The Historian (4 page)

―Dracula—‖ He paused. ―Dracula—Vlad Tepes—is still alive.‖

―Good Lord,‖ my father said suddenly, looking at his watch. ―Why didn‘t you tell me?

It‘s almost seven o‘clock.‖

I put my cold hands inside my navy jacket. ―I didn‘t know,‖ I said. ―But please don‘t stop the story. Please don‘t stop there.‖ My father‘s face looked momentarily unreal to me; I‘d never before considered the possibility that he might be—I didn‘t know what to call it.

Mentally unbalanced? Had he lost his balance for a few minutes, in the telling of this story?

―It‘s late for such a long tale.‖ My father picked up his teacup and put it down again. I noticed that his hands were shaking.

―Please go on,‖ I said.

He was ignoring me. ―Anyway, I don‘t know whether I‘ve scared you or simply bored you. You probably wanted a good straightforward tale of dragons.‖

―There was a dragon,‖ I said. I wanted, too, to believe he had made the story up. ―Two dragons. Will you at least tell me more tomorrow?‖

My father rubbed his arms, as if to warm himself, and I saw that for now he was fiercely unwilling to talk about it further. His face was dark, closed. ―Let‘s go get some dinner.

We can leave our luggage at Hotel Turist first.‖

―All right,‖ I said.

―They‘re going to throw us out in a minute, anyway, if we don‘t leave.‖ I could see the light-haired waitress leaning against the bar; she didn‘t seem to care whether we stayed or went. My father got out his wallet, smoothed flat some of those big faded bills, always with a miner or farmworker smiling heroically off the back, and put them in the pewter tray. We worked our way around wrought-iron chairs and tables and went out the steamy door.

Night had come down hard—a cold, foggy, wet, East European night, and the street was almost deserted. ―Keep your hat on,‖ my father said, as he always did. Before we stepped out under the rain-washed sycamores, he suddenly stopped, held me back behind his outstretched hand, protectively, as if a car had gone rushing past us. But there was no car, and the street dripped quiet and rustic under its yellow lights. My father looked sharply left and right. I thought I saw no one, although my long-eaved hood partly blocked my sight. He stood listening, his face averted, body stock-still.

Then he let his breath out heavily and we walked on, talking about what to order for dinner at the Turist when we got there.

There would be no more discussions of Dracula on that journey. I was soon to learn the pattern of my father‘s fear: he could tell me this story only in short bursts, reeling it out not for dramatic effect but to preserve something—his strength? His sanity?

At home in Amsterdam, my father was unusually silent and busy, and I waited uneasily for opportunities to ask him about Professor Rossi. Mrs. Clay ate dinner with us every night in the dark-paneled dining room, serving us from the sideboard but otherwise joining in as a member of the family, and I felt instinctively that my father would not want to tell more of his story in her presence. If I sought him in his library, he asked me quickly about my day or wanted to see my homework. I checked his library shelves in secret soon after our return from Emona, but the book and papers had already vanished from their high place; I had no idea where he‘d put them. If it was Mrs. Clay‘s night out, he suggested that we go to a movie ourselves, or he took me for coffee and pastries at the noisy shop across the canal. I might have said he was avoiding me, except that sometimes when I sat near him, reading, watching for an opening to ask questions, he would reach out and stroke my hair with an abstracted sadness in his face. At those moments, I was the one who could not bring up the story.

When my father went south again, he took me with him. He would have only one meeting, and an informal one at that, almost not worth the long trip, but he wanted me to see the scenery, he said. This time we rode the train far beyond Emona and then settled for taking a bus to our destination. My father preferred local transportation whenever he could use it. Now, when I travel, I often think of him and bypass the rental car for the metro. ―You‘ll see—Ragusa is no place for cars,‖ he said as we clung to the metal bar behind the bus driver‘s seat. ―Always sit up front and you‘re less likely to be sick.‖ I squeezed the bar until my knuckles were white; we seemed to be airborne among the towering piles of pale-gray rock that served as mountains in this new region. ―Good God,‖ my father said after one horrible leap across a hairpin turn. The other passengers looked completely at ease. Across the aisle an old woman in black sat crocheting, her face framed by the fringe of her shawl, which danced as the bus jolted. ―Watch carefully,‖ my father said. ―You‘re going to see one of the greatest sights of this coast.‖

I gazed diligently out the window, wishing he didn‘t find it necessary to give me so many instructions, but taking in everything I could of the rock-piled mountains and the stone villages that crowned them. Just before sunset I was rewarded by the sight of a woman standing at the edge of the road, perhaps waiting for a bus going in the opposite direction.

She was tall, dressed in long, heavy skirts and a tight vest, her head crowned by a fabulous headdress like an organdy butterfly. She stood alone among the rocks, touched by late sun, a basket on the ground beside her. I would have thought she was a statue, except that she turned her magnificent head as we passed. Her face was a pale oval, too far away for me to see any expression. When I described her to my father, he said she must have been wearing the native dress of this part of Dalmatia. ―A big bonnet, with wings on each side? I‘ve seen pictures of that. You could say she‘s a sort of ghost—she probably lives in a very small village. I suppose most of the young people here wear blue jeans now.‖

I kept my face glued to the window. No more ghosts appeared, but I didn‘t miss a single view of the miracle that did: Ragusa, far below us, an ivory city with a molten, sunlit sea breaking around its walls, roofs redder than the evening sky inside their tremendous medieval enclosure. The city sat on a large round peninsula, and its walls looked impenetrable to sea storm and invasion, a giant wading off the Adriatic coast. At the same time, seen from the great height of the road, it had a miniature appearance, like something carved by hand and set down out of scale at the base of the mountains.

Ragusa‘s main street, when we reached it a couple of hours later, was marble underfoot, highly polished by centuries of shoe soles and reflecting splashes of light from the surrounding shops and palaces so that it gleamed like the surface of a great canal. At the harbor end of the street, safe in the city‘s old heart, we collapsed on café chairs, and I turned my face straight into the wind, which smelled of crashing surf and—strange to me in that late season—of ripe oranges. The sea and sky were almost dark. Fishing boats danced on a sheet of wilder water at the far reaches of the harbor; the wind brought me sea sounds, sea scents, and a new mildness. ―Yes, the South,‖ my father said with satisfaction, pulling up a glass of whiskey and a plate of sardines on toast. ―Say you put your boat in right here and had a clear night to travel. You could steer by the stars from here directly to Venice, or to the Albanian coast, or into the Aegean.‖

―How long would it take to sail to Venice?‖ I stirred my tea, and the breeze pulled the steam out to sea.

―Oh, a week or more, I suppose, in a medieval ship.‖ He smiled at me, relaxed for the moment. ―Marco Polo was born on this coast, and the Venetians invaded frequently.

We‘re actually sitting in a kind of gateway to the world, you could say.‖

―When did you come here before?‖ I was only beginning to believe in my father‘s previous life, his existence before me.

―I‘ve been here several times. Maybe four or five. The first was years ago, when I was still a student. My adviser recommended I visit Ragusa from Italy, just to see this wonder, while I was studying—I told you I studied Italian in Florence one summer.‖

―You mean Professor Rossi.‖

―Yes.‖ My father looked sharply at me, then into his whiskey.

There was a little silence, filled by the café awning, which flapped above us on that unseasonably warm breeze. From inside the bar and restaurant came a blur of tourists‘

voices, clinking china, saxophone and piano. From beyond came the slop of boats in the dark harbor. At last my father spoke. ―I should tell you a little more about him.‖ He didn‘t look at me, still, but I thought his voice had a fine crack in it.

―I‘d like that,‖ I said cautiously.

He sipped his whiskey. ―You‘re stubborn about stories, aren‘t you?‖

You are the stubborn one, I longed to say, but I held my tongue; I wanted the story more than I did the quarrel.

My father sighed. ―All right. I‘ll tell you more about him tomorrow, in the daylight, when I‘m not so tired and we have a little time to walk the walls.‖ He pointed with his glass to those gray-white, luminous battlements above the hotel. ―That‘ll be a better time for stories. Especially that story.‖

By midmorning we were seated a hundred feet above the surf, which crashed and foamed white around the city‘s giant roots. The November sky was brilliant as a summer day. My father put on his sunglasses, checked his watch, folded away the brochure about the rusty-roofed architecture below, let a group of German tourists drift past us out of earshot. I looked out to sea, beyond a forested island, to the fading blue horizon. From that direction the Venetian ships had come, bringing war or trade, their red and gold banners restless under the same glittering arc of sky. Waiting for my father to speak, I felt a stirring of apprehension far from scholarly. Perhaps those ships I imagined on the horizon were not simply part of a colorful pageant. Why was it so difficult for my father to begin?

As I‘ve told you, my father said, clearing his throat once or twice, Professor Rossi was a fine scholar and a true friend. I wouldn‘t want you to think anything different of him. I know that what I made the mistake, perhaps, of telling you earlier makes him sound—

crazy. You remember that he‘d described to me something terribly difficult to believe.

And I was deeply shocked, and filled with doubt about him, although I saw sincerity and acceptance in his face. When he finished speaking he glanced at me with those keen eyes.

―What on earth do you mean?‖ I must have been stammering.

―I repeat,‖ Rossi said emphatically, ―I discovered in Istanbul that Dracula lives among us today. Or did then, at least.‖

I stared at him.

―I know you must think I‘m insane,‖ he said, relenting visibly. ―And I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad.‖ He sighed. ―In Istanbul there is a little-known repository of materials, founded by Sultan Mehmed II, who took the city from the Byzantines in 1453. This archive is mostly odds and ends collected later by the Turks as they were gradually beaten back from the edges of their empire. But it also contains documents from the late fifteenth century, and among them I found some maps that purported to give directions to the Unholy Tomb of a Turk-slayer, who I thought might be Vlad Dracula. There were three maps, actually, graduated in scale to show the same region in greater and greater detail. There was nothing on these maps that I recognized or could tie to any area I knew of. They were labeled mainly in Arabic, and they dated from the late fifteenth century, according to the archive‘s librarians.‖ He tapped the strange little volume that I told you resembled my own find so closely. ―The information in the center of the third map was in a very old Slavic dialect.

Only a scholar with multiple linguistic resources at his command could have made head or tail of them. I did my best, but it was uncertain work.‖

At this point, Rossi shook his head, as if still regretting his limits. ―The effort I poured into this discovery drew me unreasonably far from my official summer research on the ancient trade of Crete. But I was beyond the reach of reason, I think, sitting in that hot, sticky library in Istanbul. I remember I could see the minarets of the Hagia Sophia through the grimy windows. I worked there, with those clues to the Turkish view of Vlad‘s kingdom resting on the desk in front of me, toiling over my dictionaries, taking copious notes, and copying the maps by hand.

―To make a long research story short, there came an afternoon when I found myself closing in on the carefully marked spot of the Unholy Tomb, on the third and most puzzling map. You remember that Vlad Tepes is supposed to have been buried at the island monastery on Lake Snagov, in Romania. This map, like the others, didn‘t show any lake with an island in it—although it did show a river running through the area, widening in the middle. I had translated everything around the borders already, with the help of a professor of Arabic and Ottoman language at Istanbul University—cryptic proverbs about the nature of evil, many of them from the Qur‘an. Here and there on the map, nestled among roughly sketched mountains, was some writing that at first glance appeared to be place-names in a Slavic dialect but that translated as riddles, probably a code for real locations: the Valley of Eight Oaks, Pig-Stealing Village, and so forth—

strange peasant names that meant nothing to me.

―Well, in the center of the map, above the site of the Unholy Tomb, wherever it was supposed to be located, was a rough sketch of a dragon, wearing a castle as a sort of crown on its head. The dragon looked nothing like the one in my—our—old books, but I conjectured it must have come down to the Turks with the legend of Dracula. Below the dragon someone had inked tiny words, which I thought at first were Arabic, like the proverbs in the map‘s borders. Looking at them through a magnifying glass, I suddenly realized that these markings were actually Greek, and I translated aloud before I had thought about courtesy—although of course the library room was empty except for myself and occasionally a bored librarian who came in and out, apparently to make sure I didn‘t steal anything. At this moment I was completely alone. The infinitesimal letters danced under my eyes as I sounded them out: ‗In this spot, he is housed in evil. Reader, unbury him with a word.‘