among all those fading treasures. The floor was highly polished. I could see another, similar room beyond.
"Ranov was looking around, too, and now he snorted. 'In my opinion, Professor Stoichev is permitted to keep too many national possessions. These should be sold for the benefit of the people.'
"Either Irina understood no English or she didn't deign to respond to this; she turned away and led us out of the room and up a narrow flight of stairs. I don't know what I expected to see at the top. Perhaps we would find a littered den, a cave where the old professor hibernated, or perhaps, I thought - with that now-familiar twinge of misery - we might find a neat, orderly office of the sort that had masked Professor Rossi's tumultuous and splendid mind. I had all but put this vision behind me when the door at the top of the stairs opened, and a white-haired man, small but erect, came out on the landing. Irina hurried to him, grasping his arm with both hands and addressing him in quick Bulgarian mixed with some excited laughter.
"The old man turned to us, calm, quiet, his face deeply withdrawn, so that I had for a minute the sense that he was gazing down at the floor, although he looked directly at us. I stepped forward then and offered my hand. He shook it gravely and turned to Helen and shook hers as well. He was polite, he was formal, he had the kind of deference that is not really deference but dignity, and his large, dark eyes went from one of us to the other, and then took in Ranov, who hung back watching the scene. At this Ranov came up and shook hands with him, too - patronizingly, I thought, disliking our guide more every minute. I wished with all my heart that he would leave, so that we could speak alone with Professor Stoichev. I wondered how on earth we were going to accomplish any kind of honest discussion, learn anything from Stoichev at all, with Ranov hovering behind us like a fly.
"Professor Stoichev turned slowly and ushered us into the room. This room, as it turned out, was one of several on the top floor of the house. It was never clear to me, during our two visits there, where its inhabitants slept. As far as I could see, the upper story of the house contained only the long, narrow sitting room that we were entering, and several smaller rooms opening off it. The doors to the other rooms stood ajar, and sunlight filtered into them through the green trees in the windows opposite and caressed the bindings of innumerable books, books that lined the walls and sat in wooden crates on the floor, or lay heaped on tables. Among them were shelved loose documents of all shapes and sizes, many of them clearly of great antiquity. No, this was not Rossi's neat study but rather a sort of cluttered laboratory, the upper story of a collector's mind. Everywhere I saw sunlight touching old vellum, old leather, tooled bindings, hints of gilt, crumbling page corners, knobby bindings - red and brown and bone-colored wonderful books - books and scrolls and manuscripts in a working disarray. Nothing was dusty, nothing heavy was heaped on anything fragile, and yet these books, these manuscripts were absolutely everywhere in Stoichev's rooms, and I had a sense of being surrounded by them in a way one is not even in a museum, where such precious objects would have been more sparsely, methodically displayed.
"On one wall of the sitting room hung a primitive map, painted, to my amazement, on leather. I couldn't help stepping toward it, and Stoichev smiled. 'Do you like that?' he asked. 'It is the Byzantine Empire in about 1150.' It was the first time he had spoken, and he used a quiet, correct English.
"'While Bulgaria was still among its territories,' Helen mused.
"Stoichev glanced at her, clearly pleased. 'Yes, exactly. I think this map was made in Venice or Genoa and brought to Constantinople, perhaps as a gift to the emperor or someone in his court. This is a copy which a friend has made for me.'
"Helen smiled, touching her chin in thought. Then she almost winked at him.
'The emperor Manuel I Comnenus, perhaps?' "I was stunned and Stoichev looked astonished, too. Helen laughed. 'Byzantium used to be quite a hobby with me,' she said. The old historian smiled, then, and bowed to