Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  26

  The priest then said, as anyone would: But Milena did come back.

  I must have dreamed it all, replied Michael, and when Milena’s mother and the neighbors insisted that they had seen that demon in his wife’s form (at least Doroteja kept kindly silent), he pointed down at the thing in the coffin and said: But there she is!

  Even the executioner agreed that there was no point in driving a stake into it.

  Reclosing the coffin, they reinterred it, not gently, because they all felt disappointed, and the way things should have gone, Michael and Milena ought to be burning together now. How exactly he got out of it I cannot tell you, but it might have had something to do with the payment of gold, and his grace was certainly provisional, so that evening, once he had bolted himself back inside the little house which was no longer his, and dug up Milena from under the kitchen floor (she woke up crying out: I was so lonely!), he stood defiant at the window, while she sat discreetly behind him in the hot darkness. He watched their neighbors standing behind the fence, waiting for them to come out; and for the last time he saw Doroteja crossing the footbridge by Milena’s mother’s house.

  Since of the two of them only Milena could see in the dark, not until moonrise did they set out, leaving forever their high-roofed farmhouse beneath its chestnut trees; no doubt the roof would soon fall in; who else would care to live there? He carried a few tools at his belt; her wifely lockbox was light; he bore that on his shoulder.

  The moon slipped behind a cloud. Milena whispered that she’d flit ahead and behind, to ensure that no one lay in wait. He worried then; he wouldn’t know where she was.

  She told him: If you love me enough, you’ll learn to listen.

  For what?

  For me.

  How will I know?

  When your ears are sensitive enough to hear a vampire’s fingernails growing underground.

  He complained that she was being uncanny, and she laughingly kissed his throat; he realized that she was teasing him.

  She vanished and returned: A horseman was coming. Michael’s faithful wife led him quickly to the cemetery, where they ducked down among the uneven ranks of pale gravestones in the grass and the mud. The horseman passed. Michael would have liked to bid goodbye to their daughters. Strange to say, he also wished to visit Milena’s grave. It seemed awkward to pose the matter to his wife, who in any event probably knew what he was thinking. Besides, who could say which ghouls and monsters were here?— Courage! she whispered, squeezing his hand.

  Something chuckled, then whinnied like a horse. Faraway horses began screaming.— Oh, that joker! laughed Milena.

  So they hurried along the dirt road which curved in obedience to the adjacent river. Passing the Dark Man by the water who disguises himself as driftwood (he was an acquaintance of Milena’s), they hastened on, and behind them came a sound as if the water were being flogged with planks. Long before dawn they were both weary. Skirting the villages of Nachtstern and Grabmund, where dogs barked at them, they found another cemetery. Michael smashed the lock on a vault, and retired within to sleep out the day with his faithful wife, unable to keep from smiling now that everything had ended so well.

  27

  She brought him a gold ring from some churchyard, and he sold it in a tavern. With those wages they took to the road again, in fear of every human being, and therefore in still greater need of each other, hiding in a beehive-shaped night-coach pulled by two horses; so they got past the high-towered castles inhabited by all those others who would never understand them, their way lighted by the glowing greenish eyes in her dark face.

  In Kreuzdorf he hired a coach for himself and his long narrow box. The driver was to take them to the frontier. It was afternoon; he’d scarcely slept, since he must flee with her by night and protect her by day. The horses were nervous. The driver studied him as if he or Milena were somehow to blame—and if she were not, then how could he be, who had sworn to care for her until the end? In the dirt road, a man who held a fat cow by the string tied to one of her horns stood chatting with a man who leaned on his broom. Now it was evening. When they came into Feuerstadt the horses slowed as they approached two barefoot women in long ragged skirts which were grimed to match the color of the road; one wore an open basket on her back, and her arms were folded across her breast; she was telling the other some trouble; then they turned, saw the coach, peered in and crossed themselves—in the name of Saint Polona, what could they be seeing? Milena looked just like anyone else!

  Two men and four black-clad children formed in a line along the road, staring at them.

  Begging their forgiveness, the driver withdrew from service. It was safely dark; they leaped out and departed, leaving the coffin behind; but still he loyally bore her little notion-box, and her caress strengthened his weary step, the sharp blade of morning-dread pressing ever against her unbeating heart.

  28

  So they ran away, over cattle tracks, through the mountains and into the hinterlands of the Holy Roman Empire, around pest-haunted villages, avoiding every church, sometimes chased by thieves and witches; and he clove to her, untempted by any other woman, even when they traversed a piazza which happened to be dazzlingly irradiated just then by the brass-bangled arm of a girl whose hair was still wet from the bath; while his faithful wife’s hands were as cool yellow marble. He was still proud of her lovely long neck. At the last minute she had even brought him another present from beyond the grave: a cameo exactly the size of her fingernail, depicting an unknown white blossom and sealed in old glass or strange lacquer or perhaps even amber.

  In her ornate coffer with the three locks (her mother’s wedding present), she kept those three pet spiders who could weave lace in any pattern she chose: the many-branching floral kind sold very well, but sometimes people liked fleurs-de-lys, or multireplicated suns in a checkerboard pattern. These creatures must have come from the same place as the cameo, but Michael thought it best not to inquire into that which Milena hesitated to reveal. So as they crept southward, unable to trust anyone but each other, he peddled her lacework in the street for small pay, imminently expecting exposure since all the other such vendors were crones and their daughters. And yet they could not say, in the fashion of most outlaws, that they had been unlucky. All they wished for now was a place in which to be themselves. Milena slept in wolf-holes on the edge of town. At first he used to worry that someone would find her and destroy her while she was thus helpless, but she promised always to bury herself as well as she could. There were nights when he lacked a safe place to bathe her, and then with all his heart he pitied and grieved for his sweetheart who once more was black with dirt; but he never recoiled from her; for her part, the faithful wife, understanding now that even her mother’s love had never been what it seemed, clung the more constantly to Michael, who had begun to go grey. So it went, like the many small square scenes of the life of Jesus in a folding triptych icon. She subsisted on the blood of fieldmice and the occasional dog.

  By now he had become mercifully addicted to her gruesome odor—which is only to say what you already know: that he loved her. What is toleration but habit? Consider for instance the halfway sour-moldy odor of fresh strawberries at the market; much of this smell derives from the leaves; all the same, it contains an unwholesome component, over which it is astonishing that so many fruit lovers complacently pass. Hence it would be more accurate to write: Slowly he grew fond of her earthy, sweaty smell. In perilous stretches of daytime he did not in the least mind guarding her remains, no matter what stench leached out of her coffin, trench or shed. Over her remains he sometimes murmured: If they killed you again, and then I never saw you—

  They moved to Torino, and if he were only literate he could have become a bookseller. She taught him Italian, for she already knew Latin, that being a dead language. He did odd jobs of night-work, guarding rich men’s homes from brigands while Milena hid beneath ground. At t
he milliner’s he consigned his wife’s productions: skeletons of frogs done in silver lace, or a lace snail whose shell coiled in spirals, with a waning moon at the center. Nobody except the milliner suspected he was married.

  But, as usual, the couple soon betrayed themselves. A child saw her and screamed. A dog died; a horse grew anemic. Sometimes the neighbors heard them singing the songs of their youth.— People had begun inquiring whether Milena was his wife or his daughter. Soon the Inquisition would be onto them. In Torino there is a certain chocolate shop on Via XX Settembre whose rainbow-striped pistachio chocolate pastilles may, if eaten during the the eleventh Mansion of the Moon (Azobra, which is propitious for redeeming captives), facilitate time travel. If only they had known about it! There came a dawn when Michael saw angry men sharpening stakes. That night he fled with his faithful wife, forsaking all they could not carry. The three spiders travelled inside her mouth. The so-called dark night of the soul might not have been experienced as such by Milena; in any case, it remains intrinsically impenetrable, so I cannot tell you exactly how or where that couple adventured. Our narrative resumes with their arrival in Trieste not long before the end of the bora wind, the trees bowing and whipping before them, in evidence of Fortune’s two sides. They stole into port in a tiny guzzo of Dalmatian make, paying off the boatman in ancient coins. Milena was cloaked and veiled, while Michael looked decidedly unprosperous, not to say desperate, so that the ruffians along the Canal Grande left them alone.

  Declining to flee anymore, they settled in the theater district. He sold her dearest embroideries for insulting wages until he gained the means to wash his face into complacent honesty. Then, having spied and loitered about as their travels had taught him to do, he commenced to fish for more gainful business. And presently through his mediation she became a dressmaker for singers and actresses, dwelling by day within the travelling-trunk of a dead tenor, her flesh oozing in mercurial drops, the floral wallpaper inside the box peeling like rotten papyrus. They hired a dressmaker’s girl to take the clients’ measurements. That got them talked about. Milena’s work grew famous; everyone wished to know who she was. (My wife is not well, he frequently explained.) So resplendently did she fashion the curtains of light chain mail on the helmet of the baritone who sang the knight’s role that everyone cried: Madonna! By then they were able to take better lodgings. He got her a coffin as pretty as a violin case. She clapped her hands. That night he threw the tenor’s trunk into the canal.

  So there he was, secure behind high walls with his faithful wife! He would have been satisfied to give up his life for her, or, better yet, to kill her enemies. In fact she was now the one to build up their wealth, his role mostly being to provide her with the love she required to justify her emergence from the ground and all her subsequent actions. In a trice she uttered linen handkerchiefs with silver roses on them, or even golden wedding-cloth for Duchesses.

  By now their sins were as numerous and lovely as the gilded volumes in Baron Revoltella’s library, but they had begun to trust in the famous indulgence on the part of Italians to the imperfections of others. No one could blame them for adapting themselves to the world they found, and for seeking to prosper; even those who kill it forbear to criticize the scorpion for following its own nature. So Michael and Milena did adapt and prosper, so that their sins were indulged indeed.

  A singer demanded to meet Milena. She thought it only right that Milena should personally take her measurements. And Milena came, just after dusk, muffling up her face against a toothache. The singer was charmed. So was Milena. Michael managed to seem so. As their fortunes ascended, they began to enter society, if only to peep in from the back of the hall, as befitted modest persons. Milena was veiled, and Michael looked, at least to himself, middlingly well-born in the green suit that his faithful wife had made him; his hands were rough, his face was red and his hair was grey. That night there was a rouged signora playing the pianoforte in such a way as to show off her white neck; there was a flower in her hair, and she wore one of Milena’s gowns, whose needlework made blue diamonds from one angle and black crosses from another.— Madonna! they cried again.

  The manager of a travelling troupe had a proposition. They decided to risk inviting him for dinner, together with his actors and actresses. The guests found good food, and Friulian wine, of course, so that they enjoyed themselves sincerely, while the host and hostess replied with a falsity so perfect that they might as well have been polite guests on their own account. And so even the actors and actresses, who were by profession practiced at fictions, supposed themselves to be at table with people like themselves, who slept by night and found contentment rather than peril in every crowd. It is true that on the next day one of the actresses asked another whether it is ever possible to discern traces of vampirism in a sick man’s face; for their host, who must have been of rustic or ignorant birth, had appeared to be watching them with a cautious, considering grimness, as if he might become unfriendly. As for his cat-eyed, sensuous dead wife, who kept smiling faintly, they pitied her for an imbecile. Anyhow she was harmless; so they stayed late, drank much, and then off they went, the midnight air shining with dangers which only she could see were merely cats’ eyes.

  To be sure, his wife’s unhealthy look did sometimes attract attention, which in those times was a dangerous matter. Fearful and ashamed, Michael performed his utmost to make them forget her, growing so ingratiating that he practically would have performed conjuring tricks to please them—and when it didn’t quite work he sometimes nearly blamed her for his troubles; but one marble-eyed glance from his faithful wife sufficed to blot out his rage, which became as a coin sinking down to the bottom of a mucky pond: settled, concealed.

  She gazed upon every guest with a level smile. Once he asked: Weren’t you afraid?—to which she replied: What were they going to do—kill me?

  Just then she seemed even farther away than poor Doroteja, whose loneliness, had it been her lying there, would most certainly have sickened him with remorse.

  After that, Michael and Milena had nearly enough money, and so there were other dinners. They even had a nighttime servingmaid to carry out the platters. And there, playing the hostess, sat his faithful wife, wise enough not to hang long glistening earrings from her dead face! Of course it was still dreadfully risky. When Milena was still alive, she sometimes used to preen herself before a little mirror that her mother had given her; when she was pregnant she used to stand before it, combing back her hair with her lovely breasts thrusting out; nowadays, of course, she cast no mirror-image. So it was difficult to get ready for company; she had to rely on her husband to tell her how she looked. But he was careful; nobody caught her out. People remarked on the woman’s lucent green stare, but not to her, and certainly not to her husband, who had a ruffianly look about him.

  Of course they would have preferred to open their hearts to others, to accept true friendship as opposed to eternally giving it (favors can be done with kindness and even sincerity, without revealing oneself; consider the rich man in his hooded cloak who drops a coin into the half-naked beggar’s hand). But why complain? Their household in Trieste became nearly respectable, their evenings gilded by Friulian wine, which indeed also served to propitiate their neighbors: after a bottle or two of that stuff, every guest thought Michael and Milena to be the best couple they ever knew; and this even went for the new priest, who had been curious, I suspect, to meet someone to whom uncanny facts actually applied; at first he kept baring his teeth at them like a corpse, but once they opened the third bottle he began singing. The guests departed by midnight; in the small hours Milena was uttering bordi of gold and silver thread, her needles ducking in and out to make flowers, ivy-enclosing caskets, wheels and suns all of precious metals, triple-stemmed artichokes, slender rolls of feminine chain mail. Her odor could make a stray dog howl.

  Thanks to her, his daylight hours no longer burdened him with labor. All he had to do was take orders and
deliver them. How he loved those opera singers, sweet mountains of flesh, sweating in their velvet dresses, their wide pink foreheads, exuding the salty juice of life!

  When she slept, he sometimes liked to sit on his doorstep and watch the children who wrapped their arms around their teachers’ waists, the teachers who at the first stroke of the bell formed them into a double line, the little boys who held hands or swished their raincoats at each other, the little girls who sang songs. But he was always tired in the daytime nowadays; on account of his appearance it happened that certain clients declined to receive him directly when he delivered the garments they had ordered; they feared he might bear some contagious disease. Sometimes he grew lonely and irritable, but then he reminded himself of his dear quiet wife whose hands worked unceasingly for them both.

  He would have liked to have children again, but, as thirteen learned doctors have already proved, after a woman’s womb dies once, it lacks the twin elements of fire and water most needed for propagation, being corrupted by a surplus of earth. Besides, who would care to have children with a vampire?— Well, Michael did; he certainly tried. Lying beside her just before dawn, he whispered his wish for more daughters; but the pressure of the oncoming light was already causing her to twitch and grimace; it was time for her to go away again.— That cantata singer’s dress is finished, but ask her if she’d like more ruffles at the sleeves. Because she . . . oh, Michael, I don’t feel well; hide me away quickly; I’m ashamed to die in front of you—