People of the Book

Hanna Boston, Spring 1996

“IT’S TOO BAD,” Raz said, reaching for the basket of warm pappadams, “that we’ll never know what really happened.”

“I know.” I’d been thinking about little else all evening. I looked out the restaurant window onto Harvard Square, one floor below. Students with their necks wrapped in scarves made their way past the homeless people panhandling in their accustomed doorways. Middle of April, and the temperature had plunged again, leaving the last remnants of ashy, unmelted snow pushed into stubborn clumps on the street corners. Harvard Square could feel like a party on a warm night, full of energy and privilege and promise. Or it could seem like one of the bleakest places on earth—an icy, windswept rat maze where kids wasted their youth clawing over one another in a fatuous contest for credentials.

After the initial exhilaration of discovering the bloodstain, I’d fallen into a funk. It was a familiar feeling for me; an occupational hazard. It was as if I was up against some genie who lived within the pages of old books. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you got to release him for an instant or two, and he would reward you with a misty glimpse into the past. Other times, pouf—he’d blow it all away before you could make sense of it, and stand there, arms crossed: Thus far, and no farther.

Raz, oblivious to my mood, just kept rubbing it in. “Blood is potentially so dramatic,” he said, swirling the pinot in his glass.

Raz’s wife, Afsana, stayed in Providence three nights a week because she’d scored an assistant professorship teaching poetry at Brown. So we were dining alone and could talk shop as much as we liked. But all we could do was speculate, and that was annoying me.

“I don’t know how you drink red wine with Indian food,” I said, trying to change the subject. I sucked on my beer.

“Could’ve been some big drama,” Raz continued, undaunted. “Passionate Spaniards, fighting for possession of the book—sabers drawn, daggers—”

“More likely some bloke was carving the Passover roast and his hand slipped,” I interrupted grumpily. “Don’t look for zebras.”

“What?”

“Just a saying. ‘If it has four feet, a long nose, and it eats hay, look for a horse before you go searching for a zebra.’” It was my mother’s saying, actually; something to do with her residents. Apparently inexperienced docs always want to diagnose rare syndromes, even if the patient’s symptoms fit some perfectly common condition.

“Oh, you’re just a wet blanket. Zebras are much more exciting.” Raz reached for the bottle and recharged his glass. The haggadah wasn’t his project; he didn’t feel the frustration the way I did. “You could run a DNA test, I suppose…. Find out the ethnic origins of the person whose blood it is….”

“You could. Except you can’t. You’d have to violate the parchment to extract a big enough sample. And even if I recommended it, which I wouldn’t, I doubt they’d let me.” I broke a piece of pappadam—flat, crisp, like matzoh. Like the matzoh the mysterious black woman held in the haggadah illumination. Another mystery I wouldn’t be able to solve.

Raz went rabbiting on: “It’d be great if you could transport back in time and be there when it happened….”

“Yeah, I bet the wife yelled at him: ‘You klutz! Look what you’ve done to our book!’”

Raz grinned, defeated at last by my sour mood. He’d always had a romantic streak. That’s what had drawn him to shipwrecks, I suppose. The waiter arrived with a bowl of searing vindaloo. I dribbled the fiery sauce over my rice, took a forkful, and felt my eyes water. I loved this stuff. I had lived on it when I was at Harvard. The burn was as close as I’d found to my favorite food in the world: the king prawn sambal at the Malayan restaurant at home in Sydney. Food can be very restorative sometimes. After a few bites I started to feel a bit better.

“You’re right,” I said. “It would be something, to be back there, when the haggadah was still just some family’s book, a thing to be used, before it became an exhibit, locked up in a vitrine….”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Raz said. He was poking at the vindaloo suspiciously. He served himself a scant spoonful and loaded the rest of his plate with dal. “It’s still doing what it was meant to do, or it will be, as soon as it goes into the museum. It was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, from what you’ve told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You’ve got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything’s humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize ‘the other’—it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists…same old, same old. It seems to me the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.”

“Pretty profound, for an organic chemist.” I could never resist a chance to take the piss. Raz scowled at me, then he laughed, and asked what I was planning to talk about at the Tate. I told him I was giving a paper on the structural features and conservation problems of Turkish manuscripts. Their binding format often leads to damage in use, and it’s amazing how many conservators still don’t know how to deal with it. From there we drifted into gossip about my bezillionaire client and the pros and cons of university deaccessioning programs. Raz’s lab did all the important work on Harvard’s holdings, so he had some strong views on the subject.

“It’s one thing if a manuscript is in a university library, accessible to scholars, another if it gets passed off to a private collector and locked away in a vault somewhere….”

“I know. And you should see this guy’s vault….” My client lived in one of the huge old mansions on Brattle Street, and he’d excavated a safe room that was state of the art and absolutely stuffed with treasures. Raz, who had access every day to fantastic things, was pretty hard to impress. But even his eyes widened when I told him, in strict confidence, about a few of the things this guy had managed to acquire.

From that discussion we moved on to museum politics in general and from there to spicier shop talk: sex in the stacks, a.k.a. the love lives of librarians. And that pretty much was the whole conversation for the rest of the evening. At one point I was fiddling with the saltshaker. In all the excitement of checking out the bloodstain, we hadn’t looked at the scraping of salt crystals I’d taken off the parchment. I told Raz I’d need to trouble him again the next day because I really wanted to get a look at those crystals under his video spectral comparator.

“You’re very welcome. Anytime. You know we’d love to have you at Straus. Permanently. There’s a job for you, whenever you raise your hand.”

“Thanks, matey, that’s very flattering. But there’s no way I’d leave Sydney.”

I guess all the chatting about who was doing who in our little world had something to do with what happened next. We were leaving the restaurant when Raz put a hand on my hip. I turned and looked at him.

“Raz?”

“Afsana’s not here,” he said. “What’s the harm? Auld lang syne and all that.”

I looked down at his hand, picked it up between my thumb and forefinger, and removed it from my person. “Guess I’ll have to rename you.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll have to call you ‘Rat’ from now on, instead of Raz.”

“Oh, come on, Hanna. When did you turn into such a prude?”

“Ah, let’s see—perhaps that would be two years ago? When you got married?”

“Well, I certainly don’t expect Afsana to live like a nun when she’s in Providence, with all those juicy young undergrads sitting dewy-eyed at her feet, so I don’t see—”

I covered my ears with my hands. “Spare me. I don’t need to know the details of your marital arrangements.”

I turned away from him and hurried down the stairs. I suppose I am a bit of a prude, about some things, anyway. I like loyalty. I mean, do what you like when you’re single. Live and let live. Lay and get laid. But why bother to be married at all, if you don’t want the commitment?

We walked the few blocks to my hotel in an awkward silence and parted with a stilted good night. I went up to my hotel room feeling ticked off, and a little bit desolate. If I found someone I loved enough to marry, I wouldn’t be as reckless about it as Raz.

Weirdly, when I fell asleep, I dreamed about Ozren. We were downstairs from his apartment, in the bakery at Sweet Corner, except the stove was my DeLonghi, from the flat in Bondi. We were cooking muffins, of all things. When I took the tray out of the oven, he came up behind me so that his forearm rested against mine. The muffins were perfectly risen, steaming, fragrant, bursting out of their patty pans. He held one up to my lips. The crust gave way in my mouth and I tasted something creamy and rich and delicious.

Sometimes a muffin is just a muffin. But not in that dream.

I woke to the insistent bleating of the telephone. Thinking it was just my wake-up call, I rolled over, lifted the receiver, and dropped it back into the cradle. Two minutes later, it was ringing again. This time I sat up and noticed the time winking red on the digital clock. Two-thirty. If it was my wake-up call, four hours early, the desk clerk was going to have hell to pay. I muttered a grumpy, “Huhgn?”

“Dr. Heath?”

“Mmmm.”

“This is Dr. Friosole, Max Friosole. I’m calling from Mount Auburn Hospital. I have a Dr. Sarah Heath here….”

Anybody else in the world would have been wide-staring awake and in an anxiety attack right then. But the fact that my mother was at a hospital in the middle of the night struck me, in my sleepy stupor, as perfectly ordinary. “Mmmhuh?” I grunted.

“She’s seriously injured. I believe you are next of kin?”

Suddenly I was sitting up, groping for the light switch, disoriented in the strange hotel bed. “What’s happened?” My voice was husky, like I’d swallowed a toilet brush.

“It was an MVA. She was ambulatory on scene with pain on palpation suggesting pulmonary—”

“Wait. Stop. Speak English, will you?”

“But I thought…Dr. Heath…”

“My mother’s an MD, I’m a PhD.”

“Oh, uh. She was in a car accident.”

I thought of her hands first. She’s so protective of her hands.

“Where is she? Can I speak to her?”

“Well, I think you should come down here. She…she’s, well, to put it frankly, she’s been a bit difficult. She signed herself out AMA—ah, that’s ‘against medical advice’—but she suffered a syncope—I mean fainted—in the hospital corridor. She has a ruptured spleen—massive hemoperitoneum—blood in the abdomen. We’re prepping her for surgery now.”

My hands shook as I took down the hospital details. By the time I got there, she’d been moved from the ER and up to the OR. Dr. Friosole turned out to be a junior resident with a five o’clock shadow and a gaunt, sleep-deprived look around the eyes. In the very short time it took me to throw on some clothes, find a cab, and get over there, he’d dealt with a gunshot wound and a heart attack, so he could hardly remember who I was. He looked up the admitting info for me and established that Mum had been a passenger in the car, driven by an eighty-one-year-old woman who had been DOA. They’d hit a crash barrier on Storrow Drive. No other vehicle involved. “The police took a statement from your mother at the scene.”

“How come? I mean, are they allowed to do that, if someone is seriously injured?”

“She was lucid when they got there, administering CPR to the other victim, apparently.” He glanced again at the notes. “Argued with the EMTs—wanted to intubate the woman at the scene and was quite difficult when the EMTs insisted on proceeding to the ER.”

That’d be right, I thought. I could just hear her. “But if she was in good shape then, what happened?”

“That’s the spleen for you. Sneaky. You’re a bit sore but basically fine and you don’t know you’re hemorrhaging until much later, when your BP crashes through the floor. She diagnosed herself, you know, just before she passed out….” I must have looked a little green at this point because he stopped talking about oozing guts and asked if I wanted to sit down.

“The old lady…do you have a name?”

He flicked the paper on his clipboard. “Delilah Sharansky.”

It didn’t mean anything to me. I tried to follow the directions Friosole was giving me to the part of the hospital where Mum was, but my mind was working so hard on the whole idea of this unlikely accident that I made about six wrong turns getting there. I sat down on a hard plastic chair—buttercup yellow, almost obscenely bright against the gray sludge color of everything else in the hospital. Then there was nothing for me to do but wait.

She looked absolutely awful when they wheeled her out of recovery. She had IVs the size of garden hoses in her arm, and one cheek was all bruised and swollen where it must have slammed into the side of the car. She was groggy, but she recognized me straightaway and gave a crooked grin that might have been the most sincere smile she’d ever given me. I took the hand that didn’t have the large-bore IV in it.

“Five on this one,” I said. “And five on the other one. Surgeon Heath, still in business.”

She groaned softly. “Yes, but doctors who work in hospitals need their spleens,” she whispered. “Can’t fight infections….” Her voice broke and her eyes watered and big fat tears traveled down her poor smashed cheek. I had never, in thirty years, seen my mother cry. I picked up her hand and kissed it, and then I started crying, too.

They let me stay in her room on a kind of Barcalounger chair. The sedation and the painkillers knocked her out again within about fifteen minutes, which was a good thing because she was pretty upset. I couldn’t get back to sleep on the damned chair so I just zoned out, waiting for the sky to get light and listening to the gathering sounds in the corridors outside as the morning shift got ready to do meds and BPs and prep the poor sods arriving for elective surgery. I thought of all the things I needed to do—call the Tate and cancel my presentation. Call Mum’s secretary, Janine, and get her to work on reschedding the appointments waiting for Mum back in Sydney. Call the police, and find out what Mum’s legal obligations were, if any. In Sydney there’d be an inquest, probably, if an accident resulted in a fatality. I imagined Mum would be pretty dark if she had to stick around Boston to appear at something like that.

Eventually I got so agitated about all this that I went off to find a phone and get going on the calls. It was still business hours in London, and there’d be someone on duty at the hospital in Sydney even though it was the middle of the night. When I got back to the room, Mum was awake. She must have been feeling better because she had her Dr. Heath, chair of neurosurgery, voice back, giving the nurse who was trying to change her IV a hard time about the placement of the cannula. I saw her eyes on me as I came into the room.

“Thought you’d gone,” she said.

“Nup. Can’t get rid of me so easily. I was just leaving a message for Janine to, you know, let her know…. How are you feeling?”

“Bloody ghastly.” Mum never swore, except for the occasional four-letter word, delivered like a bludgeon. Colloquial, casual Aussie swearing was beneath her.

“Can I get you something?”

“A competent nurse.”

I gave the nurse a look meant to express apology for my mother’s rudeness, but she wasn’t a bit fazed. She just rolled her eyes and shrugged and went on taking Mum’s vitals. Actually, it wasn’t a bit like Mum to be rude to a nurse. I knew then that she had to be in real pain. It was one of the things I really had to give her: the nurses at her hospital worshipped her. One of them, a nurse who’d gone to med school and was then an intern, had taken me aside after she’d overheard the two of us going at it in Mum’s office one day. I must have been in take-no-prisoners mode, for her to bother. Anyway, she said there was a side of Mum I didn’t know, or I wouldn’t say such terrible things to her. She said Mum was the only surgeon who actually encouraged nurses to ask questions, to take on more skilled tasks. “Most surgeons get their backs up if you question them, treat you like you’re up yourself or something. But your mother—she was the one who got me the application for mature-age admission to med school, wrote the recommendation that got me in.”

I remember I was pretty surly with that intern, at the time. Basically told her to butt out and mind her own business. But inside, somewhere, what she said made me really proud. The trouble was, what was great for her was poison for me. When it came to medicine, Mum was a real evangelist. And I was like the minister’s daughter who grows up apostate.

When the nurse left the room, Mum signaled weakly. “Yes, actually, you can get me something. A pen and paper. Write down this address.”

I took down the street name she gave me, an avenue somewhere in Brookline.

“I want you to go there.”

“What for?”

“It’s Delilah Sharansky’s home. Tonight they will be sitting shivah. It’s the Jewish mourning ritual.”

“I know what it is, Mum,” I said, a trifle curtly. “I’ve got a bloody degree in biblical Hebrew.” I wanted to say, The big surprise is that you know what it is. I’d always suspected she was a bit of an anti-Semite. Mum’s bigotries were very bifurcated. When it came to patients, she didn’t see skin color. But watching the news, she’d make casual ethnic slurs about “the lazy Abos” or the “bloodthirsty Arabs.” Likewise, she’d given plenty of bright Jews coveted spots in her residency program, but I never recall her inviting one home to dinner.

“These people, the Sharanskys? They don’t know me from soap. They won’t want a stranger there.”

“They will.” She shifted her weight in the bed, and winced from the effort. “They will want you there.”

“But why would they? Who was Delilah Sharansky, anyway?”

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

“It’s no good now. All bound to come out at the inquest, or whatever damn thing they have here.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

She opened her eyes and looked right at me. “Delilah Sharansky was your grandmother.”

I stood on the steps of the tall redbrick house for a long time, trying to get up the guts to knock on the door. It was in my favorite part of Brookline, the edgy part right near Alston where the burrito joints give way to the kosher groceries and the street life is equal parts artstudenty goth and Jewish frum.

There’s a very good chance I never would have knocked at all, if another group of mourners hadn’t arrived behind me and just sort of swept me inside with them. The door opened on a dozen or so loud voices, all talking at once. Someone handed me vodka in a shot glass. Somehow, I hadn’t pictured shivah like this. I guess that was the Russian part of Russian Jewish.

The house also wasn’t at all what you’d expect, going by the conventional exterior or by the fact that an eighty-one-year-old woman had lived here. The inside had been all opened up, in a very contemporary way, with white walls and light pouring in from well-placed skylights. There were tall, spare ceramic vases with twisted branches in them, and Mies chairs and other vintage-modern, Bauhaus-y pieces.

On the far wall, there was a very large painting. The kind of painting that knocks your breath out of you. It was a gorgeous, burning expanse of Australian sky with just a strip of hard red desert implied in a few lines of paint in the lower quarter of the canvas. So simple, so powerful. It was one of the pictures that had made the artist’s name in the early 1960s. You could see one from that series in just about any major museum that bothered at all with Australian art. But this was one of the greats. The best I’d seen. We had one ourselves—I mean, Mum did—at the house in Bellevue Hill. I’d never thought about it that much. She had quite a few trophy paintings: Brett Whiteley, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd. Always the big boys with the big names. No reason why she wouldn’t have an Aaron Sharansky.

That morning, Mum and I had talked for quite a while, until I could see I was exhausting her. I’d got the nurse to give her something, and when she fell asleep, I went to Widener Library to look up the facts of Aaron Sharansky’s biography. It was all there, easily retrieved. Born in 1937. Father, survivor of Ukrainian concentration camp, professor of Russian language and literature at Boston University. He brought his family to Australia when he was invited to create the first Russian language department at the University of New South Wales in 1955. Aaron attended art school at East Sydney Tech, went jackarooing in the Northern Territory, started doing the paintings that made him famous. Became an enfant terrible of Aussie art. Outspoken, outrageous. Deeply political when it came to the desert environment and the mining industry’s destruction thereof. I remembered seeing him on the news, being arrested at some sit-in, protesting a bauxite mine, I think it was. He’d had long black hair, and the rozzers—who were rough in those days—were using it to drag him through the sand. There was a big scandal about it, I remembered that. He refused the bail conditions, that he not go back to the mining site, and sat in jail for a month with a dozen Aboriginal men. He came out of it with a lot to say about the terrible treatment of Aboriginal people in custody. He was quite the hero in some circles after that. Even conservatives had to listen politely, if they wanted a crack at buying one of his paintings. Every time he had a show, there was a kind of frenzy to get one, no matter how high the prices rose.

Then, at twenty-eight, the story took a different turn. His vision started to fail. Turned out he had a tumor, pressing on his optic nerve. Risked delicate surgery to remove it. A few days later, he died of “postoperative complications.”

What was not noted in any of the profiles or the numerous obits was the name of the neurosurgeon who had performed the operation. Australian doctors weren’t allowed to be named in the press in those days—some kind of medical ethics policy. Although I wasn’t in a position to know for sure, I suspected that, in her early thirties, my mother already had the complete lack of self-doubt that would have made it possible for her to operate on his difficult tumor. But had she? If so, she’d gone against a long-standing tradition, that doctors don’t operate on those with whom they are emotionally involved.

Sarah Heath and Aaron Sharansky were lovers. At the time of his surgery, she was four months’ pregnant with his child.

“You thought I didn’t love your father?”

The look on her face was one of absolute astonishment. It was as if I’d said there was a hippopotamus in the hand basin. I’d returned to the hospital from Widener in the afternoon. She was still asleep when I got there, and it was all I could do not to shake her awake. When she finally opened her eyes, I was almost standing over her, crazy with questions. We talked then, questions, answers, and long silences. It was the longest conversation we’d ever had that wasn’t an argument.

“Well, why wouldn’t I think you didn’t love him? You never mentioned him. Ever. Not once. And when I finally got up the nerve to ask you, you just walked away with a disgusted look on your face.” The memory of that moment still hurt. “D’you know, for a long time after that, I was convinced that I was the child of a rape, or something….”

“Oh, Hanna….”

“And it seemed clear that you couldn’t stand the sight of me.”

“Of course that wasn’t true.”

“I…I thought I must remind you of him, or something….”

“You did remind me of him. You looked so much like him, right from the minute you were born. That dimple you’ve always had, the shape of your head, your eyes. Later, your hair—the exact color and texture of his. The expression on your face when you concentrate—it’s the same look he had when he was painting. And I thought, All right, she looks like him, but she’ll be like me, because she’s with me. I’m raising her. But you weren’t like me. You were interested in the things he loved. Always. Even your laugh is like his, the way you look when you are angry…. Every time I looked at you I thought of him…. And then, when you hit adolescence, and you seemed to hate me so much…it was as if that was part of my punishment.”

“Punishment? What do you mean? Punishment for what?”

“For killing him.” Her voice was suddenly very small.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Mum. You’re the one who’s always telling me not to be self-dramatizing. Losing a patient is hardly the same as killing him.”

“He wasn’t my patient. Are you mad? Haven’t you learned anything about medicine from living with me all those years? What kind of a doctor would I be if I’d operated on someone I was absolutely, passionately in love with? Of course I didn’t operate on him. I did the tests, got the diagnosis—he presented complaining of blurred vision. He had a tumor. Benign, slow growing, not life threatening at all. I recommended radiation, and he tried that, but the visual impairment persisted. He wanted the surgery, risks and all. So I referred him to Andersen.”

The legendary Andersen. I’d heard the name all my life. Mum practically worshipped him.

“So, you sent him to the best. How can you blame yourself for that?”

She sighed. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“You could give me a chance to—”

“Hanna, you had your chance. A long time ago.” She closed her eyes then, and I sat there, squirming. I couldn’t believe we were falling into the same old, same old. Not at a time like this, when there was so much I needed to know.

Outside, it would have been getting dark, but in the bowels of the hospital there was no way to know that. Corridor sounds of clanking gurneys and beeping pagers filled the silence. I wondered if she’d drifted back into a medicated doze. But then she stirred, and started speaking. She still had her eyes closed.

“You know, when I applied for a neurosurgical residency, they didn’t want to give it to a woman. Two of the assessors said straight-out that it would be a waste of training, that I’d marry and have kids and never practice.”

Her voice rose and hardened. In her mind, I could tell she was back there in that room, facing the men who wanted to deny her the future she’d set her heart on. “But the third assessor was the chair of the department. He knew I’d had the highest marks of anyone in my year, that I’d consistently excelled during my internship. He said to me, ‘Dr. Heath, I am going to ask you just one question: is there anything, anything in the world, that you can imagine yourself doing, other than being a neurosurgeon? Because if the answer is yes, then I urge you to withdraw your application.”

She opened her eyes then, and looked at me. “I didn’t hesitate for a second, Hanna. There wasn’t anything else, for me. Not a thing. I didn’t want to be married. I didn’t want a child. I’d let go of all those ordinary, normal desires. I tried to make you understand it, Hanna, how utterly amazing and wonderful it is, to be able to do it—the hardest surgery, the surgery that matters most. To know that you have a person’s thoughts, their personality, under your fingertips and that your skill—I don’t just save lives, Hanna. I save the very thing that makes us human. I save souls. But you never…” She sighed again, and I shifted in my seat. The evangelist was back in her pulpit. I’d heard it all before and knew where it went from here, and that was no place I wanted to go. But she changed gears suddenly.

“When I got pregnant, it was a mistake, and I was so angry with myself. I had no intention of having a baby, ever. But Aaron was thrilled, and he made me thrilled, too.” She was still holding me in a direct blue gaze, and her eyes started to glisten.

“In some ways, Hanna, we were the most unlikely lovers. He was this tomato-tossing lefty iconoclast, and I was—” She broke off. Her hands were traveling nervously across the sheet, smoothing nonexistent wrinkles. “Until I met him, Hanna, I’d never looked up. I’d never voluntarily spent a minute of my time on anything that didn’t lead to being a doctor, and then, when I was one, to being a better one. Politics, nature, art—he introduced me to all those things. I don’t believe in clichés like love at first sight and all that, but that was what it was, with us. I’d never felt anything like it. Never have, since. He walked into my surgery, and I just knew—”

A nurse’s aide backed into the room, pulling a tea cart. Mum’s hands were shaking, so I held the cup for her. She took a few sips and then waved it away. “Americans can’t make decent tea.” I plumped the pillows, and she adjusted her position, wincing with the effort.

“Do you want me to ask them for something?”

She shook her head. “Dopey enough already,” she said. She took a deep breath, gathering her strength, then she went on. “That first day, when I got home, there was a painting waiting for me—the one that hangs over the sideboard in the dining room.”

I whistled. Even then, that painting must’ve been worth a hundred grand. “Most I ever got from a would-be suitor was a bunch of flowers, wilted, actually.”

Mum gave a crooked grin. “Yes,” she said. “It was quite a statement of intent. There was a note from him, with it. I still have it. Always. It’s in my wallet. You can see it if you like.”

I walked over to her locker and took out her handbag.

“The wallet’s in the zip compartment. Yes, that’s right, there.”

I pulled it out. “It’s behind my driver’s license.”

It was short, just two lines, written with an artist’s charcoal pencil in big, swooping letters.

What I do is me, for that I came.

I recognized the line. It was from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Underneath, Aaron had written:

Sarah, you are the one. Help me to do what I came for.

I was staring at the words, trying to imagine the hand that had written them. My father’s hand, which I had never held.

“I called him, to say thank you for the painting. He asked me to come over to his studio. And after that…after that, we spent every spare moment together. Until the end. It wasn’t long. Just a few months, really. I’ve often wondered if it would have lasted, what we had, if he’d lived…. He might have ended up hating me, just like you.”

“Mum, I didn’t—”

“Hanna, don’t. There’s no point. I know you’ve never been able to get past the fact that I wasn’t a 24/7 mother to you, when you were little. By the time you hit adolescence you might as well have been a cactus plant, as far as I was concerned. You wouldn’t let me get near you. I’d walk into the house and I’d hear you and Greta laughing together. But when I came up to you, you’d shut down. If I asked what the joke was, you’d just give me this stone for a face and say, ‘You wouldn’t get it.’”

It was true. I’d done exactly that. My little way of punishing her. I let my hands fall open in my lap in a gesture of surrender. “That’s all a long time ago, now,” I said.

She nodded. “All of it. All a long time ago.”

“What happened, with the operation?”

“I didn’t tell Andersen about our relationship when I referred Aaron to him. I was already pregnant, but no one knew. Amazing what you can hide under a white coat. Anyway, Andersen invited me to scrub in, but I said no—made some lame excuse. I remember how he looked at me. Usually I’d walk over hot coals for a chance to scrub in with him. For that type of tumor, you go in through the skull base. You peel back the scalp and—”

She broke off. I realized I’d involuntarily raised my hand to my ears, to shut out the gruesome description. She gave me a lacerating stare. I dropped my hands like a guilty child.

“In any case, I didn’t choose to scrub in. But I did find some reason to be hanging around the OR when Andersen came out. He was pulling off his gloves, and I’ll never forget his face when he looked up. I thought Aaron must have died on the table. It took everything I had, just to stand there, upright. ‘It was a benign meningioma, as you diagnosed. But the optic nerve sheaths were extensively involved.’ He’d tried to peel the tumor off the sheaths to get the blood supply back to the nerves, but there was too much of it. Anyway, I knew from what he said that Aaron wouldn’t be able to see. And I knew right then and there that Aaron wouldn’t consider it living. As it happened, he never woke up to find out he was blind. That night, there was a bleed, and Andersen missed it. By the time they took your father back into the OR to evacuate the clot—”

The nurse came in then. She gave Mum an appraising look. It was obvious how agitated she was. The nurse turned to me. “I think you’d better let the patient rest for a while,” she said.

“Yes. Go.” Mum’s voice sounded strained, as if even those two small words required a huge effort. “It’s time. It’s time you were with the Sharanskys.”

“Hanna Heath?” I turned away from the painting on Delilah Sharansky’s wall and found myself looking into a familiar set of features. Mine, translated onto the face of a much older man.

“I’m Delilah’s son. Her other son. Jonah.”

I held out a hand, but he grabbed me around the shoulders and drew me to him. I felt desperately awkward. When I was a little girl, I’d longed for family. Mum had been an only child and not close to her parents. Her dad had made a pile in the insurance business and taken his wife off to a tennis and golf retirement community in Noosa before I was even born. I think I’d met my grandmother once before she died suddenly, of a heart attack. My grandfather rather hastily married someone else, a tennis coach. My mother didn’t approve, so we never visited.

Suddenly, here I was, surrounded by strangers who were my blood relations. There were quite a few of them: three cousins, an aunt. There was another aunt, apparently, who was working as a trade rep in Yalta. And there was Uncle Jonah, the architect who had renovated this house for Delilah.

“We were so relieved to hear that your mother is recovering,” he said, flipping back a troublesome strand of straight black hair in a nervous gesture that was, I realized, a mirror of one of my own. “None of us wanted Mom to keep driving after she turned eighty, but she was a stubborn old bat.” She’d been a widow for more than fifteen years, he said, and had grown used to calling her own shots. “Ten years ago she went back and got her PhD—so I suppose it’s understandable that she wouldn’t let us tell her what to do. But we all feel terribly about your mother. If there’s anything we can do…”

I assured him that Mum was being well taken care of. Once word had got around the neurosurgical meeting, the whole doctor network had sprung into action, the way it does for one of its own. I doubted there was a patient in Boston who was getting more attentive care.

“Well, Mom would be glad that this tragedy has brought us you, at last.”

“Yeah, it’s too bad you and your mum didn’t stay in Australia—it would have been nice to have a granny when I was a kid.”

“Oh, but we did stay there, for a few years. Mom wanted to give me the chance to finish my architecture degree. I was a night student at the Institute of Technology and I worked for the NSW Government Architect during the day. I designed the loos at Taronga Park Zoo. If you ever have occasion to take a piss there…” He grinned. “Well, they’re really nice, as loos go….” He put his glass down and looked at me as if he was trying to decide whether or not to say something. “You should know. Mom begged Sarah to let us see you, to make you part of the family. But Sarah said no. She insisted that there be no contact.”

“But you just said your mother didn’t take orders from anyone. Why would she listen to Sarah?”

“I think it came hard to her. But she knew we were moving back here. I suppose she thought it was unfair to create a big disruption in your life and then vanish. But she found out where you went to pre-school, you know, and would go there and watch for you, in the afternoon, when the housekeeper came to collect you. She worried about you. She said you looked like a sad little kid….”

“Well, that was pretty perceptive of her,” I said. My voice, much to my embarrassment, was breaking, and I couldn’t keep the tremble from my lip. How bloody cruel. Cruel to Delilah, who must have yearned for her grandchild, all she had left of her son. And cruel to me. I would have been a different person if I’d had this family.

“But why did Mum keep in touch, then? I mean, why were they together last night?”

“Estate matters. Aaron’s trust—he willed his copyright to create the Sharansky Foundation.”

“Of course,” I said. It was one of Mum’s boards. She was in big demand for boards—corporate, charity. She’d take the director’s fees and the prestige, but I’d never got the sense she cared that much about any of them. The Sharansky Foundation had always seemed an odd one for her; its interests weren’t exactly aligned with the Establishment.

“Aaron wrote a will just before his operation, creating the Foundation. He named Delilah and Sarah as trustees. I guess he thought he’d bind them together that way.”

Someone else came up then, and Jonah turned to speak to her. I stared at the pictures on the bookshelf. There were just a few, in plain silver frames. There was one of Delilah as a young woman, dressed in a white organza frock with a silver-spangled collar. She had huge dark eyes, all lit with excitement over whatever event it was that she’d dressed up so beautifully for. And there was a picture of Aaron, in his studio, paint-spattered, considering the canvas in front of him as if the photographer wasn’t even there. There were family group shots, bar mitzvahs, I suppose, brises, maybe…. Good-looking people with arms over one another’s shoulders, smiling eyes, body language that said they were glad to be together.

They were all so warm—plying me with food, hugging me even. I’m not used to being hugged. I was trying to recast myself as someone who belonged in this setting, someone half Russian Jewish. Someone who could have been going through life named Hanna Sharansky.

The vodka bottle was sitting on the glass table, and I kept gravitating toward it. I lost count of how many I’d had. I kept tossing them down, glad of the numbing buzz. Everyone was telling Delilah stories, Jonah’s wife was telling how, when she first got married, Jonah kept saying her matzoh balls weren’t like his mom’s. “I tried whipping the egg whites separately, combining everything gently by hand, and making these lovely, airy matzoh balls, but no, they were never like Delilah’s. And then one day I got fed up and just threw everything in the blender. They were golf balls. So tough. And what does Jonah say? ‘Just like Delilah’s!’”

There were other stories in the same vein. Delilah hadn’t been a stereotypical Jewish mother, or grandmother, for that matter. Jonah’s son, a bloke a bit younger than I, talked about the first time his parents had left him alone for a weekend, supposedly staying with his granny Delilah. “She met me at the door and she had two take-out chickens in foil bags. She thrust them at me and said, ‘Now go home and have a nice weekend with your friends. Just don’t get yourself—or me—into any trouble.’ It was an overprotected fourteen-year-old’s dream, I tell you.”

Jonah and his wife buried their faces in their hands in mock horror. “If we’d known…”

I said I had to go not long after that. I said I had to look in on Mum, which I didn’t have any intention of doing. But I did have to get out of there. I was reeling, partly from the vodka shots, but only partly. It was going to take me more than one night to catch up with thirty years of missing information. Missing love.

By the time I got back to the hotel, all the confusing new feelings I’d been having about my mother since her accident had resolved themselves into the familiar little angry knot I’d had with me most of my life. It wasn’t enough to know that she had once been a woman capable of a great love. Yeah, sure, she’d suffered. Lost the love of her life, and carried a gutful of blame over it. And yes, I hadn’t been perfect by any means. Needy and unforgiving and a nightmare adolescent. But it still wasn’t enough. Because in the end, she’d made all the decisions, and I’d paid for them.

I went into the bathroom and threw up, which is something I hadn’t done—at least from too much drinking—since I was an undergrad. I lay on the bed with a wet washcloth on my face and tried not to notice the room spinning. As the headache started to kick in, I decided that I wouldn’t cancel my Tate talk after all. Let Mum’s fellow docs take care of her. I knew they would. She’d always put her work first….

And so did he. The voice in my head was her voice. He was the one who really chose work over love. He needn’t have risked his life with a dangerous operation. He had so much. A lover, a family. A child on the way. But none of it was as important to him as his work.

OK, then, bugger the both of them. Better just get on with it, like they would.

I had a wicked hangover, which is just what you don’t want on a seven-hour plane trip. At least I was in the pointy end again, courtesy of the bezillionare. I took the piece of seared salmon the flight attendant offered me, thinking of all the poor sods in the back struggling through their cardboard chicken and rubber pasta. But even in first class, airline food is crap. The fish was seared, all right; cooked to perfection, and then left on the griddle for another hour and a half. All I really wanted was water, anyway. While I waited for someone to take the tray, I picked up the little plastic saltshaker, letting a few grains drop into my hand. After Mum’s accident, I hadn’t thought of getting back to Raz’s lab. When I hadn’t shown up, he’d assumed I was still dark with him. He’d done the analysis without me, as a goodwill gesture. He’d left a message, scribbled by hand, at the desk of my hotel. I had it out on the linen-covered tray table in front of me.

I smiled. Typical Raz. Looking for zebras again. And, of course, his shipwreck obsession would lead him to think of maritime mishaps. But I would take his advice and look into it. What made salt kosher, anyway? I had no idea. It was another line of inquiry, another thread to follow. Perhaps the genie in the book would give me a glimpse of something.

I let the white grains fall from my hand onto a weary, rust-edged lettuce leaf. Thousands of feet below, the salty waves of an unseen ocean heaved and crashed in the dark.