Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

Around us lay softly worn flagstones, interrupted here and there by heavy shade trees-serious, melancholy old trees with the occasional bench underneath. A little rectangle of perfect grass and a narrow pool of water lay at the feet of the college’s main building. It was one of Oxford ’s oldest, endowed by Edward III in the thirteenth century, its newest additions shaped by Elizabethan architects. Even that patch of carefully clipped grass looked venerable; certainly I never saw anyone step on it.

We skirted the grass and water and made our way to the porter’s office just inside, and from there to a suite of rooms adjoining the master’s house. These rooms must have been part of the original design of the college, although it was hard to tell what they had originally been used for; they were very low-ceilinged, with dark paneling and tiny leaded windows. My father’s bedroom had blue draperies. Mine, to my infinite satisfaction, had a high chintz canopy bed.

We unpacked a little, washed our travelers’ faces in a pale-yellow basin in our shared bathroom, and went to meet Master James, who was expecting us in his office at the other end of the building. He turned out to be a hearty, kind-spoken man with graying hair and a knobby scar on one cheekbone. I liked his warm handshake and the expression of his large, rather protuberant hazel eyes. He seemed to find nothing strange about my accompanying my father to the conference and went so far as to suggest that I tour the college with his student assistant that afternoon. His assistant, he said, was an obliging and very knowledgeable young gentleman. My father said I could certainly do that; he himself would be busy with meetings then, and why shouldn’t I see the treasures of the place while I was there?

I turned up eagerly at three o’clock, my new beret in one hand and a notebook in the other, since my father had suggested I might get notes for a school paper out of the tour. My guide was a pale-haired, gangly undergraduate, whom Master James introduced as Stephen Barley. I liked Stephen’s fine, blue-veined hands and heavy fisherman’s sweater-“jumpah,” he called it when I admired it aloud. It gave me a feeling of temporary acceptance into that elite community to stroll across the quad at his side. It also gave me my first faint quaver of sexual belonging, the elusive feeling that if I slipped my hand into his as we walked along, a door would fall open somewhere in the long wall of reality as I knew it, never to be closed again. I’ve explained that I had led an extremely sheltered life-so sheltered, I see now, that even at nearly eighteen I hadn’t realized how close its confines were. The quiver of rebellion I felt walking beside a handsome university student came to me like a strain of music from an alien culture. But I clutched my notebook and my childhood more tightly and asked him why the courtyard was mainly stone instead of grass. He smiled down at me. “Well, I don’t know. No one’s asked that before.”

He took me into the dining hall, a high-ceilinged, Tudor-beamed barn full of wooden tables, and showed me where a young Earl of Rochester had cut something rude into a bench while dining there. The hall was lined with leaded windows, each ornamented in the center with an ancient scene of good works: Thomas à Becket kneeling at a deathbed, a priest in a long gown ladling out soup for a line of the cowering poor, a medieval doctor bandaging someone’s leg. Above the Rochester bench was a scene I couldn’t figure out, a man with a cross around his neck and a stick in one hand bending over what looked like a bundle of black rags. “Oh, that’s a curiosity indeed,” Stephen Barley told me. “We’re very proud of that. You see, this man is a don from the early years of the college, driving a silver stake through the heart of a vampire.”

I stared at him, speechless for a moment. “Were there vampires in Oxford in those days?” I asked finally.

“I don’t know about that,” he admitted, smiling. “But there’s a tradition that the early scholars of the college helped protect the countryside around here from vampires. Actually, they collected quite a bit of lore on vampires, quaint stuff, and you can still see it in the Radcliffe Camera, across the way. The legend says that the early dons wouldn’t even have books about the occult housed in the college, so they were put in various other places and finally ended up there.”

I suddenly remembered Rossi and wondered if he’d seen some of this old collection. “Is there any way of finding out the names of students from the past-I mean-maybe-fifty years ago-in this college? Graduate students?”

“Of course.” My companion looked quizzically at me across the wooden bench. “I can ask the master for you, if you like.”

“Oh, no.” I felt myself blushing, the curse of my youth. “It’s nothing important. But I would-could I see the vampire lore?”

“You like scary stuff, eh?” He looked amused. “It’s not much to look at, you know-just some old folios and a lot of leather books. But all right. We’ll go and see the college library now-you can’t miss that-and then I’ll take you up to the Camera.”

The library was, of course, one of the gems of the university. Since that innocent day, I have seen most of those colleges and known some of them intimately, wandered through their libraries and chapels and dining halls, lectured in their seminar rooms and taken tea in their parlors. I can safely say there is nothing to equal that first college library I saw, except perhaps Magdalen College Chapel, with its divine ornamentation. We first went into a reading room surrounded by stained glass like a tall terrarium, in which the students, rare captive plants, sat around tables whose antiquity was almost as great as that of the college itself. Strange lamps hung from the ceiling, and enormous globes from the era of Henry VIII stood on pedestals in the corners. Stephen Barley pointed out the many volumes of the originalOxford English Dictionary lining the shelves of one wall; others were filled with atlases from a long sweep of centuries, others with ancient peerages and works of English history, still others with Latin and Greek textbooks from every era of the college’s existence. In the center of the room stood a giant encyclopedia on a carved baroque stand, and near the entrance to the next room rested a glass case in which I could see a stark-looking old book that Stephen told me was a Gutenberg Bible. Above us, a round skylight like the oculus of a Byzantine church admitted long tapers of sunlight. Flights of pigeons wheeled overhead. The dusty sunshine touched the faces of students reading and turning pages at the tables, brushed their heavy jumpers and serious faces. It was a paradise of learning, and I prayed for eventual admission.

The next room was a vast hall hung with balconies, winding staircases, a high clerestory of old glass. Every available wall was lined with books, top to bottom, stone floor to vaulted ceiling. I saw acres of finely tooled leather bindings, swaths of portfolios, masses of little dark red nineteenth-century volumes. What, I wondered, could be in all those books? Would I understand anything in them? My fingers itched to take a few off the shelves, but I didn’t dare touch even a binding. I wasn’t sure if this was a library or a museum. I must have been gazing around with naked emotion on my face, because I suddenly caught my guide smiling at me, amused. “Not bad, eh? You must be a bookworm yourself. Come on, then-you’ve seen the best of it, and we’ll go up to the Camera.”

The bright day and the noisy, speeding cars were more jarring than ever after the hush of the library. I had them to thank, however, for a sudden gift: as we hurried across the traffic, Stephen took my hand, pulling me along to safety. He might have been someone’s peremptory big brother, I thought, but the touch of that dry, warm palm sent a tingling signal into mine, which glowed there after he’d dropped my hand. I felt sure, stealing glances at his cheerful, unchanged profile, that the message had registered in only one direction. But it was enough, for me, to have received it.