It was quite a procession indeed. The blood-red banners hung from the town hall. Doroteja was there, and so was Milena’s mother, her face as hard as a shoemaker’s wooden form. Yes, Doroteja was pale, yet avid, of course; and here came all the old women whose children or grandchildren had been sucked dead by the satanic pest; with them came the living representatives of youth, hungry for horrors, and the one-legged soldier who desired (so he loudly explained) to see if anything could make him flinch — and here came Michael’s former friends, who used to partake of Communion beside him (the same cowards who if they were alone would pay off a corpse with silver, so that it would not come haunting), and the ones whose cows Milena had healed, not to mention everyone else, the presence of the whole town being required by the Church — and none of them meaning him or Milena any good. Why it was that he could not be left in quiet with his faithful wife in whatever happiness they could make was certainly beyond him. But there it was; and now men from other villages were coming, too, and some few carried sharpened stakes over their shoulders.
I do him no injustice to state that his awareness that any time he wished to, he could get rid of this vampire and then taste Doroteja, devour her even, was delicious to him; for isn’t it human nature to be pleased when fate offers us more than we already possess? It gave him a sense almost of pride, to know that he continued to stir Doroteja’s heart. To be sure, he was also afraid of her; it was precisely on account of her almost predatory determination to have whatever she wanted that he had first chosen the more easygoing Milena. At this very moment, as he could well see, she was brooding over him, in much the way that an evil spirit studies us. Of course he would have enjoyed experiencing with her the understanding of the flesh; and for the first time it now struck him that her fleshly intuition or comprehension of him might well exceed his of her; for all he knew, she might be able to read him down to his discreetest parentheses. This possibility should have increased his fear; instead, it flattered him.
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 missaclass="underline" 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.