“‘Just a minute,’ I said. ‘I want to secure my dinner date.’ It took little effort for me to find Hugh James again; he was clearly looking for me, too. We agreed to meet at seven in the lobby of the university hotel. Helen was going to take the bus to her aunt’s house, and I saw in her face that she would be wondering the whole time what Hugh James had to tell us.
“The walls of the university library, when we reached it, glowed an unblemished ocher, and I found myself marveling again at the rapidity with which the Hungarian nation was rebuilding itself after the catastrophe of war. Even the most tyrannical of governments could not be wholly wicked if it could restore so much beauty for its citizenry in such a short time. That effort had probably been fueled just as much by Hungarian nationalism, I speculated, remembering Aunt Éva’s noncommittal remarks, as by communist fervor. ‘What are you thinking?’ Helen asked me. She had pulled on her gloves and had her purse firmly over her arm.
“‘I’m thinking about your aunt.’
“‘If you like my aunt so much, perhaps my mother will not be your style,’ she said with a provoking laugh. ‘But we shall see, tomorrow. Now, let’s take a look for something in here.’
“‘What? Stop being so mysterious.’
“She ignored me, and we entered the library together through heavy carved doors. ‘Renaissance?’ I whispered to Helen, but she shook her head.
“‘It’s a nineteenth-century imitation. The original collection here wasn’t even in Pest until the eighteenth century, I think-it was in Buda, like the original university. I remember one of the librarians told me once that many of the oldest books in this collection were given to the library by families who were running away from Ottoman invaders in the sixteenth century. You see, we owe the Turks for some things. Who knows where all those books would be now, otherwise?’
“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home. This one was a neoclassical treasure house, all dark-carved wood, balconies, galleries, frescoes. But what drew my eye were the rows of books, hundreds of thousands of them lining the rooms, floor to ceiling, their red and brown and gilt bindings in neat rows, their marbled covers and endpapers smooth under the hand, the bumpy vertebrae of their spines brown as old bones. I wondered where they had been hidden during the war, and how long it had taken to range them again on all these reconstructed shelves.
“A few students were still turning through volumes at the long tables, and a young man was sorting stacks of them behind a big desk. Helen stopped to speak with him and he nodded, beckoning us toward a great reading room I’d already glimpsed through an open door. There he located a large folio for us, placed it on a table, and left us alone. Helen sat down and drew off her gloves. ‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘I think this is what I remember. I looked at this volume just before I left Budapest last year, but I did not think then that it had any great significance.’ She opened it to the title page, and I saw it was in a language I didn’t know. The words looked strangely familiar to me, and yet I could not read a single one of them.
“‘What is this?’ I put a finger on what I took to be the title. The page was a fine thick paper, printed in brown ink.
“‘This is Romanian,’ Helen told me.
“‘Can you read it?’
“‘Certainly.’ She put her hand on the page, close to mine. I saw that our hands were nearly the same size, although hers had finer bones and narrow square-tipped fingers. ‘Here,’ she said. ”‘Did you study French?’
“‘Yes,’ I admitted. Then I saw what she meant and began to decipher the title. ‘Ballads of the Carpathians,1790.’
“‘Good,’ she said. ‘Very good.’
“‘I thought you couldn’t speak Romanian,’ I said.
“‘I speak poorly, but I can read it, more or less. I studied Latin for ten years in school, and my aunt taught me to read and write a great deal of Romanian. Against my mother’s wishes, of course. My mother is very stubborn. She seldom talks about Transylvania, but she has never abandoned it, either, in her heart.’
“‘And what is this book?’
“She turned the first leaf over, gently. I saw a long column of text, none of which I could understand at a glance; in addition to the unfamiliarity of the words, many of the Latin letters in which it was written were ornamented with crosses, tails, circumflexes, and other symbols. It looked more like witchcraft to me than like a Romance language. ‘I found this book when I did the last wave of my research before leaving for England. There’s not so much material about him in this library, actually. I did find a few documents about vampires, because Mátyás Corvinus, our bibliophile king, was curious about them.’
“‘Hugh said as much,’ I muttered.
“‘What?’
“‘I’ll explain later. Go on.’
“‘Well, I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned here, so I read through a huge mass of material on the history of Wallachia and Transylvania. It took me several months. I made myself read even what was in Romanian. Of course, a lot of documents and histories about Transylvania are in Hungarian, from Hungary ’s centuries of domination, but there are some Romanian sources as well. This is a collection of texts of folk songs from Transylvania and Wallachia, published by an anonymous collector. Some of them are much more than folk songs-they are epic poems.’
“I felt a little disappointed; I had been expecting some kind of rare historical document, something about Dracula. ‘Do any of them mention our friend?’
“‘No, I’m afraid not. But there was one song in here that stayed in my mind, and I thought of it again when you told me about what Selim Aksoy wanted us to see in the archive in Istanbul-you know, that passage about the monks from the Carpathians entering the city of Istanbul with their wagon and mules, remember? I wish now that we had asked Turgut to write down a translation for us.’ She began to turn through the folio very carefully. Some of the long texts were illustrated at the top with woodcuts, mostly ornaments with a look of folk embroideries, but also a few crude trees, houses, and animals. The type was neatly printed, but the book itself had a rough, homemade quality. Helen ran her finger along the first lines of the poems, her lips moving slowly, and shook her head. ‘Some of these are so sad,’ she said. ‘You know, we Romanians are different, at heart, from Hungarians.’
“‘How is that?’
“‘Well, there is a Hungarian proverb that says, ”The Magyar takes his pleasures sadly.“ And it is true- Hungary is full of sad songs, too, and the villages are full of violence, drinking, suicide. But Romanians are even sadder, even sadder. We are sad not from life but by nature, I think.’ She bent her head over the old book, her eyelashes heavy on her cheek. ‘Listen to this-this is typical of these songs.’ She translated haltingly, and the result was something like this, although this particular song is a different one and comes from a little volume of nineteenth-century translations that is now in my personal library:
The child that is dead was ever sweet and fair.
Now younger sister the same smile doth wear.
She saith to their mother: “Oh, Mother, dear,
My good dead sister told me not to fear.
The life she might not live she gives to me,
That I might bring fresh happiness to thee.“
But, nay, the mother could not raise her head,
And sat a-weeping for the one now dead.
“‘Good God,’ I said with a shudder. ‘It’s easy to see how a culture that could create a song like that believed in vampires-produced them, even.’
“‘Yes,’ Helen said, shaking her head, but she was already searching further through the volume. ‘Wait.’ She paused suddenly. ‘This could have been it.’ She was pointing to a short verse with an ornate woodcut above it that seemed to depict buildings and animals enmeshed in a prickly forest.