GLASS SOUP Read online

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died very young—I think he was only in his early thirties. And of course most of his autographs have disappeared over the years, but there are still some left, especially up in the Wienerwald written on trees and stones. It’s the eeriest thing you can imagine to come across one out there in the middle of the Vienna Woods. I’ve heard there’s a club of Kyselak fanatics who trade maps of where they’ve found his work.

  “That’s what I want to show you now—a real Kyselak. One I discovered a few years ago.”

  “How did you find out about this guy?”

  “Petras Urbsys.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She winked at him. “That’s the second thing I want to show you tonight.”

  Isabelle’s Kyselak was written low and at a peculiar angle on the wall of a baroque church deep in the heart of the Fifth District. They stood very close together on the sidewalk while she shone her flashlight back and forth across the wall down there, again and again lighting up the signature for Ettrich. Eventually she turned off the light and they stood together in the cold, looking toward the dark wall.

  Ettrich said, “Can you imagine how happy Kyselak would be to know that almost two hundred years after he did that, a pretty woman would be showing it off in the middle of the night as her treasure? That’s pretty damned cool.”

  “Treasure? Yes, it’s true. I like that, Vincent. I never thought of it that way, but it really is a treasure to me.”

  “Who else have you shown it to?”

  She hesitated a moment before answering. “No one—only you.”

  He was startled by how much his happiness leapt up at that news. Just him—only him.

  “Come on—I want to show you something else.” She put her gloved hand through the crook of his arm and gently pulled him forward. It was the first time they had touched since dancing together back at the party. She led them away from where her car was parked. Ettrich looked once over his shoulder toward it.

  She noticed it. “Don’t worry—this won’t take long.”

  “I’m not worried. It’s only that I left my gloves in the car and was wondering if I should go back and get them.”

  Without hesitating she slid her hand down his arm into the coat pocket and took his cold bare hand in her warm gloved one. What was most lovely about the gesture was that she made no big deal about it. She did it to warm his hand and nothing more. Only kindness, that rarest of things when it comes pure. With another woman in another circumstance it would have meant a moment, a decisive event happening between them. But instinctively he knew that wasn’t the case here. Her simple thoughtfulness delighted him.

  He looked toward their hands and then at her. “Where are we going?”

  “I told you—to Petras Urbsys.”

  “I don’t know if that sounds like a person or a Russian weapon. Maybe some new kind of amphibious tank.”

  She squeezed his hand. “It’s a person, although he is Russian, or was, because he’s Lithuanian.”

  “Petras—”

  “—Urbsys.”

  “Urbsys.” Ettrich waited a beat and then snuck in, “Are you sure he’s not a weapon and a Lithuanian?”

  Isabelle squeezed his hand again but didn’t appear to want to talk any more. They walked together through that nondescript working class district where the night air smelled of burning coal and wood, damp stone and winter. Cars passed, adding the acrid immediate stink of exhaust fumes. But it was late so there were not many. Once in a while a person appeared around a corner or walking toward them but these passersby kept their eyes averted. All of them were hurrying along to wherever they were going—home, or just out of that cold. It was a dull part of town in which to be taking a stroll. Other than row after row of dreary apartment buildings and the occasional run-down restaurant or gasthaus, there was nothing much to see. Ettrich wondered where they were heading.

  Halfway down the next block he slowed when he saw something. When they reached the place he motioned for her to stop. They stood in front of a brightly lit store window. Almost every other display window they’d passed was either dark or too dimly lit to see much. It was late—at that hour who was around to buy what they were selling?

  In contrast, this window glowed like Vienna needed what it had to offer day and night. That physical brightness was what had first caught his attention.

  “Check out the stuff in this window. What the hell do they sell here?” Staring at the display, he was spellbound. Ettrich had a job in advertising. Most of his days were spent trying to convince people to buy products they either didn’t know about or need. As a result, he loved to see how the rest of the world attempted to sell its products too.

  In this store window ten Old Spice cologne bottles were lined up like oddly shaped bowling pins. Next to them were six thin men’s ties in campy but now very “in” retro colors and geometric patterns. Ties from another era perfectly preserved. It was plain that they were originals. They all looked freshly cleaned and ironed; maybe they had never even been used. Dead stock. Ettrich remembered that term from the time as a boy he had worked in a stationery store. Products that were new but had never sold, so they were stored for a future time when they’d be brought out again and hopefully find a buyer.

  Standing open behind the ties was a 33⅓ record album set of the recorded speeches of General Douglas MacArthur. Near that lying open was a large illustrated book about the sculptor William Edmondson. Beneath the book were eight square bars of soap with the words White Floating etched across their middles. A foot away was an old green crocodile purse in perfect condition. Vincent could tell at a glance that it was old by the striking shape—it was the sort of bag Lauren Bacall carried tucked up under her arm in a 1940s movie.

  Scattered haphazardly between the objects in the window were black-and-white photographs from that era. Bending down for a better look, Ettrich saw that many of them featured one man. In about half of the photos he was dressed in a military uniform, but the outfit was unfamiliar. What army did it belong to?

  In one of these pictures, the man sat among three nurses wearing high complicated hairdos. Another was taken in a bar, the man and another woman sitting close to each other on chrome stools, their glasses touching in a toast. In a third snapshot he was standing with this same woman, his arm around her, next to a small car, huge and beautiful snow-covered mountains looming in the background behind them.

  “Vincent.”

  Ettrich could barely tear himself away from the window and trying to make sense of all this stuff, even when it was Isabelle Neukor calling. There was something about the things in the window and the way they had been arranged. Was it the strangeness of them placed together? Or the obvious care and thought that had gone into the display? The whole tableau reminded him of a very personal photo album, or a shelf in someone’s living room where the most cherished, important keepsakes and talismans were kept.

  “Look up.”

  “What?”

  She lifted her arm and pointed to something high up. “Look there. Look over the door.”

  Not understanding why she wanted that, Ettrich nonetheless did what she said. Looking up, he saw a large black-and-white sign over the doorway that said only “PETRAS URBSYS.”

  He couldn’t believe it. “Here? This is the place you were bringing me, Isabelle?”

  “Yup. You can go back to looking in the window. It’s great, isn’t it? He changes it every week.”

  “He’s selling his life.” Isabelle licked her spoon.

  Ettrich stared intently into his coffee cup as he listened to her speak. Otherwise if he looked at Isabelle he’d surely lose track of his thoughts. “Say again?”

  They sat in the back of the smoky café Alt Wien, one of the few places in town that stays open very late. They’d gone there after Vincent had had his fill of staring in the window at Petras Urbsys.

  Isabelle tapped the back of his hand with the spoon. “That’s what he ha
s in the store: everything from his life. Or a lot of it; the things that mattered enough to him to keep. And now he’s selling all of it.”

  “How do you sell your life? And why would you?”

  “Because he’s an old man who wants to see his treasures go to good homes before he dies. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Most of what’s for sale in his store are records and CDs. Petras is crazy for music—all kinds. I think he has something like five thousand records.”

  “Yes, but Isabelle, there were also old bars of soap in that window! Don’t tell me he’s selling the soap he’s collected over the years too.”

  “Could be. It wouldn’t surprise me. But think about it for a minute. You’re old and lonely. No one cares about you anymore and no one wants to listen to you. Your stories, your complaints, whatever hopes and dreams you have left: no-one-cares. It’s always like that with old people.

  “But you’ve got some money saved, too much time on your hands, and a million memories you want to share. Can you think of anything better than to open a store and sell everything that matters to you to customers who will enjoy it as much as you did? And Petras wants to talk to you before he sells you anything. Because if he doesn’t like the person, no sale. I’ve seen him refuse more than once.

  “He said that most of the people who come into his store are lonely old ones like him who only want to chat, music fanatics with his kind of taste, or just interesting people who look in his window, get intrigued by what they see and can’t resist going in.”

  Ettrich rubbed his forehead because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. “And he has customers?”

  “Oh yes, almost every time I go in there he’s talking to someone. A lot of the time the people look lonely or ragged, or like they just stepped out of a UFO, but he’s okay with that.

  “You know that dancing Elvis on the dashboard of my car? One of his customers gave it to me—an Elvis fanatic. I was in the store the day Petras sold the guy a very rare live recording of Elvis in Las Vegas singing ‘Ave Maria.’” Although Vincent and Isabelle both happened to be looking at their hands on the table when she said this, they cackled at almost the same time at the image of the King singing that most holy of songs. In Vegas.

  When he spoke again his voice was as excited as a child’s. “You’ve got to introduce me to this Petras. I’ve got to meet him.”

  Isabelle nodded. “We can go there tomorrow if you like.”

  “Do you promise?”

  It was such a funny thing for him to say, but somehow it made her very happy. “Vincent, I promise.”

  Petras

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Vincent spoke as he rubbed his eyes slowly with the heels of his hands: “That we should go talk to Petras about this.”

  They were again sitting in the car in the Wienerwald. Hietzl rested its head on Ettrich’s shoulder. The windows were rolled down. Isabelle crossed her arms and, turning away from him, listened to the world outside. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

  Reaching forward, he poked dancing Elvis on the dashboard. “I was thinking about the night we met and where you told me you got him.” He gestured toward the small figure.

  When she spoke her voice was wholly different. It came out high pitched, fast and querulous, like an angry child’s. “I don’t want to do that, Vincent. I really, really don’t want to go to Petras for this.”

  “I understand. I’d feel the same way if I was you. But I think we have to unless you can come up with something else.”

  She knew he was right but that didn’t make it any easier. Isabelle had known half an hour ago that it was her only course of action. The moment she’d learned what the cicada sound out there really was, the first thing that had come to mind was “Petras.” And she hated that.

  Now she looked again at Vincent, her eyes pleading.

  He saw that desperation and took her hand. “Sweetheart, do whatever you think is best. You know I’ll support you. If you don’t want to deal with him, then don’t. I just have no other idea of what to do.”

  “You haven’t said yet what you think is happening to me, Vincent. You haven’t said a word about it; except that I bring back the dead whenever I return from there.”

  She was being ingenuous. Sometimes she did that when she was trying to hide from the truth of a situation. It was an unattractive, weak ploy. But now he wasn’t having it because this development was too big and dangerous. Isabelle had to face the truth and deal with it immediately.

  His voice came out hard—harder than he would have liked. “What can I say that you don’t already know, Fizz? You brought me back from the dead. To do that, you had to learn how to go there and Petras taught you. But remember, he told you back then what the consequences of doing it could be.

  “You know the way into death but now someone is using it against you. They’re pulling you back through that door whenever they want to, whether you like it or not. For some reason they’ve been taking you to Haden’s death. I don’t know why.”

  “I think they want our baby because Anjo’s a danger to them. We’ve known that a long time.”

  “And why do you think I should see Petras?”

  Irritated, Ettrich made a slow fist and lowered his chin to his chest. “Do you really need me to answer that question?”

  Her mouth tightened. “Don’t talk like that, Vincent. Not now. I want you to help, not scold me. And yes, say why you think I should go see him.”

  Vincent’s first impulse was to blurt out an emotional response. But he held himself back and instead reached over his shoulder and scratched the dog on the top of the head a while before speaking. “After I died, you went to Petras and he showed you how to enter death and bring me back here. And he was right—it worked. I honestly think we need to talk to him now about all of this and hear what he has to say about it. There’s no one else we can turn to, Isabelle. If anyone can give us advice on what to do with all this, it’s him.”

  Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof is one of the largest cemeteries in Europe. It is a gigantic, mostly beautiful, anti-Semitic place. Enter through the heroic main gates and one gets the impression that you are walking into a grand Elysian Fields—like resting place of the great and famous. You would not be surprised to see a grazing white unicorn there, or the contented ghost of Franz Schubert walk by, hands behind his back, deep in thought about his next work of genius. Mozart’s grave is near the entrance and so is Beethoven’s. Walk a little farther on and there are the final homes of more of the great and near-great: eminent writers, generals who fought and fell in celebrated battles, politicians, doctors, architects, and social reformers who made a real difference in their lifetimes. Farther along are the family plots—the huge Jugendstil or baroque whipped cream monuments of the rich, and the infinitely more dignified simple black stones/gold lettering of the gut burgerlich others.

  But the dirty little secret of Vienna’s main cemetery is the Jewish section. Many of the tombstones there have been vandalized or overturned and left that way. The entire section is indifferently tended by the cemetery’s large grounds staff.

  Isabelle and Ettrich had walked in the friedhof for almost fifteen minutes before reaching this area. Much of the time the only sound between them was that of their footsteps on the pavement and gravel. A thick hedge of misunderstanding and resentment had grown up between them since they sat in the car in the Vienna Woods trying to make some sense of all that had happened to them that day.

  Isabelle knew where they were going here, Ettrich did not. He had visited this cemetery on several occasions but never this section, never for this purpose. Walking slightly behind her, he felt like a child that accompanies its parents on a Sunday to lay a wreath on Grandpa’s grave.

  She stopped, hesitated a moment as if to get her bearings, and then took a left down one of the rows.

  “Fizz?”

  Ignoring him, she kept moving.

  Ettrich sped up, touched the back of her arm
and hoped she would stop. She did.

  But then he didn’t know what to say. He’d said her name only to make her stop a moment and look at him. He loved her so much and knew that he had done everything wrong in the last hour. He was desperate to fix things between them, especially now when they needed each other so much.

  “Yes?” Her voice and body language showed only impatience.

  Vincent’s mind ran all over the place looking to find something right to say, but finally he could only come up with “What… what are we looking for?”

  “The ark. It’s around here. We’re close—I remember these surroundings from the last time I was here.” She moved off without looking at him. Her tone of voice had been neutral, only informative.

  “What ark?”

  “The gravestone is a copy of William Edmondson’s sculpture called ‘Noah’s Ark.’ This one is just bigger than the original. There! Way down there—I see it.”

  He looked where she was pointing. Knowing nothing about either the Edmondson sculpture or the grave they sought, Ettrich logically scanned the many headstones around them for some kind of stone boat, some kind of “ark.” He saw none but Isabelle kept walking determinedly in one direction so he dutifully followed.

  A few minutes later she stopped in front of a brownish gray headstone that was shaped like some sort of peculiar house. Or rather two houses because part of the peculiarity was that one rested on top of the other. The higher one was smaller and had the same shape as the plastic houses used in the game Monopoly. It had four sides, six windows, and a slanting gabled roof. There was absolutely nothing special about the building.

  It rested in form-fitting niches on the flat “roof” of the larger house. That second one had four windows and at one end what Ettrich assumed were double doors. Both houses perched on top of two identically sized stone slabs. On one of them, PETRAS URBSYS was carved rather crudely and obviously by hand into the stone, along with the dates that he had lived.

  “I thought you said Noah’s Ark.” Ettrich certainly did not want to cause any more trouble with her. But looking at this strange and mysterious monument marking Petras’s grave, he was just too curious about it not to ask.