Trouble in Transylvania (23 page)

“You’re on the downside of ripening, I’d say; the grain is starting to go to seed, but the old juices are still flowing. You’re more September than October, still a long way from winter.”

“I see. Sort of like blackberry season?”

“Yeah. The vines are withering, but the fruit is getting sweeter by the day.”

“And what happens on Beltane, Jack?” Bree asked, flushed with the thought of being a Goddess of Love.

“It’s the time when the power and sacredness of sexuality are recognized. In Celtic times they lit Beltane fires from hilltop to hilltop, to celebrate the coming of the new moon. The entire community danced with upraised arms in imitation of the horned moon. And then they mated communally in orgiastic rites that went on all night.”

“Wow,” said Cathy. “They didn’t show that on the program.”

Jack coughed, and came back to earth. “No, ah, well… and then the next day is May Day, which is celebrated in some form all over the world. The Maypole and so on. In some places in Europe they still do circle dances and drink from sacred wells.”

From outside came the sound of excited barking and then Archie rushed in, followed by a reluctant Gladys. “Hecate and her hounds of hell,” said Jack.

“I only wish I had more to feed them,” Gladys said. She was wearing her appliquéd Western shirt and coyote bolo tie.

Archie looked dazed. “I counted thirteen, Gladys. Thirteen scrawny mutts out there.”

The editor of the
Weekly Gleaner
seemed to have lost his bearings. His felt hat, a reliable indicator, was pulled forward down to his eyebrows instead of pushed back so you could see his mild, excitable expression. His agate eyes were dark with worry and he was less talkative than usual.

For a few moments he simply sat staring at his hands, while Gladys talked about how she’d like to get hold of the whirlpool room for a couple of hours and give some of those dogs a good soaking.

Then he said, “It’s so strange not to have Emma here. I keep looking around for her and then realize she’s with Zsoska. I hope she’s all right. This isn’t what I meant to happen. I don’t know what Lynn is going to say.”

“Oh Dad, Emma’s fine,” said Cathy. “She’s probably better than she’s been for years.”

“How can you say that, Cathy?” Archie’s eyes flashed. “She would have gone from the hospital to an orphanage if we hadn’t adopted her. Zsoska never would have come back for her. She’s not that kind of person, she’s too… I don’t know.”

There was a silence while we all thought about Zsoska.

“Zsoska kind of reminds me of my mother,” Gladys said unexpectedly. “Married too young. Short temper. Wild. She ran off for a while with the fellow who owned the local mercantile. But she came back after about a year. She was quieter then. Women didn’t have a lot of choice in those days, not like you kids today. There were four of us kids all under six years old. She couldn’t take it and left. But she didn’t forget us, and when she’d sorted herself out, she came back. In fact, her time away probably made her a better mother.”

That wasn’t what Archie wanted to hear. He stood up. “Come on, Kit-Kat, it’s getting to be bedtime.”

“It is not. It’s early. I want to stay here!” She looked around for support but, finding none, stood up sulkily and followed her father to the elevators.

“I guess I’ll be hitting the sack too.” Gladys yawned and waved us good-night.

“Your grandmother is an amazing woman,” said Jack. “I hope I’m half as energetic as she is when I’m seventy-five … though that’s a long time off, of course.”

“It’s funny, Gram hardly ever talks about her childhood,” Bree said. “She’s always so positive that I forget what a hard time she had.”

“What happened when her mother came back?” I asked.

“Supposedly things were good for a while, but her father lost his job and then
he
left. It was the Depression and they were in a small town in Arizona. Gram did whatever she could to survive. I guess she wanted to go to college and be a vet, but there wasn’t the money. She got married, had my mother, her husband died and she had to support the two of them. That’s when she got into the pet business. She makes good money at it. She sent my mom to college and graduate school.”

Bree suddenly looked straight at me. Her dark hair tangled against the milk white of her neck. Maybe I’d been overly hasty in turning her down, but it was too late now. She said, “You don’t think there’s really any danger here, do you Cassandra? I keep telling Gram we should think about leaving, but she says she’s having the time of her life. I can’t tell with her, I mean, if she’s scared or not. She doesn’t know about the secret police and everything. And even if she did, she still wouldn’t want to back down.”

“I think somehow the cops are getting the idea,” I said, “that Gladys has great personal resources. But I’d feel better if she weren’t involved at all.” I remembered Nadia coming out of the police station. I wanted to trust Nadia. I did trust Nadia. But what if she were in league with the police to get Gabor removed from his position, and what if she were using Gladys to do it?

I went upstairs to my room to wait for Eva to turn up, with a forlorn feeling I couldn’t quite put a name to. It had been such a long day and so much had happened that I hadn’t been able to absorb it all. Before switching the lights on, I walked over to the window and looked out. There had never been a sunset, only a pale stain of red behind the mounting gray clouds. Even now the light wasn’t quite gone; reluctant, it clung to the trees and lake, clutching at a leaf, at a wave, even as the wind tried to pull it away from the earth.

I kept thinking about Zsoska giving Emma up for adoption, about how confused and lost Emma must have felt being abandoned and then taken to a new world. I kept thinking about Margit getting pregnant over and over by Pustulescu, having to lie to everyone. The evil spirit that was Pustulescu still seemed malevolently alive. His heart had stopped, but no one had put a stake through it, and that was the only way to really kill a vampire.

I stood there at the window remembering a curious piece of translation work that had come my way about two years before. Until then I’d never read
Dracula,
much less Le Fanu’s story, “Carmilla,” and I associated vampires only with drive-in movies in Kalamazoo. The book was a collection of odd little vampire stories from Spain, written by a woman, Rosalia de Vega-Muñoz, and published in Madrid in the fifties. I undertook a sample translation to English for a British publisher, John Molesworth, an elderly and secretive man, more an antiquarian bookseller than a publisher really, though he did put out a book or two a year. Molesworth had discovered the original,
Cuentos de sangre y amor (Tales of Blood and Love)
while on holiday, in a remote hotel on the Galician coast. Try as he might, he could not find out anything about the author, except that she had died in 1976, apparently in a boating accident. She seemed to have no relatives.

Molesworth told me about the book when I visited his shop in Islington one day. As it happened, I was just off to Ireland. My last remaining great-aunt had finally died, and the old people’s home notified me that she had left everything—the contents of five boxes—to me. Aunt Maeve and I had never gotten along well, but she had loved my father Michael Reilly and she always said I reminded her of him,

I decided to rent a cottage in the village for a week and to work on the Molesworth manuscript. The village was on the Cork coast, an eerie sort of landscape at that time of year, late November.

I took a xeroxed copy with me (the original book, which was sold to a Japanese collector, was a lovely edition, printed on heavy cream stock with detailed copperplate illustrations). After paying my respects to the nuns and carting away the boxes, I settled down to work in my cottage.

From the first I had trouble getting the mood right. The stories were more perversely ironic than supernatural, yet the language was arcane and self-conscious. It was difficult to translate into English without resorting to a Victorian vocabulary. Words like “phantasmagoria” and “sylvan” abounded, the sun always set in “melancholy splendor” and a hill was never a hill but an “eminence.”

Between long walks on days when the sun refused either to shine or to sink, when the sometimes luminous, but often threatening gray-blue sky merged with the cold gray-green expanse of sea, I found myself among Aunt Maeve’s old books, pouring over Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, looking for a vocabulary that would be as evocative as it was enigmatic. I found it curious, but not at all strange, that the two greatest vampire authors were Irish.

The Galician writer’s tales were love stories, or more accurately stories of desire beyond dreaming, beyond fulfillment, beyond mere life: desire between women. The word lesbian was never used; it was encoded in the word “perverse.” The acts the women dreamed of were chaste but suffused with longing. One woman was the seductress, more experienced, and perhaps more evil; the other was often a virgin, troubled in mind, yearning for something she did not understand, hesitant and yet willing. The two women met in heightened circumstances: on an ocean liner in the middle of an Atlantic storm, at an opulent hotel on the coast of an unnamed country. In one story, incestuous, they were twins separated at birth. In another they were headmistress and student.

Always they recognized each other, always they seemed to have met before, in another lifetime, in another century. There were haunted glances, white columnar necks with gleaming crucifixes that were slowly removed or ripped aside, heaving bosoms and throbbing temples… feverish love consummated by burning kisses, only to be destroyed by jealous fathers and fiancés, only to vanish in the mists.

Men always came into the picture, figures of authority: a doctor, an investigator, a fiancé who couldn’t understand the change in his previously docile beloved. There were deaths—servant girls and students began to disappear. The virgin grew pale as death, her eyes glittered strangely. She lost her appetite, wore scarves around her neck, took to walking late at night in graveyards.

In some of the stories, the seductress, the mysterious stranger with the slight foreign accent and riveting glance was hunted down with blazing torches, crucifixes and stakes. Packs of men surrounded her and murdered her, skewering her heart. But in many of the stories, the perverse desires lived on, in the apparently innocent virgin, in the daughter of the house who may have lost her lover but who had gained forbidden knowledge. The spirit of the vampire had entered her. She was ready to begin her own career of seduction.

While I was trying to translate these stories, I often stood at the window of the cottage and looked out on the dark waters of the Atlantic, just as tonight I looked out at where the lake was fast disappearing into the twilight. I had thought then, too, of the persistent human desire that life last longer than it was meant to, that life should return—as a spirit living on in another body, as the winter hag being reborn as a young goddess of spring and fertility, as Demeter and Persephone being reunited.

In the end I never finished the translation. I showed two of the stories to Molesworth when I got back, and he decided that they were less explicit than he’d hoped. Not that he put it quite that way. He said, “The subtle imagination is a wonderful thing. But what the public likes is another matter.”

I turned from the window and lay down on my bed, waiting for Eva to knock, longing for Eva to knock, and fell into a dreamlike state, full of despair at the shortness of human life, and yearning for something more lasting, that is to say, eternal.

W
HEN I WOKE
up it was after midnight, and the wind was howling outside. It was not the wind that woke me, however, but the sound of voices in the room next door, Eva’s room. Not voices exactly, but sounds: a man and a woman making love. I strained to catch the tone of the man, but I already knew who it was.

You start out discussing the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia and the next thing you’re in bed. It wasn’t surprising. Gabor was an attractive man, and he adored Hungary. As for Eva—I should have known. There would always be a Mrs. Nagy or a Señor Martínez or a Dr. Gabor between me and this particular object of desire.

Nevertheless I didn’t feel like listening to the sounds of a rapprochement between Magyars from two nations.

I got up and put on my beret, two sweaters and my leather bomber jacket, and slipped out into the corridor with my flashlight. The elevators were no longer running, so I walked down the five flights and into the dimly lit lobby. The bar had closed in the lounge and the reception desk was empty. Through the glass doors the world looked dark and crazed and threatening.

It reminded me that though the name Arcata summoned up visions of enchanted pastoral life, lush green fields and flocks of fluffy sheep tended by singing and dancing shepherds, in reality Arcadia had been a region in ancient Greece where violent human sacrifices took place, and cannibalism as well.

There had been wolves in Arcadia, and there were wolves here too. Or at least half-wild dogs, whose howling echoed that of the wind.

I hesitated a moment, then opened the hotel door and went outside.

Although the wind was blowing hard, to my surprise the air was almost warm. The waters of the lake made a slapping sound, and the light from the waxing moon hooked the waves in fishnets made of silver. The branches of the newly leafed birches rushed back and forth among themselves like women in frothy skirts at a party, while the fir trees and pines creaked and moaned.

I left the lakeside and headed past the blank dark windows of Nadia’s tourist office, up the cobbled road to the two chiseled and painted wooden gates across from each other, and went through the one leading to the chocolate fairy-tale villa. I didn’t know why this house drew me so. Even in the darkness, abandoned as it was, it didn’t seem threatening or forbidding. Not like a ghost house in a horror movie, in spite of the gothic turrets and gables, the weather-vane spires, the overhanging doorway heavily carved with designs that in the moonlight looked archaic and indecipherably mysterious.