The Historian

“Now I could hear Helen in the hall bathroom, ru

“Breakfast in the restaurant was strong coffee-very strong-in a copper pot with a long handle, served with bread, salty cheese, and olives and accompanied by a newspaper we couldn’t read. Helen ate and drank in silence and I sat musing, sniffing the cigarette smoke that drifted across our table from the waiter’s corner. The place was empty this morning apart from some sunlight that crept in through the arched windows, but the bustle of morning traffic just outside filled it with pleasant sounds and with glimpses of people passing by dressed for work, or carrying baskets of market produce. We had instinctively sought a table as far from the windows as possible.

“‘The professor won’t be here for another two hours,’ Helen observed, loading her second cup of coffee with sugar and stirring vigorously. ‘What shall we do?’

“‘I was thinking we might walk back to Hagia Sophia,’ I said. ‘I want to see the place again.’

“‘Why not?’ she murmured. ‘I do not mind being the tourist while we are here.’ She looked rested, and I noticed that she had put on a clean pale-blue blouse with her black suit, the first color I had seen her wear, an exception to her black-and-white garb. As usual, she wore the little scarf over the place in her neck where the librarian had bitten her. Her face was ironic and wary, but I had the sense-with no particular proof-that she was getting used to my presence across the table, almost to the point of relaxing some of her ferocity.

“The streets were filled with people and cars by the time we took ourselves out, and we wandered among them through the heart of the old city and into one of the bazaars. Every aisle was full of shoppers-old women in black who stood fingering rainbows of fine textiles; young women in rich colors, their heads covered, bargaining for fruits I had never seen before or examining trays of gold jewelry; old men with crocheted caps on their white hair or balding pates, reading newspapers or bending over to examine a selection of carved wooden pipes. Some of them carried prayer beads in their hands. Everywhere I looked I saw handsome, shrewd, strong-featured, olive-ski

“Helen wore her bemused, upside-down smile, looking about her at these strangers as if they pleased her, but as if she thought she understood them all too well. To me the scene was delightful, but I, too, felt a wariness, a sensation that I could have dated in myself as less than a week old, a feeling I had these days in any public place. It was a sense of searching the crowd, of glancing over my shoulder, of sca

“Whatever its roots, I felt my own paranoia as an affront to my former self. A week ago I’d been a normal American graduate student, content in my discontent with my work, enjoying deep down a sense of the prosperity and moral high ground of my culture even while I pretended to question it and everything else. The Cold War was real to me now, in the person of Helen and her disillusioned stance, and an older cold war made itself felt in my very veins. I thought of Rossi, strolling these streets in the summer of 1930 before his adventure in the archive had sent him pell-mell out of Istanbul, and he was real to me, too-not only Rossi as I knew him but also the young Rossi of his letters.

“Helen tapped my arm as we walked and nodded in the direction of a couple of old men at a little wooden table tucked away near a booth. ‘Look-there’s your theory of leisure in person,’ she said. ‘It’s nine in the morning and they are already playing chess. It is strange that they are not playingtabla -that is the favorite game, in this part of the world. But I believe this is chess, instead.’ Sure enough, the two men were just setting up their pieces on a worn-looking wooden board. Black was arrayed against ivory, knights and rooks guarded their lieges, pawns faced one another in battle formation-the same arrangement of war the world over, I mused, stopping to watch. ‘Do you know about chess?’ Helen asked.

“‘Of course,’ I said a little indignantly. ‘I used to play it with my father.’

“‘Ah.’ The sound was acerbic, and I remembered too late that she had had no such childhood lessons, and that she played her own kind of chess with her father-with her image of him, in any case. But she seemed to be caught up in historical reflections. ‘It’s not Western, you know-it’s an ancient game from India -shahmatin Persian.Checkmate, I think you say in English.Shah is the word forking. A battle of kings.’

“I watched the two men begi

“The booth near them was just opening up. It was really a shed, wedged under a venerable fig tree at the edge of the bazaar. A young man in a white shirt and dark trousers was pulling vigorously at the stall’s doors and curtains, setting up tables outside and laying out his wares-books. Books stood in stacks on the wooden counters, tumbled out of crates on the floor, and lined the shelves inside.

“I went forward eagerly, and the young owner nodded a greeting and smiled, as if he recognized a bibliophile whatever his national cut. Helen followed more slowly, and we stood turning through volumes in perhaps a dozen languages. Many of them were in Arabic, or in the modern Turkish language; some were in Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, others in English, French, German, Italian. I found a Hebrew tome and a whole shelf of Latin classics. Most were cheaply printed and shoddily bound, their cloth covers already shabby with handling. There were new paperbacks with lurid scenes on the covers, and a few volumes that looked very old, especially some of the works in Arabic. ‘The Byzantines loved books, too,’ Helen murmured, leafing through what looked like a set of German poetry. ‘Perhaps they bought books on this very spot.’