Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“My amazement increased during the taxi ride to town. I don’t know exactly what I had expected of Istanbul-nothing, maybe, since I had had so little time to anticipate the journey-but the beauty of this city knocked the wind out of me. It had anArabian Nights quality that no number of honking cars or businessmen in Western suits could dissolve. The first city here, Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium and the first capital of Christian Rome, must have been splendid beyond belief, I thought-a marriage of Roman wealth and early Christian mysticism. By the time we found some rooms in the old quarter of Sultanahmet, I had received a dizzying glimpse of dozens of mosques and minarets, bazaars hung with fine textiles, even a flash of the many-domed, four-horned Hagia Sophia billowing above the peninsula.

“Helen had never been here either, and she studied everything with quiet concentration, turning to me only once during the cab ride to remark how strange it was for her to see the wellspring-I believe that was her word-of the Ottoman Empire, which had left so many traces on her native country. This was to become a theme of our days there-her brief, pungent remarks on all that was already familiar to her: Turkish place-names, a cucumber salad consumed in an outdoor restaurant, the pointed arch of a window frame. This had a peculiar effect on me, too, a sort of doubling of my experience, so that I seemed to be seeing Istanbul and Romania at the same time, and as the question gradually arose between us of whether we would have to go into Romania itself, I had a sense of being led there by the artifacts of the past as I saw them through Helen’s eyes. But I digress-this is a later episode of my story.

“Our landlady’s front hall was cool after the glare and dust of the street. I sank gratefully into a chair in the entrance there, letting Helen reserve two rooms in her excellent but weirdly accented French. The landlady-an Armenian woman who was fond of travelers and had apparently learned their languages-didn’t know the name of Rossi’s hotel, either. Perhaps it had vanished years before.

“Helen liked to run things, I mused, so why not allow her the satisfaction? It was unspoken but firmly agreed between us that I would later pay the bill. I had withdrawn all of my sparse savings from the bank at home; Rossi deserved every effort I could make, even if I failed. I would simply have to go home bankrupt if it came to that. I knew that Helen, a foreign student, probably had less than nothing, lived on nothing. I had already noticed that she seemed to own just two suits, which she varied with a selection of sternly tailored blouses. ‘Yes, we’ll take the two separate rooms side by side,’ she told the Armenian lady, a fine-featured old woman. ‘My brother-mon frère-ronfle terriblement.’

“‘Ronfle?’I asked from the lounge.

“‘Snores,’ she said tartly. ‘You do snore, you know. I didn’t get a blink of sleep in New York.’

“‘Wink,’ I corrected.

“‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Just keep your door shut,s’il te plaît. ’

“With or without snoring, we had to sleep off the exhaustion of travel before we could do anything else. Helen wanted to hunt down the archive at once, but I insisted on rest and a meal. So it was late afternoon before we began our first prowl of those labyrinthine streets, with their glimpses of colorful gardens and courtyards.

“Rossi had not named the archive in his letters, and in our conversation he had called it only ‘a little-known repository of materials, founded by Sultan Mehmed II.’ His letter about his research in Istanbul added that it was attached to a seventeenth-century mosque. Beyond this, we knew that he’d been able to see the Hagia Sophia from a window there, that the archive had more than one floor, and that it had a door communicating directly with the street on the first floor. I had tried cautiously to find information on such an archive at the university library at home just before our departure, but without success. I wondered at Rossi’s not giving the name of the archive in his letters; it wasn’t like him to leave out that detail, but perhaps he hadn’t wanted to remember it. I had all his papers with me in my briefcase, including his list of the documents he’d found there, with that strangely incomplete line at the end: ‘Bibliography, Order of the Dragon.’ Looking through an entire city, a maze of minarets and domes, for the source of that cryptic line in Rossi’s handwriting was a daunting prospect, to say the least.

“The only thing we could do was to turn our feet toward our one landmark, the Hagia Sophia, originally the great Byzantine Church of Saint Sophia. And once we drew near it, it was impossible for us not to enter. The gates were open and the huge sanctuary pulled us in among the other tourists as if we rode a wave into a cavern. For fourteen hundred years, I reflected, pilgrims had been drawn into it, just as we were now. Inside, I walked slowly to the center and craned my head back to see that vast, divine space with its famous whirling domes and arches, its celestial light pouring in, the round shields covered with Arabic calligraphy in the upper corners, mosque overlaying church, church overlaying the ruins of the ancient world. It arched far, far above us, replicating the Byzantine cosmos. I could hardly believe I was there. I was stunned by it.

“Looking back at that moment, I understand that I had lived in books so long, in my narrow university setting, that I had become compressed by them internally. Suddenly, in this echoing house of Byzantium -one of the wonders of history-my spirit leaped out of its confines. I knew in that instant that, whatever happened, I could never go back to my old constraints. I wanted to follow life upward, to expand with it outward, the way this enormous interior swelled upward and outward. My heart swelled with it, as it never had during all my wanderings among the Dutch merchants.

“I glanced at Helen and saw that she was equally moved, her head tipped back like mine so that her dark curls fell over the collar of her blouse, her usually guarded and cynical face full of a pale transcendence. I reached out, impulsively, and took her hand. She grasped mine hard, with that firm, almost bony grip I knew already from her handshake. In another woman, this might have been a gesture of submission or coquetry, a romantic acquiescence; in Helen it was as simple and fierce a gesture as her gaze or the aloofness of her posture. After a moment she seemed to recall herself; she dropped my hand, but without embarrassment, and we wandered around the church together admiring the fine pulpit, the glinting Byzantine marble. It took me a mighty effort to remember that we could return to Hagia Sophia at any time during our stay in Istanbul, and that our first business in this city was to find the archive. Helen apparently had the same thought, for she moved toward the entrance when I did, and we made our way through the crowds and into the street again.

“‘The archive could be quite far away,’ she observed. ‘Saint Sophia is so large that you could see it from almost any building in this part of the city, I think, or even on the other side of the Bosphorus.’

“‘I know. We’ve got to find some other clue. The letters said that the archive was attached to a small mosque from the seventeenth century.’

“‘The city is filled with mosques.’

“‘True.’ I flipped through my hastily purchased guidebook. ‘Let’s start with this-the Great Mosque of the Sultans. Mehmed II and his court might have worshipped there sometimes-it was built in the late fifteenth century, and that would be a logical neighborhood for his library to end up in, don’t you think?’

“Helen thought it was worth a try, and we set off on foot. Along the way, I dipped into the guidebook again. ‘Listen to this. It says thatIstanbul is a Byzantine word that meantthe city. You see, even the Ottomans couldn’t demolish Constantinople, only rename it-with a Byzantine name, at that. It says here that the Byzantine Empire lasted from 333 to 1453. Imagine-what a long, long afternoon of power.’