Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“Is this what you wanted?” the lady librarian was asking me. I looked down at the paper she pushed toward me. “You see, it’s the slip for Bram Stoker,Dracula. We have just one copy.”

The grubby male librarian suddenly dropped a book on the floor, and the sound of it reverberated with a bang through the high nave. He straightened and looked directly at me, and I have never seen-or until that moment had never seen-a human gaze so full of hatred and wariness. “That’s what you wanted, right?” the lady was insisting.

“Oh, no,” I said, thinking fast, catching hold of myself. “You must have misunderstood me. I’m looking for Gibbon’sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I told you, I’m teaching a course on it and we’ve got to have extra copies.”

She frowned heavily. “But I thought -”

I hated to sacrifice her feelings, even in that unpleasant moment, when she’d unbent so far toward me. “That’s all right,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t look carefully enough. I’ll go back and check the catalog again.”

As soon as I said the wordcatalog, however, I knew I’d overused my new fluency. The tall librarian’s eyes narrowed further and he moved his head slightly, like an animal following the motions of its prey. “Thanks very much,” I murmured politely and walked off, feeling those sharp eyes boring into my back all the way down the great aisle. I made a show of going back to the catalog for a minute, then closed my briefcase and went purposefully out the front door, through which the faithful were already flocking for their morning study. Outside, I found a bench in the brightest possible sunlight, my back against one of those neo-Gothic walls, where I could safely see everyone around me coming and going. I needed five minutes to sit and think-reflection, Rossi always taught, should be well-timed rather than time-consuming.

It was all too much to digest quickly, however. In that dazed moment I had taken in not only my glimpse of the librarian’s wounded neck but also the name of the library patron who had beaten me toDracula. Her name was Helen Rossi.

The wind was cold and increasingly strong. My father paused here and drew from his camera bag two waterproof jackets, one for each of us. He kept them rolled up tightly to fit with his photographic equipment, canvas hat, and a little first-aid kit. Without speaking, we put them over our blazers, and he continued.

Sitting there in the late-spring sunshine, watching the university stir and wake to its usual activities, I felt a sudden envy of all those ordinary-looking students and faculty striding here and there. They thought that tomorrow’s exam was a serious challenge, or that department politics constituted high drama, I reflected bitterly. Not one of them could have understood my predicament, or helped me out of it. I felt the loneliness, suddenly, of standing outside my institution, my universe, a worker bee expelled from the hive. And this state of things, I realized with surprise, had come about in forty-eight hours.

I had to think clearly now, and fast. First, I had observed what Rossi himself had reported: someone outside the immediate threat to Rossi-in this case the someone was a half-washed, eccentric-looking librarian-had been bitten in the neck. Let us presume, I told myself, almost laughing at the preposterousness of the things I was starting to believe, let us presume that our librarian was bitten by a vampire, and quite recently. Rossi had been swept out of his office-with bloodshed, I reminded myself-only two nights earlier. Dracula, if he were at large, seemed to have a predilection not only for the best of the academic world (here I remembered poor Hedges) but also for librarians, archivists. No-I sat up straight, suddenly seeing the pattern-he had a predilection for those who handled archives that had something to do with his legend. First there had been the bureaucrat who had snatched the map from Rossi in Istanbul. The Smithsonian researcher, too, I thought, recalling Rossi’s last letter. And, of course, threatened all along, there was Rossi himself, who had a copy of “one of these nice books” and had examined other possibly relevant documents. And then this librarian, although I had no proof yet that the fellow had handled any Dracula documents. And finally-me?

I picked up my briefcase and hurried to a public phone booth near the student commons. “University information, please.” No one had followed me here, as far as I could see, but I closed the door and through it kept a sharp eye on the passersby. “Do you have a listing for a Miss Helen Rossi? Yes, graduate student,” I hazarded.

The university operator was laconic; I could hear her shuffling slowly through papers. “We have an H. Rossi listed in the women’s graduate dormitory,” she said.

“That’s it. Thank you so much.” I scribbled the number down and dialed again. A matron answered, her voice sharp and protective. “Miss Rossi? Yes? Who’s calling, please?”

Oh, God. I hadn’t thought ahead to this. “Her brother,” I said quickly. “She told me she’d be at this number.”

I could hear footsteps leaving the phone, a sharper stride returning, the rustle of a hand taking the receiver. “Thank you, Miss Lewis,” said a distant voice, as if in dismissal. Then she spoke into my ear and I heard the low, strong tone I remembered from the library. “I do not have a brother,” she said. It sounded like a warning, not a mere statement of fact. “Who is this?”

My father rubbed his hands together in the chill wind, making the sleeves of his jacket crinkle like tissue paper. Helen, I thought, although I did not dare repeat the name aloud. It was a name I had always liked; it evoked for me something valiant and beautiful, like the Pre-Raphaelite frontispiece showing Helen of Troy in myChildren’s Book of the Iliad, which I had owned at home in the United States. Above all, it had been my mother’s name, and she was a topic my father never discussed.

I looked hard at him, but he was already speaking again. “Hot tea in one of those cafés down there,” he said. “That’s what I need. How about you?” I noticed for the first time that his face-the handsome, tactful face of a diplomat-was marred by heavy shadows, which ringed his eyes and gave his nose a pinched look at the base, as if he never slept enough. He rose and stretched, and then we looked out at each of the giddily framed views a last time. My father held me back a little as if he feared I would fall.

Athens made my father nervous and tired; I could see that plainly after only a day there. For my part, I found it exhilarating: I liked the combined senses of decay and vitality, the suffocating, exhaust-spewing traffic that whirled around its squares and parks and outcroppings of ancient monuments, the Botanic Gardens with a lion caged in the middle, the soaring Acropolis with frivolous-looking restaurant awnings fluttering around its base. My father promised we would climb up for a view as soon as he had time. It was February of 1974, the first time in nearly three months he’d traveled anywhere, and he’d brought me reluctantly, because he disliked the Greek military presence on the streets. I intended to make the most of every moment.

Meanwhile, I worked diligently in my hotel room, keeping an eye on the temple-crowned heights out my one window as if they might take wing after twenty-five hundred years and fly off without my ever having explored them. I could see the roads, paths, alleys that wound upward toward the base of the Parthenon. It would be a long, slow walk-we were in hot country again, and summer began early here-among whitewashed houses and stuccoed lemonade shops, a path that broke out into ancient marketplaces and temple grounds from time to time, then cut back through the tile-roofed neighborhoods. I could see some of this labyrinth from the dingy window. We would rise from one view to another, looking out on what the residents of the Acropolis neighborhood saw from their front doors every day. I could imagine from here the vistas of ruins, looming municipal buildings, semitropical parks, winding streets, gold-tipped or red-tiled churches that stood out in the evening light like colored rocks scattered on a gray beach.