Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“Returning with my hand intertwined with Helen’s would be a great consolation, of course. I intended to ask her, when this horror was somehow over, to marry me; I would have to save a little money first, if I could, and take her to Boston to meet my parents. Yes, I would return with her hand in mine, but there would be no father from whom to request it in marriage. I watched through a shimmer of grief as Helen opened the gate.

“Inside, Stoichev’s house was sinking softly into an uneven ground-part yard and part orchard. The foundation of the house was built from a brownish-gray stone held together with white stucco; I later learned that this stone was a kind of granite, out of which most of Bulgaria ’s old buildings have sprung. Above the foundation the walls were brick, but brick of the softest, mellowest red-gold, as if they had been soaking in sunlight for generations. The roof was of fluted red ceramic tiles. Roof and walls were a little dilapidated. The whole house looked as if it had grown slowly out of the earth and was now slowly returning to it, and as if the trees had grown above it simply to shade this process. The first floor had put out a rambling wing on one side, and on the other stretched a trellis, which was covered with the tendrils of grapevines above and walled with pale roses below. Under the trellis sat a wooden table and four rough chairs, and I imagined how the shadow of the grape leaves would deepen there as summer progressed. Beyond this, and beneath the most venerable of the apple trees, hovered two ghostly beehives; near them, in full sun, lay a little garden where someone had already coaxed up translucent greens in neat rows. I could smell herbs and perhaps lavender, fresh grass and frying onions. Someone tended this old place with care, and I half expected to get a glimpse of Stoichev in monk’s habit, kneeling with his trowel in the garden.

“Then a voice began to sing inside, perhaps in the vicinity of the crumbling chimney and first-floor windows. It was not the baritone chant of the hermit, but a sweet, strong feminine voice, an energetic melody that made even Ranov, sulking next to me with his cigarette, look interested.‘Izvinete!’ he called.‘Dobar den!’The singing stopped abruptly and was followed by a clatter and a thump. Stoichev’s front door opened and the young woman who stood there stared hard at us, as if the last thing she’d imagined in her yard was people.

“I would have stepped forward, but Ranov cut me off, removing his hat, nodding, bowing, greeting her in a flow of Bulgarian. The young woman had put her hand to her cheek, regarding Ranov with a curiosity that seemed to me mingled with wariness. At second glance, she was not quite as young as I’d thought, but there was an energy and vigor about her that made me think she might be the author of the resplendent little garden and the good smells from the kitchen. Her hair was brushed back from a round face; she had a dark mole on her forehead. Her eyes, mouth, and chin looked like a pretty child’s. She had an apron over her white blouse and blue skirt. She surveyed us with a sharp glance that had nothing to do with the innocence of her eyes, and I saw that under her quick interrogations Ranov even opened his wallet and showed her a card. Whether she was Stoichev’s daughter or his housekeeper-did retired professors have housekeepers, in a communist country?-she was no fool. Ranov seemed to be making an uncharacteristic effort at charm; he turned, smiling, to introduce us to her. ‘This is Irina Hristova,’ he explained as we shook hands. ‘She is the ness of Professor Stoichev.’

“‘The nest?’ I said, thinking for a second that this was some elaborate metaphor.

“‘The daughter of his sister,’ Ranov said. He lit another cigarette and offered one to Irina Hristova, who refused with a decided nod. When he explained that we were from America, her eyes widened and she looked us over very carefully. Then she laughed, although I never knew what that meant. Ranov scowled again-I don’t think he was capable of looking pleasant for more than a few minutes at a time-and she turned and led us in.

“Again the house took me by surprise; it might be a sweet old farm outside, but inside, in a dusk that contrasted strongly with the sunlight of the front walk, it was a museum. The door opened directly onto a large room with a fireplace, where sunlight fell across the stones in place of fire. The furniture-dark, intricately carved bureaus set with mirrors, princely chairs and benches-would have been arresting in itself, but what drew my eye and Helen’s murmur of admiration was the rare mix of folk textiles and primitive paintings-icons, mainly, of a quality that in many cases seemed to me to surpass what we’d seen in the churches in Sofia. There were luminous-eyed Madonnas and thin-lipped, sad saints, large and small, highlighted with gilt paint or encased in beaten silver, apostles standing in boats, and martyrs patiently undergoing their martyrdoms. The rich, smoke-tinted, ancient colors were echoed on all sides by rugs and aprons woven in geometrical patterns, and even an embroidered vest and a couple of scarves trimmed with tiny coins. Helen pointed to the vest, which had strips of horizontal pockets sewn down each side. ‘For bullets,’ she said, simply.

“Next to the vest hung a pair of daggers. I wanted to ask who’d worn it, who’d caught those bullets, who’d carried those daggers. Someone had filled a ceramic jug on a table below them with roses and fronds of green, which looked supernaturally alive among all those fading treasures. The floor was highly polished. I could see another, similar room beyond.

“Ranov was looking around, too, and now he snorted. ‘In my opinion, Professor Stoichev is permitted to keep too many national possessions. These should be sold for the benefit of the people.’

“Either Irina understood no English or she didn’t deign to respond to this; she turned away and led us out of the room and up a narrow flight of stairs. I don’t know what I expected to see at the top. Perhaps we would find a littered den, a cave where the old professor hibernated, or perhaps, I thought-with that now-familiar twinge of misery-we might find a neat, orderly office of the sort that had masked Professor Rossi’s tumultuous and splendid mind. I had all but put this vision behind me when the door at the top of the stairs opened, and a white-haired man, small but erect, came out on the landing. Irina hurried to him, grasping his arm with both hands and addressing him in quick Bulgarian mixed with some excited laughter.

“The old man turned to us, calm, quiet, his face deeply withdrawn, so that I had for a minute the sense that he was gazing down at the floor, although he looked directly at us. I stepped forward then and offered my hand. He shook it gravely and turned to Helen and shook hers as well. He was polite, he was formal, he had the kind of deference that is not really deference but dignity, and his large, dark eyes went from one of us to the other, and then took in Ranov, who hung back watching the scene. At this Ranov came up and shook hands with him, too-patronizingly, I thought, disliking our guide more every minute. I wished with all my heart that he would leave, so that we could speak alone with Professor Stoichev. I wondered how on earth we were going to accomplish any kind of honest discussion, learn anything from Stoichev at all, with Ranov hovering behind us like a fly.

“Professor Stoichev turned slowly and ushered us into the room. This room, as it turned out, was one of several on the top floor of the house. It was never clear to me, during our two visits there, where its inhabitants slept. As far as I could see, the upper story of the house contained only the long, narrow sitting room that we were entering, and several smaller rooms opening off it. The doors to the other rooms stood ajar, and sunlight filtered into them through the green trees in the windows opposite and caressed the bindings of innumerable books, books that lined the walls and sat in wooden crates on the floor, or lay heaped on tables. Among them were shelved loose documents of all shapes and sizes, many of them clearly of great antiquity. No, this was not Rossi’s neat study but rather a sort of cluttered laboratory, the upper story of a collector’s mind. Everywhere I saw sunlight touching old vellum, old leather, tooled bindings, hints of gilt, crumbling page corners, knobby bindings-red and brown and bone-colored wonderful books-books and scrolls and manuscripts in a working disarray. Nothing was dusty, nothing heavy was heaped on anything fragile, and yet these books, these manuscripts were absolutely everywhere in Stoichev’s rooms, and I had a sense of being surrounded by them in a way one is not even in a museum, where such precious objects would have been more sparsely, methodically displayed.