“What do you want with this morbid rubbish?” Barley was gazing over my shoulder.
“School paper,” I mumbled. The book was divided into chapters, as I remembered:“Vampires de la Toscane,” “Vampires de la Normandie,” and so on. I found the right one at last:“Vampires de Provence et des Pyrénées.” Oh, Lord, was my French up to this? Barley was starting to look at his watch. I ran a quick finger above the page, careful not to touch the magnificent type or ivory paper.“Vampires dans les villages de Provence -” What had my father been looking for here? He’d been poring over this first page of the chapter.“‘Il y a aussi une legende…’” I leaned closer.
Since that moment, I have known many times what I first experienced then. Until then, my forays into written French had been purely utilitarian, the completion of almost mathematical exercises. When I comprehended a new phrase it was merely a bridge to the next exercise. Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light. Since then I have known this moment of truth with other companions: German, Russian, Latin, Greek, and-for a brief hour-Sanskrit.
But that first time held the revelation of all the others.“‘Il y a aussi une legende,’” I breathed, and Barley suddenly bent to follow the words. What he translated aloud, however, I had already taken in with a mental gasp: “‘There is also a legend that Dracula, noblest and most dangerous of all vampires, attained his power not in the region of Wallachia but through a heresy in the monastery of Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyrénées-Orientales, a Benedictine house founded in the year 1000 of Our Lord.’ What is this, anyway?” Barley said.
“School paper,” I repeated, but our eyes met strangely over the book, and he looked as if he were seeing me for the first time. “Is your French very good?” I asked humbly.
“Of course.” He smiled and bent over the page again. “‘Dracula is said to visit the monastery every sixteen years to pay tribute to his origins and to renew the influences that have allowed him to live in death.’”
“Go on, please.” I gripped the edge of the table.
“Certainly,” he said. “‘The calculations done by Brother Pierre de Provence in the early seventeenth century indicate that Dracula visits Saint-Matthieu in the half-moon of the month of May.’”
“What is the moon now?” I gasped, but Barley didn’t know either. There was no further mention of Saint-Matthieu; the remaining pages paraphrased a document from a church in Perpignan about disturbances among sheep and goats in the region in 1428; it wasn’t clear whether the cleric-author blamed vampires or sheep rustlers for these problems. “Odd stuff,” Barley commented. “Is this what your family reads for fun? Do you want to hear about vampires in Cyprus?”
Nothing else in the book looked relevant to my purposes, and when Barley glanced at his watch again, I turned sadly away from the enticing walls of volumes.
“Well, that was cheerful,” Barley said on the way down the staircase. “You’re an unusual girl, aren’t you?” I couldn’t tell how he meant this, but I hoped it was a compliment.
On the train, Barley entertained me with chat about his fellow students, a pageant of madcaps and scapegoats, then carried my bag onto shipboard for me above the oily gray water of the Channel. It was a bright, chill day and we settled into the vinyl seats inside, sheltered from the wind. “I don’t sleep much during term,” Barley informed me, and promptly dozed off with his coat rolled into a ball under one shoulder.
It was just as well for me that he slept for a couple of hours, because I had a lot to ponder, matters of a practical nature as well as a scholarly one. My immediate problem was not a question of links among historical events but of Mrs. Clay. She would be waiting all too solidly in the front hall of our house in Amsterdam, full of smothering concern for my father and me. Her presence would keep me housebound at least overnight, and if I didn’t appear after school the next day, she would be on my trail like a pack of wolves, probably with half the police force of Amsterdam to keep her company. Also, there was Barley. I glanced at his sleeping face across from me; he was snoring discreetly against his jacket. Barley would be headed off to the ferry again as I left for school tomorrow, and I would have to be careful not to intercept him on the way.
Mrs. Clay was indeed home when we arrived. Barley stood with me on the doorstep while I searched for my keys; he was craning admiringly at the old mercantile houses and gleaming canals-“Excellent! And all those Rembrandt faces in the streets!” When Mrs. Clay suddenly opened the door and drew me inside, he almost didn’t make it in after me. I was relieved to see his good manners take over. While the two of them disappeared into the kitchen to call Master James, I hurried upstairs, calling back that I wanted to wash my face. In fact-the thought made my heart beat with guilty rapidity-I intended to sack my father’s citadel at once. I would figure out later how to deal with Mrs. Clay and Barley. Now I had to find what I felt sure must be hidden there.
Our town house, built in 1620, had three bedrooms on the second floor, narrow dark-beamed rooms that my father adored because, he said, they seemed to him still full of the hardworking and simple people who had first lived in them. His room was the largest of these, an admirable period display of Dutch furniture. He had mixed the spartan furnishings with an Ottoman carpet and bed hangings, a minor sketch by van Gogh, and twelve copper pans from a French farmhouse-these made a gallery on one wall and picked up glints of light from the canal below. I realize now what a remarkable room this was, not only for its display of eclectic tastes but also for its monastic simplicity. It did not contain a single book; those had all been relegated to the library downstairs. No clothing ever hung over the back of the seventeenth-century chair; no newspaper ever profaned the looming desk. There was no telephone and not even a clock-my father woke naturally in the early hours every morning. It was pure living space, a chamber in which to sleep, wake, and perhaps pray-although whether any prayer still occurred there I couldn’t guess-as it had been when it was new. I loved the room but seldom entered it.
Now I went in as quietly as a burglar, shut the door, and opened his desk. It was a terrible feeling, like breaking the seal of a coffin, but I pressed forward, pulling everything out of the pigeonholes, rooting through the drawers but replacing each item with care as I went along-the letters from his friends, his fine pens, his monogrammed notepaper. At last my hand closed on a sealed package. I undid it shamelessly and saw a few lines inside, addressed to me and admonishing me to read the enclosed letters only in the case of my father’s unexpected demise or long-term disappearance. Hadn’t I seen him writing, night after night, something that he covered with one arm when I drew near? I seized the package greedily, closed the desk, and took my find to my own room, listening hard for Mrs. Clay’s foot on the stairs.
The packet was full of letters, each neatly folded into an envelope and addressed to me at our home, as if he had thought he might have to mail them to me one at a time from some other location. I kept them in order-oh, I had learned things without knowing it-and carefully opened the first. It was dated six months earlier and it seemed to begin not with mere words but with a cry from the heart. “My dear daughter”-his handwriting trembled under my eyes-“If you are reading this, forgive me. I have gone to look for your mother.”
Part Two
What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked?… I began to rub my eyes and pinch myself to see if I were awake. It all seemed like a horrible nightmare to me, and I expected that I should suddenly awake, and find myself at home, with the dawn struggling in through the windows, as I had now and again felt in the morning after a day of overwork. But my flesh answered the pinching test, and my eyes were not to be deceived. I was indeed awake and amo
ng the Carpathians. All I could do now was to be patient, and to wait the coming of the morning.
– Bram Stoker,Dracula, 1897
Chapter 25
The train station in Amsterdam was a familiar sight to me-I’d passed through it dozens of times. But I had never been there alone before. I had never traveled anywhere alone, and as I sat on a bench waiting for the morning express to Paris, I felt a quickening of my pulses that was not entirely trepidation for my father-a rising of sap that was simply the first moment of complete freedom I had ever known. Mrs. Clay, doing the breakfast dishes at home, thought I was on my way to school. Barley, safely packed off to the ferry wharf, also thought I was on my way to school. I regretted deceiving kind, boring Mrs. Clay and I regretted even more parting from Barley, who had kissed my hand with sudden gallantry on the front step and given me one of his chocolate bars, although I’d reminded him that I could buy Dutch treats anytime I wanted. I thought I might write him a letter when all this trouble had ended-but that far ahead, I could not see.
For now, the Amsterdam morning sparkled, gleamed, shifted around me. Even this morning I found something comforting in the walk along canals from our house to the station, the scent of bread baking and the humid smell of the canals, the not-quite-elegant, busy cleanliness of everything. On a bench at the station, I reviewed my packing: change of clothes, my father’s letters, bread, cheese, foil packages of juice from the kitchen. I had raided the plentiful kitchen cash, too-if I was going to do one bad thing, I was going to do twenty-to supplement what was in my purse. That would tip Mrs. Clay off all too quickly, but there was no help for it-I couldn’t linger until the banks opened to get money out of my childishly small savings account. I had a warm sweater and a rain jacket, my passport, a book for the long train rides, and my French pocket dictionary.
I had stolen something else. From our parlor I had taken a silver knife that sat in the curio cabinet among souvenirs of my father’s far-flung first diplomatic missions, the journeys that had constituted his early attempts to establish his foundation. I had been too young to accompany him, and he’d left me in the United States with various relatives. The knife was of a sinister sharpness and had an ornately embossed handle. It rested in a sheath, also highly decorated. It was the only weapon I’d ever seen in our household-my father disliked guns, and his collector’s taste did not run to swords or battle-axes. I had no idea how to protect myself with the little blade, but I felt more secure knowing it was in my purse.
The station was crowded by the time the express pulled up. I felt then, as I do now, that there is no joy like the arrival of a train, no matter how disturbing your situation-particularly a European train, and particularly a European train that will carry you south. During that period of my life, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, I heard the whistle of some of the last steam locomotives to cross the Alps on a regular run. I boarded now, clutching my schoolbag, almost smiling. I had hours ahead of me, and I was going to need them, not to read my book but to peruse again those precious letters from my father. I believed I’d picked my destination correctly, but I needed to ruminate on why it was correct.
I found a quiet compartment and drew the curtains shut along the aisle next to my seat, hoping no one would follow me in there. After a moment a middle-aged woman in a blue coat and hat came in anyway, but she smiled at me and settled down with a pile of Dutch magazines. In my comfortable corner, watching the old city and then the little green suburbs trundle past, I unfolded again the first of my father’s letters. I knew its opening lines by heart already, the shocking shapes of the words, the startling place and date, the urgent, firm handwriting.
“My dear daughter:
“If you are reading this, forgive me. I have gone to look for your mother. For many years I have believed she was dead, and now I am not certain about that. This uncertainty is almost worse than grief, as you may someday understand; it tortures my heart night and day. I have never told you much about her, and that has been a weakness in me, I know, but our story was too painful for me to relate to you easily. I’d always intended to tell you more as you grew older and could understand it better without being terribly frightened-although, as far as that goes, it has frightened me so much, so unendingly, that this has been the poorest of my excuses to myself about the matter.
“During the last few months, I have tried to compensate for my weakness by telling you little by little what I could about my own past, and I intended to bring your mother gradually into the story, although she entered my life rather suddenly. Now I fear I may not manage to tell you all you should know of your heritage before I am either silenced-literally unable to inform you myself-or fall prey again to my own silences.
“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 touch
ed 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 anArabian 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 Sultanahmet, 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.
The Historian Page 20
