“We might have remained there parrying or avoiding looks all day if Professor Sándor had not suddenly appeared. ‘Very good,’ he trumpeted. ‘I find you enjoy your lunch. You are finished? And now, if you will be very kind to come with me, we will arrange your lecture to begin.’
“I flinched-I had actually forgotten for a few minutes the torture that awaited me-but I rose in obedience. Géza dropped respectfully behind Professor Sándor-a little too respectfully? I asked myself-and that gave me a blessed moment to look at Helen. I widened my eyes and motioned toward Hugh James, who had also risen politely to his feet at Helen’s approach and was standing mutely at the table. She frowned, puzzled, and then Professor Sándor, to my great relief, clapped Géza on the shoulder and led him away. I thought I read annoyance in the young Hungarian’s massive suit-jacketed back, but perhaps I had already imbibed too much of Helen’s paranoia about him. In any case, it gave us an instant of freedom.
“‘Hugh got a book,’ I whispered, shamelessly breaking the Englishman’s confidence.
“Helen stared, but without comprehension. ‘Hugh?’
“I nodded quickly at our companion, and he stared at us. Then Helen’s jaw dropped. Hugh stared at her in turn. ‘Did she also -?’
“‘No,’ I whispered. ‘She’s helping me. This is Miss Helen Rossi, anthropologist.’
“Hugh shook her hand with brusque warmth, still staring. But Professor Sándor had turned back and was waiting for us, and there was nothing we could do but follow him. Helen and Hugh stayed as close to my side as if we’d been a flock of sheep.
“The lecture room was already beginning to fill, and I took a place in the front row, pulling my notes from my briefcase with a hand that didn’t quite tremble. Professor Sándor and his assistant were fiddling with the microphone again, and it occurred to me that perhaps the audience wouldn’t be able to hear me, in which case I had little to worry about. All too soon, however, the equipment was working and the kind professor was introducing me, bobbing his white head enthusiastically over some notes. He outlined once again my remarkable credentials, described the prestige of my university in the United States, and congratulated the conference on the rare treat of hearing me, all in English this time, probably for my benefit. I realized suddenly that I had no interpreter to render my dog-eared lecture notes into German while I spoke, and this idea gave me a burst of confidence as I stood to face my trial.
“‘Good afternoon, colleagues, fellow historians,’ I began, and then, feeling that was pompous, put down my notes. ‘Thank you for giving me the honor of speaking to you today. I would like to talk with you about the period of Ottoman incursion into Transylvania and Wallachia, two principalities that are well known to you as part of the current nation of Romania.’ The sea of thoughtful faces looked fixedly at me, and I wondered if I detected a sudden tension in the room. Transylvania, for Hungarian historians, as for many other Hungarians, was touchy material. ‘As you know, the Ottoman Empire held territories across Eastern Europe for more than five hundred years, administering them from a secure base after its conquest of ancient Constantinople in 1453. The Empire was successful in its invasions of a dozen countries, but there were a few areas it never managed to completely subdue, many of them mountainous pockets of Eastern Europe ’s backwoods, whose topography and natives both defied conquest. One of these areas was Transylvania.’
“I went on like this, partly from my notes and partly from memory, experiencing now and then a wave of scholarly panic; I didn’t know the material well yet, although Helen’s lessons about it were vividly etched in my mind. After this introduction, I gave a brief overview of Ottoman trade routes in the region and then described the various princes and nobles who had attempted to repulse the Ottoman incursion. I included Vlad Dracula among them, as casually as I could, because Helen and I had agreed that to leave him out of the talk altogether might appear suspicious to any historian who knew of his importance as a destroyer of Ottoman armies. It must have cost me more than I’d thought it would to utter that name in front of a crowd of strangers, because as I began to describe his impalement of twenty thousand Turkish soldiers, my hand flew out a little too suddenly and I knocked over my glass of water.
“‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ I exclaimed, glancing miserably out at a mass of sympathetic faces-sympathetic with the exception of two. Helen looked pale and tense, and Géza Jószef was leaning a little forward, unsmiling, as if he took the keenest interest in my blunder. The blue-shirted student and Professor Sándor both rushed to my rescue with their handkerchiefs, and after a second I was able to proceed, which I did with all the dignity I could muster. I pointed out that although the Turks had eventually overcome Vlad Dracula and many of his comrades-I thought I should work the word in somewhere-uprisings of this sort had persisted over generations until one local revolution after another toppled the Empire. It was the local nature of these uprisings, with their ability to fade back into their own terrain after each attack, that had ultimately undermined the great Ottoman machine.
“I had meant to end more eloquently than this, but it seemed to please the crowd, and there was ringing applause. To my surprise, I had finished. Nothing terrible had occurred. Helen slumped back, visibly relieved, and Professor Sándor came beaming up to shake my hand. Looking around, I noted Éva in the back, clapping away with her lovely smile very wide. Something was amiss in the room, however, and after a minute I realized that Géza’s stately form had vanished. I couldn’t recall his slipping out, but perhaps the end of my lecture had been too dull for him.
“As soon as I was done, everyone stood up and began to talk in a babble of languages. Three or four of the Hungarian historians came over to shake my hand and congratulate me. Professor Sándor was radiant. ‘Excellent!’ he cried. ‘I am full of pleasure to know you understand so well our Transylvanian history in America.’ I wondered what he would have thought if he’d known I’d learned everything in my lecture from one of his colleagues, seated at a restaurant table in Istanbul.
“Éva came up and gave me her hand, too. I wasn’t sure whether to kiss or shake it, but finally decided on the latter. She looked if anything taller and more imposing today in the midst of this gathering of men in shabby suits. She had on a dark green dress and heavy gold earrings, and her hair, curling under a little green hat, had changed from magenta to black overnight.
“Helen came over to talk with her, too, and I noticed how formal they were with each other in this gathering; it was hard to believe Helen had run to her arms the night before. Helen translated her aunt’s congratulations for me: ‘Very nice work, young man. I could see by everyone’s faces that you managed to offend no one, so probably you didn’t say very much. But you stand up straight at the podium and look your audience in the eye-that will take you far.’ Aunt Éva tempered these remarks with her dazzling, even-toothed smile. ‘Now I must get home to do some chores there, but I will see you at dinner tomorrow night. We can dine at your hotel.’ I hadn’t known we were going to have dinner with her again, but I was glad to hear it. ‘I am so sorry I cannot make you a really good dinner at home, as I would like to,’ she told me. ‘But when I explain that I am under construction like the rest of Budapest, I am sure you will understand. I could not have a visitor see my dining room in such a mess.’ Her smile was thoroughly distracting, but I managed to glean two pieces of information from this speech-one, that in this city of (presumably) tiny apartments, she had a dining room; and two, that whether or not it was a mess, she was too wary to serve dinner to a strange American there. ‘I must have a little conference with my niece. Helen can come to me tonight, if you can spare her.’ Helen translated all this with guilty exactness.
“‘Of course,’ I said, returning Aunt Éva’s smile. ‘I am sure you have a lot to discuss after a long separation. And I think I will have dinner plans myself.’ My eye was already searching out Hugh James’s tweed jacket in the crowd.
“‘Very well.’ She offered her hand again, and
this time I kissed it like a true Hungarian, the first time I had ever kissed a woman’s hand, and Aunt Éva departed.
“This break was followed by a talk in French on peasant revolts in France in the early modern period, and by further performances in German and Hungarian. I listened to them seated in the back again, next to Helen, enjoying my anonymity. When the Russian researcher on the Baltic States left the podium, Helen assured me in a low voice that we had been there long enough and could leave. ‘The library is open for another hour. Let’s slip out now.’
“‘Just a minute,’ I said. ‘I want to secure my dinner date.’ It took little effort for me to find Hugh James again; he was clearly looking for me, too. We agreed to meet at seven in the lobby of the university hotel. Helen was going to take the bus to her aunt’s house, and I saw in her face that she would be wondering the whole time what Hugh James had to tell us.
“The walls of the university library, when we reached it, glowed an unblemished ocher, and I found myself marveling again at the rapidity with which the Hungarian nation was rebuilding itself after the catastrophe of war. Even the most tyrannical of governments could not be wholly wicked if it could restore so much beauty for its citizenry in such a short time. That effort had probably been fueled just as much by Hungarian nationalism, I speculated, remembering Aunt Éva’s noncommittal remarks, as by communist fervor. ‘What are you thinking?’ Helen asked me. She had pulled on her gloves and had her purse firmly over her arm.
“‘I’m thinking about your aunt.’
“‘If you like my aunt so much, perhaps my mother will not be your style,’ she said with a provoking laugh. ‘But we shall see, tomorrow. Now, let’s take a look for something in here.’
“‘What? Stop being so mysterious.’
“She ignored me, and we entered the library together through heavy carved doors. ‘Renaissance?’ I whispered to Helen, but she shook her head.
“‘It’s a nineteenth-century imitation. The original collection here wasn’t even in Pest until the eighteenth century, I think-it was in Buda, like the original university. I remember one of the librarians told me once that many of the oldest books in this collection were given to the library by families who were running away from Ottoman invaders in the sixteenth century. You see, we owe the Turks for some things. Who knows where all those books would be now, otherwise?’
“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home. This one was a neoclassical treasure house, all dark-carved wood, balconies, galleries, frescoes. But what drew my eye were the rows of books, hundreds of thousands of them lining the rooms, floor to ceiling, their red and brown and gilt bindings in neat rows, their marbled covers and endpapers smooth under the hand, the bumpy vertebrae of their spines brown as old bones. I wondered where they had been hidden during the war, and how long it had taken to range them again on all these reconstructed shelves.
“A few students were still turning through volumes at the long tables, and a young man was sorting stacks of them behind a big desk. Helen stopped to speak with him and he nodded, beckoning us toward a great reading room I’d already glimpsed through an open door. There he located a large folio for us, placed it on a table, and left us alone. Helen sat down and drew off her gloves. ‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘I think this is what I remember. I looked at this volume just before I left Budapest last year, but I did not think then that it had any great significance.’ She opened it to the title page, and I saw it was in a language I didn’t know. The words looked strangely familiar to me, and yet I could not read a single one of them.
“‘What is this?’ I put a finger on what I took to be the title. The page was a fine thick paper, printed in brown ink.
“‘This is Romanian,’ Helen told me.
“‘Can you read it?’
“‘Certainly.’ She put her hand on the page, close to mine. I saw that our hands were nearly the same size, although hers had finer bones and narrow square-tipped fingers. ‘Here,’ she said. ”‘Did you study French?’
“‘Yes,’ I admitted. Then I saw what she meant and began to decipher the title. ‘Ballads of the Carpathians,1790.’
“‘Good,’ she said. ‘Very good.’
“‘I thought you couldn’t speak Romanian,’ I said.
“‘I speak poorly, but I can read it, more or less. I studied Latin for ten years in school, and my aunt taught me to read and write a great deal of Romanian. Against my mother’s wishes, of course. My mother is very stubborn. She seldom talks about Transylvania, but she has never abandoned it, either, in her heart.’
“‘And what is this book?’
“She turned the first leaf over, gently. I saw a long column of text, none of which I could understand at a glance; in addition to the unfamiliarity of the words, many of the Latin letters in which it was written were ornamented with crosses, tails, circumflexes, and other symbols. It looked more like witchcraft to me than like a Romance language. ‘I found this book when I did the last wave of my research before leaving for England. There’s not so much material about him in this library, actually. I did find a few documents about vampires, because Mátyás Corvinus, our bibliophile king, was curious about them.’
“‘Hugh said as much,’ I muttered.
“‘What?’
“‘I’ll explain later. Go on.’
“‘Well, I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned here, so I read through a huge mass of material on the history of Wallachia and Transylvania. It took me several months. I made myself read even what was in Romanian. Of course, a lot of documents and histories about Transylvania are in Hungarian, from Hungary ’s centuries of domination, but there are some Romanian sources as well. This is a collection of texts of folk songs from Transylvania and Wallachia, published by an anonymous collector. Some of them are much more than folk songs-they are epic poems.’
“I felt a little disappointed; I had been expecting some kind of rare historical document, something about Dracula. ‘Do any of them mention our friend?’
“‘No, I’m afraid not. But there was one song in here that stayed in my mind, and I thought of it again when you told me about what Selim Aksoy wanted us to see in the archive in Istanbul-you know, that passage about the monks from the Carpathians entering the city of Istanbul with their wagon and mules, remember? I wish now that we had asked Turgut to write down a translation for us.’ She began to turn through the folio very carefully. Some of the long texts were illustrated at the top with woodcuts, mostly ornaments with a look of folk embroideries, but also a few crude trees, houses, and animals. The type was neatly printed, but the book itself had a rough, homemade quality. Helen ran her finger along the first lines of the poems, her lips moving slowly, and shook her head. ‘Some of these are so sad,’ she said. ‘You know, we Romanians are different, at heart, from Hungarians.’
“‘How is that?’
“‘Well, there is a Hungarian proverb that says, ”The Magyar takes his pleasures sadly.“ And it is true- Hungary is full of sad songs, too, and the villages are full of violence, drinking, suicide. But Romanians are even sadder, even sadder. We are sad not from life but by nature, I think.’ She bent her head over the old book, her eyelashes heavy on her cheek. ‘Listen to this-this is typical of these songs.’ She translated haltingly, and the result was something like this, although this particular song is a different one and comes from a little volume of nineteenth-century translations that is now in my personal library:
The child that is dead was ever sweet and fair.
Now younger sister the same smile doth wear.
She saith to their mother: “Oh, Mother, dear,
My good dead sister told me not to fear.
The life she might not live she gives to me,
That I might bring fresh happiness to thee.“
But, nay, the mother could not raise her head,
And sat a-weeping for the one now dead.
“‘Good God,’ I said with a shudder. ‘It’s easy to see how a cu
lture that could create a song like that believed in vampires-produced them, even.’
“‘Yes,’ Helen said, shaking her head, but she was already searching further through the volume. ‘Wait.’ She paused suddenly. ‘This could have been it.’ She was pointing to a short verse with an ornate woodcut above it that seemed to depict buildings and animals enmeshed in a prickly forest.
“I sat in suspense for a few long minutes while Helen read in silence, and at last she looked up. There was a spark of excitement in her face; her eyes shone. ‘Listen to this-as well as I can translate.’ And here, I reproduce for you an exact translation, which I have kept these twenty years in my papers:
They rode to the gates, up to the great city.
They rode to the great city from the land of death.
“We are men of God, men from the Carpathians.
We are monks and holy men, but we bring only evil news.
We bring news of a plague to the great city.
Serving our master, we come weeping for his death.“
They rode up to the gates and the city wept with them
When they came in.
“A shudder went through me at this weird verse, but I had to object. ‘This is very general. The Carpathians are mentioned, but they must show up in dozens or even hundreds of old texts. And ”the great city“ could mean anything. Maybe it means the City of God, the kingdom of heaven.’
“Helen shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘For the people of the Balkans and Central Europe-Christian and Muslim-the great city has always been Constantinople, unless you count the people who made pilgrimages to Jerusalem or Mecca over the centuries. And the mention of a plague and monks-it seems to me somehow connected to the story in Selim Aksoy’s passage. Couldn’t the master they mentioned be Vlad Tepes himself?’
The Historian Page 36
