by Rice, Anne
Its library alone is worth a king’s ransom in any earthly currency. There are manuscripts in all languages, indeed some from the famous old library of Alexandria burnt centuries ago, and others from the libraries of the martyred Cathars, whose culture is no more. There are texts from ancient Egypt for a glimpse of which archaeologists might cheerfully commit murder. There are texts by preternatural beings of several known species, including vampires. There are letters and documents in these archives which have been written by me.
None of these treasures interest me. They never have. Oh, in my more playful moments I have toyed with the idea of breaking into the vaults and reclaiming a few old relics that once belonged to immortals I loved. I know these scholars have collected possessions which I myself have abandoned—the contents of rooms in Paris near the end of the last century, the books and furnishings of my old house in the tree-shaded streets of the Garden District, beneath which I slumbered for decades, quite oblivious to those who walked the rotted floors above. God knows what else they have saved from the gnawing mouth of time.
But I no longer cared about those things. That which they had salvaged they might keep.
What I cared about was David, the Superior General who had been my friend since the long ago night when I came rudely and impulsively through the fourth-storey window of his private rooms.
How brave and poised he had been. And how I had liked to look at him, a tall man with a deeply lined face and iron-gray hair. I wondered then if a young man could ever possess such beauty. But that he knew me, knew what I was—that had been his greatest charm for me.
What if I make you one of us. I could do it, you know …
He’s never wavered in his conviction. “Not even on my deathbed will I accept,” he’d said. But he’d been fascinated by my mere presence, he couldn’t conceal it, though he had concealed his thoughts well enough from me ever since that first time.
Indeed his mind had become like a strongbox to which there was no key. And I’d been left only with his radiant and affectionate facial expressions and a soft, cultured voice that could talk the Devil into behaving well.
As I reached the Motherhouse now in the small hours, amid the snow of the English winter, it was to David’s familiar windows that I went, only to find his rooms empty and dark.
I thought of our most recent meeting. Could he have gone to Amsterdam again?
That last trip had been unexpected or so I was able to find out, when I came to search for him, before his clever flock of psychics sensed my meddlesome telepathic scanning—which they do with remarkable efficiency—and quickly cut me off.
Seems some errand of great importance had compelled David’s presence in Holland.
The Dutch Motherhouse was older than the one outside London, with vaults beneath it to which the Superior General alone had the key. David had to locate a portrait by Rembrandt, one of the most significant treasures in the possession of the order, have it copied, and send that copy to his close friend Aaron Lightner, who needed it in connection with an important paranormal investigation being carried on in the States.
I had followed David to Amsterdam and spied on him there, telling myself that I would not disturb him, as I had done many times before.
Let me tell the story of that episode now.
At a safe distance I had tracked him as he walked briskly in the late evening, masking my thoughts as skillfully as he always masked his own. What a striking figure he made under the elm trees along the Singel gracht, as he stopped again and again to admire the narrow old three- and four-storey Dutch houses, with their high step gables, and bright windows left undraped, it seemed, for the pleasure of the passersby.
I sensed a change in him almost at once. He carried his cane as always, though it was plain he still had no need of it, and he flipped it upon his shoulder as he’d done before. But there was a brooding to him as he walked; a pronounced dissatisfaction; and hour after hour passed during which he wandered as if time were of no importance at all.
It was very clear to me soon that David was reminiscing, and now and then I did manage to catch some pungent image of his youth in the tropics, even flashes of a verdant jungle so very different from this wintry northern city, which was surely never warm. I had not had my dream of the tiger yet. I did not know what this meant.
It was tantalizingly fragmentary. David’s skills at keeping his thoughts inside were simply too good.
On and on he walked, however, sometimes as if he were being driven, and on and on I followed, feeling strangely comforted by the mere sight of him several blocks ahead.
Had it not been for the bicycles forever whizzing past him, he would have looked like a young man. But the bicycles startled him. He had an old man’s inordinate fear of being struck down and hurt. He’d look resentfully after the young riders. Then he’d fall back into his thoughts.
It was almost dawn when he inevitably returned to the Motherhouse. And surely he must have slept the greater part of each day.
He was already walking again when I caught up with him one evening, and once again there seemed no destination in particular. Rather he meandered through Amsterdam’s many small cobblestoned streets. He seemed to like it as much as I knew he liked Venice, and with reason, for the cities, both dense and darkly colored, have, in spite of all their marked differences, a similar charm. That one is a Catholic city, rank and full of lovely decay, and the other is Protestant and therefore very clean and efficient, made me, now and then, smile.
The following night, he was again on his own, whistling to himself as he covered the miles briskly, and it soon came clear to me that he was avoiding the Motherhouse. Indeed, he seemed to be avoiding everything, and when one of his old friends—another Englishman and a member of the order—chanced to meet him unexpectedly near a bookseller’s in the Leidsestraat, it was plain from the conversation that David had not been himself for some time.
The British are so very polite in discussing and diagnosing such matters. But this is what I separated out from all the marvelous diplomacy. David was neglecting his duties as Superior General. David spent all his time away from the Motherhouse. When in England, David went to his ancestral home in the Cotswolds more and more often. What was wrong?
David merely shrugged off all these various suggestions as if he could not retain interest in the exchange. He made some vague remark to the effect that the Talamasca could run itself without a Superior General for a century, it was so well disciplined and tradition bound, and filled with dedicated members. Then off he went to browse in the bookseller’s, where he bought a paperback translation in English of Goethe’s Faust. Then he dined alone in a small Indonesian restaurant, with Faust propped before him, eyes racing over the pages, as he consumed his spicy feast.
As he was busy with his knife and fork, I went back to the bookstore and bought a copy of the very same book. What a bizarre piece of work!
I can’t claim to have understood it, or why David was reading it. Indeed it frightened me that the reason might be obvious and perhaps I rejected the idea at once.
Nevertheless I rather loved it, especially the ending, where Faust went to heaven, of course. I don’t think that happened in the older legends. Faust always went to hell. I wrote it off to Goethe’s Romantic optimism, and the fact that he had been so old by the time he wrote the end. The work of the very old is always extremely powerful and intriguing, and infinitely worth pondering, and all the more perhaps because creative stamina deserts so many artists before they are truly old.
In the very small hours, after David had vanished into the Motherhouse, I roamed the city alone. I wanted to know it because he knew it, because Amsterdam was part of his life.
I wandered through the enormous Rijksmuseum, perusing the paintings of Rembrandt, whom I had always loved. I crept like a thief through the house of Rembrandt in the Jodenbreestraat, now made into a little shrine for the public during daylight hours, and I walked the many narrow lanes of the city, feeling t
he shimmer of olden times. Amsterdam is an exciting place, swarming with young people from all over the new homogenized Europe, a city that never sleeps.
I probably would never have come here had it not been for David. This city had never caught my fancy. And now I found it most agreeable, a vampire’s city for its vast late-night crowds, but it was David of course that I wanted to see. I realized I could not leave without at least exchanging a few words.
Finally, a week after my arrival, I found David in the empty Rijksmuseum, just after sunset, sitting on the bench before the great Rembrandt portrait of the Members of the Drapers’ Guild.
Did David know, somehow, that I’d been there? Impossible, yet there he was.
And it was obvious from his conversation with the guard—who was just taking his leave of David—that his venerable order of moss-back snoops contributed mightily to the arts of the various cities in which they were domiciled. So it was an easy thing for the members to gain access to museums to see their treasures when the public was barred.
And to think, I have to break into these places like a cheap crook!
It was completely silent in the high-ceilinged marble halls when I came upon him. He sat on the long wooden bench, his copy of Faust, now very dog-eared and full of bookmarks, held loosely and indifferently in his right hand.
He was staring steadily at the painting, which was that of several proper Dutchmen, gathered at a table, dealing with the affairs of commerce, no doubt, yet staring serenely at the viewer from beneath the broad brims of their big black hats. This is scarcely the total effect of this picture. The faces are exquisitely beautiful, full of wisdom and gentleness and a near angelic patience. Indeed, these men more resemble angels than ordinary men.
They seemed possessed of a great secret, and if all men were to learn that secret, there would be no more wars or vice or malice on earth. How did such persons ever become members of the Drapers’ Guild of Amsterdam in the 1600s? But then I move ahead of my tale …
David gave a start when I appeared, moving slowly and silently out of the shadows towards him. I took a place beside him on the bench.
I was dressed like a tramp, for I had acquired no real lodgings in Amsterdam, and my hair was tangled from the wind.
I sat very still for a long moment, opening my mind with an act of will that felt rather like a human sigh, letting him know how concerned I was for his well-being, and how I’d tried for his sake to leave him in peace.
His heart was beating rapidly. His face, when I turned to him, was filled with immediate and generous warmth.
He reached over with his right hand and grasped my right arm. “I’m glad to see you as always, so very glad.”
“Ah, but I’ve done you harm. I know I have.” I didn’t want to say how I’d followed him, how I’d overheard the conversation between him and his comrade, or dwell upon what I saw with my own eyes.
I vowed I would not torment him with my old question. And yet I saw death when I looked at him, even more perhaps for his brightness and cheerfulness, and the vigor in his eyes.
He gave me a long lingering thoughtful look, and then he withdrew his hand, and his eyes moved back to the painting.
“Are there any vampires in this world who have such faces?” he asked. He gestured to the men staring down at us from the canvas. “I am speaking of the knowledge and understanding which lies behind these faces. I’m speaking of something more indicative of immortality than a preternatural body anatomically dependent upon the drinking of human blood.”
“Vampires with such faces?” I responded. “David, that is unfair. There are no men with such faces. There never were. Look at any of Rembrandt’s paintings. Absurd to believe that such people ever existed, let alone that Amsterdam was full of them in Rembrandt’s time, that every man or woman who ever darkened his door was an angel. No, it’s Rembrandt you see in these faces, and Rembrandt is immortal, of course.”
He smiled. “It’s not true what you’re saying. And what a desperate loneliness emanates from you. Don’t you see I can’t accept your gift, and if I did, what would you think of me? Would you still crave my company? Would I crave yours?”
I scarce heard these last words. I was staring at the painting, staring at these men who were indeed like angels. And a quiet anger had come over me, and I didn’t want to linger there anymore. I had forsworn the assault, yet he had defended himself against me. No, I should not have come.
Spy on him, yes, but not linger. And once again, I moved swiftly to go.
He was furious with me for doing it. I heard his voice ring out in the great empty space.
“Unfair of you to go like that! Positively rude of you to do it! Have you no honor? What about manners if there is no honor left?” And then he broke off, for I was nowhere near him, it was as if I’d vanished, and he was a man alone in the huge and cold museum speaking aloud to himself.
I was ashamed but too angry and bruised to go back to him, though why, I didn’t know. What had I done to this being! How Marius would scold me for this.
I wandered about Amsterdam for hours, purloining some thick parchment writing paper of the kind I most like, and a fine-pointed pen of the automatic kind that spews black ink forever, and then I sought a noisy sinister little tavern in the old red-light district with its painted women and drugged vagabond youths, where I could work on a letter to David, unnoticed and undisturbed as long as I kept a mug of beer at my side.
I didn’t know what I meant to write, from one sentence to the next, only that I had to tell him in some way that I was sorry for my behavior, and that something had snapped in my soul when I beheld the men in the Rembrandt portrait, and so I wrote, in a hasty and driven fashion, this narrative of sorts.
You are right. It was despicable the way I left you. Worse, it was cowardly. I promise you that when we meet again, I shall let you say all you have to say.
I myself have this theory about Rembrandt. I have spent many hours studying his paintings everywhere—in Amsterdam, Chicago, New York, or wherever I find them—and I do believe as I told you that so many great souls could not have existed as Rembrandt’s paintings would have us believe.
This is my theory, and please bear in mind when you read it that it accommodates all the elements involved. And this accommodation used to be the measure of the elegance of theories … before the word “science” came to mean what it means today.
I believe that Rembrandt sold his soul to the Devil when he was a young man. It was a simple bargain. The Devil promised to make Rembrandt the most famous painter of his time. The Devil sent hordes of mortals to Rembrandt for portraits. He gave wealth to Rembrandt, he gave him a charming house in Amsterdam, a wife and later a mistress, because he was sure he would have Rembrandt’s soul in the end.
But Rembrandt had been changed by his encounter with the Devil. Having seen such undeniable evidence of evil, he found himself obsessed with the question What is good? He searched the faces of his subjects for their inner divinity; and to his amazement he was able to see the spark of it in the most unworthy of men.
His skill was such—and please understand, he had got no skill from the Devil; the skill was his to begin with—that not only could he see that goodness, he could paint it; he could allow his knowledge of it, and his faith in it, to suffuse the whole.
With each portrait he understood the grace and goodness of mankind ever more deeply. He understood the capacity for compassion and for wisdom which resides in every soul. His skill increased as he continued; the flash of the infinite became ever more subtle; the person himself ever more particular; and more grand and serene and magnificent each work.
At last the faces Rembrandt painted were not flesh-and-blood faces at all. They were spiritual countenances, portraits of what lay within the body of the man or the woman; they were visions of what that person was at his or her finest hour, of what that person stood to become.
This is why the merchants of the Drapers’ Guild look like the oldest and wis
est of God’s saints.
But nowhere is this spiritual depth and insight more clearly manifest than in Rembrandt’s self-portraits. And surely you know that he left us one hundred and twenty-two of these.
Why do you think he painted so many? They were his personal plea to God to note the progress of this man who, through his close observation of others like him, had been completely religiously transformed. “This is my vision,” said Rembrandt to God.
Towards the end of Rembrandt’s life, the Devil grew suspicious. He did not want his minion to be creating such magnificent paintings, so full of warmth and kindness. He had believed the Dutch to be a materialistic and therefore worldly people. And here in pictures full of rich clothing and expensive possessions, gleamed the undeniable evidence that human beings are wholly unlike any other animal in the cosmos—they are a precious mingling of the flesh and immortal fire.
Well, Rembrandt suffered all the abuse heaped upon him by the Devil. He lost his fine house in the Jodenbreestraat. He lost his mistress, and finally even his son. Yet on and on he painted, without a trace of bitterness or perversity; on and on he infused his paintings with love.
Finally he lay on his deathbed. The Devil pranced about, gleefully, ready to snatch Rembrandt’s soul and pinch it between evil little fingers. But the angels and saints cried to God to intervene.
“In all the world, who knows more about goodness?” they asked, pointing to the dying Rembrandt. “Who has shown more than this painter? We look to his portraits when we would know the divine in man.”
And so God broke the pact between Rembrandt and the Devil. He took to himself the soul of Rembrandt, and the Devil, so recently cheated of Faust for the very same reason, went mad with rage.