People of the Book (37 page)

“Hanna.” Ozren’s voice was low. “If we do these things, we will be creating an international incident over an allegation that both Dr. Heinrich, whose expertise is without question, and I, myself, believe to be false and without foundation. Because of the special tensions here, once such an allegation is made, certain people will chose to believe it, even if it proves groundless. You will be sowing intercommunal dissent over the very artifact that was meant to stand for the survival of our multiethnic ideal. And you will be making a fool of yourself, ruining your professional reputation. If you are completely and utterly convinced that you know better than Werner Heinrich, then go ahead, inform the UN. But the museum will not support you.” He paused, then delivered the hammer blow. “And I will not support you.”

I couldn’t talk anymore. I just looked from one to the other of them, and then at the book. I let my hand rest on the binding. The tips of my fingers sought the small area where I’d repaired the worn leather. I could just feel the minute ridge where the new fibers melded with the old.

I turned away then and walked out of the room.

Jerusalem, 2002

I
AM AN OLD WOMAN NOW,
and mornings are hard for me. I wake early these days. I think it’s the cold that wakes me, stirring up the ache in my bones. People don’t realize how cold it is here in winter. Not like the cold in the mountains of Sarajevo, but cold enough. This apartment was part of an Arab’s house, before ’48, and the old stones suck the chill into their crevices. I can’t afford much heat. But maybe I just wake early because I am afraid to sleep too long. I know that one day, not so very many days from now, the cold will creep out of the stones and into my body where it lies in this narrow bed. And then I’ll never get up again.

And what of it? I have had enough. More than my measure. Anyone who was born when I was, where I was, what I was, cannot complain of a death that will come, as mine will, in its due season.

I get a pension, but it is small, so I still go to work for a few hours each week, mostly on Shabbat. It’s the easiest day to find work if you’re not religious. The Orthodox won’t work that day, and people with families want to enjoy the day off. Years ago, I used to have to compete with the Arabs for Shabbat work, but since the intifada, there are always too many curfews, too many checkpoints, so they’re late or absent half the time, and nobody wants to hire them. I feel sorry for them, I do. I feel sorry that they have to suffer so.

In any case, the job I have now, they wouldn’t want it. Not many people would. For myself, I have made my peace with the dead. The photographs of the women standing on the edge of the pit that will be their grave, the lamp shade made of human skin, these things don’t bother me anymore.

I clean the display cases and I dust the frames and I think about the women. It is good to think about them. To remember them. Not naked and terrified, as they are in the photos, but as they were: at home, beloved, doing ordinary things in ordinary lives.

I think, also, about the person whose skin is stretched across the lamp shade. It’s the first thing you see when you walk into the museum. I’ve watched some visitors, when they realize what it is, just turn around and walk out. They are too upset to go on. Me, when I look at it, I feel almost a kind of tenderness. It could be my mother’s skin, for all I know. If things had been just a little different, it could have been mine.

Cleaning those rooms is, for me, a privilege. I can say that, old and slow as I am, I clean them perfectly. When I am done, there is not a speck of dust or scuff on the floor or a smear of a fingerprint. It’s what I can do for them.

I used to come here, even before I got this job. Not to the museum, but to the garden, because Serif and Stela Kamal have a plaque there, in the Garden of the Righteous, their names among those of the other Gentiles who risked so much to save people like me.

I never saw them again, after that late-summer evening in the mountains outside Sarajevo. I was so afraid, that night, that I didn’t even say a proper good-bye. Didn’t even thank them.

The man they took me to that night was a Ustashe officer, of all things. He was secretly married to a Jewish woman, and so he helped people like me, when he could. It was simple for him to arrange everything for me. I went south with proper papers and spent the rest of the war safely, in the Italian zone. After, when Tito came to power, I was an important person for the first and last time in my life. For a few months, we were big socialist heroes, the young ones who had been Partisans with him in the mountains. The fact that he’d betrayed us, abandoned us to die out there, all that was forgotten and not mentioned, even by us. I got a job in the new army, assigned to work as an aide in a home for wounded Partisans in an old building by the sea in Split. That was where I found Branko, who had been our leader and then left us to die. He’d been shot, in the hip and the gut. He looked awful. He could barely walk and he was constantly falling ill with infections.

I married him. Don’t ask me why. I was a stupid girl. But when you have no one left, no one at all who remembers you, anyone who has a shared past with you becomes special. Even someone like Branko.

I knew I had made a mistake well before we reached our first wedding anniversary. His wound had left him damaged, as a man, and it was as if he blamed me somehow for that. He wanted me to do all kinds of strange things to satisfy him. I’m not a prude. I really tried, but I was so young and innocent, in that way, at least…. Well, it was hard on me, to do some of the things he wanted. If he had been the least bit tender, it might have felt different. But he was a bully, even from his sickbed, and most of the time I just felt used.

When I read in the newspaper that Serif Kamal was to go on trial as a Nazi collaborator, I told Branko I was going to Sarajevo to testify on his behalf. I remember how he looked at me. He was propped up in an armchair by the window. We had a room of our own in the married barracks because of my job, and because of his status as an injured hero. He leaned forward, and tapped his cane on the floorboards. It was summer, very hot. The light poured in through the narrow window that looked out over the port.

“No,” he said. There was glare off the dark blue water, and I had to raise my hand to shade my eyes.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“You are not going to Sarajevo. You are a solider in the Yugoslav army, as am I. You will not jeopardize our position by standing against the will of the party. If they have seen fit to bring charges against this man, then they have their reasons. It is not for the likes of you to question them.”

“But Effendi Kamal was no collaborator! He hated the Nazis! He saved me, Branko, after you had turned your back on me. I wouldn’t be alive today if he hadn’t risked so much—”

He cut me off. He had a loud voice and he used it, anytime I disagreed with him, even about something as small as whether his boots needed blacking or not. The walls were thin in the barracks, and he knew how I hated our neighbors hearing his abuse.

He was used to me giving in, the moment he raised his voice. But that one time, I stood my ground. I said he could bellow at me all he liked, I would do what was right. He swore and he cursed, and when I still would not yield, he flung his cane at me. Weak as he was, his aim was good, and the metal tip caught me just below my jaw and stung.

In the end, he arranged to have me put under surveillance while the trial was on. I could go to my work and come home, but always guarded. It was demeaning. I had no idea what he’d told them, what excuse he’d given to have me watched. But he succeeded in keeping me in Split. There was no way I could get to Sarajevo.

I didn’t think I had any tears left in those days. I’d spent so many during the war. So many more just after, when I learned the fates of my mother and father, my little sister, my auntie. Auntie’s weak heart gave out in the truck taking them to the Kruscia transit camp. Dora died there, starved and weak, two months later. My mother kept herself alive through all that grief almost to the end of the war. But then they sent her to Auschwitz. I thought I had spent all the tears I had. But I cried that week, for Serif, who would surely be hanged or face a firing squad. For Stela, left all alone with her beautiful baby son. And for myself. For my humiliation at the hands of the brute I’d married, who had turned me into a betrayer.

Branko died of complications from a gastric infection in 1951. I did not mourn him. I had heard that Tito was allowing Jews to go to Israel, and so I decided to leave my country—I had nothing left there—and start again here. I suppose, in the back of my mind, I thought I might find Mordecai, my old teacher from the Young Guardians all those years ago. I was still young, you see. Still a stupid girl.

I did find Mordecai, eventually, in the military cemetery on Mount Hertzl. He fell in the ’48 war. He was a leader in a Nahal unit, with the other boys and girls from the kibbutzim, and he died on the Jerusalem road.

So I have had to make my own life here, and it has not been a bad life. Hard, yes; much work, little money. But not bad. I never married again, but I had a lover for a time. A big, laughing truck driver who’d come here from Poland and belonged to a kibbutz in the Negev. It started with him making fun of me when I bought from his stall in the market. I was shy because of my bad Hebrew, so he would tease me until he could make me laugh. Soon, every time he drove the kibbutz produce to the city he would come to me. He would feed me the dates he’d helped to grow, and oranges, and we’d lie together in the afternoons, with the sun streaming in the window. Our skin smelled of citrus oil, and our kisses were sweetened by the plump, sticky dates.

I would have married him, if he’d asked. But he’d had a wife in Poland who’d been taken from the ghetto in Warsaw. He said he had never been able to find out what had happened to her. He could not be sure if she was alive or dead. Maybe it was just a line, a way to keep his distance. But I don’t know. I think he felt guilty that he had lived. I liked him better because he honored her memory with his hope. Anyway, eventually some other kibbutznik got the truck-driving job, and he came to the city less and less, and finally not at all. I missed him. I still think about those afternoons.

I don’t have a lot of friends. My Hebrew isn’t so great, even today. Oh, I can get by: people here are used to making sense of foreign accents and mistaken grammar because almost everyone here came from somewhere else. But to tell the things of my heart to someone, I don’t have the words in Hebrew for that.

Over time, I’ve grown used to the hot, dry summers, the fields of ripe cotton, the white glare, and the bare, rock-ribbed rises of land where no trees grow. And while the hills of Jerusalem are not the mountains of home, it sometimes snows here in winter and if I close my eyes tight, I can imagine I’m in Sarajevo. Even though many of my friends think I am a crazy old woman to do it, sometimes I still go to the Arab quarter in the Old City and sit in a café where the coffee smells like home.

During the war in Yugoslavia, there were some Bosnians here. Israel took in quite a few refugees. Some Jews, but mostly Muslims. So I was able to speak my own language for a while, and it was lovely, such a relief. I volunteered at the resettlement center to help them fill out simple forms—this country loves forms—or read the bus timetable, or make appointments for their kids to see a dentist. It was just by chance, reading an old magazine someone had left behind there, that I saw Effendi Kamal’s obituary and learned that he had recently died.

It was like a stone fell from my heart. I had lived for years believing he’d been executed, because that was the sentence passed on all Nazi collaborators. But the obituary said he’d died after a long illness, and that he was
kustos
of the library at the National Museum, just as he had been when I knew him.

I felt like a sentence had been lifted from me, as well as him. I had been given another chance to do what was right, to testify for him. It took me two nights to carefully write down the story of what he had done for me. I sent it to the Holocaust museum, to Yad Vashem. After some little time, I had a letter from Stela, who had gone to stay in Paris with her son after her apartment in Sarajevo was destroyed by a Serb mortar. She said there had been a very nice ceremony in their honor at the Israeli embassy in Paris, that she understood why I had not been able to help them after the war, and that she was very glad I was alive and doing well. She said, Thank you for telling the world that my husband was a great friend to the Jews at a time when they had few true friends.

After they put the plaque for the Kamals in the museum garden, I started to go there quite often. It made me feel better. I would pull some weeds from under the cypress trees, and pinch the dead blooms from the flowers. One day, a custodian from the museum saw me doing that and asked if I would like to work there as a janitor.

It is very quiet on Shabbat. Some people might say ghostly quiet. It doesn’t bother me. In fact, I hate the noise my polisher makes when I do the floors. I prefer the hours when I walk from chamber to chamber with my dust cloths, working in silence. The library takes the longest. I asked once, and the library assistant told me there were more than a hundred thousand books there, and more than sixty million pages of documents. It’s a good number, I think: ten pages for every person who died. A kind of monument in paper for people who have no gravestones.

When you think about it, one small book among so many, it seems like a miracle, what happened. Maybe it
was
a miracle. I think it was. I had, of course, dusted those shelves for more than a year. Every week, I made a habit to take all the books down from one section of shelf, to dust beneath and behind them, then to dust the tops of the pages. Stela had taught me to do that when I cleaned the many bookshelves in the Kamals’ apartment. So I suppose the memory of them, and that time, was always there in a small measure whenever I did that work. It might have been what made it possible for me to see.

I came into the library that day, and I found the section of shelves I’d cleaned the week before, and started taking down the books on the next section. They were older books, mostly, so I was especially careful when I set them to one side. And then I had it in my hand. I looked at it. I opened it. And I was back in Sarajevo, in Effendi Kamal’s study, with Stela trembling beside me, realizing, in a way I only half understood at the time, that Effendi Kamal must have done something that made her very afraid. And then it was as if I could hear Effendi Kamal’s voice: “The best place to hide a book might be in a library.”

I wasn’t sure what to do. For all I knew the book was supposed to be here. But it seemed strange, that such a famous old manuscript would be just shoved on a shelf like that.

That’s what I said to them, when they questioned me, the head librarian, and the museum director, and another man I didn’t know, who looked like a soldier but seemed to know all about the book, and about Serif Kamal as well. I was nervous, because they didn’t seem to believe me, to believe that such a coincidence could really happen, and when I am anxious, the Hebrew words fly away from me. I couldn’t think of the word
peleh,
for “miracle,” and said
siman,
which is more like a sign.