Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“There was static on the line again, and I had to shout. ‘Did you say 1477? What language is it in?’

“‘I cannot hear you, dear boy!’ Turgut bellowed, far away. ‘There was a rainstorm here. I will call you tomorrow night.’ A Babel of voices-I couldn’t tell whether they were Hungarian or Turkish-broke in on us and swallowed his next words. More clicking followed, and then the line went dead. I hung up slowly, wondering if I should call back, but the clerk was already taking the phone from me with a worried expression and adding up my bill on a scrap of paper. I paid glumly and stood there for a moment, not liking to go up to my bare new room, to which I’d been allowed to take only my shaving instruments and a clean shirt. My spirits were sinking rapidly-it had already been a very long day, after all, and the clock in the lobby said nearly eleven.

“They would have sunk lower still if a taxi hadn’t pulled up at that moment. Helen got out and paid the driver, then came through the great door. She hadn’t noticed me by the desk yet, and her face was grave and reticent, with the melancholy intensity I’d sometimes noticed in it. She had wrapped herself in a shawl of downy black-and-red wool that I had never seen before, perhaps a gift from her aunt. It muted the harsh lines of her suit and shoulders and made her skin glow white and luminous even under the crude lighting of the lobby. She looked like a princess, and I stared unabashedly at her for a moment before she saw me. It was not only her beauty, thrown into relief by the soft wool and the regal angle of her chin, that kept me riveted. I was remembering again, with an uneasy quiver inside, the portrait in Turgut’s room-the proud head, the long straight nose, the great dark eyes with their heavy, hooded lids above and below. Perhaps I was just very tired, I told myself, and when Helen saw me and smiled, the image vanished again from my inner sight.”

If I hadn’t shaken Barley awake, or if he had been alone, he would have passed in slumber across the border into Spain, I think, to be rudely awakened by the Spanish customs officers. As it was, he stumbled onto the platform at Perpignan half asleep, so that I was the one who asked the way to the bus station. The blue-coated conductor frowned, as if he thought we should be at home in the nursery by this hour, but he was kind enough to find our orphaned bags behind the station counter. Where were we going? I told him we wanted a bus to Les Bains, and he shook his head. For that we would have to wait till morning-didn’t I know it was almost midnight? There was a clean hotel up the street where I and my-“Brother,” I supplied quickly-could find a room. The conductor looked us over, observing my darkness and extreme youth, I supposed, and Barley’s lanky blondness, but he only made a clicking sound with his tongue and walked on.

“The next morning dawned even fairer and more beautiful than the one before, and when I met Helen in the hotel dining room for breakfast, my forebodings of the previous night were already a distant dream. Sun came through the dusty windows and lit the white tablecloths and heavy coffee cups. Helen was making some notes in a little notebook at the table. ‘Good morning,’ she said affably as I sat down and poured myself coffee. ‘Are you ready to meet my mother?’

“‘I haven’t thought about anything else since we reached Budapest,’ I confessed. ‘How are we going to get there?’

“‘Her village is on a bus route that is north of the city. There is only one bus there on Sunday mornings, so we must be sure we do not miss it. The ride is about an hour through very boring suburbs.’

“I doubted anything about this excursion could bore me, but I held my peace. One thing still troubled me, however. ‘Helen, are you sure you want me to come along? You could go talk with her alone. Maybe that would be less embarrassing to her than your showing up with a total stranger-an American, to boot. And what if my presence got her in trouble?’

“‘It is exactly your presence that will make it easier for her to talk,’ Helen said firmly. ‘She is very reserved around me, you know. You will charm her.’

“‘Well, I’ve certainly never been accused of being charming before.’ I helped myself to three slices of bread and a plate of butter.

“‘Don’t worry-you are not.’ Helen gave me her most sardonic smile, but I thought I saw a glint of affection in her eyes. ‘It is just that my mother is easy to charm.’

“She did not add,Rossi charmed her, so why not you? I thought it better to leave the subject there.

“‘I hope you let her know we’re coming.’ I wondered, looking at her across the table, if she would tell her mother about the librarian’s attack on her. The little scarf was wound firmly around her neck, and I tried hard not to glance at it.

“‘Aunt Éva sent a message to her last night,’ Helen said calmly, and passed me the preserves.

“The bus, when we caught it at the northern edge of the city, wound slowly in and out of suburbs, as Helen had predicted-first old outlying neighborhoods much damaged by the war, and then a host of newer buildings, rising high and white like tombstones for giants. This was the communist progress that was often elaborated upon with hostility in the Western press, I thought-the herding of millions of people all over Eastern Europe into sterile high-rise apartments. The bus stopped at several of these complexes, and I found myself wondering how sterile they really were; around the base of each lay homely gardens full of vegetables and herbs, bright flowers and butterflies. On a bench outside one building, close to the bus stop, two old men in white shirts and dark vests were playing a board game-what, I couldn’t make out at a distance. Several women got on the bus in brightly embroidered blouses-a Sunday costume?-and one carried a cage with a live hen inside it. The driver waved the hen in with everyone else, and her owner settled in the back of the bus with some knitting.

“When we had left the suburbs behind, the bus lumbered out onto a country road, and here I saw fertile fields and wide, dusty roads. Sometimes we passed a horse-drawn wagon-the wagon made like a simple basket of wooden boughs-driven by a farmer in a black fedora and vest. Now and then we caught up with an automobile that would have been in a museum in the United States. The land was beautifully green and fresh, and yellow-leaved willows hung over the little streams that wound through it. From time to time we rode into a village; sometimes I could pick out the onion cupolas of an Orthodox church among the other church towers. Helen leaned across me for a view, too. ‘If we kept on this road, we’d reach Esztergom, the first capital of the Hungarian kings. That’s certainly worth seeing, if only we had the time.’

“‘Next time,’ I lied. ‘Why did your mother choose to live out here?’

“‘Oh, she moved here when I was still in high school, to be close to the mountains. I did not want to go with her-I stayed in Budapest with Éva. She has never liked the city, and she said the Börzsöny Mountains, north of here, remind her of Transylvania. She goes there with a hiking club every Sunday, except when the snows are heavy.’

“This added another little piece to the mosaic portrait of Helen’s mother that I was constructing in my mind. ‘Why didn’t she move to the mountains themselves?’

“‘There is no work there-it is mostly a national park. Besides, my aunt would have forbidden it, and she can be very stern. She thinks my mother has isolated herself too much already.’

“‘Where does your mother work?’ I peered out at a village bus stop; the only person standing there was an old woman dressed completely in black, with a black kerchief on her head and a bunch of red and pink flowers in one hand. She didn’t get on the bus when we pulled up, nor did she greet anyone who got off. As we drove away I could see her staring after us, holding up her nosegay.