Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“Now,” he said, “let us take a brief tour.” He lit all the candles again, and I followed him from table to table while he lit the lanterns there. “We shall have something to read by.” I did not like the way the light played on his face as he bent over each new flame, and I tried to look instead at more of the book titles. He came to my side as I stood before the rows of scrolls and books in Arabic I’d noticed before. To my relief, he was still five feet away, but an acrid smell rose from his presence and I fought off a little faintness. I must keep my wits about me, I thought; there was no telling what this night would bring. “I see you have found one of my prizes,” he was saying. There was a rumble of satisfaction in his cold voice. “These are my Ottoman holdings. Some of them are very old, from the first days of their diabolical empire, and this shelf here contains volumes from their last decade.” He smiled in the flickering light. “You cannot imagine what a satisfaction it was for me to see their civilization die. Their faith is not dead, of course, but their sultans are gone forever, and I have outlived them.” I thought for a moment that he might laugh, but his next words were grave. “Here are great books made for the sultan about his many lands. Here”-he touched the edge of a scroll-“is the history of Mehmed, may he rot in hell, by a Christian historian turned flatterer. May he rot in hell also. I tried to find him myself, that historian, but he died before I could reach him. Here are the accounts of Mehmed’s campaigns, by his own flatterers, and of the fall of the Great City. You do not read Arabic?”

“Very little,” I confessed.

“Ah.” He seemed amused. “I had the opportunity to learn their language and their writing while I was their prisoner. You know that I was in bondage to them?”

I nodded, trying not to look at him.

“Yes, my own father left me to the father of Mehmed, as a pledge that we would not wage war against the Empire. Imagine, Dracula a pawn in the hands of the infidel. I wasted no time there-I learned everything I could about them, so that I might surpass them all. That was when I vowed to make history, not to be its victim.” His voice was so fierce that I glanced at him in spite of myself and saw the terrible blaze in his face, the hatred, the sharp upwards curl of the mouth under its long mustache. Then he did laugh, and the sound was equally horrifying. “I have triumphed and they are gone.” He put his hand on a finely tooled leather binding. “The sultan was so much afraid of me that he founded an order of their knights to pursue me. There are still a few of them, somewhere inTsarigrad-a nuisance. But they are fewer and fewer, their ranks are dwindling to nothing, while my servants multiply around the globe.” He straightened his powerful body. “Come. I will show you my other treasures, and you must tell me how you propose to catalogue them all.”

He led me from one section to another, pointing out particular rarities, and I saw that my surmise about the patterns of his collecting were correct. Here was a large cabinet full of manuals of torture, some of them dating to the ancient world. They ranged through the prisons of mediaeval England, to the torture chambers of the Inquisition, to the experiments of the Third Reich. Some of the Renaissance volumes contained woodcuts of implements of torture, others diagrams of the human body. Another section of the room chronicled the church heresies for which many of those manuals of torture had been employed. Another corner was dedicated to alchemy, another to witchcraft, another to philosophy of the most disturbing sort.

Dracula paused in front of a great bookshelf and laid his hand on it affectionately. “This is of special interest to me, and will be to you, as well, I think. These works are biographies of me.” Each volume there was connected in some way to his life. There were works by Byzantine and Ottoman historians-some of them very rare originals-and their many reprints through the ages. There were pamphlets from mediaeval Germany, Russia, Hungary, Constantinople, all documenting his crimes. Many of them I’d neither seen nor heard of in my research, and I felt an unreasonable flare of curiosity before I remembered that I had no reason, now, to complete that research. There were also numerous volumes of folklore, from the seventeenth century on, ranging over the legend of the vampire-it struck me as strange and terrible that he included these so frankly among his own biographies. He brought his great hand to rest on an early edition of Bram Stoker’s novel and smiled, but said nothing. Then he moved quietly away into another section.

“This is of special interest to you as well,” he said. “These are works of history about your century, the twentieth. A fine century-I look forward to the rest of it. In my day, a prince was able to eliminate troublesome elements only one person at a time. You do this with an infinitely greater sweep. Think, for example, of the improvement from the accursed cannon that broke the walls of Constantinople to the divine fire your adoptive country dropped onto the Japanese cities some years ago.” He gave me the trace of a bow, courtly, congratulatory. “You will have read many of these works already, Professor, but perhaps you will glance through them with a new perspective.”

At last he bade me settle by the fire again, and I found more of the steaming tea waiting at my elbow. When we were both resting in our chairs, he turned to me. “Soon, I must take my own refreshment,” he said quietly. “But first, I will ask you a question.” My hands began to tremble in spite of myself. I had tried until now to speak to him as little as possible without incurring his rage. “You have enjoyed my hospitality, such as I can offer here, and my boundless faith in your gifts. You shall enjoy the eternal life that only a few beings can claim. You have the free run of what is certainly the finest archive of its kind on the face of the earth. Rare works are open to you that, indeed, cannot now be seen anywhere else. All this is yours.” He stirred in his chair, as if it was difficult for him to keep his great, undead body completely still for long. “Furthermore, you are a man of unparalleled sense and imagination, of keen accuracy and profound judgment. I have much to learn from your methods of research, your synthesis of sources, your imagination. For all these qualities, as well as the great scholarship they feed, I have brought you here, to my treasure-house.”

Again he paused. I watched his face, unable to look away. He gazed at the fire. “With your unflinching honesty, you can see the lesson of history,” he said. “History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is. Why should you not use your great mind in service of what is perfectible? I ask you, my friend, to join me of your own accord in my research. If you do so, you will save yourself great anguish, and you will save me considerable trouble. Together we will advance the historian’s work beyond anything the world has ever seen. There is no purity like the purity of the sufferings of history. You will have what every historian wants: history will be reality to you. We will wash our minds clean with blood.”

He turned the full flood of his gaze on me then, the eyes with their ancient knowledge blazing up and the red lips parted. It would have been a face of the most exquisite intelligence, I suddenly thought, if it had not been shaped by so much hatred. I struggled not to faint, not to go to him on the instant and throw myself on my knees before him, not to put myself under his hand. He was a leader, a prince. He brooked no trespasses. I summoned my love of all I had had in my life, and I formed the word as firmly as I could. “Never.”