Nocturnes

by T. R. Stingley

  “You are a stubborn man, Isaac. I have a need to make you understand me better. I admit, finding ourselves in one another’s lives is something I don’t completely comprehend myself. But I have no doubt that there is some purpose to it. We will, and I stress WILL, learn the dimensions of this mystery, together.”

  Their refreshments arrived. Julian swallowed a quarter of his beer and resumed.

  “Here is the truth of it…contrary to your prejudices, I am not corrupt of spirit. I am not evil. The corruption that you fancy in me is nothing more than the reality of my nature. Just as the scorpion must use the poison in its tail, so must the vampire feed on the blood of the living. For six hundred years I have struggled to maintain my humanity in spite of my affliction.

  “After Clara’s death, I very nearly succumbed to the primal desires of the Old Ones. I abhorred the God who had so brutally betrayed my impassioned prayers. Clara’s death was my final break with the delusion of salvation. Now I was free to satisfy my cravings as my appetites dictated.

  “But try as I might, I could not rid myself of the deeper feelings that Clara had awakened. Her innate goodness had given life to my own. If I wished to sustain my love in loving memories— and I so desperately did—then I could not become a monster. Clara’s love, which I had wished upon like a star, could only survive through my own evolution. It was a long shot, and I knew it. But I believed that, somehow, if I were worthy, I might just see her again. Do you see how it is? That the long-lived intensity of our grief might be the only authentic validation that certain love can reach into infinity?”

  Isaac looked away. Such words coming from a vampire! Yet he couldn’t deny the turbulence of the emotions gathering in him like a coming storm. And Julian poured it on.

  “So I made a conscious decision to refine that sense I already possessed…a sense inherent in all predators. I learned to locate the old, the weak, and the dying. This is what I tried to show you in that club with Erica. Certainly, I could choose any victim. With the possible exception of lovers, whose aura is too blinding, I can feed on anyone. But, for the past couple of centuries, I have targeted the dying exclusively. That is why I prey primarily on the homeless. From the predator’s point of view, they are the natural choice. Society’s discards. The sick, the insane, the hopeless. They are all there, in every city in America, and in ever-growing numbers. I do not want for wretched victims. And, whether you accept it or not, I often relieve them of the burdens their lives have become.”

  Isaac had sat passively with the tempest gathering inside of him. The vampire’s last remark triggered his explosion.

  “Euthanasia!!?!” He immediately lowered his voice when several sharp glances stabbed at his outcry. “You imagine yourself a mercy killer? Do you honestly believe that you are doing these poor people a service? Perhaps you should poll them first. You might be surprised to find that they prefer their lives, as miserable as they might be. You remind me of a barbaric group of murderers I encountered some fifty years ago. They too thought that they would do the world a great service by exterminating all non-Aryans. Very noble of you, Julian. You should be applauded.”

  He had spit the words out like venom, in one breath. He gulped air, then beer, and glared into the darkening eyes of the vampire. Several minutes passed before Julian responded with icy control.

  “Listen to me very carefully, old man. In a twisted, worldly sense, I may well be performing a service. Not necessarily for the sad creatures that fall to my hunger, but for your uncaring and self-absorbed little society. You have cast these poor creatures aside long before I stumble upon them. But the crux of the matter is that, like you, I have no choice but to feed. I have no choice but to seek sustenance. I do, however, have a choice over whom I will feed upon. And I have chosen the most natural path for the historical predator: targeting the weakest creatures in my territory. It may not be noble, but it is certainly not evil. Particularly when you realize that the choice of who I am has been taken from me.”

  Isaac started to voice an objection, but two raised fingers from the vampire silenced him. Isaac could see turbulent anger bubbling beneath the black orbs of his eyes. Julian continued with subdued intensity.

  “I have, at times, looked bitterly upon this species that I must depend on but can no longer belong to. I consistently show more humanity to this herd than this hypocritical mass you call mankind. You, of all people, should appreciate what I am saying. You are a victim of one of man’s grossest atrocities. I kill out of need, Isaac. But I have observed the perverse pleasures that man derives from the act. So many righteous wars. The indiscriminate slaughter of innocents, Genocide. Assassination. And these are the acts of governments. The legal horrors that some privileged High Council awards itself, but punishes in its own citizenry. Your species practices layers of evil that I am incapable of understanding.”

  Julian stared down into the dregs of his beer as a gypsy would stare into a crystal sphere. “This humanity…it twists and warps its youth from an early age, then medicates the very imagination out of them. How many of your children are depressed, angry, suicidal? And then ask yourself how many of them are understood? Whatever genius they might once have possessed has been eradicated by your mono-culture and all that is left is the pursuit of wages and lifelong mediocrity. Can you give me a single example of how the West prepares its citizens for any kind of moral enlightenment? We condemn one another for our differences but think nothing of the assembly-line-for-sameness that the ‘civilized’ world has become.

  “I recall one of many troubling days…when the lesson of sameness was renewed and repeated like the easy rhymes from a determined nanny…nearly two hundred years ago. Just outside of Vienna, a city that boasted of its culture, and its appreciation for the genius of ‘art.’ It was a darkly rainy twilight, too miserable even for mourners. I stood above an open grave, alone. Peering down into that ditch, that pit, strangled with the frustrated emotions of it all. There were a dozen shroud-wrapped corpses, jumbled and tossed down together like garbage…a stinking chaos of ‘final rest.’ One of them was Mozart.”

  He paused again, swallowed hard on his now-warm beer, and called for two more. When they arrived and he had drained half of the fresh one, he went on.

  “I could bore you with stories like that for a month…a lifetime. Time and again I have watched as a handful of men and women from their respective generations have labored against the narrow visions and expectations of their societies, only to be disillusioned and cast down by mass conformity. The unique is abhorred. And the sickness that your world perpetuates is treated, not with healing and compassion, but with punishment. Your prisons overflow with your refuse, just like your streets with your homeless. You strap living human beings into monstrous contraptions of voltage and anguish and you call it justice. But the melting eyes and the burning flesh smell more like revenge. It is an ancient odor. I have inhaled that stench the world over.”

  He paused and looked deeply into the old man’s eyes…to the very edge of Isaac’s soul.

  “In fact, I detect traces of it right now.”

  Now Julian was whispering, and Isaac found himself leaning involuntarily forward in his seat.

  “You want revenge, Isaac. This is your curse, just as I have mine. You want revenge so badly that the craving for it sustains you like food. And you want it of God Himself.”

  Isaac jerked back into his seat and stared with wide eyes at the vampire’s remarks. But Julian wasn’t finished with him yet.

  “You think of yourself as faithful, with your pious hypocrisy. You are so typical. There is but one shred of greatness left in you, and one only. Your love for your wife is your truth. But it is not enough to save you because your hatred is too strong.”

  “No!” Isaac had found his tongue again. He was answered once more with harsh stares from the other patrons. “You know nothing of my love, or of my hate. You grasp at straws of cliched h
uman weakness to give credibility to your own delusions. It is you who is unsaveable. You have made truths from your lies, but they persuade only yourself.”

  Julian was unruffled. “Then enlighten me. Tell me YOUR story, Isaac…from your own lips. And we shall learn the truth together. I suspect that the truth is a grave you have been throwing dirt over for many long years.”

  The vampire had commanded, and Isaac was now compelled to reveal the most intimate aspects of his life.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Julian, you know that what you are demanding is difficult for me. If I must speak these things, then let us leave this place.”

  “Yes, alright. We will take the streetcar to Audubon Park, and we will talk there. Come.”

  He rose and the laid cash on the table. They walked to St. Charles Avenue and caught the car, then jumped off near Loyola University and walked into the shadowed interior of the park.

  Isaac noticed the scarcity of vagrants, and Julian explained.

  “Most of them gather in City Park, or stay on the roam in the Quarter before retiring under the wharves along the river. This park is too close to the tourist sites and is swept by the police at regular intervals. It wouldn’t do to have the tourists tripping over those who have no place to go but who have to go somewhere. As you must have discovered, I don’t prey on the homeless in this city. There is an old wisdom that cautions not to build your outhouse next to your pantry,” he commented without humor.

  When they had walked as far into the park as they could without beginning to walk out again, Julian stopped at a bench and motioned for Isaac to sit down. Time assumed a fullness, and each minute of silence weighed on Isaac’s narrow shoulders like a stone. Finally he could postpone it no longer and the words began to take the shape of Isaac’s shattered life.

  “My story. Perhaps it is one of faith…or the lack of it. From childhood, even when my uncle would talk about the dangers that faced European Jews, I would allow my thoughts to wander to happier places. My uncle was political. Not involved in Polish politics, but well aware of how they affected him, his family, and his people. He was constantly warning and reminding all of us to be alert, to keep our noses to the wind. But I could never imagine the things he warned of, even though so much was already historical fact. These things had not touched me personally. So I was able to maintain a foolish belief in a worldly sort of good nature. I was an apathetic human being.

  “Early on in my life, my story becomes the story of Lessa. It is a thing that I have considered from infinite angles. Lessa was so perfect for me, so complementary of my flaws and strengths. At first I thought of myself as the stronger of us. That was wrong. I was wrong about many things.

  “Lessa understood me better than I knew. My ‘strength’ was really nothing more than a kind of self-delusion about the reality of things. It is easy to be strong and brave when you cannot see the hammer swinging at you from behind. And Lessa’s ‘fear,’ which I spent a great deal of time trying to console, was actually wisdom. Here is the irony. When the matter finally played itself out and the Nazis came to Warsaw to prime our people for the ‘Final Solution,’ Lessa’s fear evaporated and was replaced by a resolve that one could only acknowledge with awe. My ‘strength,’ on the other hand, eroded quickly into a hopeless, pitiful despair.

  “Lessa and I had grown up together. For all those years, I had listened to her poems and lullabies….so lyrical and sweet…and terrified of the night. Midnight, dark storms, lullabies, and nocturnes. These were the canvas of her intuitive dreams. I had come to look at Lessa as one might attend to a frightened bird. I showered her with attention and affection, thinking that these would comfort her misgivings. But all she ever needed was my acknowledgment of the truth. She wasn’t afraid of the Nazis. She was terrified of my indifference.

  “It wasn’t the Nazis who inspired Lessa’s courage. It was what happened just before they came into our lives. It was our marriage. That bonding in love was the final piece of life’s complex puzzle for her. With the discovery of true love she came into a season of renewed faith. That faith in the enduring power of love over fear liberated my wife. While fear bound me in layers of chains, Lessa’s faith in love allowed her to soar above all the mortal madness.

  “It was a faith that, try as I might, I could not connect with. When the Germans came to Poland, I began to struggle with incredible guilt. Lessa had asked me, begged me, only a year before to flee from Poland with her. Once again, my denial, to use your word, kept me from seeing the true danger. I was able to convince her of the folly of her ideas. But then one morning we all awoke in the ghetto and premonitions of catastrophe began to mock my every waking hour. I withdrew deeply into myself, into a disgusting little world of self-loathing and self-pity. I was unworthy of my new bride. I had failed her. And more…I had doomed her.

  “I would close my eyes at night and pray for the mercy of sleep. Instead, I was tortured by Bosch-like visions of those filthy beasts with their eyes and their hands groping eagerly at my Lessa’s beauty. We were so unarguably at their disposal that they commanded life and death, comfort and pain. If their whim was a bullet in the brain of a child or the brutal rape of a young wife, it was done.

  “Here is where my madness began. The ghetto was a staging area. We all knew it. Just as we knew that the random terror of violence wasn’t really quite so random. The Nazis systematically weeded out the very young, the elderly, and the sick. So it became conducive to pass oneself off as healthy, robust, and in the prime of life. Old men who had walked half-erect for years struggled to right themselves, to conceal the limp of an ailing wife or an infirm mother. Terror raged like a great fire around our people. You could have argued that the world had become too grim to support the laughing dreams of life. But here they were, contorting themselves, going to extreme lengths so that they might pass the Nazis’ tests for a brief reprieve…for their very survival.

  “I could not reconcile any of what I was seeing. It was obvious to me that God had turned his back on His faithful followers. How, then, was anything to save us? We were on our own.

  “But Lessa tried. Dear God, she believed. And she almost reached me on one rain-threatened afternoon, in a field outside the city. It was a lover’s field. We had been picnicking. One of those last days before the ghetto roundup began. Lessa was, once again, speaking words of comfort and reassurance to my deafness. She was so patient, Julian. The storm finally broke as we lay there, and I began to gather our things to flee the deluge. But she reached out and took my hand…and pulled me back down to the blanket to make love in the rain. I suppose that she sought to reconnect me to the wild wonder of life and love. And she whispered something, words that vibrated and echoed through the years of sorrow. I didn’t understand them then, and I ponder their meaning to this day. ‘Eden was never tame…’”

  Isaac paused, as if hearing the words for the first time. He peered off across the dark expanses of the park, imagining a pair of trusting lovers there. Lost as he was in his reverie, he did not notice the raw currents of electricity that surged through the suddenly-jolted vampire. Julian made a conscious effort to calm the breath that had suddenly expanded in his lungs.

  “In any case,” he continued, “a few weeks later the Nazis gathered all Jews into the ghetto. All of my fears seemed justified. If I had known then that there was an even darker night before us, I would have worked harder to find my way back to her…to make the time that was left to us more special. As it happened, I very nearly went completely insane when they herded us like livestock onto two narrow rails bound for the ultimate despair…Auschwitz.

  “We were separated immediately upon arrival. For the next seven months, I survived without any particular will or desire to do so. But word finally reached me that Lessa had also survived the processing. I wish that I could explain in some sort of new, startling language how such information can work upon the mind. It wasn’t an altogether welcome
revelation. For now, I began to worry about her all over again.

  “I had brought Lessa to that place. Subsequent fallout from that frame of mind was my unhealthy desire to secure her safety at any cost. I ingratiated myself with the guards. I was willing to perform any task, any unholy act that might work in Lessa’s favor. You have to understand. I was a weak, lice-ridden Jew, the lowest of the low to our captors. Somehow, I needed to get their attention and, hopefully, their sympathy.

  “I volunteered as a sonderkommando…that is, I removed the bodies of my people from the gas chambers.”

  Isaac swallowed hard, his hands trembling uncontrollably, and Julian could see that the old man had reached a place where old, incriminating memories had been buried for a long time. Isaac was venturing back into Hell.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “In the hierarchy of the death camp there is nothing lower than the sonderkommando. The work we did was so foul, so repulsive, that we were shunned by our own people. Even the Nazis could barely stand the sight of us. And of course they would despise us. While many were forced into the role, there were just as many others who, like myself, volunteered in the hopes of currying favor…mostly the favor of life.

  “When the new trains arrived and the lines formed to shuffle off to the ‘showers,’ we, the untouchables, would take our place just outside the doors, as the doomed filed past us. We dared not look at their faces, for fear that we would cause them undue anxiety. If they could believe that they were being deloused, as they were told, they wouldn’t suffer as much. Then we would close the iron doors behind them. For the next several agonizing minutes, as the gas hissed and filled the chamber, I would die with those voices that reached us from the other side…the children crying out for their mothers…until the last muffled cries were stilled. And our terrible work would begin.