Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“Of course not.” My father snorted softly, but I thought his eyes shone with affection.

“Well, as we were getting off the train in Paris, I saw an old man on the platform, a Muslim, I guess, in a dark red hat with a long tassel, and a long robe, like an Ottoman pasha, and I suddenly remembered that letter. Then your father’s story hit me again-you know, the name of the Turkish professor”-he gave me a somber look-“and I went to the phone. I realized Master James must still be in on this hunt, in some way.”

“Where was I?” I asked jealously.

“In the bathroom, I suppose. Girls are always in the bathroom.” He might as well have blown me a kiss, but not in front of the others. “Master James was livid with me on the phone, but when I told him what was going on, he said I was in his good graces forever.” Barley’s red lips trembled a little. “I didn’t dare ask him what he meant to do, but now we know.”

“Yes, we do,” my father echoed sadly. “He must have done the calculation from that old book, too, and figured out that it was sixteen years to the week since Dracula’s last visit to Saint-Matthieu. Then he’d certainly have realized where I was going. In fact, he was probably checking up on me when he went up to the rare-book niche-he was after me several times in Oxford to tell him what was wrong, worried about my health and spirits. I didn’t want to drag him into it, knowing what a risk was involved.”

Helen nodded. “Yes. I think I must have been there just before he was. I found the open book and did the calculation for myself, and then I heard someone on the stairs and slipped out in the other direction. Like our friend, I saw that you would go to Saint-Matthieu, Paul, to try to find me and to find that fiend, and I traveled as fast as I could. But I didn’t know which train you would take, and I certainly didn’t know our daughter would try to follow you, too.”

“I saw you,” I said in wonder. She gazed at me, and we let it drop for the moment. There would be so much time to talk. I could see she was tired, that we were all tired to the bone, that we could not even begin to say to one another tonight what a triumph this had been. Was the world safer because we were all together, or because he was finally gone from it? I looked into a future I had never known about before. Helen would live with us and blow out the candles in the dining room. She would come to my graduation from high school and my first day at university and help me dress for my wedding, if I ever married. She would read aloud to us in the front room after dinner, she would rejoin the world and teach again, she would take me to buy shoes and blouses, she would walk with her arm around my waist.

I could not know then that she would also drift from us at times, not speaking for hours, fingering her neck, or that a wasting illness would take her away for good nine years later-long before we had gotten used to having her back, although we might never have gotten used to that, might never have tired of the reprieve of her presence. I couldn’t foresee that our last gift would be knowing that she rested in peace, when it could have been otherwise, and that this certainty would be both heartbreaking and curative for us. If I had been able to foresee these things at all, I might have known that my father would disappear for a day after her funeral, and that the little dagger in our parlor cabinet would go with him, and that I would never, never ask him about it.

But at that fireside in Les Bains, the years we would have with her stretched ahead of us in endless benediction. They began a few minutes later when my father rose and kissed me, shook Barley’s hand with momentary fervor, and drew Helen from the divan. “Come,” he said, and she leaned on him, her story spent for now, her face weary, joyful. He was gathering her hands in his. “Come up to bed.”

Acouple of years ago, a strange opportunity presented itself to me while I was in Philadelphia for a conference, an international gathering of medieval historians. I had never been to Philadelphia before and I was intrigued by the contrast between our meetings, which delved into a feudal and monastic past, and the lively metropolis around us, with its more recent history of Enlightenment republicanism and revolution. The view from my fourteenth-floor hotel room downtown showed an odd mix of skyscrapers and blocks of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century houses, which looked like miniatures next to them.

During our few hours of leisure, I slipped away from the endless talk of Byzantine artifacts to see some real ones in the magnificent art museum. There I picked up a pamphlet for a small literary museum and library downtown, whose name I’d heard years before from my father, and whose collection I had reason to know about. It was as important a site for Dracula scholars-whose numbers, of course, have swelled considerably since my father’s first investigations-as many archives in Europe. There, I recalled, a researcher might see Bram Stoker’s notes forDracula, culled from sources at the British Museum Library, and an important medieval pamphlet, as well. The opportunity was irresistible. My father had always wanted to visit this collection; I would spend an hour there for his sake. He had been killed by a land mine in Sarajevo more than ten years before, working to mediate Europe’s worst conflagration in decades. I hadn’t known for nearly a week; the news, when it found me, had left me marooned in silence for a year. I still missed him every day, sometimes every hour.

That was how I came to find myself in a small, climate-controlled room in one of the city’s nineteenth-century brownstones, handling documents that breathed not only a distant past but also the urgency of my father’s researches. The windows looked out on a couple of feathery street trees and across to more brownstones, their elegant facades unsullied by any modern additions. There was only one other scholar in the small library that morning, an Italian woman who whispered into her cell phone for a few minutes before opening someone’s handwritten diaries-I tried not to crane at them-and beginning to read. When I had settled myself with a notebook and a light sweater against the air-conditioning, the librarian brought me first Stoker’s papers and then a small cardboard box bound with ribbon.

Stoker’s notes were a pleasant diversion, a study in chaotic note taking. Some were written in a cramped hand, some typed on ancient onionskin. Among them lay newspaper clippings about mysterious events and leaves from his personal calendar. I thought how my father would have enjoyed this, how he would have smiled over Stoker’s innocent dabbling in the occult. But after half an hour I put them carefully aside and turned to the other box. It held one slim volume, bound in a neat, probably nineteenth-century cover-forty pages printed on nearly unblemished fifteenth-century parchment, a medieval treasure, a miracle of movable type. The frontispiece was a woodcut, a face I knew from my long travail, its great eyes, wide and yet somehow sly, looking piercingly out at me, the heavy mustache drooping over a square jaw, the long nose fine and yet menacing, the sensual lips just visible.

It was a pamphlet from Nuremberg, printed in 1491, and it told of Dracole Waida’s crimes, his cruelty, his bloodthirsty feasts. I could make out, from their familiarity to me, the first lines of the medieval German: “In the Year of Our Lord 1456, Drakula did many terrible and curious things.” The library had provided a translation sheet, in fact, and there I reread with a shudder some of Dracula’s crimes against humanity. He had had people roasted alive, he had flayed them, he had buried them up to their necks, he had impaled infants on their mothers’ breasts. My father had examined other such pamphlets, of course, but he would have valued this one for its astounding freshness, the crispness of its parchment, its nearly perfect condition. After five centuries, it looked newly printed. Its very purity unnerved me, and after a while I was glad to put it away and tie the ribbon again, wondering a little why I’d wanted to see the thing in person. That arrogant stare fixed me until I shut the book on it.