People of the Book

I

I MIGHT AS WELL SAY, right from the jump: it wasn’t my usual kind of job.

I like to work alone, in my own clean, silent, well-lit laboratory, where the climate is controlled and everything I need is right at hand. It’s true that I have developed a reputation as someone who can work effectively out of the lab, when I have to, when the museums don’t want to pay the travel insurance on a piece, or when private collectors don’t want anyone to know exactly what it is that they own. It’s also true that I’ve flown halfway around the world, to do an interesting job. But never to a place like this: the boardroom of a bank in the middle of a city where they just stopped shooting at each other five minutes ago.

For one thing, there are no guards hovering over me at my lab at home. I mean, the museum has a few quiet security professionals cruising around, but none of them would ever dream of intruding on my work space. Not like the crew here. Six of them. Two were bank security guards, two were Bosnian police, here to keep an eye on the bank security, and the other two were United Nations peace-keepers, here to keep an eye on the Bosnian police. All having loud conversations in Bosnian or Danish over their crackly radio handsets. As if that wasn’t enough of a crowd, there was also the official UN observer, Hamish Sajjan. My first Scottish Sikh, very dapper in Harris tweed and an indigo turban. Only in the UN. I’d had to ask him to point out to the Bosnians that smoking wasn’t going to be happening in a room that would shortly contain a fifteenth-century manuscript. Since then, they’d been even more fidgety.

I was starting to get fidgety myself. We’d been waiting for almost two hours. I’d filled the time as best I could. The guards had helped me reposition the big conference table nearer to the window, to take advantage of the light. I’d assembled the stereo microscope and laid out my tools: documentation cameras, probes, and scalpels. The beaker of gelatin was softening on its warming pad, and the wheat paste, linen threads, gold leaf were laid out ready, along with some glassine envelopes in case I was lucky enough to find any debris in the binding—it’s amazing what you can learn about a book by studying the chemistry of a bread crumb. There were samples of various calfskins, rolls of handmade papers in different tones and textures, and foam forms positioned in a cradle, ready to receive the book. If they ever brought the book.

“Any idea how much longer we’re going to have to wait?” I asked Sajjan. He shrugged.

“I think there is a delay with the representative from the National Museum. Since the book is the property of the museum, the bank cannot remove it from the vault unless he is present.”

Restless, I walked to the windows. We were on the top floor of the bank, an Austro-Hungarian wedding cake of a building whose stuccoed facade was speckled with mortar pockmarks just like every other structure in the city. When I put my hand on the glass, the cold seeped through. It was supposed to be spring; down in the small garden by the bank’s entrance, the crocuses were blooming. But it had snowed earlier that morning, and the bowl of each small flower brimmed with a foam of snowflakes, like tiny cups of cappuccino. At least the snow made the light in the room even and bright. Perfect working light, if only I could get to work.

Simply to be doing something, I unrolled some of my papers—French-milled linen. I ran a metal ruler over each sheet, working it flat. The sound of the metal edge traveling across the large sheet was like the sound of the surf I can hear from my flat at home in Sydney. I noticed that my hands were shaking. Not a good thing in my line of work.

My hands are not what you’d call one of my better features. Chapped, wattled across the back, they don’t look like they belong on my wrists, which I am happy to report are slender and smooth like the rest of me. Charwoman’s hands, my mother called them, the last time we argued. After that, when I had to meet her at the Cosmopolitan for coffee—brief, correct, the pair of us brittle as icicles—I wore a pair of gloves from the Salvos as a sort of piss-take. Of course, the Cosmopolitan is probably the only place in Sydney where someone might miss the irony in that gesture. My mother did. She said something about getting me a hat to match.

In the bright snow light, my hands looked even worse than usual, all ruddy and peeling from scouring the fat off cow gut with a pumice stone. When you live in Sydney, it’s not the simplest thing in the world to get a meter of calf’s intestine. Ever since they moved the abattoir out of Homebush and started to spruce the place up for the 2000 Olympics, you have to drive, basically, to woop woop, and then when you finally get there, there’s so much security in place because of the animal libbers you can barely get in the gate. It’s not that I blame them for thinking I was a bit sketchy. It’s hard to grasp right off the bat why someone might need a meter of calf’s appendix. But if you are going to work with five-hundred-year-old materials, you have to know how they were made five hundred years ago. That’s what my teacher, Werner Heinrich, believed. He said you could read about grinding pigments and mixing gesso all you like, but the only way to understand is to actually do it. If I wanted to know what words like cutch and schoder really described, I had to make gold leaf myself: beat it and fold it and beat it again, on something it won’t stick to, like the soft ground of scoured calf intestine. Eventually, you’ll have a little packet of leaves each less than a thousandth of a millimeter thick. And you’ll also have horrible-looking hands.

I made a fist, trying to smooth out the old-lady wattle skin. Also to see if I could stop the trembling. I’d been nervous ever since I changed planes in Vienna the day before. I travel a lot; you basically have to, if you live in Australia and want a piece of the most interesting projects in my field, which is the conservation of medieval manuscripts. But I don’t generally go to places that are datelines in war correspondents’ dispatches. I know there are people who go in for that sort of thing and write great books about it, and I suppose they have some kind of “It can’t happen to me” optimism that makes it possible for them. Me, I’m a complete pessimist. If there’s a sniper somewhere in the country I’m visiting, I fully expect to be the one in his crosshairs.

Even before the plane landed, you could see the war. As we broke through the gray swag of cloud that seems to be the permanent condition of the European sky, the little russet-tiled houses hugging the Adriatic looked familiar at first, just like the view I’m used to, down over the red rooftops of Sydney to the deep blue arc of Bondi Beach. But in this view, half the houses weren’t there anymore. They were just jagged bits of masonry, sticking up in ragged rows like rotting teeth.

There was turbulence as we went over the mountains. I couldn’t bring myself to look as we crossed into Bosnia so I pulled down the window shade. The young bloke next to me—aid worker, I guessed, from the Cambodian scarf and the gaunt malarial look of him—obviously wanted to look out, but I ignored his body language and tried to distract him with a question.

“So, what brings you here?”

“Mine clearance.”

I was tempted to say something really borderline like, “Business booming?” but managed, uncharacteristically, to restrain myself. And then we landed, and he was up, with every single other person in the plane, jostling in the aisle, ferreting around in the overhead bins. He shouldered an immense rucksack and then proceeded to almost break the nose of the man crowding the aisle behind him. The lethal backpacker ninety-degree turn. You see it on the bus at Bondi all the time.

The cabin door finally opened, and the passengers oozed forward as if they were glued together. I was the only one still seated. I felt as if I’d swallowed a stone that was pinning me to my spot.

“Dr. Heath?” The flight attendant was hovering in the emptied aisle.

I was about to say, “No, that’s my mother,” when I realized she meant me. In Australia only prats flaunt their PhDs. I certainly hadn’t checked in as anything other than Ms.

“Your United Nations escort is waiting on the tarmac.” That explained it. I’d already noticed, in the run-up to accepting this gig, that the UN liked to give everyone the flashiest possible handle.

“Escort?” I repeated stupidly. “Tarmac?” They’d said I’d be met, but I thought that meant a bored taxi driver holding a sign with my name misspelled. The flight attendant gave me one of those big, perfect, German smiles. She leaned across me and flung up the drawn shade. I looked out. Three huge, armor-plated, tinted-window vans, the kind they drive the American president around in, stood idling by the plane’s wingtip. What should have been a reassuring sight only made the stone in my gut a ton heavier. Beyond them, in long grass posted with mine-warning signs in various languages, I could see the rusting hulk of a huge cargo plane that must have missed the runway during some earlier unpleasantness. I looked back at Fräulein Smiley-Face.

“I thought the cease-fire was being observed,” I said.

“It is,” she said brightly. “Most days. Do you need any assistance with your hand luggage?”

I shook my head, and bent to tug out the heavy case wedged tightly under the seat in front of me. Generally, airlines don’t like collections of sharp metal things on board, but the Germans are great respecters of trades, and the check-in clerk understood when I explained how I hate to check my tools in case they end up touring Europe without me while I sit on my rear end unable to do my work.

I love my work. That’s the thing. That’s why, despite being a world-class coward, I agreed to take this job. To be honest, it never occurred to me not to take it. You don’t say no to the chance to work on one of the rarest and most mysterious volumes in the world.

The call had come at 2:00 a.m., as so many calls do when you live in Sydney. It drives me spare sometimes, the way the smartest people—museum directors who run internationally renowned institutions or CEOs who can tell you to the cent what the Hang Seng was at on any given day—can’t retain the simple fact that Sydney is generally nine hours ahead of London and fourteen hours ahead of New York. Amitai Yomtov is a brilliant man. Probably the most brilliant in the field. But could he figure the time difference between Jerusalem and Sydney?

“Shalom, Channa,” he said, his thick sabra accent putting a guttural ch sound into my name as usual. “I’m not waking you?”

“No, Amitai,” I said. “I’m always up at two a.m.; best part of the day.”

“Ah, well, sorry, but I think you might be interested to know that the Sarajevo Haggadah has turned up.”

“No!” I said, suddenly wide awake. “That’s, um, great news.” And it was, but it was great news I could easily have read in an e-mail at a civilized hour. I couldn’t imagine why Amitai had felt it necessary to call me.

Amitai, like most sabras, was a pretty contained character, but this news had made him ebullient. “I always knew that book was a survivor. I knew it would outlast the bombs.”

The Sarajevo Haggadah, created in medieval Spain, was a famous rarity, a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against illustrations of any kind. It was thought that the commandment in Exodus “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness of any thing” had suppressed figurative art by medieval Jews. When the book came to light in Sarajevo in 1894, its pages of painted miniatures had turned this idea on its head and caused art history texts to be rewritten.

At the beginning of the Sarajevo siege in 1992, when the museums and libraries became targets in the fighting, the codex had gone missing. The Bosnian Muslim government had sold it to buy arms, one rumor said. No, Mossad agents had smuggled it out through a tunnel under the Sarajevo airport. I never believed either scenario. I thought that the beautiful book had probably been part of the blizzard of burning pages—Ottoman land deeds, ancient Korans, Slavic scrolls—that had fallen in a warm snow upon the city after the flames of phosphorous bombs.

“But, Amitai, where’s it been the past four years? How did it turn up?”

“You know it’s Pesach, right?”

As a matter of fact I did; I was still nursing the ragged end of a red wine hangover from the raucous and highly unorthodox Passover picnic that one of my mates had hosted on the beach. The name for the ritual meal in Hebrew is seder, which means order; this had been one of the more disorderly nights in my recent history.

“Well, last night the Jewish community in Sarajevo had their seder, and in the middle of it—very dramatic—they brought out the haggadah. The head of the community made a speech saying that the survival of the book was a symbol of the survival of Sarajevo’s multiethnic ideal. And do you know who saved it? His name is Ozren Karaman, head of the museum library. Went in under intense shelling.” Amitai’s voice suddenly seemed a bit husky. “Can you imagine, Channa? A Muslim, risking his neck to save a Jewish book.”

It wasn’t like Amitai to be impressed by tales of derring-do. An indiscreet colleague had once let drop that Amitai’s compulsory army service had been in a commando squad so supersecret that Israelis refer to it only as “the unit.” Even though that was long in his past when I first met him, I’d been struck by his physique, and by his manner. He had the dense muscle of a weight lifter and a kind of hypervigilance. He’d look right at you when he was talking to you, but the rest of the time his eyes seemed to be scanning the surroundings, aware of everything. He’d seemed genuinely pissed off when I’d asked him about the unit. “I never confirmed this to you,” he’d snapped. But I thought it was pretty amazing. You certainly don’t meet that many ex-commandos in book conservation.

“So what did this old bloke do with the book once he had it?” I asked.

“He put it in a safe-deposit box in the vault of the central bank. You can imagine what that’s done to the parchment…. No one in Sarajevo’s had any heat through at least the last two winters…and some metal cash box…metal, of all things…it’s back there now…. I can’t bear to think about it. Anyway, the UN wants someone to inspect its condition. They’re going to pay for any necessary stabilization work—they want to exhibit it as soon as possible, to raise the city’s morale, you know. So I saw your name on the program for next month’s conference at the Tate, and I thought that, while you are coming to this side of the world, maybe you could fit this job in?”

“Me?” My voice actually squeaked. I don’t go in for false modesty: I’m great at what I do. But for a job like this, a once-in-a-lifetime career maker, there were at least a dozen people with more years on the clock and better connections in Europe. “Why not you?” I asked.

Amitai knew more about the Sarajevo Haggadah than anybody alive; he’d written monographs on it. I knew he would have loved this chance to handle the actual codex. He gave a deep sigh. “The Serbs have spent the past three years insisting that the Bosnians are fanatical Muslims, and finally, maybe, a few Bosnians have started to believe them. Seems the Saudis are big donors there now, and there was opposition to giving the job to an Israeli.”

“Oh, Amitai, I’m sorry….”

“It’s all right, Channa. I’m in good company. They didn’t want a German either. Of course, I suggested Werner first—no offense….” Since Herr Doktor Doktor Werner Maria Heinrich was not only my teacher, but also, after Amitai himself, the leading Hebrew manuscripts specialist in the world, I was hardly likely to take any. But Amitai explained that the Bosnians were still carrying a grudge against Germany for setting off the war in the first place, by recognizing Slovenia and Croatia. “And the UN doesn’t want an American because the U.S. Congress is always bad-mouthing UNESCO. So I thought you would be good, because who has any strong opinions about Australians? Also I told them that your technical skills are not bad.”

“Thanks for that ringing endorsement,” I said. And then, more sincerely, “Amitai, I’ll never forget this. Thank you, really.”

“You can repay me by making good documentation of the book, so at least we can print a beautiful facsimile. You’ll send me the pictures you make, yes, and a draft of your report, as soon as you can?”

His voice sounded so wistful l felt guilty about my own elation. But there was one question I had to ask him.

“Amitai, are there any issues of authenticity? You know the rumors, during the war…”

“No, we have no concerns there. The librarian Karaman and his boss, the director of the museum, have authenticated it beyond doubt. Your job is merely technical at this point.”

Technical. We’ll see about that, I thought to myself. A lot of what I do is technical; science and craftsmanship that anyone with decent intelligence and good fine-motor skills can be taught to do. But there is something else, too. It has to do with an intuition about the past. By linking research and imagination, sometimes I can think myself into the heads of the people who made the book. I can figure out who they were, or how they worked. That’s how I add my few grains to the sandbox of human knowledge. It’s what I love best about what I do. And there were so many questions about the Sarajevo Haggadah. If I could answer just one of them…

I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I threw on my sweats and went out, through the nighttime streets still faintly sour with the mingled stink of spewed beer and deep-fryer fat, down to the beach, where the air blows, clean and briny, over half a planet’s worth of uninterrupted ocean. Because it was autumn, and a midweek night, there was hardly anyone around. Just a few drunks, slumped by the wall of the surf club, and a pair of lovers, entwined on a beach towel. No one to notice me. I started walking along the edge of the foam, luminous against the lacquered darkness of the sand. Before I knew it, I was running and skipping, dodging the breakers like a child.

That was a week ago. In the days following, that feeling of exhilaration had been gradually buried under visa applications, reissued airline tickets, UN red tape, and a thick dollop of nerves. As I staggered down the stairs from the plane to the tarmac under the weight of my case, I had to keep reminding myself that this was exactly the kind of assignment I lived for.

I had barely a second to take in the mountains, rising all around us like the rim of a giant bowl, and then a blue-helmeted soldier—tall and Scandinavian-looking—leaped from the middle vehicle and seized my bag, hurling it into the rear of the van.

“Steady!” I said. “There’s delicate equipment in there!” The soldier’s only reply was to grab me by the arm and propel me into the backseat, slamming the door and jumping in front alongside the driver. The automatic locks clicked down with a definitive thunk, and the driver gunned the engine.

“Well, this is a first for me,” I said, trying for some wan levity. “Book conservators don’t usually have much call to travel in armored cars.” There was no response from the soldier or the thin, drawn civilian hunched over the wheel of the immense vehicle, his head pulled into his shoulders like a tortoise. Through the tinted glass the devastated city passed in a blur of shrapnel-splashed buildings. The vans drove fast, swerving around cavernous potholes made by mortar shells and bumping over bitumen shredded by the tracks of armored vehicles. There wasn’t much traffic. Most people were on foot; gaunt, exhausted-looking people, coats pulled tight against the chill of a spring that hadn’t quite arrived. We passed an apartment block that looked like the dollhouse I’d had as a girl, where the entire front wall lifted off to reveal the rooms within. In this block, the wall had been peeled away by an explosion. But like my dollhouse, the exposed rooms were furnished. As we sped by, I realized that people were somehow still living there, their only protection a few sheets of plastic billowing in the wind. But they’d done their laundry. It flapped from lines strung between the twisted spikes of reinforcing bars that protruded from the shattered concrete.

I thought they’d take me straight to see the book. Instead, the day was consumed by endless, tedious meetings, first with every UN official who’d ever had a thought about a cultural matter, then with the director of the Bosnian museum, then with a bunch of government officials. I doubt I’d have gotten much sleep anyway, given the anticipation of starting work, but the dozen or so cups of strong Turkish coffee I’d been served in the course of the day hadn’t helped. Maybe that’s why my hands were still shaking.

There was a burst of static from the police radios. Suddenly all the people were up on their feet: the police, the guards, Sajjan. The bank official shot the door bolts and a whole lot more guards entered in a sort of flying wedge. At the center was a thin young man in faded blue jeans. The slacker from the museum, probably, who’d kept us all waiting. But I didn’t have time to be irritated with him, because he was cradling a metal box. When he set it down on the bench I saw it was sealed in several places with stamped wax and adhesive papers. I passed him my scalpel. He broke the seals and eased open the lid. He unwrapped several sheets of silk paper. And then he handed me the book.

II

AS MANY TIMES as I’ve worked on rare, beautiful things, that first touch is always a strange and powerful sensation. It’s a combination between brushing a live wire and stroking the back of a newborn baby’s head.

No conservator had handled this manuscript for a century. I had the forms positioned, ready. I hesitated for just a second—a Hebrew book, therefore spine to the right—and laid it in the cradling foam.

Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at. It was small, for one thing, convenient for use at the Passover dinner table. Its binding was of an ordinary nineteenth-century style, soiled and scuffed. A codex as gorgeously illustrated as this one would originally have had an elaborate binding. You don’t make filet mignon then serve it on a paper plate. The binder might have used gold leaf or silver tooling, maybe inlays of ivory or pearl shell. But this book had probably been rebound many times in its long life. The only one we knew about for sure, because it had been documented, was the last time, in Vienna in the 1890s. Unfortunately, the book had been terribly mishandled in that instance. The Austrian binder had cropped the parchment heavily and discarded the old binding—something no one, especially not a professional working for a major museum—would ever do anymore. It was impossible to say what information might have been lost at that time. He had rebound the parchments in simple cardboard covers with an inappropriate Turkish printed floral paper decoration, now faded and discolored. Only the corners and spine were calfskin, and this was dark brown and flaking away, exposing the edge of the gray board beneath.

I ran my middle finger lightly along the cracked corners. These I would consolidate over the coming days. As my finger followed the edges of the board, I noticed something unexpected. The binder had made a pair of channels and a set of small holes in the board edge to accept a pair of clasps. It was usual for books of parchment to have clasps, to hold the pages flat. Yet there were no clasps on this binding. I made a note to myself to investigate this.

Moving the forms to support the spine, I opened the cover and leaned close to examine the torn endpapers. I would mend these with wheat paste and shreds of matching linen paper. I could see at once that the linen cords the Viennese binder had used were frayed, barely holding. That meant I would have to take the quires apart and restitch them. Then I breathed deeply and turned the page to the parchment of the manuscript itself. This was what mattered; this was what would disclose what four hard years had done to a survivor of five centuries.

The snow light flared on brightness. Blue: intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli carried by camel caravan all the way from the mountains of Afghanistan. White: pure, creamy, opaque. Less glamorous, more complicated than the blue. At that time it would still have been made according to the method discovered by ancient Egyptians. You cover lead bars with the dregs of old wine and seal them up in a shed full of animal dung. I’d done it once, in my mother’s greenhouse in Bellevue Hill. She’d had a load of manure delivered, and I couldn’t resist. The acid in the vinegary wine converts lead to its acetate, which in turn combines with the carbon dioxide released by the dung to make basic white lead carbonate, PbCO₃. My mother pitched a fit about it, of course. Said she couldn’t stand to go near her bloody prize orchids for weeks.

I turned a page. More dazzle. The illuminations were beautiful, but I didn’t allow myself to look at them as art. Not yet. First I had to understand them as chemicals. There was yellow, made of saffron. That beautiful autumn flower, Crocus sativus Linnaeus, each with just three tiny precious stigmas, had been a prized luxury then and remained one, still. Even if we now know that the rich color comes from a carotene, crocin, with a molecular structure of 44 carbon, 64 hydrogen, and 24 oxygen, we still haven’t synthesized a substitute as complex and as beautiful. There was malachite green, and red; the intense red known as worm scarlet—tola’at shani in Hebrew—extracted from tree-dwelling insects, crushed up and boiled in lye. Later, when alchemists learned how to make a similar red from sulfur and mercury, they still named the color “little worm”—vermiculum. Some things don’t change: we call it vermilion even today.

Change. That’s the enemy. Books do best when temperature, humidity, the whole environment, stay the same. You could hardly get more dramatic changes than this book had been through: moved under extreme difficulties and without preparation or precaution, exposed to wild swings of temperature. I’d been worried that the parchment might have shrunk, the pigments cracked and lifted. But the colors had held fast, as pure and as vivid as the day the paint was applied. Unlike the leaf on the spine, which had flaked away, the burnished gold of the illuminations was fresh and blazing. The gilder of five hundred years ago had definitely had a better grasp of his trade than the more modern Viennese bookbinder. There was silver leaf also. This had oxidized and turned dark gray, as you would expect.

“Will you be replacing that?” It was the thin young man from the museum. He was pointing at a distinct area of tarnish. He was standing too close. Because parchment is flesh, human bacteria can degrade it. I moved my shoulder so that he had to withdraw his hand and take a step backward.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.” I did not look up.

“But you’re a restorer; I thought…”

“Conservator,” I corrected. The last thing I wanted right then was a long discussion on the philosophy of book conservation. “Look,” I said, “you’re here; I’m instructed that you have to be here, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt my work.”

“I understand,” he said, his voice gentle after my abrasiveness. “But you must also understand: I am the kustos, the book is in my care.”

Kustos. It took a minute to sink in. I turned then, and stared at him. “You can’t be Ozren Karaman? The one who saved the book?”

The UN rep, Sajjan, sprang up, all apologies. “I am sorry, I should have made the introduction. But you were so anxious to get to work. I—Dr. Hanna Heath, please may I present Dr. Ozren Karaman, chief librarian of the National Museum and professor of librarianship at the National University of Bosnia.”

“I—Sorry, that was rude of me,” I said. “I expected that you’d be much older, to be chief curator of such a major collection.” I also didn’t expect a person in that position to look quite so disheveled. He was wearing a scuffed leather jacket over a crumpled white T-shirt. His jeans were frayed. His hair—wild, curly, neither combed nor cut—flopped over a pair of glasses that were mended in the middle with a bit of duct tape.

He raised an eyebrow. “You yourself, of course, being so very advanced in years, would have every reason to think that.” He kept a perfectly straight face as he said this. I guessed he was about thirty, like me. “But I would be very pleased, Dr. Heath, if you could spare a moment to say what you have in mind to do.” He shot Sajjan a glance as he said this, and in it I could read a volume. The UN thought it was doing Bosnia a favor, funding the work so that the haggadah could be properly displayed. But when it comes to national treasures, no one wants outsiders calling the shots. Ozren Karaman clearly felt he’d been sidelined. The last thing I wanted was to get involved in any of that. I was here to care for a book, not some librarian’s bruised ego. Still, he had a right to know why the UN had chosen someone like me.

“I can’t say exactly the extent of my work till I’ve thoroughly inspected the manuscript, but here’s the thing: no one hires me looking for chemical cleanups or heavy restorations. I’ve written too many papers knocking that approach. To restore a book to the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history. I think you have to accept a book as you receive it from past generations, and to a certain extent damage and wear reflect that history. The way I see it, my job is to make it stable enough to allow safe handling and study, repairing only where absolutely necessary. This, here,” I said, pointing to a page where a russet stain bloomed over the fiery Hebrew calligraphy, “I can take a microscopic sample of those fibers, and we can analyze them, and maybe learn what made that stain—wine would be my first guess. But a full analysis might provide clues as to where the book was at the time it happened. And if we can’t tell now, then in fifty, a hundred years, when lab techniques have advanced, my counterpart in the future will be able to. But if I chemically erased that stain—that so-called damage—we’d lose the chance at that knowledge forever.” I took a deep breath.

Ozren Karaman was looking at me with a bemused expression. I suddenly felt embarrassed. “Sorry, you know all that, of course. But it’s a bit of an obsession with me, and once I get started…” I was only digging a deeper hole, so I stopped. “The thing is, they’ve given me only a week’s access to the book, so I really need every minute. I’d like to get started…. I’ll have it till six this evening, yes?”

“No, not quite. I’ll need to take it about ten minutes before the hour, to get it secured before the bank guards change shifts.”

“All right,” I said, drawing my chair in close. I inclined my head to the other end of the long table where the security detachment sat. “Any chance we could get rid of a few of them?”

He shook his uncombed head. “I’m afraid we’ll all be staying.”

I couldn’t help the sigh that escaped me. My work has to do with objects, not people. I like matter, fiber, the nature of the varied stuffs that go to make a book. I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright earths and lethal toxins of ancient pigments. Wheat paste—I can bore the pants off anyone about wheat paste. I spent six months in Japan, learning how to mix it for just the necessary amount of tension.

Parchment, especially, I love. So durable it can last for centuries, so fragile it can be destroyed in a careless instant. One of the reasons, I’m sure, that I got this job was because I have written so many journal articles on parchment. I could tell, just from the size and scatter of the pore holes, that the parchments in front of me had been made from the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep. You can date manuscripts from the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile to within a hundred years or so if you know when that particular breed was all the go with the local parchment makers.

Parchment is leather, essentially, but it looks and feels different because the dermal fibers in the skin have been reorganized by stretching. Wet it, and the fibers revert to their original, three-dimensional network. I had worried about condensation within the metal box, or exposure to the elements during transport. But there was very little sign of either. There were some pages that showed signs of older water damage, but under the microscope I saw a rime of cube-shaped crystals that I recognized: NaCl, also known as plain old table salt. The water that had damaged this book was probably the saltwater used at the seder table to represent the tears of the slaves in Egypt.

Of course, a book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand. The gold beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders, those are the people I feel most comfortable with. Sometimes, in the quiet, these people speak to me. They let me see what their intentions were, and it helps me do my work. I worried that the kustos, with his well-meaning scrutiny, or the cops, with the low chatter of their radios, would keep my friendly ghosts at bay. And I needed their help. There were so many questions.

For a start, most books like this, rich in such expensive pigments, had been made for palaces or cathedrals. But a haggadah is used only at home. The word is from the Hebrew root hgd, “to tell,” and it comes from the biblical command that instructs parents to tell their children the story of the Exodus. This “telling” varies widely, and over the centuries each Jewish community has developed its own variations on this home-based celebration.

But no one knew why this haggadah was illustrated with numerous miniature paintings, at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments. It was unlikely that a Jew would have been in a position to learn the skilled painting techniques evinced here. The style was not unlike the work of Christian illuminators. And yet, most of the miniatures illustrated biblical scenes as interpreted in the Midrash, or Jewish biblical exegesis.

I turned the parchment and suddenly found myself gazing at the illustration that had provoked more scholarly speculation than all the others. It was a domestic scene. A family of Jews—Spanish, by their dress—sits at a Passover meal. We see the ritual foods, the matzoh to commemorate the unleavened bread that the Hebrews baked in haste on the night before they fled Egypt, a shank bone to remember the lamb’s blood on the doorposts that had caused the angel of death to “pass over” Jewish homes. The father, reclining as per custom, to show that he is a free man and not a slave, sips wine from a golden goblet as his small son, beside him, raises a cup. The mother sits serenely in the fine gown and jeweled headdress of the day. Probably the scene is a portrait of the family who commissioned this particular haggadah. But there is another woman at the table, ebony-skinned and saffron-robed, holding a piece of matzoh. Too finely dressed to be a servant, and fully participating in the Jewish rite, the identity of that African woman in saffron has perplexed the book’s scholars for a century.

Slowly, deliberately, I examined and made notes on the condition of each page. Each time I turned a parchment, I checked and adjusted the position of the supporting forms. Never stress the book—the conservator’s chief commandment. But the people who had owned this book had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile, genocide, war.

As I reached the end of the Hebrew text, I came to a line of script in another language, another hand. Revisto per mi. Gio. Domenico Vistorini, 1609. The Latin, written in the Venetian style, translated as “Surveyed by me.” Were it not for those three words, placed there by an official censor of the pope’s Inquisition, this book might have been destroyed that year in Venice, and would never have crossed the Adriatic to the Balkans.

“Why did you save it, Giovanni?”

I looked up, frowning. It was Dr. Karaman, the librarian. He gave a tiny, apologetic shrug. Probably he thought I was irritated at the interruption, but actually I was surprised that he had voiced the very question in my mind. No one knew the answer; any more than they knew how or why—or even when—the book had come to this city. A bill of sale from 1894 stated that someone named Kohen had sold it to the library. But no one had thought to question the seller. And since World War II, when two-thirds of the Jews in Sarajevo were slaughtered and the city’s Jewish quarter ransacked, there had been no Kohens left in the city to ask. A Muslim librarian had saved the book from the Nazis then, too, but the details of how he’d done it were sparse and conflicting.

When I had completed the notes on my initial examination, I set up an eight-by-ten camera and worked through again from the beginning, photographing every page so as to make an accurate record of the book’s condition before any conservation work was attempted. When I was done with the conservation work and before I re-bound the pages, I would photograph each page again. I would send the negatives to Amitai in Jerusalem. He would direct the making of a set of high-grade prints for the world’s museums and the printing of a facsimile edition that ordinary people everywhere would be able to enjoy. Normally, a specialist would do those photos, but the UN didn’t want to jump through the hoops of finding another expert that passed muster with all the city’s constituencies, so I’d agreed to do it.

I flexed my shoulders and reached for my scalpel. Then I sat, my chin resting on one hand, the other poised over the binding. Always a moment of self-doubt, at the instant before you begin. The light glinted on the bright steel, and made me think of my mother. If she hesitated like this, the patient would bleed out on the table. But my mother, the first woman to chair a department of neurosurgery in the history of Australia, was a stranger to self-doubt. She hadn’t doubted her right to flout every convention of her era, bearing a child without troubling to take a husband, or even naming a father. To this day, I have no idea who he was. Someone she loved? Someone she used? The latter, more likely. She thought she was going to raise me in her own image. What a joke. She’s fair and perpetually tennis-tanned; I’m dark and pale as a Goth. She has champagne tastes. I prefer beer straight out of the tinnie.

I realized a long time ago that she would never respect me for choosing to be a repairer of books rather than bodies. For her, my double-honors degrees in chemistry and ancient Near Eastern languages might as well have been used Kleenex. A masters in chemistry and a PhD in fine art conservation didn’t cut it, either. “Kindergarten work,” she calls it, my papers and pigments and pastes. “You’d be through your internship by now,” she said when I got back from Japan. “At your age I was chief resident” was all I got when I came home from Harvard.

Sometimes, I feel like a figure in one of the Persian miniatures I conserve, a tiny person forever watched by immobile faces, staring down from high galleries or spying from behind lattice screens. But in my case, the faces are always just that one face, my mother’s, with her pursed mouth and disapproving glare.

And here I am, thirty years old, and still she can get between me and my work. That feeling, of her impatient, disapproving scrutiny, finally stirred me. I slipped the scalpel under the thread, and the codex eased apart into its precious folios. I lifted the first one. A tiny speck of something fluttered from the binding. Carefully, with a sable brush, I moved it onto a slide and passed it under the microscope. Eureka. It was a tiny fragment of insect wing, translucent, veined. We live in a world of arthropods, and maybe the wing came from a common insect and wouldn’t tell us anything. But maybe it was a rarity, with a limited geographic range. Or maybe it was from a species now extinct. Either would add knowledge to the history of the book. I placed it in a glassine envelope and labeled it with a note of its position.

A few years ago, a tiny sliver of quill paring I’d found in a binding had caused a complete uproar. The work was a very beautiful little set of suffrages, short prayers to individual saints, supposedly part of a lost Book of Hours. It was owned by an influential French collector who had charmed the Getty into considering paying an absolute fortune for it. The collector had provenance documents going way back, attributing it to the Bedford Master who had painted in Paris around 1425. But something about it didn’t sit just right with me.

Generally, a quill paring won’t tell you much. You don’t need an exotic feather to make a quill. Any good strong flight feather from any robust bird can be made into a serviceable pen. It always makes me laugh when I see actors in period movies scribbling away with flamboyant ostrich feathers. For one thing, there weren’t a whole lot of ostriches marching around in medieval Europe. And for another, scribes always trimmed the feather down to something that looked pretty much like a stick, so the fluffy bits didn’t get in their way while they were working. But I insisted on checking out the paring with an ornithologist, and what do you know? The paring came from a Muscovy duck feather. Muscovys are common everywhere these days, but in the 1400s they were still pretty much confined to Mexico and Brazil. They weren’t introduced to Europe until the early 1600s. Turned out the French “collector” had been faking manuscripts for years.

As I gently lifted off the haggadah’s second folio, I drew out the frayed thread holding it, and noticed that a fine white hair, about a centimeter long, had become trapped in the thread fiber. Checking under magnification, I could see that the hair had left a very slight indentation near the binding, on the page that depicted the Spanish family seder. Gently, with surgical tweezers, I disentangled it and placed it in its own envelope.

I needn’t have worried about the people in the room being a distraction. I didn’t even notice they were there. People came and went, and I didn’t raise my head. It was only when the light began to fade that I realized I’d worked right through the day without a break. I suddenly felt stiff from tension, and ravenously hungry. I stood, and Karaman was immediately there, his dreadful metal box ready. I laid the book with its separated folios carefully inside.

“We absolutely have to change this right away,” I said. “Metal is the worst thing for transmitting variations in heat and cold.” I placed a sheet of glass on top and weighed it with little velvet sandbags to keep the parchments flat. Ozren fiddled with his wax, stamps, and strings while I cleaned and organized my tools. “How do you find our treasure?” he said, inclining his head toward the book.

“Remarkable for its age,” I said. “There’s no apparent recent damage from inappropriate handling. I’m going to do some tests on a few microscopic samples to see what they’ll tell us. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of stabilization, and repair of the binding. As you know, it’s a late-nineteenth-century binding, and about as physically and mechanically tired as you’d expect.”

Karaman leaned down hard on the box, pressing the library’s stamp into the wax. Then he stood aside while a bank official did the same with the bank’s stamp. The elaborate weave of strings and wax seals meant that any unauthorized access to the contents of the box would be instantly apparent.

“I’d heard that you are Australian,” Karaman said. I suppressed a sigh. I was still transported by my day’s work and not in the mood for small talk. “It seems a strange occupation for a person from such a young country, looking after other people’s ancient treasures.” I didn’t say anything. Then he added: “I suppose you were hungry for some culture, growing up there?”

Because I had been rude before, I made an effort now. A slight effort. That young country–cultural desert stuff gets very old. Australia happens to have the longest continuous artistic tradition in the world—Aboriginal people were making sophisticated art on the walls of their dwellings thirty thousand years before the people in Lascaux chewed the end off their first paintbrush. But I decided to spare him the full lecture. “Well,” I said, “you should consider that immigration has made us the most ethnically diverse country in the world. Australians’ roots run very deep and wide. That gives us a stake in all the world’s cultural heritage. Even yours.” I didn’t add that when I was growing up, the Yugoslavs were famous as the only migrant group who’d managed to import their Old World grievances. Everyone else soon succumbed to a kind of sunstruck apathy, but Serbs and Croats were forever going at it, bombing each other’s soccer clubs, stoushing with each other even in end-of-the-earth outback shitholes like Coober Pedy.

He received the barb with good grace, smiling at me over the box. He had a very nice smile, I have to say. His mouth sort of turned down and up at the same time, like a Charles Schulz drawing.

The guards stood to escort Karaman and the book. I followed down the long, ornate corridors until they descended the marble staircase to the vaults. I was waiting for someone to unlock the main doors when Karaman turned back and called after me.

“Perhaps I could invite you to dinner? I know a place in the Old City. It just reopened last month. To be quite frank and sincere, I cannot guarantee the food, but at least it will be Bosnian.”

I was about to say no. It’s just a reflex with me. And then I thought, why not? Better than some bland, room-service mystery meat in my bleak little hotel room. I told myself that it was legitimate research. Ozren Karaman’s rescue had made him part of the history of the book, and I wanted to know more about that.

I waited for him at the top of the stairs, listening to the pneumatic swish of the vault and then the clang of the metal bars that enclosed it. The sound was final and reassuring. The book, at least, would be safe for the night.

III

WE STEPPED OUT into the dark city streets, and I shivered. Most of the snow had disappeared during the day, but now the temperature was dropping again, and heavy clouds hid the moon. There were no streetlights working. When I realized that Karaman proposed to walk to the Old City, the feeling of a stone in the gut returned.

“Are you sure that’s, you know, OK? Why don’t we have my UN escort drive us?”

He made a slight face, as if he smelled something unappetizing. “Those oversized tanks they drive will not fit in the narrow ways of the Baščaršija,” he said. “And there has been no sniping for over a week now.”

Great. Tremendous. I let him handle the argy-bargy with the UN Vikings, hoping he wouldn’t be able to convince them to let me go on without an escort. Unfortunately, he was a pretty persuasive fellow—stubborn, anyway—and finally we set off on foot. He had a long-legged stride, and I had to quicken my pace to keep up with him. As we walked, he delivered a kind of countertourism monologue—a guide-from-hell kind of a thing—describing the city’s various shattered structures. “That is the Presidency Building, neo-Renaissance style and the Serbs’ favorite target.” A few blocks farther: “That is the ruins of the Olympic Museum. That was once the post office. This is the cathedral. Neo-Gothic. They had midnight Mass there last Christmas, but they held it at noon because, of course, no one went out at night at that time unless they were suicidal. On its left you see the synagogue and the mosque. On the right the Orthodox church. All the places where none of us go to worship, situated within a very convenient hundred meters of one another.”

I tried to imagine how I would feel if Sydney were suddenly scarred like this, the landmarks of my childhood damaged or destroyed. Waking up one day and finding that the people in North Sydney had set up barricades on the Harbour Bridge and started shelling the Opera House.

“I suppose it’s still a bit of a luxury to walk in the city,” I said, “after four years of running from snipers.” He was walking a little bit ahead of me. He stopped suddenly.

“Yes,” he said. “Quite.” Somehow he poured a whole bucket of sarcasm into that terse reply.

The wide avenues of Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo had gradually given way to the narrow, cobbled footpaths of the Ottoman town, where you could stretch out your arms and almost touch buildings on opposite sides of the way. The buildings were small scale, as if built for halflings, and pressed together so tightly that they reminded me of tipsy friends, holding each other upright on the way home from the pub. Large parts of this area had been out of range of the Serb guns, so the damage here was much less evident than in the modern city. From a minaret, the khoja called the faithful to aksham, the evening prayer. It was a sound I associated with hot places—Cairo, Damascus—not a place where frost crunched underfoot and pockets of unmelted snow gathered in the crotch between the mosque’s dome and its stone palisade. I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims’ vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace.

The khoja of this small mosque was an old man, but his voice carried, unwavering and beautiful on the cold night air. Only a handful of other old men answered; shuffling across the cobbled courtyard, dutifully washing their hands and faces in the icy water of the fountain. I stopped for a moment to watch them. Karaman was ahead of me, but he turned back, and followed my gaze. “There they are,” he said. “The fierce Muslim terrorists of the Serb imagination.”

The restaurant he had chosen was warm and noisy and full of delicious aromas of grilling meat. A photograph by the door showed the proprietor, in military fatigues, brandishing an immense bazooka. I ordered a plate of cevapcici. He ordered a salad of shaved cabbage and a dish of yogurt.

“That’s a bit austere,” I said.

He smiled. “I’ve been a vegetarian since I was a child. That was useful, during the siege, since there wasn’t any meat. Of course, the only greens you could get most of the time were grass clippings. Grass soup, that became my specialty.” He ordered two beers. “Beer, you could get, even during the siege. The brewery was one thing in the city that never closed down.”

“Aussies would approve of that,” I said.

“I was thinking about what you said earlier, about the people from this country who migrated to Australia. Actually, we had quite a few Australians visiting the museum library, just before the war.”

“Oh?” I said absently, sucking on my beer, which was, I have to say, a little soapy.

“Well dressed, speaking terrible Bosnian. Same peoples came from the United States as well. We averaged about five a day, looking up their family history. At the library we gave them a nickname, after that black man in the American TV show—Kinta Kunte.”

“Kunta Kinte,” I corrected.

“Yes, him: we called them the Kunta Kintes because they were searching for their roots. They wanted to look at the official gazettes, 1941 to ’45. Never looking for Partisans in their family tree. They didn’t want to be descendants of leftists. Always it was the nationalist fanatics—Chetniks, Ustashe, the killers of the Second World War. Imagine wanting to be related to such people. I wish I’d known then that they were the storm crows. But we didn’t want to believe that such madness could ever come here.”

“I’ve always kind of admired Sarajevans for being so surprised by the war,” I said. It had seemed the rational response to me. Who wouldn’t be in a state of denial when your next-door neighbor suddenly starts shooting at you, casually and without remorse, like you’re some kind of unwanted introduced species, the way the farmers at home eradicate rabbits.

“It’s true,” he said. “Years ago, we watched Lebanon fall apart and said, ‘That’s the Middle East, they’re primitive over there.’ Then we saw Dubrovnik in flames, and we said, ‘We’re different in Sarajevo.’ That’s what we all thought. How could you possibly have an ethnic war here, in this city, when every second person is the product of a mixed marriage? How to have a religious war in a city where no one ever goes to church? For me, the mosque, it’s like a museum, quaint thing to do with grandparents. Picturesque, you know. Once a year, maybe, we’d go and see the zikr, when the dervishes dance, and it was like theater—like, what do you call it? A pantomime. My best friend, Danilo, he’s a Jew, and he’s not even circumcised. There was no mohel here after the war; you had to go to the local barber. Anyway, our parents were all leftists, they thought such things were primitive….” He trailed off, downing his beer in a couple of swallows and ordering two more.

“I wanted to ask you about the day you saved the haggadah.”

He grimaced and looked down at his hands, which were spread out on the speckled Laminex of the café table. His fingers were long and delicate. Funny how I hadn’t noticed that earlier, when I’d been rude to him and worried he might lay an unauthorized paw on my precious parchment.

“You have to understand. It is as I was just saying. We did not believe in the war. Our leader had said, ‘It takes two sides to have a war, and we will not fight.’ Not here, not in our precious Sarajevo, our idealistic Olympic city. We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don’t have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death. We know that now. But then, those first few days, we all did things that were a little crazy. Kids, teenagers, they went off to demonstrate against the war, with posters and music, as if they were going to a picnic. Even after the snipers shot a dozen of them, we still didn’t get it. We expected that the international community would put a stop to it. I believed that. I was worried about getting through a few days, that’s all, while the world—how do you say?—got its act together.”

He was speaking so quietly I could barely hear him over the buzz of laughter that filled the restaurant. “I was kustos; the museum was being shelled. We were not prepared for it. Everything there was exposed. There were two kilometers of books in the museum, and the museum was just twenty meters from the Chetnik guns. I was thinking that one phosphorous bomb could burn the whole thing down, or that these…these…the Bosnian word papci, I can’t translate it.” He curled his hand into a fist and walked it across the table. “What do you call the foot part of an animal? A cow or a horse?”

“A hoof?” I said.

“Yes, that’s it. We called the enemy ‘hoofs’—something from the barnyard. I thought, if they got into the museum, they would trample the place looking for gold, and destroy things whose value they were too ignorant even to guess at. Somehow, I made my way to the police station. Most of the police had gone to defend the city as best they could. The desk officer said, ‘Who wants to put his head on the block to save some old things?’ But when he realized that I was going anyway, alone, he rounded up two ‘volunteers’ to help me. He said he couldn’t have people saying that a dusty librarian has more guts than the police.”

Some larger things they had moved to inner rooms. Smaller valuable items they had hidden away where looters might not look, like the janitor’s supply room. Ozren’s long hands fanned the air as he described the artifacts he had saved—the skeletons of Bosnia’s ancient kings and queens, the rare natural history specimens. “And then I tried to find the haggadah.” In the 1950s a museum staffer had been implicated in a plot to steal the haggadah, so ever since then, the museum’s director was the only one who was allowed to know the combination for the safe where it was kept. But the director lived across the river, where the fighting was most intense. Ozren knew he would never make it to the museum.

Ozren continued speaking quietly, in short, undramatic sentences. No light. A fractured pipe. Rising water. Shells hitting the walls. It was left for me to fill in the blanks. I’d been in enough museum basements to imagine how it was; how every shell burst that shook the building must have sent a rain of plaster falling over the precious things, and over him, too, into his eyes as he crouched in the dark, hands shaking, striking match after match to see what he was doing. Waiting for a lull in the bombing so that he could hear the fall of the tumblers as he tried one combination and then another. Then not being able to hear anyway, because the beating of the blood in his head was so loud.

“How on earth did you ever manage to crack it?”

He raised his hands, palms up. “It was an old safe, not very sophisticated….”

“But still, the odds…”

“I am not, as I told you, a religious man, but if I did believe in miracles…the fact I got to that book, in those conditions…”

“The miracle,” I said, “was that you—”

He didn’t let me finish. “Please,” he interrupted, wrinkling his face with distaste. “Don’t make me out to be a hero. I don’t feel like one. Frankly, I feel like shit, because of all the books I couldn’t save….” He looked away.

I think that’s what got me, that look. That reticence. Maybe because I’m the opposite of brave, I’ve always been a bit suspicious of heroes. I’m inclined to think they lack imagination, or there’s no way they could do the madly daring things they do. But this was a guy who got choked up over lost books, and who had to be dragged through an account of what he’d done. I was starting to think I liked him quite a bit.

The food arrived then, juicy little patties of meat, peppery and thyme-scented. I was ravenous. I fell on the plate, scooping up the meat with rounds of hot, soft Turkish bread. I was so intent on the food that it took me a while to realize that Ozren wasn’t eating, just staring at me. He had green eyes, a deep, mossy green, flecked with glints of copper and bronze.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked you about all that. I’ve put you off your food.”

He grinned—that attractive, crooked grin. “It’s not that.”

“What’s up, then?”

“Well, when I watched you working today, your face was so still and serene, you reminded me of a Madonna in the icons of the Orthodox. It’s just quite amusing to me, a heavenly face with such an earthy appetite.”

I can’t bear that I still blush like a schoolgirl. I could feel the blood rising, so I tried to pretend that no compliment was intended. “And that’s one way of pointing out that I eat like a pig,” I said with a laugh.

He reached over then and wiped a smear of grease off my cheek. I stopped laughing. I reached for his hand before he could withdraw it, and turned it over in my own. It was a scholar’s hand, to be sure, with clean, well-kept nails. But there were calluses as well. I suppose even scholars had to chop wood, if they could find any, during the siege. The tips of his fingers glistened with the lamb grease from my cheek. I brought them to my lips and licked them, slowly, one by one. His green eyes regarded me, asking a question anyone could understand.

His apartment was close by, an attic above a pastry shop on a crossroads called Sweet Corner. The door to the shop was steamy, and a wall of warmth hit us as we entered. The proprietor raised a floury hand in greeting. Ozren waved in reply and then steered me through the crowded café to the attic stairs. The scent of crisp pastry and burned sugar followed us.

Ozren could just stand up under the swooping eaves of the attic. The ends of his unruly curls brushed the lowest beams. He turned to take my jacket, and as he did so, touched my throat, lightly. He ran his middle finger over the tiny arc of bone at the back of my neck, where my hair lifted and swirled into a twist. He traced the line of bone along my shoulder and then down, over my sweater. When he reached my hips, he slid his hands under the cashmere and eased it up, over my head. The wool caught on my hair clip. The clip rattled as it hit the floor and the twist of hair unfurled over my bare shoulders. I shivered, and he wrapped his arms around me.

Later, we lay in a tangle of sheet and clothing. He lived like a student, his bed a thin mattress pushed up against the wall, piles of books and newspapers pushed carelessly into corners. He was as spare as a racehorse, all long bone and lean muscle. Not a gram of fat on him. He fingered a strand of my hair. “So straight. Like a Japanese,” he said.

“Expert, are you?” I teased. He grinned and got up and poured two little glasses of fiery rakija. He hadn’t turned on the light when we’d come in, but now he lit a pair of candles. As the flame steadied, I could see that the far wall of the attic was filled by a large figurative painting, a portrait of a woman and an infant, in a thick, urgent impasto. The baby was partly hidden by the curve of the woman’s body, which seemed to shelter it in a protective arc. The woman was turning away from us and toward the child, but she looked back at the artist—at us—with a steady, appraising gaze, beautiful and grave.

“It’s a wonderful painting,” I said.

“Yes, my friend Danilo—the one I told you about—he painted it.”

“Who is she?”

He frowned, and sighed. Then he raised his glass in a kind of toast.

“My wife.”

IV

WHEN YOU HAVE WORKED WELL, there should be no sign that you have worked at all.

Werner Heinrich, my instructor, taught me that. “Never mistake yourself for an artist, Miss Heath. You must be always behind your object.”

At the end of a week, there probably weren’t ten people in the world who could have told for sure that I’d taken this book apart and put it back together. The next thing I had to do was pay visits on a few old friends who’d be able to tell me what, if anything, the tiny samples I’d extracted from the codex meant. The UN had asked me to contribute an essay that would be included in the catalog when the book went on exhibition. I’m not ambitious in the traditional sense. I don’t want a big house or a big bank account; I don’t give a rat’s about those things. I don’t want to be the boss of anything or manage anyone but myself. But I do take a lot of pleasure in surprising my stuffy old colleagues by publishing something they don’t know. I just love to move the ball forward, even if it’s only a millimeter, in the great human quest to figure it all out.

I stood away from the table, and stretched. “So, my kustos, I think that I can return the haggadah now to your care.”

Ozren did not smile, or even look at me, but just rose and went to get the new box he’d had made to my specifications, a properly designed archival container that would hold the book safely while the UN finished the work on a climate-controlled exhibition room at the museum. It was to be a shrine to the survival of Sarajevo’s multiethnic heritage. The haggadah would have pride of place, but all around the walls would be Islamic manuscripts and Orthodox icons that would show how the people and their arts had grown from the same roots, influencing and inspiring one another.

As Ozren took the book, I laid a hand on his hand. “They’ve invited me back for the opening. I’m supposed to be giving a paper at the Tate the week before. If I flew here from London, would I see you then?”

He moved so that my hand fell away from his. “At the ceremony, yes.”

“And after?”

He shrugged.

We’d spent three nights together at Sweet Corner, but he hadn’t said a single word about the wife who gazed at us from the painting. Then, on the fourth night, I’d woken up a little before dawn, because the pastry chef was clumping around, firing his bread ovens. I’d rolled over and found Ozren wide awake, staring at the painting. He had a haggard look, very sad. I touched his face lightly.

“Tell me,” I said.

He turned and gazed at me, taking my face in his hands. Then he got up off the mattress and pulled on his jeans, throwing my clothes from the night before over to me. When we were dressed, I followed him downstairs. He talked to the pastry chef for a few minutes, and the guy tossed him a set of car keys.

We found the battered old Citroën at the end of the narrow alley. We drove in silence out of town, up into the mountains. It was beautiful up there; the first rays of the sun turned the snow golden and pink and tangerine. A powerful wind tossed the pine boughs around, and the smell brought incongruous memories: the resinous tang of Christmas trees, the scent of their sap so strong on the heat-wave December days of Sydney’s midsummer.

“This is Mount Igman,” he said at last. “It was the bobsled run during the winter Olympics, before the Serbs moved in with their high-powered rifles and their telescopic sights and turned it into a sniper pit.” He put out a hand to grab me as I moved toward the pit. “There are land mines everywhere up here, still. You have to keep to the roadway.”

From where we stood, there was a perfect view down into the city. They’d taken aim at her from here, as she stood holding her infant son in a UN water line. The first bullet had severed her femoral artery. She had crawled, dragging the baby, to the nearest wall and thrown her body across her son. No one dared to help her, not the UN soldiers, who stood by as she bled to death, or the terrified civilians who scattered, wailing, for whatever poor hiding places they could find.

“The heroic people of Sarajevo.” Ozren’s voice was tired and bitter, his words hard to hear as he spat them out into the teeth of the wind. “That’s what CNN was always calling us. But most of us weren’t so heroic, believe me. When the shooting started, we’d run just as fast as the next person.”

Aida, wounded, bleeding, had been an irresistible target for the Mount Igman murderer. The second shot pierced her shoulder and hit bone. The bullet shredded, so only a small fragment of metal passed through her and into the baby’s skull. The baby’s name was Alia. Ozren said it in a whisper, like a sigh.

The initial insult—that’s the technical neurosurgical term. When I was a teenager, I’d overhear my mother, on the phone, taking the calls that often came as a welcome interruption to our dinner table arguments. It would be some nervous young resident in the emergency room. I’d always thought “insult” was a pretty apt term for something like being shot in the head or whacked across the skull with a bit of two-by-four. Hard to get more insulting than that. In Alia’s case, the initial insult had been compounded by the fact that Sarajevo had no neurosurgeon, let alone a pediatric specialist. The general surgeon had done his best, but there’d been swelling and infection—a “secondary insult”—and the little boy had lapsed into a coma. By the time a neurosurgeon got to the city, months later, he’d declared that nothing further could be done.

When we came down from the mountain, Ozren asked if I wanted to go to the hospital, to see his boy. I didn’t. I hate hospitals. Always have. Sometimes, on weekends, when the housekeeper had the day off, my mother would drag me with her on rounds. The bright lights, the sludge green walls, the noise of metal on metal, the sheer bloody misery hanging over the halls like a shroud—I hated the lot of it. The coward in me has total control of my imagination in hospitals. I see myself in every bed: in the traction device or unconscious on the gurney, oozing blood into drainage bags, hooked up to urinary catheters. Every face is my own face. It’s like those kids’ flip books where you keep the same head but keep changing the bodies. Pathetic, I know. Can’t help it, though. And Mum wondered why I didn’t want to be a doctor.

But Ozren was looking at me with this expression, like a really gentle dog, head tilted, expecting kindness. I couldn’t say no. He told me then that he went every day, before work. I hadn’t realized. The past few mornings, he’d walked me back to my hotel so I could shower—if there was any running water—and change my clothes. I hadn’t known that he’d gone to the hospital after that, to spend an hour with his son.

I tried not to look right or left, into the wards, as we walked down the hall. And then we were in Alia’s room, and there was nowhere to look but at him. A sweet, still face, slightly swollen from the fluids they pumped into him to keep him alive. A tiny body threaded with plastic tubes. The sound of the monitors, measuring out the minutes of his limited little life. Ozren had told me his wife had died a year ago, so Alia couldn’t have been more than three years old. It was hard to tell. His underdeveloped body could have belonged to a younger infant, but the expressions that passed across his face seemed to register emotions of someone very old. Ozren brushed the brown hair off the small brow, sat down on the bed, and whispered softly in Bosnian, gently flexed and straightened the rigid little hands.

“Ozren,” I said quietly. “Have you considered getting another opinion? I could take his scans with me and—”

“No,” he said, cutting me off midsentence.

“But why not? Doctors are only people, they make mistakes.” I can’t count the times I heard my mother dismiss the views of a supposedly eminent colleague: “Him! I wouldn’t go to him for an ingrown toenail!” But Ozren just shrugged and didn’t answer me.

“Have you got MRI scans, or just CTs? MRIs show a lot more, they—”

“Hanna, shut up, please. I said no.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “I never would’ve picked you as a believer in that bullshit, insha’Allah, fatalist mentality.”

He got up off the bed and took a step toward me, grabbing my face between his hands and bringing his own face so close to mine that his angry features blurred.

“You,” he said, his voice a low, contained whisper. “You are the one who is consumed by bullshit.”

His sudden ferocity scared me. I pulled away.

“You,” he continued, grabbing my wrist. “All of you, from the safe world, with your air bags and your tamper-proof packaging and your fat-free diets. You are the superstitious ones. You convince yourself you can cheat death, and you are absolutely offended when you learn that you can’t. You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, ‘How awful!’ and then you got up and made yourself another cup of gourmet coffee.” I flinched when he said that. It was a pretty accurate description. But he wasn’t done. He was so angry he was actually spitting.

“Bad things happen. Some very bad things happened to me. And I’m no different from a thousand other fathers in this city who have kids who suffer. I live with it. Not every story has a happy ending. Grow up, Hanna, and accept that.”

He flung my wrist away. I was shaking. I wanted to get away, to get out of there. He turned back to Alia and sat down again on the bed, facing away from me. I pushed past him on the way to the door, and saw that he had a kids’ book, in Bosnian, in his hands. From the familiar illustrations, I could tell it was a translation of Winnie-the-Pooh. He put the book down and rubbed his palms over his face. He looked up at me, his expression drained. “I read to him. Every day. It is not possible for a childhood to pass by without these stories.” He turned to a page he’d bookmarked. I had my hand on the door, but the sound of his voice held me. Every now and then, he’d look up and talk to Alia. Maybe he was explaining the meaning of a hard word, or sharing some fine point of Milne’s English humor. I’d never seen anything so tender between a father and his child.

And I knew I couldn’t bear to see it again. That night after work Ozren started to apologize for his outburst. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a prelude to another invitation to spend the night, but I didn’t let him get that far. I made some lame excuse as to why I had to go back to my hotel room. Same thing the next night. By the third night he stopped asking. And anyway, by then it was time for me to go.

I was once told, by a very handsome and very hurt botanist, that my attitude to sex was like something he’d read about in a sociology textbook about the 1960s. He said I acted like the book’s description of a prefeminist male, acquiring partners for casual sex and then dumping them as soon as any emotional entanglement was required. He hypothesized that because I didn’t have a father and because my mother was emotionally unavailable, no one had modeled a healthy, caring, reciprocal relationship in my life.

I told him if I wanted to hear psychobabble, I could visit a shrink cheap on Medibank. I’m not casual about sex, far from it. I’m actually very picky. I prefer the fit few to the mediocre masses. But I’m not big on wringing out other people’s soggy hankies, and if I wanted a partner, I’d join a law firm. If I do choose to be with someone, I want it to stay light and fun. It gives me no pleasure, none at all, to hurt people’s feelings, especially not tragic cases like Ozren, who is clearly a spectacular human being, brave and intelligent and all the rest of it. Even handsome, if you can cope with the unkempt thing. I felt bad about the botanist, too. But he’d started talking about bush-walking with kids in the backpack. I had to let him go. I wasn’t even twenty-five at the time. Kids are definitely a midlife luxury, in my opinion.

As for my dysfunctional so-called family, it’s true that I’ve inherited a core belief, to wit: don’t rely on some other sod for your emotional sustenance. Find something absorbing to do—something so absorbing that you don’t have time to dwell on the woe-is-me stuff. My mother loves her work, I love mine. So the fact that we don’t love each other…well, I hardly ever think about it.

When Ozren was done with his seals and strings, I walked with him down the stairs of the bank building for what would be the last time. If I came back to Sarajevo for the opening, the book would be where it belonged, in its nice, new, state-of-the-art, securely guarded display space at the museum. I waited for Ozren to put the book in the vault, but when he came back up, he was in conversation in Bosnian with the guards, and he did not turn.

The guard unlocked the front door for him.

“Good night,” I said. “Good-bye. Thank you.”

He had his hand on the ornate silver door pull. He looked back at me and nodded curtly. Then he pushed the door open and walked out into the dark. I went back upstairs, alone, to pack up my tools.

I had my glassine envelopes with the bit of insect’s wing and the single white hair from the binding, and tiny samples, each no bigger than the full stop at the end of a sentence, that I’d lifted on scalpel tip from the pages that were stained. I placed these things carefully in my document case. Then I paged through my notebook to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I skimmed the notes I’d made the first day, when I’d dismantled the binding. I saw the memo I’d scribbled about the channels in the board edges and my query to myself about missing clasps.

To get to London from Sarajevo, you had to change planes in Vienna. I was planning to use that necessary stopover to accomplish two things. I had an old acquaintance—an entomologist—who was a researcher and curator at the Naturhistorisches Museum there. She could help me identify the insect fragment. I also wanted to visit my old teacher, Werner Heinrich. He was a dear man, kind and courtly, sort of like the grandfather I’d never had. I knew he’d be keen to hear about my work on the haggadah, and I also wanted to get his advice. Maybe his influence would allow me to break through Viennese formalities at the museum where the rebinding had been done in 1894. If he could get me access to the archives, it was just possible I’d find some old records about the condition of the book when it arrived at the museum. I put the notebook in my case. Last of all, I slipped in the large manila envelope from the hospital.

I’d forged the request in my mother’s name and made the wording ambiguous: “…asked to consult at the request of a colleague of Dr. Karaman in the case of his son….” They knew her name, even here. She’d coauthored a text on aneurysms that was the standard reference in the field. Not that I was in the habit of asking her for favors. But she’d said she was heading to Boston to give a paper at the American neurosurgeons’ annual gabfest, and I had a client in Boston, a bezillionaire and a major manuscripts collector, who’d been after me to look at a codex he was thinking of buying from a Houghton Library deaccessioning sale.

Australians in general are pretty casual about traveling. If you grow up there, you basically get trained in long-haul flights—fifteen hours, twenty-four—it’s what we’re used to. For us, eight hours across the Atlantic seems like a doddle. He’d offered to pay for a firstclass ticket, and I don’t usually get to sit in the pointy end. I figured I could cram in the appraisal, pick up a nice fee, and be back in London in time to deliver my paper at the Tate. Usually I would have arranged my itinerary so that Mum and I would just miss each other. There’d be a brief telephone call: “What a pity!” “Yes, can you believe it?” Each outdoing the other in insincerity. The night before, when I’d suggested we actually meet up in Boston, there’d been a minute of dead air on the phone, the crackle of Sarajevo-to-Sydney static. Then, in an affectless voice: “How nice. I’ll try to find a time.”

I didn’t ask myself why exactly I was subjecting myself to this. Why I was butting in, invading a man’s privacy, flouting his wishes, which could not have been expressed more clearly. I suppose the answer was that if something can be known, I can’t stand not knowing it. In that way, Alia’s brain scans were just like the bits of fiber in my glassine envelopes, messages in a code that expert eyes might just be able to read for me.

V

VIENNA SEEMED to be doing rather well off the fall of communism. The whole of the city was getting a makeover, like a wealthy matron going under the knife. As my taxi merged with the traffic on the Ringstrasse, I saw construction cranes everywhere, bowing over the city’s wedding cake skyline. Light flared off the freshly gilded Hofburg friezes, and sandblasters had flushed the soot off dozens of neo-Renaissance facades, revealing the warm cream stone that had been obscured by centuries of grime. Western capitalists evidently wanted spruced-up headquarters for all their new joint ventures with neighboring countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic. And now they had cheap laborers from the east to do the work.

When I’d been in Vienna in the early 1980s on a traveling scholarship, it had been a gray, grimy place. Every building was filthy, although I didn’t realize that at the time. I thought they were all meant to be black. I’d found it a depressing place and a bit creepy. Vienna’s location, teetering at the far edge of Western Europe, had made it a Cold War listening post. The stout matrons and the loden-clad gents with their bourgeois solidity existed in an atmosphere that always seemed a little stirred, a little charged, like the air after lightning. But I had liked the gilded rococo Kaffeehäuser and the music, which was everywhere—the city’s pulse and its heartbeat. The joke was that anyone in Vienna who wasn’t carrying a musical instrument was either a pianist, a harpist, or a foreign spy.

One didn’t think of the city as a hub of science, and yet it had its share of high-tech businesses and innovative labs. My old mate Amalie Sutter, the entomologist, headed one of them. I’d met Amalie years earlier, when she was a postdoc, living about as far as you could get from gilded rococo cafés. I came across her on the side of a mountain in remote northern Queensland. She lived in an upended, corrugated-iron water tank. I was backpacking at the time. I dropped out of my expensive, elitist girl’s school at sixteen, which was the first possible moment I could get free of it. I’d tried to get them to expel me earlier, but they were too scared of Mum to go for it, no matter what outrages against decorum I managed to devise. I walked out of our palatial home and joined that shifting band—the healthy Scandinavian kids on working holidays, the surfie dropouts, and the gaunt druggies—drifting north to Byron Bay and then on up the coast, past Cairns, past Cooktown, until the road ran out.

I’d traveled almost two thousand clicks to get away from my mother, and I ended up finding someone who was, in some ways, exactly like her. Or like she might have been in a parallel universe. Amalie was my mother stripped of social pretensions and material ambition. But she was just as driven by what she did, which was to study how a certain species of butterfly relied on ants to keep its caterpillars safe from predators. She let me stay in her water tank and taught me all about compostable toilets and solar showers. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I now think those weeks on the mountain, watching the way she looked at the world with this close, passionate attention, the way she busted her butt just for the chance to find out something new about how the world worked, were what turned me around and headed me back to Sydney, to start my real life.

Years later, when I came to Vienna and apprenticed myself to Werner Heinrich, I ran into her again. Werner had asked me to investigate the DNA of a book louse he’d extracted from a binding, and someone said the DNA lab over at the Naturhistorisches Museum was the best in the city. At the time I thought that seemed odd. The museum was a fantastic antique of a place, full of moth-eaten stuffed animals and nineteenth-century gentlemen’s rock collections. I loved to wander around in there because you never knew what you’d find. It was like a cabinet of curiosities. There was a rumor, though I’d never confirmed it, that they even had the severed head of the Turkish vizier who’d lost the seige of Vienna in 1623. Supposedly, they kept him in the basement.

But Amalie Sutter’s lab was a state-of-the-art facility for the research of evolutionary biology. I remembered the rather bizarre directions to her office: take the elevator to the third floor, follow the skeleton of the diplodocus, and when you reach the jawbone, her door is on the left. An assistant told me she was in the collections room and walked me down the corridor. I opened the door to a pungent blast of mothball odor. There was Amalie, pretty much as I’d left her, poring over a drawer full of silvery blue shimmer.

She was pleased to see me, but even more pleased to see my specimen. “I thought you were bringing me another book louse.” Last time, she’d had to grind it up to extract the DNA, amplify it, and then wait days to do an analysis. “But this,” she said, holding the envelope carefully. “This, if I’m not much mistaken, is going to be a lot easier. I think what you’ve got here is an old friend of mine.”

“A moth?”

“No, not a moth.”

“It can’t be part of a butterfly?” Bits of butterfly don’t generally wind up in books. Moths do, because they come indoors, where books are kept. But butterflies are outdoor creatures.

“I think it might be.” She stood and closed the collection cabinet. We walked back to her office, where she scanned the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, then hauled down a huge tome on wing veination. She pushed open a tall door that had a life-size picture of her as a graduate student, in the Malaysian rain forest, brandishing a four-meter butterfly net. It was remarkable how little she’d aged since then. I think her absolute enthusiasm for her work acted on her like some kind of preservative. On the other side of the door was a gleaming lab, with postdocs wielding pipettes and peering at DNA graphs on computer monitors. She gently lifted my little bit of wing onto a slide and placed it under a powerful microscope.

“Hello, lovely,” she said. “It is you.” She looked up and beamed at me. She hadn’t even glanced at the veination diagrams. “Parnassius mnemosyne leonhardiana. Common throughout Europe.”

Damn. My heart sank, and my face must have shown it. No new information there. Amalie’s smile widened. “Not much help?” She beckoned me to follow her back down the corridor to the room filled with collection cabinets. She stopped in front of one and opened the tall metal door with a clang. She slid out a wooden drawer. Rows of Parnassius butterflies hovered in their perpetual stasis, afloat forever above their carefully lettered names.

The butterflies were lovely in a subtle, muted way. They had creamy white forewings, splashed with black dots. The rear wings were almost translucent, like lead glass, divided into panes by the distinct tracery of black veins. “Not the flashiest butterfly in the world by any means,” said Amalie. “But collectors love them. Perhaps because you have to climb a mountain to get one.” She closed the drawer and turned to me. “Common throughout Europe, yes. But confined to high alpine systems, generally around two thousand meters. The caterpillars of the Parnassius feed only on an alpine variety of larkspur that grows in steep, stony environments. Your manuscript, Hanna, dear. Has it been on a trip to the Alps?”