Thanks to her, his daylight hours no longer burdened him with labor. All he had to do was take orders and deliver them. How he loved those opera singers, sweet mountains of flesh, sweating in their velvet dresses, their wide pink foreheads, exuding the salty juice of life!
When she slept, he sometimes liked to sit on his doorstep and watch the children who wrapped their arms around their teachers’ waists, the teachers who at the first stroke of the bell formed them into a double line, the little boys who held hands or swished their raincoats at each other, the little girls who sang songs. But he was always tired in the daytime nowadays; on account of his appearance it happened that certain clients declined to receive him directly when he delivered the garments they had ordered; they feared he might bear some contagious disease. Sometimes he grew lonely and irritable, but then he reminded himself of his dear quiet wife whose hands worked unceasingly for them both.
He would have liked to have children again, but, as thirteen learned doctors have already proved, after a woman’s womb dies once, it lacks the twin elements of fire and water most needed for propagation, being corrupted by a surplus of earth. Besides, who would care to have children with a vampire? — Well, Michael did; he certainly tried. Lying beside her just before dawn, he whispered his wish for more daughters; but the pressure of the oncoming light was already causing her to twitch and grimace; it was time for her to go away again. — That cantata singer’s dress is finished, but ask her if she’d like more ruffles at the sleeves. Because she… oh, Michael, I don’t feel well; hide me away quickly; I’m ashamed to die in front of you—
It was July, and he gasped in the summer air. It seemed that he couldn’t breathe enough. Although Trieste is no more humid than Lyon, and far less so than New Orleans, his lungs felt malnourished. All that year he craved more and more of that perfumed oxygen, even when it was drizzling, even when the freezing bora finally blew again; needing fresh air, he revolted against the muddy charnel odor of his wife. But it wasn’t that he didn’t desire her.
In Bohemia people had regarded her with horror, while here they merely felt spiteful disgust. Her eyes did perhaps look a little sunken in, and her flesh might have been yellow; but to her husband, who had lived with her since she was young, she remained much the same. (It might have been that his pleasure in her was tinctured with a secret sense of superiority, because she was dead.) He bought her a plaid corset which helped keep her flesh together. Now came September, and his faithful wife was stirring porridge with a long wooden spoon — nearly time for his breakfast and her sleep. How he longed to live out one more day! Had she learned to see his thoughts? For what a cold pale gaze she was turning on him! — although hadn’t she done the same when she was alive? No, he must not suspect her of anything; their most precious jewel was trust. (Some say that vampires have two hearts; by all the saints, Milena had but one!) The bora whistled, and the nights lengthened, thank God; now it was easier to renounce the sunlight, for Milena’s sake. But in due time he found himself tormented again by spring; and in June, when the cities begin to stifle their inhabitants, who cling to the shadowed sides of the streets, and in all the many-windowed palaces, curtains close themselves against sunlight, concealing sweating insomniacs in much the same way that a lake smooths itself out above a sinking stone, both Michael and Milena grew restless, because they found it more difficult to breathe. He attended more than before to the sweating chests of the young city women, and each morning that she withdrew into her allotted world, he felt lonelier than before.
In the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, each of the tenfold emanations of Divinity comprises its own tenfold sphere; and every aspect of the marital state may, indeed must, be comparably, multiply subdivided. I won’t deny the complexity of their relations. Sometimes she wept: My poor, poor children! (He never brought them up, of course; she might have worried that his trust in her was falling off.) The closest they ever came to disagreeing was on an occasion when they were talking over the times when she and the children still lived; of course their memories of her mother and most of the others had soured, but when it came to her old rival, whom she might have been expected to hate, Milena said: That summer before I got sick, when the crop was bad and our girls needed shoes, I even begged a loan from Doroteja—
What! And did she oblige you?
She did.
And you repaid her?
No, because I died.
It was on the tip of his tongue then to blame her, but she struck first, saying: Tell me the truth. Was there ever anything between you?
I swear there wasn’t.
Then Doroteja—
Wife, she’s the vampire, not you.
Oh, sweet-tempered Milena was! On occasion he could not refrain from gazing upon her in her stupor and wondering, just as we all do about one another, which secrets colored her blood; and, to be less metaphysical, what evil she might do, and what good she might in time of desperation do or refrain from doing. But the instant that the lid closed upon her face, he invariably felt that he could have treated her more kindly. She, who had done everything for him, who must have passed (although they never spoke of it) through nightly agonies of temptation or even physiological compulsion without becoming the kind of evil thing which feeds on people, had made herself his innocuous lovebird; so that his anxiety had merely to do with how to live a lie with everyone but his faithful wife, while somehow reserving from her some moments of sunlight, contented social trivialities, roseate flesh and neighborly approval, not to mention the summer expanses of this great world. Bile foamed all the way up to his heart; he nearly vomited. Honoring her fidelity, he remained false to all others in order to be true to her; and she grew ever more beautiful in his sight, as certainly should have been the case, for this was a pretty time, a musical time, when Schandl and Warbinek were making pianoforte verticale in Trieste.
Before she married him, and rolled up her hair in a wife’s cap, she used to toss her head at him, and her long tresses licked her neck. Now she had grown rather stiff, as old people will. Between marriage and death she had kept her hair pulled up in a bun; but now she left it loose again, as if she were a newborn maiden; he liked that very much.
At times he was ambuscadoed by a longing to have married Doroteja, to see her standing in the kitchen in the morning with the sun illuminating the edge-strands of her golden hair as she set out the bowl of fresh milk whose cloud-clean whiteness for that one quarter-hour the sun would touch with purples, lilacs, yellows and many other colors, to see the play of sunlight on his wife’s hands, my God, was that too much? But in the summer evenings, bathing Milena in his arms, as she floated with her long pale legs almost lilac-colored in the twilight, her slender arms barely grazing his shoulders — she had gained so much practice in lying still! — until, half-opening her eyes, she began to caress his hand, he was not at all troubled by the lack of Doroteja. There she was, his faithful wife, floating in a long tin bathtub with her gaze locked upon his; there she was every night, lying in her coffin, with her long legs pressed together, slowly raising her head, smiling at him before she had even opened her eyes, with her hands sprouting up toward him. Just as a baby turns its round head, opens its wide eyes wider, smiles and reaches toward its mother, as if somehow its arm can bridge any distance — which indeed it can, for she now bends down to take the child into her arms — so his dependent, adorable wife yearned unto him unfailingly, trusting him to care for her, hide her and love her.