Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  It was July, and he gasped in the summer air. It seemed that he couldn’t breathe enough. Although Trieste is no more humid than Lyon, and far less so than New Orleans, his lungs felt malnourished. All that year he craved more and more of that perfumed oxygen, even when it was drizzling, even when the freezing bora finally blew again; needing fresh air, he revolted against the muddy charnel odor of his wife. But it wasn’t that he didn’t desire her.

  In Bohemia people had regarded her with horror, while here they merely felt spiteful disgust. Her eyes did perhaps look a little sunken in, and her flesh might have been yellow; but to her husband, who had lived with her since she was young, she remained much the same. (It might have been that his pleasure in her was tinctured with a secret sense of superiority, because she was dead.) He bought her a plaid corset which helped keep her flesh together. Now came September, and his faithful wife was stirring porridge with a long wooden spoon—nearly time for his breakfast and her sleep. How he longed to live out one more day! Had she learned to see his thoughts? For what a cold pale gaze she was turning on him!—although hadn’t she done the same when she was alive? No, he must not suspect her of anything; their most precious jewel was trust. (Some say that vampires have two hearts; by all the saints, Milena had but one!) The bora whistled, and the nights lengthened, thank God; now it was easier to renounce the sunlight, for Milena’s sake. But in due time he found himself tormented again by spring; and in June, when the cities begin to stifle their inhabitants, who cling to the shadowed sides of the streets, and in all the many-windowed palaces, curtains close themselves against sunlight, concealing sweating insomniacs in much the same way that a lake smooths itself out above a sinking stone, both Michael and Milena grew restless, because they found it more difficult to breathe. He attended more than before to the sweating chests of the young city women, and each morning that she withdrew into her allotted world, he felt lonelier than before.

  In the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, each of the tenfold emanations of Divinity comprises its own tenfold sphere; and every aspect of the marital state may, indeed must, be comparably, multiply subdivided. I won’t deny the complexity of their relations. Sometimes she wept: My poor, poor children! (He never brought them up, of course; she might have worried that his trust in her was falling off.) The closest they ever came to disagreeing was on an occasion when they were talking over the times when she and the children still lived; of course their memories of her mother and most of the others had soured, but when it came to her old rival, whom she might have been expected to hate, Milena said: That summer before I got sick, when the crop was bad and our girls needed shoes, I even begged a loan from Doroteja—

  What! And did she oblige you?

  She did.

  And you repaid her?

  No, because I died.

  It was on the tip of his tongue then to blame her, but she struck first, saying: Tell me the truth. Was there ever anything between you?

  I swear there wasn’t.

  Then Doroteja—

  Wife, she’s the vampire, not you.

  Oh, sweet-tempered Milena was! On occasion he could not refrain from gazing upon her in her stupor and wondering, just as we all do about one another, which secrets colored her blood; and, to be less metaphysical, what evil she might do, and what good she might in time of desperation do or refrain from doing. But the instant that the lid closed upon her face, he invariably felt that he could have treated her more kindly. She, who had done everything for him, who must have passed (although they never spoke of it) through nightly agonies of temptation or even physiological compulsion without becoming the kind of evil thing which feeds on people, had made herself his innocuous lovebird; so that his anxiety had merely to do with how to live a lie with everyone but his faithful wife, while somehow reserving from her some moments of sunlight, contented social trivialities, roseate flesh and neighborly approval, not to mention the summer expanses of this great world. Bile foamed all the way up to his heart; he nearly vomited. Honoring her fidelity, he remained false to all others in order to be true to her; and she grew ever more beautiful in his sight, as certainly should have been the case, for this was a pretty time, a musical time, when Schandl and Warbinek were making pianoforte verticale in Trieste.

  Before she married him, and rolled up her hair in a wife’s cap, she used to toss her head at him, and her long tresses licked her neck. Now she had grown rather stiff, as old people will. Between marriage and death she had kept her hair pulled up in a bun; but now she left it loose again, as if she were a newborn maiden; he liked that very much.

  At times he was ambuscadoed by a longing to have married Doroteja, to see her standing in the kitchen in the morning with the sun illuminating the edge-strands of her golden hair as she set out the bowl of fresh milk whose cloud-clean whiteness for that one quarter-hour the sun would touch with purples, lilacs, yellows and many other colors, to see the play of sunlight on his wife’s hands, my God, was that too much? But in the summer evenings, bathing Milena in his arms, as she floated with her long pale legs almost lilac-colored in the twilight, her slender arms barely grazing his shoulders—she had gained so much practice in lying still!—until, half-opening her eyes, she began to caress his hand, he was not at all troubled by the lack of Doroteja. There she was, his faithful wife, floating in a long tin bathtub with her gaze locked upon his; there she was every night, lying in her coffin, with her long legs pressed together, slowly raising her head, smiling at him before she had even opened her eyes, with her hands sprouting up toward him. Just as a baby turns its round head, opens its wide eyes wider, smiles and reaches toward its mother, as if somehow its arm can bridge any distance—which indeed it can, for she now bends down to take the child into her arms—so his dependent, adorable wife yearned unto him unfailingly, trusting him to care for her, hide her and love her.

  But while Milena slept her open-eyed sleep, he could hardly manage himself; his desperation (if such is not too emphatic a word) ripened within him like a worm in a corpse, until he could scarcely meet the eyes of others. Down a certain shady side-street lived a flower vendor of easy morals, who looked not unlike Doroteja. One afternoon he found his feet pulling him there. She smelled like roses, as he knew quite well from having bought bouquets for Milena. Her name was Anna. She smiled; her breath was as flowers. Oh, he almost could have done it! But as she stretched out her fingers to be kissed, he found himself imperfectly recollecting a night when his faithful wife was lying on her side, with her head turned away from him and her buttocks exposed to him beneath the edge of the blanket—had she been asleep? If so, she must still have been alive. How tired she was, with the first two girls already born and always hungry; and once the sun was high she would have to be spreading the hay for the goats, with the elder one crying within the house and the younger one weighing down Milena’s back, while he went to the forest to steal firewood; how could he magnify the griefs of this woman? And during those Triestine summer days, when she lay reeking in her wormy rags, and in those winter nights, when her caress was as cold as the bronze clasp of an old leather book, he loved and pitied her even more. He could easily have found some daytime courtesan, or perhaps even a sunshine wife, but it was only when Milena was present, and he accordingly felt like himself, that women attracted him.

  Until evening allowed her globs of flesh to recombine he was always so tired nowadays, and come nightfall no one could compare to his wife, shameless and therefore innocent, her chin darkly dripping. As for her, of course, she was touched by the sweet feebleness of her faithful husband who had not yet died. She went on weaving noblewomen veils more fine than smoke, and custom came to her like flies to a corpse.

  29

  Vampires tend to have a fatalistic nature; and the faithful wife had certainly never anticipated being able to enjoy her husband forever. For many good years they comforted one another: for their friendless, lurking existence, for the deaths of their children a
nd the loss of their old home—and since they were such perfectly suited helpers each to the other, I’d call their marriage as successful as any.

  Once they caught sight of a kindred vrykolakas, dark brown like one of those Slovenian honey-breads in the shapes of animals; the Triestini had haled him out of his tomb, and were burning him in the piazza. He was wicked; anyhow, Milena and Michael could not save him; they turned away from his cries.

  Then there was the child who disappeared—a very good little boy, too, of whom everyone was fond. Michael found difficulty in protecting Milena just then. But he had long since become the good husband who knew and in a manner of speaking even cherished his wife’s infirmities. He knew how to clean things up! As for her, she kept bringing renown to the neighborhood; on her devolves all credit for the soprano Rina Pelligrini’s costume in “Lucia di Lammermoor”: golden embroidery on white, pale silver on a white as soft as the blurred face and girl-smooth hands of a priest’s tomb-effigy after centuries of rain. And so the neighbors settled on a Jew to burn.

  A few years later came the case of the dead man who an hour before had been laughing and full of blood. To save Milena from suspicion, Michael had to lead her out in the sun—barely after dawn, of course, and utterly gloved, perfumed and veiled; her tottering, twitching body began to liquefy at once, and she bit her tongue nearly in two so as not to screech; supporting her around the waist, he conveyed her down into the street, as if to help her take the air, fanned the light away from her face, explained to the passersby (who started at the stench): my wife is not well, then carried her back inside, terrified that he might have killed her forever. She did not leave her coffin for three days. Dusk of the fourth disclosed her helpless, as are we all when dead: hideous with sores, blind, unable to speak. He ran out, bought the fattest hen he could find and forced its head into her mouth. She tried feebly to bite, but even this she could not manage, so he slit the bird’s throat, directing the wonder-working jets of blood upon her face.— Thank you, she whispered.— Perceiving that this had not sufficed, he rushed out again, just in time to catch a stray cat which had scented Milena. This time she was able to kill for herself. Then her sores began to heal. Every night he fed her on suchlike live creatures, and she lay there on the bed, grimacing and twitching. Soon she could see again. He sat by the threshold (although that was unlucky), wishing to take her in his arms or at least utter loving words but understanding that at this moment anything pertaining to life was nearly unbearable to her. All this she was suffering, if not for him alone, then for both of them. The distance between them seemed to have existed forever. But by then the neighbors had forgotten their suspicions of Milena, because a new wonder had been discovered in Trieste: a certain dead Countess’s portrait, painted in oils, which could wink its left eye at anyone who praised it. And when he comprehended that he had saved her for a little longer, he felt the way he had as a boy in Bohemia on a certain January morning, the ice black on the river and the whole family almost starving, when he found a precious apple hidden under the straw.

  You might think that he sometimes wished to go back to the days before any of these events happened; for it is tiring to hide a secret, and lonely to forgo one’s friends. But the fact is that he never thought along those lines. For they were consecrated unto each other. Their joint career was besprinkled with blood, perhaps, but only of the insignificant. And they were safe now. Who among the Triestini could believe this vital if pallid night-woman and her sweaty companion who sometimes behaved as if he kept a dagger near could be any worse than murderers or thieves? (Anyhow, in Trieste there is always some dead man or other rotting at the bottom of the Canal Grande.) By virtue of the magnetic sacraments they cherished one another to the end. Now it was time to make a silver girdle for the Duchess d’Aosta. Smiling at him with all her sharp teeth, Milena laid her hand upon his pulsing breast.

  30

  She had to go to bed earlier and earlier. By now a stench would come out of her an hour before dawn, her black tongue lolling out, her eyes screwing shut. As for him, he continued to look unwholesome, as might be expected of a man who never got quite enough sleep. Which of them loved the other more I cannot tell; they were bound to one another by the obscurest appetites of the blood.

  I have seen an octagonally-framed daguerreotype of them from sometime after 1845—no, the legend you wish to cite is false; vampires do sometimes cast shadows, reflections and images, even if their husbands can’t see them—with her dark hair parted high across that pallid forehead of hers; she wears a high-busted corset with a glass jewel about her neck; his arm is around her as she smiles, showing her teeth—no, what are you thinking? She wasn’t like that!

  Saving up their money until they could buy their indulgences, they entered the bosom of the Church, which was certainly soft and rich, although sometimes they found it difficult to breathe. He managed to protect her so long as they both lived, and she nourished him and kept her copperware shining like winter suns.

  So finally they died together, and because they were wealthy and generous, the Archbishop himself made sure that trentals were sung for them in church; and then they were buried in a marble tomb in consecrated ground, ringed round by the great trees, which do not even know their own names, and whose leaves hang down like grapes, like women’s luscious hair, like ivy rushing to cover skeletons; and the crypt was sealed; the mausoleum was locked; and the moon passed into silver clouds, like a beautiful dead lady returning to the cemetery.

  DOROTEJA

  1

  Doroteja sat embroidering red snapdragons on a white tablecloth which she would then hem with lace. She was childless. The joy she felt when one of Michael’s daughters came running into her arms would surpass your belief.

  Like any goodwife, she knew what is done with cristallium, tansy, zedoary, hassock and fennel in a jar of hallowed wine; all the same, the goblins had gotten at her, so that she miscarried. Her late husband had never comprehended the grief that a woman feels to lose the child she has cherished so long beneath her heart. Her mother, understanding quite well, taught her the charm to sing while stepping thrice across a dead man’s grave: This is my help against the evil late birth. After that she was supposed to sell a clod from her baby’s grave swaddled in black wool, saying: I sell it, you must sell it, this black wool and the seeds of this grief, but she could never find any merchant, peddler or Gypsy kind enough to buy this burden away from her. If only Tadeusz had lived, to give her another child!

  The windows of her cottage were always darkened now.

  But there was Michael, who ought to have wedded her in the first place. Milena was too ill to live, people said. With her out of the way, Doroteja needed but to sing the correct spell in order to have him.

  On New Year’s Day, with Milena declining more irrevocably, Doroteja washed herself in the water in which a silver coin had been dropped, in order to be as abundant in money as in water (because Michael had always been poor), and within the month six copper pieces came her way. Before Easter she bathed in a tincture of last year’s roses, so as to be more beautiful—her elder sister staring at her, that same stinking kerchief on her head; Doroteja tried to wash herself at least twice a month.

  Milena died when the moon entered her sixth mansion, and Doroteja felt very sorry, of course. A month later, Michael had not yet proposed. So she paid a visit to his daughters, and the eldest one said: Aunt Doroteja, every night I pray for you to become our mother.

  Soon after that, she learned that Milena had come back.

  On the night of Holy Saturday, the dead souls go to church, which is the reason we burn graveyard fires on that night. Doroteja decided to ask her deceased husband for advice.

  Reader, I would not care for you to believe that Doroteja was a witch, for we burn witches. She was simply one of those lucky girls whom God permits to be born on Easter Sunday.— Others hesitated to visit the cemetery at night. For Doroteja, the place was not
much worse than her goat-shed.

  Just as some papyri buried in humid old graves crumble away within moments after being unearthed, so it can be with deep-seated loves suddenly exposed; but the feelings of Doroteja and Tadeusz for each other endured like a hoard of gold coins. She had never loved him, but what did that matter? They were friends. Now that he was in the ground, she intended to indulge her hunger for love, which meant Michael.

  Doroteja built a fire upon Tadeusz’s grave. At midnight, after the dead sermon had been preached, he returned, pallidly glistening, and found his widow sitting at what for once could be called his hearthstone.

  She said: Tad, do you still care for me?

  Well, well, he said. What do you want? I’ve found more money if you need it—a hoard of Roman gold! And if you feed your calf a hank of grass from that grave over there, you’ll get a fat milch-cow.

  Where’s our baby?

  I never see him.

  Tad, I want to marry Michael.

  And eat my curse?

  You wouldn’t curse me, would you?

  Gazing at him in the firelight, she fancied that his eyes and mouth were holes.

  He said: Milena’s living with him again. What would you do—put away his lawful wife?

  Her rights are ended! I went to Father Hauser—

  What would he say about your necromancy here?

  Tad, never mind that. He said that Milena’s sin is that she refused to bear in patience the death which God has appointed for us.

  Flittering round and round her face, Tadeusz smiled at her with translucent teeth. Perhaps he too found death difficult to bear. Doroteja’s mother had told her of the dead woman who returned on purpose to bite her husband’s finger; when he pushed her away, she sank her teeth into his side. Remembering this, not to mention the fact that he kept circling closer, Doroteja began to fear her husband.