Stay, gentle friends! You go to do you know not what. Wherein have I thus deserv’d your loves? What am I to you? (Voices: You are our leader! The Admiral!) Other voices: Hear! hear! You are our admiral! Let us board ships and sail away! A voice (poetically): Let us sail away. Gulls and clouds will ask us: who are you? what do you seek? … and our sails will reply: Melkior sails! Melkior seeks a barren reef … (the poetic voice drowns in tears. All the others begin crying, too).
Blessed be those tears, my people! Away, then! But … wait an instant … for I wish to be quite clean before you. (Voices: It’s all right, you’re clean! Let’s go!) Not quite I’m not, friends and countrymen. (Yes you are, pure as an angel!) No, no, I have passions and lusts flaming inside me. (All the better — that means you’re a man! ha-ha laughter full of admiration.) Yes, but what kind of man? One with low, Priapic passions. Priapus, Priapus, exclaimed … I can’t tell you who, she’s a married woman. As for our chaste, white nurse … Acika (indeed a name to sneeze at, he thought in passing), I tried to embrace and kiss her, too, by force, friends and countrymen, because she’s a smashing little muffin, is she not? (Wow, Admiral, you do take the cake! — this in admiration and approval down in the courtyard.)
“You’re not to trust him, good-looking folk, you’re not to trust him!” shouts a voice from above (deus ex machina, thinks Melkior). “You’re not to trust him, he’s up to his ears in love — I know him! (Goodbye Viviana, mutters the voice in passing.) Lets on he’s a cynic — and him an honorable man indeed. Eustachius, be our leader! Our admiral!” and the huge black fillings darkened the sky. Ugo’s appealing voice. But what is he doing here? “Exalted Parampion, it’s you!” exclaimed Melkior joyously and heard his voice strangely distant from himself as though it had been an echo exclaiming.
~ ~ ~
Melkior felt his nose being pulled. He woke up instantly and opened his eyes wide in surprise. Sitting on his bed was a bulky young man in white, his mouth stretched into a make-believe smile, looking at him in a sticky-sweet way, “Good morning” fairly flowing from his ocular liquid.
“Name’s Mitar. Vampire, they call me. Shh, don’t wake ’em up, I got the moniker here in this very room,” whispered the man in white. “It’s all right — I’m just a lab tech, I came for a drop of your blood.”
Melkior thought he was dreaming. “Friends and countrymen,” he said mechanically and propped himself on his elbows to clear his head. They come to suck your blood in your sleep, the vampires … Old wives’ tales. All the same horror slithered up his back.
The others were still asleep, slurping up the last dregs of sleep before morning wake-up. They blew in and out cooperatively at their common task, Hermaphrodite’s lusty snore taking the lead. Melkior heaved a sigh of envy.
“What do you need my blood for?” he said, looking hopelessly at the gray wall in front.
“All right, so you refuse,” Mitar concluded indifferently. “I’ll report that to the Major.”
“I only said, ‘What do you need my blood for?’” Melkior now fully awake. “I haven’t got two thimblefuls in me.”
“I can make do with one,” smiled Mitar sweetly. “But it doesn’t follow that I’m just a lightweight … I do have some say in things. Know what blood work is?”
“No.”
“Well then.”
“Where will you take it from?” Melkior offered him an arm.
“Take it easy. We don’t have to do it right away. Just relax and lie back down.” He cautiously laid Melkior down on his back and covered him up to the chin. He even pushed Melkior’s arms under the covers. “You’re a patient, you must take care of yourself. If you want to get well again, you’ve got to comply. What do you think we’re here for?”
Melkior yielded. He couldn’t understand what this Mitar fellow wanted.
“Well, there you are, you’re saying nothing. Not that you could say anything — it’s true what I said. Everything can be read from your blood: health and disease and malingering. It’s all written in there as in the Bible, your destiny. That’s why it’s called blood work, and that’s where I’m in charge. What I say goes. And there’s no ‘let me see’ or ‘I wonder if’ with me. I give it to you plain: sedimentation rate, Wassermann reading, erythro and leuko counts, bilirubin, the whole kit and kaboodle. And if I mark it all ‘Negative’ and ‘NTR,’ it’s forward march, direction barracks and not even God Himself can get you off.”
Mitar the Vampire made a telling pause. He then brought his broad, greasy face over Melkior and ran his gaze over him: searching for a likely spot to grab.
“Then again, there’s blood work and there’s blood work …” he cast a cautious glance around the other beds and whispered with a kind of considerate contempt: “Sleeping, the weary heroes … It’s like having your picture taken at a photographer’s: you can ask for it to be warts-and-all or you can have it retouched. Now retouching’s no problem, you just leave that to me.”
“Is this expensive?” whispered Melkior conspiratorially.
Mitar seemed not to have heard the question and went on whispering; this time, in what was more like a private lament:
“Oh, oh, what a greedy bastard I am, from head to toe, God strike me! Look at the size of this!” he boastfully displayed his rotund belly with his trouser belt buckled prudently below it, “that’s my lord and master! The only one I serve — the rest can go to hell. It’s grilled meat, grilled meat makes the world go round, as the poet says — and that’s what’s going to bankrupt me, too. Braised heart, grilled liver, lamb chops, mincemeat steak, not to mention tripes on the fatty side … you’ve no idea how much I like gourmet food, God help me! Funnily enough, I don’t go in much for kebab, not even with sour cream — unless it’s tucked into a grilled bread pocket. I’m a big man for young spitted duck, with fat dripping from the tip of its crispy little bum, he, he,” tittered Mitar licking his lips and purring hoarsely: “Grrr … grr … grill grrates, grrill grrates, that’s what the Gypsies shout who hawk them. Find my taste amusing, don’t you? Your shit’s fat-free, right? A piece of boiled fish, an olive or two, that’s more the way you like it, eh? Oh, and Swiss chard, I bet. I can just see your gut piping ake me back to my home by the sea …”
One of the sleepers grunted before waking. Mitar quickly got going with his instruments.
“Let’s get this over with, all right?” he whispered in a seemingly casual way, making his preparations.
“Very well, let’s do it,” Melkior proffered his skinny white arm.
“Retouched, am I right?” Mitar tightened the rubber tube around Melkior’s upper arm. “Jeez, not an honest vein in sight. This is going to be tricky,” he said out loud, worriedly shaking his head; as his head moved he whispered hastily: “Fifty up front, the rest when you get your ticket, OK?”
“How much is … the rest?” muttered Melkior all but unintelligibly.
“Well … another hundred fifty. To keep me flush for taking the girlfriend out. She’s into the green liqueurs, damn her … and they are pricey.” He glanced at Melkior’s undecided face. “All right, a hundred, because it’s you — I can see you suffering. Christ, you are a stingy crowd, you types from Dalmatia, strike you … Turds in olive oil! What can you buy for the money? A pair of pajamas, if that … Chic à la française and look at you — so damned miserable you can’t take a decent shit. Look at the state of your veins. Two thimblefuls, you say? Hell, you haven’t got enough to give a bedbug a square meal. Things are tough these days, you know,” Mitar spoke in a whisper again. “There’s a war on, man!” he cried sternly, “and we’re in the army, we’ve got to be prepared!” and he gave Melkior a sly wink: he was saying this for the benefit of “the guys.”