Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“‘I am glad to have the chance to talk with anyone who is interested in our medieval history,’ Stoichev said to me. ‘Perhaps it would be interesting for you and Miss Rossi to see a holiday that celebrates two of our great medieval figures. Tomorrow is the day of Kiril and Methodii, creators of the great Slavonic alphabet. In English you would say Cyril and Methodius-you call it Cyrillic, do you not? We saykirilitsa, for Kiril, the monk who invented it.’

“For a moment I was confused, thinking of our Brother Kiril, but when Stoichev spoke again I saw what he had in mind, and how resourceful he was.

“‘I am very busy with my writing this afternoon,’ he said, ‘but if you would like to come back tomorrow, some of my former students will be here to celebrate the day, and I can tell you more about Kiril then.’

“‘That is extremely kind of you,’ Helen said. ‘We do not want to use too much of your time, but we would be honored to join you. Can that be arranged, Comrade Ranov?’

“Thecomrade did not seem to be lost on Ranov, who scowled at her over his second glass of brandy. ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘If that is how you would like to accomplish your research, I am happy to be of assistance.’

“‘Very good,’ Stoichev said. ‘We will gather here at about one-thirty, and Irina will have something nice for our lunch. It is always a pleasant group. You may meet some scholars whose work you will find interesting.’

“We thanked him profusely and obeyed Irina’s urging to eat, although I noticed that Helen, too, avoided the rest of therakiya. When we had finished the simple meal, Helen rose at once and we all followed suit. ‘We will not tire you further, Professor,’ she said, taking his hand.

“‘Not at all, my dear.’ Stoichev shook her hands warmly, but I thought he did look weary. ‘I shall look forward to our meeting tomorrow.’

“Irina showed us to the gate again, through the green yard and gardens. ‘Until tomorrow,’ she said, smiling at us, and added something pert in Bulgarian that made Ranov smooth his hair down before putting his hat on again. ‘She is a very pretty girl,’ he remarked complacently as we walked to his car, and Helen rolled her eyes at me behind his back.

“It wasn’t until evening that we had a few minutes alone together. Ranov had taken his departure after an interminable dinner in the bleak hotel dining room. Helen and I walked upstairs together-the elevator was broken again-and then lingered in the hall near my room, moments of sweetness filched from our peculiar situation. Once we thought that Ranov must be gone, we went back downstairs, strolled out to a café on a side street nearby, and sat there under the trees.

“‘Someone is watching us here, also,’ Helen said quietly, as we seated ourselves at a metal table. I laid my briefcase carefully across my lap; I’d stopped even setting it under café tables. Helen smiled. ‘But at least this is not bugged, like my room. And yours.’ She looked up into the green branches above us. ‘Linden trees,’ she said. ‘In a couple of months they will be covered with flowers. People make tea out of them at home-probably here, too.’ When you sit at a table outside like this, you must clean off the table first because the blossoms and the pollen fall everywhere. They smell like honey, very sweet and fresh.‘ She made a quick motion, as if brushing aside thousands of pale green flowers.

“I took her hand then, and turned it over so that I could see her palm with its graceful lines. I hoped they meant she would have a long life and good fortune, both shared by me. ‘What do you make of Stoichev’s having that letter?’

“‘It might be a stroke of luck for us,’ she mused. ‘At first I thought it was only a piece of a historical puzzle-a wonderful piece, but how was it going to help us? But when Stoichev guessed our letter was dangerous, then I felt a great deal of hope that he knows something important.’

“‘I hoped so, too,’ I admitted. ‘But I also thought he might mean simply that it was politically sensitive material, like so much of his work-because it involves the history of the church.’

“‘I know.’ Helen sighed. ‘It might mean only that.’

“‘And that would be enough to make him wary of discussing it in front of Ranov.’

“‘Yes. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out what he meant.’ She laced her fingers through mine. ‘It is agonizing for you to wait every day, isn’t it?’

“I nodded slowly. ‘If you knew Rossi,’ I said, and stopped.

“Her eyes were fixed on mine and she slowly brushed back a lock of hair that had slipped out of its pins. The gesture was so sad that it gave full weight to her next words. ‘I do begin to know him, through you.’

“At that moment, a waitress in a white blouse came out to us and asked something. Helen turned to me. ‘What to drink?’ The waitress looked curiously at us, creatures who spoke a foreign language.

“‘What do you know how to order?’ I teased Helen.

“‘Chai,’she said, pointing at herself and me. ‘Tea, please.Molya. ’

“‘You’re learning fast,’ I said, when the waitress had gone back inside.

“She shrugged. ‘I’ve studied some Russian. Bulgarian is very close.’

“When the waitress had returned with our tea, Helen stirred it with a somber face. ‘It is such a relief to get away from Ranov that I can hardly bear to think about seeing him again tomorrow. I don’t see how we are going to do any serious research with him at our backs.’

“‘If I knew whether he actually suspects anything about our search, I’d feel better,’ I confessed. ‘The strange thing is, he reminds me of someone I’ve met before, but I seem to have amnesia about who that is.’ I glanced at Helen’s serious, lovely face, and in that second I felt my brain groping for something, fluttering on the edge of some puzzle, and it wasn’t the question of Ranov’s possible twin. It had to do with Helen’s face in the twilight, and the act of lifting my tea to drink, and the odd word I had chosen. My mind had fluttered there before, but this time the thought broke through in a rush.

“‘Amnesia,’ I said. ‘Helen-Helen, amnesia.’

“‘What?’ She frowned at my intensity, puzzled.

“‘Rossi’s letters!’ I almost shouted. I pulled open my briefcase so hastily that our tea slopped onto the table. ‘His letter, his trip to Greece!’

“It took me several minutes to find the damn thing among my papers, and then to trace the passage, and then to read it aloud to Helen, whose eyes widened slowly to a shocked darkness. ‘You remember the letter about how he went back to Greece-to Crete-after having his map taken away from him in Istanbul, and how his luck changed to bad and everything went wrong?’ I rattled the page in front of her. ‘Listen to this: ”The old men in Crete’stavernas seemed much more inclined to tell me their two hundred and ten vampire stories than they were to explain where I might find other shards of pottery like that one, or what ancient shipwrecks their grandfathers had dived into and plundered. One evening I let a stranger buy me a round of a local speciality called, whimsically, amnesia, with the result that I was sick all the next day.“’

“‘Oh, my God,’ Helen said softly.

“‘I let a stranger buy me a drink called amnesia,’ I paraphrased, trying to keep my voice down. ‘Who the hell do you think that stranger was? And that’s why Rossi forgot -’

“‘He forgot -’ Helen seemed hypnotized by the word. ‘He forgot Romania -’

“‘- that he had been there at all. His letters to Hedges said he was going back to Greece from Romania, to get some money and attend an archaeological dig -’