The Historian

by Elizabeth Kostova

When my father returned from some name on the European map that hung on the wall in our dining room, he smelled like other times and places, spicy and tired.

Because this city is where my story starts, I’ll call it Emona, its Roman name, to shield it a little from the sort of tourist who follows doom around with a guidebook. Emona was built on Bronze Age pilings along a river now lined with art-nouveau architecture.

“We’d better stop there,” my father said. I had lately come to dislike the way he blew on his tea over and over to cool it, and to dread the inevitable moment when he said we should stop eating, stop doing whatever was enjoyable, save room for dinner. Looking at him in his neat tweed jacket and turtleneck, I felt he had denied himself every adventure in life except diplomacy, which consumed him.

Even the British Museum Library had never seen it before and offered me a considerable sum for it.” “But you didn’t want to sell.” “No. I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It’s the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, ‘I know who you are. You can’t fool me.’”

“Lie still now,” I urged. “Don’t talk. The doctor will be here in a few minutes. Try to relax and breathe.” “Dear me,” Hedges murmured. “Pope and the alliterative. Sweet nymph. For argument.” I stared at him, my stomach tightening. “Hedges?” “‘The Rape of the Lock,’” Hedges said politely. “Without a doubt.”

it seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn’t Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn’t it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Protestant chapels that dotted the university could be much help; they didn’t look qualified to wrestle with the undead.

One of the paintings in particular caught my attention: a ghoulish Pre-Raphaelite Lazarus, tottering out of the tomb into the arms of his sisters, his ankles gray-green and his grave clothes dingy. The face, faded after a century of smoke and incense, looked bitter and weary, as if gratitude were the last thing he felt on being called back from his rest.

Since that moment, I have known many times what I first experienced then. Until then, my forays into written French had been purely utilitarian, the completion of almost mathematical exercises. When I comprehended a new phrase it was merely a bridge to the next exercise. Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light. Since then I have known this moment of truth with other companions: German, Russian, Latin, Greek, and—for a brief hour—Sanskrit.

As usual, she wore the little scarf over the place in her neck where the librarian had bitten her. Her face was ironic and wary, but I had the sense—with no particular proof—that she was getting used to my presence across the table, almost to the point of relaxing some of her ferocity.

I thanked him and asked if he carried old books. ‘Yes, very old.’ He handed me a nineteenth-century edition of Much Ado About Nothing—cheap looking, bound in worn cloth. I wondered what library this had drifted from and how it had made its journey—from bourgeois Manchester, say—to this crossroads of the ancient world.

When Turgut uttered Rossi’s name in that unmistakable tone of familiarity, I had the sudden sense of a world shifting, of bits of color and shape knocked out of place into a vision of intricate absurdity. It was as if I’d been watching a familiar movie and suddenly a character who had never been part of it before had strolled onto the screen, joining the action seamlessly but without explanation.

It is a fact that we historians are interested in what is partly a reflection of ourselves, perhaps a part of ourselves we would rather not examine except through the medium of scholarship; it is also true that as we steep ourselves in our interests, they become more and more a part of us.

Visiting an American university—not mine—several years after this, I was introduced to one of the first of the great American historians of Nazi Germany. He lived in a comfortable house at the edge of the campus, where he collected not only books on his topic but also the official china of the Third Reich. His dogs, two enormous German shepherds, patrolled the front yard day and night. Over drinks with other faculty members in his living room, he told me in no uncertain terms how he despised Hitler’s crimes and wanted to expose them in the greatest possible detail to the civilized world. I left the party early, walking carefully past those big dogs, unable to shake my revulsion.

I remember I was doing some research for an article on a lost work of Shakespeare, The King of Tashkani, which some believe was set in a fictional version of Istanbul. Perhaps you have heard of it?’ “I shook my head. “‘It is quoted in the work of several English historians. From them we know that in the original play, an evil ghost called Dracole appears to the monarch of a beautiful old city that he—the monarch—has taken by force. The ghost says he was once the monarch’s enemy but that he now comes to congratulate him on his bloodthirstiness. Then he urges the monarch to drink deeply of the blood of the city’s inhabitants, who are now the monarch’s minions. It is a chilling passage.

At that moment, the world in which I had grown up, its reserve and silences, its mores and manners, the world in which I had studied and achieved and occasionally attempted to love, seemed as far off as the Milky Way.

two nights before, his kind friend the archivist had been attacked a second time in the apartment where he was now resting. The first man they’d had watching him had fallen asleep on duty and had seen nothing. They had a new guard now, whom they hoped would be more careful. They were taking every precaution, but poor Mr. Erozan was very unwell.