Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

In the impending darkness, the villa looked small, a low-slung farmhouse made of fieldstone, with cypress and olive trees clustered around its reddish roofs and a couple of leaning stone posts to mark a front walk. Light glowed in the windows on the first floor, and I found myself suddenly hungry, tired, filled with a young crankiness I would have to hide in front of our hosts. My father took our bags from the trunk of the car and I followed him up the walk. “Even the bell’s still here,” he said, satisfied, pulling on a short rope by the entryway and smoothing his hair back in the gloom.

The man who answered came out like a tornado, hugging my father, slapping him hard on the back, kissing him soundly on both cheeks, bending over a little too far to shake my hand. His own hand was enormous and warm and he put it on my shoulder to lead me in with him. In the front hall, which was low beamed and full of ancient furniture, he bellowed like a farm animal. “Giulia! Giulia! Quickly! The big arrival! Come here!” His English was ferocious and sure, strong, loud.

The smiling tall woman who came in pleased me at once. Her hair was gray but it gleamed silver, pinned back from a long face. She smiled at me first and didn’t bend over to meet me. Her hand was warm, like her husband’s, and she kissed my father on each cheek, shaking her head through a gentle stream of Italian. “And you,” she said to me in English, “must have your own room, a good one, okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed, liking the sound of that and hoping it would be safely near my father’s and would have a view of the surrounding valley from which we’d climbed so precipitously.

After dinner in the flagstoned dining room, all the grown-ups leaned back and sighed. “Giulia,” my father said, “you become a greater cook every year. One of the great cooks of Italy.”

“Nonsense, Paolo.” Her English breathed Oxford and Cambridge. “You always talk nonsense.”

“Maybe it’s the Chianti. Let me look at that bottle.”

“Let me fill your glass again,” Massimo interjected. “And what are you studying, lovely daughter?”

“We study all subjects at my school,” I said primly.

“She likes history, I think,” my father told them. “She’s a good sightseer, too.”

“History?” Massimo filled Giulia’s glass again, and then his own, with wine the color of garnets, or dark blood. “Like you and me, Paolo. We gave your father this name,” he explained to me, aside, “because I can’t stand those boring Anglo names you all have. Sorry, I just can’t. Paolo, my friend, you know I could have dropped dead when they told me you gave up your life in the academy toparley-vous all over the world. So he likes to talk more than he likes to read, I said to myself. A great scholar lost to the world, that’s your father.” He gave me half a glass of wine without asking my father and poured some water into it from the jug on the table. I felt fond of him now.

“Now you’re talking nonsense,” my father said contentedly. “I like to travel, that’s what I like.”

“Ah.” Massimo shook his head. “And you, Signor Professor, once said you’d be the greatest of them all. Not that your foundation isn’t a wonderful success, I know.”

“We need peace and diplomatic enlightenment, not more research on tiny questions no one else cares about,” my father countered, smiling. Giulia lit a lantern on the sideboard, turning off the electric light. She brought the lantern to the table and began to cut up atorta I’d been trying not to stare at earlier. Its surface gleamed like obsidian under the knife.

“In history, there are no tiny questions.” Massimo winked at me. “Besides, even the great Rossi said you were his best student. And the rest of us could hardly please the fellow.”

“Rossi!”

It was out of my mouth before I could stop myself. My father glanced uneasily at me over his cake.

“So you know the legends of your father’s academic successes, young lady?” Massimo filled his mouth hugely with chocolate.

My father gave me another glance. “I’ve told her a few stories about those days,” he said. I didn’t miss the undercurrent of warning in his voice. A moment later, however, I thought it might have been directed at Massimo, not me, since Massimo’s next comment shot a chill through me before my father quashed it with a quick shift to politics.

“Poor Rossi,” Massimo said. “Tragic, wonderful man. Strange to think anyone one has known personally can just-poof-disappear.”

The next morning we sat on the sun-washed piazza at the town’s summit, jackets firmly buttoned and brochures in hand, watching two boys who should, like me, have been at school. They shrieked and punted their soccer ball back and forth in front of the church, and I waited patiently. I had been waiting all morning, through the tour of dark little chapels “with elements of Brunelleschi,” according to the vague and bored guide, and the Palazzo Pubblico, with its reception chamber that had served for centuries as a town granary. My father sighed and gave me one of two Oranginas in dainty bottles. “You’re going to ask me something,” he said a little glumly.

“No, I just want to know about Professor Rossi.” I put my straw into the neck of the bottle.

“I thought so. Massimo was tactless to bring that up.”

I dreaded the answer, but I had to ask. “Did Professor Rossi die? Is that what Massimo meant when he saiddisappear? ”

My father looked across the sun-filled square to the cafés and butcher shops on the other side. “Yes. No. Well, it was a very sad thing. Do you really want to hear about that?”

I nodded. My father glanced around, quickly. We were sitting on a stone bench that projected from one of the fine old palazzi, alone except for the fleet-footed boys on the square. “All right,” he said at last.

You see, my father said, that night when Rossi gave me the package of papers, I left him smiling at his office door, and as I turned away I was seized by the feeling that I should detain him, or turn back to talk with him a little longer. I knew it was merely the result of our strange conversation, the strangest of my life, and I buried it at once. Two other graduate students in our department came by, deep in conversation, greeting Rossi before he shut his door and walking briskly down the stairs behind me. Their animated talk gave me the sensation that life was going on around us as usual, but I still felt uneasy. My book, ornamented with the dragon, was a burning presence in my briefcase, and now Rossi had added this sealed packet of notes. I wondered if I should look through them later that night, sitting alone at the desk in my tiny apartment. I was exhausted; I felt I couldn’t face whatever they held.

I suspected, also, that daylight, morning, would bring a return of confidence and reason. Perhaps I wouldn’t even believe Rossi’s story by the time I awoke, although I also felt sure it would haunt me whether I actually believed it or not. And how, I asked myself-outside now, passing under Rossi’s windows and glancing up involuntarily to where his lamp still shone-how could I not believe my adviser on any point related to his own scholarship? Wouldn’t that call into question all the work we had done together? I thought of the first chapters of my dissertation, sitting in piles of neatly edited typescript on my desk at home, and shuddered. If I didn’t believe Rossi’s story, could we go on working together? Would I have to assume he was mad?

Maybe it was because Rossi was on my mind as I passed under his windows that I became acutely aware of his lamp still shining there. In any case, I was actually stepping into the puddles of light thrown from them onto the street, heading toward my own neighborhood, when they-the pools of light-went out quite literally under my feet. It happened in a fraction of a second, but a thrill of horror washed over me, head to foot. One moment I was lost in thought, stepping into the pool of brightness his light threw on the pavement, and the next moment I was frozen to the spot. I had realized two strange things almost simultaneously. One was that I had never seen this light on the pavement there, between the Gothic classroom buildings, although I’d walked up the street perhaps a thousand times. I had never seen it before because it had never been visible there before. It was visible now because all the streetlights had suddenly gone off. I was alone on the street, my last footstep the only sound lingering there. And except for those broken patches of light from the study where we’d sat talking ten minutes earlier, the street was dark.