Sleeping in Flame

He had been a poet, a man capable of taking our endlessly long Russian words and sewing them invisibly together into beautiful quilts of language and imagery. While the cancer squeezed that last of him in its stone fist, he began work on a play about a child who accidentally builds a new Tower of Babel with toy blocks. My father died silent and sad because his body wouldn't permit him to finish the first act. The inscription on his grave read Dum vita est, spes est. While there is life, there is hope. He chose it himself.

I didn't know my mother because she'd died when I was born. However, my father, who had the very un-Russian name Melchior, was almost enough to compensate for a life without her. He cooked and cleaned for us, showed me off to the world as his greatest achievement and joy, and spoke to me from the very begi

An old couple nearby stood in front of a small grave and spoke approvingly of how well Nikolai looked. I looked at the tombstone and saw that Nikolai (their son?) had been dead forty years. Father would have appreciated their ongoing love. Like Heinrich Heine, most of his work had been a hymn to the good in life. One of his friends, Nozdryov, said Melchior Kroll admired thieves for their initiative, earthquakes for changing the scenery, and a cholera plague for inspiring artists to their greatest work. But the same Nozdryov fell on his knees and wept the day they lowered my father into the earth.

"We didn't deserve him, Alexi. If he isn't in heaven right now, then God is a whore."

In my pocket was the knife I'd used two nights before to kill the red woman. It was a beautiful Swedish knife and had always done its job perfectly, almost known by itself where that baby-soft spot just below the ear sang out to be cut. If I was in a good mood, the job was finished in two moves: once hard below the ear into the neck, then out again and straight into the heart. The first touch for greeting, the second to finish.

The red woman said she worked in a leather factory, making gloves. I believed her because beneath all her fingernails was the red dye she used in her job. I noticed all their hands. One woman had bitten every fingernail down to the nub, another had black on two fingers from blotting ink in her office. The red woman, the nub woman, the black woman. All of St. Petersburg was talking about it. I had become the celebrity my father should have been. I had the fingertips of each of their thumbs in my pocket. I was writing a play about it.

Bending down to his grave, I took out pieces of bread and cheese. The bread caught for a moment on the knife, so I had to reach deeper into that pocket to free it.

From behind me I heard someone shout, "Look out! It's a mad one. Look at its face!"

I turned and saw the dog. It ran, then stopped and swayed as if dancing to some secret music. People yelled at each other to watch out – it was mad, it had rabies. And of course it did, but that was him now. I stayed where I was and put my hand out for him to come to me. He tried, but his roaring eyes and rubbery legs kept him standing where he was. His thick brown tongue hung uselessly out of one side of his mouth. He saw me and growled, then whimpered. He fell down and got up, fell down again. Poor thing.

"Careful, it'll bite you!" The old man who'd come to visit his Nikolai tried weakly to pull me away. I brushed his hands away.

"Come here."

When he was a meter away, he began speaking to me in German.

"Vielleicht hist du Rippenbiest, Hammelwade, oder Schnьrbein?"

I put my hand out again to touch him. When I moved, his eyes cleared to a ferocious gold. He lunged, biting deep through my arm into the bone.

"Hello, Papa."

Venasque drove his Jeep like a little old man.

"I am a little old man, Walker. What do you expect?"

We were traveling north on the Pacific Coast Highway at thirty-five miles an hour. The car was packed with mysterious-looking boxes, a portable television, and both animals. The two of them either sat at attention next to each other, an inch behind my ear, or lay on their name pillows and snored like propeller planes. Untrue to his word, Venasque had an economy-size bag of M & M candies on his lap that he fed to them over his shoulder.

"They get tired traveling. This gives them some extra energy."

He kept his hands at three and nine o'clock on the steering wheel and never moved them an inch from that position. He checked both inside and outside mirrors constantly. Every hour, no matter where we were on the road, he slammed on the brakes "just to make sure they're working." I found that u

"Why'd you buy such a big car?"

"I travel to the mountains a lot. If you get in an accident in a Jeep, you don't have to worry. Besides, right before I got it, I saw John James driving one down Pico Boulevard. That was good enough for me."

"Who's John James?"

He looked at me incredulously. "Don't you watch 'Dynasty'? Jeff Colby. He's a major TV star."

A 1951 Ford passed us on the left going about twenty miles an hour.

"How much television do you watch a day?"

"As much as I can. When I don't have to teach, I try to go straight through."

"You watch all day?"

"Don't sound condescending, Walker. Can you remember your last three lives? I remember mine. Can you fly? I can. Can you do this?" He took something off the dashboard – a snapshot of his animals. With one hand, he stood the picture vertically on the tip of his thumb. It stayed there and didn't move. Reaching over, I took it and did the same trick on my own finger. Like the day in Maris's apartment with her photograph of Luc.

"Good! You can do that. It saves me some time. Who taught you?"

"No one. It happened by itself."

He checked both rearview mirrors. "Nope. Lesson number one: Nothing happens by itself. It happens either because you got a special talent, or because you teach yourself. Looks like with this, you found part of yourself in that photo and it said hello to you."

"I don't understand." I put the picture down on the seat.

"You want to hear how it happened to me?"

"I'd love to, but do you think you could first speed up a little and go around this guy? He keeps looking back as though he's afraid we're going to hit him."

Venasque gave it some gas and passed a man struggling along on a bicycle. When we were by, the rider gave us the finger and shook his head. Venasque waved.

"Back in France before the war, I was a kindergarten teacher. The best job I ever had. I sat in a room and watched little kids grow up. The only things I had to teach them were fun to do, and most of the time all we did was laugh. I taught well, too, because if you failed them, you failed life.

"It took a long time for the war to reach us because our town was unimportant, but when it did, it was like a knife in the eye. Nice people I'd known all my life started wearing uniforms and flying Nazi flags and saying Jews were shit. We tried to ignore it, but couldn't.

"Then people started taking their kids out of our school because both my sister and I taught there and we were Jews."

"The Nazis killed her, didn't they?"

Venasque licked his lips and nodded. "You know that too? Yes, they shot Ilonka and her husband Raymond in their own garden. Someone told me she had a strawberry in her mouth when they picked up her body. Death doesn't even let you finish your meal, huh? That was the same day they came for me and the children. Do you remember that?"

I looked at him. "Should I?"

"You were there, Walker. I thought you might remember. Yes."