People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks

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      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 first-class 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. СКАЧАТЬ