Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“Before we left, I asked the abbot to say a blessing for Helen at the far end of the cloister, where she’d jumped. He made a service of it, gathering the monks around him, holding up to the vast air one ritual object after another-it didn’t matter to me what they actually were-and chanting to an enormity that swallowed his voice at once. My father and mother stood with me, my mother wiping her eyes rapidly, and you squirmed in my arms. I held you fast; I had almost forgotten, in these weeks, how soft your dark hair was, how strong your protesting legs. Above all, you were alive; you breathed against my chin and your small arm went around my neck, companionably. When a sob shook me, you grabbed my hair, pulled my ear. Holding you, I vowed that I would try to recover some life, a life of some sort.”

Barley and I sat looking at each other across my mother’s postcards. Like my father’s letters, they broke off without giving me much understanding of the present. The main thing, the thing that was burned into my brain, was their dates. She had written them after her death.

“He’s gone to the monastery,” I said.

“Yes,” said Barley. I swept up the cards and put them on the marble top of the dressing table.

“Let’s go,” I said. I looked through my purse, took out the little silver knife in its sheath, and put it carefully in my pocket.

Barley leaned over and kissed my cheek. It surprised me. “Let’s go,” he said.

The road to Saint-Matthieu was longer than I’d remembered, dusty and hot even in late afternoon. There were no cabs in Les Bains-at least none in sight-so we set out on foot, walking swiftly through rolling farmland until we reached the edge of the forest. From there the road began to climb the peak. Entering the woods, with their mix of olive and pine, their towering oaks, was like entering a cathedral; it was dim and cool and we dropped our voices, although we hadn’t been saying much. I was hungry, in the midst of my anxiety; we hadn’t even waited for the maître d’s coffee. Barley took off the cotton cap he was wearing and wiped his forehead.

“She wouldn’t have survived such a fall,” I said once through the constriction in my throat.

“No.”

“My father never wondered-at least not in his letters-if she was pushed by someone.”

“That’s true,” Barley said, replacing his cap.

I was silent for a while. Our feet on the uneven pavement-the road was still paved, at this point-made the only sound. I didn’t want to say these things, but they welled up in me anyway. “Professor Rossi wrote that suicide puts a person at risk for becoming a-becoming -”

“I remember that,” said Barley simply. I wished I hadn’t spoken. The road wound high now. “Maybe someone will come by in a car,” he added.

But no car appeared and we walked faster and faster, so that after a while we panted instead of speaking. The walls of the monastery took me by surprise when we came out of the woods around the last bend; I hadn’t remembered that bend, or the sudden opening at the peak of the mountain, the huge evening all around us. I barely remembered the flat dusty area below the front gate, where today there were no cars parked. Where were the tourists? I wondered. A moment later we were close enough to read the sign-repairs, no visitors this month. It was not enough to slow our footsteps. “Come on,” Barley said. He took my hand and I was deeply glad for it; my own had begun to tremble.

The front walls around the gate were ornamented with scaffolding now. A portable cement mixer-cement? here?-stood in our path. The wooden doors under the portal were firmly shut but not locked, we discovered, trying the iron ring with cautious hands. I didn’t like breaking in; I didn’t like the fact that there was no sign of my father. Maybe he was still down in Les Bains, or someplace else. Could he be searching the foot of the cliff as he had years ago, hundreds of feet below, out of our range of vision? I began to regret our impulse to come straight to the monastery. In addition, although true sunset was perhaps an hour away, the sun was dropping swiftly behind the Pyrénées to the west, slipping visibly behind the highest peaks. The woods we’d just come out of were already in deep gloom, and soon the last color of the day would drain from the monastery’s walls.

We stepped inside, cautiously, and went up into the courtyard and cloisters. The red marble fountain bubbled audibly in the center. There were the delicate corkscrewed columns I remembered, the long cloisters, the rose garden at the end. The golden light was gone, replaced by shadows of a deep umber. Nobody was in sight. “Do you think we should go back to Les Bains?” I whispered to Barley.

He seemed about to answer when we caught a sound-chanting, from the church on the other side of the cloister. Its doors were shut, but we could hear distinctly the progress of a service inside, with intervals of silence. “They’re all in there,” Barley said. “Maybe your father is, too.”

But I doubted this. “If he’s here, he’s probably gone down -” I paused and looked around the courtyard. It had been almost two years since my visit here with my father-my second visit, I now knew-and I couldn’t remember for a moment where the entrance to the crypt was. Suddenly I saw the doorway, as if it had opened in the nearby wall of the cloisters without my noticing. I remembered now the peculiar beasts carved in stone around it: griffins and lions, dragons and birds, strange animals I couldn’t identify, hybrids of good and evil.

Barley and I both looked at the church, but the doors stayed firmly shut, and we crept across the courtyard to the crypt doorway. Standing there a moment under the gaze of those frozen beasts, I could see only the shadow into which we would have to descend, and my heart shrank inside me. Then I remembered that my father might be down there-might, in fact, be in some kind of terrible trouble. And Barley was holding my hand still, lanky and defiant next to me. I almost expected him to mutter something about the odd things my family got into, but he was taut beside me, poised as I was for anything. “We don’t have a light,” he whispered.

“Well, we can’t go into the church for one,” I pointed out unnecessarily.

“I’ve got my lighter.” Barley took it out of his pocket. I hadn’t known he smoked. He flicked it on for a second, held it above the steps, and we descended together into darkness.

At first it was dark indeed, and we were feeling our way down the steepness of the ancient steps, and then I saw a light flickering in the depths of the vault-not Barley’s lighter, which he relit every few seconds-and I was terribly afraid. That shadowy light was somehow worse than darkness. Barley gripped my hand until I felt the life draining out of it. The stairwell curved at the bottom and when we came around the last turn I remembered what my father had told me, that this had been the nave of the earliest church here. There was the abbot’s great stone sarcophagus. There was the shadowy cross carved in the ancient apse, the low vaulting above us, one of the earliest surviving gestures of the Romanesque in all of Europe.

I took this in peripherally, however, because just then a shadow on the other side of the sarcophagus detached itself from deeper shadows and straightened up: a man holding a lantern. It was my father. His face looked ravaged in the shifting light. He saw us in the instant we saw him, I think, and he swore-“Jesus Christ!” We stared at each other. “What are you doing here?” he demanded in a low voice, looking from me to Barley, holding up the lantern in front of our faces. His tone was ferocious-full of anger, fear, love. I dropped Barley’s hand and ran to my father, around the sarcophagus, and he caught me in his arms. “Jesus,” he said, stroking my hair for a second. “This is the last place you should be.”