People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

We went and had our tea—don’t ask me why. I made some rote conversation: a question about the paper she’d delivered and when it would be published. I have no idea what she answered. I kept thinking about Ozren, and Winnie the bloody Pooh.

  I was still chewing on it as I took the Harvard shuttle back across the river to see Razmus Kanaha, chief conservation scientist at the Fogg. Raz was an old postdoc mate of mine. He’d had a pretty rapid career rise and was very young to be heading up the oldest art research center in the United States. He’d come at conservation through chemistry, as I had, but he’d kept closer to that side of the work. He was noted for his analysis of carbohydrates and lipids in marine environments, which had led to a whole new paradigm in the treatment of art recovered from shipwrecks. He’d grown up in Hawaii, which perhaps explained his maritime obsession.

  The security at the Fogg was pretty intense, for obvious reasons: the museum housed one of America’s finest collections of impressionist and postimpressionist masterworks, as well as a handful of fabulous Picassos. The visitor’s pass had some kind of computer-chip-looking thing in it, so as to track my movements around the building. Raz had to come down and personally sign me in.

  Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he’d inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion. I’d been quite taken with him when we were postdocs together. It was just my kind of relationship; light, easy, fun, no strings. He’d go off on long marine salvage gigs somewhere, gathering research for his dissertation, and when he came back, we’d pick up the relationship, or not, depending on what mood we were both in. There were never any hard feelings if one or the other of us was otherwise engaged.

  After the Harvard years, we hadn’t seen a lot of each other, but we’d kept in loose touch. When he married a poet, I sent them a beautiful little nineteenth-century edition I’d found with woodcuts of famous shipwrecks. The wedding photo they sent me back was something. Raz’s wife was the daughter of an Iranian-Kurdish mother and a Pakistani-American father. I couldn’t wait to see their kids: they’d be walking Benetton ads.

  We hugged awkwardly, the way you do in a workplace, not quite knowing whether to air kiss once or twice, getting it wrong, banging skulls, and wishing you’d just shaken hands. We walked across the light-drenched atrium and up the stone stairway past the galleries. There was a metal security gate sealing off the top floor, where Raz and the other conservators did their work.

  The Straus Center for Conservation was a strange mix: an absolutely up-to-date science facility coupled with an attic-style assembly of collections gathered by its founder, Edward Forbes. Early last century, Forbes traveled the world, trying to obtain a sample of every known pigment ever used in art. The walls of the stairwell were lined with shelves holding his finds: a rainbow spectrum of vitrines full of ground lapis and malachite as well as real rarities, such as Indian Yellow, made from the piss of cows fed only on mango leaves. This wonderful, lime-tinged, lemony pigment doesn’t really exist anymore. The British banned its production during the Raj because the restricted diet was too cruel to the cattle.

  At one end of a long studio, someone was working on a bronze torso. “She’s comparing a cast made in the sculptor’s lifetime with one made later to see what differences there are in the finishes,” Raz explained. Down at the other end stood the bench that housed the spectrometer. “So, what have you got for me?” Raz asked.

  “They’re specimens I lifted from a stained parchment. Wine, I’m betting.” I drew out the photograph I’d taken of the stained page, the russet blooming across the pale cream ground. I’d marked the photos to show where I’d lifted the two minute samples. I hoped I’d taken enough. I handed Raz the glassine envelope. He took up a curved scalpel and placed the first dot of stained matter onto a kind of round microscope slide with a sliver of diamond at the center for the specimen to rest on. He ran a roller over the sample, to squash it flat against the diamond so that infrared light could pass through it. He slipped the slide under the lens.

  He peered through the microscope to make sure the specimen was centered, and adjusted the two snake lights on either side to illuminate it correctly. In any other lab, including mine at home, it took hours to get a dozen spectra. Every molecule gives off light in various colors of the spectrum. Some substances tend more to the blue end, others to the red, and so on. That means the spectrum of a molecule is like a fingerprint that can be used to identify it. Raz’s new toy was the latest thing: it could get two hundred spectra in less than a minute. I felt a stab of envy as the computer screen next to us came alive with green lines that leaped and dived up and down a grid that measured light absorbance. Raz studied the graph.

  “That’s odd,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. Let me look at the other sample.”

  He fiddled around again with the glassine envelope and mounted the second dot. This time, the squiggles on the screen seemed to map an entirely different mountain range.

  “Ha,” he said.

  “What do you mean, ‘Ha’?” I was actually sweating.

  “Just a minute.” Raz changed the slides again, and again the graph rose and fell across the screen. He tapped some keys on the computer keyboard. Other graphs, in yellow, red, orange, and blue, leaped up around the green line.

  “Ha,” he said again.

  “Raz, if you don’t tell me what it is that you are seeing, I’m going to run you through with your own scalpel.”

  “Well, what I’m seeing doesn’t make a lot of sense. This is a Hebrew manuscript, right? Didn’t you say a haggadah?”

  “Yes.” I almost barked.

  “So any wine that would have been spilled on it, we can assume pretty safely that it would be kosher?”

  “Yes, of course. Kosher for Passover, strict as strict can be.”

  He leaned back in his chair and pushed away from the desk so that he was facing me.

  “Do you know anything about kosher wine?”

  “Not a lot,” I said. “Just that it’s usually sweet and undrinkable.”

  “Not these days. There are some perfectly quaffable kosher wines being made, especially in the Golan Heights, but other wineries too.”

  “How come you’re such an expert? You’re not Jewish. Or are you?” Raz’s ancestry was so mixed up anything was possible.

  “I’m not. But you could say I’m religious about wine. Remember I spent six months at the Technion in Israel, working on artifacts recovered from a Mediterranean wreck? Well, I got friendly with a woman whose family owned a vineyard in the Golan. Lovely spot. Spent a lot of time there, one way and another, especially during the vintage. Which is, I have to say, lucky for you.” He had his hands behind his head and was leaning back in the chair, grinning smugly.

  “Raz, that’s great. I mean, whoop-de-do. But for God’s sake, what has it got to do with this stain?”

  “Keep your shirt on and I’ll tell you.” He turned back to the graph and pointed to a tall spike. “See that? That nice spike of absorbance there? That’s protein.”

  “So?”

  “So there shouldn’t be any protein in kosher wine. In traditional wine making they’ve pretty much always used egg white as a clarifying agent, so you can expect to get traces of protein. But the use of any animal product is prohibited in kosher wine. Traditionally, they use a kind of fine clay instead, to do the same job.” He rattled a couple of keys and brought up the graph from the second specimen. “This one looks the way you’d expect it to.”

  “So what are you saying? That they spilled two different kinds of wine on the same page? Pretty far-fetched.”

  “No, what I’m saying
is that there’s something else mixed in with the wine in places.” He tapped another key, and the screen came alive again with a variety of lines in various colors. “I’ve called up the library of all the spectrometry we’ve done here, looking for something that matches the profile. And there it is. See that blue line? It tracks almost exactly over the green line generated by the first specimen. I’d say that’s what you’ve got there on the page, mixed in with the wine, staining your parchment.”

  “So?” I was almost yelling, at this point. “So what is it?”

  “That blue line?” he said calmly. “That’s blood.”

  Wine Stains

  Venice, 1609

  Introibo ad altare Dei.

  —Latin Mass

  THE BELLS—silvery, shivering—rang in his head as if the clappers were striking the raw red interior of his skull. The wine lapped the cup as he replaced it on the altar. When his knee touched the floor, he rested his brow against the crisp linen. He stayed there a moment, letting the cold of the marble seep through the altar cloth. When he got up, there was a small damp patch from his sweat.

  The old mothers at this early Mass were too devout to notice that he staggered slightly as he rose. Their heads, wrapped in threadbare shawls, were bent in devotion. Only the altar boy, his eyes bright as a newt, drew his brows together. Damn the young and the clarity of their judgments. He tried—God knows how he tried—to keep his own mind centered on the holy mystery. But the faint stink of his own predawn vomit would not leave his nostrils.

  He was dry. The words stuck to his tongue like ashes of burned parchment. Like the ashes that had fallen in a warm rain after the last book burning. A piece had landed on his cassock, and as he raised a hand to brush it away, he noticed that the words were still legible, pale ghost letters against the charred ground. And then they turned to dust and blew away.

  “Per ipsum”—he held the Body over the Blood and made the sign of the cross—“et cum ipso”—curse his tremors—“et in ipso”—the Bread of Heaven was dancing over the chalice like a bumblebee—“est tibi Deo Patri omnipotenti, in unitat e Spiritus Sancti, omnis honor et gloria.” He raced through the Pater Noster, the Libera Nos, the Agnus Dei, and the prayers for peace and sanctification and grace until, Deo gratias, he finally tilted the chalice and felt the Precious Blood—cool, astringent, delicious—washing away the bile and the bitterness and the terrible tremor in his flesh. He turned to give Communion to the server. The boy’s eyes, thankfully, were closed, their judgment hidden behind the thick hedge of his lashes. Then he made his way to the altar rail and placed bright white hosts on a half dozen furry old tongues.

  In the sacristy after the Mass, Giovanni Domenico Vistorini felt the boy’s appraising gaze again, lingering on the tremor in his hands as he drew off his stole and struggled with the tie on his cincture.

  “What are you dawdling about for, Paolo? Take off your cassock and get along. I saw your grandmother at Mass. Go on now. She will have need of your arm.”

  “As you wish, Father.” The boy spoke, as ever, with an exaggerated politeness. There was even the hint of a bow. Vistorini sometimes thought he might have preferred open insolence. But Paolo was graceful and precise, at the altar and away from it, and gave him nothing to complain about. The boy’s contempt was conveyed only in long, assessing glances. He gave the priest one of these lacerating stares and then turned away to disrobe, his efficient, economical gestures mocking Vistorini’s fumbling. He was out the door without another word.

  Alone in the sacristy, Vistorini opened the cabinet that contained the unconsecrated Communion wine. The cork came out of the decanter with a wet, sucking sound. He licked his lips. The cool jug was misted with condensation, so Vistorini raised it carefully, for his hands were still trembling, and took a deep swallow. Then another. Better.

  He was about to replace the stopper in the decanter, but then he considered the morning stretching before him. The office of the pope’s Inquisitor in Venice was not noted for its liberality. The rooms the doge had assigned to the members of the Inquisition were gloomy, badly furnished, and poorly provisioned. Vistorini believed that the doge was trying to make a point; that the minions of Rome held a subordinate position in the state where only he, and the Ten, made decisions of significance. In any case, it might well be past the noon hour before he could procure another drink. He raised the jug again and let the velvet liquid course down his throat.

  Vistorini’s step was almost jaunty as he closed the side door of his church and stepped out into the milky light of early morning. The sun was just high enough to reach into the narrow calle, throwing dappled reflections from the canal that silvered the stone in bright, dancing patches. The chime of the Marangona bell sounded, deeper and more resonant than any other bell in the city. It signaled the start of the workday for arsenalotti, and the opening of the gates at the nearby Geto. Shutters rattled as merchants opened for trade on the campiello in front of the church.

  Vistorini breathed deeply. Even after thirty years in the city, he still loved the light and the air of Venice, its mingled scents of brine and moss, mold and moist plaster. He had been only six years old when he came to the city, and the brothers at the orphanage had encouraged him to shed all memories of the past, along with his accent and his foreign manners. They had conveyed to him that reminiscence was a shadowy and shameful thing, indicating lack of gratitude for his present blessings. He had been schooled to push away thoughts of his dead parents and the short life he had shared with them. But sometimes, fragments broke through, in dreams, or when his will was weakened by intoxication. And in those fragments, the past was always lit by a wincing glare and tasted of dust carried by scorching winds.

  As he moved over the bridge, past the bargeman delivering meat to the butcher and the washerwomen at work by the canal, he recognized several of his parishioners. He greeted them with a pleasant word or a kind inquiry, depending on the family’s condition. A legless beggar propelled himself forward on the stumps of what should have been his arms. Great God. Vistorini formed a mental prayer for the man, whose deformity was so grotesque that even a surgeon would be hard pressed to lay eyes on him without recoil. He placed a coin on the beggar’s oozing extremity and then, fighting his revulsion, laid a hand on his scabby head and blessed him. The beggar responded with an animal grunt that seemed to be an expression of gratitude.

  As a parish priest, Vistorini tried his best to feign interest in the little lives of his flock. Yet the work of ministry didn’t really engage him. His principal service to his church lay elsewhere. Vistorini’s abilities had been recognized by the brothers who had taken him in as an orphan. They had been impressed by his facility with languages, but also with his superior understanding of complex, abstract theology. They had educated him in Greek and Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic, and he had absorbed it all. In those days, his thirst for knowledge had been great; now, it was the other thirst that ordered his existence.

  In 1589, when Pope Sixtus V proclaimed a ban on any books by Jews or Saracens that contained anything against the Catholic faith, the young priest Vistorini had been a natural choice to work as censor of the Inquisitor. For seventeen years, almost his entire life in Holy Orders, Domenico had read and passed judgment on the works of alien faiths.

  As a scholar, he had an innate reverence for books. This he had been required to subdue when his mission was to destroy them. Sometimes, the beauty of the Saracens’ fluid calligraphy moved him. Other times, it was the elegant argument of a learned Jew that gave him pause. He would take his time considering such manuscripts. If, in the end, he determined that they had to go to the flames, he would avert his gaze as the parchments blackened. His job was easier when the heresy was patent. At those times, he could watch the flames, rejoicing in them as a cleansing thing, ridding human thought of error.

  He had such a book with him this morning, a Jewish text. His morning’s work would be to draft the order for all copies in the city to be surrendered to the Inquisi
tor’s office, from whence they would go to the fire. The words, the blasphemous words, danced in his head, the Hebrew letters as familiar to him as Latin script:

  Christian worship of Jesus is an idolatry much worse than the Israelites’ worship of the golden calf, for the Christians err in saying that something holy entered into a woman in that stinking place…full of feces and urine, which emits discharge and menstrual blood and serves as a receptacle for men’s semen.

  Sometimes, Vistorini wondered how such words still came to be committed to paper, after more than a hundred years of Inquisition. Jews and Arabs had been fined, imprisoned, even put to death, for lesser blasphemies than these. He supposed that the proliferation of printing houses in Venice was to blame. Officially, Jews were banned from the trade of publishing, and yet their houses thrived under the flimsy front of some Christian willing to lend his name in exchange for a few gold sequins.

  Not every man who wished to set up as a printer should be approbated to do so. Some of them, evidently, were ignorant or malicious. He would have to discuss this with Judah Aryeh. The Jews should exercise more control, or the Inquisitor would be obliged to do it for them. Better to keep the Office of the Inquisition outside of the Geto walls. Surely even a lesser intellect than Judah’s would see the sense of that.

  As if his thoughts had conjured him up out of the stones, Vistorini saw the scarlet hat of the rabbi Judah Aryeh, making a furtive way through the crowd in front of him on the Frezzeria, where the arrow makers crafted their wares. He was walking with the stooped, head-down posture he always affected when outside the Geto. Vistorini raised a hand to hail the man, but hesitated. He watched the rabbi for a moment, considering him. How many small humiliations had it taken to bow him over into that cringing stoop: the abusive pranks of loutish boys, the jeers and spittle of the ignorant. If only the stiffnecked fellow would embrace the truth of Christ, he could end all such abasements.