by Richard Ayre
‘Hard, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘When after years of trying, you finally get what you have been looking for.’ His voice was papery-thin.
I only just managed to nod.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he continued. Which was good, because at that point I didn’t have a clue.
‘You’re thinking of when you saw me last. You’re thinking about how I looked in the little clues I left lying around for you, how I’ve aged over the years. You’re wondering how I’m still alive.’
‘Clues?’ I managed.
‘The photographs. At the hospital in France. The one from Auschwitz. The one of me here in Berlin.’
‘Berlin?’
‘Oh, you never saw that one? It was good. I looked very dapper. It was taken in 1930. Just before I went to France.’
‘You were in Berlin then?’ I asked, shocked, and he giggled and nodded.
‘I have been near you quite a few times, Mr Deakin. Keeping an eye on you. Seeing how my touch had developed on you.’
I frowned at him. ‘Your touch? What do you mean?’ I leaned towards him. ‘What did you do to me? How did you make me like this?’
A thought struck me then, as he just smiled insipidly at me. I licked my dry lips. ‘How old are you?’
‘Chronologically?’ he asked. ‘Or from when I became mortal once more?’
My frown deepened. He wasn’t making any sense at all. ‘Once more?’
‘How old would you say I was when we met so briefly in 1916?’ he asked, ignoring my last question.
I shrugged, shaking my head at this mad conversation. ‘Twenty-nine?’ I guessed. ‘Thirty?’
‘So how old does that make me now?’ He chuckled again. It was an unpleasant sound, like water gurgling down a drain. He answered his own question. ‘That would make me one-hundred-and-ten years old.’
He suddenly looked pensive, glancing down at his bony hands.
‘I think it’s the remnants,’ he said, musingly, almost to himself. ‘The remnants of the immortality I once possessed. The wispy fragments of the God-like status I once held.’
His eyes came back into focus and he grinned at me again. His teeth were just brown stumps.
‘Or perhaps not. Maybe it’s just luck that I reached this grand old age, eh?’ He rubbed the back of one of his hands, wincing. ‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘if you’re asking me about my real age, I’m afraid I’m much older than that. I was born in 1782.’
I fumbled in my jacket for a cigarette, offering him one, which he declined. I lit it and smoked hungrily, my mind whirling. There was so much I wanted to ask him that I didn’t know where to start.
‘How…?’ I started. Then stopped, lost for words.
Holmann wasn’t smiling now. He got himself comfortable in his wheelchair and his gaze went past mine, over the flower bed and across the distant city.
‘There is much you don’t know, Deakin. In fact, you know nothing. You’ve blundered around on this planet for a hundred years and you are but an infant.’
He sighed, as if consumed by a great burden. ‘Let me tell you my story,’ he said.
*
‘My name, my real name, is Louis Mandrin. I was born, as I have already told you, in the year 1782, in Paris. My father I never knew, and my mother was a seamstress, making a little money when she could.
‘I think, when I was younger, she prostituted herself to keep a roof over our heads and some food on the table, but I don’t know that for sure. I had two older brothers, but they both died in the wars after the coronation of Napoleon. I had a sister too, but she perished only a few weeks after I was born, so I never knew her. It happened a lot in those days. I think it was when she died that my father left us.
‘Anyway, when I was old enough I began to help my mother out in the shop, as did my two brothers: fetching and carrying, that sort of thing. And then the Revolution came along and changed everything for us. I was only seven at the time, but as I grew I witnessed the old aristocracy losing their lands and losing their heads.’
He laughed at the memory.
‘Snip, snip, snip, they went. I think it was then, even at such a young age, that I first began to understand the brutality of human beings. Their inherent wickedness. I began to know them and their ways.
‘Day after day, week after week, the bodies and the heads piled up higher and higher and the crowds continued to howl for more; until, of course, the grand man himself, Robespierre, lost his own head in 1794. When Napoleon came to power ten years later, I and my brothers flocked to his side along with all the other young men of France. I was twenty-two and desperate to make things change. I had seen how ideals could be twisted, and how people could move from wanting to change things for the better, to become nothing more than an unthinking, violent mob.
‘The things I saw, Deakin. The horror I witnessed. Violence, murder, fear, suspicion. This is the nature of humanity. This is what they are, what they have always been. They crawl and preen and scrabble in the shit because they think, they actually believe, that they are worth something. The Revolution showed me their reality. They are worse than any other animal on this planet. They are the stupidest creatures to have ever walked the Earth, and they cause misery and death wherever they go. They do not deserve to breathe. They should all just go! Disappear. All of them!’
He paused, breathing hard, glancing in disgust at the others in their wheelchairs. He seemed furious and I despaired at what he was telling me.
He was like me! He was just like me. He was, or at least had been, immortal. And his anger and vitriol towards humanity was even greater than my own. I wondered, with a terrible, morbid curiosity, if I was looking upon my own future. I opened my mouth to speak but he held up a hand. He seemed to have got himself back under some sort of control.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Let me finish.’
I nodded, and he eventually continued.
‘I wanted something better, and the Emperor seemed to offer that. I went to him, like I’ve said, and it wasn’t long before I saw my first war. Not my last, by any means, but my first. I fought in most of the major campaigns for Napoleon, I was lucky to survive on more than a few occasions and, even after both my brothers had been killed in his never-ending quest for glory and power, I went to his side again in 1815 where I watched his defeat at the hands of Wellington. I thought he was different, you see. I thought he was better. But I was wrong. He was just the same as all the rest of them. Just as twisted. Just as wicked’
He glanced at my face, and smiled a sly, secret smile. His eyes, his black eyes, seemed to see straight inside my soul and his weak voice was hypnotic. I listened in silent awe to his tale.
‘It was at Waterloo where I got my face bashed in by a British Rifleman. He left it in rather a mess I’m afraid. But I still managed to skewer him.’
He tittered as I frowned at him.
‘Anyway, after the defeat I returned to a cowed Paris to find my mother living with another man, a local merchant. She didn’t love him, but she needed his money to survive in the now once again Royalist city without her sons. He didn’t like me coming back to her, though, and his dislike very quickly turned to hatred. He didn’t want anyone else in his house, you see. He already had a son and a daughter of his own, and he didn’t want a cuckoo living on his money too. So he set me up.
‘A man came to the ale house I was living in and said I had slighted his fiancée, and that he demanded satisfaction. I hadn’t done anything of the sort of course, I had been in Belgium, fighting for him and his whore of a fiancée while he cowered in the city. It was a charade. The merchant, by now married to my mother, had paid for the whole thing to be played out. However, I was a proud fool back then, and a veteran of war. I wasn’t going to let anyone slur my good name.
‘So we met, as was the norm of the day, in a clearing at the Bois de Boulogne forest. The seconds made sure the weapons we were using—pistols—were correct and in order. I fired first and my bullet took him in t
he head. My honour had been restored.’
His lips twisted as he said those words, and I once again glimpsed the pent-up fury in this ancient creature.
‘But, of course, that was not what was supposed to have happened. It was I who should have ended up with a hole in my head. The man my stepfather had paid was a champion pistol shot, but I’d killed him. So the two men who had been with him, acting as seconds, shot my second and myself, leaving us for dead.’
He seemed to gaze at the view of the city, but I don’t think he saw it. I think, instead, he saw a forest in France and a body lying drenched in blood.
‘My second died instantly, I think. He was a decent enough lad, a comrade from the Peninsula campaign. I lay there, the grass turning red and the day turning to night. I remember staring up at the stars in the darkening sky and wondering whether I had been good enough to reach heaven. I didn’t think I had been.’
His words reawakened a similar scene of myself lying, choking on my own blood in the church in 1916, staring up at the wooden figure of the saviour, thinking I would die that night.
‘At the end,’ he continued, ‘as the blood from my wound slowed almost to a standstill and my heartbeat grew weaker in my chest, as I was dying, I heard footsteps on the grass and I looked up into the face of a woman.
‘She was dressed in the finest clothes of the time. I remember them vividly. She wore a gold-coloured gown and she had pearls at her neck. She carried a fan and her blonde hair was piled on her head. I still remember her face: she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She seemed like a golden angel, come to carry me off to my death, and I smiled at her, trying to beg her not to judge me too harshly.’
He broke off and turned away briefly. I saw his throat working as he seemingly choked off some emotion the memory had wrought.
Then he sighed and turned back to me.
‘But the real memory I have of her was her smell. She smelled divine, some sort of soap. Lavender. Every time I have smelled lavender since, I am reminded of her. She smelled clean and fresh after hours of the stink from the blood and shit leaking from my stomach.
‘Her face hovered above me in the dusk light. Above her head I saw bats hunting and, in her green eyes, I saw something else. Something that twisted and heaved. Something dark.’
His own eyes were haunted now as he remembered what had happened.
‘There was a madness in those eyes,’ he continued, his voice shaking slightly. ‘They terrified me, but they also captivated me. It was like looking into the eyes of something immensely alive, something old, older than time itself, something primordial, but contained within the beautiful face of a woman no more than twenty-five years of age.
‘She reached down and touched my chest and she leaned very close to me. She seemed a little unsure of what she was doing, but determined to carry it out. She lowered her mouth to my ear and at the time I didn’t understand what the words were that she spoke. I recognised the language, it was Russian, yet I didn’t understand what she had said. But the words stayed with me, and later, I found out what they meant. She said, “Ya imel dostatochno. Ne bol’she, ne bol’she. Ya peredayu eto”. “I have had enough. No more, no more. I pass it along.”
‘I felt a warmth from her hand, and that warmth seemed to move through me like a wave that filled my body with heat. It was rather like when you are in a bath and someone adds more hot water, except this was on the inside. Do you understand?’
He raised his eyebrows at me and I nodded, dumbly.
I sort of did understand him. His words were bringing back memories of my own, suppressed for eighty years. Of the touch of a hand, some murmured words and a spreading warmness, heralding a rebirth of immense proportions.
‘I fell asleep then, or perhaps I died, I don’t know. When I awoke, it was morning and the woman was gone. My second was still there, lying where he’d been shot, and our horses cropped happily at the grass nearby. I staggered to my feet, as I felt much stronger. I looked at my stomach and, as I opened my torn shirt, I found two bullets lying in its folds. My body had pushed them out in the night. The bullet wounds were almost completely healed.’
I remembered my own body doing the same thing back in my apartment in New York and I nodded again for him to continue. Nodding was about all I could do.
‘I was obviously mystified as to what had happened, but I was sure it was something to do with that woman. Perhaps she had been an angel and had saved me for some reason as yet unknown. I took my second’s body back into Paris for burial, then I left. I never saw my mother again and I didn’t know at the time about my stepfather’s betrayal. By the time I realised it had been him and went for my revenge, they were both dead.
‘And I was different. My mother’s death didn’t seem to matter anymore. Nothing seemed to matter. I moved to Normandy and met a girl there, staying with her for a while. But she died after a few years, and soon I began to realise I was not ageing. The touch of that woman, and her words, had frozen my body in time. She had healed me, yes, but she had changed me.’
‘What is it?’ I asked, finding my voice at last and leaning even closer to him. ‘What did she do to you? What did you do to me?’
He shook his head.
‘I don’t know. I have thought about it a lot, as you may have imagined, but I have never truly known. I have hunted for years, trying to find any other examples of life and death such as yours and mine, but found very little.
‘There are a few medieval texts that mention a touch that brought forth a “life bereft of death”, but they don’t necessarily mean the same thing. The earliest I ever found comes from around the time of the First Crusade and mentions a knight who was mortally wounded but who was healed with just a touch by a Muslim soldier. Supposedly he went on to live well into the thirteenth century.’
He shrugged. ‘Wherever it first came from, my belief is that it is a different way for life to continue. An older, darker way, separate from the norm. An alternative form of procreation if you will. A touch, from one infected person to another which means the life energy goes on and on.’
‘Infected?’
He laughed softly. ‘I sometimes think of that energy, that life force as a living thing. Almost as if everyone it touches are simply hosts for it to survive in. And I believe it has been around for a very long time. Like bacteria, a disease, it infects whoever it enters. Its hosts are infected with life.’
‘Did you find out who the woman was?’ I asked, my voice shaking. The idea that the energy that had once poured through his veins and now poured through mine was a living thing, a sentient, parasitic thing, made me squirm. It was an uncomfortable thought. Infected with life!
He shook his head. ‘No, and neither was I interested to do so. It was only years after we met that I realised just how different I was when I thought about her. But I never looked for her.
‘I moved from place to place. I think it has probably always been so for whoever is touched. It’s hard to stay in one place for long as the people around you grow older and die. I found it was best to keep myself to myself. Like you, I wandered the world, seeing new things, experiencing as much as I could.
‘But all the time, in the back of my mind, the knowledge that I was different hovered. I couldn’t settle; I couldn’t fall in love. I realised I couldn’t have children. I believe the touch does this. What is the point of producing squalling infants when life has already been passed on? I would have to experience the changing of the world instead of the love of any children. But I couldn’t share my strange existence with anyone else, because everyone, everyone, was different to me.’
I thought of my own, lonely life, my own losses, the babies Madeleine had craved and had blamed herself for not being able to produce.
What was the point of it all? Why were we so different to others? I brought my attention back to him as he spoke again.
‘Eventually, I found myself in a Europe once again desperate for war. I was in France when it broke out
. I had trained as a doctor in Vienna before this. I became a surgeon. I was obsessed by this point. After so many years of not caring, I became obsessed with finding out about human physiology. I wanted to know how the body worked, why the body aged. By learning these secrets, I believed I might understand why I was different. Of course, I never did. When World War One broke out, I joined the French army as a medic, and I worked in many different hospitals and field hospitals. And that, of course, is where I met you.’
He smiled his brown-toothed smile at me again.
‘I hated humanity by then,’ he continued, his face twisting again with some old, unresolved rancour. ‘They were like cattle to me, no more important or different than all the other animals nature produced. They all lived and died in a heartbeat. I was happy the war broke out, because then more of them would die and they would not pollute the world with their stupid, brainless continuance. I worked in the field hospitals and I watched them die and it fulfilled me in a way I suspect you are beginning to understand.’
He held up a withered arm at my protestations.
‘Please, I know how you think, I know how you feel about them. Don’t try to lie to me.’
I wanted to deny him. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, but I couldn’t. It was as if he could see inside my soul. I waited for him to continue.
‘On the first of July 1916, I was at the field hospital you were brought to. I believe Ducos filled you in on the details, back in the late twenties?’
I nodded again. Had my quarry been around me my entire life?
‘The British army came after me because they had found out my identity was false. They thought I was a spy.’ He laughed at this. ‘As if I gave a damn about nationalities by then. But anyway, my previous identity had been German, and someone found out about it, I don’t know how. Probably a slip-up on my behalf. Like you, I had discovered I had to keep reinventing myself so my real identity was kept secret. The Commandant at the field hospital called me into his office to show me the telegram and, well, you know the rest of the story. I killed him in the heat of the moment. I didn’t mean to. I just lost my temper, and he was only a human.’
