Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

She blew out a curl of gray smoke, thinking, but her eyes never left mine. It occurred to me that Helen Rossi was likelier to run into persecution by the communist governments she referred to with such cynicism than by Dracula. Perhaps she had actually defected to the West. I made a mental note to ask her about this later. Later? And what had become of her mother? And had she made all of this up, in Hungary, in order to attach herself to the reputation of a famous Western academic?

She was following her own train of thought. “Isn’t it a pretty picture? The long-lost daughter turns out to be a great credit, finds her father, happy reunion.” The bitterness in her smile turned my stomach. “But that is not quite what I had in mind. I have come here to let him hear about me, as if by accident-my publications, my lectures. We will see if he can hide from his past then, ignore me as he ignored my mother. And about this Dracula thing -” She pointed her cigarette at me. “My mother, bless her simple soul for thinking of it, told me something about that.”

“Told you what?” I asked faintly.

“Told me about Rossi’s special research on the subject. I had not known about it, not until last summer, just before I left for London. That is how they met; he was asking around in the village about vampire lore, and she had heard something about local vampires from her father and his cronies-not that a man alone should have been addressing a young girl in public, you understand, in that culture. But I suppose he did not know any better. Historian, you know-not an anthropologist. He was in Romania looking for information on Vlad the Impaler, our own dear Count Dracula. And don’t you think it’s strange”-she leaned forward suddenly, bringing her face closer to mine than it had been yet, but ferociously, not in appeal-“don’t you think it is downright weird that he has not published a thing on the subject? Not one thing, as you surely know. Why? I asked myself. Why should the famous explorer of historical territories-and women, apparently, since who knows how many other genius daughters he has out there-why should he not have published anything out of this very unusual research?”

“Why?” I asked, not moving.

“I’ll tell you. Because he is saving it up for a grand finale. It is his secret, his passion. Why else would a scholar remain silent? But he has a surprise coming to him.” Her lovely smile was a grin this time, and I didn’t like it. “You would not believe how much ground I have covered in a year, since I learned about this little interest of his. I have not contacted Professor Rossi, but I have been careful to make my expertise known in my department. What a shame it will be for him when someone else publishes the definitive work on the subject first-someone with his own name, too. It is beautiful. You see, I even took his name, once I arrived here-an academic nom de plume, you might say. Besides, in the East Bloc, we do not like other people stealing our heritage and commenting on it; they usually misunderstand it.”

I must have groaned out loud, because she paused momentarily and frowned at me. “By the end of this summer, I will know more than anyone in the world about the legend of Dracula. You can have your old book, by the way.” She opened the bag again and thumped it horribly, publicly, on the table between us. “I was simply checking something in it yesterday and I did not have time to go home for my own copy. You see, I do not even need it. It is only literature, in any case, and I know the whole damn thing almost by heart.”

My father looked around him like a man in a dream. We’d been standing on the Acropolis in silence for a quarter of an hour now, our feet planted on that crest of ancient civilization. I was awed by the muscular columns above us, and surprised to find that the most distant view on the horizon was of mountains, long dry ridges that hung darkly over the city at this sunset hour. But as we started back down, and he came out of his reverie to ask how I liked the great panorama, it took me a minute to collect my thoughts and answer. I had been thinking about the night before.

I’d gone into his room a little later than usual so that he could look through my algebra homework, and I found him writing, mulling over the day’s paperwork, as he often did in the evening. That night he sat very still with his head bent above the desk, drooping toward some documents, not upright and paging through them with his usual efficiency. I couldn’t tell from the doorway whether he was intently scanning something he’d just written, almost without seeing it, or simply trying not to doze. His form cast a great shadow on the undecorated hotel-room wall, the figure of a man slumped dully over another, darker desk. If I hadn’t known his fatigue, and the familiar shape of his shoulders sloping above the page, I might for a second-not knowing him-have said he was dead.

Triumphal, clear weather, the days enormous as a mountain sky, followed us with spring into Slovenia. When I asked if we’d have time to see Emona again-I connected it already with an earlier era in my life, one with a different flavor altogether, and with a beginning, and as I’ve said before one tries to revisit such places-my father said hurriedly that we’d be far too busy, staying at a great lake north of Emona for his conference and then rushing back to Amsterdam before I fell behind in school. Which I never did, but the possibility worried my father.

Lake Bled, when we arrived, was no disappointment. It had poured into an alpine valley at the end of one of the Ice Ages and provided early nomads there with a resting place-in thatched houses out on the water. Now it lay like a sapphire in the hands of the Alps, its surface burnished with whitecaps in the late-afternoon breeze. From one steep edge rose a cliff higher than the rest, and on this, one of Slovenia ’s great castles roosted, restored by the tourist bureau in unusually good taste. Its crenellations looked down on an island, where a specimen of those modest red-roofed churches of the Austrian type floated like a duck, and boats went out to the island every few hours. The hotel, as usual, was steel and glass, socialist tourism model number five, and we escaped it on the second day for a walk around the lower part of the lake. I told my father I didn’t think I could wait another twenty-four hours without seeing the castle that dominated the distant view at every meal, and he chuckled. “If you must, we’ll go,” he said. The new détente was even more promising than his team had hoped, and some of the lines on his forehead had relaxed since our arrival here.

So on the morning of the third day, leaving a diplomatic rehash of what had been rehashed the day before, we took a little bus around the lake, riding nearly to the level of the castle, and then dismounted to walk to the summit. The castle was made of brown stones like discolored bone, joined neatly together after some long state of dilapidation. When we came through the first passageway to a chamber of state (I suppose it was), I gasped: through a leaded window the surface of the lake shone a thousand feet below, stretching white in the sunlight. The castle seemed to be clinging to the edge of the precipice with only its toes dug in for support. The yellow-and-red church on the island below, the cheerful boat docking just then among tiny beds of red-and-yellow flowers, the great blue sky, had all served centuries of tourists, I thought.

But this castle, with its rocks worn smooth since the twelfth century, its tepees of battle-axes, spears, and hatchets in every corner, threatening to crash down if touched-this was the essence of the lake. Those early lake dwellers, moving skyward from their thatched, flammable huts, had ultimately chosen to perch here with the eagles, ruled over by one feudal lord. Even restored so deftly, the place breathed an ancient life. I turned from the dazzling window to the next room and saw, in a coffin of glass and wood, the skeleton of one small woman, dead long before the advent of Christianity, her bronze cloak ornament resting on her crumbling breastbone, green-bronze rings sliding off the bones of her fingers. When I bent over the case to look down at her, she smiled at me suddenly out of eye-sockets deep as twin pits.