The Historian

Chapter 8

December 13, 1930 Trinity College, Oxford
My dear and unfortunate successor: I take some comfort today in the fact that this date is dedicated in the church calendar to Lucia, saint of light, a holy presence carted home by Viking traders from southern Italy. What could offer better protection against the forces of darkness - internal, external, eternal - than light and warmth, as one approaches the shortest, coldest day of the year? And I am still here, after another sleepless night. Would you be less puzzled if I told you that I now slumber with a wreath of garlic under my pillow, or that I keep a little gold crucifix on a chain around my atheist neck? I don't, of course, but I will leave you to imagine those forms of protection, if you like; they have their intellectual, their psychological, equivalents. To these latter, at least, I cling night and day. To resume my account of my research: yes, I changed my travel plans last summer to include Istanbul, and I changed them under the influence of one small piece of parchment. I had examined every source I could find at Oxford and in London that might pertain to the Drakulya of my mysterious blank book. I had taken a sheaf of notes on the subject, which you, unquiet reader of the future, will find with these letters. I have expanded them a little since then, as you shall hear later, and I hope they will protect as well as guide you.
I had every intention of dropping this pointless research, this chase after a random sign in a randomly discovered book, on the eve of my departure for Greece. I knew perfectly well that I had taken it up as a challenge dealt me by fate, in whom, after all, I didn't even believe, and that I was probably pursuing the elusive and evil word Drakulya back into history out of a sort of scholarly bravado, to prove I could find the historical traces of anything, anything at all. In fact, I had so nearly lapsed into a chastened frame of mind, packing my clean shirts and my weather-beaten sun hat, that I almost forsook the whole thing, that last afternoon.
But, as usual, I had prepared too diligently for my travels, I was ahead of myself, I had a little time before my last sleep and the morning train. Either I could go down to the Golden Wolf to order a pint of stout and see if my good friend Hedges was there or - here I made an unfortunate detour, in spite of myself - I could stop one last time in the Rare Book Room, which would be open until nine. There was a file I had intended to try there (although I doubted it would bring anything to light), an entry under Ottoman that had struck me as pertaining to precisely the period of Vlad Dracula's life, since the documents listed in it were, I'd noticed, mainly from the mid- to late fifteenth century.
Of course, I reasoned with myself, I couldn't go hunting through every source from that period for all of Europe and Asia; it would take years - lifetimes -  and I didn't foresee getting even an article out of this bloody goose chase. But I turned my feet away from the cheering pub - a mistake that has been the downfall of many a poor scholar - and towards Rare Books.
The boxed file, which I found without difficulty, contained four or five flattened short scrolls of Ottoman workmanship, all part of an eighteenth-century gift to the University. Each scroll was covered with Arabic calligraphy. An English description at the front of the file assured me that this was no treasure trove, as far as I was concerned. (I referred immediately to the English because my Arabic is depressingly rudimentary, as I'm afraid it will probably remain. One has time for only a handful of the great languages unless one gives up everything else in favor of linguistics.) Three of the scrolls were inventories of taxes levied on the peoples of Anatolia by Sultan Mehmed II. The last of them listed taxes collected from the cities of Sarajevo and Skopje, a little closer to home, if home for me just now was Dracula's abode in Wallachia, but still a distant part of empire from his, in that day and time. I reassembled them with a sigh and considered the short but satisfying visit I might still pay to the Golden Wolf. As I gathered the parchments to return them to their cardboard file, however, a bit of writing on the back of that last one caught my eye.
It was a short list, a casual graffito, an ancient doodle on the reverse of Sarajevo and Skopje's official paperwork for the sultan. I read it curiously. It appeared to be a record of expenses - the objects purchased had been noted down on the left and the cost, in an unspecified currency, noted neatly down on the right. "Five young mountain lions for his Gloriousness the Sultan, 45," I read with interest. "Two golden belts with precious stones for the Sultan, 290. Two hundred sheepskins for the Sultan, 89." And then the final entry, which made the hair rise along my arm as I held that aging parchment up: "Maps and military records from the Order of the Dragon, 12."
How, you ask, could I take all this in at a glance, when my knowledge of Arabic is as crude as I've already confessed? My quick-minded reader, you are staying awake for me, following my lucubrations with care, and I bless you for it. This scrawl, this mediaeval memorandum, was written out in Latin. Below it, a faintly scratched date seared the thing into my brain: 1490.
In 1490, I recalled, the Order of the Dragon lay in ruins, crushed by Ottoman might; Vlad Dracula was fourteen years' dead and buried, according to legend, in the monastery at Lake Snagov. The Order's maps, records, secrets -  whatever this elusive phrase referred to - had been bought cheap, very cheap, compared to the bejewelled belts and the loads of stinking sheep wool. Perhaps they'd been thrown into this merchant's purchase at the last minute, as a curiosity, a sample of the bureaucracy of conquest to flatter and amuse an erudite sultan whose father or grandfather had expressed grudging admiration for the barbaric Order of the Dragon that harassed him at the edge of the Empire. Was my merchant a Balkan traveller, Latin writing, speaking some Slav or Latinate dialect? Certainly he was highly educated, since he could write at all, perhaps a Jewish merchant with three or four languages at his command. Whoever he was, I blessed his dust for jotting down those expenses. If he had sent off the caravan of spoils without incident, and if it had reached the sultan safely, and if - least likely of all - it had survived in the sultan's treasure-house of jewels, beaten copper, Byzantine glass, barbarous church relics, works of Persian poetry, books of cabala, atlases, astronomical charts -  I went to the desk, where the librarian was checking through a drawer. "Excuse me," I said. "Do you have a listing of historical archives by country? Archives in - in Turkey, for example?"
"I know what you're looking for, sir. There is such a listing, for universities and museums, although it's by no means complete. We don't have it here - the central library desk can show it to you. They open tomorrow at nine o'clock in the morning."
My train to London, I remembered, didn't leave until 10:14. It would take only ten minutes or so to glance through the possibilities. And if Sultan Mehmed II's name, or the names of his immediate successors, appeared among any of the possibilities - well, I hadn't wanted to see Rhodes so very badly after all.
Yours in profoundest grief, Bartholomew Rossi Time seemed to have stopped in the high-vaulted library hall, despite the activity all around me. I had read one whole letter, but there were at least four more in the pile beneath it. I noticed, looking up, that a blue depth had opened behind the upper windows: twilight. I would have to walk home in it alone, I thought like a frightened child. Again I felt the urge to rush to Rossi's office door and knock briskly on it. Surely I'd find him sitting there turning over pages of manuscript in the pool of yellow light on his desk. I was perplexed, all over again, the way one is after a friend's death, by the unreality of the situation, the impossibility it presented to the mind. In fact, I was as much puzzled as I was afraid, and my bewilderment increased my fear because I couldn't recognize my usual self in that state.
As I pondered this, I glanced down at the neat piles of papers on my table. I had taken up a great deal of the surface with this spread. As a consequence, probably, no one had tried to sit down opposite me or to occupy any of the other chairs at the table. I was just wondering if I should gather up all of this work and walk home to continue there later when a young woman approached and seated herself at one end of the table. I saw, looking around, that the surrounding catalog tables were full to capacity and strewn with other people's books, typescripts, card-catalog drawers, and notepads. She had no other place to sit, I realized, but I felt suddenly protective of Rossi's documents; I dreaded the involuntary glance of a stranger's eye on them. Did they look obviously mad? Or did I?
I was just about to gather the papers together, carefully, preserving their original order, and pack them away, just about to make those slow and polite movements with which you try falsely to assure the other person who has just sat down apologetically at the cafeteria table that you really were leaving anyway - when I suddenly noticed the book the young woman had propped up in front of her. She was already flipping through the center section of it, a notebook and pen lying ready at her elbow. I glanced from the book's title to her face, in astonishment, and then at the other book she had set down nearby. Then I looked back at her face.
It was a young face but already aging very slightly and handsomely, with the light crinkling of skin I recognized around my own eyes in the mirror every morning, a barely veiled fatigue, so I knew she must be a graduate student. It was also an elegant, angular face that wouldn't have been out of place in a medieval altar painting, saved from a pinched look by the delicate widening of cheekbones. Her complexion was pale but could have turned olive after a week in the sun. Her lashes were lowered toward the book, her firm mouth and spreading eyebrows somehow made alert by whatever her eyes followed on the page. Her dark, almost sooty hair sprang away from her forehead with more vigor than was fashionable in those tightly groomed days. The title of her reading, in this place of myriad inquiry - I looked again, again astonished  - was The Carpathians. Under her dark-sweatered elbow rested Bram Stoker's Dracula.
At that moment, the young woman glanced up and met my gaze, and I realized I'd been staring directly at her, which must have been offensive. In fact, the dark, deep stare I got back - although her eyes also had a curious amber in their depths, like honey - was extremely hostile. I wasn't what people still called then a ladies' man; in fact I was something of a recluse. But I knew enough to feel ashamed, and I hurried to explain. Later I realized that her hostility was the defense of the striking-looking woman who is stared at again and again. "Excuse me," I said quickly. "I couldn't help noticing your books -  I mean, what you're reading."
She stared unhelpfully back at me, keeping her book open in front of her, and raised the dark sweep of her eyebrows. "You see, I'm actually studying the same subject," I persisted. Her eyebrows rose a little higher, but I indicated the papers in front of me. "No, really. I've just been reading about - " I looked at the piles of Rossi's documents in front of me and stopped abruptly. The contemptuous slant of her eyelids made my face grow warm.
"Dracula?" she said sarcastically. "Those appear to be primary sources you have got there." She had a rich accent I couldn't place, and her voice was soft, but library soft, as if it could spring into real strength when uncoiled.
I tried a different tactic. "Are you reading those for fun? I mean, for enjoyment? Or are you doing research?"
"Fun?" She kept the book open, still, maybe to discourage me with every possible weapon.
"Well, that's an unusual topic, and if you've also gotten out a work on the Carpathians, you must be deeply interested in your subject." I hadn't spoken so quickly since the orals for my master's degree. "I was just about to check that book out myself. Both of them, in fact."
"Really," she said. "And why is that?"
"Well," I hazarded, "I've got these letters here, from - from an unusual historical source - and they mention Dracula. They're about Dracula."
A faint interest dawned inside her gaze, as if the amber light had won out and was turned reluctantly on me. She slumped slightly in her chair, relaxed into something like masculine ease, without taking her hands off her book. It struck me that this was a gesture I had seen a hundred times before, this slackening of tension that accompanied thought, this settling into a conversation. Where had I seen it?
"What are those letters, exactly?" she asked, in her quiet foreign voice. I thought with regret that I should have introduced myself and my credentials before getting into any of this. For some reason, I felt I couldn't start over at this point - couldn't suddenly put out my hand to shake hers and tell her what department I was in, and so on. It also occurred to me that I'd never seen her before, so she certainly wasn't in history, unless she was new, a transfer from some other university. And should I lie to protect Rossi? I decided, at random, not to. I simply left his name out of the equation.
"I'm working with someone who's - having some problems, and he wrote these letters more than twenty years ago. He gave them to me thinking I might be able to help him out of his current - situation - which has to do with - he studies, I mean he was studying - "
"I see," she said with cold politeness. She stood up and started collecting her books, deliberately and without haste. Now she was picking up her briefcase. Standing, she looked as tall as I'd imagined her, a little sinewy, with broad shoulders.
"Why are you studying Dracula?" I asked in desperation.
"Well, I must say it is not any of your business," she told me shortly, turning away, "but I am planning a future trip, although I do not know when I will take it."
"To the Carpathians?" I felt suddenly rattled by the whole conversation.
"No." She flung that last word back at me, disdainfully. And then, as if she couldn't help herself, but so contemptuously that I didn't dare follow her: "To Istanbul."
"Good Lord," my father prayed suddenly against the twittering sky. The last swallows were homing in above us, the town with its diminished lights settling heavily into the valley. "We shouldn't be sitting around here with a hike ahead of us tomorrow. Pilgrims are supposed to turn in early, I'm sure. With the coming of dark, or something like that."
I shifted my legs; one foot had fallen asleep under me and the stones of the churchyard wall felt suddenly sharp, impossibly uncomfortable, especially with the thought of bed looming ahead of me. I would have pins and needles on the stumbling walk downhill to the hotel. I felt a boiling irritation, too, far sharper than the sensations in my feet. My father had stopped his story too soon, again.
"Look," my father said, pointing straight out from our perch. "I think that must be Saint-Matthieu." I followed his gesture to the dark, massed mountains and saw, halfway up, a small, steady light. No other light appeared close to it; no other habitation seemed anywhere near it. It was like a single spark on immense folds of black cloth, high up but not close to the highest peaks - it hung between the town and the night sky. "Yes, that's just where the monastery must be, I think," my father said again. "And we'll have a real climb tomorrow, even if we go by the road." As we set off along moonless streets, I felt that sadness that comes with dropping down from a height, leaving anything lofty. Before we turned the corner of the old bell tower, I glanced back once, to pin that tiny spot of light in my memory. There it was again, gleaming above a house wall tumbled over with dark bougainvillea. Standing still for a moment, I looked hard at it. Then, just once, the light winked.