People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  “Is Ozren all right? I mean—”

  He cut me off again. Apparently Sarajevans didn’t have a lot of time for the easy sentiment of outsiders. “He is a father who has lost his only son. No, he is not ‘all right.’ But if you mean is he going to jump into the Miljacka, then no, I do not think so.”

  I felt bleak and sick to my stomach, but this unwarranted sarcasm curdled all those feelings into a clot of anger. “There’s no need to take that tone, I’m just trying—”

  “Miss Heath, I mean, Dr. Heath. The other book expert said you were Dr. Heath, I should have remembered that. I am sorry I was rude. But we are all very tired here, and rather busy with the funeral arrangements, and your colleague stayed such a long while—”

  “What colleague?” It was my turn, now, to be abrupt.

  “The Israeli, Dr. Yomtov.”

  “He was there?”

  “I assumed you knew. He said you were working together on the haggadah.”

  “Oh, uh, sort of.” Amitai may well have left a message at my Sydney lab saying he was going to Sarajevo and someone there forgot to tell me. But I doubted it. His presence in the city was baffling. And I couldn’t think why on earth he would go to Ozren’s apartment. With the man grieving for his dead son, it was beyond peculiar. But I wasn’t going to get anything more out of this bloke, that was clear. The handset was practically in the cradle at his end as I was in the middle of asking him to tell Ozren how sorry I was.

  I had been of two minds about going on to Sarajevo from London. But suddenly I was calling the airline to arrange a ticket. I told myself it was to find out what Amitai was up to. As I said, I’m not a soggy Kleenex kind of person. A grieving father isn’t really my thing at all, so the thought of seeing Ozren again, under these circumstances, could hardly figure into the decision.

  I was on hold with the airline for quite a while, working out connections, and as soon as I put the phone down, it rang.

  “Dr. Heath? It’s Clarissa Montague-Morgan from the Metropolitan Police Forensics Unit.”

  “Oh, hi. I was going to ring you at nine, I…” I wondered how she’d gotten the number at Maryanne’s, since I hadn’t given it to her. But then, I guess if you work at Scotland Yard, you can easily find out that sort of thing.

  “Never mind, Dr. Heath. I just thought that my findings were rather interesting, and I wanted to share them with you. It’s a cat hair, we can be definitive about that. The cuticle scales are prototypically sharp and pointed. But there’s something quite odd about your sample.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the cuticle, you see. There are trace particles there, where you don’t see them in animals, of very strong dyes in the yellow spectrum. You might see such particles in human hair—if a woman had colored or highlighted her hair, for example. But I’ve never seen it in an animal sample before. I think you’d agree with me that cats, in general, do not dye their hair.”

  A White Hair

  Seville, 1480

  My eyes seep sorrow; water skins with holes.

  —Abid bin al-Abras

  WE DO NOT FEEL the sun here. Even after the passage of years, that is still the hardest thing for me. At home, I lived in brightness. Heat baked the yellow earth and dried the roof thatch until it crackled.

  Here, the stone and tile are cool always, even at midday. Light steals in among us like an enemy, fingering its narrow way through the lattices or falling from the few high panes in dulled fragments of emerald and ruby.

  It is hard to do my work in such light. I must be always moving the page to get a small square of adequate brightness, and this constant fidgeting breaks my concentration. I set down my brush and stretch my hands. The boy beside me rises unbidden and goes to fetch the sherbet girl. She is new here, in the house of Netanel ha-Levi, and I wonder how he came by her. Perhaps, like me, she was the gift of some grateful patient. If so, a generous one. She is a skilled servant, gliding across the tiles silent as silk. I nod, and she kneels, pouring a rust-colored liquid that I do not recognize. “It is pomegranate,” she says, in an unfamiliar tribal accent. She has green eyes, like the sea, but her skin gleams with the tones of some southern land. As she bends over the goblet, the cloth at her throat falls away and I note that her neck is the golden brown of a bruised peach. I puzzle on what hues I would combine to render this. The sherbet is good; she has mixed it so that the tartness of the fruit still tells beneath the syrup.

  “God bless your hands,” I say as she rises.

  “May the blessings be abundant as rain upon your own,’’ she murmurs. Then I see her eyes widen as they fall upon my work. As she turns, her lips begin to move, and though her accent makes it difficult to be sure, I think that the prayer she whispers is of a different import entirely. I look down at my tablet then and try to see my work as it must appear to her. The doctor gazes back at me, his head tilted and his hand raised, fingering the curl of his beard as he does when he considers some matter that interests him. I have him, there is no doubt of it. It is an excellent likeness. One might say he lives.

  No wonder the girl looked startled. It puts me in mind of my own astonishment when Hooman first showed me the likenesses in the paintings that had enraged the iconoclasts. But it is Hooman who would be astonished if he could see me now: me, a Muslim, in the service of a Jew. He did not think he was training me for such a fate. For myself, I have grown accustomed to it. At first, when I came here, I felt ashamed to be enslaved to a Jew. But now my shame is only that I am a slave. And it is the Jew, himself, who has taught me to feel this.

  I was fourteen when my world changed. The valued child of an important man, I never thought to find myself sold into bondage. The day the traders brought me to Hooman, it seemed that we passed by the workshops of every trade in the known world. They had a sack over my head so that I would not try to escape, but even through the jute, smells and sounds told which guilds we walked among. I remember the stench rising from the tanners, the sudden sweet tang of the esparto grass in the street of the espadrille makers, the clang of the armorers, the dull beat of the carpet looms, and the stray, discordant notes of the instrument makers testing their wares.

  Finally, we came to the pavilion of the book. The guard pulled off my blindfold then, and I saw that the calligraphers’ studio occupied the highest ground and faced south, enjoying the best light. The painters’ studio was set beneath. As the trader led me through the rows of seated figures, not one raised his head from his work to steal a glance at me. The assistants in Hooman’s workshop knew he demanded complete concentration, and how harshly he could punish failure.

  A pair of cats lay sleeping, curled together on a corner of his silk carpet. With a wave of his hand, he shooed them off, and signaled me to kneel in their place. He spoke coldly to my guard, and the man bent to slash the filthy rope that bound my wrists. Hooman reached out, lifted my hands and turned them over, examining the places where the twine had cut deep. He barked harshly at the guard before dismissing him. Then he turned to me.

  “So, you claim you are a mussawir.” His voice, as he said this last, was a whisper, the swish of brush across polished paper.

  “I have painted since I was a child,” I answered.

  “So long as that?” he said. The lines around his eyes tightened with amusement.

  “I will be fifteen before the end of Ramadan.”

  “Is that so?” He reached out and ran a long-fingered hand over my beardless chin. I flinched from him, and he raised his arm sharply, as if to strike me for it. But then he let it fall instead to his side and reached into the pocket of his robe. He said nothing, just looked at me until I felt the heat in my face and dropped my head. To fill the silence, I blurted, “Plants, especially, I am skilled at.”

  He withdrew his hand then, and I saw that there was a small bag of embroidered silk pinched between his thumb and forefinger. From it, he drew a grain of rice of the elongated staple such as Persians prize. He handed it to me. “Tell me, ya mussawir
, what do you see?”

  I stared at the grain, and I suppose my mouth fell slack, like a simpleton’s. Upon it was painted a polo match—one player galloping, his horse’s tail flying as he bore down upon finely wrought goal-posts, another sitting his mount as a servant handed him his stick. You could count the braids in the mount’s mane and feel the texture of the rider’s brocade jacket. As if this were not astonishing enough, there was an inscription also:

  Into one grain, there come a hundred harvests

  In a single heart is a whole world contained.

  He took back the grain then, and placed into my palm a second one. This was plain—a rice grain such as any. “Since you are ‘especially skilled’ at plants, you shall give me here a garden. I will have in it such foliage and flowers as you think best reveal your abilities. You have two days. Take your place over there, among the others.”

  He turned from me then, and picked up his brush. He had only to glance across the room and a boy leaped up, the scarlet he had mixed bright as fire, licking the sides of the bowl he cradled between careful hands.

  I do not think it will come as any great surprise when I say I failed his test. I had spent my days, before my capture, making drawings of plants known to my father for their medicinal virtues. Thus, healers separated from him by many miles, and even many languages, might know precisely which plant was meant, no matter by what name they might be used to call it. I had thought it exacting work, and had taken pride that my father thought me fit to do it.

  My father, Ibrahim al-Tarek, was already an old man when I was born. I arrived into a house so crowded with offspring that I never expected to win any notice from him. Muhammad, the eldest of my six brothers, was more of an age to have been my father; indeed, he had a son born two years before me who proved, for a while, the chief tormentor of my childhood.

  My father was a tall man, even with his slight stoop; handsome, even though the flesh of his face was sunken and scoured with lines. After evening prayers, he would come to the courtyard and sit on the woven mats set beneath the tamarisk, listening to the women’s accounts of their day, admiring their weaving, and asking gentle questions about us—the youngest ones—and how we did. When my mother was alive, he sat longest of all with her, and I took secret pleasure in my half-formed understanding of her special place with him. We quieted our voices when he came, and while our games did not stop, they lost intensity. Somehow, we would find ourselves playing nearer and nearer to the place where he sat, ignoring our mothers’ meaning frowns and shooing hands. Finally, he would reach out a long arm and clasp one of us to him, and set that lucky one beside him on the mat for a gentle word. Other times, if we played at hide-and-seek, he would let one or other of us use the long folds of his robe as a hiding place, and laugh at our squeals when we were discovered there.

  His rooms—the plain cell where he slept, the library dense with books and scrolls, and the workroom crowded with delicate beakers and jars—these we were never to enter. And I would not have dared to do so, if the lizard who had become my secret companion had not escaped my pocket one afternoon and scurried off along the beaten-earth floor, always just out of reach of my pursuit. I was seven at the time, and my mother had been dead for almost a year. The other women had been kind to me, especially Muhammad’s wife, who was nearer to my mother’s age than my father’s other wives. But despite their care, longing for her ate at my heart, and I suppose the little lizard was one of the many ways I tried to fill the hollow places.

  I was just outside the library when I finally caught up with him. My hand hovered over his lacquered skin. His tiny heart beat hard. I lowered my hand, and in an instant he poured like liquid through my fingers and, shrinking himself somehow flat as a riyal, vanished under the library door. My father was out, or so I thought, and so I hesitated for just a moment before pushing the door and entering.

  He was an orderly man, in general, but that order did not extend to his books. Later, when I worked beside him, I came to know very well the cause of the chaos that greeted me in his library that afternoon. His scrolls lay along one wall of the room, pressed close, floor to ceiling, so that the circular ends of them were forced a little flat, like the cells of a honeycomb. Somehow, there was an order in which he had laid them, and this he held in his head, for he would pull out a scroll without hesitation, open it on his workbench, and then lean down with his forearms across it. He would stay so, for many minutes or very few, then straighten suddenly so that the scroll snapped closed. He would push it aside then and pace to the other wall, where he kept some score or so of bound volumes. Choosing one, he would leaf through its pages, grunt, pace some more, sweep it, also, to one side and grope for his writing stuffs, scrawl some lines on a parchment, fling down his brush, and then repeat the whole again. By the end of it, there would be as many items on the floor as on the bench.

  My lizard had chosen an excellent place to elude me, I thought, as I crawled under the bench, pushing aside papers and fallen volumes. I was down there when my father’s sandaled feet appeared. I abandoned pursuit of my lizard then, and stayed as still as I could, hoping he had come in search of a single scroll and that he would leave again and allow me to slip away undiscovered.

  But he did not leave. He had a branch of some glossy green plant in his hand. He set this down and embarked upon the restless ritual I have described. A half hour passed so, then an hour. I grew stiff. My foot, on which my weight rested, fizzed and prickled beneath me. But I did not dare move. As my father worked on, pages of his writing, started and then pushed aside, fell from the bench, along with the branch he had carried in. When one of his pens landed by me, I had grown bored and daring enough to reach for it. I studied a leaf from the branch. I liked the way the blade was divided by ribs into a pattern that seemed as regular and purposeful as the mosaics that lined the walls in the room where my father and my older brothers received their guests. On a corner of my father’s discarded page, I began to draw that leaf. The brush was a marvel to me—a few fine hairs set into the shaft of a feather. With it, if I steadied my hand and concentrated my thought, I could capture exactly the delicacy of the thing I drew. When the ink dried, I replenished it from the spots that fell liberally onto the floor from my father’s impatient scratchings.

  Perhaps my movement caught his eye. His large hand reached out and grabbed my wrist. My heart fluttered. He drew me out and stood me before him. I did not take my eyes from the floor, so fearful was I of finding anger in that beloved face. He said my name then, softly and without rancor.

  “You know you are not permitted to be here.”

  In a trembling voice, I told him of my lizard, and begged his pardon, “but I thought he might perhaps be eaten by one of the cats.”

  His grip eased as I spoke. He enfolded my hand in his larger one, and patted it gently. “Well, the lizard has his own fate, as do we all,” he said. “But what is this?” He lifted my other hand then, where I still clutched the page on which I’d made my drawing. He studied it for a moment and said nothing. Then he shooed me out of the room.

  In the courtyard that evening, I hung back and did not seek his notice, hoping that he might not think to mention my transgression. Later, when I went, unpunished, to my mat with the others, I congratulated myself on the success of this plan.

  The next day, after he led the household in morning prayer, my father called me to his side. My stomach heaved. I thought that I was to be punished after all. But instead my father had brought a fine pen, some ink, and an old scroll only partly scribbled over with his jottings. “I want you to practice,” he said. “Your skill, if it is developed, could be of much help to me.”

  I worked hard on those drawings. Every morning, after I set aside the wooden plank on which I learned to write the verses of the Holy Koran—my father insisted that every one of his children attend these lessons—I did not join the games or the chores of the others, but took out my parchment and drew till my hand grew stiff. I relished my father’s no
tice and wished above anything to be of use to him. By the time I was twelve, I had developed some competence. Almost every day after that, I spent some part of my time in his company, helping him to make the books that mended the health of strangers across a score of countries.

  By late afternoon of that first day in Hooman’s studio, I felt as if those sweet years and all their learning had deserted me entirely. As the daylight waned and my hand trembled from the strain of strokes so minute that an observer could not see that any movement had been made, I lay down on my mat in a corner of the workshop and felt both worthless and afraid. Tears stung my tired eyes, and a sob must have escaped me, for the man settling himself upon a mat nearby whispered gruffly that I mustn’t mind. “Be glad that you were not sent instead to the bindery,” he said. “There, the apprentices must learn to draw out a strand of gold so fine it may thread through a hole in a poppy seed.”

  “But Hooman will not keep me if I cannot do this work, and yet it is the only skill I have.” On the journey here, after my capture, I had seen other foreign youths my age, clinging terrified to the ship’s rigging in a wild sea, breaking rock in the white-hot glare of the quarries, or coming, hunched and filthy, from the dark mouths of the mines.

  “You will not be the first to fail, believe me. He will find some task for you.”

  And so he did. He barely glanced at my rice grain before casting it aside. He sent me off to work with the “preparers of the ground”—those painters and calligraphers whose sight had weakened or hands lost their steadiness. All day I sat with those bitter men, rubbing each parchment with mother-of-pearl, perhaps a thousand times, until the page was polished smooth. After a few days of this, the flesh of my fingers puckered and peeled away in shreds. Soon, I could not hold a paintbrush. That was when I gave way to the despair that I had held back since my capture.