People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks

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СКАЧАТЬ microscopic samples to see what they’ll tell us. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of stabilization, and repair of the binding. As you know, it’s a late-nineteenth-century binding, and about as physically and mechanically tired as you’d expect.”

      Karaman leaned down hard on the box, pressing the library’s stamp into the wax. Then he stood aside while a bank official did the same with the bank’s stamp. The elaborate weave of strings and wax seals meant that any unauthorized access to the contents of the box would be instantly apparent.

      “I’d heard that you are Australian,” Karaman said. I suppressed a sigh. I was still transported by my day’s work and not in the mood for small talk. “It seems a strange occupation for a person from such a young country, looking after other people’s ancient treasures.” I didn’t say anything. Then he added: “I suppose you were hungry for some culture, growing up there?”

      Because I had been rude before, I made an effort now. A slight effort. That young country–cultural desert stuff gets very old. Australia happens to have the longest continuous artistic tradition in the world—Aboriginal people were making sophisticated art on the walls of their dwellings thirty thousand years before the people in Lascaux chewed the end off their first paintbrush. But I decided to spare him the full lecture. “Well,” I said, “you should consider that immigration has made us the most ethnically diverse country in the world. Australians’ roots run very deep and wide. That gives us a stake in all the world’s cultural heritage. Even yours.” I didn’t add that when I was growing up, the Yugoslavs were famous as the only migrant group who’d managed to import their Old World grievances. Everyone else soon succumbed to a kind of sunstruck apathy, but Serbs and Croats were forever going at it, bombing each other’s soccer clubs, stoushing with each other even in end-of-the-earth outback shitholes like Coober Pedy.

      He received the barb with good grace, smiling at me over the box. He had a very nice smile, I have to say. His mouth sort of turned down and up at the same time, like a Charles Schulz drawing.

      The guards stood to escort Karaman and the book. I followed down the long, ornate corridors until they descended the marble staircase to the vaults. I was waiting for someone to unlock the main doors when Karaman turned back and called after me.

      “Perhaps I could invite you to dinner? I know a place in the Old City. It just reopened last month. To be quite frank and sincere, I cannot guarantee the food, but at least it will be Bosnian.”

      I was about to say no. It’s just a reflex with me. And then I thought, why not? Better than some bland, room-service mystery meat in my bleak little hotel room. I told myself that it was legitimate research. Ozren Karaman’s rescue had made him part of the history of the book, and I wanted to know more about that.

      I waited for him at the top of the stairs, listening to the pneumatic swish of the vault and then the clang of the metal bars that enclosed it. The sound was final and reassuring. The book, at least, would be safe for the night.

      

      III

      WE STEPPED OUT into the dark city streets, and I shivered. Most of the snow had disappeared during the day, but now the temperature was dropping again, and heavy clouds hid the moon. There were no streetlights working. When I realized that Karaman proposed to walk to the Old City, the feeling of a stone in the gut returned.

      “Are you sure that’s, you know, OK? Why don’t we have my UN escort drive us?”

      He made a slight face, as if he smelled something unappetizing. “Those oversized tanks they drive will not fit in the narrow ways of the Baščaršija,” he said. “And there has been no sniping for over a week now.”

      Great. Tremendous. I let him handle the argy-bargy with the UN Vikings, hoping he wouldn’t be able to convince them to let me go on without an escort. Unfortunately, he was a pretty persuasive fellow—stubborn, anyway—and finally we set off on foot. He had a long-legged stride, and I had to quicken my pace to keep up with him. As we walked, he delivered a kind of countertourism monologue—a guide-from-hell kind of a thing—describing the city’s various shattered structures. “That is the Presidency Building, neo-Renaissance style and the Serbs’ favorite target.” A few blocks farther: “That is the ruins of the Olympic Museum. That was once the post office. This is the cathedral. Neo-Gothic. They had midnight Mass there last Christmas, but they held it at noon because, of course, no one went out at night at that time unless they were suicidal. On its left you see the synagogue and the mosque. On the right the Orthodox church. All the places where none of us go to worship, situated within a very convenient hundred meters of one another.”

      I tried to imagine how I would feel if Sydney were suddenly scarred like this, the landmarks of my childhood damaged or destroyed. Waking up one day and finding that the people in North Sydney had set up barricades on the Harbour Bridge and started shelling the Opera House.

      “I suppose it’s still a bit of a luxury to walk in the city,” I said, “after four years of running from snipers.” He was walking a little bit ahead of me. He stopped suddenly.

      “Yes,” he said. “Quite.” Somehow he poured a whole bucket of sarcasm into that terse reply.

      The wide avenues of Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo had gradually given way to the narrow, cobbled footpaths of the Ottoman town, where you could stretch out your arms and almost touch buildings on opposite sides of the way. The buildings were small scale, as if built for halflings, and pressed together so tightly that they reminded me of tipsy friends, holding each other upright on the way home from the pub. Large parts of this area had been out of range of the Serb guns, so the damage here was much less evident than in the modern city. From a minaret, the khoja called the faithful to aksham, the evening prayer. It was a sound I associated with hot places—Cairo, Damascus—not a place where frost crunched underfoot and pockets of unmelted snow gathered in the crotch between the mosque’s dome and its stone palisade. I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims’ vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace.

      The khoja of this small mosque was an old man, but his voice carried, unwavering and beautiful on the cold night air. Only a handful of other old men answered; shuffling across the cobbled courtyard, dutifully washing their hands and faces in the icy water of the fountain. I stopped for a moment to watch them. Karaman was ahead of me, but he turned back, and followed my gaze. “There they are,” he said. “The fierce Muslim terrorists of the Serb imagination.”

      The restaurant he had chosen was warm and noisy and full of delicious aromas of grilling meat. A photograph by the door showed the proprietor, in military fatigues, brandishing an immense bazooka. I ordered a plate of cevapcici. He ordered a salad of shaved cabbage and a dish of yogurt.

      “That’s a bit austere,” I said.

      He smiled. “I’ve been a vegetarian since I was a child. That was useful, during the siege, since there wasn’t any meat. Of course, the only greens you could get most of the time were grass clippings. Grass soup, that became my specialty.” He ordered two beers. “Beer, you could get, even during the siege. The brewery was one thing in the city that never closed down.”

      “Aussies would approve of that,” I said.

      “I was thinking about what you said earlier, about the people from this country who migrated to Australia. Actually, we had quite a few Australians visiting the museum library, СКАЧАТЬ