But in the warmer light of Ozren’s muted torch, I could see that the hairlike lines were script. Arabic script.
“Quick! Quick, Ozren, give me a magnifying glass.”
“What? Are you mad? We don’t have time for this. What the—”
I reached up and pulled his glasses off his face. I lowered the left lens to the tiny line of script and squinted. Then I read aloud:
“‘I fashioned’—or the word could be translated as ‘made’ or ‘painted’—” My voice was breaking. I put out a hand to steady myself against the vitrine. “‘I fashioned these pictures for Binyamin ben Netanel ha-Levi.’ And then there’s a name. Ozren, there’s a name! Zana—no, not Zana, it’s Zahra—‘Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek, known in Seville as al-Mora.’ Al-Mora—it means ‘the Moorish woman.’ Ozren, it must be her—the woman in saffron. She’s the artist.”
Ozren snatched back his glasses and peered closely at the script as I held the flashlight steady. “An African Muslim. Woman. The mysterious illuminator of the Sarajevo Haggadah. And we’ve been staring at her self-portrait for five hundred years.”
I was so thrilled by the discovery that I’d forgotten we were in the middle of a reverse heist. The low whir of the video camera, doing an automatic pan of the room, reminded me. Ozren lifted the side of the vitrine and locked it with a definitive click.
“What do we do about that?” I said, pointing up at the video camera.
He signaled me to follow him. From a locked cabinet in his office, he selected a tape from a shelf of videos arranged by date. He set the chosen one on his desk. He had a sticky label prepared, marked with that day’s date. He simply placed that label over the existing one, from the same hour a week earlier.
“Now we have to get you out of here before the guards arrive.” On the way out, we stopped at the security desk. Ozren filled in the log, showing that the 4:30 rounds had been completed without incident. Then he pressed the Eject button on the video monitor and switched the videos.
With a few quick tugs, he pulled the incriminating tape from its plastic container.
“Dump it on the way back to Sweet Corner, would you? Somewhere inconspicuous, where there is a lot of garbage already. I just have to reset the motion sensors and wait to brief the morning guards. Then I’ll meet you there. We still have to dispose of the fake haggad—”
We both realized at the same moment. The fake—the incriminating, perfect fake—was still where we had left it, on the gallery floor.
It was ten minutes to five. If one of the morning guards arrived early, we would be, as they say in the classics, totally stuffed. The next few minutes of my life might be the segment I would be most inclined to edit out. To say my heart was pounding would be a gross understatement. I fully expected to have an aneurysm. I sprinted to Ozren’s office, fumbled with keys, opened the case, grabbed another substitute tape, and then rifled through his assistant’s desk, looking for a sticky label. I couldn’t find one.
“Shit! Shit!” I couldn’t believe we were going to be caught red-handed for the lack of a damn sticky label.
“They’re in here,” said Ozren, opening a small wooden box. He had raced back to the haggadah gallery, repunched the codes, and grabbed the fake. Together, we ran to the security desk. I slipped on the marble floor and cracked my knee, hard. The tape skidded across the floor. Ozren turned and swept it up, then pulled me to my feet so roughly he almost dislocated my shoulder. My eyes were tearing. “I’m so not cut out for this kind of thing,” I whimpered.
“Never mind that now, OK? Just go, quick. Take this.” He thrust Werner’s fake at me. “I’ll see you at Sweet Corner.” He pushed me out the door.
I was one block from the museum when I saw a man in a gray museum guard’s uniform ambling toward me, yawning. As I passed him, I had to force myself to keep walking normally—as normally as I could with my aching knee. When I got to Sweet Corner, the pastry chef was already at work, firing up his ovens. He gave me a very strange look as I hobbled up the steps to the attic, alone. Inside, I rekindled the fire and thought about Zahra al-Tarek, artist. How she had learned how to paint, how to write. No mean achievements for a woman of her day. There were so many anonymous women artists who had been cheated of the acclaim that was their due. Now, at last, this one would be known. Famous. I could do that for her.
And it was just a beginning. The other name, ha-Levi. The mention of Seville—if she was in Seville, and the ha-Levi family was, too, then that meant the illuminations probably predated the text…. The number of lines of inquiry radiating from these few words would lead to so many more discoveries, so much more knowledge. I propped a couple of Ozren’s pillows against the wall. It would be wet season in the Top End for two, three months. I leaned back and started planning a trip to Spain.
A few minutes later, I heard Ozren coming. He was calling out my name as he bounded up the stairs, two at a time. I could hear the ancient treads and risers creaking in complaint. He was as excited about this as I was. He understood. He would help me. Together, we would seek out the truth about Zahra al-Tarek. Together, we would bring her back to life.
But first, there was a chore to do.
Ozren stood in front of the fire, Werner’s facsimile in his hand. He didn’t move.
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking that if I could have one wish, this would be the last book ever to be burned in my city.”
It was the cold hour, just before sunrise. I stared at the flames, thinking of blackening parchments in a medieval auto-da-fé of youthful Nazi faces, lit by bonfires of burning books; of the shelled and gutted ruin, just a few blocks away, of Sarajevo’s library. Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
“‘Burn but his books,’” I said. Caliban, plotting against Prospero. I couldn’t remember the rest. But Ozren knew.
“Remember first to possess his books; for without them
He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command….”
Through the frosty panes of the dormer window, I watched the stars fade as the sky slowly brightened to a rich ultramarine. Ultra, “the far side.” Marine, “of the sea.” The color named for the journey of lapis lazuli, from the far side of the sea to the pallet of Zahra al-Tarek. The same stone that Werner had ground to make the rich blues that would soon blacken to carbon.
Ozren stared at the book in his hand, then at the fire. “I don’t think I can,” he said.
I looked at the fake. As a facsimile, it was a masterpiece. My master’s piece. The epitome of everything Werner had learned in his long life, everything he’d taught me about the importance of mastering the old crafts until you could do what the craftsmen had known how to do. Perhaps, I thought, I could put it in the wheelie cart. Take it to Amitai. After a decent interval, he could announce that it was a gift, made as a labor of love by the great Werner Heinrich for the people of Israel. It was, after all, now a part of the history of the true haggadah. Even though it was a part of the history that would need to stay secret for a while. But one day, maybe, somebody would puzzle it out. Just as a conservator in the next century, or the one after, would find the seed I dropped into the binding of the genuine haggadah, between the first and second quires. A Morton Bay fig seed, from the fruit of the big twisty trees that line the shores of Sydney Harbour. I had done it on a whim, my last day in Sydney. My mark. A clue, for someone like me in the far future, who would find it, and wonder….
“It’s incriminating,” I said. “Dangerous for you.”
“I know. But there have been too many books burned in this city.”
“Too many books burned in the world.”
Even though we were by the fire, I shivered. Ozren put the book down, on the mantel above the hearth. He reached for me. This time, I didn’t pull away.
Afterword
People of the Book is a work of fiction inspired by the true story of the Hebrew codex known a
s the Sarajevo Haggadah. While some of the facts are true to the haggadah’s known history, most of the plot and all of the characters are imaginary.
I first heard of the haggadah when I was a newspaper reporter, in Sarajevo to cover the Bosnian war for The Wall Street Journal. At that time, the city’s fire-gutted library reeked of burned pages after the barrage of Serbian phosphorous shells. The Oriental Institute and its marvelous manuscripts were in ashes, and the National Museum of Bosnia was splattered with the shrapnel of frequent shelling. The fate of the Sarajevo Haggadah—priceless jewel of the Bosnian collections—was unknown, and the subject of much journalistic speculation.
Only after the war was it revealed that a Muslim librarian, Enver Imamovic, had rescued the codex during the shelling and hidden it for safekeeping in a bank vault. It was not the first time this Jewish book had been saved by Muslim hands. In 1941, Dervis Korkut, a renowned Islamic scholar, smuggled the manuscript out of the museum under the very nose of a Nazi general, Johann Hans Fortner (later hanged for war crimes), and spirited it away to a mosque in the mountains, where it remained safely hidden till after World War II. While these heroic rescues were my initial inspirations, the characters to whom I have ascribed these actions in the novel are entirely fictional.
The haggadah first came to the attention of scholars in Sarajevo in 1894, when an indigent Jewish family offered it for sale. Art historians were excited by its discovery because it was one of the earliest illuminated medieval Hebrew books to come to light. Its discovery called into question the belief that figurative art had been suppressed among medieval Jews for religious reasons. Unfortunately, scholars were not able to learn much of the book’s creation other than that it was made in Spain, possibly as early as the mid-fourteenth century, toward the close of the period known as Convivencia, when Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted in relative peace.
Of the haggadah’s history during the tumultuous years of the Spanish Inquisition and the 1492 expulsion of the Jews nothing is known. The novel’s chapters “A White Hair” and “Saltwater” are entirely fictional. However, there is a saffron-robed, black-skinned woman at the seder table in one of the haggadah’s illuminations, and the mystery of her identity inspired my inventions.
By 1609, the haggadah had found its way to Venice, where the handwritten inscription by a Catholic priest named Vistorini apparently saved it from the book burnings of the pope’s Inquisition. Nothing is known of Vistorini beyond the books that have survived because they bear his signature. But many of the Catholic Hebraists of the period were converted Jews, and I used that fact in “Wine Stains.” In that chapter, also, the character of Judah Aryeh is inspired by the life of Leon Modena as described in The Autobiography of a Seventeenth Century Rabbi, translated and edited by Mark R. Cohen. Richard Zacks provided an invaluable collection of materials on gambling in seventeenth-century Venice.
Because Bosnia was under occupation by the Austro-Hungarian empire when the haggadah came to light there in 1894, it was natural that it should be sent to Vienna, hub of culture and scholarship, for study and restoration. For the atmosphere in the city at that time, and especially for details such as the unctuous manners of telephone operators, I am in debt to the remarkable narrative history A Nervous Splendour by Frederic Morton. Similarly, Brian Hall’s The Dreamers and The Impossible Country provided indispensable insights. While it is true that, by modern standards, the rebinding of the haggadah was mishandled in Vienna, the matter of the missing clasps is a novelist’s invention.
Before writing “An Insect’s Wing” I had many long conversations with members of the family of Dervis Korkut, and am in especial debt to Servet Korkut, who was by her husband’s side and supported his many heroic acts of resistance during the fascist occupation of Sarajevo. I hope that the Korkut family will find my invented family, the Kamals, in sympathy with their humanistic ideals. For details of the experiences of young Jewish Partisans, I relied on the harrowing account by Mira Papo, which is in the collection of Yad Vashem, where the librarians were most helpful.
The librarians of Sarajevo are a very special breed. At least one of them, Aida Buturovic, gave her life as she saved books from Sarajevo’s burning library. Others, such as Kemal Bakarsic, took immense risks, night after night, to evacuate collections under dangerous conditions. Enver Imamovic, as previously noted, saved the haggadah during a period of intense shelling. I am grateful to both men for speaking to me about their experiences, and also to Sanja Baranac, Jacob Finci, Mirsada Muskic, Denana Buturovic, Bernard Septimus, Bezalel Narkiss, and B. Nezirovic for their help and insight.
For assistance with research and translation, I would like to thank Andrew Crocker, Naida Alic, Halima Korkut, and Pamela J. Matz. For introducing me to the Parnassius butterfly at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, I’m grateful to Naomi Pierce.
Pamela J. Spitzmueller and Thea Burns of Harvard College Library were generous with their stories of the sleuthing aspect of book conservation. In December 2001, Andrea Pataki very kindly allowed me to be one more presence in a very crowded room while she worked on the real Sarajevo Haggadah under heavy guard at the European Union Bank. I would not have been able to observe her meticulous work without the intercession of Fred Eckhard and Jacques Klein of the United Nations.
For letting me spill kosher wine on bits of old parchment, for explaining the fine points of video spectral comparators, and for being an Aussie when I wasn’t sure that the career I’d invented for Hanna was all that plausible, I am thankful to my paysan Narayan Khandekar at the Straus Center for Conservation. While I learned a great deal about the career and the technical aspects of conversation from both Andrea Pataki and Narayan Khandekar, the fictional characters Hanna Heath and Razmus Kanaha bear absolutely no resemblance to either one of these real-life professionals.
I would not have had access to all the riches of Harvard’s libraries and museums were it not for a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, for which I am most grateful to Drew Gilpin Faust. Judy Vichniac led an amazingly supportive staff at the institute. The Radcliffe fellows, especially the members of the Tuesday writers’ table, helped shape my thinking and writing in myriad ways.
I also relied heavily on the insights of my early readers, especially Graham Thorburn, the Horwitz team of Joshua, Elinor, Norman, and Tony, Rabbi Caryn Broitman of the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, sofer stam Jay Greenspan, Christine Farmer, Linda Funnel, Clare Reihill, Marie Anderson, and Gail Morgan.
Thanks hardly seem adequate for my editor Molly Stern and my agent Kris Dahl, who are, as ever, my indispensable supports and two of the most formidable professionals in publishing.
Lastly and most of all, I have to thank Tony and Nathaniel, inspirations and welcome distractions, without whom nothing is possible.
People of the Book Page 37