Chapter 52
“Where can we sleep?” Barley said doubtfully. We were in our hotel room in Perpignan, a double room we’d gotten by telling the elderly clerk, too, that we were brother and sister. He’d given it to us without a murmur, although he’d looked dubiously from one of us to the other. We couldn’t afford separate rooms, and we both knew it. “Well?” Barley said, a little impatiently. We looked at the bed. There was no other place, not even a rug on the bare and polished floor. Finally Barley made a decision—for himself, at least. While I stood frozen to the spot, he went into the bathroom with some clothes and a toothbrush, emerging a few minutes later in cotton pajamas as pale as his hair.
Something about this picture, and his failure at nonchalance, made me laugh aloud, even while my cheeks burned, and then he began to laugh, too. We both laughed until the tears rent our faces—Barley bent double, crossing his arms over his skinny middle, and I clutching the depressing old armoire. In hysterical laughter, we relinquished all the tension of the trip, my fears, Barley’s disapproval, my father’s anguished letters, our arguments. Years later, I learned the term fou rire—a crazy fit of laughter—and that was my first one, there in that French hotel. My first fou rire was followed by other firsts, as we stumbled toward each other. Barley grabbed my shoulders with as little elegance as I had held onto the armoire a moment before, but his kiss was angelically graceful, his youthful experience pressing softly into my utter lack of it. Like our laughter, it left me winded.
All my previous knowledge of lovemaking was drawn from polite movies and confusing books, and I was mostly unable to proceed. Barley, however, proceeded for me, and I followed gratefully, if clumsily. By the time we found ourselves lying on the stale, neat bed, I had already learned something of the negotiation between lovers and their clothing. Each garment seemed to me a momentous decision, Barley’s pajama shirt first of all; its removal revealed an alabaster torso and surprisingly muscled shoulders. The shedding of my blouse and ugly white brassiere was as much my decision as his. He told me that he loved the color of my skin, because it was completely different from his, and it was true that my arm had never looked so olive as when it lay against the snow of Barley’s. He drew the flat of his hand across me, and across my remaining clothes, and for the first time I did the same to him, discovering the alien contours of the male body; I seemed to be feeling my way shyly over the craters of the moon. My heart knocked inside me with such force that I worried he would be able to feel it striking his breast.
In fact, there was so much to do, to take care of, that we didn’t remove any more clothing, and a great deal of time seemed to pass before Barley curled himself around me with a strangled sigh, murmuring, “You’re just a kid,” and put one arm possessively over my shoulders and neck.
When he said this, I suddenly knew that he, too, was just a kid—an honorable kid. I think I loved him more in that moment than at any other.
Chapter 53
“The borrowed apartment where Turgut had left Mr. Erozan was perhaps a ten-minute walk from his own—or a ten-minute run, because we all but ran, even Helen in her heeled pumps hurrying along with us. Turgut muttered (and swore, I guessed) under his breath. He had brought with him a little black bag, which I thought might contain medical supplies in case the doctor did not come, or didn’t come in time. At last we found ourselves climbing the wooden stairway in an old house. We tore up the stairs after Turgut and he threw open a door at the top.
“The house had apparently been divided into dingy little apartments; in this one a bed, chairs, and a table furnished the main room, and a single lamp lit it. Turgut’s friend lay on the floor with a blanket over him, and from beside him a stammering man of about thirty rose to greet us. The man was almost hysterical with fright and contrition; he kept wringing his hands and telling Turgut something over and over. Turgut pushed him aside and he and Selim knelt by Mr. Erozan. The poor victim’s face was ashen, his eyes were closed, and his breath came in rattling gasps. There was an ugly tear in his neck, larger than when we’d last seen it, but the more horrible because it was strangely clean, if ragged, with only a fringe of blood at the edges. It occurred to me that such a deep wound ought to bleed copiously, and the realization sent a thrill of nausea to my stomach. I put my arm around Helen and we stood staring, unable to look away.
“Turgut was examining the wound without touching it and now he glanced up at us. ‘A few minutes ago, this damnable man went for a strange doctor without consulting me, but the doctor was out. That, at least, is fortunate, because we do not want a doctor here now. But he left Erozan alone just at sunset.’ He spoke with Aksoy, who got up suddenly and—with a force I would not have predicted—struck the hapless watchman and sent him from the room. The man backed away and then we heard his terrified descent down the stairwell. Selim locked the door behind him and looked out the window to the street, as if to satisfy himself that the fellow wouldn’t be returning. Then he knelt by Turgut and they conferred in low voices.
“After a moment, Turgut reached into the bag he had brought with him. I saw him draw from it an object already familiar to me: it was a vampire-hunting kit similar to the one he had given me in his study more than a week earlier, except that this one was in a finer box, ornamented with Arabic writing and what looked like mother-of-pearl inlay. He opened it and took stock of the instruments inside. Then he looked up at us again. ‘Professors,’ he said quietly, ‘my friend has been bitten by the vampire at least three times, and he is dying. If he dies naturally in this condition, he will soon become undead.’ He wiped his forehead with a big hand. ‘This is a terrible moment now, and I must ask you to leave the room. Madam, you must not see this.’
“‘Please, let us do whatever will help you,’ I began hesitantly, but Helen stepped forward.
“‘Let me stay,’ she told Turgut in a low voice. ‘I want to know how it is done.’ For a moment, I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering—surreal thought—that she was, after all, an anthropologist. He glared at her, then seemed to acquiesce without words, and bent again to his friend. I hoped, still, that what I had already guessed was wrong, but Turgut was murmuring something in his friend’s ear. He took Mr. Erozan’s hand and stroked it.
“Then—and this was perhaps the worst of all the awful things that followed—Turgut pressed his friend’s hand to his own heart and broke out in a keening wail, words that seemed to come to us from the depths of a history not only too ancient but too alien for me to distinguish their syllables, a howl of grief akin to the muezzin’s call to prayer, which we had heard from the minarets in the city—except that Turgut’s wail sounded more like a summons to hell—a string of horror-stricken notes that seemed to arise from the memory of a thousand Ottoman camps, a million Turkish soldiers. I saw the fluttering banners, the splashes of blood on the legs of their horses, the spear and the crescent, the glitter of sunlight on scimitars and chain mail, the beautiful and mutilated young heads, faces, bodies; heard the screams of men crossing into the hand of Allah and the cries of their faraway mothers and fathers; smelled the reek of burning houses and fresh gore, the sulfur of cannon fire, the conflagrations of tent and bridge and horseflesh.
“Most strangely, I heard in the midst of this roar a cry I could understand at will: ‘Kaziklu Bey! The Impaler!’ In the heart of the chaos I seemed to see a figure different from the rest, a dark-clad, cloaked man on horseback wheeling among the bright colors, his face drawn up in a snarl of concentration and his sword harvesting Ottoman heads, which rolled heavily in their pointed helmets.
“Turgut’s voice fell back and I found I was standing near him now, looking down at the dying man. Helen was blessedly real next to me—I opened my mouth to ask her a question and saw that she had heard the same horror in Turgut’s chant. I remembered without wanting to that the blood of the Impaler ran in her veins. She turned to me for a second, her face shocked but steady; it came to me just in time that Rossi’s heritage—mild,
patrician, Tuscan, and Anglo—also ran through her, and I saw Rossi’s incomparable kindness in her eyes. In that moment, I think—not later, not at home in my parents’ stodgy brown church, not in front of any minister—I married her, I wed her in my heart, I cleaved to her for life.
“Turgut, silent now, had placed the string of prayer beads on his friend’s throat, which made the body quiver a little, and selected from the stained satin in the box a tool longer than my hand and made of bright silver. ‘I have never had to do this before, God save me, in my life,’ he said quietly. He opened Mr. Erozan’s shirt and I saw the aging skin, the curling chest hair gray as ashes, rising and falling unevenly. Selim searched the room with silent efficiency and brought Turgut a brick that had apparently been used as a door prop, and this homely object Turgut took in his hand, weighing it for a second. He put the sharp end of the stake on the left side of the man’s chest and began a low chant, in which I caught words I remembered from somewhere—book, movie, conversation?—‘Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar: Allah is great.’ I couldn’t, I knew, force Helen to leave the room any more than I could leave it myself, but I pulled her back a step as the brick descended. Turgut’s hand was large and steady. Selim held the stake upright for him and with a splintering, sucking thud it went into the body. Sluggish blood welled around the point and smeared the pale skin. Mr. Erozan’s face convulsed horribly for a second and his lips drew back from his yellowing teeth like a dog’s. Helen stared and I did not dare look away; I didn’t want her to watch anything I couldn’t see with her. The librarian’s body quivered, the stake suddenly went down to its hilt, and Turgut sat back, as if waiting. His lips trembled and sweat had sprung out all over his face.
“After a moment the body relaxed and then the face; the lips drooped peacefully over Mr. Erozan’s mouth, a sigh came up out of his chest; his feet in their pathetically worn socks twitched and were still. I kept a firm hold on Helen, and felt her shiver next to me, but she stood quiet. Turgut raised his friend’s limp hand and kissed it. I saw tears running down his ruddy face, dripping into his mustache, and he covered his eyes with one hand. Selim touched the dead librarian’s brow, then rose and pressed Turgut’s shoulder.
“After a moment, Turgut recovered himself enough to stand and blow his nose into a handkerchief. ‘He was a very good man,’ he said to us, his voice unsteady. ‘A generous, kind man. Now he rests in Muhammad’s peace instead of joining the legions of hell.’ He turned away to wipe his eyes. ‘My fellows, we must get this body away from here. There is a doctor at one of the hospitals who—he will help us. Selim will remain here with the door locked while I call, and the doctor will come with the ambulance and sign the necessary certificates.’ Turgut took from his pocket several cloves of garlic and placed them gently in the dead man’s mouth. Selim removed the stake and washed it at the sink in the corner, putting it carefully away in the beautiful box. Turgut cleaned up every trace of blood, bandaged the man’s chest with a dishcloth and rebuttoned his shirt, then took from the bed a sheet, which he let me help him spread over the body, covering its now-quiet face.
“‘Now, my dear friends, I ask of you this favor. You have seen what the undead can do, and we know they are here. You must protect yourselves every minute. And you must go to Bulgaria—as soon as possible—in the next few days, if you can arrange this. Call me at my apartment when you have made your plans.’ He looked hard at me. ‘If we do not see each other in person before you go, I wish you all the best possible good fortune and safety. I will think of you every moment. Please call me as soon as you come back to Istanbul, if you come back here.’
“I hoped he meant If that’s how you route your travel and not If you survive Bulgaria. He shook hands warmly with us, and so did Selim, who followed this up by kissing Helen’s hand very shyly.
“‘We will go now,’ Helen said simply, taking my arm, and we walked out of that sad room and down the stairs to the street.”
Chapter 54
“My first impression of Bulgaria—and my memory of it ever after—was of mountains seen from the air, mountains high and deep, darkly verdant and mainly untouched by roads, although here and there a brown ribbon ran among villages or along sudden sheer cliffs. Helen sat quietly next to me, her eyes fixed on the small porthole of the airplane window, her hand resting in mine under cover of my folded jacket. I could feel her warm palm, her slightly chilled, fine fingers, the absence of rings. We could occasionally see glinting veins in the crevasses of the mountains, which must, I thought, be rivers, and I strained without hope for some configuration of winding dragon tail that might be the answer to our puzzle. Nothing, of course, fit the outlines I already knew with my eyes closed.
“And nothing was likely to, I reminded myself, if only to quell the hope that rose uncontrollably in me again at the sight of those ancient mountains. Their very obscurity, their look of having been untouched by modern history, their mysterious lack of cities or towns or industrialization made me hopeful. I felt somehow that the more perfectly hidden the past was in this country, the more likely it was to have been preserved. The monks, whose lost trail we now soared above, had made their way through mountains like these—perhaps these very peaks, although we didn’t know their route. I mentioned this to Helen, wanting to hear myself voice my hopes aloud. She shook her head. ‘We don’t know for a fact that they reached Bulgaria or even actually set out for it,’ she reminded me, but she softened the flat scholarship of her tone with a caress of my hand under the jacket.
“‘I don’t know anything about Bulgarian history, you know,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be lost here.’
“Helen smiled. ‘I am not an expert myself, but I can tell you that Slavs migrated to this area from the north in the sixth and seventh centuries, and a Turkic tribe called the Bulgars came here in the seventh, I think. They united against the Byzantine Empire—wisely—and their first ruler was a Bulgar named Asparuh. Tsar Boris I made Christianity the official religion in the ninth century. He is a great hero here, apparently, in spite of that. The Byzantines ruled from the eleventh to the beginning of the thirteenth, and then Bulgaria became very powerful until the Ottomans crushed them in 1393.’
“‘When were the Ottomans driven out?’ I asked with interest. We seemed to be meeting them everywhere.
“‘Not until 1878,’ Helen admitted. ‘Russia helped Bulgaria to expel them.’
“‘And then Bulgaria sided with the Axis in both wars.’
“‘Yes, and the Soviet army brought a glorious revolution just after the war. What would we do without the Soviet army?’ Helen gave me her most brilliant and bitter smile, but I squeezed her hand.
“‘Keep your voice down,’ I said. ‘If you won’t be careful, I’ll have to be careful for both of us.’”
“The airport in Sofia was a tiny place; I’d expected a palace of modern communism, but we descended to a modest area of tarmac and strolled across it with the other travelers. Nearly all of them were Bulgarian, I decided, trying to catch something of their conversations. They were handsome people, some of them strikingly so, and their faces varied from the dark-eyed pale Slav to a Middle-Eastern bronze, a kaleidoscope of rich hues and shaggy black eyebrows, noses long and flaring, or aquiline, or deeply hooked, young women with curly black hair and noble foreheads, and energetic old men with few teeth. They smiled or laughed and talked eagerly with one another; one tall man gesticulated to his companion with a folded newspaper. Their clothes were distinctly not Western, although I would have been hard put to say what it was about the cuts of suits and skirts, the heavy shoes and dark hats, that was unfamiliar to me.
“I also had the impression of a barely concealed happiness among these people as their feet touched Bulgarian soil—or asphalt—and this disturbed the picture I’d carried there with me of a nation grimly allied with the Soviets, Stalin’s right-hand ally even now, a year after his death—a joyless country in the grip of delusions from which they might never awake. The difficulties of obtaining a Bu
lgarian visa in Istanbul—a passage oiled in great part by Turgut’s sultanic funding and by calls from Aunt Éva’s Bulgarian counterpart in Sofia—had only increased my trepidations about this country, and the cheerless bureaucrats who had finally, grudgingly stamped their approval in our passports in Budapest had seemed to me already embalmed in oppression. Helen had confided to me that the very fact that the Bulgarian embassy had granted us visas at all made her uneasy.
“Real Bulgarians, however, appeared to be a different race altogether. On going into the airport building, we found ourselves in customs lines, and here the din of laughter and talk was even louder, and we could see relatives waving over the barriers and shouting greetings. Around us people were declaring small bits of money and souvenirs from Istanbul and previous destinations, and when our turn came we did the same.
“The eyebrows of the young customs officer disappeared into his cap at the sight of our passports, and he took the passports aside for a few minutes to consult with another officer. ‘Not a good omen,’ Helen said under her breath. Several uniformed men gathered around us, and the oldest and most pompous-looking began to question us in German, then in French, and finally in broken English. As Aunt Éva had instructed, I calmly pulled out our makeshift letter from the University of Budapest, which implored the Bulgarian government to let us in on important academic business, and the other letter Aunt Éva had obtained for us from a friend in the Bulgarian embassy.
“I don’t know what the officer made of the academic letter and its extravagant mix of English, Hungarian, and French, but the embassy letter was in Bulgarian and bore the embassy seal. The officer read it in silence, his huge dark eyebrows knit over the bridge of his nose, and then his face took on a surprised, even an astonished expression, and he looked at us in something like amazement. This made me even more nervous than his earlier hostility had, and it occurred to me that Éva had been rather vague with us about the contents of the embassy letter. I certainly couldn’t ask now what it said, and I felt miserably at sea when the officer broke into a smile and actually clapped me on the shoulder. He made his way to a telephone in one of the little customs booths and after considerable effort seemed to have reached someone. I didn’t like the way he smiled into the receiver and glanced across at us every few seconds. Helen shifted uneasily next to me and I knew she must be reading even more into all this than I was.
The Historian Page 49