People of the Book Read online

  “I wanted to ask you about the day you saved the haggadah.”

  He grimaced and looked down at his hands, which were spread out on the speckled Laminex of the café table. His fingers were long and delicate. Funny how I hadn’t noticed that earlier, when I’d been rude to him and worried he might lay an unauthorized paw on my precious parchment.

  “You have to understand. It is as I was just saying. We did not believe in the war. Our leader had said, ‘It takes two sides to have a war, and we will not fight.’ Not here, not in our precious Sarajevo, our idealistic Olympic city. We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don’t have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death. We know that now. But then, those first few days, we all did things that were a little crazy. Kids, teenagers, they went off to demonstrate against the war, with posters and music, as if they were going to a picnic. Even after the snipers shot a dozen of them, we still didn’t get it. We expected that the international community would put a stop to it. I believed that. I was worried about getting through a few days, that’s all, while the world—how do you say?—got its act together.”

  He was speaking so quietly I could barely hear him over the buzz of laughter that filled the restaurant. “I was kustos; the museum was being shelled. We were not prepared for it. Everything there was exposed. There were two kilometers of books in the museum, and the museum was just twenty meters from the Chetnik guns. I was thinking that one phosphorous bomb could burn the whole thing down, or that these…these…the Bosnian word papci, I can’t translate it.” He curled his hand into a fist and walked it across the table. “What do you call the foot part of an animal? A cow or a horse?”

  “A hoof?” I said.

  “Yes, that’s it. We called the enemy ‘hoofs’—something from the barnyard. I thought, if they got into the museum, they would trample the place looking for gold, and destroy things whose value they were too ignorant even to guess at. Somehow, I made my way to the police station. Most of the police had gone to defend the city as best they could. The desk officer said, ‘Who wants to put his head on the block to save some old things?’ But when he realized that I was going anyway, alone, he rounded up two ‘volunteers’ to help me. He said he couldn’t have people saying that a dusty librarian has more guts than the police.”

  Some larger things they had moved to inner rooms. Smaller valuable items they had hidden away where looters might not look, like the janitor’s supply room. Ozren’s long hands fanned the air as he described the artifacts he had saved—the skeletons of Bosnia’s ancient kings and queens, the rare natural history specimens. “And then I tried to find the haggadah.” In the 1950s a museum staffer had been implicated in a plot to steal the haggadah, so ever since then, the museum’s director was the only one who was allowed to know the combination for the safe where it was kept. But the director lived across the river, where the fighting was most intense. Ozren knew he would never make it to the museum.

  Ozren continued speaking quietly, in short, undramatic sentences. No light. A fractured pipe. Rising water. Shells hitting the walls. It was left for me to fill in the blanks. I’d been in enough museum basements to imagine how it was; how every shell burst that shook the building must have sent a rain of plaster falling over the precious things, and over him, too, into his eyes as he crouched in the dark, hands shaking, striking match after match to see what he was doing. Waiting for a lull in the bombing so that he could hear the fall of the tumblers as he tried one combination and then another. Then not being able to hear anyway, because the beating of the blood in his head was so loud.

  “How on earth did you ever manage to crack it?”

  He raised his hands, palms up. “It was an old safe, not very sophisticated….”

  “But still, the odds…”

  “I am not, as I told you, a religious man, but if I did believe in miracles…the fact I got to that book, in those conditions…”

  “The miracle,” I said, “was that you—”

  He didn’t let me finish. “Please,” he interrupted, wrinkling his face with distaste. “Don’t make me out to be a hero. I don’t feel like one. Frankly, I feel like shit, because of all the books I couldn’t save….” He looked away.

  I think that’s what got me, that look. That reticence. Maybe because I’m the opposite of brave, I’ve always been a bit suspicious of heroes. I’m inclined to think they lack imagination, or there’s no way they could do the madly daring things they do. But this was a guy who got choked up over lost books, and who had to be dragged through an account of what he’d done. I was starting to think I liked him quite a bit.

  The food arrived then, juicy little patties of meat, peppery and thyme-scented. I was ravenous. I fell on the plate, scooping up the meat with rounds of hot, soft Turkish bread. I was so intent on the food that it took me a while to realize that Ozren wasn’t eating, just staring at me. He had green eyes, a deep, mossy green, flecked with glints of copper and bronze.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked you about all that. I’ve put you off your food.”

  He grinned—that attractive, crooked grin. “It’s not that.”

  “What’s up, then?”

  “Well, when I watched you working today, your face was so still and serene, you reminded me of a Madonna in the icons of the Orthodox. It’s just quite amusing to me, a heavenly face with such an earthy appetite.”

  I can’t bear that I still blush like a schoolgirl. I could feel the blood rising, so I tried to pretend that no compliment was intended. “And that’s one way of pointing out that I eat like a pig,” I said with a laugh.

  He reached over then and wiped a smear of grease off my cheek. I stopped laughing. I reached for his hand before he could withdraw it, and turned it over in my own. It was a scholar’s hand, to be sure, with clean, well-kept nails. But there were calluses as well. I suppose even scholars had to chop wood, if they could find any, during the siege. The tips of his fingers glistened with the lamb grease from my cheek. I brought them to my lips and licked them, slowly, one by one. His green eyes regarded me, asking a question anyone could understand.

  His apartment was close by, an attic above a pastry shop on a crossroads called Sweet Corner. The door to the shop was steamy, and a wall of warmth hit us as we entered. The proprietor raised a floury hand in greeting. Ozren waved in reply and then steered me through the crowded café to the attic stairs. The scent of crisp pastry and burned sugar followed us.

  Ozren could just stand up under the swooping eaves of the attic. The ends of his unruly curls brushed the lowest beams. He turned to take my jacket, and as he did so, touched my throat, lightly. He ran his middle finger over the tiny arc of bone at the back of my neck, where my hair lifted and swirled into a twist. He traced the line of bone along my shoulder and then down, over my sweater. When he reached my hips, he slid his hands under the cashmere and eased it up, over my head. The wool caught on my hair clip. The clip rattled as it hit the floor and the twist of hair unfurled over my bare shoulders. I shivered, and he wrapped his arms around me.

  Later, we lay in a tangle of sheet and clothing. He lived like a student, his bed a thin mattress pushed up against the wall, piles of books and newspapers pushed carelessly into corners. He was as spare as a racehorse, all long bone and lean muscle. Not a gram of fat on him. He fingered a strand of my hair. “So straight. Like a Japanese,” he said.

  “Expert, are you?” I teased. He grinned and got up and poured two little glasses of fiery rakija. He hadn’t turned on the light when we’d come in, but now he lit a pair of candles. As the flame steadied, I could see that the far wall of the attic was filled by a large figurative painting, a portrait of a woman and an infant, in a thick, urgent impasto. The baby was partly hidden by the curve of the woman’s body, which seemed to shelter it in a protective arc. The woman was turning away from us and toward the child, but she looked back at the artist—at us—with a steady, appraising gaze, beautiful and gra
ve.

  “It’s a wonderful painting,” I said.

  “Yes, my friend Danilo—the one I told you about—he painted it.”

  “Who is she?”

  He frowned, and sighed. Then he raised his glass in a kind of toast.

  “My wife.”

  IV

  WHEN YOU HAVE WORKED WELL, there should be no sign that you have worked at all.

  Werner Heinrich, my instructor, taught me that. “Never mistake yourself for an artist, Miss Heath. You must be always behind your object.”

  At the end of a week, there probably weren’t ten people in the world who could have told for sure that I’d taken this book apart and put it back together. The next thing I had to do was pay visits on a few old friends who’d be able to tell me what, if anything, the tiny samples I’d extracted from the codex meant. The UN had asked me to contribute an essay that would be included in the catalog when the book went on exhibition. I’m not ambitious in the traditional sense. I don’t want a big house or a big bank account; I don’t give a rat’s about those things. I don’t want to be the boss of anything or manage anyone but myself. But I do take a lot of pleasure in surprising my stuffy old colleagues by publishing something they don’t know. I just love to move the ball forward, even if it’s only a millimeter, in the great human quest to figure it all out.

  I stood away from the table, and stretched. “So, my kustos, I think that I can return the haggadah now to your care.”

  Ozren did not smile, or even look at me, but just rose and went to get the new box he’d had made to my specifications, a properly designed archival container that would hold the book safely while the UN finished the work on a climate-controlled exhibition room at the museum. It was to be a shrine to the survival of Sarajevo’s multiethnic heritage. The haggadah would have pride of place, but all around the walls would be Islamic manuscripts and Orthodox icons that would show how the people and their arts had grown from the same roots, influencing and inspiring one another.

  As Ozren took the book, I laid a hand on his hand. “They’ve invited me back for the opening. I’m supposed to be giving a paper at the Tate the week before. If I flew here from London, would I see you then?”

  He moved so that my hand fell away from his. “At the ceremony, yes.”

  “And after?”

  He shrugged.

  We’d spent three nights together at Sweet Corner, but he hadn’t said a single word about the wife who gazed at us from the painting. Then, on the fourth night, I’d woken up a little before dawn, because the pastry chef was clumping around, firing his bread ovens. I’d rolled over and found Ozren wide awake, staring at the painting. He had a haggard look, very sad. I touched his face lightly.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He turned and gazed at me, taking my face in his hands. Then he got up off the mattress and pulled on his jeans, throwing my clothes from the night before over to me. When we were dressed, I followed him downstairs. He talked to the pastry chef for a few minutes, and the guy tossed him a set of car keys.

  We found the battered old Citroën at the end of the narrow alley. We drove in silence out of town, up into the mountains. It was beautiful up there; the first rays of the sun turned the snow golden and pink and tangerine. A powerful wind tossed the pine boughs around, and the smell brought incongruous memories: the resinous tang of Christmas trees, the scent of their sap so strong on the heat-wave December days of Sydney’s midsummer.

  “This is Mount Igman,” he said at last. “It was the bobsled run during the winter Olympics, before the Serbs moved in with their high-powered rifles and their telescopic sights and turned it into a sniper pit.” He put out a hand to grab me as I moved toward the pit. “There are land mines everywhere up here, still. You have to keep to the roadway.”

  From where we stood, there was a perfect view down into the city. They’d taken aim at her from here, as she stood holding her infant son in a UN water line. The first bullet had severed her femoral artery. She had crawled, dragging the baby, to the nearest wall and thrown her body across her son. No one dared to help her, not the UN soldiers, who stood by as she bled to death, or the terrified civilians who scattered, wailing, for whatever poor hiding places they could find.

  “The heroic people of Sarajevo.” Ozren’s voice was tired and bitter, his words hard to hear as he spat them out into the teeth of the wind. “That’s what CNN was always calling us. But most of us weren’t so heroic, believe me. When the shooting started, we’d run just as fast as the next person.”

  Aida, wounded, bleeding, had been an irresistible target for the Mount Igman murderer. The second shot pierced her shoulder and hit bone. The bullet shredded, so only a small fragment of metal passed through her and into the baby’s skull. The baby’s name was Alia. Ozren said it in a whisper, like a sigh.

  The initial insult—that’s the technical neurosurgical term. When I was a teenager, I’d overhear my mother, on the phone, taking the calls that often came as a welcome interruption to our dinner table arguments. It would be some nervous young resident in the emergency room. I’d always thought “insult” was a pretty apt term for something like being shot in the head or whacked across the skull with a bit of two-by-four. Hard to get more insulting than that. In Alia’s case, the initial insult had been compounded by the fact that Sarajevo had no neurosurgeon, let alone a pediatric specialist. The general surgeon had done his best, but there’d been swelling and infection—a “secondary insult”—and the little boy had lapsed into a coma. By the time a neurosurgeon got to the city, months later, he’d declared that nothing further could be done.

  When we came down from the mountain, Ozren asked if I wanted to go to the hospital, to see his boy. I didn’t. I hate hospitals. Always have. Sometimes, on weekends, when the housekeeper had the day off, my mother would drag me with her on rounds. The bright lights, the sludge green walls, the noise of metal on metal, the sheer bloody misery hanging over the halls like a shroud—I hated the lot of it. The coward in me has total control of my imagination in hospitals. I see myself in every bed: in the traction device or unconscious on the gurney, oozing blood into drainage bags, hooked up to urinary catheters. Every face is my own face. It’s like those kids’ flip books where you keep the same head but keep changing the bodies. Pathetic, I know. Can’t help it, though. And Mum wondered why I didn’t want to be a doctor.

  But Ozren was looking at me with this expression, like a really gentle dog, head tilted, expecting kindness. I couldn’t say no. He told me then that he went every day, before work. I hadn’t realized. The past few mornings, he’d walked me back to my hotel so I could shower—if there was any running water—and change my clothes. I hadn’t known that he’d gone to the hospital after that, to spend an hour with his son.

  I tried not to look right or left, into the wards, as we walked down the hall. And then we were in Alia’s room, and there was nowhere to look but at him. A sweet, still face, slightly swollen from the fluids they pumped into him to keep him alive. A tiny body threaded with plastic tubes. The sound of the monitors, measuring out the minutes of his limited little life. Ozren had told me his wife had died a year ago, so Alia couldn’t have been more than three years old. It was hard to tell. His underdeveloped body could have belonged to a younger infant, but the expressions that passed across his face seemed to register emotions of someone very old. Ozren brushed the brown hair off the small brow, sat down on the bed, and whispered softly in Bosnian, gently flexed and straightened the rigid little hands.

  “Ozren,” I said quietly. “Have you considered getting another opinion? I could take his scans with me and—”

  “No,” he said, cutting me off midsentence.

  “But why not? Doctors are only people, they make mistakes.” I can’t count the times I heard my mother dismiss the views of a supposedly eminent colleague: “Him! I wouldn’t go to him for an ingrown toenail!” But Ozren just shrugged and didn’t answer me.

  “Have you got MRI scans, or j
ust CTs? MRIs show a lot more, they—”

  “Hanna, shut up, please. I said no.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I never would’ve picked you as a believer in that bullshit, insha’Allah, fatalist mentality.”

  He got up off the bed and took a step toward me, grabbing my face between his hands and bringing his own face so close to mine that his angry features blurred.

  “You,” he said, his voice a low, contained whisper. “You are the one who is consumed by bullshit.”

  His sudden ferocity scared me. I pulled away.

  “You,” he continued, grabbing my wrist. “All of you, from the safe world, with your air bags and your tamper-proof packaging and your fat-free diets. You are the superstitious ones. You convince yourself you can cheat death, and you are absolutely offended when you learn that you can’t. You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, ‘How awful!’ and then you got up and made yourself another cup of gourmet coffee.” I flinched when he said that. It was a pretty accurate description. But he wasn’t done. He was so angry he was actually spitting.