Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

That was it. I turned the big brown envelope upside down, even shook it, so that not so much as a dead fly could go unnoticed. While I was doing this I suddenly (and for the first time) had a sensation that would accompany me through all the ensuing efforts required of me: I felt Rossi’s presence, his pride in my thoroughness, something like his spirit living and speaking to me through the careful methods he himself had taught me. I knew he worked swiftly, as a researcher, but also that he abused nothing and neglected nothing-not a single document, not an archive, however far from home it was located, and certainly not an idea, however unfashionable it might be among his colleagues. His disappearance, and-I thought wildly-his very need of me, had suddenly made us almost equals. I had the sense, also, that he had been promising me this outcome, this equality, all along, and waiting for the time when I would earn it.

I now had every dry-smelling item spread on the table in front of me. I began with the letters, those long dense epistles typed on onionskin with few mistakes and few corrections. There was one copy of each, and they seemed to be in chronological order already. Each was carefully dated, all from December 1930, more than twenty years before. Each was headedTRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, without any further address. I glanced through the first letter. It told the story of his discovery of the mysterious book, and of his initial research at Oxford. The letter was signed, “Yours in grief, Bartholomew Rossi.” And it began-I held the onionskin carefully even when my hand started to shake a little-it began affectionately: “My dear and unfortunate successor -”

My father suddenly stopped, and the trembling of his voice made me turn tactfully away before he could force himself to say anything more. By unspoken consent, we gathered our jackets and strolled across the famous little piazza, pretending the facade of the church still held some interest for us.

My father did not leave Amsterdam again for several weeks, and during that time I felt that he shadowed me in a new way. I came home from school a little later than usual one day and found Mrs. Clay on the phone with him. She put me on at once. “Where have you been?” my father asked. He was calling from his office at the Center for Peace and Democracy. “I phoned twice and Mrs. Clay hadn’t seen you. You’ve put her in a big pother.”

He was the one in a pother, I could tell, although he kept his voice level. “I was reading at a new coffee shop near school,” I said.

“All right,” my father said. “Why don’t you just call Mrs. Clay or me if you’re going to be late, that’s all.”

I didn’t like to agree, but I said I would call. My father came home early for dinner that night and read aloud to me fromGreat Expectations. Then he got out some of our photograph albums and we looked through them together: Paris, London, Boston, my first roller skates, my graduation from third grade, Paris, London, Rome. It was always just me, standing in front of the Pantheon or the gates of Père Lachaise, because my father took the pictures and there were only two of us. At nine o’clock he checked all the doors and windows and let me go to bed.

The next time I was going to be late, I did call Mrs. Clay. I explained to her that some of my classmates and I were going to do our homework together over tea. She said that was fine. I hung up and went by myself to the university library. Johan Binnerts, the librarian in the medieval collection in Amsterdam, was getting used to the sight of me, I thought; at least he smiled gravely whenever I stopped by with a new question, and he always asked how my history essays were coming along. Mr. Binnerts found for me a passage in a nineteenth-century text that I was particularly pleased to have, and I spent some time making notes from it. I have a copy of the text now, in my study at Oxford -I found the book again a few years ago in a bookshop: Lord Gelling’sHistory of Central Europe. I have a sentimental attachment to it, after all these years, although I never open it without a bleak feeling, too. I remember very well the sight of my own hand, smooth and young, copying down passages in my school notebook:

In addition to displaying great cruelty, Vlad Dracula possessed great valor. His daring was such that in 1462 he crossed the Danube and carried out a night raid on horseback in the very encampment of Sultan Mehmed II and his army, which had assembled there to attack Wallachia. In this raid Dracula killed several thousand Turkish soldiers, and the Sultan barely escaped with his life before the Ottoman guard forced the Wallachians into a retreat.

A similar quantity of material might be dredged up in connection with the name of any great feudal lord of his era in Europe-more than this, in many cases, and much more, in a few. The extraordinary thing about the information available on Dracula is its longevity-that is to say, his refusal to die as an historical presence, the persistence of his legend. The few sources available in England refer directly or obliquely to other sources whose diversity would make any historian profoundly curious. He seems to have been notorious in Europe even during his own lifetime-a great accomplishment in days when Europe was a vast and by our standards disjointed world whose governments were connected by horse messenger and river freight, and when horrifying cruelty was not an unusual characteristic among the nobility. Dracula’s notoriety did not end with his mysterious death and strange burial in 1476, but seems to have continued almost unabated until it faded into the brightness of the Enlightenment in the West.

The entry on Dracula ended there. I’d had enough history to puzzle over for one day, but I wandered into the English literature division and was glad to find that the library owned a copy of Bram Stoker’sDracula. In fact, it would take me quite a few visits to read it. I didn’t know if I was allowed to check out books there, but even if I had been, I wouldn’t have wanted to bring it home, where I would have the difficult choice of hiding it or leaving it carefully out in the open. Instead, I readDracula sitting in a slippery chair by a library window. If I peered outside, I could see one of my favorite canals, the Singel, with its flower market, and people buying snacks of herring from a little stand. It was a wonderfully secluded spot, and the back of a bookshelf sheltered me from the other readers in the room.

There, in that chair, I gradually allowed Stoker’s alternating Gothic horror and cozy Victorian love stories to engulf me. What I wanted from the book, I didn’t quite know; according to my father, Professor Rossi had thought it mainly useless as a source of information about the real Dracula. The courtly, repulsive Count Dracula of the novel was a compelling figure, I thought, even if he didn’t have much in common with Vlad Tepes. But Rossi himself had been convinced that Dracula had become one of the undead, in life-in the course of history. I wondered if a novel could have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality. After all, Rossi had made his discovery well after the publication ofDracula. Vlad Dracula, on the other hand, had been a force for evil almost four hundred years before Stoker’s birth. It was very perplexing.

And hadn’t Professor Rossi also said that Stoker had turned up lots of sound information about vampire lore? I had never even seen a vampire movie-my father did not like horror of any sort-and the conventions of the story were new to me. According to Stoker, a vampire could attack his victims only between sunset and sunrise. The vampire lived indefinitely, feasting on the blood of mortals and thereby converting them to his own undead state. He could take the form of bat or wolf or mist; he could be repelled by the use of garlic blossoms or a crucifix; he could be destroyed if you drove a stake through his heart and filled his mouth with garlic while he slept in his coffin during the daylight. A silver bullet through the heart could also destroy him.