People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  After a few minutes, one of the guards came up to me and asked if I was ill, and did I need help. I looked up at him, shook my head, and gulped air, trying to stop the sobbing. But I couldn’t get a hold of myself. He crouched down beside me and patted my back. “Somebody died?” he whispered. His voice was very kind. Strong regional accent. Yorkshire, maybe. Yes, I nodded. “My father.”

  “Ah, well, then. That’s hard, luv,” he said.

  After a while, he held out an arm, and I took it, and together we scrambled awkwardly up. I stammered thanks, then I let go of his arm and stumbled through the gallery, trying to find my way to the exit.

  Instead, I found myself in the room with all the Francis Bacon paintings. I stopped in front of the one I’ve always loved best. It’s not a really well-known one and they don’t always hang it. There’s a man, walking away, sort of leaning into the wind, while a black dog does a tail-chasing swirl in the foreground. It’s somehow ominous and innocent at the same time. Bacon just got the dog thing. Absolutely nailed it. But this time, looking at it with my eyes all teary, what registered with me wasn’t the dog at all. It was the bloke. Walking away. I stared at it for a long time.

  The next day, I woke up in my Bloomsbury hotel room feeling light and washed out. I’ve always been suspicious of people who advocate a good cry as a remedy for anything. But I really did feel much better. I determined to focus on the conference. There were actually a couple of useful papers, if you could overlook the twit accents of the people delivering them. The art world in England is an absolute magnet for the second sons of threadbare lords, or women named Annabelle Something-hyphen-Something who dress in black leggings and burnt orange cashmeres and smell faintly of wet Labrador. I always find myself lapsing into Paleolithic Strine when I’m around them, using words I’d never dream of using in real life, like cobber and bonza. In the United States, it’s the opposite. Despite my best efforts, I really have to watch myself or I fall right into what they call “linguistic accommodation.” I start losing the t out of water and plopping down a d instead, or start saying “sidewalk” and “flashlight” when I mean “footpath” and “torch.” I guess I resist it more diligently in England because Mum has always affected a kind of plummy, haut-Pom accent I associate with her snobbery. When I was little, she’d actually wince when I talked to her. “Really, Hanna, your vowels! They sound like a lorry has run over them. Anyone would think I was sending you off to the western suburbs every morning instead of the most expensive crèche in Double Bay.”

  To pull myself out of the funk I’d allowed myself to fall into, I decided to focus on the haggadah catalog essay. What with all the drama back in Boston, I’d fallen behind on the writing, and the printer’s deadline was closing in. A journo friend, Maryanne, who was back visiting her family in Oz, had offered me her cottage in Hampstead, so as soon as the conference was over, I holed myself up there for a couple of days. It was a fantastic little wooden house beside a lumpy graveyard, with deep blue ceanothus and climbing roses cascading over mossy garden walls. It was an old house, creaky, with hobbit proportions—low doorways and wavy ceiling beams that looped down to brain the unwary. Maryanne was short, unlike me. Woe to anyone over five feet ten—which was the height of the kitchen ceiling. I’d been to parties there where the tall guests spent all night hunched over, like furtive gnomes.

  I thought I’d better call Ozren and let him know where I was at with the essay, but when I rang the museum, the assistant librarian answered with a terse, “Not here.”

  “When are you expecting him?”

  “Exactly, I do not know. Maybe here after tomorrow. Maybe no.” I tried his apartment, but the phone rang into empty space. So I just got on with it. I liked writing in Maryanne’s little study, a tiny room under the eaves at the top of the house. It had great light and a view all the way across London. On rare days, when it wasn’t raining or misty or too polluted, you could see the outlines of the South Downs.

  I was pretty confident about the essay. While I hadn’t come up with the big drumroll discovery I always hoped for, I felt that the insights about the Parnassius and the missing clasps broke new ground. I was leaving the finishing touches till after I’d checked out the white hair sample I’d extracted from the binding. I’d asked Amalie Sutter about it. She’d said I could have any number of zoologists at the museum look at it. “But the people who really know hair—animal, human—are the police.” She thought a forensics lab would be the place. Having read rather too many P. D. James novels, I’d decided to leave it till London. I had a fancy to see how the real thing squared with the fiction.

  Lucky for me, Maryanne had really good contacts at the Metropolitan Police. She was a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, and had written a lot about Salman Rushdie, right after the Iranians threatened to top him. She’d been one of the few people Rushdie had trusted enough to see regularly during the worst years, and she’d wound up getting seriously involved with one of the blokes in his Scotland Yard detail. I’d met him once at a party at Maryanne’s—he was definitely a kitchen croucher since he was about six-two and a gorgeous specimen, even when scrunched. He’d finagled an appointment for me at the Metropolitan Police hair-and-fiber lab. “It’s against policy,” Maryanne warned me, “so you’ll need to be discreet about it. But apparently the lab person was just really intrigued by the story about the book and she wanted to do it for you on her own time.”

  I was also keen to know if Ozren had had a chance to follow up on the Parnassius, on checking out which mountain village the haggadah had been hidden in during World War II. If he had any more info, I wanted to include it in the essay. Generally, these kind of essays are dry as Lake Eyre. Very technical, like the report by the French guy in Vienna, Martell. Full of riveting stuff like how many quires there are and how many leaves per quire, the state of the binding threads, the number of sewing holes, and so on, and on, ho hum. I wanted this one to be different. I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful. So I wrote and rewrote certain sections of historical background to use as seasoning between the discussion of technical issues. I tried to give a sense of the Convivencia, of poetry parties on summer nights in beautiful formal gardens, of Arabic-speaking Jews mixing freely with Muslim and Christian neighbors. Although I couldn’t know the story of the scribe or the illuminator, I tried to give a sense of each of them by explaining the details of their crafts and what medieval pavilions of the book were like and where such artisans fitted into the social milieu. Then, I wanted to build up a certain tension around the dramatic, terrible reversals of the Inquisition and the expulsion. I wanted to convey fire and shipwreck and fear.

  When the writing stalled, I called up the local Hampstead rabbi and quizzed him on salt—What made it kosher? “You’d be surprised how many people ask me that,” he said, a trifle wearily. “Generally speaking, it’s not the salt that’s kosher, it’s the fact that it’s the right kind of salt for koshering meat—brining it, in other words, to get the traces of blood out, because Jews who keep kosher don’t consume blood.”

  “So what you’re saying is any salt with a large crystal structure could be kosher salt? It doesn’t matter if it’s mined rock salt or evaporated from the sea or what?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “And also it should have no additives. If it had, say, dextrose, which is added to some salt along with iodine, that would be an issue at Passover, because dextrose comes from corn.”

  I didn’t bother to get him to explain to me why corn wasn’t kosher at Passover, since I was pretty sure no one was adding dextrose to any salt that would have been used around the haggadah. But I did use the fact that the salt stains came from sea salt as a way into describing the haggadah’s sea voyage, probably at the time of the expulsion, working in quotes from some vivid contemporary accounts of those terrible forced journeys.

  I’d got as far
as Venice, the Jewish community there in the original ghetto, the pressures of censorship in general and on Jewish books in particular, the threads of commerce and culture that bound the Jewish communities of Italy with those across the Adriatic, the suggestion that the book might have come to Bosnia with an Italian-trained cantor named Kohen. I was so engrossed in the writing—it can get that way, on good days, when you fall down a rabbit hole and the rest of the world disappears—that I almost exploded when the doorbell rang.

  I could see a courier’s van parked in the lane and I went down to open the door, unreasonably pissed off that some package for Maryanne had broken my concentration. But what the courier had was an envelope for me, from the Tate. I signed and opened it, wondering what it could be. Inside was an express letter that had already been forwarded once, from Boston. The damn thing had been chasing me around the world.

  I slit the envelope, curious. Inside was a copy of an ambrotype and a screed in flamboyant handwriting from Frau Zweig. The photo was of a man and women, formally posed—she seated, he standing behind with his hand on her shoulder. Someone, Frau Zweig, I assumed, had drawn a circle around the woman’s head, which was turned in three-quarter profile. An arrow pointed to her earring.

  Frau Zweig’s letter had no preamble, no salutation. It was the written version of a squeal.

  “Check it out!!!

  “Is the Frau wearing part of our missing clasp??? Remember Martell’s description of the wing??? Turns out Mittl died of arsenic poisoning just after he worked on the haggadah. He had the clap (like at least half the citizens of Vienna!) and this Frau’s husband, Dr. Franz Hirschfeldt, was his clap doctor. I was only able to find all this because they actually TRIED Hirschfeldt for Mittl’s murder. He got off—he was only trying to help the guy—but the case has been written up a lot lately as part of our long-stalled soul search into Austrian anti-Semitism.

  “Call me when you get this!”

  Of course, I got right on the phone.

  “I thought you’d never call! I thought, I know Australians are laid back, but how blasé can she be?”

  I explained about the letter, and how I’d just that minute received it. “Now, if we can only find the other piece—the roses. I’m still on the hunt, believe me. It’s MUCH more fun than anything else I have to do here….”

  I glanced at my watch and realized that if I didn’t hoof it, I was going to miss my appointment at the Yard. I blathered an effusive thanks to Frau Zweig and shrugged on a jacket as I tried to find the number of a cab. I was way too late to get there on the Tube. While I waited for the cab to show up, I tried Ozren again. I wanted to tell him the news about the clasps, and also maybe have a little brag to him about how well the writing was going. The assistant at the museum was as brusque as she’d been the day before: “Not here. Call back.”

  I’d ordered a gypsy cab because London black cabs have gotten ridiculously expensive. I almost had a seizure on the way in from Heathrow when the meter for the trip hit the equivalent of a hundred Australian dollars and we weren’t even out of Hammersmith. The cab that turned up was a shabby gray van, but the driver was a great-looking West Indian, with wonderful long dreads. The van smelled faintly of ganja. He gave a textbook double take when I said where I wanted to go.

  “You Babylon, mon?”

  “What?”

  “Are you filth?”

  “Oh. You mean a rozzer? No way, mate. Just visiting the rozzers.”

  He stopped a couple of blocks short of the actual address, anyway. “They got sniffer dogs there, mon,” he explained. Since he charged me only ten quid for a trip that would’ve set me back about sixty in the black cab, I didn’t complain, even though it was raining. The rain in London isn’t like the stuff in Sydney. There, it doesn’t rain a whole lot, but when it does, you know about it: big, lacerating downpours that turn the roads into cataracts. In London the drizzle is more or less constant, but it’s hardly even worth putting up your umbrella, it’s so fine. I’ve actually won quite a few drinks from people in London, betting on which of the two cities has the higher average rainfall.

  There was a woman hovering just inside the main entrance. She came out as soon as I started climbing the steps.

  “Dr. Heath?”

  I nodded. She was a tweedy matron of about sixty, built like a brick dunny. She looked more like the stereotype of a prison guard than a scientist. She shook my hand in a hard grip and, without letting go, sort of rotated me on the steps and propelled me back down toward the street.

  “I’m Clarissa Montague-Morgan.” Another Something-hypen-Something, although this one lacked the Sloany style, and the faint smell she gave off was lab chemicals, not Labs. “I’m terribly sorry I can’t invite you in,” she said, as if I’d arrived at her flat for high tea or something. “But there are quite strict protocols here, protecting the chain of evidence and so forth. It really is extraordinarily difficult to get permission for a nonstaff visitor, especially a non–law enforcement individual.”

  I was disappointed; I’d wanted to see how she went about evaluating the hair, and said so.

  “Well, I can tell you all about that,” she said. “But why don’t we just pop in here, out of the rain? I’m on tea break, I have about fifteen minutes.”

  We were outside a dreary little Laminex-table sandwich shop. There were no other customers. We both ordered tea. Even in crummy establishments in London, you can generally get proper tea, in a pot, unlike the bag on the side of a cup of tepid water that you often get even in high-end American places.

  As soon as the tea came, piping hot and very strong, Clarissa started in on the subject of hair analysis. She spoke in clipped, clear, very precise sentences. I wouldn’t have wanted her as a witness against me in court.

  “The first question we would ask, if it were a crime-scene matter, is, human or animal? That’s very easily determined. You look first at the cuticle of the hair. The hair scales on humans are readily identifiable and rather smooth, but on animals they’re various—petal shaped, spinous—depending on the species. You make a scale cast to see the pattern more clearly. In the rare case the scales are not definitive, there’s always the medulla—the central core of the hair. Cells there are very regular in animals but amorphous in humans. And then there’s pigment. Pigment granules in animal hair are distributed toward the medulla, in humans it’s toward the cuticle. Have you got the sample there?”

  I handed it to her. She put on her glasses, held the envelope up to the fluorescent light, and peered at it.

  “Unfortunate,” she said.

  “What?”

  “No root. Under magnification it can reveal a wealth of information. And the DNA’s there, of course, so you’re out of luck with that. You always get root tissue in hair that has been naturally shed—mammals are shedding about a third of their hair at any given time, you know…. But I’d say this hair has been cut; not shed, not pulled. I’ll verify all this when I get back to the lab.”

  “Have you ever solved a crime with a hair sample?”

  “Oh, quite a few. The least challenging are the ones where you’ve got human hair on the body of the victim that you can DNA match with the suspect. Puts the suspect at the crime scene for you. My favorite cases are a bit more involved. There was the chap who strangled his ex-wife. He’d moved to Scotland after the marriage broke up, she still lived in London, and he’d been ever so careful to build a good alibi. Said he was at his parents’ home in Kent all day. Well, he was there, part of the day. The investigating officer noticed that the parents had a yappy little Peke. The hairs from that dog matched hairs found on the victim’s clothing. That wouldn’t have been definitive, but it certainly got the investigating officer’s attention. A search of the chap’s house in Glasgow turned up a recently dug flower bed. We excavated it, and found he’d buried the clothes he wore to do the murder, and they were covered in Pekingese dog hair.”

  Clarissa glaced at her watch then, and said she’d best be getting back to wo
rk. “I’ll look at this tonight for you. Call me at home around nine p.m.—here’s the number—and I’ll tell you what I’ve found.”

  I took the Tube back to Hampstead since I wasn’t in a rush, and went for a nice soggy walk on the heath. Back at Maryanne’s, I heated a mug of soup and went upstairs with it, to polish up my essay. I decided to see if I could reach Ozren at his flat.

  Someone picked up the phone on the first ring. A man’s voice, not Ozren’s, answered with a muted, “Molim?”

  “Excuse me, I don’t speak Bosnian. Is—is Ozren there?”

  The man switched easily into English, but kept his voice so low I could hardly make out what he was saying. “Ozren, he is here, but he is not taking calls right now. Who is this, please?”

  “My name’s Hanna Heath. I am a colleague of Ozren’s—I mean, I worked with him for a few days last month, I—”

  “Miss Heath.” He cut me off. “Could I suggest that someone else at the library help you? It is not a good time. Just now, my friend is not thinking about his work.”

  I got that feeling you get when you’re about to ask a question and you already know the answer, and you don’t want to hear it.

  “What’s happened? Is it Alia?”

  The voice at the other end gave a long sigh. “Yes, I am sorry to say. My friend got a call from the hospital the night before last, saying that the boy had a high fever. It was a massive infection. He died this morning. We bury him soon.”

  I swallowed hard. I didn’t know what to say. The conventional thing in Arabic is to say, “May all your sorrows now be behind you.” But I didn’t have a clue what Bosnian Muslims said to each other to express condolences.