People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  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.”

  “But he saved the haggadah. How could he be a collaborator?”

  “Not just the haggadah. He saved Jews, too. But a charge of collaboration was a useful way for the Communists to get rid of anyone who was too intellectual, too religious, too outspoken. He was all of those things. He fought with them a lot, especially when they wanted to tear down the Old City. Horrible urban renewal plans they had, for a while. He helped stop that madness, but it cost him. Six years in solitary confinement—absolutely terrible conditions. Then, suddenly, they pardoned him. That was how it went at that time. He got back his old job at the museum. But probably the time in jail destroyed his health. He died in the 1960s, after a long illness.”

  I raked a hand through my hair, pulling out the pins that secured it.

  “Six years in solitary. I don’t know how anyone copes with that.”

  Ozren was silent for a moment. “No, I don’t know, either.”

  “I mean, it wasn’t like he was a soldier or even a political activist…people like that, you think, well, they know what the stakes are. But he was just a librarian….”

  As soon as I said that, I felt like an idiot. Ozren, after all, was “just” a librarian, and that hadn’t stopped him acting with guts when he’d had to.

  “I mean…”

  “I know what you mean, Hanna. So, tell me: what are your plans?”

  “I’m going to check out the archives at the National Museum tomorrow. See if there’s anything about clasps. Then I’ll be in Boston for a couple of days and I can do some tests on the stains at a friend’s lab there.”

  “Good. Let me know what you find out.”

  “I will…. Ozren…”

  “Hmmm?”

  “How is Alia?”

  “We’re almost finished Winnie-the-Pooh. I thought perhaps I’d read him some Bosnian fairy tales next.”

  I hoped the static on the phone line masked the way my voice went all weird as I mumbled a reply.

  Frau Zweig, the chief archivist at the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, was not at all what I expected. In her late twenties, she was dressed in high black boots, a teensy plaid skirt, and a tight, electric blue jersey that emphasized an enviable figure. Her dark hair was cropped in a jagged bob and streaked in various shades of red and yellow. There was a silver stud in the side of her retroussé nose.

  “You are a friend of Werner?” she said, shocking me further by being the only Viennese I’d ever heard call him by his first name. “He’s a trip, isn’t he? With the velvet suits and that whole last-century thing he’s got going on. I just adore him.”

  She led me down the back stairs of the museum, into the warren of basement rooms. The clip clip of her high-heeled boots echoed on the stone floor. “Sorry to set you up in such a dump,” she said, opening the door to a storeroom whose functional metal shelves were filled with the familiar accoutrements of exhibition spaces—bits of old frames and mounting boards, dismantled display cases, jars of preservative. “I would have put you in my office, but I’m in meetings there practically all day—staff review time, you know. Sooooo boring.” She rolled her eyes like an adolescent resisting a parental directive. “Austrian bureaucracy sucks, you know? I trained in New York City. It was hard to come back here to all this formality.” She wrinkled her small nose. “I wish I could move to Australia. Everyone in New York thought I was from there, you know? I’d say Austria and they’d go, ‘Oh! Such cute kangaroos!’ I let them think that. You guys have such a better reputation than we do. Everyone thinks, Australians: relaxed, funny. Austrians: Old World, stuffy. Should I move there, you think?” I didn’t want to disillusion her, so I didn’t let on that I’d never seen anyone quite as unstuffy as she was in a senior archivist position in Australia.

  There was an archival box on the workbench in the center of the room. Frau Zweig took a box cutter and broke the seals. “Good luck,” she said. “Let me know if you need anything. And give Werner a big kiss from me.” She closed the door, but I could hear the clip of her boots receding down the corridor.

  There were three folders in the box. I doubted anyone had looked at them in a hundred years. All of them were embossed with the museum seal, and the abbreviation K.u.K, which stood for Kaiserlich und Königlich—imperial and royal. The Hapsburgs had the title “emperor” in Austria and “king” in Hungary. I blew the dust off the first folder. It contained just two documents, both in Bosnian. I could tell that one of them was a copy of the bill of sale to the museum from the family named Kohen. The second was a letter, in very fair handwriting. Luckily, there were translations attached to it, probably made for the visiting scholars. I scanned the English version.

  The author of the letter introduced himself as a teacher—h
ence the careful handwriting. He was, he said, an instructor of the Hebrew language at Sarajevo’s maldar. The translator had added a note explaining that this was the name for the elementary schools run by Sephardic Jews. “A son of the Kohen family, being my pupil, brought the haggadah to me. The family, recently bereaved of its breadwinner, desired to alleviate their financial strains by realizing something on the sale of the book…sought my opinion as to its value…. While I have seen dozens of haggadot, some of them very old, I have never seen illuminations of this kind…. On visiting the family to learn more, I found that there was no information regarding the haggadah beyond the fact that it had been in the Kohen family “many years.” The widow said her husband had related that the book had been used when his grandfather conducted seder, which would put it in Sarajevo as early as the mid-eighteenth century…. She said, and I was able to confirm, that the Kohen grandfather in question was a cantor who had trained in Italy….”

  I sat back in the chair. Italy. The Vistorini inscription—Revisto per mi—put the haggadah in Venice in 1609. Had the Kohen grandfather trained in Venice? The Jewish community there would have been much larger and more prosperous than Bosnia’s, and the musical heritage of the city was rich. Had he perhaps acquired the book there?

  I imagined the family, with its educated, cosmopolitan patriarch, gathered at the seder table; the son, growing from child to man, burying his father in due season and taking his place at the head of the table. Dying himself, probably suddenly, since his family had been left in such precarious circumstances. I felt sad for the widow, struggling to feed her kids, raising them alone. And then even sadder, realizing that the kids of those kids must have perished, because there wasn’t a single Jew by the name of Kohen left in Sarajevo after the Second World War.

  I made a note to myself to look into exchanges between the Jewish communities of the Adriatic in the 1700s. Maybe there was a particular Italian yeshiva where Bosnian cantors went to study. It would be great to make an educated guess as to how the haggadah reached Sarajevo.

  But none of this had to do with clasps, so I set that folder aside and reached for the next one. Herman Rothschild, ancient Near Eastern manuscripts specialist of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, unfortunately had handwriting a great deal less legible than the Hebrew teacher’s. His report, ten densely scribbled pages, might as well have been in Bosnian, it was so difficult for me to decipher. But soon enough I discovered that he hadn’t dealt with the binding at all. He had been so dazzled by the fact of the illuminations that his entire report was more of an art history treatise, an aesthetic evaluation of the miniatures in the context of Christian medieval art. I read through his pages, which were erudite and beautifully expressed. I copied down a few lines to quote in my own essay. But none of it was relevant to the matter of the clasps. I set the pages aside and rubbed my eyes. I hoped his French colleague had taken a broader view.

  M. Martell’s report was a complete contrast to that of his British counterpart. In point form, very terse, it was entirely technical. I was yawning as I paged through it, the usual boring enumeration of quires and folios, until I got to the last page. And then I stopped yawning. Martell described, in technospeak, a worn-out, stained, and damaged binding of eroded, ragged kid. He noted that the linen threads were missing or frayed, so that most of the quires were no longer attached to the binding at all. Amazing and fortunate, according to what he described, that pages hadn’t been lost.

  And then there were several short sentences that had been crossed out. I pulled the desk light down to see if I could read what M. Martell had had second thoughts about. No luck. I turned the paper over. Sure enough, the force of his hand had made a partially legible imprint under the strikeout. For several minutes, I puzzled over the letters I could decipher. Reading incomplete French words backward was tricky. But eventually I had most of it, and I knew why it had been crossed out.

  “Pair nonfunctioning, oxidized Ag clasps. Double hook and eye, mechanically exhausted. After cleaning w. dilute NaHCO3, reveal motif of flower enfolded by wing. Chasing = embossed + repoussé. No hallmark.” Here in this museum in 1894, M. Martell had worked his soft cloth and his small brushes over the old and blackened pieces of metal until the silver once again gleamed in the light. For just a moment, the very dispassionate M. Martell had lost his head.

  “The clasps,” he had written, “are extraordinarily beautiful.”

  Feathers and a Rose

  Vienna, 1894

  Vienna is the laboratory of the apocalypse.

  —Karl Kraus

  “FRÄULEIN OPERATOR in Gloggnitz? May I have the honor to wish you a splendid good afternoon? I trust that your day has passed pleasantly so far. The party at this end of the wire, Herr Doktor Franz Hirschfeldt, presents his compliments and would like to extend to you a most grateful kiss on the hand for the favor of completing this connection.”

  “And a very fine afternoon to you, my dear Fräulein Operator in Vienna. Thank you for your good wishes, and please accept in return my most sincere felicitations. I am happy to reply to your kind inquiry by remarking that my day has been very agreeable and I hope that you and your party are likewise enjoying the very delightful summer weather. As the humble representative of my party, may I venture to say that His Excellency the baron looks forward to the opportunity to add his good wishes and…”

  Franz Hirschfeldt held the telephone away from his ear and tapped a pencil against his desk. He had no patience for this time-wasting stream of pleasantries. The words going through his mind were by no means so polite. He longed to cut in, to tell the women to shut up and make the damned connection. He tapped the pencil so hard against the desk’s nickel edge that a portion of it snapped, flew off, crossed the surgery, and landed on the white-sheeted examination table. Didn’t these women know there was a ten-minute time limit on calls out of the city? Sometimes, it seemed to Hirschfeldt as if the entire allotment was squandered before he even got his party on the line. But the last time he’d been short with an operator she’d dropped the connection entirely, so he held his peace.

  It was just another small irritation, like the rub of the shirt collar that the laundress would overstarch, despite his express instructions. There were too many such annoyances in this city: the tedious obsequiousness, the fashion for strangulating collars. It provoked him that he had to be so constantly provoked. He was thirty-six years old, father of two attractive children, married to a woman he still admired, discreetly entertained by a series of mistresses who amused him. He was professionally successful, even prosperous. All this, and he lived in Vienna, which was undoubtedly one of the greatest cities of the world.

  Hirschfeldt lifted his gaze from the desk and let it travel beyond the corniced window as the fräuleins continued to drape their compliments over the length of the telegraph wires. The city had been confident enough to raze its own medieval fortress walls and replace them with the welcoming new sweep of the Ringstrasse; pragmatic enough to embrace the industrialization that dusted the horizon with the haze of prosperity.

  Here was his city, in all her magnificence, capital of an empire that stretched from the Tyrolean Alps, across the Bohemian Massif and the Great Hungarian Plain, to the Dalmatian coast and the wide golden lands of the Ukraine; a cultural hub that attracted the best intellects and the most creative artists—only last night his wife, Anna, had dragged him out to hear that man Mahler’s latest, very strange composition, and wasn’t he from Bohemia or somewhere of that sort? And the exhibition of paintings by Klimt that they’d looked in on—that was something different. Artistic license, he supposed one called it, but the man had a very odd conception of the female anatomy.

  It wasn’t as if nothing moved in Vienna. On the contrary, the city pulsed with the frantic energy of its own great invention, the waltz. And yet…

  And yet seven centuries of Hapsburg monarchy had encrusted the imperial capital with an excess of its own grandeur, buried it under twirls of plaster, mired it in swirls
of thick cream, weighed it down with curlicues of gold braid (even the dustmen had epaulets!), and stupefied it by this stream—no—this cataract, of unctuous courtesies….

  “…if it is still convenient for Herr Doktor Hirschfeldt to entertain the connection, His Excellency the baron would be only too pleased…”

  Well, he would be pleased, thought Hirschfeldt. The fräulein was right about that. The baron would be very pleased. Pleased to hear that he had an inconveniently located boil and not a raging case of syphilis. No need for the near-toxic dose of mercury or the visit to the malaria ward to contract a fever torrid enough to burn out the worse infection. With any luck, the baron hadn’t yet made any foolish, guilty confessions to the baroness. The doctor had counseled him to take his weeping member away, alone, to his mountain lodge, until Hirschfeldt had a chance to examine his paramour.

  The baron’s lover had turned out to be a naive girl whose young flesh was sound and whose story held up to Hirschfeldt’s tactful and astute interrogation. She had just left the surgery, her cornflower eyes red from a little cry. They always had a little cry; the infected from despair, the healthy from relief. But this girl had wept from humiliation. The sheet on the examination table still held the impression of her slender body. She’d been as pale as the sheet, and trembling, when Hirschfeldt had required her to spread her thighs. No hardened courtesan, this one. Hirschfeldt had felt her shame and handled her with delicacy. Sometimes, when prying into the details of a patient’s intimate life, one had to play the bully to get to the truth. But not with this delicate creature, who had been only too willing to recount the short history of her seductions, the first by a literary gentleman, who as it happened was also a patient of Hirschfeldt’s and known to him as a man with a jealous regard for his physical soundness. After no very lengthy affair, he had passed her on to the attentions of the baron.