“‘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 meanyou 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.
Chapter 38
“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.