The Historian

by Elisabeth Kostova

  “Even worse,” I said. “If that was one of his minions, then maybe he’s at Saint-Matthieu already himself.”

  “Or,” said Barley, but he stopped. I knew he had been about to say, “Or perhaps he’s here, with us.”

  “We did indicate exactly where we were getting off,” I said, to save him the trouble.

  “Who’s being nasty now?” Barley came up behind me and put one rather awkward arm around my shoulders, and I realized that he had at least been speaking as if he believed my father’s story. The tears that had been struggling to stay under my lids spilled over and rolled down my face. “Come, now,” said Barley. When I put my head on his shoulder, his shirt was warm from sun and perspiration. After a moment I pulled away, and we went back to our silent dinner in the farmhouse garden.

  “Helen wouldn’t say more during our journey back to the pension, so I contented myself with watching the passersby for any signs of hostility, looking around and behind us from time to time to see if we were being followed by anyone. By the time we reached our rooms again, my mind had reverted to our frustrating lack of information about how to search for Rossi. How was a list of books, some of them apparently not even extant, going to help us?

  “‘Come to my room,’ Helen said unceremoniously as soon as we’d reached the pension. ‘We need to talk in private.’ Her lack of maidenly scruple would have amused me at another moment, but just now her face was so grimly determined that I could only wonder what she had in mind. Nothing could have been less seductive, anyway, than her expression at that moment. In her room, the bed was neatly made and her few belongings apparently stowed out of sight. She sat down on the window seat and gestured to a chair. ‘Look,’ she said, pulling off her gloves and taking off her hat, ‘I’ve been thinking about something. It seems to me we have reached a real barrier to finding Rossi.’

  “I nodded glumly. ‘That’s just what I’ve been puzzling over for the last half hour. But maybe Turgut will turn up some information for us among his friends.’

  “She shook her head. ‘It is a wild duck chase.’

  “‘Goose,’ I said, but without enthusiasm.

  “‘Goose chase,’ she amended. ‘I have been thinking that we are neglecting a very important source of information.’

  “I stared at her. ‘What’s that?’

  “‘My mother,’ she said flatly. ‘You were right when you asked me about her, while we were still in the United States. I have been thinking about her all day. She knew Professor Rossi long before you did, and I never truly asked her about him after she first told me he was my father. I don’t know why not, except that it was clearly a painful subject for her. Also’-she sighed-‘my mother is a simple person. I did not think she could add to my knowledge of Rossi’s work. Even when she told me last year that Rossi believed in Dracula’s existence, I did not press her much-I know how superstitious she is. But now I wonder if she knows anything that might help us find him.’

  “Hope had leaped up in me with her first words. ‘But how can we talk with her? I thought you said she had no phone.’

  “‘She doesn’t.’

  “‘Then-what?’

  “Helen pressed her gloves together and slapped them smartly against her knee. ‘We will have to go see her in person. She lives in a small town outside Budapest.’

  “‘What?’ Now it was my turn to be irritable. ‘Oh, very simple. We just hop a train with your Hungarian passport and my-oops-American passport, and drop by to chat with one of your relatives about Dracula.’

  “Unexpectedly, Helen smiled. ‘There is no reason to be so bad tempered, Paul,’ she said. ‘We have a proverb in Hungarian: ”If a thing is impossible, it can be done.“’

  “I had to laugh. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What’s your plan? I’ve noticed you always have one.’

  “‘Yes, I have.’ She smoothed out her gloves. ‘Actually, I am hoping my aunt will have a plan.’

  “‘Your aunt?’

  “Helen glanced out the window, toward the mellowed stucco of the old houses across the street. It was nearly evening, and the Mediterranean light I had already come to love was deepening to gold on every surface of the city outside. ‘My aunt has worked in the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior since 1948, and she is a rather important lady. I got my scholarships because of her. In my country, you do not accomplish anything without an aunt or an uncle. She is my mother’s older sister, and she and her husband helped my mother flee from Romania to Hungary, where she-my aunt-was already living, just before I was born. We are very close, my aunt and I, and she will do whatever I ask her. Unlike my mother, she has a telephone, and I think I will call her.’

  “‘You mean, she could bring your mother to the phone somehow to talk with us?’

  “Helen groaned. ‘Oh, Lord, do you think that we can talk with them on the phone about anything private or controversial?’

  “‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  “‘No. We will go there in person. My aunt will arrange it. That way we can talk face-to-face with my mother. Besides’-something gentler crept into her voice-‘they will be so glad to see me. It is not very far from here, and I have not seen them for two years.’

  “‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m willing to try almost anything for Rossi, although it’s hard for me to imagine just waltzing into communist Hungary.’

  “‘Ah,’ said Helen. ‘Then it will be even harder for you to imagine waltzing, as you say, into communist Romania?’

  “This time I was silent for a moment. ‘I know,’ I said at last. ‘I’ve been thinking about it, too. If Dracula’s tomb turns out not to be in Istanbul, where else could it be?’

  “We sat for a minute, each of us lost in thought and impossibly far from the other, and then Helen stirred. ‘I will see if the landlady can let us call from downstairs,’ she said. ‘My aunt will be home from work soon, and I would like to talk with her immediately.’

  “‘May I come with you?’ I inquired. ‘After all, this concerns me, too.’

  “‘Certainly.’ Helen pulled on her gloves, and we went down to corner the landlady in her parlor. It took us ten minutes to explain our intentions, but the production of a few extra Turkish liras, with the promise of payment in full for the phone call, smoothed the way. Helen sat on a chair in the parlor and dialed through a maze of numbers. At last I saw her face brighten. ‘It’s ringing.’ She smiled at me, her beautiful, frank smile. ‘My aunt is going to hate this,’ she said. Then her face changed again, to alertness. ‘Éva?’ she said. ‘Elena!’

  “Listening carefully, I realized that she must be speaking Hungarian; I knew at least that Romanian was a Romance language, so I thought I might have understood a few words. But what Helen was speaking sounded like the galloping of horses, a Finno-Ugric stampede that I could not arrest with my ear for even a second. I wondered if she ever spoke Romanian with her family, or if perhaps that part of their lives had died long before, under the pressure to assimilate. Her tones rose and fell, interrupted sometimes by a smile and sometimes by a small frown. Her aunt Éva, on the other end, seemed to have a great deal to say, and sometimes Helen listened deeply, then broke in with those strange syllabic hoofbeats again.

  “Helen seemed to have forgotten my presence, but she suddenly raised her glance to me again and gave a wry little smile and a triumphant nod, as if the outcome of her conversation was favorable. She smiled into the receiver and hung up. Immediately our concierge was upon us, apparently worried about her phone bill, and I quickly counted out the agreed-upon amount, added a little, and deposited it in her outstretched hands. Helen was already on her way back to her room, beckoning to me to follow; I thought her secrecy unnecessary, but what did I know, after all?

  “‘Quick, Helen,’ I groaned, settling into the armchair again. ‘The suspense is killing me.’

  “‘It’s good news,’ she said calmly. ‘I knew my aunt would try to help in the end.’

  “‘What on earth did you tell her?’

  �
��She grinned. ‘Well, there’s only so much I could say on the telephone, and I had to be quite formal about it. But I told her I am in Istanbul on academic research with a colleague and that we need five days in Budapest to conclude our research. I explained that you are an American professor and that we are writing a joint article.’

  “‘On what?’ I asked with some apprehension.

  “‘On labor relations in Europe under the Ottoman occupation.’

  “‘Not bad. But I don’t know a thing about that.’

  “‘It’s all right.’ Helen brushed some lint from the knee of her neat black skirt. ‘I’ll tell you a little about it.’

  “‘You do take after your father.’ Her casual erudition had reminded me suddenly of Rossi, and the comment was out of my mouth before I’d thought about it. I glanced quickly at her, afraid I had somehow offended. It struck me that this was the first time I’d found myself thinking of her quite naturally as Rossi’s daughter, as if at some point unknown even to myself I’d accepted the idea.

  “Helen surprised me by looking sad. ‘It is a good argument for genetics over environment’ was all she said. ‘Anyway, Éva sounded annoyed, especially when I told her that you are an American. I knew she would be, because she always thinks I am impulsive and that I take too many risks. Of course, I do. And, of course, she needed to sound annoyed at first, to make it all right on the telephone.’

  “‘To make it all right?’

  “‘She has to think of her job and status. But she said she would fix something up for us, and I’m supposed to call her again tomorrow night. So that is that. She is very clever, my aunt, so I have no doubt she will find a way. We will get some round-trip tickets to Budapest from Istanbul, maybe the airplane, when we hear more.’

  “I sighed inwardly, thinking of the probable expense and wondering how long my funds would hold out in this chase, but I said only, ‘It seems to me she’ll have to be a miracle worker to get me into Hungary and keep us out of trouble along the way.’

  “Helen laughed. ‘Sheis a miracle worker. That is why I am not at home working in the cultural center in my mother’s village.’

  “We went downstairs again and, as if by mutual consent, drifted out to the street. ‘There’s not much to do just now,’ I mused. ‘We’ve got to wait until tomorrow for results from Turgut and your aunt. I have to say that I find all this waiting difficult. What shall we do, in the meantime?’

  “Helen thought a minute, standing in the deepening gold light of the street. She had her gloves and hat firmly on again, but the low rays of sunlight picked out a little red in her black hair. ‘I would like to see more of this city,’ she said finally. ‘After all, I may never come here again. Shall we go back to Hagia Sophia? We could walk around that area a little before dinner.’

  “‘Yes, I’d like that too.’ We did not speak again during our walk to the great building, but as we drew near it and I saw its domes and minarets filling the streetscape again, I felt our silence deepen, as if we were walking closer together. I wondered whether Helen felt it, too, and whether it was the spell of the enormous church reaching out to us in our smallness. I was still pondering what Turgut had told us the day before-his belief that Dracula had somehow left a curse of vampirism in the great city. ‘Helen,’ I said, although I was half loath to break the quiet between us. ‘Don’t you think he could have been buried here-here in Istanbul? That would explain Sultan Mehmed’s anxiety about him after his death, wouldn’t it?’

  “‘He? Ah, yes.’ She nodded, as if approving my not speaking that name in the street. ‘That is an interesting idea, but wouldn’t Mehmed have known about it, and wouldn’t Turgut have found some evidence of it? I cannot believe such a thing could have been hidden here for centuries.’

  “‘It’s also hard to believe that Mehmed would have permitted one of his enemies to be buried in Istanbul, if he’d known about it.’

  “She appeared to brood on this. We had almost reached the great entrance to Hagia Sophia.

  “‘Helen,’ I said slowly.

  “‘Yes?’ We stopped among the people, the tourists and the pilgrims flocking in through the vast gate. I moved close to her so that I could speak very quietly, almost in her ear.

  “‘If there’s some chance that the tomb is here, it could mean Rossi is here, too.’

  “She turned and looked into my face. Her eyes were lustrous, and there were fine lines of age and worry between her dark eyebrows. ‘But of course, Paul.’

  “‘I read in the guidebook that Istanbul has underground ruins, too-catacombs, cisterns, that kind of thing-like Rome. We have at least a day before we leave-maybe we could talk with Turgut about it.’

  “‘That is not such a bad idea,’ Helen said softly. ‘The palace of the Byzantine emperors must have had an underground area.’ She almost smiled, but her hand went up to the scarf at her neck, as if something troubled her there. ‘In any case, whatever is left of the palace must be full of evil spirits-emperors who blinded their cousins and that kind of thing. Exactly the right company.’

  “Because we were reading so closely the thoughts written on each other’s faces, and contemplating together the strange, vast hunt they might lead to, I failed at first to look hard at the figure that seemed suddenly to be looking hard at me. Besides, it was no tall and menacing specter but rather a small, slight man, ordinary among those crowds, hovering about twenty feet away against the wall of the church.

  “Then, in an instant of shock, I recognized the little scholar with the shaggy gray beard, crocheted white cap, and drab shirt and pants who had come into the archive that morning. But the next second brought a much greater shock. The man had made the mistake of gazing at me so intently that I could suddenly see him head-on through the crowd. Then he was gone, disappearing like a spirit among the cheerful tourists. I dashed forward, almost knocking Helen over, but it was no use. The man had vanished; he had seen me see him. His face, between the awkward beard and new cap, had been indisputably a face from my university at home. I’d last looked at it just before it was covered by a sheet. It was the face of the dead librarian.”

  Chapter 34

  Ihave several photographs of my father from the period just before he left the United States to search for Rossi, although when I first saw those images during my childhood, I knew nothing about what they preceded. One of them, which I had framed a few years ago and which now hangs above my writing desk, is a black-and-white image from an era when black and white was being edged out by the color snapshot. It shows my father as I never knew him. He looks directly into the camera, his chin raised a little as if he’s about to respond to something the photographer is saying. Who the photographer was I will never know; I forgot to ask my father if he remembered. It couldn’t have been Helen, but perhaps it was some other friend, some fellow graduate student. In 1952-only the date is recorded in my father’s hand on the back of the photo-he had been a graduate student for a year and had already begun his research on the Dutch merchants.

  In the photograph my father seems to be posing next to a university building, judging by the Gothic stonework in the background. He has one foot jauntily up on a bench, his arm slung over it, hand dangling gracefully near his knee. He wears a white or light colored dress shirt and a tie of diagonal stripes, dark creased trousers, shiny shoes. He has the same build I remember from his later life-average height, average shoulders, a trimness that was pleasant but not remarkable and that he never lost in middle age. His deep-set eyes are gray in the photo but were dark blue in life. With those sunken eyes and bushy eyebrows, the prominent cheekbones, thick nose, and wide thick lips parted in a smile, he has a rather simian look-a look of animal intelligence. If the photograph were color, his slicked-down hair would be bronze in the sunlight; I know about that color only because he described it to me once. When I knew him, from as early as I could remember, his hair was white.

  “That night, in Istanbul, I took the full measure of a sleepless night. For one th
ing, the horror of that moment when I first saw a dead face alive and tried to comprehend what I had seen-that moment alone would have kept me awake. For another thing, knowing that the dead librarian had seen me and then disappeared made me feel the terrible vulnerability of the papers in my briefcase. He knew that Helen and I possessed a copy of the map. Had he appeared in Istanbul because he was following us, or had he somehow figured out that the original of this map was here? Or, if he hadn’t deciphered this on his own, was he privy to some source of knowledge I did not know about? He had looked at the documents in Sultan Mehmed’s collection at least once. Had he seen the original maps there and copied them? I couldn’t answer these riddles, and I certainly couldn’t risk dozing, when I thought of the creature’s lust for our copy of the map, the way he had leaped on Helen to strangle her for it in the library stacks at home. The fact that he had bitten Helen there, had perhaps acquired a taste for her, made me even more nervous.

  “If all this had not been enough to keep me wide-eyed that night while the hours passed more and more quietly, there was the sleeping face not far from my own-but not so close, either. I had insisted that Helen sleep in my bed while I sat up in the shabby armchair. If my eyelids drooped once or twice, a glance at that strong, grave face sent a wave of anxiety through me, bracing as cold water. Helen had wanted to stay in her own room-what, after all, would the concierge think, if she found out about this arrangement?-but I had pressed her until she agreed, if irritably, to rest under my watchful eye. I had seen too many movies, or read too many novels, to doubt that a lady left alone for a few hours at night might be the fiend’s next intended victim. Helen was tired enough to sleep, as I could see from the deepening shadows under her eyes, and I had the faintest sense that she was frightened, too. That whiff of fear from her scared me more than another woman’s sobs of terror would have and sent a subtle caffeine through my veins. Perhaps, too, something in the languor and softness of her usually haughtily erect form, her diurnal broad-shouldered definiteness, kept my own eyes open. She lay on her side, one hand under my pillow, her curls darker than ever against its whiteness.