“That sort of disturbing thought followed me from room to marvelous room throughout the palace; everywhere I sensed something sinister or perilous, which could simply have been the overwhelming evidence of the sultan’s supreme power, a power not so much concealed as revealed by the narrow corridors, twisting passages, barred windows, cloistered gardens. At last, seeking a little relief from the mingled sensuality and imprisonment, the elegance and the oppression, I wandered back outside to the sunlit trees of the outer court.
“Out there, however, I met the most alarming ghosts of all, for my guidebook located there the executioner’s block and explained in generous detail the sultan’s custom of beheading officials and anyone else with whom he disagreed. Their heads were displayed on the spikes of the sultan’s gates, a stern example to the populace. The sultan and the renegade from Wallachia were a pleasant match, I thought, turning away in disgust. A stroll in the surrounding park restored my nerves, and the low, red gleam of sun on the waters, turning a passing ship to black silhouette, reminded me that the afternoon was waning and that I ought to go back to Helen and perhaps to some news from her aunt.
“Helen was waiting in the lobby with an English newspaper when I arrived. ‘How was your walk?’ she asked, looking up.
“‘Gruesome,’ I said. ‘I went to the Topkapı Palace.’
“‘Ah.’ She closed the newspaper. ‘I am sorry I missed that.’
“‘Don’t be. How are things out in the big world?’
“She traced the headlines with a finger. ‘Gruesome. But I have good news for you.’
“‘You spoke to your aunt?’ I deposited myself in one of the sagging chairs near her.
“‘Yes, and she has been extraordinary, as always. I’m sure she is going to scold me when we arrive, but that does not matter. The important thing is that she has found a conference for us to attend.’
“‘A conference?’
“‘Yes. It’s magnificent, actually. There is an international conference of historians meeting in Budapest this week. We will attend as visiting scholars, and she has arranged our visas so that we can get them here.’ She smiled. ‘My aunt has a friend who is a historian at the University of Budapest, apparently.’
“‘What is the topic of the conference?’ I asked apprehensively.
“‘European Labor Issues to 1600.’
“‘A sprawling subject. And I suppose we are to attend in our capacity as Ottoman specialists?’
“‘Exactly, my dear Watson.’
“I sighed. ‘Good thing I popped into the Topkapı, then.’
“Helen smiled at me, but whether a little maliciously or simply from confidence in my powers of disguise, I couldn’t tell. ‘The conference begins on Friday, so we have only two days to get there. Over the weekend we will attend lectures, and you will give one. On Sunday part of the day is free for the scholars to explore historic Budapest, and we will slip out to explore my mother.’
“‘I will do what?’ I could not help glaring at her, but she smoothed a curl around her ear and met my gaze with an even more innocent smile.
“‘Oh, a lecture. You will give a lecture. That is our way to get in.’
“‘A lecture on what, pray?’
“‘On the Ottoman presence in Transylvania and Wallachia, I think. My aunt has kindly had it added to the program by now. It won’t have to be a long lecture, because of course the Ottomans never managed to fully conquer Transylvania. I thought that would be a good topic for you because we both know so much about Vlad already, and he was instrumental in keeping them out, in his time.’
“‘That’s good of you,’ I snorted. ‘You mean you know so much about him. Are you telling me I have to stand up in front of an international gathering of scholars and talk about Dracula? Please recall for a moment that my dissertation is on Dutch merchant guilds and I haven’t even finished it. Why can’t you give the lecture?’
“‘That would be ridiculous,’ Helen said, folding her hands on the newspaper. ‘I am—how do you put it in English?—the old hat. Everyone at the university knows me already and has already been bored several times by my work. Having an American will add a little extra éclat to the scene, and they will all be grateful to me for bringing you, even at the last minute. Having an American will make them feel less embarrassed about the shabby university hostel and the canned peas they will serve everyone at the big dinner on the last night. I will help you write the lecture—or write it for you, if you are going to be so unpleasant—and you can deliver it on Saturday. I think my aunt said around one o’clock.’
“I groaned. She was the most impossible person I had ever met. It occurred to me that my presence there with her might be more of a political liability than she was admitting, too. ‘Well, what do the Ottomans in Wallachia or Transylvania have to do with European labor issues?’
“‘Oh, we will find a way to put in some labor issues. That is the beauty of the solid Marxist education you did not have the privilege of receiving. Believe me, you can find labor issues in any topic if you look hard enough. Besides, the Ottoman Empire was a great economic power, and Vlad disrupted their trade routes and access to natural resources in the Danube region. Do not worry—it will be a fascinating lecture.’
“‘Jesus,’ I said finally.
“‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No Jesus, please. Just labor relations.’
“Then I couldn’t help laughing and also couldn’t help silently admiring the gleam in her dark eyes. ‘I just hope no one at home ever gets wind of this. I can imagine what my dissertation committee would have to say. On the other hand, I think Rossi might have enjoyed the whole thing.’ I began to laugh again, picturing the corresponding gleam of mischief in Rossi’s bright blue glance, then stopped. The thought of Rossi was becoming so sore a spot in my heart that I could hardly bear it; here I was on the other side of the world from the office where he’d last been seen, and I had every reason to believe I would never see him alive again, perhaps never know what had become of him. Never stretched long and desolate before me for a second, and then I pushed the thought aside. We were going to Hungary to speak with a woman who had purportedly known him—known him intimately—long before I’d ever met him, when he was in the throes of his quest for Dracula. It was a lead we could not afford to ignore. If I had to give a charlatan’s lecture to get there, I would do even that.
“Helen had been watching me in silence, and I felt, not for the first time, her uncanny ability to read my thoughts. She confirmed my sense of this after a moment by saying, ‘It is worth it, is it not?’
“‘Yes.’ I looked away.
“‘Very good,’ she said softly. ‘And I am pleased that you will meet my aunt, who is wonderful, and my mother, who is wonderful, too, but in a different way, and that they will meet you.’
“I looked quickly at her—the gentleness of her tone had made my heart suddenly contract—but her face had reverted to its usual guarded irony. ‘When do we leave, then?’ I asked.
“‘We will pick up our visas tomorrow morning and fly the next day, if everything goes well with our tickets. My aunt told me that we must go to the Hungarian consulate before it opens tomorrow and ring the front bell—about seven-thirty in the morning. We can go straight from there to a travel agent to order plane tickets. If there are no seats, we will have to take the train, which would be a very long trip.’ She shook her head, but my sudden vision of a roaring, clattering Balkan train, wending its way from one ancient capital to another, made me hope for a moment that the airline was thoroughly overbooked, despite the time we might lose.
“‘Am I correct in imagining that you take after this aunt of yours, rather than after your mother?’ Maybe it was simply the mental adventure by train that made me smile at Helen.
“She hesitated only a second. ‘Correct again, Watson. I am very much like my aunt, thank goodness. But you will like my mother best—most people do. And now, may I invite you to dine with me at our favorite establishment, an
d to work on your lecture over dinner?’
“‘Certainly,’ I agreed, ‘as long as there are no Gypsies around.’ I offered her my arm with careful exaggeration, and she traded her newspaper for the support. It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one’s life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.”
On a sunny morning in Boulois, Barley and I boarded the early train for Perpignan.
Chapter 38
“The Friday plane to Budapest from Istanbul was far from full, and when we had settled in among the black-suited Turkish businessmen, the gray-jacketed Magyar bureaucrats talking in clumps, the old women in blue coats and head shawls—were they going to cleaning jobs in Budapest, or had their daughters married Hungarian diplomats?—I had only a short flight in which to regret the train trip we might have taken.
“That trip, with its tracks carved through mountain walls, its expanses of forest and cliff, river and feudal town, would have to wait for my later career, as you know, and I have taken it twice since then. There is something vastly mysterious for me about the shift one sees, along that route, from the Islamic world to the Christian, from the Ottoman to the Austro-Hungarian, from the Muslim to the Catholic and Protestant. It is a gradation of towns, of architecture, of gradually receding minarets blended with the advancing church domes, of the very look of forest and riverbank, so that little by little you begin to believe you can read in nature itself the saturation of history. Does the shoulder of a Turkish hillside really look so different from the slope of a Magyar meadow? Of course not, and yet the difference is as impossible to erase from the eye as the history that informs it is from the mind. Later, traveling this route, I would also see it alternately as benign and bathed in blood—this is the other trick of historical sight, to be unrelentingly torn between good and evil, peace and war. Whether I was imagining an Ottoman incursion across the Danube or the earlier sweep of the Huns toward it from the East, I was always plagued by conflicting images: a severed head brought into the encampment with cries of triumph and hatred, and then an old woman—maybe the greatest of grandmothers of those wrinkled faces I saw on the plane—dressing her grandson in warmer clothes, with a pinch on his smooth Turkic cheek and a deft hand making sure her stew of wild game didn’t burn.
“These visions lay in the future for me, however, and during our plane trip, I regretted the panorama below without knowing what it was, or what thoughts it might later provoke in me. Helen, a more experienced and less excitable traveler, used the opportunity to sleep curled in her seat. We had been up late at the restaurant table in Istanbul two nights in a row, working on my lecture for the conference in Budapest. I had to admit to a greater knowledge of Vlad’s battles with the Turks than I’d previously enjoyed—or not enjoyed—although that wasn’t saying much. I hoped no one would ask any questions following my delivery of all this half-learned material. It was remarkable, though, what Helen had stored in her brain, and I marveled again that her self-education about Dracula had been fueled by so elusive a hope as showing up a father she could barely claim. When her head lolled in sleep onto my shoulder, I let it rest there, trying not to breathe in the scent—Hungarian shampoo?—of her curls. She was tired; I sat meticulously still while she slept.
“My first impression of Budapest, taken in through the windows of our taxi from the airport, was of a vast nobility. Helen had explained to me that we would be staying in a hotel near the university on the east side of the Danube, in Pest, but she had apparently asked our driver to take us along the Danube before dropping us off. One minute we were traversing dignified eighteenth- and nineteenth-century streets, enlivened here and there by a burst of art-nouveau fantasy or a tremendous old tree. The next minute we were in sight of the Danube. It was enormous—I hadn’t been prepared for its grandeur—with three great bridges spanning it. On our side of the river rose the incredible neo-Gothic spires and dome of the Parliament Buildings, and on the opposite side rose the immense tree-cushioned flanks of the royal palace and the spires of medieval churches. In the midst of everything was that expanse of the river, gray-green, its surface finely scaled by wind and glinting with sunlight. A huge blue sky arched over the domes and monuments and churches, and touched the water with shifting colors.
“I had expected to be intrigued by Budapest, and to admire it; I had not expected to be awed. It had absorbed a panoply of invaders and allies, beginning with the Romans and ending with the Austrians—or the Soviets, I thought, remembering Helen’s bitter comments—and yet it was different from all of them. It was neither quite Western, nor Eastern like Istanbul, nor, for all its Gothic architecture, northern European. I stared out the confining taxi window at a splendor wholly individual. Helen was staring, too, and after a moment she turned to me. Some of my excitement must have registered on my face, because she burst out laughing. ‘I see you like our little town,’ she said, and I heard under her sarcasm a keen pride. Then she added in a low voice, ‘Dracula is one of our own here—did you know? In 1462 he was imprisoned by King Matthias Corvinus about twenty miles from Buda because he had threatened Hungary’s interests in Transylvania. Corvinus apparently treated him more like a houseguest than a prisoner and even gave him a wife from the Hungarian royal family, although no one knows exactly who she was—Dracula’s second wife. Dracula showed his gratitude by converting to the Catholic faith, and they were allowed to live in Pest for a while. And as soon as he was released from Hungary —’
“‘I think I can imagine,’ I said. ‘He went right back to Wallachia and took over the throne as soon as possible and renounced his conversion.’
“‘That is basically correct,’ she admitted. ‘You are getting a feel for our friend. He wanted more than anything to take and keep the Wallachian throne.’
“Too soon the taxi was looping back into the old section of Pest, away from the river, but here there were more wonders for me to gawk at, which I did without shame: balconied coffeehouses that imitated the glories of Egypt or Assyria, walking streets crowded with energetic shoppers and forested with iron street lanterns, mosaics and sculptures, angels and saints in marble and bronze, kings and emperors, violinists in white tunics playing on a street corner. ‘Here we are,’ Helen said suddenly. ‘This is the university section, and there is the university library.’ I craned to get a look at a fine classical building of yellow stone. ‘We will go in there when we have the chance—in fact I want to look at something there. And here is our hotel, just off Magyar utca—Magyar Street, to you. I must find you a map somehow so you don’t get lost.’
“The driver hauled out our bags in front of an elegant, patrician facade of gray stone, and I gave my hand to Helen to help her from the car. ‘I thought so,’ she said with a snort. ‘They always use this hotel for conferences.’
“‘It looks fine to me,’ I ventured.
“‘Oh, it is not bad. You will especially enjoy the choice of cold or cold water, and the factory food.’ Helen was paying the driver from a selection of large silver and copper coins.
“‘I thought Hungarian food was wonderful,’ I said consolingly. ‘I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere. Goulash and paprika, and so on.’
“Helen rolled her eyes. ‘Everyone always mentions goulash if you say Hungary. Just as everyone mentions Dracula if you say Transylvania.’ She laughed. ‘But you can ignore the hotel food. Wait until we eat at my aunt’s house, or my mother’s, and then we will discuss Hungarian cooking.’
“‘I thought your mother and aunt were Romanian,’ I objected, and was immediately sorry; her face froze.
“‘You may think whatever you like, Yankee,’ she told me peremptorily, and picked up her own suitcase before I could take it for her.
“The hotel lobby was quiet and cool, lined with marble and gilt from a more prosperous age. I found it pleasant and saw nothing for Helen to be ashamed
of in it. A moment later I realized that I was in my first communist country—on the wall behind the front desk were photographs of government officials, and the dark blue uniform of all the hotel personnel had something self-consciously proletarian about it. Helen checked us in and handed me my room key. ‘My aunt has arranged things very well,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘And there is a telephone message from her to say that she will meet us here at seven o’clock this evening to take us out to dinner. We will go to register at the conference first, and attend a reception there at five o’clock.’
“I was disappointed by the news that the aunt would not be taking us home for her own Hungarian food and a glimpse of the life of the bureaucratic elite, but I reminded myself hurriedly that I was, after all, an American and should not expect every door to fly open to me here. I might be a risk, a liability, or at the least an embarrassment. In fact, I thought, I would do well to keep a low profile and make as little trouble as possible for my hosts. I was lucky to be here at all, and the last thing I wanted was any problem for Helen or her family.
The Historian Page 32