by Rice, Anne
“You take them because I have a world of them. And I will write to you and send you more, more so that you will never need to do anything but what you want to do—ride and hunt, and tell the tales of old times by the fire. Buy a fine harp with this, buy books if you will for the little ones, buy what you will.”
“I don’t want this; I want you, my son.”
“Yes, and I want you, my Father, but this little power is all we may have.”
I took his head in both my hands, displaying my strength, perhaps unwisely, but making him stay still while I gave him my kisses, and then with one long warm embrace, I rose to go.
I was out of the room so fast, he couldn’t have seen anything but the door swinging shut.
The snow was coming down. I saw my Master several yards away, and I went to meet him and together we started up the hill. I didn’t want for my Father to come out. I wanted to get away as fast as I could.
I was about to ask that we take to vampire speed and get clear of Kiev when I saw that a figure was hurrying towards us. It was a small woman, her long heavy furs trailing in the wet snow. She had something bright in her arms.
I stood fixed, my Master waiting on me. It was my Mother who had come to see me. It was my Mother who was making her way to the tavern, and in her arms, facing me, was an ikon of the scowling Christ, the one I looked at so long through the chink in the wall of the house.
I drew in my breath. She lifted the ikon by either side and she presented it to me.
“Andrei,” she whispered.
“Mother,” I said. “Keep it for the little ones, please.” I embraced her and kissed her. How much older, how miserably older she seemed. But childbearing had done that to her, pulling the strength out of her, if only for babies to be buried in small plots in the ground. I thought of how many babies she had lost during my youth, and how many were still counted before I was born. She had called them her angels, her little babies, not big enough to live.
“Keep it,” I said to her. “Keep it for the family here.”
“All right, Andrei,” she said. She looked at me with pale, suffering eyes. I could see that she was dying. I understood suddenly that it wasn’t mere age that worked on her, nor the hardship of children. She was diseased from within, and would soon truly die. I felt such a terror, looking at her, such a terror for the whole mortal world. It was just a tiresome, common and inevitable disease.
“Goodbye, darling angel,” I said.
“And goodbye to you, my darling angel,” she answered. “My heart and soul are happy that you are a proud Prince. But show me, do you make the Sign of the Cross in the right way?”
How desperate she sounded. She meant these words. She meant simply, Had I gotten all this apparent wealth by converting to the church of the West? That is what she meant.
“Mother, you put a simple test to me.” I made the Sign of the Cross for her, in our way, the Eastern Way, from right shoulder to left, and I smiled.
She nodded. Then she took something carefully from inside her heavy wool shift coat and she gave it to me, only releasing it when I had made a cradle for it with my hand. It was a dark ruby-red painted Easter egg.
Such a perfect and exquisitely decorated egg. It was banded with long lengthwise ribbons of yellow, and in a center created by them was painted a perfect rose or eight-pointed star.
I looked down at it and then I nodded to her.
I took out a handkerchief of fine Flemish linen and wrapped the egg in this, padding it over and over, and I slipped the little burden faithfully into the folds of my tunic beneath my jacket and cloak.
I bent over and kissed her again on her soft dry cheek. “Mother,” I said, “the Joy of All Sorrows, that is what you are to me!”
“My sweet Andrei,” she answered. “Go with God if you must go.”
She looked at the ikon. She wanted me to see it. She turned the ikon around so that I could look at the gleaming golden Face of God, as waxen and fine as the day I’d painted it for her. Only I hadn’t painted it for her. No, it was the very ikon which I had taken that day on our march into the wild lands.
Oh, what a marvel, that my Father had brought it back with him, all the way from the scene of such loss. And yet why not? Why not would such a man as he have done such a thing?
The snow fell onto the painted ikon. It fell on the stern Face of Our Savior, which had come ablaze under my racing brush as if by magic, a face which with its stern and smooth lips and slightly furrowed brow meant love. Christ, my Lord, could look even more stern peering out from the mosaics of San Marco. Christ, my Lord, could look as stern in many an old painting. But Christ, my Lord, in any manner and in any style, was full of unstinting love.
The snow came in flurries and seemed to melt when it touched His Face.
I feared for it, this fragile panel of wood, and this glistering lacquered image, meant to shine for all time. But she thought of this too, and she quickly shielded the ikon from the wetness of the melting snow with her cloak.
I never saw it again.
But is there anyone who needs now to ask me what an ikon means to me? Is there anyone who needs now to know why, when I saw the Face of Christ before me on the Veil of Veronica, when Dora held it high, this Veil, brought back from Jerusalem and the hour of Christ’s passion, by Lestat himself, through Hell and into the world, that I fell down on my knees, and cried, “It is the Lord”?
11
The journey from Kiev seemed a journey forwards in time, towards the place where I truly belonged.
All of Venice, upon my return, seemed to share the shimmer of the gold-plated chamber in which I made my grave. In a daze, I spent my nights roaming, with or without Marius, drinking up the fresh air of the Adriatic and perusing the splendid houses and government palaces to which I’d grown accustomed over the last few years.
Evening church services drew me like honey draws flies. I drank up the music of the choirs, the chanting of the priests and above all the joyous sensual attitude of the worshipers, as if all this would be a healing balm to those parts of me that were skinned and raw from my return to the Monastery of the Caves.
But in my heart of hearts I reserved a tenacious and heated flame of reverence for the Russian monks of the Monastery of the Caves. Having glimpsed a few words of the sainted Brother Isaac, I walked in the living memory of his teachings—Brother Isaac, who had been a Fool for God, and a hermit, and a seer of spirits, the victim of the Devil and then his Conqueror in the name of Christ.
I had a religious soul, there was no doubt of it, and I had been given two great modes of religious thought, and now in surrendering to a war between these modes, I made war on myself, for though I had no intention of giving up the luxuries and glories of Venice, the ever shining beauty of Fra Angelico’s lessons and the stunning and gilded accomplishments of all those who followed him, making Beauty for Christ, I secretly beatified the loser in my battle, the blessed Isaac, whom I imagined, in my childish mind, to have taken the true path to the Lord.
Marius knew of my struggle, he knew of the hold which Kiev had upon me, and he knew of the crucial importance of all this to me. He understood better than anyone I’ve ever known that each being wars with his own angels and devils, each being succumbs to an essential set of values, a theme, as it were, which is inseparable from living a proper life.
For us, life was the vampiric life. But it was in every sense life, and sensuous life, and fleshly life. I could not escape into it from the compulsions and obsessions I’d felt as a mortal boy. On the contrary, they were now magnified.
Within the month after my return, I knew I had set the tone for my approach to the world around me. I should wallow in the luscious beauty of Italian painting and music and architecture, yes, but I would do it with the fervor of a Russian saint. I would turn all sensuous experiences to goodness and purity. I would learn, I would increase understanding, I would increase in compassion for the mortals around me, and I would never cease to put a pressure upon
my soul to be that which I believed was good.
Good was above all kind; it was to be gentle. It was to waste nothing. It was to paint, to read, to study, to listen, even to pray, though to whom I prayed I wasn’t sure, and it was to take every opportunity to be generous to those mortals whom I did not kill.
As for those I killed, they were to be dispatched mercifully, and I was to become the absolute master of mercy, never causing pain and confusion, indeed snaring my victims as much as I could by spells induced by my soft voice or the depths of my eyes offered for soulful looks, or by some other power I seemed to possess and seemed able to develop, a power to thrust my mind into that of the poor helpless mortal and to assist him in the manufacture of his own comforting images so that the death became the flicker of a flame in a rapture, and then silence most sweet.
I also concentrated on enjoying the blood, on moving deeper, beneath the turbulent necessity of my own thirst, to taste this vital fluid of which I robbed my victim, and to feel most fully that which it carried with it to ultimate doom, the destiny of a mortal soul.
My lessons with Marius were broken off for a while. But at last he came to me gently and told me it was time to study again in earnest, that there were things that we must do.
“I make my own study,” I said. “You know it well enough. You know I haven’t been idle in my wanderings, and you know my mind is as hungry as my body. You know it. So leave me alone.”
“That’s all well and good, little Master,” he said to me kindly, “but you must come back into the school I keep for you. I have things which you must know.”
For five nights I put him off. Then, as I was dozing on his bed sometime after midnight, having spent the earlier evening in the Piazza San Marco at a great festival, listening to musicians and watching the jugglers, I was startled to feel his switch come crashing down on the back of my legs.
“Wake up, child,” he said.
I turned over and looked up. I was startled. He stood, holding the long switch, with his arms folded. He wore a long belted tunic of purple velvet and his hair was tied back at the base of his neck.
I turned away from him. I figured he was being dramatic and that he would go away. The switch came crashing down again and this time there followed a volley of blows.
I felt the blows in a way I’d never felt them when mortal. I was stronger, more resistant to them, but for a split second each blow broke through my preternatural guard and caused a tiny exquisite explosion of pain.
I was furious. I tried to climb up off the bed, and probably would have struck him, so angry was I to be treated in this manner. But he placed his knee on my back and whipped me over and over with the switch, until I cried out.
Then he stood up and dragged me up by the collar. I was shaking with rage and with confusion.
“Want some more?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, throwing off his arm, which he allowed with a little smile. “Perhaps so! One minute my heart is of the greatest concern to you, and the next I’m a schoolboy. Is that it?”
“You’ve had enough time to grieve and to weep,” he said, “and to reevaluate all you’ve been given. Now it’s back to work. Go to the desk and prepare to write. Or I’ll whip you some more.”
I flew into a tirade. “I’m not going to be treated this way; there’s absolutely no necessity for this. What should I write? I’ve written volumes in my soul. You think you can force me into the dreary little mold of an obedient pupil, you think this is appropriate to the cataclysmic thoughts that I have to ponder, you think—.”
He smacked me across the face. I was dizzy. As my eyes cleared, I looked into his.
“I want your attention again. I want you to come out of your meditation. Go to the desk and write for me a summary of what your journey to Russia meant to you, and what you see now here that you could not see before. Make it concise, use your finest similes and metaphors and write it cleanly and quickly for me.”
“Such crude tactics,” I muttered. But my body was throbbing from the blows. It was altogether different from the pain of a mortal body, but it was bad, and I hated it.
I sat down at the desk. I was going to write something really churlish such as “I’ve learned that I’m the slave of a tyrant.” But when I looked up and saw him standing there with the switch in his hand, I changed my mind.
He knew it was the perfect moment to come to me and kiss me. And he did this, and I realized I had lifted my face for his kiss before he bent his head. This didn’t stop him.
I felt the overwhelming happiness of giving in to him. I put my arm up and around his shoulders.
He let me go after a long sweet moment, and then I did write out many sentences, pretty much describing what I’ve explained above. I wrote about the battle in me between the fleshly and the ascetic; I wrote of my Russian soul as seeking after the highest level of exaltation. In the painting of the ikon I had found it, but the ikon had satisfied the need for the sensual because the ikon was beautiful. And as I wrote, I realized for the first time that the old Russian style, the antique Byzantine style, embodied a struggle in itself between the sensual and the ascetic, the figures suppressed, flattened, disciplined, in the very midst of rich color, the whole giving forth pure delight to the eyes while representing denial.
While I wrote, my Master went away. I was aware of it, but it didn’t matter. I was deep into my writing, and gradually I slipped out of my analysis of things, and began to tell an old tale.
In the old days, when the Russians didn’t know Jesus Christ, the great Prince Vladimir of Kiev—and in those days Kiev was a magnificent city—sent his emissaries to study the three religions of the Lord: the Moslem religion, which these men found to be frantic and foul-smelling; the religion of Papal Rome, in which these men did not find any glory; and finally the Christianity of Byzantium. In the city of Constantinople, the Russians were led to see the magnificent churches in which the Greek Catholics worshiped their God, and they found these buildings so beautiful that they didn’t know whether they were in Heaven or still on Earth. Never had the Russians seen anything so splendid; they were certain then that God dwelt among men in the religion of Constantinople, and so it was this Christianity which Russia embraced. It was beauty therefore that gave birth to our Russian Church.
In Kiev once men could find what Vladimir sought to recreate, but now that Kiev is a ruin and the Turks have taken Santa Sofia of Constantinople, one must come to Venice to see the great Theotokos, the Virgin who is the God-Bearer, and her Son when He becomes the Pantokrator, the Divine Creator of All. In Venice, I have found in sparkling gold mosaics and in the muscular images of a new age the very miracle which brought the Light of Christ Our Lord to the land where I was born, the Light of Christ Our Lord which burns still in the lamps of the Monastery of the Caves.
I put down the pen. I pushed the page aside, and I laid my head down on my arms and cried softly to myself in the quiet of the shadowy bedroom. I didn’t care if I was beaten, kicked or ignored.
Finally, Marius came for me to take me to our crypt, and I realize now, centuries later, as I look back, that his forcing me to write on this night caused me to remember always the lessons of those times.
The next night, after he’d read what I had written, he was contrite about having hit me, and he said that it was difficult for him to treat me as anything but a child, but that I was not a child. Rather I was some spirit like unto a child—naive and maniacal in my pursuit of certain themes. He had never expected to love me so much.
I wanted to be aloof and distant, on account of the whipping, but I couldn’t be. I marveled that his touch, his kisses, his embraces meant more to me than they had when I was human.
12
I wish I could slip away now from the happy picture of Marius and me in Venice and take up this tale in New York City, in modern times. I want to go to the moment in the room in New York City when Dora held up Veronica’s Veil, the relic brought back by Lestat from his journ
ey into the Inferno, for then I would have a tale told in two perfect halves—of the child I had been and of the worshiper I became, and of the creature I am now.
But I cannot fool myself so easily. I know that what happened to Marius and to me in the months that followed my journey to Russia is part and parcel of my life.
There is nothing to do but cross The Bridge of Sighs in my life, the long dark bridge spanning centuries of my tortured existence which connects me to modern times. That my time in this passage has been described so well already by Lestat doesn’t mean that I can escape without adding my own words, and above all my own acknowledgment of the Fool for God that I was to be for three hundred years.
I wish I had escaped this fate. I wish that Marius had escaped what happened to us. It is plain now that he survived our separation with far greater insight and strength than I survived it. But then he was already centuries old and a wise being, and I was still a child.
Our last months in Venice were unmarred by any premonition of what was to come. Vigorously, he taught me the essential lessons.
One of the most important of these was how to pass for human in the midst of human beings. In all the time since my transformation, I had not kept good company with the other apprentices, and I had avoided altogether my beloved Bianca, to whom I owed a vast debt of gratitude not merely for past friendship but for nursing me when I was so ill.
Now, I had to face Bianca, or so Marius decreed. I was the one who had to write a polite letter to her explaining that on account of my illness I had not been able to come to her before.
Then, one evening early, after a brief hunt in which I drank the blood of two victims, we set out to visit her, laden with gifts for her, and found her surrounded by her English and Italian friends.
Marius had dressed for the occasion in smart dark blue velvet, with a cloak of the same color for once, which was unusual for him, and he had urged me to dress in sky blue, his favorite color for me. I carried the wine figs and sweet tarts in a basket for her.