The Historian (8 page)

―No,‖ I said finally. ―I don‘t see anything different.‖

―All right.‖ The policeman turned me toward the windows. ―Look up, then.‖

On the white plaster ceiling over the desk, high above us, a dark smear about five inches long drifted sideways, as if pointing toward something outside. ―This appears to be blood, too. Don‘t worry; it may or may not be Professor Rossi‘s. That ceiling‘s too high for a person to reach it easily, even with a step stool. We‘ll have everything tested. Now think hard. Did Rossi mention a bird getting in that night? Or did you hear any sounds as you left, maybe like something getting in? Was the window open, do you remember?‖

―No,‖ I said. ―He didn‘t mention anything like that. And the windows were shut, I‘m sure.‖ I couldn‘t take my eyes off the stain; I felt if I stared hard enough I might read something in its horrible and hieroglyphic shape.

―We‘ve had birds in this building several times,‖ the chairman contributed behind us.

―Pigeons. They get in through the skylights once in a while.‖

―That‘s a possibility,‖ the policeman said. ―Although we haven‘t found any droppings, it‘s certainly a possibility.‖

―Or bats,‖ the chairman said. ―What about bats? These old buildings probably have all kinds of things living in them.‖

―Well, that‘s another possibility, especially if Rossi tried to hit something with a broom or umbrella and wounded it in the process,‖ suggested a professor in the doorway.

―Did you see anything like a bat in here, ever, or a bird?‖ the policeman asked me again.

It took me a few seconds to form the simple word and get it past my dry lips. ―No,‖ I said, but I could hardly make sense of his question. My eyes had finally caught the inner end of the dark stain and what it seemed to trail away from. On the top shelf of Rossi‘s bookcase, in his row of ―failures,‖ a book was missing. Where he had replaced his mysterious book two nights before, one narrow black crevice now gaped among the spines.

My colleagues were leading me out again, patting my back and telling me not to worry; I must have looked white as a piece of typing paper. I turned to the policeman, who was shutting and locking the door behind us. ―Is there any chance Professor Rossi is already in a hospital somewhere, if he cut himself, or if someone injured him?‖

The officer shook his head. ―We‘ve got a line to the hospitals, and we‘ve done a first check. No sign of him. Why? Do you think he might have injured himself? I thought you said he didn‘t seem suicidal or depressed.‖

―Oh, he didn‘t.‖ I took a deep breath and felt my feet under me again. The ceiling was too high for him to have smeared his wrist on, anyway—that was a grim consolation.

―Well, folks, we‘ll be on our way.‖ He turned to the department chairman, and they went off in low-voiced conference. The crowd around the office door was beginning to disperse, and I moved away ahead of them. I needed above all a quiet place to sit down.

My favorite bench in the nave of the old university library was still being warmed by the last sun of a spring afternoon. Around me three or four students read or talked in low voices, and I felt the familiar calm of that scholar‘s haven soak through my bones. The great hall of the library was pierced by colored windows, some of which looked into its reading rooms and cloisterlike corridors and courtyards, so that I could see people moving around inside or outside, or studying at big oak tables. It was the end of an ordinary day; soon the sun would desert the stone tablets under my feet and plunge the world into twilight—marking a full forty-eight hours since I‘d sat talking with my mentor. For now, scholarship and activity prevailed here, pushing back the verges of darkness.

I should tell you that usually when I studied in those days I liked to be completely alone, undisturbed, in monastic silence. I‘ve already described the study carrels I often worked in, on the upper floors of the library stacks, where I had my own niche and where I‘d found that weird book that had changed my life and thoughts almost overnight. Two days ago at this time I‘d been studying there, busy and unafraid, about to sweep up my books on the Netherlands and hurry toward a pleasant conference with my mentor. I‘d thought of nothing but what Heller and Herbert had written the year before on Utrecht‘s economic history and how I might refute it in an article, perhaps an article filched efficiently from one of my own dissertation chapters.

In fact, if I had imagined any part of the past at all, then, I had been picturing those innocent, slightly grasping Nederlanders debating their guilds‘ little problems, or standing, arms akimbo, in doorways above the canals, watching some new crate of goods as it was hauled up to the top floor of their houses-cum-warehouses. If I had had any visions of the past, I had seen only their rose-tinted, sea-freshened faces, beetling brows, capable hands, heard the creaking of their fine ships, smelled the spice and tar and sewage of the wharf and rejoiced in the sturdy ingenuity of their buying and bartering.

But history, it seemed, could be something entirely different, a splash of blood whose agony didn‘t fade overnight, or over centuries. And today my studies were to be of a new sort—novel to me, but not to Rossi and not to many others who had picked their way through the same dark underbrush. I wanted to begin this new kind of research in the cheerful murmur and clang of the main hall, not in the silent stacks, with their occasional wearily treading footsteps on distant stairs. I wanted to open the next phase of my life as a historian there under the unsuspecting eyes of young anthropologists, graying librarians, eighteen-year-olds thinking of their squash games or new white shoes, of smiling undergraduates and harmlessly lunatic professors emeritus—all the traffic of the university evening. I looked once more around the teeming hall, the rapidly withdrawing patches of sunlight, the brisk business of the doors at the main entrance swinging open and shut on bronze hinges. Then I picked up my shabby briefcase, unsnapped the top, and drew out a thickly full dark envelope, labeled in Rossi‘s handwriting. It said, merely: SAVE FOR NEXT ONE.

Next one? I hadn‘t looked closely at it two nights before. Had he meant to save the information enclosed for the next time he attempted this project, this dark fortress? Or was I myself the ―next one‖? Was this a proof of his madness?

Inside the open envelope I saw a pile of papers of different weights and sizes, many dingy and delicate with age, some of them onionskin covered with dense rows of typing.

A great deal of material. I would have to spread it out, I decided. I went to the nearest honey-colored table by the card catalog. There were still plenty of people around, all friendly strangers, but I looked superstitiously over one shoulder before drawing out the documents and arranging them on the table.

I had handled some of Sir Thomas More‘s manuscripts two years before, and some of the elder Albrecht‘s letters from Amsterdam, and more recently had helped to catalog a set of Flemish account books from the 1680s. I knew, as a historian, that the order of any archival find is an important part of its lesson. Digging out a pencil and paper, I made a list of the order of the items as I withdrew them. The first, the topmost, of Rossi‘s documents proved to be the onionskin sheets. They had been covered by the neatest possible typing, more or less in the form of letters. I kept them carefully together without letting myself look closely.

The second item was a map, hand drawn with awkward neatness. This was already fading, and the marks and place-names showed up poorly on a thick foreign-feeling notebook paper obviously torn from some old tablet. Two similar maps followed it. After these came three pages of scattered handwritten notes, in ink and quite legible at first glance. I set these together, too. Next was a printed brochure inviting tourists to

―Romantic Roumania,‖ in English, that looked from its Deco embellishments like a product of the 1920s or ‗30s. Next, two receipts for a hotel and for meals taken there.

Istanbul, in fact. Then a large old road map of the Balkans, untidily printed in two colors.

The last item was a little ivory envelope, sealed and unlabeled. I set it aside, heroically, without touching the flap.

That was it. I turned the big brown envelope upside down, even shook it, so that not so much as a dead fly could go unnoticed. While I was doing this I suddenly (and for the first time) had a sensation that would accompany me through all the ensuing efforts required of me: I felt Rossi‘s presence, his pride in my thoroughness, something like his spirit living and speaking to me through the careful methods he himself had taught me. I knew he worked swiftly, as a researcher, but also that he abused nothing and neglected nothing—not a single document, not an archive, however far from home it was located, and certainly not an idea, however unfashionable it might be among his colleagues. His disappearance, and—I thought wildly—his very need of me, had suddenly made us almost equals. I had the sense, also, that he had been promising me this outcome, this equality, all along, and waiting for the time when I would earn it.

I now had every dry-smelling item spread on the table in front of me. I began with the letters, those long dense epistles typed on onionskin with few mistakes and few corrections. There was one copy of each, and they seemed to be in chronological order already. Each was carefully dated, all from December 1930, more than twenty years before. Each was headed TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, without any further address. I glanced through the first letter. It told the story of his discovery of the mysterious book, and of his initial research at Oxford. The letter was signed, ―Yours in grief, Bartholomew Rossi.‖ And it began—I held the onionskin carefully even when my hand started to shake a little—it began affectionately: ―My dear and unfortunate successor—‖

My father suddenly stopped, and the trembling of his voice made me turn tactfully away before he could force himself to say anything more. By unspoken consent, we gathered our jackets and strolled across the famous little piazza, pretending the facade of the church still held some interest for us.

My father did not leave Amsterdam again for several weeks, and during that time I felt that he shadowed me in a new way. I came home from school a little later than usual one day and found Mrs. Clay on the phone with him. She put me on at once. ―Where have you been?‖ my father asked. He was calling from his office at the Center for Peace and Democracy. ―I phoned twice and Mrs. Clay hadn‘t seen you. You‘ve put her in a big pother.‖

He was the one in a pother, I could tell, although he kept his voice level. ―I was reading at a new coffee shop near school,‖ I said.

―All right,‖ my father said. ―Why don‘t you just call Mrs. Clay or me if you‘re going to be late, that‘s all.‖

I didn‘t like to agree, but I said I would call. My father came home early for dinner that night and read aloud to me from
Great Expectations
. Then he got out some of our photograph albums and we looked through them together: Paris, London, Boston, my first roller skates, my graduation from third grade, Paris, London, Rome. It was always just me, standing in front of the Pantheon or the gates of Père Lachaise, because my father took the pictures and there were only two of us. At nine o‘clock he checked all the doors and windows and let me go to bed.

The next time I was going to be late, I did call Mrs. Clay. I explained to her that some of my classmates and I were going to do our homework together over tea. She said that was fine. I hung up and went by myself to the university library. Johan Binnerts, the librarian in the medieval collection in Amsterdam, was getting used to the sight of me, I thought; at least he smiled gravely whenever I stopped by with a new question, and he always asked how my history essays were coming along. Mr. Binnerts found for me a passage in a nineteenth-century text that I was particularly pleased to have, and I spent some time making notes from it. I have a copy of the text now, in my study at Oxford—I found the book again a few years ago in a bookshop: Lord Gelling‘s
History of Central Europe
. I have a sentimental attachment to it, after all these years, although I never open it without a bleak feeling, too. I remember very well the sight of my own hand, smooth and young, copying down passages in my school notebook:

In addition to displaying great cruelty, Vlad Dracula possessed great valor. His daring was such that in 1462 he crossed the Danube and carried out a night raid on horseback in the very encampment of Sultan Mehmed II and his army, which had assembled there to attack Wallachia. In this raid Dracula killed several thousand Turkish soldiers, and the Sultan barely escaped with his life before the Ottoman guard forced the Wallachians into a retreat.

A similar quantity of material might be dredged up in connection with the name of any great feudal lord of his era in Europe—more than this, in many cases, and much more, in a few. The extraordinary thing about the information available on Dracula is its longevity—that is to say, his refusal to die as an historical presence, the persistence of his legend. The few sources available in England refer directly or obliquely to other sources whose diversity would make any historian profoundly curious. He seems to have been notorious in Europe even during his own lifetime—a great accomplishment in days when Europe was a vast and by our standards disjointed world whose governments were connected by horse messenger and river freight, and when horrifying cruelty was not an unusual characteristic among the nobility. Dracula‘s notoriety did not end with his mysterious death and strange burial in 1476, but seems to have continued almost unabated until it faded into the brightness of the Enlightenment in the West.