The Historian (27 page)

―I have described to you some of my life as a graduate student before your birth and have told you a little about the odd circumstance of my adviser‘s disappearance after his revelations to me. I have told you also how I met a young woman named Helen who had as great an interest as mine in finding Professor Rossi, perhaps a greater one. At every quiet opportunity I have tried to advance this story for you, but now I feel I should begin to write down the rest of it, commit it securely to paper. If you must read it now instead of listening to me unfold it for you on some rocky hilltop or quiet piazza, in some sheltered harbor or at some comfortable café table, then the fault is mine for not telling it quickly enough or sooner.

―As I write this I am looking out over the lights of an old harbor—and you sleep undisturbed and innocent in the next room. I am tired after the day‘s work, and tired at the thought of beginning this long narrative—a sad duty, an unfortunate precaution. I feel I have some weeks, possibly months, in which I will certainly be able to continue my tale in person, so I will not retrace all the ground I have already covered for you during our strolls in so many countries. Past that stretch of time—weeks or months—I am less certain. These letters are my insurance against your solitude. In the worst case, you will inherit my house, my money, my furniture and books, but I can easily believe that you will treasure these documents in my hand more than any of the other items, because they will contain your own story, your history.

―Why have I not told you all the facts of this history at a blow, to get it over with, to inform you fully? The answer lies, again, in my own weakness, but also in the fact that an abbreviated version would be exactly that—a blow. I can‘t possibly wish you such pain, even if it would be a mere fraction of my own. Furthermore, you might not fully believe it if I told it at a blow, just as I could not believe my adviser Rossi‘s story fully without pacing the length of his own reminiscences. And, finally, what story can be reduced in actuality to its factual elements? Therefore, I relate my story one step at a time. I must hazard a guess, too, at how much I will have managed to tell you already if these letters come into your hands.‖

My father‘s guess had not been quite accurate, and he had picked up the story a beat or two beyond what I already knew. I might never hear his response to Helen Rossi‘s astounding resolution to go with him on his search, I thought sadly, or the interesting details of their journey from New England to Istanbul. How, I wondered, had they managed to perform all the necessary paperwork, to clear the hurdles of political estrangement, the visas, the customs? Had my father told his parents, kind and reasonable Bostonians, some fib about his sudden plan to travel? Had he and Helen gone to New York immediately, as he‘d planned to? And had they slept in the same hotel room? My adolescent mind could not solve this riddle any more than it could avoid pondering it. I had to content myself at last with a picture of the two of them as characters in some movie of their youth, Helen stretched out discreetly under the covers of the double bed, my father miserably asleep in a wing chair with his shoes—but nothing else—off, and the lights of Times Square blinking a sordid invitation just outside the window.

―Six days after Rossi‘s disappearance, we flew to Istanbul from Idlewild Airport on a foggy weeknight, changing planes in Frankfurt. Our second plane touched down the next morning, and we were herded out with all the other tourists. I had been to Western Europe twice by then, but those jaunts now seemed to me excursions to a completely different planet from this one—Turkey, which in 1954 was even more a world apart than it is today. One minute I was huddled in my uncomfortable airplane seat, wiping my face with a hot washcloth, and the next we were standing outside on an equally hot tarmac, with unfamiliar smells blowing over us, and dust, and the fluttering scarf of an Arab in line ahead of us—that scarf kept getting into my mouth. Helen was actually laughing next to me, watching my amazement at all this. She had brushed her hair and put on lipstick in the airplane and looked remarkably fresh after our cramped night. She wore the little scarf on her neck; I still had not seen what lay under it and wouldn‘t have dared to ask her to remove it. ‗Welcome to the big world, Yankee,‘ she said, smiling. It was a real smile this time, not her customary grimace.

―My amazement increased during the taxi ride to town. I don‘t know exactly what I had expected of Istanbul—nothing, maybe, since I had had so little time to anticipate the journey—but the beauty of this city knocked the wind out of me. It had an
Arabian
Nights
quality that no number of honking cars or businessmen in Western suits could dissolve. The first city here, Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium and the first capital of Christian Rome, must have been splendid beyond belief, I thought—a marriage of Roman wealth and early Christian mysticism. By the time we found some rooms in the old quarter of Sultan Ahmet, I had received a dizzying glimpse of dozens of mosques and minarets, bazaars hung with fine textiles, even a flash of the many-domed, four-horned Hagia Sophia billowing above the peninsula.

―Helen had never been here either, and she studied everything with quiet concentration, turning to me only once during the cab ride to remark how strange it was for her to see the wellspring—I believe that was her word—of the Ottoman Empire, which had left so many traces on her native country. This was to become a theme of our days there—her brief, pungent remarks on all that was already familiar to her: Turkish place-names, a cucumber salad consumed in an outdoor restaurant, the pointed arch of a window frame.

This had a peculiar effect on me, too, a sort of doubling of my experience, so that I seemed to be seeing Istanbul and Romania at the same time, and as the question gradually arose between us of whether we would have to go into Romania itself, I had a sense of being led there by the artifacts of the past as I saw them through Helen‘s eyes. But I digress—this is a later episode of my story.

―Our landlady‘s front hall was cool after the glare and dust of the street. I sank gratefully into a chair in the entrance there, letting Helen reserve two rooms in her excellent but weirdly accented French. The landlady—an Armenian woman who was fond of travelers and had apparently learned their languages—didn‘t know the name of Rossi‘s hotel, either. Perhaps it had vanished years before.

―Helen liked to run things, I mused, so why not allow her the satisfaction? It was unspoken but firmly agreed between us that I would later pay the bill. I had withdrawn all of my sparse savings from the bank at home; Rossi deserved every effort I could make, even if I failed. I would simply have to go home bankrupt if it came to that. I knew that Helen, a foreign student, probably had less than nothing, lived on nothing. I had already noticed that she seemed to own just two suits, which she varied with a selection of sternly tailored blouses. ‗Yes, we‘ll take the two separate rooms side by side,‘ she told the Armenian lady, a fine-featured old woman. ‗My brother—
mon frère
—
ronfle
terriblement
.‘

―‗
Ronfle
?‘ I asked from the lounge.

―‗Snores,‘ she said tartly. ‗You do snore, you know. I didn‘t get a blink of sleep in New York.‘

―‗Wink,‘ I corrected.

―‗Fine,‘ she said. ‗Just keep your door shut,
s’il te plaît
. ‘

―With or without snoring, we had to sleep off the exhaustion of travel before we could do anything else. Helen wanted to hunt down the archive at once, but I insisted on rest and a meal. So it was late afternoon before we began our first prowl of those labyrinthine streets, with their glimpses of colorful gardens and courtyards.

―Rossi had not named the archive in his letters, and in our conversation he had called it only ‗a little-known repository of materials, founded by Sultan Mehmed II.‘ His letter about his research in Istanbul added that it was attached to a seventeenth-century mosque.

Beyond this, we knew that he‘d been able to see the Hagia Sophia from a window there, that the archive had more than one floor, and that it had a door communicating directly with the street on the first floor. I had tried cautiously to find information on such an archive at the university library at home just before our departure, but without success. I wondered at Rossi‘s not giving the name of the archive in his letters; it wasn‘t like him to leave out that detail, but perhaps he hadn‘t wanted to remember it. I had all his papers with me in my briefcase, including his list of the documents he‘d found there, with that strangely incomplete line at the end: ‗Bibliography, Order of the Dragon.‘ Looking through an entire city, a maze of minarets and domes, for the source of that cryptic line in Rossi‘s handwriting was a daunting prospect, to say the least.

―The only thing we could do was to turn our feet toward our one landmark, the Hagia Sophia, originally the great Byzantine Church of Saint Sophia. And once we drew near it, it was impossible for us not to enter. The gates were open and the huge sanctuary pulled us in among the other tourists as if we rode a wave into a cavern. For fourteen hundred years, I reflected, pilgrims had been drawn into it, just as we were now. Inside, I walked slowly to the center and craned my head back to see that vast, divine space with its famous whirling domes and arches, its celestial light pouring in, the round shields covered with Arabic calligraphy in the upper corners, mosque overlaying church, church overlaying the ruins of the ancient world. It arched far, far above us, replicating the Byzantine cosmos. I could hardly believe I was there. I was stunned by it.

―Looking back at that moment, I understand that I had lived in books so long, in my narrow university setting, that I had become compressed by them internally. Suddenly, in this echoing house of Byzantium—one of the wonders of history—my spirit leaped out of its confines. I knew in that instant that, whatever happened, I could never go back to my old constraints. I wanted to follow life upward, to expand with it outward, the way this enormous interior swelled upward and outward. My heart swelled with it, as it never had during all my wanderings among the Dutch merchants.

―I glanced at Helen and saw that she was equally moved, her head tipped back like mine so that her dark curls fell over the collar of her blouse, her usually guarded and cynical face full of a pale transcendence. I reached out, impulsively, and took her hand. She grasped mine hard, with that firm, almost bony grip I knew already from her handshake.

In another woman, this might have been a gesture of submission or coquetry, a romantic acquiescence; in Helen it was as simple and fierce a gesture as her gaze or the aloofness of her posture. After a moment she seemed to recall herself; she dropped my hand, but without embarrassment, and we wandered around the church together admiring the fine pulpit, the glinting Byzantine marble. It took me a mighty effort to remember that we could return to Hagia Sophia at any time during our stay in Istanbul, and that our first business in this city was to find the archive. Helen apparently had the same thought, for she moved toward the entrance when I did, and we made our way through the crowds and into the street again.

―‗The archive could be quite far away,‘ she observed. ‗Saint Sophia is so large that you could see it from almost any building in this part of the city, I think, or even on the other side of the Bosphorus.‘

―‗I know. We‘ve got to find some other clue. The letters said that the archive was attached to a small mosque from the seventeenth century.‘

―‗The city is filled with mosques.‘

―‗True.‘ I flipped through my hastily purchased guidebook. ‗Let‘s start with this—the Great Mosque of the Sultans. Mehmed II and his court might have worshipped there sometimes—it was built in the late fifteenth century, and that would be a logical neighborhood for his library to end up in, don‘t you think?‘

―Helen thought it was worth a try, and we set off on foot. Along the way, I dipped into the guidebook again. ‗Listen to this. It says that
Istanbul
is a Byzantine word that meant
the city
. You see, even the Ottomans couldn‘t demolish Constantinople, only rename it—

with a Byzantine name, at that. It says here that the Byzantine Empire lasted from 333 to 1453. Imagine—what a long, long afternoon of power.‘

―Helen nodded. ‗It is not possible to think about this part of the world without Byzantium,‘ she said gravely. ‗And, you know, in Romania you see glimpses of it everywhere—in every church, in the frescoes, the monasteries, even in the people‘s faces, I think. In some ways, it is closer to your eyes there than it is here, with all of this Ottoman—sediment—on top.‘ Her face clouded. ‗The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II was one of the greatest tragedies in history. He broke down these walls with his cannonballs and then he sent his armies in to pillage and murder for three days. The soldiers raped young girls and boys on the altars of the churches, even in Saint Sophia. They stole the icons and all the other holy treasures to melt down the gold, and they threw the relics of the saints in the streets for the dogs to chew. Before that, this was the most beautiful city in history.‘ Her hand closed in a fist at her waist.

―I was silent. The city was still beautiful, with its delicate, rich colors and its exquisite domes and minarets, whatever atrocities had occurred here long ago. I was beginning to understand why an evil moment five hundred years ago was so real to Helen, but what did this really have to do with our lives in the present? It struck me suddenly that perhaps I had come a long way for nothing, to this magical place with this complicated woman, looking for an Englishman who might be on a bus trip to New York. I swallowed the thought and tried instead to tease her a little. ‗How is it that you know so much about history? I thought you were an anthropologist.‘