People of the Book (12 page)

Vienna, Spring 1996

P
ARNASSIUS
.

Great name for a butterfly. It had a kind of loftiness, and I felt elevated as I walked out through the manicured gardens of the museum toward the swirling traffic of the Ringstrasse. I’d never found butterfly remains in a book before. I couldn’t wait to get to Werner’s place and tell him all about it.

The traveling scholarship that brought me to Vienna after my undergraduate degree could have taken me anywhere. Jerusalem or Cairo would have made most sense. But I was determined to study with Werner Maria Heinrich, or Universitätsprofessor Herr Doktor Doktor Heinrich, as I’d been told to address him, the Austrians being the opposite of Australians in insisting on giving a separate title for each degree earned. I’d heard about his expertise in traditional techniques—he was the world’s best at spotting forgeries because he knew more than anyone about the original crafts and materials. He was also a specialist in Hebrew manuscripts, which I found intriguing for a German Catholic of his generation. I offered myself as his apprentice.

His reply to my first letter was polite but dismissive—“honored by your interest but unfortunately not in a position,” etc. My second letter yielded a shorter, slightly more exasperated turndown. The third got a flat and rather testy one-liner that translated into Aussie as “no bloody way.” But I came anyway. With an immense amount of front, I presented myself at his apartment on Maria-Theresienstrasse, and begged him to take me on. It was winter, and, like most Australians on their first trip to a seriously cold place, I’d come unprepared for the brutal weather. I thought my rather fetching, cropped leather jacket was a winter coat, since it served that purpose in Sydney. I had no idea. So I must’ve cut a pathetic figure when I lobbed up on his doorstep, shivering, the snowflakes that’d melted in my hair turned to little icicles that clinked when I moved my head. His innate courtliness made it impossible for him to turn me away.

The months I spent grinding pigments or polishing parchments in his spacious flat-cum-workshop, or sitting beside him in the conservation department of the nearby university library taught me more, I think, than all my formal degrees combined. The first month was very stiff: “Miss Heath” this and “Herr Doktor Doktor” that, correct and rather chilly. But by the time I left I was his “Hanna,
Liebchen.
” I think we each filled a vacancy in the other’s life. We were both rather shorthanded in the family department. I’d never known my grandparents. His family had been killed in the Dresden fire-bombing. He’d been in Berlin, in the army, of course, although he never talked of it. Nor did he speak about his childhood in Dresden, abbreviated by war. Even in those days, I had enough tact not to press it. But I noticed that when I walked with him near the Hofburg, he always went out of his way to avoid Heldenplatz, the Hero’s Square. It was only much later that I came across the famous picture of that square, taken in March of 1938. In the photograph, it is packed with people, some of them clinging to the gigantic equestrian statues to get a better view, all of them cheering as Hitler announced the incorporation of his birth nation into the Third Reich.

After I left Werner to go to Harvard for my PhD (where I probably wouldn’t have been accepted without his glowing recommendation), he wrote to me occasionally, telling me about interesting projects he was working on, offering me career advice. And when he came to New York a couple of times, I’d take the train down from Boston to see him. But it had been a few years since then, so I wasn’t prepared for the frail figure waiting for me at the top of the marble-clad staircase that led up to his flat.

He was leaning on an ebony cane with a silver top. His hair, too, was silver, rather long, brushed back from his forehead. He was wearing a dark velvet jacket with pale lemon piping on the lapels. At his neck he wore a bow tie in the nineteenth-century fashion, a long piece of patterned silk tied loosely under the collar. He had a little white rosebud for a boutonniere. I knew how particular he was about appearances, so I’d taken more than usual pains with my own grooming, making my French twist fancy rather than functional and wearing a fuchsia suit that looked good with my dark hair.

“Hanna,
Liebchen
! How beautiful today! How beautiful! More lovely each time I see you!” He grasped my hand and kissed it, then peered at the chapped skin and made a little
tsk.
“The price of our craft, eh?” he said. His own hands were rough and gnarled, but I noted that his nails were freshly manicured, which mine, alas, were not.

In his mid-seventies, Werner had retired from the university, but he still wrote the rare paper and occasionally consulted on important manuscripts. The minute I stepped into the apartment, I could see—and smell—that he hadn’t stopped working with the materials of old books. The long table by the tall Gothic windows, where I’d sat beside him and learned so much, remained cluttered with agate stones and foul-smelling gallnuts, antique gold-beater’s tools, and parchments in all states of preparation.

He had a maid now, and as he ushered me into the library—one of my favorite rooms in the world, since every volume in it seemed to come with a story—she served the
kaffee.

The rich cardamom scent made me feel like a twenty-year-old student again. Werner had taken to drinking his coffee Arabic style after a visiting professorship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he’d lived in the Christian quarter of the Old City, among Palestinians. Every time I smelled cardamom it reminded me of him, and of this apartment, washed with the pale gray European light that is so easy on the eyes when you’re working for hours on fine details.

“So. It is good to see you, Hanna. Thank you for taking the time to come out of your way and humor an old man.”

“Werner, you know I love to see you. But I was hoping you might be able to help me with something, as well.”

His face lit up. He leaned forward in his wing chair. “Tell me!”

I’d brought my notes, so I referred to these as I told him what I had done in Sarajevo. He nodded, approving. “It is exactly as I myself would have done. You are a good student.” Then I told him about the
Parnassius
wing fragment, which intrigued him, and then the other artifacts—the white hair, the samples of stain and the salt, and finally I got to the oddity of the grooved boards.

“I agree,” he said. “Definitely it seems they were prepared to take a pair of clasps.” He looked up at me, his blue eyes watery behind gold-rimmed glasses. “So, why are they not there? Most interesting. Most mysterious.”

“Do you think the National Museum would have anything on the haggadah, and the work that was done there back in 1894? It’s a long time ago….”

“Not so very long for Vienna, my dear. I am sure there will be something. Whether it is something useful is another matter. But it was a tremendous fuss, you know, when the manuscript came to light. The first of the illustrated haggadot to be rediscovered. Two of the foremost scholars of the day traveled here to examine it. I am sure the museum has their papers, at least. I think that one of them was Rothschild, from Oxford; yes, that’s right, I’m sure of it. The other was Martell, from the Sorbonne—you read French, yes? The binder’s notes, if they kept them, they would be in German. But perhaps the binder left no notes. As you saw for yourself, the rebinding was disgracefully mishandled.”

“Why do you think that was, when the book was the center of so much attention?”

“I believe there was a controversy over who should keep the book. Vienna, of course, wanted to retain it. Why not? The capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the center of Europe’s artistic energy…But remember, the Hapsburgs only
occupied
Bosnia at that time—they didn’t annex it until 1908. And the Slav nationalists hated the occupation.” He raised a crooked finger and waved it—it was a mannerism of his when he had something he thought particularly interesting to say.

“By coincidence, the man who started World War I was born the very year the haggadah came here, did you know that?”

“You mean the student who shot the Hapsburg guy in Sarajevo?” Werner drew in his chin, grinning smugly. He loved to tell people something they didn’t know. We were alike in that way.

“In any case, I think fear of inciting nationalism might have been why the book was eventually returned to the Bosnian Landesmuseum. My guess is that the clumsy binding was Vienna’s revenge, a little piece of petty snobbery: if it has to go to the provinces, then a cheap binding is good enough. Or it may have been something more sinister.” His voice dropped a little, and he drummed his fingers on the brocaded arm of his chair. “I don’t know if you are aware of it, but those fin de siècle years saw a great surge in anti-Semitism here. Everything Hitler said and some large part of what he did with regard to the Jews was rehearsed here, you know. It was the air he breathed, growing up in Austria. He would have been, let me see, about five years old, starting kindergarten in Braunau, when the haggadah was here. So strange, to think about such things….” His voice trailed off. We had begun to tread rather close to forbidden ground. When he looked up at me and spoke again, I thought at first that he was trying to change the subject.

“Tell me, Hanna, have you read Schnitzler? No? You must! You cannot understand anything about the Viennese, even today, without Arthur Schnitzler.”

He groped for his cane and stood, with difficulty, treading slowly and carefully toward the bookcases. He ran his finger along the spines of volumes that were almost all first or rare editions. “I have only the German and you still do not read German, do you? No? Great pity. Very interesting writer, Schnitzler, very—forgive me—erotic. Very frank about his many seductions. But also he writes a great deal on the rise of the
Judenfressers
—that means Jew Eaters, because the term
anti-Semitism
was not yet coined when he was a boy. Schnitzler was Jewish, of course.”

He drew a book from the shelf—“This is called
My Youth in Vienna
. It’s a very nice edition—an association copy, Schnitzler to his Latin master, one Johann Auer, ‘with thanks for the Auerisms.’ Do you know, I found this in a church book sale in Salzburg? Remarkable that no one had spotted it….” He leafed through the book until he found the passage he sought. “Here, he apologizes for writing so much on ‘the so-called Jewish question.’ But he says that no Jew, no matter how assimilated, was allowed to forget the fact of his birth.” He adjusted his glasses and read aloud, translating. “‘Even if you managed to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched; as for instance a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin has been anesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut until the blood flows.’” Werner closed the book. “He wrote that in the early 1900s. The imagery is very chilling, is it not, in the light of what followed….”

He replaced the book on the shelf, then drew a crisply ironed white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. He sat down heavily in his armchair. “So it is possible that the rebinding was careless because the binder was one of Schnitzler’s Jew Eaters.”

He sipped the last of his coffee. “But maybe it was none of these things. At that time, it wasn’t appreciated, what even the most dilapidated binding might be able to tell. Much information was lost when old bindings were stripped and discarded. Every time I have had to work on such a volume, it pains me to think of it. Most likely, if the book arrived in Vienna with clasps of some kind on the old binding, they would have been the original…but one cannot be sure….”

I nibbled at a small piece of a devastatingly rich cake called Waves of the Danube, which was Werner’s favorite. He rose, dusting the crumbs from his jacket, and shuffled to the telephone to call his contact at the museum. After an animated conversation in German, he put down the receiver. “The Verwaltungsdirektor can see you tomorrow. She says the papers from that era are archived in a depository some distance away from the museum. She will have them sent to her by noon tomorrow. When do you need to be in Boston?”

“I can stay another day or two,” I said.

“Good! You will call me, yes, and let me know if you find something?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. I got up to go. At the door, I leaned down—he was slightly stooped now and just a little shorter than I was—and kissed his papery cheek.

“Werner, forgive me for asking, but, are you quite well?”

“
Liebchen,
I am seventy-six. Very few of us are ‘quite well’ at that age. But I manage.”

He stood at the doorway as I walked down the stairs. I turned in the ornate entranceway, looked up, and blew him a kiss, wondering if I’d ever see him again.

Later that afternoon, I sat on the corner of my narrow bed in the pension near Peterskirche with the phone in my lap. I’d badly wanted to tell Ozren about the
Parnassius.
But when I pulled my notebook from my document case, the envelope with Alia’s brain scans had fallen out. I felt suddenly guilty about flouting Ozren’s will and butting into his private suffering. He’d probably go ballistic all over again if he found out what I’d done. He was right; it was none of my damn business. Much as I wanted to talk to him about the butterfly wing, the fact of my own deception hung over me like a wet sack. Finally, when it was well past the time I thought he’d be at the museum, I got up the nerve to call. He was there, working late. I blurted out the news about the book, and could hear the pleasure in his voice.

“There has always been a big question about where the haggadah was during World War II. We know that the
kustos
somehow kept it from the Nazis, but there were various stories: that he concealed it within the library among some Turkish documents, that he took it to a village in the mountains and hid it in a mosque. Your wing seems to be evidence for the mountains. I can look at the elevations and see if I can narrow down a village, and then ask around to see if he had any special ties in any of them. It would be very nice to know who we have to thank for hosting the haggadah during the war. Too bad no one ever asked him when he was alive. He suffered a lot, after the war, you know. The Communists charged him with being a Nazi collaborator.”