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ONE. mors vincit omnia - “death conquers all”
Tanya died in the electrical storm, to the churning clouds and silver-blue cracks in the sky. It was all happening so fast, so slow: minutes, hours, days --- she knew she was dying because her heart stopped beating and the world was on fire, but the rain was still pouring down on her. She wanted, needed to climb out of her skin that ached full of pins and needles, out from her bones that burned like red iron in a blacksmith’s kernel. (The world was on fire but the rain was falling. Water was everywhere.) Nothing made any sense. She stayed still, for hours, maybe days and she died; she felt life slip away from her, like a rope keeping her tethered to the shore was cut.
She became a witness to her own cremation. She had always thought that death was painless; she was wrong. And the rain, the rain kept falling as the sky split open above her and everything inside her burned and charred and withered. But the death she waited for never came; not the kind of death Tanya knew anyways. When she finally opened her eyes to the clearing blue sky, thunder still rumbling far away, she was sure it was all a mistake: the skin like marble, the blinding thirst, the strength she never had.
Tanya was born in the electrical storm; it was her second birth (but really it was her death and it wasn’t like anything she wanted it to be).
*
TWO. in inceptum finis est – “the way you begin is how you will end”
Tanya’s grandmother used to tell stories of the rusalka, of the beautiful young women spirits who lived in the lakes. The tragedy of their deaths, betrayed by their lovers, and left to drown (some they say had taken their own lives); they all died violently and before their time. They were damned to live as spirits forever and they wander the shoreline, singing their sad songs and they would lure men away and kill him in retribution for what happened to them.
“Hush, my little child, do you hear that? It’s their song, a warning. Do not wander to the lakes at night, my dear one. They will take you away from me, for they all yearn for children, and they will keep you as their own. Do not wander too far alone, my love.” Watery gray eyes and hands like spider webs, her grandmother’s voice floated over the hearth like the trees whispering in the wind, and the night swallowed Tanya like a sinking stone.
For years, Tanya believed that she had become a rusalka. Because his hands were around her neck, when it happened and it all happened so fast, he pushed her into the lake water and held her there, just four inches below the surface. She screamed no please stop why please no stop why stop, until the cold water filled her lungs, her hair swirling around her like fabric, and the chill pierced through her flesh and into her bones, until she couldn’t hear anything anymore. Then the hands were gone and the lake consumed her, folded onto her and pulled her away.
She didn’t know how long she drifted, somewhere in between life and death, betrayal and rage. Then the world started burning but water was everywhere.
For years, she didn’t know what she was. So she decided that she had become a rusalka, a succubus, because some place in her still blistered with the deceit and the anger and everything else that the lake filled her with. (His hands around her neck, but now it was her hands—her teeth—around his neck.)
*
THREE. graviora manent – “heavier things remain”
Edward thinks that he understands people because he can hear their thoughts and see into their minds. He thinks that people are predictable, that they are simple, just automata. But Tanya knows better. Edward thinks that he understands her. He picks up the pieces from her thoughts and just decides (saints or whores, sunsets or car crashes, love or hate). But Tanya knows that he really understands nothing at all.
Edward asks about her past once. Uncertainty flutters across his face and his voice is soft and curious; it’s such a delicate question that it should have been lost in the night air. Tanya looks up at him and says, “I don’t remember anymore.” (There are places that even she doesn’t want to go, wounds so deep that they gape at her like an open grave. These are the things she still doesn’t understand, but she never pretends that she does.)
*
FOUR. pulvis et umbra sumus – “we are dust and shadow”
Her people were Slavic nomads. Tanya was the oldest daughter in her father’s tribe. But it was her younger brother who will assume the leadership of the clan. The winter of her fifteenth year, her father negotiated her marriage with a competing tribe. The meeting was straightforward, a simple business transaction. The next day, she left with the delegation. Her mother allowed her to take her own horse; it was the only thing she was permitted to keep. Tanya never looked back.
Her husband was a large stout man, with black matte hair and eyes like coal. He looked at her and saw straight through her like she was never there to begin with. The three years she lived with him, she never met his gaze. It was not due to fear (she was never afraid of him, even at the end), but because she couldn’t stand the void in his face, because he never perceive her as anything other than something he owned, no better than the tapestries than covered his tents.
He never called her by her name; it was only wife woman whore. His fleshy hands grabbed at her like a boy hoarding his toys; the same hands that left marks against her throat.
(When the Christian missionaries came, they preached monogamy and forgiveness and heaven and hell. When the Christian missionaries came, she had her fourth miscarriage. There was no forgiveness in his coal black eyes and monogamy weighed down like iron shackles around his chest.)
*
FIVE. sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus – “but it flees in the meantime, irretrievable time flees”
Tanya knew time like the edge of a Mobius strip, where every end was also a beginning. She didn’t know where she had been; she didn’t know where she was going. The sense of order and progression had a strange way of diminishing when time became infinite. Yesterday, today, tomorrow; it was all the same and nothing changed. Years turned into centuries and suddenly a millennium. Time blended into memory and memory into history. (Yet history, like love, was never enough.)
*
SIX. in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni – “we enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire”
Edward is trapped by what he is. Tanya catches desperate flashes in his eyes, something like a feral beast impatiently pacing in a cage, simmering to get out. Edward can’t see past his own immorality; the poison in his veins was a prison, a curse he can’t ever break.
“Silly boy,” she tells him, angry at him for being so naive. “You are so young.”
She was trapped once too. (Four inches of water, fingers around her neck, and ice splintering in her lungs like lead.) But it wasn’t because of what she became. She couldn’t see past her rage and she hung on to it like a cancer, a wild fire spreading out inside her. She was good at being angry; somehow it made her feel alive. So she let men fall in love with her, because it was easy, and she killed them all, because she could. (He couldn’t hurt her anymore.)
Tanya was trapped once. Until she decided to break free. She didn’t want her human remains anymore, the parts of her that remembered her fragility and the parts of her he took when he murdered her. Tanya stopped yearning for the blood that fueled her anger; she needed to let go of the vengeance that burned through her. She stopped drinking the blood that haunted her. But out of the ashes, she rose finally clean of him.
Her grandmother always said that Tanya had hair like a fire bird because, like her, they die only to be reborn.
*
SEVEN. cum mortuis in lingua mortua – “with the dead in a dead language”
In 1374, Tanya moved to England and learned Middle English and memorized The Canterbury Tales and she realized that she was a fast learner. She thought, as the verse slipped off her tongue like she had always known them, that this, this was going to be remembered long after language evolved, and perhaps live even longer than her. That thought comforted her, because even in 1374, the years were drawn out before her like a nightmare.
In 1635, Tanya lived in Amsterdam and read treatises in Latin and spoke French. Her intelligence shocked the gentlemen company she kept because science and philosophy were the activities of men and Tanya wanted to scream. She served them tea with a thin smile and serenely corrected their grasp of the new Cartesian mathematics and casually tore apart their attempts at solving the mind-body problem. In 1635, she had finally learned how to carry her years and her centuries, not as dead weights but as knowledge. (And later, much later, Tanya learned that it was wisdom.)
*
EIGHT. dues ex machina – “god from a machine”
“Oh please, Edward. Do you really think that a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God would have allowed for our existence? We are monsters; we are gruesome distortions of nature. What kind of God would allow our creation?”
“Yes, yes, yes, ergo God does not exist,” Edward finishes for her impatiently and frowns.
“Either that or God does exist but he’s not benevolent or omnipotent or omniscient.”
He sighs heavily. “This is a very old argument, Tanya. But it still stands that the existence of evil in this world does not preclude the existence of God.”
“Not evil, Edward. Us.” She doesn’t know if she was arguing because this is what she actually believed or just arguing for the sake of argument. Maybe she wants to hurt him --- to make him see reason, the painful truth of the matter: atoms and void, pure mechanics, there is no purpose, just inert matter bumping into each other in the great emptiness of space, and quantum indeterminacy, electrons blinking in and out existence randomly; there is no meaning.
He looks tired. “Tanya,” he pleads.
In this moment, Tanya realizes with horrific clarity that Edward has been waiting for a miracle, for some supernatural being to pass the final judgment. Something hitches in her throat; a weight settles. “You have to stop---” this guilt, this grief, this regret, this self hatred. But she stops. “Edward,” she relents because something is broken between them. Because Edwards wants to be saved and Tanya has lived long enough to know that you can only ever save yourself. Because Edward desperately wants to believe that good is possible when Tanya has been through enough centuries to know that everything is absurdly relative. (“There is no absolution and there’s no good or evil, just a whole lot of gray,” she wants to tell him but holds her tongue.)
*
NINE. qui totum vult totum perdit – “he who wants everything loses everything”
Magic was only magic when it didn’t exist. When it became real it crossed the line into the mundane, it became like everything else, disappointing and terrible. Like a song repeated so many times that it turned into nonsensical noise, into an afterthought, fading until it was no longer heard at all. Like her, because she shouldn’t exist but after one thousand years, she realized that immorality was never that special to begin with.
“Love me, Edward,” she told him; the words escaping her before she could help them. She teased him. “Love me because love doesn’t exist. But I’ve tried everything else that does.”
(And Tanya knew love, like magic, was only extraordinary when it was never meant to be real.)
*
TEN. si vales, bene est, ego valeo – “if you are well, that is good; I am well”
Edward believes in soul mates. Because he vaguely believes that in some primal time our souls were cut in half. From that point forward, we are only matching parts of a human whole. We wander the earth with cavernous holes inside ourselves in the shape of the other person. We wander, maimed and lost, until we finally find our other halves. Then we are complete because we become what we are always meant to be: one soul. (Edward wants desperately to believe this, if he could bring himself to believe that his kind is capable of harboring souls.)
Tanya thinks the whole idea is ridiculous. He tells her about souls and soul mates and love and the human girl and Tanya wants to laugh. (Because, really, Edward should know better.)
“What about her soul?” she asks him just to see him wince. (Because, really, Edward needs to grow up.)
“I love her,” he says, desperate. She can’t tell if it was an excuse or explanation or something terrible. His eyes flash and for a moment, Tanya thinks that there’s nothing behind them, like he’s empty inside.
Edward wants to believe that love is going to save him, save them all. She hopes so. She wants to believe it too, for his sake. (But she really, really doesn’t think so.) Tanya smiles again and doesn’t speak.
Some days, Tanya thinks that maybe she does have a huge cavernous hole inside, a bottomless abyss at her navel filled by the absence of all that could have been. (In another reality, Tanya falls in love and lives happily in the Carpathian Mountains and grows old to the laughter of her children and her children’s children and her husband’s hands at her heart and soft kisses in the chill of the night and she feels the seasons change around her and when her hair loses its luster to gray and then white, she curls up in her husband’s arms, tired and warily, and thinks life is very long. In another reality, Tanya never wakes up to the electrical storm.)
Tanya unfolds the centuries in her mind. (Edward wants to fill himself up because he can’t stand it. Edwards wants to fix it so that it doesn’t hurt. She presses her lips against Edward’s forehead, because he is hopeless and helpless.) Tanya has a hole inside her and sometimes her skin becomes a shell and suddenly she’s hollow and sometimes it all hurts like hell, but it’s okay. It’s okay. She’s okay.
*
*
Footnotes/Historical Notes/DVD Commentary: (optional)
- Modern day Slovakia is a small country in Central Europe. In The Middle Ages, it was mostly occupied by Slavic tribes until the 11th century, when the area was slowly integrated into the Kingdom of Hungary. Very little is known about ancient Slavic history, traditions, and beliefs, since no original written records have survived. Most likely Slavic tribes passed on their culture orally. Nearly all ancient Slavic languages had long been lost. Christianization of the Kingdom of Hungary began in the late 10th century and continued through most of the 11th century, where all pagan beliefs were renounced and their iconography destroyed. The geography of Slovakia is mountainous. Roughly two-thirds of the country are in the Western Carpathian Mountains.
- The rusalka is a real Slavic legend. There are several famous operas based on the idea of a rusalka, drowning maiden betrayed by her lover (Ophelia anyone?), one of my favorites is a Czech opera by Antonín Dvořák. You can read more about rusalka at Wikipedia.
- I wanted Tanya to be a woman first and a vampire second. In my canon, Tanya became a succubus out of her hatred for her first husband. Because she was betrayed and murdered by her husband and she lived in such a misogynistic time that she grew up always being second to males. All her choices in life had been about the men in her life, her father, her brother, her husband, because a woman can’t survive without being attached to a man. So when she became a vampire, she realized that she didn’t need to survive depending on someone else anymore, and her husband can’t hurt her anymore. She killed men because she wanted revenge of all the pain and suffering all the men in her brought to her. Until finally, she realized that she can’t live in vengeance forever. Because even though she was killing men, she was still trapped by her twisted relationship with them. So she became a vegetarian vampire. She realized that she’s better than that and that’s how she becomes free and finally no longer holding on to her anger. This is how I believe Tanya came to be who she is.
- I also believe that Tanya has a love/hate relationship with Edward out of purely philosophical reasons. It is a sort of deep-rooted ideological rift that they will always be at odds with each other. Edward hates who he is, while Tanya has come to terms with it because becoming a vegetarian vampire she’s free and she doesn’t understand why Edward is so depressed about it. Edward keeps thinking that he can fix who he is; he thinks that by loving a human he can restore his humanity. While Tanya accepts that she’s a vampire and lives her life accordingly and to her, Edward’s attempts are futile and silly. Edward is also a hopeless romantic, while Tanya has lost complete faith in love (she was murdered by her husband after all). I think that’s the deepest wedge between them. That Tanya thinks the only way to save yourself is to accept the things you can’t change and make the best of it, while Edward still thinks that by fighting for some lofty ideals (love, morality, kindness) you can transcend your present state.
- I don’t think Tanya ever loved Edward, because she can’t. She has lost her ability to love because while she was human, it only disappointed her in the worst way possible. Edward, on the other hand, falls in love very easily. He convinces himself to fall in love because he thinks that if he could fall in love, then he’s still human somehow. And of course, Tanya thinks that Edward’s ridiculous.
- I also think another huge philosophical disagreement between them is on the matter of religion. Because Tanya is so old, she’s from a time before Christianity was common, that she has no concept of the Christian God and Christian ideas of redemption. She doesn’t trust religion either because the Christian missionaries tried to convert her husband that eventually forced him to kill her. When her husband decided to convert to Christianity, he can’t take other wives and since Tanya can’t have children, he killed her so that he could remarry. So here you have Tanya who is an atheist. And then you have Edward, who grew up in the Christian tradition and has the influence of Carlisle with his whole redemption-forgiveness-salvation package
partly due to the fact that Stephanie Meyers is Mormon. And Edward can’t stand it. He can’t stand that Tanya doesn’t believe in God and he can’t stand that Tanya doesn't believe in spiritual redemption. - Edward is terrified that Tanya might be right. He thinks that vampires don’t have souls and that redemption might be impossible for them. And really, what kind of benevolent God who created everything will allow the existence of blood-sucking vampires? There’s this deep internal struggle within him because he wants to believe Carlisle, yet at the same time he’s terrified that Tanya is right. This is why Edward loves Tanya and can’t stand her at the same time. Because Edward admires her for being so strong and old and everything she’s been through, yet he’s scared of her because she represents everything he doesn’t want to believe about his existential condition.
- I think Edward loves Bella because he thinks that she can be his savior. (Okay don’t kill me.) I think it is a lot more complicated than the whole soul mat/true love deal, although love is definitely part of it. It’s a philosophical commitment. He believes in redemption and he thinks that he can save himself through love (in accordance with Christian beliefs) and that by loving Bella, it will be okay to turn her into a vampire. That’s how he justifies it, even though Tanya thinks it is bullshit. Tanya has lived as a vampire for a thousand years and she’s tired and she doesn’t understand why Edward thinks it is okay. Because some things are only good and special when it’s not real, when it becomes real it becomes terrible. You might think living forever and loving someone forever is good and special, but when it actually happens it’s not anymore. Tanya is a pessimist in this way and she thinks Edward is a silly idealist. She wants to tell him, “You think these ideals are good and perfect. But that’s because they don’t exist and will never exist. That’s what makes them good, that’s what makes them ideals. It’s stupid to think that they can actually be real.” In the end, they are both tragic characters.
- I ended up using a lot of Latin in this story to emphasize Tanya’s history: she is really, really old. Memento mori can be translated to mean “remember that you will die” or “remember your death.” It is meant as a reminder of mortality, like treasure your life because you will die. It is important to this story because both Tanya and Edward are struggling to deal with their mortality, which is really their immortality. Tanya has figured it out, after 1000 years. But Edward is still trying. The idea of death, dying, rebirth is absolutely central to this story. This story is completely about how Tanya and Edward choose to define and understand death and their existence.
- Dues ex machina is a Latin saying meaning literally "God from a machine." It came from medieval plays, where in the last act the characters are all in great peril with no way out and suddenly, God appears (or an angel, etc.) usually raised by machinery onto the stage and solves all the problems for everyone in the play. It is used today to suggest an improbable convenience or a contrived quick solution to a bad storyline or problem. I thought it was particularly fitting here, because Edward wants a miracle, he is waiting for dues ex machina. (And he thinks that Bella is it.)
- Si vales, bene est, ego valeo (if you are well, that is good; I am well) is a common greeting/opening in letters used during Classical times.
- I hope people don’t find this story too depressing. Because it is not meant that way. Even though they struggle with their (im)mortality, their lives, struggling to come up with a sound philosophical position, a existential viewpoint, Tanya realizes that it is okay to struggle. It is okay to not know. You get keep going and trying to find meaning the best way you can.
- Wow, okay sorry that I decided to rant on and on about this. If you actually read through these insane notes, thank you for reading and you should be applauded for your stamina and perseverance! You should win a prize or something. These are the philosophical points that I wanted to present in this story that underlie their entire relationship. I hope it got through!