“Turgut’s voice fell back and I found I was standing near him now, looking down at the dying man. Helen was blessedly real next to me-I opened my mouth to ask her a question and saw that she had heard the same horror in Turgut’s chant. I remembered without wanting to that the blood of the Impaler ran in her veins. She turned to me for a second, her face shocked but steady; it came to me just in time that Rossi’s heritage-mild, patrician, Tuscan, and Anglo-also ran through her, and I saw Rossi’s incomparable kindness in her eyes. In that moment, I think-not later, not at home in my parents’ stodgy brown church, not in front of any minister-I married her, I wed her in my heart, I cleaved to her for life.
“Turgut, silent now, had placed the string of prayer beads on his friend’s throat, which made the body quiver a little, and selected from the stained satin in the box a tool longer than my hand and made of bright silver. ‘I have never had to do this before, God save me, in my life,’ he said quietly. He opened Mr. Erozan’s shirt and I saw the aging skin, the curling chest hair gray as ashes, rising and falling unevenly. Selim searched the room with silent efficiency and brought Turgut a brick that had apparently been used as a door prop, and this homely object Turgut took in his hand, weighing it for a second. He put the sharp end of the stake on the left side of the man’s chest and began a low chant, in which I caught words I remembered from somewhere-book, movie, conversation?-‘Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar:Allah is great.’ I couldn’t, I knew, force Helen to leave the room any more than I could leave it myself, but I pulled her back a step as the brick descended. Turgut’s hand was large and steady. Selim held the stake upright for him and with a splintering, sucking thud it went into the body. Sluggish blood welled around the point and smeared the pale skin. Mr. Erozan’s face convulsed horribly for a second and his lips drew back from his yellowing teeth like a dog’s. Helen stared and I did not dare look away; I didn’t want her to watch anything I couldn’t see with her. The librarian’s body quivered, the stake suddenly went down to its hilt, and Turgut sat back, as if waiting. His lips trembled and sweat had sprung out all over his face.
“After a moment the body relaxed and then the face; the lips drooped peacefully over Mr. Erozan’s mouth, a sigh came up out of his chest; his feet in their pathetically worn socks twitched and were still. I kept a firm hold on Helen, and felt her shiver next to me, but she stood quiet. Turgut raised his friend’s limp hand and kissed it. I saw tears running down his ruddy face, dripping into his mustache, and he covered his eyes with one hand. Selim touched the dead librarian’s brow, then rose and pressed Turgut’s shoulder.
“After a moment, Turgut recovered himself enough to stand and blow his nose into a handkerchief. ‘He was a very good man,’ he said to us, his voice unsteady. ‘A generous, kind man. Now he rests in Muhammad’s peace instead of joining the legions of hell.’ He turned away to wipe his eyes. ‘My fellows, we must get this body away from here. There is a doctor at one of the hospitals who-he will help us. Selim will remain here with the door locked while I call, and the doctor will come with the ambulance and sign the necessary certificates.’ Turgut took from his pocket several cloves of garlic and placed them gently in the dead man’s mouth. Selim removed the stake and washed it at the sink in the corner, putting it carefully away in the beautiful box. Turgut cleaned up every trace of blood, bandaged the man’s chest with a dishcloth and rebuttoned his shirt, then took from the bed a sheet, which he let me help him spread over the body, covering its now-quiet face.
“‘Now, my dear friends, I ask of you this favor. You have seen what the undead can do, and we know they are here. You must protect yourselves every minute. And you must go to Bulgaria -as soon as possible-in the next few days, if you can arrange this. Call me at my apartment when you have made your plans.’ He looked hard at me. ‘If we do not see each other in person before you go, I wish you all the best possible good fortune and safety. I will think of you every moment. Please call me as soon as you come back to Istanbul, if you come back here.’
“I hoped he meantIf that’s how you route your travel and notIf you survive Bulgaria. He shook hands warmly with us, and so did Selim, who followed this up by kissing Helen’s hand very shyly.
“‘We will go now,’ Helen said simply, taking my arm, and we walked out of that sad room and down the stairs to the street.”
Chapter 54
“My first impression of Bulgaria-and my memory of it ever after-was of mountains seen from the air, mountains high and deep, darkly verdant and mainly untouched by roads, although here and there a brown ribbon ran among villages or along sudden sheer cliffs. Helen sat quietly next to me, her eyes fixed on the small porthole of the airplane window, her hand resting in mine under cover of my folded jacket. I could feel her warm palm, her slightly chilled, fine fingers, the absence of rings. We could occasionally see glinting veins in the crevasses of the mountains, which must, I thought, be rivers, and I strained without hope for some configuration of winding dragon tail that might be the answer to our puzzle. Nothing, of course, fit the outlines I already knew with my eyes closed.
“And nothing was likely to, I reminded myself, if only to quell the hope that rose uncontrollably in me again at the sight of those ancient mountains. Their very obscurity, their look of having been untouched by modern history, their mysterious lack of cities or towns or industrialization made me hopeful. I felt somehow that the more perfectly hidden the past was in this country, the more likely it was to have been preserved. The monks, whose lost trail we now soared above, had made their way through mountains like these-perhaps these very peaks, although we didn’t know their route. I mentioned this to Helen, wanting to hear myself voice my hopes aloud. She shook her head. ‘We don’t know for a fact that they reached Bulgaria or even actually set out for it,’ she reminded me, but she softened the flat scholarship of her tone with a caress of my hand under the jacket.
“‘I don’t know anything about Bulgarian history, you know,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be lost here.’
“Helen smiled. ‘I am not an expert myself, but I can tell you that Slavs migrated to this area from the north in the sixth and seventh centuries, and a Turkic tribe called the Bulgars came here in the seventh, I think. They united against the Byzantine Empire -wisely-and their first ruler was a Bulgar named Asparuh. Tsar Boris I made Christianity the official religion in the ninth century. He is a great hero here, apparently, in spite of that. The Byzantines ruled from the eleventh to the beginning of the thirteenth, and then Bulgaria became very powerful until the Ottomans crushed them in 1393.’
“‘When were the Ottomans driven out?’ I asked with interest. We seemed to be meeting them everywhere.
“‘Not until 1878,’ Helen admitted. ‘ Russia helped Bulgaria to expel them.’
“‘And then Bulgaria sided with the Axis in both wars.’
“‘Yes, and the Soviet army brought a glorious revolution just after the war. What would we do without the Soviet army?’ Helen gave me her most brilliant and bitter smile, but I squeezed her hand.
“‘Keep your voice down,’ I said. ‘If you won’t be careful, I’ll have to be careful for both of us.’”
“The airport in Sofia was a tiny place; I’d expected a palace of modern communism, but we descended to a modest area of tarmac and strolled across it with the other travelers. Nearly all of them were Bulgarian, I decided, trying to catch something of their conversations. They were handsome people, some of them strikingly so, and their faces varied from the dark-eyed pale Slav to a Middle-Eastern bronze, a kaleidoscope of rich hues and shaggy black eyebrows, noses long and flaring, or aquiline, or deeply hooked, young women with curly black hair and noble foreheads, and energetic old men with few teeth. They smiled or laughed and talked eagerly with one another; one tall man gesticulated to his companion with a folded newspaper. Their clothes were distinctly not Western, although I would have been hard put to say what it was about the cuts of suits and skirts, the heavy shoes and dark hats, that was unfamiliar to me.