He was proud of the fact that some of his paintings on canvas survived, now owned by the Romanian Cultural Heritage Foundation and considered national treasures. He'd been to the museums to see them himself and had enjoyed standing off to the side, but close enough to hear viewers' comments.
Baka sat on the dirt floor of his prison in utter darkness living his worst nightmare. Since the day he had remembered who he was, the only thing he had asked from life was enough distraction to keep him from reliving his life as a vampire. But there in the black with his hands manacled, with no creature or thing to divert his journey to hell, it all replayed in vivid detail.
On a Spring day in 1468, at age fifteen, Baka's father was hired to repair the roof of the monastery and brought Baka to assist. He saw one of the monks writing through a window and was captivated. The monk noticed the boy's fascination and was, in turn, fascinated himself. Baka was invited to come inside for a closer look.
The monk asked Baka for his thoughts on philosophical questions and was impressed with the fact that the boy had given thought to theological questions of good and evil. Most unusual for the progeny of peasant class. While he was helping his father repair roofs or mend fences, there was, apparently, a lot going on in the boy's head. His mind was just as busy as his hands.
Brother Cufaylin asked if Baka would like to have a job working for the monks doing what needed to be done in exchange for meals and an education. For a peasant like Baka, the prospect of an education was tantamount to a lottery win. He couldn't believe his good fortune. He said goodbye to his parents and moved into the monastery.
He was given a pallet that was rolled up and stowed under a cabinet during the day. At night he unrolled it and slept by the kitchen fire. The boy gladly performed any service required of him promptly and without complaint whether it was cooking, carrying, chopping, hauling, or digging. Gradually all the monks came to regard him with fondness. Collectively they were amazed at the depth of the questions he posed, some of which might have challenged Thomas Aquinas himself.
Baka proved a quick study, with a natural proclivity for writing, mathematics, and, surprising enough, illuminating. The manuscripts he illuminated were so beautiful they were left open in the library as inspiration and evidence of the god's love expressed through the art of a penniless peasant boy. Secretly, there were times when Brother Cufaylin wondered if the care, education, and guidance of this special boy wasn't his true god-given purpose, or even that of the monastery itself.
In the year 1470, an artist came from Italy to paint a mural on the chapel wall. Baka observed the man's technique for a few days and then proceeded to prove that he was as talented at painting large scale scenes as illuminating manuscripts. Brother Faescu, who served in the capacity of accountant for the monastery, was persuaded to approve a small expenditure for the purchase of paints and supplies so that Baka might practice and improve upon his talent. He worked hard at creating art, but he would never have named it work as it was a labor of love in the purest sense.
Whenever he stopped to think about the hardships of living in those times, he thought he must be the luckiest person alive to spend his days making beauty out of a handful of raw materials. In time, that beauty astounded all who came to see.
Shortly after Baka turned eighteen, he learned that one of the local girls, who was fifteen, had been left alone as the rest of her family succumbed to a fever and died. He went to Brother Cufaylin, explained that he would like to rescue the girl through an offer of marriage. The monk asked if Baka loved her. Baka admitted that he did not love her, but went on to say that he loved the idea of doing a good thing.
The monk could not have been more pleased. He took some of the manuscripts Baka had illuminated and sold them for enough money to buy a stone cottage in the mountainside forest, fifteen minutes' walk from the monastery, and gave it to Baka for a wedding present. He also informed Baka that he would thereafter receive compensation sufficient to sustain a small family comfortably.
Gheorghita knew she should be thinking of nothing but mourning the family she had survived, but it was hard to concentrate on that when she had won such a prize as she had never hoped for. Istvan Baka was the name on the tongue of every girl in the province. He was beautiful as a boy could be and seemed to have the light of spirit shining all around him. He was also completely oblivious to the feminine attention he drew to himself and had never shown the slightest interest in anyone. Certainly the fact that he had risen in status above the station of peasant to artisan made her all the more fortunate.
They were married by Brother Cufaylin and set about creating an idyllic domicile in a stone cottage on the forested mountainside. Baka was easy going and good company, even if on the quiet side. He liked Gheorghita well enough and liked sex more than he had expected to. His observation of animals in the fields had been that they appeared to be suffering through a rather unpleasant task.
His appetite for carnal knowledge far exceeded his wife's so he took what was tolerated and was glad for it.
Every day Baka thanked his god for his good fortune and his many blessings. His basic needs were met which enabled him to wrestle with the harder, more abstract, and intellectual questions such as what might his purpose be?
Those questions were answered with the birth of his first child, a girl he named Stavna. From the moment he first held her in his hands, Baka's core philosophy centered on a certainty that the meaning of life is children.
Gheorghita delighted him with a son the next year, but in the third year both she and a second boy died in childbirth. He grieved as much for his children's loss as anything. He had two children under the age of three and no caretaker. So he bundled them up and took them with him to the village to inquire about someone to watch them in his absence. The old herb woman suggested that he try the Widow Mironescu, saying that it might be a practical match. The widow had recently been left with two little children and no husband. Baka had recently been left with two little children and no wife.
To Baka it seemed like sound reasoning. So he went to see the Widow Mironescu and made a proposal to give her the safety of marriage and the basic necessities for herself and her children in exchange for being a loving mother to his little ones. She was a plain woman but not ill-formed. She was older, in her mid twenties, but, as Baka thought, no one is perfect.
The widow rejoiced and wept with gratitude. In terms of what might be expected to befall a Middle Ages widow, she was fortunate indeed to contract such a practical marriage, equally beneficial to both parties.
Baka loaded the few things she could call her own onto the cart and started back up the mountain with a family quickly grown to four children and a new wife named Marilena.
Baka was pleased enough with the new situation. Marilena fulfilled her obligation to keep the house, cook, and take care of Baka's children as well as her own. When it came to sex, she preferred to remain clothed, as was the custom of the time, wanting to bare only what was necessary for as little time as was necessary. She was not interested in foreplay nor was she interested in expressions of affection afterward. She encouraged Baka to accelerate the speed at which he reached orgasm to make short work of her wifely duty and, because he was an affable spirit, he did his best to comply.
Over the next seven years they had three children together. The year that he was twenty-eight, a fever sickness spread through the valley and eventually reached his home on the mountain. Marilena, her two children, and two of the three they had together died leaving Baka with his first daughter, Stavna, who was then nine-years-old, and a little boy who was four.
Suffering so many deaths caused Baka to struggle with issues of faith. If children were the meaning of life, then how could his god be so cruel as to take them and leave him behind? Baka was thirty-one, but the losses had left him feeling old. He was a widower a second time, but he thanked his god for sparing Stavna, who was not only the apple of his eye, but also of an age to take over the responsibilities of some household chores and and watching her little brother.
A year passed without Baka feeling motivated to take another wife. Then another. The year that he was thirty-one, several of the monks were to journey to Bucharest to arrange matters of trade, and Brother Cufaylin wanted Baka to accompany them. They made arrangements for Stavna and her little brother to stay in the village with the herb woman while they were away.
Baka had never been away from the valley community where he'd been born. Though he tried to appear outwardly sophisticated, on the inside he was excited as a child. It took four days to reach Bucharest. Baka had not thought there were that many people on Earth. Certainly he never could have imagined anything as grand as the palace that was Prince Vlad Dracula III's summer residence.
The monks made arrangements to stay on the second floor of a stone building that housed a tavern at street level. They were served the evening meal by the innkeeper's young daughter, Helena. When she stopped next to Baka with a pitcher, ready to fill his mug with ale, she looked down into his face and caught her breath. He had lost the youthful beauty that had made the village girls stare and titter. His hair was no longer sun-streaked from working outside with his father. His eyes weren't bright with the promise of an unknown future. His skin wasn't flawless and it didn't flush when he realized he'd attracted feminine attention.
What the innkeeper's daughter saw in that face transcended the bloom of youth. She saw the character of a man who was so good that he didn't struggle to do the right thing. It was just natural for him. She saw a man so steady that everyone who knew him knew that they could count on him. And, though she was sexually innocent, her body responded to him in ways that awoke her curiosity.
Baka was every bit as taken with Helena as she was with him. He thought she was a walking work of art and was amazed that she was interested in a man over thirty and worn by the world. He wanted to take her home, but was concerned that a young woman accustomed to crowds and excitement might be unhappy with a quiet, secluded mountainside cottage and ordinary chores. When he voiced this concern, it was confirmation that her intuition was right about him because it was hardly typical to think about the happiness of a wife, much less to be concerned about it. She assured him that she simply wanted to be where he was and that would be happiness enough for her.
On the last day of his sojourn to the Wallachia capital, he approached the innkeeper with a proposal. The man expressed considerable displeasure at the prospect of losing a valuable asset in the form of a daughter who worked for free.
Brother Cufaylin assisted with negotiations and reached an agreement with the man that included payment of a dowry. Just two days before, the monastery had enjoyed a generous influx of cash from the sale of some of Baka's paintings which they had brought to a Bucharest art dealer. If Baka had understood that Helena's dowry was being funded with money he had made, it wouldn't have changed a thing. He would not have felt cheated. He would have said he had everything he needed and wanted.