The Historian

by Elizabeth Kostova

  “And what is it you wish me to do for your library?”

  “As I said, to catalogue it. I have never made a full record of my holdings, of their origins and condition. This will be your first task, and you will accomplish it more swiftly and brilliantly than anyone else would be able to, with your many languages and the breadth of your knowledge. In the course of this task, you will handle some of the most beautiful books—and the most powerful—ever produced. Many of them do not exist anywhere else anymore. Perhaps you know, Professor, that only about one one-thousandth of the literature ever published is still in existence? I have set myself the task of raising that fraction, over the centuries.” As he spoke, I noticed again the peculiar clarity and coldness of his voice, and that rattling in the depths of it—like the rattle of the snake, or cold water running over stones.

  “Your second task will be much larger. In fact, it will last forever. When you know my library and its purposes as intimately as I do, you will go out into the world, under my command, and search for new acquisitions—and old ones, too, for I shall never stop collecting from the works of the past. I will put many archivists at your disposal—the finest of them—and you shall bring more under our power.”

  The dimensions of this vision, and his full meaning, if I was comprehending it correctly, broke over me like a cold sweat. I found my voice, but unsteadily. “Why will you not continue to do this yourself?”

  He smiled into the fire, and again I saw that flash of a different face—the dog, the wolf. “I shall have other things to attend to now. The world is changing and I intend to change with it. Perhaps soon I will not need this form”—he indicated with a slow hand his mediaeval finery, the great dead power of his limbs—“in order to accomplish my ambitions. But the library is precious to me and I would like to see it grow. Besides, I have felt for some time that it is less and less secure here. Several historians have come close to finding it, and you would have found it yourself if I had left you long enough to your own devices. But I needed you here at once. I smell a danger approaching, and the library must be catalogued before it is moved.”

  It helped me, for a moment, to pretend again that I was dreaming. “Where will you move it?” And me with it? I might have added.

  “To an ancient spot, older even than this one, that has many fine memories for me. A remote place, but one closer to the great modern cities, where I can easily come and go. We shall set the library down there and you shall increase it vastly.” He looked at me with a sort of confidence that might have been fondness, on a human face. Then he stood up with his vigorous, strange movement. “We have conversed enough for one night—I see that you are tired. Let us use these hours to read a while, as I usually do, and then I shall go out. When morning comes, you must take the paper and pens you will find near the press and begin your catalogue. My books are already sorted by category, rather than by century or decade. You will see. There is a typewriter also, which I have provided for you. You may wish to compile the catalogue in Latin, but I leave this to your discretion. And, of course, you are free now and at any time to read whatever you would like to.”

  With this he rose from his chair and selected a book from the table, then sat down again with it. I was afraid not to follow suit, and took up the first volume that came to hand. It turned out to be an early edition of Machiavelli: The Prince, accompanied by a series of discourses on morality I’d never before seen or even heard of. I could not begin to decipher any of it, in my present state of mind, but sat staring at the type, or turned a page at random. Dracula seemed deeply engrossed in his book. I wondered, stealing a glance at him, how he had accustomed himself to this nocturnal, underground existence, the life of a scholar, after a lifetime of battle and action.

  At last he rose and set his volume quietly aside. Without a word, he stepped into the darkness of the great hall, so that I could no longer make out his form. Then I heard a dry scratching sound, as of an animal in crumbling earth, or the striking of a match, although no light appeared, and I felt myself vastly alone. I strained my ears, but I couldn’t tell which direction he had gone. He was not going to feast on me tonight, at least. I wondered fearfully what he was saving me for, when he might have made me his minion that much more swiftly and slaked his thirst at the same time. I sat in my chair some hours, rising now and then to stretch my sore body. I dared not sleep as long as it was night, but I must have dozed a little in spite of myself just before dawn, because I woke suddenly to feel a change in the air, although no new light entered that dark chamber, and to see Dracula’s cloaked form approaching the fireside. “Good day,” he said quietly, and turned away towards the dark wall where my sarcophagus lay. I had risen to my feet, compelled by his presence. Then, once again, I could not see him and a deep silence shrouded my ears.

  After a long while I took my candle up and relit the candelabrum and also some candles I found in sconces along the walls. On many of the tables I discovered ceramic lamps or small iron lanterns, and I lit several of these as well. The increased illumination was a relief to me, but I wondered if I would ever see daylight again, or if I had already begun an eternity of darkness and flickering candle flame—this in itself stretched before me as a version of hell. At least I could see a little more of the chamber now; it was very deep in every direction and the walls were lined with great cabinets and shelves. Everywhere I saw books, boxes, scrolls, manuscripts, the piles and rows of Dracula’s vast collection. Along one wall stood the dim shapes of three sarcophagi. I went closer with my light. The two smaller ones were empty—one of these must have been the one in which I’d found myself.

  Then I saw the largest sarcophagus of all, a great tomb more lordly than all the rest, huge in the candlelight, nobly proportioned. Along the side ran one word, cut in Latin letters: DRACULA . I raised my candle and looked in, almost against my own will. The great body lay there, inert. For the first time I could see his closed, cruel face clearly, and I stood staring at it in spite of my revulsion. His brow was knitted tightly as if from a disturbing dream, the eyes open and staring, so that he looked more dead than asleep, his skin waxen yellow, his long dark lashes unmoving, his strong, almost handsome features translucent. A tumble of long dark hair fell around his shoulders, filling the sides of the sarcophagus. The most terrible thing to me was the richness of the color in his cheeks and lips, and the full look his face and form had not had in the firelight. He had spared me for a time, it was true, but out in the night somewhere he had drunk his fill. The little spot of my blood was gone from his lips; now they bloomed ruby beneath his dark mustache. He looked so full of an artificial life and health that it made my own blood run cold to see that he did not breathe—his chest never rose and fell in the slightest degree. Strange, too: he was wearing a different suit of clothes, these as rich and fine as the ones I’d seen already, a tunic and boots of deep red, a mantle and cap of purple velvet. The mantle was a little shabby over the shoulders, and the cap sported a brown feather. His collar shone with gems.

  I stood there gazing until the strangeness of the sight made me feel faint, and then I fell back a pace to try to gather my thoughts. It was early in the day, still—I had hours until sunset. I would look first for an escape, and then for a means to destroy the creature while he slept, so that whether I succeeded or failed in vanquishing him I might immediately flee. I took my light firmly in hand. Suffice it to say that I searched the great stone chamber for upwards of two hours without finding any exit. At one end, opposite the hearth, was a great wooden door with an iron lock, and this I pushed and pulled and tried until I was weary and sore. It did not budge a crack; in fact, I believe it had not been opened in many years—perhaps centuries. There was no other means of egress—no other door, no tunnel or loose stone or opening of any sort. Certainly there were no windows, and I felt sure we were quite deep underground. The only niche in the walls was the one where the three sarcophagi lay, and there, too, the stones were immovable. It was a torment to me to feel along
that wall in sight of Dracula’s still face with its hugely open eyes; even if the eyes never moved I felt they must have some secret power to watch and curse.

  I sat down by the fire again to recover my fading strength. The fire never burned lower, I noticed, holding my hands above it, although it was consuming real branches and logs and gave off a palpable, comforting heat. I realized for the first time, too, that it was smokeless; had it been burning so all night? I drew a hand over my face, warning myself. I needed every ounce of my sanity. In fact—in this moment I made my resolution—I would make it my task to keep my mind and moral fibre intact to my last moment. That would be my sustenance, the final one left to me.

  When I had collected myself, I began my search again, systematically, looking for any possible way to destroy my monstrous host. If I managed to do so, of course, I would still die alone here, without escape, but he would never again leave this chamber to prey upon the outside world. I thought fleetingly and not for the first time of the comfort of suicide—but that I could not allow myself. I was already at risk for becoming like Dracula, and legend asserted that any suicide might become undead without the added contamination I had received—a cruel legend, but still I had to heed it. That way was closed to me. I went through every nook and cranny of the chamber, opening drawers and boxes, checking shelves, holding my candle aloft. It was unlikely that the clever prince had left me any weapon that might be used against him, but I had to search. I found nothing, not even an old piece of wood that I might somehow have sharpened into a stake. When I tried to pull a log from the fireplace, the flames blazed up suddenly, burning my hand. I tried this several times, but with the same demonic result each time.

  At last I returned to the great central sarcophagus, dreading the last resort that lay there: the dagger that Dracula himself wore at his belt. His scarred hand was closed over its hilt. The dagger might well be made of silver, in which case I could plunge it into his heart, if I could bring myself to take it from his body. I sat down for a while to gather courage for this endeavor, and to overcome my revulsion. Then I stood and put my hand cautiously near the dagger, holding up my candle with the other hand. My careful touch did not prompt any flicker of life in the rigid face, I saw, although the cruelty of the expression, the deep pinched look of the nose, seemed to grow sharper. But I found to my terror that the great hand was closed on the dagger hilt for a reason. I would have to pry it off myself to reach the dagger. I put my hand on Dracula’s and the feel of it was a horror I do not wish to put down here, even for nobody but myself. His hand was closed like a stone over the dagger’s hilt. I could not pry it off or even move it; I might as well have tried to remove a marble dagger from the hand of a statue. The dead eyes seemed to kindle with hatred. Would he remember this later, when he awoke? I fell back, exhausted and repelled beyond strength, and sat on the floor again for some time with my candle.

  At last, seeing no possible success to my schemes, I resolved on a new course of action. First, I would make myself sleep a short time, while it was still around midday, at the latest, so that I might awake long before Dracula without his waking first and finding me asleep. This I managed for the space of an hour or two, I think—I must find some better way to sense or measure time in this vacuum—by lying down before the hearth with my jacket folded under my head. Nothing could have persuaded me to climb back into that sarcophagus, but I managed some comfort from the warmth of the hearthstones under my aching limbs.

  When I awoke, I listened carefully for any sound, but the chamber was deathly still. I found the table near my chair supplied again with a savory meal, although Dracula lay in the same state of paralysis in his tomb. Then I went in search of the typewriter I had seen earlier. Here I have been writing since then, as swiftly as I can, to record everything I have observed. In this way I have found some measure of time again, too, since I know my own typing pace and the number of pages I can cover in an hour. I am writing these last lines now by the light of one candle; I’ve extinguished the others to save them. I am famished now, and miserably cold, in the dankness away from the fire. Now I will hide these pages, eat something, and engage myself in the work Dracula has set for me, so that he will find me at it when he wakes. Tomorrow I will try to write further, if I am still alive and enough myself to do so.

  Second Day

  After I wrote my first entry above, I folded the pages I’d written and inserted them behind a nearby cabinet, where I could reach them again but where they were not visible from any angle. Then I took a fresh candle and made my way slowly among the tables. There were tens of thousands of books in the great room, I estimated—perhaps hundreds of thousands counting all the scrolls and other manuscripts. They lay not only on the tables but in piles inside the heavy old cabinets and along the walls on rough shelves. Mediaeval books seemed to be mixed with fine Renaissance folios and modern printing. I found an early Shakespeare quarto—histories—next to a volume of Thomas Aquinas. There were massive works on alchemy from the sixteenth century next to an entire cabinet of illuminated Arabic scrolls—Ottoman, I surmised. There were Puritan sermons on witchcraft and small volumes of nineteenth-century poetry and long works of philosophy and criminology from our own century. No, there was no pattern in time, but I saw another pattern emerging clearly enough.

  Arranging the books as they would have been stored in the history collection of a normal library would take weeks or months, but since Dracula considered them sorted, according to his own interests, I would leave them as they were and merely try to distinguish one type of collection here from another. I thought the first collection began at the wall of the chamber near the immovable door and ranged through three cabinets and across two large tables: statesmanship and military strategy, I might call it.

  Here I found more Machiavelli, in exquisite folios from Padua and Florence. I found a biography of Hannibal by an eighteenth-century Englishman and a curling Greek manuscript, dating back perhaps to the library of Alexandria: Herodotus on the Athenian wars. I began to feel a new chill as I turned through book after manuscript, each one more startling than the last. There was a dog-eared first edition of Mein Kampf and a diary in French—handwritten, spotted here and there with brown mould—that appeared from its opening dates and accounts to chronicle the Reign of Terror from the point of view of a government official. I would have to look at it more closely later—the diarist seemed not to have named himself anywhere. I found a large volume on the tactics of Napoleon’s first military campaigns, printed while he was on Elba, I calculated. In a box on one of the tables I found a yellowing typescript in the Cyrillic alphabet; my Russian is rudimentary, but I was certain from the headings that it was an internal memo from Stalin to someone in the Russian military. I couldn’t read much of it, but it contained a long list of Russian and Polish names.

  These were some of the items I could identify at all; there were also many books and manuscripts whose authors or subjects were completely new to me. I had just begun a list of everything I could identify, dividing it roughly by century, when I felt a deepened cold, like a breeze where there was no breeze, and I looked up to see that strange figure standing ten feet away, on the other side of one of the tables.

  He was dressed in the red-and-violet finery I’d seen in the sarcophagus, and he was larger and more solid than I seemed to remember from the night before. I waited, speechless, to see if he would attack me at once—did he remember my attempt to take his dagger? But he inclined his head slightly, as if in greeting. “I see you have begun your work. You will, no doubt, have questions for me. First, let us breakfast, and then we will talk of my collections.” I saw a glint in his face, through the dimness of the hall, perhaps a flash of gleaming eye. He led the way with that inhuman but imperious stride back to our fireside, and there I found hot food and drink again, including a steaming tea that brought some relief to my chilled limbs. Dracula sat watching the smokeless fire, his head erect on his great shoulders. Without wishing to, I thought about th
e decapitation of his corpse—on that point, all the accounts of his death agreed. How did he retain his head now, or was this all illusion? The collar of his fine tunic rose high under his chin, and his dark curls tumbled around it and fell to his shoulders.

  “Now,” he said, “let us take a brief tour.” He lit all the candles again, and I followed him from table to table while he lit the lanterns there. “We shall have something to read by.” I did not like the way the light played on his face as he bent over each new flame, and I tried to look instead at more of the book titles. He came to my side as I stood before the rows of scrolls and books in Arabic I’d noticed before. To my relief, he was still five feet away, but an acrid smell rose from his presence and I fought off a little faintness. I must keep my wits about me, I thought; there was no telling what this night would bring. “I see you have found one of my prizes,” he was saying. There was a rumble of satisfaction in his cold voice. “These are my Ottoman holdings. Some of them are very old, from the first days of their diabolical empire, and this shelf here contains volumes from their last decade.” He smiled in the flickering light. “You cannot imagine what a satisfaction it was for me to see their civilization die. Their faith is not dead, of course, but their sultans are gone forever, and I have outlived them.” I thought for a moment that he might laugh, but his next words were grave. “Here are great books made for the sultan about his many lands. Here”—he touched the edge of a scroll—“is the history of Mehmed, may he rot in hell, by a Christian historian turned flatterer. May he rot in hell also. I tried to find him myself, that historian, but he died before I could reach him. Here are the accounts of Mehmed’s campaigns, by his own flatterers, and of the fall of the Great City. You do not read Arabic?”

  “Very little,” I confessed.

  “Ah.” He seemed amused. “I had the opportunity to learn their language and their writing while I was their prisoner. You know that I was in bondage to them?”