by John Klima
And I was. Who, at our age, had a library like this? Of course, it must have helped to come from an academic family, but still . . . I couldn’t imagine most of our peers investing the time and energy to assemble such an extensive private collection of academic journals and monographs, before their twenty-eighth birthday. Tea-dances and second-rate imitations of last year’s Paris fashions would have been more their kind of thing. It was only at this moment, I think, that I fully began to appreciate what a serious scholar she was, quite apart from being a brilliant one. There was a strength and a passion here, under the surface of this dusty room, that even an outsider could sense with the application of but a little empathy. Indeed, being confronted so suddenly with the private realm of her creative mind was almost shocking. Like seeing her naked.
And would that really be so bad?—a still, small, provocative voice seemed to whisper behind me.
I glanced up at her rangy form, as she rummaged in the drawers of her desk, and had to admit that it would not.
Then she turned with an expression of triumph, and came over to sit beside me, waving an untidy wad of papers like a flag of victory.
“Here, I wanted to show you these . . .” She said. “These are the vampires you read about yesterday—the burials . . .”
She brushed a thin layer of dust off a thick, brown manila folder, and a photo spilled out. It showed a contorted human skeleton, half-buried in the dirt, with a hole in its head and a set of rusty iron manacles chaining each hand to the opposite foot. An archaeologist’s measuring rod counted out the centimetres clinically in smart black and white checks to the left of it, while a handful of modern silver coins had been spread out for scale to its right. It seemed this particular vampire had been little more than a metre tall by the time it was safely dead and buried, and the survivors had left it to rot forever in its peculiar Central Bohemian purgatory.
“From Celakovice, east of Prague,” said Frida. “And this one’s from Uherske Hradiste . . .”
She pulled out another photo, and this time I was confronted by a skeleton with multiple fractures in both legs, and a large slab of what appeared to be granite crushing the fragile bones of its rib cage.
I sized up the folder with my gaze, and wondered how many more unspeakable human destinies it could contain—how many more examples of an only too readily conceivable cruelty, how many perverse testaments to the even-handedness of fate? How many expressions of the human capacity to create its own worst tragedies? But Frida, evidently well used to these pictures by now, seemed hardly affected by their images of pain and suffering. She simply reached into the folder and fished out an oversize sheet of cartridge paper, which I could see contained some kind of pencil sketch, highlighted with dabs of watercolor.
“This is the one that is really peculiar . . .” She said, passing it over to me. “This is the one that I came here to show you.”
I took it carefully in both hands, and spread it out on my knees to catch the light. There had been a slight catch in her throat as she spoke to me, and now, as I examined the image, I heard her suppress a sharp intake of breath. What could it be about this picture that was so important to her?—I wondered. And why was she watching me so intently?
I looked down at the drawing again, and saw that it depicted a young woman with smooth, pale skin and long, reddish-gold hair, lying on the short, green turf of what appeared to be a closely-cropped pasture. Cowslips and daisies dotted the grass, and a line of crumbly white boulders ran down one side of the paper, at the edge of the greensward. With just a minimum of effort I could imagine the buzzing of the insects and the crackling of the soil in the summer heat. The picture was nicely done.
It was the girl that was the main focus, though. The artist had dressed her up in what was evidently meant to be her best white smock, bound around the waist with a thin hemp rope, and embroidered over the breasts in a typically Slavic pattern of semi-abstract red, blue and brown flowers. I knew that style of embroidery all too well: from the Bohemytown grandmothers that my relatives had always liked to talk about, to the Ruthenian folk-art I had seen just the previous afternoon, in a small gallery near the Lucerna. It was very much of its place.
The girl’s eyes were closed and her face was calm, as if she was sleeping. Only her pallor indicated that anything might be amiss.
“She’s beautiful,” I said spontaneously. And somehow naggingly familiar, I added at the back of my mind, silently.
And then, all of a sudden, I realized why the portrait was so profoundly disturbing: for belatedly, I noticed that the girl’s head was no longer attached to its shoulders. At some point, before she had been laid out on the grass, she had been crudely decapitated. And the red circle on her temple, which I had at first taken to be a birth mark, was in actuality, as I could now see, a painfully irregular drill-hole. And instead of hands and feet, she had only stumps. Her severed limbs were laid out neatly in a grisly quadrangle at the edges of the paper, like giant, mutated butterflies, caught up in a bizarre mating ritual on the edge of the other world. Worst of all, though, was the hint of a bloodstain that marred the pure white folds of her shift near the crotch, as if her demented neighbors had wanted to make sure that, even in death, she could not come back to breed monsters.
I felt my arms and neck starting to itch. It didn’t bear thinking about.
“Who . . . What is it?” I stuttered, my voice thick with shock.
“Another burial . . .” Frida replied. “I reconstructed it.”
“You?” I must have sounded incredulous.
Frida nodded. “We all learn to draw, out in the field, it comes with the profession.”
And then, finally, it dawned on me, why the girl had seemed so familiar . . . She was my spitting image. Perhaps a little anaemic after the ordeal she had just been through, perhaps a little idealized, but even in death there was no mistaking it. She had my own face and my own complexion, my own hair and my own hands—what was left of them—my own build and my own body . . . We were so alike, we might have been hatched out of the same swan’s egg in some old Russian fairy tale. Looking down at the drawing was like peering into the quicksilver depths of an especially macabre antique mirror.
But how was that possible? I glanced up at Frida measuringly. She couldn’t possibly have had the time to produce work of this quality in the last twenty-four hours, no matter what her talent.
She shrugged. “Last night, I wasn’t sure,” she continued, perhaps with a touch of embarrassment. “It was only when I got home and dug out the portrait . . .”
“You dug it out?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve had it for weeks. I know people are never quite the same in the flesh, but it is you, isn’t it?”
I said nothing, struggling to come to terms with the impossibility of what she had just told me.
“Maybe I dreamed you,” Frida suggested. There was a peculiar, almost pleading tone to her voice.
Well, yes. Or maybe she had evoked me by some kind of sympathetic magic she had picked up through her folklore studies. Or maybe, just maybe, she had already seen my photo in This Quarter, and it had influenced her subconsciously. Though if this picture was a representative sample of her dreams, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what kind of demands she liked to make on her real-life friends and lovers.
“So tell me, why do you think they chopped her hands off?” I asked, more for the sake of avoiding an awkward silence, than from any real curiosity. But Frida leapt on the topic with evident relief and an unfeigned enthusiasm.
“Well, in most cases, it would simply have been a routine punishment for being much too familiar with the herbs of the hedgerows . . . For causing the winter wheat to freeze in the ground, and enchanting the children, and curdling the milk . . . For stealing the blood and vitality out of the young men’s veins and the fertility from the old men’s loins . . . Though in more acute cases they may have been trying to protect their lands against the depredations of a more dangerous kind of revenant. You know ho
w it goes . . .”
I didn’t, but I let it pass.
“Deflowering virgins before burial, disabling harlots . . . Anything to prevent that unbounded female energy from coming back to haunt them. Vampires, werewolves, she-devils, lamias, liliths, succubae . . . Ever since the fall of the matriarchy, all our societies have always lived in a constant state of siege, and our own supposedly modern era is no better in this, than the most impoverished peat-bog monarchy. Even if you have a whole catalogue of books on the shelves of the British Museum, or a prestigious new chair of nuclear physics at the Sorbonne, you are still, in the final analysis, part of that monstrous regiment, which has always disturbed the minds of right-thinking men since the start of history—a conspirator against Crown and Christendom. Even if you have money and status, they will always do their best to exorcise you at the first sign you might be a living female . . .”
She was talking about herself again, I realized. What had she had to go through to make her so defensive?
“But the picture . . .” I changed the subject. “Could a simple suspicion of sex and witchcraft have been enough to explain the extreme viciousness of the attack?” Of course, thinking about the inward-looking atmosphere of all the small towns I had ever visited, I realized at once that it could. But still, I pressed on: “Could it not have been some greater transgression? Polluting a more serious harvest? Stealing the seed of the lord of the manor?”
Frida laughed, her face filling with light again.
“Oh, I suspect that the lord’s seed was volatile enough. Who ever heard of an aristocracy that didn’t put itself about a bit? It was almost a point of honor back then: sowing your oats in the servants’ halls, and casting your tares on the stony ground . . . It was like a test of your virility, of your fitness to rule. No, it was the lord’s love that was sacrosanct, the pledge of his hand in marriage and the rights to his feoff . . .”
“So you’re saying that my twin here might have been too well liked—too well loved—by the lord of the manor, and that got her called vampire, because she sucked the life-blood from his germ-line’s dreams of inheritance?”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. And then she hesitated, as if on the brink of a momentous decision. “Or maybe . . . Maybe . . .” She stammered. “Maybe because she was too well liked—too well loved—by the master’s daughter.”
She blushed.
So that was it. I felt my heart skip a beat. It couldn’t have been easy for her in a small town like this, becoming slowly aware, as she grew older, that her innermost nature was going to put her so far beyond any possibility of complete social acceptance. That, like her vampires and her rusalkas, she would be forever damned. And strangely, despite my better judgement, I found myself responding to her emotional nakedness, for why was she telling me this, if not because she was now struggling with something like the emotional state of her hypothetical maid of the manor? I felt flustered—excited and confused, and not a little flattered at this sense of being the object of her attentions—in a way I had not since my first, clumsy teenage romance, oh, many years ago.
“Daughters have always loved each other,” I replied inanely, playing for time, because for all my worldly veneer, her revelation had shaken me.
It was then that I saw the beginnings of disappointment cross her face, as if she was starting to brace herself for yet another in a long line of rejections. She bore it bravely, of course, with a fortitude born of cruel experience—and what had she had to go through, to acquire that deep a capacity for resignation at so young an age?—but her eyes—her beautiful, sea-green, Vorticist eyes—looked so hurt she might have been dying. It nearly broke my heart.
So I stepped forward and kissed her.
Her lips were soft, not quite as warm as I expected, and her face—her strikingly angular, deliquescent face—was suddenly, shockingly flushed with tears. It was almost too much, the way I could taste her salt on the scarlet blush of her cheek bones, as if she were some kind of glistening, piratical sea creature, cast up on the strand of a muddy Bohemian fishpond.
I don’t know which of us was the more nervous. But I felt better having touched her. Maybe if I let my hands do my talking, they could fill in the gaps in my language, for at that moment, I could not have found the words to describe what I was doing, let alone the rush of all the different things I felt. It had been a very long time since I had last been reduced to a condition of wordlessness, and to my surprise, I found it extraordinarily refreshing. And the pulse of her body, as she made my own body dance on the close-cropped turf of her riverbank, was as intoxicating as any absinthe, as narcotic as any vision. As much the culmination of an improbable dream as any figure of Central European folklore.
Of course, if I had been a boy, I would never have been allowed to spend the night in her chamber, but as it was, nobody thought twice to disturb us. No matter how loudly our cornstalks waved . . . No matter how distinctly the plish and splatter of our millwheels floated out over the silent rooftops . . . We were only girls.
And she, my Rusalka.
Baudelaire, as so often, has a phrase for it. What do I care if you are wise?—he says in one his poems. Be beautiful! Be sad! And even today, with the Europe we once knew torn to tatters, and the lights of our old free-wheeling, arty crowd buried under a ton of blackout, there is something about his words that strikes me as essentially true. For if I had placed my bets on wisdom that day, I would never have got to know her. I would never have learned to love and long for the translucently angular planes of her face, and the uneven, coral-pink moons of her breasts—the sibylline bedding planes of her torso, and the honeycomb depths of her savante visionary’s womb . . . And my life would have been all the poorer.
For even after all these years, she is beautiful still, in her androgynous, transformative, Toyenish sort of way. Only her sadness has gone. Which is strange, given that she has been forced to abandon her home and her family—her life’s work and her memories, her career, even her mother-tongue—for a rootless and far from luxurious exile. But I suppose we all have to learn to adapt to our circumstances.
We did try New York for a while, but the magic I had known there at the start of the ’30s had gone. So we came back to England, and now we support the war effort by writing pamphlets for the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, and growing vegetables, and I spend my nights operating searchlight batteries with seven other women from a soggy little dug-out on the edge of the Fens.
It only goes to show where being an avant-garde artist can get you.
Love and loss and enchantment.
Exile and redemption.
I wouldn’t change it for anything, in testament of which I here sign my name:
Zora Dienstbier, author, sometime muse, photographer’s model, wife
Castle Mansions, Maiden Harborough
October 1941
∞°
Darin Bradley
Artaud Wells, executor
Estate no. 0102-0125, de Blainville
Lot appraisal 3821-06 (affidavit 3821-b)
[SIGNATORY WAIVED]
Artaud:
Attached, please find our bibliographer’s analysis for de Blainville Lot 3821-06. Dr. Paulin Gáribe’s chemical analysis appears in appendix ii, Dr. Anna Singlest’s commentary in appendix iii, and Dr. Anima Nandwani’s in appendix v. The accompanying affidavits will appear under separate cover (excepting 3821-b, reproduced here as appendix vi), each from the analysts’ respective laboratories and universities. We now record these in triplicate, so sign all three of each and return a copy to us. At the direction of one of our new insurance providers, we’ve included notarized memoranda in duplicate following the appendices: the documents stipulate that we request (and you agree) to provide a copy of each of the analysts’ affidavits for the de Blainville heirs. The other copies are for your records.
Our bibliographer assures us he will return the lot by this weekend. Let the matter of his scanning and uploading the documents be done between us. Fol
lowing last week’s deposition, both your lawyers and ours signed off on the agreement (cf. “Fair Use,” appendix vii: Millennial Philology Subscription and accredited partners). It is for posterity and research that our agent made his copy—even if, I grant, he should have first acquired leave. As he told us, he did it without thinking—a scholar’s reflex, perhaps. Let me encourage you to acquire a transcript of the deposition, which includes the record of the bibliographer’s testimony, for it is both disturbing and brilliant. He felt (and still does) as if the documents scanned and uploaded themselves—as if, through his analytic processes, their perpetuation occurred as a foregone matter of course.
I think he may simply have acted on his bookish instincts without thinking. Regardless, the lot is undamaged, and we regret the inconvenience to the de Blainville heirs.
All best.
—Robert
Encl.: bibliographic analysis, Lot 3821
index of title-page facsimile images
Gáribe: chemical analysis
Singlest: socio-historical analysis
Facsimile manifest, Abergavenny House, 1666
Nandwani: site-specific socio-historical analysis
Electronic-facsimile subscription royalty agreement
Facsimile, affidavit 3821-b
Appendix i
Bibliographic Analysis: lot 3821
Estate no. 0102-0125, de Blainville
[SIGNATORY, Aubrick & Wain, Inc.]
Disclosure of Electronic Publication: An Anonymous Salvage (and accompanying analysis)
For Use by Subscription: Millennial Philology Subscription (and accredited partners)
Per my agreement with Aubrick & Wain, Inc., and the de Blainville Estate, I, the attending bibliographer (lot 3821), have made a full facsimile reproduction of An Anonymous Salvage and my accompanying analysis. This digital document will be accessible only by subscription (cf. agreement regarding the de Blainville estate’s due-royalties) as approved by Mr. Artaud Wells (appendix vi).
