The Best of Electric Velocipede (33 page)

“Yes.” She replied eventually, her eyes clouding over again. She seemed troubled, as if she was being forced to remember something she would rather have forgotten. “Yes, exactly. Like Murnau and my vampires.”

She paused, and then with an evident effort, turned to face me. “Zora,” she said in a voice so small it made her seem half her age, “there is something I have to show you. I’ve been putting it off all day. All night. Since yesterday . . . But there’s no escaping it. Will you come back with me to my apartment?”

I am ashamed to say I hesitated. It was only our second meeting, after all, and what I did know of her, really? Was I ready for the escalation of intimacy that was implied by her question on such a casual acquaintanceship?

But Frida, seeing me draw back, misinterpreted my reasons. “It’s all right,” she assured me, “you don’t have to meet my parents. My father is in Olomouc, and my mother is almost certainly at the Scheinpflugs. We shall be quite alone, except for the maid. It’s just that I don’t have my things with me. Won’t you please come?”

Well, of course I went.

She led me out of the gallery and back in the direction of the Slovanka Cafe, and then to a No. 16 tram. It was heading for the municipal cemetery, I noticed, and I wondered for a moment if, despite appearances, she might not have more in common with Murnau than she was admitting. But after five stops, she leaped up and pulled the bell cord.

We found ourselves on a steeply sloping street, lined with luxurious, but slightly old-fashioned, Art Nouveau apartment blocks, with a view out over the parks and rooftops of the southern suburbs. It was not hard to see why the medieval kings of Bohemia had chosen this particular hill for their vineyards.

“It’s spectacular, isn’t it?” Frida had stopped in front an ornate five-story wedding cake of a building, painted an improbable shade of chartreuse, but I assumed she meant the panorama of the hills to the south, with their faint hint of green meadows and blue-flowering chicory, just on the far side of the railway line. Something about the light always gives it away, that transition between the new city street and the old rural suburb. I knew it only too well from Paris—from all those absurdly over-optimistic small towns on the edge of New York, and before that, from London.

“Well, this is it . . .” Frida had found her tongue again, the discomposure of her departure from the gallery apparently forgotten.

She opened the engraved glass street door and flipped a suggestively round, brass toggle to light up the heavy, stone staircase. I gazed at the light fitting in wonder. It looked, for the world, like some hapless water-nymph’s ice-puckered, pre-Raphaelite nipple, and Frida had just tweaked it. Who designed these things?

I paused for a few moments on the threshold, and briefly—fleetingly—I was seized by a strange sense of anxiety, like a voyeur who is finally about to commit her first act of trespass. But then it passed, to be replaced by a rush of hilarity. I felt ten again. It was all I could do, not to seize Frida by the hand and run up the stairs, skipping and jumping and belting out nursery rhymes like a hoyden.

I think Frida must have caught something of my mood, too, because she laughed out loud, and started to take the stairs two at a time. By the time we reached her door, we were both quite out of breath, and though, of course, it’s easy to say this with hindsight, I wonder, now, how much of that was simply down to our having raced up four flights of a very steep stairwell. Because, undeniably, I was excited by Frida. I was attracted by her wildly unconventional, angular good looks, and her charm and her hospitality. I was entranced by her scholarship and her urbanity and her brilliance. And as she searched for her keys, I realized that, somewhat unexpectedly, I was looking forward to this visit with far more than my usual half-hearted sense of anticipation.

What was it that this strange and beautiful young woman could possibly want with me? What was her secret? And what was it that she had so urgently needed to show me, that we had abandoned the equally brilliant Toyen’s private view?

The apartment itself, when we entered it, was huge and quiet, with high ceilings and ornate plaster mouldings, and an extensive lining of books and paintings from the end of the previous century. Evidently her parents’. But for all their age, they were clearly still well-loved and carefully tended. One picture in particular, tucked away between an impressive library of the more obscure French symbolists, and a well-thumbed edition of Zeyer—evidences, no doubt, of that earlier generation’s idle and bookish childhood—caught my eye almost immediately. It depicted the half-length figure of a young man with a camellia, his eyes dark and brooding under strangely vulnerable, hooded brows, his skinny body draped asthenically in the folds of an over-sized frock coat. If it were not for the wispy brown line of his moustache, he would have looked almost exactly like Frida.

Frida saw me examining it, and just for a few seconds, she looked mortified. Like a pilgrim who discovers, at journey’s end, that the promise of palm trees she has been pursuing all day is, after all, only a mirage.

“Your father?” I guessed.

“Yes,” she nodded sheepishly, and I could almost taste her embarrassment. “He used to be quite good friends with Svabinsky, when he was younger . . .” She said it, as if she was making excuses. But then, who doesn’t feel the need to apologise for their parents?

A maid—in uniform, no less—chose that moment to stick her head out of the kitchen, but Frida dismissed her, and the girl left us alone to contemplate the mixed blessing of families.

“Come, let me show you my study . . .”

She led me down a narrow corridor to what turned out to be the front of the house, and into a large, sunny room, centred around an alcove with a view of the street and a huge wooden desk. There were bookshelves everywhere, and papers weighed down by fragments of pottery, and a sofa which looked as if it might also double up as a day-bed. A strange mixture of straw masks and carefully-framed pieces of folk art hung on the walls, while a glass-fronted cabinet held what seemed at first sight to be a pile of rusting manacles.

“Sit . . .” Frida waved me over to the sofa, while she herself wandered over to her desk. She seemed anxious again, I realized.

“So this is where you wrote your masterwork?” I asked, only half-teasing.

She nodded absentmindedly, flushed and seemingly intent on her papers.

“It looks cozy. Lived in . . .” —I continued, trying to put her at her ease— “. . . a powerhouse. I’m impressed.”

And I was. Who, at our age, had a library like this? Of course, it must have helped to come from an academic family, but still . . . I couldn’t imagine most of our peers investing the time and energy to assemble such an extensive private collection of academic journals and monographs, before their twenty-eighth birthday. Tea-dances and second-rate imitations of last year’s Paris fashions would have been more their kind of thing. It was only at this moment, I think, that I fully began to appreciate what a serious scholar she was, quite apart from being a brilliant one. There was a strength and a passion here, under the surface of this dusty room, that even an outsider could sense with the application of but a little empathy. Indeed, being confronted so suddenly with the private realm of her creative mind was almost shocking. Like seeing her naked.

And would that really be so bad?
—a still, small, provocative voice seemed to whisper behind me.

I glanced up at her rangy form, as she rummaged in the drawers of her desk, and had to admit that it would not.

Then she turned with an expression of triumph, and came over to sit beside me, waving an untidy wad of papers like a flag of victory.

“Here, I wanted to show you these . . .” She said. “These are the vampires you read about yesterday—the burials . . .”

She brushed a thin layer of dust off a thick, brown manila folder, and a photo spilled out. It showed a contorted human skeleton, half-buried in the dirt, with a hole in its head and a set of rusty iron manacles chaining each hand to the opposite foot. An archaeologist’s measuring rod counted out the centimetres clinically in smart black and white checks to the left of it, while a handful of modern silver coins had been spread out for scale to its right. It seemed this particular vampire had been little more than a metre tall by the time it was safely dead and buried, and the survivors had left it to rot forever in its peculiar Central Bohemian purgatory.

“From Celakovice, east of Prague,” said Frida. “And this one’s from Uherske Hradiste . . .”

She pulled out another photo, and this time I was confronted by a skeleton with multiple fractures in both legs, and a large slab of what appeared to be granite crushing the fragile bones of its rib cage.

I sized up the folder with my gaze, and wondered how many more unspeakable human destinies it could contain—how many more examples of an only too readily conceivable cruelty, how many perverse testaments to the even-handedness of fate? How many expressions of the human capacity to create its own worst tragedies? But Frida, evidently well used to these pictures by now, seemed hardly affected by their images of pain and suffering. She simply reached into the folder and fished out an oversize sheet of cartridge paper, which I could see contained some kind of pencil sketch, highlighted with dabs of watercolor.

“This is the one that is really peculiar . . .” She said, passing it over to me. “This is the one that I came here to show you.”

I took it carefully in both hands, and spread it out on my knees to catch the light. There had been a slight catch in her throat as she spoke to me, and now, as I examined the image, I heard her suppress a sharp intake of breath.
What could it be about this picture that was so important to her?
—I wondered.
And why was she watching me so intently?

I looked down at the drawing again, and saw that it depicted a young woman with smooth, pale skin and long, reddish-gold hair, lying on the short, green turf of what appeared to be a closely-cropped pasture. Cowslips and daisies dotted the grass, and a line of crumbly white boulders ran down one side of the paper, at the edge of the greensward. With just a minimum of effort I could imagine the buzzing of the insects and the crackling of the soil in the summer heat. The picture was nicely done.

It was the girl that was the main focus, though. The artist had dressed her up in what was evidently meant to be her best white smock, bound around the waist with a thin hemp rope, and embroidered over the breasts in a typically Slavic pattern of semi-abstract red, blue and brown flowers. I knew that style of embroidery all too well: from the Bohemytown grandmothers that my relatives had always liked to talk about, to the Ruthenian folk-art I had seen just the previous afternoon, in a small gallery near the Lucerna. It was very much of its place.

The girl’s eyes were closed and her face was calm, as if she was sleeping. Only her pallor indicated that anything might be amiss.

“She’s beautiful,” I said spontaneously.
And somehow naggingly familiar
, I added at the back of my mind, silently.

And then, all of a sudden, I realized why the portrait was so profoundly disturbing: for belatedly, I noticed that the girl’s head was no longer attached to its shoulders. At some point, before she had been laid out on the grass, she had been crudely decapitated. And the red circle on her temple, which I had at first taken to be a birth mark, was in actuality, as I could now see, a painfully irregular drill-hole. And instead of hands and feet, she had only stumps. Her severed limbs were laid out neatly in a grisly quadrangle at the edges of the paper, like giant, mutated butterflies, caught up in a bizarre mating ritual on the edge of the other world. Worst of all, though, was the hint of a bloodstain that marred the pure white folds of her shift near the crotch, as if her demented neighbors had wanted to make sure that, even in death, she could not come back to breed monsters.

I felt my arms and neck starting to itch. It didn’t bear thinking about.

“Who . . . What is it?” I stuttered, my voice thick with shock.

“Another burial . . .” Frida replied. “I reconstructed it.”

“You?” I must have sounded incredulous.

Frida nodded. “We all learn to draw, out in the field, it comes with the profession.”

And then, finally, it dawned on me, why the girl had seemed so familiar . . .
She was my spitting image
. Perhaps a little anaemic after the ordeal she had just been through, perhaps a little idealized, but even in death there was no mistaking it. She had my own face and my own complexion, my own hair and my own hands—what was left of them—my own build and my own body . . . We were so alike, we might have been hatched out of the same swan’s egg in some old Russian fairy tale. Looking down at the drawing was like peering into the quicksilver depths of an especially macabre antique mirror.

But how was that possible? I glanced up at Frida measuringly. She couldn’t possibly have had the time to produce work of this quality in the last twenty-four hours, no matter what her talent.

She shrugged. “Last night, I wasn’t sure,” she continued, perhaps with a touch of embarrassment. “It was only when I got home and dug out the portrait . . .”

“You
dug it out
?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve had it for weeks. I know people are never quite the same in the flesh, but it is you, isn’t it?”

I said nothing, struggling to come to terms with the impossibility of what she had just told me.

“Maybe I dreamed you,” Frida suggested. There was a peculiar, almost pleading tone to her voice.

Well, yes. Or maybe she had evoked me by some kind of sympathetic magic she had picked up through her folklore studies. Or maybe, just maybe, she had already seen my photo in
This Quarter
, and it had influenced her subconsciously. Though if this picture was a representative sample of her dreams, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what kind of demands she liked to make on her real-life friends and lovers.

“So tell me, why do you think they chopped her hands off?” I asked, more for the sake of avoiding an awkward silence, than from any real curiosity. But Frida leapt on the topic with evident relief and an unfeigned enthusiasm.