Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“I didn’t touch him! I don’t know anything about it!”

“Oh, yes, you do.” Helen bent closer. Her expression was fierce, but she was very white, and I noticed now that she held her free hand tightly over her neck.

“Helen!”

I must have gasped aloud, but she waved me away, glaring at the librarian. “Where is Rossi? What was it you waited years for?” He shrank back. “I’m going to put this on your face now,” Helen said, lowering the crucifix.

“No!” he screamed. “I’ll tell you. Rossi didn’t want to go. I wanted to. It wasn’t fair. He took Rossi instead of me! He took him by force-I would have gone willingly to serve him, to help him, to catalog -” He suddenly clamped his mouth shut.

“What?” I thumped his head slightly on the floor for good measure. “Who took Rossi? Are you keeping him somewhere?”

Helen held the cross right over his nose, and he began to sob again. “My master,” he whimpered. Helen, next to me, drew a long breath and sat back on her heels, as if recoiling involuntarily from his words.

“Who is your master?” I dug my knee into his leg. “Where did he take Rossi?”

His eyes blazed. It was a shocking sight-the contortion, the normal human features hieroglyphic with terrible meaning. “Where I should have been allowed to go! To the tomb!”

Maybe my grip had weakened, or maybe his confession made him suddenly strong-probably from terror for himself, I realized afterward. In any case, he suddenly freed one hand, swung around like a scorpion, and bent my wrist backward where it held down his shoulder. The pain was unbearably sharp, and I jerked my arm back in fury. He was gone before I could understand what had happened, and I took off after him down the stairs, clattering past the undergraduate seminar and the quiet realms of knowledge below. But I was hampered by my briefcase, which I still clutched in one hand. Even in that first moment of pursuit, I realized fleetingly, I hadn’t wanted to drop it. Or throw it to Helen. She had told him about the map. She was a traitor. And he had bitten her, if only for a moment. Wouldn’t she be tainted herself now?

For the first and last time I ran through the hushed nave of the library instead of walking, only half seeing the astonished faces that turned toward me as I flew along. There was no sign of the librarian. He could have escaped into any backstage region, I realized with despair, any cataloging dungeon or broom closet for librarians only. I thrust open the heavy front door, an opening cut in the great double Gothic-style doors to the hall, which were never fully opened. Then I stopped short on the steps. The afternoon light blinded me as if I, too, had been living in an underworld, a cave of bats and rodents. On the street in front of the library, several cars had stopped. Traffic was at a halt, in fact, and a girl in a waitress uniform was crying on the sidewalk, pointing at something. Someone was shouting, and a couple of men knelt by the front tire of one of the stopped cars. The weaselly librarian’s legs stuck out from under the car, twisted at an impossible angle. One of his arms was flung over his head. He lay facedown on the pavement in a little blood, asleep forever.

My father was reluctant to take me to Oxford. He would be there six days, he said, a long time for me to miss school again. I was surprised that he was willing to leave me at home; he hadn’t done that even once since I’d found the dragon book. Was he planning to leave me with particular precautions? I pointed out that our trip along the Yugoslav coast had taken almost two weeks, without any sign of detriment to my schoolwork. He said education should always come first. I pointed out that he had always postulated travel as the best education, and that May was the pleasantest month for travel. I produced my latest report card, which gleamed with high grades, and a history paper on which my rather pompous instructor had written, “You show extraordinary insight into the nature of historical research, especially for one of your years,” a comment I had memorized and often repeated to myself as a mantra before I slept.

My father wavered visibly, setting his knife and fork down in a way I knew meant a pause in our dinner in the old Dutch dining room, not a decisive end to the first course. He said his work would prevent him from showing me around properly this time and he didn’t want to spoil my first impressions of Oxford by keeping me cooped up somewhere. I said I preferred being cooped up in Oxford to being cooped up at home with Mrs. Clay-at this point we dropped our voices, although she was having her evening off. Besides, I was old enough, I said, to wander around by myself. He said he just didn’t know if it was a good idea for me to go, since these talks promised to be rather-tense. It might not be quite-but he couldn’t go on and I knew why. Just as I could not use my real argument for going to Oxford, he could not use his for wanting to prevent me from going. I could not tell him aloud that I couldn’t bear to let him, with his dark-circled eyes and the fatigued stoop of shoulder and head, out of my sight now. And he could not counter aloud that he might not be safe in Oxford and that, therefore, I might not be safe with him. He was silent for a minute or two, and then he asked me very gently what we were having for dessert, and I brought in Mrs. Clay’s dreary rice pudding with currants, which she always left as a compensation for going out to the movies at the British Centre without us.

Ihad imagined Oxford hushed and green, a kind of outdoor cathedral where dons in medieval dress paraded around, each with a single student at his side, lecturing on history, literature, obscure theology. The reality was shockingly lively: beeping motorcycles, little cars darting here and there and narrowly missing students as they crossed the streets, a crowd of tourists photographing a cross on the sidewalk where a couple of bishops had been burned at the stake four hundred years earlier, before sidewalks. The dons and students alike wore disappointingly modern dress, mostly wool sweaters, with dark flannel trousers for the mentor and blue jeans for the disciple. I thought with regret that in Rossi’s time, a good forty years before we stepped off our bus onto Broad Street, Oxford must at least have dressed with a little more dignity.

Then I caught sight of the first college I ever saw there, towering over its walled enclosure in the morning light, and looming near it the perfect shape of the Radcliffe Camera, which I took at first for a small observatory. Behind that rose the spires of a great brown church, and along the street ran a wall that looked so old even the lichens on it seemed antique. I couldn’t imagine how we would have appeared to whoever had walked these streets when that wall was young-I in my short red dress and crocheted white stockings and my book bag, my father in his navy jacket and gray slacks, his black turtleneck and tweed hat, each of us lugging a small suitcase. “Here we are,” my father pronounced, and to my delight we turned in at a gate in the lichened wall. It was locked, and we waited there until a student held the wrought-iron bars open for us.

At Oxford my father was to speak at a conference on political relations between the United States and Eastern Europe, now in the full flower of a thaw. Because the university was hosting the conference, we were invited to stay in private rooms in the house of one of the college masters. The masters, my father explained, were benevolent dictators who looked after the students who lived in each college. As we made our way through the dark, low entryway and into the blazing sunlight of the college quadrangle, I realized for the first time that soon I, too, would go to college, and I crossed my fingers on my book-bag handle and breathed a wish that I would then find myself in a haven like this one.