The Historian Read Online Free PDF Page B

pictures of that. You could say she‘s a sort of ghost—she probably lives in a very small village. I suppose most of the young people here wear blue jeans now.‖
    I kept my face glued to the window. No more ghosts appeared, but I didn‘t miss a single view of the miracle that did: Ragusa, far below us, an ivory city with a molten, sunlit sea breaking around its walls, roofs redder than the evening sky inside their tremendous medieval enclosure. The city sat on a large round peninsula, and its walls looked impenetrable to sea storm and invasion, a giant wading off the Adriatic coast. At the same time, seen from the great height of the road, it had a miniature appearance, like something carved by hand and set down out of scale at the base of the mountains.
    Ragusa‘s main street, when we reached it a couple of hours later, was marble underfoot, highly polished by centuries of shoe soles and reflecting splashes of light from the surrounding shops and palaces so that it gleamed like the surface of a great canal. At the harbor end of the street, safe in the city‘s old heart, we collapsed on café chairs, and I turned my face straight into the wind, which smelled of crashing surf and—strange to me in that late season—of ripe oranges. The sea and sky were almost dark. Fishing boats danced on a sheet of wilder water at the far reaches of the harbor; the wind brought me sea sounds, sea scents, and a new mildness. ―Yes, the South,‖ my father said with satisfaction, pulling up a glass of whiskey and a plate of sardines on toast. ―Say you put your boat in right here and had a clear night to travel. You could steer by the stars from here directly to Venice, or to the Albanian coast, or into the Aegean.‖
    ―How long would it take to sail to Venice?‖ I stirred my tea, and the breeze pulled the steam out to sea.
    ―Oh, a week or more, I suppose, in a medieval ship.‖ He smiled at me, relaxed for the moment. ―Marco Polo was born on this coast, and the Venetians invaded frequently.
    We‘re actually sitting in a kind of gateway to the world, you could say.‖
    ―When did you come here before?‖ I was only beginning to believe in my father‘s previous life, his existence before me.
    ―I‘ve been here several times. Maybe four or five. The first was years ago, when I was still a student. My adviser recommended I visit Ragusa from Italy, just to see this wonder, while I was studying—I told you I studied Italian in Florence one summer.‖
    ―You mean Professor Rossi.‖
    ―Yes.‖ My father looked sharply at me, then into his whiskey.

    There was a little silence, filled by the café awning, which flapped above us on that unseasonably warm breeze. From inside the bar and restaurant came a blur of tourists‘
    voices, clinking china, saxophone and piano. From beyond came the slop of boats in the dark harbor. At last my father spoke. ―I should tell you a little more about him.‖ He didn‘t look at me, still, but I thought his voice had a fine crack in it.
    ―I‘d like that,‖ I said cautiously.
    He sipped his whiskey. ―You‘re stubborn about stories, aren‘t you?‖
    You are the stubborn one, I longed to say, but I held my tongue; I wanted the story more than I did the quarrel.
    My father sighed. ―All right. I‘ll tell you more about him tomorrow, in the daylight, when I‘m not so tired and we have a little time to walk the walls.‖ He pointed with his glass to those gray-white, luminous battlements above the hotel. ―That‘ll be a better time for stories. Especially that story.‖
    By midmorning we were seated a hundred feet above the surf, which crashed and foamed white around the city‘s giant roots. The November sky was brilliant as a summer day. My father put on his sunglasses, checked his watch, folded away the brochure about the rusty-roofed architecture below, let a group of German tourists drift past us out of earshot. I looked out to sea, beyond a forested island, to the fading blue