Fiend, page 12
part #3 of Voice of Blood Series
“Pray continue,” said Maria quietly.
“I don’t think he can,” Georgie said. She was absolutely correct.
“That’s a shame.” Maria shrugged. “It’s quite an entertaining show to see my lady transformed into a prick-sucking alley cat. She does it surprisingly well.”
“Up your arse,” Georgina huffed, gathering the lacy folds of her dress around her. She marched up to Maria, threw back her head, and declared, “You don’t own me,” before quitting the room and slamming the door to her own bedroom.
I thought to myself that I might not ever be able to continue, ever again.
Maria arched her eyebrow at me. “I do own you,” she remarked lightly. “Please, come, and take a letter for me. I wish to invite a gentlewoman of nobility for supper at our home.”
I could have smashed the divan into splinters, or told Maria that I shat on her letters to women of nobility and she should learn how to write legibly. But I did not. It was as if I bore Georgina’s shame on her behalf, and performed as the quiet, dutiful servant that Maria desired. And yet neither was entirely true. At that time, I think that doing as Maria requested was the simplest course of action and the best way of restoring any level of dignity to myself. I was the house cat that has gotten its tail caught in the door in front of a room full of people, that elegantly walks under the dining room table and grooms every inch of its fur twice, just to make sure.
Avalanche
8 January 1847, Paris
My dearest Jozef,
Please forgive my horrendous delay in writing to you these last six months. Terrible events have made it impossible even for me to set pen to paper for an unbearably long time, and now that I have sharpened my quill and blackened its tip, I find myself so blinded with tears, even to recall my recent history, that I have had to start on a new page.
The Kaffir is dead. Yes, dead! Or perhaps he is not— for no body was ever recovered from the snow that destroyed our mountain palace. But if not—how horrible to live crushed under a mountain of ice! I recall with wonder how we would dance under the falling snowflakes, and catch them harmlessly upon our tongues, and yet this very same substance can crush out hopes, dreams, sunlight, even a man’s life. Have you ever seen an avalanche? I imagine that you have not; Cracow has no knowledge of such a monstrous and random event, caused by nothing more heinous than the sneeze of a foolish woman. Imagine if you can—a thousand tons of vengeful snow, moving as swiftly and inexorably as a steam engine down a steep and rugged mountain side, reducing houses, carriages, horses, and men to mangled tatters! My dearest Kaffir! Gone! Dead and buried in an icy tomb, never to be recovered in this life!
The Kaffir and I were out on the mountainside near our summer cottage, digging through a recent wet snowfall to where we had recently seen new-sprung berries, and we desired to pick them and eat them frozen—we have many times enjoyed the delicacy in our Alpine paradise. But the snow was too new and too fragile, and I had caught a touch of cold, which made me sneeze. At once, we felt the ground quake beneath us, and before I could do more than let out a gasp, white warhorses of frozen fury snatched us away from each other, flinging me one way and he the other. We slid away from one another, our hands outstretched; I fell through an air pocket between slanted trees, and the branches formed a shelter over which the snow collapsed as heavy as stone. Striking my head against the trunk of one of these trees, I lost my senses, for which I cannot decide if I am grateful or bitter—grateful that I did not see the destruction, yet bitter that I could do nothing to prevent it.
When I regained consciousness, I clawed my way from the strangling white prison with my fingers, though it took me a day and a night, and emerged to a singular white expanse of blank silence. The Kaffir had vanished utterly! I could make out no trace of the cottage, nor the young trees that ringed it, nor the pond where the Kaffir caught fish and I washed our garments. There was truly nothing left of the life that we created together. I managed to stagger up the mountainside to a way station closer to the summit, and was there received by the fine mountaineers who staff that place, and they warmed me before their fire and gave me food and drink. I had been unconscious for more than two days, and I survived only by a miracle. They themselves had lost six of their number to the avalanche, and another two in attempts to locate and rescue any snowbound people. They had no women’s clothing there, so I was moved to attire myself in their own spare trousers and jackets, as my own clothes were in ruins. I nearly lost four toes to frostbite, but after soaking my feet in cold water for two days, the extremities recovered. But oh, my heart never shall!
I have since that time taken residence at a convent outside Paris, and I do believe I shall remain there while I recover my strength. The sisters of St. Pierre are most kind and gracious, though, as you can well imagine, I cannot very well observe their own vows of silence. Nonetheless, my youthful vigor and volume has been greatly lessened by the loss of my love. Can you imagine—Jadzia the Siren, reduced to quiet prayers and louder sighs of woe!
Ah, such is the curse of getting old.
I beg you to send me your best wishes, and to accept mine for yourself, Anna, Jerzy, Zuzanna, Tomas, and little Fryderyk. I shall write again soon.
All my love,
Jadzia
This letter was returned unopened, wrapped in another letter in a hasty and scrawling hand. Georgie would not let me see this other letter, but stood with her back to me, her coat held tightly around her, her eyes scanning the paper and her mind closed. I looked away, up the darkened street around a crooked corner from the church of St. J—, where she had mesmerized the clergy into receiving correspondence for her. I needed no supernatural power to see that she was upset, and so upset that she wished to conceal the intensity of it.
She had never before made an effort to hide her emotions from me. (Though, sometimes, I wished that she would.) At last she straightened her head, folded the letter, and shoved it into her pocket. “Jozef is dead,” she announced flatly, her chin jutting out to keep her lips from trembling. She wore trousers, boots, a shapeless hat, and a rough jacket, but she had never looked more like a little girl, trying to understand that he wasn’t coming back, ever, no matter what. “And my niece Zuzanna was prudent enough not to read what I wrote to him. See? It’s still sealed. She sent me her best wishes. She is a good child.” Her tight smile hardly deserved the name. “I have a locket with a miniature of her. She painted it herself.” The smile collapsed. “Now she hasn’t got a father.”
“Oh, George,” I said, holding out my arms, but she shook her head and moved away.
“No, no, no. No matter. Don’t feel sorry for me; death does come. He hit his head falling out of a tree.” She gave a single hoot of laughter. “That Jozef— climbing trees at his age! Sixty-five years old and a grandfather twice. We are much alike, he and I.” She put her two forefingers into her mouth and bit her claws with her fangs, a habit that she had recently acquired. “What must he think of me now?”
I thought of Vito and realized that many decades had passed since I last saw him standing before me, perfect and shining. Lorenzo, like a leech, had bled him from me. “He loves you, wherever he is.”
“Heh. He is dead and in the ground. Who knows if he still loves anything.” She bit her lip and set her face into a stern and boyish configuration. “Let us away. We have work to do. And remember, do not call me George; you must call me Jerzy. Jerzy Dolski. Remember your role.”
“Yes, my dear,” I said without thinking. Worshipers leaving evening Mass passed as the words left my lips, and gave us a curious stare; two students, the grubby one the beloved of the dandy, all in the shadow of the church. I gave them a smile and twisted the high collar of my shirt into a defiant point. If only they knew the half of it!
The crowded café was a warm and welcome respite out of the chilly, biting October wind, despite its stink of burnt coffee, sour hashish smoke, and cook fires extinguished with urine. Georgina scanned the room, eyes narrowed, then pointed to the left. “There they are. Let’s join them.”
At a round table sat three men, two young, one old, all with furrows of concentration marked deep and permanent on their foreheads. Georgie strode up and shook hands with them all as I followed slowly behind her. “This is my colleague, Grise,” she was saying, indicating me. “He is a translator, and assists me with shaping my ideas into a higher ideal of the French language. He works with me, but I get to take all the credit. A fine arrangement! Ha, ha. Grise, these are Frederic Lotte, Jean-Pierre Villon, and Théodore Soltan, the publishers of Les letters solidarité.”
I shook hands as well, and took a seat on the edge of the table, half turned toward the room, drinking in the atmosphere and the blazing heat from the fireplace. I did not desire these men’s attention; it was enough that they noted my mere presence, and they paid no mind to me whatsoever. My own attention was absorbed by the dandies in their fawn-colored trousers, the ladies of diminished virtue with red lip-paint purpled by wine, the artists with white and fragile wrists like a hard season’s parsnips. In the years before the debut of La Bohemè, they were not yet aware of their part in history, and as such, were bearable. I could already tell that this fascinating mosaic would soon be extinct; it was too pretty, too bizarre, to be more than tenuous. It was like a dream, the facts easily distorted in recollection.
Georgina proudly drew a roll of paper from her shoulder bag and laid it on the table in front of the men. The pages were rapidly snatched up and perused. “I have written many more,” she said. “I brought the best, in M. Grise’s opinion. You don’t have to publish them all at once, but at your convenience.”
“I am glad you have that perspective,” said the man introduced as Villon, his mouth full of black bread, “for we could not possibly devote space to all of them in a single issue. This is enough for ten.” His eyes nonetheless greedily scanned the writing, forgetting the wineglass already raised toward his lips. Georgie wiggled in her chair and rubbed her hands together, controlling her grins with difficulty. “Yet I wish we did have the space; this is excellent work. Though . . . I must say, you devote rather a lot of text to the plight of Poland.”
Soltan plucked the pages away from the other man and peered into them, his heavy black eyebrows knitting themselves into a single one. His thick, full beard stank of pipe smoke. “Not an excessive amount, in my opinion,” he grunted. “It is difficult to overstate.”
“I agree,” Georgina put in.
A plump, pretty waitress in a blue kerchief approached our table. “Jadz-Jerzy,” I said, hastily swallowing the instinctive “darling,” “will you drink?”
“Water, please,” said Georgina brightly. “Like Murger. Oh, and a pipe.”
I ordered spirits, amused at Georgina’s performance as the youthful social revolutionary, supposedly too poor to drink wine but eager for the prop of the tobacco pipe and the romantically shrouding smoke. The waitress smiled and curtsied, and thought to herself, That’s a woman in a man’s getup, or I’ll be deuced.
I did not follow the debate that raged between Georgie and the editors, nor the gossip about the various radical groups that formed, swelled, and were suppressed or fell apart. It amused me, however, that she might have easily bent them to her will but chose instead to leave them with their own opinions, attempting to change their minds through philosophy. As long as her disguise protected her, she was content to accept humanity as it was. While I felt the sting of injustice in the necessity for Georgina’s deception, she did not mind, and in fact welcomed the freedom from a female’s restrictive clothing and ladylike manners. And her colleagues at the newspaper had no idea that this impulsive young Polish student was a girl (and a deadly angel) underneath her layers of grime and bluster.
The Poland debate raged on for an hour, forming a layer of animated background noise to accompany my human sightseeing. My ears did prick up at the invitation to an evening’s pleasure at the home of M. Lotte the fortnight after, coinciding with the release of the next issue of the newspaper. “We shall have food, wine, and discussion,” Lotte said, “music, and poetry, and attractive young girls.” He wiggled his eyebrows at George, who did not have to pretend excitement. “And you should come, too, Grise. Dance and get into an argument. Put a little color in those white cheeks of yours.”
“I am honored,” I replied. “I would be delighted to attend, since you assure me there will be poetry and music. All in the same place—how extraordinary!”
As we walked into the river-reeking wind after we left, Georgina got cross with me. “Why must you be so inappropriate all the time?” she snapped.
That’s interesting, coming from you, I mused silently. “I thought you liked that about me,” I said.
“This is different. Having my work published means a great deal to me. I give my essays a great deal of thought, and when I display them, prominent thinkers are impressed. Did you hear them? They wish they could publish them all.”
Prominent thinkers? A trio of fringe-dwelling, failed academics with a stolen printing press? “I never said that it wasn’t important, or that your writing isn’t clever. I was just being myself,” I said. “I did not hinder you in any way. M. Lotte was not offended by me and he suspects nothing—and I propped you up. I don’t know if you noticed; your concentration was slipping. Your breasts were practically heaving.”
You bastard, Orfeo! Her cheeks burned with rage, and immediately I was stricken with headache. “They were not! Clever? Is that what you think? You don’t understand anything, do you?” She whirled to face me, her hands balled into fists. “Why can’t you be serious? Don’t you care about anything?”
I stared at her openmouthed; she impotently beat her thighs with her fists, and turned, again and again, as if looking for an escape route. I seized her by the shoulders and gave her a gentle shake, then pulled her into my arms, embracing her in lieu of slapping her. At once, she dissolved into grief-stricken tears. “You don’t have to hide when you’re with me,” I said, holding her as tightly as I dared. “You don’t have to be something you’re not with me. I feel what you feel.”
“I just want things to change. I want things to be more fair. Because right now, nothing is fair. Nothing is just.” She cried on my shoulder during the whole long, shuddery ride home.
The following fortnight gripped her tightly in the black fist of grief and mourning. She did not leave the apartment, and for the first few nights did not even leave her bedchamber, taking no blood. She moved from couch to couch in every room, sitting, sprawling, staring at the walls, weeping and sobbing, and reading from a threadbare book of fairy stories that she had kept since her childhood, fifty years previous. Maria and I took turns staying with her, though neither of us particularly wanted to, as George felt no particular need to keep her emotions to herself anymore. She struck us with headaches, nausea, stabbing pains in the stomach, and a blanketing gloom. Whoever was in the room was fair game. The naive servants were miserable and refused to look after her. Even attending Mass and contemplating the sufferings of Christ was more cheerful.
On the appointed date of Lotte’s soiree, I woke from sleep in anticipation of being immediately swamped with sadness, but the ether was clear. I donned my dressing gown and tiptoed to George’s room, to find her humming as she wrapped the linen over her breasts. “Ah, Orfeo, just in time—will you hold this while I pin it? Or pin it while I hold it?”
I allowed her to pin. “How are you feeling?” I ventured.
“Oh, all right,” she said, frowning a little. “You know. There is a giant hole in my heart that will never heal. But well enough.”
“I have . . . nothing to compare it to,” I confessed.
“Oh, you do. Your heart is riddled with holes. I only wish I could handle it as gracefully as you do.”
“This is graceful?” I joked, gesturing toward my mussed hair and thin, drawn morning face. I needed a drink.
She pulled a dirty white singlet on over the pinned linen, and a clean white shirt over that. “But you know, I am still alive. I still have things to do. We have a gathering to attend at the home of M. Lotte.”
I smiled. “They shall have poetry and music.”
“Don’t forget the pretty girls.” Georgina added a black coat, one of mine that had been retailored by Georgina herself. “I shall wear black, however. And I would be very pleased if you would do so as well.”
“Actually . . . I had a mind to wear my green coat.” I had been wearing black all week, but I suppose she hadn’t noticed. “I just got it, and I haven’t had a chance to wear it yet.”
“And your brother died fifty years ago, so why should you mourn?” she sniffed. “Fine. Wear your green coat. Can you be ready in one hour? I know that is challenging for you.”
I had never wanted to slap someone so hard in all my life. Instead, I gave her a nod and a smile and backed out of the room.
Maria came in with the new valet, Gruetter, and my new green coat. Gruetter laid out the coat to display it to me, but I could hardly appreciate the shimmering pine-colored sized wool that had so enchanted me at the tailor’s shop the week before. “She’s turning into you,” I spat at Maria’s reflection in the looking glass.
Maria frowned, and touched Gruetter on the left shoulder. Having received his signal, he silently left and closed the door behind him. Maria smoothly took his place and continued buttoning my shirt cuff. I immediately regretted having spoken. “What do you mean?” she asked me mildly.
“She’s ordering me around,” I said, “telling me what to do, speaking down to me. All those things that you usually do.”
“She believes that she is right,” she replied, unruffled. “As do I. As do you.”
“Yes, but—”
“She realizes that she is sixty years old and her brother is dead. Pray for her, don’t judge her.”
“I do, and I don’t.” I sighed. Maria brushed my cuffs with the soft little broom, then set to tying my loose cravat of pale pink silk perfumed with rose water. “I do not know how to mourn on another’s behalf, and I resent the implication that I should or else I do not love her.”
