“Bad things happen. Some very bad things happened to me. And I’m no different from a thousand other fathers in this city who have kids who suffer. I live with it. Not every story has a happy ending. Grow up, Hanna, and accept that.”
He flung my wrist away. I was shaking. I wanted to get away, to get out of there. He turned back to Alia and sat down again on the bed, facing away from me. I pushed past him on the way to the door, and saw that he had a kids’ book, in Bosnian, in his hands. From the familiar illustrations, I could tell it was a translation of Winnie-the-Pooh. He put the book down and rubbed his palms over his face. He looked up at me, his expression drained. “I read to him. Every day. It is not possible for a childhood to pass by without these stories.” He turned to a page he’d bookmarked. I had my hand on the door, but the sound of his voice held me. Every now and then, he’d look up and talk to Alia. Maybe he was explaining the meaning of a hard word, or sharing some fine point of Milne’s English humor. I’d never seen anything so tender between a father and his child.
And I knew I couldn’t bear to see it again. That night after work Ozren started to apologize for his outburst. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a prelude to another invitation to spend the night, but I didn’t let him get that far. I made some lame excuse as to why I had to go back to my hotel room. Same thing the next night. By the third night he stopped asking. And anyway, by then it was time for me to go.
I was once told, by a very handsome and very hurt botanist, that my attitude to sex was like something he’d read about in a sociology textbook about the 1960s. He said I acted like the book’s description of a prefeminist male, acquiring partners for casual sex and then dumping them as soon as any emotional entanglement was required. He hypothesized that because I didn’t have a father and because my mother was emotionally unavailable, no one had modeled a healthy, caring, reciprocal relationship in my life.
I told him if I wanted to hear psychobabble, I could visit a shrink cheap on Medibank. I’m not casual about sex, far from it. I’m actually very picky. I prefer the fit few to the mediocre masses. But I’m not big on wringing out other people’s soggy hankies, and if I wanted a partner, I’d join a law firm. If I do choose to be with someone, I want it to stay light and fun. It gives me no pleasure, none at all, to hurt people’s feelings, especially not tragic cases like Ozren, who is clearly a spectacular human being, brave and intelligent and all the rest of it. Even handsome, if you can cope with the unkempt thing. I felt bad about the botanist, too. But he’d started talking about bush-walking with kids in the backpack. I had to let him go. I wasn’t even twenty-five at the time. Kids are definitely a midlife luxury, in my opinion.
As for my dysfunctional so-called family, it’s true that I’ve inherited a core belief, to wit: don’t rely on some other sod for your emotional sustenance. Find something absorbing to do—something so absorbing that you don’t have time to dwell on the woe-is-me stuff. My mother loves her work, I love mine. So the fact that we don’t love each other…well, I hardly ever think about it.
When Ozren was done with his seals and strings, I walked with him down the stairs of the bank building for what would be the last time. If I came back to Sarajevo for the opening, the book would be where it belonged, in its nice, new, state-of-the-art, securely guarded display space at the museum. I waited for Ozren to put the book in the vault, but when he came back up, he was in conversation in Bosnian with the guards, and he did not turn.
The guard unlocked the front door for him.
“Good night,” I said. “Good-bye. Thank you.”
He had his hand on the ornate silver door pull. He looked back at me and nodded curtly. Then he pushed the door open and walked out into the dark. I went back upstairs, alone, to pack up my tools.
I had my glassine envelopes with the bit of insect’s wing and the single white hair from the binding, and tiny samples, each no bigger than the full stop at the end of a sentence, that I’d lifted on scalpel tip from the pages that were stained. I placed these things carefully in my document case. Then I paged through my notebook to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I skimmed the notes I’d made the first day, when I’d dismantled the binding. I saw the memo I’d scribbled about the channels in the board edges and my query to myself about missing clasps.
To get to London from Sarajevo, you had to change planes in Vienna. I was planning to use that necessary stopover to accomplish two things. I had an old acquaintance—an entomologist—who was a researcher and curator at the Naturhistorisches Museum there. She could help me identify the insect fragment. I also wanted to visit my old teacher, Werner Heinrich. He was a dear man, kind and courtly, sort of like the grandfather I’d never had. I knew he’d be keen to hear about my work on the haggadah, and I also wanted to get his advice. Maybe his influence would allow me to break through Viennese formalities at the museum where the rebinding had been done in 1894. If he could get me access to the archives, it was just possible I’d find some old records about the condition of the book when it arrived at the museum. I put the notebook in my case. Last of all, I slipped in the large manila envelope from the hospital.
I’d forged the request in my mother’s name and made the wording ambiguous: “…asked to consult at the request of a colleague of Dr. Karaman in the case of his son….” They knew her name, even here. She’d coauthored a text on aneurysms that was the standard reference in the field. Not that I was in the habit of asking her for favors. But she’d said she was heading to Boston to give a paper at the American neurosurgeons’ annual gabfest, and I had a client in Boston, a bezillionaire and a major manuscripts collector, who’d been after me to look at a codex he was thinking of buying from a Houghton Library deaccessioning sale.
Australians in general are pretty casual about traveling. If you grow up there, you basically get trained in long-haul flights—fifteen hours, twenty-four—it’s what we’re used to. For us, eight hours across the Atlantic seems like a doddle. He’d offered to pay for a firstclass ticket, and I don’t usually get to sit in the pointy end. I figured I could cram in the appraisal, pick up a nice fee, and be back in London in time to deliver my paper at the Tate. Usually I would have arranged my itinerary so that Mum and I would just miss each other. There’d be a brief telephone call: “What a pity!” “Yes, can you believe it?” Each outdoing the other in insincerity. The night before, when I’d suggested we actually meet up in Boston, there’d been a minute of dead air on the phone, the crackle of Sarajevo-to-Sydney static. Then, in an affectless voice: “How nice. I’ll try to find a time.”
I didn’t ask myself why exactly I was subjecting myself to this. Why I was butting in, invading a man’s privacy, flouting his wishes, which could not have been expressed more clearly. I suppose the answer was that if something can be known, I can’t stand not knowing it. In that way, Alia’s brain scans were just like the bits of fiber in my glassine envelopes, messages in a code that expert eyes might just be able to read for me.
V
VIENNA SEEMED to be doing rather well off the fall of communism. The whole of the city was getting a makeover, like a wealthy matron going under the knife. As my taxi merged with the traffic on the Ringstrasse, I saw construction cranes everywhere, bowing over the city’s wedding cake skyline. Light flared off the freshly gilded Hofburg friezes, and sandblasters had flushed the soot off dozens of neo-Renaissance facades, revealing the warm cream stone that had been obscured by centuries of grime. Western capitalists evidently wanted spruced-up headquarters for all their new joint ventures with neighboring countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic. And now they had cheap laborers from the east to do the work.
When I’d been in Vienna in the early 1980s on a traveling scholarship, it had been a gray, grimy place. Every building was filthy, although I didn’t realize that at the time. I thought they were all meant to be black. I’d found it a depressing place and a bit creepy. Vienna’s location, teetering at the far edge of Western Europe, had made it a Cold War li
stening post. The stout matrons and the loden-clad gents with their bourgeois solidity existed in an atmosphere that always seemed a little stirred, a little charged, like the air after lightning. But I had liked the gilded rococo Kaffeehäuser and the music, which was everywhere—the city’s pulse and its heartbeat. The joke was that anyone in Vienna who wasn’t carrying a musical instrument was either a pianist, a harpist, or a foreign spy.
One didn’t think of the city as a hub of science, and yet it had its share of high-tech businesses and innovative labs. My old mate Amalie Sutter, the entomologist, headed one of them. I’d met Amalie years earlier, when she was a postdoc, living about as far as you could get from gilded rococo cafés. I came across her on the side of a mountain in remote northern Queensland. She lived in an upended, corrugated-iron water tank. I was backpacking at the time. I dropped out of my expensive, elitist girl’s school at sixteen, which was the first possible moment I could get free of it. I’d tried to get them to expel me earlier, but they were too scared of Mum to go for it, no matter what outrages against decorum I managed to devise. I walked out of our palatial home and joined that shifting band—the healthy Scandinavian kids on working holidays, the surfie dropouts, and the gaunt druggies—drifting north to Byron Bay and then on up the coast, past Cairns, past Cooktown, until the road ran out.
I’d traveled almost two thousand clicks to get away from my mother, and I ended up finding someone who was, in some ways, exactly like her. Or like she might have been in a parallel universe. Amalie was my mother stripped of social pretensions and material ambition. But she was just as driven by what she did, which was to study how a certain species of butterfly relied on ants to keep its caterpillars safe from predators. She let me stay in her water tank and taught me all about compostable toilets and solar showers. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I now think those weeks on the mountain, watching the way she looked at the world with this close, passionate attention, the way she busted her butt just for the chance to find out something new about how the world worked, were what turned me around and headed me back to Sydney, to start my real life.
Years later, when I came to Vienna and apprenticed myself to Werner Heinrich, I ran into her again. Werner had asked me to investigate the DNA of a book louse he’d extracted from a binding, and someone said the DNA lab over at the Naturhistorisches Museum was the best in the city. At the time I thought that seemed odd. The museum was a fantastic antique of a place, full of moth-eaten stuffed animals and nineteenth-century gentlemen’s rock collections. I loved to wander around in there because you never knew what you’d find. It was like a cabinet of curiosities. There was a rumor, though I’d never confirmed it, that they even had the severed head of the Turkish vizier who’d lost the seige of Vienna in 1623. Supposedly, they kept him in the basement.
But Amalie Sutter’s lab was a state-of-the-art facility for the research of evolutionary biology. I remembered the rather bizarre directions to her office: take the elevator to the third floor, follow the skeleton of the diplodocus, and when you reach the jawbone, her door is on the left. An assistant told me she was in the collections room and walked me down the corridor. I opened the door to a pungent blast of mothball odor. There was Amalie, pretty much as I’d left her, poring over a drawer full of silvery blue shimmer.
She was pleased to see me, but even more pleased to see my specimen. “I thought you were bringing me another book louse.” Last time, she’d had to grind it up to extract the DNA, amplify it, and then wait days to do an analysis. “But this,” she said, holding the envelope carefully. “This, if I’m not much mistaken, is going to be a lot easier. I think what you’ve got here is an old friend of mine.”
“A moth?”
“No, not a moth.”
“It can’t be part of a butterfly?” Bits of butterfly don’t generally wind up in books. Moths do, because they come indoors, where books are kept. But butterflies are outdoor creatures.
“I think it might be.” She stood and closed the collection cabinet. We walked back to her office, where she scanned the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, then hauled down a huge tome on wing veination. She pushed open a tall door that had a life-size picture of her as a graduate student, in the Malaysian rain forest, brandishing a four-meter butterfly net. It was remarkable how little she’d aged since then. I think her absolute enthusiasm for her work acted on her like some kind of preservative. On the other side of the door was a gleaming lab, with postdocs wielding pipettes and peering at DNA graphs on computer monitors. She gently lifted my little bit of wing onto a slide and placed it under a powerful microscope.
“Hello, lovely,” she said. “It is you.” She looked up and beamed at me. She hadn’t even glanced at the veination diagrams. “Parnassius mnemosyne leonhardiana. Common throughout Europe.”
Damn. My heart sank, and my face must have shown it. No new information there. Amalie’s smile widened. “Not much help?” She beckoned me to follow her back down the corridor to the room filled with collection cabinets. She stopped in front of one and opened the tall metal door with a clang. She slid out a wooden drawer. Rows of Parnassius butterflies hovered in their perpetual stasis, afloat forever above their carefully lettered names.
The butterflies were lovely in a subtle, muted way. They had creamy white forewings, splashed with black dots. The rear wings were almost translucent, like lead glass, divided into panes by the distinct tracery of black veins. “Not the flashiest butterfly in the world by any means,” said Amalie. “But collectors love them. Perhaps because you have to climb a mountain to get one.” She closed the drawer and turned to me. “Common throughout Europe, yes. But confined to high alpine systems, generally around two thousand meters. The caterpillars of the Parnassius feed only on an alpine variety of larkspur that grows in steep, stony environments. Your manuscript, Hanna, dear. Has it been on a trip to the Alps?”
An Insect’s Wing
Sarajevo, 1940
Here lies the grave. Stay, for a while, when the forest listens.
Take off your caps! Here rests the flower of a people that knows how to die.
—Inscription, World War II memorial, Bosnia
THE WIND BLEW ACROSS the Miljacka River, hard as a slap. Lola’s thin coat was no protection. She ran across the narrow bridge, her hands thrust deep in her pockets. On the other side of the river, a set of rough-hewn stone stairs rose abruptly, leading to a warren of narrow lanes lined with shabby apartment buildings. Lola took the stairs two at a time and turned in to the second alleyway, sheltered at last from the bitter gusts.
It was not yet midnight, so the outer door to her building hadn’t been locked. Inside, it was not much warmer than on the street. She steadied herself and took a moment to catch her breath. A heavy smell of boiled cabbage and fresh cat piss hung over the foyer. Lola crept up the stairs and gently turned the latch on her family’s apartment. Although her right hand reached up instinctively to touch the mezuzah on the doorjamb before she slipped inside, Lola could not have said why. She took off her coat, unlaced her boots, and carried them as she tiptoed past the sleeping forms of her mother and father. The apartment was one room, with a dividing curtain the only privacy.
Her little sister was just a bulge beneath the quilt. Lola lifted the coverlet and slid in beside her. Dora was curled up like a small animal, radiating welcome heat. Lola reached for the warmth of her sister’s back. The child protested in her sleep, uttering a tiny cry and pulling away. She tucked her icy hands into her own armpits. Despite the cold, her face was still flushed, her brow still damp from the dancing, and if her father woke, he might notice that.
Lola loved the dancing. That was what had lured her to the Young Guardians meetings. She liked the hiking, too; the long, hard walks in the mountains to a hanging lake or the ruins of an ancient fortress. The rest of it, she didn’t care much for. The endless discussions of politics bored her. And the Hebrew—she didn’t even enjoy reading in her own language, much less struggling to decode the st
range black squiggles that Mordechai was always trying to get her to remember.
She thought about his arm across her shoulder in the circle. She could still feel the pleasant weight of it, muscular from farm labor. When he’d rolled up his sleeves, his forearm had been brown and hard as a hazelnut. Even though she didn’t know the steps, it was easy to follow the dance with him beside her, smiling encouragement. A Sarajevan—even a poor one like Lola—would never give a second glance to a Bosnian peasant. Never mind if the farmer was quite well-off, a city person felt superior. But Mordechai was another thing entirely. He’d grown up in Travnik, which, while not Sarajevo, was a fine town nevertheless. He was educated; he’d attended the gymnasium. Yet two years earlier, at the age of seventeen, he’d gone off on a boat to Palestine to work on a farm. And not a prosperous farm either, by his description. A dried-out, barren piece of dust where you had to break your back to raise a crop. And for no profit, just the food in your mouth and the work clothes on your back. Worse than a peasant, really. Yet when he talked about it, it was as if there was no more fascinating or noble profession in the world than digging irrigation ditches and harvesting dates.
Lola loved listening to Mordechai when he talked about all the practical things a pioneer had to know, like how to treat a scorpion bite or stanch a bad cut; how to site a sanitary latrine or improvise a shelter. Lola knew she would never leave home to pioneer in Palestine, but she liked to think about the kind of adventurous life that might demand such skills. And she liked to think about Mordechai. The way he spoke reminded her of the old Ladino songs her grandfather had sung to her when she was a little girl. He had a seed stand at the open-air market, and Lola’s mother would sometimes leave her there with him while she worked. Grandfather was full of tales of knights and hidalgos, and poems from a magic place called Sepharad, where he said their ancestors had lived long ago. Mordechai spoke about his new land as if it were Sepharad. He told the group that he couldn’t wait to get back there, to Eretz Israel. “I am jealous of every sunrise I am not there to see the white stones of the Jordan Valley turn to gold.”
People of the Book Page 5