The Historian (11 page)

―I see,‖ she said with cold politeness. She stood up and started collecting her books, deliberately and without haste. Now she was picking up her briefcase. Standing, she looked as tall as I‘d imagined her, a little sinewy, with broad shoulders.

―Why are you studying Dracula?‖ I asked in desperation.

―Well, I must say it is not any of your business,‖ she told me shortly, turning away, ―but I am planning a future trip, although I do not know when I will take it.‖

―To the Carpathians?‖ I felt suddenly rattled by the whole conversation.

―No.‖ She flung that last word back at me, disdainfully. And then, as if she couldn‘t help herself, but so contemptuously that I didn‘t dare follow her: ―To Istanbul.‖

―Good Lord,‖ my father prayed suddenly against the twittering sky. The last swallows were homing in above us, the town with its diminished lights settling heavily into the valley. ―We shouldn‘t be sitting around here with a hike ahead of us tomorrow. Pilgrims are supposed to turn in early, I‘m sure. With the coming of dark, or something like that.‖

I shifted my legs; one foot had fallen asleep under me and the stones of the churchyard wall felt suddenly sharp, impossibly uncomfortable, especially with the thought of bed looming ahead of me. I would have pins and needles on the stumbling walk downhill to the hotel. I felt a boiling irritation, too, far sharper than the sensations in my feet. My father had stopped his story too soon, again.

―Look,‖ my father said, pointing straight out from our perch. ―I think that must be Saint-Matthieu.‖

I followed his gesture to the dark, massed mountains and saw, halfway up, a small, steady light. No other light appeared close to it; no other habitation seemed anywhere near it. It was like a single spark on immense folds of black cloth, high up but not close to the highest peaks—it hung between the town and the night sky. ―Yes, that‘s just where the monastery must be, I think,‖ my father said again. ―And we‘ll have a real climb tomorrow, even if we go by the road.‖

As we set off along moonless streets, I felt that sadness that comes with dropping down from a height, leaving anything lofty. Before we turned the corner of the old bell tower, I glanced back once, to pin that tiny spot of light in my memory. There it was again, gleaming above a house wall tumbled over with dark bougainvillea. Standing still for a moment, I looked hard at it. Then, just once, the light winked.

December 14, 1930

Trinity College, Oxford

My dear and unfortunate successor:

I shall conclude my account as rapidly as possible, since you must draw from it vital information if we are both to—ah, to survive, at least, and to survive in a state of goodness and mercy. There is survival and survival, the historian learns to his grief. The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia.

And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.

But to proceed: on my journey from England to Greece, I experienced some of the smoothest travelling I have ever known. The director of the museum in Crete was actually at the dock to welcome me, and he invited me to return later in the summer, to attend the opening of a Minoan tomb. In addition, two American classicists whom I had wanted for years to meet were staying at my pension. They urged me to inquire about a faculty position that had just become available at their university—exactly the thing for someone with my background—and heaped my work with compliments. I had easy access to every collection I approached, including some private ones. In the afternoons, when the museums shut down and the town took its siesta, I sat on my lovely vine-shaded balcony, fleshing out my notes, and in the process derived ideas for several other works to be attempted at some later date. Under these idyllic circumstances I considered dropping entirely what now seemed to me to be a morbid fancy, the pursuit of that peculiar word,
Drakulya
. I had brought the antique book with me, not wanting to be parted from it, but I had not opened it for a week now. All in all, I felt free of its spell.

But something—an historian‘s passion for thoroughness, or maybe sheer love of the chase—compelled me to stick to my plans and go on to Istanbul for a few days. And now I must tell you of my singular adventure in an archive there. This is perhaps the first of several events I shall describe that may inspire your disbelief. Only read to the end, I beg you.

In obedience to this plea, my father said, I read every word. That letter told me again about Rossi‘s chilling experience among the documents of Sultan Mehmed II‘s collection—his finding there a map labeled in three languages that seemed to indicate the whereabouts of Vlad the Impaler‘s tomb, the map‘s theft by a sinister bureaucrat, and the two tiny, blistered wounds on the bureaucrat‘s neck.

In the telling of this story, his writing style lost some of the compactness and control I had noticed in the earlier two letters, stretching thin and harried and blossoming with small errors, as if he had typed it in great agitation. And despite my own uneasiness (for it was now night, I had returned to my apartment, and I was reading alone there, with the door bolted and the curtains superstitiously drawn), I noticed the language he used in unfolding those events; it followed closely what he‘d said to me only two nights before. It was as if the story had bitten so deeply into his mind, nearly a quarter-century earlier, that it needed only to be read off to a new listener.

There were three letters left, and I went on to the next one eagerly.

December 15, 1930

Trinity College, Oxford

My dear and unfortunate successor:

From the moment the ugly official snatched away that map, my luck failed. On my return to my rooms, I found that the hotel manager had moved my belongings to a smaller and rather dirtier chamber because one corner of the ceiling had fallen in, in my own room.

During this process, some of my papers had disappeared, and a pair of gold cuff-links of which I was extremely fond had also vanished.

Sitting in my cramped new quarters, I tried at once to resurrect my notes on Vlad Dracula‘s history—and the maps I had seen in the archives—from memory. Then I hurried away from that place back into Greece, where I attempted to resume my studies on Crete, since I now had extra time at my disposal.

The boat trip to Crete was horrendous, the sea being very high and rough. A hot, crazing wind, like France‘s infamous
mistral
, blew down over the island without cease. My previous rooms were occupied and I found only the most pitiful lodgings, dark and musty. My American colleagues had departed. The kindly director of the museum had fallen ill and no one seemed to remember his having invited me to the opening of a tomb.

I tried to go on with my writing about Crete but searched my notes in vain for inspiration.

My nervousness was hardly appeased by the primitive superstitions I encountered even among townspeople, superstitions I hadn‘t noticed on previous trips, although they are so widespread in Greece that I must have come across them before. In Greek tradition, as in many others, the source of the vampire, the
vrykolakas
, is any corpse not properly buried, or slow to decompose, not to mention anybody accidentally buried alive. The old men in Crete‘s
tavernas
seemed much more inclined to tell me their two hundred and ten vampire stories than they were to explain where I might find other shards of pottery like that one, or what ancient shipwrecks their grandfathers had dived into and plundered.

One evening I let a stranger buy me a round of a local speciality called, whimsically, amnesia, with the result that I was sick all the next day.

Nothing, in fact, went well with me until after I reached England, which I did in a terrible rainy gale that caused me the most gruesome seasickness I have ever experienced.

I note down these circumstances in case they have some bearing on other aspects of my case. At the very least, they will explain to you my state of mind when I arrived in Oxford: I was exhausted, dejected, fearful. In my mirror I looked pale and thin.

Whenever I cut myself shaving, which I did frequently in my nervous clumsiness, I winced, remembering those half-congealed little wounds on the Turkish bureaucrat‘s neck and doubting more and more the sanity of my own recollection. Sometimes I had the sense, which haunted me almost to madness, of some purpose unfulfilled, some intention whose form I could not reconstruct. I was lonely and full of longing. In a word, my nerves were in a state I‘d never known before.

Of course, I attempted to carry on as usual, saying nothing of these matters to anyone and preparing for the upcoming term with my usual care. I wrote to the American classicists I‘d met in Greece, intimating that I would be interested in at least a brief appointment in the States, if they could help me acquire one. I was nearly done with my degree, I felt more and more the need to start afresh, and I thought the change would do me good. I also completed two short articles on the juncture of archaeological and literary evidence in the study of Crete‘s pottery production. With effort, I brought my natural self-discipline to bear on each day, and each day calmed me further.

For the first month after my return, I tried not only to stifle all memory of my unpleasant journey but also to avoid any renewal of my interest in the odd little book in my luggage, or in the research it had precipitated. However, my confidence reasserting itself and my curiosity growing again—perversely—within me, I picked up the volume one evening and reassembled my notes from England and Istanbul. The consequence—and from then on I did view it as a consequence—was immediate, terrifying, and tragic.

I must pause here, brave reader; I cannot bring myself to write more, for the moment. I beg you not to desist in these readings but to pursue them further, as I will try to, myself, tomorrow.

Yours in profoundest grief, Bartholomew Rossi

As an adult, I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveler: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable in itself—we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different. The rough-hewn door is still there, but it‘s much smaller; the day is cloudy instead of brilliant; it‘s spring instead of autumn; we‘re alone instead of with three friends. Or, worse, with three friends instead of alone.

The very young traveler knows little of this phenomenon, but before I knew it in myself, I saw it in my father, at Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyrénées-Orientales. I sensed in him, rather than read clearly, the mystery of repetition, already knowing he had been there years before. And, oddly, this place drew him into abstraction in a way no other we‘d visited had done. He had been to the region of Emona once before our visit, and to Ragusa several times. He had visited Massimo and Giulia‘s stone villa for other happy suppers, in other years. But at Saint-Matthieu I sensed that he had actually longed for this place, thought it through over and over for some reason I could not excavate, relived it without telling anyone. He did not tell me now, except to recognize aloud the curve of the road before it finally ran up against the abbey wall, and to know, later, which door opened into sanctuary, cloister, or—finally—crypt. This memory for detail was nothing new to me; I had seen him reach for the right door in famous old churches before, or take the correct turn to the ancient refectory, or stop to buy tickets at the right guardhouse in the right shady gravel drive, or recall, even, where he had previously had the finest cup of coffee.

The difference at Saint-Matthieu was a difference of alertness, an almost cursory scanning of walls and cloistered walkways. Instead of seeming to say to himself, ―Ah, there‘s that fine tympanum above the doors; I
thought
I remembered it was on this side,‖

my father appeared to be checking off views he could already have described with his eyes closed. It came over me gradually, even before we had finished climbing the steep, cypress-shaded grounds to the main entrance, that what he remembered here were not architectural details, but events.

A monk in a long brown habit stood by the wooden doors, quietly handing brochures to the tourists. ―As I told you, it‘s a working monastery still,‖ my father was saying in an ordinary voice. He had put on his sunglasses, although the monastery wall threw a deep shade over us. ―They keep the crowds down to a dull roar by letting everyone in for only a few hours a day.‖ He smiled at the man as we approached, then stretched his hand out for a pamphlet. ―Merci beaucoup—we‘ll take just one,‖ he was saying in his courteous French. But this time, with the intuitive accuracy the young turn on their parents, I knew even more surely that he had not merely seen this place before, camera in hand. He hadn‘t just ―done‖ it properly, even if he knew all its art-historical coordinates from his guidebook. Instead, something, I felt sure, had happened to him here.

My second impression was as fleeting as my first, but sharper: when he opened the pamphlet and put one foot on the stone threshold, bending his head too casually to the words instead of to the beasts in relief overhead (which would normally have caught his eye), I saw that he hadn‘t lost some old emotion for the sanctuary we were about to enter.