The Historian

by Elisabeth Kostova

  “I scarcely breathed the words. ‘You mean that this is more than a thousand years old?’ Holding the book carefully in both hands, I sat down on the edge of the bed next to Helen. Neither of us made a sound; we were speaking more or less with our eyes. ‘It’s in nearly perfect condition. And you intend to smuggle such a treasure out of Bulgaria? Helen,’ I told her with a glance, ‘you are out of your mind. And what about the fact that it belongs to the Bulgarian people?’

  “She kissed me, took the book out of my hands, and opened it to the front. ‘It was a gift from my father,’ she whispered. The inside front cover had a deep flap of leather over it, and she reached carefully inside this. ‘I have waited to look at this until we could open it together.’ She drew out a packet of thin paper covered with dense typing. Then we read together, in silence, Rossi’s agonized journal. When we were done, neither of us spoke, although we were both weeping. At last Helen wrapped the book in the handkerchief again and put it carefully back in its hiding place against her skin.

  “Turgut smiled as I finished a diluted version of this story. ‘But there is more I have to tell you, and it is very important,’ I said. I described Rossi’s terrible imprisonment in the library. They listened with still, grave faces, and when I came to the fact that Dracula knew of the continued existence of a guard formed by the sultan to pursue him, Turgut drew a sharp breath. ‘I am sorry,’ I said.

  “He translated quickly for Selim, who bowed his head and then said something in a soft voice. Turgut nodded. ‘He says the thing I most feel. This terrible news only means we must be the more diligent in pursuing the Impaler, and in keeping his influence from our city. His Gloriousness the Refuge of the World would command us in just this way, if he were alive. This is true. And what will you do with this book when you go home?’

  “‘I know someone who has a connection with an auction house,’ I said. ‘We will be very careful, of course, and we’ll wait a while before we do anything. I expect some museum will get it, sooner or later.’

  “‘And the money?’ Turgut shook his head. ‘What will you do with so much?’

  “‘We’re thinking it over,’ I said. ‘Something in the service of good. We don’t yet know what.’

  “Our plane to New York left at five, and Turgut began looking at his watch as soon as we’d finished our last enormous lunch on the divans. He had an evening class to teach, alas, alack, but Mr. Aksoy would ride with us to the airport in a taxicab. When we stood to go, Mrs. Bora brought out a scarf of the finest cream-colored silk, embroidered with silver, and put it around Helen’s neck. It hid the shabbiness of her black jacket and soiled collar and we all gasped-at least I did, and I can’t have been alone. Her face above the scarf was the countenance of an empress. ‘For your marriage day,’ Mrs. Bora said, standing on tiptoe to kiss her.

  “Turgut kissed Helen’s hand. ‘It belonged to my mother,’ he said simply, and Helen could not speak. I spoke for both of us, shaking their hands. We would write, we would think of them. Life being long, we would see one another again.”

  Chapter 76

  “The last part of my story is perhaps the hardest for me to tell, since it begins with so much happiness, in spite of everything. We returned quietly to the university and took up our work again. I was questioned by the police once more, but they seemed satisfied that my trip abroad had been connected with research, and not with Rossi’s vanishing. The newspapers had seized upon his disappearance by then and made a local mystery of it, which the university did its best to ignore. My chairman questioned me, too, of course, and of course I told him nothing, except to say that I grieved as much as anyone for Rossi. Helen and I were married in my parents’ church in Boston that autumn-even in the midst of the ceremony I couldn’t help noticing how bare and plain it was, how devoid of incense.

  “My parents were a little stunned by all this, of course, but they could not help liking Helen, ultimately. None of her native harshness showed around them, and when we visited them in Boston I often found Helen laughing in the kitchen with my mother, teaching her to cook Hungarian specialties, or discussing anthropology with my father in his cramped study. For myself, although I felt the pain of Rossi’s death and the frequent melancholy it seemed to cause in Helen, I found that first year full of a brimming joy. I finished my dissertation under a second adviser, whose face remained a blur to me throughout the process. It was not that I cared about Dutch merchants anymore; I only wanted to complete my education so that I could settle us comfortably somewhere. Helen published a long article on Wallachian village superstitions, which was well-received, and began a dissertation on the remnants of Transylvanian customs in Hungary.

  “We wrote something else, too, as soon as we returned to the States: a note to Helen’s mother, care of Aunt Éva. Helen didn’t dare to put much information into it, but she told her mother in a few brief lines that Rossi had died remembering and loving her. Helen sealed the letter with a look of despair on her face. ‘I will tell her everything someday,’ she said, ‘when I can whisper it into her ear.’ We never knew for certain whether this letter reached its destination because neither Aunt Éva nor Helen’s mother wrote back, and within a year Soviet troops had invaded Hungary.

  “I fully intended to live happily ever after, and I mentioned to Helen soon after we married that I hoped we would have children. At first she shook her head, touching the scar on her neck with gentle fingers. I knew what she meant. But her exposure had been minimal, I pointed out; she was well and strong and healthy. As time went by she seemed lulled by her own complete recovery, and I saw her looking with wistful eyes into the baby carriages we passed on the street.

  “Helen received her doctorate in anthropology the spring after we were married. The speed with which she wrote her dissertation shamed me; I would often wake during that year to find that it was five in the morning and she had already left our bed for her desk. She looked pale and tired, and the day after she defended her dissertation I woke to blood on the sheets, and Helen lying next to me faint and wracked with pain: a miscarriage. She had been waiting to surprise me with good news. She was ill for several weeks afterward, and very quiet. Her dissertation received the highest honors, but she never spoke of that.

  “When I got my first teaching job, in New York City, she urged me to take it, and we moved. We settled in Brooklyn Heights, in a pleasantly run-down brownstone. We took walks along the promenade to watch the tugboats navigating the port and the great passenger liners-the last of their race-pulling out for Europe. Helen taught at a university as good as mine and her students adored her; there was a magnificent balance to our lives, and we were making a living doing what we liked best.

  “Now and then we took out theLife of Saint George and looked slowly through it, and the day came when we went to a discreet auction house with it, and the Englishman who opened it nearly fainted. It was sold privately, and eventually made its way to the Cloisters, in upper Manhattan, and a great deal of money made its way into a bank account we had set up for the purpose. Helen disliked elaborate living as much as I did, and apart from the attempt to send small amounts to her relatives in Hungary, we left the money alone, for the time being.

  “Helen’s second miscarriage was more dramatic than the first, and more dangerous; I came home one day to a pattern of bloody footsteps on the parquet floor in the hall. She had managed to call the ambulance herself and was nearly out of danger by the time I reached the hospital. Afterward, the memory of those footprints woke me over and over in the middle of the night. I began to fear we would never have a healthy child and to wonder how this would affect Helen’s life, in particular. Then she became pregnant again, and month after cautious month passed without incident. Helen grew as soft-eyed as a Madonna, her form round under her blue wool dress, her walk a little unsteady. She was always smiling; this one, she said, was the one we would keep.

  “You were born in a hospital overlooking the Hudson. When I saw that you were dark and fine-browed like
your mother, and as perfect as a new coin, and that Helen’s eyes were overflowing with tears of pleasure and pain, I held you up in your tight cocoon to give you a glimpse of the ships below. That was partly to hide my own tears. We named you for Helen’s mother.

  “Helen was enthralled by you; I would like you to know that fact more than almost anything else about our lives. She had left her teaching during the pregnancy and seemed content to spend hours at home playing with your fingers and feet, which she said with a wicked smile were completely Transylvanian, or rocking you in the big chair I bought her. You smiled early and your eyes followed us everywhere. I left my office on impulse sometimes to come home and make sure the two of you-my dark-haired women-were still lying drowsily on the sofa together.

  “One day, I arrived home early, at four, bringing some little boxes of Chinese food and some flowers for you to stare at. No one was in the living room, and I found Helen leaning over your crib while you took a nap. Your face was exquisitely tranquil in sleep, but Helen’s was smeared with tears, and for a second she didn’t seem to register my presence. I took her into my arms and felt, with a chill, that something in her returned only slowly to my embrace. She would not tell me what had been troubling her, and after a few futile rounds I didn’t dare question her further. That evening she was playful over the carried-in food and the carnations, but the next week I found her in tears again, silent again, looking through one of Rossi’s books, which he had signed for me when we’d first begun our work together. It was his huge volume on the Minoan civilization, and it lay across her lap, open to one of Rossi’s own photographs of a sacrificial altar on Crete. ‘Where’s the baby?’ I said.

  “She raised her head slowly and stared at me, as if reminding herself what year it was. ‘She’s asleep.’

  “I found myself, strangely, resisting the urge to go into the bedroom and check on you. ‘Darling, what’s the matter?’ I put the book away and held her, but she shook her head and said nothing. When I finally went in to see you, you were just waking in your crib, with your lovely smile, flipping over on your stomach, pushing yourself up to look at me.

  “Soon Helen was silent almost every morning and cried for no apparent reason every evening. Since she wouldn’t talk to me, I insisted she see a doctor, and then a psychoanalyst. The doctor said he could find nothing wrong with her, that women were sometimes blue during the first months of motherhood, that she would be fine once she got used to it. I discovered too late, when a friend of ours ran into Helen at the New York Public Library, that she had not been going to the analyst at all. When I confronted her with this, she said she’d decided that some research would cheer her up more, and had been using the babysitter’s time for that instead. But her mood was so low some evenings that I concluded she desperately needed a change of scene. I took a little money from our hoard and bought airline tickets to France for early spring.

  “Helen had never been to France, although she’d read about it all her life and spoke an excellent schoolgirl French. She looked cheerful on Montmartre, commenting with some of her old wryness thatle Sacré Coeur was even more monumentally ugly than she’d ever dreamed. She liked pushing your carriage in the flower markets, and along the Seine, where we lingered, turning through the wares of the booksellers while you sat looking at the water in your soft red hood. You were an excellent traveler at nine months and Helen told you it was only the beginning.

  “The concierge at our pension turned out to be the grandmother of many, and we left you sleeping under her care while we toasted each other at a brass-railed bar or drank coffee outside with our gloves on. Above all, Helen-and you, with your bright eyes-loved the echoing vault of Notre Dame, and eventually we wandered farther south to see other cavernous beauties-Chartres and its radiant glass; Albi with its peculiar red fortress-church, home of heresies; the halls of Carcassone.

  “Helen wanted to visit the ancient monastery of Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyrénées-Orientales, and we decided to go there for a day or two before returning for Paris and the flight home. I thought her face had brightened considerably on the trip, and I liked the way she lay sprawled across our hotel bed in Perpignan, flipping through a history of French architecture that I’d bought in Paris. The monastery had been built in the year 1000, she told me, although she knew I’d already read that whole section. It was the oldest surviving example of Romanesque architecture in Europe. ‘Almost as old as theLife of Saint George, ’ I mused, but at this she closed the book and her face and lay staring at you hungrily where you played on the bed beside her.

  “Helen insisted that we approach the monastery on foot, like pilgrims. We climbed the road from Les Bains on a cool spring morning, our sweaters tied around our waists as we grew warmer. Helen carried you in a corduroy pack on her chest, and when she got tired I carried you in my arms. The road was empty at this season, except for one silent, dark-haired peasant who passed us on his horse, going up. I told Helen we should have asked him for a ride, but she didn’t answer; her low mood had returned this morning, and I noted with anxiety and frustration that her eyes filled with tears from time to time. I knew already that if I asked her what was wrong she would shake her head, shake me off, so I tried to content myself with holding you tenderly as we climbed, pointing out the views to you when we turned a bend in the road, long vistas of dusty fields and villages below. At the summit of the mountain the road broke into a wide estuary of dust, with an old car or two parked there, and the peasant’s horse-apparently-tied to a tree, although the man himself was nowhere in sight. The monastery rose above this area, heavy stone walls climbing the very summit, and we went up through the entrance and into the care of the monks.

  “In those days, Saint-Matthieu was much more a working monastery than it is now, and it must have had a community of twelve or thirteen, leading the lives their predecessors had for a thousand years, with the exception of the fact that they gave the occasional tour to visitors and kept an automobile parked for their own use outside the gates. Two monks showed us around the exquisite cloisters-I remember how surprised I was when I went to the open end of the courtyard and saw that sheer drop over outcroppings of rock, the vertical cliff, the plains below. The mountains around the monastery are even higher than the summit where it perches, and on their distant flanks we could see veils of white that I realized after a moment were waterfalls.

  “We sat a while on a bench near this precipice, with you balanced between us, looking out at the enormous noon sky and listening to the bubbling water in the monastery cistern at the center, carved of red marble-heaven only knew how they’d hauled that up here, centuries before. Helen seemed more cheerful again, and I noted with pleasure the peace in her face. Even if she was still sad at times, this trip had been well worthwhile.

  “Eventually Helen said she wanted to see more of the place. We put you back in your sack and went around to the kitchens and the long refectory where the monks still ate, and the hostel where pilgrims could still sleep on cots, and the scriptorium, one of the oldest parts of the complex, where so many great manuscripts had been copied and illuminated. There was a sample of one under glass there, a Matthew open to a page bordered with tiny demons goading one another downward. Helen actually smiled over it. The chapel was next-it was small, like everything else in the monastery, but its proportions were melody in stone; I’d never seen the Romanesque like this, so intimate and lovely. Our guidebook claimed that the rounding outward of the apse was the first moment of the Romanesque, a sudden gesture that brought in light across the altar. There was some fourteenth-century glass in the narrow windows, and the altar itself was perfectly arrayed for mass in red and white, with golden candlesticks. We left quietly.

  “At last the young monk who was our guide said we’d seen everything but the crypt, and we followed him down there. It was a small dank hole off the cloisters, architecturally interesting for an early Romanesque vault held up by a few squat columns, and for a grimly ornamented stone sarcophagus dating from the ear
liest century of the monastery’s existence-the resting place of their first abbot, said our guide. Next to the sarcophagus sat an elderly monk lost in his meditations; he looked up, kind and confused, when we entered, and bowed to us without rising from his chair. ‘We have had a tradition here for centuries that one of us sits with the abbot,’ explained our guide. ‘Usually it is an older monk who has held this honor for his lifetime.’

  “‘How unusual,’ I said, but something about the place, perhaps the chill, made you whimper and struggle on Helen’s chest, and seeing that she was tired I offered to take you up to the fresh air. I stepped out of that dank hole with a sense of relief myself and went to show you the fountain in the cloisters.

  “I’d expected Helen to follow me at once, but she lingered underground, and when she came up again her face was so changed that I felt a rush of alarm. She looked animated-yes, more lively than I’d seen her in months-but also pale and wide-eyed, intent on something I couldn’t see. I moved toward her as casually as I could; I asked her if there’d been anything else of interest down there. ‘Maybe,’ she said, but as if she couldn’t quite hear me for the roar of thoughts inside. Then she turned to you, suddenly, and took you from me, hugging you and kissing your head and cheeks. ‘Is she all right? Was she frightened?’

  “‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘A little hungry, maybe.’ Helen sat down on a bench, fished out a jar of baby food, and began to feed you, singing you one of those little songs I couldn’t understand-Hungarian or Romanian-while you ate. ‘This is a beautiful place,’ she said after a minute. ‘Let’s stay for a couple of days.’