Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

The book was small, covered in ancient-looking brown velvet like an old prayer missal or Book of Days, with nothing on the spine or front to give it an identity. It had a bronze-colored clasp that slipped apart with a little pressure. The book itself fell open to the middle. There, spread across the center, was my-I saymy -dragon, this time overflowing the edges of the pages, claws outstretched, savage beak open to show its fangs, with the same bannered word in the same Gothic script.

“Of course,” Rossi was saying, “I’ve had time, and I’ve had this identified. It’s a Central European design, printed about 1512-so you see it could very well have been set with movable-type text throughout, if there had been any text.”

I flipped slowly through the delicate leaves. No titles on the first pages-no, I knew it already. “What a strange coincidence.”

“It’s been stained by salt water on the back, perhaps from a trip on the Black Sea. Not even the Smithsonian could tell me what it’s seen in the course of its travels. You see, I actually took the trouble of getting a chemical analysis. It cost me three hundred dollars to learn that this thing sat in an environment heavily laden with stone dust at some point, probably prior to 1700. I also went all the way to Istanbul to try to learn more about its origins. But the strangest thing is the way I acquired this book.” He stretched out a hand and I gladly gave the volume back, old and fragile as it was.

“Did you buy it somewhere?”

“I found it in my desk when I was a graduate student.”

A shiver went over me. “Your desk?”

“My library carrel. We had them, too. The custom goes back to seventh-century monasteries, you know.”

“Where did you-where did it come from? A gift?”

“Maybe.” Rossi smiled strangely. He seemed to be controlling some difficult emotion. “Like another cup?”

“I will, after all,” I said, dry throated.

“My efforts to find its owner failed, and the library couldn’t identify it. Even the British Museum Library had never seen it before and offered me a considerable sum for it.”

“But you didn’t want to sell.”

“No. I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It’s the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, ‘I know who you are. You can’t fool me.’”

“So what is it? Do you think this larger copy was made by the same printer at the same time?”

His fingers drummed the windowsill. “I haven’t thought much about it in years, actually, or I’ve tried not to, although I always sort of-feel it, there, over my shoulder.” He gestured up toward the dark crevice among the book’s fellows. “That top shelf is my row of failures. And things I’d rather not think about.”

“Well, maybe now that I’ve turned up a mate for it, you can fit the pieces in place better. They can’t be unrelated.”

“They can’t be unrelated.” It was a hollow echo, even if it came through the swish of fresh coffee.

Impatience, and a slightly fevered feeling I often had in those days from lack of sleep and mental overexertion, made me hurry him on. “And your research? Not just the chemical analysis. You said you tried to learn more -?”

“I tried to learn more.” He sat down again and spread small, practical-looking hands on either side of his coffee cup. “I’m afraid I owe you more than a story,” he said quietly. “Maybe I owe you a sort of apology-you’ll see why-although I would never consciously wish such a legacy on any student of mine. Not on most of my students, anyway.” He smiled, affectionately, but sadly, I thought. “You’ve heard of Vlad Tepes-the Impaler?”

“Yes, Dracula. A feudal lord in the Carpathians, otherwise known as Bela Lugosi.”

“That’s the one-or one of them. They were an ancient family before their most unpleasant member came to power. Did you look him up on your way out of the library? Yes? A bad sign. When my book appeared so oddly, I looked up the word itself, that afternoon-the name, as well asTransylvania, Wallachia, and theCarpathians. Instant obsession.”

I wondered if this might be a veiled compliment-Rossi liked his students working at a high pitch-but I let it pass, afraid to interrupt his story with extraneous comment.

“So, the Carpathians. That’s always been a mystical spot for historians. One of Occam’s students traveled there-by donkey, I suppose-and produced out of his experiences a funny little thing calledPhilosophie of the Aweful. Of course, the basic story of Dracula has been hashed over many times and doesn’t yield much to exploration. There’s the Wallachian prince, a fifteenth-century ruler, hated by the Ottoman Empire and his own people-both. Really among the nastiest of all medieval European tyrants. It’s estimated that he slaughtered at least twenty thousand of his fellow Wallachians and Transylvanians over the years.Dracula meansson of Dracul -son of the dragon, more or less. His father had been inducted into the Order of the Dragon by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund-it was an organization for the defense of the Empire against the Ottoman Turks. Actually, there is evidence that Dracula’s father gave Dracula over to the Turks when he was a boy as hostage in a political bargain, and that Dracula acquired some of his taste for cruelty from observing Ottoman torture methods.”

Rossi shook his head. “Anyway, Vlad’s killed in a battle against the Turks, or perhaps just by accident by his own soldiers, and buried in a monastery on an island in Lake Snagov, now in the possession of our friend socialist Romania. His memory becomes legend, passed down through generations of superstitious peasants. At the end of the nineteenth century, a disturbed and melodramatic author-Abraham Stoker-gets hold of the nameDracula and fastens it on a creature of his own invention, a vampire. Vlad Tepes was horrifyingly cruel, but he wasn’t a vampire, of course. And you won’t find any mention of Vlad in Stoker’s book, although his version of Dracula talks about his family’s great past as Turk-fighters.” Rossi sighed. “Stoker assembled some useful lore about vampire legends-about Transylvania, too, without ever going there-actually, Vlad Dracula ruled Wallachia, which borders Transylvania. In the twentieth century, Hollywood takes over and the myth lives on, resurrected. That’s where my flippancy stops, by the way.”

Rossi set his cup aside and folded his hands together. For a moment, he seemed unable to continue. “I can joke about the legend, which has been monstrously commercialized, but not about what my research turned up. In fact, I felt unable to publish it, partly because of the presence of that legend. I thought the very subject matter wouldn’t be taken seriously. But there was another reason, too.”

This brought me to a mental standstill. Rossi left no stone unpublished; it was part of his productivity, his lavish genius. He sternly instructed his students to do the same, to waste nothing.

“What I found in Istanbul was too serious not to be taken seriously. Perhaps I was wrong in my decision to keep this information-as I can honestly call it-to myself, but each of us has his own superstitions. Mine happen to be an historian’s. I was afraid.”

I stared and he gave a sigh, as if reluctant to go on. “You see, Vlad Dracula had always been studied in the great archives of Central and Eastern Europe or, ultimately, in his home region. But he began his career as a Turk-killer, and I discovered that no one had ever looked in the Ottoman world for material on the Dracula legend. That was what took me to Istanbul, a secret detour from my research on the early Greek economies. Oh, I published all the Greek stuff, with a vengeance.”

For a moment he was silent, turning his gaze toward the window. “And I suppose I should just tell you, straight out, what I discovered in the Istanbul collection and tried not to think about afterward. After all, you’ve inherited one of these nice books.” He put his hand gravely on the stack of two. “If I don’t tell you all this myself, you will probably simply retrace my steps, maybe at some added risk.” He smiled a little grimly at the top of the desk. “I could save you a great deal of grant writing, anyway.”