The Historian

The Historian Page 29

I had dozed off this time, instead of Barley. When I woke, I found myself wedged against him, my head lolling on the shoulder of his navy sweater. He was staring out the window, my father's letters stored neatly again in their envelopes on his lap, his legs crossed, his face - not so far above mine -  turned to the passing scenery of what I knew must by now be the French countryside. I opened my eyes to a view of his bony chin. When I looked down I could see Barley's hands clasped loosely together over the letters. I noticed for the first time that he bit his nails, as I always did myself. I closed my eyes again, feigning continued sleep, because the warmth of his shoulder was so comforting. Then I was afraid he wouldn't like my leaning against him, or that I had drooled on his sweater in my doltish slumber, and I sat quickly upright. Barley turned to look at me, his eyes full of faraway thoughts, or perhaps just full of the land beyond the window, no longer flat but rolling, a modest French farm country. After a minute he smiled.

"As the lid went up on Sultan Mehmed's box of secrets, a smell I knew well drifted out of it. It was the scent of very old documents, of parchment or vellum, of dust and centuries, of pages time had long since begun to defile. It was the smell, too, of the small blank book with the dragon in the middle, my book. I had never dared put my nose directly into it, as I secretly had with some of the other old volumes I'd handled - I feared, I think, that there might be a repulsive edge to its perfume or, worse, a power in the scent, an evil drug I didn't want to inhale.

"Turgut was gently lifting documents from the box. Each was wrapped in yellowing tissue paper, and the items varied in shape and size. He spread them carefully on the table before us. 'I will show you these papers myself and tell you what I know of them,' he said. 'Then perhaps you would like to sit and brood on them, don't you think?' Yes, perhaps we would - I nodded, and he unwrapped a scroll and unwound it delicately under our gaze. It was parchment attached to fine wooden spindles, very different from the large flat pages and bound ledgers I was used to in my research on Rembrandt's world. The edges of the parchment were decorated in a colorful border of geometric patterns, gilt and deep blue and crimson. The handwritten text, to my disappointment, was in Arabic lettering. I'm not sure what I had expected; this document had come from the heart of an empire that spoke the Ottoman language and wrote it down in Arabic letters, resorting to Greek only to bully the Byzantines, or Latin to storm the gates of Vienna.

"Turgut read my face and hurried to explain. 'This, my friends, is a ledger of the expenses of a war with the Order of the Dragon. It was written in a town on the southern side of the Danube by a bureaucrat who was spending the sultan's money there - it is a report of business, in other words. Dracula's father, Vlad Dracul, cost the Ottoman Empire a great deal of money in the mid-fifteenth century, you see. This bureaucrat commissioned armor and - how do you say? - scimitars for three hundred men to guard the border of the western Carpathians so that the local people would not revolt, and he bought horses for them, also. Here' - he pointed a long finger at the bottom of the scroll - 'it says that Vlad Dracul was an expense and a - a rotten nuisance and had cost them more money than the pasha wanted to spend. The pasha is very sorry and miserable, and he wishes a long life to the Incomparable One in the name of Allah.'

"Helen and I glanced at each other, and I thought I read in her eyes something of the awe I felt myself. This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did - as we would. I looked away, unable to watch the flicker of emotion on her strong face.

"Turgut had rolled up the scroll again and was opening a second package, which contained two more scrolls. 'Here is a letter from the pasha of Wallachia in which he promises to send Sultan Mehmed any documents he can find about the Order of the Dragon. And this is an account of trading along the Danube in 1461, not far from where the Order of the Dragon had control. The boundaries of this area were not stalwart, you understand - they were continually changing. Here it lists the silks, spices, and horses the pasha requests to trade for wool from the shepherds of his domain.' The next two scrolls proved to be similar accounts. Then Turgut unrolled a smaller package, which contained a flat sketch on parchment. 'A map,' he said. I made an involuntary move for my briefcase, which held Rossi's sketches and notes, but Helen shook her head almost imperceptibly. I understood her meaning - we did not know Turgut well enough to spread all our secrets in front of him. Not yet, I amended mentally; after all, he had apparently opened all his own resources to us.

"'I have never been able to understand what this map is, my fellows,' Turgut told us. There was regret in his voice, and he stroked his mustache with a thoughtful hand. I looked closely at the parchment and saw with a thrill a neat, if faded, version of the first map Rossi had copied, the long crescents of mountains, the curving river north of them. 'It does not resemble any region I have studied myself, and there is no way to know the - how do you say? -  scale of the map, you know?' He set it aside. 'Here is another map, which appears to be a closer view of the area in the first.' I knew it was - I had seen all this already, and my excitement climbed. 'I believe these are the mountains shown in the west on the first map, no?' He sighed. 'But there is no further information, and you see it is not much labeled, except for some lines from the Qur'an and this strange motto - I translated it carefully, once - that says something like "Here he is housed with evil. Reader, with your words dig him up."'

"I had put out a startled hand to stop him, but Turgut had spoken too quickly and caught me off guard. 'No!' I cried, but too late, so that Turgut stared at me in astonishment. Helen looked from one of us to the other, and Mr. Erozan turned from his work on the other side of the hall and stared at me, too. 'Excuse me,' I whispered. 'I'm just excited by seeing these documents. They're so - interesting.'

"'Oh, I am glad you find them interesting.' Turgut almost beamed through his gravity. 'And these words do sound a wit strange. They give one a - you know? - a turn.'

"At that moment there was a step in the hall. I looked around nervously, half expecting to see Dracula himself, whatever he looked like, but it was only a small man in a white cap and shaggy gray beard. Mr. Erozan went to the door to greet him, and we turned back to our documents. Turgut drew from the box another parchment. 'This is the last document in here,' he said. 'I have never been able to make sense of it. It is listed in the library catalog as a bibliography of the Order of the Dragon.'

"My heart lurched, and I saw the color rise in Helen's face. 'A bibliography?' "'Yes, my friend.' Turgut spread it gently on the table before us. It looked very old and quite brittle, written in Greek in a fine hand. The top curved raggedly, as if it had once been part of a longer scroll, and the bottom edge was clearly torn off. There were no ornaments of any sort on the manuscript, just the finely penned words in rows. I sighed. I had never studied Greek, although I doubted anything but complete mastery would have helped me with such a document, anyway.

"As if divining my problem, Turgut took a notebook from his briefcase. 'I have had this translated by a scholar of Byzantium from our university. He has a ravishing knowledge of their language and documents. This is a list of works of literature, although many of them I have never found mentioned in any other example.' He opened his notebook and smoothed out a page. It was covered in neat Turkish script. This time Helen sighed. Turgut slapped his forehead. 'Oh, a million pardons,' he said. 'Here, I shall translate for you as we go along, all right? "Herodotus, The Treatment of Prisoners of War. Pheseus, On Reason and Torture. Origen, Treatise on First Principles. Euthymius the Elder, The Fate of the Damned. Gubent of Ghent, Treatise on Nature. St. Thomas Aquinas, Sisyphus. " You see, it is quite a strange selection, and some of the books on it are very rare. My friend who is a Byzantine scholar told me, for example, that it would be a miracle if a previously unknown version of this treatise by the early Christian philosopher Origen had survived somewhere - most of Origen's work was destroyed because he was accused of heresy.'

"'What heresy?' Helen looked interested. 'I am sure I have read about him somewhere.'

"'He was accused of arguing in this treatise that it is a matter of Christian logic that even Satan will be saved and resurrected,' Turgut explained. 'Shall I go on with the list?'

"'If you wouldn't mind,' I said, 'could you write the titles down for us in English, just as you are reading them?'

"'With pleasure.' Turgut sat down with his notebook and drew out a pen."'What do you make of this?' I asked Helen. Her face said more plainly than any words, We came all this way for a jumbled list of books? 'I know it makes no sense yet,' I told her in a low voice, 'but let's see what it leads to.'

"'Now, then, my friends, let me read you the next few titles.' Turgut was writing cheerfully away. 'Almost all of them are connected with torture or murder or something else unpleasant, you can see. "Erasmus, Fortunes of an Assassin. Henricus Curtius, The Cannibals. Giorgio of Padua, The Damned. "'

"'No dates for these works are listed with them?' I asked, bending over the documents.

"Turgut sighed. 'No. And I have never been able to find other references to some of these titles, but of those I have located, there is none written later than 1600.'

"'And yet that is later than the lifetime of Vlad Dracula,' Helen commented. I looked at her in surprise; I hadn't thought of that. It was a simple point, but quite true and very puzzling.

"'Yes, dear madam,' Turgut said, looking up at her. 'The most recent of these works was written more than a hundred years after his death and after the death of Sultan Mehmed, as well. Alas, I have been unable to find any information about how or when this bibliography became part of Sultan Mehmed's collection. Someone must have added it later, perhaps long after the collection came to Istanbul.'

"'But before 1930,' I mused.

"Turgut looked at me sharply. 'That is the date when this collection was put under lock and key,' he said. 'What makes you say that, Professor?'

"I felt myself reddening, both because I had said far too much, so much that Helen was turning away from me in despair at my idiocy, and because I was

not yet a professor. I was silent a minute; I have always hated to lie, and I try,

my dear daughter, never to do so if I can possibly avoid it.

"Turgut was studying me, and I felt - uncomfortably - that before this moment I had never fully registered the extreme keenness of his dark eyes with their genial crow's-feet. I took a deep breath. I would have it out with Helen later. I had trusted Turgut all along, and he might well help us more if he knew more. To stall for another moment, however, I looked down at the list of documents he was translating for us, then glanced at the Turkish translation from which he was working. I couldn't meet his eyes. Exactly how much of what we knew should I tell him? If I related the full extent of my knowledge of Rossi's experiences here, would he discredit our seriousness and sanity? It was precisely because I'd lowered my eyes in indecision that I suddenly saw something strange. My hand flew out toward the original Greek document, the bibliography of the Order of the Dragon. Not all of it was in Greek, after all. I could clearly read the name at the bottom of the list: Bartolomeo Rossi. It was followed by a phrase in Latin.

"'Good God!' My exclamation had ruffled the silent researchers all over the room, I realized too late. Mr. Erozan, still talking with the man in the cap and long beard, turned quizzically toward us.

"Turgut took alarm at once, and Helen moved swiftly closer. 'What is it?' Turgut put out a hand toward the document. I was still staring; it was easy enough for him to follow my gaze. Then he jumped to his feet, breathing out what could have been an echo of my own agitation, so clear an echo that it brought me a strange comfort in the midst of all that other strangeness: 'My God! Professor Rossi!'

"The three of us looked at one another, and for a moment nobody spoke. Finally I tried. 'Do you,' I said to Turgut in a low voice, 'know that name?'

"Turgut looked from me to Helen. 'Do you?' he said at last." Barley's smile was kind. "You must have been tired or you wouldn't have slept so hard. I'm tired myself, just thinking what a mess you're in. What would anyone say if you told them about all this - anyone else, I mean? That lady there, for example." He nodded at our drowsy companion, who hadn't gotten off at Brussels and apparently meant to nap all the way to Paris. "Or a policeman. No one would think you were anything but crazed." He sighed. "And you really intended to travel to the south of France by yourself? I wish you'd tell me the exact location, instead of making me guess it, so I could wire Mrs. Clay and get you in the biggest possible trouble."

It was my turn to smile. We'd been over this ground a couple of times already. "You're awfully stubborn," Barley groaned. "I never would have thought one little girl could be so much trouble - namely the trouble I'd be in with Master James if I left you in the middle of nowhere in France, you know." That almost made the tears start up behind my eyes, but his next words dried them before they had time to form. "At least we'll have time for lunch before we have to catch our next train. The Gare du Nord has the most delicious sandwiches and we can use up my francs." It was the choice of pronoun that warmed my heart.