Sleeping in Flame

The cameo of Benedikt was large and vaguely yellow from age. He wore a dark suit and formal shirt, but no tie. Not only did we look alike, but for the first time I realized he wore an expression halfway between amusement and small exasperation that I often had on. My mother called me Mr. Long-suffering whenever she saw it. So, the last public image of Moritz Benedikt was as Mr. Long-suffering. Too bad for him. It made me smile. I wanted to smile then or just generally lighten up because the more I looked at my . . . self, the more nervous and uncomfortable I became. Besides the impossible similarity in looks, I had a gooseflesh chill going up the middle of my spine from something else as well. Some people, after shivering involuntarily, are asked what's the matter. The common answer I'd heard all my life was "Someone just walked over my grave." How's this, though – imagine coming across your grave, replete with a picture of you on it wearing one of your most recognizable expressions. Only it isn't your grave and it isn't your stone and it isn't a picture of you and the person in the ground there has been dead thirty years. That ground two feet in front of you.

Two old women, both dressed in black, both carrying identical purses, walked by. One of them looked at me and nodded her head.

"Guten Tag, Herr Rednaxela."

The name stuck its finger in my ear, but I couldn't remember where I'd heard it before. I smiled at the woman as if I knew her and what she was talking about.

"It took you a long time to get here!"

Her friend looked angry and shook her head. "Leave him alone. He's way ahead of schedule."

Rednaxela. The crazy man on the bicycle the first day in Vie

Without really seeing, I watched the two women start walking away.

"Wait!" I ran a few steps to catch them. "What are you talking about? Who's Rednaxela?"

Both women smiled and exchanged glances – they were in on something I didn't know anything about. One of them gave me a little coquettish shrug. "That's your job to find out. You've come this far."

The other one came up and patted my shoulder. "Everybody's proud of you. Don't mind what I said before. I was only teasing."

They began to leave again. I grabbed the one closest by the arm and pulled her around to face me. Her smile vanished. "Don't touch me! Stop asking questions. Fuck off!"

I shook her arm. It was thin as a pipe cleaner through the thick wool of her coat. "What are you talking about? Who's Rednaxela? How do you know me?"

A bunch of birds on the grass started as one and flew away.

The woman saw a young couple nearby and started screaming in a squeaky voice, "Help! Let me go! Leave me! Help!" Her companion hit me on the back with her purse. The couple came ru

"Who's Rednaxela, damn it!"

"You'll find out, shithead!"

"Just tell me now."

"The fuck I will, so

I started back at her, but the man held me.

"Hey, man, are you crazy? That's an old woman!" He was strong and wasn't going to let go.

The old women scuttled away, watching me the whole time over their shoulders. At first they both looked terrified, but when they were a safe distance away, one of them laughed like a loon and made a crazy face at me: thumbs in her ears, pinkies pulling out the corners of her mouth, her tongue zipping in and out like a snake's. Her laugh was so strange and loud that the man, his wife, and I all stopped tussling to watch the two women as they turned and disappeared among the gravestones.

"Are you crazy, man? Beating up on old ladies? What the hell for?"

He let go of me and crossed his arms – a father expecting an explanation from his ten-year-old.

"Forget it. It was a mistake." I was embarrassed and angry and wished like hell I knew where the "ladies" had gone.

"You don't shake up old ladies in graveyards, man. I don't care what you do in your own country."

I looked at him. "What are you talking about?"

"This is Austria. I don't care how you treat people in your own country. Even if that was your grandmother. Here you do it our way."

His wife came up and gave me a defiant look. "Where are you from? What kind of language was that? I used to work out at the United Nations, but I never heard people talking as crazy as that before."

"What do you mean?"

"That language. Those sounds you were using. Both you and the old women. Where are you from?"

Her husband gave a big snort. "The ocean maybe! Maybe they're all three dolphins in drag."

I looked at him, his wife. "What did it sound like?" I was frightened.

She looked at me as if I were putting her on. "You know what it sounded like. You were doing it!"

Her man snorted again. "What did it sound like? It sounded like this." He put two fingers together and started whistling – whistling so loud that it startled a flock of birds out of a nearby chestnut tree. I looked at him, then at his wife. She nodded at me.

"That's it. Just like that. Where do you speak like that? Can you do it again?" She smiled encouragingly.

I didn't tell Maris. What would I say? "I met two old women at the cemetery today. I attacked one and spoke dolphin-whistle to the other. Then they ran away and stuck their tongues out at me." It would have been a fu

And what about that strange language I was supposed to have spoken with them? Where did it fit in, and why hadn't I been aware of speaking anything other than my good old American German?

Who was Rednaxela? Or if I was him, as two nutty old women and a bearded UFO on a bicycle contended, who was he/I? How come I didn't know anything about who "we" were? Or did I?

Finally, what did Moritz Benedikt have to do with it? Joking, the old woman said it'd taken me long enough to figure out that I had to come to the cemetery to see his grave . . .

How did it all fit in? What screws or pieces or instructions were missing from the kit that would enable me to put things together correctly and understand?

I knew a peculiar American in town named David Buck who spent most of his time in the National Library researching an obscure sixteenth-century German Anabaptist who'd camped out in Austria for a while. Buck was forever broke and looking for ways to make money. So I called and said I'd pay him to research Moritz Benedikt. All I knew about the man were his dates and the fact that he was buried in the Zentralfriedhof, but Buck said that was enough to go on. He would get back to me when he had something.

Nicholas's death and the bizarre scene at the cemetery shook me badly. I spent days just reading, looking out the window, and eating the good meals Maris cooked. She kept me company and shared a comfortable, necessary silence. At first I tried to hide the dark things swimming just below my surface, but she saw them fast and said I didn't have much faith in us if I did that.

"The whole purpose of friendship is to give the other strength when they need it. Don't cheat me out of that perk, Walker."

To complicate things, Eva Sylvian called two or three times a day, every day. The conversations (monologues) were all the same. It struck me she would have been happier taping what she said on a recorder, then playing it back so she could agree with herself. She asked if we would do this or that for her, ranging from helping to choose the inscription on Nicholas's vault to picking up her dry cleaning. The tone of her voice said she expected these things to be done. Maris said it sounded more as if Eva felt she deserved to be loved, if not for herself, then certainly for her loss. Fu