LUKAREVICH (LUCCARI), EPHROSINIA
(17th century)--Born into the Getaldich-Kruhoradich family of Dubrovnik landed gentry, she married a nobleman from the Luccari family. In her palazzo she kept a caged jay-bird, whose presence in the house was medicinal, and on the wall a Greek clock that played hymns and psalms on holidays. She was wont to say that opening every new door in life is as uncertain as dealing cards, and about her rich husband she said that he dined on silence and water. She was known for her uninhibited behavior and was beautiful; she defended herself by saying with a smile that flesh and honor do not go together. She had two thumbs on each hand, and always wore gloves, even at meals. She liked red, blue, and yellow foods, and wore dresses in the same colors. She had two children, a boy and a girl.
One night, watching through the window that separated her room from her mother's, the seven-year-old daughter saw her mother give birth. Attended by her bird, Lady Ephrosinia gave birth to a bearded little man with spurs on his bare feet, who entered the world crying, "A hungry Greek will even to heaven go," bit off his own umbilical cord, and rushed off, grabbing not clothes but a cap and calling for his sister by name. The little girl was struck dumb, could be neither led nor pushed, and was removed from sight to Konavlje. These things were said to happen to Lady Ephrosinia because she had sat on bread and was secretly having an affair with a Jew named Samuel Cohen <cohen.htm> from the Dubrovnik ghetto. To accusations about her free ways, Lady Ephrosinia coldly replied that she accepted lectures from no one.
"The truth be told, if I could choose from one hundred charming, strong, and noble dark-maned lords, whose days were not fleeting, then tempted I might be. But in Ragusa not even one hundred such fifers can in a hundred years be found! And who has one hundred years to wait?"
The other accusations she did not even answer. Namely, it was said that she had been Mora as a girl, became a witch before she married, and after her death would be a vampire for three years. Not everybody believed this third part, because it was held that vampires were most often Turks, less often Greeks, and never Jews. And it was whispered that Lady Ephrosinia was secretly of Moses' faith.
Be that as it may, when Samuel Cohen was banished from Dubrovnik, Lady Ephrosinia did not take it lightly: it was said that she would die of sorrow, and that every night she held her fist, the thumbs clenched on either side, like a rock against her heart. But instead of dying, one morning she disappeared from Dubrovnik; she was subsequently seen in Konavlje, then at Dance sitting on a grave at high noon combing her hair, and later traveling north to Belgrade and down to the Danube in search of her lover. When she heard that Cohen had died at Kladovo, she did not return home. She cut off and buried her hair and no-one knows what happened to her after that. Her death is believed to be described in a long, sad folk poem, recorded in Kotor in 1721 and preserved only in Italian translation under the title The Latin Maiden and the Walachian Count Dracula. Although the translation is damaged, the heroine of the poem is believed to represent Lady Ephrosinia, and Count Dracula a person by the name of Vlad Malescu, who actually lived in Transylvania in the 17th and 18th centuries. Briefly the poem imparts the following information:
The white reeds were already sprouting when a beautiful, sorrowful woman went down to the Danube to search for her beloved, who had been sent to war. When she heard ha had been killed, she went to Count Dracula, who look's through tomorrow's eye and is the most costly healer of sorrow. He had an almost black skull under his hair, a wrinkle of silence on his face, and an enormous penis, which on holidays he tied to a chaffinch and let the bird carry for him on the long silk thread as it flew ahead. Tucked under his belt was a small scrap of shell with which he could skin a living man to perfection; he could then dress him again in the same skin, holding him by the pigtail. He concocted potions for sweet death, and his court was constantly besieged by vampires dousing candles and asking Dracula to let them die once more. Death was their only remaining contact with life. The knobs on the doors leading into his living quarters turned of their own accord, and in front of his court a small whirlwind drew everything within reach into its kneading swirl. It had been whirling here for seven thousand years now, and moistening its center or eye was the moonlight which had shone as brightly as noon for all these seven thousand years. When the young woman arrived, Count Dracula's servants were sitting in the shade of the whirlwind drinking; one of them would take a swig from the jug while the other emitted long sounds resembling a song, and the first one drank until the other took a breath. Then they reversed roles. In honor of the visitor, they sang first an evensong, then a harvest song, and lastly a song sung "heads together", which went as follows:
Every spring, when the birds start counting the fish in the Danube, a white reed grows at the mouth of the river into the sea. (It grows only for three days that the fresh water and the salt water intermingle, its seeds are swifter than any other, it blossoms faster than a turtle moves, reaching hights that overtake the ants crawling up it. On dry land, the seed of the white reed can lie dormant for up to two hundred years, but when it encounters the damp, it germinates in less than an hour, within three to four hours it reaches the height of one meter, then it thickens, and by the end of the day you can no longer put your hands around it. By the morning it is as thick as a man's waist and as tall as a house, and fishermen often tie their nets to the white reed, which, as it grows, pulls the nets out of the water itself. Birds know that the white reed also grows in the entrails, and they are careful not to swallow it's seed or shoot. Still, boatmen and shepherds will sometimes see a bird being torn apart in the sky, and they know it because the bird, in some fit of madness or avian grief, reminiscent of a human lie, has pecked at the seed of the white reed, which then sprouted inside and tore it asunder in the sky. Something like took-marks are always found near the root of the white reed; the shepherds say that the white reed grows not from the soil but from the mouth of some underwater demon that whistles and talks through it, luring birds and other greedy creatures to its seed. That is why the white reed is not used to make flutes: one does not blow another's flute. Other fishermen say that, instead of using their own seed, birds sometimes impregnate their mates with the seed of the white reed; thus is the egg of death renewed on earth."
When the song was over, the girl let her greyhounds loose on the foxes, entered Count Dracula's tower alone, and gave him a bag of gold so he would heal her sorrow. He embraced her, led her into the bedchamber, and did not let her go until the greyhounds had returned from their fox hunt. It was morning when they parted; in the evening the shepherds found the greyhounds whimpering by the Danube in front of a lovely young woman torn to pieces like a bird that had been impregnated with the seed of the white reed. Only her silken dress still clung to the huge stalk that had already spread its roots and rustled through her hair. The girl had given birth to a mercurial daughter--her own death. In that death her beauty was divided into whey and curdled milk, and at the bottom was a mouth holding the root of the reed.