The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova Page B

father prayed suddenly against the twittering sky. The last swallows were homing in above us, the town with its diminished lights settling heavily into the valley. ―We shouldn‘t be sitting around here with a hike ahead of us tomorrow. Pilgrims are supposed to turn in early, I‘m sure. With the coming of dark, or something like that.‖
    I shifted my legs; one foot had fallen asleep under me and the stones of the churchyard wall felt suddenly sharp, impossibly uncomfortable, especially with the thought of bed looming ahead of me. I would have pins and needles on the stumbling walk downhill to the hotel. I felt a boiling irritation, too, far sharper than the sensations in my feet. My father had stopped his story too soon, again.
    ―Look,‖ my father said, pointing straight out from our perch. ―I think that must be Saint-Matthieu.‖
    I followed his gesture to the dark, massed mountains and saw, halfway up, a small, steady light. No other light appeared close to it; no other habitation seemed anywhere near it. It was like a single spark on immense folds of black cloth, high up but not close to the highest peaks—it hung between the town and the night sky. ―Yes, that‘s just where the monastery must be, I think,‖ my father said again. ―And we‘ll have a real climb tomorrow, even if we go by the road.‖
    As we set off along moonless streets, I felt that sadness that comes with dropping down from a height, leaving anything lofty. Before we turned the corner of the old bell tower, I glanced back once, to pin that tiny spot of light in my memory. There it was again, gleaming above a house wall tumbled over with dark bougainvillea. Standing still for a moment, I looked hard at it. Then, just once, the light winked.

Chapter 9
    December 14, 1930
    Trinity College, Oxford

    My dear and unfortunate successor:
    I shall conclude my account as rapidly as possible, since you must draw from it vital information if we are both to—ah, to survive, at least, and to survive in a state of goodness and mercy. There is survival and survival, the historian learns to his grief. The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia.
    And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.
    But to proceed: on my journey from England to Greece, I experienced some of the smoothest travelling I have ever known. The director of the museum in Crete was actually at the dock to welcome me, and he invited me to return later in the summer, to attend the opening of a Minoan tomb. In addition, two American classicists whom I had wanted for years to meet were staying at my pension. They urged me to inquire about a faculty position that had just become available at their university—exactly the thing for someone with my background—and heaped my work with compliments. I had easy access to every collection I approached, including some private ones. In the afternoons, when the museums shut down and the town took its siesta, I sat on my lovely vine-shaded balcony, fleshing out my notes, and in the process derived ideas for several other works to be attempted at some later date. Under these idyllic circumstances I considered dropping entirely what now seemed to me to be a morbid fancy, the pursuit of that peculiar word, Drakulya . I had brought the antique book with me, not wanting to be parted from it, but I had not opened it for a week now. All in all, I felt free of its spell.
    But something—an historian‘s passion for thoroughness, or maybe sheer love of the chase—compelled me to stick to my plans and go on to Istanbul for a few days. And now I must tell you of my singular adventure in an archive there. This is perhaps the first of several events I shall describe that may inspire your disbelief. Only read to the end, I beg you.
    In obedience to this plea, my father said, I read every word. That letter told me again about Rossi‘s chilling experience among the documents of