"Why do you want to talk? I told you everything."
"It's about Kaspar Benedikt. I have to tell you something that I found out about him."
"Like what?"
"Please come and meet me. I'm five minutes from your place. We can go to the cafй across the street."
"All right, but only for a few minutes. I'll get Herr Lachner to sit with Lillis."
She came into the cafй wearing an orange housedress and pink bedroom slippers. The waitress knew her and brought over a glass of white wine without being asked.
While she drank I looked closely at Elisabeth's face, trying to find the woman of my forty-year-old dream. Some people keep their looks all their lives. Whether they get fat or thin, the face stays with them, like their fingerprints. Moritz's wife was from the other group. In my dream she was thin and drawn from the war. Since then, she'd traded her face for potatoes and bread, and white wine at eleven in the morning.
"What do you want today?"
"You said you believed Kaspar Benedikt had special powers. Did you mean that?"
She drank and nodded at the same time. Her glass was already three-quarters empty and she signaled for another. "I told you, I come from Greece, so I've seen some people with powers, mister. Believe it or not, I've seen ghosts, and a woman told my future exactly by reading lamb bones."
"Yes, I remember that. If you do believe, Mrs. Benedikt, then I want to tell you a dream I had. It might scare you, but it's necessary that you hear it."
"When you've lived with a midget, then a war, then Lillis, not much scares you. Tell me."
"Okay. In the dream I'm coming into the Westbahnhof on a troop train from France. The train cars are all green brown and they're filled with soldiers coming back after the war. I'm looking out the window of our car but I can't see you or Papa." Elisabeth's mouth tightened when she heard that word. I expected her to say something, but she only closed her eyes and shook her head. "Should I go on?"
"Yes."
"I'm trying to think of what I'm going to say to you if you're there, but my mind is blank. Tonight, or whenever I get you into bed, I'm going to tell you that. I'm going to tell you I'm so excited to see and . . . touch you that I don't know what to say."
"What else?"
"Are you all right?"
"Yes. What else?" The waitress brought her second glass, but she only put her hand around it.
"I get off the train carrying two big duffle bags with me. In one of them are two pairs of red silk underpants I got for you when I was in Paris. As the train comes to a squeaking stop, I see you and Papa standing maybe twenty meters down the platform. You wave to me and start to run, but he holds you back."
Her eyes still closed, she spat out, "The little shit. I'll remember that the rest of my life. What nerve! He grabbed my arm and said so loudly that everyone around us could hear, 'I go first. You think he wants to see you before he sees his father?' I was so embarrassed to be there with him anyway. People would think we were related or something."
"The end of the dream is looking over his shoulder as I hugged him. I wanted to see where you were. You were the first one I wanted to see."
She gave one hard laugh, almost a grunt. "I know. That's what you told me that night." She opened her eyes. "You dreamed that?"
"You're not surprised?"
"Why? I believe in reincarnation. I thought something was strange about your wanting to come and talk to me. After I saw your face I was sure something else was going on inside you."
"Then I want to tell you some other things."
We were there an hour. In between she made a phone call to the man watching Lillis and said she would be back soon.
I told her everything but what had happened with the computer and the fairy tale. The dreams, the prophetic visions, the deaths of my friends. Unlike the first time we'd met, she was quiet, but when she did speak, it was to ask an interesting or perceptive question. I began to understand why her husband had cared so much for her. When I was almost finished I described my experiences with the man on the bicycle and how he'd welcomed me "back" as Rednaxela.
"I'm cold."
"Would you like to put on my jacket?" I started to take it off.
"That won't help. I'm cold inside. There's nothing you can do about that. My friend Herr Lachner has met his sister from their last incarnation. She lives in Perchtoldsdorf. Now I've met my husband. Looking at you, I'm not surprised."
She was suspiciously calm. Had I gotten through?
"Mrs. Benedikt, let's say it's true. Let's say I am your late husband and Kaspar Benedikt has returned too, as the man on the bicycle."
"That's why I'm cold. I think it's true. I want to know what he'll do to us this time. You've seen Lillis. What more could he do?"
"Do you know why he hurt your son?"
"He was also Moritz's son. Have you ever seen a man with no Spatzy?"
"Spatzy? What's that?"
"A penis. Prick. Pee-pee."
"No."
"I have: Kaspar Benedikt. A midget with no prick. Can you think of a worse combination? I always wondered how he made Moritz. Once, I went into the store to meet Moritz for lunch. The old man didn't know I was there and walked out of the back room with only a shirt on. No pants or underpants. I couldn't help looking, you know? I saw it for only a second or two, but there was nothing there, or it was smaller than the eye could see. It was only red down there and, I don't know, shiny. Like a scar from a burn."
"Rumpelstiltskin."
"What?"
"Nothing. What did you do when you saw it?"
"Choked. Made some shocked noise because that's when he saw me."
I sat forward. "What did he do?"
"The pig! He pulled up his pants fast but then asked me if I wanted to lick him there. That's when we really started hating each other. I don't let anyone talk to me like that. Nobody."
Almost to myself I said,. "He isn't human."
"Whatever he is, or whatever he was, wasn't very human. You don't know how the man treated me, even before we knew Lillis was coming. I tell you, he hated me because he knew how much his son loved me. In the beginning he only ignored me. But when he knew how much love there was between us, he got a million times worse.
"I hate to think he might be back. I was so happy when I heard he'd hung himself. The worst night of my life there I was, laughing and crying because they'd found him with a rope around his neck down on the Graben.
"You know what I did with the body?"
"Yes. Why aren't you more . . . shocked that you might be sitting across the table from Moritz?"
"Because you're not Moritz. You look like him and you remember things about me, but I don't feel anything for you. It's like bumping into an old friend forty years later. Maybe the face is familiar and maybe there are some good memories, but it's not the person you gave your soul to. The only thing that would make me jump or faint now would be to see him walk into this room. I'd know it was him just as I know you're not. He'd come over here and say things only the two of us knew."
"I know some of those things, Mrs. Benedikt."
"So what? You don't know them all. That's the difference between you and Moritz. Scattered little pieces don't make a person. It's all the pieces put together that does."
A week later I made a huge mistake. Maris had been doing well in the hospital and they were talking about letting her go home early if she continued to progress.
On the other side of town, I was regressing. One night I dreamed I was a young male prostitute in Vienna at the turn of the century. None of it made sense to me, but on waking I remembered what "Papa" had said about my thirty-one lives and knew this had to be one of them. It was a violent, sensual dream full of homosexual opera singers, barons in drag, and a brothel straight out of a Jean Genet play.