People of the Book

Hanna Arnhem Land, Gunumeleng, 2002

I WAS IN A CAVE six hundred meters up a rock escarpment and a hundred clicks from the nearest landline when they finally got ahold of me.

The message, brought by one of the Aboriginal kids, was odd, and I didn’t know what to make of it. He was a bright kid, and a bit of a prankster, so at first I thought it was some kind of joke.

“No, missus. No gammon this time. Fella from that Canberra mob, he bin call all day. We bin tell ’im, you mob’s bush all week, but ’im call and ’im call, even after Butcher growled ’im.”

Butcher was the boy’s uncle and the manager of Jabiru Station, the cattle property where we stayed when we weren’t doing field-work.

“Did he say what he wanted?”

The boy tilted his head to the side, the ambiguous gesture that might mean “no,” or “I don’t know,” or maybe “I don’t have the right to tell you.”

“You better come, missus, or Butcher’ll growl me, too.”

I stepped out of the cave and blinked in the bright daylight. The sun was a big disk of brilliant madder, reddening the stripes of ore that ran through the sheer black-and-ocher rock face. Down below, the first shoots of new spear grass washed the plain in vivid green. Light silvered the sheets of water left behind by the previous night’s downpour. We’d moved into Gunumeleng—one of six seasons the Aborigines identified in a year that whites divided simply into Wet and Dry. Gunumeleng brought the first storms. In another month, the entire plain would be flooded. The so-called road, which was actually a really marginal dirt track, would be impassable. I was hoping to get this section of caves documented and at least minimally conserved before another big Wet set in. The last thing I needed was a two-and-a-half-hour, bone-jarring drive back to the station to talk to some clown in Canberra. But in the distance, where the track ended, I could just make out the glint on the windshield of Butcher’s beloved Toyota. Butcher wouldn’t have let the boy drive it unless the message really was important.

“OK, then, Lofty. You go on ahead and tell Uncle that Jim and I’ll be along by teatime. I’ll just finish up a few silicone lines here, then we’ll follow you.”

The boy turned and scrambled down the escarpment. He was a skinny kid, and small for a sixteen-year-old (which was why everyone called him Lofty). But he could get up and down a rock face about twenty times more quickly than I could. I returned to the cave where Jim Bardayal, the archeologist I worked with, was waiting for me.

“At least we’ll get to sleep in a bed tonight, then,” he said, handing me the silicone cartridge.

“Ah, listen to you. What a softie. Back in Sydney you were always banging on about your country, how you missed it. Now, we get one night’s drizzle, and someone dangles a hot and a cot in front of you, you can’t get there quick enough.”

Jim grinned. “Bloody balanda,” he said. The storm the night before had actually been a lashing. Strobes of lightning had lit up the twisted white gum trees, and gusts of wind had just about blown the tarps right off our shelter.

“It’s not the rain,” Jim said. “It’s the bloody mozzies.”

I couldn’t argue with that. There was no such thing as peacefully contemplating the gorgeous sunsets out here. Dusk was a dinner bell for millions of mosquitoes, and we were the catch of the day. Just thinking about them made me itch all over. I shot a line of silicone, like a ridge of sticky chewing gum, across the rock face where we’d determined the rainwater would be likely to flow. The idea was to divert the water away from the soluble ochers of the paintings. This part of the escarpment was rich with art: Mimi paintings, the wonderful, energetic pictures of lithe figures hunting. Jim’s people, the Mirarr, believed they’d been painted by spirits. His other people, the archeological community, had established that the earliest of the paintings had been done thirty thousand years ago. All through those ages, certain knowledgeable elders had been charged with ceremonially restoring them when necessary. But after Europeans came, the Mirarr had gradually stopped inhabiting the caves of the stone country. They’d moved off to work for the balanda—the white settlers—on cattle stations, or gone to live in the towns. Our job now was to protect what they had left behind.

It wasn’t work I’d ever imagined myself doing. But Sarajevo had destroyed my confidence. While part of me continued to believe that it was Ozren and Heinrich who were wrong, the larger part—the coward in me—had swamped that conviction in a toxic sea of self-doubt. I’d come home feeling humiliated and unworthy and suddenly unsure of my own expertise. For a month, I moped around my Sydney lab, turning down any assignment that sounded the least bit challenging. If I’d made such an embarrassing mistake in Sarajevo, who was I to be passing judgment on anything?

Then I got a call from Jonah Sharansky. He had two things to tell me. One was that Delilah had left me a substantial inheritance. The other was that the family wanted me to take over my mother’s role in Aaron’s foundation. The other board members had already voted on it, apparently. I felt like I needed to get away from the lab for a while, so I decided to use the inheritance money and take some time to go and see what the foundation’s work was all about, and if there was something I might be able to contribute to it.

My mother went spare when she found out she’d been given the shove. At first, I felt bad. I assumed she saw the foundation as a last link with Aaron, and I could imagine how painful it would be, to have his family reject her like that.

She’d returned to Sydney a few weeks after I had. After she got out of the hospital, she’d taken herself off to some fancy spa in California to recuperate. “I’ve got to be in good shape when I get back to Sydney,” she told me on the phone. “Those vultures at the hospital will be circling.” When I met her at the airport, she looked amazing, fit for anything. But when I got her home, I noticed there were lines of strain around her mouth and shadows under her eyes and that she really was holding it together by force of will.

“You could take some more time off, Mum. Make sure you’re really, you know, ready to go back to work.”

She was sitting on the bed, letting me unpack for her. She kicked off her Manolos or Jimmy Choos or whatever they were—why she subjected herself to such torturing shoes I have no idea—and leaned back against the pillows. “I’ve got an eighth-nerve tumor on the schedule the day after tomorrow. Do you know what that’s like? No, how would you. Well, it’s like picking bits of wet Kleenex out of a bowl of tofu….”

“Mum, please…” I felt nauseated. “I’ll never be able to eat tofu again.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Hanna. Can you stop being solipsistic for five minutes? I’m just trying to explain it to you in a way you can grasp.” (Dear old Mum. Never let a chance go by to make me feel like the dimmest bulb in the chandelier.) “It’s difficult surgery, takes hours. And I skedded it on purpose, to show those vultures that I’m not a corpse yet.” She closed her eyes. “I’ll just take a nap now; pass me that throw, will you? Leave the rest of the unpacking. And you needn’t stay…. I can manage quite well with the housekeeper.”

It was just a few days later that she heard from the Sharanskys that they wanted me to replace her on the board. She summoned me to Bellevue Hill. She was sitting on the veranda when I arrived, with a bottle of Hill of Grace open and breathing on the table. With Mum, the quality of the wine was an indicator of the gravity of the talk. This one, I could tell, was going to be mega.

She had already told me, from her hospital bed in Boston, that she wanted me to keep my paternity a secret. I thought she was nuts. I mean, who cared who she’d slept with all those years ago. But she asked me to think about her position, and I considered it. I considered her position. I really did. I was still considering it when the foundation thing came up.

“If you join that board, Hanna, it will raise all kinds of questions.” The sun filtered through blooming tibouchinas and gave the light a violet shimmer. Fallen frangipani blossoms littered the manicured lawn, releasing a spicy scent. I sipped the glorious wine and didn’t say anything. “Awkward questions. For me. The accident has already put me in a precarious position at the hospital. Davis and Harrington couldn’t wait to raise the infection issue, and there are others who’ve never reconciled themselves to my appointment as chair. I’ve had to work twice as hard as usual to make it clear to them that I’m not going anywhere. It would be unfortunate timing if the other matter…” She left the sentence hanging.

“Well, but I might actually have some skills that would be useful, you know, to the Sharansky Foundation.”

“Skills? What skills could you possibly have, darling? I mean, you know nothing about the management of nonprofits, and I hadn’t noticed that you are a particular wizard in the investment field.”

I gripped the stem of my glass and stared into the shiraz. I sipped the wine and let the flavors billow in my mouth. I was determined not to let her set me off.

“Art skills, Mum. I thought I might possibly be able to help in the field, with the conservation program.”

She put her wineglass down on the marble table so hard I was surprised it didn’t shatter.

“It’s bad enough, Hanna, that you’ve spent all these years playing with paste and scraps of paper. But at least books have something to do with culture. Now you are proposing to go out to the middle of absolutely nowhere, to save meaningless, muddy daubs of primitives?”

I looked at her. I imagine my jaw might’ve actually dropped.

“How is it,” I blurted, “that a man like Aaron Sharansky could have loved someone like you?”

It went on from there. One last, god-awful, no-holds-barred blue; one of those fights where you pour out every poisonous thought you’ve ever had, the dregs of every grievance, and you set the cup in front of the other person and force them to drink it. I had to hear again what a disappointment I’d always been; a self-pitying pygmy of a personality who’d thought my scraped knees were more worthy of attention than her critically ill patients. I’d been an insufferable brat as a kid, and a delinquent slut as an adolescent. I’d glommed on to the Sharanskys in desperation because I was so busy nursing childish resentments that I couldn’t form adult attachments of my own. And then the familiar kicker: I’d squandered my opportunity to enter a real profession and wasted my life as “a tradeswoman.”

When you’ve fought with someone all your life, you know where the weaknesses are. By this point I was casting around for a weapon I could use to retaliate, so I went for her where I knew it would wound. “So, what good was it, all your precious medical expertise, when you couldn’t even save the bloke you loved?”

She suddenly looked stricken. I felt exultant, and pressed my advantage. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? I have to pay, all my life. No father, not even a name, all because you feel you fucked up your most important case.”

“Hanna, you don’t know what you are talking about.”

“That’s it, isn’t it? You referred him to the great almighty Andersen, and Andersen blew it. You would have done better. That’s what you think, isn’t it? You’re so arrogant, and then the one time when you should have trusted your own expertise—”

“Hanna. Shut up. You have no idea—”

“You could have saved him, that’s what you think, right? You would have picked up the bleed, if he’d been your patient.”

“I did pick up the bleed.”

Because I was still ranting, right over the top of her, it took me a second to process what she’d said.

“You…what?”

“Of course I picked it up. I monitored him all that night. I knew he was hemorrhaging. I let it happen. I knew he wouldn’t want to wake up blind.”

For several minutes, I was too stunned to say anything. A flock of rainbow lorikeets swooped and screeched through the garden then, on their way to their nighttime roost. I let my eyes follow them, until their colors—the royal blue, the emerald green, the scarlet—became suddenly blurred by my tears. I’m not going to go into what I said to her. I’m not sure I recall it all that accurately. But at the end of it, I told her I was going to change my name to Sharansky.

I don’t see her anymore. We don’t even go through the motions. Ozren had been right about one thing: some stories just don’t have happy endings.

I expected to feel more adrift than I did, being entirely on my own. But if there was an empty place in my life, it wasn’t very much bigger than it always had been. She had never understood me, or why what I did mattered, and why I loved it. And those were the important things. Without that, our conversations had just been noise.

Leaving Sydney helped. Clean break and all that. The Sharansky Foundation’s projects were in places I’d barely heard of, like Oenepelli and Burrup, where mining companies wanted to turn incredible natural landscapes and ancient cultural sites into giant holes in the ground. The foundation funded research and then, if there was enough to sustain a case, they’d assist the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land to bring a lawsuit against the companies.

It didn’t take me long out there, in the landscapes my father had painted, to realize that as much as I loved my country, I barely knew it. I’d spent so many years studying the art of our immigrant cultures, and barely any time at all on the one that had been here all along. I’d gone cross-eyed swotting classical Arabic and biblical Hebrew but could barely name even five out of the five hundred Aboriginal languages spoken here. So I set myself a crash course and became a pioneer in a new field: desperation conservation. My job became the documentation and preservation of ancient Aboriginal rock art, before the uranium or bauxite companies had a chance to blast it into rubble.

It was hard physical work, getting to remote sites, often on foot, usually in tremendous heat, backpacking kilos of equipment. Sometimes, the best thing you could do to conserve a piece of rock art was to take a mattock and hack away invading tree roots. Not exactly fine-motor-skill stuff. To my surprise, I found I loved it. For the first time in my life, I was tanned and sinewy. I traded in my cashmeres and silks for serviceable khakis, and one day, because I was hot and sweaty and my French twist kept falling down, I hacked off my long hair. New name, new look, new life. And a very long way from anything that reminded me of extinct Spanish sheep and pore-scatter patterns on parchment.

I fell asleep in the truck on the way to Jabiru Station. That’s how exhausted I was. It’s not what you’d call a relaxing drive. The track is a hundred clicks of washboard, when it isn’t one big sandpit. Plus there are big mobs of roos that appear from nowhere at dusk, and if you swerve to avoid them, you can wind up bogged to your manifold.

But Jim had driven on tracks like this since he could see over the top of a steering wheel, so we got there. Butcher had roasted a whole barramundi he’d caught that day, and flavored it with dried jupie, little sweet-tart berries that were a Mirarr staple. The station phone rang right as I was licking the last succulent morsel of fish off my fork.

“Yeah, she here,” Butcher said, handing me the phone.

“Dr. Sharansky? It’s Keith Lowery calling, from DFAT.”

“From where, sorry?”

“DFAT. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. You’re a hard woman to get ahold of.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Dr. Sharansky, we were hoping we might be able to get you back here, to Canberra, or Sydney if that’s easier. We’ve got a bit of a situation, and your name came up as someone who might be in a position to help.”

“Well, I’m going to be back in Sydney in two or three weeks, when Gudjewg—I mean, when the wet season really sets in….”

“Ah, right. The thing is, we were hoping you might fly down here tomorrow.”

“Mr. Lowery, I’m in the middle of a project. The mining company is breathing down these people’s neck here and the escarpment’s going to be inaccessible in about two weeks. So I’m not real keen on junketing anywhere just at the minute. Do you mind telling me what this is all about?”

“I can’t discuss it on the phone, sorry.”

“Is this something the bloody mining companies have cooked up? I mean, that’d be pretty desperate. I know that some of those characters are lower than a snake’s armpit…. But involving your mob to do their dirty work…”

“It’s nothing like that. Much as my colleagues over in Trade might lament the Sharansky Foundation’s occasionally negative impact on mining export revenues, that is not our concern here on the Near East desk. I’m not calling about your present work. It’s about a rather, ah, high-profile job you undertook six years ago. In Europe.’’

Suddenly, the barramundi wasn’t sitting too well.

“Do you mean the Sara—”

“It would be better to discuss this in person.”

Near East desk. I started to feel the onset of heartburn. “You deal with Israel, right?”

“As I said, Dr. Sharansky, better in person. Now, would you like me to arrange your flight out of Darwin tomorrow to Canberra, or to Sydney?”

The view from the DFAT office in Sydney is enough to make a diplomat turn down a foreign posting. As I waited in the tenth-floor lobby for Keith Lowery, I watched the yachts skittering across the sun-spangled harbor, heeling in the breeze as if in homage to the soaring white sails of the Opera House.

The interior decor was pretty nice, too. Foreign Affairs had its pick of art from the national collection, so the reception area had a Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly canvas on one wall and a fabulous Rover Thomas Roads Crossing on the opposite.

I was admiring the rich ochers in Rover’s painting when Lowery came up behind me.

“Sorry we don’t have one of your dad’s here—brilliant painter. We’ve got an absolute beauty down in Canberra.”

Lowery was a tall, broad, sandy-haired bloke with the easy swagger and the slightly stove-in features of a serious rugby player. Made sense. Rugby was a big sport at the elite private schools, and most Aussie dips still tended to have that background, despite all our egalitarian myths.

“Thanks for coming down here, Dr. Sharansky. I know it’s a big ask.”

“Yeah, well. Odd, isn’t it, that you can get to Sydney from London or New York in twenty-four hours, but it still takes almost twice that from some parts of the Top End.”

“Does it? Never been up there, myself.”

Typical, I thought. Probably been to every museum in Florence and yet never seen the Lightning Man at Nourlangie Rock.

“I usually work in Canberra, so I’ve borrowed an office here for our meeting. Margaret…it is Margaret, isn’t it?” He’d turned to the receptionist. “We’re in Mr. Kensington’s office. Will you make sure that we’re not disturbed?”

We walked through a metal detector and down a corridor to a large corner office. Lowery punched a code that opened the door. My eyes went straight to the windows, which offered a panorama even more spectacular than the one in the lobby, because it took in the whole sweep from the Botanic Gardens to the bridge.

“Your mate Mr. Kensington must be a big muckety muck,” I said, turning to Lowery. Because I’d been distracted by the view, I hadn’t noticed that there was someone else already in the room. He’d been sitting on the couch, but he was on his feet now, moving toward me with his hand outstretched.

“Shalom, Channa.”

His hair had thinned a bit, but he still had the tanned, muscular look that had always set him apart from everyone else in our line of work.

I took a step away from him and put my hands behind my back.

“No ‘G’day, mate’? You are still angry with me? Even after six years?”

I glanced at Lowery, wondering how much he knew about all this.

“Six years?” My voice was as cold as I could make it. “Six years is nothing, compared with five hundred years. What did you do with it?”

“Nothing. I did nothing with it.” He paused a beat, and then walked across the room to a handsome desk made of Huon pine. An archival box was sitting there. He eased the catches.

“See for yourself.”

I crossed the room, blinking hard. My hands hovered over the box. I lifted the lid, and there it was. I hesitated a moment. I didn’t have gloves, forms. I had no business touching it. But I had to be sure. As carefully as I could, I removed it from the box and set it on the desk. I turned to the Creation illuminations. And there it was. The difference between being right, and being wrong. Of knowing my craft, and not knowing it.

I blinked away tears that were partly relief, and partly self-pity for the misery I’d lived with, thinking I’d been wrong, for six long years. When I looked up at Amitai, all the uncertainty, all the self-doubt dissolved and reformed into the purest rage I think I have ever felt. “How could you?”

To my intense irritation, he smiled at me. “I didn’t.”

I slammed my hand down so hard on the desk that it hurt.

“Stop it!” I yelled. “You’re a thief and a crook and a bloody liar.” He just kept smiling slightly, a calm, infuriating, shit-eating grin. I wanted to slap him. “You’re a disgrace to the profession.”

“Dr. Sharansky.” It was Lowery, trying, I suppose, to be diplomatic. He took a step toward me and laid his hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off and stepped away from him.

“Why is this man here? He’s guilty of grand larceny. He should be in the slammer. Don’t tell me this bloody government is mixed up in this…in this…heist…this conspiracy….”

“Dr. Sharansky, you’d better sit down.”

“Don’t tell me to sit down! I don’t want anything to do with this. And why is that book here? How on earth can you justify bringing a five-hundred-year-old codex halfway across the world? It’s beyond unethical, it’s criminal. I’m walking out of here and I’m calling Interpol. I suppose you think you can hide this behind diplomatic immunity or some crap like that.”

I was at the door. There was no knob, no handle. Just a keypad, for which I didn’t know the combination.

“You better let me out of here or I’ll—”

“Dr. Sharansky!” Lowrey had raised his voice. He suddenly looked a lot more like a front-row forward than a smooth diplomat. “Shut up for a second, will you, and let Dr. Yomtov get a word in.”

Amitai had stopped grinning. He spread his hands as if in supplication. “It wasn’t me. If you had come to me when you spotted the forgery, together we might have stopped them.”

“Stopped who?”

His voice was very soft. Almost a whisper. “It was Dr. Heinrich.”

“Werner?” I felt all the air go out of my body. I sank down onto the couch. “Werner Heinrich?” I repeated stupidly. “Who else? You just said, ‘Stopped them.’”

“Ozren Karaman, I am most sorry to tell you. It would not have been possible otherwise.” My teacher and my lover. They had both of them stood there, together, and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. I felt absolutely betrayed.

“But why? And how come you’ve got it now. Here.”

“It is a bit of a long story.” Amitai sat down on the couch beside me and poured a glass of water from a decanter on the coffee table. He handed it to me and poured another for Lowery, who waved no thanks. Amitai took a sip and then he began to speak.

“A long story that starts in the winter of 1944, when Werner was just fourteen years old. He was conscripted, as all the boys and the old men were, at that time. Most of them ended up manning antiair-craft guns, things of that nature. But he was required for a different service. Werner went to work for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg—you know what that is?”

Of course I knew about the infamous arm of the Third Reich, the most efficient and methodical looters in the history of art. It had been headed by Hitler’s confidant Alfred Rosenberg, who had written a book before the war calling German abstract expressionism “syphilitic.” He’d formed the Combat League for German Culture, aimed at eradicating anything “degenerate,” which, of course, included anything written or painted by Jews.

“As the Reich was speeding up the Final Solution, so Rosenberg’s unit was rushing to finish the destruction of all the Jewish materials they had confiscated from the synagogues, from the great collections of Europe. Werner’s job was to transport the Torah scrolls and the incunabula to the incinerators and burn them. One of the collections he burned was the Sarajevo pincus—” He looked up at Lowery. “That’s the complete records of a Jewish community. Irreplaceable. Sarajevo’s pincus was very old. It contained documents that went back as far as 1565.”

“So,” I said. “That’s why he specialized in Hebrew manuscripts.”

Amitai nodded. “Exactly. It was his passion that not another book should be lost. During the early months of the Bosnian war, he approached me because the Serbs’ bombing of the Oriental Institute and the National and University Library mirrored what had happened in his own past. In particular, he wanted the Israeli government to mount a rescue mission for the haggadah. I told him we didn’t have any intelligence about where it was, whether, in fact, it still existed. He thought I was hiding the truth from him. And then, after the war, when the United Nations determined to conserve the haggadah and put it on display, he still believed it was in danger. He didn’t have faith in the peace. He told me he thought there was a very strong chance that when NATO and the UN lost interest, Bosnia could be hijacked by fanatical Islamists. He feared the influence of the Saudis, who, of course, have a terrible record of destroying ancient Jewish sites on the Arabian Peninsula. He was tormented by the idea that the haggadah would once again be at risk.”

Amitai took another sip of water. “I should have listened more carefully to what he was saying. I had no idea that his past had made him into such an extremist. You would think, an Israeli my age, I would know from extremists. But still, I missed it.”

“But what about Ozren? Surely he didn’t believe those things about Bosnia?”

“Why not? Bosnia hadn’t protected his wife. It hadn’t saved his little son. Ozren had seen too much. He had seen people shot by snipers as they tried to carry books from the burning library. He had risked his own life to save the haggadah, and he knew what a close call that had been. I think it would have been easy, at a certain time, for Werner to find Ozren most receptive to his views.”

I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Ozren would think that way. He loved his city. Loved what it stood for. I couldn’t believe he had given up on it.

The unsparing Sydney light was pouring through the huge windows, falling onto the open pages of the haggadah. I went over to the desk and picked up the book. I placed the haggadah carefully back into the protection of the archive box. I was about to close the lid, but then I paused. I felt the edges of the binding, and found the ridge where the fibers of leather—the new ones I’d placed—merged with the older work of Florien Mittl. I turned back to Amitai.

“You were the one who had the negatives.”

“Werner convinced me that he could get the German government to sponsor a better facsimile edition than the one we were planning. He was very persuasive. They were prepared to spend six times our budget, they were going to print on vellum…it was going to be a gesture of goodwill from the new Germany. What can I say? I believed him. I gave your documentation to him. Of course he used it to mimic every possible detail—even your conservation work. And since he was your teacher, he knew very well how to do that.”

“But why were you there, that night, at Ozren’s place?”

Amitai sighed. “I was there, Channa, because I, too, lost a child. My daughter. She was three.”

“Amitai.” I had no idea. I knew he was divorced. I hadn’t realized there was a child. “I’m so sorry. Was it a suicide bombing?”

He shook his head and gave a slight smile. “Everyone thinks Israelis always die in wars or bombings. Some few of us do manage to die in our beds. For her, it was a heart defect. A child lost—it is the same emptiness, I think, however it happens. I was there to bring materials donated by Israel as part of the library restoration project, and I heard the news about Ozren’s son. As a father, I felt for him.”

There was an awkward silence for a few moments. “I don’t blame you, Channa, for suspecting me. You shouldn’t think I do.”

He went on then to tell me how the book had been found and how he’d immediately suspected Werner, because of the quality of the fake that was on display in Sarajevo.

“But why did Werner choose Yad Vashem?”

“He knew it well. He’d worked there as a visiting scholar many times over the years. It was the simplest thing for him to place the haggadah there. He did not care, you see, that no one would know, that no one would study it, or celebrate it. He was only concerned that it would be safeguarded, and he told me he had decided that Yad Vashem was the safest place in the world. That even if the worst happened, and Israel was in an existential conflict, we would defend that place above all others.” Amitai looked down. “And about that, at least, he is correct.”

“You’ve seen him? Is he under arrest?”

“Yes, I have seen him. And no, he is not under arrest.”

“But why not?”

“He is in a hospice in Vienna. He is an old man, Channa. He is very frail, not too lucid. It took me many hours to learn what I have told you.”

“Well, what about Ozren? Has he been arrested?”

“No. In fact he has been promoted. He is director of the National Museum now.”

“But why are you letting him get away with this? Why hasn’t he been charged?”

Amitai glanced at Lowery.

“The Israelis are of the opinion that it is better if this doesn’t become a public matter,” Lowery said. “The fact that the book was discovered in Israel would be enough to…well…With Heinrich too out of it to be a credible witness, nobody sees any point in stirring up negative sentiment. I think the technical diplomatic term is shit storm.”

“I still don’t get it. You are saying that the Israeli government supports giving this back, right? Surely you could just do it, quiet diplomacy, diplomatic pouch, something like that….”

Amitai looked down at his hands. “You know the old saying, Channa? Two Jews, three opinions? There are certain factions in my country’s government who would insist to keep this book in Israel. It would be like all their Hanukkahs had come at once.” He coughed and reached for his water glass. “When Mr. Lowery said ‘the Israelis,’ he was not speaking of the actual government.”

I turned to Lowery. “So what on earth is the Department of Foreign Affairs doing, involving itself in this mess? What’s the possible Australian interest?”

Lowery cleared his throat. “The prime minister’s a close personal friend of the president of Israel, and the president’s an old army mate of Amitai here. So we’re giving them a crack at you as a sort of, well, favor.” He grinned sheepishly. “Even though I’m guessing that you’re not a big fan of this particular PM, we’re hoping you might see your way clear to pitch in and give a hand on this one.”

Amitai chimed in. “I could smuggle the book to Sarajevo. Yes, no question. But then what? Believe me, I did not do this lightly—bringing the codex all this way. We took the decision and the risk of bringing the haggadah here because of you, Channa. Because we think you have the best chance to convince Ozren to restore it to its rightful place.” Amitai paused. I was pretty stunned, and trying to process this. I must’ve had a blank look on my face.

“Because of the nature of your past relationship with him,” Lowery added.

That was too much. “How the hell do you know about my ‘past relationship’? How dare you all pry into my personal life? What ever happened to civil liberties around here?”

Amitai raised a hand. “It wasn’t just you, Channa. You were in Sarajevo at a delicate time. The CIA, the Mossad, the DGSE…”

“Even ASIO,” Lowery interjected. “At that time, just about any person with a pulse in the former Yugoslavia was either a spy, or being spied on. Or both. Don’t take it so personally.”

I got up, agitated. Easy for him to say. How would he like it if I turned around and told him who he’d slept with six years ago? Well, maybe in his line of work you expect that sort of thing. But it creeped me out. I’m a bookworm; not a diplomat, not a spook. And certainly not some kind of commando Ms. Fix-It for Israel. Or any other country for that matter.

I walked over to the desk and looked down at the haggadah. It had already survived so many risky journeys. Now it sat on a desk in a land that hadn’t even been part of its makers’ known world. And it was here because of me.

Years ago, when I came home from Sarajevo, I’d gone to the archives of the Australian National Gallery and listened to hours of taped interviews with my father. I knew the sound of his voice now. It was a voice with many layers. The top layer, the dominant one, was the spare, laconic cadence of the outback. The voice he’d found as a young man, when he was discovering what he loved and what he was meant to do. But there were other layers underneath. Hints of a Boston boyhood. A tiny trace of Russian accent. An occasional Yiddish inflection.

What I do is me, for that I came.

I knew now how he would sound, saying that line from the Hopkins poem. I could hear him saying it in my head.

What I do is me.

He made art. I saved it. That was my life’s work. What I do. But taking a risk. A big one. That, most definitely, is not what I do. Not me at all.

I turned around and leaned against the desk. I was feeling a bit shaky. They were both staring at me.

“And if I get caught? In possession of—I’ll take a wild stab here—fifty, sixty million dollars’ worth of stolen goods. What then?”

Amitai suddenly seemed really interested in his hands again. Lowery, meanwhile, became transfixed by the lunching office workers, sunning themselves on the grass in the Botanic Gardens. Nobody said anything.

“I asked you both a question. What if I get caught with this, and accused of boosting an incredibly important piece of the world’s cultural heritage?”

Amitai glanced up at Lowery, who couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away from the view.

“Well?”

Amitai and Lowery both started talking at once.

“The Australian government…”

“The Israeli government…”

They both stopped and looked at each other, making polite “after you” gestures. It was almost comical, really. Lowery cracked first.

“See that place over there, under those Morton Bay fig trees?” He was pointing at a grassy rise of harbor-hugging foreshore. “Bit of a coincidence, really. That’s exactly where they shot the final scene in Mission: Impossible II.”

They’d built a new airport in Sarajevo. It was all spiffy and totally civilian, with nice bars and gift shops. Normal.

Me, I wasn’t feeling too normal. As I stood in the immigration line, I was very glad of the beta-blockers Amitai had given me an hour earlier, before I left him in Vienna. “These will stop the appearance of nervousness,” he’d said. “The sweaty hands, the breathlessness. Ninety-nine percent of what customs officers look for is nervous demeanor. Of course, you will still feel nervous. The pills won’t stop that.”

He was right. I felt horrible. I’d had to take the beta-blockers twice. I’d thrown up the first lot.

He had also given me the case he’d used to transport the haggadah from Israel to Australia. It was a black nylon wheelie bag and it looked just like every other wheelie bag—the kind that just barely fit in the overhead lockers—but it had a false back panel made with some supersecret, X-ray-filtering fiber. “Undetectable by any current screening technology,” he assured me.

“Do I really need that?” I’d asked. “I mean, so what if the X-ray machine shows a book in my bag? Nobody but a specialist is going to know what it is. But if I get caught with some kind of smuggler’s kit…”

“Why take a chance? You are going to Sarajevo. There are people in that city, not even Jews, who bought facsimile copies of the haggadah even when they couldn’t afford food for their table. It is a most beloved object there. Anyone—a customs officer, a person in the queue behind you—might recognize it. The bag, it really is the best we can do. No one is going to catch you.”

There were a half dozen Iranian nationals on my flight, and that, as it turned out, was a stroke of luck for me. Those poor blokes sucked up all the attention in the arrivals hall. Sarajevo had become a favorite entry port for people trying to sneak into Europe, because Bosnia’s borders were still pretty porous, and the EU had been on the Bosnians to do something about the influx. The Iranian ahead of me got his cases opened, his documents scrutinized. I could tell he hadn’t had the benefit of a beta-blocker. He was sweating like crazy.

When I reached the front of the line, all I got was a smile and a “Welcome in Bosnia,” and suddenly I was out of the airport, in a taxi, driving past a mammoth new mosque built by the Gulfies and then past a sex shop and an Irish pub offering “20 brands of world beer.” The much-shelled Holiday Inn had been revamped, bright as a child’s Lego tower in blocks of vibrant yellow. Sycamore saplings, planted to replace the trees cut for fuel during the siege, lined the main thoroughfares. When we entered the narrow ways of the Bašcaršija, the alleys were filled with brightly dressed women and men in their best suits, braving subzero weather to promenade among balloon sellers and flower vendors.

I wanted to ask the taxi driver what was going on. I pointed to a group of little girls in velvet party frocks.

“Biram!” he replied, smiling broadly. So that was it; I hadn’t realized. Ramadan had just ended, and the town was celebrating one of the biggest feasts of the Muslim calendar.

The pastry shop at Sweet Corner was absolutely packed. I could barely get through to the counter with my wheelie bag in tow. The pastry chef didn’t recognize me, and why would he, after six years? I pointed to the stairs that ran up to the attic.

“Ozren Karaman?” I said.

He nodded, and then pointed to his watch and then the door, which I took to indicate that Ozren would be back soon. I waited for a stool in the bustling, noisy shop to become vacant. Then I sat down in a warm corner, nibbling the crisp edge of a too-sugary confection, watching the door.

I waited an hour, then two. The pastry chef began to look at me oddly, so I ordered another honey-drenched sweet, even though I hadn’t eaten the first one.

Finally, at around eleven o’clock, Ozren pushed open the steam-misted door. If I hadn’t been staring at every face intently, if I’d just passed him on the street, I’m not sure I would have recognized him. His hair was still long and tousled, but it had turned completely silver. His face had not softened into jowels—he was still lean, still without a gram of spare fat—but there were hard lines scoured into his cheeks and brow. As he shrugged off his overcoat—the same threadbare one I remembered from six years earlier—I could see that he was actually wearing a suit. Must be a requirement of the museum director’s job—no way he’d do that voluntarily. It was a nice suit, good fabric, well tailored, but it looked as if he’d slept in it.

By the time I excused my way around the chairs and stools, he was already halfway up the stairs to the attic.

“Ozren.” He turned and looked at me, blinking. He didn’t recognize me. Tense as I was, a whisper of vanity told me it must be the poor light, or the short haircut. I didn’t like to think that I’d aged that much.

“It’s me. Hanna Shar—Hanna Heath.”

“Good God.” He didn’t say anything else. Just stood there, blinking.

“Can I, you know, come up?” I said. “I need to talk with you.”

“Uh, my apartment, it’s not…It’s very late. What about tomorrow, at the museum? It is a holiday, but I will be there in the morning.” He had recovered from his surprise and schooled his voice. His tone was very correct, cool and professional.

“I need to talk to you now, Ozren. I think you know what it is about.”

“I really don’t think I—”

“Ozren. I have something. Here. In this bag.” I inclined my head toward the wheelie. “Something that belongs to your museum.”

“Good God,” he said again. He was sweating, and not from the warmth of the pastry shop. He extended an arm. “After you, by all means.” I pushed past him on the narrow stairway, wrestling with the bag. He made to take it from me, but I gripped it so hard my knuckles whitened. Some people in the shop, including the chef, had turned to look at us, sensing a tiff of some kind. I headed up the stairs, the bag thumping noisily on the treads behind me. Ozren followed. I heard the noise level rise again as the patrons, realizing there wasn’t going to be any spectacle, turned back to their coffee and their cheerful holiday conversations.

Ozren ushered me into the attic. He closed the door, shot the old wrought-iron bolt, and leaned his back against it. His silver hair, brushing the rafters, brought back memories. Distracting memories.

There was kindling laid ready in the small grate. Wood had still been scarce in Sarajevo when I’d been there before, and we’d never had the luxury of a fire. Ozren bent to the grate. As the flame caught, he laid a single log upon the kindling. He took a bottle of rakijah from a shelf and poured two glasses. He handed me one, unsmiling.

“To a happy reunion,” he said dourly, and downed his drink in a swallow. I sipped mine.

“I imagine you have come to put me behind bars,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well, why not? I deserve it. I have been expecting it, every day for six years. Better it should be you. You have more right than anyone.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“It was terrible, what we did to you. Making you doubt your own expertise like that, lying to you.” He poured himself another shot of rakijah. “When you saw it, that should have been enough. We should have ended it right there. But I was not myself, and Werner—you must know it was Werner, yes?”

I nodded.

“Werner was obsessed.” His face crumpled suddenly, the hard lines softening. “Hanna, there is not a day since that book left this country that I have not regretted it. I tried, just a few months afterward, to convince Werner to return it. I told him I was going to confess. He said if I did, he would deny everything. And that he would move the haggadah to some place where no one would ever find it. By that time, my vision had cleared. I could see that he was mad enough to do it. Hanna…”

He moved toward me then and took my glass from me, set it down, and grasped my hands. “I missed you so much. I wanted so much to find you, to tell you…to ask for your pardon…. ’’

I felt my throat tighten as all the feelings I had for him—for him, and no one since—started to overwhelm me in that room, with its memories. But then the anger at what he’d put me through got the upper hand. I pulled away.

He raised his own hands, palms toward me, as if to show that he understood that he had stepped over a line.

“You know I’ve barely touched a book in six years, because of you? Because of your lies. I gave it up, because you told me I was wrong.”

He walked over to where the dormer window looked out on a patch of sky and city. There were lights twinkling outside. The lights of a living city. Six years ago, there hadn’t been any.

“There is no excuse for what I did. But when Alia died, I was so angry with my country. I gave way to despair. And Werner was there, whispering in my ear, telling me it was the right thing that this book be returned to the Jews in recompense for all that had been stolen from them. That it was theirs, and that they could protect it. Protect it in a way that this fledgling state—in this region whose very name is a synonym for murderous hostility and ineffectuality—would not be able to.”

“How could you think that way, Ozren? When you, a Sarajevan and a Muslim, saved it. When that other librarian, Serif Kamal, risked his life for it?” He didn’t say anything. “Do you think that way, still?”

“No,” he said. “Not now. You know I am not a religious man. But Hanna, I have spent many nights, lying awake here in this room, thinking that the haggadah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox.”

Downstairs, in the pastry shop, someone gave a raucous laugh. The log shifted and fell in the fireplace.

“So,” I said. “How do we put it back?”

Later, when I met up with Amitai and told him how we did it, he smiled.

“It’s almost always that way. Ninety-nine percent of what I did in the unit was that way. But people who go to the movies or read spy novels don’t want to believe it. They like to think there are agents in ninja suits dropping on wires out of air-conditioning ducts, plastic explosives, disguised as…as pineapples or something, going off everywhere. But so much more often it is exactly like what you did: a combination of luck, timing, and a bit of common sense. And that we have a Muslim feast day to thank for it—even better.”

Because it was Biram, there was only a single guard on duty at the museum that night. We waited till just after 4:00 a.m., knowing that the morning guards’ shift began at 5:00. Ozren simply told the guard that he couldn’t sleep after too much revelry, and had decided to do some work. Since it was Biram, he sent the guard home to get some rest so he could celebrate with his family later in the day. Ozren assured him he would make the necessary security checks.

I waited outside, shivering, until I saw the guard leave. Ozren let me in. We went first to the basement, where the panel that controlled the sensors in the haggadah gallery was located. As director, Ozren had the override codes, so the crisscross of motion sensors could be temporarily blinded. The video monitor was another thing: that couldn’t be disconnected without triggering an alarm. But Ozren said he’d thought of that. We walked down the halls, past the prehistoric boat and the antiquities collections, until we stood at the door of the haggadah gallery.

Ozren’s hand was shaking a little as he entered his code, and he mispunched one of the numbers.

“I can do that only once. A second error, the alarm goes off.” He took a deep breath and punched his numbers again. The pad blinked back at him: ENTERED. But the door did not open. “It’s on after-hours setting, so it takes two of us. The chief librarian’s code also is necessary. You do it, will you? My hand won’t stop shaking.”

“But I don’t know it!”

“Twenty-five, five, eighteen, ninety-two,” he said without hesitation. I looked at him questioningly, but he just nodded to go ahead. I did. The door swished open.

“But how did you know it?”

He smiled. “She was my assistant for nine years. She’s a great librarian, but she has no head for figures. The only number she can remember is Tito’s birthday. She uses it for everything.”

We entered the room, which was kept very dim, with just enough light to allow the security camera to function. The lens stared down at us, recording our every move. Ozren had brought a flashlight so that we wouldn’t have to turn lights on. He’d tied a red dishcloth over it to mute the brightness. The beam danced around the walls for a second as he reached into his pocket for the digital key that opened the vitrine.

He swiped the key, then folded back the glass pane. Werner’s fake was open to the illumination of the Spanish seder, the prosperous family, and the mysterious African woman in her Jewish dress. It was the page where I’d found the white hair in the original. Ozren closed Werner’s copy, lifted it from the vitrine, and set it on the floor.

In the reverse of the moment that had passed between us six years before, I handed him the Sarajevo Haggadah.

He held it in both hands, and then he pressed it to his forehead for a moment. “Welcome back,” he said.

He set it carefully on the forms and gingerly turned the parchments until he reached the seder illumination.

I had been holding my breath without even knowing it. Ozren reached to close the vitrine.

“Wait,” I said. “Just let me look at it for one more second.” I wanted another instant with the book before I had to let go of it forever.

It wasn’t until later that I realized why I could see it, there, in that dim light, when I hadn’t ever seen it before. The color temperature of the red light emitted by the torch made it possible. There were faint markings following the line of the hem of the African woman’s gown. The artist had used a tone just one value darker than the saffron of the robe. The lines of script were so fine, impossibly fine—made by a brush of just a single hair. When I had studied the image in daylight, or in the cool light of fluorescent bulbs, the tiny lines had looked like shading, merely; a clever artist’s suggestion of fabric folds.

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.

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.