It was a young face but already aging very slightly and handsomely, with the light crinkling of skin I recognized around my own eyes in the mirror every morning, a barely veiled fatigue, so I knew she must be a graduate student. It was also an elegant, angular face that wouldn’t have been out of place in a medieval altar painting, saved from a pinched look by the delicate widening of cheekbones. Her complexion was pale but could have turned olive after a week in the sun. Her lashes were lowered toward the book, her firm mouth and spreading eyebrows somehow made alert by whatever her eyes followed on the page. Her dark, almost sooty hair sprang away from her forehead with more vigor than was fashionable in those tightly groomed days. The title of her reading, in this place of myriad inquiry-I looked again, again astonished-wasThe Carpathians. Under her dark-sweatered elbow rested Bram Stoker’sDracula.
At that moment, the young woman glanced up and met my gaze, and I realized I’d been staring directly at her, which must have been offensive. In fact, the dark, deep stare I got back-although her eyes also had a curious amber in their depths, like honey-was extremely hostile. I wasn’t what people still called then a ladies’ man; in fact I was something of a recluse. But I knew enough to feel ashamed, and I hurried to explain. Later I realized that her hostility was the defense of the striking-looking woman who is stared at again and again. “Excuse me,” I said quickly. “I couldn’t help noticing your books-I mean, what you’re reading.”
She stared unhelpfully back at me, keeping her book open in front of her, and raised the dark sweep of her eyebrows.
“You see, I’m actually studying the same subject,” I persisted. Her eyebrows rose a little higher, but I indicated the papers in front of me. “No, really. I’ve just been reading about -” I looked at the piles of Rossi’s documents in front of me and stopped abruptly. The contemptuous slant of her eyelids made my face grow warm.
“Dracula?” she said sarcastically. “Those appear to be primary sources you have got there.” She had a rich accent I couldn’t place, and her voice was soft, but library soft, as if it could spring into real strength when uncoiled.
I tried a different tactic. “Are you reading those for fun? I mean, for enjoyment? Or are you doing research?”
“Fun?” She kept the book open, still, maybe to discourage me with every possible weapon.
“Well, that’s an unusual topic, and if you’ve also gotten out a work on the Carpathians, you must be deeply interested in your subject.” I hadn’t spoken so quickly since the orals for my master’s degree. “I was just about to check that book out myself. Both of them, in fact.”
“Really,” she said. “And why is that?”
“Well,” I hazarded, “I’ve got these letters here, from-from an unusual historical source-and they mention Dracula. They’re about Dracula.”
A faint interest dawned inside her gaze, as if the amber light had won out and was turned reluctantly on me. She slumped slightly in her chair, relaxed into something like masculine ease, without taking her hands off her book. It struck me that this was a gesture I had seen a hundred times before, this slackening of tension that accompanied thought, this settling into a conversation. Where had I seen it?
“What are those letters, exactly?” she asked, in her quiet foreign voice. I thought with regret that I should have introduced myself and my credentials before getting into any of this. For some reason, I felt I couldn’t start over at this point-couldn’t suddenly put out my hand to shake hers and tell her what department I was in, and so on. It also occurred to me that I’d never seen her before, so she certainly wasn’t in history, unless she was new, a transfer from some other university. And should I lie to protect Rossi? I decided, at random, not to. I simply left his name out of the equation.
“I’m working with someone who’s-having some problems, and he wrote these letters more than twenty years ago. He gave them to me thinking I might be able to help him out of his current-situation-which has to do with-he studies, I mean he was studying -”
“I see,” she said with cold politeness. She stood up and started collecting her books, deliberately and without haste. Now she was picking up her briefcase. Standing, she looked as tall as I’d imagined her, a little sinewy, with broad shoulders.
“Why are you studying Dracula?” I asked in desperation.
“Well, I must say it is not any of your business,” she told me shortly, turning away, “but I am planning a future trip, although I do not know when I will take it.”
“To the Carpathians?” I felt suddenly rattled by the whole conversation.
“No.” She flung that last word back at me, disdainfully. And then, as if she couldn’t help herself, but so contemptuously that I didn’t dare follow her: “To Istanbul.”
“Good Lord,” my father prayed suddenly against the twittering sky. The last swallows were homing in above us, the town with its diminished lights settling heavily into the valley. “We shouldn’t be sitting around here with a hike ahead of us tomorrow. Pilgrims are supposed to turn in early, I’m sure. With the coming of dark, or something like that.”
I shifted my legs; one foot had fallen asleep under me and the stones of the churchyard wall felt suddenly sharp, impossibly uncomfortable, especially with the thought of bed looming ahead of me. I would have pins and needles on the stumbling walk downhill to the hotel. I felt a boiling irritation, too, far sharper than the sensations in my feet. My father had stopped his story too soon, again.
“Look,” my father said, pointing straight out from our perch. “I think that must be Saint-Matthieu.”
I followed his gesture to the dark, massed mountains and saw, halfway up, a small, steady light. No other light appeared close to it; no other habitation seemed anywhere near it. It was like a single spark on immense folds of black cloth, high up but not close to the highest peaks-it hung between the town and the night sky. “Yes, that’s just where the monastery must be, I think,” my father said again. “And we’ll have a real climb tomorrow, even if we go by the road.”
As we set off along moonless streets, I felt that sadness that comes with dropping down from a height, leaving anything lofty. Before we turned the corner of the old bell tower, I glanced back once, to pin that tiny spot of light in my memory. There it was again, gleaming above a house wall tumbled over with dark bougainvillea. Standing still for a moment, I looked hard at it. Then, just once, the light winked.
Chapter 9
December 14, 1930
Trinity College, Oxford
My dear and unfortunate successor:
I shall conclude my account as rapidly as possible, since you must draw from it vital information if we are both to-ah, to survive, at least, and to survive in a state of goodness and mercy. There is survival and survival, the historian learns to his grief. The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.
But to proceed: on my journey from England to Greece, I experienced some of the smoothest travelling I have ever known. The director of the museum in Crete was actually at the dock to welcome me, and he invited me to return later in the summer, to attend the opening of a Minoan tomb. In addition, two American classicists whom I had wanted for years to meet were staying at my pension. They urged me to inquire about a faculty position that had just become available at their university-exactly the thing for someone with my background-and heaped my work with compliments. I had easy access to every collection I approached, including some private ones. In the afternoons, when the museums shut down and the town took its siesta, I sat on my lovely vine-shaded balcony, fleshing out my notes, and in the process derived ideas for several other works to be attempted at some later date. Under these idyllic circumstances I considered dropping entirely what now seemed to me to be a morbid fancy, the pursuit of that peculiar word,Drakulya.I had brought the antique book with me, not wanting to be parted from it, but I had not opened it for a week now. All in all, I felt free of its spell. But something-an historian’s passion for thoroughness, or maybe sheer love of the chase-compelled me to stick to my plans and go on to Istanbul for a few days. And now I must tell you of my singular adventure in an archive there. This is perhaps the first of several events I shall describe that may inspire your disbelief. Only read to the end, I beg you.