By Blood We Live

I will not here indulge in that most vulgar of recent fashions, autobiography. Suffice it to say that I, along with every other vampire since the classical age of our Slavic forefathers, clawed my way out of that very well-appointed coffin and into the inevitably moonlit night. I availed myself, as so many of us do, of the graveyard caretaker as my first victim-how many of us recall the awkwardness of that first exsanguination! It is so much like making love for the first time; one has no clear idea what goes where, but clutches stiffly to whatever seems more or less correct, spraying fluids all over one's best evening clothes and mumbling apologies to the hapless partner, who no doubt experienced none of the crude pleasure one hoards to oneself. Of course, the experience of feeding is hardly the psycho-sexual revelation recent extra-cultural authors have claimed-do you, dear reader, find yourself in involuntary climax when ingesting a plate of pasta and a modest red wine? Certainly not. Yet certain in vogue lady novelists would have their deluded readership believe our own furtive suppers are orgiastic communions of the highest order.

Ah, but I have forgotten the tiresome necessity of all vampiric literature-I have not given my credentials. I ought to simply attach a notice of my parentage to my lapel or my Curriculum Vitae, perhaps even have it notarized like the breeding papers of a half-feeble spaniel. But certainly, without credentials, I can have nothing of importance to say. Very well.

I was sponsored by a very beguiling old debauch by the name of Ambrose Mosshammer who asked me to stay after his Herodotus seminar for special instruction. I fully expected to be accosted in his windowless eighth floor office-though when I imagined his skeletal hand groping my breasts and tearing my new wool skirt, I did not quite realize that he would simultaneously be whispering the tale of Gyges in my ear and divining the path of my jugular with his tongue before slashing into my throat with his gnarled, ancient teeth. It was certainly not what I had been led to expect young ladies experienced behind the closed doors of the offices of elderly colleagues. (I beg the forgiveness of any vampiric readers, for whom this recitation must be as tedious and gauche as a human reading about the expulsion of the placenta from his mother's womb. But the forms must be followed.)

Ambrose's blood tasted faintly of dust and the glue of book-bindings, as well as a peculiar undertaste of sandalwood and tobacco. It was not unpleasant, but I was rather in a rush to finish the process, once I realized what was afoot. There is no need to dwell in ritual-that sort of decadence can be safely left to Catholicism. He proffered his wrist in a most gentlemanly manner, and I availed myself of the necessary blood. I cannot overstate his professionalism and patience, truly, the old ones have a gravitas the younger generation of fiends cannot match.

I left his office with a rumpled skirt and a torn blouse, carried by his graduate students out to the parking lot, where I could safely be assumed to have been a victim of an over-zealous mugger. A few days later, I had risen from my grave and thusly embarked on my postdoctoral career.

– Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu

University of Budapest

Night Campus

About the Author

Anna-Silvia Oppenhagen-Petrescu was born in 1948 to Danish-Romanian parents, Adrian Petrescu and Marie Oppenhagen. Adrian and Marie had immigrated from the Continent whilst Marie was pregnant to the quiet London suburb of Kensington, where they raised their only daughter in relative tranquility

1 .The life of a young scholar is often tediously predictable, and young Anna was educated in the usual single-sex boarding schools before entering the equally homogenous St. Hilda's College, Oxford University. She studied Classics there under the watchful eye of Dr. Ambrose K. Mosshammer, who in her final year of study graciously Converted her in recognition of her great talent

2 .Once Anna had graduated, her interest shifted from the roots of human civilization in Ancient Greece to the roots of Vampiric civilization in the Slavic states and Central Europe. Her unromantic and strictly researched work in the field of Proto-History is widely recognized as having been one of the foundations of the field. In 1983, she helped to establish the Order of the Ivory Tooth, an association of literary historians who set out to archive the entirety of the Vampiric Corpus-that is, the sum total of all literature involving Vampires in the West. While this goal is far from complete, the Order is now one of the most highly respected institutions among the Vampiric elite, and its work, and ritual conferences, are watched with great interest.

In the early eighties, while a humble lecturer at the University of the Danube