The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  For the trip, Rudi had thoughtfully procured for us a diplomatic touring car, a Mercedes with darkened windows. With Anastasia at the wheel, we drove through mile after mile of wheat fields, past tight little groupings of red-tiled rooftops overshadowed by ruined fortifications. Narrow, pointed haystacks dotted the landscape, Queen Anne’s lace and purple wildflowers grew wild over the softly sloping terrain.

  Soon we were winding up the steeply rolling hills at the base of the Carpathians. As we came upon the medieval walls of Sighisoara, birthplace of the great Romanian warrior Vlad Dracul, the sun was setting behind mountain peaks as sharp and menacing as jackals’ teeth.

  It must have been market day. In the main square, farmers were loading willow crates filled with flapping chickens, mud-caked potatoes, and wormy cabbages back onto crude wagons drawn by shaggy horses. The men wore colorful embroidered vests over white shirts, the women were draped in long black shawls. They stopped working and stared as we drove by. A tall, strong-looking fellow crossed himself when he caught my eye.

  “Don’t look at them,” she admonished me softly. “They know what we are.” A smile played at the corners of her red lips.

  At the top of the tallest peak, Anastasia stopped the car. I could hear the bass string twang of frogs croaking, and leaves rustling together like the souls of the damned. Peering forward into the trees, I could make out the ruins of a thick stone wall.

  “Careful where you step,” she said as we climbed out. “There used to be a moat here.”

  She had dressed for the occasion in a gold lamé Vionnet gown. It shimmered and sparkled in the headlights. “Welcome to Luceafarul De Dimineata,” she said. “Morning Star. When it was built in the fifteenth century, it was the strongest citadel in all of Transylvania. You used to be able to see the flags flying on the towers from five miles away. It withstood Turkish and Tartar invasions. But it could not withstand the onslaught of an angry mob of villagers armed with torches and buckets of burning pitch.”

  I knew the story. In life, Anastasia had been a lacemaker, straining her eyes for fourteen hours a day in a poorly-lit cellar under a shop. At forty her eyes gave out. The foreman of the lace shop was sorry to see her go, but that was business. She was returning home late that night, wondering how she was going to pay the bills, when fate intervened in the person of Constantin Mondragon. Training his dark-rimmed eyes on her as she walked slowly down Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, too preoccupied with her troubles to notice, he folded her into the black wings of his coat on the night of October 31, 1869.

  Constantin swept her back to Transylvania, traveling in a dirt-filled box on the back of a wagon, made her the mistress of his castle. He took her with him on his travels, introducing her to leaders of society and heads of state, artists and musicians, gypsies and debased religious figures, bomb makers and anarchists. She smiled prettily and listened, absorbing lessons from them all, while her natural curiosity grew into a ferocious intelligence. She was his constant companion until 1899, when he was staked, beheaded, and set on fire. His castle and everything in it burned to the ground.

  “I watched it all from behind that rock over there,” she said. Her eyes were opaque and remote. “I’ve never seen such brutality in my life.”

  From the boot of the car, she took a dusty green bottle and three wine glasses. She handed the bottle to Rudi, who uncorked it and filled our glasses. The liquid was a deep red-brown, the consistency almost viscous.

  “This, my darlings, is the very last bottle of wine from Constantin’s vineyard, bottled just before the phylloxera virus killed all the grapevines. Vizuina Dragon, Dragon’s Lair. I tracked it down in Budapest.” She poured the rest of the bottle on the stony ground. “To Constantin, who gave me the world, then nurtured my spirit as if I were a cherished child. I miss you every day. Noroc, my darling. Te iubesc.”

  We heard it at the same time; twigs snapping, the crackling of last year’s leaves, the noises of purposeful movement through the trees. A loose cadre of men bore down upon us, carrying torches. At their head was some kind of a religious authority in a white and saffron robe emblazoned with golden crosses. An old man, at least seventy, with a gaunt face and a long scraggly beard, a figure out of an El Greco painting. He held before him an enormous painted cross bearing a hapless Jesus, suffering under a crown of thorns, his wounds raw and bleeding.

  They came to a halt a short distance away from us. By the firelight I could see there were seven of them including the priest, wearing the clothes of the village. They wore the obligatory cross around their necks, garlands of garlic bulbs, and wreathes of garlic flowers in their hair. They came equipped for a fight, each man wielding the tool of his trade; scythes, pitchforks, hoes and spades.

  The man in front had the smoldering eyes of a true believer. His gaze was fixed firmly on Anastasia. In a deep voice, he was declaiming something long and canonical in Romanian, making the sign of the cross in the air in front of him with two fingers over and over again. “Oh, he can’t be serious.” I heard Rudi mutter.

  “Grigorii? Is that you?” Anastasia said playfully. “An Archbishop! You’ve done very well for yourself. You were just a monk back when I used to visit town.”

  “And you, Anastasia Bonheur,” he changed over to sonorous French. “Forty years have passed, but you are unchanged. We are here to return your immortal soul to God, so that you may finally rest in peace.”

  “Am I dreaming?” I whispered to Anastasia. “Nobody says this stuff.”

  His gaze turned slowly to me. He handed the cross to the man behind him. “You were made only recently,” he said, his voice gentle. “I can still see traces of a soul behind your eyes.”

  He stretched out his hand, beckoning me closer. Fierce, dark-rimmed eyes bored into mine. “My son. You are still a child of God. You die a little each time you take a life, don’t you. Come to me and together we can rescue your tormented soul.”

  I took a step forward into the clearing, then another one, till I was standing directly in front of him. Behind me, I could hear Anastasia hissing. “What are you doing?” in English.

  From a pocket in his robe he took a small vial of oil and anointed my forehead, my chin, my cheeks, my hands, my nostrils. He indicated that I unbutton my shirt, and when I did, he dabbed oil on my chest. As he did these things, he intoned something liturgical in Romanian, stopping once to ask me my name. He smelled of garlic and patchouli.

  “He’s giving you extreme unction, you idiot.” Anastasia informed me.

  He finished with a flourish of unfamiliar saints’ names. Out of his vestments, he produced a sharpened wooden stake and a mallet, and planted it over my heart, where he had painted my chest with oil.

  The point dug into my bare skin. When his eyes met mine again, they burned with religious fervor.

  “The pain is your penance, my son,” he said.

  “Wait,” I said. “Padre. Before we start.”

  The men from the town muttered uneasily, shuffling their feet, gripping their tools. He shushed them, then turned back to me.

  “You’ve known other vampires.”

  “Yes.” He crossed himself.

  “Do I have a purpose? Am I part of God’s design?”

  Thoughtfully, he stroked his stringy beard. “Of course,” he said. “Every creature on God’s earth has a reason for being. You punish the headstrong, the questioning, the wandering, the weak, the ones who stray. You exist to hammer home the lessons of teachers, parents, the God-fearing. Even evil has a purpose.

  “Take his arms,” he said to his men.

  I opened my fangs wide and struck, crushing his larynx and windpipe with my jaws. He was a wily old vampire hunter, and he got in one good stroke with the mallet before he went down. I felt the point of the stake wedge between my ribs. His blood ran down my throat, hot and garlicky.

  The men around me shouted in panic and raised their weapons. Blows rained down upon my back, my shoulders. The man holding the cross wielded it like a baseball
bat, striking me in the side, and I felt something break.

  From behind came a sharp crack, like the snapping of a bough. The man with the cross looked concerned; and then he slumped forward and collapsed. I whipped around, and there was Rudi, holding a pistol.

  “This man is under the protection of the Third Reich,” he announced in German. The villagers were terrified now, staring aghast at their dead leader. “Stay where you are. I want all your names.”

  There was a moment of silence, a stalemate. Then one of the men flung his torch at Rudi, who dodged away, firing wildly. They dropped their tools and melted into the woods. Rudi emptied his pistol into the trees.

  And then Anastasia began to laugh. Somewhere nearby, a chorus of wolves warbled along with her. “Brilliant, my darling!” she said when she could finally speak. “I really thought you were going to let him do it. Oh, you were magnificent!”

  “You are one crazy bastard, Sinclair.” Rudi agreed, shaking his head. “Excuse me, please. I have to make a call.” He disappeared behind the car, where he kept a field telephone in the boot.

  Anastasia leaned over, ran her warm tongue in a long line up my chest, lapping up the blood. Then she kissed me, deeply and fervently. “Thank you,” she said, smiling. “That was a better tribute to Constantin than I could have planned.” She buttoned my shirt back up and straightened my tie. “Now let’s get out of here. You could really use a bath.”

  Rudi came hurrying up. His whole affect had changed. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” Anastasia said.

  “The front,” he said. “We are at war with Russia.”

  It was still nighttime when we got back to Sighisoara, Anastasia was asleep with her head on my shoulder. Rudi pulled up outside Gestapo Headquarters, formerly the town hall. “Better if you stay inside,” he advised us. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  I was too restless to sleep, and besides, I was still hungry. I got out of the car and quietly shut the door. I wasn’t about to start letting Anastasia’s boyfriends tell me what to do.

  I prowled through streets just wide enough for a horse-cart, over broken cobblestones, past stooped, darkened hovels, hoping to run into a rebellious teenager, a married someone on the way back from a tryst. I lingered outside one storey cottages with high, miserly windows, I lurked in a covered passageway completely overgrown with vines. But the streets were deserted, the shutters battened down tight against the likes of me.

  Ascending a set of stairs cut into the mountain, I found myself before the massive wooden doors of a basilica. I pushed them open, waiting to be struck by lightning, or for the earth to open up under my feet. When neither of these things happened, I removed my hat and found a bench, surrounded by painted scenes from the lives of the saints.

  At the moment that I stepped forward to meet the old man, I had every intention of letting him drive that stake through my heart.

  He was right. Every time I dug my teeth into another innocent throat, I receded farther away from the man I used to be. I had been a vampire for almost two years now. I’d lost track of how many people I had killed long ago.

  Was I evil? Yes, I killed people, many people. The savage things I did in the dead of night to keep myself alive were certainly evil. If the old man was right, I deserved to die, and sooner better than later.

  Was there any good left in me at all? Could it be that my sole purpose in this world was to punish unhappy housewives and wayward teenagers? Was that the sum of me? Maybe the old man was wrong. Maybe it was still in my hands to shape my own destiny.

  I dropped my head into my hands. I didn’t feel evil. I felt lost. And then, Sofia’s lovely face appeared before my mind’s eye, as she had looked in the dance hall, listening to me go on about my hopes and dreams, her eyes half-closed as she basked in the sound of my voice. I felt anger throbbing dully behind my temples. Sofia, Sofia. Look at what’s become of me.

  The sun was coming up, illuminating the stained glass windows. Time to go.

  I hurried back the way I had come, anxiously watching the lightening sky, sinking back into the soft leather of the Mercedes seat just as the sun burst in a red-orange ball over the Carpathians. As the morning light feebly touched the plaza with its first rays, I could just make out something new in the main square where yesterday the market tables had stood. With a shock, I realized I was looking at the skeletal framework of a gallows.

  Seven bodies swung from it, necks stretched too long, twisting slowly back and forth. Stripped of his white and saffron robes, the Archbishop was just a scrawny old man, meeting the first few stunned parishioners in a sad gray suit of oft-mended long underwear.

  Just then, Rudi returned, accompanied by a man in a black uniform with silver lightning slashes on his collar. They conferred briefly, and then Rudi raised his arm in a Nazi salute and got in. He put the car in gear, rolling us past the corpses slowly rotating in the morning breeze and out of the gates of the city, heading east into the sunrise.

  The next day, I boarded a train that would take me to another train that would connect with a third train that would take me away from this place. I returned to Paris, the City of Light, from Eastern Europe, the cradle of darkness. It was June, 1941.

  Outside the Gare de l’Est, I flagged down a cab and asked him to take me home. It took me a moment to remember the exact address; I’d last seen it two years ago.

  Everything was exactly the way I had left it. Clothing heaped on a chair, a few unwashed dishes on the kitchen counter. A toothbrush on the sink. A dingy white shirt on the floor where I had dropped it, a souvenir of my haste to leave town. My table laid with neat rows of paint. My brushes, waiting for my return, standing bristle-end-up in a coffee can. I stroked their sable tips across my open palm, as if I were a canvas.

  I gazed at the paintings in various stages of completion propped up against the walls, where they would remain forever unfinished. The young man who had started them was dead.

  I was cold. I was always cold. I built a fire and huddled in front of the fireplace, bundled up to my neck in an eiderdown quilt. Then I unwrapped one of my new paintings—the Rembrandt—and hung it up over the fireplace. Stepping back to admire it, I bumped into the armchair. With a soft thump, something slid onto the floor at my feet.

  It was my sketchbook, covered with a light layer of dust. I picked it up, brushing it off, and flipped idly through it. Quick drawings of old men in the Tuileries, unfinished baguettes and wine bottles, studies of an open hand or the way a skirt draped around a body. Endless doodles of people in cafés. Painfully bad poetry. Hastily scribbled appointments to meet friends at a gallery, a nightclub, a theater. Mysterious jottings, their meanings lost to time.

  A paper fell out, glided to the floor. I stooped down to pick it up. I turned it over slowly, knowing what it was. An Exquisite Corpse drawing, from the night I found Sofia alone at a table in La Coupole, the same night she drew my head onto the body of a god with the wings of an angel. I leaned against the fireplace, traced my fingers lightly over her strong black lines.

  The night she told me her story. The night I fell in love with her. The night she ruined my life.

  And then, finally, I allowed myself to turn my head and rest my eyes on Sofia’s artworks, rescued from her flat along with her paints and brushes, leaning against the wall in the corner where the porter had deposited them.

  Now I leafed through her copies of nudes and holy families, holier to me because they were done by her hand. I ran my fingers over her female figures as if by doing so, I could touch her.

  I was finally angry. Outraged. Consumed with fury.

  Had she only stayed with me, none of this would have happened. We would have made our own happily-ever-after in Paris, or London, or New York, or whatever sodding place she wanted to live. I would not be a parasitical blood-sucking incubus, and she would not be a phony housewife going to gardening club meetings with a fake smile pasted on her face in Toledo-fucking-Ohio.

  These are the words
I told myself as I fed her drawings, one by one by one, into the hungry jaws of the fire.

  Some of the images were visible for a few moments, backlit by firelight, before flames caught the edges. Two models in bloomers drawn in willow charcoal and sanguine. A Del Sarto Madonna. And then the paper would brown and curl into ash. With each drawing, my hatred grew.

  I didn’t stop there. I was possessed. I scoured the flat of my own artwork, throwing armloads of laid paper from the finest mills of Europe onto the blaze. Tongues of flame jetted forth into the room. The paintings went next; the stretchers took up too much space in the fireplace, so I took my knife to them and flayed them out of their frames.

  A lifetime of work went up the chimney. The fire roared like a furnace. I held my hands up to its blaze. Oh, I was warm now.

  As I was about to throw in the last of the lot, a canvas, I caught a glimpse of the image, and turned it around.

  A couple swathed in white sheets, locked in embrace. The man raised himself over his partner, supported by sinewy arms. The woman spread ecstatically beneath him, her lips a red smudge in the heart-shaped face, her hair falling in blue-black streaks around the pillow. Unmistakably Sofia, her skin almost as white as the sheets. The man—well, it was me.

  I’d never seen it before, she must have done it right before she left. I made to throw it in the fire, too; but at the last moment I lost my courage. Carefully, I wrapped it up in the old bedcovering I had used to transport the Rembrandt, and stashed it in the maid’s room behind the kitchen.

  Smoking with rage, I swept forth into the night.

  So, I resumed the life I’d left behind, in a fashion. I went to clubs and bars and theaters, seeking out slummy places least likely to be frequented by the society I used to know, searching among the individuals least likely to be missed. I traded bon mots with the Free French, émigré spies, SS officers. I flirted with French prostitutes and lonely German girls in drab gray uniforms. I even acquired a notoriety of sorts; the papers wrote breathlessly of the Reich’s tireless efforts to bring down the Montmartre Ripper.