I looked at that corner awhile, then up toward Uschi's apartment, then at the corner again. It was time for Rednaxela to go home.
3.
I pulled the handbrake up tight, gave the motor one last goose, then turned it off. The Renault shivered and coughed, as if angry the trip was finally over. But Maris and I weren't. We had driven all night from Munich through a snowstorm straight out of Doctor Zhivago. What was worse, the car had no snow tires, heated only our feet (sort of), and the windshield wipers marched to the beat of a truly different drummer. Four times we'd had to pull off the dark and treacherous autobahn to scrape icy slush off the windshield. The last time, outside Linz, the car wouldn't start again when we climbed back in. Nietzsche said there are times when things get so bad you either laugh or go crazy. Another option is to sit in a cold Renault R4 that won't start and eat Extrawьrst sandwiches at four in the morning.
The car was loaded to the gills with her things, which included seven large LEGO cities, a stuffed Russian crow, and a state-of-the-art Atari computer that looked like something the Pentagon used. The cities and crow made sense, but the computer was a surprise. It turned out she used it to sketch and design the cities before she built them.
As soon as I got out, my neck and back felt as though I'd been hefting cement bags for the last nine hours. Bending over and touching my toes a few times, some of the hairier moments on the road came back to give me the creeps. I looked through the car window and saw she was doing stretches, too.
"Remember how that border guard looked at your crow?"
"It was the only thing that interested him. I'm sure he thought I had heroin or something inside. Walker, you know how much I appreciate your helping me."
"Would you have done the same thing?"
"You know I would."
"Right. So I just did what you would have done."
"Don't be so gallant. You did me a really big favor and I appreciate it a lot."
"That's good. Let's start unpacking your things."
"Don't you want breakfast first? Let me treat. We can go to Aida and have hot Tцpfen golatschen."
"If I fill my stomach now and get warm and cozy, I'll go into coma. Let's take the first couple of loads up to your place and then have coffee there."
"Gut Sowieso."
Although she spoke fluent, unaccented German, having lived there so long, it almost always surprised me when she slipped unconsciously into Deutsch. Once, when I asked her what language she thought in, she said both.
"Okay, Ms. Sowieso, let's go."
After studying the real estate section of the newspaper every day for two weeks, Maris had found a small, recently renovated studio apartment in a Biedermeier house on the edge of the Wienerwald. The owners were a rich, unpleasant couple named Schuschitz who immediately announced that the big untidy lawn behind the house was not for her to use. I told her no one with that name and that much pettiness deserved her rent money, but Maris said she was sure they'd all get along fine after awhile. And she was right.
I took the computer out of the car and gingerly made my way across the icy street to the front gate. She unlocked it, and then went back to get a load from the car.
It was seven o'clock in the morning and the sun was just up, but the hard cold stillness and heavy gray sky were not the best welcome home to our first day back in Vienna. As I struggled up the outside stairs to her apartment, Diplom Ingenieur Schuschitz (as the big brass plaque on their numerous doors announced) came toward me.
"So, Frau York finally decided to bring her things and stay awhile, eh?"
He had the face of a man who was sure he had all the answers and would be happy to tell them, if only you were smart enough to ask. But I knew his wife had all the money from her side of the family, and treated him with the sweet dismissal due the fool she'd married a long time ago when they were both young, she was naive, and he only was good-looking.
I was about to say something unpleasant when Maris came up close behind me.
"Frau York, that's not your computer is it? What do you do with something like that?" he asked.
"I'm working on schematic physiology right now, and need the machine to do the representative zero zone equations. It's much faster that way."
He looked puzzled, then hunted: If he stood there a moment longer, we'd discover he didn't know a thing about "schematic physiology."
Smiling like a nervous rat, he welcomed her home and hurried past.
I waited till I heard the gate close behind him, then said over my shoulder, "I didn't know you were good at zero zone equations."
She laughed a little. "Sure, he's an ass, but remember, I have to live in their house. Anyway, that's how you treat people like that: Make 'em know how dumb they are, and they go away feeling a little less pleased with themselves."
For the next hour we toted Maris's old environment into her new one. It was another way of getting to know her. She liked rough-edged singers like Tom Waits and Screaming Jay Hawkins ("You like cool music, but I want to hear the kind that tears your heart out"), heavy, laced shoes and boots, obscure novels in both English and German. I'd helped pack these boxes in Munich, but we did everything in a hurry so as to be out of there as quickly as possible. To tell the truth, she'd been calmer than I then, but I wasn't ashamed of that nervousness. From the moment we rode west out of Vienna two days before, I'd had a deep-seated feeling I would do something both extreme and regrettable if Luc showed up.
In the month we'd been together, Maris slowly told the tale of her relationship with him. Too much of it reminded me of the ingredients in the witches' pot in Macbeth: fillet of fenny snake, a toad dead under a rock thirty days, sweat from the body of a just-hung man. She resented the comment when I said it, but there was no avoiding the fact she'd tied up with a high-level psychopath with a Ph.D. in creative sadism.
They'd met through a mutual friend, and from the beginning Luc had done all the chasing. Charming and clever and vulnerable (she thought), he called constantly, sent exotic flowers, took her to meals he paid for with borrowed or stolen money. They slept together for the first time in a seven-room apartment in Schwabing he said was his, but later turned out to belong to an old lover he threatened to beat if she didn't get out for two days and leave him the keys. He told Maris truths like that when their own relationship had degenerated into a series of ominous scenes and dangerous possibilities. One afternoon he came over to her and a date at Schumann's and sadly scolded her for not telling this man she had AIDS. Just because she was dying didn't mean she had the right to kill others, no matter how bitter she was.
"He sounded so heartbroken and convincing, Walker. The other guy ended up thanking Luc as if he'd saved his life."
"What did you do?"
"What can you do? Say you don't have AIDS? That's a hard accusation to follow, you know?"
Somewhere in those cardboard boxes was a film he'd made about her entitled It's Incredible! It showed the cities, her working on them, people talking about them at one of her shows. The film was all right, but pedestrian. If it was any indication of his ability as a film director, it didn't say much. When they started having trouble, he took the film and added a new section: He stole her favorite piece of work, and filmed himself pouring gasoline over it and burning it.
"Why didn't you just leave? Or tell him to get the hell out!"
"I did, but he had a key."
"Change the lock."
"I did! But he got a locksmith and had a copy made when I wasn't there. I changed it three times. The last time, I had one of those expensive unpickable locks put in. When I came home that night, he'd squeezed Krazy Glue into the hole and even I couldn't get into my place."