The Historian

The Historian Page 28

Barley sat musing in our train compartment, chin in his long-fingered hands, trying in vain to remember something about Master James. Finally he looked at me, and I was struck by the beauty of his narrow, rosy face when it was serious. Without that unnerving jollity, it could have been the face of an angel, or maybe a monk in a Northumbrian cloister. I perceived these comparisons dimly; they bloomed for me only later.

"Well," he said at last, "as I see it, there are two possibilities. Either you're daft, in which case I have to stick with you and get you back home safely, or you're not daft, in which case you're headed for a lot of trouble and I have to stick with you anyway. I'm supposed to be in lecture tomorrow, but I'll figure out what to do about that." He sighed and glanced at me, leaned back against the seat again. "I have this idea Paris is not going to be your terminal destination. Could you enlighten me about where you're going after that?"

"If Professor Bora had given us each a slap across the face at that pleasant restaurant table in Istanbul, it would not have been more stunning than what he'd told us about his 'eccentric hobby.' It was a salutary slap, however; we were wide-awake now. My jet lag was gone, and with it my feeling of hopelessness about finding more information about Dracula's tomb. We had come to the right place. Perhaps - here my heart lurched, and not with mere hope - perhaps Dracula's tomb was in Turkey itself.

"This had never really occurred to me before, but now I thought it might make sense. After all, Rossi had been severely admonished here by one of Dracula's henchmen. Could the undead have been guarding not only an archive but also a grave? Could the strong presence of vampires to which Turgut had referred just now be a legacy of Dracula's continuing occupation of this city? I ran over what I knew already about Vlad the Impaler's career and legend. If he had been imprisoned here in his youth, couldn't he have returned after his death to this site of his early education in torture? He might have had a sort of nostalgia for the place, like people who retire to the town where they grew up. And if Stoker's novel was to be trusted for its chronicling of a vampire's habits, the fiend could certainly leave one place for another, making his grave wherever he liked; in the story, he had traveled in his coffin to England. Why couldn't he have come to Istanbul somehow, moving by night after his demise as a mortal into the very heart of the empire whose armies had brought about his death? It would have been a fitting revenge on the Ottomans, after all.

"But I couldn't ask Turgut any of these questions yet. We had just met the man, and I was still wondering whether we could trust him. He seemed genuine, and yet his turning up at our table with his 'hobby' was almost too strange to be countenanced. He was talking to Helen now, and she, at last, was talking to him. 'No, dear madam, I do not actually know "everything" about Dracula's history. In truth, my knowledge is far from ravishing. But I suspect that he had a great influence on our city, for evil, and that keeps me searching. And you, my friends?' He glanced keenly from Helen to me. 'You seem a portion interested in my topic yourselves. What is your dissertation about, exactly, young man?'

"'Dutch mercantilism in the seventeenth century,' I said lamely. It sounded lame to me, in any case, and I was beginning to wonder if it had always been a rather bland endeavor. Dutch merchants, after all, did not prowl the centuries attacking people and stealing their immortal souls.

"'Ah.' I thought Turgut looked puzzled. 'Well,' he said finally, 'if you are interested also in the history of Istanbul, you can come with me tomorrow morning to see Sultan Mehmed's collection. He was a splendid old tyrant - he collected many interesting things, in addition to my favorite documents. I must get home to my wife now, as she will be in a state of dissolution, I am so late.'

He smiled, as if her state was more pleasant to anticipate than otherwise. 'She will certainly wish you to come dine with us tomorrow, too, as I wish you to.' I pondered this for a moment; Turkish wives must be as submissive, still, as the harems of legend. Or did he just mean that his wife was as hospitable as he? I waited for Helen to snort, but she sat quiet, watching both of us. 'So, my friends - ' Turgut was gathering himself to leave. He drew a little money out of nowhere - I thought - and slid it under the edge of his plate. Then he toasted us a last time and downed the remainder of his tea. 'Adieu until the morrow.'

"'Where shall we meet you?' I asked.

"'Oh, I will come here to fetch you. Let us say exactly here at ten o'clock in the morning? Good. I wish you a merry evening.' He bowed and was gone. After a minute I realized that he had barely eaten dinner, had paid our bill as well as his own, and had left us the talisman against the Evil Eye, which shone at the center of the white tablecloth.

"I slept that night like the dead, as they say, after the exhaustion of travel and sightseeing. When the sounds of the city woke me, it was already six-thirty. My small room was dim. In the first moment of consciousness, I looked around at the whitewashed walls, the simple, somehow foreign furniture, and the gleam of the mirror above the washstand, and I felt a weird confusion. I thought of Rossi's sojourn here in Istanbul, his tenure in that other pension - where had it been? - where his bags had been ransacked and his sketches of the precious maps removed, and I seemed to remember it as if I had been there myself, or was living the scene now. After a minute I realized that all was peaceful and orderly in the room; my suitcase lay undisturbed on the top of the bureau, and - more importantly - my briefcase with all its precious contents sat untouched next to the bed, where I could stretch out a hand and feel it. Even in my sleep I had been somehow aware of that ancient, silent book resting inside it.

"Now I could hear Helen in the hall bathroom, running water and moving around. After a moment, I realized this might constitute eavesdropping on her, and I felt ashamed. To cover my feeling, I got up quickly, ran water into the washstand in my room, and began to splash my face and arms. In the mirror, my face - and how young I looked even to myself in those days, my dear daughter, I cannot possibly convey to you - was the same as usual. My eyes were rather bleary after all this travel, but alert. I polished my hair with a little of the ubiquitous oil of the epoch, combed it back flat and shiny, and dressed in my rumpled trousers and jacket, with a clean, if wrinkled, shirt and tie. As I straightened my tie in the mirror, I heard the sounds in the bathroom cease, and after a few moments I got out my shaving kit and forced myself to knock briskly at the door. When there was no answer, I went in. Helen's scent, a rather harsh and cheap-smelling cologne, perhaps one she had brought from home, lingered in the tiny chamber. I had almost grown to like it.

"Breakfast in the restaurant was strong coffee - very strong - in a copper pot with a long handle, served with bread, salty cheese, and olives and accompanied by a newspaper we couldn't read. Helen ate and drank in silence and I sat musing, sniffing the cigarette smoke that drifted across our table from the waiter's corner. The place was empty this morning apart from some sunlight that crept in through the arched windows, but the bustle of morning traffic just outside filled it with pleasant sounds and with glimpses of people passing by dressed for work, or carrying baskets of market produce. We had instinctively sought a table as far from the windows as possible.

"'The professor won't be here for another two hours,' Helen observed, loading her second cup of coffee with sugar and stirring vigorously. 'What shall we do?'

"'I was thinking we might walk back to Hagia Sophia,' I said. 'I want to see the place again.' "'Why not?' she murmured. 'I do not mind being the tourist while we are here.' She looked rested, and I noticed that she had put on a clean pale-blue blouse with her black suit, the first color I had seen her wear, an exception to her black-and-white garb. As usual, she wore the little scarf over the place in her neck where the librarian had bitten her. Her face was ironic and wary, but I had the sense - with no particular proof - that she was getting used to my presence across the table, almost to the point of relaxing some of her ferocity.

"The streets were filled with people and cars by the time we took ourselves out, and we wandered among them through the heart of the old city and into one of the bazaars. Every aisle was full of shoppers - old women in black who stood fingering rainbows of fine textiles; young women in rich colors, their heads covered, bargaining for fruits I had never seen before or examining trays of gold jewelry; old men with crocheted caps on their white hair or balding pates, reading newspapers or bending over to examine a selection of carved wooden pipes. Some of them carried prayer beads in their hands. Everywhere I looked I saw handsome, shrewd, strong-featured, olive-skinned faces, gesturing hands, pointing fingers, flashing smiles that sometimes showed a glimpse of gold teeth. All around us I heard the clamor of emphatic, confident, haggling voices, sometimes a laugh.

"Helen wore her bemused, upside-down smile, looking about her at these strangers as if they pleased her, but as if she thought she understood them all too well. To me the scene was delightful, but I, too, felt a wariness, a sensation that I could have dated in myself as less than a week old, a feeling I had these days in any public place. It was a sense of searching the crowd, of glancing over my shoulder, of scanning faces for good or ill intent - and perhaps also of being watched. It was an unpleasant feeling, a harsh note in the harmony of all those lively conversations around us, and I wondered not for the first time if it was partly the contagion of Helen's cynical attitude toward the human race. I wondered, too, if that attitude in her was intrinsic or simply the result of her life in a police state.

"Whatever its roots, I felt my own paranoia as an affront to my former self. A week ago I'd been a normal American graduate student, content in my discontent with my work, enjoying deep down a sense of the prosperity and moral high ground of my culture even while I pretended to question it and everything else. The Cold War was real to me now, in the person of Helen and her disillusioned stance, and an older cold war made itself felt in my very veins. I thought of Rossi, strolling these streets in the summer of 1930 before his adventure in the archive had sent him pell-mell out of Istanbul, and he was real to me, too - not only Rossi as I knew him but also the young Rossi of his letters.

"Helen tapped my arm as we walked and nodded in the direction of a couple of old men at a little wooden table tucked away near a booth. 'Look - there's your theory of leisure in person,' she said. 'It's nine in the morning and they are already playing chess. It is strange that they are not playing tabla - that is the favorite game, in this part of the world. But I believe this is chess, instead.' Sure enough, the two men were just setting up their pieces on a worn-looking wooden board. Black was arrayed against ivory, knights and rooks guarded their lieges, pawns faced one another in battle formation - the same arrangement of war the world over, I mused, stopping to watch. 'Do you know about chess?' Helen asked.

"'Of course,' I said a little indignantly. 'I used to play it with my father.' "'Ah.' The sound was acerbic, and I remembered too late that she had had no such childhood lessons, and that she played her own kind of chess with her father - with her image of him, in any case. But she seemed to be caught up in historical reflections. 'It's not Western, you know - it's an ancient game from India - shahmatin Persian. Checkmate, I think you say in English. Shah is the word forking. A battle of kings.' "I watched the two men beginning their game, their gnarled fingers selecting the first warriors. Jokes flashed between them - probably they were old friends. I could have stood there all day, watching, but Helen moved restlessly away, and I followed her. As we went by, the men seemed to notice us for the first time, glancing up quizzically for a moment. We must look like foreigners, I realized, although Helen's face blended beautifully with the countenances around us. I wondered how long their game would take - all morning, maybe  - and which of them would win this time. "The booth near them was just opening up. It was really a shed, wedged under a venerable fig tree at the edge of the bazaar. A young man in a white shirt and dark trousers was pulling vigorously at the stall's doors and curtains, setting up tables outside and laying out his wares - books. Books stood in stacks on the wooden counters, tumbled out of crates on the floor, and lined the shelves inside.

"I went forward eagerly, and the young owner nodded a greeting and smiled, as if he recognized a bibliophile whatever his national cut. Helen followed more slowly, and we stood turning through volumes in perhaps a dozen languages. Many of them were in Arabic, or in the modern Turkish language; some were in Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, others in English, French, German, Italian. I found a Hebrew tome and a whole shelf of Latin classics. Most were cheaply printed and shoddily bound, their cloth covers already shabby with handling. There were new paperbacks with lurid scenes on the covers, and a few volumes that looked very old, especially some of the works in Arabic. 'The Byzantines loved books, too,' Helen murmured, leafing through what looked like a set of German poetry. 'Perhaps they bought books on this very spot.'

"The young man had finished his preparations for the day, and he came over to greet us. 'Speak German? English?'

"'English,' I said quickly, since Helen did not answer. "'I have books in English,' he told me with a pleasant smile. 'No problem.' His face was thin and expressive, with large greenish eyes and a long nose. 'Also newspaper from London, New York.' I thanked him and asked if he carried old books. 'Yes, very old.' He handed me a nineteenth-century edition of Much Ado About Nothing - cheap looking, bound in worn cloth. I wondered what library this had drifted from and how it had made its journey - from bourgeois Manchester, say - to this crossroads of the ancient world. I flipped through the pages, to be polite, and handed it back. 'Not enough old?' he asked, smiling. "Helen had been peering over my shoulder, and now she looked pointedly at her watch. We hadn't even reached Hagia Sophia, after all. 'Yes, we've got to be going,' I said. "The young bookseller gave us a courteous bow, volume in hand. I stared at him for a second, troubled by something that bordered on recognition, but he had turned away and was helping a new customer, an old man who could have been a triplet to the chess players. Helen nudged my elbow, and we left the shop and went more purposefully around the edge of the bazaar and back toward our pension.

"The little restaurant was empty when we entered, but a few minutes later Turgut appeared in the doorway, nodding and smiling, and asked us how we had slept. He was wearing an olive wool suit this morning, despite the gathering heat, and seemed full of suppressed excitement. His curly dark hair was slicked back, his shoes shone with polish, and he moved quickly to usher us out of the restaurant. I noticed again that he was a person of great energy, and I felt relief at having such a guide. Excitement was rising in me, too. Rossi's papers rested securely in my briefcase, and perhaps the next few hours would bring me a step closer to his whereabouts. Soon, at least, I might be able to compare his copies of the documents with the originals he had examined so many years before. "As we followed Turgut through the streets, he explained to us that Sultan Mehmed's archive was not housed in the main building of the National Library, although it was still under state protection. It was now in a library annex that had once been a mendrese, a traditional Islamic school. Ataturk had closed these schools in his secularization of the country, and this one currently contained the National Library's rare and antique books on the history of the Empire. We would find Sultan Mehmed's collection among others from the centuries of Ottoman expansion.

"The annex to the library proved to be an exquisite little building. We entered it from the street through brass-studded wooden doors. The windows were covered with a tracery of marble; sunlight filtered through them in fine geometric shapes, decorating the floor of the dim entryway with fallen stars and octagons. Turgut showed us where to sign the register, which lay on a counter at the entrance (Helen put down an illegible scrawl, I noticed), and signed it himself with a flourish.

"Then we proceeded into the collection's one room, a large, hushed space under a dome set with green-and-white mosaic. Polished tables ran the length of it, and three or four researchers already sat working there. The walls were lined not only with books but also with wooden drawers and boxes, and delicate brass lamp shades fitted with electric lighting hung from the ceiling. The librarian, a slender man of fifty with a string of prayer beads on his wrist, left his work and came over to shake both of Turgut's hands in his. They spoke for a minute - on Turgut's side of the conversation I caught the name of our university at home - and then the librarian addressed us in Turkish, smiling and bowing. 'This is Mr. Erozan. He welcomes you to the collection,' Turgut told us with a look of satisfaction. 'He would like to be of assassination to you.' I recoiled, in spite of myself, and Helen smirked. 'He will set forth for you immediately Sultan Mehmed's documents from the Order of the Dragon.

But first, we must sit in comfort here and wait for him.' "We settled at one of the tables, carefully distant from the few other researchers. They eyed us with transitory curiosity and then returned to their work. After a moment, Mr. Erozan came back carrying a large wooden box with a lock on the front and Arabic lettering carved into the top. 'What does that say?' I asked the professor.

"'Ah.' He touched the top of the box with his fingertips. 'It says, "Here is evil" - hmm - "here is evil contained - housed. Lock it with the keys of holy Qur'an."' My heart made a jump; the phrases were strikingly similar to what Rossi had reported reading in the margins of the mysterious map and had spoken aloud in the old archives where it had once been stored. He'd made no mention of this box in his letters, but perhaps he'd never seen it, if a librarian had brought him just the documents. Or perhaps they had been placed in the box sometime after Rossi's sojourn here.

"'How old is the box itself?' I asked Turgut. "He shook his head. 'I don't know, and neither does my friend here. Because it is of wood, I do not think it is very likely to be as old as the time of Mehmed. My friend told me once' - he beamed in Mr. Erozan's direction, and the man beamed back without comprehension - 'that these documents were put in the box in 1930, to keep them safe. He knows that because he discussed it with the previous librarian. He is most meticulous, my friend.' "In 1930! Helen and I looked at each other. Probably by the time Rossi had penned his letters - December 1930 - to whoever might later receive them, the documents he had examined had already been put into this box for safekeeping. An ordinary wooden receptacle might have kept out mice and damp, but what had prompted the librarian of that era to lock the documents of the Order of the Dragon inside a box ornamented with a sacred warning?

"Turgut's friend had produced a ring of keys and was fitting one to the lock. I almost laughed, remembering our modern card catalog at home, the accessibility of thousands of rare books in the university library system. I had never imagined myself doing research that required an old key. It clicked in the lock. 'Here we are,' Turgut murmured, and the librarian withdrew. Turgut smiled at each of us - rather sadly, I thought - and lifted the lid."

In the train, Barley had just finished reading my father's first two letters for himself. It gave me a pang to see them lying open in his hands, but I knew Barley would trust my father's authoritative voice, whereas he might only half believe my weaker one. "Have you been to Paris before?" I asked him, partly to cover my emotion.

"I suppose I have," Barley said indignantly. "I studied there for a year before I went to university. My mother wanted me to know French better." I longed to ask about his mother and why she required this delectable accomplishment in her son, and also what it was like to have a mother, but Barley was deep in the letter again. "Your father must be a very good lecturer," he mused. "This is a lot more entertaining than what we get at Oxford."

This opened up another realm for me. Were lectures at Oxford ever dull? Was that possible? Barley was full of things I wanted to know, a messenger from a world so large I could not begin to imagine it. I was interrupted this time by a conductor hurrying down the aisle past our door. "Bruxelles!" he called. The train was slowing already, and a few minutes later we were looking out the window into the Brussels station; the customs officers were boarding. Outside, people were rushing for their trains and pigeons were hunting for morsels from the platform.

Perhaps because I was secretly fond of pigeons, I was gazing hard enough into the crowd to suddenly notice one figure that was not moving at all. A woman, tall and dressed in a long black coat, stood quietly on the platform. She had a black scarf tied over her hair, framing a white face. She was a little too far away for me to see her features clearly, but I caught a flash of dark eyes and an almost unnaturally red mouth - bright lipstick, maybe. There was something odd about the silhouette of her clothes; amid the miniskirts and hideous block-heeled boots of the day, she wore narrow black pumps.

But what caught my attention about her first, and held it for a moment before our train began to move again, was her attitude of alertness. She was scanning our train, up and down. I drew back from the window instinctively, and Barley looked a question at me. The woman apparently hadn't seen us, although she took a hovering step in our direction. Then she seemed to change her mind and turned to scan another train, which had just pulled in on the opposite side of the platform. Something about her stern, straight back kept me staring until we began to move out of the station again, and then she disappeared among the throngs of people there, as if she had never existed.