Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (31 page)

Gazing round him at the audience, most of whom perhaps hoped in horror to see a slender female arm rise gracefully up from the ground, Michael thought to himself: Even if Milena is what they say she is, why should that make her any worse than these old peasants who have nothing better to do than watch the weeds grow on their mortgaged fields?— He hated them all.

The day was as bright as the illuminated miniature in some Cardinal's
missal: sky of lapis lazuli, fields of malachite, which is more faithfully permanent than emerald, attire of—Well, I should not say red and blue, for who in that town was so rich, and who would have wished to wear fine clothes to an exhumation? Let's say that the figures were perfect in their diminutive fashion, and that they were all ringed round with gold leaf; for who could disagree with their purpose? Michael, perhaps, might not have been so contented. He could not prevent himself from envisioning what would happen once they had operated on his wife: Her eyeballs would sink into her skull and her mouth would split her face from ear to ear, in a grinning crack of darkness.

There was another old shrew who had been terrorizing the neighborhood; three young mothers whose breasts were full of milk but who had lost their babies just the same had already made formal accusation against her. Singing a prayer, they opened her coffin first. She was quite decomposed.

Getting a bit dark at the armpits, are we? said the surgeon.— Just in case, he drove a stake through her heart—which is to say, he positioned the sharpened lindenwood skewer in the most infallible anatomical position, then nodded to the butcher, who swung the mallet with all his might. To everyone's disappointment, the corpse declined to shriek, so the executioner had nothing to do.

Well, how was that experience? asked the priest.

The butcher, who felt passing proud just then, wanted everyone to appreciate his experience. So he considered awhile, then said: It was like driving a nail into blood pudding.

Next, they opened the three daughters' coffins, just to be sure. The faces had already fallen in, with spiderwebs or cauls growing mercifully over them. At the priest's direction, the surgeon cut their heads off and packed the grinning mouths with garlic.

Now it was Milena's turn. Michael stood to one side, temporarily overlooked by the little boys with bare and grubby feet in whose names this was being done. The sexton dug up the coffin. The butcher helped him pull it out. On account of their confidence that whatever lay inside had become evil, they slammed it down with what Michael, who knew better than to say anything, considered to be disrespect. The sexton leaned on
his shovel, gasping and coughing. The butcher, sweating, pulled off his bloody apron and slapped it against an old tombstone until the worms fell off. The executioner smiled, with his hand on the pommel of his sword. The priest led them in a prayer; Michael's lips moved meaninglessly. The surgeon, whose belt buckle resembled a great lock, shouted:
Amen!
The grubby mothers and grandmothers raised the babies over their heads so that they could see and learn everything; then the sexton, having caught his wind, tapped a chisel into the crack between coffin and lid, twisted expertly, and pried it open. So the roundcheeked priest pressed forward, raising a cross, while the lean, longhaired surgeon peeped cautiously over his shoulder, gripping what is nearly as efficacious against monsters as a cross—namely, his sharpest knife, which could saw open a skull at need.

There lay Milena, with her head on her breast, in that same silent and patient position as the old beggar who stands outside our church.

The good priest, so wide, steady and sad, had been ready for anything. But Milena looked . . . well, lovely in her coffin. Her face was as glossy-white as that famous intaglio portrait of Duchess Margherita of Savoy. Since everybody awaited his word, he said: Lift her out—gently, now! (Michael, are you with us or against us?) All right now. Sexton, have you seen her wedding ring?

And all these people who had once loved them, they did not know whether to pronounce her dead, alive or monstrous.

Just as it is for a woman all alone in bed at witch-hour, with a single candle to light her, and the other rooms of the house dread-darkened, and the world beyond filled with night and death; so it was and ever would be for Milena in daytime, even with her husband lying on top of her coffin to guard and comfort her. How much more so now! And had the villagers truly met with such a sight as I have imagined in the previous chapter, that would have been Milena's end. In fact what they discovered—for Michael and his wife had been provident—was a woman's remains, long
decomposed, slopping out of Milena's burying clothes. Her ooziness proved her innocence.

The priest then said, as anyone would:
But Milena did come back.

I must have dreamed it all, replied Michael, and when Milena's mother and the neighbors insisted that they had seen that demon in his wife's form (at least Doroteja kept kindly silent), he pointed down at the thing in the coffin and said: But there she is!

Even the executioner agreed that there was no point in driving a stake into it.

Reclosing the coffin, they reinterred it, not gently, because they all felt disappointed, and the way things should have gone, Michael and Milena ought to be burning together now. How exactly he got out of it I cannot tell you, but it might have had something to do with the payment of gold, and his grace was certainly provisional, so that evening, once he had bolted himself back inside the little house which was no longer his, and dug up Milena from under the kitchen floor (she woke up crying out: I was so lonely!), he stood defiant at the window, while she sat discreetly behind him in the hot darkness. He watched their neighbors standing behind the fence, waiting for them to come out; and for the last time he saw Doroteja crossing the footbridge by Milena's mother's house.

Since of the two of them only Milena could see in the dark, not until moonrise did they set out, leaving forever their high-roofed farmhouse beneath its chestnut trees; no doubt the roof would soon fall in; who else would care to live there? He carried a few tools at his belt; her wifely lockbox was light; he bore that on his shoulder.

The moon slipped behind a cloud. Milena whispered that she'd flit ahead and behind, to ensure that no one lay in wait. He worried then; he wouldn't know where she was.

She told him: If you love me enough, you'll learn to listen.

For what?

For me.

How will I know?

When your ears are sensitive enough to hear a vampire's fingernails growing underground.

He complained that she was being uncanny, and she laughingly kissed his throat; he realized that she was teasing him.

She vanished and returned: A horseman was coming. Michael's faithful wife led him quickly to the cemetery, where they ducked down among the uneven ranks of pale gravestones in the grass and the mud. The horseman passed. Michael would have liked to bid goodbye to their daughters. Strange to say, he also wished to visit Milena's grave. It seemed awkward to pose the matter to his wife, who in any event probably knew what he was thinking. Besides, who could say which ghouls and monsters were here?— Courage! she whispered, squeezing his hand.

Something chuckled, then whinnied like a horse. Faraway horses began screaming.— Oh, that joker! laughed Milena.

So they hurried along the dirt road which curved in obedience to the adjacent river. Passing the Dark Man by the water who disguises himself as driftwood (he was an acquaintance of Milena's), they hastened on, and behind them came a sound as if the water were being flogged with planks. Long before dawn they were both weary. Skirting the villages of Nachtstern and Grabmund, where dogs barked at them, they found another cemetery. Michael smashed the lock on a vault, and retired within to sleep out the day with his faithful wife, unable to keep from smiling now that everything had ended so well.

She brought him a gold ring from some churchyard, and he sold it in a tavern. With those wages they took to the road again, in fear of every human being, and therefore in still greater need of each other, hiding in a beehive-shaped night-coach pulled by two horses; so they got past the high-towered castles inhabited by all those others who would never understand them, their way lighted by the glowing greenish eyes in her dark face.

In Kreuzdorf he hired a coach for himself and his long narrow box. The driver was to take them to
the frontier. It was afternoon; he'd scarcely slept, since he must flee with her by night and protect her by day. The horses were nervous. The driver studied him as if he or Milena were somehow to blame—and if she were not, then how could he be, who had sworn to care for her until the end? In the dirt road, a man who held a fat
cow by the string tied to one of her horns stood chatting with a man who leaned on his broom. Now it was evening. When they came into Feuerstadt the horses slowed as they approached two barefoot women in long ragged skirts which were grimed to match the color of the road; one wore an open basket on her back, and her arms were folded across her breast; she was telling the other some trouble; then they turned, saw the coach, peered in and crossed themselves—in the name of Saint Polona, what could they be seeing? Milena looked just like anyone else!

Two men and four black-clad children formed in a line along the road, staring at them.

Begging their forgiveness, the driver withdrew from service. It was safely dark; they leaped out and departed, leaving the coffin behind; but still he loyally bore her little notion-box, and her caress strengthened his weary step, the sharp blade of morning-dread pressing ever against her unbeating heart.

So they ran away, over cattle tracks, through the mountains and into the hinterlands of the Holy Roman Empire, around pest-haunted villages, avoiding every church, sometimes chased by thieves and witches; and he clove to her, untempted by any other woman, even when they traversed a piazza which happened to be dazzlingly irradiated just then by the brass-bangled arm of a girl whose hair was still wet from the bath; while his faithful wife's hands were as cool yellow marble. He was still proud of her lovely long neck. At the last minute she had even brought him another present from beyond the grave: a cameo exactly the size of her fingernail, depicting an unknown white blossom and sealed in old glass or strange lacquer or perhaps even amber.

In her ornate coffer with the three locks (her mother's wedding present), she kept those three pet spiders who could weave lace in any pattern she chose: the many-branching floral kind sold very well, but sometimes people liked fleurs-de-lys, or multireplicated suns in a checkerboard pattern. These creatures must have come from the same place as the cameo, but Michael thought it best not to inquire into that which Milena hesitated to reveal. So as they crept southward, unable to trust anyone but each other, he peddled her lacework in the street for small pay,
imminently expecting exposure since all the other such vendors were crones and their daughters. And yet they could not say, in the fashion of most outlaws, that they had been unlucky. All they wished for now was a place in which to be themselves. Milena slept in wolf-holes on the edge of town. At first he used to worry that someone would find her and destroy her while she was thus helpless, but she promised always to bury herself as well as she could. There were nights when he lacked a safe place to bathe her, and then with all his heart he pitied and grieved for his sweetheart who once more was black with dirt; but he never recoiled from her; for her part, the faithful wife, understanding now that even her mother's love had never been what it seemed, clung the more constantly to Michael, who had begun to go grey. So it went, like the many small square scenes of the life of Jesus in a folding triptych icon. She subsisted on the blood of fieldmice and the occasional dog.

By now he had become mercifully addicted to her gruesome odor—which is only to say what you already know: that he loved her. What is toleration but habit? Consider for instance the halfway sour-moldy odor of fresh strawberries at the market; much of this smell derives from the leaves; all the same, it contains an unwholesome component, over which it is astonishing that so many fruit lovers complacently pass. Hence it would be more accurate to write:
Slowly he grew fond of her earthy, sweaty smell.
In perilous stretches of daytime he did not in the least mind guarding her remains, no matter what stench leached out of her coffin, trench or shed. Over her remains he sometimes murmured: If they killed you again, and then I never saw you—

They moved to Torino, and if he were only literate he could have become a bookseller. She taught him Italian, for she already knew Latin, that being a dead language. He did odd jobs of night-work, guarding rich men's homes from brigands while Milena hid beneath ground. At the milliner's he consigned his wife's productions: skeletons of frogs done in silver lace, or a lace snail whose shell coiled in spirals, with a waning moon at the center. Nobody except the milliner suspected he was married.

But, as usual, the couple soon betrayed themselves. A child saw her and screamed. A dog died; a horse grew anemic. Sometimes the neighbors heard them singing the songs of their youth.— People had begun
inquiring whether Milena was his wife or his daughter. Soon the Inquisition would be onto them. In Torino there is a certain chocolate shop on Via XX Settembre whose rainbow-striped pistachio chocolate pastilles may, if eaten during the the eleventh Mansion of the Moon
(Azobra,
which is propitious for redeeming captives), facilitate time travel. If only they had known about it! There came a dawn when Michael saw angry men sharpening stakes. That night he fled with his faithful wife, forsaking all they could not carry. The three spiders travelled inside her mouth. The so-called
dark night of the soul
might not have been experienced as such by Milena; in any case, it remains intrinsically impenetrable, so I cannot tell you exactly how or where that couple adventured. Our narrative resumes with their arrival in Trieste not long before the end of the
bora
wind, the trees bowing and whipping before them, in evidence of Fortune's two sides. They stole into port in a tiny
guzzo
of Dalmatian make, paying off the boatman in ancient coins. Milena was cloaked and veiled, while Michael looked decidedly unprosperous, not to say desperate, so that the ruffians along the Canal Grande left them alone.