The Historian (20 page)

―Told you what?‖ I asked faintly.

―Told me about Rossi‘s special research on the subject. I had not known about it, not until last summer, just before I left for London. That is how they met; he was asking around in the village about vampire lore, and she had heard something about local vampires from her father and his cronies—not that a man alone should have been addressing a young girl in public, you understand, in that culture. But I suppose he did not know any better. Historian, you know—not an anthropologist. He was in Romania looking for information on Vlad the Impaler, our own dear Count Dracula. And don‘t you think it‘s strange‖—she leaned forward suddenly, bringing her face closer to mine than it had been yet, but ferociously, not in appeal—―don‘t you think it is downright weird that he has not published a thing on the subject? Not one thing, as you surely know. Why? I asked myself. Why should the famous explorer of historical territories—and women, apparently, since who knows how many other genius daughters he has out there—why should he not have published anything out of this very unusual research?‖

―Why?‖ I asked, not moving.

―I‘ll tell you. Because he is saving it up for a grand finale. It is his secret, his passion.

Why else would a scholar remain silent? But he has a surprise coming to him.‖ Her lovely smile was a grin this time, and I didn‘t like it. ―You would not believe how much ground I have covered in a year, since I learned about this little interest of his. I have not contacted Professor Rossi, but I have been careful to make my expertise known in my department. What a shame it will be for him when someone else publishes the definitive work on the subject first—someone with his own name, too. It is beautiful. You see, I even took his name, once I arrived here—an academic nom de plume, you might say.

Besides, in the East Bloc, we do not like other people stealing our heritage and commenting on it; they usually misunderstand it.‖

I must have groaned out loud, because she paused momentarily and frowned at me. ―By the end of this summer, I will know more than anyone in the world about the legend of Dracula. You can have your old book, by the way.‖ She opened the bag again and thumped it horribly, publicly, on the table between us. ―I was simply checking something in it yesterday and I did not have time to go home for my own copy. You see, I do not even need it. It is only literature, in any case, and I know the whole damn thing almost by heart.‖

My father looked around him like a man in a dream. We‘d been standing on the Acropolis in silence for a quarter of an hour now, our feet planted on that crest of ancient civilization. I was awed by the muscular columns above us, and surprised to find that the most distant view on the horizon was of mountains, long dry ridges that hung darkly over the city at this sunset hour. But as we started back down, and he came out of his reverie to ask how I liked the great panorama, it took me a minute to collect my thoughts and answer. I had been thinking about the night before.

I‘d gone into his room a little later than usual so that he could look through my algebra homework, and I found him writing, mulling over the day‘s paperwork, as he often did in the evening. That night he sat very still with his head bent above the desk, drooping toward some documents, not upright and paging through them with his usual efficiency. I couldn‘t tell from the doorway whether he was intently scanning something he‘d just written, almost without seeing it, or simply trying not to doze. His form cast a great shadow on the undecorated hotel-room wall, the figure of a man slumped dully over another, darker desk. If I hadn‘t known his fatigue, and the familiar shape of his shoulders sloping above the page, I might for a second—not knowing him—have said he was dead.

Triumphal, clear weather, the days enormous as a mountain sky, followed us with spring into Slovenia. When I asked if we‘d have time to see Emona again—I connected it already with an earlier era in my life, one with a different flavor altogether, and with a beginning, and as I‘ve said before one tries to revisit such places—my father said hurriedly that we‘d be far too busy, staying at a great lake north of Emona for his conference and then rushing back to Amsterdam before I fell behind in school. Which I never did, but the possibility worried my father.

Lake Bled, when we arrived, was no disappointment. It had poured into an alpine valley at the end of one of the Ice Ages and provided early nomads there with a resting place—

in thatched houses out on the water. Now it lay like a sapphire in the hands of the Alps, its surface burnished with whitecaps in the late-afternoon breeze. From one steep edge rose a cliff higher than the rest, and on this, one of Slovenia‘s great castles roosted, restored by the tourist bureau in unusually good taste. Its crenellations looked down on an island, where a specimen of those modest red-roofed churches of the Austrian type floated like a duck, and boats went out to the island every few hours. The hotel, as usual, was steel and glass, socialist tourism model number five, and we escaped it on the second day for a walk around the lower part of the lake. I told my father I didn‘t think I could wait another twenty-four hours without seeing the castle that dominated the distant view at every meal, and he chuckled. ―If you must, we‘ll go,‖ he said. The new détente was even more promising than his team had hoped, and some of the lines on his forehead had relaxed since our arrival here.

So on the morning of the third day, leaving a diplomatic rehash of what had been rehashed the day before, we took a little bus around the lake, riding nearly to the level of the castle, and then dismounted to walk to the summit. The castle was made of brown stones like discolored bone, joined neatly together after some long state of dilapidation.

When we came through the first passageway to a chamber of state (I suppose it was), I gasped: through a leaded window the surface of the lake shone a thousand feet below, stretching white in the sunlight. The castle seemed to be clinging to the edge of the precipice with only its toes dug in for support. The yellow-and-red church on the island below, the cheerful boat docking just then among tiny beds of red-and-yellow flowers, the great blue sky, had all served centuries of tourists, I thought.

But this castle, with its rocks worn smooth since the twelfth century, its tepees of battle-axes, spears, and hatchets in every corner, threatening to crash down if touched—this was the essence of the lake. Those early lake dwellers, moving skyward from their thatched, flammable huts, had ultimately chosen to perch here with the eagles, ruled over by one feudal lord. Even restored so deftly, the place breathed an ancient life. I turned from the dazzling window to the next room and saw, in a coffin of glass and wood, the skeleton of one small woman, dead long before the advent of Christianity, her bronze cloak ornament resting on her crumbling breastbone, green-bronze rings sliding off the bones of her fingers. When I bent over the case to look down at her, she smiled at me suddenly out of eye-sockets deep as twin pits.

On the castle terrace, tea came in white porcelain pots, an elegant concession to the tourist trade. It was strong and good, and the paper-wrapped cubes of sugar were not stale, for once. My father was clenching his hands together on the iron table; the knuckles showed white. I stared at the lake instead, then poured him another cup. ―Thank you,‖ my father said. There was a distant pain in his eyes. I noticed again how worn and thin he looked these days; should he be seeing a doctor? ―Look, darling,‖ he said, turning away a little so that I could see only his profile against that terrific drop of cliff and sparkling water. He paused. ―Would you consider writing them down?‖

―The stories?‖ I asked. My heart contracted, sped up its count in my chest.

―Yes.‖

―Why?‖ I countered finally. It was an adult question, with no hedge of childhood wiles around it. He looked at me, and I thought that behind all their fatigue his eyes were full of goodness and sorrow.

―Because if you don‘t, I might have to,‖ he said. Then he turned to his tea, and I saw that he wouldn‘t speak about it again.

That night, in the grim little hotel room next to his, I began to write down everything he had told me. He had always said I had an excellent memory—too good a memory, was the way he sometimes put it.

My father told me at breakfast the next morning that he wanted to sit still for two or three days. It was hard for me to picture him actually sitting still, but I could see dark rings under his eyes and I liked the idea of his having a rest. I couldn‘t help feeling that something had happened to him, that he was burdened by some silent new anxiety. But he told me only that he was longing again for the Adriatic beaches. We took an express train south through stations whose names were posted in both Latin and Cyrillic letters, then through stations whose names were posted in Cyrillic only. My father taught me the new alphabet, and I amused myself trying to sound out the station signs, each of which looked to me like code words that could open a secret door.

I explained this to my father and he smiled a little, leaning back in our train compartment with a book propped on his briefcase. His gaze wandered frequently from his work to the window, where we could see young men riding little tractors with plows behind, sometimes a horse pulling a cartload of something, old women in their kitchen gardens bending, scraping, weeding. We were moving south again and the land mellowed to gold and green as we hurried through it, then rose up into rocky gray mountains, then dropped on our left to a shimmering sea. My father sighed deeply, but with satisfaction, not the fatigued little gasp he gave more and more often these days.

In a busy market town we left the train and my father rented a car to drive us along the folded complexities of the coastal road. We both craned to see the water on one side—it stretched to a horizon full of late-afternoon haze—and on the other side the skeletal ruins of Ottoman fortresses that climbed steeply toward the sky. ―The Turks held this land for a long, long time,‖ my father mused. ―Their invasions involved all kinds of cruelty, but they ruled rather tolerantly, as empires go, once they‘d conquered—and efficiently, too, for hundreds of years. This is pretty barren land, but it gave them control of the sea. They needed these ports and bays.‖

The town where we parked was right on the sea; the little harbor there was lined with fishing boats knocking against one another in a translucent surf. My father wanted to stay on a nearby island, and he engaged a boat with a wave to its owner, an old man with a black beret on the back of his head. The air was warm, even this late in the afternoon, and the spray that reached my fingertips was fresh but not cold. I leaned out of the bow, feeling like a figurehead. ―Careful,‖ my father said, gathering the back of my sweater in his hand.

The boatman was steering us close to an island port now, an old village with an elegant stone church. He slung a rope around a stump of pier and offered me one gnarled hand up out of the boat. My father paid him with some of those colorful socialist bills, and he touched his beret. As he was clambering back to his seat, he turned. ―Your girl?‖ he shouted in English. ―Daughter?‖

―Yes,‖ my father said, looking surprised.

―I bless her,‖ the man said simply and carved a cross in the air near me.

My father found us rooms that looked back at the mainland, and then we ate our dinner at an outdoor restaurant near the docks. Twilight was coming down slowly, and I noticed the first stars visible above the sea. A breeze, cooler now than it had been in the afternoon, brought me the scents I had already grown to love: cypress and lavender, rosemary, thyme. ―Why do good smells get stronger when it‘s dark?‖ I asked my father.

It was something I genuinely wondered, but it served also to postpone our discussing anything else. I needed time to recover somewhere where there were lights and people talking, needed at least to look away from that aged trembling in my father‘s hands.

―Do they?‖ he asked absently, but it brought me relief. I grasped his hand to stop its shaking, and he closed it, still absently, over mine. He was too young to grow old. On the mainland, the silhouettes of mountains danced almost into the water, looming over the beaches, looming almost over our island. When civil war broke out in those coastal mountains almost twenty years later, I closed my eyes and remembered them, astonished.

I couldn‘t imagine that their slopes housed enough people to fight a war. They had seemed utterly pristine when I saw them, devoid of human habitation, the home of empty ruins, guarding only the monastery on the sea.

After Helen Rossi slammed the book Dracula—which she obviously thought was our bone of contention—onto the diner table between us, I half expected everyone in the place to rise and run, or someone to cry, ―Aha!‖ and come over to kill us. Of course, nothing at all happened, and she sat there looking at me with the same expression of bitter pleasure. Could this woman, I asked myself slowly, with her legacy of resentment and her scholarly vendetta against Rossi, have injured him herself, caused his disappearance?

―Miss Rossi,‖ I said as calmly as I could, taking the book off the table and putting it facedown beside my briefcase, ―your story is extraordinary and I have to say it‘ll take me some time to digest all this. But I must tell you something very important.‖ I drew in a deep breath, then another. ―I know Professor Rossi quite well. He has been my adviser for two years now and we‘ve spent hours together, talking and working. I‘m sure if you—when you—meet him you will find him a far better and kinder person than you can imagine at this point—‖ She made a movement as if to speak, but I rushed on. ―The thing is—the thing is—I take it from the way you talked about him that you don‘t realize Professor Rossi—your father—has disappeared.‖