People of the Book

Hanna Vienna, Spring 1996

PARNASSIUS.

Great name for a butterfly. It had a kind of loftiness, and I felt elevated as I walked out through the manicured gardens of the museum toward the swirling traffic of the Ringstrasse. I’d never found butterfly remains in a book before. I couldn’t wait to get to Werner’s place and tell him all about it.

The traveling scholarship that brought me to Vienna after my undergraduate degree could have taken me anywhere. Jerusalem or Cairo would have made most sense. But I was determined to study with Werner Maria Heinrich, or Universitätsprofessor Herr Doktor Doktor Heinrich, as I’d been told to address him, the Austrians being the opposite of Australians in insisting on giving a separate title for each degree earned. I’d heard about his expertise in traditional techniques—he was the world’s best at spotting forgeries because he knew more than anyone about the original crafts and materials. He was also a specialist in Hebrew manuscripts, which I found intriguing for a German Catholic of his generation. I offered myself as his apprentice.

His reply to my first letter was polite but dismissive—“honored by your interest but unfortunately not in a position,” etc. My second letter yielded a shorter, slightly more exasperated turndown. The third got a flat and rather testy one-liner that translated into Aussie as “no bloody way.” But I came anyway. With an immense amount of front, I presented myself at his apartment on Maria-Theresienstrasse, and begged him to take me on. It was winter, and, like most Australians on their first trip to a seriously cold place, I’d come unprepared for the brutal weather. I thought my rather fetching, cropped leather jacket was a winter coat, since it served that purpose in Sydney. I had no idea. So I must’ve cut a pathetic figure when I lobbed up on his doorstep, shivering, the snowflakes that’d melted in my hair turned to little icicles that clinked when I moved my head. His innate courtliness made it impossible for him to turn me away.

The months I spent grinding pigments or polishing parchments in his spacious flat-cum-workshop, or sitting beside him in the conservation department of the nearby university library taught me more, I think, than all my formal degrees combined. The first month was very stiff: “Miss Heath” this and “Herr Doktor Doktor” that, correct and rather chilly. But by the time I left I was his “Hanna, Liebchen.” I think we each filled a vacancy in the other’s life. We were both rather shorthanded in the family department. I’d never known my grandparents. His family had been killed in the Dresden fire-bombing. He’d been in Berlin, in the army, of course, although he never talked of it. Nor did he speak about his childhood in Dresden, abbreviated by war. Even in those days, I had enough tact not to press it. But I noticed that when I walked with him near the Hofburg, he always went out of his way to avoid Heldenplatz, the Hero’s Square. It was only much later that I came across the famous picture of that square, taken in March of 1938. In the photograph, it is packed with people, some of them clinging to the gigantic equestrian statues to get a better view, all of them cheering as Hitler announced the incorporation of his birth nation into the Third Reich.

After I left Werner to go to Harvard for my PhD (where I probably wouldn’t have been accepted without his glowing recommendation), he wrote to me occasionally, telling me about interesting projects he was working on, offering me career advice. And when he came to New York a couple of times, I’d take the train down from Boston to see him. But it had been a few years since then, so I wasn’t prepared for the frail figure waiting for me at the top of the marble-clad staircase that led up to his flat.

He was leaning on an ebony cane with a silver top. His hair, too, was silver, rather long, brushed back from his forehead. He was wearing a dark velvet jacket with pale lemon piping on the lapels. At his neck he wore a bow tie in the nineteenth-century fashion, a long piece of patterned silk tied loosely under the collar. He had a little white rosebud for a boutonniere. I knew how particular he was about appearances, so I’d taken more than usual pains with my own grooming, making my French twist fancy rather than functional and wearing a fuchsia suit that looked good with my dark hair.

“Hanna, Liebchen! How beautiful today! How beautiful! More lovely each time I see you!” He grasped my hand and kissed it, then peered at the chapped skin and made a little tsk. “The price of our craft, eh?” he said. His own hands were rough and gnarled, but I noted that his nails were freshly manicured, which mine, alas, were not.

In his mid-seventies, Werner had retired from the university, but he still wrote the rare paper and occasionally consulted on important manuscripts. The minute I stepped into the apartment, I could see—and smell—that he hadn’t stopped working with the materials of old books. The long table by the tall Gothic windows, where I’d sat beside him and learned so much, remained cluttered with agate stones and foul-smelling gallnuts, antique gold-beater’s tools, and parchments in all states of preparation.

He had a maid now, and as he ushered me into the library—one of my favorite rooms in the world, since every volume in it seemed to come with a story—she served the kaffee.

The rich cardamom scent made me feel like a twenty-year-old student again. Werner had taken to drinking his coffee Arabic style after a visiting professorship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he’d lived in the Christian quarter of the Old City, among Palestinians. Every time I smelled cardamom it reminded me of him, and of this apartment, washed with the pale gray European light that is so easy on the eyes when you’re working for hours on fine details.

“So. It is good to see you, Hanna. Thank you for taking the time to come out of your way and humor an old man.”

“Werner, you know I love to see you. But I was hoping you might be able to help me with something, as well.”

His face lit up. He leaned forward in his wing chair. “Tell me!”

I’d brought my notes, so I referred to these as I told him what I had done in Sarajevo. He nodded, approving. “It is exactly as I myself would have done. You are a good student.” Then I told him about the Parnassius wing fragment, which intrigued him, and then the other artifacts—the white hair, the samples of stain and the salt, and finally I got to the oddity of the grooved boards.

“I agree,” he said. “Definitely it seems they were prepared to take a pair of clasps.” He looked up at me, his blue eyes watery behind gold-rimmed glasses. “So, why are they not there? Most interesting. Most mysterious.”

“Do you think the National Museum would have anything on the haggadah, and the work that was done there back in 1894? It’s a long time ago….”

“Not so very long for Vienna, my dear. I am sure there will be something. Whether it is something useful is another matter. But it was a tremendous fuss, you know, when the manuscript came to light. The first of the illustrated haggadot to be rediscovered. Two of the foremost scholars of the day traveled here to examine it. I am sure the museum has their papers, at least. I think that one of them was Rothschild, from Oxford; yes, that’s right, I’m sure of it. The other was Martell, from the Sorbonne—you read French, yes? The binder’s notes, if they kept them, they would be in German. But perhaps the binder left no notes. As you saw for yourself, the rebinding was disgracefully mishandled.”

“Why do you think that was, when the book was the center of so much attention?”

“I believe there was a controversy over who should keep the book. Vienna, of course, wanted to retain it. Why not? The capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the center of Europe’s artistic energy…But remember, the Hapsburgs only occupied Bosnia at that time—they didn’t annex it until 1908. And the Slav nationalists hated the occupation.” He raised a crooked finger and waved it—it was a mannerism of his when he had something he thought particularly interesting to say.

“By coincidence, the man who started World War I was born the very year the haggadah came here, did you know that?”

“You mean the student who shot the Hapsburg guy in Sarajevo?” Werner drew in his chin, grinning smugly. He loved to tell people something they didn’t know. We were alike in that way.

“In any case, I think fear of inciting nationalism might have been why the book was eventually returned to the Bosnian Landesmuseum. My guess is that the clumsy binding was Vienna’s revenge, a little piece of petty snobbery: if it has to go to the provinces, then a cheap binding is good enough. Or it may have been something more sinister.” His voice dropped a little, and he drummed his fingers on the brocaded arm of his chair. “I don’t know if you are aware of it, but those fin de siècle years saw a great surge in anti-Semitism here. Everything Hitler said and some large part of what he did with regard to the Jews was rehearsed here, you know. It was the air he breathed, growing up in Austria. He would have been, let me see, about five years old, starting kindergarten in Braunau, when the haggadah was here. So strange, to think about such things….” His voice trailed off. We had begun to tread rather close to forbidden ground. When he looked up at me and spoke again, I thought at first that he was trying to change the subject.

“Tell me, Hanna, have you read Schnitzler? No? You must! You cannot understand anything about the Viennese, even today, without Arthur Schnitzler.”

He groped for his cane and stood, with difficulty, treading slowly and carefully toward the bookcases. He ran his finger along the spines of volumes that were almost all first or rare editions. “I have only the German and you still do not read German, do you? No? Great pity. Very interesting writer, Schnitzler, very—forgive me—erotic. Very frank about his many seductions. But also he writes a great deal on the rise of the Judenfressers—that means Jew Eaters, because the term anti-Semitism was not yet coined when he was a boy. Schnitzler was Jewish, of course.”

He drew a book from the shelf—“This is called My Youth in Vienna. It’s a very nice edition—an association copy, Schnitzler to his Latin master, one Johann Auer, ‘with thanks for the Auerisms.’ Do you know, I found this in a church book sale in Salzburg? Remarkable that no one had spotted it….” He leafed through the book until he found the passage he sought. “Here, he apologizes for writing so much on ‘the so-called Jewish question.’ But he says that no Jew, no matter how assimilated, was allowed to forget the fact of his birth.” He adjusted his glasses and read aloud, translating. “‘Even if you managed to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched; as for instance a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin has been anesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut until the blood flows.’” Werner closed the book. “He wrote that in the early 1900s. The imagery is very chilling, is it not, in the light of what followed….”

He replaced the book on the shelf, then drew a crisply ironed white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. He sat down heavily in his armchair. “So it is possible that the rebinding was careless because the binder was one of Schnitzler’s Jew Eaters.”

He sipped the last of his coffee. “But maybe it was none of these things. At that time, it wasn’t appreciated, what even the most dilapidated binding might be able to tell. Much information was lost when old bindings were stripped and discarded. Every time I have had to work on such a volume, it pains me to think of it. Most likely, if the book arrived in Vienna with clasps of some kind on the old binding, they would have been the original…but one cannot be sure….”

I nibbled at a small piece of a devastatingly rich cake called Waves of the Danube, which was Werner’s favorite. He rose, dusting the crumbs from his jacket, and shuffled to the telephone to call his contact at the museum. After an animated conversation in German, he put down the receiver. “The Verwaltungsdirektor can see you tomorrow. She says the papers from that era are archived in a depository some distance away from the museum. She will have them sent to her by noon tomorrow. When do you need to be in Boston?”

“I can stay another day or two,” I said.

“Good! You will call me, yes, and let me know if you find something?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. I got up to go. At the door, I leaned down—he was slightly stooped now and just a little shorter than I was—and kissed his papery cheek.

“Werner, forgive me for asking, but, are you quite well?”

“Liebchen, I am seventy-six. Very few of us are ‘quite well’ at that age. But I manage.”

He stood at the doorway as I walked down the stairs. I turned in the ornate entranceway, looked up, and blew him a kiss, wondering if I’d ever see him again.

Later that afternoon, I sat on the corner of my narrow bed in the pension near Peterskirche with the phone in my lap. I’d badly wanted to tell Ozren about the Parnassius. But when I pulled my notebook from my document case, the envelope with Alia’s brain scans had fallen out. I felt suddenly guilty about flouting Ozren’s will and butting into his private suffering. He’d probably go ballistic all over again if he found out what I’d done. He was right; it was none of my damn business. Much as I wanted to talk to him about the butterfly wing, the fact of my own deception hung over me like a wet sack. Finally, when it was well past the time I thought he’d be at the museum, I got up the nerve to call. He was there, working late. I blurted out the news about the book, and could hear the pleasure in his voice.

“There has always been a big question about where the haggadah was during World War II. We know that the kustos somehow kept it from the Nazis, but there were various stories: that he concealed it within the library among some Turkish documents, that he took it to a village in the mountains and hid it in a mosque. Your wing seems to be evidence for the mountains. I can look at the elevations and see if I can narrow down a village, and then ask around to see if he had any special ties in any of them. It would be very nice to know who we have to thank for hosting the haggadah during the war. Too bad no one ever asked him when he was alive. He suffered a lot, after the war, you know. The Communists charged him with being a Nazi collaborator.”

“But he saved the haggadah. How could he be a collaborator?”

“Not just the haggadah. He saved Jews, too. But a charge of collaboration was a useful way for the Communists to get rid of anyone who was too intellectual, too religious, too outspoken. He was all of those things. He fought with them a lot, especially when they wanted to tear down the Old City. Horrible urban renewal plans they had, for a while. He helped stop that madness, but it cost him. Six years in solitary confinement—absolutely terrible conditions. Then, suddenly, they pardoned him. That was how it went at that time. He got back his old job at the museum. But probably the time in jail destroyed his health. He died in the 1960s, after a long illness.”

I raked a hand through my hair, pulling out the pins that secured it.

“Six years in solitary. I don’t know how anyone copes with that.”

Ozren was silent for a moment. “No, I don’t know, either.”

“I mean, it wasn’t like he was a soldier or even a political activist…people like that, you think, well, they know what the stakes are. But he was just a librarian….”

As soon as I said that, I felt like an idiot. Ozren, after all, was “just” a librarian, and that hadn’t stopped him acting with guts when he’d had to.

“I mean…”

“I know what you mean, Hanna. So, tell me: what are your plans?”

“I’m going to check out the archives at the National Museum tomorrow. See if there’s anything about clasps. Then I’ll be in Boston for a couple of days and I can do some tests on the stains at a friend’s lab there.”

“Good. Let me know what you find out.”

“I will…. Ozren…”

“Hmmm?”

“How is Alia?”

“We’re almost finished Winnie-the-Pooh. I thought perhaps I’d read him some Bosnian fairy tales next.”

I hoped the static on the phone line masked the way my voice went all weird as I mumbled a reply.

Frau Zweig, the chief archivist at the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, was not at all what I expected. In her late twenties, she was dressed in high black boots, a teensy plaid skirt, and a tight, electric blue jersey that emphasized an enviable figure. Her dark hair was cropped in a jagged bob and streaked in various shades of red and yellow. There was a silver stud in the side of her retroussé nose.

“You are a friend of Werner?” she said, shocking me further by being the only Viennese I’d ever heard call him by his first name. “He’s a trip, isn’t he? With the velvet suits and that whole last-century thing he’s got going on. I just adore him.”

She led me down the back stairs of the museum, into the warren of basement rooms. The clip clip of her high-heeled boots echoed on the stone floor. “Sorry to set you up in such a dump,” she said, opening the door to a storeroom whose functional metal shelves were filled with the familiar accoutrements of exhibition spaces—bits of old frames and mounting boards, dismantled display cases, jars of preservative. “I would have put you in my office, but I’m in meetings there practically all day—staff review time, you know. Sooooo boring.” She rolled her eyes like an adolescent resisting a parental directive. “Austrian bureaucracy sucks, you know? I trained in New York City. It was hard to come back here to all this formality.” She wrinkled her small nose. “I wish I could move to Australia. Everyone in New York thought I was from there, you know? I’d say Austria and they’d go, ‘Oh! Such cute kangaroos!’ I let them think that. You guys have such a better reputation than we do. Everyone thinks, Australians: relaxed, funny. Austrians: Old World, stuffy. Should I move there, you think?” I didn’t want to disillusion her, so I didn’t let on that I’d never seen anyone quite as unstuffy as she was in a senior archivist position in Australia.

There was an archival box on the workbench in the center of the room. Frau Zweig took a box cutter and broke the seals. “Good luck,” she said. “Let me know if you need anything. And give Werner a big kiss from me.” She closed the door, but I could hear the clip of her boots receding down the corridor.

There were three folders in the box. I doubted anyone had looked at them in a hundred years. All of them were embossed with the museum seal, and the abbreviation K.u.K, which stood for Kaiserlich und Königlich—imperial and royal. The Hapsburgs had the title “emperor” in Austria and “king” in Hungary. I blew the dust off the first folder. It contained just two documents, both in Bosnian. I could tell that one of them was a copy of the bill of sale to the museum from the family named Kohen. The second was a letter, in very fair handwriting. Luckily, there were translations attached to it, probably made for the visiting scholars. I scanned the English version.

The author of the letter introduced himself as a teacher—hence the careful handwriting. He was, he said, an instructor of the Hebrew language at Sarajevo’s maldar. The translator had added a note explaining that this was the name for the elementary schools run by Sephardic Jews. “A son of the Kohen family, being my pupil, brought the haggadah to me. The family, recently bereaved of its breadwinner, desired to alleviate their financial strains by realizing something on the sale of the book…sought my opinion as to its value…. While I have seen dozens of haggadot, some of them very old, I have never seen illuminations of this kind…. On visiting the family to learn more, I found that there was no information regarding the haggadah beyond the fact that it had been in the Kohen family “many years.” The widow said her husband had related that the book had been used when his grandfather conducted seder, which would put it in Sarajevo as early as the mid-eighteenth century…. She said, and I was able to confirm, that the Kohen grandfather in question was a cantor who had trained in Italy….”

I sat back in the chair. Italy. The Vistorini inscription—Revisto per mi—put the haggadah in Venice in 1609. Had the Kohen grandfather trained in Venice? The Jewish community there would have been much larger and more prosperous than Bosnia’s, and the musical heritage of the city was rich. Had he perhaps acquired the book there?

I imagined the family, with its educated, cosmopolitan patriarch, gathered at the seder table; the son, growing from child to man, burying his father in due season and taking his place at the head of the table. Dying himself, probably suddenly, since his family had been left in such precarious circumstances. I felt sad for the widow, struggling to feed her kids, raising them alone. And then even sadder, realizing that the kids of those kids must have perished, because there wasn’t a single Jew by the name of Kohen left in Sarajevo after the Second World War.

I made a note to myself to look into exchanges between the Jewish communities of the Adriatic in the 1700s. Maybe there was a particular Italian yeshiva where Bosnian cantors went to study. It would be great to make an educated guess as to how the haggadah reached Sarajevo.

But none of this had to do with clasps, so I set that folder aside and reached for the next one. Herman Rothschild, ancient Near Eastern manuscripts specialist of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, unfortunately had handwriting a great deal less legible than the Hebrew teacher’s. His report, ten densely scribbled pages, might as well have been in Bosnian, it was so difficult for me to decipher. But soon enough I discovered that he hadn’t dealt with the binding at all. He had been so dazzled by the fact of the illuminations that his entire report was more of an art history treatise, an aesthetic evaluation of the miniatures in the context of Christian medieval art. I read through his pages, which were erudite and beautifully expressed. I copied down a few lines to quote in my own essay. But none of it was relevant to the matter of the clasps. I set the pages aside and rubbed my eyes. I hoped his French colleague had taken a broader view.

M. Martell’s report was a complete contrast to that of his British counterpart. In point form, very terse, it was entirely technical. I was yawning as I paged through it, the usual boring enumeration of quires and folios, until I got to the last page. And then I stopped yawning. Martell described, in technospeak, a worn-out, stained, and damaged binding of eroded, ragged kid. He noted that the linen threads were missing or frayed, so that most of the quires were no longer attached to the binding at all. Amazing and fortunate, according to what he described, that pages hadn’t been lost.

And then there were several short sentences that had been crossed out. I pulled the desk light down to see if I could read what M. Martell had had second thoughts about. No luck. I turned the paper over. Sure enough, the force of his hand had made a partially legible imprint under the strikeout. For several minutes, I puzzled over the letters I could decipher. Reading incomplete French words backward was tricky. But eventually I had most of it, and I knew why it had been crossed out.

“Pair nonfunctioning, oxidized Ag clasps. Double hook and eye, mechanically exhausted. After cleaning w. dilute NaHCO₃, reveal motif of flower enfolded by wing. Chasing = embossed + repoussé. No hallmark.” Here in this museum in 1894, M. Martell had worked his soft cloth and his small brushes over the old and blackened pieces of metal until the silver once again gleamed in the light. For just a moment, the very dispassionate M. Martell had lost his head.

“The clasps,” he had written, “are extraordinarily beautiful.”