Ménage à Trois, With HorseBy Don Dussault
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1. Brendan.
'Twas the fault of the blasted mountains albeit their beastly geography deserves no more curses than the Count and Emily themselves acting within their natures. Perhaps I suppressed minute unaccountable moments of dread in the lowlands as after a stopover by the Danube the Orient Express pulled out of Budapest in late afternoon and clackety-clacked through the drawn-out summer twilight and into a moonless black night dotted with sparse yellowflame lights in scattered villages, yet, though boring despite my proximity to Emily, a luxurious ride subsequently followed by a mad automobile dash into black mountains on endless winding dirt roads until, after endless hours, arriving at a massive iron gate. As the brakes bit, the headlights joggled the irregular stone surfaces into shuddering phantasms. Stone towers loomed more felt than seen as their tenebrous bulk occulted stars in the black sky. The hunchbacked driver spoke into a telephone at the gate and returned to sit behind his wheel until a gatekeeper arrived as a dim moving shadow and pulling the iron bars inward, opening a space through which we passed. The motorcar crossed the flagstones of a courtyard to massive smoke-gray ash twin doors set in carved stone. From the invisible heights of the castle towers surely would descend a fire-eyed winged gargoyle with claws long as pitchforks.
How came I thus to this forsaken place?
In Paris Emily and I had common friends, impecunious artists and writers all. Dayslong in the painting studio she wore dungarees and ate frugal lunches and disappeared afterward, I learned later, to a modest hotel, not patrician yet far beyond the means of everyone we knew. Gracious she was and reserved and not perceived as genteel. Magical Paris connected us as much as our yielding to impulse in my spare tiny room. Though I'm a redfurred, nevertheless gentle, bear, I believe she was drawn to my unexalted wit, my impromptu recitations of Irish poetry, my oft-coarse tales of my two older brothers, two sisters, mother and father in our cramped apartment in Carrigrohane, west of Cork, and aye, rousing tales from McCarthy's down on the highway, told with brash irreverence learned from my father. This affluent American from Newport toured Europe with me in the lowbudget garb of students, which she found amusing and "real", reveling in our second-class train rides, busrides zigzagging the western side of Italy, staying in cheap hotels she called charmingly bucolic to please me while she directed glances of surreptitious yearning at palaces with uniformed doormen and luxurious lobbies. She never spoke of her family, seldom wrote them, content to live on "savings", her word for her bottomless trust fund, a desert island upon which she was marooned alone amidst her lost bearings. "Dear Brendan, am I sometimes featherbrained?"
2. Emily.
In Vienna autumn, 1913, we found an inexpensive apartment, one room with a narrow bed and a small gas stove west of the innercity and he earned some of our subsistence as an occasional day laborer. In December he shoveled snow. Vienna incited my fondest high school dreams of a fairyland! Among stone blocks stacked into chunky stone structures lurked freizes of saints, kings, coryatids, gargoyles, robed and semirobed young women posing as artloving Muses. I felt like dancing among this population of fanciful and mythical creatures. Legions of fierce ancient warriors in marble, and their armored horses around the buildings and atop them protected the city. Red and white flags and talismen and coats-of-arms depicting two-headed warlike eagles warned of everlasting doom to invaders. We wandered about with a map and lists of tourist attractions, browsed stores for books in English we could read in cafes, watching others read and sip coffee, listening for familiar words, making amusing sometimes obligatory conversation with each other. While Brendan lamented he missed hearing his mellifluous native tongue, I didn't mind not understanding what I overheard, allowing words to flow past like untranslated librettos, deciding I benefited from not having to listen to likely inane chatter. Strings of electric lights and the scent of green fir boughs sprinkled reprieves from the stark city winter. This city's natural season had to be Christmas. It was tempting to search the skies for Santa Claus doing midnight rounds. If my Paris had been the City of Light, of daylight clarity, Vienna was my City of Incandescence. One January afternoon, under the high arched ceilings and the bright chandeliers of the Café Central, beside a row of chess players along the tall colonnades, I spotted a familiar face among four men in animated conversation two tables away. At that moment the face turned toward me. He approached our table. "At Pisa, was it not, in the railroad station? Did you enjoy Italy?”
I let Brendan delineate our trip, forcing a smile when the man, Anton, stolidly middleaged, glanced at me with a discomfiting fondness. He insisted we take our chairs and small tapered espresso cups to his table. After the round of introductions Anton informed us Leon was a war correspondent for a Kiev newspaper and back from the front only yesterday, from Sofia. "Belgrade," Leon corrected him.
I graded Leon the brightest-looking of an unusually intelligent four, impressed by his rich black hair, a thick black mustache and intense dark eyes behind steelrimmed glasses. Brendan said, "I've not heard there is a war on."
In halting English Leon explained the Austro-Hungarian Empire wasn't involved in it. "The Balkan nations. The Greeks. They resist the Ottomans." Brendan was coming alive, more than I'd felt in some time, in discussion with these new acquaintances. "Who's winning?”
In a meld of English and French Leon asserted that's a question those ask who don't go to war. No one wins a war. Shaking his head as one does in pain he told of his visits to hospitals for the wounded. Anton managed a simplified translation: "Many are still in the battle. They have nightmares at night. Sometimes during the day, while awake. Shooting. Running. Seeing comrades die. Over and over.”
Leon's features clenched at the agony he was describing. Anton addressed a question to an average-looking highbrowed man with a skimpy mustache, wearing pince-nez glasses. "Herr Doctor Alfred, can these men be restored to normal lives?"
"It is possible," replied the doctor in an Austrian accent, "with personal psychiatry. Without relying on preconceived ideas of treatment.”
"Or quackery," hinted Anton.
The doctor made a light smile. "By which you mean ideology. My approach would differ from the pre-eminent theory of our time. These wounded men are isolated. They have forgotten where they belong. I would have them describe their pre-war memories and re-connect them to their lives.”
"Your dispute in the community is wellknown.”
"Therefore I prefer not to dwell on it. I shall not respond to— his ruthless attacks in the same manner. Herr Professor Joy wants followers. My course is to break off pointless conflict."
Anton took a small sip of his cup of mokka. "Fortunately the professor comes here no longer." He glanced at me to discern if I guessed whom they were discussing. "His new favorite is the Landtmann."
The doctor murmured, "Das bessere für uns."
I sent Anton an inquiring glance. He whispered, "Better for us."
Leon made an observation in German and the doctor replied in German. Anton told Brendan, "Combating illness and overthrowing a sick government have less in common than Leon would like.”
Brendan looked puzzled, intrigued. The fourth man, an overweight theater director named Egon, leaned forward, confiding, "Adolf is at the window. He is looking inside."
Anton shrank in apprehension. "Does he seem inclined to enter?"
"Unfortunately so.”
"He lives in a home for indigent men. Poverty has turned him bitter."
The table fell silent and in minutes a thin man approached, carefully managing a large black portfolio under his arm. Anton asked how his sales were going. Adolf shook his head. In German Anton suggested, "Show our lady friend your new watercolors."
"Englisch?" inquired Adolf.
“Amerikanisch."
Adolf opened his portfolio and displayed three street scenes one after the other. Anton informed him, "Sie ist ein Künstler, auch." He shifted to English, "What do you think, my dear?”
My reply carried a faintly appeasing tone I couldn’t suppress. "They are professional. That building there, I recognize it.”
Anton interpreted in German and Adolf tied the portfolio shut, looking miffed at the paucity of my enthusiasm for his work, not, I guessed, a new experience for him. Adolf launched into a rapid rant in German. Brendan smiled. "I know not the words but I envy the blarney."
I sent Anton a questioning look and he explained, "He is upset about the state of the arts in his fatherland. The academy fails to appreciate his work while accepting inferior works of the style academics are fond of. He calls them fools who reward their flatterers and have no feeling for art.”
The others waited Adolf out in silence, Leon with a wry smile. Adolf turned his diatribe on Leon. After a brief exchange between them Adolf tied his portfolio and stalked out. I said to Anton. "Obviously they aren't friends."
"Adolf accused Leon and his fellow Russians of child's play, intellectuals and revolutionaries hiding under false names. Leon writes about the war under a pseudonym. He has used many. As a Jew he has good reason. His compatriot Vladimir has taken the surname Lenin. He did not come here today. The solitary Russian who never comes here, short, thin, pockmarked, he calls himself Steel." Brendan shifted in his chair. The doctor offered, "He is a cold one, that Yosef. And more intelligent than one may expect from his peasant features.”
Egon eyed the doctor. "If he has any mental defect he hides it, unlike Adolf, also a solitary individual. Adolf wears his passions on his sleeve." He scanned the table. "Has anyone ever seen those two together, Adolf and Yosef? I think not. Should they meet, Adolf would talk Yosef to death. His own. Yosef hates verbosity. He would end the conversation by drawing his knife, he carries one, you know, and could kill Adolf for his pleasure. Both are, what would our Anglo-Saxon friends say, stuck? Herr Doctor, your profession pronounces no mental disease incurable?"
The doctor named Alfred humored Egon's amateurish analysis. “That must be our working assumption."
"My question is simpler. Can you cure any mental disease?”
"Not so simple, sir. We have no pill to undo years of damage. The talking remedy requires time, often many years.”
"Until the patient dies," argued Egon. "Or tires of his illness and in boredom he goes on to some other form of entertainment.”
The doctor shrugged, disinclined to defend his occupation against a lightweight skeptic. Leon stood up. He had writing to do. The doctor made a slight nod to me and Brendan and left, accompanied by Egon. Anton mentioned he had an evening appointment. During the conversation I had been appraising Anton and his interest in me and decided men everywhere are pretty much alike, some hairier, some perspiring more, most focused on themselves. Nurture, upbringing are inevitable influences, of course, and at the edges national and cultural differences lend them definition. Variety intrigues. Anton was a collector, an uncommon one loyal to his collectibles in Cafe Central, in his bed, not one to forget, take for granted, dismiss and when bored disappear. Being American designated me as a prize, perhaps also, though less likely, in Brendan's mind. Proprietorship is a male prerogative. Possessiveness is more generic. Do I project my desires onto men? I may be less different from men than I assumed.
3. Brendan.
Her desire for a winter in the Black Forest mountains delayed our return to Vienna until the following year. Now as we strolled to the Innere Stadt district on a sunny afternoon in early July, 1914, I was speculating on who'd grace Cafe Central today. Anton for sure, noted Emily, and he'd have talkative males bent with age around him, each differently fascinating. Though but twentythree I could banter with the best, a family trait as she must have observed. We found our way impeded by the slow procession of an ornate carriage drawn by six horses and their riders and followed by some hundred men, pallidgray government officials, and uniformed military officers on foot and in motor vehicles. At a cafe table Anton was chatting with two men, one bald but for a swatch of dark hair around the sides and back of his head down to the collar of a well-worn coat and bunched upon a tieless collarless shirt, the other gentleman elegant in a dark suit, pressed white shirt and black tie matching his thick eyebrows and straight black hair. Rising, the darksuited one made a slight bow as Anton introduced them as Peter, just Peter, and Count Vasile Grigore. "Vasile is sufficient and appropriate," the blackhaired man corrected in well-enunciated Oxford English as his long thin fingers splayed over his heart and his curious black eyes swept over me and lingered on Emily. "My Transylvania is a province within the Empire. You are from the Emerald Isle, I presume."
"Emerald as all get-out, yes," I interjected. "The lady is American.”
Emily hadn't left off eyeballing the Count. "On the way we passed a funeral procession. Somebody important died?”
"Crown Prince Ferdinand," explained Vasile. "He was assassinated.”
"That's awful. Why would somebody do such a thing?”
"He visited Serbia. Balkan politics defy rational explanation.”
I understood Peter to say in German, "Rulers of empires are wisest to stay home behind their armies and guard their treasures. Pride lures empires to excesses, most typically military adventurism. They overreach and they are brought down. All of them, without exception. So Leon would say."
"Leon?" inquired Vasile.
"One of those conspiratorial Russians.”
Emily guessed Peter spoke no English and asked him, in halting German, "Conspiracy is a fine art in Vienna?”
"It pays better than literature."
Anton smiled at her. "You are learning to speak German."Peter grumbled, "Those Russians never buy me coffee. A humorless bunch.”
In German Anton added, "Peter is a writer. A good one. He never has money.”
Guessing what Anton had said, Peter expounded, "I studied law and medicine. I could have had a lucrative profession." He couldn't suppress a yearning glance at Anton's fork severing a moist bitesize irregular cube from the chocolate cake on Anton's plate. "My writing talent, my curse, plunked me into a life of poverty. I don't complain. I have been rewarded. I have many good friends. Generous friends."
"You are a classic ausgeflippter," observed Vasile, in a tone weighted with a sense of superiority colored with selfacknowledged social prestige and abundant sangfroid yet as free of arrogance as such a combination may permit.
He wore his imperious bearing with ease, not as performance but as a part of himself. His soft clear voice sliced through sometimes excited chatter with unstrained authority. I could see why Vasile impressed Emily.
Anton responded to Emily's inquiring look. "An ausgeflippter is what in your language you would call, a drop-out."
Peter grinned. "Drop-out, yes. I like your English word better."
Anton informed him, "She is a artist.”
"No artist wears such fine clothes. The laws of nature forbid it.”
Vasile leaned toward Emily. "I am beguiled. You studied in America?"
"And Paris. With Madame Stettler."
"Ah, I am returned from Paris seeking an artist to depict my family.
They are wild men there. Brilliant, but would you entrust your portrait to Picasso? The local artists, Kokoscha, Klimt, are talented but idiosyncratic. Ludwig Koch has mastered large scale works, portraits, horses, all however in a stilted pedestrian style. Nor do I want an official portrait like such that hang in government halls, where the subject appears embalmed. You understand my dilemma?"
"Are you offering me a job?”
"A job?" He smiled as if he'd learned a new word. "A challenge. More, an opportunity to capture outward appearance as it is and reveal the inner qualities. Assuming you possess the genius. Tell me, from whom of the classic masters of portraiture have you learned the most?"
She had to think a moment. "I'd say Velasquez."
"Excellent. You can emulate his style?"
"Kind of."
A natural wisdom resides in the universal distrust of an accent. With an ease I would consider suspicious, were I suspicious, they agreed to a test. The next morning she returned carrying an oversize sketchpad. As she told me their story later, Vasile was sitting alone at a window table. "Where is your companion?"
"Brendan is looking for work."
"I wish him well. Let us begin."
In a dark suit with jacket and vest buttoned top to bottom and his hands sculpted in yellow gloves of fine leather folded above his waist, he sat for three hours, releasing from his pose for an occasional sip of coffee, while she fashioned a charcoal drawing of his head and another of a full-length pose at the table. Extracting a monocle from his vest pocket he examined the drawings with care and then, enthusiastic, he told her to pack tonight, she'd return with him to Transylvania. In response to her coolness toward such a journey he explained his vision, a lifesize painting of him and his favorite horse surrounded by his wife and their son outside his castle, with a background view of his lands. A lifesized horse! She was awed. “Sounds like a huge painting."
"No less than ten meters by fifteen meters. Your composition will decide the proportions. You and your companion will have private quarters in the castle. Excellent dining. You will be well-paid when the painting is finished."
A castle! "Why such a large painting?”
"I have a large wall. Ah, I am not accomplished. Another ordinary painting of another ordinary nobleman would offer nothing to posterity. As the incidental subject of a grand masterpiece I shall be content to shine as a dim reflection of your luminescence. As you would say, ride on your glory.”
"A job like that will take quite a while.”
"I offer you as much time as you need. Imagine rendering the many textures, the play of light in the mountains. Painting is light enraptured, no?" When she returned to our apartment, I was already there. "I had no luck. What did your Count think of your drawings?"
"How would you like to move to Transylvania?”
Her description of their afternoon and Vasile's project goaded my latent doubts. During our smooth casual two years together filled with the distracting entertaining logistics of travel, our sole conflicts had arisen from her determination to explore museums and churches in every city we visited, for her a professional imperative risen to the level of obsession, while I favored sitting in cafes and jotting notes and lines for as yet uncreated poems and conversing with anyone promising— conflicts too inconsequential to jangle our well-wrought ease. While her life's challenge enlivened her, my joy flowed less sanguine. "What would I do in Transylvania?"
"How would you like to be free to write without having to work."
A new concept had been chucked at me. "Perfect," I said, thinking, too perfect.
"Then why don't I hear your enthusiasm?"
She who had never done a finished portrait was selected over the many portrait painters of France. Better that I suppress my misgivings. "Surprise, 'tis all. You like the offer, you should accept it."
"I've already accepted it. A taxi will be at our door in the morning.”
In brightening dawn, we rode to the Süd train station. I still felt put out she had anticipated my intent to remark her happiness made me happy, depriving me of exhibiting my generosity, also tipping me off she would have gone without me. I kept such ruminations silent, tolerating her cheerful chatter until we met Vasile and boarded the Orient Express. Aware I was coming off as reticent I made an effort to match Vasile's good humor by relating anecdotes about Ireland and my brothers. Vasile said little about his own family, content to discuss history and art, listening with consummate skill. A distinct improvement from my poor poet's diet and surpassing my dear mother’s home cooking, the fine dining on the rails softened my disposition and in our cabin I yielded to merciful drowsing. Vasile's words jarred me alert. "We disembark soon.”
Carrying our suitcases along a wooden platform lit by a single overhead light and a night light inside the locked station, we three halted at the end of the platform blinded by sudden automobile headlights. A uniformed man with a hunch in his spine stacked our suitcases in the boot. Vasile took the front passenger seat and Emily and I the backseat and the powerful engine roared down an unlit street past dark houses and into silent black hills. The straining engine and the car jouncing identified our roadway as rough, winding, rising, unpaved stony dirt. Our sole communions comprised infrequent glances toward each other. Hour after hour, the car sped, exceeding seventy, I guessed, crawling hairpin curves and then resuming high speeds, then laboring on steep grades. From the engine reverberating against close cliff walls, easing or straining at dips or rises, I deduced we were trending upward in high mountains. After an apparent forever the motorcar rumbled across a wooden bridge. Around and below the bridge, black nothingness. A long minute it took to cross. A stone arch framed a wroughtiron gate in a wall of cubic stones. We waited until a shadow swung open a screeching halfgate. In the courtyard Emily and I stiffly extricated ourselves from the vehicle.
Our shoes susurred on thick carpets covering a stone floor while a thin whitehaired man flanked her. Atop a flight of stairs he directed her into a room where a fourposter flaunted a high carved headboard, warmed by attenuating flames in the fieldstone fireplace. The man pointed me to the next room, with a similar bed and fireplace. Tired, enervated, I stood dumbly mulling why it held a fire in late June until I realized the narrow window was open to the chill of the mountain night. A rooster crowed at a wispy breeze lightening the air in imminent dawn. I was facing east. Closing the ponderous window drapes and without undressing, I lay me down on the bed to rest a moment.
I woke to sunlight simpering between the window frame and the drapes. I'd slept in my clothes. Smokeless black embers lay prostrate in the fireplace. Chill air pervaded the room. I shut the window. Downstairs a six-foot clock in a curvilinear wooden case designated nine fortytwo. I followed voices into a great hall where two rows of octagonal columns taller than the Cafe Central colonnade supported steep stone arches. Emily and Vasile stood among stacked paper, a weighty easel, canvases, palettes, brushes, tubes of oil colors, cans of turpentine. She grinned. "Brendan, look! He's got everything I need. This will be my studio. Isn't it wonderful? The painting will go there." Her outthrown arms couldn't embrace much of the high end wall between the windows. "It will be huge! I'm ready to start."
They'd had breakfast. In the kitchen the housekeeper, Sorina, darkeyed, with white lines in her black hair, would fix whatever I liked. Her plain white ankle-length chemise with red aprons front and back at her waist posited a split skirt. Sorina pointed to a wooden table and chairs in the broad kitchen. Obeying, I sat as she fried two eggs, buttered a thick cut of offwhite bread and warmed the coffeepot. After breakfast, finding no one in the great hall I wandered out into the courtyard. The hunchback was washing the motorcar, a Mercedes. He gave no impression he'd wipe his hand dry to shake mine. I intertwined my fingers behind my back and leaned forward in a manner he should take as friendly. "I'm Brendan."
His eyes didn't have the coolth of Vasile's, though they held some heat, not what I'd call warmth. He reeked of diffidence. “Dracul.”
He continued slow-swiping a washcloth across the hood. I estimated his age about Sorina's, fortyish. "Sorina's family?"
"Brother. Her husband die six years ago."
"Have you seen the Count?"
Dracul directed me with a head nod. "Horse stable."
A youth was sweeping near the stable doors. Inside, Emily beamed at me. "Look at this horse. He's awesome! I said I couldn't do a proper painting of him unless I rode him but Vasile saw through me."
Vasile smiled. "My noble steed." His voice glazed across the words, then turned stern. "I impose few rules here. Regarding Lovan I am a dictator. I ride him. No one else."
She made a teasing grin. "Nope, he rides no other but his dearest."
Vasile looked blank for a moment, then broke into a rare grin. I wasn't inclined to join in. Appraising the horse, yes, Lovan was a magnificent blackmaned black stallion beside which the other horse, a healthy mare, stood commonplace as a bucket. I'd ridden horses when I was eleven, at Uncle Hugh's farm out by Dromboy, none comparable to Lovan, not in size nor comportment. Lovan could boast unparalleled equine charisma. Leaving Emily and Vasile I strolled past flowering fruit trees to a chicken coop and a vegetable garden fenced on all sides with heavy six-foot boards. Inside the open gate the whitehaired man was hoeing. I commented, "Think you a fence under two meters keeps out deer?"
"Keep out bear. No deer here."
"I thought deer roamed everywhere."
"No many here. Wolves. You hear at night?"
"Not yet."
"Maybe tonight."
Beyond the garden a strip of meadow declined into a surround of dense evergreen forest. The distance materialized pale snowcapped mountains. The castle would be in shade by four in the afternoon. From the stable and the garden I could wander a mere hundred yards along the castle wall, for on its other three sides the castle perched on steep rocky cliffs. I went inside, pausing in the great hall to watch her, my Emily, stepping around charcoal sketches of Vasile she'd spread across the floor, some of him standing, views of his face from various angles. I interrupted her fluttering. "Where's the Count now?"
"In his office. He's got a telephone in there. He's a financier or something. He started to explain his business to me. Then he saw money talk bores me.”
"He's old money, isn't he?"
"He says his money is so old it's drying up. He has to work."
I marveled at the incongruity of Vasile working. From boyhood, I guessed, he'd been raised to rule. Perhaps the small scale of his dominion, a three-person household, humbled him. I didn't feel like talking about Vasile. A new suspicion had lodged in my mind: the huge painting a pretext Vasile improvised in Vienna to lure Emily under his roof and keep her here as he worked his subtle wiles, a most insidious deception to set my blood boiling. I contained myself. “I've been thinking… we could move into one room, mine or yours, whichever you prefer."
"Hm. I'll be keeping odd hours now." She frowned at one of the sketches. "This painting will challenge me. When I plunge in I lose track of time. We can talk later, when I feel more settled." She saw my disappointment. “Oh, I must write a letter home. I'm too long overdue."
That night I lay awake serenaded by the exotic harmonies of wolves howling in the woods below the castle. Such a castle, it perches on a rocky bluff surrounded by deep chasms. Its ancient smoothed stones raise high ceilings that outreach the light from the wall fixtures, harboring darkness in their heights. In thickwalled rooms behind narrow hallways light rarely ventures, evoking nighttime city alleys. Thick large-animal hanging furs and woolen carpets and dark ponderous furniture likely front for concealed passages. Inhabiting this primeval realm a Count less accessible than he seemed employed a hunchback with furtive eyes, a taciturn housekeeper and an old servant, solitaries in a place extravagant as a fiction by my countryman Bram Stoker. I had to assure myself the bathroom contained a mirror. I dared to leave the window open to the mountain night. After fitful sleep I meandered downstairs. The high sun bedazzled the kitchen. Vasile was handing Emily a fountain pen and an envelope with a printed return address. They didn't look at me until I sat down beside them. With care she folded two pages handwritten on both sides and slid them into the envelope and lettered an address on the envelope. She asked what time the mailman comes by and Vasile told her there's no scheduled mail delivery here, he'd have Dracul post the letter in the village. I watched the envelope disappear into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. At last she'd done it, written that letter of reconciliation with her family. I was less pleased with our new situation, yielding to my suspicion Vasile was less than forthcoming, although I could invent no sensible reason to think so. Vasile asked me, "Did you sleep well?"
"It was noisy outside."
"You will get accustomed to the wolves. Emily, why do you think representation in painting has declined and led to an art stripped of meaning?"
"Meaning is being expanded."
"Psychologically?"
"Emotionally."
Peeved at his sudden leap into a new conversation, I wouldn't bail him out. In silence I tried to envision an enormous painting like Vasile's commissioned large-as-life portrait of himself, his Lovan, his deceased wife and the castle staff. Vasile romanticized his past. He dwelt in no urgency to see the painting completed, being content to sit and chat. Did Emily apprehend that? She launched a tale about a pair of stray cats in Newport in her childhood. "They sounded like babies crying.”
After breakfast I sat in the stone courtyard with notebook in hand and lost myself in fruitless lucubration, deploring the broken warp and weft of my wordweaving. More tense than I had suspected, I drew no inspiration into me. Doubt, for certain, was assaulting my spirit. Escaping me, the why and wherefore of my presence in this place, behind an iron gate and massive wooden beams bridging a gorge. The kitchen would have coffee to revive my spirit. Beside the kitchen sink Sorina chopped turnips. The whitehaired man's arm rested on the table, half-encircling a cup of black coffee. When I introduced myself, he said in London-accented English he was Ilie, the butler, Sorina's father. Approachable, Ilie was a joy among the taciturns. I returned to the great hall. No Emily. I found her in the stable incising black lines, rubbing peppery grays on a charcoal drawing of the horse's head. "I've got to make Lovan's portrait as good as everyone else's."
"Lovan will appreciate it, I'm sure. How many people will be in this thing?"
I regretted using a dismissive, "thing", and hoped she hadn't noticed. "Vasile's wife and son for sure. I think the help, too. He considers them like family."
"Wife and son? Are they here?"
"His wife died when his son was born. His son's a student at Goettingen. I'll do drawings of him when he visits. Vasile has photographs of his wife. I'll use them to make a cast of her face. He can help me get it right. I'll construct a mannequin I can dress and pose. This project has so many challenges!"
"His wife is what, twenty years younger in that photo?"
"If he wants, I’ll age her a little and take a few years off him."
"Truth in art, eh?"
"Beauty is truth, wouldn't you say?"
"An analytic thinker like Vasile wouldn't settle for Keats."
"No big deal. He calls my notions free-spirited and charming."
I let "charming" hang in a closed back-closet of my head. Despite numerous textile hangings depicting, most of them, historical events, heroic warriors on horseback, the stone walls blazoned claustrophobia to one like me accustomed to open spaces. Outside I gazed across the valley at the slopes and peaks spiny with evergreens basking in sunlight. Stone castles boast permanence and their many shadowed corners summon chthonic mysteries. Certainty and ambiguity spin together like a coin on its end. In these mountains multitudinous overworlds and underworlds engender romance, of a sort anyway. In so exotic a place I found myself unable to jot a line. I blight my national lineage and its masters of language. Do I confuse my love of language with an unsubstantiated fancy I possess the gift of creation? I vowed to enjoy Vasile's hospitality despite my suspicion of his motives. Small good fortune it was I spent little time with him, occupied as he was in his office, where Sorina brought his midday meals.
In the unpredictable intervals when Emily left her workplace, she and I snacked in the kitchen. I often engaged Ilie in conversation while he puttered on his chores. Dracul held me off with watchful minimal politeness as every other day he washed the Mercedes, soaping it with a sponge, squeezing out the graywater, immersing the sponge in a pail of clear water, constant in his resolute concentration on his tasks. Evenings Emily and I dined with Vasile at the long diningroom table with its fine linen snow-bright under a centuries-old wooden chandelier adapted for electric lights. Good manners prevailed. I countered Vasile's monopolization of Emily with bumptious exaggerated escapades with my brothers, displaying narrative and improvisatory skills honed in cafes and pubs, pingponging my tales of Ireland with Vasile's insights on central Europe, yet disadvantaged by his superior learning to mine. ("One must admire the perceptiveness and logic of your Englishman Locke, yet I am drawn more to Leibnitz and Schopenhauer for inviting humanity into the thin air of philosophy and to Nietzsche for his fire.") Heavier, brawnier than he, with a vocal capacity from whispersoft to booming, I'd not stew over using my physical advantage to counter his softer subtle tones though doing so sparingly, to come off as a hailfellow with the generosity not to bully one weaker. I labored to refine my storytelling skills to display no weakness in Vasile's presence while binding Emily's attention to me.
A wasteland was that dinner table, with ourselves a mere three clustered at one end of this table capable of seating eighteen. In an expansive diningroom that could handle the mix of occupations and personalities of a cafe, where speculation, song, story and banter could blossom into camaraderie, Vasile's table was designed for hierarchy, not democracy. With Vasile presiding from his end-chair and Ilie standing-by, awaiting the proper moments to serve, pour or clear away, the table ordained the authority of wealth in elegant goldrimmed handpainted china plates worthy of any national museum, elaborate monogrammed silverware posing on fine linen tablecloths, singing wine glasses burnished under a glittering chandelier. Priding myself I could revel in luxury anywhere, I of working-class Irish descent lacked Vasile's and Emily's ease with affluence. Their smiles and gestures flowed, fluent as prized wines in the thin fine wineglasses they tilted at their lips. I wondered, does my lower-class upbringing rule my vision, lure me into blind envy, and does their easy familiarity with wealth suit them better to each other than to a plebeian such as myself?
Aware Emily disliked interruptions while she worked, I timed my approaches with care. One day I showed her some nature poems I'd ground out, a step above doggerel that nevertheless served their purpose, winning a revival of her special smile and a night in her bedroom. When she relaxed, I dared inquire, "How do you feel about Vasile?"
"How do I feel?" I waited out her stalling. "Why do you ask?"
An edge to her tone warned me not to raise her hair-trigger defenses.
"Is it tricky having an employer who's also a friend?”
"Easier than not. He's your friend too, isn't he?"
"I wouldn't say we're close, he and I."
She frowned. "You don't like him? He likes you. Treats you well."
"He's a smooth one. I can't get a grip on him."
"A personality conflict?"
"'Tis more a matter of trust."
"Trust is a two-way street." Her scrutiny discomfited me. Her tone changed to sympathy. "Ah. You think I'm close with him?" Be wary. Misspeak and I'm impaled on the stake of jealousy. Not a time for blarney. I opted for silence and an innocuous gaze. I heard strain in her voice. "I have to get along with my boss."
Unwise to complain, yet I had to reveal some quarter of myself. "I'm left to prowl the castle and the grounds like a hare looking for a cabbage in a plantation of weeds."
"Am I a cabbage now?" I didn't return her quick smile, which vanished almost at its creation. "This painting is a huge job. We'll be here a year at least. Let's make the best of it."
You'll be here another year, maybe I won't— ha, a new thought to marvel at. My lips tightened, not to speak it. Cheese it, Brendan: threats serve neither of us. She kissed me on the forehead and turned away to sleep. I lay on my back, letting thoughts rampage. Advantage hers. Two fish on a string are better than one. I cautioned myself, night thoughts transport demons. Daylight may exorcise them. In the morning I asked if she'd gotten a reply to her letter. Her eyes saddened as she shook her head. After her departure to the great hall, I sought out Dracul at the Mercedes gently sliding a piece of chamois over the boot, then squeezing out dribbles of moisture. Ever polite, watchful, he concentrated on his tasks to avoid empty confabulation with a foreigner. I asked if he'd mailed an envelope to America. Dracul's eyes withdrew, defensive. "Every day I post mail to many places."
"To New York?"
"Maybe. Not remember all mail.”
"You'd remember one to New York. Emily wrote the envelope.”
"I think, maybe.”
"No maybe. You'd know for damned sure if you did or didn’t."
"Yes, I remember!" He made a rare grin with raised eyebrows. "To New York. Yes, New York.”
"And Boston?”
"Maybe..." His eyes narrowed to study mine. "New York, I think.”
"And I know you'd lie for your boss," I muttered under my breath. Dracul wouldn't lie on a whim. He'd defend his master. "You would do anything the Count asked of you, I assume."
He kept his attention on his work. I held my stance until he yielded. "Of course."
"Because 'tis your job."
He looked at me. "I am not a clerk in a government office. I not sell shoelaces in the market."
"True, you're important here. Like family. You protect him."
"With my life!"
"You don't need to tell him so."
"He know."
"You use your judgment. You decide when he needs protection and how to protect him." Dracul's features went noncommittal, not having far to travel to get there. "If you see a danger you can act on it without first asking him. Without delaying for approval."
"I must," he muttered.
"And afterward, when he is safe, why tell him about it?”
"If danger is gone, no necessary to worry."
He faced me a second longer, ostensibly curious until he felt certain I'd not tell him why I pursued that line of thought, then he concentrated on running a finger across the shiny black bonnet of the Mercedes, testing its smoothness. I portioned out an ostentatious pause before walking off dissatisfied. I waited until Emily was in her daily clean-up before dinner. I never liked the sweet insidious smell of turpentine. "Are you certain your letter was mailed?"
She was wiping her palette dry. "Why shouldn't I think so?"
"Dracul thinks he mailed it. I don't trust him."
"I trust Vasile. His people obey him faithfully. What business is it of yours to go poking around his staff and my mail?"
"Would you ask the Count about your letter?"
"I won't insult him by questioning the honesty of his people."
"He should understand the letter's important to you."
"The letter was mailed and that's that. If I don't get a reply, it means my priggish sister is offended and disowns me." She forced a grim smile. "Now go get yourself ready for dinner."
I occupied my hours observing the household routines. Easy always to engage Ilie in conversation while he puttered on his chores. Sorina guarding her private stories with her life. Deferential of Emily, Sorina didn't conceal her suspicions of me, as if she detected some character flaw or a deformity of my skull imperceptible to everyone but me. With similar watchfulness I observed her treating Dracul no better, burying him with silence. Certainly the hunchback posed no potential challenge to her dominion over the kitchen. Dracul divided his daytimes between the Mercedes and the garden, rising ahead of the sun every morning and disappearing after his evening meal. I fancied he slept in a coffin in the depths of the castle.
Incarcerated in the Count's benevolence I was free to wander, with nowhere to go. Mind free, feet fettered. Finding some advantage in quietude, I filled sheets of paper with lines that seemed wise and clever until I read them the next day. Languid efforts don't pay off. I needed more— bookstores and city lights and the banter of varied company to fill long summery days. At dinner and lunch I consumed second and third glasses of the bumptious red wines that so well accompany the rich meaty local cuisine. I rode with a taciturn Dracul to the nearby small nondescript village to help carry supplies and glimpse a smidgen of the universe outside the castle grounds. Worrying that like a neglected housewife I was losing the rogue in myself, a wellspring of my creative spirit, I could, as many greats had done, return to my roots. I vivified ancient scenes: my father younger strutting about, my mother's brisk efficient cooking and cleaning, neighbors such as Mrs. Gallagher bending to sweep her doorstep every day with her long whisk-broom, dawdling as her eyes scoured the neighborhood for sources of gossip, Mr. O'Riley's fascination with the much-younger Walsh daughter oblivious to his existence, picturesque folk but not compelling. Such the dampening spell the Count cast.
He released an unexpected man in him the evening he and I waited at the diningtable while Emily having just finished her cleanup was upstairs dressing. He inquired about my family's health. "Quite robust," I replied.
"My father and mother died young. Relatively speaking, of course. My father was the archetypical aristocrat, noble beyond the nobility of the day. A childhood ambition of mine was to exceed him. I never could attain his loftiness."
Ah, asking about my family as prelude to talking of his. "A good father instills sound goals," I declared in a tone similar to my own paternal parent's.
"My father overpraised my youthful successes, strongly reproved me for any failings…" He paused, unaccustomed to confessing. "…of which I committed many. In every way possible I endeavored to make him proud of his only son. He urged me to play polo. I became quite skilled at it. In his eyes a success." The Count was confiding as to an old friend. "I hated polo. Charging back and forth across a long wide field. Mallets swinging wildly. Collisions. I cannot tolerate abuse of horses. I esteem them as companions. I would never subject a noble spirit as my Lovan's to such violence. Lovan has royal blood. We understand each other perfectly."
Tempted to advise him to relinquish Emily in favor of Lovan, I allowed I'd best hold my silence on her, instead veering into a generality. "All great and small creatures seek to be understood, in what for them passes as understanding."
Wildflowers flaunted remembrance of my joyful first sight of gentians in a green meadow when I was four. During the summer I opened the iron gate and took long solitary walks on the road armed with pencil and paper to invite inspiration, which seldom responded and when it did, spoke to a dissociation from my life. Though under the same sun, these mountains darkened my spirit as the meadows and forests of Donegal entranced me, where, as my father told, great golden eagles once soared above the uplands. One afternoon I sat on a roadside rock out of sight of Vasile's castle and scribbled hasty verses, trifled with them, scowled, crumpled into my pocket strained forays I couldn't dignify as poetry, accumulated dissatisfactions shunted into coarse quasihumorous wordplay, evident symptoms of disintegrating talent.
Do I demean you when my many memories of us
are launched by your fragrances
or the bite on a tongue tip as my blind food tester prowls
vulviformities of the valiant vulnerable
oft-vilified cleft? Do I deny the fullness of you
your flowering sensibilities
or do you--
when your urgent efflorescences enchant your pollinator?
Are we but smelly lures to promote the procreative
imperatives built in us,
prone to fallacious probing, fancying there love lurks?
Callow apothegms to color a brothel wall. Dessicated bones wired into a clanky skeleton, untouched by sublimity, yet my lexical extravagance and syntactical gymnastics served a purpose, burning out of me unsuspected cynicism, also distracting me from my imposed-upon self. From that latter realization followed another: writing poetry, good poetry decent or not, even the simple phrasings of my schooldays, proposed modica of insight. My Muse had ensnared herself in the tangles of my viscera and despaired of her lost freedom. I have too long been among minor literati and Americans.
The following evening, as Ilie was setting silverware and plates on the diningtable, Vasile announced, "I was on the telephone all afternoon. We are at war with Serbia."
I asked, "Why?"
"The day we met at Cafe Central, you remember the funeral procession? The archduke was heir to the throne. Now the Austrian-Hungarian Empire has started a war."
"Because of one man?”
Emily looked irritated, "One man or thousands, no matter. Wars are what empires do.”
"An empire needs to demonstrate power and control at all times,” asserted Vasile, "else it be demeaned as fraudulent.”
I asked, "The empire, 'tis us?"
"Transylvania is part of the empire.”
Emily worried, "What does that mean for us?”
"Very little. In these mountains we are— what do Americans say?"
"Out of the way?”
"Yes. Off the beaten path." After a thoughtful pause Vasile added, "For the present.”
I suggested to Emily, "We might consider going to back to France or Italy." She looked stunned at the suggestion of leaving her precious painting unfinished. Vasile said, "Europe is entangled in alliances and counteralliances. You are safe here."
As months passed, Vasile's reports on war declarations and battles confirmed his assessment. I missed city lights to alleviate the early darkness of looming mountains. Vigilant, silent, I watched Emily prance from one to another of the sheets of drawings spread across the carpeted stones of the great hall. On her easel rested an unfinished oil study of Vasile's head. I bellowed, "If I got drunk enough, I'd howl like the wolves," and she sent me a look combining disbelief and exasperation and resumed analyzing her sketches.
I was sleeping into midmorning and meandering along hallways crepuscular in daytime, tenebrous at night. After one nightfall, crossing the great hall in moonlight, I became cognizant of someone at an open window: Vasile in his customary dark perfectly tailored suit, absorbed in flamboyant constellations and the soft shadows cast by moonlight on the mountainsides. Tall, lean, his back to me, solitary in this isolated place, he bore no hint of loneliness, a marvel. Could he turn into a gigantic bat? I scolded myself for my deterioration into childishness. Wolves howled. I approached with heavy footsteps not to startle him. He didn't turn. "Beautiful animals, are they not?"
"I've seen them only in pictures."
"A pity. They move with serene mindful grace. They own the night.”
"I wouldn't want to meet them day or night."
He nodded. "Odd how animals that could kill us with ease avoid us. A formidable wolfpack will approach a single human with caution, watching for a hint of fear or a sign of a weapon. They observe us more than we know. How can a wolf who has never seen a man firing a gun know to avoid a man carrying one? Do you believe in racial memory?"
"It doesn't sound scientific."
"To the wolf mind, could this man have mythological power? An inheritance buried deep in instinct. Imagine meeting a myth in the forest, a Zeus who hurls thunderbolts."
"'Twould be a good story to tell."
"And be believed?"
"As we believe the verses of Shakespeare."
In a wry tone he asked, "Is there room for poetry in science?"
"You pose an eternal question."
He looked at me for the first time. His dark eyes flashed. His voice went stern. "A poet should know the obvious answer."
I knew what I didn't like, the noiseless slicing through flesh. He knows he has the advantage of me and makes no bones about it. Do I roar as one does advancing into pitched combat, I betray my weakness in this place of fine chill manners. Blood should not flow in silence, softly yielding its heat. However fine and noble is civilization, when it falters let shouts of anger be heard to the tops of the clouds. Aye, yet I know this: when anger may be a detriment, wisdom recommends restraint though it leaves one unmanned. How can one be and not be? All roads must lead to an ending if oft to other roads. The man Vasile, this carrier of light, dwells among shifting shadows and contains his awe of them by measuring their dimensions on stone walls. Small tight parcels of darkness lodge embedded among the stones.
A frequent sound of summer was rain splattering on the courtyard pavestones. Awakened one morning by a thunderstorm I padded barefooted into the hallway and for the first time saw Vasile's bedroom door open— a room for royalty, to be sure, with brilliant heavyweight wall hangings, complex rich carpeting and a wide fourposter bed with its purple curtains open, revealing twin pillows scrunched on the unmade bed. Sorina turned from a table near the bed carrying a tray of dirty dishes, silverware, a darkgreen wine bottle that looked empty and two wineglasses. Frowning she swept past me with the hard look of a policeman questioning a defiant witness, set down the tray, closed and locked the door and strode downstairs without a word. Not liking my surmises I followed her to the kitchen. Ilie and Dracul were having after-breakfast coffee. I poured myself a mug of coffee from the pot, discomfiting Sorina, who saw pouring coffee as her task. Perhaps defying some castle rule I carried my coffee to the great hall, where Emily was rummaging through a stack of oversized charcoal drawings of Vasile in different poses. She smiled. By the fall she'd be ready to order the enormous canvas from a dealer in Bucharest who would deliver it by truck, whose workers would stretch it in the great hall. Ambling to a window I studied the overcast. In this land viscous rain-swollen clouds could linger for weeks, release a sudden downpour and then turn white and scatter in sunshine. The treecovered mountains would glisten and the air again taste cool and smell fresh. Unease tweaked my thoughts. She looked up as if she'd read them. Was that a trace of worry in her eyes? I wouldn't voice the sternness I wanted to express. She tossed a thought into the emptiness between us. "For as long as we've been here, I know but scatters of Vasile. He's alone most of the time."
I kept my tone mild. "Is he lonely?"
"He seems not." She paused. "He keeps his own counsel."
An odd expression for an American, more likely to come from Vasile.
"He's about forty, you think?"
"Fortyfour."
She knew with precision. I frowned. "Ten years older than you."
She sounded distant. "I haven't been counting."
"Don't you think age difference can be a problem for couples?”
"I'm ten years older than you. It hasn't been a problem for us." She focused into my eyes. "Has it?"
In our oddly symmetrical numerology Vasile could be my father. I suppressed saying so, not a problem of mine until now. Having fathomed my restiveness toward Vasile, she proferred mollification, referring to ourselves as "us". I yielded. "No problem for me."
"Me neither."
Her little smile fell short. Should have launched a hug and a kiss. Neither of us moved. I yielded. "I'll let you get back to work," which with a sidelong glance she promptly did.
For three weeks, as weather permitted, she set up her easel outdoors, making quick charcoal sketches of the castle from different viewpoints, posing Vasile and the horse in various places, while Vasile smiled, amused, at her commands to move or gesture or be still. Watching her work could entertain me for a time, until I realized I was intruding on private moments and would leave to wander about the castle. In the grand hall and along passageways, as my echoing footsteps pursued me, I had to resist the temptation to turn and look where I knew I'd see no one. Their voices, faint, bouncing off the stones of other rooms discomposed my incidental thoughts into shards of regret, resentment, misgiving and, alas, malignity. I sought happier transports out under the plum, apple and cherry trees, where light breezes coursing the mountains, carrying the green aromas of a million trees, shunted me into wellings of pleasant disconcertment. How my life had changed since my spur-of-the-moment telephone call to my sister Deirdre prompted Emily’s leaving the Titanic to return to me. Flighty she was and myself spontaneous, or vice versa, now admitting, I do, our quickness to yield to impulse. I devolved in her eyes to an oversize downy puler. A multichambered stone cold shell of a castle enclosed me, itself enclosed as in an enameled jar by endless mountains.
Discovering in a sitting room four shelves of books in English, I reread three Dickens novels, read two by Twain and perused a volume each of English and American poets, escaping for a time my sense of isolation. Close on all sides presumptuous looming mountains curtailed my thinking and left incipient ideas stillborn. Standing in the courtyard I watched the sun sink without a true sunset. I dwelt on the curtailed winter days here, still many months away, when the mountains become high white walls dimming as the sun departs at noon. Foreshadowings of my future bred darksome thoughts.
In the lambent sunshine of an August early morning I walked in on Vasile and Emily in the diningroom wearing their city best. Ilie was carrying plates out to wash. Seeing me, Emily slumped slightly, apologetic, revealing they hadn't expected me up yet. "We're going to Bucharest for the day. Vasile has business there. I want to examine the canvas I ordered."
With a briefcase hanging from four fingers Vasile took her arm and guided her toward the door. I followed. "Hold up a moment. I'll go with you."
"You haven't had breakfast. We won't be stopping until Bucharest. Nothing there for you to do.”
"Emily, I want to go. Isn't that enough?"
"Some other time. We have a busy day ahead. We need to get going."
Peevish, I had to draw a line. "Alright, I do have something to do, pack my suitcase. You can be rid of me at the train station. Any train station."
"Don't be silly. We can talk when I get back."
As her aristocrat resumed walking, she turned to keep up with him. I needed to prove I wasn't bluffing. "Spare me ten minutes?"
Without deigning to look back Vasile told Emily, "We have a schedule to keep. If we hurry, we may get back tonight."
"You'll be rid of me forever," I called. "Am I not worth a ten-minute delay?"
Dracul was behind the wheel. The Mercedes, engine running, pointed at the open gate. They got into the backseats. I charged across the courtyard toward the car. As Dracul gunned the engine, I raised my arm, fist tight, in outcry remulating my father's best bellow: "Blighters! A tinker's dam to you both! Now me Irish is up!”
The car was through the gate and rattling on the wooden beams of the bridge. Small chance they'd have heard me. I strode past Ilie in the doorway and comandeered a chair at the kitchen table. Sorina cracked two eggs into a fryingpan, pointedly not looking at me. She knew more than she'd ever tell me. Ilie joined me at the table with a mug of coffee and said it was a beautiful day and, despite Ilie's calming presence, I almost flubbed a simple yes. I nursed my coffee until Sorina and Ilie left to work in the garden. Wrapping a chunk of cheese, a cold sausage and a loaf of bread in wax paper I hastened to the stable, put the food in a pair of saddlebags, instructed Nicu, the stable boy, to feed Lovan and left with the saddlebags. Slipping around the castle on the riding path out to the courtyard to assure myself the gate was still open, I tiptoed inside to Vasile's office, which was never locked as no one dared to enter without knocking. Today it was locked. Vasile and Emily had discussed me. Such sly distrust. A ten-inch ring of keys, I knew, hung in the kitchen beside the door. Many keys. I tried nine before one opened the office door. Tall windows behind the desk brightened the neat businesslike office. New and old bound volumes and plain paperbacks filled the bookshelves. Glancing over three oaken filing cabinets, a typewriter, telephone, other office trappings, I snatched two preprinted lettersize envelopes. Shutting the office door without troubling to lock it, I replaced the keys. In my room I pocketed my passport and crammed clean clothes into the saddlebags, topping them with the envelopes and my maps. I waited in the stable until Lovan had finished eating and then, as Nicu watched wide-eyed, I placed the saddle on the great stallion's back, adjusted and cinched it and attached the saddlebags, not easily even for a sixfooter like myself. I took my time fitting the bridle to avoid agitating Lovan, humming a melody to calm myself as the words rolled through my brain,
"…I saw her first and knew
her dark hair would weave a snare
that I might one day rue."
Winking at horrified Nicu, I rode Lovan out to the courtyard. The great horse's hooves clattered on the flagstones and thumped across the bridge.
I set a steady easy pace, not to tire Lovan early. In the afternoon, we drank from a roadside creek. At dusk near a meadow Lovan grazed and I dined on my provisions. When a nearfull moon rose above the trees, I resumed my ride between black trees under ghostgray mountainsides. At distances I couldn't estimate, wolves howled. I embraced a reliving of Jonathan Harker's desperate escape from Dracula.
"We can talk," Emily had said, perhaps to acknowledge we hadn't had a meaningful conversation in months. Out of pique I'd run off on a premature assumption she intended to announce we were no longer a couple, ask me to accept as a friend the nobleman with whom she now dallied. My reward a rail ticket? What a fine old euphemism that was, dally, cover for their sweaty bareass tumbling in the sheets. We can talk, aye, words seldom promising. She could also have wished to explain that nighttime episode in her room had amounted to nothing more than a casual talkfest or her surrender to a moment of weakness or worse, desire, while I languished. Possibly she intended to reassure me, confess she'd neglected me, plead for a fresh start. I deplored my impulsive departure, my rejection of hope to avoid the pain of futility. Shifting, I could rationalize her behavior in defiance of my own intuitions. No, ever capricious, she'd flown away, seized upon a luxurious castle and a rockstable Count who'd allow her to reign as she'd been destined since her Newport birth. Cease the back-and-forth, Brendan, consign her to the past. You'll never know...
A distant flash of light alerted me. Headlight beams swung into bright discs at a distant bend in the road ahead. I pulled Lovan up and peered into the darkness under the trees. Finding a break in the underbrush I dismounted and led Lovan into the darkness and waited. The passing car crunched the stony roadway, spitting dust and pebbles. Vasile's Mercedes. If Vasile retired for the night unaware his horse was missing, I'd have a full day's lead on any pursuit. If someone reported the theft when he arrived at the castle, Vasile would telephone police and start an immediate search himself. I re-mounted Lovan. I'd ride until the moon dipped to the treetops, then hide out for the night.
Without a watch, gauging the passage of time by the moon, I conjectured I'd traveled three hours. The great stallion's pace had slowed. In the dense mountain brush I sought a concealed shelter close to the road. I dismounted, still adrenalin-energized, unlike the exhausted Lovan. Above the treetops a beam of light was creeping through the darkness, flickering among invisible trees, the headlights of a car descending a hairpin curve I'd navigated some three miles back. Fainter shimmers wavered behind the headlights. Vasile was on his way, searching the roadside with a handheld electric lantern.
Having better odds on the driverside of the road, I pushed through the brush where it looked thin. I maneuvered deep among the trees to a patch of meadow. Hitching Lovan to a tree I slipped back, crouching behind roadside bushes, hoping the hard ground resisted hoofprints, wondering what they did to horse thieves in Transylvania. Lovan was too magnificent. Though short of cash I wouldn't risk trying to sell a more splendid horse than I'd be expected to own. At a train station I'd tie the horse and write to Vasile informing him of Lovan's location. I'd leave an envelope with Vasile's address in the saddle straps, proof I'd only borrowed Lovan. I lowered my head as the headlights and rumble of the Mercedes passed, then rested on a patch of weeds, back braced against a tree, prepared to wait out Vasile's return to the castle. I caught myself dozing a few times. At last shrub tops and lowhanging branches jounced in headlight beams, brightening fast. The roar resounded, passing, diminishing. Vasily had given up and was heading home.
I relaxed. Enough moonlight remained to go several miles farther. As I rose to my feet, odd noises in the woods alerted me, followed by prolonged spinefreezing screams unlike any I'd heard before, amid pounding and thrashing in the brush. I stood stockstill, yielding to an instinctive paralysis. When silence returned, I ventured back toward Lovan, tentative, guarded, hearing sounds I couldn't identify. I peered over some low brush. On the dim ground a black changeable silhouette blobbed and, as I tried to decipher shifts and movements within it, the blackness grew a bulge, roundish, topped with pointed canine ears. Greenish eyes flashed. In a low crouch I edged backward, nose inches from the ground, then turned still crouching, letting my fingertips trail to catch branches that might rustle, to brush aside twigs that might crackle under my feet. On the road I took off my shoes and began picking heedful steps. After some hundred yards I dared put my shoes back on and run, and run I did, hard, fast, until I had to stop and brace my hands on my knees, gasping. For long minutes I listened: a repetitious owl hoot, a sleepless bird cry, intermittent sussurations by unseen creatures I couldn't identify. Unable to listen while running, still breathing hard, I resumed at a walk.
As moonlight faded, black treetop silhouettes intruded into a starry black sky. Dawn would be hours off. My strength was evaporating. I stumbled into weeds and skinny boughs. Couching face and eyes in an elbow I groped to a solid tree trunk with low branches and began climbing, reaching for invisible branches, bumping against others. Wolves didn't climb trees, did they? Above the thickest low branches, cradling myself where two forked, I looped my belt under one arm and across my chest and shoulder and around a solid branch and dozed in fits and starts until daylight.
Stiff, cramped, too little rested, I resumed walking, listening for approaching motor vehicles. As the morning wore on, hunger and tiredness took over. Loudly I bemoaned my saddlebagged bread, cheese and sausage, the wolves' dessert. Let Vasile find me if he was still making the effort. I'd defend myself with sticks and stones, without guilt or remorse, with the let-come-what-may freedom of fatalism. I'd defy this entire land of endless wooded mountains sparse in farms and villages, harbouring not one pub with good draft, stout, laughter and cheer. From a miraculous cool spring burbling out of a mountainside I scooped water with my hands, splashed myself as I gulped all I could, satisfying thirst, appeasing hunger. In the multiplicity of green leaves some had to be edible, I conjectured. I bit into four species and spat them out. In midafternoon I gorged on wild roadside blackberries. I pushed onward until sunset. A mere seven vehicles and horsecarts had trekked the road. At each, I scrambled into the brush. I'd not risk being turned over to police. A full moon rose. I walked fast, listening for wolves, distrusting the silence. When the moon descended, I climbed a tree, finding the climb harder. I was weakening. I did sleep better and longer, abbreviating my available daylight the next day.
At sunset of my third day, at a cluster of tents and thatchroofed huts, a tribe of families in unfamiliar native costume who spoke no English gave me bread and a few raw vegetables. So poor were they I considered offering them money from my meager wherewithal. My red hair amused the children, who'd never seen such a wonder, reminding me to watch for police looking for an Irishman. I sat on a fallen treetrunk and watched the children's excited play with a hollow rubber ball as the parents congregated nearby and talked until as dusk deepened they called the children home. Allowed to sleep in an empty hut I quaffed the silence. The simple joys amid deprivation of these people and the unearned prestige of the wealthy businessman in his high castle moldered in my thoughts. Unbidden words sprang…
Empire, who needs one?
There, touch the flametip in a grain of sand
hear the nightbird cry for the missing sun
see the heart of darkness in broad daylight.
On the road by early morning I mounted a crag. Far ahead the road descended. By midafternoon I arrived at a village. At the only market I bought vegetables and a widebrimmed peasant hat. Around sunset I trudged into a small town bisected by a railroad line, overrun with thousands of armed troops sitting in trucks or standing in loose formations and sergeants clamoring over the rumble of a long line of military vehicles facing the direction from which I'd come. At the cafe I sidled to a table in a dim corner. Under my broad hatbrim bent low I melted to a shadow in the shadows. The police would be coping with too much confusion to notice me. I suppered on mititei and half-listened to noisy chatter. An army officer at the next table quoted Pascal. In Paris I'd absorbed enough French to lean over and, eschewing English, ask the officer what was going on and deduce the gist of his reply: Romania was at war with Transylvania. What local policemen now would waste time chasing a dinky horsethief? I might slip aboard the next train in the midst of the military. I’d skirt the war concentrated in central Europe and wend the periphery, starting with Greece or Italy. There among an abundance of new acquaintances gifted at storytelling I could reciprocate with my own adventures. A caution. I should exercise wisdom regarding whom to regale with my tale of the Count, the stallion and the wolves. With pints unavailable and the local red wines dense and puissant, I tilted my hat circumspectly low and sipped strong black coffee.
'Twas the fault of the blasted mountains albeit their beastly geography deserves no more curses than the Count and Emily themselves acting within their natures. Perhaps I suppressed minute unaccountable moments of dread in the lowlands as after a stopover by the Danube the Orient Express pulled out of Budapest in late afternoon and clackety-clacked through the drawn-out summer twilight and into a moonless black night dotted with sparse yellowflame lights in scattered villages, yet, though boring despite my proximity to Emily, a luxurious ride subsequently followed by a mad automobile dash into black mountains on endless winding dirt roads until, after endless hours, arriving at a massive iron gate. As the brakes bit, the headlights joggled the irregular stone surfaces into shuddering phantasms. Stone towers loomed more felt than seen as their tenebrous bulk occulted stars in the black sky. The hunchbacked driver spoke into a telephone at the gate and returned to sit behind his wheel until a gatekeeper arrived as a dim moving shadow and pulling the iron bars inward, opening a space through which we passed. The motorcar crossed the flagstones of a courtyard to massive smoke-gray ash twin doors set in carved stone. From the invisible heights of the castle towers surely would descend a fire-eyed winged gargoyle with claws long as pitchforks.
How came I thus to this forsaken place?
In Paris Emily and I had common friends, impecunious artists and writers all. Dayslong in the painting studio she wore dungarees and ate frugal lunches and disappeared afterward, I learned later, to a modest hotel, not patrician yet far beyond the means of everyone we knew. Gracious she was and reserved and not perceived as genteel. Magical Paris connected us as much as our yielding to impulse in my spare tiny room. Though I'm a redfurred, nevertheless gentle, bear, I believe she was drawn to my unexalted wit, my impromptu recitations of Irish poetry, my oft-coarse tales of my two older brothers, two sisters, mother and father in our cramped apartment in Carrigrohane, west of Cork, and aye, rousing tales from McCarthy's down on the highway, told with brash irreverence learned from my father. This affluent American from Newport toured Europe with me in the lowbudget garb of students, which she found amusing and "real", reveling in our second-class train rides, busrides zigzagging the western side of Italy, staying in cheap hotels she called charmingly bucolic to please me while she directed glances of surreptitious yearning at palaces with uniformed doormen and luxurious lobbies. She never spoke of her family, seldom wrote them, content to live on "savings", her word for her bottomless trust fund, a desert island upon which she was marooned alone amidst her lost bearings. "Dear Brendan, am I sometimes featherbrained?"
2. Emily.
In Vienna autumn, 1913, we found an inexpensive apartment, one room with a narrow bed and a small gas stove west of the innercity and he earned some of our subsistence as an occasional day laborer. In December he shoveled snow. Vienna incited my fondest high school dreams of a fairyland! Among stone blocks stacked into chunky stone structures lurked freizes of saints, kings, coryatids, gargoyles, robed and semirobed young women posing as artloving Muses. I felt like dancing among this population of fanciful and mythical creatures. Legions of fierce ancient warriors in marble, and their armored horses around the buildings and atop them protected the city. Red and white flags and talismen and coats-of-arms depicting two-headed warlike eagles warned of everlasting doom to invaders. We wandered about with a map and lists of tourist attractions, browsed stores for books in English we could read in cafes, watching others read and sip coffee, listening for familiar words, making amusing sometimes obligatory conversation with each other. While Brendan lamented he missed hearing his mellifluous native tongue, I didn't mind not understanding what I overheard, allowing words to flow past like untranslated librettos, deciding I benefited from not having to listen to likely inane chatter. Strings of electric lights and the scent of green fir boughs sprinkled reprieves from the stark city winter. This city's natural season had to be Christmas. It was tempting to search the skies for Santa Claus doing midnight rounds. If my Paris had been the City of Light, of daylight clarity, Vienna was my City of Incandescence. One January afternoon, under the high arched ceilings and the bright chandeliers of the Café Central, beside a row of chess players along the tall colonnades, I spotted a familiar face among four men in animated conversation two tables away. At that moment the face turned toward me. He approached our table. "At Pisa, was it not, in the railroad station? Did you enjoy Italy?”
I let Brendan delineate our trip, forcing a smile when the man, Anton, stolidly middleaged, glanced at me with a discomfiting fondness. He insisted we take our chairs and small tapered espresso cups to his table. After the round of introductions Anton informed us Leon was a war correspondent for a Kiev newspaper and back from the front only yesterday, from Sofia. "Belgrade," Leon corrected him.
I graded Leon the brightest-looking of an unusually intelligent four, impressed by his rich black hair, a thick black mustache and intense dark eyes behind steelrimmed glasses. Brendan said, "I've not heard there is a war on."
In halting English Leon explained the Austro-Hungarian Empire wasn't involved in it. "The Balkan nations. The Greeks. They resist the Ottomans." Brendan was coming alive, more than I'd felt in some time, in discussion with these new acquaintances. "Who's winning?”
In a meld of English and French Leon asserted that's a question those ask who don't go to war. No one wins a war. Shaking his head as one does in pain he told of his visits to hospitals for the wounded. Anton managed a simplified translation: "Many are still in the battle. They have nightmares at night. Sometimes during the day, while awake. Shooting. Running. Seeing comrades die. Over and over.”
Leon's features clenched at the agony he was describing. Anton addressed a question to an average-looking highbrowed man with a skimpy mustache, wearing pince-nez glasses. "Herr Doctor Alfred, can these men be restored to normal lives?"
"It is possible," replied the doctor in an Austrian accent, "with personal psychiatry. Without relying on preconceived ideas of treatment.”
"Or quackery," hinted Anton.
The doctor made a light smile. "By which you mean ideology. My approach would differ from the pre-eminent theory of our time. These wounded men are isolated. They have forgotten where they belong. I would have them describe their pre-war memories and re-connect them to their lives.”
"Your dispute in the community is wellknown.”
"Therefore I prefer not to dwell on it. I shall not respond to— his ruthless attacks in the same manner. Herr Professor Joy wants followers. My course is to break off pointless conflict."
Anton took a small sip of his cup of mokka. "Fortunately the professor comes here no longer." He glanced at me to discern if I guessed whom they were discussing. "His new favorite is the Landtmann."
The doctor murmured, "Das bessere für uns."
I sent Anton an inquiring glance. He whispered, "Better for us."
Leon made an observation in German and the doctor replied in German. Anton told Brendan, "Combating illness and overthrowing a sick government have less in common than Leon would like.”
Brendan looked puzzled, intrigued. The fourth man, an overweight theater director named Egon, leaned forward, confiding, "Adolf is at the window. He is looking inside."
Anton shrank in apprehension. "Does he seem inclined to enter?"
"Unfortunately so.”
"He lives in a home for indigent men. Poverty has turned him bitter."
The table fell silent and in minutes a thin man approached, carefully managing a large black portfolio under his arm. Anton asked how his sales were going. Adolf shook his head. In German Anton suggested, "Show our lady friend your new watercolors."
"Englisch?" inquired Adolf.
“Amerikanisch."
Adolf opened his portfolio and displayed three street scenes one after the other. Anton informed him, "Sie ist ein Künstler, auch." He shifted to English, "What do you think, my dear?”
My reply carried a faintly appeasing tone I couldn’t suppress. "They are professional. That building there, I recognize it.”
Anton interpreted in German and Adolf tied the portfolio shut, looking miffed at the paucity of my enthusiasm for his work, not, I guessed, a new experience for him. Adolf launched into a rapid rant in German. Brendan smiled. "I know not the words but I envy the blarney."
I sent Anton a questioning look and he explained, "He is upset about the state of the arts in his fatherland. The academy fails to appreciate his work while accepting inferior works of the style academics are fond of. He calls them fools who reward their flatterers and have no feeling for art.”
The others waited Adolf out in silence, Leon with a wry smile. Adolf turned his diatribe on Leon. After a brief exchange between them Adolf tied his portfolio and stalked out. I said to Anton. "Obviously they aren't friends."
"Adolf accused Leon and his fellow Russians of child's play, intellectuals and revolutionaries hiding under false names. Leon writes about the war under a pseudonym. He has used many. As a Jew he has good reason. His compatriot Vladimir has taken the surname Lenin. He did not come here today. The solitary Russian who never comes here, short, thin, pockmarked, he calls himself Steel." Brendan shifted in his chair. The doctor offered, "He is a cold one, that Yosef. And more intelligent than one may expect from his peasant features.”
Egon eyed the doctor. "If he has any mental defect he hides it, unlike Adolf, also a solitary individual. Adolf wears his passions on his sleeve." He scanned the table. "Has anyone ever seen those two together, Adolf and Yosef? I think not. Should they meet, Adolf would talk Yosef to death. His own. Yosef hates verbosity. He would end the conversation by drawing his knife, he carries one, you know, and could kill Adolf for his pleasure. Both are, what would our Anglo-Saxon friends say, stuck? Herr Doctor, your profession pronounces no mental disease incurable?"
The doctor named Alfred humored Egon's amateurish analysis. “That must be our working assumption."
"My question is simpler. Can you cure any mental disease?”
"Not so simple, sir. We have no pill to undo years of damage. The talking remedy requires time, often many years.”
"Until the patient dies," argued Egon. "Or tires of his illness and in boredom he goes on to some other form of entertainment.”
The doctor shrugged, disinclined to defend his occupation against a lightweight skeptic. Leon stood up. He had writing to do. The doctor made a slight nod to me and Brendan and left, accompanied by Egon. Anton mentioned he had an evening appointment. During the conversation I had been appraising Anton and his interest in me and decided men everywhere are pretty much alike, some hairier, some perspiring more, most focused on themselves. Nurture, upbringing are inevitable influences, of course, and at the edges national and cultural differences lend them definition. Variety intrigues. Anton was a collector, an uncommon one loyal to his collectibles in Cafe Central, in his bed, not one to forget, take for granted, dismiss and when bored disappear. Being American designated me as a prize, perhaps also, though less likely, in Brendan's mind. Proprietorship is a male prerogative. Possessiveness is more generic. Do I project my desires onto men? I may be less different from men than I assumed.
3. Brendan.
Her desire for a winter in the Black Forest mountains delayed our return to Vienna until the following year. Now as we strolled to the Innere Stadt district on a sunny afternoon in early July, 1914, I was speculating on who'd grace Cafe Central today. Anton for sure, noted Emily, and he'd have talkative males bent with age around him, each differently fascinating. Though but twentythree I could banter with the best, a family trait as she must have observed. We found our way impeded by the slow procession of an ornate carriage drawn by six horses and their riders and followed by some hundred men, pallidgray government officials, and uniformed military officers on foot and in motor vehicles. At a cafe table Anton was chatting with two men, one bald but for a swatch of dark hair around the sides and back of his head down to the collar of a well-worn coat and bunched upon a tieless collarless shirt, the other gentleman elegant in a dark suit, pressed white shirt and black tie matching his thick eyebrows and straight black hair. Rising, the darksuited one made a slight bow as Anton introduced them as Peter, just Peter, and Count Vasile Grigore. "Vasile is sufficient and appropriate," the blackhaired man corrected in well-enunciated Oxford English as his long thin fingers splayed over his heart and his curious black eyes swept over me and lingered on Emily. "My Transylvania is a province within the Empire. You are from the Emerald Isle, I presume."
"Emerald as all get-out, yes," I interjected. "The lady is American.”
Emily hadn't left off eyeballing the Count. "On the way we passed a funeral procession. Somebody important died?”
"Crown Prince Ferdinand," explained Vasile. "He was assassinated.”
"That's awful. Why would somebody do such a thing?”
"He visited Serbia. Balkan politics defy rational explanation.”
I understood Peter to say in German, "Rulers of empires are wisest to stay home behind their armies and guard their treasures. Pride lures empires to excesses, most typically military adventurism. They overreach and they are brought down. All of them, without exception. So Leon would say."
"Leon?" inquired Vasile.
"One of those conspiratorial Russians.”
Emily guessed Peter spoke no English and asked him, in halting German, "Conspiracy is a fine art in Vienna?”
"It pays better than literature."
Anton smiled at her. "You are learning to speak German."Peter grumbled, "Those Russians never buy me coffee. A humorless bunch.”
In German Anton added, "Peter is a writer. A good one. He never has money.”
Guessing what Anton had said, Peter expounded, "I studied law and medicine. I could have had a lucrative profession." He couldn't suppress a yearning glance at Anton's fork severing a moist bitesize irregular cube from the chocolate cake on Anton's plate. "My writing talent, my curse, plunked me into a life of poverty. I don't complain. I have been rewarded. I have many good friends. Generous friends."
"You are a classic ausgeflippter," observed Vasile, in a tone weighted with a sense of superiority colored with selfacknowledged social prestige and abundant sangfroid yet as free of arrogance as such a combination may permit.
He wore his imperious bearing with ease, not as performance but as a part of himself. His soft clear voice sliced through sometimes excited chatter with unstrained authority. I could see why Vasile impressed Emily.
Anton responded to Emily's inquiring look. "An ausgeflippter is what in your language you would call, a drop-out."
Peter grinned. "Drop-out, yes. I like your English word better."
Anton informed him, "She is a artist.”
"No artist wears such fine clothes. The laws of nature forbid it.”
Vasile leaned toward Emily. "I am beguiled. You studied in America?"
"And Paris. With Madame Stettler."
"Ah, I am returned from Paris seeking an artist to depict my family.
They are wild men there. Brilliant, but would you entrust your portrait to Picasso? The local artists, Kokoscha, Klimt, are talented but idiosyncratic. Ludwig Koch has mastered large scale works, portraits, horses, all however in a stilted pedestrian style. Nor do I want an official portrait like such that hang in government halls, where the subject appears embalmed. You understand my dilemma?"
"Are you offering me a job?”
"A job?" He smiled as if he'd learned a new word. "A challenge. More, an opportunity to capture outward appearance as it is and reveal the inner qualities. Assuming you possess the genius. Tell me, from whom of the classic masters of portraiture have you learned the most?"
She had to think a moment. "I'd say Velasquez."
"Excellent. You can emulate his style?"
"Kind of."
A natural wisdom resides in the universal distrust of an accent. With an ease I would consider suspicious, were I suspicious, they agreed to a test. The next morning she returned carrying an oversize sketchpad. As she told me their story later, Vasile was sitting alone at a window table. "Where is your companion?"
"Brendan is looking for work."
"I wish him well. Let us begin."
In a dark suit with jacket and vest buttoned top to bottom and his hands sculpted in yellow gloves of fine leather folded above his waist, he sat for three hours, releasing from his pose for an occasional sip of coffee, while she fashioned a charcoal drawing of his head and another of a full-length pose at the table. Extracting a monocle from his vest pocket he examined the drawings with care and then, enthusiastic, he told her to pack tonight, she'd return with him to Transylvania. In response to her coolness toward such a journey he explained his vision, a lifesize painting of him and his favorite horse surrounded by his wife and their son outside his castle, with a background view of his lands. A lifesized horse! She was awed. “Sounds like a huge painting."
"No less than ten meters by fifteen meters. Your composition will decide the proportions. You and your companion will have private quarters in the castle. Excellent dining. You will be well-paid when the painting is finished."
A castle! "Why such a large painting?”
"I have a large wall. Ah, I am not accomplished. Another ordinary painting of another ordinary nobleman would offer nothing to posterity. As the incidental subject of a grand masterpiece I shall be content to shine as a dim reflection of your luminescence. As you would say, ride on your glory.”
"A job like that will take quite a while.”
"I offer you as much time as you need. Imagine rendering the many textures, the play of light in the mountains. Painting is light enraptured, no?" When she returned to our apartment, I was already there. "I had no luck. What did your Count think of your drawings?"
"How would you like to move to Transylvania?”
Her description of their afternoon and Vasile's project goaded my latent doubts. During our smooth casual two years together filled with the distracting entertaining logistics of travel, our sole conflicts had arisen from her determination to explore museums and churches in every city we visited, for her a professional imperative risen to the level of obsession, while I favored sitting in cafes and jotting notes and lines for as yet uncreated poems and conversing with anyone promising— conflicts too inconsequential to jangle our well-wrought ease. While her life's challenge enlivened her, my joy flowed less sanguine. "What would I do in Transylvania?"
"How would you like to be free to write without having to work."
A new concept had been chucked at me. "Perfect," I said, thinking, too perfect.
"Then why don't I hear your enthusiasm?"
She who had never done a finished portrait was selected over the many portrait painters of France. Better that I suppress my misgivings. "Surprise, 'tis all. You like the offer, you should accept it."
"I've already accepted it. A taxi will be at our door in the morning.”
In brightening dawn, we rode to the Süd train station. I still felt put out she had anticipated my intent to remark her happiness made me happy, depriving me of exhibiting my generosity, also tipping me off she would have gone without me. I kept such ruminations silent, tolerating her cheerful chatter until we met Vasile and boarded the Orient Express. Aware I was coming off as reticent I made an effort to match Vasile's good humor by relating anecdotes about Ireland and my brothers. Vasile said little about his own family, content to discuss history and art, listening with consummate skill. A distinct improvement from my poor poet's diet and surpassing my dear mother’s home cooking, the fine dining on the rails softened my disposition and in our cabin I yielded to merciful drowsing. Vasile's words jarred me alert. "We disembark soon.”
Carrying our suitcases along a wooden platform lit by a single overhead light and a night light inside the locked station, we three halted at the end of the platform blinded by sudden automobile headlights. A uniformed man with a hunch in his spine stacked our suitcases in the boot. Vasile took the front passenger seat and Emily and I the backseat and the powerful engine roared down an unlit street past dark houses and into silent black hills. The straining engine and the car jouncing identified our roadway as rough, winding, rising, unpaved stony dirt. Our sole communions comprised infrequent glances toward each other. Hour after hour, the car sped, exceeding seventy, I guessed, crawling hairpin curves and then resuming high speeds, then laboring on steep grades. From the engine reverberating against close cliff walls, easing or straining at dips or rises, I deduced we were trending upward in high mountains. After an apparent forever the motorcar rumbled across a wooden bridge. Around and below the bridge, black nothingness. A long minute it took to cross. A stone arch framed a wroughtiron gate in a wall of cubic stones. We waited until a shadow swung open a screeching halfgate. In the courtyard Emily and I stiffly extricated ourselves from the vehicle.
Our shoes susurred on thick carpets covering a stone floor while a thin whitehaired man flanked her. Atop a flight of stairs he directed her into a room where a fourposter flaunted a high carved headboard, warmed by attenuating flames in the fieldstone fireplace. The man pointed me to the next room, with a similar bed and fireplace. Tired, enervated, I stood dumbly mulling why it held a fire in late June until I realized the narrow window was open to the chill of the mountain night. A rooster crowed at a wispy breeze lightening the air in imminent dawn. I was facing east. Closing the ponderous window drapes and without undressing, I lay me down on the bed to rest a moment.
I woke to sunlight simpering between the window frame and the drapes. I'd slept in my clothes. Smokeless black embers lay prostrate in the fireplace. Chill air pervaded the room. I shut the window. Downstairs a six-foot clock in a curvilinear wooden case designated nine fortytwo. I followed voices into a great hall where two rows of octagonal columns taller than the Cafe Central colonnade supported steep stone arches. Emily and Vasile stood among stacked paper, a weighty easel, canvases, palettes, brushes, tubes of oil colors, cans of turpentine. She grinned. "Brendan, look! He's got everything I need. This will be my studio. Isn't it wonderful? The painting will go there." Her outthrown arms couldn't embrace much of the high end wall between the windows. "It will be huge! I'm ready to start."
They'd had breakfast. In the kitchen the housekeeper, Sorina, darkeyed, with white lines in her black hair, would fix whatever I liked. Her plain white ankle-length chemise with red aprons front and back at her waist posited a split skirt. Sorina pointed to a wooden table and chairs in the broad kitchen. Obeying, I sat as she fried two eggs, buttered a thick cut of offwhite bread and warmed the coffeepot. After breakfast, finding no one in the great hall I wandered out into the courtyard. The hunchback was washing the motorcar, a Mercedes. He gave no impression he'd wipe his hand dry to shake mine. I intertwined my fingers behind my back and leaned forward in a manner he should take as friendly. "I'm Brendan."
His eyes didn't have the coolth of Vasile's, though they held some heat, not what I'd call warmth. He reeked of diffidence. “Dracul.”
He continued slow-swiping a washcloth across the hood. I estimated his age about Sorina's, fortyish. "Sorina's family?"
"Brother. Her husband die six years ago."
"Have you seen the Count?"
Dracul directed me with a head nod. "Horse stable."
A youth was sweeping near the stable doors. Inside, Emily beamed at me. "Look at this horse. He's awesome! I said I couldn't do a proper painting of him unless I rode him but Vasile saw through me."
Vasile smiled. "My noble steed." His voice glazed across the words, then turned stern. "I impose few rules here. Regarding Lovan I am a dictator. I ride him. No one else."
She made a teasing grin. "Nope, he rides no other but his dearest."
Vasile looked blank for a moment, then broke into a rare grin. I wasn't inclined to join in. Appraising the horse, yes, Lovan was a magnificent blackmaned black stallion beside which the other horse, a healthy mare, stood commonplace as a bucket. I'd ridden horses when I was eleven, at Uncle Hugh's farm out by Dromboy, none comparable to Lovan, not in size nor comportment. Lovan could boast unparalleled equine charisma. Leaving Emily and Vasile I strolled past flowering fruit trees to a chicken coop and a vegetable garden fenced on all sides with heavy six-foot boards. Inside the open gate the whitehaired man was hoeing. I commented, "Think you a fence under two meters keeps out deer?"
"Keep out bear. No deer here."
"I thought deer roamed everywhere."
"No many here. Wolves. You hear at night?"
"Not yet."
"Maybe tonight."
Beyond the garden a strip of meadow declined into a surround of dense evergreen forest. The distance materialized pale snowcapped mountains. The castle would be in shade by four in the afternoon. From the stable and the garden I could wander a mere hundred yards along the castle wall, for on its other three sides the castle perched on steep rocky cliffs. I went inside, pausing in the great hall to watch her, my Emily, stepping around charcoal sketches of Vasile she'd spread across the floor, some of him standing, views of his face from various angles. I interrupted her fluttering. "Where's the Count now?"
"In his office. He's got a telephone in there. He's a financier or something. He started to explain his business to me. Then he saw money talk bores me.”
"He's old money, isn't he?"
"He says his money is so old it's drying up. He has to work."
I marveled at the incongruity of Vasile working. From boyhood, I guessed, he'd been raised to rule. Perhaps the small scale of his dominion, a three-person household, humbled him. I didn't feel like talking about Vasile. A new suspicion had lodged in my mind: the huge painting a pretext Vasile improvised in Vienna to lure Emily under his roof and keep her here as he worked his subtle wiles, a most insidious deception to set my blood boiling. I contained myself. “I've been thinking… we could move into one room, mine or yours, whichever you prefer."
"Hm. I'll be keeping odd hours now." She frowned at one of the sketches. "This painting will challenge me. When I plunge in I lose track of time. We can talk later, when I feel more settled." She saw my disappointment. “Oh, I must write a letter home. I'm too long overdue."
That night I lay awake serenaded by the exotic harmonies of wolves howling in the woods below the castle. Such a castle, it perches on a rocky bluff surrounded by deep chasms. Its ancient smoothed stones raise high ceilings that outreach the light from the wall fixtures, harboring darkness in their heights. In thickwalled rooms behind narrow hallways light rarely ventures, evoking nighttime city alleys. Thick large-animal hanging furs and woolen carpets and dark ponderous furniture likely front for concealed passages. Inhabiting this primeval realm a Count less accessible than he seemed employed a hunchback with furtive eyes, a taciturn housekeeper and an old servant, solitaries in a place extravagant as a fiction by my countryman Bram Stoker. I had to assure myself the bathroom contained a mirror. I dared to leave the window open to the mountain night. After fitful sleep I meandered downstairs. The high sun bedazzled the kitchen. Vasile was handing Emily a fountain pen and an envelope with a printed return address. They didn't look at me until I sat down beside them. With care she folded two pages handwritten on both sides and slid them into the envelope and lettered an address on the envelope. She asked what time the mailman comes by and Vasile told her there's no scheduled mail delivery here, he'd have Dracul post the letter in the village. I watched the envelope disappear into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. At last she'd done it, written that letter of reconciliation with her family. I was less pleased with our new situation, yielding to my suspicion Vasile was less than forthcoming, although I could invent no sensible reason to think so. Vasile asked me, "Did you sleep well?"
"It was noisy outside."
"You will get accustomed to the wolves. Emily, why do you think representation in painting has declined and led to an art stripped of meaning?"
"Meaning is being expanded."
"Psychologically?"
"Emotionally."
Peeved at his sudden leap into a new conversation, I wouldn't bail him out. In silence I tried to envision an enormous painting like Vasile's commissioned large-as-life portrait of himself, his Lovan, his deceased wife and the castle staff. Vasile romanticized his past. He dwelt in no urgency to see the painting completed, being content to sit and chat. Did Emily apprehend that? She launched a tale about a pair of stray cats in Newport in her childhood. "They sounded like babies crying.”
After breakfast I sat in the stone courtyard with notebook in hand and lost myself in fruitless lucubration, deploring the broken warp and weft of my wordweaving. More tense than I had suspected, I drew no inspiration into me. Doubt, for certain, was assaulting my spirit. Escaping me, the why and wherefore of my presence in this place, behind an iron gate and massive wooden beams bridging a gorge. The kitchen would have coffee to revive my spirit. Beside the kitchen sink Sorina chopped turnips. The whitehaired man's arm rested on the table, half-encircling a cup of black coffee. When I introduced myself, he said in London-accented English he was Ilie, the butler, Sorina's father. Approachable, Ilie was a joy among the taciturns. I returned to the great hall. No Emily. I found her in the stable incising black lines, rubbing peppery grays on a charcoal drawing of the horse's head. "I've got to make Lovan's portrait as good as everyone else's."
"Lovan will appreciate it, I'm sure. How many people will be in this thing?"
I regretted using a dismissive, "thing", and hoped she hadn't noticed. "Vasile's wife and son for sure. I think the help, too. He considers them like family."
"Wife and son? Are they here?"
"His wife died when his son was born. His son's a student at Goettingen. I'll do drawings of him when he visits. Vasile has photographs of his wife. I'll use them to make a cast of her face. He can help me get it right. I'll construct a mannequin I can dress and pose. This project has so many challenges!"
"His wife is what, twenty years younger in that photo?"
"If he wants, I’ll age her a little and take a few years off him."
"Truth in art, eh?"
"Beauty is truth, wouldn't you say?"
"An analytic thinker like Vasile wouldn't settle for Keats."
"No big deal. He calls my notions free-spirited and charming."
I let "charming" hang in a closed back-closet of my head. Despite numerous textile hangings depicting, most of them, historical events, heroic warriors on horseback, the stone walls blazoned claustrophobia to one like me accustomed to open spaces. Outside I gazed across the valley at the slopes and peaks spiny with evergreens basking in sunlight. Stone castles boast permanence and their many shadowed corners summon chthonic mysteries. Certainty and ambiguity spin together like a coin on its end. In these mountains multitudinous overworlds and underworlds engender romance, of a sort anyway. In so exotic a place I found myself unable to jot a line. I blight my national lineage and its masters of language. Do I confuse my love of language with an unsubstantiated fancy I possess the gift of creation? I vowed to enjoy Vasile's hospitality despite my suspicion of his motives. Small good fortune it was I spent little time with him, occupied as he was in his office, where Sorina brought his midday meals.
In the unpredictable intervals when Emily left her workplace, she and I snacked in the kitchen. I often engaged Ilie in conversation while he puttered on his chores. Dracul held me off with watchful minimal politeness as every other day he washed the Mercedes, soaping it with a sponge, squeezing out the graywater, immersing the sponge in a pail of clear water, constant in his resolute concentration on his tasks. Evenings Emily and I dined with Vasile at the long diningroom table with its fine linen snow-bright under a centuries-old wooden chandelier adapted for electric lights. Good manners prevailed. I countered Vasile's monopolization of Emily with bumptious exaggerated escapades with my brothers, displaying narrative and improvisatory skills honed in cafes and pubs, pingponging my tales of Ireland with Vasile's insights on central Europe, yet disadvantaged by his superior learning to mine. ("One must admire the perceptiveness and logic of your Englishman Locke, yet I am drawn more to Leibnitz and Schopenhauer for inviting humanity into the thin air of philosophy and to Nietzsche for his fire.") Heavier, brawnier than he, with a vocal capacity from whispersoft to booming, I'd not stew over using my physical advantage to counter his softer subtle tones though doing so sparingly, to come off as a hailfellow with the generosity not to bully one weaker. I labored to refine my storytelling skills to display no weakness in Vasile's presence while binding Emily's attention to me.
A wasteland was that dinner table, with ourselves a mere three clustered at one end of this table capable of seating eighteen. In an expansive diningroom that could handle the mix of occupations and personalities of a cafe, where speculation, song, story and banter could blossom into camaraderie, Vasile's table was designed for hierarchy, not democracy. With Vasile presiding from his end-chair and Ilie standing-by, awaiting the proper moments to serve, pour or clear away, the table ordained the authority of wealth in elegant goldrimmed handpainted china plates worthy of any national museum, elaborate monogrammed silverware posing on fine linen tablecloths, singing wine glasses burnished under a glittering chandelier. Priding myself I could revel in luxury anywhere, I of working-class Irish descent lacked Vasile's and Emily's ease with affluence. Their smiles and gestures flowed, fluent as prized wines in the thin fine wineglasses they tilted at their lips. I wondered, does my lower-class upbringing rule my vision, lure me into blind envy, and does their easy familiarity with wealth suit them better to each other than to a plebeian such as myself?
Aware Emily disliked interruptions while she worked, I timed my approaches with care. One day I showed her some nature poems I'd ground out, a step above doggerel that nevertheless served their purpose, winning a revival of her special smile and a night in her bedroom. When she relaxed, I dared inquire, "How do you feel about Vasile?"
"How do I feel?" I waited out her stalling. "Why do you ask?"
An edge to her tone warned me not to raise her hair-trigger defenses.
"Is it tricky having an employer who's also a friend?”
"Easier than not. He's your friend too, isn't he?"
"I wouldn't say we're close, he and I."
She frowned. "You don't like him? He likes you. Treats you well."
"He's a smooth one. I can't get a grip on him."
"A personality conflict?"
"'Tis more a matter of trust."
"Trust is a two-way street." Her scrutiny discomfited me. Her tone changed to sympathy. "Ah. You think I'm close with him?" Be wary. Misspeak and I'm impaled on the stake of jealousy. Not a time for blarney. I opted for silence and an innocuous gaze. I heard strain in her voice. "I have to get along with my boss."
Unwise to complain, yet I had to reveal some quarter of myself. "I'm left to prowl the castle and the grounds like a hare looking for a cabbage in a plantation of weeds."
"Am I a cabbage now?" I didn't return her quick smile, which vanished almost at its creation. "This painting is a huge job. We'll be here a year at least. Let's make the best of it."
You'll be here another year, maybe I won't— ha, a new thought to marvel at. My lips tightened, not to speak it. Cheese it, Brendan: threats serve neither of us. She kissed me on the forehead and turned away to sleep. I lay on my back, letting thoughts rampage. Advantage hers. Two fish on a string are better than one. I cautioned myself, night thoughts transport demons. Daylight may exorcise them. In the morning I asked if she'd gotten a reply to her letter. Her eyes saddened as she shook her head. After her departure to the great hall, I sought out Dracul at the Mercedes gently sliding a piece of chamois over the boot, then squeezing out dribbles of moisture. Ever polite, watchful, he concentrated on his tasks to avoid empty confabulation with a foreigner. I asked if he'd mailed an envelope to America. Dracul's eyes withdrew, defensive. "Every day I post mail to many places."
"To New York?"
"Maybe. Not remember all mail.”
"You'd remember one to New York. Emily wrote the envelope.”
"I think, maybe.”
"No maybe. You'd know for damned sure if you did or didn’t."
"Yes, I remember!" He made a rare grin with raised eyebrows. "To New York. Yes, New York.”
"And Boston?”
"Maybe..." His eyes narrowed to study mine. "New York, I think.”
"And I know you'd lie for your boss," I muttered under my breath. Dracul wouldn't lie on a whim. He'd defend his master. "You would do anything the Count asked of you, I assume."
He kept his attention on his work. I held my stance until he yielded. "Of course."
"Because 'tis your job."
He looked at me. "I am not a clerk in a government office. I not sell shoelaces in the market."
"True, you're important here. Like family. You protect him."
"With my life!"
"You don't need to tell him so."
"He know."
"You use your judgment. You decide when he needs protection and how to protect him." Dracul's features went noncommittal, not having far to travel to get there. "If you see a danger you can act on it without first asking him. Without delaying for approval."
"I must," he muttered.
"And afterward, when he is safe, why tell him about it?”
"If danger is gone, no necessary to worry."
He faced me a second longer, ostensibly curious until he felt certain I'd not tell him why I pursued that line of thought, then he concentrated on running a finger across the shiny black bonnet of the Mercedes, testing its smoothness. I portioned out an ostentatious pause before walking off dissatisfied. I waited until Emily was in her daily clean-up before dinner. I never liked the sweet insidious smell of turpentine. "Are you certain your letter was mailed?"
She was wiping her palette dry. "Why shouldn't I think so?"
"Dracul thinks he mailed it. I don't trust him."
"I trust Vasile. His people obey him faithfully. What business is it of yours to go poking around his staff and my mail?"
"Would you ask the Count about your letter?"
"I won't insult him by questioning the honesty of his people."
"He should understand the letter's important to you."
"The letter was mailed and that's that. If I don't get a reply, it means my priggish sister is offended and disowns me." She forced a grim smile. "Now go get yourself ready for dinner."
I occupied my hours observing the household routines. Easy always to engage Ilie in conversation while he puttered on his chores. Sorina guarding her private stories with her life. Deferential of Emily, Sorina didn't conceal her suspicions of me, as if she detected some character flaw or a deformity of my skull imperceptible to everyone but me. With similar watchfulness I observed her treating Dracul no better, burying him with silence. Certainly the hunchback posed no potential challenge to her dominion over the kitchen. Dracul divided his daytimes between the Mercedes and the garden, rising ahead of the sun every morning and disappearing after his evening meal. I fancied he slept in a coffin in the depths of the castle.
Incarcerated in the Count's benevolence I was free to wander, with nowhere to go. Mind free, feet fettered. Finding some advantage in quietude, I filled sheets of paper with lines that seemed wise and clever until I read them the next day. Languid efforts don't pay off. I needed more— bookstores and city lights and the banter of varied company to fill long summery days. At dinner and lunch I consumed second and third glasses of the bumptious red wines that so well accompany the rich meaty local cuisine. I rode with a taciturn Dracul to the nearby small nondescript village to help carry supplies and glimpse a smidgen of the universe outside the castle grounds. Worrying that like a neglected housewife I was losing the rogue in myself, a wellspring of my creative spirit, I could, as many greats had done, return to my roots. I vivified ancient scenes: my father younger strutting about, my mother's brisk efficient cooking and cleaning, neighbors such as Mrs. Gallagher bending to sweep her doorstep every day with her long whisk-broom, dawdling as her eyes scoured the neighborhood for sources of gossip, Mr. O'Riley's fascination with the much-younger Walsh daughter oblivious to his existence, picturesque folk but not compelling. Such the dampening spell the Count cast.
He released an unexpected man in him the evening he and I waited at the diningtable while Emily having just finished her cleanup was upstairs dressing. He inquired about my family's health. "Quite robust," I replied.
"My father and mother died young. Relatively speaking, of course. My father was the archetypical aristocrat, noble beyond the nobility of the day. A childhood ambition of mine was to exceed him. I never could attain his loftiness."
Ah, asking about my family as prelude to talking of his. "A good father instills sound goals," I declared in a tone similar to my own paternal parent's.
"My father overpraised my youthful successes, strongly reproved me for any failings…" He paused, unaccustomed to confessing. "…of which I committed many. In every way possible I endeavored to make him proud of his only son. He urged me to play polo. I became quite skilled at it. In his eyes a success." The Count was confiding as to an old friend. "I hated polo. Charging back and forth across a long wide field. Mallets swinging wildly. Collisions. I cannot tolerate abuse of horses. I esteem them as companions. I would never subject a noble spirit as my Lovan's to such violence. Lovan has royal blood. We understand each other perfectly."
Tempted to advise him to relinquish Emily in favor of Lovan, I allowed I'd best hold my silence on her, instead veering into a generality. "All great and small creatures seek to be understood, in what for them passes as understanding."
Wildflowers flaunted remembrance of my joyful first sight of gentians in a green meadow when I was four. During the summer I opened the iron gate and took long solitary walks on the road armed with pencil and paper to invite inspiration, which seldom responded and when it did, spoke to a dissociation from my life. Though under the same sun, these mountains darkened my spirit as the meadows and forests of Donegal entranced me, where, as my father told, great golden eagles once soared above the uplands. One afternoon I sat on a roadside rock out of sight of Vasile's castle and scribbled hasty verses, trifled with them, scowled, crumpled into my pocket strained forays I couldn't dignify as poetry, accumulated dissatisfactions shunted into coarse quasihumorous wordplay, evident symptoms of disintegrating talent.
Do I demean you when my many memories of us
are launched by your fragrances
or the bite on a tongue tip as my blind food tester prowls
vulviformities of the valiant vulnerable
oft-vilified cleft? Do I deny the fullness of you
your flowering sensibilities
or do you--
when your urgent efflorescences enchant your pollinator?
Are we but smelly lures to promote the procreative
imperatives built in us,
prone to fallacious probing, fancying there love lurks?
Callow apothegms to color a brothel wall. Dessicated bones wired into a clanky skeleton, untouched by sublimity, yet my lexical extravagance and syntactical gymnastics served a purpose, burning out of me unsuspected cynicism, also distracting me from my imposed-upon self. From that latter realization followed another: writing poetry, good poetry decent or not, even the simple phrasings of my schooldays, proposed modica of insight. My Muse had ensnared herself in the tangles of my viscera and despaired of her lost freedom. I have too long been among minor literati and Americans.
The following evening, as Ilie was setting silverware and plates on the diningtable, Vasile announced, "I was on the telephone all afternoon. We are at war with Serbia."
I asked, "Why?"
"The day we met at Cafe Central, you remember the funeral procession? The archduke was heir to the throne. Now the Austrian-Hungarian Empire has started a war."
"Because of one man?”
Emily looked irritated, "One man or thousands, no matter. Wars are what empires do.”
"An empire needs to demonstrate power and control at all times,” asserted Vasile, "else it be demeaned as fraudulent.”
I asked, "The empire, 'tis us?"
"Transylvania is part of the empire.”
Emily worried, "What does that mean for us?”
"Very little. In these mountains we are— what do Americans say?"
"Out of the way?”
"Yes. Off the beaten path." After a thoughtful pause Vasile added, "For the present.”
I suggested to Emily, "We might consider going to back to France or Italy." She looked stunned at the suggestion of leaving her precious painting unfinished. Vasile said, "Europe is entangled in alliances and counteralliances. You are safe here."
As months passed, Vasile's reports on war declarations and battles confirmed his assessment. I missed city lights to alleviate the early darkness of looming mountains. Vigilant, silent, I watched Emily prance from one to another of the sheets of drawings spread across the carpeted stones of the great hall. On her easel rested an unfinished oil study of Vasile's head. I bellowed, "If I got drunk enough, I'd howl like the wolves," and she sent me a look combining disbelief and exasperation and resumed analyzing her sketches.
I was sleeping into midmorning and meandering along hallways crepuscular in daytime, tenebrous at night. After one nightfall, crossing the great hall in moonlight, I became cognizant of someone at an open window: Vasile in his customary dark perfectly tailored suit, absorbed in flamboyant constellations and the soft shadows cast by moonlight on the mountainsides. Tall, lean, his back to me, solitary in this isolated place, he bore no hint of loneliness, a marvel. Could he turn into a gigantic bat? I scolded myself for my deterioration into childishness. Wolves howled. I approached with heavy footsteps not to startle him. He didn't turn. "Beautiful animals, are they not?"
"I've seen them only in pictures."
"A pity. They move with serene mindful grace. They own the night.”
"I wouldn't want to meet them day or night."
He nodded. "Odd how animals that could kill us with ease avoid us. A formidable wolfpack will approach a single human with caution, watching for a hint of fear or a sign of a weapon. They observe us more than we know. How can a wolf who has never seen a man firing a gun know to avoid a man carrying one? Do you believe in racial memory?"
"It doesn't sound scientific."
"To the wolf mind, could this man have mythological power? An inheritance buried deep in instinct. Imagine meeting a myth in the forest, a Zeus who hurls thunderbolts."
"'Twould be a good story to tell."
"And be believed?"
"As we believe the verses of Shakespeare."
In a wry tone he asked, "Is there room for poetry in science?"
"You pose an eternal question."
He looked at me for the first time. His dark eyes flashed. His voice went stern. "A poet should know the obvious answer."
I knew what I didn't like, the noiseless slicing through flesh. He knows he has the advantage of me and makes no bones about it. Do I roar as one does advancing into pitched combat, I betray my weakness in this place of fine chill manners. Blood should not flow in silence, softly yielding its heat. However fine and noble is civilization, when it falters let shouts of anger be heard to the tops of the clouds. Aye, yet I know this: when anger may be a detriment, wisdom recommends restraint though it leaves one unmanned. How can one be and not be? All roads must lead to an ending if oft to other roads. The man Vasile, this carrier of light, dwells among shifting shadows and contains his awe of them by measuring their dimensions on stone walls. Small tight parcels of darkness lodge embedded among the stones.
A frequent sound of summer was rain splattering on the courtyard pavestones. Awakened one morning by a thunderstorm I padded barefooted into the hallway and for the first time saw Vasile's bedroom door open— a room for royalty, to be sure, with brilliant heavyweight wall hangings, complex rich carpeting and a wide fourposter bed with its purple curtains open, revealing twin pillows scrunched on the unmade bed. Sorina turned from a table near the bed carrying a tray of dirty dishes, silverware, a darkgreen wine bottle that looked empty and two wineglasses. Frowning she swept past me with the hard look of a policeman questioning a defiant witness, set down the tray, closed and locked the door and strode downstairs without a word. Not liking my surmises I followed her to the kitchen. Ilie and Dracul were having after-breakfast coffee. I poured myself a mug of coffee from the pot, discomfiting Sorina, who saw pouring coffee as her task. Perhaps defying some castle rule I carried my coffee to the great hall, where Emily was rummaging through a stack of oversized charcoal drawings of Vasile in different poses. She smiled. By the fall she'd be ready to order the enormous canvas from a dealer in Bucharest who would deliver it by truck, whose workers would stretch it in the great hall. Ambling to a window I studied the overcast. In this land viscous rain-swollen clouds could linger for weeks, release a sudden downpour and then turn white and scatter in sunshine. The treecovered mountains would glisten and the air again taste cool and smell fresh. Unease tweaked my thoughts. She looked up as if she'd read them. Was that a trace of worry in her eyes? I wouldn't voice the sternness I wanted to express. She tossed a thought into the emptiness between us. "For as long as we've been here, I know but scatters of Vasile. He's alone most of the time."
I kept my tone mild. "Is he lonely?"
"He seems not." She paused. "He keeps his own counsel."
An odd expression for an American, more likely to come from Vasile.
"He's about forty, you think?"
"Fortyfour."
She knew with precision. I frowned. "Ten years older than you."
She sounded distant. "I haven't been counting."
"Don't you think age difference can be a problem for couples?”
"I'm ten years older than you. It hasn't been a problem for us." She focused into my eyes. "Has it?"
In our oddly symmetrical numerology Vasile could be my father. I suppressed saying so, not a problem of mine until now. Having fathomed my restiveness toward Vasile, she proferred mollification, referring to ourselves as "us". I yielded. "No problem for me."
"Me neither."
Her little smile fell short. Should have launched a hug and a kiss. Neither of us moved. I yielded. "I'll let you get back to work," which with a sidelong glance she promptly did.
For three weeks, as weather permitted, she set up her easel outdoors, making quick charcoal sketches of the castle from different viewpoints, posing Vasile and the horse in various places, while Vasile smiled, amused, at her commands to move or gesture or be still. Watching her work could entertain me for a time, until I realized I was intruding on private moments and would leave to wander about the castle. In the grand hall and along passageways, as my echoing footsteps pursued me, I had to resist the temptation to turn and look where I knew I'd see no one. Their voices, faint, bouncing off the stones of other rooms discomposed my incidental thoughts into shards of regret, resentment, misgiving and, alas, malignity. I sought happier transports out under the plum, apple and cherry trees, where light breezes coursing the mountains, carrying the green aromas of a million trees, shunted me into wellings of pleasant disconcertment. How my life had changed since my spur-of-the-moment telephone call to my sister Deirdre prompted Emily’s leaving the Titanic to return to me. Flighty she was and myself spontaneous, or vice versa, now admitting, I do, our quickness to yield to impulse. I devolved in her eyes to an oversize downy puler. A multichambered stone cold shell of a castle enclosed me, itself enclosed as in an enameled jar by endless mountains.
Discovering in a sitting room four shelves of books in English, I reread three Dickens novels, read two by Twain and perused a volume each of English and American poets, escaping for a time my sense of isolation. Close on all sides presumptuous looming mountains curtailed my thinking and left incipient ideas stillborn. Standing in the courtyard I watched the sun sink without a true sunset. I dwelt on the curtailed winter days here, still many months away, when the mountains become high white walls dimming as the sun departs at noon. Foreshadowings of my future bred darksome thoughts.
In the lambent sunshine of an August early morning I walked in on Vasile and Emily in the diningroom wearing their city best. Ilie was carrying plates out to wash. Seeing me, Emily slumped slightly, apologetic, revealing they hadn't expected me up yet. "We're going to Bucharest for the day. Vasile has business there. I want to examine the canvas I ordered."
With a briefcase hanging from four fingers Vasile took her arm and guided her toward the door. I followed. "Hold up a moment. I'll go with you."
"You haven't had breakfast. We won't be stopping until Bucharest. Nothing there for you to do.”
"Emily, I want to go. Isn't that enough?"
"Some other time. We have a busy day ahead. We need to get going."
Peevish, I had to draw a line. "Alright, I do have something to do, pack my suitcase. You can be rid of me at the train station. Any train station."
"Don't be silly. We can talk when I get back."
As her aristocrat resumed walking, she turned to keep up with him. I needed to prove I wasn't bluffing. "Spare me ten minutes?"
Without deigning to look back Vasile told Emily, "We have a schedule to keep. If we hurry, we may get back tonight."
"You'll be rid of me forever," I called. "Am I not worth a ten-minute delay?"
Dracul was behind the wheel. The Mercedes, engine running, pointed at the open gate. They got into the backseats. I charged across the courtyard toward the car. As Dracul gunned the engine, I raised my arm, fist tight, in outcry remulating my father's best bellow: "Blighters! A tinker's dam to you both! Now me Irish is up!”
The car was through the gate and rattling on the wooden beams of the bridge. Small chance they'd have heard me. I strode past Ilie in the doorway and comandeered a chair at the kitchen table. Sorina cracked two eggs into a fryingpan, pointedly not looking at me. She knew more than she'd ever tell me. Ilie joined me at the table with a mug of coffee and said it was a beautiful day and, despite Ilie's calming presence, I almost flubbed a simple yes. I nursed my coffee until Sorina and Ilie left to work in the garden. Wrapping a chunk of cheese, a cold sausage and a loaf of bread in wax paper I hastened to the stable, put the food in a pair of saddlebags, instructed Nicu, the stable boy, to feed Lovan and left with the saddlebags. Slipping around the castle on the riding path out to the courtyard to assure myself the gate was still open, I tiptoed inside to Vasile's office, which was never locked as no one dared to enter without knocking. Today it was locked. Vasile and Emily had discussed me. Such sly distrust. A ten-inch ring of keys, I knew, hung in the kitchen beside the door. Many keys. I tried nine before one opened the office door. Tall windows behind the desk brightened the neat businesslike office. New and old bound volumes and plain paperbacks filled the bookshelves. Glancing over three oaken filing cabinets, a typewriter, telephone, other office trappings, I snatched two preprinted lettersize envelopes. Shutting the office door without troubling to lock it, I replaced the keys. In my room I pocketed my passport and crammed clean clothes into the saddlebags, topping them with the envelopes and my maps. I waited in the stable until Lovan had finished eating and then, as Nicu watched wide-eyed, I placed the saddle on the great stallion's back, adjusted and cinched it and attached the saddlebags, not easily even for a sixfooter like myself. I took my time fitting the bridle to avoid agitating Lovan, humming a melody to calm myself as the words rolled through my brain,
"…I saw her first and knew
her dark hair would weave a snare
that I might one day rue."
Winking at horrified Nicu, I rode Lovan out to the courtyard. The great horse's hooves clattered on the flagstones and thumped across the bridge.
I set a steady easy pace, not to tire Lovan early. In the afternoon, we drank from a roadside creek. At dusk near a meadow Lovan grazed and I dined on my provisions. When a nearfull moon rose above the trees, I resumed my ride between black trees under ghostgray mountainsides. At distances I couldn't estimate, wolves howled. I embraced a reliving of Jonathan Harker's desperate escape from Dracula.
"We can talk," Emily had said, perhaps to acknowledge we hadn't had a meaningful conversation in months. Out of pique I'd run off on a premature assumption she intended to announce we were no longer a couple, ask me to accept as a friend the nobleman with whom she now dallied. My reward a rail ticket? What a fine old euphemism that was, dally, cover for their sweaty bareass tumbling in the sheets. We can talk, aye, words seldom promising. She could also have wished to explain that nighttime episode in her room had amounted to nothing more than a casual talkfest or her surrender to a moment of weakness or worse, desire, while I languished. Possibly she intended to reassure me, confess she'd neglected me, plead for a fresh start. I deplored my impulsive departure, my rejection of hope to avoid the pain of futility. Shifting, I could rationalize her behavior in defiance of my own intuitions. No, ever capricious, she'd flown away, seized upon a luxurious castle and a rockstable Count who'd allow her to reign as she'd been destined since her Newport birth. Cease the back-and-forth, Brendan, consign her to the past. You'll never know...
A distant flash of light alerted me. Headlight beams swung into bright discs at a distant bend in the road ahead. I pulled Lovan up and peered into the darkness under the trees. Finding a break in the underbrush I dismounted and led Lovan into the darkness and waited. The passing car crunched the stony roadway, spitting dust and pebbles. Vasile's Mercedes. If Vasile retired for the night unaware his horse was missing, I'd have a full day's lead on any pursuit. If someone reported the theft when he arrived at the castle, Vasile would telephone police and start an immediate search himself. I re-mounted Lovan. I'd ride until the moon dipped to the treetops, then hide out for the night.
Without a watch, gauging the passage of time by the moon, I conjectured I'd traveled three hours. The great stallion's pace had slowed. In the dense mountain brush I sought a concealed shelter close to the road. I dismounted, still adrenalin-energized, unlike the exhausted Lovan. Above the treetops a beam of light was creeping through the darkness, flickering among invisible trees, the headlights of a car descending a hairpin curve I'd navigated some three miles back. Fainter shimmers wavered behind the headlights. Vasile was on his way, searching the roadside with a handheld electric lantern.
Having better odds on the driverside of the road, I pushed through the brush where it looked thin. I maneuvered deep among the trees to a patch of meadow. Hitching Lovan to a tree I slipped back, crouching behind roadside bushes, hoping the hard ground resisted hoofprints, wondering what they did to horse thieves in Transylvania. Lovan was too magnificent. Though short of cash I wouldn't risk trying to sell a more splendid horse than I'd be expected to own. At a train station I'd tie the horse and write to Vasile informing him of Lovan's location. I'd leave an envelope with Vasile's address in the saddle straps, proof I'd only borrowed Lovan. I lowered my head as the headlights and rumble of the Mercedes passed, then rested on a patch of weeds, back braced against a tree, prepared to wait out Vasile's return to the castle. I caught myself dozing a few times. At last shrub tops and lowhanging branches jounced in headlight beams, brightening fast. The roar resounded, passing, diminishing. Vasily had given up and was heading home.
I relaxed. Enough moonlight remained to go several miles farther. As I rose to my feet, odd noises in the woods alerted me, followed by prolonged spinefreezing screams unlike any I'd heard before, amid pounding and thrashing in the brush. I stood stockstill, yielding to an instinctive paralysis. When silence returned, I ventured back toward Lovan, tentative, guarded, hearing sounds I couldn't identify. I peered over some low brush. On the dim ground a black changeable silhouette blobbed and, as I tried to decipher shifts and movements within it, the blackness grew a bulge, roundish, topped with pointed canine ears. Greenish eyes flashed. In a low crouch I edged backward, nose inches from the ground, then turned still crouching, letting my fingertips trail to catch branches that might rustle, to brush aside twigs that might crackle under my feet. On the road I took off my shoes and began picking heedful steps. After some hundred yards I dared put my shoes back on and run, and run I did, hard, fast, until I had to stop and brace my hands on my knees, gasping. For long minutes I listened: a repetitious owl hoot, a sleepless bird cry, intermittent sussurations by unseen creatures I couldn't identify. Unable to listen while running, still breathing hard, I resumed at a walk.
As moonlight faded, black treetop silhouettes intruded into a starry black sky. Dawn would be hours off. My strength was evaporating. I stumbled into weeds and skinny boughs. Couching face and eyes in an elbow I groped to a solid tree trunk with low branches and began climbing, reaching for invisible branches, bumping against others. Wolves didn't climb trees, did they? Above the thickest low branches, cradling myself where two forked, I looped my belt under one arm and across my chest and shoulder and around a solid branch and dozed in fits and starts until daylight.
Stiff, cramped, too little rested, I resumed walking, listening for approaching motor vehicles. As the morning wore on, hunger and tiredness took over. Loudly I bemoaned my saddlebagged bread, cheese and sausage, the wolves' dessert. Let Vasile find me if he was still making the effort. I'd defend myself with sticks and stones, without guilt or remorse, with the let-come-what-may freedom of fatalism. I'd defy this entire land of endless wooded mountains sparse in farms and villages, harbouring not one pub with good draft, stout, laughter and cheer. From a miraculous cool spring burbling out of a mountainside I scooped water with my hands, splashed myself as I gulped all I could, satisfying thirst, appeasing hunger. In the multiplicity of green leaves some had to be edible, I conjectured. I bit into four species and spat them out. In midafternoon I gorged on wild roadside blackberries. I pushed onward until sunset. A mere seven vehicles and horsecarts had trekked the road. At each, I scrambled into the brush. I'd not risk being turned over to police. A full moon rose. I walked fast, listening for wolves, distrusting the silence. When the moon descended, I climbed a tree, finding the climb harder. I was weakening. I did sleep better and longer, abbreviating my available daylight the next day.
At sunset of my third day, at a cluster of tents and thatchroofed huts, a tribe of families in unfamiliar native costume who spoke no English gave me bread and a few raw vegetables. So poor were they I considered offering them money from my meager wherewithal. My red hair amused the children, who'd never seen such a wonder, reminding me to watch for police looking for an Irishman. I sat on a fallen treetrunk and watched the children's excited play with a hollow rubber ball as the parents congregated nearby and talked until as dusk deepened they called the children home. Allowed to sleep in an empty hut I quaffed the silence. The simple joys amid deprivation of these people and the unearned prestige of the wealthy businessman in his high castle moldered in my thoughts. Unbidden words sprang…
Empire, who needs one?
There, touch the flametip in a grain of sand
hear the nightbird cry for the missing sun
see the heart of darkness in broad daylight.
On the road by early morning I mounted a crag. Far ahead the road descended. By midafternoon I arrived at a village. At the only market I bought vegetables and a widebrimmed peasant hat. Around sunset I trudged into a small town bisected by a railroad line, overrun with thousands of armed troops sitting in trucks or standing in loose formations and sergeants clamoring over the rumble of a long line of military vehicles facing the direction from which I'd come. At the cafe I sidled to a table in a dim corner. Under my broad hatbrim bent low I melted to a shadow in the shadows. The police would be coping with too much confusion to notice me. I suppered on mititei and half-listened to noisy chatter. An army officer at the next table quoted Pascal. In Paris I'd absorbed enough French to lean over and, eschewing English, ask the officer what was going on and deduce the gist of his reply: Romania was at war with Transylvania. What local policemen now would waste time chasing a dinky horsethief? I might slip aboard the next train in the midst of the military. I’d skirt the war concentrated in central Europe and wend the periphery, starting with Greece or Italy. There among an abundance of new acquaintances gifted at storytelling I could reciprocate with my own adventures. A caution. I should exercise wisdom regarding whom to regale with my tale of the Count, the stallion and the wolves. With pints unavailable and the local red wines dense and puissant, I tilted my hat circumspectly low and sipped strong black coffee.
Don Dussault lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His history includes a BA and MA in English literature and postgrad study in linguistics. He's placed several pieces in literary publications and is wrapping up a multivoiced saga of a dysfunctional family.