The Historian

by Elisabeth Kostova

My father clenched his hands together. “That withdrawal gave me hope for a few months, or at least put a question into my mind, but my bank could not trace it. I got the money back.” But not you, he could have added, and didn’t. His face shone, weary and glad.

  Helen dropped her eyes. “In any case, I found a place to stay for a few days, away from Les Bains, until my cuts could heal. I hid myself until I could go out into the world.”

  Her fingers strayed to her throat and I saw the small white scar I had already noticed many times. “I knew in my bones that Dracula had not forgotten about me, and that he might search for me again. I filled my pockets with garlic and my mind with strength. I kept my gun with me, my dagger, my crucifix. Everywhere I went I stopped in the village churches and asked for a blessing, although sometimes even entering their doors made my old wound throb. I was careful to keep my neck covered. Eventually I cut my hair short and colored it, changed my clothes, wore dark glasses. For a long time I stayed away from cities, and then I began little by little to go to the archives where I had always wanted to do my research.

  “I was thorough. I found him everywhere I went-in Rome in the 1620s, in Florence under the Medici, in Madrid, in Paris during the Revolution. Sometimes it was the report of a strange plague, sometimes an outbreak of vampirism in a great cemetery-Père Lachaise, for example. He seemed always to have liked scribes, archivists, librarians, historians-anyone who handled the past through books. I tried to deduce from his movements where his new tomb was, where he had hidden himself after we opened his tomb at Sveti Georgi, but I couldn’t discover any pattern. I thought that once I found him, once I killed him, I would come back and tell you how safe the world had become. I would earn you. I lived in fear that he would find me before I could find him. And everywhere I went I missed you-oh, I was so lonely.”

  She picked up my hand again and caressed it like a fortune-teller, and I felt, in spite of myself, a surge of anger-all those years without her. “Finally I thought that even if I was not worthy, I wanted to have just a glimpse of you. Both of you. I had read about your foundation in the papers, Paul, and I knew you were in Amsterdam. It was not hard to find you, or to sit in a café near your office, or to follow you on a trip or two-very carefully-very, very carefully. I never let myself see either of you face-to-face, for fear you would see me. I came and went. If my research was going well, I allowed myself a visit to Amsterdam and followed you from there. Then one day-in Italy, at Monteperduto-I saw him on the piazza. He was following you, too, watching you. That was when I realized he had become strong enough to go out in broad daylight sometimes. I knew that you were in danger, but I thought that if I went to you, to warn you, I might bring the danger closer. After all, he might be looking for me, not you, or he might be trying to make me lead him to you. It was an agony. I knew that you must be doing some kind of research again-that you must be interested in him again, Paul-to attract his notice. I could not decide what to do.”

  “It was me-my fault,” I murmured, squeezing her plain, lined hand. “I found the book.”

  She looked at me for a moment, her head to one side. “You are a historian,” she said after a moment. It wasn’t a question. Then she sighed. “For several years, I had been writing postcards to you, my daughter-without sending them, of course. One day, I thought that I could communicate with the two of you from a distance, to let you know I was alive without letting anyone else see me. I sent them to Amsterdam, to your house, in a package addressed to Paul.”

  This time I turned to my father in amazement and anger. “Yes,” he told me sadly. “I felt I could not show them to you, could not upset you without being able to find your mother for you. You can imagine what that period was like for me.” I could. I remembered suddenly his terrible fatigue in Athens, the evening I’d seen him looking half dead at the desk in his room. But he smiled at us, and I realized that he might now smile every day.

  “Ah.” She smiled too. There were deep lines around her mouth, I saw, and the corners of her eyes were creased.

  “And I began looking for you-and for him.” His smile grew grave.

  She was gazing at him. “And then I saw I must give up my research and simply follow him following you. I saw you sometimes, and saw you doing your own research again-watched you going into libraries, Paul, or coming out of them, and how I wished I could tell you all I had learned myself. Then you went to Oxford. I hadn’t been to Oxford before in the course of my search, although I’d read that they had an outbreak of vampirism there in the late medieval period. And in Oxford you left a book open -”

  “He shut it when he saw me,” I put in.

  “And me,” said Barley with his lightning grin. It was the first time he’d spoken, and I was relieved to see that he could still look cheerful.

  “Well, the first time he looked at it, he forgot to close it.” Helen almost winked at us.

  “You’re right,” said my father. “Come to think of it, I did forget.”

  Helen turned to him with her lovely smile. “Do you know I had never seen that book before?Vampires du Moyen Age? ”

  “A classic,” my father said. “But a very rare one.”

  “I think Master James must have seen it, too,” Barley put in slowly. “You know, I saw him in there just after we surprised you at your research, sir.” My father looked perplexed. “Yes,” Barley said. “I’d left my mackintosh on the main floor of the library, and I went back for it less than an hour later. And I saw Master James coming out of the niche in the balcony, but he didn’t see me. I thought he looked awfully worried, sort of cross and distracted. I thought about that when I decided to call him, too.”

  “You called Master James?” I was surprised, but past feeling indignant. “When? Why did you do that?”

  “I called him from Paris because I remembered something,” Barley said simply, stretching his legs. I wanted to go over and twine my arm around his neck, but not in front of my parents. He looked at me. “I told you I was trying to remember something, on the train, something about Master James, and when we got to Paris I remembered it. I’d seen a letter on his desk once when he was putting away some papers-an envelope, actually, and I liked the stamp on it, so I looked a little more closely.

  “It was from Turkey, and it was old-that’s what made me look at the stamp-well, it was postmarked twenty years ago, from a Professor Bora, and I thought to myself that I wanted to have a big desk someday, and get letters from all over the world. The nameBora stuck with me, even at the time-it sounded so exotic. I didn’t open it or read the letter, of course,” Barley added hastily. “I wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Of course not.” My father snorted softly, but I thought his eyes shone with affection.

  “Well, as we were getting off the train in Paris, I saw an old man on the platform, a Muslim, I guess, in a dark red hat with a long tassel, and a long robe, like an Ottoman pasha, and I suddenly remembered that letter. Then your father’s story hit me again-you know, the name of the Turkish professor”-he gave me a somber look-“and I went to the phone. I realized Master James must still be in on this hunt, in some way.”

  “Where was I?” I asked jealously.

  “In the bathroom, I suppose. Girls are always in the bathroom.” He might as well have blown me a kiss, but not in front of the others. “Master James was livid with me on the phone, but when I told him what was going on, he said I was in his good graces forever.” Barley’s red lips trembled a little. “I didn’t dare ask him what he meant to do, but now we know.”

  “Yes, we do,” my father echoed sadly. “He must have done the calculation from that old book, too, and figured out that it was sixteen years to the week since Dracula’s last visit to Saint-Matthieu. Then he’d certainly have realized where I was going. In fact, he was probably checking up on me when he went up to the rare-book niche-he was after me several times in Oxford to tell him what was wrong, worried about my health and spirits. I didn’t want to drag him into it, knowing what a risk was
involved.”

  Helen nodded. “Yes. I think I must have been there just before he was. I found the open book and did the calculation for myself, and then I heard someone on the stairs and slipped out in the other direction. Like our friend, I saw that you would go to Saint-Matthieu, Paul, to try to find me and to find that fiend, and I traveled as fast as I could. But I didn’t know which train you would take, and I certainly didn’t know our daughter would try to follow you, too.”

  “I saw you,” I said in wonder. She gazed at me, and we let it drop for the moment. There would be so much time to talk. I could see she was tired, that we were all tired to the bone, that we could not even begin to say to one another tonight what a triumph this had been. Was the world safer because we were all together, or because he was finally gone from it? I looked into a future I had never known about before. Helen would live with us and blow out the candles in the dining room. She would come to my graduation from high school and my first day at university and help me dress for my wedding, if I ever married. She would read aloud to us in the front room after dinner, she would rejoin the world and teach again, she would take me to buy shoes and blouses, she would walk with her arm around my waist.

  I could not know then that she would also drift from us at times, not speaking for hours, fingering her neck, or that a wasting illness would take her away for good nine years later-long before we had gotten used to having her back, although we might never have gotten used to that, might never have tired of the reprieve of her presence. I couldn’t foresee that our last gift would be knowing that she rested in peace, when it could have been otherwise, and that this certainty would be both heartbreaking and curative for us. If I had been able to foresee these things at all, I might have known that my father would disappear for a day after her funeral, and that the little dagger in our parlor cabinet would go with him, and that I would never, never ask him about it.

  But at that fireside in Les Bains, the years we would have with her stretched ahead of us in endless benediction. They began a few minutes later when my father rose and kissed me, shook Barley’s hand with momentary fervor, and drew Helen from the divan. “Come,” he said, and she leaned on him, her story spent for now, her face weary, joyful. He was gathering her hands in his. “Come up to bed.”

  Epilogue

  Acouple of years ago, a strange opportunity presented itself to me while I was in Philadelphia for a conference, an international gathering of medieval historians. I had never been to Philadelphia before and I was intrigued by the contrast between our meetings, which delved into a feudal and monastic past, and the lively metropolis around us, with its more recent history of Enlightenment republicanism and revolution. The view from my fourteenth-floor hotel room downtown showed an odd mix of skyscrapers and blocks of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century houses, which looked like miniatures next to them.

  During our few hours of leisure, I slipped away from the endless talk of Byzantine artifacts to see some real ones in the magnificent art museum. There I picked up a pamphlet for a small literary museum and library downtown, whose name I’d heard years before from my father, and whose collection I had reason to know about. It was as important a site for Dracula scholars-whose numbers, of course, have swelled considerably since my father’s first investigations-as many archives in Europe. There, I recalled, a researcher might see Bram Stoker’s notes forDracula, culled from sources at the British Museum Library, and an important medieval pamphlet, as well. The opportunity was irresistible. My father had always wanted to visit this collection; I would spend an hour there for his sake. He had been killed by a land mine in Sarajevo more than ten years before, working to mediate Europe’s worst conflagration in decades. I hadn’t known for nearly a week; the news, when it found me, had left me marooned in silence for a year. I still missed him every day, sometimes every hour.

  That was how I came to find myself in a small, climate-controlled room in one of the city’s nineteenth-century brownstones, handling documents that breathed not only a distant past but also the urgency of my father’s researches. The windows looked out on a couple of feathery street trees and across to more brownstones, their elegant facades unsullied by any modern additions. There was only one other scholar in the small library that morning, an Italian woman who whispered into her cell phone for a few minutes before opening someone’s handwritten diaries-I tried not to crane at them-and beginning to read. When I had settled myself with a notebook and a light sweater against the air-conditioning, the librarian brought me first Stoker’s papers and then a small cardboard box bound with ribbon.

  Stoker’s notes were a pleasant diversion, a study in chaotic note taking. Some were written in a cramped hand, some typed on ancient onionskin. Among them lay newspaper clippings about mysterious events and leaves from his personal calendar. I thought how my father would have enjoyed this, how he would have smiled over Stoker’s innocent dabbling in the occult. But after half an hour I put them carefully aside and turned to the other box. It held one slim volume, bound in a neat, probably nineteenth-century cover-forty pages printed on nearly unblemished fifteenth-century parchment, a medieval treasure, a miracle of movable type. The frontispiece was a woodcut, a face I knew from my long travail, its great eyes, wide and yet somehow sly, looking piercingly out at me, the heavy mustache drooping over a square jaw, the long nose fine and yet menacing, the sensual lips just visible.

  It was a pamphlet from Nuremberg, printed in 1491, and it told of Dracole Waida’s crimes, his cruelty, his bloodthirsty feasts. I could make out, from their familiarity to me, the first lines of the medieval German: “In the Year of Our Lord 1456, Drakula did many terrible and curious things.” The library had provided a translation sheet, in fact, and there I reread with a shudder some of Dracula’s crimes against humanity. He had had people roasted alive, he had flayed them, he had buried them up to their necks, he had impaled infants on their mothers’ breasts. My father had examined other such pamphlets, of course, but he would have valued this one for its astounding freshness, the crispness of its parchment, its nearly perfect condition. After five centuries, it looked newly printed. Its very purity unnerved me, and after a while I was glad to put it away and tie the ribbon again, wondering a little why I’d wanted to see the thing in person. That arrogant stare fixed me until I shut the book on it.

  I collected my belongings, then, with a feeling of pilgrimage completed, and thanked the kind librarian. She seemed pleased by my visit; this pamphlet was one of her favorite items among their holdings; she had written an article on it herself. We parted with cordial words and a handshake and I went downstairs to the gift shop, and from there out to the warm street, with its smells of car exhaust and lunch to be had somewhere nearby. The very contrast between the purified air inside the museum and the bustle of the city outside made the oak door behind me look forbiddingly sealed, so that it startled me all the more to see the librarian hurrying out of it. “I think you forgot these,” she said. “Glad I caught you.” She gave me the self-conscious smile of one who returns to you a treasure-wouldn’t want to lose this-your wallet, your keys, a fine bracelet.

  I thanked her and took the book and notebook she handed me, startled again, nodding my acquiescence, and she disappeared into the old building as quickly as she’d descended on me. The notebook was mine, certainly, although I thought I’d packed it safely in my briefcase before leaving. The book was-I can’t say now what I actually thought it was, in that first moment, only that the cover was a rubbed old velvet, very, very old, and that it was both familiar and unfamiliar under my hand. The parchment inside had none of the freshness of the pamphlet I’d examined in the library-despite the emptiness of its pages, it reeked of centuries of handling. The ferocious single image at the center was open in my hand before I could stop myself, closed again before I could look at it long.

  I stood perfectly still on the street, while a feeling of unreality broke over me; the cars, passing, were just as solid as before, a car horn honked so
mewhere, a man with a dog on a leash was trying to get around me, between me and the ginkgo tree. I looked quickly up at the museum windows, thinking of the librarian, but they reflected only the houses opposite. No lace curtain moved there, either, and no door closed quietly as I looked around. Nothing was wrong on this street.

  In my hotel room, I set my book on the glass-topped table and washed my face and hands. Then I went to the windows and stood looking out over the city. Down the block I could see the patrician ugliness of Philadelphia City Hall, with its statue of peace-loving William Penn balanced on top. From here the parks were green squares of treetops. Light glanced off the bank towers. Far to my left I could see the federal building that had been bombed the month before, the red-and-yellow cranes grappling with the debris in its center, and could hear the roar of rebuilding.

  But it was not this scene that filled my gaze. I was thinking, in spite of myself, of another one, which I seemed to have watched before. I leaned against the window, feeling the summer sun, feeling oddly safe despite my great height from the ground, as if unsafety lay for me in a completely different realm.

  Iwas imagining a clear autumn morning in 1476, a morning just cool enough to make mist rise from the surface of the lake. A boat runs aground at the edge of the island, below the walls and domes with their iron crosses. There is the gentle scraping of a wooden bow on rocks, and two monks hurry out from beneath the trees to pull it ashore. The man who steps out of it is alone, and the feet he sets on the stone embankment are clad in finely made boots of red leather, each with a sharp spur clamped to it. He is shorter than both of the young monks but seems to tower over them. He is dressed in purple and red damask under a long black velvet cloak, which is pinned across his broad chest with an elaborate brooch. His hat is a pointed cone, black with red feathers fastened to the front. His hand, heavily scarred across the back, fiddles with the short sword at his belt. His eyes are green, preternaturally large and wide-set, his mouth and nose cruel, and his black hair and mustache show coarser white strands.