Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“Eventually Helen said she wanted to see more of the place. We put you back in your sack and went around to the kitchens and the long refectory where the monks still ate, and the hostel where pilgrims could still sleep on cots, and the scriptorium, one of the oldest parts of the complex, where so many great manuscripts had been copied and illuminated. There was a sample of one under glass there, a Matthew open to a page bordered with tiny demons goading one another downward. Helen actually smiled over it. The chapel was next-it was small, like everything else in the monastery, but its proportions were melody in stone; I’d never seen the Romanesque like this, so intimate and lovely. Our guidebook claimed that the rounding outward of the apse was the first moment of the Romanesque, a sudden gesture that brought in light across the altar. There was some fourteenth-century glass in the narrow windows, and the altar itself was perfectly arrayed for mass in red and white, with golden candlesticks. We left quietly.

“At last the young monk who was our guide said we’d seen everything but the crypt, and we followed him down there. It was a small dank hole off the cloisters, architecturally interesting for an early Romanesque vault held up by a few squat columns, and for a grimly ornamented stone sarcophagus dating from the earliest century of the monastery’s existence-the resting place of their first abbot, said our guide. Next to the sarcophagus sat an elderly monk lost in his meditations; he looked up, kind and confused, when we entered, and bowed to us without rising from his chair. ‘We have had a tradition here for centuries that one of us sits with the abbot,’ explained our guide. ‘Usually it is an older monk who has held this honor for his lifetime.’

“‘How unusual,’ I said, but something about the place, perhaps the chill, made you whimper and struggle on Helen’s chest, and seeing that she was tired I offered to take you up to the fresh air. I stepped out of that dank hole with a sense of relief myself and went to show you the fountain in the cloisters.

“I’d expected Helen to follow me at once, but she lingered underground, and when she came up again her face was so changed that I felt a rush of alarm. She looked animated-yes, more lively than I’d seen her in months-but also pale and wide-eyed, intent on something I couldn’t see. I moved toward her as casually as I could; I asked her if there’d been anything else of interest down there. ‘Maybe,’ she said, but as if she couldn’t quite hear me for the roar of thoughts inside. Then she turned to you, suddenly, and took you from me, hugging you and kissing your head and cheeks. ‘Is she all right? Was she frightened?’

“‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘A little hungry, maybe.’ Helen sat down on a bench, fished out a jar of baby food, and began to feed you, singing you one of those little songs I couldn’t understand-Hungarian or Romanian-while you ate. ‘This is a beautiful place,’ she said after a minute. ‘Let’s stay for a couple of days.’

“‘We have to get back to Paris by Thursday night,’ I objected.

“‘Well, there is not much difference between staying here for a night and staying in Les Bains,’ she said calmly. ‘We can walk down tomorrow and catch the bus, if you think we need to go so soon.’

“I agreed, because she seemed so strange, but I felt some reluctance even as I went to discuss this with the tour-guide monk. He applied to his superior, who said that the hostel was empty and we were welcome. Between the simple lunch and simpler supper they gave us in a room off the kitchen, we wandered the rose gardens, walked in the steep orchard outside the walls, and sat in the back of the chapel to hear the monks sing mass while you slept on Helen’s lap. A monk made up our cots with clean, coarse sheets. After you fell asleep on one of them, with ours pushed up close on either side so that you couldn’t roll out, I lay reading and pretending not to watch Helen. She sat in her black cotton dress on the edge of her cot, looking out toward the night. I was thankful the curtains were closed, but eventually she got up and lifted them and stood gazing out. ‘It must be dark,’ I said, ‘with no town near.’

“She nodded. ‘It is very dark, but that is the way it has always been here, don’t you think?’

“‘Why don’t you come to bed?’ I reached over you and patted her cot.

“‘All right,’ she said, without any sign of protest. In fact, she smiled at me and bent over to kiss me before she lay down. I caught her in my arms for a moment, feeling the strength in her shoulders, the smooth skin of her neck. Then she stretched out and covered herself, and appeared to drift off long before I’d finished my chapter and blown out the lantern.

“I woke at dawn, feeling a sort of breeze go through the room. It was very quiet; you breathed next to me under your wool baby blanket, but Helen’s cot was empty. I got up soundlessly and put on my shoes and jacket. The cloisters outside were dim, the courtyard gray, the fountain a shadowy mass. It occurred to me that it would take some time for the sun to reach this place, since it first had to climb above those huge eastern peaks. I looked all around for Helen without calling out, because I knew she liked to rise early and might be sitting deep in thought on one of the benches, waiting for dawn. There was no sign of her, however, and as the sky lightened a little I began to search more rapidly, going once to the bench where we’d sat the day before and once into the motionless chapel, with its ghostly smell of smoke.

“At last I began to call her name, quietly, and then louder, and then in alarm. After a few minutes, one of the monks came out of the refectory, where they must have been eating the first silent meal of the day, and asked if he could help me, if I needed something. I explained that my wife was missing, and he began to search with me. ‘Perhaps madame went for a walk?’ But there was no sign of her in the orchard or the parking area or the dark crypt. We looked everywhere as the sun came over the peaks, and then he went for some other monks, and one of them said he would take the car down to Les Bains to make inquiries. I asked him, on impulse, to bring the police back with him. Then I heard you crying in the hostel; I hurried to you, afraid you’d rolled off the cots, but you were just waking. I fed you quickly and kept you in my arms while we looked in the same places again.

“Finally I asked that all the monks be gathered and questioned. The abbot gave his consent readily and brought them into the cloisters. No one had seen Helen after we’d left the kitchens for the hostel the night before. Everyone was worried-‘La pauvre,’said one old monk, which sent a wave of irritation through me. I asked if anyone had spoken with her the day before, or noticed anything strange. ‘We do not speak with women, as a general rule,’ the abbot told me gently.

“But one monk stepped forward, and I recognized at once the old man whose job it was to sit in the crypt. His face was as tranquil and kind as it had been by lantern light in the crypt the day before, with that mild confusion I had noted then. ‘Madame stopped to speak to me,’ he said. ‘I did not like to break our rule, but she was such a quiet, polite lady that I answered her questions.’

“‘What did she ask you?’ My heart had already been pounding, but now it began to race painfully.

“‘She asked me who was buried there, and I explained that it was one of our first abbots, and that we revere his memory. Then she asked what great things he had done and I explained that we have a legend’-here he glanced at the abbot, who nodded for him to continue-‘we have a legend that he had a saintly life but was the unfortunate recipient of a curse in death, so that he rose from his coffin to do harm to the monks, and his body had to be purified. When it was purified, a white rose grew out of his heart to signify the Holy Mother’s forgiveness.’