you” is another of those things my tight, dry throat won’t let me say, so I just press my cheek hard against her mitten. All around us is the great noisy world of people, but in my heart there is a stillness and a light, and I am a lamp cupped in my sister’s hand, a warm bright hidden light.

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, after school and through the rain, my sister takes me down towards the canal, and our feet slapping against wet pavement sound like someone applauding at a concert. The canal today is itself a grey-green pavement of ripples under mist and I drag back a little on Zilla’s arm, staring at it, as we cross the bridge. Water pools in the iron grooves tracing the main streets, the slots that guide the trams, but when our own streetcar comes the rain has slowed to a drizzle.