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But I couldn't bring harm to her. I couldn't bring my Evil Blood to her. I couldn't take her over to me, and now a most great and grotesque quality attached itself to her in my eyes.
She was evil as I was evil, and when I watched her from the corner of her room, I fancied that I studied a thing which was like unto myself.
For her life, she dispatched her victims. For my life, I drank human blood.
And so this tender girl, in her costly gowns with her long blond locks and soft cheeks, took on a dark majesty for me; and I was fascinated by her more than ever before.
One night, so great was my pain, so dire was my need to separate myself from this young woman, that I went alone in my gondola, telling my oarsman to row back and forth through the smallest canals of the city and not bring me back to the palazzo until I gave the command.
What did I seek? The smell of death and rats in the blackest waters, the occasional merciful flashes of the moon.
I lay down in the boat, my head on my pillow. I listened to the voices of th
e city so that I would not hear my own.
And quite suddenly, as we came into the wider canals again, as we came into a certain district of Venice, there came a voice quite different from all the others, for it was speaking from a desperate and deranged mind.
In a flash I saw an image behind the cry of this voice, the image of a painted face. Indeed, I saw the paint laid on in marvelous strokes. I knew the painted face. It was the face of Christ!
What did this mean? In a solemn silence, I listened. No other voice mattered to me. I banished a city full of whispers.
It was a woeful crying. It was the voice of a child behind thick walls who on account of the recent cruelties done him could not remember his native language or even his name.
Yet in that forgotten language he prayed to be delivered from those who had cast him down in darkness, those who had tormented him and jabbered at him in a tongue he didn't know.
Once again there came that image, the painted Christ staring forward. The painted Christ in a time-honored and Greek style. Oh, how well I knew this fashion of painting; oh, how well I knew this countenance.
Had I not seen it a thousand times in Byzantium, and in all those places East and West to which its power had reached?
What did this mean, this mingled voice and imagery? What did it mean that the child thought again and again of an ikon and did riot know that he prayed?
Once again there came the plea from one who thought himself to be utterly silent.
And I knew the language in which he prayed. It was no matter to me to disentangle it, to put the words in order, having as I did such a knowledge of languages the world wide. Yes, I knew his tongue and I knew his prayer. "Dear God, deliver me. Dear God, let me die. "
A frail child, a hungry child, a child who was alone.
Sitting up in the gondola, I listened. I delved for the images locked away inside the child's most wordless thoughts.
He had once been a painter, this bruised and young one. The face of Christ had been his work. He had once mixed the egg yolk and the pigment just as I mixed them. He had once painted the face of Christ, again and again!
Whence came this voice? I had to discover the source of it. I listened with all my skill.
Somewhere very near, this child was imprisoned. Somewhere very near, he offered up his prayer with his last breath.
He had painted his precious ikons in the far country of snowy Russia.
Indeed, this child had been supremely gifted in the painting of ikons. But he could not remember that now. That was the mystery. That was the complexity! He could not even see the images which I was seeing, so broken was his heart.
I could understand what he himself could not understand. And he was pleading silently with Heaven in a Russian dialect to be delivered from those who had made him a slave in Venice and sought to make him serve others in a brothel through acts which to him were sins of the flesh which he could not abide!
I told my oarsman to stop.
I listened until I had found the exact source. I directed the boat to go back only a few doors until I found the precise place.
The torches were burning brightly before the entrance. I could hear the music inside.
The voice of the child was persistent, and yet there came that clear understanding on my part that the child did not know his own prayers, his own history, his own tongue.
