People of the Book (15 page)

Perhaps it was the very festival commemorated in the book he had been given to rebind. He didn’t know. Nor did he care. He was glad to have the work, even if it was a Jewish book. Typical that they would give him a
Jewish
book, destined for the obscurity of a provincial museum. He, who once had been entrusted with the gems of the imperial collection, the finest psalters, the most beautiful Books of Hours…. Well, it was months since the museum had sent anything at all his way, so it was no use dwelling on the past. He would do his best. He’d started on the boards for the new binding, cut them, grooved them for the clasps. The book must have had a remarkable binding once, judging by those clasps. They were as finely wrought as anything in the imperial collection. Four hundred years ago, and some Jew was already rich. Always knew how to get money, them. Why not he? Bring the binding back to that standard, that was what he must strive for. Impress the museum director. Prove he wasn’t ready for the scrap heap. Get more work. He must get more work. Scrape together the funds for the Jew doctor’s cure. Of course, the doctor probably lied about the cost. He wouldn’t charge another Jew such a usurious rate, Mittl would wager on it. Bloodsuckers, all of them, growing fat on Christian suffering.

Bitter, frightened, in pain, Mittl made his way along the street, dreading the moment he would have to turn into the
platz.
The small square might as well be the wastes of the Sahara, so difficult to make the crossing. He hugged the periphery of the square, staying close to the walls of the buildings, grateful for fence railings to grasp against a sudden gust of wind that might topple him. At last he arrived at his own building. He did battle with the heavy door, and then leaned, exhausted, against the newel post at the foot of the stairs. He rested there for a long moment, gathering his wind and his will, before the slow ascent. He feared the stairs. He saw himself dead at the base of them, his head pulped, a broken leg twisted grotesquely. He clutched at the banister, pulling himself up hand over hand like an alpinist.

The apartment was dark, and smelled bad. The usual scents of leather and size were overlaid with ranker aromas of unwashed clothes and rancid meat. He lit a single gas lamp—all he could afford—and unwrapped the slice of mutton his daughter had left for him, oh, several days ago. Why did the girl neglect him so? She was all he had, since her mother…since Lise…

With the thought of his wife, guilty regret swept over him. What a wedding present he had given her. Did his daughter know? He couldn’t bear it if his daughter knew. But perhaps that’s why she had grown distant, helping him only as far as mean duty demanded. Probably he disgusted her. Certainly he disgusted himself. Like the meat. Rotten. Rotting inside. The mutton had a greenish tinge, and was slimy to the touch. He ate it anyway. There was nothing else.

He had intended to start again on the work. He wiped his hands on a piece of rag and turned toward his workbench, where the book in its damaged binding lay waiting for his attentions. Years, centuries, since anyone had repaired it. A chance for him to show his skill. Do it quickly, impress them, so that they might send him more commissions. Dazzle them. That was what he must do. But the light was so poor, and the pains traveled up and down his arms without respite. He sat down, and pulled the lamp close. He picked up the knife, and then placed it down again. What was it he was supposed to do? What was the first thing? Remove the boards? Release the quires? Prepare the size? He had rebound hundreds of books—valuable, rare books. But suddenly he couldn’t recall a sequence of steps that had been as natural to him as breathing.

He put his face in his hands. Yesterday, he hadn’t been able to remember how to make the tea. Such a simple thing. A thing he’d done without thinking, several times a day, most of the days of his life. But yesterday it had loomed at him like the frightening staircase, too many steps. He had put the tea leaves into the cup, and the sugar into the teapot, and scalded himself with the water.

If only the Jew doctor could be persuaded to give him the cure. He had to save what was left of his mind, what was left of himself. There must be something other than money he could offer him. No. Nothing. Jews were only interested in money. There must be something he could sell. His wife’s wedding ring. But his daughter had that; hard to ask her for it back. Only a drop in the ocean anyway. Not such a very fine ring. She deserved better, poor Lise. Poor dead Lise.

How could he think, how could he work, with this worry constantly gnawing him? He would lie down, perhaps, for just a little while, and then he would be better. Then he would remember, and be able to go on.

Florien Mittl woke, fully dressed, when the light of late morning finally won its struggle with the grime that coated his window. He lay there, blinking, trying to collect his scattered thoughts. He remembered the book. Then he remembered the dread of the evening before. How was it that he could remember
not
remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could a man misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go? His thoughts were like an army in retreat, ceding ever more territory to the enemy, his illness. No, not a retreat. Not lately. More like a rout. He turned his head stiffly. A beam of sunlight lay like a stripe of yellow ribbon across the workbench. It hit the sad, tattered, untouched cover of the book. And then it flared on the freshly polished silver of the clasps.

Hirschfeldt did not fast on the Day of Atonement. Racial solidarity was one thing; he had made a dutiful appearance at the synagogue, nodded to those to whom he needed to nod, and slipped out at the first seemly moment. But unhealthy dietary practices were something else. He thought such customs superstitions from a bygone, primitive age. Generally, Anna agreed with him. But this year she had fasted, creeping around the flat as the day wore on with a hand pressed to her temple. Dehydration headache was Hirschfeldt’s silent diagnosis.

As the light faded, the children huddled together on the balcony, waiting for the glimmer of the third evening star, which signaled the end of the fast. The two of them had gone without sustenance only the short hour since nursery tea, but they loved the semblance of ritual. There were several squeals, several false alarms, before the moment when the silver trays laden with good things—poppy-seed cakes and sweet crescent pastries—officially became permitted fare.

Hirschfeldt placed a small square of torte, Anna’s favorite, on a plate. He poured some cool water from the silver ewer into a crystal glass and carried these things to his wife. His rage at her had subsided quite suddenly. So suddenly that he had surprised himself, giving himself immense plaudits for his magnanimity, his maturity, his sophistication. He had not thought of himself as quite such a man of the world. That he had returned home the morning after his discovery to find her tearful, penitent, and full of pleadings, this had surely helped. But the odd thing was that the idea of her, desired by another, had rekindled his own passion. The erotic appetite was a fascinating thing, he mused, as he kissed a sweet crumb from the corner of her hungry lips. That man Freud, whose rooms were so close to his own, he must get to know him better. Some of his writings were full of insight. He had barely thought of Rosalind, away in Baden, or the girl with cornflower eyes.

“I don’t know, Herr Mittl. I’ve never taken a payment like this before….”

“Please, Herr Doktor. I have removed them from the Mittl family Bible, you must see they are very fine….”

“Very fine, Herr Mittl. Lovely. Not that I know anything about silversmithy, but anyone can appreciate the detail in this…work of a real craftsman…an artist, indeed.”

“They are pure silver, Herr Doktor, not plate.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it, Herr Mittl. That’s not the issue. It’s just that I…we…Jews in general, we don’t have family Bibles. Our Torah is kept in the synagogue, and in any case, it is a scroll….”

Mittl frowned. He wanted to blurt out that the clasps had come off a Jewish book, but he could hardly reveal that fact without exposing himself as a thief. Was it a measure of his madness, or of his desperation, that he had persuaded himself no one from the museum would miss the pair of clasps? If they did, he had determined to assert that the clasps had never come to him. He would throw suspicion on the foreign scholars instead.

But this negotiation was not going well. He squirmed in his seat. He had been convinced that the doctor, in his avarice, would fall on the bright metal as instinctively as a bowerbird.

“Even you Jews must have some kind of…of prayer book?”

“Yes, of course we do. I, for example, have a siddur, for services, and we have a haggadah, for Passover, but I really don’t think either of them is equal to silver clasps. Pedestrian editions, I’m afraid. Contemporary bindings. One should have better, I suppose. I’ve often meant to—”

Hirshfeldt stopped himself in midsentence. Damn it. The little man was going to cry again. A woman’s tears were one thing. He was used to them; he did not mind them. They could even be charming, in a way. One enjoyed consoling a woman. But a man’s tears. Hirschfeldt cringed. The first time he had seen a man really weep was his father, the night his mother died. It had been harrowing. He had believed his father impregnable. For him, it had been a night of double loss. His father’s uncontained grief had turned his own childish tears into a howling, heaving fit of hysteria. He and his father had never treated each other quite the same way, after that night.

And this, too, was harrowing. Hirshfeldt had unconsciously wrapped his hands around his ears, trying to shut out the sound of it. Horrible. How desperate Mittl must be, to weep like this. How desperate, to have vandalized his own family Bible.

And then, quite suddenly, Hirschfedlt stepped out from behind the wall that years of training and experience had erected. He allowed himself to be exposed to the broken, sobbing figure in front of him, and to be moved, not as a doctor is moved by a patient, to a safe and serviceable sympathy, but as a human being who allows himself full empathy with the suffering of another.

“Please, Herr Mittl. There is no need for this. I will send to Dr. Ehrlich in Berlin and request a course of his serum for you. We can begin the treatments early next week. I can’t promise you results, but we can hope….”

“Hope?” Florien Mittl looked up and took the handkerchief the doctor held out to him. Hope. That was enough. That was everything.

“You mean it? You will?”

“Yes, Herr Mittl.” As he saw the transfiguration of Mittl’s narrow, rodent face, Hirschfeldt felt an even greater surge of magnanimity. He took the clasps in his hand and stood. He walked around his desk to where Mittl sat, breathing raggedly, dabbing at his eyes. He was about to hand the clasps back, to tell him to restore them to their rightful place.

But then the light gleamed on the silver. Such delicate roses. Rosalind. He needed a farewell gift for her when she returned from Baden. One must begin and end an affair with some panache, even if one hasn’t behaved impeccably throughout. He shifted the clasps in his hand and studied them more closely. Yes, a skilled jeweler—he knew just the man—could make a pair of earrings from the roses, a perfect pair of fine studs. Rosalind, whose beauty was of a large and overstated variety, preferred such subtle, smaller pieces for her jewels.

What did he owe to the Mittl family Bible, after all? At least it existed. Not like the mountains of Talmuds and other Jewish books consigned to flames over centuries by order of Herr Mittl’s church. What did it matter if it had no clasps? Ehrlich charged an exorbitant sum for his serum. Earrings for Rosalind were only a partial recompense for what he would have to spend. He looked again at the clasps. He noted that the feathers, made to enclose the roses, had a curve that suggested an enfolding wing. It would be a shame if one did not use those, too. The jeweler could make a second pair of earrings, perhaps. For an instant, he thought of delicate, birdlike limbs, and cornflower eyes….

No. Not for her. Not yet. Perhaps never. For the first time in years, he felt no urgency for a mistress. He had Anna. He had only to think of her, and imagine a strange hand touching her, to be overcome with desire. He smiled. How very appropriate. A pair of wings, to gleam amid the dark hair of his own Fallen Angel.

Vienna, Spring 1996

M
Y HANDS WERE SHAKING
as I put down the report. Where were they, these silver clasps, so beautiful that they’d moved a dry old stick like Martell? And who’d crossed out his notes?

My mind raced through scenarios. The clasps had been loose on the binding when it arrived. Black and encrusted, so that their value wasn’t immediately apparent. Why had the Kohen family not kept them polished? Perhaps they never realized that the black metal was silver. “Nonfunctioning,” “mechanically exhausted,” Martell had said, which probably meant they weren’t hooking together, serving their original purpose of keeping the parchments pressed flat. In any case, they would have been removed by Martell for cleaning, and handed on to the binder already detached from the book, to be fixed onto the new binding. That’s if they
had
been handed on. Maybe Martell, who had fancied them so much, had boosted them. But no: that couldn’t be. The boards had grooves. The binder had prepared for clasps. So Martell wasn’t the villain.

The clasps had gone to the bindery. Or maybe not: maybe they’d gone to a silversmith for repair of the mechanism. Had they come back to the museum? That was the next question. I pulled out the last file in the box.

There were ten documents, all in German. One seemed to be a bill, or an invoice. The handwriting was awful, but there was a signature. To have a name, it’s what you pray for. A name is like the beginning of the ball of thread that’ll lead you through the labyrinth. There were marginal notes scribbled on the bill, in a different, much clearer hand. The other documents were correspondence between the Staatsmuseum of Vienna and the Landesmuseum of Bosnia. Looking at the dates, I could see it spanned several years. It seemed to be about arrangements for the return of the haggadah, but beyond that I was in the dark.

I had to find Frau Zweig. It wasn’t really the done thing, to walk around someone else’s museum with one of their archive boxes under your arm, but I couldn’t leave the documents unattended, and I couldn’t wait. When I found my way to her office, she was deep in conversation with a small gray man—gray hair, gray suit, even his tie was gray. In the corridor, a pimply youth, clad all in black, was waiting his turn to see her. Frau Zweig looked like a rainbow lorikeet locked up by mistake in an aviary of pigeons. When she saw me hovering, she gestured that she’d be only a few more minutes.

True to her word, she ushered out the gray man with some dispatch, and asked young Mr. Black to kindly wait. We went into her office.

I closed the door. “Ohh,” she said. “I hope that means you have found a
scandale
! Believe me, this place needs one!”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said, “but I have established that there were silver clasps on the book when it got here, and according to all sources, they weren’t on the book when it left.”

I quickly summarized what I’d read and then handed her the documents in German. She pulled out a pair of reading glasses with lime green frames and perched them on her ski-jump nose, just above the stud. The invoice was, as I’d hoped, from the binder, and there was a name, or part of one. “Something or other Mittl. The signature is terrible, I can’t make out the first name. But Mittl…Mittl…I’ve seen it before. I think he was a binder the museum used quite a bit, at one period…. I seem to remember it in connection with the imperial collections. I can easily check that. We just computerized the entire records last year.” She turned to the keyboard on her desk and tapped away. “Interesting. Florien Mittl—the Christian name is Florien—completed more than forty commissions for the museum, according to this. But guess what?” She paused dramatically and pushed herself back from the computer, twirling in her office chair. “The haggadah was the last.” She turned back to the invoice. “This note, here in the margin, is interesting…. It’s someone quite senior, from the tone of it. He is directing that the invoice not be paid ‘until outstanding matters are resolved.’”

She scanned the other letters. “These are weird. This one is a long list of excuses why the haggadah can’t be returned to Bosnia at this time. Pretty flimsy excuses, most of them…. It seems like the Staatsmuseum is stalling on the return of the book, and the Bosnians are…how do you say? Piss? Pissed?”

“Australians say ‘pissed off.’
Pissed
means drunk.
Piss
is alcohol. To take the piss—that means to send someone up, make fun of them.” (Why was I telling her all this?)

“So the Bosnians. They are very
pissed off
about it. Between the lines, here is my guess: Mittl stole the clasps, or lost them, and it cost him his commissions from the museum. The museum hushed it up so as not to upset the Bosnians. But then they had to stall returning the book for as long as possible, hoping that by the time it went back no one would notice that a pair of broken old black clasps had been left off the new binding.”

“In which case, they were lucky,” I mused. “History helped them out quite a bit, I’d say. By the time the book finally went home, everyone who knew anything was either dead or preoccupied….”

“Speaking of preoccupied, I have to deal with these so-stupid evaluations…. When do you leave for the States? I can look into Mittl for you, yes?”

“Yes, please, that’d be great.”

“And tonight, please let me take you out to a part of Vienna where you can’t get Sacher torte and I can absolutely guarantee that you won’t hear a waltz.”

Thanks to Frau Zweig’s late-night tour of S-and-M clubs, jazz basements, and conceptual art studios (one artist, naked and trussed like a chicken, was suspended from the ceiling, and the big event of the night was when he peed on someone in the audience below), I slept all the way to Boston. Waste of a firstclass ticket. I might as well have been back there in cattle class, as per bloody usual.

I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It’s the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as “Massholes.” But there’s a whole other reason not to drive there: the tunnels. It’s really hard to avoid them; you’re always being one-wayed or no-left-turned into their gaping maw. In general, I don’t have anything against tunnels. My cowardice usually doesn’t extend that far. I don’t have any trouble with the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, for instance. It’s bright down there, clean and shiny, confidence inspiring. But when you go into Boston tunnels, they’re really creepy. They’re dim, and the tiles are leak stained, as if Boston Harbor is oozing its way through flaws in substandard concrete that some Irish mafia conned the city into buying. They look like they’re going to crack open any minute, like something in a Spielberg movie, and the last thing you hear will be the roar of freezing water. My imagination can’t handle it.

The T is the oldest subway system in the United States, and I figure if it has lasted this long, it must have been built right in the first place. The train I took from the airport gradually filled with students. They all seemed to be wearing T-shirts with messages on them. Signaling each other like fireflies. NERD PRIDE, said one, and on the back: A WELL-ROUNDED PERSON HAS NO POINT. Another one: THERE ARE ONLY 10 KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND THE BI-NARY SYSTEM AND THOSE WHO DON’T. Both got off at the MIT stop.

Sometimes, I think if you took all the universities and all the hospitals out of greater Boston, you’d be able to fit what’s left into about six city blocks. Harvard straddles both sides of the river and segues into MIT on one side and Boston University on the other. All three campuses are absolutely huge. Then there are Brandeis, Tufts, Wellesley, and a bunch of little ones like Lesley and Emerson and dozens more you’ve hardly heard of. You can’t spit without hitting a PhD. And I was here because of one of them: the bezillionaire who had paid for my ticket from London was an MIT math genius who’d invented an algorithm that led to some kind of toggle switch that was used in every silicon chip. Or something like that. I’d never quite gotten it when someone explained it to me, and I’d never actually talked to him face-to-face. He’d arranged for the Houghton librarians to show me the codex he was interested in, and I was there when the library opened and able to do my appraisal in plenty of time to make my other meeting of the morning, with my mother.

She had left a terse message on my answering machine at home in Sydney, explaining that her only free moment was a brief tea break the very morning I flew in. I could just hear her brain ticking: “Maybe she won’t call in to her machine, and I can get out of seeing her.” But I checked my messages before I left Vienna. I grinned to myself as I listened to her voice, tentative and distracted. “There is no escape, Captain Kirk,” I muttered. “You
will
be seeing me in Boston.”

Nevertheless, it was a job locating her. Like the universities, the big hospitals in Boston merge into one another—Mass General, Brigham and Women’s, Dana Faber—it’s like a giant industrial park devoted to illness. The conference center was an offshoot of the complex, purpose-built for humongous medical meetings. I had to ask directions four times before I finally found the lecture theater where she had said she would be. I’d picked up a program at the registration desk and saw she had one of the coveted keynote addresses, scheduled when no one else was speaking. Lesser lights had to compete for attention with other doctors’ presentations, while the lowliest made do with a poster about their research displayed with dozens of others in a big hall.

Mum’s talk was humbly titled “How I Do It: Giant Aneurysms.” I slipped into the back row. She was at the podium, stylish in a cream cashmere dress tailored to emphasize her athletic figure. She paced as she talked, showing off her long legs. Almost everyone else in the auditorium was a balding guy in a dark rumpled suit. She had them transfixed. They were either staring at her, rapt, or scribbling like mad in their notebooks as she unfolded the fruits of her most recent research, which had to do with a new technique she’d pioneered. Instead of opening heads, she snaked a catheter up into the brain and shot little metal coils into the aneurysms, blocking them off and preventing them from bursting.

She was one of the rare breed who still did this kind of “bench and bedside” medicine, developing a technique in the lab, then taking it to the OR. Personally, I think she liked the austerity of the science a lot better than dealing with actual patients, whom she tended to see not as human beings with ambitions and affections so much as complex data sets and problem lists. But she also loved the strut and swagger of being a top surgeon, a top
woman
surgeon.

“You think it’s for me?” she’d said one day when, in the middle of some blue or other, I’d accused her of loving the way everyone at the hospital kowtows to her. “It’s not for me. It’s for every nurse or female intern who has had to put up with being belittled and demeaned, having her backside fondled or her intelligence questioned. It’s for you, Hanna. And all the women of your generation, who’ll never have to be harassed and leered at in a workplace again, because women like me struggled, and survived. And I run things now, and I don’t let anyone forget it.”

I don’t know how true it was, the whole altruism riff, but I know she believed it. Anyway, I loved to see her taking questions in a setting like this, although I averted my eyes from the viscous, slimy things up on the big screen behind her. She was in complete control of her data and responded to what she considered to be good points or queries with a gracious eloquence. But woe to anyone who asked something half-baked, or questioned her conclusions. She would fix them with this charming smile, but you could hear the chain saw revving. Without a hint of anger or arrogance in her voice, she’d dismember them. I really couldn’t bear to watch her do it to students, but this room full of blokes was another matter. They were supposedly her peers, and therefore fair game. She certainly knew how to work a crowd. The applause, when she finished, was more like the sound at a rock arena than a medical convention.

I slipped out while they were still clapping and waited on a bench in the hall. She emerged surrounded by a scrum of admirers. I got up and moved into her line of sight. I was going to join in the chorus of compliments about her great presentation, but when she spotted me her face actually fell, and I realized that she really had been hoping I wouldn’t make it. It was almost comical, the way her expression changed, and then changed back again as she remembered to rearrange it.

“Hanna. You made it. How nice.” Then, as soon as the other doctors had melted away, “But how pale you look, darling. You really should
try
to get outside sometimes.”

“Well, I’m, you know, working….”

“Of course you are, darling.” Her blue eyes, nicely made up with some kind of dusky brown shadow, traveled from my boots to the top of my head and back again. “We all work, don’t we? It doesn’t mean we can’t get out and exercise. If
I
can find the time, dear, then
you
should certainly be able to. How is your latest tatty little book, anyway? Fixed all the dog-eared pages?”

I took a deep breath and let that one go right through to the keeper. I didn’t want to piss her off till I got what I’d come for. She looked at her watch. “I’m so sorry I don’t have more time. We’ll have to get tea in the cafeteria, I’m afraid. I have meetings just back-to-back and then I simply
have
to make an appearance at the predinner drinks this evening. They’ve got some
Nigerian
writer, Wally Something, for the keynote speaker. Just because the current president of the Neurosurgical Congress is a Nigerian, we have to have some obscure African, in Boston, when there are probably a dozen decent local writers who at least speak English that they could have asked.”

“Wole Soyinka did get the Nobel prize for literature, Mum. And, actually, they do speak English in Nigeria.”

“Well, you would know that sort of thing, of course.” She had a hand on the back of my jacket and was already propelling me down the hallway.