The Historian

by Elizabeth Kostova

“I bless her,” the man said simply and carved a cross in the air near me.

  My father found us rooms that looked back at the mainland, and then we ate our dinner at an outdoor restaurant near the docks. Twilight was coming down slowly, and I noticed the first stars visible above the sea. A breeze, cooler now than it had been in the afternoon, brought me the scents I had already grown to love: cypress and lavender, rosemary, thyme. “Why do good smells get stronger when it’s dark?” I asked my father. It was something I genuinely wondered, but it served also to postpone our discussing anything else. I needed time to recover somewhere where there were lights and people talking, needed at least to look away from that aged trembling in my father’s hands.

  “Do they?” he asked absently, but it brought me relief. I grasped his hand to stop its shaking, and he closed it, still absently, over mine. He was too young to grow old. On the mainland, the silhouettes of mountains danced almost into the water, looming over the beaches, looming almost over our island. When civil war broke out in those coastal mountains almost twenty years later, I closed my eyes and remembered them, astonished. I couldn’t imagine that their slopes housed enough people to fight a war. They had seemed utterly pristine when I saw them, devoid of human habitation, the home of empty ruins, guarding only the monastery on the sea.

  Chapter 19

  After Helen Rossi slammed the book Dracula—which she obviously thought was our bone of contention—onto the diner table between us, I half expected everyone in the place to rise and run, or someone to cry, “Aha!” and come over to kill us. Of course, nothing at all happened, and she sat there looking at me with the same expression of bitter pleasure. Could this woman, I asked myself slowly, with her legacy of resentment and her scholarly vendetta against Rossi, have injured him herself, caused his disappearance?

  “Miss Rossi,” I said as calmly as I could, taking the book off the table and putting it facedown beside my briefcase, “your story is extraordinary and I have to say it’ll take me some time to digest all this. But I must tell you something very important.” I drew in a deep breath, then another. “I know Professor Rossi quite well. He has been my adviser for two years now and we’ve spent hours together, talking and working. I’m sure if you—when you—meet him you will find him a far better and kinder person than you can imagine at this point —” She made a movement as if to speak, but I rushed on. “The thing is—the thing is—I take it from the way you talked about him that you don’t realize Professor Rossi—your father—has disappeared.”

  She stared at me, and I couldn’t detect any guile in her face, only confusion. So this news was a surprise. The pain over my heart lessened a little. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

  “I mean—three nights ago I was talking with him as usual, and by the next day he had vanished. The police are looking for him now. He apparently disappeared from his office, and was maybe even injured there, because they found blood on his desk.” I recounted briefly the events of that evening, beginning with my bringing him my strange little book, but said nothing about the story Rossi had told me.

  She looked at me, her face twisted with perplexity. “Is this some kind of trick you are playing on me?”

  “No, not in the least. It really isn’t. I’ve hardly been able to eat or sleep since it happened.”

  “Don’t the police have any idea where he is?”

  “None, as far as I can tell.”

  Her look was suddenly shrewd. “Do you?”

  I hesitated. “Possibly. It’s a long story, and it seems to be getting longer by the hour.”

  “Wait.” She looked hard at me. “When you were reading those letters in the library yesterday, you said they had to do with a problem some professor was having. Did you mean Rossi?”

  “Yes.”

  “What problem was he having? Is he having?”

  “I don’t want to involve you in unpleasantness or danger by telling you even what little I know.”

  “You promised to answer my questions after I answered yours.” If she’d had blue eyes instead of dark ones, her face would have been the twin of Rossi’s at that moment. I imagined I could see a resemblance now, an uncanny molding of Rossi’s English crispness into the strong, dark frame of Romania, although it could merely have been the effect of her assertion that she was his daughter. But how could she be his daughter if he had stoutly denied having been in Romania? He had said, at least, that he’d never been to Snagov. On the other hand, he had left that brochure on Romania among his papers. Now she was glaring at me, too, something Rossi had never done. “It is too late to tell me I shouldn’t ask questions. What did those letters have to do with his disappearance?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But I may need the help of an expert. I don’t know what discoveries you’ve made in the course of your research —” Again, I received her wary, heavy-lidded look. “I’m convinced that before he vanished Rossi believed he was in personal danger.”

  She seemed to be trying to take all of this in, this news of a father she had known for so long only as a symbol of challenge. “Personal danger? From what?”

  I took the plunge. Rossi had asked me not to share his insane story with my colleagues. I hadn’t done that, but now, unexpectedly, I had available to me the possibility of assistance from an expert. This woman might know already what it would take me many months to learn; she might be right, even, in thinking she knew more than Rossi himself. Rossi always emphasized the importance of seeking expert help—well, I would do that now. Forgive me, I prayed to the forces of good, if this endangers her. Besides, it had a peculiar kind of logic. If she was actually his daughter, she might have the greatest right of all to know his story. “What does Dracula mean to you?”

  “Mean to me?” She frowned. “As a concept? My revenge, I suppose. Eternal bitterness.”

  “Yes, I understand that. But does Dracula mean anything more to you?”

  “What do you mean?” I couldn’t tell whether she was being evasive or simply honest.

  “Rossi,” I said, still hesitating, “your father, was—is—convinced that Dracula still walks the earth.” She stared at me. “What do you make of that?” I asked. “Does it seem insane to you?” I waited for her to laugh, or stand up and leave as she had in the library.

  “It’s funny,” Helen Rossi answered slowly. “Normally I’d say that was peasant legend—superstition about the memory of a bloody tyrant. But the strange thing is that my mother is absolutely convinced of the same thing.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Yes. I told you, she is a peasant by birth. She has a right to these superstitions, although she is probably less convinced of them than her parents were. But why an eminent Western scholar?” She was an anthropologist, all right, despite her bitter quest. The detachment of her quick intelligence from personal questions was astonishing to me.

  “Miss Rossi,” I said, making up my mind suddenly. “I somehow don’t have the smallest doubt that you like to examine things for yourself. Why don’t you read Rossi’s letters? I’m giving you my frankest warning that everyone who has handled his papers on this topic has been subjected to some kind of threat, as far as I can tell. But if you aren’t afraid, read them for yourself. It’ll save us the time of my trying to persuade you that his story is true, which I firmly believe it is.”

  “Save us time?” she echoed contemptuously. “What are you planning for my time?”

  I was too desperate to be stung. “You’ll read these letters with a better-educated eye, in this case, than mine.”

  She seemed to be thinking over this proposal, her chin in her fist. “All right,” she said finally. “You have got me in a vulnerable spot. Of course I cannot resist the temptation to learn more about Father Rossi, especially if it puts me ahead of his research. But if he seems to me merely insane, I warn you that you will not get much sympathy from me. That would be just my luck, for him to be shut away in an institution before I have my fair chance to torture him.” Her smile was n
ot a smile.

  “Fine.” I ignored the last remark and the ugly grimace, forcing myself not to glance at her canine teeth, which I could already see plainly weren’t longer than normal. Before we concluded our transaction, however, I had to lie on one point. “I’m sorry to say I don’t have the letters with me. I was afraid to carry them around today.” Actually, I’d been thoroughly afraid to leave them in my apartment, and they were hidden in my briefcase. But I’d be damned—literally, maybe—if I pulled them out in the middle of the diner. I had no idea who might be there, watching us—the creepy librarian’s little friends, for example? I had another reason, too, which I had to test even if my heart sank under its unpleasantness. I had to be sure Helen Rossi, whoever she was, was not in league with—well, wasn’t it just possible that the enemy of her enemy was already her friend? “I’ll have to go home and get them. And I’ll have to ask you to read them in my presence; they’re fragile and very precious to me.”

  “All right,” she said coolly. “Can we meet tomorrow afternoon?”

  “That’s too late. I’d like you to see them immediately. I’m sorry. I know it sounds odd, but you’ll understand my sense of urgency once you’ve read them.”

  She shrugged. “If it will not take too long.”

  “It won’t. Can you meet me at—at Saint Mary’s Church?” This test, at least, I could perform with Rossi’s own thoroughness. Helen Rossi looked unflinchingly at me, her hard, ironic face unchanged. “That’s on Elm Street, two blocks from —”

  “I know where it is,” she said, gathering her gloves and putting them on very neatly. She rewound the blue scarf, which shimmered around her throat like lapis lazuli. “What time?”

  “Give me thirty minutes to get the papers from my apartment and meet you there.”

  “At the church. All right. I will stop by the library for an article I need today. Please be on time—I have a lot to do.” Her black-coated back was lean and strong, moving out the diner door. I realized too late that she had somehow paid the bill for our coffee.

  Chapter 20

  Saint Mary’s Church, my father said, was a homely little piece of Victoriana that lingered at the edge of the old section of campus. I’d passed it hundreds of times without ever going in, but it seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn’t Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn’t it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Protestant chapels that dotted the university could be much help; they didn’t look qualified to wrestle with the undead. I felt sure those big square Puritan churches on the town green would be helpless in the face of a European vampire. A little witch burning was more in their line—something limited to the neighbors. Of course, I would be at Saint Mary’s long before my reluctant guest. Would she even show up? That was half the exam.

  Saint Mary’s was indeed open, fortunately, and its dark paneled interior smelled of wax and dusty upholstery. Two old ladies in hats sprigged with fake flowers were arranging real ones on the carved altar up front. I stepped in rather awkwardly and settled myself in a back pew, where I could see the doors without being seen at once by anyone who entered. It was a long wait, but the quiet interior and the ladies’ hushed conversation soothed me a little. I began to feel tired for the first time, after my late night. At last the front door swung open again on its ninety-year-old hinges, and Helen Rossi stood hesitating for a moment, looked behind her, and then stepped in.

  Sunlight from the side windows threw turquoise and mauve on her clothes as she stood there. I saw her glance around the carpeted entrance. Seeing no one, she moved forward. I watched for any kind of cringing, for an evil shriveling of skin or color in her firm face—anything, I didn’t know what, that might show an allergy to Dracula’s ancient enemy, the church. Perhaps a boxy Victorian relic wouldn’t ward off the forces of darkness anyway, I thought doubtfully. But this building apparently had some power of its own for Helen Rossi, because after a moment she moved through the radiant colors of the window toward the wall font. With a sense of shame for my voyeurism, I saw her remove her gloves and dip one hand into the basin, then touch her forehead. The gesture was tender; her face from where I sat had a grave look. Well, I was doing it for Rossi. And now I knew absolutely that Helen Rossi was not a vrykolakas, however hard and sometimes sinister her appearance.

  She came into the nave and then drew back a little, seeing me get to my feet. “Did you bring the letters?” she whispered, her eyes fixing me accusingly. “I have to return to my department by one o’clock.” She glanced around again.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked quickly, my arms prickling with instinctive nervousness. I seemed to have developed some sort of morbid sixth sense over the last two days. “Are you afraid of something?”

  “No,” she said, still whispering. She clenched her gloves together in one hand so that they looked like a flower against her dark suit. “I simply wondered—did someone else come in just now?”

  “No.” I glanced around, too. The church was pleasantly empty except for the altar-guild ladies.

  “Someone was following me,” she said in the same low voice. Her face, framed by the roll of heavy dark hair, wore an odd expression, mixed suspicion and bravado. For the first time, I wondered what it had cost her to learn her own species of courage. “I think he was following me. A small, thin man in shabby clothes—tweed jacket, green tie.”

  “Are you sure? Where did you see him?”

  “In the card catalog,” she said softly. “I went to check your story about the missing cards. I simply was not sure I believed it.” She spoke matter-of-factly, without apology. “I saw him there, and the next thing I knew he was following me, but at a distance, on Elm Street. Do you know him?”

  “Yes,” I said dismally. “He’s a librarian.”

  “A librarian?” She seemed to wait for more, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the wound I’d seen on the man’s neck. It was too incredible, too strange; hearing that, she would certainly give me up as a mental case.

  “He seems suspicious of my movements. You absolutely must stay out of his way,” I said. “I’ll tell you more about him later. Come, sit down and be comfortable. Here are the letters.”

  I made room for her in one of the velvet-cushioned pews and opened my briefcase. Immediately her face was intent; she lifted out the package with careful hands and removed the letters almost as reverently as I had the day before. I could only wonder what kind of sensation this must be for her, to see on some of them the handwriting of the alleged father she had known only as a source of anger. I looked at it over her shoulder. Yes, it was a firm, kind, upright hand. Perhaps it had already made him seem faintly human to his daughter. Then I thought I should stop watching, and I got to my feet. “I’ll just wander around here and give you whatever time you need. If there’s anything I can explain or help you with —”

  She nodded absently, eyes fixed on the first letter, and I walked away. I could see she would handle my precious papers with care, and that she was already reading Rossi’s lines with great swiftness. For the next half hour I examined the carved altar, the paintings in the chapel, the tasseled hangings at the pulpit, the marble figure of the exhausted mother and her squirming baby. One of the paintings in particular caught my attention: a ghoulish Pre-Raphaelite Lazarus, tottering out of the tomb into the arms of his sisters, his ankles gray-green and his grave clothes dingy. The face, faded after a century of smoke and incense, looked bitter and weary, as if gratitude were the last thing he felt on being called back from his rest. The Christ who stood impatiently at the tomb’s entrance, holding up his hand, had a countenance of pure evil, greedy and burning. I blinked, turned away. My lack of sleep was clearly poisoning my thoughts.

  “I’m done,” Helen Rossi said behind me. Her voice was low, and she looked pale and tired. “You were right,” she said. “There is no mention of his affair with my mother, or even of his travel
ing to Romania. You were telling the truth about that. I cannot understand it. This must have been during the same period, surely the same trip to the Continent, because I was born nine months after that.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her dark face hadn’t asked for pity, but I felt it. “I wish I had some clues for you here, but you see how it is. I can’t explain it, either.”

  “At least we believe each other, don’t we?” She looked directly at me.

  I was surprised to discover I could feel pleasure in the midst of all this grief and apprehension. “We do?”

  “Yes. I don’t know if something called Dracula exists, or what it is, but I believe you when you say Rossi—my father—felt himself in danger. He clearly felt it many years ago, so why not a return of his fears when he saw your little book, an uncomfortable coincidence and reminder of the past?”

  “And what do you make of his disappearance?”

  She shook her head. “It could have been a mental breakdown, of course. But I understand what you mean, now. His letters have the mark of”—she hesitated—“a logical and fearless mind, just like his other works. Besides, you can tell a great deal from a historian’s books. I know his very well. They are the efforts of stable, clear thought.”

  I led her back to the letters and my briefcase; it made me nervous to leave them alone for even a few minutes. She had put everything neatly back in the envelope—in its original order, I had no doubt. We sat down on the pew together, almost companionably.

  “Let’s just say there might be some supernatural force involved in his disappearance,” I ventured. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but for the sake of argument. What would you advise doing next?”

  “Well,” she said slowly. Her profile was sharp and thoughtful, close to me in the dim light. “I cannot see that this will help you very much in a modern investigation, but if you were to obey the dictates of Dracula lore, you would have to assume that Rossi has been assaulted and removed by a vampire, who would either kill him or—more likely—pollute him with the curse of the undead. Three attacks that mingle your blood with that of Dracula or one of his disciples make you a vampire eternally, you know. If he has been bitten once already, you will have to find him as soon as possible.”