The Vampire Armand

19

I SHOT UPWARDS. The pain I felt was total, scalding away all will or power to choose momentum. An explosion inside me sent me skyward, right into the pearly snowy light which had come in a sudden flood, as it always does, from a threatening eye one moment, sending its endless rays over the cityscape, to a tidal wave of weightless molten illumination, rolling over all things great and small.

Higher and higher I went, spinning as if the force of the interior explosion would not stop its intensity, and in my horror I saw that my clothes had been burnt away, and a smoke veered off my limbs into the whirling wind.

I caught one full glimpse of my limbs, my naked outstretched arms and splayed legs, silhouetted against the obliterating light. My flesh was burnt black already, shiny, sealed to the sinews of my body, collapsed to the intricate tangle of muscles which encased my bones.

The pain reached the zenith of what I could bear, but how can I explain that it didn't matter to me; I was on the way to my own death, and this seemingly endless torture was nothing, nothing. I could endure all things, even the burning in the eyes, the knowledge that they would soon melt or explode in this furnace of sunlight, and that all that I was would pass out of flesh.

Abruptly the scene changed. The roar of the wind was gone, my eyes were quiet and focused, and all around there arose a great familiar chorus of hymns. I stood at an altar, and as I looked up I beheld a church before me thronged with people, its painted columns rising like so many ornate tree trunks out of the wilderness of singing mouths and wondering eyes. Everywhere, to right and to left, I saw this immense and endless congregation. The church had no walls to bind it, and even the rising domes, decorated in the purest and most glittering gold with the hammered saints and angels, gave way to the great ever thinning and never ending blue sky.

Incense filled my nostrils. Around me, the tiny golden bells rang in unison, and with one riff of delicate melody tumbling fast upon another. The smoke burnt my eyes but so sweetly, as the fragrance of the incense filled my nostrils and made my eyes water, and my vision become one with all I tasted and touched and heard.

I threw out my arms, and I saw long golden-trimmed white sleeves covering them, falling back from wrists which were covered with the soft fleecy down of a man's natural hair. These were my hands, yes, but my hands years past the mortal point where life had been fixed in me. They were the hands of a man.

Out of my mouth there came a song, echoing loudly and singly over the congregation, and then their voices rose in answer, and once again I intoned my conviction, the conviction that had overcome me to the marrow of my bones:

"Christ is come. The Incarnation is begun in all things and in all men and women, and will go on forever!" It seemed a song of such perfection that the tears flowed from me, and as I bowed my head and clasped my hands I looked down to see the bread and the wine in front of me, the rounded loaf waiting to be blessed and broken and the wine in the golden chalice there to be transformed.

"This is the Body of Christ, and this is Blood shed for us now and before and forever, and in every moment of which we are alive!" I sang out. I laid my hands on the loaf and lifted it, and a great stream of light poured forth out of it, and the congregation gave forth their sweetest loudest hymn of praise.

In my hands I held the chalice. I held it high as the bells pealed from the towers, towers and towers that crowded near the towers of this grand church, stretching for miles in all directions, the whole world having becoming this great and glorious wilderness of churches, and here beside me the little golden bells chimed.

Once again came the gusts of incense. Setting down the chalice I looked at the sea of faces stretching before me. I turned my head from left to right, and then I looked Heavenward at the disappearing mosaics which became one with the rising, roiling white clouds.

I saw gold domes beneath Heaven.

I saw the endless rooftops of Podil.

I knew it was Vladimir's City in all its glory, and that I stood in the great sanctuary of Santa Sofia, all screens having been taken away that would have divided me from the people, and all those other churches which had been but ruins in my long-ago dim childhood were now restored to magnificence, and the golden domes of Kiev drank the light of the sun and gave it back with the power of a million planets basking eternal in the fire of a million stars.

"My Lord, my God!" I cried out. I looked down at the embroidered splendor of my vestments, the green satin and its threads of pure metallic gold.

On either side of me stood my brothers in Christ, bearded, eyes glowing as they assisted me, as they sang the hymns which I sang, as our voices mingled, pressing on from anthem to anthem in notes that I could almost see rising before me to the airy firmament above.

"Give it to them! Give it to them because they are hungry," I cried. I broke the loaf of bread in my hands. I broke it into halves, and then into quarters, and tore these hastily into small morsels which crowded the shining golden plate.

En masse, the congregation mounted the steps, tender pink little hands reaching for the morsels, which I gave out as fast as I could, morsel after morsel, not a crumb spilling, the bread divided among dozens, and then scores, and then hundreds, as they pressed forward, the newcomers barely allowing those who had been fed to make their way back.

On and on they came. But the hymns did not cease. Voices, muted at the altar, silenced as the bread was devoured, soon burst forth loud and jubilant again.

The bread was eternal.

I tore its soft thick crust again and again and put it into the outstretched palms, the gracefully cupped fingers.

"Take it, take the Body of Christ!" I said.

Dark wavering shadowy forms rose around me, rising up out of the gleaming gold and silver floor. They were trunks of trees, and their limbs arched upward and then down towards me, and leaves and berries fell from these branches, down onto the altar, onto the golden plate and onto the sacred bread now in a great mass of fragments.

"Gather them up!" I cried. I picked up the soft green leaves and the fragrant acorns and I gave these too to the eager hands. I looked down and I saw grain pouring through my fingers, grain which I offered to opened lips, grain which I poured into open mouths.

The air was thick with the soundless falling of the green leaves, so much so that the soft brilliant shade of green tinted all around it, broken suddenly everywhere by the flight of tiny birds. A million sparrows flushed Heavenward. A million finches soared, the brilliant sun flitting on their tiny outstretched wings.

"Forever, ongoing, always in every cell and every atom," I prayed. "The Incarnation," I said. "And the Lord has dwelt among us." My words rang out again as if a roof covered us, a roof that could echo my song, though our roof was now the roofless sky alone.

The crowd pressed in. They surrounded the altar. My brothers had slipped away, thousands of hands tugging gently at their vestments, pulling them back from the table of God. All around me there pressed these hungry ones who took the bread as I gave it, who took the grain, who took the acorns by the handful, who took even the tender green leaves.

There stood my Mother beside me, my beautiful and sad-faced Mother, a fine embroidered headdress gracing her thick gray hair, with her wrinkled little eyes fastened on me, and in her trembling hands, her dried and fearful fingers, she held the most splendid of offerings, the painted eggs! Red and blue, and yellow and golden, and decorated with bands of diamonds and chains of the flowers of the field, the eggs shimmered in their lacquered splendor as if they were giant polished jewels.

And there in the very center of her offering, this offering which she held up with shivering wrinkled arms, there lay the very egg which she had once so long ago entrusted to me, the light, raw egg so gorgeously decorated in brilliant ruby red with the star of gold in the very center of the framed oval, this precious egg which had surely been her finest creation, the finest achievement of her hours with the burning wax and boiling dye.

It wasn't lost. It had never been lost. It was there. But something was happening. I could hear it. Even under the great swelling song of the multitudes I could hear it, the tiny sound inside the egg, the tiny fluttering sound, the tiny cry.

"Mother," I said. I took it. I held it in both hands and brought my thumbs down against the brittle shell.

"No, my son!" she cried. She wailed. "No, no, my son, no!"

But it was too late. The lacquered shell was smashed beneath my thumbs and out of its fragments had risen a bird, a beautiful and full-grown bird, a bird of snow-white wings and tiny yellow beak and brilliant black eyes like bits of jet.

A long fall sigh came out of me.

Out of the egg, it rose, unfolding its perfectly feathered white wings, its tiny beak open in a sudden shrill cry. Up it flew, this bird, freed of the broken red shell, up and up, over the heads of the congregation, and up through the soft swirling rain of the green leaves and fluttering sparrows, up through the glorious clamour of the pealing bells, it flew.

The bells of the towers rang out so loud that they shook the swirling leaves in the atmosphere, so loud that the soaring columns quivered, that the crowd rocked and sang all the more heartily as if to be in perfect unison with the great resounding golden-throated peals.

The bird was gone. The bird was free.

"Christ is born," I whispered. "Christ is risen. Christ is in Heaven and on Earth. Christ is with us."

But no one could hear my voice, my private voice, and what did it matter, for all the world sung the same song?

A hand clutched me. Rudely, meanly, it tore at my white sleeve. I turned. I drew in my breath to scream and froze in terror.

A man, come out of nowhere, stood beside me, so close that our faces almost touched. He glared down at me. I knew his red hair and beard, his fierce and impious blue eyes. I knew he was my Father, but he was not my Father but some horrific and powerful presence infused into my Father's visage, and there, planted beside me, a colossus beside me, glaring down at me, mocking me by his power and his height.

He reached out and slammed the back of his hand against the golden chalice. It wobbled and fell, the consecrated wine staining the morsels of bread, staining the altar cloth of woven gold.

"But you can't!" I cried. "Look what you've done!" Could nobody hear me over the singing? Could no one hear me above the peal of the bells?

I was alone.

I stood in a modern room. I stood beneath a white plaster ceiling. I stood in a domestic room.

I was myself, a smallish man figure with my old tousled shoulder-length curls and the purple-red coat of velvet and the ruff of layered white lace. I leant against the wall. Stunned and still, I leant there, knowing only that every particle of this place, every particle of me, was as solid and real as it had been a split second before.

The carpet beneath my feet was as real as the leaves which had fallen like snowflakes throughout the immense Cathedral of Santa Sofia, and my hands, my hairless boyish hands, were as real as the hands of the priest I'd been a moment before, who had broken the bread.

A terrible sob rose in my throat, a terrible cry that I myself could not bear to hear. My breath would stop if I didn't release it, and this body, damned or sacred, mortal or immortal, pure or corrupt, would surely burst.

But a music comforted me. A music slowly articulated itself, clean and fine, and wholly unlike the great seamless and magnificent chorus which I had only just heard.

Out of the silence there leapt these perfectly formed and discrete notes, this multitude of cascading sounds that seemed to speak with crispness and directness, as if in beautiful defiance of the inundation of sound which I had so loved.

Oh, to think that ten fingers alone could draw these sounds from a wooden instrument in which the hammers, with a dogged rigid motion, would strike upon a bronze harp of tautly stretched strings.

I knew it, I knew this song, I knew the piano Sonata, and had loved it in passing, and now its fury paralyzed me. Appassionata. Up and down the notes rang in gorgeous throbbing arpeggios, thundering downward to rumble in a staccato drumming, only to rise and race again. On and on went the sprightly melody, eloquent, celebratory and utterly human, demanding to be felt as well as heard, demanding to be followed in every intricate twist and turn.

Appassionata.

In the furious torrent of notes, I heard the resounding echo of the wood of the piano; I heard the vibration of its giant taut bronze harp. I heard the sizzling throb of its multitudinous strings. Oh, yes, on, and on, and on, and on, and on, louder, harder, ever pure and ever perfect, ringing out and wrung back as if a note could be a whip. How can human hands make this enchantment, how can they pound out of these ivory keys this deluge, this thrashing, thundering beauty?

It stopped. So great was my agony I could only shut my eyes and moan, moan for the loss of those racing crystalline notes, moan for the loss of this pristine sharpness, this wordless sound that had nevertheless spoken to me, begged me to bear witness, begged me to share and understand another's intense and utterly demanding furor.

A scream jolted me. I opened my eyes. The room around me was large and jammed with rich and random contents, framed paintings to the ceiling, flowered carpets running rampant beneath the curly legs of modern chairs and tables, and there the piano, the great piano out of which had come this sound, shining in the very middle of this mayhem, with its long strip of grinning white keys, such a triumph of the heart, the soul, the mind.

Before me on the floor a boy knelt praying, an Arab boy of glossy close-cropped curls and a small perfectly fitted djellaba, that is, a cotton desert robe. His eyes were shut, his round little face pointed upwards, though he didn't see me, his black eyebrows knit and his lips moving frantically, the words tumbling in Arabic:

"Oh, come some demon, some angel and stop him, oh, come something out of the darkness I care not what, something of power and vengeance, I care not what, come, come out of the light and out of the will of the gods who won't stand to see the oppression of the wicked. Stop him before he kills my Sybelle. Stop him, this is Benjamin, son of Abdulla, who calls upon you, take my soul in forfeit, take my life, but come, come, that which is stronger than me and save my Sybelle."

"Silence!" I shouted. I was out of breath. My face was wet. My lips were shuddering uncontrollably. "What do you want, tell me?"

He looked at me. He saw me. His round little Byzantine face might have come wonder-struck from the church wall, but he was here and real and he saw me and I was what he wanted to see.

"Look, you angel!" he shouted, his youthful voice sharpened with its Arab accent. "Can't you see with your big beautiful eyes!"

I saw.

The whole reality of it came down at once. She, the young woman, Sybelle, was fighting to cling to the piano, not to be snatched off the bench, her hands out struggling to reach the keys, her mouth shut, and a terrible groan pushing up against her sealed lips, her yellow hair flying about her shoulders. And the man who shook her, who pulled at her, who screamed at her, suddenly dealing her one fine blow with his fist that sent her over backwards, falling off the piano bench so that a scream escaped from her and she fell over herself, an ungainly tangle of limbs on the carpeted floor.

"Appassionata, Appassionata," he growled at her, a bear of a creature in his megalomaniacal temper. "I won't listen to it, I will not, I will not, you will not do this to me, to my life. It's my life!" He roared like a bull. "I won't let you go on!"

The boy leapt up and grabbed me. He clutched at my wrists and when I shook him off, staring at him in bafflement, he clutched my velvet cuffs.

"Stop him, angel. Stop him, devil! He cannot beat her anymore. He will kill her. Stop him, devil, stop him, she is good!"

She crawled to her knees, her hair a shredded veil concealing her face. A great smear of dried blood covered the side of her narrow waist, a stain sunk deep into the flowered fabric.

Incensed, I watched as the man withdrew. Tall, his head shaven, his eyes bulging, he put his hands to his ears, and he cursed her: "Mad stupid bitch, mad mad selfish bitch. Do I have no life? Do I have no justice? Do I have no dreams?"

But she had flung her hands on the keys again. She was racing right into the Second Movement of the Appassionata as though she had never been interrupted. Her hands beat on the keys. One furious volley of notes after another rose, as if written for no other purpose than to answer him, to defy him, as if to cry out, I will not stop, I will not stop-.

I saw what was to happen. He turned around and glared at her, but it was only to let the rage rise to its fall power, his eyes wide, his mouth twisted in anguish. A lethal smile formed on his lips.

Back and forth she rocked on the piano bench, her hair flying, her face lifted, her mind having no need to see the keys she struck, to plot the course of her hands that raced from right to left, that never lost control of the torrent.

Out of her sealed lips there came a low humming, a grinding humming right in tune with the melodies that gushed from the keys. She arched her back and lowered her head, her hair falling down on the backs of her racing hands. On she went, on into thunder, on into certainty, on into refusal, on into defiance, on into affirmation, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

The man made his move for her.

The frantic boy, leaving me in desperation, darted to come between them, and the man slammed him aside with such fury that the boy was knocked flat and sprawling on the floor.

But before the man's hands could reach her shoulders, before he could so much as touch her-and she went now into the First Movement again, ah, ah aaaah! the Appassionata all over again in all its power-I had hold of him, and spun him round to face me.

"Kill her, will you?" I whispered. "Well, we shall see."

"Yes!" he cried out, face sweating, protuberant eyes glistening. "Kill her! She's vexed me to utter madness, that's what she's done, and she'll die!" Too incensed even to question my presence, he tried to push me aside, his sights fixed already once again on her. "Damn you, Sybelle, stop that music, stop it!"

Her melody and chords were in the mode of thunder again. Flinging her hair from side to side, she charged onward.

I forced him backwards, my left hand catching his shoulder, my right pushing his chin up out of my way as I nuzzled in against his throat, tore it open and let the blood come into my mouth. It was scalding and rich and full of his hatred, full of bitterness, fall of his blasted dreams and vengeful fancies.

Oh, the heat of it. I took it in in deep draughts, seeing it all, how he had loved her, nourished her, she his talented sister, he the clever, vicious-tongued and tone-deaf brother, guiding her towards the pinnacle of his precious and refined universe, until a common tragedy had broken her ascent and left her mad, turning from him, from memory, from ambition, locked forever in mourning for the victims of that tragedy, their loving and applauding parents, struck down on a winding road through a dark and distant valley in the very nights before her greatest triumph, her debut as full-fledged genius of the piano for all the wide world.

I saw their car rattling and plummeting through the darkness. I heard the brother in the back seat chattering, his sister beside him fast asleep. I saw the car strike the other car. I saw the stars above in cruel and silent witness. I saw the bruised and lifeless bodies. I saw her stunned face as she stood unharmed, her clothes torn, by the side of the road. I heard him cry out in horror. I heard him curse in disbelief. I saw the broken glass. Broken glass everywhere glittering beautifully in the light of headlamps. I saw her eyes, her pale blue eyes. I saw her heart close.

My victim was dead. He slipped out of my grasp.

He was as lifeless as his parents had been in that hot desert place.

He was dead and crumpled and could never hurt her again, could never pull her long yellow hair, or beat her, or stop her as she played.

The room was sweetly still except for her playing. She had come again to the Third Movement, and she swayed gently with its quieter beginning, its polite and measured steps.

The boy danced for joy. In his fine little djellaba, his feet bare, his round head covered with thick black curls, he was the Arab angel leaping into the air, dancing, crying out, "He's dead, he's dead, he's dead." He clapped his hands, he rubbed them together, he clapped them again, he flung them up. "He's dead, he's dead, he's dead, he'll never hurt her, he'll never vex her, he's double-vexed forever, he's dead, he's dead."

But she didn't hear him. On she played, making her way through these slumberish low notes, humming softly and then parting her lips to make a monosyllabic song.

I was fall with his blood. I felt it washing through me. I loved it, I loved every drop of it. I regained my breath from the effort of having so quickly consumed it, and then I walked slowly, quietly as I could, as if she could hear when she could not, and stood at the end of the piano looking at her.

What a small tender face she had, so girlish with deep-set, huge and pale blue eyes. But look at the bruises on her face. Look at the blood-red scratches on her cheek. Look at the field of tiny red bleeding pinpoint wounds on her temple where a shock of her hair had been ripped right out by the roots.

She didn't care. The greenish-black bruises on her bare arms meant nothing to her. She played on.

How delicate her neck was, even with the blackish swelling imprint of his fingers, and how graceful her small bony shoulders, barely holding up the sleeves of her thin flowered cotton dress. Her strong ashen eyebrows came together in the sweetest frown of concentration as she gazed before her at nothing but her lilting, peaking music, her long clean fingers alone envincing her titanic and indomitable strength.

She let her gaze drift to me, and she smiled as if she had seen something that momentarily pleased her; she bowed her head once, twice, three times in rapid time with the music, but as though she were nodding to me.

"Sybelle," I whispered. I put my fingers to my lips and kissed them and blew the kiss to her, as her fingers marched on.

But then her vision misted, and she was off again, the Movement demanding speed from her, her head jerked back with the effort of her assault on the keys. And the Sonata sprang once again into its most triumphant life.

Something more powerful than the light of the sun engulfed me. It was a power so total that it utterly surrounded me and sucked me up out of the room, out of the world, out of the sound of her playing, out of my senses.

"Noooo, don't take me now!" I screamed. But an immense and empty blackness swallowed the sound.

I was flying, weightless, with my burnt black limbs outstretched, and in a Hell of excrutiating pain. This cannot be my body, I sobbed, seeing the black flesh sealed to my muscles like leather, seeing every tendon of my arms, my fingernails bent and blackened like bits of burnt horn. No, not my body, I cried, Oh, Mother help me, help me! Benjamin, help me...

I began to fall. Oh, there was no one who could help me now but one Being.

"God, give me the courage," I cried. "God if it's begun, give me the courage, God, I can't give up my reason, God, let me know where I am, God, let me understand what is happening, God, where is the church, God, where is the bread and the wine, God, where is she, God help me, help me."

Down and down I fell, past spires of glass, past grids of blind windows. Past rooftops and pointed towers. I fell through the harsh and wild wailing of the wind. I fell through the stinging torrent of snow. I fell and I fell. I fell past the window where the unmistakable figure of Benjamin stood with his tiny hand on the drape, his black eyes fixed on me for one split second, his mouth open, tiny Arab angel. I fell down and down, the skin shriveling and tightening on my legs so that I couldn't bend them, tightening on my face so that I couldn't open my mouth, and with an agonizing explosion of raw pain, I struck hard-packed snow.

My eyes were open and fire flooded them.

The sun had fully risen.

"I shall die now. I shall die!" I whispered. "And in this last moment of burning paralysis, when all the world is gone and there is nothing left, I hear her music! I hear her playing the final notes of the Appassionata! I hear her. I hear her tumultuous song."