People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  Lola didn’t speak up in the group discussions. She felt stupid compared to the others. Many of them were Svabo Jijos, Yiddish-speaking Jews, who had come to the city with the Austrian occupation in the late nineteenth century. Ladino-speaking families like Lola’s had been in the city since 1565, when Sarajevo was part of the Ottoman empire, and the Muslim sultan had offered refuge from Christian persecution. Most of those who came had been wandering since the expulsion from Spain in 1492, unable to find a permanent home. They had found peace in Sarajevo, and acceptance, but only a few families had really prospered. Most remained small-time merchants like her grandfather, or artisans with simple skills. The Svabo Jijos were more educated, more European in their outlook. Very soon they had much better jobs and were blending with the highest ranks of Sarajevan society. Their children went to the gymnasium and even sometimes to the university. At the Young Guardians, they were the natural leaders.

  One was the daughter of a city councilor, one the son of the pharmacist, a widower, for whom Lola’s mother did laundry. Another girl’s father was a bookkeeper at the finance ministry, where Lola’s father worked as a janitor. But Mordechai treated everyone as an equal, so gradually she gathered enough courage to ask a question.

  “But Mordechai,” she’d asked shyly, “aren’t you glad to be home in your own country, speaking your own language, not having to work so hard?”

  Mordechai had turned to her with a smile. “This isn’t my home,” he said gently. “And it isn’t yours, either. The only true home for Jews is Eretz Israel. And that’s why I’m here, to tell you all about the life you could have, to prepare you, and to bring you back with me, to build our Jewish homeland.”

  He raised his arms, as if including her in a communal embrace. “‘If you will it, it is no dream.’” He paused, letting the words hang in the air. “A great man said that, and I believe it. What about you, Lola, will you act your dreams, and make them real?” She blushed, unused to the attention, and Mordechai smiled kindly. Then he spread his hands to include the whole group. “But think of this. What do you will? Is it to do the pigeon dance, scratching around for the crumbs of others, or will you be desert hawks, and soar to your own destiny?”

  Isak, the pharmacist’s son, was a slight, studious boy with pencil-thin limbs. Lola’s mother often opined that for all his learning, the pharmacist didn’t have the first idea about how to properly feed a growing child. But of all the young people in the hall, Isak alone fidgeted impatiently during Mordechai’s rhetorical flight. Mordechai noticed and turned the full force of his warmth upon him. “What is it, Isak? Do you have a view to share with us?”

  Isak pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Maybe what you say is true for Jews in Germany. We all hear troubling news from there. But not here. Anti-Semitism has never been part of our lives in Sarajevo. Look where the synagogue is: between the mosque and the Orthodox church. I’m sorry, but Palestine is the Arabs’ home, not yours. Certainly not mine. We are Europeans. Why turn our backs on a country that has offered us prosperity and education, in order to become a peasant among people who don’t want us?”

  “So, you are happy to be a pigeon?” Mordechai said this with a smile, but his intention to belittle Isak was clear, even to Lola. Isak pinched the bridge of his nose and scratched his head.

  “Maybe so. But at least the pigeon does no harm. The hawk lives at the expense of the other creatures that dwell in the desert.”

  Lola had listened to the two of them argue until her head ached. She had no idea who was right. She turned over on the thin mattress and tried to quiet her mind. She had to get to sleep, otherwise she’d nod off over her tasks the next day, and her father would want to know why. Lola worked in the laundry with her mother, Rashela. If she was tired, it was a chore to walk the streets of the city with her heavy baskets, delivering fresh starched linens and picking up soiled clothes. The warm, moist steam would make her drowsy when she was supposed to be tending the copper. Her mother would find her, slumped in a corner, as the water cooled and a greasy scum congealed on the surface.

  Lujo, her father, was not a harsh man, but he was a strict and practical one. At first, he had allowed her to go to the Young Guardians, Hashomer Haza’ir in Hebrew, after her work was done. His friend Mosa, the custodian at the Jewish community center, had spoken in favor of the group, saying it was a harmless and wholesome youth organization, like the Gentiles’ Scouts. But then Lola had fallen asleep and let the fire that heated the copper go out. Her mother had scolded, and her father had asked why. When he learned that there was a dance, the hora, which boys and girls did together, he’d banned her from attending any more meetings. “You are only fifteen, daughter. When you are a little older, we will find a nice fiancé to partner with you, and then you may dance.’’

  She had pleaded, saying she would sit down during the dances. “There are things I can learn there,” she said.

  “Things!” said Lujo contemptuously. “Things that will help you earn bread for your family? No? I did not think so. Wild ideas. Communistic ideas, from what I have heard. Ideas that are banned in our country and will get you into trouble you don’t need. And a dead language that no one speaks, save for a handful of old men in the synagogue. Really, I don’t know what Mosa was thinking. I will look to your honor, even if others forget the value of these things. Hiking, on Sunday, I don’t mind it, if your mother has no chores for you. But from now on you spend your evenings at home.”

  From then on, in fact, Lola had begun to lead an exhausting double life. Hashomer met two nights a week. On those nights, she went to bed early, with her little sister. Sometimes, when she had worked very hard, it took an immense effort of will to keep herself awake, listening to the gentle, even breathing of Dora’s little body next to her. But mostly her anticipation made it easy to feign sleep until her parents’ snores told her it was safe to leave. Then she would creep out, scrambling into her clothes on the landing and hoping no neighbors came out of their doors to notice.

  On the evening that Mordechai told the group he was leaving, Lola at first did not understand him. “I am going home,” he said. Lola thought he meant Travnik. Then she realized he was taking a freighter back to Palestine, and that she would never see him again. He invited everyone to come to the train station on the day of his departure, to see him off. Then he announced that Avram, an apprentice printer, had decided to go with him.

  “He is the first. I hope many of you will follow.” He glanced at Lola, and it seemed to her that his gaze lingered. “Whenever you come home, we will be there to welcome you.”

  The day that Mordecai and Avram were to leave, Lola longed to go to the train station, but her mother had an immense amount of laundry to do. Rashela toiled with the heavy iron while Lola took her accustomed place at the copper and the mangle. At the hour when Mordechai’s train was to depart for the coast, Lola stared at the gray walls of the laundry, watching the steam condense and trickle down the cold stone. The smell of mold filled her nostrils. She tried to imagine the hard white sunlight that Mordechai had described, silvering the leaves of olive trees, and the scent of orange blossoms blooming in the stone-walled gardens of Jerusalem.

  The leader who took Mordechai’s place, a young man named Samuel from Novi Sad, was a competent teacher of outdoor skills, but lacked the charisma that had kept Lola awake on meeting nights. Now, more often than not, she fell asleep herself as she waited for her exhausted parents to drop off. She would wake to the khoja’s dawn prayer call, rallying their Muslim neighbors to devotions. She would realize she had missed a meeting and feel only slight regret.

  Other boys and girls did follow Avram and Mordechai to Palestine, each time with a big send-off at the railway station. Occasionally they would write back to the group. Always there was a sameness to the reports; the work was hard, but the land was worth any effort, and to be a Jew building a Jewish land was what mattered most in the world. Lola sometimes wondered about these letters. Surely
someone was homesick? Surely such a life could not agree with everyone who tried it? But it seemed as if those who left all became one person, speaking with the same monotonous voice.

  The tempo of departures picked up as the news from Germany worsened. The annexation of Austria put the Reich hard up against their borders. But life at the community center went on as usual, the old people meeting for coffee and gossip, the religious for their Oneg Shabbat on Friday night. There was no sense of danger, even when the government turned a blind eye to the fascist gangs who began to roam the streets, harassing anyone they knew to be a Jew, getting into fistfights with the Gypsies. “They are just louts.” Lujo shrugged. “Every community has its louts, even ours. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Sometimes, when Lola was collecting soiled laundry from an apartment in the affluent part of the city, she would catch sight of Isak, always with a heavy book bag slung across his shoulder. He was at the university now, studying chemistry as his father had. Lola wanted to ask him what he thought of the louts, and whether it worried him that France had fallen. But she was embarrassed by the basket of sour-smelling garments she carried. And she wasn’t sure she knew enough to ask the questions in a way that would not disclose her as a fool.

  When Stela Kamal heard a light knock on the door of her apartment, she reached up to the crown of her head and pulled down her lace veil before she went to answer it. She had been in Sarajevo for a little more than a year, but she still clung to the more conservative ways of Priština, where no traditional Muslim family allowed its women to show their faces to a strange man.

  That afternoon, though, her caller was not a man; just the laundress her husband had arranged. Stela felt sorry for the young girl. On her back she carried a wicker pannier laden with pressed laundry. Over the shoulder straps for this, she had slung calico bags full of soiled items. She looked tired and chilled. Stela offered her a hot drink.

  At first, Lola could not understand Stela’s Albanian accent. Stela threw back the fine piece of lace that covered her face and repeated her offer, miming the pouring of coffee from a džezva. Lola accepted gladly; it was so cold outside, and she had walked miles. Stela beckoned her into the apartment and went to the mangala, where the embers were still hot. She flung the coffee grounds into the džezva and let it boil up once, twice.

  The rich aroma made Lola’s mouth water. She stared around her. She had never seen so many books. The apartment’s walls were lined with them. It wasn’t a large apartment, but everything in it had an easy grace, as if it had always been there. Low wooden tables, inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the Turkish style, had yet more books open upon them. Celims in muted colors warmed the gleaming waxed floors. The mangala was very old, the copper burnished, the hemispherical cover decorated with crescents and stars.

  Stela turned and handed Lola a delicate porcelain fildžan, also with a crescent and star glazed into the bottom of the cup. Stela raised the džezva high and poured the hot coffee in a long dark thread. Lola wrapped her fingers around the handleless cup and felt the fragrant steam caress her face. As she sipped the strong coffee, she looked over the rim of the cup at the young Muslim woman. Even at home, Stela’s hair was tied back beneath spotless white silk, her lace veil lying prettily over it, ready to be drawn down again if modesty required. The young woman was very beautiful, with warm dark eyes and creamy skin. Lola registered, with surprise, that the two of them were probably around the same age. She felt a stab of envy. Stela’s hands, holding the džezva, were smooth and pale, not red and scaly like Lola’s. How nice to have such an easy life, in such a fine apartment, with someone else to do the irksome chores.

  Then Lola noticed a silver-framed photograph of the young woman on what must have been her wedding day, although her expression betrayed no joy. The man beside her was tall and distinguished, wearing a fez and a long dark frock coat. But he looked more than twice her age. An arranged marriage, probably. Lola had heard that Albanian tradition required brides to stand stock-still from dawn to dusk on their wedding day, forbidden from taking any part in the celebration. Even a smile was considered immodest and reprehensible. Lola, accustomed to wild rejoicing even at the most observant Jewish weddings, couldn’t imagine such a thing. She wondered if it was true, or just one of the rumors that different communities made up about one another. Gazing at the picture, her envy waned. She, at least, would marry someone young and strong. Like Mordechai.

  Stela saw Lola scrutinizing the photograph. “That is my husband, Serif effendi Kamal,” she said. She was smiling now, and slightly flushed. “Do you know him? Most people in Sarajevo seem to.” Lola shook her head. There was no point of intersection between her poor, unlettered family and the Kamals, a large and influential clan of Muslim alims, or intellectuals. The Kamals had given Bosnia many muftis, the highest religious office in a province.

  Serif Kamal had studied theology at the university in Istanbul and Oriental languages at the Sorbonne in Paris. He had been a professor and the senior official in the ministry of religious affairs before becoming chief librarian at the National Museum. He spoke ten languages and had written scholarly books on history and architecture, although his specialty was the study of ancient manuscripts. His intellectual passion was the literature that had developed at Sarajevo’s cultural crossroads: lyric poetry written by Muslim Slavs in classical Arabic, yet following the forms of Petrarchan sonnets that had been carried inland from Diocletian’s court on the Dalmatian coast.

  Serif had postponed marriage while he pursued his studies, and had finally taken a wife simply to silence all those in his circle who nagged him to do so. He had been visiting Stela’s father, who had taught him the Albanian language. His old professor had begun to rib him about his extended bachelorhood. Flippantly, Serif had said he would marry, but only if his friend would give him one of his daughters. The next thing Serif knew, he had a bride. More than a year later, he was still surprised at how happy he was with this sweet young presence in his life. Especially since she had just confided that she was pregnant.

  Stela had carefully folded the soiled sheets and garments. She handed them to Lola almost diffidently. She had always done her own laundry. She expected to. But with the baby coming, Serif had insisted on lessening her household chores.

  Lola picked up the basket, thanked Stela for the coffee, and went on her way.

  On an April morning, when the first snowmelt brought grassy scents from the mountains, the Luftwaffe sent wave after wave of Stuka dive-bombers to raid Belgrade. Armies from four hostile nations poured across the borders. It took less than two weeks for the Yugoslav army to surrender. Even before that, Germany had declared Sarajevo part of a new state. “This is now the Ustashe and Independent State of Croatia,” the Nazi-appointed leader declared. “It must be cleansed of Serbs and Jews. There is no room for any of them here. Not a stone upon a stone will remain of what once belonged to them.”

  On April 16, the Germans marched into Sarajevo and for the next two days, they rampaged through the Jewish quarter. Anything of value was looted. Fires burned unchecked in the old synagogues. Anti-Jewish laws for the “protection of Aryan blood and the honor of the Croatian people” meant that Lola’s father, Lujo, no longer had a job at the finance ministry. Instead, he was forced into a work brigade with other Jewish men, even professionals like Isak’s father, the pharmacist. All were forced to wear a yellow star. Lola’s little sister, Dora, was expelled from school. The family, always poor, now had to rely on the few coins that Lola and Rashela could earn.

  Stela Kamal was troubled. Her husband, usually so courteous, so concerned about her condition, had hardly exchanged six words with her in two days. He had returned home late from the museum, barely touched his dinner, and shut himself up in his study. In the morning he had said little at breakfast, and left early. When Stela went to tidy the study, she found his desk strewn with pages, some heavily corrected with many crossed-out sentences, some balled up and tossed onto the floor.

  Ser
if usually worked calmly. His desk was always impeccably neat and organized. Almost guiltily, Stela smoothed out one of the discarded sheets. “Nazi Germany is a kleptocracy,” she read. She did not know the word. “Museums have a duty to resist the plundering of cultural heritage. The losses in France and Poland could have been stanched had not museum directors offered up their skill and expertise to facilitate German looting. Instead, to our shame, we are become one of the most Nazified professions in Europe….” There was nothing else on the sheet. She picked up another crumpled ball. This one had a heading, heavily underlined: ANTI-SEMITISM IS FOREIGN TO THE MUSLIMS OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA. The page seemed to be an article, or some kind of open letter, decrying the passage of anti-Jewish laws. There was much crossing out, but Stela could read parts of sentences: “…only a lightning rod used to draw the people’s attention away from their real problems.”…“Provide help to the poor among the Jewish population, whose number is much higher than commonly estimated….”

  Stela crumpled the paper and swept it into a rubbish container. She pressed her knuckles into the small of her back, which was aching a little. She had never doubted that her husband was the wisest of men. She did not doubt it now. But his silences, the crumpled pages, the alarming sentences…She thought about speaking to him of these things. All day, she rehearsed what she might say. But when he came home, she poured his coffee from the džezva and said nothing.

  After a few weeks, the arrests began. In early summer, Lujo was ordered to report for transport to a labor camp. Rashela wept and pleaded with him not to answer the summons, to flee the city, but Lujo said that he was strong, and a good worker, and would manage. He took his wife’s chin in his hand. “Better this way. The war cannot last forever. If I run away, they will come for you.” Never a demonstrative man, he kissed her, long and tenderly, and climbed aboard the truck.