something in a soft voice. Turgut nodded. ‘He says the thing I most feel. This terrible news only means we must be the more diligent in pursuing the Impaler, and in keeping his influence from our city. His Gloriousness the Refuge of the World would command us in just this way, if he were alive. This is true. And what will you do with this book when you go home?’
“‘I know someone who has a connection with an auction house,’ I said. ‘We will be very careful, of course, and we’ll wait a while before we do anything. I expect some museum will get it, sooner or later.’
“‘And the money?’ Turgut shook his head. ‘What will you do with so much?’
“‘We’re thinking it over,’ I said. ‘Something in the service of good. We don’t yet know what.’
“Our plane to New York left at five, and Turgut began looking at his watch as soon as we’d finished our last enormous lunch on the divans. He had an evening class to teach, alas, alack, but Mr. Aksoy would ride with us to the airport in a taxicab. When we stood to go, Mrs. Bora brought out a scarf of the finest cream-colored silk, embroidered with silver, and put it around Helen’s neck. It hid the shabbiness of her black jacket and soiled collar and we all gasped-at least I did, and I can’t have been alone. Her face above the scarf was the countenance of an empress. ‘For your marriage day,’ Mrs. Bora said, standing on tiptoe to kiss her.
“Turgut kissed Helen’s hand. ‘It belonged to my mother,’ he said simply, and Helen could not speak. I spoke for both of us, shaking their hands. We would write, we would think of them. Life being long, we would see one another again.”
Chapter 76
“The last part of my story is perhaps the hardest for me to tell, since it begins with so much happiness, in spite of everything. We returned quietly to the university and took up our work again. I was questioned by the police once more, but they seemed satisfied that my trip abroad had been connected with research, and not with Rossi’s vanishing. The newspapers had seized upon his disappearance by then and made a local mystery of it, which the university did its best to ignore. My chairman questioned me, too, of course, and of course I told him nothing, except to say that I grieved as much as anyone for Rossi. Helen and I were married in my parents’ church in Boston that autumn-even in the midst of the ceremony I couldn’t help noticing how bare and plain it was, how devoid of incense.
“My parents were a little stunned by all this, of course, but they could not help liking Helen, ultimately. None of her native harshness showed around them, and when we visited them in Boston I often found Helen laughing in the kitchen with my mother, teaching her to cook Hungarian specialties, or discussing anthropology with my father in his cramped study. For myself, although I felt the pain of Rossi’s death and the frequent melancholy it seemed to cause in Helen, I found that first year full of a brimming joy. I finished my dissertation under a second adviser, whose face remained a blur to me throughout the process. It was not that I cared about Dutch merchants anymore; I only wanted to complete my education so that I could settle us comfortably somewhere. Helen published a long article on Wallachian village superstitions, which was well- received, and began a dissertation on the remnants of Transylvanian customs in Hungary.
“We wrote something else, too, as soon as we returned to the States: a note to Helen’s mother, care of Aunt Eva. Helen didn’t dare to put much information into it, but she told her mother in a few brief lines that Rossi had died remembering and loving her. Helen sealed the letter with a look of despair on her face. ‘I will tell her everything someday,’ she said, ‘when I can whisper it into her ear.’ We never knew for certain whether this letter reached its destination because neither Aunt Eva nor Helen’s mother wrote back, and within a year Soviet troops had invaded Hungary.
“I fully intended to live happily ever after, and I mentioned to Helen soon after we married that I hoped we would have children. At first she shook her head, touching the scar on her neck with gentle fingers. I knew what she meant. But her exposure had been minimal, I pointed out; she was well and strong and healthy. As time went by she seemed lulled by her own complete recovery, and I saw her looking with wistful eyes into the baby carriages we passed on the street.
“Helen received her doctorate in anthropology the spring after we were married. The speed with which she wrote her dissertation shamed me; I would often wake during that year to find that it was five in the morning and she had already left our bed for her desk. She looked pale and tired, and the day after she defended her dissertation I woke to blood on the sheets, and Helen lying next to me faint and wracked with pain: a miscarriage. She had been waiting to surprise me with good news. She was ill for several weeks afterward, and very quiet. Her dissertation received the highest honors, but she never spoke of that.
“When I got my first teaching job, in New York City, she urged me to take it, and we moved. We settled in Brooklyn Heights, in a pleasantly run-down brownstone. We took walks along the promenade to watch the tugboats navigating the port and the great passenger liners-the last of their race- pulling out for Europe. Helen taught at a university as good as mine and her students adored her; there was a magnificent balance to our lives, and we were making a living doing what we liked best.
“Now and then we took out theLife of Saint George and looked slowly through it, and the day came when we went to a discreet auction house with it, and the Englishman who opened it nearly fainted. It was sold privately, and eventually made its way to the Cloisters, in upper Manhattan, and a great deal of money made its way into a bank account we had set up for the purpose. Helen disliked elaborate living as much as I did, and apart from the attempt to send small amounts to her relatives in Hungary, we left the money alone, for the time being.
“Helen’s second miscarriage was more dramatic than the first, and more dangerous; I came home one day to a pattern of bloody footsteps on the parquet floor in the hall. She had managed to call the ambulance herself and was nearly out of danger by the time I reached the hospital. Afterward, the memory of those footprints woke me over and over in the middle of the night. I began to fear we would never have a healthy child and to wonder how this would affect Helen’s life, in particular. Then she became pregnant again, and month after cautious month passed without incident. Helen grew as soft-eyed as a Madonna, her form round under her blue wool dress, her walk a little unsteady. She was always smiling; this one, she said, was the one we would keep.
“You were born in a hospital overlooking the Hudson. When I saw that you were dark and fine-browed like your mother, and as perfect as a new coin, and that Helen’s eyes were overflowing with tears of pleasure and pain, I held you up in your tight cocoon to give you a glimpse of the ships below. That was partly to hide my own tears. We named you for Helen’s mother.
“Helen was enthralled by you; I would like you to know that fact more than almost anything else about our lives. She had left her teaching during the pregnancy and seemed content to spend hours at home playing with your fingers and feet, which she said with a wicked smile were completely Transylvanian, or rocking you in the big chair I bought her. You smiled early and your eyes followed us everywhere. I left my office on impulse sometimes to come home and make sure the two of you-my dark-haired women-were still lying drowsily on the sofa together.
“One day, I arrived home early, at four, bringing some little boxes of Chinese food and some flowers for you to stare at. No one was in the living room, and I found Helen leaning over your crib while you took a nap. Your face was exquisitely tranquil in sleep, but Helen’s was smeared with tears, and for a second she didn’t seem to register my presence. I took her into my arms and felt, with a chill, that something in her returned only slowly to my embrace. She would not tell me what had been troubling her, and after a few futile rounds I didn’t dare question her further. That evening she was playful over the carried-in food and the carnations, but the next week I found her in tears again, silent again, looking through one of Rossi’s books, which he had signed for me when we’d first begun our work together. It was his huge volume on the Minoan civilization, and it lay across her lap, open to one of Rossi’s own photographs of a sacrificial altar on Crete. ‘Where’s the baby?’ I said.
