People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  The clasps had gone to the bindery. Or maybe not: maybe they’d gone to a silversmith for repair of the mechanism. Had they come back to the museum? That was the next question. I pulled out the last file in the box.

  There were ten documents, all in German. One seemed to be a bill, or an invoice. The handwriting was awful, but there was a signature. To have a name, it’s what you pray for. A name is like the beginning of the ball of thread that’ll lead you through the labyrinth. There were marginal notes scribbled on the bill, in a different, much clearer hand. The other documents were correspondence between the Staatsmuseum of Vienna and the Landesmuseum of Bosnia. Looking at the dates, I could see it spanned several years. It seemed to be about arrangements for the return of the haggadah, but beyond that I was in the dark.

  I had to find Frau Zweig. It wasn’t really the done thing, to walk around someone else’s museum with one of their archive boxes under your arm, but I couldn’t leave the documents unattended, and I couldn’t wait. When I found my way to her office, she was deep in conversation with a small gray man—gray hair, gray suit, even his tie was gray. In the corridor, a pimply youth, clad all in black, was waiting his turn to see her. Frau Zweig looked like a rainbow lorikeet locked up by mistake in an aviary of pigeons. When she saw me hovering, she gestured that she’d be only a few more minutes.

  True to her word, she ushered out the gray man with some dispatch, and asked young Mr. Black to kindly wait. We went into her office.

  I closed the door. “Ohh,” she said. “I hope that means you have found a scandale! Believe me, this place needs one!”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said, “but I have established that there were silver clasps on the book when it got here, and according to all sources, they weren’t on the book when it left.”

  I quickly summarized what I’d read and then handed her the documents in German. She pulled out a pair of reading glasses with lime green frames and perched them on her ski-jump nose, just above the stud. The invoice was, as I’d hoped, from the binder, and there was a name, or part of one. “Something or other Mittl. The signature is terrible, I can’t make out the first name. But Mittl…Mittl…I’ve seen it before. I think he was a binder the museum used quite a bit, at one period…. I seem to remember it in connection with the imperial collections. I can easily check that. We just computerized the entire records last year.” She turned to the keyboard on her desk and tapped away. “Interesting. Florien Mittl—the Christian name is Florien—completed more than forty commissions for the museum, according to this. But guess what?” She paused dramatically and pushed herself back from the computer, twirling in her office chair. “The haggadah was the last.” She turned back to the invoice. “This note, here in the margin, is interesting…. It’s someone quite senior, from the tone of it. He is directing that the invoice not be paid ‘until outstanding matters are resolved.’”

  She scanned the other letters. “These are weird. This one is a long list of excuses why the haggadah can’t be returned to Bosnia at this time. Pretty flimsy excuses, most of them…. It seems like the Staatsmuseum is stalling on the return of the book, and the Bosnians are…how do you say? Piss? Pissed?”

  “Australians say ‘pissed off.’ Pissed means drunk. Piss is alcohol. To take the piss—that means to send someone up, make fun of them.” (Why was I telling her all this?)

  “So the Bosnians. They are very pissed off about it. Between the lines, here is my guess: Mittl stole the clasps, or lost them, and it cost him his commissions from the museum. The museum hushed it up so as not to upset the Bosnians. But then they had to stall returning the book for as long as possible, hoping that by the time it went back no one would notice that a pair of broken old black clasps had been left off the new binding.”

  “In which case, they were lucky,” I mused. “History helped them out quite a bit, I’d say. By the time the book finally went home, everyone who knew anything was either dead or preoccupied….”

  “Speaking of preoccupied, I have to deal with these so-stupid evaluations…. When do you leave for the States? I can look into Mittl for you, yes?”

  “Yes, please, that’d be great.”

  “And tonight, please let me take you out to a part of Vienna where you can’t get Sacher torte and I can absolutely guarantee that you won’t hear a waltz.”

  Thanks to Frau Zweig’s late-night tour of S-and-M clubs, jazz basements, and conceptual art studios (one artist, naked and trussed like a chicken, was suspended from the ceiling, and the big event of the night was when he peed on someone in the audience below), I slept all the way to Boston. Waste of a firstclass ticket. I might as well have been back there in cattle class, as per bloody usual.

  I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It’s the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as “Massholes.” But there’s a whole other reason not to drive there: the tunnels. It’s really hard to avoid them; you’re always being one-wayed or no-left-turned into their gaping maw. In general, I don’t have anything against tunnels. My cowardice usually doesn’t extend that far. I don’t have any trouble with the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, for instance. It’s bright down there, clean and shiny, confidence inspiring. But when you go into Boston tunnels, they’re really creepy. They’re dim, and the tiles are leak stained, as if Boston Harbor is oozing its way through flaws in substandard concrete that some Irish mafia conned the city into buying. They look like they’re going to crack open any minute, like something in a Spielberg movie, and the last thing you hear will be the roar of freezing water. My imagination can’t handle it.

  The T is the oldest subway system in the United States, and I figure if it has lasted this long, it must have been built right in the first place. The train I took from the airport gradually filled with students. They all seemed to be wearing T-shirts with messages on them. Signaling each other like fireflies. NERD PRIDE, said one, and on the back: A WELL-ROUNDED PERSON HAS NO POINT. Another one: THERE ARE ONLY 10 KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND THE BI-NARY SYSTEM AND THOSE WHO DON’T. Both got off at the MIT stop.

  Sometimes, I think if you took all the universities and all the hospitals out of greater Boston, you’d be able to fit what’s left into about six city blocks. Harvard straddles both sides of the river and segues into MIT on one side and Boston University on the other. All three campuses are absolutely huge. Then there are Brandeis, Tufts, Wellesley, and a bunch of little ones like Lesley and Emerson and dozens more you’ve hardly heard of. You can’t spit without hitting a PhD. And I was here because of one of them: the bezillionaire who had paid for my ticket from London was an MIT math genius who’d invented an algorithm that led to some kind of toggle switch that was used in every silicon chip. Or something like that. I’d never quite gotten it when someone explained it to me, and I’d never actually talked to him face-to-face. He’d arranged for the Houghton librarians to show me the codex he was interested in, and I was there when the library opened and able to do my appraisal in plenty of time to make my other meeting of the morning, with my mother.

  She had left a terse message on my answering machine at home in Sydney, explaining that her only free moment was a brief tea break the very morning I flew in. I could just hear her brain ticking: “Maybe she won’t call in to her machine, and I can get out of seeing her.” But I checked my messages before I left Vienna. I grinned to myself as I listened to her voice, tentative and distracted. “There is no escape, Captain Kirk,” I muttered. “You will be seeing me in Boston.”

  Nevertheless, it was a job locating her. Like the universities, the big hospitals in Boston merge into one another—Mass General, Brigham and Women’s, Dana Faber—it’s like a giant industrial park devoted to illness. The conference center was an offshoot of the complex, purpose-built for humongous medical meetings. I had to ask directions four times before I finally found the lecture theater where she had
said she would be. I’d picked up a program at the registration desk and saw she had one of the coveted keynote addresses, scheduled when no one else was speaking. Lesser lights had to compete for attention with other doctors’ presentations, while the lowliest made do with a poster about their research displayed with dozens of others in a big hall.

  Mum’s talk was humbly titled “How I Do It: Giant Aneurysms.” I slipped into the back row. She was at the podium, stylish in a cream cashmere dress tailored to emphasize her athletic figure. She paced as she talked, showing off her long legs. Almost everyone else in the auditorium was a balding guy in a dark rumpled suit. She had them transfixed. They were either staring at her, rapt, or scribbling like mad in their notebooks as she unfolded the fruits of her most recent research, which had to do with a new technique she’d pioneered. Instead of opening heads, she snaked a catheter up into the brain and shot little metal coils into the aneurysms, blocking them off and preventing them from bursting.

  She was one of the rare breed who still did this kind of “bench and bedside” medicine, developing a technique in the lab, then taking it to the OR. Personally, I think she liked the austerity of the science a lot better than dealing with actual patients, whom she tended to see not as human beings with ambitions and affections so much as complex data sets and problem lists. But she also loved the strut and swagger of being a top surgeon, a top woman surgeon.

  “You think it’s for me?” she’d said one day when, in the middle of some blue or other, I’d accused her of loving the way everyone at the hospital kowtows to her. “It’s not for me. It’s for every nurse or female intern who has had to put up with being belittled and demeaned, having her backside fondled or her intelligence questioned. It’s for you, Hanna. And all the women of your generation, who’ll never have to be harassed and leered at in a workplace again, because women like me struggled, and survived. And I run things now, and I don’t let anyone forget it.”

  I don’t know how true it was, the whole altruism riff, but I know she believed it. Anyway, I loved to see her taking questions in a setting like this, although I averted my eyes from the viscous, slimy things up on the big screen behind her. She was in complete control of her data and responded to what she considered to be good points or queries with a gracious eloquence. But woe to anyone who asked something half-baked, or questioned her conclusions. She would fix them with this charming smile, but you could hear the chain saw revving. Without a hint of anger or arrogance in her voice, she’d dismember them. I really couldn’t bear to watch her do it to students, but this room full of blokes was another matter. They were supposedly her peers, and therefore fair game. She certainly knew how to work a crowd. The applause, when she finished, was more like the sound at a rock arena than a medical convention.

  I slipped out while they were still clapping and waited on a bench in the hall. She emerged surrounded by a scrum of admirers. I got up and moved into her line of sight. I was going to join in the chorus of compliments about her great presentation, but when she spotted me her face actually fell, and I realized that she really had been hoping I wouldn’t make it. It was almost comical, the way her expression changed, and then changed back again as she remembered to rearrange it.

  “Hanna. You made it. How nice.” Then, as soon as the other doctors had melted away, “But how pale you look, darling. You really should try to get outside sometimes.”

  “Well, I’m, you know, working….”

  “Of course you are, darling.” Her blue eyes, nicely made up with some kind of dusky brown shadow, traveled from my boots to the top of my head and back again. “We all work, don’t we? It doesn’t mean we can’t get out and exercise. If I can find the time, dear, then you should certainly be able to. How is your latest tatty little book, anyway? Fixed all the dog-eared pages?”

  I took a deep breath and let that one go right through to the keeper. I didn’t want to piss her off till I got what I’d come for. She looked at her watch. “I’m so sorry I don’t have more time. We’ll have to get tea in the cafeteria, I’m afraid. I have meetings just back-to-back and then I simply have to make an appearance at the predinner drinks this evening. They’ve got some Nigerian writer, Wally Something, for the keynote speaker. Just because the current president of the Neurosurgical Congress is a Nigerian, we have to have some obscure African, in Boston, when there are probably a dozen decent local writers who at least speak English that they could have asked.”

  “Wole Soyinka did get the Nobel prize for literature, Mum. And, actually, they do speak English in Nigeria.”

  “Well, you would know that sort of thing, of course.” She had a hand on the back of my jacket and was already propelling me down the hallway.

  “I, um, I was wondering. I’ve got some films. The man I was working with in Sarajevo, the librarian, his kid got shot during the war, there was swelling…. I wondered if you—”

  She stopped in the hallway. There was a minute of silence.

  “Oh. I see. I knew there was some reason why I was being honored by your attentions.”

  “Oh, cut it out, Mum. Will you take a look, or not?”

  She snatched the manila envelope out of my hands and turned back down the corridor. We had to walk about a mile to a footbridge linking to the medical suites. We stepped into the lift. The door was closing when some elderly gent in a dressing gown tottered toward us. There’s a word a friend of mine coined for that feeble gesture we make as if we’re going to hold the door, when in reality we’ve got no intention of it. He calls it “to elefain.” My mum’s elefain was the lamest ever; the door closed right in the old bloke’s face. We let the floors pass in silence, and then I waited while she asked an intern where to find a light box.

  She hit a switch and a dazzling wall of white appeared. Snap, snap, snap. She flung the films against the light and then glanced at each scan for about two seconds.

  “Toast.”

  “What?”

  “The kid’s toast. Tell your friend he might as well pull the plug now and save himself some medical bills.”

  The anger rose swiftly: hot, stinging. To my intense chagrin, I also felt tears in my eyes. I grabbed the films off the light box. My wrists were actually limp with rage. I could barely get the scans stuffed back into the envelope. “What is it with you, Mum? Were you absent the day they taught bedside manner?”

  “Oh, Hanna. For goodness’ sake. People die every day in hospitals. If I got choked up every time I saw an adverse scan…” She gave an exaggerated sigh. “If you were a doctor, you’d understand these things.”

  I was too upset to reply. I turned away to wipe my eyes. She put out a hand and turned me back toward her. She scanned my face.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said, her voice saturated with contempt. “Don’t tell me you are involved in some way with this child’s father. Some threadbare bookworm from an Eastern European backwater. And aren’t they all Islamics or something, in Sarajevo? Isn’t that what all the fighting was about? Don’t tell me you’ve involved yourself with a Muslim? Really, Hanna, I thought I’d raised you as enough of a feminist to draw the line at that.”

  “Raised me? You?” I slammed the envelope down on the desk. “You didn’t raise me, unless you count signing checks to housekeepers.”

  She’d been gone when I woke in the morning and rarely back before my bedtime. My most vivid early memory of her was taillights in the driveway in the middle of the night. We had an automatic gate that made a grinding noise that often woke me. I’d sit up in bed and look out the window and wave to the departing Beemer. Sometimes, I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, and I’d cry, and Greta, the housekeeper, would come in, drowsy, and say, “Don’t you know your mother is saving someone’s life tonight?” And I would feel guilty for wishing she was home, in the next room, where I could crawl into bed beside her. Her patients needed her more than I did. That’s what Greta always said.

  She put a hand to her gleaming hair, as if to tidy her already flawless updo
. For once I’d actually gotten to her. I felt a little rush of satisfaction at that. But she rallied quickly. Never one to concede a point. “Well, you certainly didn’t get this tendency to overwrought self-pity from me. How was I to know you had an emotional investment in this case? You’re always telling me you’re a scientist. Forgive me for treating you like one. Oh, sit down, for goodness’ sake, and stop glaring at me. Anyone would think I shot the blessed child.”

  She pulled out a chair from behind the desk and patted it. I sat down, warily. She perched on the edge of the desk and draped one well-toned leg over the other.

  “What I am saying is simply this, in plain, unvarnished layman’s terms. The child’s brain at this point is mostly dead tissue, a spongy mess. If you continue to keep the body alive by artificial means, the limb contractures will worsen, there will be a constant battle against decubitus ulcerations of the skin, against pulmonary and urinary infection. This child will never wake up.” She raised both hands, palms up. “You asked for my opinion. Now you have it. And surely the doctors over there already told the father this?”

  “Well, yes. But I thought—”

  “If you were a doctor, you wouldn’t have to think, Hanna. You’d know.”