19
Perhaps the darkest issue in human relationships—certainly murkier than questions of vampirism, which have been resolved ages ago by our Mother Church—is that of family favoritism. Regarding the three daughters, whose names I have declined to give, in order to maintain them in their proper station in this tale, no one knew toward which parent each had experienced her closest connection; from the parents’ point of view, the question hardly presented itself; for when we marry we tend to feel (unless others have arranged the match for us) that our spouse appeals to at least some of our inclinations, which is why we chose as we did; whereas our children, no matter whether we set out on purpose to produce them, or how many of our own qualities we discover or invent in them, arrive in the form of little persons who, like us, are emphatically themselves, no matter what others might wish them to be; hence, parents and children resemble neighbors, with whom we find ourselves accidentally living, and toward whom we make more or less headway in accommodating ourselves. I would never be so rude as to state that Milena and Michael loved one another more than they did their children, nor that the girls preferred one parent to another; but I do suspect that after she had returned from the dead, Milena found her daughters less affectionate than before. Perhaps she could have made a better effort, but in those days, parents found themselves so preoccupied with protecting the family from the cruelest sort of destitution that they found scant time to cosset the small beings they ploughed and spun for. And in this case, there were the extra difficulties of ploughing and spinning while concealing a member of the undead.
Spitting three times, the cobbler informed him: The Bible tells us: You shall not suffer a witch to live.
I don’t know any witches, Michael replied.
From outside, the house still appeared unhaunted, although on the night of her first return, their grass roof had begun to die. The Bulgarians say that a vampire who is new first sprays sparks in the darkness and projects a shadow on the wall; as he gets older and stronger, the shadow gets denser. This did not transpire with Milena, although her face seemed to have widened and darkened. Perhaps she wasn’t a vampire at all. Her lips smiled reddish-brown. Her sad black eyes were huge but they did not shine; they could have been painted on. Growing ever more accustomed to her, Michael now thought it best to be straightforward (although of course not forward). His wife had come back to him; that was all. No doubt it must have been God’s will.
At any rate, how could it have stayed secret? The neighbors’ eyelids drooped as if they were half asleep, but their mouths opened and their faces turned to wood. Gathering between the ruts of the street, they watched the couple sitting together on the doorstep, her face turned toward his while she smiled as if in joy and relief, holding his hand; they claimed to believe that something was wrong, either with the way he kept massaging her fingers, as if he were striving to warm them, or with the way her dark eyes never fixed on anyone but him; that wasn’t natural; she must be sucking his blood! It’s true that he still seemed to be more or less himself, but who would swear to that in an ecclesiastical court? She appeared to fascinate him even more than she had in life, although he had certainly adored her then; he kept turning toward her; sometimes he gazed out into the world, perhaps anxiously, and then she stared into the ground. Her long black hair gleamed more than ever before; it seemed to be nourished on some new grease.
Thank God for the tomb away from home where she now passed her sunny hours! The neighbor women would have peered in on her all day, praying with their mouths open, seeking to know if that dead face were still hers. As it was, they hounded his daughters (who grew skinny and never said anything); several times he caught people snooping in the hayshed. He burned up the lovely coffin he had made, but too late; they must have told the priest. When Milena awoke that night, and flitted darkly in through his window, those two discussed the matter and found themselves of one mind. Before the grim men with stakes and torches had entirely surrounded the house, he sent for the priest himself. Then he sat at his doorstep alone, watching his dear friends and neighbors, who as usual said nothing to him.
20
The priest was as wide-eyed as an owl on a Greek vase.
I know your mother-in-law very well, of course, and she has confessed that on a recent occasion, during the night, you sent for her.
Yes, Father.
That’s all very well, saying, yes, Father, but you delayed your coming to me. Until now there’s never been anything against you. You’re a hard worker, a good tither, no blasphemy or fornication, but now . . .
Yes, Father.
Speak.
Well, Father, Milena came back to me. She was buried by mistake.
That’s not what your mother-in-law said.
Well imagining what his mother-in-law had said, he imagined equally well the recent doings of those people who all his life had known who he was and after his marriage tied up their bags of knowledge and lost them, because there was nothing further to know, and now reached new conclusions about him, mostly that he had become uncanny and ought to suffer for their safety or pleasure. Of course they had been acquainted with Milena and continued familiar with her mother, whom they now promptly haunted and tormented, until she, as most people would, gave up her dead daughter, and Michael with her. So the priest got involved. To him Michael said: But it’s true—I swear it on Milena’s grave! And since her mother didn’t approve, I told Milena to go back where she came from—
If you’re lying, you’ll be burned.
Yes, Father.
We may burn you regardless. You didn’t confess to me.
Please forgive me, Father.
The neighbors say that she sports licentiously with you every night.
She’s my wife, Father.
But you just claimed that you’d sent her away—
Yes, Father, because man who is born of woman, his days are short and filled with trouble—
I’ll remand you to the magistrate for questioning.
Please, Father, what about my children?
We’ll make provision for them. I’ll speak with Doroteja.
What if I deed our home to the Church as security?
Very well. Sign your mark here. Do you swear by the Virgin not to run away?
I swear.
The Inquisitors will send for you when they arrive.
Yes, Father.
Go tend to your children. If your wife appears, you must bring her straightaway.
Yes, Father. Father, Milena suspects the sexton of stealing her wedding ring.
We’ll search for it in the coffin.
21
Beautiful and resolute, the eldest daughter raised the carving knife over her mother, turning toward him as he entered, but appearing not to perceive him, her face barely poised in his direction, the evening light very lovely on the near side of her head and neck, her sweet lips, which resembled her mother’s, a trifle clenched.
22
The daughters, those lovely girls, soon unfortunately died, of the cholera, it was said, although the neighbors naturally wondered whether the mother had sucked them dry. In fact it truly had been the cholera, and when Michael asked Milena whether she could bring them back, she replied: Don’t ask God for too much.— Astounded that she could even speak of God, he determined to test her one morning while she slept, having obtained a pinch of consecrated salt from Father Hauser. He never meant to harm her, only to comprehend what she was.— What do you suppose happened? Did it burn her? He was just about to sprinkle it over her left hand when slowly, sadly, she opened her dark eyes, with all her best effort keeping at bay the glaring stupor of daylight, and looked at him, so that he felt ashamed. Hence he never learned whether holy salt could burn her; he went on living without seeking certainty.
Weeping, she wove the daughters’ shrouds in a single night. She requested to be alone for the sake of her grief,
but when he peeked through the keyhole he saw that three spiders were helping her. Bursting in, he demanded: Are those your familiars? Did the Devil give them to you?
Of course not, husband. I found them.
What does that mean?
I only found them; that’s all.
(Perhaps you think it ghastly, what happened to the children, but there is no evidence of malice.)
Here came Doroteja’s elder sister, likewise a widow, and a simple, hardworking woman who had already lost half her teeth, lifting up her skirts as she negotiated the mud between her house and his, the kerchief wrapped tight around her sweaty forehead and her basket half full of cow dung. Fearing her condolences, Michael locked the door. She might have heard him breathing inside.
23
The authorities reasoned with him, citing wise words of the Malleus Maleficarum, which is a book of such virtue against the Black Arts that a Papal Bull has praised it, and the wise words run thus: I have found a woman more bitter than death, who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net, and her hands are bands. And still further they counseled him from this Book, saying: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing, which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb.
But he replied to them in their own coin, beseeching them: Isn’t marriage an eternal sacrament? Have I misunderstood? At all the weddings and funerals I have attended, and on Easter, and at every baptism, you teach us that the souls of those to whom we have been united in the sacraments will be with us in the Hereafter—
Provided that the parties are Christian. My good man, don’t you see that your wife has become a foul fiend? Like Eve herself, she has grown more bitter than death. The very grave vomits her out! And the very first result is that you begin to question us. Can’t you hear the Devil laughing? Kneel down now and beg our pardon, for we know you to be a simple man misled by uxoriousness.
Pray forgive me, Fathers.
The priest’s most prized and efficacious tool, a gable-faced reliquary casket, was given to be carried in the altar boy’s arms.— And you know what will happen to you if you drop it!— Yes, Father.— As for the butcher, his apprentice bore the sack of knives and the sharpening stele, but he himself marched with the great wooden mallet (an implement of office) over his shoulder; he used it to pound tough meat into tender, which went for a higher price. Beside them walked the executioner, Hans Trollhand, a shaveheaded, essential man with a bundle of rough stakes under his arm.
In Beograd it is often the drummer boy who carries the surgeon’s box of instruments when it comes time to disinter a suspected vampire, but since the drummer boy had recently broken his head, thanks to a kick from a colonel’s stallion, the surgeon found himself unable to emulate the example of that fashionable metropolis, whose glittering doings had been polished up still more for him by hearsay; accordingly, he was sulky, not to mention uneasy about this public trial of his medical knowledge; he had worked on dead patients before, but who could say what tricks the undead might play? But what he feared most of all was the Inquisition, whose severities are infallible, not to mention inevitable. In short, he carried his own toolbox under his arm, keeping a trifle aloof from Trollhand, who looked festive in his black-and-red cloak.
It was quite a procession indeed. The blood-red banners hung from the town hall. Doroteja was there, and so was Milena’s mother, her face as hard as a shoemaker’s wooden form. Yes, Doroteja was pale, yet avid, of course; and here came all the old women whose children or grandchildren had been sucked dead by the satanic pest; with them came the living representatives of youth, hungry for horrors, and the one-legged soldier who desired (so he loudly explained) to see if anything could make him flinch—and here came Michael’s former friends, who used to partake of Communion beside him (the same cowards who if they were alone would pay off a corpse with silver, so that it would not come haunting), and the ones whose cows Milena had healed, not to mention everyone else, the presence of the whole town being required by the Church—and none of them meaning him or Milena any good. Why it was that he could not be left in quiet with his faithful wife in whatever happiness they could make was certainly beyond him. But there it was; and now men from other villages were coming, too, and some few carried sharpened stakes over their shoulders.
I do him no injustice to state that his awareness that any time he wished to, he could get rid of this vampire and then taste Doroteja, devour her even, was delicious to him; for isn’t it human nature to be pleased when fate offers us more than we already possess? It gave him a sense almost of pride, to know that he continued to stir Doroteja’s heart. To be sure, he was also afraid of her; it was precisely on account of her almost predatory determination to have whatever she wanted that he had first chosen the more easygoing Milena. At this very moment, as he could well see, she was brooding over him, in much the way that an evil spirit studies us. Of course he would have enjoyed experiencing with her the understanding of the flesh; and for the first time it now struck him that her fleshly intuition or comprehension of him might well exceed his of her; for all he knew, she might be able to read him down to his discreetest parentheses. This possibility should have increased his fear; instead, it flattered him.
Gazing round him at the audience, most of whom perhaps hoped in horror to see a slender female arm rise gracefully up from the ground, Michael thought to himself: Even if Milena is what they say she is, why should that make her any worse than these old peasants who have nothing better to do than watch the weeds grow on their mortgaged fields?— He hated them all.
The day was as bright as the illuminated miniature in some Cardinal’s missal: sky of lapis lazuli, fields of malachite, which is more faithfully permanent than emerald, attire of—Well, I should not say red and blue, for who in that town was so rich, and who would have wished to wear fine clothes to an exhumation? Let’s say that the figures were perfect in their diminutive fashion, and that they were all ringed round with gold leaf; for who could disagree with their purpose? Michael, perhaps, might not have been so contented. He could not prevent himself from envisioning what would happen once they had operated on his wife: Her eyeballs would sink into her skull and her mouth would split her face from ear to ear, in a grinning crack of darkness.
There was another old shrew who had been terrorizing the neighborhood; three young mothers whose breasts were full of milk but who had lost their babies just the same had already made formal accusation against her. Singing a prayer, they opened her coffin first. She was quite decomposed.
Getting a bit dark at the armpits, are we? said the surgeon.— Just in case, he drove a stake through her heart—which is to say, he positioned the sharpened lindenwood skewer in the most infallible anatomical position, then nodded to the butcher, who swung the mallet with all his might. To everyone’s disappointment, the corpse declined to shriek, so the executioner had nothing to do.
Well, how was that experience? asked the priest.
The butcher, who felt passing proud just then, wanted everyone to appreciate his experience. So he considered awhile, then said: It was like driving a nail into blood pudding.
Next, they opened the three daughters’ coffins, just to be sure. The faces had already fallen in, with spiderwebs or cauls growing mercifully over them. At the priest’s direction, the surgeon cut their heads off and packed the grinning mouths with garlic.
Now it was Milena’s turn. Michael stood to one side, temporarily overlooked by the little boys with bare and grubby feet in whose names this was being done. The sexton dug up the coffin. The butcher helped him pull it out. On account of their confidence that whatever lay inside had become evil, they slammed it down with what Michael, who knew better than to say anything, considered to be disrespect. The sexton leaned on his shovel, gasping and coughing. The butcher, sweating, pulled off his bloody apron and slapped it against an old tombstone until the worms fell off. The executioner smiled, with hi
s hand on the pommel of his sword. The priest led them in a prayer; Michael’s lips moved meaninglessly. The surgeon, whose belt buckle resembled a great lock, shouted: Amen! The grubby mothers and grandmothers raised the babies over their heads so that they could see and learn everything; then the sexton, having caught his wind, tapped a chisel into the crack between coffin and lid, twisted expertly, and pried it open. So the roundcheeked priest pressed forward, raising a cross, while the lean, longhaired surgeon peeped cautiously over his shoulder, gripping what is nearly as efficacious against monsters as a cross—namely, his sharpest knife, which could saw open a skull at need.
There lay Milena, with her head on her breast, in that same silent and patient position as the old beggar who stands outside our church.
24
The good priest, so wide, steady and sad, had been ready for anything. But Milena looked . . . well, lovely in her coffin. Her face was as glossy-white as that famous intaglio portrait of Duchess Margherita of Savoy. Since everybody awaited his word, he said: Lift her out—gently, now! (Michael, are you with us or against us?) All right now. Sexton, have you seen her wedding ring?
And all these people who had once loved them, they did not know whether to pronounce her dead, alive or monstrous.
25
Just as it is for a woman all alone in bed at witch-hour, with a single candle to light her, and the other rooms of the house dread-darkened, and the world beyond filled with night and death; so it was and ever would be for Milena in daytime, even with her husband lying on top of her coffin to guard and comfort her. How much more so now! And had the villagers truly met with such a sight as I have imagined in the previous chapter, that would have been Milena’s end. In fact what they discovered—for Michael and his wife had been provident—was a woman’s remains, long decomposed, slopping out of Milena’s burying clothes. Her ooziness proved her innocence.
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