Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“‘And then you were born?’ I asked quietly.

“‘Then I was born, at a hospital in Budapest, and my aunt and uncle helped to raise and educate me. We lived with them until I was in high school. Éva took us into the countryside during the war and found food for all of us somehow. My mother was educated here, too, and learned Hungarian. She always refused to teach me any Romanian, although I sometimes heard her speaking it in her sleep.’ She gave me a bitter glance. ‘You see what your beloved Rossi reduced our lives to,’ she said, her mouth twisting. ‘If it had not been for my aunt and uncle, my mother might have died alone in some mountain forest and been eaten by the wolves. Both of us, actually.’

“‘I’m thankful to your aunt and uncle, too,’ I said, and then, fearing her sardonic glance, busied myself pouring more coffee from the metal pot at my elbow.

“Helen made no reply, and after a minute she pulled some papers from her purse. ‘Shall we go over the lecture once more?’”

“The morning sunshine and cool air outside were full of menace for me; all I could think about as we walked toward the university was the moment, rapidly approaching now, when I would have to deliver my lecture. I had given only one lecture before this, a joint presentation with Rossi the previous year when he had organized a conference on Dutch colonialism. Each of us had written half of the lecture; my half had been a miserable attempt to distill into twenty minutes what I thought my dissertation was going to be about before I had written a word of it; Rossi’s had been a brilliant, wide-ranging treatise on the cultural heritage of the Netherlands, the strategic might of the Dutch navy, and the nature of colonialism. Despite my general sense of inadequacy about the whole thing, I’d been flattered by his including me. I’d also been sustained throughout the experience by his compact and confident presence beside me at the podium, his friendly thump on my shoulder as I relinquished the audience to him. Today I would be on my own. The prospect was dismal, if not terrifying, and only the thought of how Rossi would have handled it steadied me a little.

“Elegant Pest lay all around us, and now, in broad daylight, I could see that its magnificence was under construction-reconstruction, rather-where it had been damaged in the war. Many houses were still missing walls or windows in their upper floors, or even the whole upper floor, for that matter, and if you looked closely, nearly every surface, whatever it was made of, was pockmarked with bullet holes. I wished we had time to walk farther, so that I could see more of Pest, but we had agreed between us that we would attend all the morning sessions of the conference that day to make our presence there as legitimate as possible. ‘And there is something I want to do later, too, in the afternoon,’ Helen said thoughtfully. ‘We will go to the university library before it closes.’

“When we reached the large building where the reception had been held the night before, she paused. ‘Do me a favor.’

“‘Certainly. What?’

“‘Don’t talk with Géza József about our travels or the fact that we are looking for someone.’

“‘I’m not likely to do that,’ I said indignantly.

“‘I’m just warning you. He can be very charming.’ She raised her gloved hand in a conciliatory gesture.

“‘All right.’ I held the great baroque door for her and we went in.

“In a lecture room on the second floor, many of the people I’d seen the night before were already seated in rows of chairs, talking with animation or shuffling through papers. ‘My God,’ Helen muttered. ‘The anthropology department is here, too.’ A moment later she was engulfed in greetings and conversation. I saw her smiling, presumably at old friends, colleagues from years of work in her own field, and a wave of loneliness broke over me. She seemed to be indicating me, trying to introduce me from a distance, but the torrent of voices and their meaningless Hungarian made an almost palpable barrier between us.

“Just then I felt a tap on my arm and the formidable Géza was before me. His handshake and smile were warm. ‘How do you enjoy our city?’ he asked. ‘Is everything to your liking?’

“‘Everything,’ I said with equal warmth. I had Helen’s warning firmly in mind, but it was difficult not to like the man.

“‘Ah, I am delighted,’ he said. ‘And you will be giving your lecture this afternoon?’

“I coughed. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, exactly. And you? Will you be lecturing today?’

“‘Oh, no, not I,’ he said. ‘Actually, I am researching a topic of great interest to me these days. But I am not ready to give a lecture about it.’

“‘What is your topic?’ I couldn’t help asking, but at that moment Professor Sándor of the towering white pompadour called the session to order from a podium. The crowd settled into the seats like birds on telephone wires and grew quiet. I sat in the back next to Helen, glancing at my watch. It was only nine-thirty, so I could relax for a while. Géza József had taken a seat in the front; I could see the back of his handsome head in the first row. Looking around, I could also see several other faces familiar from last night’s introductions. It was an earnest, slightly scruffy crowd, everyone gazing at Professor Sándor.

“‘Guten Morgen,’he boomed, and the microphone screeched until a student in a blue shirt and black tie came up to fix it. ‘Good morning, honored visitors.Guten Morgen, bonjour, welcome to the University of Budapest. We are proud to introduce you to the first European convention of historians of -’ Here the microphone began to screech again, and we lost several phrases. Professor Sándor had apparently run out of English, too, for the time being, and he continued for some minutes in a mixture of Hungarian, French, and German. I gathered from the French and German that lunch would be served at twelve o’clock, and then-to my horror-that I would be the keynote speaker, the apex of the conference, the highlight of the proceedings, that I was a distinguished American scholar, a specialist not only in the history of the Netherlands but also in the economics of the Ottoman Empire and the labor movements of the United States of America (had Aunt Éva invented that one on her own?), that my book on the Dutch merchant guilds in the era of Rembrandt would be appearing the following year, and that they were deeply fortunate to have been able to add me to their program only this week.

“This was all worse than my wildest dreams, and I vowed that Helen would pay if she had had a hand in it. Many of the scholars in the audience were turning to look at me, smiling graciously, nodding, even pointing me out to one another. Helen sat regal and serious beside me, but something about the curve of her black-jacketed shoulder suggested-only to me, I hoped-the almost perfectly hidden desire to laugh. I tried to look dignified, too, and to remember that this, even all this, was for Rossi.

“When Professor Sándor had finished booming, a little bald man gave a lecture that seemed to be about the Hanseatic League. He was followed by a gray-haired woman in a blue dress whose subject concerned the history of Budapest, although I could follow none of it. The remaining speaker before lunch was a young scholar from the University of London-he looked about my own age-and to my great relief he spoke in English, while a Hungarian philology student read a translation of his lecture into German. (It was strange, I thought, to hear all this German here only a decade after the Germans had nearly destroyed Budapest, but I reminded myself that it had been the lingua franca of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) Professor Sándor introduced the Englishman as Hugh James, a professor of East European history.