Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

I whirled around, closed and latched the window, then thought frantically of my next move. How could I protect myself? The windows were all locked, and the door was double bolted. But what did I know about horrors from the past? Did they leak into rooms like mist, under the doors? Or shatter windows and burst directly into one’s presence? I looked around for a weapon. I didn’t own a gun-but guns never prevailed against Bela Lugosi, in the vampire movies, unless the hero was equipped with a special silver bullet. What had Rossi advised? “I wouldn’t go around with garlic in my pocket, no.” And something else, too: “I’m sure you carry your own goodness, moral sense, whatever you want to call it, with you-I like to think most of us are capable of that, anyway.”

I found a clean towel in one of the kitchen drawers and gently wrapped my friend’s body in it, laying him out in the front hall. I would have to bury him tomorrow, if tomorrow were going to come around the way it usually did. I would inter him in the backyard of the apartment house-deeply, where dogs couldn’t get at him. It was hard for me to imagine eating now, but I made my cup of soup and cut a slice of bread to go with it.

Then I sat down at the desk again and cleared away Rossi’s papers, putting them neatly back in the envelope. I set my mysterious dragon book on top of that, taking care not to let it fall open. On top of these I placed my copy of Hermann’s classicGolden Age of Amsterdam, which had long been one of my favorite books. I opened my dissertation notes across the center of the desk and propped up in front of me a pamphlet on merchants’ guilds in Utrecht, a reproduction from the library that I had yet to peruse. I laid my watch beside me and saw with a thrill of superstition that it showed a quarter to twelve. Tomorrow, I told myself, I would go to the library and swiftly do any reading I could find there that might equip me for the coming days. It couldn’t hurt to know more about silver stakes, garlic flowers, and crucifixes, if those were the peasant remedies prescribed against the undead for so many centuries. That would show a faith in tradition, at least. For now I had only Rossi’s advice, but Rossi had never failed me where it was in his power to help. I picked up my pen and bent my head over the pamphlet.

Never had I found it so difficult to concentrate. Every nerve in my body seemed alert to the presence outside, if it was a presence, as if my mind rather than my ears might be able to hear it brushing up against the windows. With an effort, I planted myself firmly in Amsterdam, 1690. I wrote a sentence, then another. Four minutes to midnight. “Look for some anecdotes about Dutch sailors’ lives,” I noted on my papers. I thought of the merchants, banding together in their already ancient guilds to squeeze the best they could from their lives and their wares, acting day by day on their rather simple sense of duty, using some of their surplus to build hospitals for the poor. Two minutes to midnight. I wrote down the name of the pamphlet’s author, to look up again later. “Explore the significance for merchants of the city’s printing presses,” I noted.

The minute hand on my watch jumped suddenly, and I jumped with it. It showed just shy of twelve o’clock. The printing presses might be extremely significant, I realized, forcing myself not to look behind me as I sat there, especially if the guilds had controlled some of them. Could they actually have purchased control of some of them, bought up ownership? Did the printers have their own guild? How did ideas about freedom of the press among Dutch intellectuals in that setting relate to the ownership of the presses? I grew interested for a moment, in spite of myself, and tried to remember what I’d read about early publishing in Amsterdam and Utrecht. Suddenly I felt a great stillness in the air, then a snapping of tension. I glanced at my watch. Three minutes after midnight. I was breathing normally and my pen moved freely across the page.

Whatever stalked me wasn’t quite as clever as I’d feared, I thought, careful not to pause in my work. Apparently, the undead took some appearances at face value, and I appeared to have heeded Rembrandt’s warning and settled down to my usual task. I wouldn’t be able to hide my real actions for long, but for tonight my own appearance was the only protection I had. I moved the lamp closer and settled into the seventeenth century for another hour, to deepen the impression of retreat into work. As I pretended to write, I reasoned with myself. The final threat to Rossi, in 1931, had been his own name on the location of Vlad the Impaler’s tomb. Rossi hadn’t been found lying dead over his desk two days ago, as I might be soon if I weren’t careful. He hadn’t been discovered wounded in the hallway, like Hedges. He had been abducted. He might be lying dead somewhere else, of course, but until I knew that for certain, I had to hope he was alive. Beginning tomorrow, I would have to try to find the tomb myself.

Seated on that old French fortress, my father was staring out to sea, rather as he’d looked across the gap of mountain air at Saint-Matthieu, watching the eagle bank and wheel. “Let’s go back to the hotel,” he said finally. “The days are getting shorter already, have you noticed? I don’t want to be caught up here after sunset.”

In my impatience, I dared a direct question. “Caught?”

He glanced at me seriously, as if considering the relative risks of the answers he could give. “The path is really steep,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t want to have to find my way back through those trees in the dark. Would you?” He could be daring, too, I saw.

I looked down into the olive groves, gray-white now instead of peach and silver. Each tree was twisted, straining up toward the ruins of a fortress that had once guarded it-or its ancestors, anyway-from Saracen torches. “No,” I answered, “I wouldn’t.”

It was early December, we were on the road again, and the lassitude of our summer trips to the Mediterranean seemed far behind us. The high Adriatic wind was combing my hair again and I liked the feel of it, its awkward roughness; it was as if a beast with heavy paws clambered over everything in the harbor, making flags snap sharply in front of the modern hotel and straining the topmost branches of the plane trees along the promenade. “What?” I shouted. My father again said something unintelligible, pointing at the top story of the emperor’s palace. We both craned back to look.

Diocletian’s elegant stronghold towered over us in the morning sunlight, and I almost fell over backward trying to see the upper edge of it. Many of the spaces between its beautiful columns had been filled in-often by people dividing up the building for apartments, my father had explained earlier-so that a patchwork of stone, much of it Roman-hewn marble plundered from other structures, shone across the whole strange facade. Here and there water or earthquake had broken long cracks in it. Tenacious little plants, even some trees, hung out of the fissures. The wind whipped up the broad collars of sailors strolling along the quay in twos and threes, their faces brass colored against white uniforms and their crew-cut dark hair shining like wire brushes. I followed my father around the edge of the building, over fallen black walnuts and the litter from sycamore trees, to the monument-lined square behind it, which smelled of urine. Just in front of us rose a fantastic tower, open to the winds and decorated like a piece of pastry, a tall thin wedding cake. It was quieter back here and we could stop shouting.

“I’ve always wanted to see this,” my father said in his normal voice. “Would you like to climb to the top?”

I led the way, taking the iron steps with gusto. In the open-air market near the quay, which I glimpsed from time to time through a marble frame, the trees had turned gold-brown, so that the cypresses along the water looked more black than green against them. As we rose I could see the water of the harbor navy blue beneath us, the small white shapes of the sailors on leave roaming among the outdoor cafés. Distant curving land, beyond our big hotel, pointed like an arrow to the interior region of the Slavic-speaking world, where my father would soon be drawn into the flood of détente spreading across it.