The Historian (52 page)

―She ushered us in and gestured for us to sit at the table, where she had set three chipped cups and a plate of rolls. I could smell coffee brewing. She had been cutting up vegetables, too, and a sharp aroma of raw onions and potatoes hung in the room.

―It was her only room, I now saw, trying not to look around too conspicuously—it served as her kitchen, bedroom, and sitting area. It was immaculately clean, the narrow bed in one corner made up with a white quilt and ornamented with several white pillows embroidered in bright colors. Next to the bed stood a table that held a book, a lamp with a glass chimney, and a pair of eyeglasses, and beside that a small chair. At the foot of the bed was a wooden chest, painted with flowers. The kitchen area, where we sat, consisted of a simple cookstove and a table and chairs. There was no electricity, nor was there a bathroom (I learned about the outhouse in the back garden only later in the visit). On one wall hung a calendar with a photograph of workers in a factory, and on another wall hung a piece of embroidery in red and white. There were flowers in a jar and white curtains at the windows. A tiny woodstove stood near the kitchen table, with sticks of wood piled next to it.

―Helen‘s mother smiled at me, still a little shyly, and then I saw for the first time her resemblance to Aunt Éva, and perhaps also some of what might have attracted Rossi. She had a smile of exceptional warmth, which began slowly and then dawned on its recipient with complete openness, almost radiance. It faded only slowly, too, as she sat down to cut more vegetables. She glanced up at me again and said something in Hungarian to Helen.

―‗She wants me to give you your coffee.‘ Helen busied herself at the stove and served up a cup, stirring in sugar from a tin. Helen‘s mother put down her knife to push the plate of rolls toward me. I took one politely and thanked her in my awkward two words of Hungarian. That radiant, slow smile began to flicker again, and she looked from me to Helen, again telling her something I could not understand. Helen reddened and turned back to the coffee.

―‗What is it?‘

―‗Nothing. Just my mother‘s village ideas, that is all.‘ She came to seat herself at the table, setting coffee before her mother and pouring some for herself. ‗Now, Paul, if you will excuse us, I‘ll ask her for news of herself and what is happening in the village.‘

―While they talked, Helen in her quick alto and her mother in murmured responses, I let my gaze wander over the room again. This woman lived not only in remarkable simplicity—perhaps her neighbors here did, too—but also in great solitude. There were only two or three books in sight, no animals, not even a potted plant. It was like the cell of a nun.

―Glancing back at her, I saw how young she was, far younger than my own mother. Her hair held a few gray threads where it was parted on top, and her face was lined with years, but there was something remarkably sound and healthy about her, an attractiveness completely apart from fashion or age. She could have married many times over, I reflected, and yet she chose to live in this conventual silence. She was smiling at me again and I smiled back; her face was so warm that I had to resist an urge to stretch out my hand and hold one of hers where it gently whittled a potato.

―‗My mother would like to know all about you,‘ Helen told me, and with her help I answered every question as fully as I could, each put to me in quiet Hungarian, with a searching look from the interlocutor, as if she could make me understand by the power of her gaze. Where in America was I from? Why had I come here? Who were my parents?

Did they mind my traveling far away? How had I met Helen? Here she inserted several other questions that Helen seemed disinclined to translate, one of them accompanied by a motherly hand smoothing Helen‘s cheek. Helen looked indignant, and I didn‘t press her to explain. Instead, we went on to my studies, my plans, my favorite foods.

―When Helen‘s mother was satisfied, she got up and began putting vegetables and pieces of meat in a big dish, which she spiced with something red from a jar over the stove and slid into the oven. She wiped her hands on her apron and sat down again, looking from one of us to the other without speaking, as if we had all the time in the world. At last Helen stirred, and I guessed from the way she cleared her throat that she meant to broach the purpose of our visit. Her mother watched her quietly, with no change of expression until Helen gestured at me on the word
Rossi
. It took all my nerve, sitting at a village table far from everything familiar to me, to fix my eyes on that tranquil face without flinching. Helen‘s mother blinked, once, almost as if someone had threatened to strike her, and for a second her eyes flew to my face. Then she nodded thoughtfully and posed some question to Helen. ‗She asks how long you have known Professor Rossi.‘

―‗For three years,‘ I said.

―‗Now,‘ Helen said, ‗I will explain to her about his disappearance.‘ Gently and deliberately, not so much as if talking to a child but as if urging herself on against her own will, Helen spoke to her mother, sometimes gesturing at me and sometimes forming a picture in the air with her hands. At last I caught the wordDracula, and at that sound I saw Helen‘s mother blanch and catch the edge of the table. Helen and I both jumped to our feet, and Helen quickly poured a cup of water from the pitcher on the stove. Her mother said something quick and harsh. Helen turned to me. ‗She says she always knew this would happen.‘

―I stood by helplessly, but when Helen‘s mother had taken a few sips of water, she seemed partly recovered. She looked up, and then, to my surprise, took my hand as I had wanted to take hers a few minutes before and drew me back down to my chair. She held my hand fondly, simply, caressing it as if soothing a child. I couldn‘t imagine any woman in my own culture doing this on first meeting a man, and yet nothing could have seemed more natural to me. I understood then what Helen had meant when she‘d said that of the two older women in her family, her mother was the one I would like best.

―‗My mother wants to know if you honestly believe that Professor Rossi was taken by Dracula.‘

―I inhaled deeply. ‗I do.‘

―‗And she wishes to know if you love Professor Rossi.‘ Helen‘s voice was faintly disdainful, but her face was earnest. If I could safely have taken her hand in my free one, I would have.

―‗I would die for him,‘ I said.

―She repeated this to her mother, who suddenly squeezed my fingers in a grip of iron; I realized later that hers was a hand strengthened by endless work. I could feel the roughness of her fingers, the calluses on her palms, the swollen knuckles. Looking down at that powerful small hand, I saw that it was years older than the woman it belonged to.

―After a moment, Helen‘s mother released me and went to the chest at the foot of her bed. She opened it slowly, moved several items inside, and took out what I immediately saw was a packet of letters. Helen‘s eyes widened and she spoke a sharp question; her mother said nothing, only returning in silence to the table and putting the package into my hand.

―The letters were in envelopes, without stamps, yellowing with age and bound together by a frayed red cord. As she gave them to me, Helen‘s mother closed my fingers over the cord with both her hands, as if urging me to cherish them. It took me only a second‘s glance at the handwriting on the first envelope to see that it was Rossi‘s, and to read the name to which they were addressed. That name I already knew, in the recesses of my memory, and the address was Trinity College, Oxford University, England.‖

―Iwas deeply moved when I held Rossi‘s letters in my hands, but before I could think about them, I had an obligation to fulfill. ‗Helen,‘ I said, turning to her, ‗I know you have sometimes felt I didn‘t believe the story of your birth. I did doubt it, at moments. Please forgive me.‘

―‗I am as surprised as you are,‘ Helen responded in a low voice. ‗My mother never told me she had any of Rossi‘s letters. But they were not written to her, were they? At least, not this one on top.‘

―‗No,‘ I said. ‗But I recognize this name. He was a great English literary historian—he wrote about the eighteenth century. I read one of his books in college, and Rossi described him in the letters he gave me.‘

―Helen looked puzzled. ‗What does this have to do with Rossi and my mother?‘

―‗Everything, maybe. Don‘t you see? He must have been Rossi‘s friend Hedges—that was the name Rossi used for him, remember? Rossi must have written to him from Romania, although that doesn‘t explain why these letters are in your mother‘s possession.‘

―Helen‘s mother sat with folded hands, looking from one of us to the other with an expression of great patience, but I thought I detected a flush of excitement in her face.

Then she spoke, and Helen translated for me. ‗She says she will tell you her whole story.‘

Helen‘s voice was choked, and I caught my breath.

―It was a halting business, the older woman speaking slowly and Helen acting as her interpreter and occasionally pausing to express to me her own surprise. Apparently, Helen herself had heard only the outlines of this tale before, and it shocked her. When I got back to the hotel that night, I wrote it down from memory, to the very best of my ability; it took me much of the night, I remember. By then many other strange things had happened, and I should have been tired, but I can still recall that I recorded it with a kind of elated meticulousness.

―‗When I was a girl, I lived in the tiny village of P—in Transylvania, very close to the Arges River. I had many brothers and sisters, most of whom still live in that region. My father always said that we were descended from old and noble families, but my ancestors had fallen on hard times, and I grew up without shoes or warm blankets. It was a poor region, and the only people there who lived well were a few Hungarian families, in their big villas downriver. My father was terribly strict and we all feared his whip. My mother was often sick. I worked in our field outside the village from the time I was small.

Sometimes the priest brought us food or supplies, but usually we had to manage as well as we could alone.

―‗When I was about eighteen, an old woman came to our village from a village higher up in the mountains, above the river. She was a
vraca
, a healer, and one with special powers to look into the future. She told my father she had a present for him and his children, that she had heard about our family and wanted to give him something magical that was rightfully his. My father was an impatient man, with no time for superstitious old women, although he himself always rubbed all the openings of our cottage with garlic—the chimney and door frame, the keyhole and the windows—to keep out vampires. He sent the old woman rudely away, saying he had no money to give her for whatever she was peddling. Later, when I went to the village well for water, I saw her standing there and I gave her a drink and some bread. She blessed me and told me I was kinder than my father and that she would reward my generosity. Then she took from a bag at her waist a tiny coin, and she put it in my hand, telling me to hide it and keep it safe because it belonged to our family. She said also that it came from a castle above the Arges.

―‗I knew I should show the coin to my father, but I did not, because I thought he would be angry at my talking with the old witch. Instead, I hid it under my corner of the bed I shared with my sisters and I told no one about it. Sometimes I would get it out when I thought nobody was looking. I would hold it in my hand and wonder what the old woman had meant by giving it to me. On one side of the coin was a strange creature with a looped tail, and on the other a bird and a tiny cross.

―‗A couple of years passed and I continued to work my father‘s land and help my mother in the house. My father was in despair about having several daughters. He said we would never get married because he was too poor to give anything for a dowry, and that we would always be a trouble to him. But my mother told us that everyone in the village said we were so beautiful that someone would marry us anyway. I tried to keep my clothes clean and my hair combed and neatly braided, so that I might be chosen someday. I did not like any of the young men who asked me to dance at the holidays, but I knew I would soon have to marry one of them so that I would not be a burden to my parents. My sister Éva had long since gone to Budapest with the Hungarian family she worked for, and sometimes she sent us a little money. She even sent me some good shoes once, a pair of leather city shoes of which I was very proud.

―‗This was my situation in life when I met Professor Rossi. It was unusual for strangers to come to our village, especially anyone from far away, but one day everyone was passing around the news that a man from Bucharest had come to the tavern, and with him a man from another country. They were asking questions about the villages along the river and about the ruined castle in the mountains upriver, a day‘s walk above our village.

The neighbor who stopped by to tell us about this also whispered something to my father as he sat on his bench outside our door. My father crossed himself and spat in the dust.

‖Rubbish and nonsense,― he said. ‖No one should be asking such questions. It is an invitation to the Devil.―

―‗But I was curious. I went out to get water so that I could hear more about it, and when I entered the village square, I saw the strangers sitting at one of the two tables outside our tavern, talking with an old man who was always there. One of the strangers was large and dark, like a Gypsy but in city clothes. The other wore a brown jacket in a style I had never seen before, and wide trousers tucked into walking boots, and a broad brown hat on his head. I stayed on the other side of the square, near the well, and from there I could not see the foreigner‘s face. Two of my friends wanted a closer look and whispered to me to come with them. I went reluctantly, knowing my father would disapprove.