‘Oh, we’ll find time for talking, I’m sure,’ said Dragosani as he followed his host to the door.
‘Use,’ said Kinkovsi, ‘take a torch and see the Herr to the guesthouse, will you? The dusk is worse than darkest midnight when you’re not sure of your step.’
The girl did as she was told and guided Dragosani across the farmyard, out of the gate and into the guesthouse. There she switched on the lights for the stairs. Before saying goodnight, she told him:
‘Herr Dragosani, there is a button beside your bed. If you require anything in the night just press it. Unfortunately, it will probably wake up my parents, too. A better way would be to open your curtains half-way – which I would see from my own bedroom window . . .’
‘What?’ said Dragosani, pretending to be slow on the uptake. ‘In the middle of the night?’
But as to her meaning, Use Kinkovsi left little doubt of that. ‘I don’t sleep very well,’ she said. ‘My room is on the ground floor. I like to open my window and smell the night air. Sometimes I even go out that way and walk in the silver moonlight – usually about 1:00 a.m.’
Dragosani nodded his head but made no answer. She was standing very close to him. Before she could further clarify the situation he turned away from her and hurried up the stairs. He could feel her mocking eyes on him until he turned the corner onto the first landing.
In his room Dragosani quickly closed the curtains at the window, unpacked his cases, ran himself a bath full of water. Heated by a gas jet, the water steamed invitingly. Adding salts, Dragosani stripped himself naked. In the bath he lay and soaked, luxuriating in the heat
and languid swirl of the water when he moved his arms. In what seemed a very short while he found himself nodding, his chin on his chest, the water growing cold.
Stirring himself, he finished bathing and prepared for bed. It was only 10:00 p.m. when he slipped between the sheets, but within a minute or two he was fast asleep.
Just before midnight he woke up, saw a vertical white band of moonlight, deep and inches wide, like a luminous shaft, streaming into the room where the curtains missed coming together. Remembering what Use Kinkovsi had said, he got up, took a safety pin and firmly pinned the
curtains shut. He half-wished it could be different – more than half- but… it couldn’t.
It wasn’t that he hated women or was frightened of them, he didn’t and wasn’t. It was more that he couldn’t understand them, and with so many other things to do -so much else to learn and try to understand – he simply had no time to waste on dubious or untried pleasures. Or so he told himself. And anyway, his needs were different to those of other men, his emotions less volatile. Except when he needed them to be. But what he’d lost in common sensuality, he more than made up for in uncommon sensitivity. Though even that would seem a paradox to anyone who knew his work.
As for those other things he had to learn or at least try to understand – they were legion. Borowitz was happy with him the way he was, yes, but Dragosani was not. He felt that at the moment his talent was one-dimensional, that it lacked any real depth. Very well, he would give it the very greatest depth, a depth unplumbed for half a millennium! Out there in the night lay one who had secrets unique, one who in life commanded monstrous magics, and who even now, in death, was undead. And there, for Dragosani, lay the fount of all knowledge. Only when he had drained that well would there be time for the rest of his sorely neglected ‘education’.
It was midnight now, the witching hour. Dragosani wondered how far the sleeper’s dreams reached out beyond the borders of the dark glade, wondered if they might meet half-way. The moon was up and full, and all the stars were bright; high in the mountains wolves prowled and howled even now, as they had five hundred years ago; all the auspices were right.