Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

I couldn’t explain. Perhaps it was just the contagion of my father’s letters, but everything looked suspicious to me now. It was as if we were being followed by eyes I could not see.

“Turgut, who seemed to have more presence of mind than I did, hurried to the door and disappeared into the little foyer. He was back a second later, shaking his head. ‘He is gone,’ he told us heavily. ‘I saw no signal of him in the street. He vanished into the throngs.’

“Mr. Erozan seemed to be apologizing, and Turgut spoke with him for a few seconds. Then he turned to us again. ‘Do you have any reason to think you have been pursued here, in your research?’

“‘Pursued?’ I had every reason to think so, but by whom, exactly, I had no idea.

“Turgut looked sharply at me, and I remembered the appearance of the Gypsy at our table the night before. ‘My friend the librarian says this man wanted to see the documents we have been examining, and he was angry when he found they were already being used. He says the man spoke Turkish but with an accent, and he thinks he is a foreigner. That is why I ask if someone is following you here. My fellows, let us go out of here, but keep a close watch. I am telling my friend to guard the documents and take notes of this man or anyone else who comes to look at them. He will try to find out who he is if he returns. Perhaps if we leave he will return sooner.’

“‘But the maps!’ It worried me to leave these precious items in their box. Besides, what had we learned? We had not even begun to solve the puzzle of the three maps, even as we had stood there looking at their miraculous reality on the library table.

“Turgut turned to Mr. Erozan again, and a smile, a signal of mutual understanding, seemed to pass between them. ‘Do not worry, Professor,’ Turgut told me. ‘I have made copies of all these things in my own hand, and the copies are safely in my apartment. Besides, my friend will not permit anything to happen to the originals. You can believe me.’

“I wanted to. Helen was looking searchingly at both our new acquaintances, and I wondered what she made of all this. ‘All right,’ I said.

“‘Come, my fellows.’ Turgut began to put away the documents, handling them with a tenderness I could not have equaled myself. ‘It seems to me we have much to discuss in private. I will take you to my apartment and we will talk there. I can also show you there some other materials on this topic I have collected. Let us not speak of these matters in the street. We will depart as visibly as possible and’-he nodded at the librarian- ‘we will leave our finest general in the breach.’ Mr. Erozan shook hands with each of us, locked the box with great care, and carried it away, disappearing with it among the bookshelves at the back of the hall. I watched until he was completely out of sight, and then I sighed out loud in spite of myself. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Rossi’s fate was still hidden in that box-almost, God forbid, that Rossi himself was entombed there-and that we had been unable to rescue him from it.

“Then we left the building, standing conspicuously on the steps for a few minutes, pretending to converse. My nerves felt shattered and Helen looked pale, but Turgut was composed. ‘If he is loitering around here somewhere,’ he said in a low voice, ‘the little sneak will know we are departing.’ He offered his arm to Helen, who took it with less reluctance than I would have predicted, and we set off together through the crowded streets. It was lunchtime, and the smells of roasting meat and baking bread rose everywhere around us, mingling with a dank smell that could have been coal smoke or diesel fuel, a smell I still remember sometimes without warning, and one that means for me the edge of the Eastern world. Whatever came next, I thought, it would be another riddle, as this whole place-I looked around me at the faces of the Turkish crowds, the slender spires of minarets on the horizon of every street, the ancient domes among the fig trees, the shops full of mysterious goods-was a riddle. The greatest riddle of all pulled at my heart again and made it ache: Where was Rossi? Was he here, in this city, or far away? Alive or dead, or something in between?”

At4:02, Barley and I boarded the southern express to Perpignan. Barley swung his bag up the steep steps and reached out a hand to pull me up after him. There were fewer passengers on this train, and the compartment we found stayed empty even after the train pulled out. I was getting tired; if I’d been at home at this hour, Mrs. Clay would have been settling me at the kitchen table with a glass of milk and a slice of yellow cake. For a second I almost missed her annoying ministrations. Barley sat down next to me, although he had four other seats to choose from, and I tucked my hand under his sweatered arm. “I ought to study,” he said, but he didn’t open his book right away; there was too much to see as we picked up speed through the city. I thought of all the times I’d been here with my father-climbing Montmartre, or gazing in at the depressed camel in the Jardin des Plantes. It seemed now like a city I’d never seen before.

Watching Barley moving his lips over Milton made me sleepy, and when he said he wanted to go to the dining car for tea, I shook my head, drowsing. “You’re a wreck,” he told me, smiling. “You stay here and sleep, then, and I’ll take my book. We can always go back for dinner when you get hungry.”

My eyes closed almost as soon as he left the car, and when I opened them again I found I was curled up on the empty seat like a child, with my long cotton skirt pulled over my ankles. Someone was sitting on the opposite bench reading a newspaper, and it was not Barley. I sat up quickly. The man was readingLe Monde, and the spread of the paper hid the rest of him-I couldn’t see anything of his upper body or face. A black leather briefcase rested on the seat next to him.

For a split second I imagined it was my father, and a wave of gratitude and confusion went through me. Then I saw the man’s shoes, which were also black leather and very shiny, the toes perforated with elegant patterns, the leather laces ending in black tassels. The man’s legs were crossed, and he wore immaculate black suit trousers and fine black silk socks. Those were not my father’s shoes; in fact, there was something wrong with those shoes, or with the feet they contained, although I couldn’t understand what made me feel this. I thought that a strange man shouldn’t have come in while I was sleeping-there was something unpleasant about that, too, and I hoped he had not been watching me sleep. I wondered in my discomfort if I might be able to get up and open the door to the compartment without his noticing me. Suddenly I saw that he had drawn the curtains to the aisle. No one walking through the train could see us. Or had Barley drawn them before leaving, to let me sleep?

I snuck a glance at my watch. It was almost five o’clock. Outside, a tremendous landscape rolled by; we were entering the South. The man behind the newspaper was so still that I began to tremble in spite of myself. After a while I realized what was frightening me. I had been awake for many long minutes by now, but during all the time I had been watching and listening, he had not turned a single page of his newspaper.

“Turgut’s apartment was located in another part of Istanbul, on the Sea of Marmara, and we took a ferry there from the busy port called Eminönü. Helen stood at the rail, watching the seagulls that followed the boat, and looking back at the tremendous silhouette of the old city. I went to stand next to her, and Turgut pointed out spires and domes for us, his voice booming above the rumble of the engines. His neighborhood, we discovered when we disembarked, was more modern than what we’d seen before, butmodern in this case meant nineteenth century. As we walked along increasingly quiet streets, heading away from the ferry landing, I saw a second Istanbul, new to me: stately, drooping trees, fine stone and wooden houses, apartment buildings that could have been lifted from a Parisian neighborhood, neat sidewalks, pots of flowers, ornamented cornices. Here and there the old Islamic empire erupted in the form of a ruined arch or an isolated mosque, a Turkish house with an overhanging second story. But on Turgut’s street, the West had made a genteel and thorough sweep. Later I saw its counterparts in other cities- Prague and Sofia, Budapest and Moscow, Belgrade and Beirut. That borrowed elegance had been borrowed all over the East.