The Historian (31 page)

―The booth near them was just opening up. It was really a shed, wedged under a venerable fig tree at the edge of the bazaar. A young man in a white shirt and dark trousers was pulling vigorously at the stall‘s doors and curtains, setting up tables outside and laying out his wares—books. Books stood in stacks on the wooden counters, tumbled out of crates on the floor, and lined the shelves inside.

―I went forward eagerly, and the young owner nodded a greeting and smiled, as if he recognized a bibliophile whatever his national cut. Helen followed more slowly, and we stood turning through volumes in perhaps a dozen languages. Many of them were in Arabic, or in the modern Turkish language; some were in Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, others in English, French, German, Italian. I found a Hebrew tome and a whole shelf of Latin classics. Most were cheaply printed and shoddily bound, their cloth covers already shabby with handling. There were new paperbacks with lurid scenes on the covers, and a few volumes that looked very old, especially some of the works in Arabic. ‗The Byzantines loved books, too,‘ Helen murmured, leafing through what looked like a set of German poetry. ‗Perhaps they bought books on this very spot.‘

―The young man had finished his preparations for the day, and he came over to greet us.

‗Speak German? English?‘

―‗English,‘ I said quickly, since Helen did not answer.

―‗I have books in English,‘ he told me with a pleasant smile. ‗No problem.‘ His face was thin and expressive, with large greenish eyes and a long nose. ‗Also newspaper from London, New York.‘ I thanked him and asked if he carried old books. ‗Yes, very old.‘ He handed me a nineteenth-century edition of
Much Ado About Nothing
—cheap looking, bound in worn cloth. I wondered what library this had drifted from and how it had made its journey—from bourgeois Manchester, say—to this crossroads of the ancient world. I flipped through the pages, to be polite, and handed it back. ‗Not enough old?‘ he asked, smiling.

―Helen had been peering over my shoulder, and now she looked pointedly at her watch.

We hadn‘t even reached Hagia Sophia, after all. ‗Yes, we‘ve got to be going,‘ I said.

―The young bookseller gave us a courteous bow, volume in hand. I stared at him for a second, troubled by something that bordered on recognition, but he had turned away and was helping a new customer, an old man who could have been a triplet to the chess players. Helen nudged my elbow, and we left the shop and went more purposefully around the edge of the bazaar and back toward our pension.

―The little restaurant was empty when we entered, but a few minutes later Turgut appeared in the doorway, nodding and smiling, and asked us how we had slept. He was wearing an olive wool suit this morning, despite the gathering heat, and seemed full of suppressed excitement. His curly dark hair was slicked back, his shoes shone with polish, and he moved quickly to usher us out of the restaurant. I noticed again that he was a person of great energy, and I felt relief at having such a guide. Excitement was rising in me, too. Rossi‘s papers rested securely in my briefcase, and perhaps the next few hours would bring me a step closer to his whereabouts. Soon, at least, I might be able to compare his copies of the documents with the originals he had examined so many years before.

―As we followed Turgut through the streets, he explained to us that Sultan Mehmed‘s archive was not housed in the main building of the National Library, although it was still under state protection. It was now in a library annex that had once been a
mendrese
, a traditional Islamic school. Ataturk had closed these schools in his secularization of the country, and this one currently contained the National Library‘s rare and antique books on the history of the Empire. We would find Sultan Mehmed‘s collection among others from the centuries of Ottoman expansion.

―The annex to the library proved to be an exquisite little building. We entered it from the street through brass-studded wooden doors. The windows were covered with a tracery of marble; sunlight filtered through them in fine geometric shapes, decorating the floor of the dim entryway with fallen stars and octagons. Turgut showed us where to sign the register, which lay on a counter at the entrance (Helen put down an illegible scrawl, I noticed), and signed it himself with a flourish.

―Then we proceeded into the collection‘s one room, a large, hushed space under a dome set with green-and-white mosaic. Polished tables ran the length of it, and three or four researchers already sat working there. The walls were lined not only with books but also with wooden drawers and boxes, and delicate brass lamp shades fitted with electric lighting hung from the ceiling. The librarian, a slender man of fifty with a string of prayer beads on his wrist, left his work and came over to shake both of Turgut‘s hands in his.

They spoke for a minute—on Turgut‘s side of the conversation I caught the name of our university at home—and then the librarian addressed us in Turkish, smiling and bowing.

‗This is Mr. Erozan. He welcomes you to the collection,‘ Turgut told us with a look of satisfaction. ‗He would like to be of assassination to you.‘ I recoiled, in spite of myself, and Helen smirked. ‗He will set forth for you immediately Sultan Mehmed‘s documents from the Order of the Dragon. But first, we must sit in comfort here and wait for him.‘

―We settled at one of the tables, carefully distant from the few other researchers. They eyed us with transitory curiosity and then returned to their work. After a moment, Mr.

Erozan came back carrying a large wooden box with a lock on the front and Arabic lettering carved into the top. ‗What does that say?‘ I asked the professor.

―‗Ah.‘ He touched the top of the box with his fingertips. ‗It says, ‖Here is evil―—hmm—

‖here is evil contained—housed. Lock it with the keys of holy Qur‘an.―‘ My heart made a jump; the phrases were strikingly similar to what Rossi had reported reading in the margins of the mysterious map and had spoken aloud in the old archives where it had once been stored. He‘d made no mention of this box in his letters, but perhaps he‘d never seen it, if a librarian had brought him just the documents. Or perhaps they had been placed in the box sometime after Rossi‘s sojourn here.

―‗How old is the box itself?‘ I asked Turgut.

―He shook his head. ‗I don‘t know, and neither does my friend here. Because it is of wood, I do not think it is very likely to be as old as the time of Mehmed. My friend told me once‘—he beamed in Mr. Erozan‘s direction, and the man beamed back without comprehension—‗that these documents were put in the box in 1930, to keep them safe.

He knows that because he discussed it with the previous librarian. He is most meticulous, my friend.‘

―In 1930! Helen and I looked at each other. Probably by the time Rossi had penned his letters—December 1930—to whoever might later receive them, the documents he had examined had already been put into this box for safekeeping. An ordinary wooden receptacle might have kept out mice and damp, but what had prompted the librarian of that era to lock the documents of the Order of the Dragon inside a box ornamented with a sacred warning?

―Turgut‘s friend had produced a ring of keys and was fitting one to the lock. I almost laughed, remembering our modern card catalog at home, the accessibility of thousands of rare books in the university library system. I had never imagined myself doing research that required an old key. It clicked in the lock. ‗Here we are,‘ Turgut murmured, and the librarian withdrew. Turgut smiled at each of us—rather sadly, I thought—and lifted the lid.‖

In the train, Barley had just finished reading my father‘s first two letters for himself. It gave me a pang to see them lying open in his hands, but I knew Barley would trust my father‘s authoritative voice, whereas he might only half believe my weaker one. ―Have you been to Paris before?‖ I asked him, partly to cover my emotion.

―I suppose I have,‖ Barley said indignantly. ―I studied there for a year before I went to university. My mother wanted me to know French better.‖ I longed to ask about his mother and why she required this delectable accomplishment in her son, and also what it was like to have a mother, but Barley was deep in the letter again. ―Your father must be a very good lecturer,‖ he mused. ―This is a lot more entertaining than what we get at Oxford.‖

This opened up another realm for me. Were lectures at Oxford ever dull? Was that possible? Barley was full of things I wanted to know, a messenger from a world so large I could not begin to imagine it. I was interrupted this time by a conductor hurrying down the aisle past our door. ―Bruxelles!‖ he called. The train was slowing already, and a few minutes later we were looking out the window into the Brussels station; the customs officers were boarding. Outside, people were rushing for their trains and pigeons were hunting for morsels from the platform.

Perhaps because I was secretly fond of pigeons, I was gazing hard enough into the crowd to suddenly notice one figure that was not moving at all. A woman, tall and dressed in a long black coat, stood quietly on the platform. She had a black scarf tied over her hair, framing a white face. She was a little too far away for me to see her features clearly, but I caught a flash of dark eyes and an almost unnaturally red mouth—bright lipstick, maybe.

There was something odd about the silhouette of her clothes; amid the miniskirts and hideous block-heeled boots of the day, she wore narrow black pumps.

But what caught my attention about her first, and held it for a moment before our train began to move again, was her attitude of alertness. She was scanning our train, up and down. I drew back from the window instinctively, and Barley looked a question at me.

The woman apparently hadn‘t seen us, although she took a hovering step in our direction.

Then she seemed to change her mind and turned to scan another train, which had just pulled in on the opposite side of the platform. Something about her stern, straight back kept me staring until we began to move out of the station again, and then she disappeared among the throngs of people there, as if she had never existed.

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.‘