The Third Antichrist (4 page)

By the end of the week he would be a walking nightmare. His hair bedraggled. His clothes unwashed. The children unfed. If one of Dracul’s mother’s exoduses coincided with the harvest, Adrian Lupei would simply abandon his fields in disgust.

‘Zina, Zina,’ he would shout around the village.

‘He is hexed,’ the villagers would say. ‘The Gypsy
vrajitoarea
witch has hexed him. Such things always result when one race marries another. Look. Even her name is hexed. Zina means “a stranger”, and Samana means “one who wanders”.’

Dracul had loved his mother. She had been wild and unpredictable; as likely as not to strike him as to cuddle him. But when she turned good – when she was happy – it was a magic time for him and Antanasia. She would take them into the woods and show them herbs and roots and the medicinal bark of trees, and explain superstitions and folk myths. She would teach them about animal spoor, and the significance of each beast in the forest. And she would tell them Gypsy stories, of her ancestors, and the strange things they had done, or had done to them.

Once, she told them of Conduc
ă
tor Ion Antonescu, his antiziganism, and his role in the wartime purging of her extended Roma family.

‘Antonescu’s people took my grandmother, my grandfather, my father, and his six brothers and sisters, and transported them all to Transnistria. Then Antonescu stole the gold they had hidden in the shafts of their horse cart, and he killed them with the typhus. Only my father escaped from the camp, for the typhus spared him, and he was still strong enough, and young enough, despite the starvation rations, to be able to walk back home. But he was a changed man. On his way out to Transnistria he had seen many bad things. He had seen a pregnant woman shot, and her baby, still alive, begin struggling for life inside her. This, because she could no longer walk fast enough with the weight she was carrying in her stomach. Again, in Transnistria, he and his family were forced to eat dogs, and moles that had been skinned, and the slugs that fed on roadside weeds. If they were lucky, during the height of the summer, they might secure freshwater mussels from the River Bug, or barter for a little food with the local population. But the sickness proved too much for them, and all, save my father, died. In this way the authorities murdered untold numbers of our people. Raped untold numbers of our women. Poisoned our future. Shut down our past. But nobody mourns us. Nobody remembers. Only the survivors. And they will not talk.’

‘Why, mama? Why will they not talk?’

‘A wise man once said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”’

‘What does that mean, mama?’

‘I cannot tell you. Some things must always remain a mystery.’

The last time his mother ran away from their father, she never came back. Or not alive, at least.

Villagers found her body near the town of C
ă
lara
ş
i. There was talk of witchcraft, and a possible lynching. Some even whispered of a Black Mass – a
Slujb
ă
Neagr
ă
– held near a willow grove. At first, his father had been suspected, but villagers could testify that Adrian had gone nowhere during her absence – and certainly not the 50 kilometres to C
ă
lara
ş
i. And everyone knew, as well, that Adrian loved his Zina, and had never raised a hand to her. Or at least not out of proportion to her wrongdoings. A certain amount of beating was good for a woman, and kept her in line – particularly if she was a Gypsy. This had been the village’s view of the matter. And anyway, a single woman should not travel unaccompanied – what had the hussy expected?

The police had finally agreed – after the payment of an appropriate sum from Adrian in recompense for their efforts – to leave the mystery of her murder unsolved. She had been a Roma, after all – a
L
ă
utari,
of the tribe which traditionally supplied musicians for weddings, feasts and funerals – and therefore not significant in the greater scheme of things.

Dracul eased himself to one side. He groaned, and fell back onto the scraped-out stone plinth. How had he been transported here? Surely the old monk could not have carried him the 200 metres from the hidden crypt to the main part of the cave monastery alone? And then down the narrow flight of stairs, and all the way to the monk’s dormitory? Such a thing was an impossibility for one old man. And what about the dead man? And the chauffeur? And the astrakhan coat? The police would come and take him away, and then all would be lost. He would be as his mother’s family. They would find out he was half Gypsy, and they would kill him.

Dracul began to cry. He had not cried since his mother’s death, and at that time he had thought that he would never cry again. But now he wept long and hard – and as he wept, pictures passed through his head. It was as if all his previous life was being wept out of his body, and he was becoming someone other – someone harder, more unforgiving. Dracul knew that in the future, if he was to survive, he must take what he wanted, just like the man he had killed. That he must force people to his way of thinking, and thereby dominate them. That if he did not do this, he would be lost – his life a worthless cipher, like his father’s.

When Dracul looked up from his weeping, he realized that the old monk was watching him from a corner of the stone dormitory. And that he was holding a bowl in one hand, and a wooden ladle in the other. And that his weeping had moved the old man, whose face now bore the tracks of his own tears down the craggy runnels in his skin.

Strangely, though, the thought struck Dracul that the old monk’s tears were acting as a torment for him, and not as a release. As if they were being shed, not in sympathy for the young man who lay there, injured and groaning on his stone cot, but rather in lamentation for his immortal soul.

6

Dracul remained in the monastery for ten days. The old monk tended to him, and fed him, and washed him, and saw to all his needs, but never once did the monk speak to him, or betray by sign or deed what had become of the dead man. Or of how Dracul had been transported to the monastery.

Dracul accepted this reticence on the monk’s part. It was just. He suspected that the monk hated him. Even feared him. But it was also clear that the monk was being driven by his faith to act towards Dracul in a charitable manner. This weakness on the part of the monk suited Dracul. The dynamic, he felt, was solely to his advantage. He was recuperating while the monk was suffering. Which was the way things ought to be.

Whilst the monk did not talk to Dracul, it was not strictly true that the pair did not communicate. During mealtimes, the monk would sit in a corner of the stone dormitory and read to Dracul from the Bible.

At first, Dracul was minded to object. Why should he be forced, alongside the pain from his wounds, to be pained also by the tedium of the monk’s biblical readings? Couldn’t the monk take himself off somewhere else to read his Bible, and leave Dracul alone with his thoughts? But after a while, Dracul found himself carried away by the stories – which were either from Revelation, or, failing that, from the Gospel and Epistles of St John the Evangelist – to such an extent that he began actively to look forward to them.

In his everyday life, there had been little cause for Dracul to study the Bible. The Communist regime, which he had always lived under, frowned on all forms of religiosity. Bibles were outlawed at the school he attended. Some of the women in the village, it was true, still supported the old ways, and the men, in secret, bowed and made the sign of the cross before the old shrine in the woods when they happened to pass it on their way through to their fields, but religion was explicitly disfavoured – its teachings marginalized. Curses, however, remained biblical, and there were still priests who travelled around the local villages and held services in secret, so that those who did not care to worship publicly might do so in private, and without endangering either their Party membership or their subventions.

But religion per se had been sidelined for so many years now that a twelve-year-old boy was hardly likely to understand either the soul or the point of it. This, clearly, the old monk hoped to change. But why, then, did he read to Dracul only about the coming Apocalypse? And Armageddon? And the nature and form of the Beast? Why didn’t he read to Dracul about Jesus Christ, and his sacrifice, and the translation of the world through the power of grace?

Either way, Dracul found that he far preferred the end-of-the-world stuff. When you measured God against the Devil, it was pretty clear to Dracul that the Devil won hands down every time. Good people, such as his sister Antanasia, would always be used, and abused, and stricken under their thumb by the bad people of this world – bad people like him, and his father, and those men from the village who got bored on Friday nights at the prospect of sleeping yet again with their wives, and fancied a bit of fresh young flesh. And had the money to pay for it, of course.

Sometimes Dracul wondered whether his sister secretly enjoyed what took place? Otherwise, why would she stay around for it? He tried hard to think his way into her mind, but found himself totally at a loss to understand her. If such a thing ever happened to him, he would wreak a terrible revenge on all those who perpetrated it. Perhaps women were different that way? Perhaps they didn’t respond in the same way as men?

Or maybe what his grandfather had told Dracul was true, and Eve really had caused the downfall of Man in the Garden of Eden? And Eve’s earthly life, and that of all her female descendants, was designed as a penance to make up for that disgrace? This would explain all that happened to Antanasia very well indeed. She, and victims like her – this stupid old monk living alone in his cell, for instance – had been specifically born to carry the evils of the world on their backs.

If the choice came down to the two of them – the old monk and his sister – Dracul decided that he would prefer being Antanasia. At least she laughed from time to time, and took pleasure in serving him. Unlike the monk, who walked around like a man who has just seen his entire family slaughtered in front of his eyes. Maybe one day Antanasia would have a child from one of the men she serviced, and fulfil herself that way? Or maybe he would give her a child himself? Stranger things had happened.

But then Dracul thought of his mother. Now there was a woman who knew how to make a man suffer. How she had goaded his father, Adrian, with her absences. However much he beat her, still she left whenever the fancy took her. In the darkest watches of the night, Dracul fell to wondering what tragedy had finally brought her down. Why had the people who killed her turned on her? And was there any truth in the rumour that she had been a witch?

Dracul could feel his brain congesting with all the thoughts that were forcing their way inside his head. He had never in his life spent so much time not doing anything. Had so much time simply to think. But the wound to his ribs made it impossible for him to move without darts of agony flaring through his flanks and chest.

When he was at his lowest ebb he fantasized a scenario in which his father would have the whole village out looking for him, fearing that he had been kidnapped or eaten by bears. But privately he knew the truth. His father would be relieved to have him out of the house so that he could have Antanasia to himself – and to the Devil with whatever might have happened to his vagabond, half-Gypsy son. When he finally came home, Adrian would beat him just for the fun of it, and just as he had done to his mother whenever she had returned from her jaunts. Dracul closed his eyes and let the anger seethe through him.

Towards the end of his stay at the monastery, when Dracul was at last able to sit up on his cot and begin to eat solids, the old monk read to him about the Second Coming of Christ. How the Parousia was foretold in scripture, and what form it would take. This, Dracul found even more interesting than St John’s gory revelations about the inevitable doom that awaited the world.

If such a doom was indeed coming, then surely it made all the more sense to make the most of the time one still had left? Surely, too, such a person as the Second Coming would have untold power over the stupid masses? To manipulate them and bend them to his will? And whenever anyone in the history of the world had exercised such power, Dracul knew from his lessons that – except in the exceptional case of Josef Stalin – they had all sooner or later come to abuse it. So the whole thing was a foregone conclusion, was it not? And didn’t bear speculating about. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’