The Historian (12 page)

That emotion, I realized without breathing between my intuition and the thought that followed it—that emotion was either grief or fear, or some terrible blend of the two.

Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyrénées-Orientales sits at a height of four thousand feet above sea level—and the sea is not as distant as this walled-in landscape with its wheeling eagles would have you believe. Red-roofed and precariously high at the summit, the monastery seems to have grown directly out of a single pinnacle of mountain rock, which is true, in a way, since the earliest incarnation of its church was hewed straight down into the rock itself in the year 1000. The main entrance to the abbey is a later expression of the Romanesque, influenced by the art of the Muslims who fought over the centuries to take the peak: a squared-off stone portal crowned by geometric, Islamic borders and two grimacing, groaning Christian monsters in bas-relief, creatures that might be lions, bears, bats, or griffins—impossible animals whose lineage could be anything.

Inside lies the tiny abbey church of Saint-Matthieu and its wonderfully delicate cloister, hedged in by rosebushes even at that tremendous altitude, surrounded by twisted single columns of red marble so fragile in appearance that they could have been corkscrewed into shape by an artistic Samson. Sunlight splashes onto the flagstones of the open courtyard, and blue sky arches suddenly overhead.

But the thing that caught my attention as soon as we entered was the sound of trickling water, unexpected and lovely in that high, dry place and yet as natural as the sound of a mountain stream. It came from the cloister fountain, around which the monks had once paced their meditations: a six-sided red marble basin, decorated on its flat exterior with chiseled relief that showed a miniature cloister, a reflection of the real one around us. The fountain‘s great basin stood on six columns of red marble (and one central support through which the springwater rose, I think). Around its exterior, six spigots burbled water into a pool below. It made an enchanting music.

When I went to the outside edge of the cloisters and sat down on a low wall there, I could look out over a drop of several thousand feet and see thin mountain waterfalls, white against the vertical blue forest. Already perched on a peak, we were surrounded by the looming, unscalable walls of the highest Pyrénées-Orientales. At this distance, the waterfalls plunged downward in silence, or appeared as mere mist, while the living fountain behind me trickled and dripped audibly without pause.

―The cloistered life,‖ my father murmured, settling down next to me on the wall. His face was strange, and he put one arm around my shoulders, something he rarely did. ―It looks peaceful, but it‘s very hard. And wicked, sometimes, too.‖ We sat gazing across that gulf, which was so deep that morning light hadn‘t yet reached the chasm below. Something hung and glinted in the air beneath us, and I realized even before my father pointed to it what it was: a bird of prey, hunting slowly along the pinnacle walls, suspended like a drifting flake of copper.

―Built higher than the eagles,‖ my father mused. ―You know, the eagle is a very old Christian symbol, the symbol of Saint John. Matthew—Saint Matthieu—is the angel, and Luke is the ox, and Saint Mark of course is the winged lion. You see that lion all over the Adriatic, because he was Venice‘s patron saint. He holds a book in his paws—if the book is open, that statue or relief was carved at a moment when Venice was at peace. Closed, it means Venice was at war. We saw him at Ragusa—remember?—with his book closed, over one of the gates. And now we‘ve seen the eagle, too, guarding this place. Well, it needs its guards.‖ He frowned, stood up, and swung away. It struck me that he regretted, almost to tears, our visit here. ―Shall we take a tour?‖

It was not until we were descending the steps to the crypt that I saw again in my father that indescribable attitude of fear. We had finished our attentive pacing through cloisters, chapels, nave, wind-worn kitchen buildings. The crypt was the last item on our self-guided tour, dessert for the morbid, as my father said in some churches. At a yawning stairwell he seemed to go forward a little too deliberately, keeping me behind him without even raising an arm as we stepped down into the hold of the rock. A stunningly cold breath reached up for us from the earthy dark. The other tourists had moved on, finished with this attraction, and left us there alone.

―This was the nave of the first church,‖ my father explained again, unnecessarily, in his thoroughly ordinary voice. ―When the abbey grew stronger and they could continue building, they simply burst into the open air up there and built a new church on top of the old.‖ Candles interrupted the darkness from stone sconces on the heavy pillars. A cross had been cut into the wall of the apse; it hovered, like a shadow, above the stone altar, or sarcophagus—it was hard to tell which—that stood in the apse‘s curve. Along the sides of the crypt lay two or three other sarcophagi, small and primitive, unmarked. My father drew a long breath, looking around that great cold hole in the rock. ―The resting place of the founding abbot and of several later abbots. And that completes our tour. All right.

Let‘s go get some lunch.‖

I paused on the way out. The urge to ask my father what he knew about Saint-Matthieu, what he remembered, even, came over me in a wave, almost a panic. But his back, broad in a black linen jacket, said as clearly as spoken words, ―Wait. Everything in its time.‖ I looked quickly toward that sarcophagus at the far end of the ancient basilica. Its form was crude, stolid in the unflickering light. Whatever it hid was part of the past, and guessing would not unbury it.

And I knew something else already, without having to guess. The story that I would hear over lunch on the monastic terrace, a tactful drop below the monks‘ quarters, might turn out to be about someplace very distant from this one, but like our visit here, it would certainly be another step toward that fear I had begun to see brooding in my father. Why had he not wanted to tell me about Rossi‘s disappearance until Massimo had blundered into it? Why had he choked, white, when the maître d‗ of the restaurant had told us a legend about the living dead? Whatever haunted my father‘s memory was brought out for him vividly by this place, which should have been more sacred than horrible and yet was horrible to him, so much so that his shoulders were squared against it. I would have to work, as Rossi had, to collect my own clues. I was becoming wise in the way of the story.

On my next visit to the library in Amsterdam, I found that Mr. Binnerts had actually looked some things up for me during my absence. When I went into the reading room straight from school, my book bag still on my back, he glanced up with a smile. ―So it‘s you,‖ he said in his nice English. ―My young historian. I have something for you, for your project.‖ I followed him to his desk and he took out a book. ―This is not such an old book,‖ he told me. ―But it has some very old stories in it. They are not very happy reading, my dear, but maybe they will help you write your paper.‖ Mr. Binnerts settled me at a table, and I looked gratefully at his retreating sweater. It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.

The book was called
Tales from the Carpathians
, a dingy nineteenth-century tome published privately by an English collector named Robert Digby. Digby‘s preface outlined his wanderings among wild mountains and wilder languages, although he had also gone to German and Russian sources for some of his work. His tales had a wild sound, too, and the prose was romantic enough, but examining them long afterward, I found his versions of them compared favorably to those of later collectors and translators.

There were two tales about ―Prince Dracula,‖ and I read them eagerly. The first recounted how Dracula liked to feast out of doors among the corpses of his impaled subjects. One day, I learned, a servant complained openly in front of Dracula about the terrible smell, whereupon the prince ordered his men to impale the servant above the others, so the smell would not offend the dying servant‘s nose. Digby presented another version of this, in which Dracula shouted for a stake three times the length of the stakes on which the others had been impaled.

The second story was equally gruesome. It described how Sultan Mehmed II had once sent two ambassadors to Dracula. When the ambassadors came before him, they did not remove their turbans. Dracula demanded to know why they were dishonoring him in this way, and they replied that they were simply acting in accordance with their own customs.

―Then I shall help you to strengthen your customs,‖ replied the prince, and he had their turbans nailed to their heads.

I copied Digby‘s versions of these two little tales into my notebook. When Mr. Binnerts came back to see how I was getting along, I asked him if we might look for some sources on Dracula by his contemporaries, if there were any. ―Certainly,‖ he said, nodding gravely. He was going off his desk then, but he would look around for something as soon as he had time. Perhaps after that—he shook his head, smiling—perhaps after that I would find some pleasanter topic, such as medieval architecture. I promised—smiling, too—that I would think about it.

There is no place on earth more exuberant than Venice on a breezy, hot, cloudless day.

The boats rock and swell in the Lagoon as if launching themselves, crewless, on adventure; the ornate facades brighten in the sunlight; the water smells fresh, for once.

The whole city puffs up like a sail, a boat dancing unmoored, ready to float off. The waves at the edge of the Piazza di San Marco become raucous in the wake of the speedboats, producing a festive but vulgar music like the clash of cymbals. In Amsterdam, Venice of the North, this jubilant weather would have made the city sparkle with renewed purpose. Here, it ended by showing cracks in the perfection—a weedy fountain in one back square, for example, whose water should have been on full spray and instead made a rusty dribble over the lip of the basin. Saint Mark‘s horses pranced shabbily in the glittering light. The columns of the doge‘s palace looked disagreeably unwashed.

I commented on this air of dilapidated celebration, and my father laughed. ―You‘ve got an eye for atmosphere,‖ he said. ―Venice is famous for her stage show, and she doesn‘t mind if she gets a little run-down, as long as the world pours in here to worship her.‖ He gestured around the outdoor café—our favorite place after Florian‘s—at the perspiring tourists, their hats and pastel shirts flapping in the breeze off the water. ―Wait till evening and you won‘t be disappointed. A stage set needs a softer kind of light than this. You‘ll be surprised by the transformation.‖

For now, sipping my orangeade, I was too comfortable to move, anyway; waiting for a pleasant surprise suited my aims exactly. It was the last hot spell of summer before autumn blew in. With autumn would come more school and, if I was lucky, a little peripatetic studying with my father as he roamed a map of negotiation, compromise, and bitter bargains. This fall he would be in Eastern Europe again, and I was already lobbying to be taken along.

My father drained his beer and flipped through a guidebook. ―Yes.‖ He pounced suddenly. ―Here‘s San Marco. You know, Venice was a rival of the Byzantine world for centuries, and a great sea power, too. In fact, Venice stole some remarkable things from Byzantium, including those carousel animals up there.‖ I looked out from under our awning at Saint Mark‘s, where the coppery horses seemed to be dragging the weight of the dripping leaden domes behind them. The whole basilica looked molten in this light—

garishly bright and hot, an inferno of treasure. ―Anyway,‖ said my father, ―San Marco was designed partly in imitation of Santa Sophia, in Istanbul.‖

―Istanbul?‖ I said slyly, dredging my glass for ice. ―You mean it looks like the Hagia Sophia?‖

―Well, of course the Hagia Sophia was overrun by the Ottoman Empire, so you see those minarets guarding the outside, and inside there are huge shields bearing Muslim holy texts. You really
see
East and West collide in there. But then there are the great domes on the top, distinctly Christian and Byzantine, like San Marco‘s.‖

―And they look like these?‖ I pointed across the piazza.

―Yes, very much like these, but grander. The scale of the place is overwhelming. It takes your breath away.‖

―Oh,‖ I said. ―Could I get another drink, please?‖

My father glared at me suddenly, but it was too late. Now I knew that he had been to Istanbul himself.

December 16, 1930

Trinity College, Oxford

My dear and unfortunate successor:

At this point, my history has almost caught up with me, or I with it, and I must narrate events that will bring my story up to the present. There, I hope, it will stop, since I can hardly bear the thought that the future may contain more of these horrors.

As I have related, I eventually picked up my strange book again, like a man compelled by an addiction. I told myself before I did it that my life had returned to normal, that my experience in Istanbul had been odd but was surely explicable and had taken on exaggerated proportions in my travel-wearied brain. So I literally picked the book up again, and I feel I should tell you about that moment in the most literal terms.

It was a rainy evening in October, only two months ago. Term had begun, and I sat in pleasant solitude in my rooms, whiling away an hour after supper. I was waiting for my friend Hedges, a don only ten years older than myself of whom I was extremely fond. He was an awkward and eminently good-natured person, whose apologetic shrugs and kind, shy smile disguised a wit so keen that I often felt thankful he turned it on eighteenth-century literature and not on his colleagues. Except for his shyness, he could have been at home among Addison, Swift, and Pope, gathering in some London coffeehouse. He had only a few friends, had never so much as looked directly at a woman not related to him, and fostered no dreams that reached beyond the Oxford countryside, where he liked to walk, leaning over a fence now and then to watch the cows chewing. His gentleness was visible in the shape of his big head, his meaty hands, and his soft brown eyes, so that he seemed rather bovine himself, or badgerlike, until that clever sarcasm of his suddenly stung the air. I loved to hear about his work, which he discussed in a modest but enthusiastic way, and he never failed to urge me on in my own pursuits. His name was—