I watched as a group of women, clad in colorful peasant dresses, backlit by several small bonfires, paced around the Qinghai Lake. They were clearing their sins; washing them away with ritual. Each woman paced seven times until they stopped, seating themselves around the bonfires. Some of the women cupped the water, droplets spilling from their wanton fingers, and spread it across their parched cheeks. They cried out as the saltwater stung their skin.
It was cold here. Bitterly cold.
I took to the skies until I saw a scarcely populated area of nomads, their tents alit with the warm glow of oil lamps. There was a central fire pit and surrounding it was a group of men. They wore double-layered flowing robes – their heads naked to the elements. Sheep and cattle mingled nearby while children slept inside the tented compound.
Not far from there, I came upon a city. Tucked into the southwestern Chinese frontier in the nomadic Tibetan countryside was Lhasa.
It was Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and people of all ages danced about wearing brightly colored dresses, the married women sporting ornately patterned aprons and the men in simple robes. Strings of metal coins hung jingling, loosely woven into the partygoers’ garments. They made a magical sound as they tinkled and chimed through the streets, the darkened corners, around the raging bonfires.
It was autumn then, and the apricot trees were blooming. The scent of fallen blossoms permeated the blackness. It was the time for the festival of ritualistically burning incense to appease local spirits.
Before Buddhism, the Tibetan people practiced Bon. It was an animistic religion rife with contradicting rituals and customs. Scholars now argue that Bon was nothing more than pre-Buddhism, with Buddhism becoming a syncretistic hodge-podge of the two traditions.
It was in the Lhokha Yarla Shampo region where legend claims the festival was born, during the reign of Pude Gungyal, the ninth king, or karály. It replaced what
was then referred to as the farmer’s festival, a time to mark the harvest. After the advent of rudimentary astrology, the festival changed to mark the day of lunar New Year.
Celebrations, feasts, dances, they would be conducted for fifteen or more days and nights. Now, after the Chinese invasion into Tibet, celebrations are a short three days in duration.
This was the fourth night of Losar, though, and at small areas near the central fire people gathered, bowls in hand, to find their fortune in guthuk dumplings. Simmering in a spicy meat stew, guthuk dumplings lay in wait to reveal their hidden treasures. Nine chances existed for the diner to get a sugar cube, a small nip of wood, folded paper, wool string, a raw bean, pebble, a cotton ball, or a hot chili pepper, with each symbolizing, in a comedic jest, the receiver’s character. Good luck would come to those whose treasures are white, while coal means the receiver has a heart of black.
I stayed in the shadow, removed from the crowd, and watched as two children explored doughy dumplings while sipping the steaming broth from their bowls. There is a transcendent innocence when children laugh. It freezes time, blurring the lines of reality.
I watched as the first child uncovered a chunk of coal, his eyes widened as his friend pointed and laughed. He tossed it into a nearby fire. The second boy, his friend now urging him, reached into the bowl and pulled out a moist dumpling. His pudgy fingers fumbled as the glob of dough slipped around, falling out of the bowl and landing on his lap. He smashed it with his hand, revealing a wisp of cotton thread. The first boy now grimaced and playfully shoved the second child.
“Remember when we were their age?”
I closed my eyes. The smell of linseed oil hung in the air. I breathed it in slowly, clinging to it as the tears formed.
“I remember many things,” I replied. The Tibetan countryside faded, replaced with candlelight and stone. The pew was hard beneath me. I could feel it. I could smell the linseed oil.
I could see her. Sister Veronica.
“We had forever in front of us,” she said, her face obstructed by the heavy black veil. She clung to the marble crucifix attached to her prayer cord. Her hands were as real as my own, down to the tiny hairs on her knuckles, and the scar on her thumb from that mirror she broke the summer of her eighth birthday.
“Do you remember when you broke that mirror?” I asked her, pointing to the scar. “You bled so much that we both cried.”
“You do not cry over blood anymore, do you?” She clutched the crucifix harder now. Her head dipped to an almost impossible low; her voice stifling tears.
“No,” I whispered. “No, I do not.”
A sniffle escaped her veil. Her head lifted, turning toward me, her eyes piercing through the years that separated us. Creases lined her eyes from worry. Her cheeks ashen and sunken away, her lips pursed as if to
speak. Then a solitary tear – a real tear – glistening as it fell, rolled down her cheek.
“I can change all that,” I told her.
“It is not your time, Bree.” She touched her hand to mine. It was warm and firm. My unnatural coldness did not scare her. I closed my eyes, let the flood of pain and guilt, of loss and longing, wash over me.
The delicate touch of her lips brushed against my cheek. Then I heard the laughing and singing. I heard the children playing nearby.
She was gone when I opened my eyes, the candlelight and stone transformed into cool grass and a festival of lights and sound.
“Who were you talking to?” he asked.
“I knew you would follow me,” I told him. He sat down beside me, placing a concerned arm around my shoulder. “Why did you do it?”
“Because I knew you would need someone.” He leaned in, playfully resting his head on my shoulder. “I knew you would need me.”
“No,” I told him, “That night in the convent. Why did you come for me?”
“I have told you this already. I was lonely,” Wesley replied.
“I want the truth,” I demanded. “You ruined… no, you stole my life. And I want to know why you felt you had that right.”
“Why did you make Aksel?”
“I had no one,” I replied. He removed his arm from my shoulder. “I left you and then I had no one.”
Wesley let the air grow stagnate with our silence. He lowered himself onto the cool grass, stretching his long legs. I watched the crowd below disperse, the people going home to their mortal beds. To age. To change. To die.
Finally, the words escaped in a whisper. “I was lonely.”
“And why did you let Viktor die?”
“Because I was lonely,” I replied. “And I knew that was no reason to rob him of peace.”
“Then you have learned from my mistake, have you not?” he said. “Now, my sister, let your ghosts rest.” He stood. “All of them.”
He left after that.
Our kind, we are lonely and small, and weak. We are lost and falling, uncertain where we will land. We are needy and breakable.
We need companions, friends. We need to exist. We need breathed in, savored, and loved.
We have all lost who we once were. And we all need to be found.
NINETEEN
When the English elms went dormant and even the waters slept on the convent grounds, we all slumbered in spirit. The world paused around us when the winter snow fell. The hearth fire warmed the center of a room while the rest of the convent grew drearily cold.
I remember the frigid hardness of those convent stones on my bare feet each morning. I remember the agonizing walk to the central hearth. Even my soul felt bathed in ice.
How I had been wrong then.
This, this immortality, was far colder than any English winter night. And no fire existed that could warm me now.
It was 1618 when I finally returned to them. I had roamed the Chinese countryside. I thought about Russia, but could not find the strength to return. And despite my sincerity, the whole experience blurred into a rolling fog of lost time.
None of it mattered.
The others, though, had been busy while I aimlessly
and futilely roamed.
Aleksandra had bestowed a substantial portion of wealth to a local society, which in turn built a boarding school. They knew nothing of her identity, of course. She never visited, and instead merely insisted on quarterly reports to a mysterious A. Vladislov. To this day, she still acts as a beneficiary through a fictitious trust in her memory.
Wesley established a hospital. He was never a doctor or one for medicine, really. But money? He had plenty of that. What began as one local clinic, merged into a giant conglomerate. He works, from behind the smoke screen of anonymity, to further medicine. Later, in the modern centuries, after the move to America, Aleksandra took up the cause of genetic medicine.
I, for one, was as lost as I had been when I departed Crete.
I came back to progress, to my kin living, existing. But, I was but a shell of what they had become.
While I was gone, Aleksandra had come across a painting of her father selling at auction. There was an unnamed woman in the painting, her hair long, her dress flowing. She lingered in the back of the scene, watching Viktor from behind a curtain. Viktor, regal and stoic, was dining on a winter’s feast, talking merrily with the then princess, Mavra.
The scowl on Mavra’s face was unforgivable. The artist, unknown as the painting was unsigned, captured the
turmoil in the princess’s eyes. She had one eye fixed on Viktor and one eye fixed on the mysterious woman behind the curtain. And I could still feel her icy glare boring into me, haunting me, chasing me through time.
“Who was she?” Aleksandra asked me the night I found it hanging in the gallery. She had placed it there, near a corner, uncertain if she should keep it. She recognized the half-veiled figure. She recognized her father. She did not recognize the woman with the icy glare.
“Mavra Vladislov,” I whispered, “your mother.”
She ran her fingertips over the painted face, over the white cheeks, the ashen hair.
“You remind me of her sometimes.”
“We never talk about her,” Aleksandra said.
“It was complicated for your father, Aleksandra,” I tried to explain.
“When was this painted?”
“I am not sure,” I told her. “Before you were born, I assume.”
We sat down on a corner couch, in the darkness. I told her everything. How Viktor married Mavra, but loved me. How Mavra was vindictive and cunning, and loved Aleksandra and Anastasia. Loved them but never knew them. I shared fond memories from the time before their birth when Mavra had changed. How what happened to her had been a tragedy. How Viktor could not see how different Mavra had become.
I then told her how I had killed her mother. The description of it, so clinical, distant, that I almost believed it happened to someone else.
How those moments, the last breathes and thoughts of a complex woman, still haunted me. How it formed a chasm separating me from humanity, even more so than I already was. And how because of it, I had to let her father die.
How letting Viktor die ate at me until it formed an enormous void which no other love could ever hope to fill. “He loved you, though,” she said as I wept.
“And I loved him,” I whispered. “I have not seen his face since I left Russia, Aleksandra.”
“Me neither,” she said. “Sometimes, I forget what he looked like.”
I reached up; my fingers met her cheek and slowly made their way across her ashen skin. Her eyes revealed the secrets her face held away, unseen. Her age. Her wisdom. Her history.
“I can never forget because I see him every time I behold your face, see your smile.”
She hugged my shoulders, and then strolled to the painting. “I never knew her,” she said as she traced Mavra’s emerald gown with her fingertip. “I will never know her.”
“She was your mother,” I told her. “A piece of her will always live within you, whether you knew her or not.”
“No,” she said turning toward me. “You are my mother. She just gave birth to me.”
The next night, when I went to see the painting, it was gone. Aleksandra had it removed and reframed.
A month later, I found it hanging in my room one night after I had been feeding. Over the fireplace, framed in gilded gold, was an image of me, peeking out from behind a curtain and Viktor, sitting at the meal, alone. She had Mavra removed, erased.
Every night I would stare up into his eyes until the emptiness gnawed at me. I would remember how it felt to be in his arms, to feel him around me, breathing, his heart beating – the smell of his sweat, the taste of his lips on my own.
Then it became impossible to look at it without wanting to depart from this existence.
I had it removed. I had it hidden. I tried to forget once again.
By the mid-1680’s, I had suppressed Viktor’s ghost. It was difficult, because a large part of me did not want to lock him away into the past again. A large part of me wanted nothing more than to be lost in that past forever. That part of me had to succumb, once again, for his spirit to go with it.
Then in 1719, the painting resurfaced. Wesley and Aleksandra had left for France. They had been gone for seven months. Then Aksel left for Russia but I could not go with him.
Alone, I went wandering through the attic. There was enough history tucked into dusty trunks, placed in shadow, to fill a dozen museums. Centuries of trinkets and art, of stories waiting to be told.
I spent my nights romancing memories.
I found the fur blanket Viktor wrapped the twins in the night they were born. I found a bag of my mother’s jewels and a painting of my great-great-grandfather that had been in my father’s library. Wesley had gone back for it and taken it, days after he became a vampire.
There were trunks of books covered in dust, many falling into the void, their moth eaten pages disintegrating as I touched them. The leather binding cracked with age, and the odor was history weathering away with each passing moment.
Then the painting slipped from the shadows, from that place I carved into my psyche to bury it in forever. I sat in that dreary land of memories and stared at that painting, at his face, the whole evening. I kissed the image and shook from the pain his memory caused.
Those eyes. Those dark, brooding eyes. The first time he looked at me with those eyes, I melted into nothingness. All my supernatural being became his.
That dark hair was now but a memory in a painting. How it had grayed, thinning at the temples, moistened with sweat on his last night with me. How I had run my fingers through each silver strand, smoothing the peppered locks, kissing his forehead as the fever seized his weakened body. Those eyes and hair, haunting, untouchable immortal specters, and the figure behind the curtain, she remained unchangeable. And she always will.
I ripped the painting from the frame and, rushing to the parlor, tossed it in the fire. The raging orange tongues devoured the fabric, melting his image, my image, as it burned.
Captivated, I watched until nothing but ash remained. I reached into the fire, touching the spot where it had burned, and brought the ashes to my lips. Once again, I kissed Viktor goodbye.
I stayed away from the attic for several months, but eventually I returned to those boxes and memories. Loneliness and a need to feel, to know those times again, those people and ages locked away in the trunks, it was powerful. Resisting the past was impossible for me.
Five more months slipped on as I sifted through those boxes, and still no one came home. They had forgotten me as I had forgotten the memories hidden before me.
I finally came across a small maple box, an ornate filigree graced its edge, faint gilding wearing away, tucked secretly away in an unobtrusive trunk. The clasp had been broken and now rusted from its hinges. When I opened it, an ivory crucifix stared back at me. Its whiteness drowned in the heavy red velvet lining, but still managed to call to me. It had once been attached to my prayer cord.
This has been mine. From the convent. From that life.
My tears slid down onto the white cruc
ifix. They slid past and down the side of the small, maple box. They fell into the void of the trunk below and then landed on blackness.
I reached into the trunk and pulled out the black fabric, unraveled it, and trembled.
“Do you remember the first time we wore those?” Sister Veronica said. Her voice did not startle me as it had in Tibet. The aroma of linseed oil married lavender and was gentle in the air, the way I always remember her smelling.
“Yes,” I told her without looking up. “The fabric always scratched you. Remember that rash you got on your back?” I began to laugh. “Nothing healed it and you had to start wearing an undershirt beneath your habit. You still itched incessantly during mass. The looks on Father Patrick’s face as you flinched…”
“You kept those clothes.” Her words were flat.
“I forgot about them,” I admitted.
“He never forgot them,” she said.
“Who?” I asked. “Wesley?”
“He broke the lock,” she said.
I took the box and tucked it back into the fabric, burying both in the trunk.
“He holds it, feels it, lets the heaviness wear down on him.”
“Why?”
“Because he refuses to forget what he has done to you,” she told me.
I watched as the hem of her habit circled in front of me, moved down to a red trunk I had yet to explore.
“He is not the only one choosing not to forget, Bree,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked her, she but faded from me as my eyes moved up, into the path of the red trunk staring at me from down across the attic.
The red trunk was unlocked and I opened it. Lying on top of a crimson gown was the snippet of a woman in emerald. Mavra’s vindictive glare teased me.
The painting scrap was rough beneath my fingers. I let it fall into the trunk and I shut it away.
The air no longer smelled of linseed oil and lavender. The house was still barren. I was still alone.
Descent Into Madness Page 17