Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“After a moment, Turgut recovered himself enough to stand and blow his nose into a handkerchief. ‘He was a very good man,’ he said to us, his voice unsteady. ‘A generous, kind man. Now he rests in Muhammad’s peace instead of joining the legions of hell.’ He turned away to wipe his eyes. ‘My fellows, we must get this body away from here. There is a doctor at one of the hospitals who-he will help us. Selim will remain here with the door locked while I call, and the doctor will come with the ambulance and sign the necessary certificates.’ Turgut took from his pocket several cloves of garlic and placed them gently in the dead man’s mouth. Selim removed the stake and washed it at the sink in the corner, putting it carefully away in the beautiful box. Turgut cleaned up every trace of blood, bandaged the man’s chest with a dishcloth and rebuttoned his shirt, then took from the bed a sheet, which he let me help him spread over the body, covering its now-quiet face.

“‘Now, my dear friends, I ask of you this favor. You have seen what the undead can do, and we know they are here. You must protect yourselves every minute. And you must go to Bulgaria -as soon as possible-in the next few days, if you can arrange this. Call me at my apartment when you have made your plans.’ He looked hard at me. ‘If we do not see each other in person before you go, I wish you all the best possible good fortune and safety. I will think of you every moment. Please call me as soon as you come back to Istanbul, if you come back here.’

“I hoped he meantIf that’s how you route your travel and notIf you survive Bulgaria. He shook hands warmly with us, and so did Selim, who followed this up by kissing Helen’s hand very shyly.

“‘We will go now,’ Helen said simply, taking my arm, and we walked out of that sad room and down the stairs to the street.”

“My first impression of Bulgaria-and my memory of it ever after-was of mountains seen from the air, mountains high and deep, darkly verdant and mainly untouched by roads, although here and there a brown ribbon ran among villages or along sudden sheer cliffs. Helen sat quietly next to me, her eyes fixed on the small porthole of the airplane window, her hand resting in mine under cover of my folded jacket. I could feel her warm palm, her slightly chilled, fine fingers, the absence of rings. We could occasionally see glinting veins in the crevasses of the mountains, which must, I thought, be rivers, and I strained without hope for some configuration of winding dragon tail that might be the answer to our puzzle. Nothing, of course, fit the outlines I already knew with my eyes closed.

“And nothing was likely to, I reminded myself, if only to quell the hope that rose uncontrollably in me again at the sight of those ancient mountains. Their very obscurity, their look of having been untouched by modern history, their mysterious lack of cities or towns or industrialization made me hopeful. I felt somehow that the more perfectly hidden the past was in this country, the more likely it was to have been preserved. The monks, whose lost trail we now soared above, had made their way through mountains like these-perhaps these very peaks, although we didn’t know their route. I mentioned this to Helen, wanting to hear myself voice my hopes aloud. She shook her head. ‘We don’t know for a fact that they reached Bulgaria or even actually set out for it,’ she reminded me, but she softened the flat scholarship of her tone with a caress of my hand under the jacket.

“‘I don’t know anything about Bulgarian history, you know,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be lost here.’

“Helen smiled. ‘I am not an expert myself, but I can tell you that Slavs migrated to this area from the north in the sixth and seventh centuries, and a Turkic tribe called the Bulgars came here in the seventh, I think. They united against the Byzantine Empire -wisely-and their first ruler was a Bulgar named Asparuh. Tsar Boris I made Christianity the official religion in the ninth century. He is a great hero here, apparently, in spite of that. The Byzantines ruled from the eleventh to the beginning of the thirteenth, and then Bulgaria became very powerful until the Ottomans crushed them in 1393.’

“‘When were the Ottomans driven out?’ I asked with interest. We seemed to be meeting them everywhere.

“‘Not until 1878,’ Helen admitted. ‘ Russia helped Bulgaria to expel them.’

“‘And then Bulgaria sided with the Axis in both wars.’

“‘Yes, and the Soviet army brought a glorious revolution just after the war. What would we do without the Soviet army?’ Helen gave me her most brilliant and bitter smile, but I squeezed her hand.

“‘Keep your voice down,’ I said. ‘If you won’t be careful, I’ll have to be careful for both of us.’”

“The airport in Sofia was a tiny place; I’d expected a palace of modern communism, but we descended to a modest area of tarmac and strolled across it with the other travelers. Nearly all of them were Bulgarian, I decided, trying to catch something of their conversations. They were handsome people, some of them strikingly so, and their faces varied from the dark-eyed pale Slav to a Middle-Eastern bronze, a kaleidoscope of rich hues and shaggy black eyebrows, noses long and flaring, or aquiline, or deeply hooked, young women with curly black hair and noble foreheads, and energetic old men with few teeth. They smiled or laughed and talked eagerly with one another; one tall man gesticulated to his companion with a folded newspaper. Their clothes were distinctly not Western, although I would have been hard put to say what it was about the cuts of suits and skirts, the heavy shoes and dark hats, that was unfamiliar to me.

“I also had the impression of a barely concealed happiness among these people as their feet touched Bulgarian soil-or asphalt-and this disturbed the picture I’d carried there with me of a nation grimly allied with the Soviets, Stalin’s right-hand ally even now, a year after his death-a joyless country in the grip of delusions from which they might never awake. The difficulties of obtaining a Bulgarian visa in Istanbul-a passage oiled in great part by Turgut’s sultanic funding and by calls from Aunt Éva’s Bulgarian counterpart in Sofia-had only increased my trepidations about this country, and the cheerless bureaucrats who had finally, grudgingly stamped their approval in our passports in Budapest had seemed to me already embalmed in oppression. Helen had confided to me that the very fact that the Bulgarian embassy had granted us visas at all made her uneasy.

“Real Bulgarians, however, appeared to be a different race altogether. On going into the airport building, we found ourselves in customs lines, and here the din of laughter and talk was even louder, and we could see relatives waving over the barriers and shouting greetings. Around us people were declaring small bits of money and souvenirs from Istanbul and previous destinations, and when our turn came we did the same.

“The eyebrows of the young customs officer disappeared into his cap at the sight of our passports, and he took the passports aside for a few minutes to consult with another officer. ‘Not a good omen,’ Helen said under her breath. Several uniformed men gathered around us, and the oldest and most pompous-looking began to question us in German, then in French, and finally in broken English. As Aunt Éva had instructed, I calmly pulled out our makeshift letter from the University of Budapest, which implored the Bulgarian government to let us in on important academic business, and the other letter Aunt Éva had obtained for us from a friend in the Bulgarian embassy.

“I don’t know what the officer made of the academic letter and its extravagant mix of English, Hungarian, and French, but the embassy letter was in Bulgarian and bore the embassy seal. The officer read it in silence, his huge dark eyebrows knit over the bridge of his nose, and then his face took on a surprised, even an astonished expression, and he looked at us in something like amazement. This made me even more nervous than his earlier hostility had, and it occurred to me that Éva had been rather vague with us about the contents of the embassy letter. I certainly couldn’t ask now what it said, and I felt miserably at sea when the officer broke into a smile and actually clapped me on the shoulder. He made his way to a telephone in one of the little customs booths and after considerable effort seemed to have reached someone. I didn’t like the way he smiled into the receiver and glanced across at us every few seconds. Helen shifted uneasily next to me and I knew she must be reading even more into all this than I was.