Where To?
by Jessica Knauss
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
I understand that he didn’t hear her because she was already a ghost. “But that first time, you saw her? She can make herself visible?”
“She puts her energy into one thing at a time: either being visible or handling objects.” He takes a delicate sip of his steaming tea. It has been brought to us on a silver platter, and I haven’t even noticed.
The glass looks filthy, but I grasp it from the top so as not to scald my fingertips, and let the liquid flow over the mint leaves and past my lips.
“She was dressed in a very antique style, but her hands and face were transparent. With the fright, I dropped my books. She disappeared, but the books returned to the shelves on their own. They didn’t return to where I’d gotten them. It was her own system. She appeared again, very close to me, and spoke to me in Ladino. I shouldn’t have been able to understand her so well. But it was like I had heard her all my life. She said she was one of the first people who came to live in Chaouen.”
“A Sephardic Jew from medieval Spain? That’s insane,” I say.
“Insane or sane, it’s true. She explained that she loved books. Then she pointed out that I was staring. She said it was all right, though, since I was her husband. I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘I’m your husband?’ And she disappeared.
“The old man at the desk shouted ‘Thank you!’ And I heard the bells on the door jingle as it shut. I looked around, and no one was there. I took the books off the shelf and considered leaving with them. But when I opened the door, it slammed in my face.”
“Oh!” I reach across the table. His tea glass is empty, and his hand is warm. “The opposite of what happened to me. It slammed shut behind me as if I should never go back.”
“She reappeared before me. She said, ‘You are my husband and I, your wife. You stay here with me, and I help you. We’ve made a deal.’ It seems that by saying I was her husband, I became trapped. I replaced the old man who was here before me. That was five years ago.”
This man has been unable to leave the general vicinity of the bookshop as long as I’ve been widowed. The coincidence is too much for me, what with his similar features, so I shake it off. “She tricked you. There must be a way out.” I feel myself stepping into the same murky territory as he has done with his incautious utterance.
He presses my hand between his and gazes into my eyes. “You want to help me?”
“Maybe,” I backpedal, even though it’s the same drowning sensation as telling my dying husband, who hated hospitals, that I couldn’t take care of him at home.
“Someone else has to come into the bond and make an equal exchange.”
I pull away. “I’m not going to marry a ghost and live in a bookstore!”
“No, no, I think there’s an easier way.” He gestures at a narrow street off the plaza. “I parked at the end of that street five years ago. I can’t reach the car on my own, but I think if you go with me...”
Romantic visions of escaping from a beautiful prison with the new love of my life have me standing up, ready to go. “I just have to leave with you? Then the link is broken, and you’re free?”
He puts several bills on the table and stands as well. “I think so. Because she’s right. You do look at me...”
“As if you were my husband?” I say. “I’m sorry. You just look so much like him.”
“Good enough,” he says.
He takes my hand, and it’s exactly like strolling in a new place with my husband, getting a feel for our surroundings, as we nonchalantly pass the tea house where I waited before. I look at him and squeeze his hand. This might work.
“If it’s been five years, you know the car probably isn’t there,” I say. My dream rapidly disperses of his driving me to Tangier to get my suitcases. “It’s at least broken down.”
The shopkeeper stops as if he’s smacked into a wall, even though there’s no physical barrier. His grip on my hand loosens; it seems that if I let go, I can keep going down the street. But our problems aren’t solved if I walk. My husband’s Doppelgänger is still trapped, and I’m still on the move.
“How is she doing this?” I whisper. I’d rather she doesn’t hear me.
“I don’t know. It’s like this every time.” He seems to be trying to lift his feet, to walk down this perfectly normal, blue, lamplit street, but there’s no way. He turns around to see if he can move in the opposite direction, and as he lets go of my hand, he’s lifted into the air by an unseen force, glides past all the teahouses and glass lanterns as if he’s on an invisible zip line, and lands on his feet on the other side of the plaza, next to the grimy table.
I scream, and this is what gets people’s attention, not the man flying through the air. Women in djellabas and caftans swarm at me from out of the tea houses and the hotel, speaking multiple languages. I guess people don’t often let loose piercing shrieks into the night here. I push through the crowd physically, alarmed beyond verbal ability, and run across the plaza.
The shopkeeper has already disappeared. He can be nowhere but inside the bookshop. I double over, trying to catch my breath, which I don’t know if I’ve lost in the short dash across the plaza or if I’ve been holding it for five years. I look up, and the waiter from the grubby tea house is staring at me.
“Should I follow him in there?” I ask the stranger. He ducks back inside his building, wanting no part of a decision I think is going to define the rest of my life. The other people in the plaza have returned to their end-of-day tasks. I’m as alone as ever, the eternal foreigner, with no one to point me in the direction I’m supposed to go.
I think of my dear departed husband. What would he do? Suddenly, it’s as if I can hear him calling to me from inside the bookshop. I feel the pull, that force that’s kept me wandering all these years. My husband, dead for as long as this man has been a ghost’s captive, has been waiting for me here, in Chefchaouen, in this plaza, in this bookstore. What’s taken me so long?
The door gives way soundlessly, as if it didn’t exist. The store seems bright in contrast with the sleepy plaza, bathed in a cold white light I don’t remember from before. I follow a murmuring deep into the labyrinth of shelving, past the spot where the books nearly took my head off, and into a corner that seems to be the impossible: the end of the building.
The shopkeeper lies face down, repeating what sounds like a prayer into the floor. After a few repetitions, I understand the ancient Ladino: “I will never leave my wife. I will never leave my wife.”
His hands — my husband’s hands — rest atop the ghost’s pointed slippers. She is as he described: in a modest but colorful tunic with many folds and a natural linen headdress, she is clearly one of the city’s founders, but her hands and face, which are all the fabric reveals of what was once her body, are translucent. Her skin’s ethereal pearlescence contrasts with the fabric’s heavy folds. She is both there and not there, and I can’t imagine looking away from her disconcerting beauty. Her eyelids float over invisible pupils, bobbing slightly to the rhythm of the repeated words, and the curl of her lips strikes me as self-satisfied. She could receive this man’s devotion for days or years and never get enough.
The floor creaks under my foot, and the shopkeeper lifts his head to see me. He interrupts his murmured mantra to say in French, “I need your help. You know what to do.”
I don’t know what it feels like to know what to do. When my husband was so ill he finally agreed to treatment, there was nothing to be done. I watched him lie in a hospital bed, a shell of who he truly was. Nothing else was in my power, and I’ve carried that failure with me all over the globe for five years.
The shopkeeper with my husband’s face returns to his speech, louder and easier to understand now. “I will never leave my wife.”
And now I know what to do.
I look straight into the ghost’s eyes, through her eyelids, past where her pupils should be, seeking what she’s made of. I enunciate clearly in English, certain she’ll understand me. “But you know what? He’s not talking about you. I am his wife.”
The satisfaction on her face evaporates. The cold light goes out, leaving everything in warm shadows. My putative husband’s hand drops to the floor as the pointed slippers disappear with the rest of her. I instinctively duck to the floor alongside the shopkeeper and roll with him as the heavy volumes smack into the floor where we were moments ago.
I hear the very shelves creak above us; she’s testing bigger weaponry. I spring up and pull my new husband out of the aisle as the ceiling-high shelves tip into the opposite ones, dumping all their printed contents with an animal-like grunt.
“Why didn’t it work?” We’re standing in an aisle full of periodicals and loose parchment. “I said I was your wife. I’ve made the same ultimate vow she tricked you into making.”
The parchments fly at us like daggers, so he takes my hand and we run two aisles ahead. Now we’re among enormous atlases stored on their sides. “Maybe we have to leave here,” he says. He has a gash on his hand.
Leaving: the solution to everything. “Find us the fastest way out,” I say, and we run as best we can around corners, books violently falling to the floor behind us.
There’s the desk, and the front door, which has behaved differently every time I’ve used it. My husband tries the knob, then leans his weight against it. He looks at me, at a loss, then swipes the keys off the desk. He inserts one after the other into the lock but, of course, nothing fits.
The ghost materializes behind him, exhaling ice and tension down his neck.
“Where do you think you might go?”
Her hand floats toward the keys, but she can’t grasp them. It’s as he said — she can do only one thing at a time. I’m relieved she’s not all-powerful, and I speak, my voice resonating through her wispy face. “I’m his wife, I’m alive, I’m leaving, and I’m taking him with me.”
“You cannot. He is my husband.”
The shopkeeper murmurs, concentrating his power in the rumbling syllables. “No. She is my wife, and I am her husband.”
It’s like a reverse explosion. The ghost’s volume collapses at the sound of his last word into a hovering point of light that burns into a single ash and flutters to the floor. It hurts my eyes, and it’s only when I open them again that I see the groaning sound was the front door opening.
My husband extends his hand, which is still bleeding lightly, to me. I take it, and we’re in the plaza, breathing air without the perfumes of glue and ink in it. It’s a shame to abandon all those books, but then again, who knows what curses might linger within their pages?
The shopkeeper’s sedan might have once been blue like the street. The tires are flat, and the windows have been broken out, leaving glass stones all over the interior like frost. But it’s so miraculous that the car is there at all, my husband whips out the keys the ghost couldn’t get earlier and ceremoniously opens the door. He brushes the glass off the seats, then raises the passenger side lock by hand, and I get in.
The dashboard is coated in bird droppings and the remnants of a small nest, and several wires poke out of the steering wheel. My husband laughs melodiously and pockets the keys.
His mouth invites me to seal our bond with a kiss. “Where to, my love?”
I start to say something, but the thought flees, because, although this is a joke my husband would’ve made, this man’s smile is so different. Beautiful still, but different. The face I’m looking at isn’t my husband’s at all. This face has brown hair, brown eyes, and an aquiline nose, but they’re fuller, younger, warmer, alive.
I have no obligation to stay with this man. The words we pledged in the bookshop bind spirits, but not living human beings.
I laugh at the futility of this new freedom. And I decide to go in for the kiss anyway.
Copyright © 2025 by Jessica Knauss
