The Historian (66 page)

―The eyebrows of the young customs officer disappeared into his cap at the sight of our passports, and he took the passports aside for a few minutes to consult with another officer. ‗Not a good omen,‘ Helen said under her breath. Several uniformed men gathered around us, and the oldest and most pompous-looking began to question us in German, then in French, and finally in broken English. As Aunt Éva had instructed, I calmly pulled out our makeshift letter from the University of Budapest, which implored the Bulgarian government to let us in on important academic business, and the other letter Aunt Éva had obtained for us from a friend in the Bulgarian embassy.

―I don‘t know what the officer made of the academic letter and its extravagant mix of English, Hungarian, and French, but the embassy letter was in Bulgarian and bore the embassy seal. The officer read it in silence, his huge dark eyebrows knit over the bridge of his nose, and then his face took on a surprised, even an astonished expression, and he looked at us in something like amazement. This made me even more nervous than his earlier hostility had, and it occurred to me that Éva had been rather vague with us about the contents of the embassy letter. I certainly couldn‘t ask now what it said, and I felt miserably at sea when the officer broke into a smile and actually clapped me on the shoulder. He made his way to a telephone in one of the little customs booths and after considerable effort seemed to have reached someone. I didn‘t like the way he smiled into the receiver and glanced across at us every few seconds. Helen shifted uneasily next to me and I knew she must be reading even more into all this than I was.

―The officer finally hung up with a flourish, helped reunite us with our dusty suitcases, and led us to a bar inside the airport, where he bought us little shots of a head-emptying brandy called
rakiya
, partaking thoroughly himself. He asked us in his several broken languages how long we‘d been committed to the revolution, when we had joined the Party, and so on, none of which made me feel any more comfortable. It all set me to pondering more than ever the possible inaccuracies of our letter of introduction, but I followed Helen‘s lead and merely smiled, or made neutral remarks. He toasted friendship among the workers of every nation, refilling our glasses and his own. If one of us said something—some platitude about visiting his beautiful country, for example—he shook his head with a broad smile, as if contradicting our statements. I was unnerved by this until Helen whispered to me that she‘d read about this cultural idiosyncrasy: Bulgarians shook their heads in agreement and nodded in disagreement.

―When we‘d had exactly as muchrakiya as I could tolerate with impunity, we were saved by the appearance of a dour-faced man in a dark suit and hat. He looked only a little older than I was and would have been handsome if any expression of pleasure had ever flitted across his countenance. As it was, his dark mustache barely hid disapprovingly pursed lips, and the fall of black hair over his forehead concealed none of his frown. The officer greeted him with deference and introduced him as our assigned guide to Bulgaria, explaining that we were privileged in this, because Krassimir Ranov was highly respected in the Bulgarian government, associated with the University of Sofia, and knew as well as anyone the interesting sights of their ancient and glorious country.

―Through a haze of brandy I shook the man‘s fish-cold hand and wished to heaven we could see Bulgaria without a guide. Helen seemed less surprised by all this and greeted him, I thought, with just the right mixture of boredom and disdain. Mr. Ranov still hadn‘t uttered a word to us, but he appeared to take a hearty dislike to Helen even before the officer reported too loudly that she was Hungarian and was studying in the United States.

This explanation made his mustache twitch over a grim smile. ‗Professor, madam,‘ he said—his first words—and turned his back on us. The customs officer beamed, shook our hands, pounded me on the shoulders as if we were old friends already, and then indicated with a gesture that we must follow Ranov.

―Outside the airport, Ranov hailed a cab, which had the most antiquated interior I‘d ever seen in a vehicle, black fabric stuffed with something that could have been horsehair, and told us from the front seat that hotel rooms had been arranged for us at a hotel of the best reputation. ‗I believe you will find it comfortable, and it has an excellent restaurant.

Tomorrow we shall meet for breakfast there, and you may explain to me the nature of your research and how I can help you make arrangements to complete it. You will no doubt wish to meet with your colleagues at the University of Sofia and with the appropriate ministries. Then we shall arrange for you a short tour of some of Bulgaria‘s historic places.‘ He smiled sourly and I stared at him in growing horror. His English was too good; despite his marked accent, it had the tonelessly correct sound of one of those records from which you can learn a language in thirty days.

―His face had something familiar in it, too. I‘d certainly never seen him before, but it made me think of someone I knew, with the accompanying frustration of my not being able to remember who on earth it was. This feeling persisted for me during that first day in Sofia, dogging me on our all-too-guided tour of the city. Sofia was strangely beautiful, however—a blend of nineteenth-century elegance, medieval splendor, and shining new monuments in the socialist style. At the city‘s center, we toured a grim mausoleum that held the embalmed body of the Stalinist dictator Georgi Dimitrov, who‘d died five years before. Ranov took off his hat before entering the building and ushered me and Helen ahead of him. We joined a line of silent Bulgarians filing past Dimitrov‘s open coffin.

The dictator‘s face was waxen, with a heavy dark mustache like Ranov‘s. I thought of Stalin, whose body had reportedly joined Lenin‘s the year before, in a similar shrine on Red Square. These atheist cultures were certainly diligent in preserving the relics of their saints.

―My sense of foreboding about our guide increased when I asked him if he could put us in touch with an Anton Stoichev and saw him recoil. ‗Mr. Stoichev is an enemy of the people,‘ he assured us in his irritable voice. ‗Why do you wish to see him?‘ And then, strangely, ‗Of course, if you desire it, I can arrange this. He does not teach at the university anymore—with his religious views he could not be trusted with our youth. But he is famous and perhaps you would like to see him for that reason?‘‖

―‗‘Ranov has been told to give us whatever we want,‗ Helen remarked quietly when we had a moment alone, outside the hotel. ‘Why is that? Why does someone think that is a good idea?‗ We looked fearfully at each other.

―‗I wish I knew,‘ I said.

―‗We are going to have to be very careful here.‘ Helen‘s face was grave, her voice low, and I didn‘t dare to kiss her in public. ‗Let us have an agreement from this moment that we will never reveal anything but our scholarly interests, and those as little as possible, if we have to discuss our work in front of him.‘

―‗Agreed.‘‖

―In these last years, I‘ve found myself remembering over and over my first sight of Anton Stoichev‘s house. Perhaps it made such a deep impression on me because of the contrast between urban Sofia and his haven just outside it, or perhaps I remember it so often because of Stoichev himself—the particular and subtle nature of his presence. I think, however, that I feel a keen, almost breathless anticipation when I recall the sight of Stoichev‘s front gate because our meeting with him was the turning point in our search for Rossi.

―Much later, when I read aloud about the monasteries that lay outside the walls of Byzantine Constantinople, sanctuaries where their inhabitants sometimes escaped citywide edicts about one point of church ritual or another, where they were not protected by the great walls of the city but were a degree removed from the state‘s tyrannical reach, I thought of Stoichev—his garden, its leaning apple and cherry trees starred with white, the house settled into a deep yard, its new leaves and blue beehives, the old double wooden gate with the portal above it that kept us out, the air of quiet over the place, the air of devotion, of deliberate retreat.

―We stood before that gate while the dust settled around Ranov‘s car. Helen was the first to press the handle of one of the old latches; Ranov hung sullenly back as if he hated being seen there, even by us, and I felt strangely rooted to the ground. For a moment I was hypnotized by the midmorning vibration of leaves and bees, and by an unexpected, sickening feeling of dread. Stoichev, I thought, might well prove no help, a final dead end, in which case we would return home having walked a long path to nowhere. I‘d imagined it a hundred times already: the silent flight back to New York from Sofia or Istanbul—I would like to see Turgut one more time, I thought—and the reorganization of my life at home without Rossi, the questions about where I had been, the problems with the department over my long absence, the resumption of my writing about those Dutch merchants—placid, prosaic people—under the guidance of some vastly inferior new adviser, and the closed door to Rossi‘s office. Above all, I dreaded that closed door, and the ongoing investigation, the inadequate questioning of the police—‗So—Mr.—er—

Paul, is it? You took a trip two days after your adviser disappeared?‘—the small and puzzled gathering at a memorial service of sorts, eventually the question of Rossi‘s works, his copyrights, his estate.

―Returning with my hand intertwined with Helen‘s would be a great consolation, of course. I intended to ask her, when this horror was somehow over, to marry me; I would have to save a little money first, if I could, and take her to Boston to meet my parents.

Yes, I would return with her hand in mine, but there would be no father from whom to request it in marriage. I watched through a shimmer of grief as Helen opened the gate.

―Inside, Stoichev‘s house was sinking softly into an uneven ground—part yard and part orchard. The foundation of the house was built from a brownish-gray stone held together with white stucco; I later learned that this stone was a kind of granite, out of which most of Bulgaria‘s old buildings have sprung. Above the foundation the walls were brick, but brick of the softest, mellowest red-gold, as if they had been soaking in sunlight for generations. The roof was of fluted red ceramic tiles. Roof and walls were a little dilapidated. The whole house looked as if it had grown slowly out of the earth and was now slowly returning to it, and as if the trees had grown above it simply to shade this process. The first floor had put out a rambling wing on one side, and on the other stretched a trellis, which was covered with the tendrils of grapevines above and walled with pale roses below. Under the trellis sat a wooden table and four rough chairs, and I imagined how the shadow of the grape leaves would deepen there as summer progressed.

Beyond this, and beneath the most venerable of the apple trees, hovered two ghostly beehives; near them, in full sun, lay a little garden where someone had already coaxed up translucent greens in neat rows. I could smell herbs and perhaps lavender, fresh grass and frying onions. Someone tended this old place with care, and I half expected to get a glimpse of Stoichev in monk‘s habit, kneeling with his trowel in the garden.

―Then a voice began to sing inside, perhaps in the vicinity of the crumbling chimney and first-floor windows. It was not the baritone chant of the hermit, but a sweet, strong feminine voice, an energetic melody that made even Ranov, sulking next to me with his cigarette, look interested. ‗I
zvinete
!‘ he called. ‗
Dobar den
!‘ The singing stopped abruptly and was followed by a clatter and a thump. Stoichev‘s front door opened and the young woman who stood there stared hard at us, as if the last thing she‘d imagined in her yard was people.

―I would have stepped forward, but Ranov cut me off, removing his hat, nodding, bowing, greeting her in a flow of Bulgarian. The young woman had put her hand to her cheek, regarding Ranov with a curiosity that seemed to me mingled with wariness. At second glance, she was not quite as young as I‘d thought, but there was an energy and vigor about her that made me think she might be the author of the resplendent little garden and the good smells from the kitchen. Her hair was brushed back from a round face; she had a dark mole on her forehead. Her eyes, mouth, and chin looked like a pretty child‘s. She had an apron over her white blouse and blue skirt. She surveyed us with a sharp glance that had nothing to do with the innocence of her eyes, and I saw that under her quick interrogations Ranov even opened his wallet and showed her a card. Whether she was Stoichev‘s daughter or his housekeeper—did retired professors have housekeepers, in a communist country?—she was no fool. Ranov seemed to be making an uncharacteristic effort at charm; he turned, smiling, to introduce us to her. ‗This is Irina Hristova,‘ he explained as we shook hands. ‗She is the ness of Professor Stoichev.‘

―‗The nest?‘ I said, thinking for a second that this was some elaborate metaphor.

―‗The daughter of his sister,‘ Ranov said. He lit another cigarette and offered one to Irina Hristova, who refused with a decided nod. When he explained that we were from America, her eyes widened and she looked us over very carefully. Then she laughed, although I never knew what that meant. Ranov scowled again—I don‘t think he was capable of looking pleasant for more than a few minutes at a time—and she turned and led us in.