Read Online The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - Free Book Online

Rossi die? Is that what Massimo meant when he said disappear ? ‖
    My father looked across the sun-filled square to the cafés and butcher shops on the other side. ―Yes. No. Well, it was a very sad thing. Do you really want to hear about that?‖
    I nodded. My father glanced around, quickly. We were sitting on a stone bench that projected from one of the fine old palazzi, alone except for the fleet-footed boys on the square. ―All right,‖ he said at last.

Chapter 6

    You see, my father said, that night when Rossi gave me the package of papers, I left him smiling at his office door, and as I turned away I was seized by the feeling that I should detain him, or turn back to talk with him a little longer. I knew it was merely the result of our strange conversation, the strangest of my life, and I buried it at once. Two other graduate students in our department came by, deep in conversation, greeting Rossi before he shut his door and walking briskly down the stairs behind me. Their animated talk gave me the sensation that life was going on around us as usual, but I still felt uneasy. My book, ornamented with the dragon, was a burning presence in my briefcase, and now Rossi had added this sealed packet of notes. I wondered if I should look through them later that night, sitting alone at the desk in my tiny apartment. I was exhausted; I felt I couldn‘t face whatever they held.
    I suspected, also, that daylight, morning, would bring a return of confidence and reason.
    Perhaps I wouldn‘t even believe Rossi‘s story by the time I awoke, although I also felt sure it would haunt me whether I actually believed it or not. And how, I asked myself—
    outside now, passing under Rossi‘s windows and glancing up involuntarily to where his lamp still shone—how could I not believe my adviser on any point related to his own scholarship? Wouldn‘t that call into question all the work we had done together? I thought of the first chapters of my dissertation, sitting in piles of neatly edited typescript on my desk at home, and shuddered. If I didn‘t believe Rossi‘s story, could we go on working together? Would I have to assume he was mad?
    Maybe it was because Rossi was on my mind as I passed under his windows that I became acutely aware of his lamp still shining there. In any case, I was actually stepping into the puddles of light thrown from them onto the street, heading toward my own neighborhood, when they—the pools of light—went out quite literally under my feet. It happened in a fraction of a second, but a thrill of horror washed over me, head to foot.
    One moment I was lost in thought, stepping into the pool of brightness his light threw on the pavement, and the next moment I was frozen to the spot. I had realized two strange things almost simultaneously. One was that I had never seen this light on the pavement there, between the Gothic classroom buildings, although I‘d walked up the street perhaps a thousand times. I had never seen it before because it had never been visible there before. It was visible now because all the streetlights had suddenly gone off. I was alone on the street, my last footstep the only sound lingering there. And except for those broken patches of light from the study where we‘d sat talking ten minutes earlier, the street was dark.
    My second realization, if it actually came second, swooped over me like a paralysis as I halted. I say swooped because that was how it came over my sight, not into my reason or instinct. At that moment, as I froze in its path, the warm light from my mentor‘s window went out. Maybe you think this sounds ordinary: office hours finish, and the last professor to leave the building turns off his lamps, darkening a street on which the streetlights have momentarily failed. But the effect was nothing like this. I had no sense of an ordinary desk lamp‘s being switched out in a window. Instead it was as if something raced over the window behind me, blotting out the