Artwork by Jamie Mann
Somewhere in Eastern Europe, 1974
The atelier was a brick building sitting in between glass ones, but it had not always been. Before the dilapidated Hanover Street had become subsumed by the city’s banking district, it was nothing more than a stone road of terraced houses; old and spacious ones, probably haunted. They, those powers that be, tried to get the atelier demolished alongside the terraced houses to build another terrible glass bank, but the rickety old thing was bought out for millions, the sort of millions that don’t exist anywhere except lottery tickets. Loena had learned of this benefactor a long time ago, in the same way she learned about how once a year all the leaves change colour and sometimes bugs transform into other bugs—that is to say, in the same way children learn about the little magics of the world and accept them before they’re old enough to know better. Loena’s family, the Nowaks, were seamstresses by trade, but were not half-bad cobblers, knitters, weavers, corsetiers, or hatters. Loena’s atelier, the bespoke clothing shop on Hanover Street, was devoid of empty surfaces. Tumbling towers of fabric, dangerously hidden pincushions, hundreds of half-used spools of thread and defunct sewing machines. Every other day, Loena’s mother would return with armfuls of expensive velvets and satins, misplace and restock golden boutonnieres like they were candy, and insist on hiring real models on which to construct her dresses. Anybody might assume—and they did, the cityfolk—Loena’s mother and all the Nowak women were extravagant spenders days or minutes away from bankruptcy. Indeed, they hoped for it: that at last, the little brick building could be properly assimilated into the street of banks, and with it would go that eccentric gaggle of frilly-coated women. But Loena’s mother could spend as much as she wished. The benefactor would always provide.
“He will arrive sometime in the next ten years,” Loena’s mother explained to her, four or five years old. “And commission a wardrobe. Not just a suit, not just a pair of shoes. Everything. Shirts, pants, undergarments, pocketscarves, formal, casual, clothes for weddings, clothes for funerals. He will commission two bags—one for travel, one for work. He will seek hats and scarves, he will seek swimwear.”
Loena began to work on the benefactor’s collection in the company of her mother and her aunts that summer. She is sixteen years old now, and it is just about done. In between designing cupcake dresses for debutantes in faraway cities or repairing the leather shoes of the banking men who ordered scrawny interns to fetch them several days late, Loena would work on stitching buttons into a shirt for the benefactor, or knotting a tie. Loena had been given very little direction about the benefactor’s abundant collection, safe for this: it had to be in-fashion. The benefactor needed to resemble every other man of the era: just dated enough to seem like an adult who had grown up in the decade prior, but otherwise imperceptible. A wardrobe that the benefactor could live with for thirty or forty years until he arrived to commission the next. Also, every shirt and coat had to have a high collar, high enough to cover most telling scars on the benefactor’s throat.
The benefactor, of course, was a vampire, who’d been commissioning wardrobes from the Nowak women every half-century since the Renaissance. He’d rebuilt the building after fires, sacks, and floods. He’d provided an endless stockpile of updated currency, sponsored exuberant upholstery shopping, and ensured the little house and the women inside flourished; that they never lacked for anything. It started with a love story, all those years ago. Now, it was something like an obsession.
The last time the benefactor visited the atelier, it was the 1920s. Loena thumbed through fading old photographs and smudged sketchbooks of the designs her grandmother and great aunts had imagined for him: brilliant striped tailcoats and cinched vests, thin hats, billowing satin shirts. There could not be any photographs of the benefactor, but in an old sewing box stuffed underneath years worth of quilted throw pillows, were excellently penned thank you cards, each addressed to the living syndicate of Nowak women who’d prepared his wardrobe. Loena often traced his swooping cursive hand with the bed of her index finger and imagined her own name listed at the bottom of the note. Soon, she thought.
The seasons waned into one another; that odd bridge of winter and spring made up of mud and pollen. Loena bristled through the park with a picnic basket of ribbons and lace when she saw him. It had to be—a lean, wolf-eyed man in old-fashioned clothes sitting on a wooden bench, observing birds, less so curious, more so hungry. She knew it must be him, most of all, because of the emblem sewn into his cuff: a coiling B and M, the Nowak watermark. He noticed her noticing him, his head turning not like any man’s head she’d seen before: it glided, as if on a swivel. In fact, all his movements seemed liquid in the same way, cool and practiced, with the supernatural ease of somebody who had occupied the same body for hundreds of years. He smiled her way, and Loena was unsure if he knew who she was because she had the face of all the Nowak women with their caterpillar eyebrows and ski-slope noses, or because of the overflowing basket of inventory. Likely it was both. Before she felt herself moving, Loena was just steps away from the bench. Before she felt herself speaking, she was asking the benefactor his name. It had never occurred to her that he might have a name until just then.
“I’m Loena,” she answered somewhat timidly. “Your wardrobe is nearly finished.”
He wasn’t as pale as she’d figured, having read her share of vampire novels, nor was he black-haired. He did not make Loena think of bats and wet crypts; perhaps a woodpecker, the way he tapped his long brown shoe against the cobblestone, and perhaps an old living room, awash with cigar smoke and lamplight. He smiled at her once more, with dimples older than the city itself. He said he knew her name, which Loena supposed she should have figured. This was how Loena ended up on the bench with the benefactor, studying the custom fit of his clothes, imagining the years-long work of her grandmother and her stubby hands adjusting the boning and flattening the lapels. She almost reached out to flatten them herself. This was how Loena asked the benefactor about his life, and this is the story he began to tell.
Somewhere in Central Europe, 1921
The benefactor had by now become accustomed and rather privy to when the world might change, and with it, its clothes. There was a certain restlessness in the air, as if everybody in the world had suddenly outgrown their shoes and were stumbling around on blistered feet; as if the trees began to find their sweaters itchy and the sky bored of its monotonous slate of colours. There was a prickling the benefactor felt on his nape when everyone around him, intensely and irreversibly, decided they ought not to be anything like those people that came before them. He knew the feeling well, and yet never still had he felt it so raucously as in the late 1910s in all his years of life. He watched the harried exchange of silhouettes like a wildlife biologist. Normally, there was an awkward phase of the transition, wherein the idea for the difference existed but nobody had quite managed to manifest it—the fabrics didn’t exist, the stitching technique hadn’t been rebanded. This time, however, the benefactor thought all the youth in the world must have conferenced secretly, away from the ears and eyes of their mums and dads, and stepped out of the boardroom shed of old skins like a snake. Nobody knew what to do with the ferociousness of the change; their arresting new fashions. So, they consumed the world, dressing it in their rectangular frames and flat shoes and silver detail. The benefactor was caught in the whirlpool of adaptation, and he no swifter than a dove was boarding a train and then another to visit the Nowak women in their atelier nested in an afterthought of a city. He’d commissioned the wardrobe in advance, but now he wondered if they’d started working too soon, and would not well enough see to the change.
The suspicion, the benefactor told Loena, was aching. Eyes narrowed on the train, legs crossed indignantly, murmurs waxed into laughter. Everybody knew the benefactor did not belong, or rather, did not belong any longer; that everybody had moved along without him. He peeled off and abandoned his outdated coat and left it in the car, and he regretted it right away as he watched the train resume its course. The hatred had made him careless, quick to forget. He decided to go after it, the wretched coat. Though of course it had not been wretched just some years earlier. The benefactor hiked in the train’s direction, his speed like no man’s, each step bringing him several paces forth. But still, it was not fast enough, and the sun was beginning to rise over the cruel horizon. The only place the benefactor might duck was a little farmhouse teeming with song, so that he easily joined into the fray and the shelter of the roof. The dancing was frantic, unstoppable. The music kept its pace. The benefactor went up as far as the door and tried to look welcome, but his formalwear—if not here anachronistic—jutted out like a swatch of colour on a wedding dress in the midst of the folk dress dancing in the barn, and he was soon approached by a young boy in sturdy lederhosen, hanging in the doorframe.
“Hi there, Old Fashioned,” he said, grinning a little crookedly. “Are you lost?”
The benefactor said that he was, that he’d gotten off at the wrong train stop and needed somewhere to spend the day until the next one. The boy didn’t question further about the train, but he did warn the benefactor: “We dance all night, all day, OK, Old Fashioned? It might be a little loud for you.” He invited the benefactor inside.
When night fell, the benefactor left without saying goodbye. He’d spent his hours meandering around the old house, looking into photographs and wondering if he’d known any of these people well sometime. His memory was not as good as somebody might imagine, nor as good as others like him. Being a vampire did not make you different, just longer. If you were stubborn on horseback, he told Loena, you’d be stubborn in a car too.
The benefactor at last found a lost and found office, arriving at the train stop, and there was his coat. The woman running the booth chuckled and said, “You know, that’s the first time somebody’s actually returned something, or come back for something. We called it the un-stealable-coat.”
The benefactor draped it over his arm and chuckled with her, and said that it was sentimental.
The woman nodded, and tucked back her coiling blond hair behind her ears to reveal garish green heirloom earrings that must have been made at least a lifetime before she was born. “I understand. It’s nice to wear old things. Everybody can tell you loved someone.”
Somewhere in Western Europe, 1868
Before the coat was remarkable and instead when it was boring, the benefactor told Loena, he lived in a beautiful townhouse where every weekend a gardener would trim the ivy that danced across its facade and where ridiculous penny-farthings were parked in a row outside on the pavement. Those things are in museums nowadays. The benefactor was living, at the time, in the largest city in the world. It had only recently become so, and it would be dethroned again soon, but for that time being, the city imbued the sort of anonymity you can only achieve subsumed by the gigantic. His fashions had done him well for quite a while, and would remain convincing enough for a while too, in that peculiarly static time. After all, it would not be until much later where regular folk allowed themselves to be distinguished from one another instead of just from them; the nobility.
Loena asked the benefactor why, in his financial abundance, he did not simply enter those circles himself. Then he could wear those hats and those wigs, even those funny breeches. The benefactor laughed and told Loena it was mostly a mercy to her great-grandmother. She would have hated to design such pompous outfits.
And so amidst the splendour of the city the benefactor remained in his immutable greys and beiges, those heavy layers of socks and suspenders and undershirts. The world was slower then, not for any reason babbling old men might whine in later years about the corruption of young people by loud music, but because it took twice as long to dress and undress beneath the buttons and clips and ties; the distance between air and flesh was inches thicker. It was sweatier, even in the winter. It took more strength to move, breathing was laboured.
The benefactor wondered if anybody else noticed this, or if it was only him, having known another way. That night, he sat in an old pub—places like these he enjoyed, stone buildings that have seen the same changing worlds as he—and spoke with the barkeep as he mopped the sick of a regular patron.
“He was born on a boat, so he’s always sick on land,” said the barkeep. The benefactor asked if that was possible, and the barkeep shrugged. The benefactor asked if it was possible that children born to wear so many layers of clothing always thought they must be cold, and the barkeep laughed.
Heading home that night, the benefactor decided to run. Indeed, he’d never seen somebody running—really, really running—in this city. Maybe they didn’t know they could. The benefactor took off, and he panted and heaved, and as he ran he tossed down his hat and kicked off his shoes, his socks slipped down his calves, he tore at his collar, and with every shedding he gained speed, until he was outside his door with his hands on his knees and worlds lighter. He did, after he caught his breath, amble back down the road to collect all his bits and pieces. But he knew then for certain that it was not the times that made the clothes, but the other way around.
Somewhere in Southern Europe, 1602
In those first years of vampirism, the benefactor stumbled around the shores of his hometown in a disarray. He skewered fish with his nails, monstrous things that had grown out in the weeks after he’d run away from home, having nearly devoured his brother in a fit of newfound bloodlust. The benefactor, who was then just a man, howled in hunger, curled into himself on the sand. He stalked cliffsides, desperate to hurry into the closest harbour town and bring it to an end of gore and heartache. But he remained in his frenzy, starving but unable to die, in his torn nightgown.
One evening, an impossibly large boat docked on that shore of his childhood. The smell of unfamiliar bodies overwhelmed the man, his pupils dilated, his bones straining and shifting inside him. Swiftly stumbling, he prowled toward the ship as it began to unload its passengers—well-dressed men in long blue capes and women in woven skirts and fur hats marvelled at the crystalline waters and ornate ancient columns, too enthralled by all the newness to notice the man stalk near. All but her—a short and serious woman, who did not squeal or draw attention, but wheel her baggage around her head and launch it precisely at the man as if it were a spear. He went barrelling to the ground again, too disoriented to avoid the blow. There were some gasps, and a couple reprimandings from her stern father, but soon enough shipmen had pounced on the man and were dragging him away to a prison cell. The man went slack in their hands, carted away.
He remained there in that cold room for several days, huddling to himself in the only shadowed corner every time the sun rose, groaning when its rays touched him and left little sizzles on his exposed shins—his body was too tall to remain in that corner, not all of him was pressed enough against the wall to avoid the burning. On the seventh day, the man received a visitor: that same assailing woman from the shore, dressed still in the clothing of her people but without the hat or gloves. The man all-but growled at her, though she appeared unphased. Instead, she produced small glass bottles from the inside of her satchel filled with a thick and cold-red liquid.
The man, forgetful of the sunny prison and too hungry to bother with the pain, leaped at the prison gates. The woman, unimpressed, held them high above her head. She tutted, said something in a language he did not know, and then said something in a language he did:
“It’s rat blood. I killed a couple on my way over here. Will it do?”
The man nodded feverishly—literally, as the sun blistered his back and neck. She held out her hand, and he his own, and she dropped one vial at a time into his fingers, only giving him the next when he finished the first and asked politely. This was Zofia Nowak, and this is how she met the benefactor.
She led him to where she was staying this short while. Not forever, she explained, only for her brother’s wedding to a noblewoman of this country. She fed him, she kept him shaded in the great comfort of the quarters she shared with her sister. Most of all, Zofia Nowak sewed him a new set of clothes.
“I’m a seamstress by trade,” Zofia told the man, measuring his chest with some old rope, “but mostly I tell stories to the children in my hometown. I noticed these—” and she touched the deep punctured wound on the left side of the man’s throat, “and I knew, this was like one of my stories.”
She was his age then. She remained in his country for one year following the wedding, awaiting another boat. During the day, she travelled the city, haggling for fabric, and worked on various most fashionable items for the man. During the night, she and he would traverse the city. They dined on rooftops and painted on walls. Mostly they swam. Zofia said that where she was from, the water was always too cold to do anything like that. When Zofia left, it was as if somebody had blown out all the candles in the world, and everything faintly smelled of wax and smoke for a long time, so that somebody might think—there were candles lit here, once. Vibrant ones, and now they have gone away. Zofia told the man that she was opening her very own atelier on a pleasant street in her hometown, and that when the times caught up with him, he ought to visit.
The man, who soon became the benefactor, never saw Zofia Nowak again. In fact, she did not ever make it home to open the atelier—the boat capsized, the benefactor learned when he finally visited, and her sister Stefania had opened it in her place. All the candles in all the world.
It is Stefania Nowak who built the man’s first wardrobe. In fact, it was already done by the time he arrived, because she and Zofia had begun to design it on their ill-fated journey home. She was that certain he would come.
Somewhere in Eastern Europe, 1974
Loena Nowak prepares in boxes the benefactor’s wardrobe while he waits in the atelier. She watches as he studies the building, running his hands along wooden beams and just barely maneuvering around the mess, which he did not seem upset by.
“This is everything!” Loena announced, a ceiling-high pile of boxes stacked up in her short arms, wobbling every which way as she expertly bounded through the atelier. Carefully, she and the benefactor helped to load the boxes of 1970s fashions into his red Alfa Romeo. The trunk just barely shut around the boxes, even with the benefactor’s impossible strength. The benefactor thanked Loena, and kissed the top of her head, as if a father. He drove into the distance. She would only see him once more in her lifetime, likely with a daughter of her own.
After the benefactor left, Loena returned to the atelier, hollow-chested. There she found a thick envelope of money, the sort of money that does not exist anywhere safe for thick and mysterious envelopes like these, along with a quaint card. Inside, it thanked Loena for her work, her name in swirling calligraphy. It said, I will see you in another time.
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