Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“The streets were filled with people and cars by the time we took ourselves out, and we wandered among them through the heart of the old city and into one of the bazaars. Every aisle was full of shoppers-old women in black who stood fingering rainbows of fine textiles; young women in rich colors, their heads covered, bargaining for fruits I had never seen before or examining trays of gold jewelry; old men with crocheted caps on their white hair or balding pates, reading newspapers or bending over to examine a selection of carved wooden pipes. Some of them carried prayer beads in their hands. Everywhere I looked I saw handsome, shrewd, strong-featured, olive-skinned faces, gesturing hands, pointing fingers, flashing smiles that sometimes showed a glimpse of gold teeth. All around us I heard the clamor of emphatic, confident, haggling voices, sometimes a laugh.

“Helen wore her bemused, upside-down smile, looking about her at these strangers as if they pleased her, but as if she thought she understood them all too well. To me the scene was delightful, but I, too, felt a wariness, a sensation that I could have dated in myself as less than a week old, a feeling I had these days in any public place. It was a sense of searching the crowd, of glancing over my shoulder, of scanning faces for good or ill intent-and perhaps also of being watched. It was an unpleasant feeling, a harsh note in the harmony of all those lively conversations around us, and I wondered not for the first time if it was partly the contagion of Helen’s cynical attitude toward the human race. I wondered, too, if that attitude in her was intrinsic or simply the result of her life in a police state.

“Whatever its roots, I felt my own paranoia as an affront to my former self. A week ago I’d been a normal American graduate student, content in my discontent with my work, enjoying deep down a sense of the prosperity and moral high ground of my culture even while I pretended to question it and everything else. The Cold War was real to me now, in the person of Helen and her disillusioned stance, and an older cold war made itself felt in my very veins. I thought of Rossi, strolling these streets in the summer of 1930 before his adventure in the archive had sent him pell-mell out of Istanbul, and he was real to me, too-not only Rossi as I knew him but also the young Rossi of his letters.

“Helen tapped my arm as we walked and nodded in the direction of a couple of old men at a little wooden table tucked away near a booth. ‘Look-there’s your theory of leisure in person,’ she said. ‘It’s nine in the morning and they are already playing chess. It is strange that they are not playingtabla -that is the favorite game, in this part of the world. But I believe this is chess, instead.’ Sure enough, the two men were just setting up their pieces on a worn-looking wooden board. Black was arrayed against ivory, knights and rooks guarded their lieges, pawns faced one another in battle formation-the same arrangement of war the world over, I mused, stopping to watch. ‘Do you know about chess?’ Helen asked.

“‘Of course,’ I said a little indignantly. ‘I used to play it with my father.’

“‘Ah.’ The sound was acerbic, and I remembered too late that she had had no such childhood lessons, and that she played her own kind of chess with her father-with her image of him, in any case. But she seemed to be caught up in historical reflections. ‘It’s not Western, you know-it’s an ancient game from India -shahmatin Persian.Checkmate, I think you say in English.Shah is the word forking. A battle of kings.’

“I watched the two men beginning their game, their gnarled fingers selecting the first warriors. Jokes flashed between them-probably they were old friends. I could have stood there all day, watching, but Helen moved restlessly away, and I followed her. As we went by, the men seemed to notice us for the first time, glancing up quizzically for a moment. We must look like foreigners, I realized, although Helen’s face blended beautifully with the countenances around us. I wondered how long their game would take-all morning, maybe-and which of them would win this time.

“The booth near them was just opening up. It was really a shed, wedged under a venerable fig tree at the edge of the bazaar. A young man in a white shirt and dark trousers was pulling vigorously at the stall’s doors and curtains, setting up tables outside and laying out his wares-books. Books stood in stacks on the wooden counters, tumbled out of crates on the floor, and lined the shelves inside.

“I went forward eagerly, and the young owner nodded a greeting and smiled, as if he recognized a bibliophile whatever his national cut. Helen followed more slowly, and we stood turning through volumes in perhaps a dozen languages. Many of them were in Arabic, or in the modern Turkish language; some were in Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, others in English, French, German, Italian. I found a Hebrew tome and a whole shelf of Latin classics. Most were cheaply printed and shoddily bound, their cloth covers already shabby with handling. There were new paperbacks with lurid scenes on the covers, and a few volumes that looked very old, especially some of the works in Arabic. ‘The Byzantines loved books, too,’ Helen murmured, leafing through what looked like a set of German poetry. ‘Perhaps they bought books on this very spot.’

“The young man had finished his preparations for the day, and he came over to greet us. ‘Speak German? English?’

“‘English,’ I said quickly, since Helen did not answer.

“‘I have books in English,’ he told me with a pleasant smile. ‘No problem.’ His face was thin and expressive, with large greenish eyes and a long nose. ‘Also newspaper from London, New York.’ I thanked him and asked if he carried old books. ‘Yes, very old.’ He handed me a nineteenth-century edition ofMuch Ado About Nothing -cheap looking, bound in worn cloth. I wondered what library this had drifted from and how it had made its journey-from bourgeois Manchester, say-to this crossroads of the ancient world. I flipped through the pages, to be polite, and handed it back. ‘Not enough old?’ he asked, smiling.

“Helen had been peering over my shoulder, and now she looked pointedly at her watch. We hadn’t even reached Hagia Sophia, after all. ‘Yes, we’ve got to be going,’ I said.

“The young bookseller gave us a courteous bow, volume in hand. I stared at him for a second, troubled by something that bordered on recognition, but he had turned away and was helping a new customer, an old man who could have been a triplet to the chess players. Helen nudged my elbow, and we left the shop and went more purposefully around the edge of the bazaar and back toward our pension.

“The little restaurant was empty when we entered, but a few minutes later Turgut appeared in the doorway, nodding and smiling, and asked us how we had slept. He was wearing an olive wool suit this morning, despite the gathering heat, and seemed full of suppressed excitement. His curly dark hair was slicked back, his shoes shone with polish, and he moved quickly to usher us out of the restaurant. I noticed again that he was a person of great energy, and I felt relief at having such a guide. Excitement was rising in me, too. Rossi’s papers rested securely in my briefcase, and perhaps the next few hours would bring me a step closer to his whereabouts. Soon, at least, I might be able to compare his copies of the documents with the originals he had examined so many years before.

“As we followed Turgut through the streets, he explained to us that Sultan Mehmed’s archive was not housed in the main building of the National Library, although it was still under state protection. It was now in a library annex that had once been amendrese, a traditional Islamic school. Ataturk had closed these schools in his secularization of the country, and this one currently contained the National Library’s rare and antique books on the history of the Empire. We would find Sultan Mehmed’s collection among others from the centuries of Ottoman expansion.