The Historian

by Elisabeth Kostova

  “‘We have to get back to Paris by Thursday night,’ I objected.

  “‘Well, there is not much difference between staying here for a night and staying in Les Bains,’ she said calmly. ‘We can walk down tomorrow and catch the bus, if you think we need to go so soon.’

  “I agreed, because she seemed so strange, but I felt some reluctance even as I went to discuss this with the tour-guide monk. He applied to his superior, who said that the hostel was empty and we were welcome. Between the simple lunch and simpler supper they gave us in a room off the kitchen, we wandered the rose gardens, walked in the steep orchard outside the walls, and sat in the back of the chapel to hear the monks sing mass while you slept on Helen’s lap. A monk made up our cots with clean, coarse sheets. After you fell asleep on one of them, with ours pushed up close on either side so that you couldn’t roll out, I lay reading and pretending not to watch Helen. She sat in her black cotton dress on the edge of her cot, looking out toward the night. I was thankful the curtains were closed, but eventually she got up and lifted them and stood gazing out. ‘It must be dark,’ I said, ‘with no town near.’

  “She nodded. ‘It is very dark, but that is the way it has always been here, don’t you think?’

  “‘Why don’t you come to bed?’ I reached over you and patted her cot.

  “‘All right,’ she said, without any sign of protest. In fact, she smiled at me and bent over to kiss me before she lay down. I caught her in my arms for a moment, feeling the strength in her shoulders, the smooth skin of her neck. Then she stretched out and covered herself, and appeared to drift off long before I’d finished my chapter and blown out the lantern.

  “I woke at dawn, feeling a sort of breeze go through the room. It was very quiet; you breathed next to me under your wool baby blanket, but Helen’s cot was empty. I got up soundlessly and put on my shoes and jacket. The cloisters outside were dim, the courtyard gray, the fountain a shadowy mass. It occurred to me that it would take some time for the sun to reach this place, since it first had to climb above those huge eastern peaks. I looked all around for Helen without calling out, because I knew she liked to rise early and might be sitting deep in thought on one of the benches, waiting for dawn. There was no sign of her, however, and as the sky lightened a little I began to search more rapidly, going once to the bench where we’d sat the day before and once into the motionless chapel, with its ghostly smell of smoke.

  “At last I began to call her name, quietly, and then louder, and then in alarm. After a few minutes, one of the monks came out of the refectory, where they must have been eating the first silent meal of the day, and asked if he could help me, if I needed something. I explained that my wife was missing, and he began to search with me. ‘Perhaps madame went for a walk?’ But there was no sign of her in the orchard or the parking area or the dark crypt. We looked everywhere as the sun came over the peaks, and then he went for some other monks, and one of them said he would take the car down to Les Bains to make inquiries. I asked him, on impulse, to bring the police back with him. Then I heard you crying in the hostel; I hurried to you, afraid you’d rolled off the cots, but you were just waking. I fed you quickly and kept you in my arms while we looked in the same places again.

  “Finally I asked that all the monks be gathered and questioned. The abbot gave his consent readily and brought them into the cloisters. No one had seen Helen after we’d left the kitchens for the hostel the night before. Everyone was worried-‘La pauvre,’said one old monk, which sent a wave of irritation through me. I asked if anyone had spoken with her the day before, or noticed anything strange. ‘We do not speak with women, as a general rule,’ the abbot told me gently.

  “But one monk stepped forward, and I recognized at once the old man whose job it was to sit in the crypt. His face was as tranquil and kind as it had been by lantern light in the crypt the day before, with that mild confusion I had noted then. ‘Madame stopped to speak to me,’ he said. ‘I did not like to break our rule, but she was such a quiet, polite lady that I answered her questions.’

  “‘What did she ask you?’ My heart had already been pounding, but now it began to race painfully.

  “‘She asked me who was buried there, and I explained that it was one of our first abbots, and that we revere his memory. Then she asked what great things he had done and I explained that we have a legend’-here he glanced at the abbot, who nodded for him to continue-‘we have a legend that he had a saintly life but was the unfortunate recipient of a curse in death, so that he rose from his coffin to do harm to the monks, and his body had to be purified. When it was purified, a white rose grew out of his heart to signify the Holy Mother’s forgiveness.’

  “‘And this is why someone sits guard on him?’ I asked wildly.

  “The abbot shrugged. ‘That is simply our tradition, to honor his memory.’

  “I turned to the old monk, stifling a desire to throttle him and see his gentle face turn blue. ‘Is this the story you told my wife?’

  “‘She asked me about our history, monsieur. I did not see anything wrong with answering her questions.’

  “‘And what did she say to you in response?’

  “He smiled. ‘She thanked me in her sweet voice and asked me my name, and I told her, Frère Kiril.’ He folded his hands over his waist.

  “It took me a moment to make sense of these sounds, the name made unfamiliar by a Francophone stress on the second syllable, by that innocentfrère. Then I tightened my arms around you so I wouldn’t drop you. ‘Did you say your name is Kiril? Is that what you said? Spell it.’

  “The astonished monk obliged.

  “‘Where did this name come from?’ I demanded. I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking. ‘Is it your real name? Who are you?’

  “The abbot stepped in, perhaps because the old man seemed genuinely perplexed. ‘It is not his given name,’ he explained. ‘We all take names when we take our vows. There has always been a Kiril-someone always has this name-and a Frère Michel-this one, here -’

  “‘Do you mean to tell me,’ I said, holding you fast, ‘that there was a Brother Kiril before this one, and one before him?’

  “‘Oh, yes,’ said the abbot, clearly puzzled now by my fierce questioning. ‘As long in our history as anyone knows. We are proud of our traditions here-we do not like the new ways.’

  “‘Where did this tradition come from?’ I was nearly shouting now.

  “‘We don’t know that, monsieur,’ the abbot said patiently. ‘It has always been our way here.’

  “I stepped close to him and put my nose almost against his. ‘I want you to open the sarcophagus in the crypt,’ I said.

  “He stepped back, aghast. ‘What are you saying? We can’t do that.’

  “‘Come with me. Here -’ I gave you quickly to the young monk who’d shown us around the day before. ‘Please hold my daughter.’ He took you, not as awkwardly as one might have expected, and held you in his arms. You began to cry. ‘Come,’ I said to the abbot. I drew him toward the crypt and he gestured for the other monks to stay behind. We went quickly down the steps. In the chill hole, where Brother Kiril had left two candles burning, I turned to the abbot. ‘You don’t have to tell anyone about this, but I must see inside that sarcophagus.’ I paused for emphasis. ‘If you don’t help me I will bring the whole weight of the law down on your monastery.’

  “He flashed me a look-fear? resentment? pity?-and went without speaking to one end of the sarcophagus. Together, we slid aside the heavy cover, just far enough to see inside. I held up one of the candles. The sarcophagus was empty. The abbot’s eyes were huge, and he slid the lid back with a mighty shove. We regarded each other. He had a fine, shrewd, Gallic face that I might have liked immensely in another situation. ‘Please do not tell the brothers about this,’ he said in a low voice, and then he turned and climbed out of the crypt.

  “I followed him, struggling to think what I should do next. I would take you and go back to Les Bains immediately, I de
cided, and make sure the police had actually been alerted. Maybe Helen had decided to return to Paris ahead of us-why, I couldn’t imagine-or even to fly home. I could feel a terrible pounding in my ears, my heart in my throat, blood rising in my mouth.

  “By the time I stepped into the cloisters again, where the sun was now flooding the fountain and the birds were singing and lighting on the ancient paving, I knew what had happened. I had tried hard for an hour not to think it, but now I almost didn’t need the news, the sight of two monks running toward the abbot, calling out. I remembered that these two had been dispatched to search outside the monastery walls, in the orchard, the vegetable gardens, the groves of dry trees, the outcroppings of rock. They had just come from the steep side-one of them pointed to the edge of the cloister where Helen and I had sat with you between us on a bench the day before, looking down into that measureless chasm. ‘Lord Abbot!’ one of them cried, as if he could not even begin to address me directly. ‘Lord Abbot, there is blood on the rocks! Down there, below!’

  “There are no words for such moments. I ran to the edge of the cloisters, clinging to you, feeling your petal-smooth cheek against my neck. The first of my tears was welling in my eyes, and it was hot and bitter beyond anything I’d ever known. I looked over the low wall. On an outcropping of rock fifteen feet below, there was a scarlet splash-not large, but distinct in the morning sun. Below that the gulf yawned, the mists rose, the eagles hunted, the mountains fell to their very roots. I ran for the main gate, stumbled around the outer walls. The precipice was so steep that even if I hadn’t been holding you I could not have climbed down safely to that first outcropping. I stood watching a wave of loss come through the celestial air toward me, through that beautiful morning. Then my grief reached me, an unspeakable fire.”

  Chapter 77

  “Istayed there three weeks, at Les Bains and the monastery, searching the cliffs and forests with the local police and with a team called in from Paris. My mother and father flew to France and spent hours playing with you, feeding you, pushing your carriage around the town-I think that was what they were doing. I filled out forms in slow little offices. I made useless phone calls, searching for French words to express the urgency of my loss. Day after day I scoured the woods at the foot of the cliff, sometimes in the company of a cold-faced detective and his team, sometimes alone with my tears.

  “At first I wanted only to see Helen alive, walking toward me with her customary dry smile, but eventually I was reduced to a bitter half longing for her broken form, hoping to stumble on it somewhere in the rocks and brush. If I could take her body home-or to Hungary, I sometimes thought, although how I would get into Soviet-controlled Hungary was a conundrum-I would have something of her to honor, to bury, some way to finish this and be alone with my grief. I almost couldn’t admit to myself that I wanted her body for another purpose, as well-to ascertain whether her death had been completely natural, or if she needed me to fulfill the bitter duty I had carried out for Rossi. Why could I not find her body? Sometimes, especially in the mornings, I felt she had simply fallen, that she would never have left us on purpose. I could believe then that she had an innocent, elemental grave somewhere in the woods, even if I would never find it. But by afternoon I was remembering only her depressions, her strange moods.

  “I knew that I would grieve for the rest of my life, but this utter lack of even her body tormented me. The local doctor gave me a sedative, which I took at night so that I could sleep and build up strength to search the woods again the next day. When the police grew busy with other matters, I searched alone. Sometimes I turned up other relics in the underbrush: stones, crumbling chimneys, and once part of a shattered gargoyle-had it fallen as far as Helen? There were few gargoyles on the monastery walls now.

  “At last my mother and father persuaded me that I could not do this forever, that I should take you back to New York for a while, that I could always come back and look again. Police all over Europe had been alerted, through the French network; if Helen were alive-they said it soothingly-someone would find her. In the end, I gave up not because of these reassurances but because of the forest itself, the meteoric steepness of the cliffs, the denseness of the undergrowth, which tore my trousers and jacket as I pushed through it, the terrible size and height of the trees, the silence that surrounded me there whenever I stopped moving and groping and stood still for a few minutes.

  “Before we left, I asked the abbot to say a blessing for Helen at the far end of the cloister, where she’d jumped. He made a service of it, gathering the monks around him, holding up to the vast air one ritual object after another-it didn’t matter to me what they actually were-and chanting to an enormity that swallowed his voice at once. My father and mother stood with me, my mother wiping her eyes rapidly, and you squirmed in my arms. I held you fast; I had almost forgotten, in these weeks, how soft your dark hair was, how strong your protesting legs. Above all, you were alive; you breathed against my chin and your small arm went around my neck, companionably. When a sob shook me, you grabbed my hair, pulled my ear. Holding you, I vowed that I would try to recover some life, a life of some sort.”

  Chapter 78

  Barley and I sat looking at each other across my mother’s postcards. Like my father’s letters, they broke off without giving me much understanding of the present. The main thing, the thing that was burned into my brain, was their dates. She had written them after her death.

  “He’s gone to the monastery,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Barley. I swept up the cards and put them on the marble top of the dressing table.

  “Let’s go,” I said. I looked through my purse, took out the little silver knife in its sheath, and put it carefully in my pocket.

  Barley leaned over and kissed my cheek. It surprised me. “Let’s go,” he said.

  The road to Saint-Matthieu was longer than I’d remembered, dusty and hot even in late afternoon. There were no cabs in Les Bains-at least none in sight-so we set out on foot, walking swiftly through rolling farmland until we reached the edge of the forest. From there the road began to climb the peak. Entering the woods, with their mix of olive and pine, their towering oaks, was like entering a cathedral; it was dim and cool and we dropped our voices, although we hadn’t been saying much. I was hungry, in the midst of my anxiety; we hadn’t even waited for the maître d’s coffee. Barley took off the cotton cap he was wearing and wiped his forehead.

  “She wouldn’t have survived such a fall,” I said once through the constriction in my throat.

  “No.”

  “My father never wondered-at least not in his letters-if she was pushed by someone.”

  “That’s true,” Barley said, replacing his cap.

  I was silent for a while. Our feet on the uneven pavement-the road was still paved, at this point-made the only sound. I didn’t want to say these things, but they welled up in me anyway. “Professor Rossi wrote that suicide puts a person at risk for becoming a-becoming -”

  “I remember that,” said Barley simply. I wished I hadn’t spoken. The road wound high now. “Maybe someone will come by in a car,” he added.

  But no car appeared and we walked faster and faster, so that after a while we panted instead of speaking. The walls of the monastery took me by surprise when we came out of the woods around the last bend; I hadn’t remembered that bend, or the sudden opening at the peak of the mountain, the huge evening all around us. I barely remembered the flat dusty area below the front gate, where today there were no cars parked. Where were the tourists? I wondered. A moment later we were close enough to read the sign-repairs, no visitors this month. It was not enough to slow our footsteps. “Come on,” Barley said. He took my hand and I was deeply glad for it; my own had begun to tremble.

  The front walls around the gate were ornamented with scaffolding now. A portable cement mixer-cement? here?-stood in our path. The wooden doors under the portal were firmly shut but not locked, we discovered, trying the iron ring with cautious hand
s. I didn’t like breaking in; I didn’t like the fact that there was no sign of my father. Maybe he was still down in Les Bains, or someplace else. Could he be searching the foot of the cliff as he had years ago, hundreds of feet below, out of our range of vision? I began to regret our impulse to come straight to the monastery. In addition, although true sunset was perhaps an hour away, the sun was dropping swiftly behind the Pyrénées to the west, slipping visibly behind the highest peaks. The woods we’d just come out of were already in deep gloom, and soon the last color of the day would drain from the monastery’s walls.

  We stepped inside, cautiously, and went up into the courtyard and cloisters. The red marble fountain bubbled audibly in the center. There were the delicate corkscrewed columns I remembered, the long cloisters, the rose garden at the end. The golden light was gone, replaced by shadows of a deep umber. Nobody was in sight. “Do you think we should go back to Les Bains?” I whispered to Barley.

  He seemed about to answer when we caught a sound-chanting, from the church on the other side of the cloister. Its doors were shut, but we could hear distinctly the progress of a service inside, with intervals of silence. “They’re all in there,” Barley said. “Maybe your father is, too.”

  But I doubted this. “If he’s here, he’s probably gone down -” I paused and looked around the courtyard. It had been almost two years since my visit here with my father-my second visit, I now knew-and I couldn’t remember for a moment where the entrance to the crypt was. Suddenly I saw the doorway, as if it had opened in the nearby wall of the cloisters without my noticing. I remembered now the peculiar beasts carved in stone around it: griffins and lions, dragons and birds, strange animals I couldn’t identify, hybrids of good and evil.

  Barley and I both looked at the church, but the doors stayed firmly shut, and we crept across the courtyard to the crypt doorway. Standing there a moment under the gaze of those frozen beasts, I could see only the shadow into which we would have to descend, and my heart shrank inside me. Then I remembered that my father might be down there-might, in fact, be in some kind of terrible trouble. And Barley was holding my hand still, lanky and defiant next to me. I almost expected him to mutter something about the odd things my family got into, but he was taut beside me, poised as I was for anything. “We don’t have a light,” he whispered.