In fact, she was still beautiful, and he had a feeling even when she looked seventy, eighty, one hundred, she would still keep those two things, the glamour and the beauty.
Although, again, probably she wouldn’t live that long, not now. Now she was in captivity and ruined.
She lost a little more each day, they had told him that. A little more.
But you’d never know.
Her hair was long as in the old pictures and just as lustrous and thick, though fine silver wires of the best kind of gray silked through it. She wore a minimum of makeup, eye shadow, and false lashes. No powder he could detect. And though her lips were a startling scarlet, it was a softer scarlet to suit the aging of her face.
Her body, like her throat, was long and slender. She wore one of those long black gowns, just close enough in fit he had seen, in her rising and sitting, her figure looked, at least when clothed, like that of a woman half her apparent age. And she had on high heels—black velvet pumps on slender tapering pins. She had surrendered very little. that way.
As for her hands, always the big giveaway, she wore mittens of thin black lace, and her nails were long and painted dull gold.
“Well,” she said. “What do you wish to know?”
“Whatever you are kind enough to tell me.”
“There is so much.”
“Yes.”
“Time,” she said. She shrugged.
“We have some time.”
“I mean, my time. Such a great amount. Like the snows and the forests. Like the mountains I saw from the beginning of my life. And always in moonlight or the light of the stars. So many nights. Centuries, and all in the dark.”
She had hypnotized him. He felt it. He didn’t struggle. But she said, “Don’t be nervous,” as if he had stuttered or flinched or drawn back. “You know, don’t you, you are perfectly safe with me tonight?”
“Yes, Madame Chaikassia.”
“That’s good. Not everyone is able to relax.”
“I know,” he said, “that you’ve given your word. You never break your word.”
She smiled then. She had beautiful teeth, but they were all caps. Thank God, he thought, with a rare compassion, she had not needed new teeth until such excellent dentistry had become available.
He could remember the little headline in the scurrilous magazine: False Fangs for a Vampire.
“Do you know my story?” she asked, not coyly, but with dignity.
Surely it would be impossible not to respond to this pride and self-control? At least, for him.
“Something of it. But only from the movies and the book.”
“Oh, my book.” She was dismissive. Any authorial arrogance had left her, or else she had never had any. “I did not write everything I should have done. Or they would not let me. Always there are restraints.”
“Yes,” he said.
She said, “It must surprise you to find me here.”
He waited, careful.
She sighed. She said, “As the world shrinks, I have been taken like an exotic animal and put into this zoo—this menagerie. And I have allowed it for there was nothing else I could do. I am the last of my kind. A unique exhibit. And of course, they feed me.”
At the vulgar flick of her last words, he found, to his slight dismay, the hair crawled on his scalp. Then curiosity, his stock-in-trade, made him say, “Can I ask you, Madame, in the realm of food, on what do they—?”
“On what do you think?”
She leaned forward. Her black eyes that had no aging mark on them beyond a faint reddening at their corners, burned into his. And he felt, and was glad to feel, an electric weakening in his spine.
If only I could give you what you need.
He heard the line in his head, as he had heard and read it on several occasions. But he kept the sense not to say it.
She had given him her word, La Vampiresse, that she would not harm him. But there was one story, if real or false he hadn’t been able to find out. One journalistic interviewer had teasingly gone too far with her, and left this place in an ambulance.
So he only waited, letting the recorder tick unheard in his pocket—they had said she didn’t object to such machines, providing she didn’t have to see or hear them.
And she leaned back after moment and said, “They bring me what I must have. It is taken quite legally. And only from the willing and the healthy.”
He risked it. “Blood, Madame.”
“Blood, monsieur. But I will tell you something. They must, by law, disguise what it is.”
“How is that possible?”
“They add a little juice, some little meat extract or other. This is required by the government. Astonishing, their hypocrisy, would you not say?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
“For everyone knows what I am and what I must have to live. But in order to protect the sensibility of a few, they perpetrate a travesty. However,” she folded her hands, her rings dark as her eyes, “I can taste what it really is, under its camouflage. And it does what it must. As you see. I am still alive.”
He had been an adolescent when he saw her first, and that was on film. He was not the only one whose earliest sexual fantasies had been lit up all through by La Vampiresse.
But also, romantically, he had fallen in love with her world, recreated so earnestly on the screen. A country and landscape of forests, mountains, spired cities on frozen rivers, or winter palaces and sleighs and wolves, and of darkness, always that, where the full moon was the only sun. Russia, or some component of Russia, but a Russia vanished far away, where the aristocrats spoke French and the slavery of serfdom persisted.
As he grew up, found fleshly women that, for all their faults, were actually embraceable, actually penetrable, he lost the dreams of blood and moonlight. And with them, perhaps strangely, or not, lost too the romance of place. So that when, all these years after, he had been looking again at the film, or at those bits of it which had been—aptly—dug up, he was amused. At himself, for ever liking these scenarios at all. At the scenarios themselves, their naivety and censored charms. Oh yes, the imagination, in those days, sexual and otherwise, had had to work overtime. And from doing it, the imagination had grown muscular and strong. So that in memory after, you saw what you had not been shown, the fondling behind the smoky drape, that closed boudoir door, or even the rending among the hustle of far-off feeding wolves . . .
Altogether, he was sorry the romance had died for him with his youth. What was more—though they had only been, to begin with, such images, a recreation—coming here he grew rather afraid she too, La Vampiresse herself, would also disappoint. Worse, that she would horrify him with scorn or pity or disgust.
But now, sitting facing her, he had to admit he was nearly aroused. Oh, not in any erotic way. Better than that—imaginatively. Those strong imagination-muscles hadn’t after all wasted completely away. For here and now he was filling in once more the hidden or obscured vision. So that under her age, still, he could make out what she had been and was, in her own manner.
And when she spoke of her food, the blood, he didn’t want to smile behind his hand or gag at the thing she told him. He felt a kind of wild rejoicing. Despite the fact she was here in this building in the desert, despite her growing old and—nearly—tame, she had remained Chaikassia.
Because of this, he was finding it easy to talk to her, and would find it easy to perform the interview. And he wondered if others had found this too. He even wondered if that had been the problem for the one who left under the care of paramedics—it had been, for him, too easy.
At the nineteenth hour, when the moon was at the top of the first window and crossing to the top of the second, someone came in to check on them.
They had been talking about two and a half hours.
Verbally, they had crossed vast tracts of land, lingered in crypts and on high towers, seem armies gleam and sink, and sunrise slit the edge of air like a knife. And she had been, through memory, a chil
d, a girl, a woman.
She had spoken of much of her life, even of her childhood, of which, until now, he had known little. A vampire’s childhood, unrevealed in her book, or in any other medium. He had even been able to glimpse her own adolescence, where she stood for him, frosted like the finest glass with candle-shine and ghostly falling snow.
As the door was knocked on, this contemporary and unforgivable door, in such an old fashioned and fake way, Chaikassia threw back her head and laughed.
“They must come in. To see whether I have attacked you.”
He knew quite well that there were three concealed cameras in the room, perhaps for her protection as much as his. He suspected she knew about these cameras too.
But he said, “They see, surely, you would never do that.”
She glanced playfully at him. “But I might after all be tempted.”
He said, “You’re flattering me.”
“Yes,” she said. “But also I am telling you a fact. But again, I have given my word, and you are safe.”
Then a uniformed man and woman were in the room. Both gave a brief bow to La Vampiresse. Then the man came over and handed her a beaker like a little silver thimble on a silver tray.
“Oh,” she said, “is it time for this, now?”
“Yes, Madame.”
She glanced at him again. “Did you know they make me also swallow such drugs?”
“I knew something about it.”
“Here is the proof. For my health, they say. Do you not?” she addressed the man. He smiled and stood waiting. Chaikassia tipped the contents of the silver thimble into her mouth. Her throat moved smoothly, used to this. “But really, it is to subdue me,” she murmured softly. And then, more softly, almost lovingly, “As if it ever could.”
The uniformed woman had come over and stood by his chair.
She said to him politely, “Do you wish for coffee, sir, hot tea, or a soft drink?”
“No, thank you.”
“I must remind you, sir, your three hours are nearly through.”
“Yes, I’m keeping count.”
When they had gone out again, Chaikassia stood up.
“Three hours,” she murmured. “Have we talked so long?”
“We have twenty-four minutes left.”
“Twenty-four. So exact. Ah, monsieur, what a captain you would have made.”
He too had got up, courteous, in the old style, He saw now, taken aback for a moment, that even in her high heels she was shorter than he. He had gained the impression, entertaining, approaching, she was about a tenth of a meter taller, for he wasn’t tall.
She had always seemed tall to him, as well. Perhaps she had shrunk a little. Despite their best efforts—the diet she now lived on . . . like the loss of her own teeth.
“What else shall I tell you?” she asked.
“Anything, Madam. Everything you wish to.”
So she began one of her vivid rambling anecdotes. Only now and then was he required to lead her with a question or comment. Of all the things she had already told him, many he recognized from other material. Yet others had proved changeable, or quite fresh, like the childhood scenes, different and new. He was aware they alone might make a book. The tape chugged on over his heart, a full four hours of it, to be on the safe side, its clever receptor catching every nuance. Even when, for a moment, she might turn her head. And he marveled at her coherence. So much and all so perfectly rendered. If she repeated herself, he barely noticed. It didn’t matter. This was really more real than anything else, surely? More impactful and apposite than any tragedy which was human.
“Look at the moon,” she suddenly said. “How arid and cold and old she is tonight.” Her voice altered. “Have they told you? I’m always better when the moon is up. When it’s full. I wonder why the hell that is? Crazy, isn’t it?”
And something in him stumbled, as it seemed something had done in her. For not only the pattern of her speech had changed, the faint accent wiped away, but as she looked back at him her face was fallen and stricken. And from her eyes ran two thin shining tears. Lost tears, all alone.
Made dumb, he stood there, seeing her oldness and her shrunkeness. Then he heard his voice come from him and, for a second, was afraid of what it would say.
“Madame Chaikassia, how you must miss your freedom, it must be so intense, the lonely sorrow of all these hundreds of years you have lived—and you are the last of your kind. You must feel the moon is your only friend at last, the only thing that can comprehend you.”
And then her face was smoothing over, the strength of imagination working its power upon her. The trite banality of his words, like some splash of bad dialogue from the worst of the scripts, but able to change her, give her back her courage and her center. So that again she rose, towering over him, her eyes wiser than a thousand nights, older than a million moons.
“You are a poet, monsieur, And you are perceptive. Come to the window. Do you see? The bars are of the finest steel, otherwise they think, my captors, I will escape them. But they have forgotten—oh, shall I tell you my secret?”
They leaned together by the cold glass, observing the slender bars.
She said, “Unlike most of my kind, I am able to make myself visible, monsieur, in mirrors—have they ever told you? Oh yes, it is an old trick. How else was I able for so long to deceive your race and live among you? But there is, through this, a reverse ability. I can pass through glass. Through this glass, through these bars. I do go out, therefore, into the vastness of the night. But I am then invisible. I see you believe me.”
“Yes, Madame Chakassia. Many of us have long thought this was what you must be doing.”
She leaned back from him, triumphant, and laughed sharply again. He caught the faint tang of the drug on her breath, the drug they gave her to “subdue” her.
“I fly by night. And though I return then to this prison-cage—one night, one night when I am ready—believe me, I shall be gone forever.”
Her eyes glittered back the stars.
He knew what to do. He took her hand and brushed the air above it with his lips.
“I’m so glad, so very glad, Madame, you are no longer shut in. I salute your intrepid spirit and your freedom.”
“You will tell no one.” Not a plea, an order. (Yes, she had now forgotten the cameras.)
“I swear I will tell no one.”
“Not when you print your story-piece about me?”
“Not even then. Of course not then.”
Flirtatiously she said, “You are afraid I will kill you otherwise?”
“Madame,” he said, “you could kill me, I’m well aware, at any instant. But you’ve given your word and will not. Now I have given my word, and your secret is secure with me, to my grave.”
He found his eyes had filled, as hers had, with tears. This would embarrass him later, but at the time it had been, maybe, necessary.
She saw his emotion. Still smiling, she turned from him and walked away across the room, and up the steps to her gallery of books. She did this with the sublime indifference of her superior state, dismissing him, now and utterly, for all her unfathomable length of time, in which he had only been one tiny dot.
So he went to the door and pressed the button, but it opened at once, because the cameras had shown the interview was over.
A copy of the piece he wrote—less story or interview than article—would be sent to her, apparently. She had stipulated this as part of the deal.
And so had he. He made sure, too, the copy she received which would be only one of three, one for her, one for himself, and one for the archive, was exactly and precisely right. Which meant it stayed faithful to the flawless lie she was now living.
He didn’t want her or intend her ever to see the real article, the commissioned one. Nobody wanted her to see that. But that was the one the public would see. Christ, he would cut his throat if she ever saw that one—well, perhaps not go so far as cutting his throat . . . But he had made abso
lutely certain. The truth was the truth, but he’d never grasped why truth always had to be used to hurt someone. To her, life had done enough. And death would do the rest.
So in his version of the article which Chaikassia would later receive and glance over in her great room, in the tall building in the cold, moon-bled desert, an article complete with a most beautiful photograph of her, taken some twenty years before, she would see, if she looked, only what she might expect from one devoted, loyal, and bound by her magical spell. But that was not what the rest of them would read, marveling and sneering, or simply turned to stone by fear at the tricks destiny or God could play.
But the real article would anyway make little stir. It wasn’t even going to be very lucrative for him, since the travel expenses had been so high. And it was only of interest to certain cliques and cults and elderly admirers, and to himself, of course, which was why he had agreed to write it, providing he could interview her, by which he had meant meet her, look at her, be with her those three hours.
The photograph used in the real article was chosen by his editor. It was very cruel. It showed her as she had become—not even, he thought, as she had appeared to him. But perhaps some of them, with imaginative muscles, would still see something in it of who she was, had been. Was, was. This phantom of his adolescence, who would now be the haunting of his dying middle-age.
Who remembers Pella Blai?
She was once said to be one of the most beautiful women in the world, or at least on TV. She had the eponymous rôle in that fantasy series of the previous century, La Vampiresse.
The storylines of the series were gorgeous if slender. It was all about a (seemingly, somewhat) Russian vampire, located (somewhere) between the Caucasus and Siberia, though God knows where. A winter country around eighteen-something of moonlit gardens and gravestones, and wolf-scrambled forest. And here she flew by night under the moon, gliding at first light down into her coffin, as any vampire must.
Though never at the top of the tree (not even her famous pearl-hung Christmas tree at Bel Delores), Pella enjoyed much success, and most of us forty years and up know the name. But then the whole ethos of this kind of romantic celluloid vampirism slunk from prominence.
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