Not long before this happened, I was reading around in a poetry anthology and came across one entitled "A Space in the Air" by Jon Silkin. The last part of the poem touched me, so that I copied it down and gave it to Maris. She liked it too and put it up on the board above her desk.
And I shall always fear
The death of those we love as
The hint of your death, love.
Why had I discovered that poem then? Why had I thought it "lovely" when all it did was tell a cold truth about life that was best ignored as long as possible? Art is beautiful until it becomes real or the truth. Keats was wrong – beauty may be truth, but the truth, once lived, is rarely beautiful.
Neither Maris nor I liked Eva Sylvian. She was a loud, self-centered woman who never stopped talking about herself. She lived in the shadow of her husband because she liked being known around town as Mrs. Nicholas Sylvian. But she was also the kind of person who fights her way out of that shadow by constantly trying to dominate any conversation with stories from her own dull life. Somewhere inside, she knew the most interesting thing about her was her husband, but that only made her more strident and desperate for attention.
In the hospital, she was impossible to listen to. After the first visit neither of us had any desire to be there, because she went on and on about what she'd seen, how she'd felt when it happened, what the doctors were doing for her . . . but little about Nicholas. To put it horribly, she had finally gotten hold of the spotlight and wasn't about to give it up for anything.
But because of Maris, we went to visit Eva every day. Maris believed in continuity: If this woman was Nicholas's wife, then it was our duty to help until she was ready to walk back into her life again. We didn't need to be her friends; only to continue for a while our friendship with the man who'd loved her.
In his will he had asked to be cremated, but first they held a memorial service at his favorite building in town, the Otto Wagner-designed church on the grounds of Vienna's largest insane asylum, the Steinhof. That was in the will too, but I could never figure out whether the request was serious or another sly Nicholas joke. No matter. The Jugendstil church was filled with people. What was most heartening, the mourners came from everywhere to say good-bye to him. He would have loved to see the array.
He'd made films about old Russians, sexy spies, a foolish tour group that got lost on its way to Venice. Some of his movies were dull, others superb. But all of them were made with the greatest love toward whomever he was picturing, and that was evident everywhere. As we were walking out of the church, an old woman with a thick Ottakringer accent and an old loden coat on said to the man next to her, "Nicholas Sylvian knew us. That's why I came. He knew what was in my refrigerator, you know what I mean?"
We drove Eva to the Zentralfriedhof where the cremation would take place. It is an enormous cemetery and you can easily get lost in it if you don't know where you're going. Eva went into the crematorium and we started walking back to the car.
"What do you think of cremation?"
"Not much. I read somewhere that your soul gets destroyed if you do it. That scares me a little. I want to be buried in a nice simple box."
She stopped and looked at me. "In Vienna?"
"I don't know. I love it here, but a small part of me thinks I should be put down in my own country. If there's any life after death, I'd be able to understand the language better."
She put her arm around my back and we walked in silence. On reaching the car, she stopped and said she wanted to wander around the place for a while by herself, if I didn't mind. She would catch a tram home. I understood because I felt like being alone too. We made a date to meet for dinner and I drove off with a quick glance at her in the rearview mirror. I would go home, she would look at gravestones, Eva would wait while her husband slept in flames.
The phone was ringing in my apartment when I opened the door. Dashing to catch it, I narrowly missed stepping on Orlando, who'd come to the door to say hello. I scooped him up and took him along to the phone.
"Hello?"
"Walker, it's Maris. You've got to come back here. You've got to see something. You have to. It's incredible!"
"Right now? I just got in this minute. I really don't feel like driving anymore, Maris."
"Have you ever heard of a man named Moritz Benedikt?"
"No."
"All right, I'll take a picture. I've got the Polaroid with me, but it's not the same. When you see this picture you're going to drive out here in the middle of the night, believe me. Can I come over after?"
"Sure. I'll probably be asleep, so use your key."
Real sadness either keeps me up all night or punches me to sleep. This time it was all I could do to put the receiver down and get to bed before going out as if I'd been conked on the head. I dreamed of Nicholas sitting naked on a scarlet stallion twenty hands high in the middle of a beautiful pond. He looked very happy and called out to me, "Bathing the red horse!"
When I awoke, Orlando was asleep on my stomach and Maris was lying by my side. The room was completely dark and warm and smelled of her distant, hours-old perfume. It took some time for my mind to land back on earth. While it was circling the airfield, I gently combed her soft hair with my fingers. It had grown much longer since she'd been in Vienna.
"How long have you been here?"
"About an hour. I'm glad you're up. I've been dying to wake you. You've got to see what I found. Can I turn on the light?"
"Uh huh."
The light burst the air like a flashbulb. I closed my eyes against the white shock. When I opened them again, she was holding a Polaroid photograph in front of me. It was a picture of an ornate black marble gravestone. Across the top, thick gold letters spelled out the name "Moritz Benedikt" and the dates he lived. Below them was a small cameo photograph of Benedikt; a common practice on Austrian gravestones. I couldn't see the photo very well, but before I had a chance to think, she handed me another snapshot, this time a close-up of the cameo.
"Holy shit!"
It was a picture of me. Same hair, soft tired eyes, large nose. It's common to hear people say they know or have seen someone who looks a lot like you. It's different when you're faced with a mirror image of yourself, thirty years dead. It's time blown through a horn – right in your face.
"Who was he?"
"I don't know. I asked every groundkeeper out there I could find, but no one knew. It'd be easy enough to track him down, though, Walker. God knows, Vienna is famous for keeping records. You could probably find out how many sugars he put in his coffee, if you looked hard enough."
I couldn't stop looking at the picture. The light wasn't good and some parts were a little out of focus, but the resemblance was stark and mysterious and . . . exciting in its way. You think you are the sole proprietor of your looks. Once you discover you aren't, you immediately start wondering what else there was in common between you and your double. What kind of life did he live? What were his secrets, what were his dreams? The world is a place of wonders, but the greatest of all is yourself. Finding that someone once walked the earth with your face is incentive enough to send you out searching for answers. But that was one of my greatest mistakes. Wonders don't always have answers or reasons. Or rather, even if they do, those answers are not necessarily what we want to know.
The black stone was so polished it looked like obsidian. The gold letters cut into its face were deep and done with great care and skill. I stood a few feet away and took in the whole thing before moving closer to look at his picture on the stone. A bouquet of not-so-long-dead flowers lay at the foot of the grave. There was someone alive who knew and still cared for Moritz Benedikt. Oddly, Maris hadn't mentioned the flowers, but she'd been right about something else: After her photographs, I'd had to come to the cemetery the next day to see for myself.