She vanished in air like a vapour, and I never saw her again. Alas! She spoke the truth. I have regretted her more than once, and I still regret her. I purchased the peace of my soul very dearly. The love of God was not too much to replace her love.
Such, brother, is the story of my youth. Never look upon a woman, and walk always with your eyes cast on the ground, for chaste and calm though you may be, a single minute may make you lose eternity.
II
The Tree
Aleksei Tolstoy
(1817 –1875)
ALTHOUGH HE PALES IN significance beside his distant cousin Leo, Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy was a prominent writer in his time. Born in St. Petersburg barely a century after its founding, he grew up in a city already growing rich in literary traditions. Walking beside the Neva, gazing out at the Baltic, he formed grand ambitions for his writing career—and achieved most of them. “I was born,” he declaimed in adulthood, “not to serve but to sing.” In contrast with writers such as Chekhov or Gogol, he had an easy life—at least in material terms. He was born into the Tolstoy family, which had already distinguished itself in the Napoleonic Wars, and spent most of his adulthood as a courtier before retiring to write full-time. He was also able to travel often to Western Europe. Yet money and social connections didn’t solve all his problems. He took an overdose of morphine and died penniless at the age of fifty-eight.
Under the collective pseudonym Kozma Prutkov—who was presented as a real author, with a history—Tolstoy and three cousins published epigrams, verse, and political satire in the literary and political magazine Sovremennik (The Contemporary). Founded by Pushkin, this influential periodical published everyone from Gogol to Turgenev and was the first journal to translate the works of Dickens and other foreign writers. But Tolstoy was best known in his lifetime for lyrical poetry about nature and romance, and for plays such as the blank-verse drama The Death of Ivan the Terrible, which launched a trilogy that he modeled after Boris Godunov, by the patron saint of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin. But he also wrote the popular historical novel The Silver Knight and a series of ghostly stories, including “Upir” and “The Family of the Vourdalak.” The latter has had a curious publication history. Like most educated Russians in the nineteenth century, Tolstoy was fluent in French, in which language he originally wrote the story in 1839, under the pseudonym Krasnorogsky (after Krasny Rog, the Tolstoy estate). But the story wasn’t published in Russian until 1884, nine years after Tolstoy’s death; Tolstoy’s peers in the Russian literary community disdained such Gothic folklore. The French manuscript was lost until after World War II. The following translation is by scholar Christopher Frayling, who remarked of it, “Tolstoy succeeded in fusing the sexual allegory of vampirism…with the folklore of peasants.” In fact, Tolstoy explicitly cites Calmet’s accounts of Bosnian and Hungarian Vourdalaks who returned from their graves to prey upon their own families.
The Family of the Vourdalak
VIENNA. 1815. WHILE THE Congress had been in session, the city had attracted all the most distinguished European intellectuals, the fashion leaders of the day, and, of course, members of the highest diplomatic elite. But the Congress of Vienna was no longer in session.
Royalist émigrés were preparing to return to their country châteaux (hoping to stay there this time); Russian soldiers were anxiously awaiting the time when they could return to their abandoned homes; and discontented Poles—still dreaming of liberty—were wondering whether their dreams would come true, back in Cracow, under the protection of the precarious “independence” that had been arranged for them by the trio of Prince Metternich, Prince Hardenberg, and Count Nesselrode.
It was as if a masked ball were coming to an end. Of the assembled “guests,” only a select few had stayed behind and delayed packing their bags in the hope of still finding some amusement, preferably in the company of the charming and glamorous Austrian ladies.
This delightful group of people (of which I was a member) met twice a week in a château belonging to Madame the dowager Princess of Schwarzenberg. It was a few miles from the city centre, just beyond a little hamlet called Hitzing. The splendid hospitality of our hostess, as well as her amiability and intellectual brilliance, made any stay at her château extremely agreeable.
Our mornings were spent á la promenade; we lunched all together either at the château or somewhere in the grounds; and in the evenings, seated around a welcoming fireside, we amused ourselves by gossiping and telling each other stories. A rule of the house was that we should not talk about anything to do with politics. Everyone had had enough of that subject. So our tales were based either on legends from our own countries or else on our own experiences.
One evening, when each of us had told a tale and when our spirits were in that tense state which darkness and silence usually create, the Marquis d’Urfé, an elderly émigré we all loved dearly for his childish gaiety and for the piquant way in which he reminisced about his past life and good fortunes, broke the ominous silence by saying, “Your stories, gentlemen, are all out of the ordinary, of course, but it seems to me that each one lacks an essential ingredient—I mean authenticity; for I am pretty sure that none of you has seen with his own eyes the fantastic incidents that he has just narrated, nor can he vouch for the truth of his story on his word of honour as a gentleman.”
We all had to agree with this, so the elderly gentleman continued, after smoothing down his jabot: “As for me, gentlemen, I know only one story of this kind, but it is at once so strange, so horrible, and so authentic that it will suffice to strike even the most jaded of imaginations with terror. Having unhappily been both a witness to these strange events and a participant in them, I do not, as a rule, like to remind myself of them—but just this once I will tell the tale, provided, of course, the ladies present will permit me.”
Everyone agreed instantly. I must admit that a few of us glanced furtively at the long shadows which the moonlight was beginning to sketch out on the parquet floor. But soon our little circle huddled closer together and each of us kept silent to hear the Marquis’s story. M. d’Urfé took a pinch of snuff, slowly inhaled it, and began as follows:
Before I start, mesdames (said d’Urfé), I ask you to forgive me if, in the course of my story, I should find occasion to talk of my affaires de coeur more often than might be deemed appropriate for a man of my advanced years. But I assure that they must be mentioned if you are to make full sense of my story. In any case, one can forgive an elderly man for certain lapses of this kind—surrounded as I am by such attractive young ladies, it is no fault of mine that I am tempted to imagine myself a young man again. So, without further apology, I will commence by telling you that in the year 1759 I was madly in love with the beautiful Duchesse de Gramont. This passion, which I then believed was deep and lasting, gave me no respite either by day or by night, and the Duchesse, as young girls often do, enjoyed adding to my torment by her coquetterie. So much so that in a moment of spite I determined to solicit and be granted a diplomatic mission to the hospodar of Moldavia, who was then involved in negotiations with Versailles over matters that it would be as tedious as it would be pointless to tell you about.
The day before my departure I called in on the Duchesse. She received me with less mockery than usual and could not hide her emotions as she said, “D’Urfé, you are behaving like a madman, but I know you well enough to be sure that you will never go back on a decision, once taken. So I will only ask one thing of you. Accept this little cross as a token of my affection and wear it until you return. It is a family relic which we treasure a great deal.”
With galanterie that was perhaps misplaced at such a moment I kissed not the relic but the delightful hand which proffered it to me, and I fastened the cross around my neck—you can see it now. Since then, I have never been parted from it.
I will not bore you, mesdames, with the details of my journey nor with the observations that I made on the Hungarians and the Serbians, those poor a
nd ignorant people who, enslaved as they were by the Turks, were brave and honest enough not to have forgotten either their dignity or their time-honoured independence. It’s enough for me to tell you that having learned to speak a little Polish during my stay in Warsaw, I soon had a working knowledge of Serbian as well—for these two languages, like Russian and Bohemian, are, as you no doubt know very well, only branches of one and the same root, which is known as Slavonian.
Anyway, I knew enough to make myself understood. One day I arrived in a small village. The name would not interest you very much. I found those who lived in the house where I intended to stay in a state of confusion, which seemed to me all the more strange because it was a Sunday, a day when the Serbian people customarily devote themselves to different pleasures, such as dancing, arquebus shooting, wrestling and so on. I attributed the confusion of my hosts to some very recent misfortune and was about to withdraw when a man of about thirty, tall and impressive to look at, came up to me and shook me by the hand.
“Come in, come in, stranger,” he said. “Don’t let yourself be put off by our sadness; you will understand it well enough when you know the cause.”
He then told me about how his old father (whose name was Gorcha), a man of wild and unmanageable temperament, had got up one morning and had taken down his long Turkish arquebus from a rack on a wall.
“My children,” he had said to his two sons, Georges and Pierre, “I am going to the mountains to join a band of brave fellows who are hunting that dog Ali Bek.” (That was the name of a Turkish brigand who had been ravaging the countryside for some time.) “Wait for me patiently for ten days and if I do not return on the tenth, arrange for a funeral mass to be said—for by then I will have been killed. But,” old Gorcha had added, looking very serious indeed, “if, may God protect you, I should return after the ten days have passed, do not under any circumstances let me come in. I command you, if this should happen, to forget that I was once your father and to pierce me through the heart with an aspen stake, whatever I might say or do, for then I would no longer be human. I would be a cursed vourdalak, come to suck your blood.”
It is important at this stage to tell you, mesdames, that the vourdalaks (the name given to vampires by Slavic peoples) are, according to local folklore, dead bodies who rise from their graves to suck the blood of the living. In this respect they behave like all types of vampire, but they have one other characteristic which makes them even more terrifying. The vourdalaks, mesdames, prefer to suck the blood of their closest relatives and their most intimate friends; once dead, the victims become vampires themselves. People have claimed that entire villages in Bosnia and Hungary have been transformed into vourdalaks in this way. The Abbé Augustin Calmet in his strange book on apparitions cites many horrible examples.
Apparently, commissions have been appointed many times by German emperors to study alleged epidemics of vampirism. These commissions collected many eyewitness accounts. They exhumed bodies, which they found to be sated with blood, and ordered them to be burned in the public square after staking them through the heart. Magistrates who witnessed these executions have stated on oath that they heard blood-curdling shrieks coming from these corpses at the moment the executioner hammered his sharpened stake into their hearts. They have formal depositions to this effect and have corroborated them with signatures and with oaths on the Holy Book.
With this information as background, it should be easier for you to understand, mesdames, the effect that old Gorcha’s words had on his sons. Both of them went down on their bended knees and begged him to let them go in his place. But instead of replying, he had turned his back on them and had set out for the mountains, singing the refrain of an old ballad. The day I arrived in the village was the very day that Gorcha had fixed for his return, so I had no difficulty understanding why his children were so anxious.
This was a good and honest family. Georges, the older of the two sons, was rugged and weather-beaten. He seemed to me a serious and decisive man. He was married with two children. His brother Pierre, a handsome youth of about eighteen, looked rather less tough and appeared to be the favourite of a younger sister called Sdenka, who was a genuine Slavic beauty. In addition to the striking beauty of her features, a distant resemblance to the Duchesse de Gramont struck me especially. She had a distinctive line on her forehead which in all my experience I have found only on these two people. This line did not seem particularly attractive at first glance, but became irresistible when you had seen it a few times.
Perhaps I was still very naïve. Perhaps this resemblance, combined with a lively and charmingly simple disposition, was really irresistible. I do not know. But I had not been talking with Sdenka for more than two minutes when I already felt for her an affection so tender that it threatened to become something deeper still if I stayed in the village much longer.
We were all sitting together in front of the house, around a table laden with cheeses and dishes of milk. Sdenka was sewing; her sister-in-law was preparing supper for her children, who were playing in the sand; Pierre, who was doing his best to appear at ease, was whistling as he cleaned a yataghan, or long Turkish knife. Georges was leaning on the table with his head in his hands and looking for signs of movement on the great highway. He was silent.
For my part, I was profoundly affected by the general atmosphere of sadness and, in a fit of melancholy, looked up at the evening clouds which shrouded the dying sun and at the silhouette of a monastery, which was half hidden from my view by a black pine forest.
This monastery, as I subsequently discovered, had been very famous in former times on account of a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary which, according to legend, had been carried away by the angels and set down on an old oak tree. But at the beginning of the previous century the Turks had invaded this part of the country; they had butchered the monks and pillaged the monastery. Only the walls and a small chapel had survived; an old hermit continued to say Mass there. This hermit showed travellers around the ruins and gave hospitality to pilgrims who, as they walked from one place of devotion to another, liked to rest a while at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Oak. As I have said, I didn’t learn all this until much later, for on this particular evening my thoughts were very far from the archaeology of Serbia. As often happens when one allows one’s imagination free rein, I was musing on past times—on the good old days of my childhood; on the beauties of France that I had left for a wild and faraway country. I was thinking about the Duchesse de Gramont and—why not admit it?—I was also thinking about several other ladies who lived at the same time as your grandmothers, the memory of whose beauty had quietly entered my thoughts in the train of the beautiful Duchesse. I had soon forgotten all about my hosts and their terrible anxiety.
Suddenly Georges broke the silence. “Wife,” he said, “at exactly what time did the old man set out?”
“At eight o’clock. I can clearly remember hearing the monastery bell.”
“Well, that’s all right then,” said Georges. “It cannot be more than half past seven.” And he again looked for signs of movement on the great highway which led to the dark forest.
I have forgotten to tell you, mesdames, that when the Serbians suspect that someone has become a vampire, they avoid mentioning him by name or speaking of him directly, for they think that this would be an invitation for him to leave his tomb. So Georges, when he spoke of his father, now referred to him simply as “the old man.”
There was a brief silence. Suddenly one of the children started tugging at Sdenka’s apron and crying, “Auntie, when will grandpapa be coming back?”
The only reply he got to this untimely question was a hard slap from Georges. The child began to cry, but his little brother, who by now was surprised and frightened, wanted to know more. “Father, why are we not allowed to talk about grandpapa?”
Another slap shut him up firmly. Both children now began to howl and the whole family made a sign of the cross. Just at that moment, I heard the sound of the
monastery bell. As the first chime of eight was ringing in our ears, we saw a human figure coming out of the darkness of the forest and approaching us.
“It is he, God be praised,” cried Sdenka, her sister-in-law, and Pierre all at once.
“May the good God protect us,” said Georges solemnly. “How are we to know if the ten days have passed or not?”
Everyone looked at him, terror-struck. But the human form came closer and closer. It was a tall old man with a silver moustache and a pale, stern face; he was dragging himself along with the aid of a stick. The closer he got, the more shocked Georges looked. When the new arrival was a short distance from us, he stopped and stared at his family with eyes that seemed not to see—they were dull, glazed, deep sunk in their sockets.
“Well, well,” he said in a dead voice, “will no one get up to welcome me? What is the meaning of this silence, can’t you see I am wounded?”
I saw that the old man’s left side was dripping with blood.
“Go and help your father,” I said to Georges. “And you, Sdenka, offer him some refreshment. Look at him—he is almost collapsing from exhaustion!”
“Father,” said Georges, going up to Gorcha, “show me your wound. I know all about such things and I can take care of it…”
He was just about to take off the old man’s coat when Gorcha pushed his son aside roughly and clutched at his body with both hands. “You are too clumsy,” he said, “leave me alone…Now you have hurt me.”
“You must be wounded in the heart,” cried Georges, turning pale. “Take off your coat, take it off. You must, I insist.”
The old man pulled himself up to his full height. “Take care,” he said in a sepulchral voice. “If you so much as touch me, I shall curse you.”
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