The Black Forest or the Secret Diary of Prof. S. Quirrell

Aug. 7

As the sun traces her wolfish features, the paws elongate into fingers, the legs unbend and the muzzle slides back into a nose and mouth. The transformation back into human form is not violent at all and Levin sleeps through it.

She is naked, but her modesty isn't threatened, still curled up as she is, as a dog beside the fire. Her skin seems paler than usual and almost hangs off her in places, as if she hasn't eaten in weeks.

I dissolve the binding spell and wait for her to wake up.

No less than a minute after the leash was gone, Levin jumped at me, her teeth bared and a growl in her throat. I pushed her back without feeling and she fell easily, rolling over on her left side.

Down her right, an angry red welt rose from the midcalf to just above her hip. The would wasn't fresh, but it had never properly healed. It needed strong medicinal spellwork.

"Let me bind that."

"Don't touch me!" The wolf had disappeared back into the place where she hid it, but the woman was worse. "Don't come near me!"

"This needs attention. I know the proper incantations. I can help."

"You can help," she raised herself on her elbows, but lacked the strength to sit up. "You have done enough already."

“I - ?”

"You! Don't think you can undo what you have done to me - what you have done!" Her voice steeled and all the weakness left her body. "But you could not kill. All this you have done to me, but you would not kill."

"I can't."

"Can't? But I am evil! Don't you understand? This is not for pity - this is for your life and the lives of others. If you cannot learn to kill, you will never defeat the darkness."

Her words were uncomfortable and turned me cold. "Get up. I'll make a fire. We'll have something to eat and then we'll talk. I'm exhausted."

I left her lying there. I didn't care.

Back in the clearing, I built a fire as the nici' magie would, using dry wood, underbrush and Levin's flint, repeating what I'd seen her do a dozen times. I was tired of magic - I am tired of magic - and I wanted for one moment to feel like the nici' magie do.

Half an hour later, Levin stumbled out of the trees, crossing to the pile of clothing. She collapsed beside the trappings of her human life and slowly dressed, ignoring me and repeating " Lepurele inculcusul sau se-nveseleste."

I waited for the ritual to end so she might join me by the fire. When she finished her chants and dressing, Levin sat down on the ground across from me.

There was an awkward silence. I opened my mouth to say something, but by then she was already speaking.

"I have tasted human flesh, verita mic. I am damned."

That lay between us like a corpse. The sun itself seemed to darken. The whole world stopped.

But Levin went on. "For not keeping his mouth shut, my father disappeared when I was 7. My brother raised me on a factory worker's job, but it was no life for a young boy. He fell in with a rough, wild crowd and loved them more than anyone because they gave him pleasure. They were not like the little girl at home. I did not stay a girl long after that. They made me a woman when I was 11 and a wolf when I was 13.

We ran in a pack at the full moon. We killed. They never expected I would be the strongest because I was a woman. That is why my brother is dead and Sergei and Pushkin. To call a werewolf by a poet's name - foolishness. Where is the poetry in ripping out a man's throat?" She laughed, but it was a strangled sound. "When the nici' magie around us began talking, reviving the legends of the wolf-man, gypsies reappeared in our town. But these were different from Romany beggars. I could smell it on them - sang 'solut and sang 'mol and I could smell the difference even between them. I urged my brother to leave, but still he ignored me. The prey was good in the countryside and the alleyways and they had all grown fat on it.

When it happened, I was in the Party youth house, as was my habit as a good Communist. I learned from my father's mistakes that one must make the appearance even if it's not true. To play a part. To be sweet and loyal and shy , even as I lived on the street and hunted my comrades like deer.

They taught me English there and I was reading A Life of Stalin in that langauge when I heard them. When I heard their screams and when I smelled their flesh burning.

"We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism. Accordingly, we also hold that a
real struggle must be waged against real enemies... "

I heard my brother cry out "Fugi, fetita, fugi daca nu mori! Daca nu mori, fetita!"

"The cornerstone of anarchism is the individual, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the masses, the collective body. According to the tenets of anarchism, the emancipation of the masses is impossible until the individual is emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: "Everything for the individual."

I wanted to cry. No, I wanted to howl. But no one person in the reading room noticed me. They knew nothing.

'Can't you smell them, comrades? Can't you hear them? They are killing my brothers and they are all I have!'

But I was not one of them anymore. I was no longer nici' magie. But I was not of the sangs either. If they found me, they would kill me, but they did not suspect me because I was a woman. So I left them all." She drew herself up with pride. "I left them."

A falcon called a greeting from a little ways off and broke the spell her words had made. I remembered where I was and what had happened between us.

"There is a very new potion - I could learn it and teach it to you - "

"There is nothing to be done for me, verita mic. I am damned." She reached for her pack which lay between my legs. "I have a little coffee. Will you take some?"

"Yes. Please." My body was ice and something warm would be welcome.

She prepared two cups, carefully wrapping the black grounds in yellowing filter paper, then dunking them tea-style into the heated water.

"How is that different from my leafy milk water then?"

She actually smiled, a real one. "This will put hair on your chest and from what I can see, boy, you could use it."

" I am not a boy!"

"You are to me."

"Right, then. How old are you?"

"I stopped counting. It didn't matter after awhile. But that last year I marked was 1985 when I left Sighisoara."

"So you're my age. You can cease with the older woman act."

"We are the same in years, maybe, but we have seen many different things."

"We have." I took a deep breath and for a moment I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to, but I didn't have the words. When I tried to speak, the Angel of Death danced into my views as if He had been hiding in the forest all along.

I thought of Charles. "Once you tell, it belongs to all of us." I don't want to belong to Levin although she now belongs in part to me.

It's selfish.

I don't care.

Rebekah belongs to me only, her memory locked inside my head. Mother may have burned the book she gave me and my record of our friendship, but she could not take her away. "To the fire with it, as your Muggle girlfriend will no doubt go herself. You are a curse on your Quirrell blood, seeking to throw away this family's chances on one of them. It's a benedictus that she's died. I should have killed her myself had this gone on any longer."

She would have, if the opportunity had come. Even her Zohar couldn't have saved Rebekah from Mother's wrath.

The book burned easily enough, but with a bright green flame. The pretty grey ashes were the only memorial I could offer her.

"Quirrell?"

I wrenched out of my thoughts at Levin's voice. At Levin's voice saying my name. My actual name.

"Are you alright?"

My vision cleared as I blinked back what might have been tears. I gave that girl all the tears I could my 7th year. I believed I had none left.

"Fine, Levin. My mind...wandered."

"Clearly," she sighed, absorbed back in herself. "So what happens now?"

"Meaning?"

"Where do I take you? Back to the reservation? To Bucharest? Home?"

"Where we've always been going, Levin. Wherever you've been taking me."

"But there is much time to be spent in that journey. Many months. Two or three phases of the moon." She looked away, expecting that reminder to signal my abandoning of her.

"I'll go with you."

"But...I will transform. I have killed, Quirrell, many times."

"And I need to learn to kill, didn't you say that? In order to combat evil."

"I am evil!" She stood, agitated and unsteady on her feet.

"You can change." I reached out for her, to steady her and, yes, to comfort her.

But she backed away, dropping the tin coffee cup at her feet. "Don't touch me! I - let me alone. Don't follow me."

She looped away like a drunkard and I stayed put like a coward.

I must have been alone there for almost three hours when I first heard her, the woman's voice rising above the sounds of the forest. But it wasn't Levin's, despite the Romanian.

"Sang 'solut," she said, "Cine se baga intre lupi, trebuie sa urle."

I whispered the translations spells, but the disembodied woman repeated, "Cine se baga intre lupi, trebuie sa urle."

Cine se baga intre lupi, trebuie sa urle. As if those words held the wisdom of the ages.

Q