Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

At a table near the window we drank tea with lemon, scalding through the thick cups, and ate our way through sardines on buttered white bread and even a few slices oftorta. “We’d better stop there,” my father said. I had lately come to dislike the way he blew on his tea over and over to cool it, and to dread the inevitable moment when he said we should stop eating, stop doing whatever was enjoyable, save room for dinner. Looking at him in his neat tweed jacket and turtleneck, I felt he had denied himself every adventure in life except diplomacy, which consumed him. He would have been happier living a little, I thought; with him, everything was so serious.

But I was silent, because I knew he hated my criticism, and I had something to ask. I had to let him finish his tea first, so I leaned back in my chair, just far enough so that my father couldn’t tell me to please not slump. Through the silver-mottled window I could see a wet city, gloomy in the deepening afternoon, and people passing in a rush through horizontal rain. The teahouse, which should have been filled with ladies in long straight gowns of ivory gauze, or gentlemen in pointed beards and velvet coat collars, was empty.

“I hadn’t realized how much the driving had worn me out.” My father set his cup down and pointed to the castle, just visible through the rain. “That’s the direction we came from, the other side of that hill. We’ll be able to see the Alps from the top.”

I remembered the white-shouldered mountains and felt they breathed over this town. We were alone together on their far side, now. I hesitated, took a breath. “Would you tell me a story?” Stories were one of the comforts my father had always offered his motherless child; some of them he drew from his own pleasant childhood in Boston, and some from his more exotic travels. Some he invented for me on the spot, but I’d recently grown tired of those, finding them less astonishing than I’d once thought.

“A story about the Alps?”

“No.” I felt an inexplicable surge of fear. “I found something I wanted to ask you about.”

He turned and looked mildly at me, graying eyebrows raised above his gray eyes.

“It was in your library,” I said. “I’m sorry-I was poking around and I found some papers and a book. I didn’t look-much-at the papers. I thought -”

“A book?” Still he was mild, checking his cup for a last drop of tea, only half listening.

“They looked-the book was very old, with a dragon printed in the middle.”

He sat forward, sat very still, then shivered visibly. This strange gesture alerted me at once. If a story came, it wouldn’t be like any story he’d ever told me. He glanced at me, under his eyebrows, and I was surprised to see how drawn and sad he looked.

“Are you angry?” I was looking into my cup now, too.

“No, darling.” He sighed deeply, a sound almost grief stricken. The small blond waitress refilled our cups and left us alone again, and still he had a hard time getting started.

You already know, my father said, that before you were born I was a professor at an American university. Before that, I studied for many years to become a professor. At first I thought I would study literature. Then, however, I realized I loved true stories even better than imaginary ones. All the literary stories I read led me into some kind of-exploration-of history. So finally I gave myself up to it. And I’m very pleased that history interests you, too.

One spring night when I was still a graduate student, I was in my carrel at the university library, sitting alone very late among rows and rows of books. Looking up from my work, I suddenly realized that someone had left a book whose spine I had never seen before among my own textbooks, which sat on a shelf above my desk. The spine of this new book showed an elegant little dragon, green on pale leather.

I didn’t remember ever having seen the book there or anywhere else, so I took it down and looked through it without really thinking. The binding was soft, faded leather, and the pages inside appeared to be quite old. It opened easily to the very center. Across those two pages I saw a great woodcut of a dragon with spread wings and a long looped tail, a beast unfurled and raging, claws outstretched. In the dragon’s claws hung a banner on which ran a single word in Gothic lettering:DRAKULYA.

I recognized the word at once and thought of Bram Stoker’s novel, which I hadn’t yet read, and of those childhood nights at the movie theater in my neighborhood, Bela Lugosi hovering over some starlet’s white neck. But the spelling of the word was odd and the book clearly very old. Besides, I was a scholar and deeply interested in European history, and after staring at it for a few seconds, I remembered something I’d read. The name actually came from the Latin root fordragon ordevil, the honorary title of Vlad Tepes-the “Impaler”-of Wallachia, a feudal lord in the Carpathians who tormented his subjects and prisoners of war in unbelievably cruel ways. I was studying trade in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, so I didn’t see any reason for a book on this subject to be tucked in among mine, and I decided it must have been left there accidentally, perhaps by someone who was working on the history of Central Europe, or on feudal symbols.

I flipped through the rest of the pages-when you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation. To my further surprise, the rest of it-all those fine old ivory-colored leaves-was completely blank. There wasn’t even a title page, and certainly no information about where or when the book had been printed, no maps or endpapers or other illustrations. It showed no imprint of the university library, no card or stamp or label.

After gazing at the book for a few more minutes, I set it on my desk and went down to the card catalog on the first floor. There was indeed a subject card for “Vlad III (‘Tepes’) of Wallachia, 1431- 1476-See also Wallachia, Transylvania, and Dracula.” I thought I should check a map first; I quickly discovered that Wallachia and Transylvania were two ancient regions in what was now Romania. Transylvania looked more mountainous, with Wallachia bordering it on the southwest. In the stacks I found what seemed to be the library’s only primary source on the subject, a strange little English translation from the 1890s of some pamphlets about “Drakula.” The original pamphlets had been printed in Nuremberg in the 1470s and ‘80s. The mention of Nuremberg gave me a chill; only a few years earlier, I had followed closely the trials there of Nazi leaders. I’d been too young by one year to serve in the war before it ended, and I had studied its aftermath with all the fervor of the excluded. The volume of pamphlets had a frontispiece, a crude woodcut of a man’s head and shoulders, a bullnecked man with hooded dark eyes, a long mustache, and a hat with a feather in it. The image was surprisingly lively, given the primitive medium.

I knew I should be getting on with my work, but I couldn’t help reading the beginning of one of the pamphlets. It was a list of some of Dracula’s crimes against his own people, and against some other groups, too. I could repeat what it said, from memory, but I think I won’t-it was extremely disturbing. I shut the little volume with a snap and went back to my carrel. The seventeenth century consumed my attention until nearly midnight. I left the strange book lying closed on my desk, hoping its owner would find it there the next day, and then I went home to bed.

In the morning I had to attend a lecture. I was tired from my long night, but after class I drank two cups of coffee and went back up to my research. The antique book was still there, lying open now to that great swirling dragon. After my short sleep and jarring lunch of coffee, it gave me a turn, as old novels used to say. I looked at the book again, more carefully. The central image was clearly a woodcut, perhaps a medieval design, a fine sample of bookmaking. I thought it might be valuable in a cold-cash way, and maybe also of personal value to some scholar, since it obviously wasn’t a library book.