People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  I gave a strained smile and tried to look flattered. Just at that moment a flock of swallows swooped past the high window, blocking the sun. I felt a sudden coldness. At the time, I did not know why. But later I realized. Kebira had told me, that first day, which seemed so very distant, but really was not so, that Muna had once been her name. The wishes and desires of the powerful can be fickle things. I knew this. But I knew it in that deep place where one hides knowledge that is inconvenient, or too painful to admit, even to oneself.

  Usually, I withdrew when the doctor came, but this day he motioned me to stay as I made to take my work away. He walked over to look at the portrait of Pedro, and complimented it, and asked a question about my training. I told him I had been in the service of Hooman, and he looked astonished at that, considering my gender. Without going into detail I explained that I had passed myself off as a youth for a time, because it had seemed safer. He did not press this, but neither did he let me be. “No,” he said. “It is not court training. I see something more in your work. Something…less practiced. Less sophisticated, perhaps. Or perhaps I should say, more honest?” So I told him then of my father, and the pride I had taken in learning to illustrate his medical texts.

  “Then I know your work,” he said, his voice full of surprise. “I admire it. The herbals of Ibrahim al-Tarek have no peer.” I flushed with pride. “But what befell your father? How came you here?”

  I related to him the story, in brief. He bowed his head when I told him of my father’s ignominious end, unburied and abandoned. He cast a hand over his eyes and murmured a prayer. “He was a very great man. His work saved many lives. I mourn his untimely death.” He looked at me then, a physician’s evaluating look. There was great compassion in his gaze, and I understood why his patients admired him so. “He was lucky, to raise a child such as you, who could assist him so ably. I have only one child, and he…” He did not finish that sentence. “Well, I wish I had someone as skilled as you to work with me.”

  The emira spoke then, and her words almost stopped the blood in my veins.

  “Then you must take her, ya doctur. Al-Mora will be my gift to you for the great care you have bestowed on me. Kebira will see to it. You may take her today, if you like.”

  I looked at Nura, my eyes imploring, but her face was very calm. Only a slight pulse in the vein at her temple revealed that she felt anything at all, even as she threw me off like a used robe.

  “Go now and gather your things,” she said. “You may take your box of pigments, and the books of gold and silver leaf. I want the doctor to have the very best.” And then, as if it were an afterthought, “Ya doctur, I will send my brother, Pedro, with al-Mora, if you will take him. He can serve as her apprentice, as she is, as you say, very skilled.” She turned to me then, and there was just the slightest catch in her voice. “Teach him well for me.”

  So that was it. Once again, I was just a tool, a thing to be used and then passed along into other hands. This time, it seemed, I was a shield for the protection of her brother. She had turned away, listening to the doctor, who was expressing his thanks most effusively. I was, in his words, “a most generous gift.” The great doctor, so noted for his compassion. Where was his compassion for the feelings of a slave?

  I was standing there, shaking, as they discussed me. The emira did not even turn to look at me directly. She waved her hand at me, as if I were a blowfly to be shooed away.

  “Go,” she said. “Go now. I have dismissed you.”

  Still I stood there.

  “Go now. If you want to live.”

  She thought she was saving my life. My life, and the life of her beloved brother. She had calculated it, lying there in the dark. Worked it all out—When? How long ago?—without consulting me. She knew that with the Jew, we would survive whatever befell the city, because Abd Allah and his faction also leaned heavily on ha-Levi’s skills, and would seek his counsel. My hands shook as I gathered up my things. I had the portrait I had been working on in my hand when she strode across the room and snatched it from me. “This, I will keep. And take care to leave behind the other also—the portrait of Muna.” Her eyes, as she said this, glistened.

  I wanted to say, Not this way. I wanted to say, Give me more days, more nights with you. But she had turned away from me, and I knew the strength of her will. She would not turn back.

  So, that was how I came here, and here I have been, living and working, for almost two years. Perhaps she was right to send me away like that, but I will never feel so in my heart. What she feared came to pass: when the emir’s wound turned poison, Abd Allah took the chance to overthrow him. Nura had made her provisions by then, and went straight to the protection of the nuns. In due season, the doctor delivered her there of a healthy girl, whose existence causes Abd Allah no anxiety. Not that he will likely reign long enough to need a successor: the breath of the Castilians blows ever hotter. And of what will come to any of us then, who knows. The doctor does not speak of it, and there are no signs of any preparations under way if we need to quit this place. I think that he has come to believe himself indispensable, whomever is in power. But I am not sure the Castilians will have the wit to value his skills.

  For myself, for now, I have little of which to complain. Here, I am called al-Mora no longer. When I came to live in the doctor’s palace, he asked me my name, so that he might present me to his wife. When I said al-Mora, he shook his head. “No. The name given to you by your father.”

  “Zahra,” I said, and realized that the last time I heard my own name was from the lips of my father, as he cried out to warn me that the raiders were upon us. “Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek.”

  The doctor has restored much to me, in addition to my name. The work I do for him is important work, and I feel connected by it to my father. Every plant, every diagram I make, I offer to the glory of Allah in my father’s memory. The doctor, although a very devout Jew, respects my faith and allows for the prayers and the fasts. When he saw me making prostrations on the bare floor of his library, he sent me a prayer rug even finer than the one I left behind at the palace. His wife, too, is very kindly and commands her large staff with gentle discipline that breeds a calm and peaceful house.

  In the spring, on the full moon, she invited me to join the family at table for one of their feasts. Although the invitation surprised me, I did so, out of respect, although I did not drink the wine that has a very large part in their ritual. The rite was performed in Hebrew, which I did not, of course, understand. But the doctor took great pains to explain to me what was meant by the various things that were said and done. It is a very moving feast, celebrating the delivery of the Hebrews from slavery in a land called Mizraim.

  He confided in me, at one point, that he felt great sadness, because tradition commands that a father must teach his son this ritual, in all its particulars, and the doctor’s only son, Benjamin, is a deaf-mute and cannot understand. He is a sweet boy, not at all simple. He likes to spend time with Pedro, who has become Benjamin’s body servant, in fact, and my apprentice in little but name. It has been good for Pedro, taking care of this needy youngster. It has given him purpose more than he was able to find in his work with me, for which he had, in truth, little aptitude. I think he has grown to love the boy, and that helps him when he misses his sister. I try to fill her place with him as best I can, but we, each of us, know that nothing can make up for such a loss as ours.

  I have taken it upon myself to make, in secret, a set of drawings for Benjamin that together will tell the story of the world as the Jews believe it to have come to be. The doctor has many books about his faith, but they have words only, not pictures such as the Christians use to help them understand their prayers. The Jews, it seems, are as reluctant to make images as we Muslims are. But as I considered Benjamin, in his silence, shut out of understanding the beautiful and moving ceremonies of his faith, I remembered Isabella’s prayer book, and the figures in it, and how she said it helped her to pray. The idea came to me
that such drawings would be of like help to Benjamin. I cannot think the doctor or his God will be offended by my pictures.

  I ask the doctor or his wife from time to time, and they are always pleased to explain to me, how Jews conceive of this or that. I reflect on what they say, and try to devise a way to illustrate it so that a young boy can understand. What struck me is how much of it I already know, for the Jews’ account of God’s creation differs only slightly from the correct version given in our Holy Koran.

  I have made images that show God’s separation of light from dark, the making of land and water. I have drawn the earth he created as if it were a sphere. My father held this to be so, and I lately had a conversation with the doctor on this subject. While difficult to grasp such a thing, he said, it was a fact that the calculations of our Muslim astronomers are far more advanced than any others. He said if he had to choose between the opinion of a Muslim astronomer and the dogma of a Catholic priest, he would not choose the priest. And anyway, I prefer compositions using circles and curves. They are harmonious, and interesting to draw. I want these drawings to be pleasing, so the boy will want to look at them. To that end, I have filled the garden of paradise with the animals of my childhood, spotted pards and fierce-jawed lions. I hope he will enjoy them.

  I am using the last of Hooman’s fine pigments to make this present for the Jew, and I wonder what he would think of that. Soon, I will have to send to the market for more pigments, but the works the doctor needs, for his texts, require only simple inks, not lapis or saffron and surely not gold. So I am taking pleasure in the use of these for what may be the last time in my life. I still have one or two of the brushes made from the fine white hair of Hooman’s cat, but these, too, are wearing out and beginning to shed.

  Sometimes, when I ask the doctor about his faith, I find myself swept up in the narrative of his stiff-necked people, so often punished by their disappointed God. I have painted the story of Nuh’s flood, and Lut’s city of fire, and his woman turned to a hill of salt. I have struggled hard to devise pictures that make clear all the elements of the spring festival story, which is, at times, quite terrible. How to show, for example, why the king of Mizraim yielded at last to Musa? How to show the horror in the tale, the terror of the plagues, or the deaths of the firstborn? I want Benjamin to understand that the children in my picture all are dead, but in my first attempt they might just as well have been asleep. Yesterday, an idea came to me. I thought of the iconoclasts and how they had slashed red lines across the throats of the human likenesses in the books they had defaced. So I painted dark shapes over each sleeping child’s mouth, to represent the dark force of the angel of death, stealing away the breath of life. The image I have made is exceedingly disturbing. I wonder if Benjamin will understand it?

  My plan is to present these pictures to the doctor at the next occasion of this feast, which is soon. I am working now on a picture of the feast itself. I have set the doctor at the head of the table with Benjamin beside him, and his wife, finely dressed, and her sisters, who share this house. Then it came into my head to add myself to the gathering. I have given myself a gown of saffron, ever my favorite color, and in doing so have used the very last I have of that pigment. I am pleased with this picture, above all those that I have done. It seemed good to me to sign it with my name, which the doctor has returned to me. I used the last of my fine brushes to do it, the last of those with but a single hair.

  I have set my head at an attentive angle, and imagine myself listening as the doctor tells of Musa, who defied the king of Mizraim, and used his enchanted staff to win his people’s freedom from their bondage.

  If only there could be another such staff, to free me from my bondage. Freedom, indeed, is the main part of what I lack now in this place where I have honorable work, and comfort enough. Yet it is not my own country. Freedom and a country. The two things the Jews craved, and which their God delivered to them through the staff of Musa.

  I set down the cat-hair brush and imagine how it might be to have such a staff. I see myself, walking to the coast. The great sea would part, and I would cross it, and make my way, in slow stages, down all the dusty roads that lead toward home.

  Hanna

  Sarajevo, Spring 1996

  THERE WAS NO United Nations escort waiting for me at the Sarajevo airport, for the simple reason that I hadn’t told anyone I was coming.

  It was late when I arrived; the connection through Vienna had been delayed two and a half hours. It was jarring, going from the Vienna airport, which is basically a big, shiny shopping mall, and arriving not quite half an hour later at the spare, empty, still-militarized terminal in Sarajevo. Outside, the cab pulled away from the airport entrance into streets still unnaturally dark—they’d repaired very few streetlights, which was a blessing, I suppose, given the blasted and depopulated appearance of the neighborhoods surrounding the airport. Although I wasn’t in quite the same state of dread as on my first visit, I was still pretty relieved when I got into my hotel room and locked the door behind me.

  In the morning I called Hamish Sajjan at the UN office and asked him if I could sneak a look at the new display room at the museum. The official ceremony was still twenty-four hours away, but he said he was sure the museum director wouldn’t mind if I had a look before the crowds of invited dignitaries descended.

  The wide boulevard, formerly known as Sniper Alley, on which the museum was located, had been given a Potemkin village spruce-up in the two weeks I’d been gone. The rubble piles had been moved, and some of the worst shell holes in the road had been filled in. A tram was running again, which somehow gave the street a sense of normalcy. I walked up the familiar stairs of the museum and was escorted to the director’s office for the compulsory Turkish coffee. Hamish Sajjan was there, beaming. For once, the UN was getting a bit of credit for doing something right in Bosnia. After sufficient pleasantries, he and the director escorted me down the hall to the new room, which was guarded by two security men. The director punched in the code. You could hear the slick new bolts retracting.

  The room was lovely. The light was perfect: even and not too bright. State-of-the-art sensors scribbled out lines that tracked temperature and humidity. I checked the graphs: 18 degrees Celsius, perfect, plus or minus 1 degree. Humidity, 53 percent. Right where it should be. The walls gave off the clean, sharp scent of fresh plaster. I thought that just being in this space would be a morale boost for most Sarajevans, a big contrast with their broken city outside.

  A specially made case occupied the center of the room. The haggadah rested inside, under a pyramid of glass that would protect it from dust and pollution as well as from people. On the walls were the related exhibits—Orthodox icons, Islamic calligraphy, Catholic psalter pages. I walked past each one of these, slowly. The selection was excellent, thoughtful. I sensed Ozren’s intelligence at work. Each piece had something in common with the haggadah—similar materials or a related artistic style. The point—that diverse cultures influence and enrich one another—was made with silent eloquence.

  Finally, I turned to the haggadah. The case had been crafted by a master cabinetmaker from a handsome burled walnut. The book was open at the Creation illuminations—the pages would be turned on a schedule so as not to expose any one page to too much light.

  I looked down through the glass, thinking about the artist, about the brush dipping into saffron pigment. The cat hair that Clarissa Montague-Morgan had identified—cut cleanly on both ends, stained with traces of yellow pigment—had come from the artist’s paintbrush. Spanish brushes were more commonly squirrel or miniver fur. Fur from the throat area of two-month-old Persian longhairs, specially bred for the purpose, was the brush material of choice for Iranian miniaturists. Irani qalam. Iranian pen. It was the name for the style, rather than the implement. And yet these miniatures were not at all Iranian in style or technique. So why had an illuminator working in Spain, for a Jewish client, in the manner of a European Christian, have used an Iranian paintbr
ush? Clarissa’s identification of this anomaly had been great for my essay. It had given me an excuse to riff on the way knowledge had traveled amazing distances during the Convivencia, over well-established routes linking the artists and intellectuals of Spain with their counterparts in Baghdad, Cairo, and Isphahan.

  I stood there, gazing, wondering which had done the traveling—the brush or the artisan who assembled it. I imagined the stir in the Spanish atelier the first time someone used one of these superior brushes, felt the soft swish of the fine white hair across the carefully prepared parchment.

  The parchment.

  I blinked, and then leaned closer to the vitrine, doubting the evidence of my own eyes. The floor seemed to drop away from under my feet.

  I straightened and turned to Sajjan. His broad smile faltered when he saw my face, which must have been as white as the fresh plaster. I tried to control my voice.

  “Where is Dr. Karaman? I need to see him.”

  “Is something the matter—the vitrine, the temperature?”

  “No, no. There’s nothing wrong…nothing wrong with the room.” I didn’t want to start a fuss in public. There would be more chance of dealing with this if we acted quietly. “I need to see Dr. Karaman—about my essay. I just realized I forgot to make a necessary correction.”

  “My dear Dr. Heath, the catalogs are printed already. Any corrections—”

  “Never mind. I just need to tell him….”

  “I believe he is in the library; shall I send for him?”

  “No, I know the way.”

  We went out, the new door closing and locking with a soft click behind us. Sajjan started translating the director’s very formal leave-taking, which I abbreviated rudely by walking backward away from them down the corridor. It was all I could do to avoid breaking into a run. I burst through the library’s large oak doors and hurried down the narrow alley between the stacks, almost knocking over an assistant librarian busy reshelving volumes. Ozren was in his office, seated at his desk, talking to someone whose back was turned to me.