Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“‘He? Ah, yes.’ She nodded, as if approving my not speaking that name in the street. ‘That is an interesting idea, but wouldn’t Mehmed have known about it, and wouldn’t Turgut have found some evidence of it? I cannot believe such a thing could have been hidden here for centuries.’

“‘It’s also hard to believe that Mehmed would have permitted one of his enemies to be buried in Istanbul, if he’d known about it.’

“She appeared to brood on this. We had almost reached the great entrance to Hagia Sophia.

“‘Helen,’ I said slowly.

“‘Yes?’ We stopped among the people, the tourists and the pilgrims flocking in through the vast gate. I moved close to her so that I could speak very quietly, almost in her ear.

“‘If there’s some chance that the tomb is here, it could mean Rossi is here, too.’

“She turned and looked into my face. Her eyes were lustrous, and there were fine lines of age and worry between her dark eyebrows. ‘But of course, Paul.’

“‘I read in the guidebook that Istanbul has underground ruins, too-catacombs, cisterns, that kind of thing-like Rome. We have at least a day before we leave-maybe we could talk with Turgut about it.’

“‘That is not such a bad idea,’ Helen said softly. ‘The palace of the Byzantine emperors must have had an underground area.’ She almost smiled, but her hand went up to the scarf at her neck, as if something troubled her there. ‘In any case, whatever is left of the palace must be full of evil spirits-emperors who blinded their cousins and that kind of thing. Exactly the right company.’

“Because we were reading so closely the thoughts written on each other’s faces, and contemplating together the strange, vast hunt they might lead to, I failed at first to look hard at the figure that seemed suddenly to be looking hard at me. Besides, it was no tall and menacing specter but rather a small, slight man, ordinary among those crowds, hovering about twenty feet away against the wall of the church.

“Then, in an instant of shock, I recognized the little scholar with the shaggy gray beard, crocheted white cap, and drab shirt and pants who had come into the archive that morning. But the next second brought a much greater shock. The man had made the mistake of gazing at me so intently that I could suddenly see him head-on through the crowd. Then he was gone, disappearing like a spirit among the cheerful tourists. I dashed forward, almost knocking Helen over, but it was no use. The man had vanished; he had seen me see him. His face, between the awkward beard and new cap, had been indisputably a face from my university at home. I’d last looked at it just before it was covered by a sheet. It was the face of the dead librarian.”

Ihave several photographs of my father from the period just before he left the United States to search for Rossi, although when I first saw those images during my childhood, I knew nothing about what they preceded. One of them, which I had framed a few years ago and which now hangs above my writing desk, is a black-and-white image from an era when black and white was being edged out by the color snapshot. It shows my father as I never knew him. He looks directly into the camera, his chin raised a little as if he’s about to respond to something the photographer is saying. Who the photographer was I will never know; I forgot to ask my father if he remembered. It couldn’t have been Helen, but perhaps it was some other friend, some fellow graduate student. In 1952-only the date is recorded in my father’s hand on the back of the photo-he had been a graduate student for a year and had already begun his research on the Dutch merchants.

In the photograph my father seems to be posing next to a university building, judging by the Gothic stonework in the background. He has one foot jauntily up on a bench, his arm slung over it, hand dangling gracefully near his knee. He wears a white or light colored dress shirt and a tie of diagonal stripes, dark creased trousers, shiny shoes. He has the same build I remember from his later life-average height, average shoulders, a trimness that was pleasant but not remarkable and that he never lost in middle age. His deep-set eyes are gray in the photo but were dark blue in life. With those sunken eyes and bushy eyebrows, the prominent cheekbones, thick nose, and wide thick lips parted in a smile, he has a rather simian look-a look of animal intelligence. If the photograph were color, his slicked-down hair would be bronze in the sunlight; I know about that color only because he described it to me once. When I knew him, from as early as I could remember, his hair was white.

“That night, in Istanbul, I took the full measure of a sleepless night. For one thing, the horror of that moment when I first saw a dead face alive and tried to comprehend what I had seen-that moment alone would have kept me awake. For another thing, knowing that the dead librarian had seen me and then disappeared made me feel the terrible vulnerability of the papers in my briefcase. He knew that Helen and I possessed a copy of the map. Had he appeared in Istanbul because he was following us, or had he somehow figured out that the original of this map was here? Or, if he hadn’t deciphered this on his own, was he privy to some source of knowledge I did not know about? He had looked at the documents in Sultan Mehmed’s collection at least once. Had he seen the original maps there and copied them? I couldn’t answer these riddles, and I certainly couldn’t risk dozing, when I thought of the creature’s lust for our copy of the map, the way he had leaped on Helen to strangle her for it in the library stacks at home. The fact that he had bitten Helen there, had perhaps acquired a taste for her, made me even more nervous.

“If all this had not been enough to keep me wide-eyed that night while the hours passed more and more quietly, there was the sleeping face not far from my own-but not so close, either. I had insisted that Helen sleep in my bed while I sat up in the shabby armchair. If my eyelids drooped once or twice, a glance at that strong, grave face sent a wave of anxiety through me, bracing as cold water. Helen had wanted to stay in her own room-what, after all, would the concierge think, if she found out about this arrangement?-but I had pressed her until she agreed, if irritably, to rest under my watchful eye. I had seen too many movies, or read too many novels, to doubt that a lady left alone for a few hours at night might be the fiend’s next intended victim. Helen was tired enough to sleep, as I could see from the deepening shadows under her eyes, and I had the faintest sense that she was frightened, too. That whiff of fear from her scared me more than another woman’s sobs of terror would have and sent a subtle caffeine through my veins. Perhaps, too, something in the languor and softness of her usually haughtily erect form, her diurnal broad-shouldered definiteness, kept my own eyes open. She lay on her side, one hand under my pillow, her curls darker than ever against its whiteness.

“I could not bring myself to read or write. Certainly I had no desire to open my briefcase, which in any case I had pushed under the bed where Helen slept. But the hours wore on, and there was no mysterious scratching in the corridor, no snuffling through the keyhole, no smoke pouring silently in under the door, no beating of wings at the window. Finally a little grayness pervaded the dim room, and Helen sighed as if sensing the coming day. Then a hand span of sunlight made its way through the shutters, and she stirred. I took my jacket, slid the briefcase out from under the bed as quietly as I could, and went tactfully away to wait for her in the entrance downstairs.

“It was not yet six o’clock, but a smell of strong coffee came from somewhere in the house, and to my surprise I found Turgut sitting on one of the embroidered chairs, a black portfolio across his lap. He looked amazingly fresh and wide-awake, and when I entered he jumped up to shake my hand. ‘Good morning, my friend. Thank the gods I have found you immediately.’