The Historian

The Historian Page 81

A couple of years ago, a strange opportunity presented itself to me while I was in Philadelphia for a conference, an international gathering of medieval historians. I had never been to Philadelphia before and I was intrigued by the contrast between our meetings, which delved into a feudal and monastic past, and the lively metropolis around us, with its more recent history of Enlightenment republicanism and revolution. The view from my fourteenth-floor hotel room downtown showed an odd mix of skyscrapers and blocks of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century houses, which looked like miniatures next to them.

During our few hours of leisure, I slipped away from the endless talk of Byzantine artifacts to see some real ones in the magnificent art museum. There I picked up a pamphlet for a small literary museum and library downtown, whose name I'd heard years before from my father, and whose collection I had reason to know about. It was as important a site for Dracula scholars - whose numbers, of course, have swelled considerably since my father's first investigations - as many archives in Europe. There, I recalled, a researcher might see Bram Stoker's notes for Dracula, culled from sources at the British Museum Library, and an important medieval pamphlet, as well. The opportunity was irresistible. My father had always wanted to visit this collection; I would spend an hour there for his sake. He had been killed by a land mine in Sarajevo more than ten years before, working to mediate Europe's worst conflagration in decades. I hadn't known for nearly a week; the news, when it found me, had left me marooned in silence for a year. I still missed him every day, sometimes every hour. That was how I came to find myself in a small, climate-controlled room in one of the city's nineteenth-century brownstones, handling documents that breathed not only a distant past but also the urgency of my father's researches. The windows looked out on a couple of feathery street trees and across to more brownstones, their elegant facades unsullied by any modern additions. There was only one other scholar in the small library that morning, an Italian woman who whispered into her cell phone for a few minutes before opening someone's handwritten diaries - I tried not to crane at them - and beginning to read. When I had settled myself with a notebook and a light sweater against the air-conditioning, the librarian brought me first Stoker's papers and then a small cardboard box bound with ribbon.

Stoker's notes were a pleasant diversion, a study in chaotic note taking. Some were written in a cramped hand, some typed on ancient onionskin. Among them lay newspaper clippings about mysterious events and leaves from his personal calendar. I thought how my father would have enjoyed this, how he would have smiled over Stoker's innocent dabbling in the occult. But after half an hour I put them carefully aside and turned to the other box. It held one slim volume, bound in a neat, probably nineteenth-century cover - forty pages printed on nearly unblemished fifteenth-century parchment, a medieval treasure, a miracle of movable type. The frontispiece was a woodcut, a face I knew from my long travail, its great eyes, wide and yet somehow sly, looking piercingly out at me, the heavy mustache drooping over a square jaw, the long nose fine and yet menacing, the sensual lips just visible.

It was a pamphlet from Nuremberg, printed in 1491, and it told of Dracole Waida's crimes, his cruelty, his bloodthirsty feasts. I could make out, from their familiarity to me, the first lines of the medieval German: "In the Year of Our Lord 1456, Drakula did many terrible and curious things." The library had provided a translation sheet, in fact, and there I reread with a shudder some of Dracula's crimes against humanity. He had had people roasted alive, he had flayed them, he had buried them up to their necks, he had impaled infants on their mothers' breasts. My father had examined other such pamphlets, of course, but he would have valued this one for its astounding freshness, the crispness of its parchment, its nearly perfect condition. After five centuries, it looked newly printed. Its very purity unnerved me, and after a while I was glad to put it away and tie the ribbon again, wondering a little why I'd wanted to see the thing in person. That arrogant stare fixed me until I shut the book on it.

I collected my belongings, then, with a feeling of pilgrimage completed, and thanked the kind librarian. She seemed pleased by my visit; this pamphlet was one of her favorite items among their holdings; she had written an article on it herself. We parted with cordial words and a handshake and I went downstairs to the gift shop, and from there out to the warm street, with its smells of car exhaust and lunch to be had somewhere nearby. The very contrast between the purified air inside the museum and the bustle of the city outside made the oak door behind me look forbiddingly sealed, so that it startled me all the more to see the librarian hurrying out of it. "I think you forgot these," she said. "Glad I caught you." She gave me the self-conscious smile of one who returns to you a treasure - wouldn't want to lose this - your wallet, your keys, a fine bracelet.

I thanked her and took the book and notebook she handed me, startled again, nodding my acquiescence, and she disappeared into the old building as quickly as she'd descended on me. The notebook was mine, certainly, although I thought I'd packed it safely in my briefcase before leaving. The book was - I can't say now what I actually thought it was, in that first moment, only that the cover was a rubbed old velvet, very, very old, and that it was both familiar and unfamiliar under my hand. The parchment inside had none of the freshness of the pamphlet I'd examined in the library - despite the emptiness of its pages, it reeked of centuries of handling. The ferocious single image at the center was open in my hand before I could stop myself, closed again before I could look at it long.

I stood perfectly still on the street, while a feeling of unreality broke over me; the cars, passing, were just as solid as before, a car horn honked somewhere, a man with a dog on a leash was trying to get around me, between me and the ginkgo tree. I looked quickly up at the museum windows, thinking of the librarian, but they reflected only the houses opposite. No lace curtain moved there, either, and no door closed quietly as I looked around. Nothing was wrong on this street.

In my hotel room, I set my book on the glass-topped table and washed my face and hands. Then I went to the windows and stood looking out over the city. Down the block I could see the patrician ugliness of Philadelphia City Hall, with its statue of peace-loving William Penn balanced on top. From here the parks were green squares of treetops. Light glanced off the bank towers. Far to my left I could see the federal building that had been bombed the month before, the red-and-yellow cranes grappling with the debris in its center, and could hear the roar of rebuilding.

But it was not this scene that filled my gaze. I was thinking, in spite of myself, of another one, which I seemed to have watched before. I leaned against the window, feeling the summer sun, feeling oddly safe despite my great height from the ground, as if unsafety lay for me in a completely different realm.

Iwas imagining a clear autumn morning in 1476, a morning just cool enough to make mist rise from the surface of the lake. A boat runs aground at the edge of the island, below the walls and domes with their iron crosses. There is the gentle scraping of a wooden bow on rocks, and two monks hurry out from beneath the trees to pull it ashore. The man who steps out of it is alone, and the feet he sets on the stone embankment are clad in finely made boots of red leather, each with a sharp spur clamped to it. He is shorter than both of the young monks but seems to tower over them. He is dressed in purple and red damask under a long black velvet cloak, which is pinned across his broad chest with an elaborate brooch. His hat is a pointed cone, black with red feathers fastened to the front. His hand, heavily scarred across the back, fiddles with the short sword at his belt. His eyes are green, preternaturally large and wide-set, his mouth and nose cruel, and his black hair and mustache show coarser white strands.

The abbot has been notified already and hurries to meet him under the trees. "We are honored, my lord," he says, extending his hand. Dracula kisses his ring and the abbot makes the sign of the cross over him. "Bless you, my son," he adds, as if in spontaneous thanksgiving. He knows that the prince's appearance is just short of miraculous; Dracula has probably crossed Turkish holdings to get here. This is not the first time the abbot's patron has appeared as if by divine transport. The abbot has heard that the metropolitan at Curtea de Arges will soon reinvest Dracula as ruler of Wallachia, and then, no doubt, the Dragon will at last wrest all Wallachia from the Turks. The abbot's fingers touch his prince's broad forehead in benediction. "We thought the worst when you did not come in the spring. God be praised."

Dracula smiles but says nothing, giving the abbot a long look. They have argued about death before, the abbot recalls; Dracula has asked the abbot several times in confession whether he, the holy man, thinks every sinner will be admitted to paradise if he truly repents. The abbot is particularly concerned that his patron be given the last rites, when the moment comes, although he is afraid to tell him so. At the abbot's gentle insistence, however, Dracula has had himself rebaptized in the true faith to show his repentance for his temporary conversion to the heretical Western church. The abbot has forgiven him everything, privately - everything. Has not Dracula devoted his life to holding back the infidels, the monstrous sultan who is battering down all the walls of Christendom? But he wonders just as privately what the Almighty will mete out to this strange man. He hopes Dracula will not bring up the subject of paradise and is relieved when the prince asks to see what progress they have made in his absence. They walk together around the edge of the monastery courtyard, the chickens scattering before them. Dracula surveys the newly completed buildings and the lustily sprouting vegetable gardens with a look of satisfaction, and the abbot hastens to show him the walkways they have built since his last visit.

In the abbot's chamber they drink tea and then Dracula sets a velvet bag before the abbot. "Open it," he says, smoothing his mustache. His muscular legs are braced far apart in his chair; the ever-present sword still hangs at his side. The abbot wishes Dracula would give his gifts with more humility, but he quietly opens the sack. "Turkish treasure," Dracula says, his smile broadening. One of his lower teeth is missing, but the rest are strong and white. Inside the bag the abbot finds jewels of infinite beauty, large clusters of emeralds and rubies, heavy gold rings and brooches of an Ottoman make, and among them other items, including a fine cross of chased gold with dark sapphires. The abbot doesn't want to know where these have come from. "We will furnish the sacristy and put in a new baptismal font," Dracula says. "I want you to order artisans from wherever you want. This will easily pay for it, with enough left over for my grave."

"Your grave, my lord?" The abbot looks respectfully at the floor.

"Yes, Eminence." His hand goes to his sword hilt again. "I have been thinking about it and I would like to be placed before the altar, with a marble stone above. You will give me the finest sung services, of course. Bring in a second choir for that." The abbot bows, but he is unnerved by the man's face, the glint of calculation in the green eyes. "In addition, I have some requests, which you will remember carefully. I want my portrait painted on the gravestone, but no cross."

The abbot looks up, startled. "No cross, my lord?"

"No cross," the prince says firmly. He looks the abbot full in the face, and for a moment the abbot does not dare to ask more. But he is this man's spiritual adviser, and after another moment he speaks up. "Every grave is marked with the suffering of our Savior, and yours must have the same honor."

Dracula's face darkens. "I do not plan to subject myself long to death," he says in a low voice.

"There is only one way in which to escape death," the abbot says bravely, "and that is through the Redeemer, if He grants us His grace."

Dracula stares at him for a few minutes and the abbot tries not to look away. "Perhaps," he says finally. "But recently I met a man, a merchant who has traveled to a monastery in the West. He said there is a place in Gaul, the oldest church in their part of the world, where some of the Latin monks have outwitted death by secret means. He offered to sell me their secrets, which he has inscribed in a book."

The abbot shudders. "God preserve us from such heresies," he says hastily. "I am certain, my son, that you refused this temptation."

Dracula smiles. "You know I am fond of books."

"There is only one true Book, and that is the one we must love with all our hearts and all our souls," the abbot says, but at the same moment he is unable to take his eyes off the prince's scarred hand and the inlaid hilt with which it plays. Dracula wears a ring on his little finger; the abbot well knows, without looking closer, the ferociously curling symbol on it.

"Come." To the abbot's relief, Dracula has apparently tired of this debate, and he stands up suddenly, vigorously. "I want to see your scribes. I will have a special job for them soon."

They go together into the tiny scriptorium, where three of the monks sit copying manuscripts, according to the old way, and one carves letters to print a page of the life of Saint Anthony. The press itself stands in one corner. It is the first printing press in Wallachia, and Dracula runs a proud hand over it, a heavy, square hand. The oldest of the scriptorium monks stands at a table near the press, chiseling a block of wood. Dracula leans over it. "And what will this be, Father?"

"Saint Mikhail slaying the dragon, Excellency," the old monk murmurs. The eyes he raises are cloudy, occluded by sagging white brows.

"Rather have the Dragon slaying the infidel," Dracula says, chuckling.

The monk nods, but the abbot shudders inwardly, again.

"I have a special commission for you," Dracula tells him. "I shall leave a sketch for it with the lord abbot."

In the sunshine of the courtyard, he pauses. "I will stay for the service, and take communion with you." He turns a smile on the abbot. "Do you have a bed for me in one of the cells tonight?"

"As always, my lord. This house of God is your home."

"And now let us go up in my tower." The abbot knows well this practice of his patron; Dracula always likes to survey the lake and surrounding shores from the highest point in the church, as if to check for enemies. He has good reason, thinks the abbot. The Ottomans seek his head from year to year, the king of Hungary bears him no small malice, his own boyars hate and fear him. Is there anyone who is not his enemy, apart from the residents of this island? The abbot follows him slowly up the winding stair, bracing himself for the ringing of the bells, which will soon begin, and which sounds very loud up here.

The dome of the tower has long openings on every side. When the abbot reaches the top, Dracula is already standing at his favorite post, staring across the water, his hands clasped behind him in a characteristic gesture of thought, of planning. The abbot has seen him stand this way in front of his warriors, directing the strategy for the next day's raid. He looks not at all like a man in constant peril - a leader whose death could occur at any hour, who should be pondering every moment the question of his salvation. He looks instead, the abbot thinks, as if all the world is before him.