Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“Stay out of sight. I’ll watch where he goes. He’s looking up and down.” Barley peered out while I cowered resolutely back, my heart pounding. He kept a hard grip on my arm. “All right-he’s walking the other way. No, he’s coming back. He’s looking in the windows. I think he’s going to get on the train again. God, he’s a cool one-checking his watch. He’s stepping up. Now he’s getting off again and coming this way. Get ready-we’re going to go back in and run the length of the train if we have to. Are you ready?”

At that moment, the fans whirred, the train gave a heave, and Barley swore. “Jesus, he’s getting back on. I think he just realized we didn’t really get off.” Suddenly Barley jerked me off the steps and onto the platform. Next to us the train heaved again and started up. Several of the passengers had put the windows down and leaned out to smoke or gaze around. Among them, several cars away, I saw a dark head turned in our direction, a man with his shoulders squared-he was full, I thought, of a cold fury. Then the train was picking up speed, pulling around a curve. I turned to Barley, and we glared at each other. Except for a few villagers sitting in the little rural station, we were alone in the middle of a French nowhere.

“If I had expected Turgut’s study to be another Oriental dream, the haven of an Ottoman scholar, I had guessed wrong. The room into which he ushered us was much smaller than the large one we had just left, but high-ceilinged like it, and daylight from two windows showed the furnishings plainly. Two walls were lined top to bottom with books. Black velvet curtains hung to the floor beside each window, and a tapestry of horses and hounds riding to the chase gave a feeling of medieval splendor to the room. Piles of English reference books lay on a table in the center of the study; an immense set of Shakespeare took up its own curious cabinet near the desk.

“But the first impression I had of Turgut’s study was not one of the preeminence of English literature; I had instead the immediate sense of a darker presence, an obsession that had gradually overcome the milder influence of the English works he wrote about. This presence leaped out at me suddenly as a face, a face that was everywhere, meeting my gaze with arrogance from a print behind the desk, from a stand on the table, from an odd piece of embroidery on one wall, from the cover of a portfolio, from a sketch near the window. It was the same face in every case, caught in different poses and different media, but always the same gaunt-cheeked, mustached, medieval visage.

“Turgut was watching me. ‘Ah, you know who this is,’ he said grimly. ‘I have collected him in many forms, as you can see.’ We stood side by side looking at the framed print on the wall behind the desk. It was a reproduction of a woodcut like the one I’d seen at home, but the face was fully frontal, so that the ink-dark eyes seemed to bore into ours.

“‘Where did you find all these different images?’ I asked.

“‘Anywhere I could.’ Turgut gestured toward the folio on the table. ‘Sometimes I had them sketched from old books, and sometimes I found them in antique shops, or at auctions. It is extraordinary how many pictures of his face still float loose in our city, once you are watching out for them. I felt that if I could gather them all, I might be able to read the secret of my strange empty book in his eyes.’ He sighed. ‘But these woodcuts are so crude, so-black and white. I could not be satisfied with them, and finally I asked a friend of mine who is an artist to blend them all into one for me.’

“He led us to a niche by one window, where short curtains, also black velvet, were drawn closed over something. I felt a kind of dread even before he put his hand up to pull the cord, and when the cleverly made drapery parted under his grasp, my heart seemed to turn over. The velvet opened to reveal a life-size and radiantly lifelike painting in oils, the head and shoulders of a young, thick-necked, virile man. His hair was long; heavy black curls tumbled around his shoulders. The face was handsome and cruel in the extreme, with luminously pale skin, unnaturally bright green eyes, a long straight nose with flaring nostrils. His red lips were curved and sensual under a drooping dark mustache, but also tightly compressed as if to control a twitching of the chin. He had sharp cheekbones and heavy black eyebrows below a peaked cap of dark green velvet, with a brown-and-white feather threaded into the front. It was a face full of life but completely devoid of compassion, brimming with strength and alertness but without stability of character. The eyes were the most unnerving feature of the painting; they fixed us with a penetration almost alive in its intensity, and after a second I looked away for relief. Helen, standing next to me, moved a little closer to my shoulder, more as if to offer solidarity than to comfort herself.

“‘My friend is a very fine artist,’ Turgut said softly. ‘You can see why I keep this painting behind a curtain. I do not like to look at it while I work.’ He might have said instead that he didn’t like the painting to look at him, I thought. ‘This is an idea of how Vlad Dracula appeared around 1456, when he began his longest rule of Wallachia. He was twenty-five years old and well-educated by the standard of his culture, and he was a very good horseman. In the next twenty years, he killed perhaps fifteen thousand of his own people-sometimes for political reasons, often for the pleasure of watching them die.’

“Turgut closed the curtain, and I was glad to see those terrible bright eyes extinguished. ‘I have some other curiosities here to show you,’ he said, indicating a wooden cabinet on the wall. ‘This is a seal from the Order of the Dragon, which I found in an antiques market down near the old city port. And this is a dagger, made of silver, that comes from the early Ottoman era of Istanbul. It is my belief that it was used to hunt vampires, because there are words on the sheath that indicate something like this. These chains and spikes’-he showed us another cabinet-‘were instruments of torture, I’m afraid, maybe from Wallachia itself. And here, my fellows, is a prize.’ From the edge of his desk he took a beautifully inlaid wooden box and unhooked the clasp. Inside, among folds of rusty black satin, lay several sharp tools that looked like surgical instruments, as well as a tiny silver pistol and a silver knife.

“‘What is that?’ Helen reached a tentative hand toward the box, then drew it back.

“‘It is an authentic vampire-hunting kit, one hundred years old,’ Turgut reported proudly. ‘I believe it to be from Bucharest. A friend of mine who is a collector of antiques found it for me several years ago. There were many of these-they were sold to travelers in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It originally had garlic in it, here in this space, but I hang mine up.’ He pointed, and I saw with a new chill the long braids of dried garlic on either side of the doorway, facing his desk. It occurred to me, as it had with Rossi only a week earlier, that perhaps Professor Bora was not merely thorough but also mad.

“Years later I understood better this first reaction in myself, the wariness I felt when I saw Turgut’s study, which might have been a room in Dracula’s castle, a medieval closet complete with instruments of torture. It is a fact that we historians are interested in what is partly a reflection of ourselves, perhaps a part of ourselves we would rather not examine except through the medium of scholarship; it is also true that as we steep ourselves in our interests, they become more and more a part of us. Visiting an American university-not mine-several years after this, I was introduced to one of the first of the great American historians of Nazi Germany. He lived in a comfortable house at the edge of the campus, where he collected not only books on his topic but also the official china of the Third Reich. His dogs, two enormous German shepherds, patrolled the front yard day and night. Over drinks with other faculty members in his living room, he told me in no uncertain terms how he despised Hitler’s crimes and wanted to expose them in the greatest possible detail to the civilized world. I left the party early, walking carefully past those big dogs, unable to shake my revulsion.