Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

Among these scattered village names I saw a square, marked by Rossi: “(Arabic) The Unholy Tomb of One Who Kills Turks.” Above this box was a rather nicely drawn little dragon, a castle crowning its head, and under it I read more Greek letters, and Rossi’s English translation: “In this spot, he is housed in evil. Reader, unbury him with a word.” The lines were unbelievably compelling, like an incantation, and I had opened my mouth to intone them aloud when I stopped and closed my lips tightly. They made a sort of poetry in my head, nevertheless, which danced there infernally for a couple of seconds.

I set the three maps aside. It was terrifying to see them there, exactly as Rossi had described them, and stranger yet to see not the originals but these copies in his own hand. What was to prove to me, ultimately, that he hadn’t made the whole thing up, drawing these very maps as a prank? I had no primary sources in this matter, apart from his letters. I drummed my fingers on the desktop. The clock in my study seemed to be ticking unusually loudly tonight, and the urban half darkness seemed too still behind my venetian blinds. I hadn’t eaten in hours and my legs ached, but I couldn’t stop now. I glanced briefly at the road map of the Balkans, but there was nothing unusual on it, apparently-no handwritten marks, for example. The brochure on Romania also yielded nothing striking, apart from the weird English in which it was printed: “Avail yourselves of our lush and appalling countryside,” for example. The only items that remained to be examined were the notes in Rossi’s hand and that small sealed envelope I’d noticed on first turning through the papers. I had meant to leave the envelope for last, because it was sealed, but I couldn’t wait longer. I found my letter opener among the papers on my desk, carefully broke the seal, and drew out a sheet of notepaper.

It was the third map again, with its dragon shape, curling river, towering caricature mountain peaks. It had been copied in black ink, like Rossi’s version, but the hand was slightly different-a good facsimile but somehow cramped, archaic, a little ornate, when you looked at it closely. I should have been prepared by Rossi’s letter for the sight of the one difference from the first version of the map, but it still hit me like a physical blow: over the boxlike tomb site and its guardian dragon curved the wordsBARTOLOMEO ROSSI.

I fought down assumptions, fears, and conclusions, and willed myself to set the paper aside and read the pages of Rossi’s notes. The first two he had apparently made in the archives at Oxford and the British Museum Library, and they told me nothing he had not already. There was a brief outline of Vlad Dracula’s life and exploits, and a listing of some literary and historical documents in which Dracula had been mentioned over the centuries. Another page followed these, on a different notepaper, and this was marked and dated from his trip to Istanbul. “Reconstituted from memory,” said his swift yet careful handwriting, and I realized they must be the notes he had thrown onto paper after his experience in the archive, when he’d sketched the maps from memory before leaving for Greece.

These notes listed the Istanbul library’s holdings of documents from Sultan Mehmed II’s time-at least whatever had struck Rossi as pertaining to his own research-the three maps, scrolls of accounts from the Carpathian wars against the Ottomans, and ledgers of goods traded among Ottoman merchants at the edge of that region. None of this seemed to me very enlightening; but I wondered at what point, exactly, Rossi’s labors had been interrupted by the ominous-looking bureaucrat. Could the scrolls of accounts and ledgers of trade he mentioned here contain clues to Vlad Tepes’s demise or burial? Had Rossi actually looked through them himself, or had he merely had time to list the possibilities in that archive before being scared away from it?

There was one last item on the list from the archive, and this one took me by surprise, so that I lingered over it for a few minutes. “Bibliography, Order of the Dragon (partial scroll form).” What surprised me about this jotting and made me hesitate over it was the fact that it was so uninformative. Usually Rossi’s notes were thorough, self-explanatory; that, he liked to say, was the point of note taking. Was this bibliography he mentioned so hurriedly a list the library had put together to record all the material they housed that pertained to the Order of the Dragon? If so, why would it be in “partial scroll form”? It must be something ancient itself, I thought-perhaps one of the library’s holdings from the time of the Order of the Dragon. But why had Rossi not explained further, on this otherwise mute sheet of notebook paper? Had the bibliography, whatever it was, proven irrelevant to his search?

These musings over a far-away archive, which Rossi had looked through so long ago, hardly seemed a direct path to his disappearance, and I dropped the page in disgust, tired suddenly of the trivia of research. I craved answers. With the exception of whatever lay in the scrolls of accounts, in the ledgers, and in that old bibliography, Rossi had been surprisingly thorough in sharing with me his discoveries. But that was like him, that conciseness; besides, he’d had the luxury, if it could be called that, of explaining himself in many pages of letters. And yet I knew little, except what I must probably attempt to do next. The envelope was completely, depressingly empty now, and I hadn’t learned much more from the last documents it had contained than I’d learned from his letters. I realized also that I must act as fast as possible. I had often stayed up all night before, and in the next hour I might be able to assemble for myself what Rossi had told me about the previous threats on his life, as he saw them.

I stood, my joints creaking, and went to my dismal little kitchen to boil some bouillon for soup. As I reached for a clean pot, I realized that my cat had not come in for his supper, a meal I shared with him. He was a stray, and I suspected that our arrangement was not wholly monogamous. But around supper time he was usually there at my narrow kitchen window, peering in from the fire escape to let me know he wanted his can of tuna or, when I’d splurged on him, his dish of sardines. I had come to love the moment when he jumped down into my lifeless apartment, stretching and crying in an extravagance of affection. He often stayed a while after eating, sleeping on the end of the sofa or watching me iron my shirts. Sometimes I thought I saw an expression of tenderness in his perfectly round yellow eyes, although it might also have been pity. He was powerful and sinewy, with a soft black-and-white coat. I called him Rembrandt. Thinking of him, I lifted the edge of the blind, pushed up the window, and called him, waiting for the thud of feline feet on the windowsill. I could hear only distant night traffic from the center of the city. I lowered my head and looked out.

His shape filled the space, grotesquely, as if he had rolled there in play and then gone limp. I drew it into the kitchen with gentle, fearful hands, immediately aware of the broken spine and weirdly flopping head. Rembrandt’s eyes were open wider than I’d ever seen them in life, his lips drawn back in a snarl of fear and his front paws splayed and thorny. I knew at once he could not have fallen there, so precisely, onto the narrow windowsill. It would take a large and strong grip to kill such a creature-I touched his soft coat, rage welling under my terror-and the perpetrator would have been scratched and perhaps bitten fiercely. But my friend was incontrovertibly dead. I had set him softly down on the kitchen floor, my lungs filling with a smoky hate, before I realized that under my hands his body was still warm.