But she was never permitted to meet with any of these luminaries. You were suspicious of anyone who tried to get close to her. Jealous, Magdalena and I agreed privately. We would never say it in front of you, of course, not wanting to risk rousing one of your dark moods. Magdalena had seen plenty of those by then as well, been left by you on a busy street corner when she said something that offended or berated when she tried to argue about why she should be allowed to hunt alone. You kept her close at hand always, insisting it was because you loved her, because you wanted to protect her and couldn’t stand to be without her.
As someone who had been loved in this way for centuries, I also knew it was much easier to keep an eye on someone who was close at hand, to guide their mind and direct their steps.
You made it into an art form, this quiet sort of violence. You were so far into our heads your gentle suggestions so often felt like our own thoughts.
And after a long time, Magdalena simply thought that there was no use in keeping up correspondence with great minds that would only shrivel and die in a blink of our immortal eyes. Gradually, she retired her stationary and stopped accepting letters. We kept moving, never staying in one place long enough for our nature to be discovered by the locals, but we stopped following her adventurous whim from nation to nation. We travelled by your compass now, following the northern star of your interests. Just like it had been before she came to join our family. And Magdalena, poor lovely Magdalena, began to fade.
It started with the fatigue, with the long bouts of bone-deep tiredness that had her sleeping not just through the day but through most of the night.
Her melancholy was palpable, wafting off her like the sticky-sweet scent of death. Soon she lost interest in any of her favorite diversions, even in hunting. I had to take her by the hand and tug her out of the door with me at night to convince her to feed. I once saw you bring a crystal glass of fast-chilling blood to her lips the way you might feed a child, just to get her to eat. You murmured to her in Greek, a language that sounded arrestingly tender and intimate to my ear, and urged her to find the will to get out of bed.
I would lie in the dark next to her on bad days, smoothing her curls and humming to her snatches of the songs my grandmother used to sing to me. Sometimes she would smile at me, or cry. Other times, she simply looked past me as though I wasn’t even there. Those were the most difficult.
“What’s wrong, my darling?” I asked quietly on a particularly bad evening. Two days prior she had been on top of the world, giggling at your jokes and preening in the mirror and stalking the streets like a beautiful panther out to find her nightly prey. She had been ablaze, barely needing any sleep and so full of ideas that she could scarcely string them together into a sentence. But now, she could barely bring herself to brush her own hair.
“You’re acting as though you have no interest in living anymore,” I whispered, my voice breaking.
Magdalena looked at me with empty eyes.
“I want to live,” she whispered back. Probably too afraid that you would hear from your rooms next door. “But I want to live in the world, not on the outskirts of it. The days just go on and on, Constanta, they never change… I’m tired.”
We did our best to learn to live with Magdalena’s melancholy, which seemed over time to become a fourth person in our marriage. She would be her usual effervescent self for days, sometimes years, but the melancholy always came back, calling on her like an unwelcome old lover disrupting a wedding.
You determined that moving so often was agitating her distraught mind, so we settled in Berlin at the sunset of the nineteenth century. The newly established German empire was in full flower, with the Kaiser presiding over a capital city stuffed with factories and theatres. The sprawling city center was large enough to hold even your attention for a number of decades, full as it was of wealth and slums, criminals and extraordinary scientific minds, all moving together in a great human sea. You were able to dig your talons into the city’s soft underbelly every night, and Magdalena was able to divert herself with German opera, Parisian revues, and Russian ballet performances any time the darkness started encroaching on her heart. It worked, for a little while. But even a life of perfect leisure was not enough to soothe her desire for true freedom. She wanted, above all, a life unshackled to convention or even the people she loved, and so her light began to dim once again.
Once, Magdalena slept for days, waking only in fitful spurts to refuse water, refuse food, and whimper to be left alone in the darkness. But on the third day, she pushed herself up from the bed and called for blood. You slaughtered the prettiest of the servants for her, offering up our household’s beloved fatted calf. Eventually, the color returned to her cheeks and the strength returned to her limbs. She returned to us as though she hadn’t been walking the knife’s edge of destruction days ago, smiling that starry smile.