Sleeping in Flame (10 page)

Luc asked what was going on. Nicholas innocently said Maris had agreed to see him, but first he would have to ask permission of "her friend," who was fast approaching.

The conversation that followed between the two men went something like this, after Goldstar took out a knife and held it open to his own nose.

"You want her back? You can't have her. That ends that discussion. You want to fuck her? First you have to fuck with me.

"She told me about you, asshole. You like to slap girls around and then walk around in their underpants? Why don't you come to work for me, too? I'll let you wear all those things -- bra, silk panties . . . We'll even buy you some Tampax too: to put up your ass! I bet you got a nice ass, huh? Tight, very fuckable."

To Luc's credit, he stayed calm and asked nicely if he could speak to Maris a moment. Goldstar turned and yelled the request back to the car. Helene Delicious rolled down the window and gave them the finger.

"I guess that means no, Luc." Goldstar folded the knife and put it back in his pocket. "Maybe she doesn't like guys who kick her ass, then wear her underpants. You got to be one or the other, you know? You got to be one or the other, right, Nicholas?"

On the phone to us later, Nicholas said Goldstar overdid it a little, but it worked. Maris said it sounded like he overdid it about 500 percent. But

I could tell she was both tickled and relieved. No matter how brave a front she'd put on since the bad days in Munich, knowing Luc was simmering in his crazy juices somewhere on the same continent worried her terribly. At night she spoke in her sleep. Although I didn't tell her, what she said was too often loud and frantic and disturbing. Walking into a restaurant, she'd seen someone who looked so much like him that she'd started to bolt. Only at the last moment did she realize the man's hair color was completely different.

Maris isn't the kind of person who runs away from things. I sensed this from the first, and it's still so now.

After Helene gave them the finger and Goldstar walked away, Nicholas asked Luc if there was anything else he wanted. The other looked confused and disoriented, but couldn't let it go. He had come so far for . . . this?

"How could she be a whore? _Maris_?"

"She's not, Luc. She's living with him, and that's the way he likes her to dress. I think he'd kill anyone who tried to touch her, especially you. I

guess she's told him everything. What was that about your wearing her underpants?"

"How could you bring her to him? A _pimp_? How could you do that?"

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"What did you do for her, Luc? Beat her up? Scare her to death? Why do you think she's even with him? She doesn't want you near her life. You're her trouble, man, not him."

"Fuck you, Sylvian."

Nicholas turned around and shouted to Goldstar, "Luc wants you to fuck yourself, Goldie."

Goldstar honked the horn twice, scrambling out of the car again. Helene tried to restrain him, but couldn't. He rose, and rose, and rose from the spotless Jaguar, looking like a demonic Mr.

Clean. Pointing a long finger at

Luc he bellowed, "Go home, little shit frog. Go home before I eat your fucking face."

When it seriously looks like Mr. Clean is going to eat your face you get out fast. That's what Luc did, but not before saying to Nicholas, "I'm going to get you."

"What did he mean by that?" Maris worried.

Once again, I'd turned the receiver so both of us could be in on the conversation at the same time.

Nicholas chuckled. "Maybe he'll report me to the Directors' Guild."

"He's a crazy man."

"Maris, he looked so goddamned confused by what he was seeing, that it's going to take him a couple of months to recover, believe me. He was scared, honey, what else could he have said?

He thinks I've got big pimp friends who can't wait to kick his ass!

"Leave it alone, forget it. You won! Walker, tell her to stop worrying.

Go out and celebrate. I've got ten things to do now so I'll be ready to go tomorrow. You know what I don't like about Israel? Breakfast. You can't put milk in your coffee, then they give you raw onions and tomatoes. God, what a country! I'll send you a postcard of a tank. Let's go to Frascati when I get back. Tell me I'm your hero, Maris."

"You know I love you anyway, Nicholas."

There was an embarrassed silence, then, "Yeah, me too. Take care of each other. I'll see you in a few weeks."

"Do you want me to take you to the airport? It's no trouble."

"No, Eva will take me. She likes to drive out and play her radio.

Bye-bye."

The next morning the Sylvians arrived at the airport an hour before Nicholas's flight. It wasn't like him to be such an early bird, but he knew El Al was very slow and careful about inspecting luggage and passports before they let you on the plane. He couldn't afford to miss the flight, so he played the good boy.

As he was checking in, an old Mercedes pulled up to one of the doors on the upper level of the airport. Several Arabs with submachine guns and hand grenades got out and ran into the building. Eyewitnesses said it was such a shock to see them there, that no one really started doing anything until after the men opened fire and threw the first grenades at the El Al counter.

The same thing was happening in Rome at Fiumicino Airport.

The bullet that tore off part of Eva Sylvian's ear was probably the same one that kept moving --

straight through her husband's head. One in the head, one in the stomach. If you have ever seen that grisly picture they ran in

_Time_ of the many dead at Vienna airport, Nicholas Sylvian is the man in the dark suit splayed like a dropped doll, still clutching something in his hand.

It is his passport in the leather billfold Maris and I gave him at our last meeting.

We heard about the attack in an electronics store while out shopping for a new VCR. The first report was that the road to the airport was closed to all traffic because of an "incident." We paid no attention because the Austrians love to interrupt their radio programs with traffic reports at all times of day. But a few minutes later the first detailed news of what had happened started coming in. Maris said she noticed the whole place stopped and, as one, everybody turned
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toward whatever radios were on in the store. These things didn't happen in Vienna. They simply didn't. No one looked at anyone else --

only the radio speakers had the answers we wanted.

In that shock-time when the enormity of what had happened began to come clear, I was first outraged at the sheer wrongness of the act. Shoot randomly into groups of people at an airport?

For what, a political cause? What about the politics of humanity? Or man's purported ability to distinguish between the enemy and a child with a doll in its arms? Or had part of the world really turned the corner en masse, really grown so mad as to think enemy and child were the same? I kept saying "Those bastards!" to myself as the news updates turned into horror stories.

Someone grabbed my arm. Before I registered it, Maris said in a scared, shrill voice, "Nicholas is out there! He was going to Israel on El Al!"

For an instant I hated her for saying that. We hate anyone who hands us the death sentence, the news that everything is terminal.

We looked at each other and ran out of the store. My car was parked nearby and we jumped in without saying anything. Both of us were silent all the way to the airport, the loud radio news the only words we shared.

A mile outside the town of Schwechat on the autobahn, police barricades blocked the road. I told the first man we came to I was afraid my brother might be one of the dead. He was sympathetic and checked with his boss, but couldn't let us through because things were still going on out there.

After they finished shooting, the terrorists ran out of the airport building, got back in their car, and drove away down the same road we were on.

They didn't get far. There was a crazy, moving-car shoot-out between them and the police that resulted in more blood and death. There is a photograph of their stopped Mercedes, its rear window blasted out, one of the terrorists dead on the road, his pants conspicuously soiled. A young policeman is looking at the body with a small smile on his face.

I made a U-turn and drove to the next phone booth, where I called my friend Barbara Wilkinson, who worked in the news department at O.R.F. Luckily I got right through, and she knew what I wanted the moment she came on the line. Nicholas had introduced us years before.

"Walker, Nicholas is dead. I just heard that. His wife was wounded, but that's all I know. Call me back in a couple of hours. Everything is completely crazy here. Call me later. I'm sorry. I'm crying. Call me later."

I realize now that I began this narrative by speaking of Nicholas's and my relationship in the present tense. But that's only because whenever he comes to mind, always several times a day, I think of him as still alive: his late-night calls, the black Valentino suits and pastel shirts, the strange but unique balance of precision and hyperbole of a good man unsure of himself but totally sure of his art. I loved the landscape inside him. Next to Maris, he was the best friend I had as an adult, and perhaps the greatest compliment I

can pay him is thinking he is still here. When he died it was the first time I ever had the feeling that life sometimes unfairly takes sides. Possibly the only reason for that relationship was to be happy together then, for that period of our lives. Expecting or wanting more was unwise or greedy.

No, I don't like that. There are too many ways to rationalize the death of someone you love.

Many sound good, but none are strong or convincing enough to genuinely console you.

Especially when you see someone smoking "his"

cigarettes, or a new film you would love to talk to him about . . . if only he were alive.

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
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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
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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.