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Wearing it did me no harm, though I doubted that whatever manner of god was out there would change his attitude towards me merely because of a small piece of metal hanging around my neck. But it was comforting to feel the icon hanging against my chest for a quite different reason. It acted as a reminder; a reminder of my superstitious wife who had sent it to me and of my superstitious lover who insisted that I keep it on.
First you decide the point you're trying to get across, then you make up a story that gets it over. You have to look beyond the ghosts and the vampires and the miracles and see the moral message.”
“In America, they have no king, but they have slaves,” Maks was explaining. “In England, they have a king, but no slaves. In France, they killed their king and created an emperor, just so that they might not be slaves. In Russia, we have an emperor and we have slaves.” He paused for a moment. “Of course, most Russians would say we have an emperor and we are slaves.”
“You know I've always been sympathetic to the Revolution.” I nodded. We all had been, until the Revolution had turned into an empire and the empire had invaded our country.
I can't cope with loving the whole of humanity. I just love what I know.
But someone, I knew, would notice. God might not be able to act as a constant sentinel in each of our lives, but He appoints as His deputy ourselves. In the very act of asking who cares what happens to me or to Vadim or to Domnikiia or to the memory of Maks, I provided at least one answer: myself.
Yet He is available and with us. Our own veils of blindness does not negate His presence.
If the unrestrained violence that had just ejected from my body had been under my conscious control, guided by my intelligence and yet untrammelled by my conscience, then I was a dangerous creature indeed. But if it had been an uncontrollable frenzy, why had I only kicked his torso, where I could hurt him, and not his head, where I might kill? Perhaps there is some visceral, primeval instinct that tells a man how to hurt another man, without causing his death.
And so it was entirely in keeping with her own upbringing that my grandmother passed on her knowledge to her children and later to her grandchildren.
Before this point, it seems the narrator took his grandmother's knowledge of society, religion, and monsters as serious as he would take a known placebo. Now that his grandmother's warnings of vampires appear real, can we assume her knowledge of all else might not be so intellectually lacking as th narrator would have originally believed? Most specifically, God?
My grandmother had died when I was seven, but it seemed she had been better read than I had given her credit for.
A cannibal is no less of an abomination than a vampire, but it is a much easier concept to handle.
My hand reached to my chest and I felt the comforting hardness of the icon of the Saviour. I offered Him a silent prayer. It would have surprised Him; He had not heard from me for many years, but I had been brought up to believe that He wasn't one to hold a petty grudge.
On the surface, he portrayed himself as the most hardened cynic of us all, but every cynic must, as well as doubting the motivations of others, always doubt their own.
A serf can sit and remain in one state until his master tells him what he must do next. A freeman must be his own master.
The hypocrisy of this is that Aleksei himself, to be with Domnikiia, will soon show his lack of love for God, Marfa, and little Dmitry, by choosing to become a vampire. This also plays against the notion that the weak ask God to lead them from temptation when in truth, like this, the weak actually fall to temptation.
Images of my wife and my son came to me, but were quickly dismissed by thoughts of Domnikiia.
It's not Domnikiia's fault but Aleksei's allegiances and loyalties seem to stay in an everlasting revolution of animalistic desire and circumstance.
