“The only thing we could do was to turn our feet toward our one landmark, the Hagia Sophia, originally the great Byzantine Church of Saint Sophia. And once we drew near it, it was impossible for us not to enter. The gates were open and the huge sanctuary pulled us in among the other tourists as if we rode a wave into a cavern. For fourteen hundred years, I reflected, pilgrims had been drawn into it, just as we were now. Inside, I walked slowly to the center and craned my head back to see that vast, divine space with its famous whirling domes and arches, its celestial light pouring in, the round shields covered with Arabic calligraphy in the upper corners, mosque overlaying church, church overlaying the ruins of the ancient world. It arched far, far above us, replicating the Byzantine cosmos. I could hardly believe I was there. I was stunned by it.
“Looking back at that moment, I understand that I had lived in books so long, in my narrow university setting, that I had become compressed by them internally. Suddenly, in this echoing house of Byzantium -one of the wonders of history-my spirit leaped out of its confines. I knew in that instant that, whatever happened, I could never go back to my old constraints. I wanted to follow life upward, to expand with it outward, the way this enormous interior swelled upward and outward. My heart swelled with it, as it never had during all my wanderings among the Dutch merchants.
“I glanced at Helen and saw that she was equally moved, her head tipped back like mine so that her dark curls fell over the collar of her blouse, her usually guarded and cynical face full of a pale transcendence. I reached out, impulsively, and took her hand. She grasped mine hard, with that firm, almost bony grip I knew already from her handshake. In another woman, this might have been a gesture of submission or coquetry, a romantic acquiescence; in Helen it was as simple and fierce a gesture as her gaze or the aloofness of her posture. After a moment she seemed to recall herself; she dropped my hand, but without embarrassment, and we wandered around the church together admiring the fine pulpit, the glinting Byzantine marble. It took me a mighty effort to remember that we could return to Hagia Sophia at any time during our stay in Istanbul, and that our first business in this city was to find the archive. Helen apparently had the same thought, for she moved toward the entrance when I did, and we made our way through the crowds and into the street again.
“‘The archive could be quite far away,’ she observed. ‘Saint Sophia is so large that you could see it from almost any building in this part of the city, I think, or even on the other side of the Bosphorus.’
“‘I know. We’ve got to find some other clue. The letters said that the archive was attached to a small mosque from the seventeenth century.’
“‘The city is filled with mosques.’
“‘True.’ I flipped through my hastily purchased guidebook. ‘Let’s start with this-the Great Mosque of the Sultans. Mehmed II and his court might have worshipped there sometimes-it was built in the late fifteenth century, and that would be a logical neighborhood for his library to end up in, don’t you think?’
“Helen thought it was worth a try, and we set off on foot. Along the way, I dipped into the guidebook again. ‘Listen to this. It says thatIstanbul is a Byzantine word that meantthe city. You see, even the Ottomans couldn’t demolish Constantinople, only rename it-with a Byzantine name, at that. It says here that the Byzantine Empire lasted from 333 to 1453. Imagine-what a long, long afternoon of power.’
“Helen nodded. ‘It is not possible to think about this part of the world without Byzantium,’ she said gravely. ‘And, you know, in Romania you see glimpses of it everywhere-in every church, in the frescoes, the monasteries, even in the people’s faces, I think. In some ways, it is closer to your eyes there than it is here, with all of this Ottoman-sediment-on top.’ Her face clouded. ‘The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II was one of the greatest tragedies in history. He broke down these walls with his cannonballs and then he sent his armies in to pillage and murder for three days. The soldiers raped young girls and boys on the altars of the churches, even in Saint Sophia. They stole the icons and all the other holy treasures to melt down the gold, and they threw the relics of the saints in the streets for the dogs to chew. Before that, this was the most beautiful city in history.’ Her hand closed in a fist at her waist.
“I was silent. The city was still beautiful, with its delicate, rich colors and its exquisite domes and minarets, whatever atrocities had occurred here long ago. I was beginning to understand why an evil moment five hundred years ago was so real to Helen, but what did this really have to do with our lives in the present? It struck me suddenly that perhaps I had come a long way for nothing, to this magical place with this complicated woman, looking for an Englishman who might be on a bus trip to New York. I swallowed the thought and tried instead to tease her a little. ‘How is it that you know so much about history? I thought you were an anthropologist.’
“‘I am,’ she said gravely. ‘But you cannot study cultures without a knowledge of their history.’
“‘Then why didn’t you simply become a historian? You could still have studied culture, it seems to me.’
“‘Perhaps.’ She looked forbidding now, and would not meet my eye. ‘But I wanted a field that my father had not already made his own.’
“The Great Mosque was still open in the golden evening light, to tourists as well as to the faithful. I tried my mediocre German on the guard at the entrance, an olive-skinned, curly headed boy-what had those Byzantines looked like?- but he said there was no library within, no archive, nothing of the sort, and he had never heard of one nearby. We asked if he had any suggestions.
“We could try the university, he mused. As for small mosques, there were hundreds of them.
“‘It’s too late to go to the university today,’ Helen told me. She was studying the guidebook. ‘Tomorrow we can visit there and ask someone for information about archives that date from Mehmed’s time. I think that will be the most efficient way. Let’s go see the old walls of Constantinople. We can walk to one section of them from here.’
“I followed her through the streets as she traced our way for us, the guidebook in her gloved hand, her small black purse over her arm. Bicycles darted past us, Ottoman robes mingled with Western dress, foreign cars and horse carts wove around one another. Everywhere I looked I saw men in dark vests and small crocheted caps, women in brightly printed blouses with ballooning trousers underneath, their heads wound in scarves. They carried shopping bags and baskets, cloth bundles, chickens in crates, bread, flowers. The streets were overflowing with life-as they had been, I thought, for sixteen hundred years. Along these streets the Roman Christian emperors had been carried by their entourages, flanked by priests, moving from palace to church to take the Holy Sacrament. They had been strong rulers, great patrons of the arts, engineers, theologians. And nasty, too, some of them-prone to cutting up their courtiers and blinding family members, in the tradition of Rome proper. This was where the original byzantine politics had played themselves out. Perhaps it wasn’t such an odd place for a vampire or two, after all.
“Helen had stopped in front of a towering, partly ruined stone compound. Shops huddled at its base and fig trees dug their roots into its flank; a cloudless sky was fading to copper above the battlements. ‘Look what remains of the walls of Constantinople,’ she said quietly. ‘You can see how enormous they were when they were intact. The book says the sea came to their feet in those days, so the emperor could embark by boat from the palace. And over there, that wall was part of the Hippodrome.’