By Hanns Heinz Ewers 1921
Translated by Joe E. Bandel 2008
Copyright 2008 by Joe E. Bandel
Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923
Vampire
By Hanns Heinz Ewers
Translated by Joe E. Bandel
A Wild Story in Fragments of Shimmering Words
To Adele G.L.
I fought with all; more than with all-with you.
I suffered much; so, I suppose, did you.
And out of cruel wounds and bleeding years
Grew forth this book, brimfull of love and pain.
It is your book-take it with gracious hands!
HHE
My muse by no means deals in fiction, she gathers a repertory of facts. And that’s one cause, she meets with contradiction. For too much truth, at first sight, never attracts.
Byron
Chapter 1
Opal
“Now the melancholy God protect thee and the tailor, make thy garment of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is very opal.”
-Shakespeare, Twelfth-Night
In the year, in which the entire world became insane, he moved out into a different time. He always said, to a different time. He didn’t count whether it was the seventh time or the tenth time or the twelfth.
He had been living at home for three years, now over three years in his old homeland in Europe. He knew very well that he was sick, Europe made him sick. The homeland that he loved made him sick.
He knew it after a year. After two years his friends saw it. After three years everyone that he spoke with noticed. It was in the nerves, somehow-
But he also knew what would cure him, or maybe not cure, but give him enough strength for another year in the homeland.
When he drank the fiery heat of the tropics, when he breathed the solitude of the wilderness, when his longing bathed itself in the infinity of the ocean, he became healthy, or almost healthy. He was almost healthy on that day in Antofagasta, Chile. Only a little something was holding back, something weak, curious, tender and untractable.
Frank Braun laughed about it, extended his arms out wide and stretched himself, sensing his old strength, as if every muscle in his body were at play. He loved to dive in the water with the sea lions and compete with them swimming through swarms of herring in the harbor of Antofagasta.
That was the day the weather glowed and flickered in the skies of the homeland, the day the screams rang around the world. They hunted through all the wires on the oceans and on the land, through the air, in all the radio waveband signals. They were the wild screams of Sarajevo and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
