People of the Book (13 page)

“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 NaHCO
₃
, 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.”

Vienna, 1894

“F
RÄULEIN
O
PERATOR
in Gloggnitz? May I have the honor to wish you a splendid good afternoon? I trust that your day has passed pleasantly so far. The party at this end of the wire, Herr Doktor Franz Hirschfeldt, presents his compliments and would like to extend to you a most grateful kiss on the hand for the favor of completing this connection.”

“And a very fine afternoon to you, my dear Fräulein Operator in Vienna. Thank you for your good wishes, and please accept in return my most sincere felicitations. I am happy to reply to your kind inquiry by remarking that my day has been very agreeable and I hope that you and your party are likewise enjoying the very delightful summer weather. As the humble representative of my party, may I venture to say that His Excellency the baron looks forward to the opportunity to add his good wishes and…”

Franz Hirschfeldt held the telephone away from his ear and tapped a pencil against his desk. He had no patience for this time-wasting stream of pleasantries. The words going through his mind were by no means so polite. He longed to cut in, to tell the women to shut up and make the damned connection. He tapped the pencil so hard against the desk’s nickel edge that a portion of it snapped, flew off, crossed the surgery, and landed on the white-sheeted examination table. Didn’t these women know there was a ten-minute time limit on calls out of the city? Sometimes, it seemed to Hirschfeldt as if the entire allotment was squandered before he even got his party on the line. But the last time he’d been short with an operator she’d dropped the connection entirely, so he held his peace.

It was just another small irritation, like the rub of the shirt collar that the laundress
would
overstarch, despite his express instructions. There were too many such annoyances in this city: the tedious obsequiousness, the fashion for strangulating collars. It provoked him that he had to be so constantly provoked. He was thirty-six years old, father of two attractive children, married to a woman he still admired, discreetly entertained by a series of mistresses who amused him. He was professionally successful, even prosperous. All this, and he lived in Vienna, which was undoubtedly one of the greatest cities of the world.

Hirschfeldt lifted his gaze from the desk and let it travel beyond the corniced window as the fräuleins continued to drape their compliments over the length of the telegraph wires. The city had been confident enough to raze its own medieval fortress walls and replace them with the welcoming new sweep of the Ringstrasse; pragmatic enough to embrace the industrialization that dusted the horizon with the haze of prosperity.

Here was his city, in all her magnificence, capital of an empire that stretched from the Tyrolean Alps, across the Bohemian Massif and the Great Hungarian Plain, to the Dalmatian coast and the wide golden lands of the Ukraine; a cultural hub that attracted the best intellects and the most creative artists—only last night his wife, Anna, had dragged him out to hear that man Mahler’s latest, very strange composition, and wasn’t he from Bohemia or somewhere of that sort? And the exhibition of paintings by Klimt that they’d looked in on—that was something different. Artistic license, he supposed one called it, but the man had a very odd conception of the female anatomy.

It wasn’t as if nothing moved in Vienna. On the contrary, the city pulsed with the frantic energy of its own great invention, the waltz. And yet…

And yet seven centuries of Hapsburg monarchy had encrusted the imperial capital with an excess of its own grandeur, buried it under twirls of plaster, mired it in swirls of thick cream, weighed it down with curlicues of gold braid (even the
dustmen
had epaulets!), and stupefied it by this stream—no—this cataract, of unctuous courtesies….

“…if it is still convenient for Herr Doktor Hirschfeldt to entertain the connection, His Excellency the baron would be only too pleased…”

Well, he
would
be pleased, thought Hirschfeldt. The fräulein was right about that. The baron would be very pleased. Pleased to hear that he had an inconveniently located boil and not a raging case of syphilis. No need for the near-toxic dose of mercury or the visit to the malaria ward to contract a fever torrid enough to burn out the worse infection. With any luck, the baron hadn’t yet made any foolish, guilty confessions to the baroness. The doctor had counseled him to take his weeping member away, alone, to his mountain lodge, until Hirschfeldt had a chance to examine his paramour.

The baron’s lover had turned out to be a naive girl whose young flesh was sound and whose story held up to Hirschfeldt’s tactful and astute interrogation. She had just left the surgery, her cornflower eyes red from a little cry. They always had a little cry; the infected from despair, the healthy from relief. But this girl had wept from humiliation. The sheet on the examination table still held the impression of her slender body. She’d been as pale as the sheet, and trembling, when Hirschfeldt had required her to spread her thighs. No hardened courtesan, this one. Hirschfeldt had felt her shame and handled her with delicacy. Sometimes, when prying into the details of a patient’s intimate life, one had to play the bully to get to the truth. But not with this delicate creature, who had been only too willing to recount the short history of her seductions, the first by a literary gentleman, who as it happened was also a patient of Hirschfeldt’s and known to him as a man with a jealous regard for his physical soundness. After no very lengthy affair, he had passed her on to the attentions of the baron.

Hirschfeldt had taken care to make a note of her address in his private diary. Perhaps, after a decent interval, when there could be no question of breaching the doctor-patient relationship, he might arrange an encounter. One could, in this city, do a great deal worse.

The baron’s rumbling, bluff baritone finally vibrated the wire, replacing the twittering of the fräuleins. Hirschfeldt, however, watched his words. The fräuleins were notorious eavesdroppers.

“Baron, good day. I just wanted to let you know at the earliest opportunity that the plant we were trying to identify is very likely, almost certainly, not the invasive weed you were concerned about.”

Down the line, he heard the baron exhale.

“Hirschfeldt, thank you. Thank you for letting me know so promptly. It is a very great relief to me.”

“Don’t mention it, Excellency. But that plant still requires some cultivation”—the boil should be lanced—“and we need to attend to it.”

“I will see you as soon as I return to the city. And thank you, as ever, for your discretion.”

Hirschfeldt put down the phone. Discretion. That was what they paid him for. All the aristocrats, their kid gloves covering the rashes on their palms. All the so-respectable bourgeoisie terrified by the canker sores pulsing in their pantaloons. He knew very well that many of them would not have a Jew defile their drawing room, or even keep him company over a coffee. But they were only too pleased to entrust to him the care of their private parts and the confidences of their private lives. Hirschfeldt had been the first in town to advertise the availability of a “sequestered” waiting room, for the use of those with “secret diseases.” But that was when he had first raised his shingle. It was many years since he had needed to advertise.

Discretion: a valuable commodity in this city, capital of carnality, where scandal and gossip were the fuels that stoked the social engine. And
so
much to gossip about. Six years since the crown prince and his paramour had done away with themselves in the hunting lodge at Mayerling, and still one never tired of new rumors regarding that tragedy, or farce, depending on one’s degree of romanticism or cynicism. Of course, the royal family’s determination to hush up the affair had only fanned the blaze of gossip, as such attempts ever will. The Hapsburgs may have had the power to haul off Mary Vetsera’s corpse in the middle of the night with a broom handle shoved up her back to disguise the fact that she was forty hours dead. But while they could erase her name from the Austrian press, they could not keep foreign newspapers from finding their way across the border and under the seats of Vienna’s cabs, where the cabbie would, for a stiff fee, deliver them to the avid eyes of his passengers.

Hirschfeldt, who trained under the royal physician, had known the crown prince, Rudolf. He had liked him. They were the same age, and of a similar liberal bent. In their few meetings, he had sensed how thwarted the prince was, how frustrated by a role that was never more than ceremonial. It was no life for a grown man, being kept out of the counsels of state, required only as a dress dummy at banquets and balls. Waiting for a destiny that shimmered and retreated each time he attempted to approach it. And yet Hirschfeldt could not condone the ridiculous suicide pact. What was it Dante wrote, about the pope who abdicated his throne to become a contemplative and yet is condemned to one of the lowest circles of hell? Something about being punished for having turned his back on a great opportunity to do good in the world…. And ever since the prince’s shocking death, Vienna had been in almost imperceptible decline—a decline of mood rather than matter. But with no liberal face left in the Hofburg to stare them down, the
Judenfressers
grew louder year by year.

Who would have thought that a single suicide—or a double suicide, more properly—could put an entire city in a sour temper? Vienna valued its suicides, especially those that were dramatic, conducted with some flourish—like the young woman who had decked herself in full bridal regalia before flinging herself from a speeding train, or the circus artist who, in the midst of his performance, had cast away his pole and leaped from the high wire to his death. The audience had applauded, because he jumped with such verve that all believed it was part of his act. It was only as the blood began to pool under his shattered body that the cheers turned to gasps and the women turned their faces away, understanding that this man had added another digit to a suicide rate already the highest in Europe.

Suicide and sexual diseases. Two great killers of the Viennese, from the highest born to the lowest.

Hirschfeldt finished his notes on the baron’s case and called on his secretary to send in the next patient. He glanced at his daybook. Ah yes. Herr Mittl, the bookbinder. Poor fellow.

“Herr Doktor, Kapitän Hirschfeldt is here to see you. Should I send him in first?”

Hirschfeldt uttered an almost inaudible groan of irritation. Why was David bothering him at the clinic? He hoped his self-absorbed brother had had tact enough to stay clear of the sequestered waiting room. Herr Mittl was a nervous, highly proper little man who had paid a high price for some momentary indiscretion in his distant youth. He felt the shame of his condition deeply and as a result had been reluctant to seek treatment in the early stages of his disease, when there might have been some hope. He, of all people, would be mortified to encounter an officer of the Hoch-und Deutschmeister.

“No, give the captain my compliments but ask him to wait. Herr Mittl has troubled to make an appointment. He must have precedence.”

“Very well, Herr Doktor, but…”

“But what?” Hirschfeldt ran his finger under his collar, which was even more stiffly starched than usual.

“He is bleeding.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake. Show him in.”

How typical, he thought, as his half brother, a foot taller but a full thirteen years younger, strode into the surgery clutching a piece of red-stained silk to the side of his sculpted jaw. Little ruby orbs of blood glinted among the blond hairs of his wide mustache.

“David, what in the name of God have you done now? Another duel? You’re not a youth anymore. Why on earth can’t you learn to control your temper? Who, this time?”

Hirschfeldt had risen from behind his desk to lead his brother toward the examining table. Then he remembered he had not had the nurse in to change the sheet. Better safe than sorry. He propelled him instead to a chair by the window and then carefully lifted the saturated silk—a fine cravat, ruined—away from the gash.

“David.” His voice was heavy with reproof. He ran a finger over an old, white cicatrix that inscribed an arc above his brother’s right eyebrow. “One dueling scar is, I suppose, excusable, even perhaps, in
your
circles, desirable. But two. Two is positively excessive.” He applied alcohol to the new wound as his brother winced. There would be a scar, no doubt. The rapier cut was short but quite deep. Hirschfeldt judged it would heal without stitches if the sides of the wound were taped together and bandaged firmly. But would his vain brother leave the bandage in place? Probably not. He turned to reach for a suture.

“Are you going to tell me? Who?”

“No one you’d know.”

“Oh? You would be surprised whom I know. Syphilis is no respecter of army rank.”

“It wasn’t an officer.”

Hirschfeldt paused, the bright point of the suture needle poised above his brother’s flesh. He turned his brother’s face toward his own. A pair of sleepy eyes, the same dark blue as the young captain’s well-cut jacket, gazed back at him insouciantly.

“A civilian? David. You go too far. This could be disastrous.”

“I don’t think so. In any case, I couldn’t abide the way he said my name.”

“Your name?”

“Oh, come on, Franz. You know very well how some people pronounce Jewish names. How they can make each syllable into a little one-act farce of derisiveness.”

“David, you are oversensitive. You see slights everywhere.”

“You weren’t there, Franz. You can’t stand in judgment on me in this matter.”

“No, I wasn’t there, this time. But I’ve seen it all before.”

“Well, even if I was oversensitive, even if I was mistaken in the matter of the name, what happened next proved otherwise. When I called him out, he proclaimed that I was in no position to demand satisfaction, being a Jew.”

“Whatever did he mean?”

“He was referring, of course, to the Waidhofen manifesto.”

“The what?”