The Historian

The Historian Page 50

Part Three

There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word, DRACULA.

- Bram Stoker, Dracula,1897

Chapter 49

Some years ago I found among my father's papers a note that would have no place in this history except that it is the only memento of his love for Helen that has ever come into my hands, apart from his letters to me. He kept no journals as such, and his occasional notes to himself were almost entirely concerned with his work - musings on diplomatic problems, or on history, especially as it pertained to some international conflict. These reflections, and the lectures and articles that grew from them, now reside in the library of his foundation, and I am left, after all, with only one piece of writing he did entirely for himself - for Helen. I knew my father as a man devoted to fact and ideal, but not to poetry, which makes this document all the more important to me. Because this is no children's book, and because I would like it to be as full a record as possible, I have included it here despite some of my own scruples. Quite possibly he wrote other letters like it, but it would have been characteristic of him to destroy them - perhaps to burn them in the tiny garden behind our house in Amsterdam, where as a young girl I sometimes found charred and unreadable scraps of paper in the little stone grill - and this one may have survived by accident. The letter is undated, so I have also hesitated about where to place it in this chronology. I give it at this point because it refers to the earliest days of their love, although the anguish in it leads me to believe that he wrote this letter when it could no longer have been delivered to her.

Oh my love, I wanted to tell you how I have thought about you. My memory belongs entirely to you, because it reverts constantly these days to our first moments alone together. I have asked myself many times why other affections can't replace your presence, and I always return to the illusion that we are still together, and then - unwillingly - to the knowledge that you have made a hostage of my memory. When I least expect it, I am overwhelmed by your words in recollection. I feel the weight of your hand over mine, both our hands hidden under the edge of my jacket, my jacket folded on the seat between us, the exquisite lightness of your fingers, your profile turned away from me, your exclamation when we entered Bulgaria together, when we first flew over the Bulgarian mountains.

Since we were young, my dear, there has been a revolution about sex, a bacchanalia of mythic proportions that you have not lived to see - now, in the Western world, at least, young people apparently encounter each other without preliminaries. But I remember our restrictions with almost as much longing as I remember their legal consummation, much later. This is the kind of memory I can share with no one: the intimacy we had with each other's clothing, in a situation in which we had to delay fulfillments, the way the removal of any garment was a burning question between us, so that I recall with agonizing clarity - and when I least want to - both the delicate base of your neck and the delicate collar of your blouse, that blouse whose outline I knew by heart before my fingers ever brushed its texture or touched its pearly buttons. I remember the scent of train travel and harsh soap in the shoulder of your black jacket, the slight roughness of your black straw hat, as fully as I do the softness of your hair, which was almost exactly the same shade. When we dared to spend half an hour together in my hotel room in Sofia before appearing for another grim meal, I felt that my longing would destroy me. When you hung your jacket on a chair, and laid your blouse over it, slowly and deliberately, when you turned to face me with eyes that never wavered from mine, I was paralyzed by fire. When you put my hands on your waist and they had to choose between the heavy polish of your skirt and the finer polish of your skin, I could have wept. Perhaps it was then that I found your single blemish - the one place, perhaps, I never kissed - the tiny curling dragon on the wing of your shoulder blade. My hands must have crossed it before I saw it. I remember my intake of breath -  and yours - when I found it and stroked it with a reluctantly curious finger. In time it became for me part of the geography of your smooth back, but at that first moment it fueled the awe in my desire. Whether or not this happened in our hotel in Sofia, I must have learned it around the time when I was memorizing the edge of your lower teeth and their fine serration, and the skin around your eyes, with its first signs of age like cobwebs -  

Here my father's note breaks off, and I can only revert to his more guarded letters to me.