by Jason Graff
“You belong to him,” she said again in a shaky voice and began to cry again.
“Your mother is just upset that you are growing up,” Papa said, then took her weeping face in his hands with a sort of gentleness that was surprising. “Better in the castle then beneath it, eh?”
“He will wear the curse now!” she shrieked. “He belongs to him! And the girl. I know who her father is. I know him, well!”
“Shhhhh…my petunia, before you wear yourself out. The boy has been chosen to go into the castle. We can do nothing if we wish to stay in the boyar’s good graces,” Papa said. Then with one arm wrapped around Mama, he touched my shoulder and said, “Please the count. Will you, my son? Please him, so that he might smile upon us some future day.”
The tutoring sessions that followed were of the same pattern. John Harker would come clanging down the hall, Christian baubles ringing like chimes. Long before we caught sight of him, the scent of a cookwoman’s vardo would wash over us. Then he would tear open the door and ramble on and on about the strange things he believed to be going on in the castle: of seeing the count transform into a bat, of devil women who laid with him in his room, and mostly of his fears that he would never escape.
Thinking I was afraid, Fifika told me to pay him no mind. The English brain, she claimed, was weak and apt to those kinds of self-deceptions. It turned out my Fifika already knew some of the English language and set out there in the count’s study to learn more as quickly as she could. She would’ve made a fine elder someday—a position much more difficult to obtain for the women of our kumpania, which was unfortunate. It was always clear to me that the bullheaded men, who often rose to such prominent positions, feared and even despised the superior female mind.
In the beginning of our time among the boyar’s brick-like tomes, my mind was filled with little more than a young man’s foolish fancies. Every movement Fifika made had me perched on the brink of ecstasy. I loved the way her brow crinkled, how those beautiful dark green eyes narrowed in contemplation, how her pouty lips moved sometimes as she worked over difficult passages. Every crinkle or exertion of her muscles set off a corresponding ache in my own. Despite my wrestling with the urges flooding my slender frame like a great ocean at the moon’s command, I became a determined if not particularly gifted pupil. The English way of forming words was not something that I caught on to quickly. Still, Fifika persisted, saying there was much she had to teach me. Such encouragements set a fire to my blood, even as my poor mind took too long to thaw. I am not sure if it was set by any great desire for knowledge, or if that was the only time the object of my longing spoke to me.
Fifika’s praise on those odd occasions when I did get something right caused my heart to swell so that it almost seemed it would burst. Often, I would carry this feeling home with me, and when Mama insisted on treating me like an endangered child, I would snap at her. She needed to learn as well; she needed to know how much she was ignorant of. Her whole world seemed to be confined to our vardo. The man I was becoming found he could do little more than pity her.
The days—and they may well have been weeks or months or years for the manner in which my previously childish brain grew to something more—passed like a series of dreams. I sat closer and closer each day to Fifika. At first, I drank only of her perfume, but in time surrendered myself to her wisdom as well. There were still too many moments when my mind would be swimming, making concentrating on the text difficult but even one as easily distracted as I could not help but learn from a scholar so learned as her. Whatever text she bowed her head over, I took to be important and in time dedicated myself to understanding as well. That poor peasant Harker did more for our education in his absence thanks to Fifika’s patience and knowledge.
Then one day, he came racing to us. His brow slicked with sweat as usual. His lips trembling as usual. The wild look in his eyes that I took to be merely “English” peeked out at us from that dim room.
In his soft hand was clutched a letter, written, I noticed, on the count’s fine stationery. He closed the door to the study, looked one way then the other before raising his finger to his lips, as though what he was about to say was of great consequence.
“Children,” he said, taking Fifika’s head in his hands and staring savagely at her with his mad eyes. “It does my soul well to see your sweet faces.”
When he reached for me, I backed away. This caused him, in turn, to flinch and drop his letter. Wobbling down like a baby learning to walk, he collapsed to all fours to retrieve it. He muttered under his breath as he did so with words that my crude English did not allow me to comprehend.
“You must help me,” he said, now rising up onto his knees. “You must see to it that this letter leaves the castle without the count seeing it.”
He then forced the letter into Fifika’s hands.
“Why?” Fifika asked, then pried the paper from his hand. “What does it matter if the count knows?”
“My love, my Mina, must see it,” he said and began to choke on sobs. “The count…” he began before his choking turned into a violent cough.
“Why? Why mustn’t the boyar know you are writing to your love?” Fifika asked again. “I am sure he will only be too happy for you. Not to mention, wanting to learn what you have been using his very fine paper for.”
Rather than answer her, Harker went to snatch the letter back, but ever the quick one, Fifika stepped away, tucking the paper into the pocket of her dress. For a long time, the Englishman stood, looking at the two of us, his breath coming in fast heaves. Suddenly, the boyar’s shadow lengthened across the wall. Seeing it, Harker shrieked and jumped away from us. An instant later, the count stood in full command of the inscrutable silence that pervaded that chamber. On such occasions, I never knew what to make of the smile that crossed his lips, for it made me feel both happy to be near him and yet, somehow afraid for those so obviously made uncomfortable by his presence.
“My friend, John,” the count said, his form taking some time to catch up with his shadow that moved more swiftly along the wall. “I hope my young charges are obeying your instructions.”
“Yes, Count, they are quick learners,” Harker said through a nervous gulp of air.
“Good, good, children. Now, if you will please excuse Mr. Harker and me for a moment. We have…matters of business to discuss.”
Fifika flashed Harker the letter before putting it back into her pocket as we moved out into the hall. I reached out to take her hand, which she slapped away with a smirk. I felt so foolish, color rushed to my cheeks. For my learning had not changed much her opinion of me, it seemed. She still, to this hour, has a way of behaving that makes me feel as though I am still only a child, an infant, amid this whirl and rush of the knowing adults’ world.
“What are you going to do with…” I began to ask, only to have her hush me in the hall.
Fifika crept to the door, putting first her eye then her ear to the enormous keyhole.
“Oh no,” she said after a few silent moments as I stood there chilled in the drafty hall. “The count is inviting Harker to stay. Can you believe that ingrate would beg him to leave? After all that the count has done for him.”
“Are you going…” I tried, again, to inquire about the letter only to be hushed by an even less patient Fifika.
“The boyar is insisting. So hospitable. Something the English have a hard time honoring.” She paused to listen more. “Finally, Harker accepts, and makes it sound like staying in this glorious home where all his needs are looked after is a burden.”
“But, Fifika…what are you going to…?”
“Is this what you keep on about?” she asked, stepping away from the door and tearing the letter from her pocket. “I guess I will follow our tutor’s wishes and find a way to have it sent. Letters between lovers, I suppose, should be private. There is nothing like getting a letter from one’s love. It is the words between you that you truly share.”
“Yes, the words,” I said,
trying as usual to fool her with the extent of my understanding.
“After hearing how Harker spoke with such an appalling lack of gratitude, I will feel guilty about my commitment to such a thing. Harker is, after all, employed in his home. Tutor—he has not taught us much, has he?” she sniffed, then squinted at me in confusion. “What are you smiling about? What is the reason for that oafish grin?”
“Harker,” I said, glad we had changed topics to something I could speak more confidently about. “I think his work for the count tires him.”
“How could he be tired?” she snapped, her voice harsh with disbelief. “He’s not in the belly of the earth moving dirt like our men.”
“The English are not really made for work. They are a race of leisure. That’s hardly Harker’s fault.”
“Harker’s fault?” she repeated with the hint of a question she’d already answered for herself. “What else isn’t Harker’s fault? Do you think?”
“I…I…” said I, trying to erase my idiotic grin.
“One should stay with the woman one loves,” Fifika noted, examining the letter once again. “Love is too precious a thing to allow to travel. Closeness should always be one’s true desire, nearness for the one he loves. He should never leave his true love for any reason. I guess I will find a way to send this letter. Just don’t you go telling our boyar about my doing so.”
No mention was made of the letter the next day. After waiting for some time for Harker to show up, we returned to our studies of our own accord. It was strange how Harker seemed to just disappear. At the time, I did not give it much thought, for I was happy to be left alone with Fifika with no threat of intrusion.
Anxious as always to continue reading the poets of England, she scoured the shelf for pages we had yet to turn. We had lifted so many of the old tomes from the count’s dusty shelves that the thought of making it through his vast library no longer seemed so impossible. As was typical of her, my beloved tutor did not make it past the volume bound in dark orange leather that was Mr. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. I did not complain of the frequency of our reading from that book. We’d been over it so many times that even with my rudimentary understanding of English, I was able to follow along as one follows a piece of music.
We began reading a lovely poem about mercy, pity, peace, and love whose sheer music made such virtues seem not only possible but a part of the air we were breathing. She was just repeating the part where it compared those words to a god, when a gentle sobbing began to echo throughout the castle. At first, the sound was soft as though whoever was crying did not want to be heard, but it soon got beyond the weeper’s control, building to something shameless, a proud weeping as though its maker were reveling in his misery. Fifika quickly rose and put the book away. We crept out from the study.
In the dining room, we found the count at the end of his great oak table. His head was in his hands, upon which he shed thick, black tears. I wanted to creep back from where I’d come to leave the boyar alone. Like most of our kumpania, I was made uncomfortable by the sight of a man crying. Naturally, my Fifika did not hesitate, approaching the count with a cautious certainty.
“Our dear Boyar, why do you weep so?” she asked.
“Children,” said the boyar, “you should not be here. My life…my life is not so easily understood.”
“You should not make us leave, dear Boyar,” Fifika said, in her tone that made me feel a child, “before at least trying to make us see. For we too, our kind, are misunderstood.”
“Elizabetha! I am alone!” cried he in a voice that pierced me to my soul. “In avenging you, I have been left with nothing.” At first, his eyes passed over us as though looking to some distant point on a far horizon. Then he did look down with shaking lips that he managed to form into something like a smile. “When I was but a boy, this was not yet such a dark place. Men of great influence and power came to call here, knowing the family line of Dracula was loyal to all the Western world held dear. When in the darkest days of that time, the hoards from the East came to attack Christendom, we pledged ourselves to the Greatness of God and the Holy Roman Church.
“No one took this vow or his love for Christ more seriously than I. When my time came to defend the Church from those who rode upon the back of terror, I did not hesitate. I became the most fearsome warrior in the Eastern world, the most loyal servant of Christ and his Church. Ruled only by the grace of God, I allowed myself to be consumed by such viral passions and did the awful work that makes of barbarians the holiest of fools.”
I shuddered as the boyar began to sob, his terrible cries filling the halls and standing the downy hairs of my neck on their ends.
“When word of my deeds were circulated, my fearsome love for Christ did not follow so closely behind it. The English called me the Impaler, as if they have any knowledge of what I was faced with, as if they had any conception of what fate forced me to sacrifice…my Elizabetha.
“The English name you in the grotesque image of themselves. It is their gift to the world,” he said, returning to himself a bit. The sobbing had stopped, yet his sadness still rang down the castle’s empty halls. Then, as he stared again at some mysterious point on some unseen and distant horizon, he grew calm. “I do not mean your tutor, Harker. He is…an unremarkable man in that way.” His eyes narrowed. His brow crinkled in anger. “I pledged my life to that god, but it was not my death with which I was rewarded. I am sorry, children. I should not speak of such things before you.”
“Your story is longer than that,” Fifika said, daring not only to approach the boyar but also even to reach up and place her small hands atop his on the table. “It is a deep history of honor and tradition. I have studied it, right here in this very house.”
I did not remember anything about the boyar coming up in our studies. Still, so much went over my head of what we read that whole days could’ve been dedicated to it without my knowing. Such is the way when one has fallen so under the spell of his teacher—he only wishes to learn one lesson and will forget the rest in a dream of discovering it.
“The history of the Bezerker and the Ugric tribe of the North, sent to these lands to protect it from an evil, an evil unexplained,” Fifika continued, sounding so serious, I felt even more keenly that I was the lone child in the room. “Your line has long been punished for only doing that which fate set before you. You sacrificed all, but were punished by the Christian God rather than rewarded.”
“You should go, children,” the boyar said, turning from Fifika. “These are dangerous memories we are…stirring.”
Fifika took my hand. The torches down the main hallway went out one by one as we passed. Looking back into the castle from the gate, I saw only darkness, heard only the echoes of our boyar’s sobs, which built to wails as he cried over and over for his lost Elizabetha. The noise, terrible to hear, became fuller and fuller, less like one man and more like the lamentations of a whole family, weeping through the decades. Leaving the castle that day, I was more frightened than I had ever been inside of it.
Suddenly, the wind came in whipping gales across our camp and back up the mountains. It blew sharp as though made of needles, cutting at our faces as it twisted and arched its way across the open camp. I made it home just in time. Mama attempted to take me in her arms but I pushed through them more easily than I had just pushed through the gale blowing outside. When thunder peeled loudest, the rain began to fall, black as ink, like blood in the moonlight. My young ears found it especially soothing since hearing the unsettling, terrible cries of our boyar.
With the boyar’s cry echoing inside of me, inside every part of me, I found sleep elusive that night. For a time, I listened to the rhythm of the rain falling. Nearby, Mama snored loudly while Papa murmured in his sleep about crates and dirt.
C
hapter Seven
I cannot say exactly what the boyar’s crying had touched inside of me. It could have been the thought that by keeping my passion a secret I was p
reventing happiness from visiting me or it could have been just the realization of purity of my love. But sometime before dawn, I sat up in bed, determined to put into words my feelings for Fifika.
From my pockets, I found the nub of a pencil that Harker had given us back when he was more than a ghost haunting those halls. Pressing sheet after sheet of paper on the windowsill above my bed, I began to try my version of a poem. In scratch marks that looked as much like birds marking a branch as they did writing, I tried to put into words feelings that sprang from so deep inside of me, they were difficult to sort once they started flowing. Finally, after many false starts, I was down to my last torn shred of foolscap. As I stared at the blank expanse of that last sheet, I knew I had to seize that moment and write what was in my heart.
‘Dearest Fifika,’ I wrote:
What heavens do we twirl in as heaven watches us
What silver moonlight calls as all moonlight must
How long was the journey that brought us together here
Will longer be the journey now that we are near
I was but a boy when we met, ensnared by fright
You feared nothing as well as nothing fears night
In the mountains on high we dreamt of another world
Away in the sky, above where the clouds do unfurl
I know the new direction from which we must start
I know the way as well as you, it is in our hearts.
In the time before the sun rose, I huddled close to the dying candle I had been writing by and read my work again and again. I read through the darkness and rain through to the first light of dawn. Then, before I could be certain and satisfied with my work, the tolling bell began to ring. I folded the paper and tucked in into my boot.
The bell was only rung when we were to congregate to discuss serious matters as a group. In truth, I had been expecting it for some time as there had long been nervous talk around the camp. It had begun with the wolves and only increased with the tragic losses of Rye and his son. Some of the more timid members of the kumpania were afraid to close their eyes at night. A superstitious rumor had begun circulating about some terror that was to take place during one evening chosen by Satan himself.