Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“‘Map, Herr Professor?’

“‘I was working on a map. I signed it out this morning, at the desk.’

“‘Not that map?’ He pointed to my worktable. In the middle of it lay an ordinary road map of the Balkans that I had never seen in my life. It certainly hadn’t been there five minutes before. The librarian was putting away his second folio.

“‘Never mind.’ I gathered my books as quickly as I could and left the library. In the busy, traffic-filled street there was no sign of the bureaucrat, although several men of his build and height in similar suits hurried past me carrying briefcases. When I reached the room where I was staying, I found that my belongings had been moved, owing to some practical problems with the room. My first sketches of the old maps, as well as the completed notes I hadn’t needed that day, were gone. My suitcase had been perfectly repacked. The hotel staff said they knew nothing about it. I lay awake all night listening to every sound outside. The next morning I gathered up my unwashed clothes and my dictionaries and took the boat back to Greece.”

Professor Rossi folded his hands again and looked at me, as if waiting patiently for my disbelief. But I was suddenly shaken by belief, not doubt. “You went back to Greece?”

“Yes, and I spent the rest of the summer ignoring the memory of my adventure in Istanbul, although I couldn’t ignore its implications.”

“You left because you were-frightened?”

“Terrified.”

“But later you did all that research-or had it done-on your strange book?”

“Yes, mainly the chemical analysis at the Smithsonian. But when it was inconclusive-and under some other influences-I dropped the whole thing and put the book on my shelf. Up there, eventually.” He nodded to the highest roost in his cage. “It’s odd-I think about these events occasionally, and I seem to remember them very clearly sometimes and then only in fragments at other times. I suppose familiarity erodes even the most awful memories, though. And there are certainly periods-years at a time-when I don’t want to think about this at all.”

“But do you really believe-this man with the wounds on his neck -”

“What would you have thought, if he’d been standing in front of you and you’d known yourself to be sane?” He stood leaning against the shelves, and for a moment his tone was fierce.

I took a last sip of cold coffee; it was very bitter, the dregs. “And you never tried again to figure out what the map meant, or where it had come from?”

“Never.” He seemed to pause for a moment. “No. One of the few pieces of research I’m sure I’ll never finish. I have a theory, however, that this ghastly trail of scholarship, like so many less awful ones, is merely something one person makes a little progress on, then another, each contributing a bit in his own lifetime. Perhaps three such people, centuries ago, did just that in drawing up those maps and adding to them, although I admit that all those talismanic sayings from the Qur’an probably didn’t further anyone’s knowledge about the whereabouts of Vlad Tepes’s real tomb. And of course it could all be nonsense. He could perfectly well have been buried in his island monastery, as reported by Romanian tradition, and stayed there peacefully like a good soul-which he wasn’t.”

“But you don’t think so.”

Again he hesitated. “Scholarship must go on. For good or for evil, but inevitably, in every field.”

“Did you ever go to Snagov to see for yourself, somehow?”

He shook his head. “No. I gave up the search.”

I put down my icy cup, watching his face. “But you kept some information,” I guessed slowly.

He reached up among the books on his top shelf again, pulling down a sealed brown envelope. “Of course. Who destroys any research completely? I copied from memory what I could of the three maps and saved my other notes, the ones I had with me that day in the archive.”

He laid the unopened packet on his desk, between us, and touched it with a tenderness that didn’t seem to me to match his horror of its contents. Maybe it was that disjunction, or the deepening of the spring evening into night outside, that made me even more nervous. “Don’t you think this might be a dangerous sort of legacy?”

“I wish to God I could say no. But perhaps dangerous only in a psychological sense. Life’s better, sounder, when we don’t brood unnecessarily on horrors. As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination. It’s been so many years that I can’t even be certain of my memories of Istanbul anymore, and I’ve never cared to go back there. Besides, I have the feeling I took away with me all I could have needed to know.”

“To go further, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“But you still don’t know who could have concocted a map that showed where this tomb is? Or was?”

“No.”

I put my hand out toward the brown envelope. “Don’t I need a rosary to go with this, or something, some charm?”

“I’m sure you carry your own goodness, moral sense, whatever you want to call it, with you-I like to think most of us are capable of that, anyway. I wouldn’t go around with garlic in my pocket, no.”

“But with some strong mental antidote.”

“Yes. I’ve tried to.” His face was deeply sad, almost grim. “Perhaps I’ve been wrong not to make use of those ancient superstitions, but I’m a rationalist, I suppose, and I’ll stick to that.”

I closed my fingers over the package.

“Here’s your book. It’s an interesting one and I wish you luck in identifying its source.” He handed me my vellum-covered volume, and I thought the sorrow in his face belied the lightness of his words. “Come two weeks from now and we’ll get back to trade in Utrecht.”

I must have blinked; even my dissertation sounded unreal to me. “Yes, all right.”

Rossi cleared away the coffee cups and I packed my briefcase, stiff fingered.

“One last thing,” he said gravely, as I turned back to him.

“Yes?”

“We won’t talk about this again.”

“You don’t want to know how I get on?” It left me aghast, lonely.

“You could put it that way. I don’t want to know. Unless, of course, you find yourself in trouble.” He took my hand in his usual affectionate grip. His face wore a look of actual grief that was new to me, and then he seemed to make himself smile.

“All right,” I said.

“Two weeks from now,” he called almost cheerfully as I went out. “Bring me a finished chapter, or else.”

My father stopped. To my astonished embarrassment, I saw that there were tears in his eyes. That gleam of emotion would have halted my questions even if he hadn’t spoken. “You see, writing a dissertation’s the really grisly thing,” he said lightly. “Anyway, we probably shouldn’t have gotten into all this. It’s such a convoluted old story, and obviously everything turned out fine, because here I am, not even a ghostly professor anymore, and here you are.” He blinked; he was recovering. “That’s a happy ending, as endings go.”

“But maybe there’s a lot in between,” I managed to say. The sun reached only through my skin, not to my bones, which had picked up some cold breeze coming off the sea. We stretched and turned this way and that to look at the town below. The latest group of milling tourists had wandered past us along the wall and were standing in a distant alcove, pointing out the islands or posing for one another’s cameras. I glanced at my father, but he was gazing out to sea. Behind the other tourists, and already far ahead of us, was a man I hadn’t noticed before, walking slowly but inexorably out of reach, tall and broad shouldered in a dark wool suit. We had seen other tall men in dark suits in that city, but for some reason I couldn’t stop staring after this one.