“Ferenc, please,” Hendrik said. He placed his forehead against mine. How I wanted to push him off, push him away from me. But I was powerless to resist him, even in that moment. “You must understand. This is not of my choosing.”
“Then end it,” I said. “Tell your father you will not do it. Marry someone else.” I paused, panting to catch my breath. “Anyone else. Please.”
“I wish there were some other way,” Hendrik said. “But what happened with Andros, my dancer…. He boasted of his newfound fortune. Many people heard the tale. Everyone whispered of it. It was a scandal throughout the city. Even with my father’s wealth, no well-regarded young woman would ever think of marrying me.”
I fell to my knees. I could not hear this. I did not want to hear this. Hendrik dropped to his knees beside me.
“That is why my father wrote to your family in the first place. To see if there were any eligible daughters. In his mind, as distant relations, your line would prove respectable enough to wed into the family. And out here, no one would know of—of what I had done.”
“No one would know,” I repeated. “But I would know, Hendrik. I would know!”
“I know, dearest. Shh, I know,” he said, cradling my head in his arms. The tears flowed freely now, and I did not care if he saw them. “Please, you must understand, I did not expect ever to find you here! You! My beautiful boy, my wish come true…. Please, Ferenc, I would never cause you any pain, not willingly. You must please try to understand.”
“But don’t do it,” I said. “Marry someone else. Another girl in the village. But not Alona.”
“I cannot,” he said. “Father would not allow it. And besides, if I do not marry Alona, he will not help your family. You will lose the mine, your home…. You will starve. Your entire village will suffer. And I cannot allow that to happen.” He took my chin in his hands, forced me to look him in the eyes. “After all, now I am married into this family. And I must take care of them. It is my duty as husband.” There was comfort in his words—cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless.
“It is not fair,” I finally whispered.
“No, no it is not,” he agreed. “But it is the way of the world amongst those such as us.”
I sighed, clearing my eyes and my mind. “Then the world is a cruel and wicked place,” I finally said.
“Oh, dearest,” Hendrik said, cradling me in his arms once again. “I had hoped to spare you that lesson for many, many years to come.”
FROM that moment forward, my life was irrevocably changed. Hendrik became the source of all my joys—the source of my laughter, my happiness, my glee. But I soon learned that wrapped within that joy were a hundred stings and shocks, the constant reminders of how the world would view us if only it knew. Even on that day, that day of our joining, Hendrik sent me back to the village first, to sneak back in unaccompanied as if I had been amongst the searchers all along. It was only an hour later when he returned alone and presented himself apologetically to his father.
I had thought Uncle Sandor would be furious beyond imagining at the sight of Hendrik, and indeed, he initially was. Hendrik later told me that his father had cursed him on the spot, declaring him to be dead in his eyes. But once Hendrik explained that he’d seen the error of his ways—that he’d come to understand that his father was right, and he placed himself and his future wholly into his father’s hands—then all, or at least much, was forgiven. The household was still disquieted that the reconciliation between the two would disintegrate into violence at any moment, but Hendrik proved true to his word, at least as far as his father or the rest of my family were concerned. But, once we were alone, he was the most ardent and devoted of lovers, and I—I was his, all for him, just as I had pledged in the ruined monastery courtyard.
Still, I was daily reminded that we must hide even a passing affection for one another, let alone our great and tumescent love. I had foolishly thought that nights with Hendrik in my bed would be spent in fervent passion. But they were mostly just chaste whispers, a quick caress and a soft kiss good night. We were cautious, he and I, lest we be discovered. But in that caution was great frustration. Only when we were alone—usually somewhere high up on the mountain—were our true feelings ever let out.
It was torment to me to sit at our dinner table and look across at Hendrik and not declare my undying devotion to him. So are the affections of the young, forever bursting at some unseen seam. And my feelings only grew stronger—and the chasm of my despair wider—when Uncle Sandor announced that it was time for his and his family’s extended stay in our village to come to an end.
I knew of course that Hendrik would not stay forever or, indeed, even for very long. But that last night I wept fiercely though silently on Hendrik’s shoulder in bed.
“We will write to each other, my beautiful one,” he whispered to me over and over.
“But how can we?” I whispered back. “What if your father were to discover the letters?”
Hendrik smiled. “Then write to me in English. Father cannot speak or read a word of anything other than Hungarian and German.”
“Won’t he be suspicious?” I asked.
Hendrik shook his head. “I’ll tell him that you are practicing your language skills with me. That will be my excuse to write every day,” he added with a grin. “Father will not be suspicious. On the contrary, he will probably think it a good thing that I am maintaining such excellent relations with my future brother-in-law!” At the thought of Hendrik’s upcoming marriage, my face fell again, overcome with sadness not only at the thought of his leaving but also at how things had to be between us. “You will see, dear one,” Hendrik whispered, consoling me as best he could. “I will write you so often that you will not have an opportunity to miss me. Pages and pages, each and every day.” But what are pages to one who has felt such love as this? And what desire had I for pages when I would hold the man of my heart in my arms each and every night? I vowed to stay awake that entire night and do all I could to forestall the dawn. But alas, the spirit of the young is often greater than the flesh. I awoke the next morning to Hendrik still stroking my hair.
We watched them all go, the entire family, waving as their motorcoach pulled away from the edge of town. I wanted to run after the car, but Hendrik’s words of warning rang in my mind, and I watched as silent and still as possible, waving only a fraction of a second longer than the rest of my family. Then we walked back to our home, my parents seeming nervous but hopeful, my grandmother quite weary, and my sister, my beloved little sister Alona, appearing for all the world as if it held no cares for her or for anyone else.
As for me, I did the best I could to hide my heartache. I was moody and petulant, but I had so often been this way before Hendrik arrived that no one gave me much notice. Besides, my parents, as I now knew, had other concerns.
There are only two seasons in high mountain villages such as ours: winter and those blessed months when the town is spared the perpetual onslaught of snow. Hendrik’s leaving seemed to foretell the coming of the snow, both in my heart and in our town. Yet just as the initial lazy flakes of white trickled down to earth, Hendrik’s first letter arrived.
I still have his letters, each and every one, the only memento I have of him or my dead town. I keep them in the drawer of my nightstand, in a small cedar box I bought many years ago in Rome. It is perhaps ironic that the letters are in English, that my life’s story dances across those pages in a language that was never quite my own. When I settled here, in my new island home, I was not aware that most of the people here were British or that even the natives spoke English, all with that clipped British accent, until I arrived. Sometimes I will sit in a café drinking a cup of strong tea and overhear an expression or a brief snatch of a conversation, just simple words that, when strung together, might make a phrase that can be found in one of Hendrik’s letters, and I am taken right back to them and to him, and for a moment, just a moment, everything is good and happy and whole again. But then the conver
sation shifts, as swiftly and subtly as the wind, and the mood is broken, and I am myself again, alone and desolate, exiled on this tropical isle so far from anything I used to call home.
In his letters Hendrik wrote of many things: his love for me, of course, but also tales of his life back in the city and news he had collected of larger, though to me, less significant, events. That autumn, the world was brought to war with the assassination of some man in a town and a place I had never heard of. Soon the empire was alight with the news of fighting and bloodshed. It amazed me then, and still does now, that the death of one man can lead to so much more death. I saw that death, stood knee deep in mud and viscera in the trenches of France on the western front. It was wet and bloody and disgusting. It wasn’t the clean death of a town buried in mere moments by tons of white, purifying snow. This was ugly. When the war was done, when a battle was won or lost, there was no shining vista, no pretty picture card or alpine landscape staring back from where once a proud village had stood. There was only blood.
I still read his letters, sometimes every day, sometimes three or four times a day. They smell of cedar, from the box mostly, but I still imagine his scent lingers there as well. They are yellowed by now, and in some places the ink has faded so much the words can no longer be read. It is no matter; I know what they say, know every dispatch, every word by heart, but still I read them if only to remind me of what we once had and that a man like Hendrik once existed in the annals of my life.
Hendrik talked of war, but he also talked of art and fashion and above all things love. Sometimes he’d talk of the love he’d read of in great books or a story he’d seen depicted on the stage, in a theater, or at a film. And in those lovers, Hendrik wrote, he saw us, or was reminded of a moment we had shared. How I wished I could share those moments with him, to read the books he read or see the shows he saw. But such things did not exist in Pilsden. And a film! Of course no one in the village had ever seen a cinema show. Though I must confess that the very notion of moving images on screen seemed such a novelty and filled me with such curiosity that for a moment, the very idea pushed even Hendrik from the center of my thoughts. But only for a moment and never longer. For always there was Hendrik, center stage in my mind, and Hendrik’s world that he wrote so meticulously about, and that I so desperately longed to share.
Though it soon became apparent I was not the only member of the family to have Hendrik on my mind.
It was a little over a month after Hendrik’s family had left Pilsden. Father was involving me more in the daily operations of the mine. I surmised that perhaps he had previously excluded me to hide the precarious financial position the mine, and by extension our family, was in. Now that the business was recovering with generous infusions of Uncle Sandor’s new “investment,” as Hendrik had predicted, my father found plenty for me to do there.
I learned much about my father in my time at the mine, much that made me proud to be his son. I learned of Poppa’s talent for geology, of reading the striations in the rock to find the next vein of raw tin. It was something he had learned from his father, a skill he planned to pass on to me. I learned how desperate the mine always seemed to be, how long it had seemingly teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. But Poppa had somehow managed to keep it all afloat without Alona or me ever feeling the palpable sting of want or need. Most impressively, I learned that my father kept his men on payroll even when they were not digging. At times the soil simply grew too hard or too wet, or the vein would dry up and no work could be done down in the trench. But Poppa was a master of finding a task for idle hands, and no man’s family went hungry because of it.
It was these lessons that Poppa wished to teach me, to become a man of business and important in the community. And I should have been happy to have suddenly become so important in Poppa’s eyes, when he had had but little use for me before. But I found the work of running the mine endlessly stultifying. While I displayed a talent for numbers, I truly had no head for business. Instead my head turned on thoughts of romance and images of Hendrik; anything else was dull by comparison. Still, I did my duty as best I could, though as often as possible I endeavored to find an excuse to leave the mine early. I might say I was running an errand for Mamma or that Grandmamma needed my assistance in some labor. If Poppa noticed my reluctance to follow so adroitly in his footsteps, he didn’t say so, at least not to me. Usually he waved me off with a dismissive hand, poring over plans with the mine’s foreman about where to start digging when the new equipment finally arrived. And off I would go, to reread Hendrik’s latest letter or simply to contemplate what he was doing at any given moment under the welcoming arms of the copper beech tree that loomed and lorded over the small gardens behind our house.
It was late one afternoon, still early on in winter, that I heard a choking sob coming from somewhere upstairs in our home. Upon entering the house I had thought it deserted, and I reveled in the rare solitude. But I soon discovered that I was not alone; Alona was there, hovering on one side of her small bed, the throw that Grandmamma and Mamma had quilted for her last year wrapped around her like an embracing cocoon of blue stitching and familial comfort. I was unaccustomed to seeing my sister this way; Alona was always a happy, bright child, girlish and gleeful. I had not heard her cry like this since Grandfather had died many years prior.
I was wary of approaching her, since there seemed little I could do to assuage her dark spirits, but leaving her alone in this state seemed too cruel, even for a brother. I walked into her room as quietly as I could before sitting on the opposite end of her bed. The sudden movement in her mattress caused her to sit up with a quick start and a small exclamation of “Oh!” Seeing that it was her elder brother who sat uncomfortably near her, she hurried to dry her eyes. I took a small white handkerchief from my pocket and handed it to her wordlessly. Alona had just turned fifteen. She was becoming a woman. She was taller, and her body more ably filled out the blouses she and Mamma sewed from muslin and calico. Unlike me, she favored our father. Her dark hair framed even darker eyes, though they were pretty eyes, a shade of indigo not unusual in the village.
“Ferenc,” she said as she dotted her eyes and wiped her sniveling nose. “I did not hear you come in.”
“Had I known it so important to be heard, I would have stomped around more loudly,” I said. It was a lame attempt at humor, but the small smile that parted Alona’s countenance showed that, if nothing else, the effort was appreciated. I moved to place a consoling hand on Alona’s back, but I could not quite come to complete the action. Biting my lip, I chose a different tactic. “What is wrong?” I asked, uncomfortable with the question but knowing it to be the only one to ask. I was more used to defending my sister outside, amongst the other children in the village. If someone were to insult her or hurt her in any way, there was her big brother, his own temper flared and his fists raised in threat, though seldom, if ever, in actual use. That was how I was used to dealing with Alona’s heartaches, with a sharp word for those who had caused it. And truth to be told, such instances were inconstant; Alona was pretty, and merry, and kind, and childhood scraps never held sway for long.
Alona was still dabbing at her eyes. “Oh, it is nothing,” she said. “Really, it is a happiness. I do not know why I am carrying on so.”
“Well, if it is a happiness,” I said, utterly confounded as to what Alona could be referring to, “then you should rejoice, and make cheer, and not cry.” The advice sounded as absurd as I felt in giving it, but it was the best I could do.
Still, Alona smiled at me through her tears. “You are right, of course, only… only I didn’t really notice him when he was here. Not in that way. Of course, I saw him as one would see any boy—any man—but really, I didn’t quite notice him. Not as a wife should notice her husband, anyway.”
At the word “wife” I felt every nerve ending in my body go instantly numb; my hands shook, my lower lip trembled, and my stomach raced to the bottomless pit now forming in my guts. I suddenly felt an u
rge to cry myself, though I would never do so in front of my sister. “Alona,” I said, quite deliberately, choosing each word carefully, “what are you referring to?”
“Hendrik,” she said. “We are to be married, he and I.” She said this casually, as if it was a simple matter of fact, as if she and he were the only two people in the world, and their union was simply the logical outcome of such a deprived population. She said his name without passion, without ardor. “I know it is silly of me to go on like this,” she said, a small laugh now replacing her tears. “I only found out this morning. Mamma and Grandmamma told me, after you and Poppa had left for the mine, and after the dowry was received. I wonder what it was? I never thought to ask….” She trailed off. “I was so excited when they told me. Imagine, me, a bride. I’ve been picturing my dress all day. White, of course, and with Mamma’s veil. And flowers in my hair. Do you think it too decadent to have flowers in my hair?”
“No,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.
“Just a few,” she said, not listening to anything I would have to say anyway. “White flowers to match my dress. And this is what I thought of all day, until, just suddenly, it occurred to me that I am to be married.” She stopped to gaze at me with a look that spoke of both amusement and dread. “It is odd, perhaps, but when they told me, I thought only of me, of what I would wear and how it would all be for me. I never thought of him.” She hugged the quilt close to her body now, and one of her slender fingers traced the blue stitching absently as she continued. “Of course, he is handsome. A bit short, perhaps, but nice to look at. And smart. He likes to read. And Mamma says he will be kind. Do you think he’ll be kind?” She did not pause for an answer. “He isn’t much like Poppa,” she mused. “Then, he isn’t like his own father either. Do you think he’ll become stout, like Uncle Sandor?” I could not imagine my Hendrik in any other way but the perfect picture I saw every time I closed my eyes, but I knew that Alona’s words were more monologue than conversation, and since my own heart was shattering into a million infinitesimal pieces as she spoke, I felt it best to just keep quiet. “I could not abide a stout husband. Poppa isn’t stout. He isn’t quite thin, either, but he certainly isn’t stout.” Her brow wrinkled in thought. “I am not sure how to describe him.” She reached underneath her pillow and pulled out a stiff piece of paper. A letter, inscribed in an all-too-familiar hand. “He wrote me, though, with the dowry Uncle Sandor sent. Isn’t that sweet?” She was not holding out the letter for me to take, but I reached for it anyway. “Ferenc!” she gasped, pulling her hand back. “You cannot read this! It is private!”
The Snow Vampire Page 5