To sleep in my grave, until nightfall.
With the coffin-lid pressing on your face?
Yes. But I won’t know it.
If I make you a new coffin, can you sleep at home?
Yes, but if anybody finds out—
I can’t bear to be apart from you, and you under the earth.
Yes, yes; I’m going now. Michael, I love you; I’m going now…
That night she returned to him. By then, he had built a wooden box to her measure, which of course he knew by heart.
Usually she awoke shortly before dusk, but she preferred not to be present until the Blessing of the Lamps. They had agreed not to tell the children, at least not until they were older.
Sometimes he peeped in on her in late afternoon, when he could not bear to wait anymore. At that time her open eyes wore that lost gaze pertaining to the faces of marble statues. Taking her thus unawares gave him an erotic feeling he could hardly resist, but as he bent down to kiss her, she seemed almost to squirm and grimace, as if his presence were disturbing her; her mouth gave off a bad smell. In the morning, as he discovered, she presented a far more hideous appearance. It was as if at dawn she relapsed into an utterly corpselike state, then slowly over the daylight hours regained whatever it was she needed to live. Once he understood this, he would no more have spied on her (at least, not too often) before the sun was waning than he would have watched her in the outhouse.
You see, he tried his best to love her as she was, which is why this story will be as sweet as the tale of little Merit, the Egyptian wife, who, playing one of her girlish pranks, predeceased her husband; he adored her so much that he permitted her to dwell forever inside the sarcophagus made to his own larger measure. The slaves built him another, and in time, as any good husband should, he came to join her. And now the glass-eyed effigies of their anthropoid coffins stare straight up, side by side. She is bewitching in her gilded and bitumen-striped mummy-mask. They have kohled the outlines of her sweet dark eyes; they have painted her eyebrows and drawn stylish cat-lines from the outer corners of her eyes toward her temples. Her cheeks have been rouged to perfection, and gold shines subtly through the transparency of her pink smile. They gaze upward, but will never see the sky.
He begged her to let him comb her hair, and, smiling wearily or perhaps grimacing, she bowed her head to him, while lovingly he ran her best four-toothed comb, one of whose teeth the middle daughter had broken off by accident when she was very little, through her long wet hair, singing to her as he untangled it.
Her mother, whom he had brought secretly, gazed downward, and her face contorted into a sobbing smile. Milena opened her eyes. When she reached up to touch her mother’s neck, the mother screamed.
They made her swear by Saint Polona not to tell anyone. She kept weeping.
Mother, it’s really me; I’m not a fiend…
Oh, I believe you; I won’t say a word, not even to the priest, but why in the Lord’s name couldn’t you sleep in your grave? What happened to you, Milena; what happened?
Before she could answer, Michael said: Mother, if you learn the answer, you’ll never have any peace. I promise upon my salvation that she’s done nothing evil. Trust me! You’re better off not not knowing what death is.
I don’t know, I don’t know—
Mother, said the returned one, do you want to see me again?
No, child. I can’t bear this. I love you, and I wish you and Michael happiness, but you’re dead. I’m going to tell myself this never happened…
Next came the turn of the daughters, peeping pale and timid, the youngest one gaping and the middle one rubbing her red eyes, the eldest folding her hands in her lap — how could this not have occurred?
It was late afternoon, going on twilight; and because their father had forbidden them to enter the hayshed they crept in there, discovering the box which he had built, and carved with flowers, hearts and apples as sweet as any of the decorations on the toys he’d made them. — And why didn’t he nail down the lid? — Reader, you know the reason: to spy upon the naked helplessness of his wife, as the children now did.
At first they supposed her to be some kind of doll. From the smell, it must have lain in the manure heap. Why was it here, and how did it come to be wearing their mother’s clothes? Cautiously stroking her cold soft flesh, they grew afraid. The sun dipped lower. And then Milena opened her eyes; her face grew round, and she struggled to speak; but the eldest daughter was the one to scream.
Their father rushed in, his face dark with fury and a hammer in his hand. When he saw the circumstances, he sighed, sat down on a hay bale and tightly closed his eyes.
Swear by Saint Polona… their mother lisped groggily, her tongue blue and swollen.
The father arose. — This is our family secret, he instructed them. Your mother has come back, because she loves us. You’re to tell no one. If you do, we’ll all be destroyed. Foolish, foolish girls! Why didn’t you listen to me? Now swear by Saint Polona to keep this quiet. You heard your mother. Go on now! Swear — you first!
After this the couple were well aware that they must soon be exposed. One of their favorite topics, and perhaps the most morbid one, became the question of which girl would tattle, and how soon. As it was, the daughters had been pale and shy ever since their mother’s death. Their father’s clandestine night existence told on him, of course, so by day he was peevish and negligent with them; they were already almost orphans. Now they were practically ill.
Their parents called a family council — after dark, of course, when their mother could be up and about. The father, who had scarcely slept, sat with his eyes half open and his head slumped forward. The mother stood beside him, holding his hand.
She said: Children, you must believe us. I would have shown myself to you in time. Say you believe.
Yes, mama.
Now, since you have brought this burden upon yourselves, you must bear it. You have committed the oldest sin. Do you know what it is?
The sin of Adam and Eve, their middle daughter whispered.
That’s right. Your father and I forgive you, because you and we are all their children together. You craved knowledge, didn’t you?
I wish there were no such thing, and we all went crawling like animals! the youngest cried out.
Oh, that would be a different state of affairs, to be sure, laughed the father. But would you still want to be an animal come slaughtering time?
Enough, their mother said. We’re a family again now. We’ll always be together by night. Michael, did you bar the door?
I never forget that.
Mama, why do the neighbors’ dogs howl every night?
They howl at me, you silly girl. You know what I am. Don’t you?
A vampire.
So they’d call me. But look at your father. Do you see any marks on his neck? I’ll never suck your blood — that I swear by Saint Polona. Now, don’t doubt me anymore, or I’ll get angry. Go fetch your needles. It’s time to mend your father’s clothes.
The candle was burning down within the hanging pewter lamp when the middle daughter asked: Mama, what should I tell the neighbors if they ask why we hide behind closed windows every night?
Tell them we’re in mourning.
You taught us never to tell lies.
Don’t contradict me, or Father will show you the back of his hand.
At every dawn, their parting increased his sorrow; aware that she was dying yet again, he could scarcely bear this latest bereavement. What if this time were truly the last, and within the coffin she would this very morning burst into putrescence, or, worse yet, become a vrykolakas? Pitying and seeking to comfort him, the faithful wife prepared his breakfast before she went to lie down. (The daughters were long asleep, tossing and moaning in their beds.) She kissed him on the mouth, trimmed his beard, helped him plan his daily projects, murmured into his hopeful ear promises of erotic loving-kindness and professions of spiritual longing, and then departed, closing her coffin-lid from within, thanks to a handle he had installed for her. He now hated so much to see her there that in the afternoons he only peeped in on her to reassure himself that she was slowly coming back to life. In truth, the transformation was hardly easy for her, either. Like her mother before her, she suffered from claustrophobia, and to lie in a dark carrion-box so close and narrow about her that she could barely lift her head a quarter-inch, much less turn over if her back got tired, was nasty enough; to depart the birds, flowers and children of daylight was harder still; worst of all was leaving him, whom she loved more than what might be called her life. How sorry she was for him, to leave him entirely alone in the house (for what good were the children to him?), with a dead woman in the hayshed, dogs howling all around and the neighbors meditating murder! Grateful for his insensitivity to her anguish on that quotidian journey into death, she sought always to distract him from what must be, as if he were her little son who had been bitten by a wolf and must now get cauterized. Let him hide his greying head in her skirt! Although she would never lie to him, she shielded him from horror wherever she could. He had wished to know what it was like to be dead, and she had answered, as a good wife should. But he could scarcely bear it. Revolting at the morning stench within her coffin, for her he fashioned sachets of mint and lavender, although that was women’s work, and bought her cloves, frankincense and other such precious spices at the apothecary’s shop; when she came back to herself in the early evenings, these scents comforted her as evidence of his love; on most occasions, however, he was there in person, watching anxiously over her with the lid drawn back. At first these invasions of her slumber humiliated her; when she caught the girls doing it she was angrier with them than ever before; at the same time, she knew (for on her wedding day her mother had told her this, earnestly advising her for the sake of decency to follow their example) that even in darkness her parents had never been entirely naked for each other; and on her very first night with Michael, intoxicated by his needy adoration, she had promised to withhold nothing that he asked of her, no matter whether she felt ashamed; he for his part swore to cherish her unerringly, as indeed he did, until all shame soon turned to luxurious joy. So it had been until her death. Now more than ever she craved that their feelings for each other would continue undecayed. She tried to make herself pretty for him before lying down, just in case that could secure her more tightly in his affections. Of course she dreaded his seeing her when she was at her worst. But again and again he swore that she was and would always be his excitress, just as for her he remained the soul which hers was framed in; and if there truly do exist spiritual vapors by which magic is excited out of flesh, even dead flesh deep in the ground, then by grace of his loving sorrow over her death he must have been gifted to exhale those vapors from his heart, kneeling desperately before her at the graveside, while the priest, mother, daughters and the rest stood back, variously moved, titillated and aghast. After all, she had dreamed in her grave that the mask which custom required him to wear, in order to give her the slip, had fallen off his face three times.