People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  I turned to Lowery. “So what on earth is the Department of Foreign Affairs doing, involving itself in this mess? What’s the possible Australian interest?”

  Lowery cleared his throat. “The prime minister’s a close personal friend of the president of Israel, and the president’s an old army mate of Amitai here. So we’re giving them a crack at you as a sort of, well, favor.” He grinned sheepishly. “Even though I’m guessing that you’re not a big fan of this particular PM, we’re hoping you might see your way clear to pitch in and give a hand on this one.”

  Amitai chimed in. “I could smuggle the book to Sarajevo. Yes, no question. But then what? Believe me, I did not do this lightly—bringing the codex all this way. We took the decision and the risk of bringing the haggadah here because of you, Channa. Because we think you have the best chance to convince Ozren to restore it to its rightful place.” Amitai paused. I was pretty stunned, and trying to process this. I must’ve had a blank look on my face.

  “Because of the nature of your past relationship with him,” Lowery added.

  That was too much. “How the hell do you know about my ‘past relationship’? How dare you all pry into my personal life? What ever happened to civil liberties around here?”

  Amitai raised a hand. “It wasn’t just you, Channa. You were in Sarajevo at a delicate time. The CIA, the Mossad, the DGSE…”

  “Even ASIO,” Lowery interjected. “At that time, just about any person with a pulse in the former Yugoslavia was either a spy, or being spied on. Or both. Don’t take it so personally.”

  I got up, agitated. Easy for him to say. How would he like it if I turned around and told him who he’d slept with six years ago? Well, maybe in his line of work you expect that sort of thing. But it creeped me out. I’m a bookworm; not a diplomat, not a spook. And certainly not some kind of commando Ms. Fix-It for Israel. Or any other country for that matter.

  I walked over to the desk and looked down at the haggadah. It had already survived so many risky journeys. Now it sat on a desk in a land that hadn’t even been part of its makers’ known world. And it was here because of me.

  Years ago, when I came home from Sarajevo, I’d gone to the archives of the Australian National Gallery and listened to hours of taped interviews with my father. I knew the sound of his voice now. It was a voice with many layers. The top layer, the dominant one, was the spare, laconic cadence of the outback. The voice he’d found as a young man, when he was discovering what he loved and what he was meant to do. But there were other layers underneath. Hints of a Boston boyhood. A tiny trace of Russian accent. An occasional Yiddish inflection.

  What I do is me, for that I came.

  I knew now how he would sound, saying that line from the Hopkins poem. I could hear him saying it in my head.

  What I do is me.

  He made art. I saved it. That was my life’s work. What I do. But taking a risk. A big one. That, most definitely, is not what I do. Not me at all.

  I turned around and leaned against the desk. I was feeling a bit shaky. They were both staring at me.

  “And if I get caught? In possession of—I’ll take a wild stab here—fifty, sixty million dollars’ worth of stolen goods. What then?”

  Amitai suddenly seemed really interested in his hands again. Lowery, meanwhile, became transfixed by the lunching office workers, sunning themselves on the grass in the Botanic Gardens. Nobody said anything.

  “I asked you both a question. What if I get caught with this, and accused of boosting an incredibly important piece of the world’s cultural heritage?”

  Amitai glanced up at Lowery, who couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away from the view.

  “Well?”

  Amitai and Lowery both started talking at once.

  “The Australian government…”

  “The Israeli government…”

  They both stopped and looked at each other, making polite “after you” gestures. It was almost comical, really. Lowery cracked first.

  “See that place over there, under those Morton Bay fig trees?” He was pointing at a grassy rise of harbor-hugging foreshore. “Bit of a coincidence, really. That’s exactly where they shot the final scene in Mission: Impossible II.”

  They’d built a new airport in Sarajevo. It was all spiffy and totally civilian, with nice bars and gift shops. Normal.

  Me, I wasn’t feeling too normal. As I stood in the immigration line, I was very glad of the beta-blockers Amitai had given me an hour earlier, before I left him in Vienna. “These will stop the appearance of nervousness,” he’d said. “The sweaty hands, the breathlessness. Ninety-nine percent of what customs officers look for is nervous demeanor. Of course, you will still feel nervous. The pills won’t stop that.”

  He was right. I felt horrible. I’d had to take the beta-blockers twice. I’d thrown up the first lot.

  He had also given me the case he’d used to transport the haggadah from Israel to Australia. It was a black nylon wheelie bag and it looked just like every other wheelie bag—the kind that just barely fit in the overhead lockers—but it had a false back panel made with some supersecret, X-ray-filtering fiber. “Undetectable by any current screening technology,” he assured me.

  “Do I really need that?” I’d asked. “I mean, so what if the X-ray machine shows a book in my bag? Nobody but a specialist is going to know what it is. But if I get caught with some kind of smuggler’s kit…”

  “Why take a chance? You are going to Sarajevo. There are people in that city, not even Jews, who bought facsimile copies of the haggadah even when they couldn’t afford food for their table. It is a most beloved object there. Anyone—a customs officer, a person in the queue behind you—might recognize it. The bag, it really is the best we can do. No one is going to catch you.”

  There were a half dozen Iranian nationals on my flight, and that, as it turned out, was a stroke of luck for me. Those poor blokes sucked up all the attention in the arrivals hall. Sarajevo had become a favorite entry port for people trying to sneak into Europe, because Bosnia’s borders were still pretty porous, and the EU had been on the Bosnians to do something about the influx. The Iranian ahead of me got his cases opened, his documents scrutinized. I could tell he hadn’t had the benefit of a beta-blocker. He was sweating like crazy.

  When I reached the front of the line, all I got was a smile and a “Welcome in Bosnia,” and suddenly I was out of the airport, in a taxi, driving past a mammoth new mosque built by the Gulfies and then past a sex shop and an Irish pub offering “20 brands of world beer.” The much-shelled Holiday Inn had been revamped, bright as a child’s Lego tower in blocks of vibrant yellow. Sycamore saplings, planted to replace the trees cut for fuel during the siege, lined the main thoroughfares. When we entered the narrow ways of the Bašcaršija, the alleys were filled with brightly dressed women and men in their best suits, braving subzero weather to promenade among balloon sellers and flower vendors.

  I wanted to ask the taxi driver what was going on. I pointed to a group of little girls in velvet party frocks.

  “Biram!” he replied, smiling broadly. So that was it; I hadn’t realized. Ramadan had just ended, and the town was celebrating one of the biggest feasts of the Muslim calendar.

  The pastry shop at Sweet Corner was absolutely packed. I could barely get through to the counter with my wheelie bag in tow. The pastry chef didn’t recognize me, and why would he, after six years? I pointed to the stairs that ran up to the attic.

  “Ozren Karaman?” I said.

  He nodded, and then pointed to his watch and then the door, which I took to indicate that Ozren would be back soon. I waited for a stool in the bustling, noisy shop to become vacant. Then I sat down in a warm corner, nibbling the crisp edge of a too-sugary confection, watching the door.

  I waited an hour, then two. The pastry chef began to look at me oddly, so I ordered another honey-drenched sweet, even though I hadn’t eaten the first one.

  Finally, at around eleven o’clock, Ozren
pushed open the steam-misted door. If I hadn’t been staring at every face intently, if I’d just passed him on the street, I’m not sure I would have recognized him. His hair was still long and tousled, but it had turned completely silver. His face had not softened into jowels—he was still lean, still without a gram of spare fat—but there were hard lines scoured into his cheeks and brow. As he shrugged off his overcoat—the same threadbare one I remembered from six years earlier—I could see that he was actually wearing a suit. Must be a requirement of the museum director’s job—no way he’d do that voluntarily. It was a nice suit, good fabric, well tailored, but it looked as if he’d slept in it.

  By the time I excused my way around the chairs and stools, he was already halfway up the stairs to the attic.

  “Ozren.” He turned and looked at me, blinking. He didn’t recognize me. Tense as I was, a whisper of vanity told me it must be the poor light, or the short haircut. I didn’t like to think that I’d aged that much.

  “It’s me. Hanna Shar—Hanna Heath.”

  “Good God.” He didn’t say anything else. Just stood there, blinking.

  “Can I, you know, come up?” I said. “I need to talk with you.”

  “Uh, my apartment, it’s not…It’s very late. What about tomorrow, at the museum? It is a holiday, but I will be there in the morning.” He had recovered from his surprise and schooled his voice. His tone was very correct, cool and professional.

  “I need to talk to you now, Ozren. I think you know what it is about.”

  “I really don’t think I—”

  “Ozren. I have something. Here. In this bag.” I inclined my head toward the wheelie. “Something that belongs to your museum.”

  “Good God,” he said again. He was sweating, and not from the warmth of the pastry shop. He extended an arm. “After you, by all means.” I pushed past him on the narrow stairway, wrestling with the bag. He made to take it from me, but I gripped it so hard my knuckles whitened. Some people in the shop, including the chef, had turned to look at us, sensing a tiff of some kind. I headed up the stairs, the bag thumping noisily on the treads behind me. Ozren followed. I heard the noise level rise again as the patrons, realizing there wasn’t going to be any spectacle, turned back to their coffee and their cheerful holiday conversations.

  Ozren ushered me into the attic. He closed the door, shot the old wrought-iron bolt, and leaned his back against it. His silver hair, brushing the rafters, brought back memories. Distracting memories.

  There was kindling laid ready in the small grate. Wood had still been scarce in Sarajevo when I’d been there before, and we’d never had the luxury of a fire. Ozren bent to the grate. As the flame caught, he laid a single log upon the kindling. He took a bottle of rakijah from a shelf and poured two glasses. He handed me one, unsmiling.

  “To a happy reunion,” he said dourly, and downed his drink in a swallow. I sipped mine.

  “I imagine you have come to put me behind bars,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Well, why not? I deserve it. I have been expecting it, every day for six years. Better it should be you. You have more right than anyone.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It was terrible, what we did to you. Making you doubt your own expertise like that, lying to you.” He poured himself another shot of rakijah. “When you saw it, that should have been enough. We should have ended it right there. But I was not myself, and Werner—you must know it was Werner, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Werner was obsessed.” His face crumpled suddenly, the hard lines softening. “Hanna, there is not a day since that book left this country that I have not regretted it. I tried, just a few months afterward, to convince Werner to return it. I told him I was going to confess. He said if I did, he would deny everything. And that he would move the haggadah to some place where no one would ever find it. By that time, my vision had cleared. I could see that he was mad enough to do it. Hanna…”

  He moved toward me then and took my glass from me, set it down, and grasped my hands. “I missed you so much. I wanted so much to find you, to tell you…to ask for your pardon…. ’’

  I felt my throat tighten as all the feelings I had for him—for him, and no one since—started to overwhelm me in that room, with its memories. But then the anger at what he’d put me through got the upper hand. I pulled away.

  He raised his own hands, palms toward me, as if to show that he understood that he had stepped over a line.

  “You know I’ve barely touched a book in six years, because of you? Because of your lies. I gave it up, because you told me I was wrong.”

  He walked over to where the dormer window looked out on a patch of sky and city. There were lights twinkling outside. The lights of a living city. Six years ago, there hadn’t been any.

  “There is no excuse for what I did. But when Alia died, I was so angry with my country. I gave way to despair. And Werner was there, whispering in my ear, telling me it was the right thing that this book be returned to the Jews in recompense for all that had been stolen from them. That it was theirs, and that they could protect it. Protect it in a way that this fledgling state—in this region whose very name is a synonym for murderous hostility and ineffectuality—would not be able to.”

  “How could you think that way, Ozren? When you, a Sarajevan and a Muslim, saved it. When that other librarian, Serif Kamal, risked his life for it?” He didn’t say anything. “Do you think that way, still?”

  “No,” he said. “Not now. You know I am not a religious man. But Hanna, I have spent many nights, lying awake here in this room, thinking that the haggadah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox.”

  Downstairs, in the pastry shop, someone gave a raucous laugh. The log shifted and fell in the fireplace.

  “So,” I said. “How do we put it back?”

  Later, when I met up with Amitai and told him how we did it, he smiled.

  “It’s almost always that way. Ninety-nine percent of what I did in the unit was that way. But people who go to the movies or read spy novels don’t want to believe it. They like to think there are agents in ninja suits dropping on wires out of air-conditioning ducts, plastic explosives, disguised as…as pineapples or something, going off everywhere. But so much more often it is exactly like what you did: a combination of luck, timing, and a bit of common sense. And that we have a Muslim feast day to thank for it—even better.”

  Because it was Biram, there was only a single guard on duty at the museum that night. We waited till just after 4:00 a.m., knowing that the morning guards’ shift began at 5:00. Ozren simply told the guard that he couldn’t sleep after too much revelry, and had decided to do some work. Since it was Biram, he sent the guard home to get some rest so he could celebrate with his family later in the day. Ozren assured him he would make the necessary security checks.

  I waited outside, shivering, until I saw the guard leave. Ozren let me in. We went first to the basement, where the panel that controlled the sensors in the haggadah gallery was located. As director, Ozren had the override codes, so the crisscross of motion sensors could be temporarily blinded. The video monitor was another thing: that couldn’t be disconnected without triggering an alarm. But Ozren said he’d thought of that. We walked down the halls, past the prehistoric boat and the antiquities collections, until we stood at the door of the haggadah gallery.

  Ozren’s hand was shaking a little as he entered his code, and he mispunched one of the numbers.

  “I can do that only once. A second error, the alarm goes off.” He took a deep breath and punched his numbers again. The pad blinked back at him: ENTERED. But the door did not open. “It’s on after-hours setting, so it takes two of us. The chief librarian’s code also is necessary. You do it, will you? My hand won’t stop
shaking.”

  “But I don’t know it!”

  “Twenty-five, five, eighteen, ninety-two,” he said without hesitation. I looked at him questioningly, but he just nodded to go ahead. I did. The door swished open.

  “But how did you know it?”

  He smiled. “She was my assistant for nine years. She’s a great librarian, but she has no head for figures. The only number she can remember is Tito’s birthday. She uses it for everything.”

  We entered the room, which was kept very dim, with just enough light to allow the security camera to function. The lens stared down at us, recording our every move. Ozren had brought a flashlight so that we wouldn’t have to turn lights on. He’d tied a red dishcloth over it to mute the brightness. The beam danced around the walls for a second as he reached into his pocket for the digital key that opened the vitrine.

  He swiped the key, then folded back the glass pane. Werner’s fake was open to the illumination of the Spanish seder, the prosperous family, and the mysterious African woman in her Jewish dress. It was the page where I’d found the white hair in the original. Ozren closed Werner’s copy, lifted it from the vitrine, and set it on the floor.

  In the reverse of the moment that had passed between us six years before, I handed him the Sarajevo Haggadah.

  He held it in both hands, and then he pressed it to his forehead for a moment. “Welcome back,” he said.

  He set it carefully on the forms and gingerly turned the parchments until he reached the seder illumination.

  I had been holding my breath without even knowing it. Ozren reached to close the vitrine.

  “Wait,” I said. “Just let me look at it for one more second.” I wanted another instant with the book before I had to let go of it forever.

  It wasn’t until later that I realized why I could see it, there, in that dim light, when I hadn’t ever seen it before. The color temperature of the red light emitted by the torch made it possible. There were faint markings following the line of the hem of the African woman’s gown. The artist had used a tone just one value darker than the saffron of the robe. The lines of script were so fine, impossibly fine—made by a brush of just a single hair. When I had studied the image in daylight, or in the cool light of fluorescent bulbs, the tiny lines had looked like shading, merely; a clever artist’s suggestion of fabric folds.