The Historian

by Elizabeth Kostova

  “Oh, no, thank you.” I waved at the lady librarian’s back. “I’m being helped already.”

  “I see.” He stepped aside as she returned with a slip of paper and put it in front of me. At that moment I didn’t know where to look—the paper swam under my eyes. For as the second librarian turned aside, he leaned over to examine some books that had obviously been returned to the desk and were waiting to be dealt with. And as he bent myopically toward them, his neck was exposed for a moment above the threadbare shirt collar, and I saw on it two scabbed, grimy-looking wounds, with a little dried blood making an ugly lacework on the skin just below them. Then he straightened and turned away again, holding his books.

  “Is this what you wanted?” the lady librarian was asking me. I looked down at the paper she pushed toward me. “You see, it’s the slip for Bram Stoker, Dracula. We have just one copy.”

  The grubby male librarian suddenly dropped a book on the floor, and the sound of it reverberated with a bang through the high nave. He straightened and looked directly at me, and I have never seen—or until that moment had never seen—a human gaze so full of hatred and wariness. “That’s what you wanted, right?” the lady was insisting.

  “Oh, no,” I said, thinking fast, catching hold of myself. “You must have misunderstood me. I’m looking for Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I told you, I’m teaching a course on it and we’ve got to have extra copies.”

  She frowned heavily. “But I thought —”

  I hated to sacrifice her feelings, even in that unpleasant moment, when she’d unbent so far toward me. “That’s all right,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t look carefully enough. I’ll go back and check the catalog again.”

  As soon as I said the word catalog, however, I knew I’d overused my new fluency. The tall librarian’s eyes narrowed further and he moved his head slightly, like an animal following the motions of its prey. “Thanks very much,” I murmured politely and walked off, feeling those sharp eyes boring into my back all the way down the great aisle. I made a show of going back to the catalog for a minute, then closed my briefcase and went purposefully out the front door, through which the faithful were already flocking for their morning study. Outside, I found a bench in the brightest possible sunlight, my back against one of those neo-Gothic walls, where I could safely see everyone around me coming and going. I needed five minutes to sit and think—reflection, Rossi always taught, should be well-timed rather than time-consuming.

  It was all too much to digest quickly, however. In that dazed moment I had taken in not only my glimpse of the librarian’s wounded neck but also the name of the library patron who had beaten me to Dracula. Her name was Helen Rossi.

  The wind was cold and increasingly strong. My father paused here and drew from his camera bag two waterproof jackets, one for each of us. He kept them rolled up tightly to fit with his photographic equipment, canvas hat, and a little first-aid kit. Without speaking, we put them over our blazers, and he continued.

  Sitting there in the late-spring sunshine, watching the university stir and wake to its usual activities, I felt a sudden envy of all those ordinary-looking students and faculty striding here and there. They thought that tomorrow’s exam was a serious challenge, or that department politics constituted high drama, I reflected bitterly. Not one of them could have understood my predicament, or helped me out of it. I felt the loneliness, suddenly, of standing outside my institution, my universe, a worker bee expelled from the hive. And this state of things, I realized with surprise, had come about in forty-eight hours.

  I had to think clearly now, and fast. First, I had observed what Rossi himself had reported: someone outside the immediate threat to Rossi—in this case the someone was a half-washed, eccentric-looking librarian—had been bitten in the neck. Let us presume, I told myself, almost laughing at the preposterousness of the things I was starting to believe, let us presume that our librarian was bitten by a vampire, and quite recently. Rossi had been swept out of his office—with bloodshed, I reminded myself—only two nights earlier. Dracula, if he were at large, seemed to have a predilection not only for the best of the academic world (here I remembered poor Hedges) but also for librarians, archivists. No—I sat up straight, suddenly seeing the pattern—he had a predilection for those who handled archives that had something to do with his legend. First there had been the bureaucrat who had snatched the map from Rossi in Istanbul. The Smithsonian researcher, too, I thought, recalling Rossi’s last letter. And, of course, threatened all along, there was Rossi himself, who had a copy of “one of these nice books” and had examined other possibly relevant documents. And then this librarian, although I had no proof yet that the fellow had handled any Dracula documents. And finally—me?

  I picked up my briefcase and hurried to a public phone booth near the student commons. “University information, please.” No one had followed me here, as far as I could see, but I closed the door and through it kept a sharp eye on the passersby. “Do you have a listing for a Miss Helen Rossi? Yes, graduate student,” I hazarded.

  The university operator was laconic; I could hear her shuffling slowly through papers. “We have an H. Rossi listed in the women’s graduate dormitory,” she said.

  “That’s it. Thank you so much.” I scribbled the number down and dialed again. A matron answered, her voice sharp and protective. “Miss Rossi? Yes? Who’s calling, please?”

  Oh, God. I hadn’t thought ahead to this. “Her brother,” I said quickly. “She told me she’d be at this number.”

  I could hear footsteps leaving the phone, a sharper stride returning, the rustle of a hand taking the receiver. “Thank you, Miss Lewis,” said a distant voice, as if in dismissal. Then she spoke into my ear and I heard the low, strong tone I remembered from the library. “I do not have a brother,” she said. It sounded like a warning, not a mere statement of fact. “Who is this?”

  My father rubbed his hands together in the chill wind, making the sleeves of his jacket crinkle like tissue paper. Helen, I thought, although I did not dare repeat the name aloud. It was a name I had always liked; it evoked for me something valiant and beautiful, like the Pre-Raphaelite frontispiece showing Helen of Troy in my Children’s Book of the Iliad, which I had owned at home in the United States. Above all, it had been my mother’s name, and she was a topic my father never discussed.

  I looked hard at him, but he was already speaking again. “Hot tea in one of those cafés down there,” he said. “That’s what I need. How about you?” I noticed for the first time that his face—the handsome, tactful face of a diplomat—was marred by heavy shadows, which ringed his eyes and gave his nose a pinched look at the base, as if he never slept enough. He rose and stretched, and then we looked out at each of the giddily framed views a last time. My father held me back a little as if he feared I would fall.

  Chapter 17

  Athens made my father nervous and tired; I could see that plainly after only a day there. For my part, I found it exhilarating: I liked the combined senses of decay and vitality, the suffocating, exhaust-spewing traffic that whirled around its squares and parks and outcroppings of ancient monuments, the Botanic Gardens with a lion caged in the middle, the soaring Acropolis with frivolous-looking restaurant awnings fluttering around its base. My father promised we would climb up for a view as soon as he had time. It was February of 1974, the first time in nearly three months he’d traveled anywhere, and he’d brought me reluctantly, because he disliked the Greek military presence on the streets. I intended to make the most of every moment.

  Meanwhile, I worked diligently in my hotel room, keeping an eye on the temple-crowned heights out my one window as if they might take wing after twenty-five hundred years and fly off without my ever having explored them. I could see the roads, paths, alleys that wound upward toward the base of the Parthenon. It would be a long, slow walk—we were in hot country again, and summer began early here—among whitewashed houses and stuccoed lemonade shops, a path that broke out into
ancient marketplaces and temple grounds from time to time, then cut back through the tile-roofed neighborhoods. I could see some of this labyrinth from the dingy window. We would rise from one view to another, looking out on what the residents of the Acropolis neighborhood saw from their front doors every day. I could imagine from here the vistas of ruins, looming municipal buildings, semitropical parks, winding streets, gold-tipped or red-tiled churches that stood out in the evening light like colored rocks scattered on a gray beach.

  Farther away, we would see the distant ridges of apartment buildings, newer hotels than this one, a sprawl of suburbs through which we’d traveled by train the day before. Beyond that, I couldn’t guess; it was too distant to imagine. My father would wipe his face with his handkerchief. And I would know, stealing a glance at him, that when we reached the summit he would show me not only the ancient ruins there but also another glimpse of his own past.

  The diner I’d chosen, my father said, was far enough from campus to make me feel out of range of that creepy librarian (who was surely required to stay on the job but probably took a lunch break somewhere) and yet close enough to be a reasonable request, not the assignation in some lonely spot that an ax murderer might make with a woman he hardly knew. I’m not sure I’d actually expected her to be late, hesitating about my motives, but Helen was there before me, so that when I pushed in through the diner door, I saw her unwinding her blue silk scarf in a far corner and taking off her white gloves—remember that this was still an era of impractical, charming accoutrements for even the most hard-boiled of female academics. Her hair was rolled back almost smoothly and pinned away from her face, so that when she turned to regard me, I had a sense of being stared at even more enormously than I had been at the library table the day before.

  “Good morning,” she said in a cold voice. “I have ordered you some coffee, since you sounded so fatigued on the phone.”

  This struck me as presumptuous—how would she know my fatigued voice from my well-rested one, and what if my coffee were already cold? But I introduced myself by name this time, and shook hands with her, trying to hide my uneasiness. I wanted to ask her immediately about her own last name, but I thought I’d better wait for the right opportunity. Her hand was smooth and dry, cool in mine, as if she still wore her gloves. I pulled out a chair opposite her and sat down, wishing I’d put on a clean shirt even for the occasion of hunting vampires. Her mannish white blouse, severe under a black jacket, looked immaculate.

  “Why did I think I would be hearing from you again?” Her tone was close to insulting.

  “I know you find this strange.” I sat up straight and tried to look her in the eye, wondering if I could ask her all the questions I wanted to before she stood up and walked off again. “I’m sorry. It’s not a practical joke and I’m not trying to bother you or disrupt your work.”

  She nodded, humoring me. Watching her face, it struck me that her general outline—certainly her voice—was ugly as well as elegant, and I took heart from this, as if the revelation made her human. “I discovered something odd this morning,” I began, with fresh confidence. “That’s why I called you out of the blue. Have you still got that copy of Dracula from the library?”

  She was quick, but I was quicker, since I’d been waiting for the flinch, the drop in color under her already pale face. “Yes,” she said warily. “Whose business is it what another person checks out from the library?”

  I ignored this bait. “Did you tear out all the cards in the card catalog pertaining to that book?”

  This time her reaction was genuine and undisguised. “Did I what?”

  “This morning I went to the card catalog to look for some information on—on the subject we both seem to be studying. I found that all the cards for Dracula and Stoker had been wrenched out of the drawer.”

  Her face had tightened and she was staring at me, the ugliness very close to the surface now, her eyes too bright. But at that moment, for the first time since Massimo had shouted to me that Rossi had disappeared, I felt an infinitesimal lightening of burdens, a shifting of the weight of loneliness. She hadn’t laughed at my melodrama, as she could have called it, or frowned, puzzled. Most importantly, there was no cunning in her look, nothing to indicate that I was talking with an enemy. Her face registered only one emotion, as far as she allowed it: a delicate, flickering fear.

  “The cards were there yesterday morning,” she said slowly, as if laying down a weapon and preparing to talk. “I looked up Dracula first, and there was an entry for it, only one copy. Then I wondered if they had other works by Stoker, and I looked him up, too. There were a few entries under his name, including one for Dracula.”

  The diner’s indifferent waiter was setting coffee on the table, and Helen drew hers toward her without looking at it. I thought with sudden fierce longing of Rossi, pouring out far finer coffee than this for himself and me—his exquisite hospitality. Oh, I had other questions for this strange young woman.

  “Someone obviously doesn’t want you—me—anybody—checking out that book,” I observed. I kept my voice quiet, watching her.

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” she said sharply, putting sugar in her cup and stirring it. But she looked unconvinced by her own words, and I pressed on.

  “Do you still have the book?”

  “Yes.” Her spoon fell with an annoyed clatter. “It is in my book bag.” She glanced down, and I noticed beside her the briefcase I’d seen her carrying the day before.

  “Miss Rossi,” I said. “I beg your pardon, and I’m afraid I’m going to sound like a maniac, but it’s my personal belief that there may be some danger to you in possessing this book, which someone else clearly doesn’t want you to have.”

  “What makes you think that?” she countered, not meeting my eye now. “Who do you think would not want me to have that book?” A slight flush had spread over her cheekbones again, and she looked guiltily down into her cup; that was the only way to describe it—she looked downright guilty. I wondered with horror if she might not be in league with the vampire: Dracula’s bride, I thought, aghast, the Sunday matinees coming back to me in rapid frames. That smoky dark hair would fit, the rich, un-identifiable accent, the lips like blackberry stain on the pale skin, the elegant black-and-white garb. I put this idea firmly out of my mind; it was fantasy and it fit too well with my jittery mood.

  “Do you actually know someone who wouldn’t want you to have that book?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. But that is certainly none of your business.” She glared at me and went back to her coffee. “Why were you hunting for the book, anyway? If you wanted my phone number, why did you not simply ask me for it, without going through all this rigmarole?”

  This time I felt my own face redden. Talking with this woman was like sitting still for a series of slaps, delivered arhythmically so you couldn’t know when the next one was coming. “I had no intention of asking for your phone number until I realized those cards had been torn out of the catalog and thought you should know about it,” I said, stiffly. “I needed that book very badly myself. So I went to the library to see if they had a second copy I might be able to use.”

  “And they didn’t,” she said fiercely, “so you had the perfect excuse to call me looking for it. If you wanted my library book, why didn’t you just put it on reserve?”

  “I need it now,” I retorted. Her tone was beginning to exasperate me. We might both be in serious trouble, and she was quibbling about this meeting as if it were a bid for a date, which it wasn’t. I reminded myself that she couldn’t know what dire straits I was in. Then it occurred to me that if I told her the whole story, she might not merely think I was insane. But it might also put her in greater danger. I sighed aloud, without meaning to.

  “Are you trying to intimidate me out of my library book?” Her tone was a little softened now, and I caught the amusement that made her strong mouth twitch. “I believe you are.”

  “No, I’m not.
But I would like to know who you think might not want you checking out this book.” I set down my cup and looked across at her.

  She moved her shoulders restlessly under the lightweight wool of her jacket. I could see one longish hair clinging to the lapel, her own dark hair, but glinting with copper lights against the black fabric. She appeared to be making up her mind to say something. “Who are you?” she asked suddenly.

  I took the question at academic face value. “I’m a graduate student here, in history.”

  “History?” It was a quick, almost angry interjection.

  “I’m writing my dissertation on Dutch trade in the seventeenth century.”

  “Oh.” She was silent for a moment. “I am an anthropologist,” she said finally. “But I am also very much interested in history. I study the customs and traditions of the Balkans and Central Europe, especially of my native”—her voice dropped a little, but sadly, not secretively—“my native Romania.”

  It was my turn to flinch. Really, this was all more and more peculiar. “Is that why you wanted to read Dracula?” I asked.

  Her smile surprised me—white, even, her teeth a little small for such a strong face, the eyes shining. Then she tightened her lips again. “I suppose you could say that.”

  “You’re not answering my questions,” I pointed out.

  “Why should I?” She shrugged. “You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.”

  “You may be in danger, Miss Rossi. I’m not trying to threaten you, but I’m perfectly serious.”

  Her eyes narrowed on mine. “You are hiding something, too,” she said. “I will tell you if you tell me.”

  I had never seen, met, or spoken with a woman like this. She was combative without being in the least flirtatious. I had the sensation that her words were a pool of cold water, into which I now plunged without stopping to count the consequences.