The Historian

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 ?va. 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 ?va 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 the Life 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 that le Sacr¨¦ 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-Pyr¨¦n¨¦es-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 the Life 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 earliest 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.'
"'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, Fr¨¨re 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 innocent fr¨¨re. 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 Fr¨¨re 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 decided, 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."