Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“‘Am I correct in imagining that you take after this aunt of yours, rather than after your mother?’ Maybe it was simply the mental adventure by train that made me smile at Helen.

“She hesitated only a second. ‘Correct again, Watson. I am very much like my aunt, thank goodness. But you will like my mother best-most people do. And now, may I invite you to dine with me at our favorite establishment, and to work on your lecture over dinner?’

“‘Certainly,’ I agreed, ‘as long as there are no Gypsies around.’ I offered her my arm with careful exaggeration, and she traded her newspaper for the support. It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one’s life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.”

On a sunny morning in Boulois, Barley and I boarded the early train for Perpignan.

“The Friday plane to Budapest from Istanbul was far from full, and when we had settled in among the black-suited Turkish businessmen, the gray-jacketed Magyar bureaucrats talking in clumps, the old women in blue coats and head shawls-were they going to cleaning jobs in Budapest, or had their daughters married Hungarian diplomats?-I had only a short flight in which to regret the train trip we might have taken.

“That trip, with its tracks carved through mountain walls, its expanses of forest and cliff, river and feudal town, would have to wait for my later career, as you know, and I have taken it twice since then. There is something vastly mysterious for me about the shift one sees, along that route, from the Islamic world to the Christian, from the Ottoman to the Austro-Hungarian, from the Muslim to the Catholic and Protestant. It is a gradation of towns, of architecture, of gradually receding minarets blended with the advancing church domes, of the very look of forest and riverbank, so that little by little you begin to believe you can read in nature itself the saturation of history. Does the shoulder of a Turkish hillside really look so different from the slope of a Magyar meadow? Of course not, and yet the difference is as impossible to erase from the eye as the history that informs it is from the mind. Later, traveling this route, I would also see it alternately as benign and bathed in blood-this is the other trick of historical sight, to be unrelentingly torn between good and evil, peace and war. Whether I was imagining an Ottoman incursion across the Danube or the earlier sweep of the Huns toward it from the East, I was always plagued by conflicting images: a severed head brought into the encampment with cries of triumph and hatred, and then an old woman-maybe the greatest of grandmothers of those wrinkled faces I saw on the plane-dressing her grandson in warmer clothes, with a pinch on his smooth Turkic cheek and a deft hand making sure her stew of wild game didn’t burn.

“These visions lay in the future for me, however, and during our plane trip, I regretted the panorama below without knowing what it was, or what thoughts it might later provoke in me. Helen, a more experienced and less excitable traveler, used the opportunity to sleep curled in her seat. We had been up late at the restaurant table in Istanbul two nights in a row, working on my lecture for the conference in Budapest. I had to admit to a greater knowledge of Vlad’s battles with the Turks than I’d previously enjoyed-or not enjoyed-although that wasn’t saying much. I hoped no one would ask any questions following my delivery of all this half-learned material. It was remarkable, though, what Helen had stored in her brain, and I marveled again that her self-education about Dracula had been fueled by so elusive a hope as showing up a father she could barely claim. When her head lolled in sleep onto my shoulder, I let it rest there, trying not to breathe in the scent-Hungarian shampoo?-of her curls. She was tired; I sat meticulously still while she slept.

“My first impression of Budapest, taken in through the windows of our taxi from the airport, was of a vast nobility. Helen had explained to me that we would be staying in a hotel near the university on the east side of the Danube, in Pest, but she had apparently asked our driver to take us along the Danube before dropping us off. One minute we were traversing dignified eighteenth- and nineteenth-century streets, enlivened here and there by a burst of art-nouveau fantasy or a tremendous old tree. The next minute we were in sight of the Danube. It was enormous-I hadn’t been prepared for its grandeur-with three great bridges spanning it. On our side of the river rose the incredible neo-Gothic spires and dome of the Parliament Buildings, and on the opposite side rose the immense tree-cushioned flanks of the royal palace and the spires of medieval churches. In the midst of everything was that expanse of the river, gray-green, its surface finely scaled by wind and glinting with sunlight. A huge blue sky arched over the domes and monuments and churches, and touched the water with shifting colors.

“I had expected to be intrigued by Budapest, and to admire it; I had not expected to be awed. It had absorbed a panoply of invaders and allies, beginning with the Romans and ending with the Austrians-or the Soviets, I thought, remembering Helen’s bitter comments-and yet it was different from all of them. It was neither quite Western, nor Eastern like Istanbul, nor, for all its Gothic architecture, northern European. I stared out the confining taxi window at a splendor wholly individual. Helen was staring, too, and after a moment she turned to me. Some of my excitement must have registered on my face, because she burst out laughing. ‘I see you like our little town,’ she said, and I heard under her sarcasm a keen pride. Then she added in a low voice, ‘Dracula is one of our own here-did you know? In 1462 he was imprisoned by King Matthias Corvinus about twenty miles from Buda because he had threatened Hungary ’s interests in Transylvania. Corvinus apparently treated him more like a houseguest than a prisoner and even gave him a wife from the Hungarian royal family, although no one knows exactly who she was-Dracula’s second wife. Dracula showed his gratitude by converting to the Catholic faith, and they were allowed to live in Pest for a while. And as soon as he was released from Hungary -’

“‘I think I can imagine,’ I said. ‘He went right back to Wallachia and took over the throne as soon as possible and renounced his conversion.’

“‘That is basically correct,’ she admitted. ‘You are getting a feel for our friend. He wanted more than anything to take and keep the Wallachian throne.’

“Too soon the taxi was looping back into the old section of Pest, away from the river, but here there were more wonders for me to gawk at, which I did without shame: balconied coffeehouses that imitated the glories of Egypt or Assyria, walking streets crowded with energetic shoppers and forested with iron street lanterns, mosaics and sculptures, angels and saints in marble and bronze, kings and emperors, violinists in white tunics playing on a street corner. ‘Here we are,’ Helen said suddenly. ‘This is the university section, and there is the university library.’ I craned to get a look at a fine classical building of yellow stone. ‘We will go in there when we have the chance-in fact I want to look at something there. And here is our hotel, just off Magyarutca – Magyar Street, to you. I must find you a map somehow so you don’t get lost.’

“The driver hauled out our bags in front of an elegant, patrician facade of gray stone, and I gave my hand to Helen to help her from the car. ‘I thought so,’ she said with a snort. ‘They always use this hotel for conferences.’