That night was as dark as a blacksmith’s tongs. A stone struck the door. When the girls tried to speak of Doroteja (for they seldom got any visitors nowadays), he sent them harshly to bed.
Why treat them so? said Milena. I know she was here.
How much can you hear in your sleep?
More than you imagine.
Then you know I kept faith with you.
I didn’t doubt it, said his wife. How can I do anything but trust you absolutely? Any day you like, call the people in…
Milena, we’d better make a plan.
Would you send me back to my grave?
No!
All the same, perhaps that’s where I had better spend my days. Doroteja will return soon.
I told her to wait.
You just don’t think, said his wife. Let me tell you how to do this.
They began to plan together.
For three nights they avoided each other. He left the windows unshuttered at dusk, as he used to when she was alive. He called upon the neighbors, who barely spoke to him. Sleep came badly; when it did, he kept dreaming that her face had grown so thickly spiderwebbed that it could have been a sculptor’s half-cut crystal.
How should he have felt, to be free of her? Perhaps it was cunning on her part, to give him opportunity to go for the priest; or it could have been simple love. It pleases me to report that he never felt the temptings of what good citizens would call conscience. He was bound to her, and freely.
He slept by night, for a change, and by day he let himself be seen in field and street. Yet the air continued to petrify around him, such was his danger and isolation. Had I more time I might have told you how it used to be for him with those people when Milena was still alive. But memories are mere tombs, containing foul dust which will never return to what it was, for all our hoping. So he resolutely forgot his friendship with those goodwives and honest men. Life must be lived without subservience to dust; God knows the stuff is difficult enough to get away from.
Thus he did whatever he could, to preserve himself and her. I wish you could have seen his face on the fourth evening, when he was to see her again.
There was an old tomb she knew (he refrained from asking which of her neighbors had showed it to her); they began to meet there in order to be alone. He took a wax impression of the lock, and the blacksmith, not suspecting what it was, made him a key. She awaited him within. They lay cool and wet together in the smell of stone. How nice it was! How lovely on those hot summer nights in the tomb with his wife! — Their daughters lay alone at home, fearfully crossing themselves.
In a shady alcove of damp black sand, the wall grown in with heart-shaped leaves, the moon peeped in at them around the shoulder of a stone Madonna; they hid behind her mossy stone robe, baby ferns creeping out from the buttresses.
At noon the ivy was as clean and shiny as grape leaves growing on the trellis, with silver-white ribs of light scraping across the dark leaf-claws. Once when she was underground he went there, the chalky stone almost sweating, and all he could think of was how much he longed to rest in her cold sweaty hair.
The next day he overheard the youngest daughter saying that since their mother had been ordinary, neither extremely good like Doroteja nor as wicked as the stepmother next door who had boiled up her husband’s little boy for soup, she thought the best course generally was to avoid conversation with their mother, although the appropriate demeanor for herself personally would be to respect whichever example her sisters set. Michael said nothing, either to himself or to Milena. He put the children to spreading manure across the field, while he went to cut firewood. Staring at his reflected face in an inlet of the river, he saw a lonely, guilty man. Well, what was he to do? Had Milena sinned against him by coming back? And if their daughters hesitated to love her, was that blameable? Perhaps he should have beaten the youngest, but what was the use? He could not imagine how many Hail Marys it might take to set things right.
Perhaps the darkest issue in human relationships — certainly murkier than questions of vampirism, which have been resolved ages ago by our Mother Church — is that of family favoritism. Regarding the three daughters, whose names I have declined to give, in order to maintain them in their proper station in this tale, no one knew toward which parent each had experienced her closest connection; from the parents’ point of view, the question hardly presented itself; for when we marry we tend to feel (unless others have arranged the match for us) that our spouse appeals to at least some of our inclinations, which is why we chose as we did; whereas our children, no matter whether we set out on purpose to produce them, or how many of our own qualities we discover or invent in them, arrive in the form of little persons who, like us, are emphatically themselves, no matter what others might wish them to be; hence, parents and children resemble neighbors, with whom we find ourselves accidentally living, and toward whom we make more or less headway in accommodating ourselves. I would never be so rude as to state that Milena and Michael loved one another more than they did their children, nor that the girls preferred one parent to another; but I do suspect that after she had returned from the dead, Milena found her daughters less affectionate than before. Perhaps she could have made a better effort, but in those days, parents found themselves so preoccupied with protecting the family from the cruelest sort of destitution that they found scant time to cosset the small beings they ploughed and spun for. And in this case, there were the extra difficulties of ploughing and spinning while concealing a member of the undead.
Spitting three times, the cobbler informed him: The Bible tells us: You shall not suffer a witch to live.
I don’t know any witches, Michael replied.
From outside, the house still appeared unhaunted, although on the night of her first return, their grass roof had begun to die. The Bulgarians say that a vampire who is new first sprays sparks in the darkness and projects a shadow on the wall; as he gets older and stronger, the shadow gets denser. This did not transpire with Milena, although her face seemed to have widened and darkened. Perhaps she wasn’t a vampire at all. Her lips smiled reddish-brown. Her sad black eyes were huge but they did not shine; they could have been painted on. Growing ever more accustomed to her, Michael now thought it best to be straightforward (although of course not forward). His wife had come back to him; that was all. No doubt it must have been God’s will.
At any rate, how could it have stayed secret? The neighbors’ eyelids drooped as if they were half asleep, but their mouths opened and their faces turned to wood. Gathering between the ruts of the street, they watched the couple sitting together on the doorstep, her face turned toward his while she smiled as if in joy and relief, holding his hand; they claimed to believe that something was wrong, either with the way he kept massaging her fingers, as if he were striving to warm them, or with the way her dark eyes never fixed on anyone but him; that wasn’t natural; she must be sucking his blood! It’s true that he still seemed to be more or less himself, but who would swear to that in an ecclesiastical court? She appeared to fascinate him even more than she had in life, although he had certainly adored her then; he kept turning toward her; sometimes he gazed out into the world, perhaps anxiously, and then she stared into the ground. Her long black hair gleamed more than ever before; it seemed to be nourished on some new grease.
Thank God for the tomb away from home where she now passed her sunny hours! The neighbor women would have peered in on her all day, praying with their mouths open, seeking to know if that dead face were still hers. As it was, they hounded his daughters (who grew skinny and never said anything); several times he caught people snooping in the hayshed. He burned up the lovely coffin he had made, but too late; they must have told the priest. When Milena awoke that night, and flitted darkly in through his window, those two discussed the matter and found themselves of one mind. Before the grim men with stakes and torches had entirely surrounded the house, he sent for the priest himself. Then he sat at his doorstep alone, watching his dear friends and neighbors, who as usual said nothing to him.