Killing Violets

by Tanith Lee

  At this instant, Árpád appeared behind her in the mirror.

  “Anna – how wonderful you look.” His voice was hollow and too low.

  “Hurry and dress,” she said. “Where is your mask?”

  “Anna – Anna forgive me. I’ve been – dreading this. No, Anna. I won’t.”

  She did not turn to him, but drew her head up, eyes masked, set free. In the mirror she confronted him.

  “You’re handsome, Árpád. You don’t see it.”

  “Anna, don’t be a fool.”

  “Beautiful. Like a prince. You…”

  “Be quiet, Anna,” harshly now. “Don’t insult me.”

  His face, turned sidelong, speaking from the edge of itself. Not looking at his own disfiguration.

  She raised the lipstick in her hand, and whirled it over the mirror glass, a long bloody strand.

  “You don’t have any care for me,” she said arrogantly.

  He turned from her almost entirely.

  “You don’t trust me,” she said. “You think I’ve lied to you.”

  “I think – oh God, Anna, I think you see me in a way no one else can. I cherish you for that. But the rest…”

  Moving, his face, its clear left side, all in the coalescence of the light, reflected behind the streak of lipstick on the mirror.

  Anna stood alone in stasis.

  Presently, after a minute, she could speak. “Árpád…” and then in a rush, “let me do something. Let me try.”

  He was tired. In despair, he had put on the splendid evening clothes. They must have weighed like lead. His shoulders sagged.

  “What?”

  “Sit down. Sit there, where the light falls.”

  “Why?”

  “Please, please – just for a moment. If you trust me at all.”

  He sat in the chair and shut his eyes.

  Anna came to him, predatory, in the aura of sunfall and some ancient holy madness.

  “What – what are you doing?”

  “It’s nothing. Keep quite still.”

  She had stroked the lipstick, carnelian red, upon the carnelian birthmark, and so drew the colour sidelong. She had bridged his nose, and ended in a curlicue, a scarlet feather, under his left eye. As God had done, she painted him. The colour of the butterfly, the hot-house leaf, the serpent, the Bird of Paradise. She drew a second tendril upward, over his chin, the second feather. And down from the mark that branded his forehead, she brought the third feather, to the hollow of his left cheek.

  And now, now Árpád was merely a god, of fire and blood. Marked for the warrior jewel, but only painted, as if before the battle of life.

  “Open your eyes.” She was standing in fear and joy before what she had done, the completion of the act, translated by her human hand so as to be understood.

  And his eyes did open, so blue, so wide, and she was in the presence of a divine and terrible being.

  “What have you done?” he said, not angrily, bemused, feeling the power she had unleashed, the room thrumming full of it, and he its centre.

  “Look in the glass.”

  He blinked, and then got up and went to the mirror.

  She could not see his face, he stood only straight and completely immobile.

  Anna was frightened. Afraid he would now deny this, smear it away. Which would be sacrilege.

  He stood on and on. And she did not dare to go closer, to see what he saw.

  And then he said, flatly, “It looks as if it’s only paint. All of it. Just paint for the carnival.” And then he said, “Do I look like that?” And she knew he also had seen himself at last, and for the very first time.

  Preguna at night – oh, did she only imagine it? – was supernatural. Gilded by lamps, with gold leaf on the buildings, and the moon so bright.

  It was like – afterwards she sought for analogies – those places said to exist beyond death, another country more beautiful, and completely amiable, representing the landscapes and cities of the world, yet perfect. Heavenly. Where you might experience the raptures that had been denied to you on earth.

  The air smelled sweet, of flowers and perfumes, and tindery from the fireworks that in bursts were let off in the parks.

  There were crowds, but all moving so easily and fluidly, as if scheduled by master choreographers. There was no roughness. The sudden inadvertent touches were like those of happy children, and yet shy and gentle as deer.

  Where did they go? It had become mixed in her mind. Tram rides, and rides on wagons drawn by horses garlanded in flowers and ribbons, walking the long streets, and dancing in the cathedral square, where orchestra succeeded orchestra. And there were Mediaeval peasant dances, partners parting, running away, swirling back again, and kisses exchanged. And there were waltzes, rather bumpy on the uneven ground, and preposterous flouncing tangos.

  Árpád knew them all. She did not ask him how. Somehow she deduced that he had learned them in secret from books, practicing with a shadow in his arms, in that room now theirs.

  At first, he had kept on turning his head at its angle, once or twice even feeling after his hat, as if it might have blown off. But then he would catch sight of himself so often, in the reflective surfaces of windows, brass plaques set on walls, and other faces; all the mirrors of the night.

  They had not gone as far as the first lighted café, when seven or eight young girls, vaporous in gauzes, and in little eye-masks like Anna’s own, skeined past, and, brazen with carnival, pointed at Árpád, laughing and exclaiming, and one even called to him in another language of the far south, saying how handsome he was.

  Árpád and Anna both grasped this language sufficiently to understand her words.

  He had been turning his head aslant for the first, and now his head snapped up. Later, as he relapsed and revived, faltered, altered, he was finally straightened out like a man cured of paralysis. Not only the way he held his neck and face had changed. His slim hard body was upright now. He moved with power. So that by the time they danced, his whole persona was his true self.

  Soon they were also slightly drunk. There was so much to drink, wine and spirits, and liqueurs, the offered bottles of strangers in the heavenly city, where all were one, and there could be no harm, the drinking parties by the cafés, where anyone might pause.

  Anna rang with happiness like a bell, or a champagne glass. Light flowed right through her. Her eyes were crystals. She stepped in winged slippers. And he was gold.

  His marvellous thick soft fair hair, with its white blondness on the right side, was now like spectacular plumage. And the colours of his face, his blazon.

  He was proud after all, and incredibly strong. He lifted her in the air as they danced, laughing up at her face, which now, briefly, was higher than his own.

  Girls everywhere fluttered when they saw him. In the square, right through the crowd of dancers, came one splendid woman, with the impossible loveliness of a film actress, a face formed of white porcelain, obscured only where the mask around her eyes made her an owl with outstretched wings. And she handed Árpád a rose.

  She was tall. Her dress was black satin, and on her wrist was a bracelet of emeralds. Ignoring Anna, this chimaera looked deeply into his eyes. She murmured, “I would die for you.” And drawing herself up, kissed his lips. This done, she swept away.

  Anna was not discomposed. In her bubble of silver glass, she needed to fear no other sorceress. Besides, Árpád turned back to her at once. “If she wants to kiss so boldly, she shouldn’t eat so much garlic.”

  Anna saw he was a purist, a prude. She had always, perhaps, known it. Then, exactly then, it didn’t matter. Yet, she was for an instant half offended. The woman had been so beautiful. Garlic on her breath was an irrelevance, unless you hated garlic, which Árpád did not. Criticism did not belong to this night.

  And Anna shrugged. “What a stern judge.”

  “You’ve ruined me,” he said. “Always so fresh and fragrant.”

  But these things a man could say
who had never been afraid. You’ve ruined me for other women – The choice.

  Her happiness ringed her. She had given him this and shown him – shown him – but what had she shown him? Ah, shown what was his own true worth.

  Now he saw that he was stared at for his exceptional qualities, stared at in admiration and envy. He had taken to it so quickly, too, as if, like the dances, he had practiced for this hour. Perhaps he had done so in dreams.

  Sometimes, even dancing with him, she saw him objectively. On this night of rarities and display, when everyone was set free, of them all he was the most splendid, his escape Promethean.

  They ate supper at one of the hundreds of tables, near the lake, over which the fireworks arced and rained, platinum and diamond and gold.

  One wine bottle was empty, so they ordered another.

  The light splashed on them. On the upturned flowers of so many faces.

  He no longer turned his head aslant. Fire burned on his skin. His eyes were wide, as if to devour the sky and every light of Preguna. He bathed in the sun of the light.

  It was simple to enter the palace of delight, this memory of great happiness, liberation and reward. But from the palace there was only one gaping exit, a descent to tumult and despair.

  She had never been able, afterwards, to relive the joy of the carnival. Because, following through shining room after shining room, she must come to the last doorway and the roaring descent.

  However, just as Árpád must sometimes have dreamed he walked the city arrogantly in daylight, his face like that of any other attractive man, so now and then in dreams Anna could be returned into heaven.

  In the dreams, heaven did not always finish in the same way. Very often she was able to wake up before the full gamut had been run.

  Even if she did dream of the night’s ending, she had never dreamed it quite as it had been.

  Her brain wouldn’t permit her, perhaps, to suffer that more than once.

  By tradition, the carnival ended with the sounding of the three o’clock bell from the cathedral.

  Then a silence fell on the revellers. Then there started a handful of outbursts of rebellious noise. Then again, silence. Like all creatures of the night, they must slink away before the dawn began.

  Here and there, a last slow dance was played by an exhausted band, some unmasked and kissed, exchanging mementoes and promises.

  Yet everywhere they rose, the celebrants, from their gilded Mass, in floating islands of dismissal. And like the sparks of the dying fireworks, humanity went drifting away, dissolving down the darkness into the reality of another world less real than heaven-on-earth.

  Árpád and Anna walked slowly, as so many couples did, worn out, tipsy, soft with premonitions of sleep.

  She did not think. Had not thought it out. It wasn’t so much that the theatre of the night had convinced her, fooled her. For it had revealed only what she had always known.

  “I’m so tired. Thank God you don’t have to get up. We can sleep till noon.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Already his voice was distant. But only, in the way of a voice which was tired.

  “What a lovely night it’s been.”

  “Yes.”

  “Darling,” she said.

  They had been holding hands. Now his hand dropped hers. She recalled how he had put the unwanted rose the woman gave him, into his water glass on the table. That had been more tender than this.

  Almost, she began to ask him what the matter was.

  Later, she could scarcely believe her stupidity.

  Had her stupidity, even, been wicked? As if she had let go her baby out of a window through carelessness, simply because she was looking at a bird in the sky.

  She knew. Everything at once. She said, nevertheless, very carefully, as if testing the words in case they were too hot, “You must be so tired.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll make some chocolate when we get in. The Italian chocolate you like. Shall I?”

  “If you want.”

  “Mm,” she said, in a quiet cheerful little voice, and chunks of terror surfaced in her bloodstream and around her heart, beginning slowly to asphyxiate her.

  They walked on.

  A tram rumbled by, its windows unlit. It was like a lumbering hearse on wires.

  The remaining figures in the streets resembled ghosts. And yet she wanted to run to them and beg them for their help. They would do nothing. They had already done enough.

  When they reached the apartment house, he went up the stairs ahead of her. He left her to come after him, or perhaps to go away.

  What she did was silly and pitiable. She dawdled on the stair, pretending she had some trouble with her shoe, as if everything were ordinary. As if nothing had happened. Or ceased to happen.

  When she reached his floor, the door of the room stood ajar. There was just space for her to squeeze inside. This gave her a moment’s hope. She had thought, she realized now, that he would close the door – not lock it, but shut it tight. As if she didn’t belong there at all.

  But when she entered the room, which had been his, and next theirs, no lights were lit, only the faint upflung glow of the street came in, and the dimmest pearl, not white or grey, was beginning on the sky.

  In the semi-dark, Árpád knelt at the book cabinet, and she saw he had pulled out the books already and put them, quite neatly, on the floor.

  Anna shut the door at her back. For they were naked now.

  “Where is it?” he said, not loudly.

  “What, darling?”

  “You know what, Anna. Where?”

  “No, I don’t kn…”

  He got up and turned to her. His eyes were two bulbs of nothingness. He said, louder now, “Where?”

  “I haven’t…”

  “Yes, Anna, you have. You took the bottle out. What did you do with it?”

  She put back her head. She challenged him angrily, “Why do you want it?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Then you mustn’t have it, must you?”

  He took a stride towards her. He was fierce, like the whirlwind, and she was afraid of him, but only for a second.

  He had stopped himself. He looked at her, and she could see him again inside his eyes. Some of him, at least.

  “Dearest Anna, you only mean to be good, I know. But you really must let me have it.”

  A dim returning anger made her say, “Why are you so selfish, Árpád? What about me?”

  “You…” His body was bowing over a little again, as it had always done. A slight stoop, what you might expect of a young man who worked at the accounts of others.

  Then he put up his hands and smeared his face quickly over. The red salve bloodied and washed about, and out of it the true red reappeared, the warrior brand of the birthmark. “Look at me,” he said. And then, “Anna, I’ve had tonight. You gave me that. You meant only the best for me. Can’t you see what you’ve done?”

  Anna trembled. Head up, she faced him, as if in the dock judges in black accused and condemned her.

  “There’s only one night of carnival, Anna.”

  “Well, then…” she faltered. She said rashly, “We just have to go back to what we had before. It was all right. It’s what you’ve always done.”

  “Till now,” he said.

  “But you saw…”

  He said, “All my life, since I was aware, I’ve seen. How they look at me, or won’t look. When I was a child. When I tried to learn to be a priest and love a God who did this to me, and make myself beloved in turn so no one would mind my face… And tonight, I lived as the gods live, Anna. The real gods. That bitch with her rose and her stinking breath – and the pretty girls blushing – and you in my arms…”

  “I love you,” she said. “I did it because I love you. Please – let’s just lie down and sleep. You’re so strung up, how can you be reasonable…?”

  “How can I be reasonable, yes, Anna. How can I? Can’t you understand? I can
’t go back to what I was. A year of that, waiting for carnival night again? No, not even with you, Anna. You were everything, but you’re not enough, not now. I want to be a human man. Only that. Not even this handsome prince you make believe I am. Just nothing, someone who can come and go unnoticed. Like the rest of you.”

  She clasped her hands across her waist. She seemed to stand on a narrow plank above a twisting sea that had no floor.

  “Árpád – forgive me – I only wanted…”

  “I forgive you, Anna. I know. Don’t distress yourself. Now tell me where the bottle is.”

  She lowered her head. She closed her eyes. Behind the mask she still had on, behind her shut lids, he could not see her.

  “No.”

  She had expected his rage probably, almost anything, but not what happened.

  He was so gentle with her, even in the act of sex. Sometimes when moths came into the apartment, he had caught them in a goblet and set them free into the night.

  When he struck her, reeling, almost falling, she thought it was some other thing, an accident of weather or some part of the ceiling crashing down.

  But he struck her again, and she lay on the floor, tasting a thin trickle of blood from her lip.

  She stared up at him. And he stood above her, enormous in the sombre hollow of the room, waiting.

  “Tell me,” he said, breathless and hoarse, and catching her hands he pulled her halfway up and slapped her face again.

  Had she cried out? She thought not. It had been so immediate, her screams, unuttered, were left behind.

  As he dropped her back her head banged on the floor. She thought idiotically, I have to tell him. But she couldn’t remember what she was to tell. And when he ordered her again to tell him, she shook her stunned head, more in confusion than denial.

  Then he kicked her. The blow was awful. Alive on its own, it didn’t hurt, yet threw everything else away.

  The blow was so far removed from him. He was no longer Árpád, but some madman who had broken in.