The Historian Read Online Free PDF

did. Before we stepped out under the rain-washed sycamores, he suddenly stopped, held me back behind his outstretched hand, protectively, as if a car had gone rushing past us. But there was no car, and the street dripped quiet and rustic under its yellow lights. My father looked sharply left and right. I thought I saw no one, although my long-eaved hood partly blocked my sight. He stood listening, his face averted, body stock-still.
    Then he let his breath out heavily and we walked on, talking about what to order for dinner at the Turist when we got there.
    There would be no more discussions of Dracula on that journey. I was soon to learn the pattern of my father‘s fear: he could tell me this story only in short bursts, reeling it out not for dramatic effect but to preserve something—his strength? His sanity?

Chapter 3
    At home in Amsterdam, my father was unusually silent and busy, and I waited uneasily for opportunities to ask him about Professor Rossi. Mrs. Clay ate dinner with us every night in the dark-paneled dining room, serving us from the sideboard but otherwise joining in as a member of the family, and I felt instinctively that my father would not want to tell more of his story in her presence. If I sought him in his library, he asked me quickly about my day or wanted to see my homework. I checked his library shelves in secret soon after our return from Emona, but the book and papers had already vanished from their high place; I had no idea where he‘d put them. If it was Mrs. Clay‘s night out, he suggested that we go to a movie ourselves, or he took me for coffee and pastries at the noisy shop across the canal. I might have said he was avoiding me, except that sometimes when I sat near him, reading, watching for an opening to ask questions, he would reach out and stroke my hair with an abstracted sadness in his face. At those moments, I was the one who could not bring up the story.
    When my father went south again, he took me with him. He would have only one meeting, and an informal one at that, almost not worth the long trip, but he wanted me to see the scenery, he said. This time we rode the train far beyond Emona and then settled for taking a bus to our destination. My father preferred local transportation whenever he could use it. Now, when I travel, I often think of him and bypass the rental car for the metro. ―You‘ll see—Ragusa is no place for cars,‖ he said as we clung to the metal bar behind the bus driver‘s seat. ―Always sit up front and you‘re less likely to be sick.‖ I squeezed the bar until my knuckles were white; we seemed to be airborne among the towering piles of pale-gray rock that served as mountains in this new region. ―Good God,‖ my father said after one horrible leap across a hairpin turn. The other passengers looked completely at ease. Across the aisle an old woman in black sat crocheting, her face framed by the fringe of her shawl, which danced as the bus jolted. ―Watch carefully,‖ my father said. ―You‘re going to see one of the greatest sights of this coast.‖
    I gazed diligently out the window, wishing he didn‘t find it necessary to give me so many instructions, but taking in everything I could of the rock-piled mountains and the stone villages that crowned them. Just before sunset I was rewarded by the sight of a woman standing at the edge of the road, perhaps waiting for a bus going in the opposite direction.
    She was tall, dressed in long, heavy skirts and a tight vest, her head crowned by a fabulous headdress like an organdy butterfly. She stood alone among the rocks, touched by late sun, a basket on the ground beside her. I would have thought she was a statue, except that she turned her magnificent head as we passed. Her face was a pale oval, too far away for me to see any expression. When I described her to my father, he said she must have been wearing the native dress of this part of Dalmatia. ―A big bonnet, with wings on each side? I‘ve seen