The Historian (42 page)

―I was disappointed to learn, as I wandered the parks, courtyards, and pavilions where the heart of the Empire had pulsed for hundreds of years, that little from Mehmed‘s time was on exhibit there—little apart from some ornaments from his treasury and some of his swords, nicked and scarred from prodigious use. I think I had hoped more than anything to catch another glimpse of the sultan whose army had battled Vlad Dracula‘s, and whose police courts had been concerned about the security of his alleged tomb in Snagov. It was rather, I thought—remembering the old men‘s game in the bazaar—like trying to determine the position of your opponent‘s
shah
in
shahmat
by knowing only the position of your own.

―There was plenty in the palace to keep my thoughts busy, however. According to what Helen had told me the day before, this was a world in which more than five thousand servants with titles such as Great Turban-Winder had once served the will of the sultan; where eunuchs guarded the virtue of his enormous harem in what amounted to an ornate prison; where Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, reigning in the mid-sixteenth century, had consolidated the Empire, codified its laws, and made Istanbul as glorious a metropolis as it had been under the Byzantine emperors. Like them, the sultan traveled out into his city once a week to worship at Hagia Sophia—but on Friday, the Muslim holy day, not Sunday. It was a world of rigid protocol and sumptuous dining, of marvelous textiles and sensuously beautiful tile work, of viziers in green and chamberlains in red, of fantastically colored boots and towering turbans.

―I had been particularly struck by Helen‘s description of the Janissaries, a crack corps of guards selected from the ranks of captured boys from all over the Empire. I knew I had read about them before, these boys born Christian in places like Serbia and Wallachia and raised in Islam, trained in hatred of the very peoples they sprang from and unleashed on those peoples when they reached manhood, like falcons to the kill. I had seen images of the Janissaries somewhere, in fact, perhaps in a book of paintings. Thinking about their expressionless young faces, massed to protect the sultan, I felt the chill of the palace buildings deepen around me.

―It occurred to me, as I moved from room to room, that the young Vlad Dracula would have made an excellent Janissary. The Empire had missed an opportunity there, a chance to harness a little more cruelty to its enormous force. They would have had to catch him quite young, I thought, perhaps to have kept him in Asia Minor instead of returning him to his father. He had been too independent after that, a renegade, loyal to no one but himself, as quick to execute his own followers as he was to kill his Turkish enemies. Like Stalin—I surprised myself with this mental leap as I gazed out at the glint of the Bosphorus. Stalin had died the year before, and new tales of his atrocities had leaked into the Western press. I remembered one report about an apparently loyal general whom Stalin had accused just before the war of wanting to overthrow him. The general had been removed from his apartment in the middle of the night and hung upside down from the beams of a busy railway station outside Moscow for several days until he died. The passengers getting on and off the trains had all seen him, but no one had dared to glance twice in his direction. Much later, the people in that neighborhood had not been able to agree on whether or not this had even happened.

―That sort of disturbing thought followed me from room to marvelous room throughout the palace; everywhere I sensed something sinister or perilous, which could simply have been the overwhelming evidence of the sultan‘s supreme power, a power not so much concealed as revealed by the narrow corridors, twisting passages, barred windows, cloistered gardens. At last, seeking a little relief from the mingled sensuality and imprisonment, the elegance and the oppression, I wandered back outside to the sunlit trees of the outer court.

―Out there, however, I met the most alarming ghosts of all, for my guidebook located there the executioner‘s block and explained in generous detail the sultan‘s custom of beheading officials and anyone else with whom he disagreed. Their heads were displayed on the spikes of the sultan‘s gates, a stern example to the populace. The sultan and the renegade from Wallachia were a pleasant match, I thought, turning away in disgust. A stroll in the surrounding park restored my nerves, and the low, red gleam of sun on the waters, turning a passing ship to black silhouette, reminded me that the afternoon was waning and that I ought to go back to Helen and perhaps to some news from her aunt.

―Helen was waiting in the lobby with an English newspaper when I arrived. ‗How was your walk?‘ she asked, looking up.

―‗Gruesome,‘ I said. ‗I went to the Topkapi Palace.‘

―‗Ah.‘ She closed the newspaper. ‗I am sorry I missed that.‘

―‗Don‘t be. How are things out in the big world?‘

―She traced the headlines with a finger. ‗Gruesome. But I have good news for you.‘

―‗You spoke to your aunt?‘ I deposited myself in one of the sagging chairs near her.

―‗Yes, and she has been extraordinary, as always. I‘m sure she is going to scold me when we arrive, but that does not matter. The important thing is that she has found a conference for us to attend.‘

―‗A conference?‘

―‗Yes. It‘s magnificent, actually. There is an international conference of historians meeting in Budapest this week. We will attend as visiting scholars, and she has arranged our visas so that we can get them here.‘ She smiled. ‗My aunt has a friend who is a historian at the University of Budapest, apparently.‘

―‗What is the topic of the conference?‘ I asked apprehensively.

―‗European Labor Issues to 1600.‘

―‗A sprawling subject. And I suppose we are to attend in our capacity as Ottoman specialists?‘

―‗Exactly, my dear Watson.‘

―I sighed. ‗Good thing I popped into the Topkapi, then.‘

―Helen smiled at me, but whether a little maliciously or simply from confidence in my powers of disguise, I couldn‘t tell. ‗The conference begins on Friday, so we have only two days to get there. Over the weekend we will attend lectures, and you will give one.

On Sunday part of the day is free for the scholars to explore historic Budapest, and we will slip out to explore my mother.‘

―‗I will do what?‘ I could not help glaring at her, but she smoothed a curl around her ear and met my gaze with an even more innocent smile.

―‗Oh, a lecture. You will give a lecture. That is our way to get in.‘

―‗A lecture on what, pray?‘

―‗On the Ottoman presence in Transylvania and Wallachia, I think. My aunt has kindly had it added to the program by now. It won‘t have to be a long lecture, because of course the Ottomans never managed to fully conquer Transylvania. I thought that would be a good topic for you because we both know so much about Vlad already, and he was instrumental in keeping them out, in his time.‘

―‗That‘s good of you,‘ I snorted. ‗You mean
you
know so much about him. Are you telling me I have to stand up in front of an international gathering of scholars and talk about Dracula? Please recall for a moment that my dissertation is on Dutch merchant guilds and I haven‘t even finished it. Why can‘t you give the lecture?‘

―‗That would be ridiculous,‘ Helen said, folding her hands on the newspaper. ‗I am—how do you put it in English?—the old hat. Everyone at the university knows me already and has already been bored several times by my work. Having an American will add a little extra éclat to the scene, and they will all be grateful to me for bringing you, even at the last minute. Having an American will make them feel less embarrassed about the shabby university hostel and the canned peas they will serve everyone at the big dinner on the last night. I will help you write the lecture—or write it for you, if you are going to be so unpleasant—and you can deliver it on Saturday. I think my aunt said around one o‘clock.‘

―I groaned. She was the most impossible person I had ever met. It occurred to me that my presence there with her might be more of a political liability than she was admitting, too.

‗Well, what do the Ottomans in Wallachia or Transylvania have to do with European labor issues?‘

―‗Oh, we will find a way to put in some labor issues. That is the beauty of the solid Marxist education you did not have the privilege of receiving. Believe me, you can find labor issues in any topic if you look hard enough. Besides, the Ottoman Empire was a great economic power, and Vlad disrupted their trade routes and access to natural resources in the Danube region. Do not worry—it will be a fascinating lecture.‘

―‗Jesus,‘ I said finally.

―‗No.‘ She shook her head. ‗No Jesus, please. Just labor relations.‘

―Then I couldn‘t help laughing and also couldn‘t help silently admiring the gleam in her dark eyes. ‗I just hope no one at home ever gets wind of this. I can imagine what my dissertation committee would have to say. On the other hand, I think Rossi might have enjoyed the whole thing.‘ I began to laugh again, picturing the corresponding gleam of mischief in Rossi‘s bright blue glance, then stopped. The thought of Rossi was becoming so sore a spot in my heart that I could hardly bear it; here I was on the other side of the world from the office where he‘d last been seen, and I had every reason to believe I would never see him alive again, perhaps never know what had become of him.
Never
stretched long and desolate before me for a second, and then I pushed the thought aside.

We were going to Hungary to speak with a woman who had purportedly known him—

known him intimately—long before I‘d ever met him, when he was in the throes of his quest for Dracula. It was a lead we could not afford to ignore. If I had to give a charlatan‘s lecture to get there, I would do even that.

―Helen had been watching me in silence, and I felt, not for the first time, her uncanny ability to read my thoughts. She confirmed my sense of this after a moment by saying, ‗It is worth it, is it not?‘

―‗Yes.‘ I looked away.

―‗Very good,‘ she said softly. ‗And I am pleased that you will meet my aunt, who is wonderful, and my mother, who is wonderful, too, but in a different way, and that they will meet you.‘

―I looked quickly at her—the gentleness of her tone had made my heart suddenly contract—but her face had reverted to its usual guarded irony. ‗When do we leave, then?‘

I asked.

―‗We will pick up our visas tomorrow morning and fly the next day, if everything goes well with our tickets. My aunt told me that we must go to the Hungarian consulate before it opens tomorrow and ring the front bell—about seven-thirty in the morning. We can go straight from there to a travel agent to order plane tickets. If there are no seats, we will have to take the train, which would be a very long trip.‘ She shook her head, but my sudden vision of a roaring, clattering Balkan train, wending its way from one ancient capital to another, made me hope for a moment that the airline was thoroughly overbooked, despite the time we might lose.

―‗Am I correct in imagining that you take after this aunt of yours, rather than after your mother?‘ Maybe it was simply the mental adventure by train that made me smile at Helen.

―She hesitated only a second. ‗Correct again, Watson. I am very much like my aunt, thank goodness. But you will like my mother best—most people do. And now, may I invite you to dine with me at our favorite establishment, and to work on your lecture over dinner?‘

―‗Certainly,‘ I agreed, ‗as long as there are no Gypsies around.‘ I offered her my arm with careful exaggeration, and she traded her newspaper for the support. It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one‘s life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.‖

On a sunny morning in Boulois, Barley and I boarded the early train for Perpignan.

―The Friday plane to Budapest from Istanbul was far from full, and when we had settled in among the black-suited Turkish businessmen, the gray-jacketed Magyar bureaucrats talking in clumps, the old women in blue coats and head shawls—were they going to cleaning jobs in Budapest, or had their daughters married Hungarian diplomats?—I had only a short flight in which to regret the train trip we might have taken.

―That trip, with its tracks carved through mountain walls, its expanses of forest and cliff, river and feudal town, would have to wait for my later career, as you know, and I have taken it twice since then. There is something vastly mysterious for me about the shift one sees, along that route, from the Islamic world to the Christian, from the Ottoman to the Austro-Hungarian, from the Muslim to the Catholic and Protestant. It is a gradation of towns, of architecture, of gradually receding minarets blended with the advancing church domes, of the very look of forest and riverbank, so that little by little you begin to believe you can read in nature itself the saturation of history. Does the shoulder of a Turkish hillside really look so different from the slope of a Magyar meadow? Of course not, and yet the difference is as impossible to erase from the eye as the history that informs it is from the mind. Later, traveling this route, I would also see it alternately as benign and bathed in blood—this is the other trick of historical sight, to be unrelentingly torn between good and evil, peace and war. Whether I was imagining an Ottoman incursion across the Danube or the earlier sweep of the Huns toward it from the East, I was always plagued by conflicting images: a severed head brought into the encampment with cries of triumph and hatred, and then an old woman—maybe the greatest of grandmothers of those wrinkled faces I saw on the plane—dressing her grandson in warmer clothes, with a pinch on his smooth Turkic cheek and a deft hand making sure her stew of wild game didn‘t burn.