PART II 16 page mother. Finally she'd escaped us entirely, but I'd found her in the armoire, beneath the jackets
and coats, clinging to her doll. And, carrying her to her crib, I sat beside her and sang to her, and she stared at me as she clung to that doll, as if trying blindly and mysteriously to calm a pain she
herself did not begin to understand. Can you picture it, this splendid domesticity, dim lamps, the
vampire father singing to the vampire daughter? Only the doll had a human face, only the doll.
" 'But we must get away from here!' said the present Claudia suddenly, as though the thought had just taken shape in her mind with a special urgency. She had her hand to her ear, as if clutching it
against some awful sound. 'From the roads behind us, from what I see in your eyes now, because
I give voice to thoughts which are nothing more to me than plain considerations...'
" 'Forgive me,' I said as gently as I could, withdrawing slowly from that long-ago room, that
ruffled crib, that frightened monster child and monster voice. And Lestat, where was Lestat? A
match striking in the other room, a shadow leaping suddenly into life, as light and dark come
alive where there was only darkness.
" 'No, you forgive me...' she was saying to me now, in this little hotel room near the first capital of western Europe. 'No, we forgive each other. But we don't forgive him; and, without him, you
see what things are between us:
" 'Only now because we are tired, and things are dreary...' I said to her and to myself, because there was no one else in the world to whom I could speak.
" 'Ah, yes; and that is what must end. I tell you, I begin to understand that we have done it all wrong from the start. We must bypass Vienna. We need our language, our people. I want to go
directly now to Paris.' "
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Date: 2015-02-03; view: 670
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