The Historian (28 page)

―‗I am,‘ she said gravely. ‗But you cannot study cultures without a knowledge of their history.‘

―‗Then why didn‘t you simply become a historian? You could still have studied culture, it seems to me.‘

―‗Perhaps.‘ She looked forbidding now, and would not meet my eye. ‗But I wanted a field that my father had not already made his own.‘

―The Great Mosque was still open in the golden evening light, to tourists as well as to the faithful. I tried my mediocre German on the guard at the entrance, an olive-skinned, curly headed boy—what had those Byzantines looked like?—but he said there was no library within, no archive, nothing of the sort, and he had never heard of one nearby. We asked if he had any suggestions.

―We could try the university, he mused. As for small mosques, there were hundreds of them.

―‗It‘s too late to go to the university today,‘ Helen told me. She was studying the guidebook. ‗Tomorrow we can visit there and ask someone for information about archives that date from Mehmed‘s time. I think that will be the most efficient way. Let‘s go see the old walls of Constantinople. We can walk to one section of them from here.‘

―I followed her through the streets as she traced our way for us, the guidebook in her gloved hand, her small black purse over her arm. Bicycles darted past us, Ottoman robes mingled with Western dress, foreign cars and horse carts wove around one another.

Everywhere I looked I saw men in dark vests and small crocheted caps, women in brightly printed blouses with ballooning trousers underneath, their heads wound in scarves. They carried shopping bags and baskets, cloth bundles, chickens in crates, bread, flowers. The streets were overflowing with life—as they had been, I thought, for sixteen hundred years. Along these streets the Roman Christian emperors had been carried by their entourages, flanked by priests, moving from palace to church to take the Holy Sacrament. They had been strong rulers, great patrons of the arts, engineers, theologians.

And nasty, too, some of them—prone to cutting up their courtiers and blinding family members, in the tradition of Rome proper. This was where the original byzantine politics had played themselves out. Perhaps it wasn‘t such an odd place for a vampire or two, after all.

―Helen had stopped in front of a towering, partly ruined stone compound. Shops huddled at its base and fig trees dug their roots into its flank; a cloudless sky was fading to copper above the battlements. ‗Look what remains of the walls of Constantinople,‘ she said quietly. ‗You can see how enormous they were when they were intact. The book says the sea came to their feet in those days, so the emperor could embark by boat from the palace. And over there, that wall was part of the Hippodrome.‘

―We stood gazing until I realized that I‘d again forgotten Rossi for a whole ten minutes.

‗Let‘s look for some dinner,‘ I said abruptly. ‗It‘s already past seven and we‘ll need to turn in early tonight. I‘m determined to find the archive tomorrow.‘ Helen nodded and we walked quite companionably back up through the heart of the old city.

―Near our pension we discovered a restaurant decorated inside with brass vases and fine tiles, with a table in the arched front window, an opening without glass where we could sit and watch people walking past on the street outside. As we waited for our dinner, I was struck for the first time by a phenomenon of this Eastern world that had escaped my notice until then: everyone who hurried by was not actually hurrying but simply walking along. What looked like a hurry here would have been a casual saunter on the sidewalks of New York or Washington. I pointed this out to Helen, and she laughed cynically.

‗When there is not much money to be made, no one goes rushing around for it,‘ she said.

―The waiter brought us chunks of bread, a dish of smooth yogurt studded with slices of cucumber, and a strong fragrant tea in glass vases. We ate heartily after the fatigue of the day and had just moved on to roasted chicken on wooden skewers when a man with a silver mustache and a mane of silver hair, wearing a neat gray suit, entered the restaurant and glanced around. He settled at a table near us and put a book down by his plate. He ordered his meal in quiet Turkish, then seemed to take in our pleasure in our dinner and leaned toward us with a friendly smile. ‗You like our native food, I see,‘ he said in accented but excellent English.

―‗We certainly do,‘ I answered, surprised. ‗It‘s excellent.‘

―‗Let me see,‘ he continued, turning a handsome, mild face on me. ‗You are not from England. America?‘

―‗Yes,‘ I said. Helen was silent, cutting up her chicken and eyeing our companion warily.

―‗Ah, yes. How very nice. You are sightseeing in our beautiful city?‘

―‗Yes, exactly,‘ I concurred, wishing Helen would at least look friendly; hostility might appear suspicious somehow.

―‗Welcome to Istanbul,‘ he said with a very pleasant smile, raising his glass beaker to toast us. I returned the compliment and he beamed. ‗Forgive the question from a stranger, but what do you love best here in your visit?‘

―‗Well, it would be hard to choose.‘ I liked his face; it was impossible not to answer him truthfully. ‗I‘m most struck by the feeling of East and West blending in one city.‘

―‗A wise observation, young man,‘ he said soberly, patting his mustache with a big white napkin. ‗That blend is our treasure and our curse. I have colleagues who have spent a lifetime studying Istanbul, and they say they will never have time to explore all of it, although they are living here always. It is an amazing place.‘

―‗What is your profession?‘ I asked curiously, although I had the sense from Helen‘s stillness that she would step on my foot under the table in another minute.

―‗I am a professor at Istanbul University,‘ he said in the same dignified tone.

―‗Oh, how extremely lucky!‘ I exclaimed. ‗We are—‘ Just then Helen‘s foot came down on mine. She wore pumps, like every woman in that era, and the heel was rather sharp.

‗We are very glad to meet you,‘ I finished. ‗What do you teach?‘

―‗My speciality is Shakespeare,‘ said our new friend, helping himself carefully to the salad in front of him. ‗I teach English literature to the most advanced of our graduate students. They are valiant students, I must tell you.‘

―‗How wonderful,‘ I managed to say. ‗I am a graduate student myself, but in history, in the United States.‘

―‗A very fine field,‘ he said gravely. ‗You will find much to interest you in Istanbul.

What is the name of your university?‘

―I told him, while Helen sawed grimly away at her dinner.

―‗An excellent university. I have heard of it,‘ observed the professor. He sipped from his vase and tapped the book by his plate. ‗I say!‘ he exclaimed finally. ‗Why don‘t you come to see our university while you are in Istanbul? It is a venerable institution also, and I would be pleased to show you and your lovely wife around.‘

―I registered a faint snort from Helen and hurried to cover for her. ‗My sister—my sister.‘

―‗Oh, I beg your pardon.‘ The Shakespeare scholar bowed to Helen over the table. ‗I am Dr. Turgut Bora, at your service.‘ We introduced ourselves—or I introduced us, because Helen kept obstinately silent. I could tell she didn‘t like my using my real name, so I quickly gave hers as Smith, a piece of dull-wittedness that drew an even deeper frown from her. We shook hands all around, and there was nothing for us to do but to invite him to join us at our table.

―He protested politely, but only for a moment, and then sat down with us, bringing along his salad and his glass vase, which he immediately raised on high. ‗A toast to you and welcome to our fair city,‘ he intoned. ‗Cheerio!‘ Even Helen smiled slightly, although she still said nothing. ‗You must forgive my lack of discretion,‘ Turgut told her apologetically, as if sensing her wariness. ‗It is very rare that I have the opportunity to practice my English with native speakers.‘ He had not yet noticed that she wasn‘t a native speaker—although he might never notice that in Helen, I thought, because she might never utter a word to him.

―‗How did you come to specialize in Shakespeare?‘ I asked him as we began to eat our dinners again.

―‗Ah!‘ Turgut said softly. ‗That is a strange story. My mother was a very unusual woman—brilliant—a great lover of languages, as well as a diminutive engineer‘—

Distinguished? I wondered—‗and she studied at the University of Rome, where she met my father. He, the delectable man, was a scholar of the Italian Renaissance, with a particular lust for—‘

―At this very interesting point, we were suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a young woman peering in the arched window from the street. Although I‘d never seen one, except in pictures, I took her for a Gypsy; she was dark skinned and sharp featured, dressed in tatty bright colors, black hair raggedly cut around penetrating dark eyes. She could have been fifteen or forty; it was impossible to read age on her thin face. In her arms she carried bunches of red and yellow flowers, which she apparently wanted us to buy. She thrust some of them at me over the table and began a shrill chant I couldn‘t understand. Helen looked disgusted and Turgut annoyed, but the woman was insistent. I was just getting out my wallet with the idea of presenting Helen—in jest, of course—with a Turkish bouquet, when the Gypsy suddenly wheeled on her, pointing and hissing.

Turgut started and Helen, usually fearless, shrank back.

―This seemed to bring Turgut to life; he half stood and with a scowl of indignation began to berate the Gypsy. It was not difficult to understand his tone and gestures, which invited her in no uncertain terms to take herself off. She glared at all of us and withdrew as suddenly as she‘d appeared, vanishing among the other pedestrians. Turgut sat down again, looking wide-eyed at Helen, and after a moment he rummaged in his jacket pocket and drew out a small object, which he placed next to her plate. It was a flat blue stone about an inch long, set with white and paler blue, like a crude eye. Helen blanched when she saw it and reached as if by instinct to touch it with her forefinger.

―‗What on earth is going on here?‘ I couldn‘t help feeling the fretfulness of the culturally excluded.

―‗What did she say?‘ Helen spoke to Turgut for the first time. ‗Was she speaking Turkish or the Gypsy language? I could not understand her.‘

―Our new friend hesitated, as if he did not want to repeat the woman‘s words. ‗Turkish,‘

he murmured. ‗Maybe it is not the better part of valor that I tell you. It is very rude what she said. And strange.‘ He was looking at Helen with interest but also with something like a flicker of fear, I thought, in his genial eyes. ‗She used a word I will not translate,‘

he explained slowly. ‗And then she said, ‖Get out of here, Romanian daughter of wolves.

You and your friend bring the curse of the vampire to our city.―‘

―Helen was white to the lips, and I fought the impulse to take her hand. ‗It‘s a coincidence,‘ I told her soothingly, at which she glared; I was saying too much in front of the professor.

―Turgut looked from me to Helen and back. ‗This is very odd indeed, gentle companions,‘ he said. ‗I think we must talk further without ado.‘‖

Ihad almost dozed in my train seat, despite the extreme interest my father‘s story held for me; reading all this the first time, during the night, had kept me up late, and I was weary.

A feeling of unreality settled over me in the sunny compartment, and I turned to look out the window at the orderly Dutch farmlands slipping by. As we approached and departed from each town, the train clicked past a series of small vegetable gardens, growing green again under a cloudy sky, the rear gardens of thousands of people minding their own business, the backs of their houses turned toward the railway. The fields were wonderfully green, a green that begins, in Holland, in early spring and lasts almost until the snow falls again, fed by the moisture of air and land and by the water that glints in every direction you look. We had already left behind a broad region of canals and bridges and were out among cows in their neatly delineated pastures. A dignified old couple on bicycles rolled along on a road next to us, swallowed the next minute by more pastures.

Soon we‘d be in Belgium, which I knew from experience one could miss entirely on this trip in the course of a short nap.

I held the letters in my lap tightly, but my eyelids were beginning to droop. The pleasant-faced woman in the seat opposite was already dozing off, magazine in hand. My eyes had closed for just a second when the door to our compartment flew open. An exasperated voice broke in and a lanky figure inserted itself between me and my daydream. ―Well, of all the nerve! I thought so. I‘ve been searching every carriage for you.‖ It was Barley, mopping his forehead and scowling at me.

Barley was angry. I couldn‘t blame him, but this was a most inconvenient turn of events for me, and I was a little mad, too. It made me all the angrier that my first twinge of annoyance was followed by a secret swelling of relief; I hadn‘t realized before seeing him how thoroughly alone I‘d felt on that train, headed toward the unknown, headed perhaps toward the larger loneliness of being unable to find my father or even toward the galactic loneliness of losing him forever. Barley had been a stranger to me only a few days before, and now his face was my vision of familiarity.

At this moment, however, it was still scowling. ―Where in bloody hell do you think you‘re going? You‘ve given me a pretty chase—what are you up to, anyhow?‖