A Fine and Private Place

"Is anyone there?" Mr. Rebeck asked again, feeling a little silly about it now.

"Oh," said the voice. "I'm here. For quite awhile."

The voice was faint, but clear and very dry. It made Mr. Rebeck think of thin shoes walking in sand.

"Are you Morris Klapper?" he asked.

"I don't know," the voice answered slowly. "I hadn't thought—" Then, with sureness, "Yes. Yes, I must be. I am Morris Klapper."

"My name is Jonathan Rebeck." He wished that he could see Morris Klapper, to find out if he really did look like him.

"What are you doing here? I don't know you, do I?"

"No," Mr. Rebeck said. "I live here."

"Here? In the cemetery?"

Mr. Rebeck nodded. The voice said nothing, but he was sure that he sensed disapproval.

"You have a beautiful house," he said, unconsciously adopting Mrs. Klapper's term. "I was just admiring it."

"What, this place?" He thought he heard a dusty sigh. "You don't know. All I wanted was a nice small stone, with my name on it and perhaps a few words of recommendation. Look what I got. A synagogue. A courthouse."

"Well, your wife wanted you to have an expensive tomb," Mr. Rebeck said.

"Oh yes," Morris Klapper said. "The place has 'Gertrude Klapper' scrawled all over it. It's a monument to her, not me."

"She didn't mean it that way," Mr. Rebeck said angrily. "You're a fool if you think that. She loves you."

"Love is not an excuse for bad taste."

Mr. Rebeck felt that he was being peered at closely, and it made him tense. He had never felt ill at ease with the dead until now, when he spoke with Morris Klapper and could not see him.

"Why are you so interested?" the voice asked. "You don't know my wife."

"I met her when she came to see you. She comes here a lot."

"Ah," Morris Klapper said. "Yes, of course. You did say you lived here. I forgot."

"I've lived here for a long time. Almost twenty years."

"How interesting," Morris Klapper said without interest. "May I ask why?"

"Because I didn't fit into the world, and because everyone else did." He was tired of talking about it. Talk rusted everything in time.

"I see," Morris Klapper said. "So, not belonging in one world, you had no choice but to adopt the other. By default, you might say."

The impersonal scholar-voice was begi

"Bravo," Morris Klapper said. "A speech to move the short-circuited hearts of the dead. Wrong, but even more beautiful because it is wrong. I am glad that I am not too long dead to appreciate a little misdirected beauty. This is not a world. There is only one world, and this is its junkyard. The dead did not make this junkyard, nor have they any interest in turning it into a world. There is nothing here with which to make a world."

"There is love," Mr. Rebeck objected. "I have seen it myself. There is humor, and contention, and friendship. All these I have seen."

"They are here only because you brought them with you. Do you think you have left the world, do you think one escapes that easily? You carry the world with you, wherever you go, like a turtle. You yourself are soft, naked, shapeless tissue, but you carry the hard shell of the world to protect your back and belly. All men carry the world on their backs, wherever they go."

"I don't want the world on my back," Mr. Rebeck said. "I never asked for it. Can I run out from under it? Is there a way out?"

"Death. Not the appearance of death, nor sleeping in the same bed with death. Nothing but the genuine article."

Mr. Rebeck sat on the steps and stared at the barred iron door. There was an inscription above the door, but he could not read it from that distance. My sight is not so good any more, he thought, and then, God, what a great hollow tooth this building is.

Laying his words down carefully, he said, "Sometimes I have thought that I might be a ghost myself. Could that be? Could I have lived here and died and not known it? I think about it a lot."

Again he felt Morris Klapper's dead eyes on him, but the ghost did not speak. Mr. Rebeck bit at a ragged fingernail. It gritted against his teeth and tasted bitter. Far away a car horn yapped. He hoped it would not come this way.

"We are all ghosts," Morris Klapper said at last. "We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes and scratching to become real. We are told that life is full of goals and that, although it is sadly necessary to fight, you can at least choose your war. But we learn that for ghosts there can only be one battle: to become real. A few of us make it, thus encouraging other ghosts to believe that it can be done."

"What is it like?" Mr. Rebeck asked. "To be real, I mean."

Morris Klapper's laugh was like the faint sound of an hourglass being turned over. "Good God, I don't know. I never made it."

"Oh," Mr. Rebeck said. Then he said, "Your wife loved you. Isn't that one way of becoming real?"

"Will you get love off your mind?" Morris Klapper demanded. "Love guarantees nothing. Anyway, Gertrude never loved me. She loved the man she wanted me to be. It was like having a stranger in the house. We were quite happy together, all three of us, but it was not the sort of love that makes a ghost real. I think the only way to become real is to be real to yourself and to someone else. Love has nothing to do with it."

For no particular reason, Mr. Rebeck thought of Mrs. Klapper's crescent hat roosting, thin and foolish, in her hair.

"I have two friends," he said. "They want me to leave the cemetery. Not for my own sake, but because they want me to do them a favor. It isn't a fair thing to ask."

"Nothing is free," Morris Klapper answered. "If you have friends, you have to pay for them sooner or later, like anything else. Nor will the cemetery protect you from this kind of debt. One friend, and the iron around this junkyard is a ring of butter; one debt between friends, and the things you love and fear walk in through the gate, whistling. It is a great mistake to have friends if you like living in cemeteries. You should never have done it, Mr.— what did you say your name was? I am old."

"Rebeck," Mr. Rebeck said. "Do you think I ought to go back, then? Do you think I ought to leave the cemetery?"

"I don't care. It doesn't matter a damn to me. I'm dead, and what you do or do not do does not interest me. You could catch fire as we talk here, and burn to the ground like a hayrick, and I wouldn't care. Except that I haven't seen fire in a very long while, and I don't remember what it looks like."

He was silent. Mr. Rebeck looked at the iron door, but he felt that the ghost was very close to him. When Morris Klapper spoke again, however, his voice was fainter, and Mr. Rebeck had to strain to hear him.

"But I tell you that you are a living man and that you have deceived yourself. For a man there is no choice between worlds. There never was."

Then Mr. Rebeck rose to his feet and cried out, "I am afraid! It is not starving I fear, or talking to people, or even being alone. But I ca

"Oh, so now you want reasons," Morris Klapper said. Again Mr. Rebeck heard the distant laugh in the air. "I have no reasons for you. Die, if you choose. Die, and you and I will sit together and talk about friendship."