“The question would be more, I think, why someone would not. She was so...human. Only a few people have the power she did, to do exactly what she wanted. What would others do, if they had that chance as well?” She glanced back. “And you, why are you interested?”
A wasp flew out of the bush and began to circle me. “Well, she definitely is disturbing, but immediately attractive. I don’t know.”
“You do not know? But you are here, climbing a mountain to see her ruin. You must know,” said Maria, walking faster.
I didn’t immediately reply. I was drawn to Maria, excited to be around her. But I wasn’t sure if I should confide in her my fascination with the destructive extreme, my fixation on Báthory’s story.
Finally I said, “I’m intrigued by her ruthlessness. She pursued beauty as a visceral experience. She’s like a reverse fairy tale.”
Maria stopped and turned to face me. Despite the sun and our pace, she was barely flushed. “I understand. But, Danica. She was not a fairy tale. She lived. Here.” She stomped her foot lightly, then continued up the slope.
We tromped on for a few minutes and then came upon a sign, the first one posted along the path. It read
Čachtichý Hradny Vrch,
and a paragraph of Slovak ran below it. Below the sign, there was a photo of Báthory’s portrait, with
Museum Čachtice
written across the top.
“They must get lots of tourists,” I said.
“They are trying. Not so many now. Austrians, Germans, mainly.”
The slope was getting steeper, and we slowed our pace. Under my shirt, my bra was soaked with sweat and chafed against my skin. “But this village, it is one of the only places associated with Báthory that advertises the link,” continued Maria. “Her castle at Sárvár, her former home in Vienna, even Beckov, just down the river from here, they all try to ignore her. They have nothing in their museums, or in the literature on the ruins, that mentions her.”
“But why?” I panted. “Wouldn’t they want to promote it, get the tourist revenue?”
Maria let out a light laugh, then a sigh. “Things are not, or at least were not, all about the money. Báthory was hated and feared among the peasants, and at the end ostracized by the Hungarian nobility. It is still not popular to speak of the Blood Countess in some areas.”
Maria slowed her pace and slid her small hand around my waist, undeterred by my sweaty torso. “But Čachtice, it is different. It is good you are here, Dani.” She wiped a trickle of sweat from my temple. Her fingers were cool, her touch light. “In ten years here, it will be as commercialized as it is in Transylvania, Wallachia. Buses full with tourists, with cameras around their necks, overrunning the sites. Like the tours to Bran and Pele?.” She pulled her arm away from my waist and picked up her pace again, despite the incline and the heat. “You will see how Čachtice is now, no commercialism.”
The path reached the top of the hill and flattened out, a grassed-over furrow that seemed to lead nowhere. We kept walking for a few minutes. Then the ruins of the castle rose into view, two tall towers and formidable stone walls. Because the structure was positioned on land slightly lower than the path, we couldn’t see it until we were about twenty feet away. The walls were about fifteen feet high, made of grey, now-crumbling stones. The two turrets, kitty-corner from each other, rose three times higher than the walls. The tops of both towers had caved in. The larger tower was missing a wide seam of stones, top to bottom, as if an enormous vulture had gutted it with a talon.
Maria led me through the winding, crumbling walls. She kept hold of my hand as we picked our way through half-buried steps and remnants of firepits. “From the local teenagers,” she said. “This is a place they gather.”
“A hangout?” I asked. “Čachtice isn’t preserved as a historical site?”
“There are many castles in these mountains, Dani. There is not money or interest enough to preserve them all. Here.” We stopped in front of the tallest tower, stepped inside through the cleft of missing stones. Maria pointed out where the masonry patterns indicated a door, a staircase, a floor. “This,” she pointed twenty feet up, “would have been the middle of the tower. Probably the royal chamber, for the lady. Where she would have died.”
A thick scattering of poppies, with a few pansies and bluebells, carpeted the ground where we stood. I wondered how many people’s blood had fertilized the soil. The red petals frilled like petticoats, each a girl cut, spilled.
We walked through the flowers, farther into the ruins. Maria stepped ahead under a dilapidated archway made from crushingly heavy stones. The mortar that held the rocks together was cracked, half of it chipped away. A crow landed, took off from the top and loosed a smattering of pebbles. I hesitated.
Maria was on the other side. She turned back to me. “You come all this way to be halted by some little stones? You are not serious, Dani.” Her hair shone, ruby waves against her mustard gold sundress. She looked at the rocks. Each lens of her dark sunglasses reflected a curved, contorted image of the arch. “It will not fall. Stepping through, it is hardly a risk.” She took three steps towards me, extended her hand underneath the stones. I held her hand and jumped through.
After I pay for my spider lashes, Maria and I go for lunch. She leads me through a series of quick lefts, rights, down a side street, and finally we’re at the vegetarian place she’s picked. We walk down a creaky set of stairs, order at the counter, then take the only table left—a two-foot-square surface made out of plywood. Maria tells me to hold our place while she goes back to correct her smoothie order. While she’s gone, I pop open my compact and smear some concealer under my eyes, careful not to touch the lashes.
“There, I caught them before they put in the lychees,” says Maria, wiggling between the table and a pew-like bench bolted against the wall. She sits and shrugs off her electric blue plaid coat, flips her blonde waves behind her shoulders. “They just do not go with the raspberries, I think.”
“A tragedy averted.”
“Dani, now you are teasing me.” She smiles. “Have you been here before?” She knows I haven’t.
“No. It’s small.”
A man bumps my chair on his way to the next table, set not quite a foot away from ours.
“Part of the charm, you will see.”
“I’m sure I will.” I have to shout over the whirr of a blender.
“You are always so serious.” She leans in closer. “So,” she says, “the section I emailed?”
“Mmm. Interesting.”
“Interesting?” she repeats. “You see, finally, some of Báthory’s diaries and that is all you have to say?”
“It’s the beginning of a good story,” I say. “Maybe that’s all it was.” I keep my eyes on her face for any reaction. All she does is smile again, a carbon copy of the one she gave me thirty seconds earlier.
“Well, it is true, perhaps she did embellish things. Perhaps she fabricated the entire document. We cannot know for certain. But it is her writings, her words. Is that not what you wanted to see?”
“Her words?” I fold my hands together, place them on the plywood tabletop. “Do you have any documentation, any proof of your supposed discovery?”
“I see.” Another smile. “You doubt me.”
“I do.” I feel satisfied saying this to her. She’s quiet for a moment.
“Dani,” she finally says, “you know my interest in Báthory, it is genuine. To forge these documents, what benefit would it be to me?”
She has a point. It would be a huge risk for her career if she faked recovering the diary. But I wouldn’t put it past her to give me a highly stylized version of the truth.
“Well, then, as a professional archivist and curator, I am sure you have the necessary evidence to authenticate your discovery. So, to start, you can tell me how you found the originals,” I say.
“Dani, you are so impatient. Yes, I will tell you the whole story.”
“You mentioned something about Szeged?” I know this is a city in the south of Hungary, but while we were collaborating Maria had never described it as important to the search.
“Number eighty-seven! Eighty-seven!” yells a deep voice from behind the counter.
“Oh, now, that is us,” says Maria. She digs in her purse, pulls out a piece of paper and pushes it across the rough wooden tabletop towards me. She stands up and taps the paper a couple of times. “Look at this.”
“EIGHTY-SEVEN,” the voice hollers again, louder.
“Oh, I am coming. So impatient,” she says, striding off.
I look at the paper. It’s a handbill, purple with a thick white border and a logo for an art gallery in the top right corner. It reads
Honey, Torture. A film and performance installation by Erszébet Báthory.
The opening reception is in two weeks, and I realize part of the Fantasy and Disaster festival that Henry and a few other people from his residency have been preparing for too.
“I am so sorry. Can you excuse me?” Over my shoulder I hear Maria making her way through the crowd.
“There.” She leans around, one arm on either side of me, and sets down our tray. “Their salads are divine. And this will be the best moussaka you have had.” She wiggles back into her seat.
“We’ll see,” I say, setting down the flyer and picking up my cutlery.
She pulls her smoothie and her salad bowl towards her, and I shift my plate in front of me. “So, you will come,” she says, nodding to the paper.
“Is this by the Dutch artist, like the show in Budapest?”
“The one who has changed her name to Báthory, yes. But this one, you will like. It is her solo show.”
I’m curious, but the last time Maria and I went to a performance the evening ended badly. “So, you’re going?”
“Of course. Edward, he is reviewing several of the openings that night.”
I’m quiet for a moment, then say, “Henry is showing that night.”
“Your artist? In the festival?” Maria says in a singsong voice. “Which gallery? What is the name of the show? Is he working with anyone?” She rat-a-tats me with questions and immediately I regret mentioning it at all.
“I can’t remember.”
“Well, you must look it up,” she says. “Really, such luck. And also come with me, and Edward, to the Báthory show.” She takes a delicate sip from her smoothie. “Besides, for your work, it would be good. Seeing that man all of the time. Báthory was his muse, yes?”
I blow on a forkful of my moussaka. “I think they overheated this.”
“For the case with Foster.” She sips again, ladylike, her big eyes locked on me for a reaction.
The moussaka’s still steaming, but I try a bite anyway, then have to take a drink of ice water to cool the burn in my mouth. Maria keeps looking at me expectantly. Part of me wants to confide in her, to share the rush of my first interview with him. I also want to keep Foster to myself, like she’s kept the diaries. In the end, though, it matters very little what I want; as his clinician there’s not a lot I can divulge, not without getting into some messy moral and legal issues.
“There are rules about confidentiality,” I finally say. “You know that.”
“I suppose. But you have mentioned him before.”
“Not while I was his clinician.”
She smiles and I realize I’ve admitted to her that I have contact with him.
“The diaries,” I say. “You were going to explain to me how you found them.”
“Yes, that. But I am telling you very much, Danica.” She shuffles her plate over, puts her elbow on the table and rests her chin on her upturned palm. “I would like to hear about your work as well.”
“How polite of you.” I give her a close-lipped smile. “But really, I insist. So, the archives?”
“Yes, fine.” Maria takes her elbow off the table, leans back in her chair. “A few months after you left, the Báthory boxes came to the archives. I searched. It took many days.” She spears a tomato with her fork, takes a bite.
“And you found the diary in those boxes? Just like that, when no one else had before?”
She takes another bite of the tomato, then another drink of her smoothie. “No, I did not find them there. It was more complicated.”
I am so frustrated by the pace of her storytelling that I want to dump the rest of her smoothie in her lap. “Then where did you find them?”
“Dani, you are impatient. Is it your new job? You are very stressed? It is not good for you.”
“The diaries?”
“Yes, yes. I did not find them in the boxes at the archives. There is much material attached to the Báthory family. They were large, their dynasty—is that the word?—their titles and land were passed down for many years. But you know this. So, many letters, many documents, about estates, about inheritances. But not many personal papers, correspondences. I sent the boxes back. I spoke with the archival staff, with some of my other colleagues, I considered the research I had conducted already on Báthory. And then I had an idea!” Maria joyously clasps her hands together.
“Which was?”
“Čachtice, you know, it is not located in modern Hungary. The boundaries, they are much different now. Even where Báthory was born in Transylvania, that is part of Romania now. She had the house in Vienna, the castle at Sárvár in Hungary. She was in what is now many countries. Her papers, I thought, they could be anywhere. The National Archives is not the only possibility. So I began to look at university archives. I asked in Budapest, but nothing. Then I had a little contract with the House of Terror, the new museum about the dictatorial regimes in Hungary. I suggested, I think, that you visit it—did you go there?”
“No. So, you had the contract, and?”
“There was a reception. I met Professor Orbán.” She twirls her wrist in the air, a
ta-da
kind of flourish. “She is based at the university in Szeged. It is said it is the best university in Hungary. More known for the medical school, but—”
I cut her off. “And how did this help you find the diaries?”
“Ah, you cannot wait for the whole story! Fine, the shorter version. I went to visit her at Szeged. She is a young professor—she reminded me of you, Dani, really, very pretty, very smart—and so she introduced me to some of her colleagues, I met the librarian in charge of the rare books and manuscripts, we discussed some things. They had holdings about the Báthory family, many things.”