“I was lost in this image when Turgut spoke again. ‘Tell me, my fellows, what makes you to be interested in this topic of Dracula?’ He had turned the table on us, with a gentlemanly-or suspicious?-smile.
“I glanced at Helen. ‘Well, I’m studying the fifteenth century in Europe as background for my dissertation,’ I said, and was immediately punished for my lack of candor by a sense that this lie might already be true. God knew when I’d be working on my dissertation again, I thought, and the last thing I needed was a broader topic. ‘And you,’ I pressed again. ‘How did you jump from Shakespeare to vampires?’
“Turgut smiled-sadly, it seemed to me, and his quiet honesty punished me further. ‘Ah, it is a very strange thing, a long time ago. You see, I was working on my second book about Shakespeare-the tragedies. I sat to work every day in a little-how do you say?-niche in our English room at the university. Then one day I found a book I never saw there before.’ He turned to me with that sad smile again. My blood had already run cold in every extremity. ‘This book was like no other, an empty book, very old, with a dragon in the middle and a word-DRAKULYA. I had never heard about Dracula before. But the picture was very strange and strong. And then I thought, I must know what this is. So I tried to learn everything.’
“Helen had frozen across from me, but now she stirred, as if with eagerness. ‘Everything?’ she echoed softly.”
Barley and I had almost reached Brussels. It had taken me a long time-although it seemed like a few minutes-to tell Barley as simply and clearly as I could what my father had related of his experiences in graduate school. Barley stared past me out the window at the little Belgian houses and gardens, which looked sad under a curtain of clouds. We could see the occasional shaft of sunlight picking out a church spire or an old industrial chimney as we drew close to Brussels. The Dutch woman snored quietly, her magazine on the floor by her feet.
I was about to embark on a description of my father’s recent restlessness, his unhealthy pallor and strange behavior, when Barley suddenly turned to face me. “This is awfully peculiar,” he said. “I don’t know why I should believe this wild tale, but I do. I want to, anyway.” It struck me that I’d never before seen him look serious-only humorous or, briefly, annoyed. His eyes, blue as chips of sky, narrowed further. “The funny thing is that it all reminds me of something.”
“What?” I was almost faint with relief at his apparent acceptance of my story.
“Well, that’s the odd thing. I can’t think what. Something to do with Master James. But what was it?”
Chapter 27
Barley sat musing in our train compartment, chin in his long-fingered hands, trying in vain to remember something about Master James. Finally he looked at me, and I was struck by the beauty of his narrow, rosy face when it was serious. Without that unnerving jollity, it could have been the face of an angel, or maybe a monk in a Northumbrian cloister. I perceived these comparisons dimly; they bloomed for me only later.
“Well,” he said at last, “as I see it, there are two possibilities. Either you’re daft, in which case I have to stick with you and get you back home safely, or you’re not daft, in which case you’re headed for a lot of trouble and I have to stick with you anyway. I’m supposed to be in lecture tomorrow, but I’ll figure out what to do about that.” He sighed and glanced at me, leaned back against the seat again. “I have this idea Paris is not going to be your terminal destination. Could you enlighten me about where you’re going after that?”
“If Professor Bora had given us each a slap across the face at that pleasant restaurant table in Istanbul, it would not have been more stunning than what he’d told us about his ‘eccentric hobby.’ It was a salutary slap, however; we were wide-awake now. My jet lag was gone, and with it my feeling of hopelessness about finding more information about Dracula’s tomb. We had come to the right place. Perhaps-here my heart lurched, and not with mere hope-perhaps Dracula’s tomb was in Turkey itself.
“This had never really occurred to me before, but now I thought it might make sense. After all, Rossi had been severely admonished here by one of Dracula’s henchmen. Could the undead have been guarding not only an archive but also a grave? Could the strong presence of vampires to which Turgut had referred just now be a legacy of Dracula’s continuing occupation of this city? I ran over what I knew already about Vlad the Impaler’s career and legend. If he had been imprisoned here in his youth, couldn’t he have returned after his death to this site of his early education in torture? He might have had a sort of nostalgia for the place, like people who retire to the town where they grew up. And if Stoker’s novel was to be trusted for its chronicling of a vampire’s habits, the fiend could certainly leave one place for another, making his grave wherever he liked; in the story, he had traveled in his coffin to England. Why couldn’t he have come to Istanbul somehow, moving by night after his demise as a mortal into the very heart of the empire whose armies had brought about his death? It would have been a fitting revenge on the Ottomans, after all.
“But I couldn’t ask Turgut any of these questions yet. We had just met the man, and I was still wondering whether we could trust him. He seemed genuine, and yet his turning up at our table with his ‘hobby’ was almost too strange to be countenanced. He was talking to Helen now, and she, at last, was talking to him. ‘No, dear madam, I do not actually know ”everything“ about Dracula’s history. In truth, my knowledge is far from ravishing. But I suspect that he had a great influence on our city, for evil, and that keeps me searching. And you, my friends?’ He glanced keenly from Helen to me. ‘You seem a portion interested in my topic yourselves. What is your dissertation about, exactly, young man?’
“‘Dutch mercantilism in the seventeenth century,’ I said lamely. It sounded lame to me, in any case, and I was beginning to wonder if it had always been a rather bland endeavor. Dutch merchants, after all, did not prowl the centuries attacking people and stealing their immortal souls.
“‘Ah.’ I thought Turgut looked puzzled. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘if you are interested also in the history of Istanbul, you can come with me tomorrow morning to see Sultan Mehmed’s collection. He was a splendid old tyrant-he collected many interesting things, in addition to my favorite documents. I must get home to my wife now, as she will be in a state of dissolution, I am so late.’ He smiled, as if her state was more pleasant to anticipate than otherwise. ‘She will certainly wish you to come dine with us tomorrow, too, as I wish you to.’ I pondered this for a moment; Turkish wives must be as submissive, still, as the harems of legend. Or did he just mean that his wife was as hospitable as he? I waited for Helen to snort, but she sat quiet, watching both of us. ‘So, my friends -’ Turgut was gathering himself to leave. He drew a little money out of nowhere-I thought-and slid it under the edge of his plate. Then he toasted us a last time and downed the remainder of his tea. ‘Adieu until the morrow.’
“‘Where shall we meet you?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, I will come here to fetch you. Let us say exactly here at ten o’clock in the morning? Good. I wish you a merry evening.’ He bowed and was gone. After a minute I realized that he had barely eaten dinner, had paid our bill as well as his own, and had left us the talisman against the Evil Eye, which shone at the center of the white tablecloth.
“I slept that night like the dead, as they say, after the exhaustion of travel and sightseeing. When the sounds of the city woke me, it was already six-thirty. My small room was dim. In the first moment of consciousness, I looked around at the whitewashed walls, the simple, somehow foreign furniture, and the gleam of the mirror above the washstand, and I felt a weird confusion. I thought of Rossi’s sojourn here in Istanbul, his tenure in that other pension-where had it been?-where his bags had been ransacked and his sketches of the precious maps removed, and I seemed to remember it as if I had been there myself, or was living the scene now. After a minute I realized that all was peaceful and orderly in the room; my suitcase lay undisturbed on the top of the bureau, and-more importantly-my briefcase with all its precious contents sat untouched next to the bed, where I could stretch out a hand and feel it. Even in my sleep I had been somehow aware of that ancient, silent book resting inside it.