People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  Anna did not see him as she swept through the door. Her head was down, her hands busy extracting hat pins. She turned to the mirror in the hallway as the wide straw hat came off. Franz saw her face reflected in the glass. She was smiling at some private joke as her fingers fluttered around thick swirls of hair that had come loose with the hat. Franz put down his glass silently and moved behind her, taking one of the twists of hair in his hand and stroking the backs of his fingers along her neck. His wife gave a startled shudder.

  “Franz! You frightened me,” she protested. Her face, as she turned to him, was flushed. But that alone would not have been enough to pierce Hirschfeldt with sudden, unwelcome knowledge. Before she turned, he had noted that one of the tiny, muslin-covered buttons on the back of her bodice had been fastened into the wrong buttonhole. Her maid, who was fastidious, would never have allowed such a thing. Such a small thing; a tiny betraying detail of a very great betrayal.

  Hirschfeldt took his wife’s face between his hands and stared at her. Was it his imagination, or did her lips have a softened, bruised look? Suddenly he did not want to touch her. He let go of her face and rubbed his hands down the side of his trouser seams, as if wiping off uncleanliness.

  “Is it Hertzl?” he hissed.

  “Hertzl?” Her eyes scanned his face. “Yes, Franz, I went to see Frau Hertzl, but she was not at home so I—”

  “Don’t. Don’t trouble to lie to me. I spend my life among the sexually reckless, the cuckolders, and their trollops.” He pushed his thumb hard across her lips, mashing them against her teeth. “You have been kissed.” He reached behind her neck and pulled hard on the muslin so that the buttons tore from the delicate loops of fabric that held them. “You have been undressed.” He leaned in close. “Someone has fucked you.”

  She took a step away from him, trembling.

  “I ask you again: was it Hertzl?”

  Her brown eyes brimmed. “No,” she whispered. “Not Hertzl. No one you know.”

  He found himself repeating what he’d said to his brother not so many hours earlier. “You’d be surprised who I know.” His mind was full of images: the baron’s boil-cratered penis, the yellow pus oozing from a girl’s eroded labia, the gummy tumors eating away at poor demented Mittl. He couldn’t breathe. He needed air. He turned away from his wife and walked out the door, slamming it behind him.

  Rosalind, having given up on seeing Hirschfeldt that evening, was dressing for a concert. There was an attractive second violin in the Behrensdorf Quartet who had stared at her across his bow all through a recital at a private salon the previous evening. After the performance, he had sought her out and made a point of telling her that he would be playing at the Musikverein tonight. She had just dabbed scent behind her ears and was contemplating whether to risk the delicate lemon silk of her bodice to the pin of a small sapphire brooch when Hirschfeldt was announced. She felt a slight stab of irritation. Why had he not called at the usual hour? He burst into her boudoir, looking entirely odd in his smoking jacket and with such an expression on his face.

  “Franz! How very peculiar! Don’t tell me you wore that in the street?”

  He did not answer, simply unbuttoned the frogs on the jacket with impatient fingers and threw it on the bed. Then he strode up to her, slid the strap of her gown off her shoulder, and commenced kissing her with an urgency he hadn’t displayed in months.

  Rosalind submitted to, rather than participated in, the untender coupling that followed. After, she raised herself on one elbow and gazed at him. “Would you care to tell me what is going on?”

  “Not really.”

  She waited a few moments, but when he said nothing more, she rose, picked up her gown where it had fallen on the floor, and commenced to dress again for the Musikverein. If she hurried, she could get there before the first interval.

  “You are going out?” He sounded aggrieved.

  “Yes, if you are going to lie there with a face like a stone. I am most certainly going out.” She turned to him, angry now herself. “Franz, do you realize it has been a month since you have taken me anywhere, brought me a gift, made me laugh? I think perhaps it is time I took a vacation. I might go to the spa at Baden.”

  “Rosalind, please. Not now.” He was chagrined. It was he who should decide when to end the affair, not she.

  She picked up the brooch. The sapphires looked well against the lemon, and drew attention to her lively eyes. She jabbed the pin into the delicate fabric. “Then, my friend, you had best give me a reason to stay.”

  With that, she stood, swirled a light stole over her creamy shoulders, and left the room.

  In the gathering dark of early evening, Florien Mittl clutched at the slender trunk of a lime tree to steady himself as fur-hatted Hassids poured out of their synagogue and filled the street with their uncouth Yiddish babble. His gait was too uncertain to risk trying to make his way against the tide. He would have to wait till they passed. In the upper-Austrian burg where he had been raised, it was the Jews who would make way for a Christian, they who would wait for him to pass. Vienna was too liberal; there was no doubt of it. These Jews had been allowed to forget their place. And was there no end to them? It was not Saturday, so he supposed it must be some Jewish festival or another that brought them out in such numbers, in such strange finery.

  Perhaps it was the very festival commemorated in the book he had been given to rebind. He didn’t know. Nor did he care. He was glad to have the work, even if it was a Jewish book. Typical that they would give him a Jewish book, destined for the obscurity of a provincial museum. He, who once had been entrusted with the gems of the imperial collection, the finest psalters, the most beautiful Books of Hours…. Well, it was months since the museum had sent anything at all his way, so it was no use dwelling on the past. He would do his best. He’d started on the boards for the new binding, cut them, grooved them for the clasps. The book must have had a remarkable binding once, judging by those clasps. They were as finely wrought as anything in the imperial collection. Four hundred years ago, and some Jew was already rich. Always knew how to get money, them. Why not he? Bring the binding back to that standard, that was what he must strive for. Impress the museum director. Prove he wasn’t ready for the scrap heap. Get more work. He must get more work. Scrape together the funds for the Jew doctor’s cure. Of course, the doctor probably lied about the cost. He wouldn’t charge another Jew such a usurious rate, Mittl would wager on it. Bloodsuckers, all of them, growing fat on Christian suffering.

  Bitter, frightened, in pain, Mittl made his way along the street, dreading the moment he would have to turn into the platz. The small square might as well be the wastes of the Sahara, so difficult to make the crossing. He hugged the periphery of the square, staying close to the walls of the buildings, grateful for fence railings to grasp against a sudden gust of wind that might topple him. At last he arrived at his own building. He did battle with the heavy door, and then leaned, exhausted, against the newel post at the foot of the stairs. He rested there for a long moment, gathering his wind and his will, before the slow ascent. He feared the stairs. He saw himself dead at the base of them, his head pulped, a broken leg twisted grotesquely. He clutched at the banister, pulling himself up hand over hand like an alpinist.

  The apartment was dark, and smelled bad. The usual scents of leather and size were overlaid with ranker aromas of unwashed clothes and rancid meat. He lit a single gas lamp—all he could afford—and unwrapped the slice of mutton his daughter had left for him, oh, several days ago. Why did the girl neglect him so? She was all he had, since her mother…since Lise…

  With the thought of his wife, guilty regret swept over him. What a wedding present he had given her. Did his daughter know? He couldn’t bear it if his daughter knew. But perhaps that’s why she had grown distant, helping him only as far as mean duty demanded. Probably he disgusted her. Certainly he disgusted himself. Like the meat. Rotten. Rotting inside. The mutton had a greenish tinge, and was slimy to the touch.
He ate it anyway. There was nothing else.

  He had intended to start again on the work. He wiped his hands on a piece of rag and turned toward his workbench, where the book in its damaged binding lay waiting for his attentions. Years, centuries, since anyone had repaired it. A chance for him to show his skill. Do it quickly, impress them, so that they might send him more commissions. Dazzle them. That was what he must do. But the light was so poor, and the pains traveled up and down his arms without respite. He sat down, and pulled the lamp close. He picked up the knife, and then placed it down again. What was it he was supposed to do? What was the first thing? Remove the boards? Release the quires? Prepare the size? He had rebound hundreds of books—valuable, rare books. But suddenly he couldn’t recall a sequence of steps that had been as natural to him as breathing.

  He put his face in his hands. Yesterday, he hadn’t been able to remember how to make the tea. Such a simple thing. A thing he’d done without thinking, several times a day, most of the days of his life. But yesterday it had loomed at him like the frightening staircase, too many steps. He had put the tea leaves into the cup, and the sugar into the teapot, and scalded himself with the water.

  If only the Jew doctor could be persuaded to give him the cure. He had to save what was left of his mind, what was left of himself. There must be something other than money he could offer him. No. Nothing. Jews were only interested in money. There must be something he could sell. His wife’s wedding ring. But his daughter had that; hard to ask her for it back. Only a drop in the ocean anyway. Not such a very fine ring. She deserved better, poor Lise. Poor dead Lise.

  How could he think, how could he work, with this worry constantly gnawing him? He would lie down, perhaps, for just a little while, and then he would be better. Then he would remember, and be able to go on.

  Florien Mittl woke, fully dressed, when the light of late morning finally won its struggle with the grime that coated his window. He lay there, blinking, trying to collect his scattered thoughts. He remembered the book. Then he remembered the dread of the evening before. How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could a man misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go? His thoughts were like an army in retreat, ceding ever more territory to the enemy, his illness. No, not a retreat. Not lately. More like a rout. He turned his head stiffly. A beam of sunlight lay like a stripe of yellow ribbon across the workbench. It hit the sad, tattered, untouched cover of the book. And then it flared on the freshly polished silver of the clasps.

  Hirschfeldt did not fast on the Day of Atonement. Racial solidarity was one thing; he had made a dutiful appearance at the synagogue, nodded to those to whom he needed to nod, and slipped out at the first seemly moment. But unhealthy dietary practices were something else. He thought such customs superstitions from a bygone, primitive age. Generally, Anna agreed with him. But this year she had fasted, creeping around the flat as the day wore on with a hand pressed to her temple. Dehydration headache was Hirschfeldt’s silent diagnosis.

  As the light faded, the children huddled together on the balcony, waiting for the glimmer of the third evening star, which signaled the end of the fast. The two of them had gone without sustenance only the short hour since nursery tea, but they loved the semblance of ritual. There were several squeals, several false alarms, before the moment when the silver trays laden with good things—poppy-seed cakes and sweet crescent pastries—officially became permitted fare.

  Hirschfeldt placed a small square of torte, Anna’s favorite, on a plate. He poured some cool water from the silver ewer into a crystal glass and carried these things to his wife. His rage at her had subsided quite suddenly. So suddenly that he had surprised himself, giving himself immense plaudits for his magnanimity, his maturity, his sophistication. He had not thought of himself as quite such a man of the world. That he had returned home the morning after his discovery to find her tearful, penitent, and full of pleadings, this had surely helped. But the odd thing was that the idea of her, desired by another, had rekindled his own passion. The erotic appetite was a fascinating thing, he mused, as he kissed a sweet crumb from the corner of her hungry lips. That man Freud, whose rooms were so close to his own, he must get to know him better. Some of his writings were full of insight. He had barely thought of Rosalind, away in Baden, or the girl with cornflower eyes.

  “I don’t know, Herr Mittl. I’ve never taken a payment like this before….”

  “Please, Herr Doktor. I have removed them from the Mittl family Bible, you must see they are very fine….”

  “Very fine, Herr Mittl. Lovely. Not that I know anything about silversmithy, but anyone can appreciate the detail in this…work of a real craftsman…an artist, indeed.”

  “They are pure silver, Herr Doktor, not plate.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it, Herr Mittl. That’s not the issue. It’s just that I…we…Jews in general, we don’t have family Bibles. Our Torah is kept in the synagogue, and in any case, it is a scroll….”

  Mittl frowned. He wanted to blurt out that the clasps had come off a Jewish book, but he could hardly reveal that fact without exposing himself as a thief. Was it a measure of his madness, or of his desperation, that he had persuaded himself no one from the museum would miss the pair of clasps? If they did, he had determined to assert that the clasps had never come to him. He would throw suspicion on the foreign scholars instead.

  But this negotiation was not going well. He squirmed in his seat. He had been convinced that the doctor, in his avarice, would fall on the bright metal as instinctively as a bowerbird.

  “Even you Jews must have some kind of…of prayer book?”

  “Yes, of course we do. I, for example, have a siddur, for services, and we have a haggadah, for Passover, but I really don’t think either of them is equal to silver clasps. Pedestrian editions, I’m afraid. Contemporary bindings. One should have better, I suppose. I’ve often meant to—”

  Hirshfeldt stopped himself in midsentence. Damn it. The little man was going to cry again. A woman’s tears were one thing. He was used to them; he did not mind them. They could even be charming, in a way. One enjoyed consoling a woman. But a man’s tears. Hirschfeldt cringed. The first time he had seen a man really weep was his father, the night his mother died. It had been harrowing. He had believed his father impregnable. For him, it had been a night of double loss. His father’s uncontained grief had turned his own childish tears into a howling, heaving fit of hysteria. He and his father had never treated each other quite the same way, after that night.

  And this, too, was harrowing. Hirshfeldt had unconsciously wrapped his hands around his ears, trying to shut out the sound of it. Horrible. How desperate Mittl must be, to weep like this. How desperate, to have vandalized his own family Bible.

  And then, quite suddenly, Hirschfedlt stepped out from behind the wall that years of training and experience had erected. He allowed himself to be exposed to the broken, sobbing figure in front of him, and to be moved, not as a doctor is moved by a patient, to a safe and serviceable sympathy, but as a human being who allows himself full empathy with the suffering of another.

  “Please, Herr Mittl. There is no need for this. I will send to Dr. Ehrlich in Berlin and request a course of his serum for you. We can begin the treatments early next week. I can’t promise you results, but we can hope….”

  “Hope?” Florien Mittl looked up and took the handkerchief the doctor held out to him. Hope. That was enough. That was everything.

  “You mean it? You will?”

  “Yes, Herr Mittl.” As he saw the transfiguration of Mittl’s narrow, rodent face, Hirschfeldt felt an even greater surge of magnanimity. He took the clasps in his hand and stood. He walked around his desk to where Mittl sat, breathing raggedly, dabbing at his eyes. He was about to hand the clasps back, to tell him to restore them to their rightful place.

  But then the light gleamed on the silver. Such delicate roses. Rosalind. He neede
d a farewell gift for her when she returned from Baden. One must begin and end an affair with some panache, even if one hasn’t behaved impeccably throughout. He shifted the clasps in his hand and studied them more closely. Yes, a skilled jeweler—he knew just the man—could make a pair of earrings from the roses, a perfect pair of fine studs. Rosalind, whose beauty was of a large and overstated variety, preferred such subtle, smaller pieces for her jewels.

  What did he owe to the Mittl family Bible, after all? At least it existed. Not like the mountains of Talmuds and other Jewish books consigned to flames over centuries by order of Herr Mittl’s church. What did it matter if it had no clasps? Ehrlich charged an exorbitant sum for his serum. Earrings for Rosalind were only a partial recompense for what he would have to spend. He looked again at the clasps. He noted that the feathers, made to enclose the roses, had a curve that suggested an enfolding wing. It would be a shame if one did not use those, too. The jeweler could make a second pair of earrings, perhaps. For an instant, he thought of delicate, birdlike limbs, and cornflower eyes….

  No. Not for her. Not yet. Perhaps never. For the first time in years, he felt no urgency for a mistress. He had Anna. He had only to think of her, and imagine a strange hand touching her, to be overcome with desire. He smiled. How very appropriate. A pair of wings, to gleam amid the dark hair of his own Fallen Angel.

  Hanna

  Vienna, Spring 1996

  MY HANDS WERE SHAKING as I put down the report. Where were they, these silver clasps, so beautiful that they’d moved a dry old stick like Martell? And who’d crossed out his notes?

  My mind raced through scenarios. The clasps had been loose on the binding when it arrived. Black and encrusted, so that their value wasn’t immediately apparent. Why had the Kohen family not kept them polished? Perhaps they never realized that the black metal was silver. “Nonfunctioning,” “mechanically exhausted,” Martell had said, which probably meant they weren’t hooking together, serving their original purpose of keeping the parchments pressed flat. In any case, they would have been removed by Martell for cleaning, and handed on to the binder already detached from the book, to be fixed onto the new binding. That’s if they had been handed on. Maybe Martell, who had fancied them so much, had boosted them. But no: that couldn’t be. The boards had grooves. The binder had prepared for clasps. So Martell wasn’t the villain.