Chapter 30: Lyudmila
At first, I respected Carl-Heinz’s wish not to talk about Heinrich and what they had done together, asking instead about what had happened to him in the Moscow laboratory.
‘So, did the Soviets treat you any better?’
‘Hah! No. Much worse,’ he said bitterly, clenching his fists. ‘I was locked up without books and often injected with stuff that made me very unwell.’
The memories seemed to pain him, but if what Stefan had told me was true and Carl-Heinz had gone over to the Soviets voluntarily, why would they have treated him so badly? I didn’t know what to make of it all, because Stefan was usually so accurate in his findings. I had a feeling Carl-Heinz was lying to me, so I continued my interrogation.
‘Did they have any other vampires?’
‘They made me create about ten others and they experimented on them too, but without success. They could force us to do things with their silver tools, but they never discovered the control drug.’
I decided to risk his displeasure and confront him with Stefan’s information. ‘I recently came across some information that says that Heinrich was killed by a German soldier with a single blow of a sword. I think you beheaded Heinrich before surrendering to the Soviets.’ I watched closely to gauge his reaction.
‘Where did you hear that?’ he spat out, furiously.
‘My Dutch friend, the vampire historian.’
‘You people and your blasted internet.’ He turned away from me angrily.
‘CH, why did you keep this hidden? Killing Heinrich was probably the best thing you could have done,’ I said.
He turned back and looked at me in silence for some moments. I could see he was weighing up how to respond, but he eventually told me why he had done it – and why he was so ashamed. By the end of 1943 the drug had started to wear off and he’d begun to remember all the things he and Heinrich had done. He had seen the suffering of the people of Leningrad and wanted no further part in it. He had also seen the courage and determination in Leningrad and believed he was fighting on the wrong side.
‘They were suffering so much. People were dying of hunger in the streets, but still they held out for more than 800 days,’ he explained.
‘Ah, so you hadn’t heard of Stalin then,’ I piped up, smiling grimly.
‘Exactly. As soon as the Soviets found out what I was, they tried to use me to their own ends, of course. When I refused to kill any Germans, they carted me off to the facility in Moscow.’
‘What did you think they were going to do?’ I asked him.
‘I know now that I was stupid and naïve,’ he answered, looking rather sheepish, ‘but back then I just thought they would be grateful if I came over to their side. I thought they would let me decide how I wanted to help them. I thought they would use my night vision skills and my ability to draw fire without being killed.’
‘So what did they get you to do in Moscow?’ I asked barely managing not to sound too interested.
‘The secret police rather liked to use me. They would lock me in a room with a suspect that they wanted to get to talk. They preferred a room with lots of mirrors, letting it slowly dawn on the suspect what he was locked in with.’
‘Fear of the unnatural is a powerful tool,’ I said gleefully. Wow! Inspired torture!
‘Yes, it worked very well. Mostly, they started talking before I had a chance to feed,’ he went on.
‘Were you allowed to kill them?’ I asked
‘Mostly yes. After the confession I was led back to their cell and left in there until I had drained the person. If I refused, they would just leave me in there until the hunger became too strong,’ he said and I could see that the memories still troubled him.
‘Nasty!’ I cried, smiling at the sheer evilness.
‘I don’t think Stalin’s secret police are remembered for their kindness,’ Carl-Heinz continued drily.
It seems the Soviets had never trusted Carl-Heinz though. After all, not only was he German, he was a vampire and he had changed sides. He told me he was only allowed out of his cell to do their dirty work and they made few efforts to communicate with him. They didn’t think it necessary to provide him with intellectual stimulus so there were no books or newspapers.
‘It must have been very frustrating and boring for you.’
‘It was most of the time, but then there was Lyudmila,’ he said, sitting back in his chair and musing.
‘Tell me more! Was she pretty?’
‘She had the kind of body you can only get after years of eating cheap meat, potatoes and cabbage washed down with vodka,’ he said without humour.
‘Oh dear. Not a love story then,’ I said, disappointed.
‘It was a long time since a woman had showed me any kindness and I did like the fact she had a very ample bosom,’ he told me, and then there was a shy smile. My word! 136 years old and still shy about girls!
Lyudmila, it turned out, had been one of the guards and one of the few in the facility that spoke German. They discovered a mutual love for chess and after her shifts Lyudmila would bring a chessboard down so they could play, with Carl-Heinz having to reach through the bars to move his pieces. The other guards hadn’t liked that she fraternised with the prisoners and didn’t trust them speaking German. Carl-Heinz was able to understand what they were saying about her when she moved out of earshot and he heard the dirty tricks they were planning to play on her.
‘I often asked why she risked it, and she said that she had never got on with the morons in the first place. Her father was German and it had never been easy for her,’ Carl-Heinz explained.
‘So you probably didn’t get much alone time with her,’ I asked, hoping for a dirty story.
‘No. Apart from the odd stolen kiss and quick feel of her breast, we didn’t get up to much. But as I said, we shared a love of chess and she made good conversation, she knew a lot about German culture. They didn’t give me books to read so she often came and sat with me in her lunch hour and read to me,’ he said.
‘Very touching. Do you think she loved you?’ I asked
‘I’m not sure. I think it was the same for both us; there just wasn’t anybody else who would give us the time of day,’ he said quietly.
Carl-Heinz and Lyudmila were not trusted and it was about six months before she was allowed into his cell, where the guards made sure she was locked in with him. After Stalin’s death in 1953 enthusiasm for the vampire project waned and funding began to be withdrawn. Lyudmila was worried she would be moved elsewhere, but she needn’t have been. The vampire project became a graveyard for scientists whose careers were going nowhere and they moved it for a while to a remote region of Kazakhstan.
‘Well, Lyudmila told me we were in a remote region. For me it was just another cell in another facility,’ Carl-Heinz explained.
‘Why did they move you?’ I asked
‘They started to do experiments with radioactivity and discovered that radiation had no effect on vampires, apart from the fact that we stayed radioactive for about two years and had to be kept in absolute isolation.’
‘So, vampires could be quite useful for going in after a nuclear accident like Chernobyl,’ I said, my mind racing with ideas of vampires carrying out disaster recovery. I could make a lot cash cleaning up nuclear spills.
‘I suppose so, but they were thinking more of reconnaissance after a nuclear strike. They still needed the drug though, to make sure we would come back – a radioactive vampire on the loose is even worse than an ordinary one – but they never managed to develop it.’
‘Did you glow in the dark or get any super powers,’ I asked, getting wildly carried away.
‘I think you have read a few comic books too many, Cameron,’ he said, with the kind of look you’d give an annoying kid brother.
But I could be relentlessly childish. ‘So, did you and Lyudmila ever do it?’ I asked.
Carl-Heinz looked at me with disappointment in his eyes, I was obviously no
t up to the same intellectual standard as busty Lyudmila had been and I despaired of him ever being comfortable enough to share the sordid details of his life with me. I decided we needed a session of male bonding to get him out of his shell.
‘Ever learn to drive CH?’ I asked him.
‘Never had the need, I take the U-Bahn.’
‘So you live in a country where there’s no speed limit and all these wonderful fast motors and you can’t drive? CH, you haven’t lived!’
I declared that we should go out right then and remedy the fact so we wandered to a quiet area and I found an older Mercedes without an alarm system and showed Carl-Heinz how to break in and get it started. Best to start with something older and less powerful, I told him. We took the car to a quiet street and started what became nightly driving lessons. He was a quick learner and had, like me, excellent night vision and reflexes. After a few nights I had him doing 160 kilometres an hour on the motorways around Berlin. I thought he was enjoying it, but with Carl-Heinz it could be hard to tell.
Back at his apartment after one of the nightly drives, Carl-Heinz asked me to move in so we could continue our talks during the day. He’d started to trust me and had maybe even begun to like having a lively, young vampire around. Once I was installed, he continued the story where he’d left off.
By the 1960s, the project’s funding had been cut again and there were very few people left working in the facility. Lyudmila had achieved promotion by the sheer fact that she was the only one that had worked there for so long. She had become the night supervisor and she allowed Carl-Heinz to come out of his cell in the evenings.
‘One night, she came into my cell and told me that the guards, Ivan and Piotr, had both called in sick. She embraced me and we started kissing. I stopped and asked her who else was there. She had undone my trousers and murmured “no one”.’ He paused. ‘I killed her quickly and fled while I could.’
‘Poor Lyudmilla!’ I cried, in mock horror.
‘Come on Cameron. You know killing comes easy to us and frankly by that point I would have killed a naked Greta Garbo!’ he said forcefully.
‘You could have shagged her first!’ I cried in disbelief.
‘It was the first opportunity I’d had to escape and I wasn’t going to miss it,’ he said drily.
He was right, I think I would have done the same. Killing does come easy to us and I hadn’t felt regret, guilt or shame since I’d made my first human kill. If it didn’t throw up so many questions and launch investigations I would quite happily eat and kill every night, but we vampires quickly learn that killing is a slippery slope and if you want to live amongst humans you have at least to pretend to live by their rules and fly under the radar. My problem was that I liked human company and conversation, so I was keen to remain among them with all the problems that brought. Maybe now I knew some other vampires, I’d be able to live without humans, but I couldn’t see that hanging out with Nanette would ever be an option.
It was 1969 when Carl-Heinz finally managed to escape from the facility and, having spent most of his vampire life in captivity, he had to learn from scratch how to survive without attracting any attention. He learned quickly and relished his new freedom, eventually getting back to West Berlin in 1973.
‘Yes that story is online too. East-German border guards were spooked by a tall chap going over the wall but not showing up on CCTV,’ I told him.
‘I suppose I have to admit that the internet is a wonderful invention, so much knowledge at your fingertips,’ he said, nodding his head.
‘How do you get by without human help,’ I asked him, ‘without credit cards and ID papers? How do you even get internet connection?’
‘One of my neighbours has an unsecured network just now, but I have learned as I stole the latest gadgets how to get by. Internet cafés are good too, but not much use during the day,’ he explained.
‘And this flat. Is it yours?’ I asked, looking around at the hideous decor and hoping it wasn’t.
‘The apartment? No, it belonged to my last victim, an old lady. I stalked her for weeks and knew she had no visitors. She divulged her pin code before I killed her, so when that dries up I will move again,’ he said.
‘Don’t you mind? You get a place just right and then you have to move again,’ I asked, still fearing the worst.
‘Just right? Look around you, Cameron. Does it look like I did much to the place?’ he asked, smiling for once.
I hadn’t wanted to say anything before, worrying that my maker really did like the floral wallpaper. I was relieved to find he had some taste after all, but we’d have to do something about his clothes. He told me he didn’t care too much where he stayed. After the years of confinement he preferred his almost nomadic lifestyle, but he was not willing to leave Berlin.
‘You know, Cameron, I think I always enjoyed books more than the company of humans,’ he said and I looked at him with disbelief, before deciding it was probably true.
‘I am surprised you came back to Berlin. It can’t hold many happy memories for you.’
‘No, it does,’ he assured me. ‘I was very happy as a child here and to be honest I didn’t know where else to go.’
‘But Berlin must be a totally different place now from the city you grew up in.’
‘Of course, I was shocked to see how much damage the bombing of world war two had done and then this big wall in the middle of the city. My first weeks back were a little unsettling to say the least. But now I like the fact that Berlin is constantly changing. There is always something new to look at and it is a very lively place,’ he said and I thought he looked content with his life.
One thing now puzzled me though. ‘I thought you’d looked in on me on occasion, but thinking back now that was before 1973, so it couldn’t have been you.’ I had been sure it was him I’d felt, but now I didn’t know who it could have been. ‘I just wonder, do you ever feel the presence of other vampires?’
‘I do,’ he told me.
‘Are there any others here in Berlin?’ I asked intrigued.
‘I haven’t felt anyone else for a long time, not until you came to visit.’
‘There’s this woman in the south of France,’ I told him ‘and I had no idea she was a vampire too until she confronted me.’
‘Sorry, I can’t explain that. By the way are you hungry too?’ he suddenly asked.
I chummed Carl-Heinz on his hospital round again that night. I’d begun to think of him as an older, nerdier brother. He had been totally institutionalised by his years of confinement and was a very different character from me, but I enjoyed his company all the same. I had the feeling Carl-Heinz was still uncomfortable with me posing so many questions but the awkwardness he’d felt at first was lifting and he’d definitely warmed to me. As George had said – I was a psychopath, but I was an utterly charming one!
‘Did you make any other friends apart from Lyudmila?’ I asked him one day.
‘There is Dmitri.’
‘Another Russian?’ I enquired.
‘He is my chess buddy and he is Belgian. He told me he lives in Ghent.’
‘Internet chess?’ I asked, but I already knew the answer.
‘Yes. He is very good, but I have managed to beat him a few times,’ he told me proudly.
‘You really are a nerd!’ I said emphatically, but Carl-Heinz didn’t seem to think this was a bad thing.
Language in the Blood Page 48
