Serif knew he had very little time. He hoped he had divined the director’s plan correctly. He scribbled out a receipt with the haggadah’s catalog numbers and then, in a different pen, signed below them in an illegible scrawl. He called for a porter and told the man to take the paper to the director’s office. “Use the service stair, and be as quick as you can. Put it on his desk where he can see it the instant he walks in.”
Then, deliberately, forcing himself to slow his movements, he walked to the hat stand and reached for his overcoat and fez. He sauntered out of the library and across the hall to the museum’s main entrance. He made eye contact with Faber’s waiting entourage, nodding in acknowledgment of their presence. Halfway down the museum stair, he stopped to confer with a colleague who was ascending. He passed the large black staff car waiting at the curb. Smiling and greeting his acquaintances, he stopped at his favorite café. He sipped his coffee slowly, as a real Bosnian is supposed to, savoring every drop. Then, and only then, he headed for home.
As Serif turned the pages of the haggadah, Lola gasped at the splendor of the illuminations.
“You should be very proud of this,” he said to her. “It is a great work of art that your people have given the world.”
Stela wrung her hands and said something in Albanian. Serif looked at her, his expression firm and yet kindly. He answered in Bosnian. “I know you are concerned, my dear. And you have every right to be. We already shelter a Jew, and now a Jewish book. Both very much wanted by the Nazis. A young life and an ancient artifact. Both very precious. And you say that you do not care about the risk to yourself, and for that I commend you, and am proud. But you fear for our son. And what you fear is very real. I, too, fear for him. I have made plans for Leila with a friend of mine. Tomorrow, we will meet him. He will guide her to a family in the Italian zone who can keep her safe.”
“But what about the book?” said Stela. “Surely the general will uncover your deception. After they search the museum, won’t they come here?”
“Don’t worry,” said Serif calmly. “It is by no means certain he will uncover us. Dr. Boscovic had the presence of mind to tell Faber one of his men had come for the book. The Nazis are looters at heart. Faber knows that his officers are schooled in theft. He probably has a half dozen men he believes capable of having stolen the book to enrich themselves. And in any case,” he said, wrapping the small volume in its cloth, “after tomorrow, it will not be here.”
“Where will you take it?” said Stela.
“I am not sure. The best place to hide a book might be in a library.” He had thought about simply returning the book to the museum, misshelving it somewhere among the many thousands of volumes. But then he recalled another library, much smaller, where he had spent many happy hours studying at the side of a dear friend. He turned to Stela and smiled. “I will take it,” he said, “to the last place anyone would think to look.”
The next day was Friday, the Muslim Sabbath. Serif went to work as usual, but excused himself at midday, saying he wished to attend the communal prayers. He returned to his home to collect Stela, Habib, and Lola. Instead of heading for the local mosque, he drove out of the city, up into the mountains. Lola held Habib during the drive, playing his favorite games of peep-o and handy pandy, drawing him close whenever she could, trying to memorize the smell of his head, which reminded her of the sweet fragrance of mown grass. The road was a difficult one, narrow and switchbacked. Now, in midsummer, the light was as rich as butter, golden on the small fields of wheat and sunflowers that filled each sliver of flatland between the swift, steep rises of the mountains. When winter came, the snows would make these ways impassable until spring thaw. Lola concentrated on Habib to stop herself from feeling nauseated by the car’s movement and by her own anxiety. She knew it was wise to leave the city, where the risk that she would be discovered was constant. But she hated to leave the Kamals. Despite the grief she carried and the fear that stalked her, the four months in their household had brought her a serenity she’d never experienced before.
It was sunset when they came through the final narrow pass and saw the village open like a flower in its small hanging valley. A farmer was bringing his cows in from the fields, and the call to evening prayer mingled with the whine and groan of the moving cattle. Up here, in the isolation of the mountains, the war and its privations seemed very far away.
Serif stopped the car at a low stone house. The walls were white, each stone laid alongside the next with the precision of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. The deep, niched windows were tall and narrow, with thick shutters, painted cerulean blue, that could be closed against winter storms. Wild larkspur, a deeper blue, grew in profusion around the building. A pair of butterflies drifted lazily amid the blossoms. An old mulberry tree spread its boughs over the courtyard. As soon as the car pulled up, a half dozen small faces peeped out of the glossy foliage. The tree was thick with children, perched on its branches like bright birds.
One by one, the children dropped out of the tree and swarmed around Serif, who had brought a sweet for each of them. From the cottage, a slightly older girl, her face veiled like Stela’s, emerged, rebuking the children for the ruckus. “But Uncle Serif is here!” the children cried excitedly, and Lola could see the girl’s eyes smiling over her veil.
“Welcome, most welcome!” she said. “Father has not yet returned from the mosque, but my brother Munib is inside. Please, come, and be comfortable.” Munib, a scholarly looking youth of about nineteen, was seated at a desk, magnifying glass in one hand, tweezers in the other, carefully mounting an insect specimen. The table shimmered with fragments of wings.
Munib turned as his sister called to him, looking cross that his concentration had been disturbed. But his expression changed when he saw Serif. “Sir! What an unexpected honor.” Serif, knowing his friend’s son’s great passion for insects, had secured work for Munib as an assistant in the museum’s natural history department during school vacations.
“I am glad to see that you keep up with your study, despite the difficult times,” Serif said. “I know your father still hopes to send you to the university one day.”
“Insha’Allah,” Munib said.
As Serif took a seat on a low couch under an arched window, Munib’s sister ushered Stela and Lola into the women’s parlor, as the younger children carried in a seemingly endless parade of trays: grape juice, pressed from the family’s own vines, tea—a rarity now in the city—homegrown cucumbers, and handmade pastries.
So Lola was not present when Serif Kamal asked his good friend, Munib’s father, the village khoja, to hide the haggadah. She did not see the enthusiasm on the khoja’s face as he impatiently brushed aside his son’s work to clear a space on the table for the manuscript, or the wonder in his eyes as he turned its pages. The sun had set, bathing the room in a warm red afterglow. Tiny motes shimmered and danced in the fading light. As a child entered carrying a tray of tea, one small piece of butterfly wing rose on the slight breeze from the open door and fluttered to rest, unnoticed, on the haggadah’s open page.
Serif and the khoja took the haggadah into the library of the mosque. They found it a narrow place on a high shelf, pressed between volumes of Islamic law. The last place anyone would think of looking.
Later that night, the Kamals drove back down the mountain. They stopped just outside the city, at a fine house with a high stone wall. Serif turned to Stela. “Say good-bye now. We can’t linger here.” Lola and Stela embraced. “Farewell, my sister,” Stela said. “God keep you safe until we meet again.” Lola’s throat closed, and she could not answer. She kissed the baby’s head and handed him to his mother, then she followed Serif into the dark.
Hanna
Vienna, Spring 1996
PARNASSIUS.
Great name for a butterfly. It had a kind of loftiness, and I felt elevated as I walked out through the manicured gardens of the museum toward the swirling traffic of the Ringstrasse. I’d never found butterfly remains in a
book before. I couldn’t wait to get to Werner’s place and tell him all about it.
The traveling scholarship that brought me to Vienna after my undergraduate degree could have taken me anywhere. Jerusalem or Cairo would have made most sense. But I was determined to study with Werner Maria Heinrich, or Universitätsprofessor Herr Doktor Doktor Heinrich, as I’d been told to address him, the Austrians being the opposite of Australians in insisting on giving a separate title for each degree earned. I’d heard about his expertise in traditional techniques—he was the world’s best at spotting forgeries because he knew more than anyone about the original crafts and materials. He was also a specialist in Hebrew manuscripts, which I found intriguing for a German Catholic of his generation. I offered myself as his apprentice.
His reply to my first letter was polite but dismissive—“honored by your interest but unfortunately not in a position,” etc. My second letter yielded a shorter, slightly more exasperated turndown. The third got a flat and rather testy one-liner that translated into Aussie as “no bloody way.” But I came anyway. With an immense amount of front, I presented myself at his apartment on Maria-Theresienstrasse, and begged him to take me on. It was winter, and, like most Australians on their first trip to a seriously cold place, I’d come unprepared for the brutal weather. I thought my rather fetching, cropped leather jacket was a winter coat, since it served that purpose in Sydney. I had no idea. So I must’ve cut a pathetic figure when I lobbed up on his doorstep, shivering, the snowflakes that’d melted in my hair turned to little icicles that clinked when I moved my head. His innate courtliness made it impossible for him to turn me away.
The months I spent grinding pigments or polishing parchments in his spacious flat-cum-workshop, or sitting beside him in the conservation department of the nearby university library taught me more, I think, than all my formal degrees combined. The first month was very stiff: “Miss Heath” this and “Herr Doktor Doktor” that, correct and rather chilly. But by the time I left I was his “Hanna, Liebchen.” I think we each filled a vacancy in the other’s life. We were both rather shorthanded in the family department. I’d never known my grandparents. His family had been killed in the Dresden fire-bombing. He’d been in Berlin, in the army, of course, although he never talked of it. Nor did he speak about his childhood in Dresden, abbreviated by war. Even in those days, I had enough tact not to press it. But I noticed that when I walked with him near the Hofburg, he always went out of his way to avoid Heldenplatz, the Hero’s Square. It was only much later that I came across the famous picture of that square, taken in March of 1938. In the photograph, it is packed with people, some of them clinging to the gigantic equestrian statues to get a better view, all of them cheering as Hitler announced the incorporation of his birth nation into the Third Reich.
After I left Werner to go to Harvard for my PhD (where I probably wouldn’t have been accepted without his glowing recommendation), he wrote to me occasionally, telling me about interesting projects he was working on, offering me career advice. And when he came to New York a couple of times, I’d take the train down from Boston to see him. But it had been a few years since then, so I wasn’t prepared for the frail figure waiting for me at the top of the marble-clad staircase that led up to his flat.
He was leaning on an ebony cane with a silver top. His hair, too, was silver, rather long, brushed back from his forehead. He was wearing a dark velvet jacket with pale lemon piping on the lapels. At his neck he wore a bow tie in the nineteenth-century fashion, a long piece of patterned silk tied loosely under the collar. He had a little white rosebud for a boutonniere. I knew how particular he was about appearances, so I’d taken more than usual pains with my own grooming, making my French twist fancy rather than functional and wearing a fuchsia suit that looked good with my dark hair.
“Hanna, Liebchen! How beautiful today! How beautiful! More lovely each time I see you!” He grasped my hand and kissed it, then peered at the chapped skin and made a little tsk. “The price of our craft, eh?” he said. His own hands were rough and gnarled, but I noted that his nails were freshly manicured, which mine, alas, were not.
In his mid-seventies, Werner had retired from the university, but he still wrote the rare paper and occasionally consulted on important manuscripts. The minute I stepped into the apartment, I could see—and smell—that he hadn’t stopped working with the materials of old books. The long table by the tall Gothic windows, where I’d sat beside him and learned so much, remained cluttered with agate stones and foul-smelling gallnuts, antique gold-beater’s tools, and parchments in all states of preparation.
He had a maid now, and as he ushered me into the library—one of my favorite rooms in the world, since every volume in it seemed to come with a story—she served the kaffee.
The rich cardamom scent made me feel like a twenty-year-old student again. Werner had taken to drinking his coffee Arabic style after a visiting professorship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he’d lived in the Christian quarter of the Old City, among Palestinians. Every time I smelled cardamom it reminded me of him, and of this apartment, washed with the pale gray European light that is so easy on the eyes when you’re working for hours on fine details.
“So. It is good to see you, Hanna. Thank you for taking the time to come out of your way and humor an old man.”
“Werner, you know I love to see you. But I was hoping you might be able to help me with something, as well.”
His face lit up. He leaned forward in his wing chair. “Tell me!”
I’d brought my notes, so I referred to these as I told him what I had done in Sarajevo. He nodded, approving. “It is exactly as I myself would have done. You are a good student.” Then I told him about the Parnassius wing fragment, which intrigued him, and then the other artifacts—the white hair, the samples of stain and the salt, and finally I got to the oddity of the grooved boards.
“I agree,” he said. “Definitely it seems they were prepared to take a pair of clasps.” He looked up at me, his blue eyes watery behind gold-rimmed glasses. “So, why are they not there? Most interesting. Most mysterious.”
“Do you think the National Museum would have anything on the haggadah, and the work that was done there back in 1894? It’s a long time ago….”
“Not so very long for Vienna, my dear. I am sure there will be something. Whether it is something useful is another matter. But it was a tremendous fuss, you know, when the manuscript came to light. The first of the illustrated haggadot to be rediscovered. Two of the foremost scholars of the day traveled here to examine it. I am sure the museum has their papers, at least. I think that one of them was Rothschild, from Oxford; yes, that’s right, I’m sure of it. The other was Martell, from the Sorbonne—you read French, yes? The binder’s notes, if they kept them, they would be in German. But perhaps the binder left no notes. As you saw for yourself, the rebinding was disgracefully mishandled.”
“Why do you think that was, when the book was the center of so much attention?”
“I believe there was a controversy over who should keep the book. Vienna, of course, wanted to retain it. Why not? The capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the center of Europe’s artistic energy…But remember, the Hapsburgs only occupied Bosnia at that time—they didn’t annex it until 1908. And the Slav nationalists hated the occupation.” He raised a crooked finger and waved it—it was a mannerism of his when he had something he thought particularly interesting to say.
“By coincidence, the man who started World War I was born the very year the haggadah came here, did you know that?”
“You mean the student who shot the Hapsburg guy in Sarajevo?” Werner drew in his chin, grinning smugly. He loved to tell people something they didn’t know. We were alike in that way.
“In any case, I think fear of inciting nationalism might have been why the book was eventually returned to the Bosnian Landesmuseum. My guess is that the clumsy binding was Vienna’s revenge, a little piece of petty snobbery: if it has to go to
the provinces, then a cheap binding is good enough. Or it may have been something more sinister.” His voice dropped a little, and he drummed his fingers on the brocaded arm of his chair. “I don’t know if you are aware of it, but those fin de siècle years saw a great surge in anti-Semitism here. Everything Hitler said and some large part of what he did with regard to the Jews was rehearsed here, you know. It was the air he breathed, growing up in Austria. He would have been, let me see, about five years old, starting kindergarten in Braunau, when the haggadah was here. So strange, to think about such things….” His voice trailed off. We had begun to tread rather close to forbidden ground. When he looked up at me and spoke again, I thought at first that he was trying to change the subject.
“Tell me, Hanna, have you read Schnitzler? No? You must! You cannot understand anything about the Viennese, even today, without Arthur Schnitzler.”
He groped for his cane and stood, with difficulty, treading slowly and carefully toward the bookcases. He ran his finger along the spines of volumes that were almost all first or rare editions. “I have only the German and you still do not read German, do you? No? Great pity. Very interesting writer, Schnitzler, very—forgive me—erotic. Very frank about his many seductions. But also he writes a great deal on the rise of the Judenfressers—that means Jew Eaters, because the term anti-Semitism was not yet coined when he was a boy. Schnitzler was Jewish, of course.”
He drew a book from the shelf—“This is called My Youth in Vienna. It’s a very nice edition—an association copy, Schnitzler to his Latin master, one Johann Auer, ‘with thanks for the Auerisms.’ Do you know, I found this in a church book sale in Salzburg? Remarkable that no one had spotted it….” He leafed through the book until he found the passage he sought. “Here, he apologizes for writing so much on ‘the so-called Jewish question.’ But he says that no Jew, no matter how assimilated, was allowed to forget the fact of his birth.” He adjusted his glasses and read aloud, translating. “‘Even if you managed to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched; as for instance a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin has been anesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut until the blood flows.’” Werner closed the book. “He wrote that in the early 1900s. The imagery is very chilling, is it not, in the light of what followed….”
People of the Book Page 10