Sleeping in Flame (28 page)

"All right, but only for a few minutes. I'll get Herr Lachner to sit with Lillis."

She came into the café wearing an orange housedress and pink bedroom slippers. The waitress knew her and brought over a glass of white wine without being asked.

While she drank I looked closely at Elisabeth's face, trying to find the woman of my forty-year-old dream. Some people keep their looks all their lives. Whether they get fat or thin, the face stays with them, like their fingerprints. Moritz's wife was from the other group. In my dream she was thin and drawn from the war. Since then, she'd traded her face for potatoes and bread, and white wine at eleven in the morning.

"What do you want today?"

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"You said you believed Kaspar Benedikt had special powers. Did you mean that?"

She drank and nodded at the same time. Her glass was already three-quarters empty and she signaled for another. "I told you, I come from

Greece, so I've seen some people with powers, mister. Believe it or not, I've seen ghosts, and a woman told my future exactly by reading lamb bones."

"Yes, I remember that. If you do believe, Mrs. Benedikt, then I want to tell you a dream I had. It might scare you, but it's necessary that you hear it."

"When you've lived with a midget, then a war, then Lillis, not much scares you. Tell me."

"Okay. In the dream I'm coming into the Westbahnhof on a troop train from France. The train cars are all green brown and they're filled with soldiers coming back after the war. I'm looking out the window of our car but

I can't see you or Papa." Elisabeth's mouth tightened when she heard that word. I expected her to say something, but she only closed her eyes and shook her head. "Should I go on?"

"Yes."

"I'm trying to think of what I'm going to say to you if you're there, but my mind is blank.

Tonight, or whenever I get you into bed, I'm going to tell you that. I'm going to tell you I'm so excited to see and . . . touch you that I don't know what to say."

"What else?"

"Are you all right?"

"Yes. What else?" The waitress brought her second glass, but she only put her hand around it.

"I get off the train carrying two big duffle bags with me. In one of them are two pairs of red silk underpants I got for you when I was in Paris.

As the train comes to a squeaking stop, I see you and Papa standing maybe twenty meters down the platform. You wave to me and start to run, but he holds you back."

Her eyes still closed, she spat out, "The little shit. I'll remember that the rest of my life. What nerve! He grabbed my arm and said so loudly that everyone around us could hear, 'I go first.

You think he wants to see you before he sees his father?' I was so embarrassed to be there with him anyway.

People would think we were related or something."

"The end of the dream is looking over his shoulder as I hugged him. I wanted to see where you were. You _were_ the first one I wanted to see."

She gave one hard laugh, almost a grunt. "I know. That's what you told me that night." She opened her eyes. "You dreamed that?"

"You're not surprised?"

"Why? I believe in reincarnation. I thought something was strange about your wanting to come and talk to me. After I saw your face I was sure something else was going on inside you."

"Then I want to tell you some other things."

We were there an hour. In between she made a phone call to the man watching Lillis and said she would be back soon.

I told her everything but what had happened with the computer and the fairy tale. The dreams, the prophetic visions, the deaths of my friends.

Unlike the first time we'd met, she was quiet, but when she did speak, it was to ask an interesting or perceptive question. I began to understand why her husband had cared so much for her.

When I was almost finished I described my experiences with the man on the bicycle and how he'd welcomed me "back" as

Rednaxela.

"I'm cold."

"Would you like to put on my jacket?" I started to take it off.

"That won't help. I'm cold _inside_. There's nothing you can do about that. My friend Herr
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Lachner has met his sister from their last incarnation.

She lives in Perchtoldsdorf. Now I've met my husband. Looking at you, I'm not surprised."

She was suspiciously calm. Had I gotten through?

"Mrs. Benedikt, let's say it's true. Let's say I am your late husband and Kaspar Benedikt has returned too, as the man on the bicycle."

"That's why I'm cold. I think it's true. I want to know what he'll do to us this time. You've seen Lillis. What more could he do?"

"Do you know why he hurt your son?"

"He was also Moritz's son. Have you ever seen a man with no _Spatzy_?"

"_Spatzy_? What's that?"

"A penis. Prick. Pee-pee."

"No."

"I have: Kaspar Benedikt. A midget with no prick. Can you think of a worse combination? I always wondered how he made Moritz. Once, I went into the store to meet Moritz for lunch.

The old man didn't know I was there and walked out of the back room with only a shirt on. No pants or underpants. I couldn't help looking, you know? I saw it for only a second or two, but there was nothing there, or it was smaller than the eye could see. It was only red down there and, I don't know, shiny. Like a scar from a burn."

"Rumpelstiltskin."

"What?"

"Nothing. What did you do when you saw it?"

"Choked. Made some shocked noise because that's when he saw me."

I sat forward. "What did he do?"

"The pig! He pulled up his pants fast but then asked me if I wanted to lick him there. That's when we really started hating each other. I don't let anyone talk to me like that. Nobody."

Almost to myself I said,. "He isn't human."

"Whatever he is, or whatever he was, wasn't very human. You don't know how the man treated me, even before we knew Lillis was coming. I tell you, he hated me because he knew how much his son loved me. In the beginning he only ignored me. But when he knew how much love there was between us, he got a million times worse.

"I hate to think he might be back. I was so happy when I heard he'd hung himself. The worst night of my life there I was, laughing and crying because they'd found him with a rope around his neck down on the Graben.

"You know what I did with the body?"

"Yes. Why aren't you more . . . shocked that you might be sitting across the table from Moritz?"

"Because you're not Moritz. You look like him and you remember things about me, but I don't feel anything for you. It's like bumping into an old friend forty years later. Maybe the face is familiar and maybe there are some good memories, but it's not the person you gave your soul to. The only thing that would make me jump or faint now would be to see _him_ walk into this room. I'd know it was him just as I know you're not. He'd come over here and say things only the two of us knew."

"I know some of those things, Mrs. Benedikt."

"So what? You don't know them all. That's the difference between you and Moritz. Scattered little pieces don't make a person. It's all the pieces put together that does."

A week later I made a huge mistake. Maris had been doing well in the hospital and they were talking about letting her go home early if she continued to progress.

On the other side of town, I was regressing. One night I dreamed I was a young male prostitute in Vienna at the turn of the century. None of it made sense to me, but on waking I remembered what "Papa" had said about my thirty-one lives and knew this had to be one of them. It was a
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violent, sensual dream full of homosexual opera singers, barons in drag, and a brothel straight out of a Jean Genet play.

"Come here, little boy. I've bought your breath."

For the first time in those other worlds I'd traveled (lived?) in, I felt thoroughly trapped and afraid. I have never been to a whore, but if their world is anything like that, they have my full sympathy. All that mattered there were orgasms and fantasy. But the orgasms came too quickly (or not at all) and the fantasies were like bad stage sets. I didn't even know my name because the men called me different things. It was not a degrading experience because I felt so distant from what was done to me. No, the fear came from feeling this is it, I'll never leave here. This will be where I end my life.

The morning after, I got out of bed and immediately began looking through Maris's boxes for her tarot cards. After an hour I realized she often carried them in her purse, so there was a good chance she had them at the hospital.

In a great mood when I got there, she hesitated only a bit before agreeing to do a reading for me. How could I have been so selfish and thoughtless? Why didn't I once think that her problem _might_ be due to my magic, or "Papa," and not natural causes? So much else had gone wrong because of those things. Perhaps I didn't consider them because I wanted the doctors to be right

-- it was a baby, this happened often, it was medical, and not unnatural.

From the first card she turned, I knew it was wrong to ask. The Tower.

The Eight of Swords, the Nine of Swords, Death . . . Any good card was upside down, the bad cards in every important place. I know nothing about the tarot, but I could read her face and that told me enough. By the time she turned the last one, her hand was shaking.

"Forget it." I started to sweep the cards up in my hand.

She grabbed it. "Don't do that! Don't touch my cards! I have to do it again. Give them to me, Walker. Now!"

"Forget it."

"Give them!"

"It doesn't _matter_, Maris!"

"It does. I have to do it for me too. Don't you understand?"

I handed them back. After shuffling many times, she laid down exactly the same hand.

"Oh, God. Walker, call the doctor. I think I'm bleeding again."

She was, and this time there was a rush of doctors and hurried talk.

Luckily, Doctor Scheer was on duty and explained what was happening.

"It's not good, Mr. Easterling. Everything was going well until now, but this indicates serious problems. We're going to have to keep much closer watch now, especially with that baby inside her. Doctor Lauringer said he's very concerned she might lose it if the bleeding continues."

"Could it have been stress?"

"That is as good a reason as any."

I stood in the parking lot outside, looking up at the sky.

"Help _her_, for God's sake. Use whatever you have to help her. She's your life, Walker. She's in there and she's sick and you're not helping at all. Think about Maris first. Think about the baby.

Save them and you save yourself. Save them and you've saved yourself."

Dave Buck looked like a refugee from Woodstock. He wore a full-length beard, American army fatigues, and combat boots. I'd been to his apartment once and the only picture in the whole place was a psychedelic poster of Moby

Grape.

If he wasn't deep in the bowels of the National Library looking up facts on his Anabaptist, Buck was walking the city. He knew more about the place than most Viennese, and would often take
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me to see some strange Roman ruin or undiscovered junk store way out in the Twenty-third District that sold old war medals and uniforms.

"The problem with the Brothers Grimm is there's been too much written on them. I got your info for you, but I've been in the friggin' library too long.

My eyes feel like old headlights. Let's walk the Ring and I'll tell you what I found."

Any guidebook will tell you that Vienna is one of the great walking cities in the world. The streets are either wide and tree-lined, or else crooked/narrow and filled with interesting or odd stores. The automobile is part of the city but doesn't own it yet.

Winter there means cold and mist. It rarely snows hard, but the days are short, cold, and damp.

Buck was standing at Schottentor with his bare hands under his armpits and a green camouflage watchcap on.

"You look like you're going on maneuvres."

"Yeah? Come on, I gotta get my blood moving."

We walked in front of the university, past the Burg Theatre and Town Hall.

"Are we going to hike or talk?"

"Talk." Still moving, he took a tape recorder out of one of his many pockets. "I use this when I want a quote from a book I can't take out of the library. Listen."

He turned the machine on and thumbed it to its highest volume. I took it and held it to my ear.

"'Contrary to popular belief, the Grimms did not collect their tales by visiting peasants in the countryside and writing down the tales that they heard. Their primary method was to invite storytellers to their house and then have them tell the tales aloud, which the Grimms either noted down on first hearing or after a couple of hearings. Most of the storytellers during this period were educated young women from the middle class or aristocracy.'"

He reached over and took the machine away from me. "That's it for that.

I've got a bunch of quotes for you that I'll transcribe and send over, but that's the most important one.

"The other thing you should know, and this applies to almost all of the Grimm fairy tales, the men _changed_ a hell of a lot of them before they ever saw print. The brothers were big believers in both the unification of Germany and the true German spirit, whatever that is. It meant they took stories they'd heard from their sources and edited them.

Took out sexy parts, changed morals around . . . That kind of thing. They didn't want any good German child reading salacious or lewd stuff. Bad for the upbringing. In their way, they really were kind of literary fascists. I never knew that before."

We stopped at the light in front of the entrance to the Hapsburg Palace and watched tourist busses pull in, eyes and cameras glued to their windows.

"Have you noticed that, like, every other tourist in Vienna these days is Japanese? What does that mean?"

"That they have better taste than the Americans who all go to Paris and eat at McDonald's.

"What about 'Rumpelstiltskin'? What did you find there?"