People of the Book (6 page)

I told him if I wanted to hear psychobabble, I could visit a shrink cheap on Medibank. I’m not casual about sex, far from it. I’m actually very picky. I prefer the fit few to the mediocre masses. But I’m not big on wringing out other people’s soggy hankies, and if I wanted a partner, I’d join a law firm. If I do choose to be with someone, I want it to stay light and fun. It gives me no pleasure, none at all, to hurt people’s feelings, especially not tragic cases like Ozren, who is clearly a spectacular human being, brave and intelligent and all the rest of it. Even handsome, if you can cope with the unkempt thing. I felt bad about the botanist, too. But he’d started talking about bush-walking with kids in the backpack. I had to let him go. I wasn’t even twenty-five at the time. Kids are definitely a midlife luxury, in my opinion.

As for my dysfunctional so-called family, it’s true that I’ve inherited a core belief, to wit: don’t rely on some other sod for your emotional sustenance. Find something absorbing to do—something so absorbing that you don’t have time to dwell on the woe-is-me stuff. My mother loves her work, I love mine. So the fact that we don’t love each other…well, I hardly ever think about it.

When Ozren was done with his seals and strings, I walked with him down the stairs of the bank building for what would be the last time. If I came back to Sarajevo for the opening, the book would be where it belonged, in its nice, new, state-of-the-art, securely guarded display space at the museum. I waited for Ozren to put the book in the vault, but when he came back up, he was in conversation in Bosnian with the guards, and he did not turn.

The guard unlocked the front door for him.

“Good night,” I said. “Good-bye. Thank you.”

He had his hand on the ornate silver door pull. He looked back at me and nodded curtly. Then he pushed the door open and walked out into the dark. I went back upstairs, alone, to pack up my tools.

I had my glassine envelopes with the bit of insect’s wing and the single white hair from the binding, and tiny samples, each no bigger than the full stop at the end of a sentence, that I’d lifted on scalpel tip from the pages that were stained. I placed these things carefully in my document case. Then I paged through my notebook to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I skimmed the notes I’d made the first day, when I’d dismantled the binding. I saw the memo I’d scribbled about the channels in the board edges and my query to myself about missing clasps.

To get to London from Sarajevo, you had to change planes in Vienna. I was planning to use that necessary stopover to accomplish two things. I had an old acquaintance—an entomologist—who was a researcher and curator at the Naturhistorisches Museum there. She could help me identify the insect fragment. I also wanted to visit my old teacher, Werner Heinrich. He was a dear man, kind and courtly, sort of like the grandfather I’d never had. I knew he’d be keen to hear about my work on the haggadah, and I also wanted to get his advice. Maybe his influence would allow me to break through Viennese formalities at the museum where the rebinding had been done in 1894. If he could get me access to the archives, it was just possible I’d find some old records about the condition of the book when it arrived at the museum. I put the notebook in my case. Last of all, I slipped in the large manila envelope from the hospital.

I’d forged the request in my mother’s name and made the wording ambiguous: “…asked to consult at the request of a colleague of Dr. Karaman in the case of his son….” They knew her name, even here. She’d coauthored a text on aneurysms that was the standard reference in the field. Not that I was in the habit of asking her for favors. But she’d said she was heading to Boston to give a paper at the American neurosurgeons’ annual gabfest, and I had a client in Boston, a bezillionaire and a major manuscripts collector, who’d been after me to look at a codex he was thinking of buying from a Houghton Library deaccessioning sale.

Australians in general are pretty casual about traveling. If you grow up there, you basically get trained in long-haul flights—fifteen hours, twenty-four—it’s what we’re used to. For us, eight hours across the Atlantic seems like a doddle. He’d offered to pay for a firstclass ticket, and I don’t usually get to sit in the pointy end. I figured I could cram in the appraisal, pick up a nice fee, and be back in London in time to deliver my paper at the Tate. Usually I would have arranged my itinerary so that Mum and I would just miss each other. There’d be a brief telephone call: “What a pity!” “Yes, can you believe it?” Each outdoing the other in insincerity. The night before, when I’d suggested we actually meet up in Boston, there’d been a minute of dead air on the phone, the crackle of Sarajevo-to-Sydney static. Then, in an affectless voice: “How nice. I’ll try to find a time.”

I didn’t ask myself why exactly I was subjecting myself to this. Why I was butting in, invading a man’s privacy, flouting his wishes, which could not have been expressed more clearly. I suppose the answer was that if something can be known, I can’t stand not knowing it. In that way, Alia’s brain scans were just like the bits of fiber in my glassine envelopes, messages in a code that expert eyes might just be able to read for me.

V

V
IENNA SEEMED
to be doing rather well off the fall of communism. The whole of the city was getting a makeover, like a wealthy matron going under the knife. As my taxi merged with the traffic on the Ringstrasse, I saw construction cranes everywhere, bowing over the city’s wedding cake skyline. Light flared off the freshly gilded Hofburg friezes, and sandblasters had flushed the soot off dozens of neo-Renaissance facades, revealing the warm cream stone that had been obscured by centuries of grime. Western capitalists evidently wanted spruced-up headquarters for all their new joint ventures with neighboring countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic. And now they had cheap laborers from the east to do the work.

When I’d been in Vienna in the early 1980s on a traveling scholarship, it had been a gray, grimy place. Every building was filthy, although I didn’t realize that at the time. I thought they were all meant to be black. I’d found it a depressing place and a bit creepy. Vienna’s location, teetering at the far edge of Western Europe, had made it a Cold War listening post. The stout matrons and the loden-clad gents with their bourgeois solidity existed in an atmosphere that always seemed a little stirred, a little charged, like the air after lightning. But I had liked the gilded rococo
Kaffeehäuser
and the music, which was everywhere—the city’s pulse and its heartbeat. The joke was that anyone in Vienna who wasn’t carrying a musical instrument was either a pianist, a harpist, or a foreign spy.

One didn’t think of the city as a hub of science, and yet it had its share of high-tech businesses and innovative labs. My old mate Amalie Sutter, the entomologist, headed one of them. I’d met Amalie years earlier, when she was a postdoc, living about as far as you could get from gilded rococo cafés. I came across her on the side of a mountain in remote northern Queensland. She lived in an upended, corrugated-iron water tank. I was backpacking at the time. I dropped out of my expensive, elitist girl’s school at sixteen, which was the first possible moment I could get free of it. I’d tried to get them to expel me earlier, but they were too scared of Mum to go for it, no matter what outrages against decorum I managed to devise. I walked out of our palatial home and joined that shifting band—the healthy Scandinavian kids on working holidays, the surfie dropouts, and the gaunt druggies—drifting north to Byron Bay and then on up the coast, past Cairns, past Cooktown, until the road ran out.

I’d traveled almost two thousand clicks to get away from my mother, and I ended up finding someone who was, in some ways, exactly like her. Or like she might have been in a parallel universe. Amalie was my mother stripped of social pretensions and material ambition. But she was just as driven by what she did, which was to study how a certain species of butterfly relied on ants to keep its caterpillars safe from predators. She let me stay in her water tank and taught me all about compostable toilets and solar showers. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I now think those weeks on the mountain, watching the way she looked at the world with this close, passionate
attention,
the way she busted her butt just for the chance to find out something new about how the world worked, were what turned me around and headed me back to Sydney, to start my real life.

Years later, when I came to Vienna and apprenticed myself to Werner Heinrich, I ran into her again. Werner had asked me to investigate the DNA of a book louse he’d extracted from a binding, and someone said the DNA lab over at the Naturhistorisches Museum was the best in the city. At the time I thought that seemed odd. The museum was a fantastic antique of a place, full of moth-eaten stuffed animals and nineteenth-century gentlemen’s rock collections. I loved to wander around in there because you never knew what you’d find. It was like a cabinet of curiosities. There was a rumor, though I’d never confirmed it, that they even had the severed head of the Turkish vizier who’d lost the seige of Vienna in 1623. Supposedly, they kept him in the basement.

But Amalie Sutter’s lab was a state-of-the-art facility for the research of evolutionary biology. I remembered the rather bizarre directions to her office: take the elevator to the third floor, follow the skeleton of the
diplodocus,
and when you reach the jawbone, her door is on the left. An assistant told me she was in the collections room and walked me down the corridor. I opened the door to a pungent blast of mothball odor. There was Amalie, pretty much as I’d left her, poring over a drawer full of silvery blue shimmer.

She was pleased to see me, but even more pleased to see my specimen. “I thought you were bringing me another book louse.” Last time, she’d had to grind it up to extract the DNA, amplify it, and then wait days to do an analysis. “But this,” she said, holding the envelope carefully. “This, if I’m not much mistaken, is going to be a lot easier. I think what you’ve got here is an old friend of mine.”

“A moth?”

“No, not a moth.”

“It can’t be part of a
butterfly
?” Bits of butterfly don’t generally wind up in books. Moths do, because they come indoors, where books are kept. But butterflies are outdoor creatures.

“I think it might be.” She stood and closed the collection cabinet. We walked back to her office, where she scanned the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, then hauled down a huge tome on wing veination. She pushed open a tall door that had a life-size picture of her as a graduate student, in the Malaysian rain forest, brandishing a four-meter butterfly net. It was remarkable how little she’d aged since then. I think her absolute enthusiasm for her work acted on her like some kind of preservative. On the other side of the door was a gleaming lab, with postdocs wielding pipettes and peering at DNA graphs on computer monitors. She gently lifted my little bit of wing onto a slide and placed it under a powerful microscope.

“Hello, lovely,” she said. “It
is
you.” She looked up and beamed at me. She hadn’t even glanced at the veination diagrams. “
Parnassius mnemosyne leonhardiana.
Common throughout Europe.”

Damn. My heart sank, and my face must have shown it. No new information there. Amalie’s smile widened. “Not much help?” She beckoned me to follow her back down the corridor to the room filled with collection cabinets. She stopped in front of one and opened the tall metal door with a clang. She slid out a wooden drawer. Rows of
Parnassius
butterflies hovered in their perpetual stasis, afloat forever above their carefully lettered names.

The butterflies were lovely in a subtle, muted way. They had creamy white forewings, splashed with black dots. The rear wings were almost translucent, like lead glass, divided into panes by the distinct tracery of black veins. “Not the flashiest butterfly in the world by any means,” said Amalie. “But collectors love them. Perhaps because you have to climb a mountain to get one.” She closed the drawer and turned to me. “Common throughout Europe, yes. But confined to high alpine systems, generally around two thousand meters. The caterpillars of the
Parnassius
feed only on an alpine variety of larkspur that grows in steep, stony environments. Your manuscript, Hanna, dear. Has it been on a trip to the Alps?”

Sarajevo, 1940

T
HE WIND BLEW ACROSS
the Miljacka River, hard as a slap. Lola’s thin coat was no protection. She ran across the narrow bridge, her hands thrust deep in her pockets. On the other side of the river, a set of rough-hewn stone stairs rose abruptly, leading to a warren of narrow lanes lined with shabby apartment buildings. Lola took the stairs two at a time and turned in to the second alleyway, sheltered at last from the bitter gusts.

It was not yet midnight, so the outer door to her building hadn’t been locked. Inside, it was not much warmer than on the street. She steadied herself and took a moment to catch her breath. A heavy smell of boiled cabbage and fresh cat piss hung over the foyer. Lola crept up the stairs and gently turned the latch on her family’s apartment. Although her right hand reached up instinctively to touch the mezuzah on the doorjamb before she slipped inside, Lola could not have said why. She took off her coat, unlaced her boots, and carried them as she tiptoed past the sleeping forms of her mother and father. The apartment was one room, with a dividing curtain the only privacy.

Her little sister was just a bulge beneath the quilt. Lola lifted the coverlet and slid in beside her. Dora was curled up like a small animal, radiating welcome heat. Lola reached for the warmth of her sister’s back. The child protested in her sleep, uttering a tiny cry and pulling away. She tucked her icy hands into her own armpits. Despite the cold, her face was still flushed, her brow still damp from the dancing, and if her father woke, he might notice that.

Lola loved the dancing. That was what had lured her to the Young Guardians meetings. She liked the hiking, too; the long, hard walks in the mountains to a hanging lake or the ruins of an ancient fortress. The rest of it, she didn’t care much for. The endless discussions of politics bored her. And the Hebrew—she didn’t even enjoy reading in her own language, much less struggling to decode the strange black squiggles that Mordechai was always trying to get her to remember.

She thought about his arm across her shoulder in the circle. She could still feel the pleasant weight of it, muscular from farm labor. When he’d rolled up his sleeves, his forearm had been brown and hard as a hazelnut. Even though she didn’t know the steps, it was easy to follow the dance with him beside her, smiling encouragement. A Sarajevan—even a poor one like Lola—would never give a second glance to a Bosnian peasant. Never mind if the farmer was quite well-off, a city person felt superior. But Mordechai was another thing entirely. He’d grown up in Travnik, which, while not Sarajevo, was a fine town nevertheless. He was educated; he’d attended the gymnasium. Yet two years earlier, at the age of seventeen, he’d gone off on a boat to Palestine to work on a farm. And not a prosperous farm either, by his description. A dried-out, barren piece of dust where you had to break your back to raise a crop. And for no profit, just the food in your mouth and the work clothes on your back. Worse than a peasant, really. Yet when he talked about it, it was as if there was no more fascinating or noble profession in the world than digging irrigation ditches and harvesting dates.

Lola loved listening to Mordechai when he talked about all the practical things a pioneer had to know, like how to treat a scorpion bite or stanch a bad cut; how to site a sanitary latrine or improvise a shelter. Lola knew she would never leave home to pioneer in Palestine, but she liked to think about the kind of adventurous life that might demand such skills. And she liked to think about Mordechai. The way he spoke reminded her of the old Ladino songs her grandfather had sung to her when she was a little girl. He had a seed stand at the open-air market, and Lola’s mother would sometimes leave her there with him while she worked. Grandfather was full of tales of knights and hidalgos, and poems from a magic place called Sepharad, where he said their ancestors had lived long ago. Mordechai spoke about his new land as if it were Sepharad. He told the group that he couldn’t wait to get back there, to Eretz Israel. “I am jealous of every sunrise I am not there to see the white stones of the Jordan Valley turn to gold.”

Lola didn’t speak up in the group discussions. She felt stupid compared to the others. Many of them were Svabo Jijos, Yiddish-speaking Jews, who had come to the city with the Austrian occupation in the late nineteenth century. Ladino-speaking families like Lola’s had been in the city since 1565, when Sarajevo was part of the Ottoman empire, and the Muslim sultan had offered refuge from Christian persecution. Most of those who came had been wandering since the expulsion from Spain in 1492, unable to find a permanent home. They had found peace in Sarajevo, and acceptance, but only a few families had really prospered. Most remained small-time merchants like her grandfather, or artisans with simple skills. The Svabo Jijos were more educated, more European in their outlook. Very soon they had much better jobs and were blending with the highest ranks of Sarajevan society. Their children went to the gymnasium and even sometimes to the university. At the Young Guardians, they were the natural leaders.

One was the daughter of a city councilor, one the son of the pharmacist, a widower, for whom Lola’s mother did laundry. Another girl’s father was a bookkeeper at the finance ministry, where Lola’s father worked as a janitor. But Mordechai treated everyone as an equal, so gradually she gathered enough courage to ask a question.

“But Mordechai,” she’d asked shyly, “aren’t you glad to be home in your own country, speaking your own language, not having to work so hard?”

Mordechai had turned to her with a smile. “This isn’t my home,” he said gently. “And it isn’t yours, either. The only true home for Jews is Eretz Israel. And that’s why I’m here, to tell you all about the life you could have, to prepare you, and to bring you back with me, to build our Jewish homeland.”

He raised his arms, as if including her in a communal embrace. “‘If you will it, it is no dream.’” He paused, letting the words hang in the air. “A great man said that, and I believe it. What about you, Lola, will you act your dreams, and make them real?” She blushed, unused to the attention, and Mordechai smiled kindly. Then he spread his hands to include the whole group. “But think of this. What do you will? Is it to do the pigeon dance, scratching around for the crumbs of others, or will you be desert hawks, and soar to your own destiny?”

Isak, the pharmacist’s son, was a slight, studious boy with pencil-thin limbs. Lola’s mother often opined that for all his learning, the pharmacist didn’t have the first idea about how to properly feed a growing child. But of all the young people in the hall, Isak alone fidgeted impatiently during Mordechai’s rhetorical flight. Mordechai noticed and turned the full force of his warmth upon him. “What is it, Isak? Do you have a view to share with us?”

Isak pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Maybe what you say is true for Jews in Germany. We all hear troubling news from there. But not here. Anti-Semitism has never been part of our lives in Sarajevo. Look where the synagogue is: between the mosque and the Orthodox church. I’m sorry, but Palestine is the Arabs’ home, not yours. Certainly not mine. We are Europeans. Why turn our backs on a country that has offered us prosperity and education, in order to become a peasant among people who don’t want us?”

“So, you are happy to be a pigeon?” Mordechai said this with a smile, but his intention to belittle Isak was clear, even to Lola. Isak pinched the bridge of his nose and scratched his head.

“Maybe so. But at least the pigeon does no harm. The hawk lives at the expense of the other creatures that dwell in the desert.”

Lola had listened to the two of them argue until her head ached. She had no idea who was right. She turned over on the thin mattress and tried to quiet her mind. She had to get to sleep, otherwise she’d nod off over her tasks the next day, and her father would want to know why. Lola worked in the laundry with her mother, Rashela. If she was tired, it was a chore to walk the streets of the city with her heavy baskets, delivering fresh starched linens and picking up soiled clothes. The warm, moist steam would make her drowsy when she was supposed to be tending the copper. Her mother would find her, slumped in a corner, as the water cooled and a greasy scum congealed on the surface.

Lujo, her father, was not a harsh man, but he was a strict and practical one. At first, he had allowed her to go to the Young Guardians, Hashomer Haza’ir in Hebrew, after her work was done. His friend Mosa, the custodian at the Jewish community center, had spoken in favor of the group, saying it was a harmless and wholesome youth organization, like the Gentiles’ Scouts. But then Lola had fallen asleep and let the fire that heated the copper go out. Her mother had scolded, and her father had asked why. When he learned that there was a dance, the hora, which boys and girls did together, he’d banned her from attending any more meetings. “You are only fifteen, daughter. When you are a little older, we will find a nice fiancé to partner with you, and then you may dance.’’

She had pleaded, saying she would sit down during the dances. “There are things I can learn there,” she said.

“Things!” said Lujo contemptuously. “Things that will help you earn bread for your family? No? I did not think so. Wild ideas. Communistic ideas, from what I have heard. Ideas that are banned in our country and will get you into trouble you don’t need. And a dead language that no one speaks, save for a handful of old men in the synagogue. Really, I don’t know what Mosa was thinking. I will look to your honor, even if others forget the value of these things. Hiking, on Sunday, I don’t mind it, if your mother has no chores for you. But from now on you spend your evenings at home.”

From then on, in fact, Lola had begun to lead an exhausting double life. Hashomer met two nights a week. On those nights, she went to bed early, with her little sister. Sometimes, when she had worked very hard, it took an immense effort of will to keep herself awake, listening to the gentle, even breathing of Dora’s little body next to her. But mostly her anticipation made it easy to feign sleep until her parents’ snores told her it was safe to leave. Then she would creep out, scrambling into her clothes on the landing and hoping no neighbors came out of their doors to notice.

On the evening that Mordechai told the group he was leaving, Lola at first did not understand him. “I am going home,” he said. Lola thought he meant Travnik. Then she realized he was taking a freighter back to Palestine, and that she would never see him again. He invited everyone to come to the train station on the day of his departure, to see him off. Then he announced that Avram, an apprentice printer, had decided to go with him.

“He is the first. I hope many of you will follow.” He glanced at Lola, and it seemed to her that his gaze lingered. “Whenever you come home, we will be there to welcome you.”

The day that Mordecai and Avram were to leave, Lola longed to go to the train station, but her mother had an immense amount of laundry to do. Rashela toiled with the heavy iron while Lola took her accustomed place at the copper and the mangle. At the hour when Mordechai’s train was to depart for the coast, Lola stared at the gray walls of the laundry, watching the steam condense and trickle down the cold stone. The smell of mold filled her nostrils. She tried to imagine the hard white sunlight that Mordechai had described, silvering the leaves of olive trees, and the scent of orange blossoms blooming in the stone-walled gardens of Jerusalem.

The leader who took Mordechai’s place, a young man named Samuel from Novi Sad, was a competent teacher of outdoor skills, but lacked the charisma that had kept Lola awake on meeting nights. Now, more often than not, she fell asleep herself as she waited for her exhausted parents to drop off. She would wake to the
khoja
’s dawn prayer call, rallying their Muslim neighbors to devotions. She would realize she had missed a meeting and feel only slight regret.

Other boys and girls did follow Avram and Mordechai to Palestine, each time with a big send-off at the railway station. Occasionally they would write back to the group. Always there was a sameness to the reports; the work was hard, but the land was worth any effort, and to be a Jew building a Jewish land was what mattered most in the world. Lola sometimes wondered about these letters. Surely someone was homesick? Surely such a life could not agree with everyone who tried it? But it seemed as if those who left all became one person, speaking with the same monotonous voice.

The tempo of departures picked up as the news from Germany worsened. The annexation of Austria put the Reich hard up against their borders. But life at the community center went on as usual, the old people meeting for coffee and gossip, the religious for their Oneg Shabbat on Friday night. There was no sense of danger, even when the government turned a blind eye to the fascist gangs who began to roam the streets, harassing anyone they knew to be a Jew, getting into fistfights with the Gypsies. “They are just louts.” Lujo shrugged. “Every community has its louts, even ours. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Sometimes, when Lola was collecting soiled laundry from an apartment in the affluent part of the city, she would catch sight of Isak, always with a heavy book bag slung across his shoulder. He was at the university now, studying chemistry as his father had. Lola wanted to ask him what he thought of the louts, and whether it worried him that France had fallen. But she was embarrassed by the basket of sour-smelling garments she carried. And she wasn’t sure she knew enough to ask the questions in a way that would not disclose her as a fool.

When Stela Kamal heard a light knock on the door of her apartment, she reached up to the crown of her head and pulled down her lace veil before she went to answer it. She had been in Sarajevo for a little more than a year, but she still clung to the more conservative ways of Priština, where no traditional Muslim family allowed its women to show their faces to a strange man.

That afternoon, though, her caller was not a man; just the laundress her husband had arranged. Stela felt sorry for the young girl. On her back she carried a wicker pannier laden with pressed laundry. Over the shoulder straps for this, she had slung calico bags full of soiled items. She looked tired and chilled. Stela offered her a hot drink.