box ornamented with a sacred warning?
“Turgut’s friend had produced a ring of keys and was fitting one to the lock. I almost laughed, remembering our modern card catalog at home, the accessibility of thousands of rare books in the university library system. I had never imagined myself doing research that required an old key. It clicked in the lock. ‘Here we are,’ Turgut murmured, and the librarian withdrew. Turgut smiled at each of us- rather sadly, I thought-and lifted the lid.”
In the train, Barley had just finished reading my father’s first two letters for himself. It gave me a pang to see them lying open in his hands, but I knew Barley would trust my father’s authoritative voice, whereas he might only half believe my weaker one. “Have you been to Paris before?” I asked him, partly to cover my emotion.
“I suppose I have,” Barley said indignantly. “I studied there for a year before I went to university. My mother wanted me to know French better.” I longed to ask about his mother and why she required this delectable accomplishment in her son, and also what it was like to have a mother, but Barley was deep in the letter again. “Your father must be a very good lecturer,” he mused. “This is a lot more entertaining than what we get at Oxford.”
This opened up another realm for me. Were lectures at Oxford ever dull? Was that possible? Barley was full of things I wanted to know, a messenger from a world so large I could not begin to imagine it. I was interrupted this time by a conductor hurrying down the aisle past our door. “Bruxelles!” he called. The train was slowing already, and a few minutes later we were looking out the window into the Brussels station; the customs officers were boarding. Outside, people were rushing for their trains and pigeons were hunting for morsels from the platform.
Perhaps because I was secretly fond of pigeons, I was gazing hard enough into the crowd to suddenly notice one figure that was not moving at all. A woman, tall and dressed in a long black coat, stood quietly on the platform. She had a black scarf tied over her hair, framing a white face. She was a little too far away for me to see her features clearly, but I caught a flash of dark eyes and an almost unnaturally red mouth-bright lipstick, maybe. There was something odd about the silhouette of her clothes; amid the miniskirts and hideous block-heeled boots of the day, she wore narrow black pumps.
But what caught my attention about her first, and held it for a moment before our train began to move again, was her attitude of alertness. She was scanning our train, up and down. I drew back from the window instinctively, and Barley looked a question at me. The woman apparently hadn’t seen us, although she took a hovering step in our direction. Then she seemed to change her mind and turned to scan another train, which had just pulled in on the opposite side of the platform. Something about her stern, straight back kept me staring until we began to move out of the station again, and then she disappeared among the throngs of people there, as if she had never existed.
Chapter 28
Ihad dozed off this time, instead of Barley. When I woke, I found myself wedged against him, my head lolling on the shoulder of his navy sweater. He was staring out the window, my father’s letters stored neatly again in their envelopes on his lap, his legs crossed, his face-not so far above mine-turned to the passing scenery of what I knew must by now be the French countryside. I opened my eyes to a view of his bony chin. When I looked down I could see Barley’s hands clasped loosely together over the letters. I noticed for the first time that he bit his nails, as I always did myself. I closed my eyes again, feigning continued sleep, because the warmth of his shoulder was so comforting. Then I was afraid he wouldn’t like my leaning against him, or that I had drooled on his sweater in my doltish slumber, and I sat quickly upright. Barley turned to look at me, his eyes full of faraway thoughts, or perhaps just full of the land beyond the window, no longer flat but rolling, a modest French farm country. After a minute he smiled.
“As the lid went up on Sultan Mehmed’s box of secrets, a smell I knew well drifted out of it. It was the scent of very old documents, of parchment or vellum, of dust and centuries, of pages time had long since begun to defile. It was the smell, too, of the small blank book with the dragon in the middle, my book. I had never dared put my nose directly into it, as I secretly had with some of the other old volumes I’d handled-I feared, I think, that there might be a repulsive edge to its perfume or, worse, a power in the scent, an evil drug I didn’t want to inhale.
“Turgut was gently lifting documents from the box. Each was wrapped in yellowing tissue paper, and the items varied in shape and size. He spread them carefully on the table before us. ‘I will show you these papers myself and tell you what I know of them,’ he said. ‘Then perhaps you would like to sit and brood on them, don’t you think?’ Yes, perhaps we would-I nodded, and he unwrapped a scroll and unwound it delicately under our gaze. It was parchment attached to fine wooden spindles, very different from the large flat pages and bound ledgers I was used to in my research on Rembrandt’s world. The edges of the parchment were decorated in a colorful border of geometric patterns, gilt and deep blue and crimson. The handwritten text, to my disappointment, was in Arabic lettering. I’m not sure what I had expected; this document had come from the heart of an empire that spoke the Ottoman language and wrote it down in Arabic letters, resorting to Greek only to bully the Byzantines, or Latin to storm the gates of Vienna.
“Turgut read my face and hurried to explain. ‘This, my friends, is a ledger of the expenses of a war with the Order of the Dragon. It was written in a town on the southern side of the Danube by a bureaucrat who was spending the sultan’s money there-it is a report of business, in other words. Dracula’s father, Vlad Dracul, cost the Ottoman Empire a great deal of money in the mid-fifteenth century, you see. This bureaucrat commissioned armor and-how do you say?-scimitars for three hundred men to guard the border of the western Carpathians so that the local people would not revolt, and he bought horses for them, also. Here’- he pointed a long finger at the bottom of the scroll-‘it says that Vlad Dracul was an expense and a-a rotten nuisance and had cost them more money than the pasha wanted to spend. The pasha is very sorry and miserable, and he wishes a long life to the Incomparable One in the name of Allah.’
“Helen and I glanced at each other, and I thought I read in her eyes something of the awe I felt myself. This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did-as we would. I looked away, unable to watch the flicker of emotion on her strong face.
“Turgut had rolled up the scroll again and was opening a second package, which contained two more scrolls. ‘Here is a letter from the pasha of Wallachia in which he promises to send Sultan Mehmed any documents he can find about the Order of the Dragon. And this is an account of trading along the Danube in 1461, not far from where the Order of the Dragon had control. The boundaries of this area were not stalwart, you understand-they were continually changing. Here it lists the silks, spices, and horses the pasha requests to trade for wool from the shepherds of his domain.’ The next two scrolls proved to be similar accounts. Then Turgut unrolled a smaller package, which contained a flat sketch on parchment. ‘A map,’ he said. I made an involuntary move for my briefcase, which held Rossi’s sketches and notes, but Helen shook her head almost imperceptibly. I understood her meaning-we did not know Turgut well enough to spread all our secrets in front of him. Not yet, I amended mentally; after all, he had apparently opened all his own resources to us.
“‘I have never been able to understand what this map is, my fellows,’ Turgut told us. There was regret in his voice, and he stroked his mustache with a thoughtful hand. I looked closely at the parchment and saw with a thrill a neat, if faded, version of the first map Rossi had copied, the long crescents of mountains, the curving river north of them. ‘It does not resemble any region I have studied myself, and there is no way to know the-how do you say?-scale of the map, you know?’ He set it aside. ‘Here is another map, which appears to be a closer view of the area in the first.’ I knew it was-I had seen all this already, and my excitement climbed. ‘I believe these are the mountains shown in the west on the first map, no?’ He sighed. ‘But there is no further information, and you see it is not much labeled, except for some lines from the Qur’an and this strange motto-I translated it carefully, once-that says something like ”Here he is housed with evil. Reader, with your words dig him up.“’
