Work Text:
An interesting story happened to me when I was young, which I would like to share with you.
I was traveling to my home village on vacation to visit my parents, and in a compartment of a half-empty train I met a young and then unknown artist. He was heading to the mountains to draw from life in search of inspiration, and we were on the same route. We were unlucky enough to be traveling at a time when the railway workers were again on strike, and the trains were running intermittently. So we were stuck in a village where we had to change trains for two whole days. Since we were both short of money, we did not go to a hotel, but rented a cheap room for two from a local auntie.
We needed something to do, so we decided to explore the local sights. Not far from the village there was a hill with ruins of some kind of building on it, probably a castle. After breakfast, we got ready and went to explore them.
The path that led up was not in the best condition, crumbling and with large boulders sticking out. These places were clearly not popular with tourists. When we got to the top of the hill, a rather sad sight opened up before our eyes. Only two outer walls remained from the castle itself, everything else was completely destroyed.
“Probably a shell hit these ruins during the war,” the artist suggested.
“It’s possible that the locals had a hand in it,” I noted. This fate befell many ancient ruins in the post-war period: destroyed villages and towns had to be rebuilt, and there was so much good material here. The government didn’t care about the restoration of any ancient monuments; it had more pressing concerns.
We made our way through the rubble (possibly at risk to life and health), and through a gaping doorway in the wall we came out into the garden adjacent to the ruins. More precisely, into what used to be a garden, but was now a thicket. In a couple of places, craters from explosions were visible, overgrown rose bushes neighbored weeds, paths were overgrown with grass. Only the northern corner of the garden remained relatively untouched. There, among the yew bushes strewn with red berries, stood a miraculously preserved gazebo, and a little further away, closer to the stone fence, grew a lonely beech, spreading and clearly old, judging by the thickness of the trunk. Under it, everything was strewn with a solid carpet of leaves. Under the foliage stood a low mound of earth, and at the head of it stood a lonely gravestone. Next to the gravestone stood a small stone bench. We were unable to find out who was buried here: time has not been kind to the gravestone. The name was completely erased from it, and the dates of birth and death were impossible to make out.
“And here you can feel the spirit of the times,” the artist said thoughtfully, looking around and estimating the position of the sun. “There should be beautiful lighting at sunset... and at night, if the moon is bright.”
At the nameless grave our inspection of the ruins ended and we headed home. Over dinner we asked the bored hostess to tell us about the castle on the hill, and this is what she told us.
The castle once belonged to a baron who ruled these lands several centuries ago, during the heyday of chivalry. The baron had a young and beautiful wife, and it so happened that one of the baron's vassals, a young knight, fell in love with her. There are different versions of what came of this. The folk version of the legend says that the baroness, without thinking twice, cuckolded her husband. The classic version, however, claims that the knight faithfully served her as his Fair Lady, not encroaching on his lord’s marriage, as was allowed by the customs of the time. Both versions agree on one thing: his feelings were mutual.
And so, one day the baron returned home after a trip, and either someone whispered to him to check what his wife was doing, or his own jealousy led him to her chambers, but the baron found both lovers there. As the legend goes, the baroness called the knight to her to give him a scarf she had embroidered as a gift before he left for his own lands. (“Well, and what the baron found them doing in the folk version of this story, you can imagine,” the hostess winked at us. The artist and I exchanged meaningful glances.)
In a rage, the baron drew his sword and tried to stab his wife, not wanting to listen to anything. The knight had to grapple with him in an attempt to protect her from imminent death, and it turned out that he inflicted a mortal wound on the baron. Dying, the baron exclaimed: “May you be damned! May you never see the light of day again or find peace!” They also say that the baron predicted that the knight would go through seven sorrows, while others say that there should be seven times seven. (“Oh, something tells me that the dying baron would have expressed himself much more briefly and less literary,” the artist grinned.)
And at the moment when the baron died, the knight turned into a devilish creature: a vampire tormented by an insatiable hunger. Not remembering himself, he attacked his beloved and killed her, drinking her blood. Only when he looked at himself in the mirror, holding her lifeless body in his hands, and did not see his reflection, did he understand what he had become and what he had done, and in despair he ran away from the castle, taking with him only his sword.
“And since then, he has wandered the world at night, doomed by a curse to eternal life. Occasionally you can meet him at the grave of his beloved, which you saw today,” the hostess concluded her story. “And the castle was damaged during the revolution, and the war hadn’t done it any good either.”
“So, the poor knight was cursed for nothing, if we follow the classic version of the legend?” I asked. “After all, it turns out he was innocent, and he simply had no choice.”
“That’s why I like this version more, it’s so tragic, you know,” the hostess responded. “But it’s not like he was so innocent: he raised his hand against his lord, breaking his knightly vows, which was a serious crime in those days. And murder is a mortal sin, after all.”
"Well," the artist stood up from the table, brushing crumbs off his clothes, "I'm going to take my sketchbook and head back to the grave! I want to paint it in the sunset light, and if possible, in the moonlight. I feel like something interesting will come of it."
"Just don't freeze there," I warned him, "it's already cold at night."
"I'm heading to the mountains, remember? I have enough warm clothes," he waved his hand and went off to get ready.
“Just in case, keep in mind that in the folk version of this legend, whoever interrupts the cursed knight while he is mourning his beloved will be torn to pieces!” the hostess called after him.
I decided that I had had enough of walking in the November weather for today, and spent the evening by the fire with a book, after which I expected to get a good night's sleep alone.
However, my hopes were not destined to come true. As soon as it began to get light, the artist burst into the room. He looked very cold and no less excited, but he could not say anything clearly, because his teeth were chattering; his fingers were convulsively clutching his sketchbook. His clothes were dirty and torn in a couple of places; apparently, he had come across a slippery stone on the path, I thought. I had no choice but to get out of bed and ask the hostess to take care of my roommate.
Sometime later, when the artist had warmed up in a hot bath and went down to the dining room, where the hostess placed breakfast in front of him, a mug of hot tea, and a good portion of some homemade herbal tincture, he was finally able to tell us what had happened to him.
The artist reached the garden without incident. As he had expected, the lonely grave under the tree looked gloomy and mysterious in the rays of the setting sun, and he made several sketches from different angles. When the sun set, it began to snow lightly. The artist settled down in the gazebo to hide from the bad weather and began to wait for the moon to rise, and there he accidentally dozed off.
When someone's voice woke him up, the sky had cleared and the moon was already hanging high in the sky. The artist carefully peered out from behind his shelter, and the following picture opened up before his eyes: a man was sitting on a bench next to the grave and talking, apparently addressing the tombstone. The man was dressed in a black jacket and trousers, he had long blond hair tied in a ponytail; next to him on the bench stood a lantern, illuminating him with a dim yellow light. It seemed to the artist that his clothes were too light for such weather, but he decided that in the darkness he could have been mistaken.
“And what did he say?” the hostess asked curiously.
“He spoke quietly, I didn’t catch everything, but he seemed to be telling where he had been and what he had seen. If you believe him, he had walked half the continent, if not more,” the artist replied. “He also complained that the world was changing faster and faster, and it was becoming too crowded. He said that he no longer recognized familiar places.”
“Well, I agree with him there, soon there will be no room to swing a cat,” I chimed in.
“Yes, but you usually hear that from older people, and he looked young. I’m also not entirely sure if I heard correctly, but he said that he had to hide his sword in some secret place in the north, because people no longer carry swords,” the narrator added.
My friend would not have been an artist if he had not started to examine the strange man, and he was quite colourful, tall and stately, with a beautiful profile and fine features. The only thing that spoiled the impression was that he looked either tired or sick , but this could be attributed to the shadows from the lantern illuminating his face from below.
“And there was such an expression on his face... such, you know, deep, sincere sadness, as if he was really mourning the one who rests there. At first, I thought that maybe he was an actor and was thus getting into character for some play. I even thought about going out and asking him to pose for me. Then I thought, what would an actor forget in such a wilderness, no offense to our dear hostess? And maybe this man really is crazy,” the artist continued. “Well, I decided: I’ll watch him until he leaves, and then, maybe, I’ll draw him from memory.”
“So, why did you look so agitated this morning?” I asked.
“I was just getting to that point! So he said everything he wanted, then he went up to the grave, dropped to one knee next to it, and fished a white rose out of his jacket. I have no idea where he got it in November, but it was definitely a rose. He laid it on the grave and quietly said something else, I didn’t catch it. But that’s when I realized,” the artist almost whispered, “he was talking, but there was no steam coming out of his mouth! It was below zero outside, he was illuminated by the light from a lantern, everything should be perfectly visible — but there was nothing, as if he wasn’t breathing at all!”
This scared our narrator so much that he accidentally moved. And the stranger turned sharply at the noise, and stared straight at where he was hiding.
“You know, I’m not a religious person,” the artist told us, “but I’ve never prayed in my life like I did then, just so he wouldn’t see me! I was so terrified. For a moment it seemed to me that people couldn’t move so fast and look like that: it wasn’t the shadows from the lantern, he really did look like a dead man. But, thank God, he finally turned away, then got up, took his lantern and left. I waited a bit and left too, though going down that path in the twilight wasn’t the best decision: I almost broke my leg there…”
“But couldn’t it be that you dreamed all this?” the hostess asked carefully. “You said yourself that you fell asleep in the gazebo, maybe the legend about the knight impressed you so much that you saw him in a dream?”
“No, no, when I left there, I checked specially. There really was a rose on the grave, but when I first came to the garden, it wasn’t there!” the artist objected heatedly. “I even thought about taking it with me as proof… But I decided that it’s somehow not nice to steal from the dead,” the hostess and I nodded in agreement. “But I have to draw him while I still remember him well. I think I’ll have time to show you a couple of sketches before the train!”
And he spent the whole day working, without raising his head. He decided to cancel his trip to the mountains and return to the city to work on the painting there, but he did manage to show us several sketches, indeed. Most of them depicted the same scene from slightly different angles: a beautiful and sad knight, whom the artist depicted in medieval clothes and a black cloak, with a sword on his belt, with his hair down, laying a white rose on a nameless grave, and the light of the full moon pouring down on him from the sky. I think you recognized in this description the painting that my fellow traveller worked on for many months, the famous “Amor Aeternus”, which the press dubbed “the most romantic painting of modern times”. The title, in my opinion, is a bit pretentious, but I myself once came to look at it in a gallery in the capital. The artist was lucky: at that time the public was tired of war scenes, tired of the post-war devastation, people really wanted something beautiful and romantic, they wanted stories about the distant and wonderful past, and he was one of the first to occupy this niche.
But there was another sketch, unknown to the general public. In it, the same knight (dressed, however, in a modern style, as the artist described him) does not look at the grave, but is turned towards the viewer and looks at him point-blank, leaning one hand on the grave ground covered with snow. In this sketch, he is slightly crouched to the ground, like a predator ready to pounce on its prey; his face is unnaturally pale, there are dark circles under his eyes, and there is little beauty in his features... and little human. Undoubtedly, my fellow traveller was talented, because this picture and the gaze of the one depicted in it sent shivers down my spine. And, looking at this sketch, I thought that perhaps that meeting was not a dream at all, and not a figment of his imagination, because for a figment of the imagination, the man depicted looked too real and alive, if this word is applicable to him.
But, although this thought sometimes worries me, another follows from it: it turns out that even such creatures not strangers to longing for their loved ones, even a forever damned sinner is capable of such a deep, touching and long-lasting feeling. Even if hell exists, we have become involuntary witnesses to the fact that even in its very depths there is a place for light and beauty.