Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“Turgut was gently lifting documents from the box. Each was wrapped in yellowing tissue paper, and the items varied in shape and size. He spread them carefully on the table before us. ‘I will show you these papers myself and tell you what I know of them,’ he said. ‘Then perhaps you would like to sit and brood on them, don’t you think?’ Yes, perhaps we would-I nodded, and he unwrapped a scroll and unwound it delicately under our gaze. It was parchment attached to fine wooden spindles, very different from the large flat pages and bound ledgers I was used to in my research on Rembrandt’s world. The edges of the parchment were decorated in a colorful border of geometric patterns, gilt and deep blue and crimson. The handwritten text, to my disappointment, was in Arabic lettering. I’m not sure what I had expected; this document had come from the heart of an empire that spoke the Ottoman language and wrote it down in Arabic letters, resorting to Greek only to bully the Byzantines, or Latin to storm the gates of Vienna.

“Turgut read my face and hurried to explain. ‘This, my friends, is a ledger of the expenses of a war with the Order of the Dragon. It was written in a town on the southern side of the Danube by a bureaucrat who was spending the sultan’s money there-it is a report of business, in other words. Dracula’s father, Vlad Dracul, cost the Ottoman Empire a great deal of money in the mid-fifteenth century, you see. This bureaucrat commissioned armor and-how do you say?-scimitars for three hundred men to guard the border of the western Carpathians so that the local people would not revolt, and he bought horses for them, also. Here’-he pointed a long finger at the bottom of the scroll-‘it says that Vlad Dracul was an expense and a-a rotten nuisance and had cost them more money than the pasha wanted to spend. The pasha is very sorry and miserable, and he wishes a long life to the Incomparable One in the name of Allah.’

“Helen and I glanced at each other, and I thought I read in her eyes something of the awe I felt myself. This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did-as we would. I looked away, unable to watch the flicker of emotion on her strong face.

“Turgut had rolled up the scroll again and was opening a second package, which contained two more scrolls. ‘Here is a letter from the pasha of Wallachia in which he promises to send Sultan Mehmed any documents he can find about the Order of the Dragon. And this is an account of trading along the Danube in 1461, not far from where the Order of the Dragon had control. The boundaries of this area were not stalwart, you understand-they were continually changing. Here it lists the silks, spices, and horses the pasha requests to trade for wool from the shepherds of his domain.’ The next two scrolls proved to be similar accounts. Then Turgut unrolled a smaller package, which contained a flat sketch on parchment. ‘A map,’ he said. I made an involuntary move for my briefcase, which held Rossi’s sketches and notes, but Helen shook her head almost imperceptibly. I understood her meaning-we did not know Turgut well enough to spread all our secrets in front of him. Not yet, I amended mentally; after all, he had apparently opened all his own resources to us.

“‘I have never been able to understand what this map is, my fellows,’ Turgut told us. There was regret in his voice, and he stroked his mustache with a thoughtful hand. I looked closely at the parchment and saw with a thrill a neat, if faded, version of the first map Rossi had copied, the long crescents of mountains, the curving river north of them. ‘It does not resemble any region I have studied myself, and there is no way to know the-how do you say?-scale of the map, you know?’ He set it aside. ‘Here is another map, which appears to be a closer view of the area in the first.’ I knew it was-I had seen all this already, and my excitement climbed. ‘I believe these are the mountains shown in the west on the first map, no?’ He sighed. ‘But there is no further information, and you see it is not much labeled, except for some lines from the Qur’an and this strange motto-I translated it carefully, once-that says something like ”Here he is housed with evil. Reader, with your words dig him up.“’

“I had put out a startled hand to stop him, but Turgut had spoken too quickly and caught me off guard. ‘No!’ I cried, but too late, so that Turgut stared at me in astonishment. Helen looked from one of us to the other, and Mr. Erozan turned from his work on the other side of the hall and stared at me, too. ‘Excuse me,’ I whispered. ‘I’m just excited by seeing these documents. They’re so-interesting.’

“‘Oh, I am glad you find them interesting.’ Turgut almost beamed through his gravity. ‘And these words do sound a wit strange. They give one a-you know?-a turn.’

“At that moment there was a step in the hall. I looked around nervously, half expecting to see Dracula himself, whatever he looked like, but it was only a small man in a white cap and shaggy gray beard. Mr. Erozan went to the door to greet him, and we turned back to our documents. Turgut drew from the box another parchment. ‘This is the last document in here,’ he said. ‘I have never been able to make sense of it. It is listed in the library catalog as a bibliography of the Order of the Dragon.’

“My heart lurched, and I saw the color rise in Helen’s face. ‘A bibliography?’

“‘Yes, my friend.’ Turgut spread it gently on the table before us. It looked very old and quite brittle, written in Greek in a fine hand. The top curved raggedly, as if it had once been part of a longer scroll, and the bottom edge was clearly torn off. There were no ornaments of any sort on the manuscript, just the finely penned words in rows. I sighed. I had never studied Greek, although I doubted anything but complete mastery would have helped me with such a document, anyway.

“As if divining my problem, Turgut took a notebook from his briefcase. ‘I have had this translated by a scholar of Byzantium from our university. He has a ravishing knowledge of their language and documents. This is a list of works of literature, although many of them I have never found mentioned in any other example.’ He opened his notebook and smoothed out a page. It was covered in neat Turkish script. This time Helen sighed. Turgut slapped his forehead. ‘Oh, a million pardons,’ he said. ‘Here, I shall translate for you as we go along, all right? ”Herodotus,The Treatment of Prisoners of War. Pheseus,On Reason and Torture. Origen,Treatise on First Principles. Euthymius the Elder,The Fate of the Damned. Gubent of Ghent,Treatise on Nature. St. Thomas Aquinas,Sisyphus. “ You see, it is quite a strange selection, and some of the books on it are very rare. My friend who is a Byzantine scholar told me, for example, that it would be a miracle if a previously unknown version of this treatise by the early Christian philosopher Origen had survived somewhere-most of Origen’s work was destroyed because he was accused of heresy.’

“‘What heresy?’ Helen looked interested. ‘I am sure I have read about him somewhere.’

“‘He was accused of arguing in this treatise that it is a matter of Christian logic that even Satan will be saved and resurrected,’ Turgut explained. ‘Shall I go on with the list?’

“‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ I said, ‘could you write the titles down for us in English, just as you are reading them?’

“‘With pleasure.’ Turgut sat down with his notebook and drew out a pen.

“‘What do you make of this?’ I asked Helen. Her face said more plainly than any words,We came all this way for a jumbled list of books? ‘I know it makes no sense yet,’ I told her in a low voice, ‘but let’s see what it leads to.’