I do not have the heart to record in detail the pain of the service held for him in our chapel at Trinity, the stifled sobs of his old father when the boys’ choir began their beautifully set psalms to comfort the living, the anger I felt towards the impotent Eucharist on its tray. Hedges was buried in his own village in Dorset, and I have visited the grave alone, on a mild November day. The stone saysREQUIESCAT IN PACE,which would have been my exact choice, too, had the decision been mine. To my infinite relief, it is the quietest of country churchyards, and the parson speaks as mildly of Hedges’s interment as he might of any local honor. I heard no tales of an Englishvrykolakasat the pub on the high street, even when I dropped the broadest, blandest hints. After all, Hedges was attacked only once, not the several times Stoker describes as necessary to infect a living person with the contagion of the undead. I believe he was sacrificed as a mere warning-to me. And to you, as well, unfortunate reader?
Yours in profoundest grief, Bartholomew Rossi
My father stirred the ice in his glass, as if to steady his hand and give himself something to do. Afternoon heat was relaxing into a calm Venetian evening, making the shadows of tourists and buildings stretch long across the piazza. A mass of pigeons started up off the paving stones, frightened by something, and wheeled overhead, enormous in flight. The chill from all those cold drinks had finally reached me, seeped into my bones. Someone laughed, far away, and I could hear seagulls crying above the pigeons. As we sat there a young man in a white shirt and blue jeans came loping up to speak with us. He had a canvas bag slung over one shoulder and his shirt was spotted with colors. “Buy a painting, signore?” he said, smiling at my father. “You and the signorina are the stars of my painting today.”
“No, no,grazie, ” my father replied automatically. The squares and alleys were full of these art-student figures. This was the third scene of Venezia we’d been offered that day; my father hardly glanced at the picture. The young man, still smiling and perhaps unwilling to leave us without at least a compliment for his work, held it up for me to see, and I nodded sympathetically, glancing at it. A second later he was bobbing away in search of other tourists, and I sat frozen, watching him go.
The painting he had shown me was a richly hued watercolor. It depicted our café, and the edge of Florian’s, a bright and unprovoking impression of the afternoon. The artist must have been stationed somewhere behind me, I thought, but fairly close to the café; he had caught a splotch of color that I recognized as the back of my red straw hat, with my father in blurry tan and blue just beyond. It was an elegant, casual piece of work, the image of summer indolence, something a tourist might well want to keep as the souvenir of an unblemished Adriatic day. But my glance at it had shown me a lone figure sitting beyond my father, a broad-shouldered, dark-headed figure, a crisp black silhouette among the cheerful colors of awning and tablecloths. That table, I recalled clearly, had been vacant all afternoon.
Chapter 13
Our next trip took us east again, beyond the Julian Alps. The little town of Kostanjevica, “place of the chestnut tree,” was indeed full of chestnuts at this time of year, some already underfoot, so that if you set your shoe down wrong on the cobbled streets you slid precariously on a sharp burr. In front of the mayor’s house, originally built to shelter an Austro-Hungarian bureaucrat, the nuts in their wicked-looking shells lay everywhere, a swarm of tiny porcupines.
My father and I walked slowly along, enjoying the end of a warm autumnal day-in the local dialect, this was called gypsy summer, a woman in a shop had told us-and I reflected on the differences between the Western world, a few hundred kilometers away, and this Eastern one, just a little south of Emona. Here everything in the stores looked like everything else, and the shop clerks, too, seemed to me exactly like one another, in royal blue work coats and flowered scarves, their gold or stainless steel teeth glinting at us over the half-empty counter. We had bought an enormous chocolate bar to supplement our picnic of sliced salami, brown bread, and cheese, and my father carried bottles of my favorite Naranca, an orange drink that reminded me already of Ragusa, Emona, Venezia.
The last meeting in Zagreb had ended the day before while I put the finishing flourish to my history homework. My father wanted me to study German now, too, and I was eager to, not because of his insistence but despite it; I would begin that tomorrow, out of a book from the foreign-language store in Amsterdam. I had a new short green dress and yellow kneesocks, my father was smiling over some unintelligible spoof that had passed between one diplomat and another that morning, and the Naranca bottles clinked together in our net bag. Ahead of us lay a low stone bridge, spanning the River Kostan. I hurried there for my first look, which I wanted to enjoy in private, without even my father beside me.
The river curved out of sight close to the bridge, and in its curve huddled a diminutive castle, a villa-sized Slav château with swans paddling below its walls and grooming themselves on the bank. As I watched, a woman in a blue coat opened an upstairs window, pushing it outward, making its latticed glass wink in the sun, and shook her dust mop. Below the bridge, young willows crowded together and swallows flew in and out of the mud bluffs at their roots. In the castle park, I saw a stone bench (not too close to the swans, whom I feared even now, in my teens) with chestnut trees leaning over it and the castle walls throwing a soothing shade on it. My father’s clean suit would be safe there, and he might sit longer than he’d intended and talk in spite of himself.
All the time I was looking through these letters in my apartment, my father said, wiping the traces of salami from his hands with a cotton handkerchief, something outside the whole tragic problem of Rossi’s disappearance kept nagging at the back of my mind. When I put down the letter recounting his friend Hedges’s gruesome accident, I felt too ill for a few moments to think clearly. I had stumbled into a world of sickness, a netherworld of the familiar academic one I’d known for many years, a subtext of the ordinary narrative of history I’d always taken for granted. In my historian’s experience, the dead stayed respectably dead, the Middle Ages held real horrors, not supernatural ones, Dracula was a colorful East European legend resurrected by the movies of my childhood, and 1930 was three years before Hitler assumed dictatorial powers in Germany, a terror that surely precluded all other possibilities.
So I felt sick, for a second, and corrupted, angry with my vanished mentor for having bequeathed me these nasty illusions. Then the regretful, gentle tone of his letters worked on me again, and I was filled with compunction for my disloyalty. Rossi depended on me-on me alone; if I refused to suspend disbelief because of some pedantic principle, I would surely never see him again.
And something else nagged at me. As my brain cleared a little, I realized it was my memory of the young woman at the library, whom I’d met only a couple of hours before, although it already seemed to me days. I remembered the extraordinary light in her eyes as she had listened to my explanation of Rossi’s letters, the masculine drawing together of her eyebrows in concentration. Why had she been reading about Dracula, at my table of all tables, that evening of all evenings, at my very elbow? Why had she mentioned Istanbul? I was rattled enough by what I had read in Rossi’s letters to suspend my disbelief further, to reject the notion of coincidence in favor of something stronger. And why not? If I accepted one supernatural occurrence, I should certainly accept others; it was only logical.