Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“How long would it take to sail to Venice?” I stirred my tea, and the breeze pulled the steam out to sea.

“Oh, a week or more, I suppose, in a medieval ship.” He smiled at me, relaxed for the moment. “Marco Polo was born on this coast, and the Venetians invaded frequently. We’re actually sitting in a kind of gateway to the world, you could say.”

“When did you come here before?” I was only beginning to believe in my father’s previous life, his existence before me.

“I’ve been here several times. Maybe four or five. The first was years ago, when I was still a student. My adviser recommended I visit Ragusa from Italy, just to see this wonder, while I was studying-I told you I studied Italian in Florence one summer.”

“You mean Professor Rossi.”

“Yes.” My father looked sharply at me, then into his whiskey.

There was a little silence, filled by the café awning, which flapped above us on that unseasonably warm breeze. From inside the bar and restaurant came a blur of tourists’ voices, clinking china, saxophone and piano. From beyond came the slop of boats in the dark harbor. At last my father spoke. “I should tell you a little more about him.” He didn’t look at me, still, but I thought his voice had a fine crack in it.

“I’d like that,” I said cautiously.

He sipped his whiskey. “You’re stubborn about stories, aren’t you?”

You are the stubborn one, I longed to say, but I held my tongue; I wanted the story more than I did the quarrel.

My father sighed. “All right. I’ll tell you more about him tomorrow, in the daylight, when I’m not so tired and we have a little time to walk the walls.” He pointed with his glass to those gray-white, luminous battlements above the hotel. “That’ll be a better time for stories. Especially that story.”

By midmorning we were seated a hundred feet above the surf, which crashed and foamed white around the city’s giant roots. The November sky was brilliant as a summer day. My father put on his sunglasses, checked his watch, folded away the brochure about the rusty-roofed architecture below, let a group of German tourists drift past us out of earshot. I looked out to sea, beyond a forested island, to the fading blue horizon. From that direction the Venetian ships had come, bringing war or trade, their red and gold banners restless under the same glittering arc of sky. Waiting for my father to speak, I felt a stirring of apprehension far from scholarly. Perhaps those ships I imagined on the horizon were not simply part of a colorful pageant. Why was it so difficult for my father to begin?

As I’ve told you, my father said, clearing his throat once or twice, Professor Rossi was a fine scholar and a true friend. I wouldn’t want you to think anything different of him. I know that what I made the mistake, perhaps, of telling you earlier makes him sound-crazy. You remember that he’d described to me something terribly difficult to believe. And I was deeply shocked, and filled with doubt about him, although I saw sincerity and acceptance in his face. When he finished speaking he glanced at me with those keen eyes.

“What on earth do you mean?” I must have been stammering.

“I repeat,” Rossi said emphatically, “I discovered in Istanbul that Dracula lives among us today. Or did then, at least.”

I stared at him.

“I know you must think I’m insane,” he said, relenting visibly. “And I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad.” He sighed. “In Istanbul there is a little-known repository of materials, founded by Sultan Mehmed II, who took the city from the Byzantines in 1453. This archive is mostly odds and ends collected later by the Turks as they were gradually beaten back from the edges of their empire. But it also contains documents from the late fifteenth century, and among them I found some maps that purported to give directions to the Unholy Tomb of a Turk-slayer, who I thought might be Vlad Dracula. There were three maps, actually, graduated in scale to show the same region in greater and greater detail. There was nothing on these maps that I recognized or could tie to any area I knew of. They were labeled mainly in Arabic, and they dated from the late fifteenth century, according to the archive’s librarians.” He tapped the strange little volume that I told you resembled my own find so closely. “The information in the center of the third map was in a very old Slavic dialect. Only a scholar with multiple linguistic resources at his command could have made head or tail of them. I did my best, but it was uncertain work.”

At this point, Rossi shook his head, as if still regretting his limits. “The effort I poured into this discovery drew me unreasonably far from my official summer research on the ancient trade of Crete. But I was beyond the reach of reason, I think, sitting in that hot, sticky library in Istanbul. I remember I could see the minarets of the Hagia Sophia through the grimy windows. I worked there, with those clues to the Turkish view of Vlad’s kingdom resting on the desk in front of me, toiling over my dictionaries, taking copious notes, and copying the maps by hand.

“To make a long research story short, there came an afternoon when I found myself closing in on the carefully marked spot of the Unholy Tomb, on the third and most puzzling map. You remember that Vlad Tepes is supposed to have been buried at the island monastery on Lake Snagov, in Romania. This map, like the others, didn’t show any lake with an island in it-although it did show a river running through the area, widening in the middle. I had translated everything around the borders already, with the help of a professor of Arabic and Ottoman language at Istanbul University -cryptic proverbs about the nature of evil, many of them from the Qur’an. Here and there on the map, nestled among roughly sketched mountains, was some writing that at first glance appeared to be place-names in a Slavic dialect but that translated as riddles, probably a code for real locations: the Valley of Eight Oaks, Pig-Stealing Village, and so forth-strange peasant names that meant nothing to me.

“Well, in the center of the map, above the site of the Unholy Tomb, wherever it was supposed to be located, was a rough sketch of a dragon, wearing a castle as a sort of crown on its head. The dragon looked nothing like the one in my-our-old books, but I conjectured it must have come down to the Turks with the legend of Dracula. Below the dragon someone had inked tiny words, which I thought at first were Arabic, like the proverbs in the map’s borders. Looking at them through a magnifying glass, I suddenly realized that these markings were actually Greek, and I translated aloud before I had thought about courtesy-although of course the library room was empty except for myself and occasionally a bored librarian who came in and out, apparently to make sure I didn’t steal anything. At this moment I was completely alone. The infinitesimal letters danced under my eyes as I sounded them out: ‘In this spot, he is housed in evil. Reader, unbury him with a word.’

“At that moment, I heard a door slam in the downstairs foyer. Heavy footsteps came up the stairwell. I was still occupied with a flash of thought, however: the magnifying glass had just told me that this map, unlike the first two more general ones, had been labeled by three different people, in their three different languages. The handwritings as well as the languages were dissimilar. So were the colors of the old, old inks. Then I had a sudden vision-you know, that intuition that a scholar can almost trust when it’s backed by weeks of careful work.

“It seemed to me that the map had originally consisted of this central sketch, and the mountains that surrounded it, with the Greek command in the center. It had probably only later been labeled in that Slavic dialect to identify the places it referred to-in code, at least. Then it had somehow fallen into Ottoman hands and been surrounded by Qur’anic material, which appeared to house or imprison that ominous message at the center, or to encircle it with talismans against the dark. If this were true, who, knowing Greek, had marked the map first, perhaps even drawn it? I knew that Greek was used by Byzantine scholars of Dracula’s time, not by most scholars in the Ottoman world.