The Historian (69 page)

―‗Please, honored guests, make yourselves welcome.‘ Stoichev waved a hand over the table as if it belonged to the emperor of Constantinople. Irina poured glasses of brandy—

the smell alone could have killed a small animal—and he toasted us gallantly, his yellow-toothed smile wide and genuine. ‗I drink to friendship among scholars everywhere.‘

―We all returned this toast with enthusiasm except for Ranov, who raised his glass ironically and looked around at us.

―‗May your scholarship advance the knowledge of the Party and the people,‘ he said, giving me a little bow. This almost took the edge off my appetite; was he speaking generally, or did he want to advance the Party‘s knowledge through something particular we knew? But I returned the bow and downed my
rakiya
. I decided there was no way to drink it except quickly, and the third-degree burn I received on the back of my throat was soon replaced by a pleasant glow. Enough of this beverage, I thought, and I might be in danger of liking Ranov slightly.

―‗I am glad to have the chance to talk with anyone who is interested in our medieval history,‘ Stoichev said to me. ‗Perhaps it would be interesting for you and Miss Rossi to see a holiday that celebrates two of our great medieval figures. Tomorrow is the day of Kiril and Methodii, creators of the great Slavonic alphabet. In English you would say Cyril and Methodius—you call it Cyrillic, do you not? We say
kirilitsa
, for Kiril, the monk who invented it.‘

―For a moment I was confused, thinking of our Brother Kiril, but when Stoichev spoke again I saw what he had in mind, and how resourceful he was.

―‗I am very busy with my writing this afternoon,‘ he said, ‗but if you would like to come back tomorrow, some of my former students will be here to celebrate the day, and I can tell you more about Kiril then.‘

―‗That is extremely kind of you,‘ Helen said. ‗We do not want to use too much of your time, but we would be honored to join you. Can that be arranged, Comrade Ranov?‘

―Thecomrade did not seem to be lost on Ranov, who scowled at her over his second glass of brandy. ‗Certainly,‘ he said. ‗If that is how you would like to accomplish your research, I am happy to be of assistance.‘

―‗Very good,‘ Stoichev said. ‗We will gather here at about one-thirty, and Irina will have something nice for our lunch. It is always a pleasant group. You may meet some scholars whose work you will find interesting.‘

―We thanked him profusely and obeyed Irina‘s urging to eat, although I noticed that Helen, too, avoided the rest of the
rakiya
. When we had finished the simple meal, Helen rose at once and we all followed suit. ‗We will not tire you further, Professor,‘ she said, taking his hand.

―‗Not at all, my dear.‘ Stoichev shook her hands warmly, but I thought he did look weary.

‗I shall look forward to our meeting tomorrow.‘

―Irina showed us to the gate again, through the green yard and gardens. ‗Until tomorrow,‘

she said, smiling at us, and added something pert in Bulgarian that made Ranov smooth his hair down before putting his hat on again. ‗She is a very pretty girl,‘ he remarked complacently as we walked to his car, and Helen rolled her eyes at me behind his back.

―It wasn‘t until evening that we had a few minutes alone together. Ranov had taken his departure after an interminable dinner in the bleak hotel dining room. Helen and I walked upstairs together—the elevator was broken again—and then lingered in the hall near my room, moments of sweetness filched from our peculiar situation. Once we thought that Ranov must be gone, we went back downstairs, strolled out to a café on a side street nearby, and sat there under the trees.

―‗Someone is watching us here, also,‘ Helen said quietly, as we seated ourselves at a metal table. I laid my briefcase carefully across my lap; I‘d stopped even setting it under café tables. Helen smiled. ‗But at least this is not bugged, like my room. And yours.‘ She looked up into the green branches above us. ‗Linden trees,‘ she said. ‗In a couple of months they will be covered with flowers. People make tea out of them at home—

probably here, too.‘ When you sit at a table outside like this, you must clean off the table first because the blossoms and the pollen fall everywhere. They smell like honey, very sweet and fresh.‗ She made a quick motion, as if brushing aside thousands of pale green flowers.

―I took her hand then, and turned it over so that I could see her palm with its graceful lines. I hoped they meant she would have a long life and good fortune, both shared by me. ‗What do you make of Stoichev‘s having that letter?‘

―‗It might be a stroke of luck for us,‘ she mused. ‗At first I thought it was only a piece of a historical puzzle—a wonderful piece, but how was it going to help us? But when Stoichev guessed our letter was dangerous, then I felt a great deal of hope that he knows something important.‘

―‗I hoped so, too,‘ I admitted. ‗But I also thought he might mean simply that it was politically sensitive material, like so much of his work—because it involves the history of the church.‘

―‗I know.‘ Helen sighed. ‗It might mean only that.‘

―‗And that would be enough to make him wary of discussing it in front of Ranov.‘

―‗Yes. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out what he meant.‘ She laced her fingers through mine. ‗It is agonizing for you to wait every day, isn‘t it?‘

―I nodded slowly. ‗If you knew Rossi,‘ I said, and stopped.

―Her eyes were fixed on mine and she slowly brushed back a lock of hair that had slipped out of its pins. The gesture was so sad that it gave full weight to her next words. ‗I do begin to know him, through you.‘

―At that moment, a waitress in a white blouse came out to us and asked something. Helen turned to me. ‗What to drink?‘ The waitress looked curiously at us, creatures who spoke a foreign language.

―‗What do you know how to order?‘ I teased Helen.

―‗Chai,‘she said, pointing at herself and me. ‗Tea, please.
Molya
. ‘

―‗You‘re learning fast,‘ I said, when the waitress had gone back inside.

―She shrugged. ‗I‘ve studied some Russian. Bulgarian is very close.‘

―When the waitress had returned with our tea, Helen stirred it with a somber face. ‗It is such a relief to get away from Ranov that I can hardly bear to think about seeing him again tomorrow. I don‘t see how we are going to do any serious research with him at our backs.‘

―‗If I knew whether he actually suspects anything about our search, I‘d feel better,‘ I confessed. ‗The strange thing is, he reminds me of someone I‘ve met before, but I seem to have amnesia about who that is.‘ I glanced at Helen‘s serious, lovely face, and in that second I felt my brain groping for something, fluttering on the edge of some puzzle, and it wasn‘t the question of Ranov‘s possible twin. It had to do with Helen‘s face in the twilight, and the act of lifting my tea to drink, and the odd word I had chosen. My mind had fluttered there before, but this time the thought broke through in a rush.

―‗Amnesia,‘ I said. ‗Helen—Helen, amnesia.‘

―‗What?‘ She frowned at my intensity, puzzled.

―‗Rossi‘s letters!‘ I almost shouted. I pulled open my briefcase so hastily that our tea slopped onto the table. ‗His letter, his trip to Greece!‘

―It took me several minutes to find the damn thing among my papers, and then to trace the passage, and then to read it aloud to Helen, whose eyes widened slowly to a shocked darkness. ‗You remember the letter about how he went back to Greece—to Crete—after having his map taken away from him in Istanbul, and how his luck changed to bad and everything went wrong?‘ I rattled the page in front of her. ‗Listen to this: ‖The old men in Crete‘s
tavernas
seemed much more inclined to tell me their two hundred and ten vampire stories than they were to explain where I might find other shards of pottery like that one, or what ancient shipwrecks their grandfathers had dived into and plundered.

One evening I let a stranger buy me a round of a local speciality called, whimsically, amnesia, with the result that I was sick all the next day.―‘

―‗Oh, my God,‘ Helen said softly.

―‗I let a stranger buy me a drink called amnesia,‘ I paraphrased, trying to keep my voice down. ‗Who the hell do you think that stranger was? And that‘s why Rossi forgot—‘

―‗He forgot—‘ Helen seemed hypnotized by the word. ‗He forgot Romania—‘

―‗—that he had been there at all. His letters to Hedges said he was going back to Greece from Romania, to get some money and attend an archaeological dig—‘

―‗And he forgot my mother,‘ Helen finished, almost inaudibly.

―‗Your mother,‘ I echoed, with a sudden image of Helen‘s mother standing in her doorway, watching us leave. ‗He never meant not to go back. He suddenly forgot everything. And that‘s—that‘s why he told me he couldn‘t always remember his research clearly.‘

―Helen‘s face was white now, her jaw clenched, her eyes harsh and filling with tears. ‗I hate him,‘ she said in a low voice, and I knew she did not mean her father.‖

―We arrived at Stoichev‘s gate the next morning promptly at one-thirty. Helen squeezed my hand, ignoring Ranov‘s presence, and even Ranov seemed in a festive mood; he frowned less than usual and had put on a heavy brown suit. From behind the gate, we could hear the sounds of conversation and laughter and smell wood smoke and some delicious meat cooking. If I put all thought of Rossi firmly out of my mind, I could feel festive, too. I felt that today, of all days, something would happen to help me find him, and I resolved to celebrate the feast of Kiril and Methodius as wholeheartedly as possible.

―Inside the yard, we could see groups of men and a few women gathered under the trellis.

Irina flitted here and there behind the table, refilling people‘s plates and pouring glasses full of that powerful amber liquid. When she saw us, she hurried forward, arms outstretched as if we were already old friends. She shook hands with me and Ranov and kissed Helen on the cheeks. ‗I am very happy that you came. Thank you,‘ she said. ‗My uncle has not been able to sleep at all, or to eat anything, since you were here yesterday. I hope you will tell him that he must eat.‘ Her pretty face was puckered.

―‗Please don‘t worry,‘ said Helen. ‗We will do our best to persuade him.‘

―We found Stoichev holding court under the apple trees. Someone had set a ring of wooden chairs there, and he sat in the largest with several younger men around him. ‗Oh, hello!‘ he exclaimed, struggling to his feet. The other men rose quickly to give him a hand, and waited to greet us. ‗Welcome, my friends. Please to meet my other friends.‘

With a frail wave, he indicated the faces around him. ‗These are some of my students from before the war, and they are so kind to come back and see me.‘ Many of these men, with their white shirts and shabby dark suits, were youthful only in comparison with Ranov; most of them were in their fifties, at least. They smiled and shook our hands warmly, one of them bending to kiss Helen‘s with formal courtesy. I liked their alert, dark eyes, their quiet smiles glinting with gold teeth.

―Irina came up behind us; she seemed to be urging everyone to eat once again, for after a minute we found ourselves carried along by a wave of guests to the tables under the trellis. There we found a groaning board indeed, and also the source of the wonderful smell, which turned out to be a whole sheep roasting over an open pit in the yard near the house. The table was laden with earthenware dishes of sliced potatoes, tomato and cucumber salad, crumbling white cheese, loaves of golden bread, pans of the same flaky cheese pastry we had eaten in Istanbul. There were meat stews, chilled bowls of yogurt, grilled eggplants and onions. Irina left us no peace until our plates were almost too heavy to carry, and she followed us back into the little orchard bearing glasses of
rakiya
.

―In the meantime, Stoichev‘s students had clearly been vying with one another to see who could bring him the most food, and now they filled his glass to the brim, and he slowly rose to his feet. All over the yard people shouted for quiet, and then he toasted them with a short speech, in which I caught the names of Kiril and Methodius, as well as mine and Helen‘s. When he was done, a cheer went up from the whole company.

‗
Stoichev! Za zdraveto na Profesor Stoichev! Nazdrave!
‘ Cheers rang all around us.

Everyone‘s face was lit up for Stoichev; everyone turned to him with a smile and a raised glass, and some had tears in their eyes. I remembered Rossi, how he‘d listened so modestly to the cheers and speeches with which we had marked his twentieth anniversary at the university. I turned away with a lump in my throat. Ranov, I noted, was drifting around under the trellis, a glass in his hand.

―When the company settled again to eating and talking, Helen and I found ourselves in places of honor next to Stoichev. He smiled and nodded to us. ‗How pleasant for me that you could come to join us today. You know, this is my favorite holiday. We have many saints‘ days in the church calendar, but this one is dear to all those who teach and learn, because it is when we honor the Slavonic heritage of alphabet and literature, and the teaching and learning of many centuries that have grown from Kiril and Methodii and their great invention. Besides, on this day all my favorite students and colleagues come back to interrupt their ancient professor at his work. And I am very grateful to them for the interruption.‘ He looked around with that affectionate smile and clapped the nearest of his colleagues on the shoulder. I saw with a twinge of sorrow how fragile his hand was, thin and almost translucent.