GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

monuments of the rich, and the infinitely more dignified simple black stones/gold lettering of the gut burgerlich others.

But the dirty little secret of Vienna’s main cemetery is the Jewish section. Many of the tombstones there have been vandalized or overturned and left that way. The entire section is indifferently tended by the cemetery’s large grounds staff.

Isabelle and Ettrich had walked in the friedhof for almost fifteen minutes before reaching this area. Much of the time the only sound between them was that of their footsteps on the pavement and gravel. A thick hedge of misunderstanding and resentment had grown up between them since they sat in the car in the Vienna Woods trying to make some sense of all that had happened to them that day.

Isabelle knew where they were going here, Ettrich did not. He had visited this cemetery on several occasions but never this section, never for this purpose. Walking slightly behind her, he felt like a child that accompanies its parents on a Sunday to lay a wreath on Grandpa’s grave.

She stopped, hesitated a moment as if to get her bearings, and then took a left down one of the rows.

“Fizz?”

Ignoring him, she kept moving.

Ettrich sped up, touched the back of her arm and hoped she would stop. She did.

But then he didn’t know what to say. He’d said her name only to make her stop a moment and look at him. He loved her so much and knew that he had done everything wrong in the last hour. He was desperate to fix things between them, especially now when they needed each other so much.

“Yes?” Her voice and body language showed only impatience.

Vincent’s mind ran all over the place looking to find something right to say, but finally he could only come up with “What… what are we looking for?”

“The ark. It’s around here. We’re close—I remember these surroundings from the last time I was here.” She moved off without looking at him. Her tone of voice had been neutral, only informative.

“What ark?”

“The gravestone is a copy of William Edmondson’s sculpture called ‘Noah’s Ark.’ This one is just bigger than the original. There! Way down there—I see it.”

He looked where she was pointing. Knowing nothing about either the Edmondson sculpture or the grave they sought, Ettrich logically scanned the many headstones around them for some kind of stone boat, some kind of “ark.” He saw none but Isabelle kept walking determinedly in one direction so he dutifully followed.

A few minutes later she stopped in front of a brownish gray headstone that was shaped like some sort of peculiar house. Or rather two houses because part of the peculiarity was that one rested on top of the other. The higher one was smaller and had the same shape as the plastic houses used in the game Monopoly. It had four sides, six windows, and a slanting gabled roof. There was absolutely nothing special about the building.

It rested in form-fitting niches on the flat “roof” of the larger house. That second one had four windows and at one end what Ettrich assumed were double doors. Both houses perched on top of two identically sized stone slabs. On one of them, PETRAS URBSYS was carved rather crudely and obviously by hand into the stone, along with the dates that he had lived.

“I thought you said Noah’s Ark.” Ettrich certainly did not want to cause any more trouble with her. But looking at this strange and mysterious monument marking Petras’s grave, he was just too curious about it not to ask.

Stepping up to the headstone, Isabelle ran her fingertips over it. “This is a kind of ark. It’s meant to be a church. But I’ve always imagined it as a church floating on a barge over some river or ocean.

“Edmondson was a very religious man. When he was young he had a vision where God spoke to him and said be a sculptor. He spent most of his life carving tombstones and religious figures. To him a church was an ark—a shelter from the outside world and all the evil in it.”

Ettrich was moved both by the image and the concept. Despite the somberness of the moment, he smiled. “So the church is the ark and the world we live in is the flood?”

“Yes. Petras loved Edmondson’s work. He said it was simple to the point of being divine. He spent hours and hours looking at pictures. They always made him smile.” What she didn’t add was that Petras was studying an Edmondson book the day she visited him to learn how to bring Vincent back from the dead.

Standing there watching Isabelle touch the gravestone with such tenderness, Ettrich couldn’t resist touching it too. The moment he did, he found himself transported back to Petras Urbsys’s store—the store that had closed months ago, after the death of its owner.

First he smelled the sandalwood incense burning. Petras loved the aroma of incense and there were always several joss sticks burning in ashtrays filled with sand placed around his store. Ettrich found himself sitting on a green velvet couch in the middle of the room. He had sat there often before when they’d visited the old man.

Now a very much alive Petras stood behind the counter, looking at what appeared to be a large coffee table book of photographs. He wore thick reading glasses which he kept adjusting on his nose as he slowly turned the pages. When the bell over the door clinged he looked up. Isabelle walked in. She was dressed completely differently and her hair was much shorter than it had been a moment ago at the cemetery.

“Isabelle, hello! Such a long time since we’ve seen you.”

“We have to talk right now. Vincent is dead.”

Petras’s face showed no reaction to this news. He slowly closed the book and rested both hands palms down on it. Isabelle walked over to the counter and stopped directly across from him. “You have to help me now, Petras.”

“I’m so sorry for you.”

She nodded