The Historian (47 page)

―‗Yes.‘ I‘d forgotten even about Helen and Géza now. ‗Why do you ask?‘

―‗But this is astounding! I think I must write to Professor Rossi at once. You see, I‘ve recently been studying a most interesting document from fifteenth-century Hungary.

That‘s what brought me to Budapest in the first place—I‘ve been looking into that period of Hungary‘s history, you know, and then I tagged along at the conference with Professor Sándor‘s kind permission. In any case, this document was written by one of King Matthias Corvinus‘s scholars, and it mentions the ghost in the amphora.‘

―I remembered that Helen had referred to King Matthias Corvinus the night before; hadn‘t he been the founder of the great library in the Buda castle? Aunt Éva had told me about him, too. ‗Please,‘ I said urgently, ‗explain.‘

―‗Well, I—it‘s rather a silly sounding thing, but I‘ve been very interested for several years in the folk legends of Central Europe. It started as a bit of a lark, I suppose, long ago, but I‘ve become absolutely mesmerized by the legend of the vampire.‘

―I stared at him. He looked as ordinary as before, with his ruddy, jolly face and tweed jacket, but I felt I must be dreaming.

―‗Oh, I know it sounds juvenile—Count Dracula and all that—but you know it really is a remarkable subject when you dig into it a bit. You see, Dracula was a real person, although of course not a vampire, and I‘m interested in whether his history is in any way connected with folk legends of the vampire. A few years ago I started looking for written material on the topic, to see if there even was any, since of course the vampire existed mainly in oral legend in Central and East European villages.‘

―He leaned back, drumming his fingers on the edge of the table. ‗Well, lo and behold, working in the university library here, I turned up this document that Corvinus apparently commissioned—he wanted someone to collect all knowledge of vampires from earliest times. Whoever the scholar was who got the job, he was certainly a classicist, and instead of tramping around villages as any good anthropologist would have done, he began poking through Latin and Greek texts—Corvinus had a lot of these here, you know—to find references to vampires, and he turned up this ancient Greek idea, which I haven‘t seen anywhere else—at least not until you mentioned it just now—of the ghost in the amphora. In ancient Greece, and in Greek tragedies, the amphora sometimes contained human ashes, you see, and the ignorant folk of Greece believed that if things didn‘t go quite right with the burial of the amphora, it could produce a vampire—I‘m not quite sure how, yet. Perhaps Professor Rossi knows something about this, if he‘s writing about ghosts in amphorae. A remarkable coincidence, isn‘t it? Actually, there are still vampires in modern Greece, according to folklore.‘

―‗I know,‘ I said. ‗Thevrykolakas. ‘

―This time it was Hugh James‘s turn to stare. His protuberant hazel eyes grew enormous.

‗How do you know that?‘ he breathed. ‗I mean—I beg your pardon—I‘m just surprised to meet someone else who—‘

―‗Is interested in vampires?‘ I said dryly. ‗Yes, that used to surprise me, too, but I‘m getting used to it, these days. How did you become interested in vampires, Professor James?‘

―‗Hugh,‘ he said, slowly. ‗Please call me Hugh. Well, I—‘ He looked hard at me for a second, and for the first time I saw that under his cheerful, bumbling exterior there glowed an intensity like a flame. ‗It‘s dreadfully strange and I don‘t usually tell people about this, but—‘

―I really couldn‘t bear the delay. ‗Did you, by any chance, find an old book with a dragon in the center?‘ I said.

―He eyed me almost wildly, and the color drained from his healthy face. ‗Yes,‘ he said. ‗I found a book.‘ His hands gripped the edge of the table. ‗Who are you?‘

―‗I found one, too.‘

―We sat looking at each other for a few long seconds, and we might have sat speechless even longer, delaying all we had to discuss, if we hadn‘t been interrupted. Géza József‘s voice was at my ear before I noticed his presence; he had come up behind me and was bending over our table with a genial smile. Helen came hurrying up, too, and her face was strange—almost guilty, I thought. ‗Good afternoon, comrades,‘ he said cordially.

‗What‘s this about finding books?‘‖

―When Professor József bent over our table with his friendly question, I wasn‘t sure for a moment what to say. I had to talk with Hugh James again as soon as possible, but in private, not in this crush of people, and certainly not with the very person Helen had warned me about—why?—breathing down my neck. At last I mustered a few words. ‗We were sharing our love of antique books,‘ I said. ‗Every scholar should be able to admit to that, don‘t you think?‘

―By this time Helen had caught up with us and was eyeing me with what I took to be mingled alarm and approval. I rose to pull out a chair for her. In the midst of my need to dissemble before Géza József, I must have communicated some excitement to her, for she stared from me to Hugh. Géza looked genially at all of us, but I fancied I saw a slight narrowing of his handsome epicanthic eyes; so, I thought, the Huns must have squinted into the Western sun through the slits of their leather headgear. I tried not to look at him again.

―We might have remained there parrying or avoiding looks all day if Professor Sándor had not suddenly appeared. ‗Very good,‘ he trumpeted. ‗I find you enjoy your lunch. You are finished? And now, if you will be very kind to come with me, we will arrange your lecture to begin.‘

―I flinched—I had actually forgotten for a few minutes the torture that awaited me—but I rose in obedience. Géza dropped respectfully behind Professor Sándor—a little too respectfully? I asked myself—and that gave me a blessed moment to look at Helen. I widened my eyes and motioned toward Hugh James, who had also risen politely to his feet at Helen‘s approach and was standing mutely at the table. She frowned, puzzled, and then Professor Sándor, to my great relief, clapped Géza on the shoulder and led him away. I thought I read annoyance in the young Hungarian‘s massive suit-jacketed back, but perhaps I had already imbibed too much of Helen‘s paranoia about him. In any case, it gave us an instant of freedom.

―‗Hugh got a book,‘ I whispered, shamelessly breaking the Englishman‘s confidence.

―Helen stared, but without comprehension. ‗Hugh?‘

―I nodded quickly at our companion, and he stared at us. Then Helen‘s jaw dropped.

Hugh stared at her in turn. ‗Did she also—?‘

―‗No,‘ I whispered. ‗She‘s helping me. This is Miss Helen Rossi, anthropologist.‘

―Hugh shook her hand with brusque warmth, still staring. But Professor Sándor had turned back and was waiting for us, and there was nothing we could do but follow him.

Helen and Hugh stayed as close to my side as if we‘d been a flock of sheep.

―The lecture room was already beginning to fill, and I took a place in the front row, pulling my notes from my briefcase with a hand that didn‘t quite tremble. Professor Sándor and his assistant were fiddling with the microphone again, and it occurred to me that perhaps the audience wouldn‘t be able to hear me, in which case I had little to worry about. All too soon, however, the equipment was working and the kind professor was introducing me, bobbing his white head enthusiastically over some notes. He outlined once again my remarkable credentials, described the prestige of my university in the United States, and congratulated the conference on the rare treat of hearing me, all in English this time, probably for my benefit. I realized suddenly that I had no interpreter to render my dog-eared lecture notes into German while I spoke, and this idea gave me a burst of confidence as I stood to face my trial.

―‗Good afternoon, colleagues, fellow historians,‘ I began, and then, feeling that was pompous, put down my notes. ‗Thank you for giving me the honor of speaking to you today. I would like to talk with you about the period of Ottoman incursion into Transylvania and Wallachia, two principalities that are well known to you as part of the current nation of Romania.‘ The sea of thoughtful faces looked fixedly at me, and I wondered if I detected a sudden tension in the room. Transylvania, for Hungarian historians, as for many other Hungarians, was touchy material. ‗As you know, the Ottoman Empire held territories across Eastern Europe for more than five hundred years, administering them from a secure base after its conquest of ancient Constantinople in 1453. The Empire was successful in its invasions of a dozen countries, but there were a few areas it never managed to completely subdue, many of them mountainous pockets of Eastern Europe‘s backwoods, whose topography and natives both defied conquest. One of these areas was Transylvania.‘

―I went on like this, partly from my notes and partly from memory, experiencing now and then a wave of scholarly panic; I didn‘t know the material well yet, although Helen‘s lessons about it were vividly etched in my mind. After this introduction, I gave a brief overview of Ottoman trade routes in the region and then described the various princes and nobles who had attempted to repulse the Ottoman incursion. I included Vlad Dracula among them, as casually as I could, because Helen and I had agreed that to leave him out of the talk altogether might appear suspicious to any historian who knew of his importance as a destroyer of Ottoman armies. It must have cost me more than I‘d thought it would to utter that name in front of a crowd of strangers, because as I began to describe his impalement of twenty thousand Turkish soldiers, my hand flew out a little too suddenly and I knocked over my glass of water.

―‗Oh, I‘m sorry!‘ I exclaimed, glancing miserably out at a mass of sympathetic faces—

sympathetic with the exception of two. Helen looked pale and tense, and Géza Jószef was leaning a little forward, unsmiling, as if he took the keenest interest in my blunder. The blue-shirted student and Professor Sándor both rushed to my rescue with their handkerchiefs, and after a second I was able to proceed, which I did with all the dignity I could muster. I pointed out that although the Turks had eventually overcome Vlad Dracula and many of his comrades—I thought I should work the word in somewhere—

uprisings of this sort had persisted over generations until one local revolution after another toppled the Empire. It was the local nature of these uprisings, with their ability to fade back into their own terrain after each attack, that had ultimately undermined the great Ottoman machine.

―I had meant to end more eloquently than this, but it seemed to please the crowd, and there was ringing applause. To my surprise, I had finished. Nothing terrible had occurred.

Helen slumped back, visibly relieved, and Professor Sándor came beaming up to shake my hand. Looking around, I noted Éva in the back, clapping away with her lovely smile very wide. Something was amiss in the room, however, and after a minute I realized that Géza‘s stately form had vanished. I couldn‘t recall his slipping out, but perhaps the end of my lecture had been too dull for him.

―As soon as I was done, everyone stood up and began to talk in a babble of languages.

Three or four of the Hungarian historians came over to shake my hand and congratulate me. Professor Sándor was radiant. ‗Excellent!‘ he cried. ‗I am full of pleasure to know you understand so well our Transylvanian history in America.‘ I wondered what he would have thought if he‘d known I‘d learned everything in my lecture from one of his colleagues, seated at a restaurant table in Istanbul.

―Éva came up and gave me her hand, too. I wasn‘t sure whether to kiss or shake it, but finally decided on the latter. She looked if anything taller and more imposing today in the midst of this gathering of men in shabby suits. She had on a dark green dress and heavy gold earrings, and her hair, curling under a little green hat, had changed from magenta to black overnight.

―Helen came over to talk with her, too, and I noticed how formal they were with each other in this gathering; it was hard to believe Helen had run to her arms the night before.

Helen translated her aunt‘s congratulations for me: ‗Very nice work, young man. I could see by everyone‘s faces that you managed to offend no one, so probably you didn‘t say very much. But you stand up straight at the podium and look your audience in the eye—

that will take you far.‘ Aunt Éva tempered these remarks with her dazzling, even-toothed smile. ‗Now I must get home to do some chores there, but I will see you at dinner tomorrow night. We can dine at your hotel.‘ I hadn‘t known we were going to have dinner with her again, but I was glad to hear it. ‗I am so sorry I cannot make you a really good dinner at home, as I would like to,‘ she told me. ‗But when I explain that I am under construction like the rest of Budapest, I am sure you will understand. I could not have a visitor see my dining room in such a mess.‘ Her smile was thoroughly distracting, but I managed to glean two pieces of information from this speech—one, that in this city of (presumably) tiny apartments, she had a dining room; and two, that whether or not it was a mess, she was too wary to serve dinner to a strange American there. ‗I must have a little conference with my niece. Helen can come to me tonight, if you can spare her.‘ Helen translated all this with guilty exactness.

―‗Of course,‘ I said, returning Aunt Éva‘s smile. ‗I am sure you have a lot to discuss after a long separation. And I think I will have dinner plans myself.‘ My eye was already searching out Hugh James‘s tweed jacket in the crowd.