GLASS SOUP

by Jonathan Carroll

  As a final experiment, Isabelle ordered a slice of her favorite cake in the world which by nice coincidence was a Demel exclusive and served only there. All her life she’d eaten that cake and if it didn’t belong on God’s table in Heaven then no food did. Yes, it was that sublime. When the cake arrived she slid it across the table to Mrs. Haden and said she must try it. Beth did not hesitate reaching forward with a fork and gouging off a hefty piece. Isabelle caught Simon’s eye and gave him an assured thumbs-up.

  After swallowing her piece of the greatest cake in the universe, Mrs. Haden lay the fork down just so next to her plate. “It’s flavorsome. But I’m no great fan of hazelnuts.”

  Add to that she walked like a fast duck. Hurrying to catch her now, Isabelle watched Beth Haden move up the street in a kind of determined waddle. Well maybe not a waddle, but her feet pointed out to the sides whenever they landed, giving her a marked side-to-side gait.

  When close enough to be heard, Isabelle called out, “Mrs. Haden? Beth? Wait, Mrs. Haden. Please.”

  The woman stopped but did not turn around. Isabelle caught up with her and walked a few steps farther so that without turning Beth could see who was calling her name.

  “Mrs. Haden, do you remember me? My name is Isabelle Neukor. We met a few years ago in Vienna when you were there with your son. I’m a friend of Simon.”

  Beth Haden said nothing. She was waiting to hear more.

  “We all had coffee together in Vienna at the Café Demel when the two of you were traveling in Europe.”

  Mrs. Haden’s face relaxed. “Oh yes, Isabelle! You’re the one who had the delicious cake. Now I remember you. And do I ever remember that cake! Mmm. What was it called again?”

  “You mean the marzipan nusstorte?”

  “Yes, nusstorte. That’s right. It was the most delectable sweet I ever had in my entire life. I’m so grateful you made me taste it. I’ve always remembered that bite.”

  Right off the bat Isabelle was nonplussed. Even the word delectable sounded wrong. Grumpy people find nothing in the world delectable. Judging by their previous meeting, Beth Haden was 101 percent grump.

  “What are you doing here, Isabelle? Are you looking for Simon? He’s coming to lunch today. Why don’t you come too? I’m making my lima bean soup which is his favorite meal on this planet. Lima bean soup for lunch, chocolate pudding for dessert.” Mrs. Haden laughed. It was a delightful laugh—light and full of happiness.

  Isabelle became even more bewildered. She felt the urge to step closer to this woman to see if she was an imposter, a fake Beth Haden who now laughed freely like a cheerful girl and remembered tasting another’s “delectable” cake years later.

  “Come on, you can help me make the soup. Have you ever tasted lima bean soup, Isabelle? It’s really very good.”

  They didn’t have far to walk. Four blocks down, a left and a right and they were standing in front of a nice split-level house on a large plot of land.

  Curious, Isabelle asked, “Is this where Simon grew up?” She remembered hearing that Mrs. Haden had sold the house and moved to a retirement condo in North Carolina.

  Beth shifted her purse from one hand to the other so that she could unlock the front door. “Yes, it is. Would you like to see his room?”

  Simon did not come for lunch that day but it didn’t appear to bother his mother very much. She rolled her eyes and said she was used to it—no big deal. The two women made the soup together, set the table, then sat down and talked while they waited for him.

  Unlike the first time they’d met when she’d only reeled off that cranky harangue about Europe and then fallen silent, today Beth Haden was a charming chatterbox. She talked about her life, her acupuncture treatments, her garden, and the new grocer at the market she was convinced was making eyes at her. She spoke nonstop, in striking contrast to the last time they had met. Most of what she said was entertaining even if 99 percent of it was about herself. Now and then Isabelle threw in a question or comment, but it wasn’t necessary because Simon’s mother had so much to say and a willing listener.

  Eventually she got around to asking, “Why are you here, Isabelle? Don’t you live in Vienna?”

  “I do, but I’m looking for your son. I need to talk to him.”

  Beth glanced at her wristwatch and shook her head. “I don’t think he’s coming. And I was sure we’d fixed it for today. But this isn’t the first time Simon has skipped one of our dates. You know kids; sometimes they forget or have other things to do…” It was a rebuke but much more love and forgiveness were in her voice than scold. She adored her son—that was very evident.

  Something was wrong here but only after Beth had spoken did Isabelle grasp what it was. In Vienna that day at the café after having finished every last crumb of his cake, Simon had pointedly said to Beth, “Look, Ma, I cleaned my plate.”

  Crabby Mrs. Haden glanced at it, gave a small humph, and lifted one shoulder in dismissal. Simon smirked and said to Isabelle, “Its an in-joke between us. When I was a kid there were two absolute laws in our house that could not be broken: I had to come for a meal as soon as I was called, and I had to eat everything on my plate or else I was slapped.”

  “Slapped?” Isabelle had never heard of any parent doing such a thing to a child.

  “That is correct. My mother gave me exactly seven minutes to get to the table. She would even time it. I could be playing ball a mile away, but if I wasn’t at the table in seven minutes—wham-o. Then I had to eat everything that was on my plate and there were no exceptions. Even if it was Brussels sprouts in hot vinegar, if I didn’t eat it all—”

  Mrs. Haden smiled slightly and said, “You were slapped.”

  “That’s right, Ma, and it happened more than once, remember? You guys were pretty tough on your son.” He patted her arm.

  Irate, Isabelle snapped, “That’s nuts!”

  “No, that’s the way to teach a child respect.”

  “No, Mrs. Haden, that’s nuts. You should be ashamed of yourself. Will you excuse me?” Isabelle got up and marched off to the toilet without being excused.

  Today this same child-slapping, disagreeable woman was as sweet and fluffy as cotton candy and sounded only wistful that her son had once again been rude enough to stand her up for lunch. Something was too wrong with this picture. Yet Isabelle knew from her previous visits that there were no rules in this place and looking for them or any logic at all was useless.

  Lacking for something to say, she thoughtlessly scratched with her index finger at a black spot on the white kitchen table. It looked like a bit of old food. The black came away easily, as if she were scratching away a makeup smudge. Beneath it was a grass-green color. As she kept scratching, more of that green appeared. What was this? Why did the paint come off so easily?

  Slightly more curious, Isabelle scraped a larger and larger area, first with her index finger and then growing more industrious, with her thumb. Green.

  Flattening her hand on the table, she vigorously rubbed her palm in a large circle. In seconds the white was gone and there was only that green beneath it. Looking over at Beth for an explanation, she was startled to see tears glistening on the other’s cheeks.

  “Green was the real color of this table, not white. It was never white. This kitchen was never white. Simon changed almost the whole house. There’s so little left of what it was really like when we lived here. It’s almost unrecognizable.”

  “I don’t understand.” Isabelle sat back.

  “Me, his father, even the color of this table… Simon changed everything when he reimagined his life after he died: us, the colors, the furniture. Nothing is the way it really was. He must have hated everything, Isabelle. There’s so little left of the real us and the life we lived together. Simon changed it all when he died and created this world from his memories.

  “In this world we’re the way he always wanted us to be, but not the way we were. Like this table—it was never white, it was green. Our kitchen table was g
reen. I even remember the day we bought it on sale.”

  “Why are you allowed to tell me this?”

  Beth shrugged one shoulder exactly the same way she had in Vienna that day. “Because you’re not Simon. Every one of his creations here knows the truth. He’s the only one who doesn’t. This place is full of lies and illusions and tricks and mirages… but they’re all Simon’s illusions. Until he realizes that, he stays trapped here.”

  Isabelle had nothing to lose so she said exactly what she’d been thinking to Beth. “If you were a terrible mother, then Simon has every right to change you here. It’s almost a compliment—he still wants you in his thoughts. But not the woman who hit him when he didn’t come to dinner on time. I’d change you too if I were him. Sometimes lies save us.”

  Instead of answering or defending herself, Simon’s mother only stared at Isabelle and after a while slowly nodded.

  When Vincent Ettrich rang Flora’s doorbell two hours after the funeral, she was alone in her living room sitting on the couch in brand-new La Perla silk underwear and listening to Otis Redding sing “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Flora had several ways of ridding herself of tension and these happened to be two of them. She loved expensive underwear. She loved the feel of it, the naughtiness that went along with buying some when she knew a new lover’s eyes were going to see her in it, the sheer sinful indulgence of spending a preposterous amount of money for something that weighed as much as a sparrow and took up about as much space in the universe. In most other aspects of her life she was unexpectedly practical and thrifty, but not when it came to her underwear, especially “stress underwear” as she referred to it. Sometimes when she was in a good mood she would even buy some and store it away for a bad day. Like today: the first thing she had done on returning to her empty house was take off her clothes and change into the unworn lingerie she had bought in Rome three months before. “Whenever I feel a nervous breakdown coming on, I buy lingerie,” she had said many times. This retail therapy must have worked because Flora had many bras and panties but not one nervous breakdown.

  And listening to the music of Otis Redding was like an antibiotic for her soul. She felt her problems were a joke when compared to those of anyone who was singing that sadly. Invariably after listening to one or two of his albums she felt the clouds lift from her heart.

  Flora was the kind of uninhibited woman who had no compunction about answering the door in her underwear and that’s exactly what she did now. When she saw who was there she made a face but felt no embarrassment about her exposed body. God knows, Ettrich had seen her in less. “Vincent.”

  “Hi. Nice underwear. I used to know a woman who owned a lingerie store. Can I come in?”

  “It’s really not a good day for a visit, Vincent. I’m sure you understand with the funeral and everything.”

  He looked at her coldly and gently pushing Flora out of his way, stepped into her house. “We have to talk about your friend Kyle Pegg.”

  When Ettrich left the cemetery that morning he knew what glass soup meant, but did not know where he was going. He would insist on that later when asked to recount exactly what had happened. He saw Leni hold up the sign with those two words on it and immediately knew that he must leave the cemetery. He could not say why; he only knew that he had to go.

  But what about Isabelle, what was she going to think about his abandoning her in the middle of the funeral? That was a problem but there were other, more pressing concerns that needed to be handled first. She would just have to trust that he’d left for a good reason.

  On reaching their car he took out the keys but while unlocking the door he stopped, frowned, and raised his head. From afar it looked like someone had called his name and he was reacting—except for the fact his eyes were closed. Ettrich had heard a voice inside himself distinctly say Go into the woods. Nothing more. When he opened his eyes it was to look at the forest directly across the road.

  The village of Weidling is at the very beginning of the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods. To this day they are fairy tale woods—dark, deep, and endless. They cover five times more land than the combined boroughs of Manhattan. It is easy to get lost in them despite the fact they are only a half-hour drive from downtown Vienna. Both Vincent and Isabelle loved walking there together and often did. The starkness that the shadows and silence of the forest evoked was a perfect contrast to walking there with someone you loved.

  Ettrich did not question why he heard this voice now or the order it gave. He dropped the car keys back in his pocket, crossed the narrow country road, and walked toward the woods.

  More than ever before, he had grown to trust this inner voice as well as his instincts and hunches. He had been brought back from the dead by Isabelle. Why? Because of their unborn son Anjo. Perhaps it was Anjo who was talking to him now, telling him what to do. Perhaps Anjo was behind all of the otherness Ettrich had been experiencing recently; even Leni Salomon’s message to him from Death. Glass soup.

  Vincent entered the woods and the temperature immediately dropped to a coolness that felt like fall. Air that only a moment before had smelled of dry earth and high summer was now damp, thick, and fecund.

  Hands on hips, he did what he always did on entering a forest—craned his head back and looked straight up. He loved watching sunlight flicker through the leaves of the trees. Whatever he was meant to do could wait a minute while he watched the play of light and dappling of colors high overhead.

  He began walking. He had no idea where he was going or what he was supposed to do here but walking felt right. Although he didn’t know it then, while Vincent moved deeper and deeper into the forest, Leni Salomon’s funeral ended. Her two best friends walked back to the car where Broximon waited for Isabelle.

  Ettrich walked for about an hour before stopping to look around. There was still no sign or indication of why he had been told to come in here, but he was all right with that. There had to be a reason, he was convinced, and eventually it would reveal itself to him. A distant bird sang and the sun, flirting down through the trees, lit the ground here and there.

  He had passed only one other person as he walked deeper into the forest—an old man who smiled warmly and tipped his Tyrolean hat at Ettrich.

  He had no idea where he was. Mounted on individual trees throughout the forest were markers from the Austrian Hiking Club that said things like FROM THIS POINT, IT IS A THREE-HOUR WALK TO THE ALMHUTTE. But that did Vincent no good because he had no idea where the Almhutte was or any of the other posted destinations in relation to Weidling or Vienna. From Ettrich’s perspective the signs might just as well have said THREE HOURS TO ZANZIBAR.

  A few times frantic thoughts stampeded through his mind like What the fuck am I doing here? But he pushed them all away by constantly reminding himself he had heard the voice.

  KYSELAK was written on a tree several feet in front of him. Ettrich’s mind was so full of the surroundings that it took time to register what he was seeing. When it did, what first crossed his mind was What kind of fool would go to the trouble of carving his name on a tree this deep in the woods? Who was ever going to see it? That’s what the conscious part of his mind thought. The unconscious part, which was awakened by the glass soup sign, declared without hesitation: I know that name. Where do I know it from?

  He walked over to the tree and stopping in front of it, tried to fish up where he had seen this strange name before. KYSELAK. Carved in crude block letters, almost childlike in their earnest simplicity, the name had to have been done long ago because the letters were very faded and the bark had grown up around them. A few more years and the letters would be absorbed back into the texture of the tree. This man-made scar would have healed and become nearly invisible.

  Kyselak. The autographist. The signature on the wall in Vienna that Isabelle had been so eager to show him the first night they met. The eccentric who wrote his name on everything and got into trouble with the emperor as a result. Ettrich had inadvertently found an original Kys
elak!

  He turned his head from side to side, thrilled and grinning, wanting to share this with someone. But there were only the trees, the sunlight and shadows, and they were all indifferent. How happy Isabelle would have been to make this marvelous discovery with him. Vincent missed her terribly then.

  To compensate for being alone, he reached forward and slid his left hand over the tree, then the signature. He ran his fingers over and around, then down into the carving. Like a blind man reading braille, Ettrich felt the seven letters of the other man’s name on his skin. A line from a television commercial he had watched as a boy came to him: “Let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages.” He let his fingers walk across Kyselak’s autograph. They said to it How do you do?

  To amuse himself and fill the silence that surrounded him, Vincent said out loud, “How do you do?”

  “Quite well, thank you,” Joseph Kyselak answered. He was sitting on the same rock Ettrich had used moments ago while resting. Kyselak wore the style of clothes and long fanciful sideburns that men favored in early nineteenth-century Vienna.

  “We were worried that you wouldn’t find us, Vincent.”

  “Were you the one back there who told me to walk into these woods?”

  Kyselak smiled. “No. They’ve been giving you instructions for ages but you’ve never heard them. Today was the first time. Congratulations.”

  “It was probably because of Leni. Seeing her message.” Ettrich pointed toward the cemetery.