I plunged through the door without knocking. Ozren stood up, surprised at the intrusion. His face was gray and haggard. His eyes were smudged with dark circles. For a moment I’d forgotten that his son had been in the ground for just a little more than forty-eight hours. My anxiety retreated for a moment behind a wave of feeling for him. I moved forward and put my arms around him.
His body was absolutely rigid. He stepped backward, out of my embrace.
“Ozren, I’m so sorry about Alia, and I’m really sorry to burst in on you like this, but I—”
“Hello, Dr. Heath.” His voice, cutting me off, was flat, formal.
“Hallo, Hanna!” The man in the chair was rising, slowly, as I turned.
“Werner! I didn’t know—thank goodness you’re here.” Werner Heinrich, my teacher, the best forgery-spotter in the business, would be able to see it instantly; he’d be able to back me up.
“Of course I’m here, Hanna, Liebchen. I wouldn’t miss tomorrow’s ceremony. But you didn’t tell me that you were coming. I imagined you were back home by now. It is wonderful you will be here for the ceremony.”
“Well, if we don’t move fast, there won’t be a ceremony tomorrow. Somebody’s stolen the haggadah. I think it must have been Amitai, he’s the only one who—”
“Hanna, my dear, slow down….” Werner reached for my hands, with which I’d been wildly gesticulating. “Tell us calmly….”
“It’s nonsense.” Ozren spoke over Werner. “The haggadah is locked in the vitrine. I secured it there myself.”
“Ozren, it’s a fake, the thing in the vitrine. It’s a fantastic fake—the oxidized silver, the stains, the smeared pigments. I mean, we’ve all seen fakes, but this is outstanding. It’s a perfect replica. Perfect, except for one thing. The one thing that can’t be replicated because it hasn’t existed for three centuries.” I had to stop. I could hardly breathe. Werner was patting my hand as if I were a hysterical child. His hands, his hard, craftsman’s hands, had the usual perfectly manicured fingernails. I pulled away my ugly untended mitt and raked it through my hair.
Ozren was pale now. He stood.
“What are you talking about?”
“The parchment. The sheep they made it from, that breed—Ovis aries Aragonosa ornata—it’s been extinct in Spain since the fifteenth century. What they’ve used, the pore holes, they’re all wrong…the size, the scatter…it’s parchment made from a different breed….”
“You could hardly tell that, surely, from inspecting one page.” Ozren spoke with a tense, thin-lipped terseness.
“Yes, I can.” I took a deep breath, trying not to hyperventilate. “It’s a subtle thing, unless you’ve spent hours comparing old parchments. I mean, to me it’s bloody obvious. Werner, you’ll see it right away, I know you will.” Werner’s face was creased now with concern. “Where is Amitai?” I demanded. “Has he already left the country? If he has, we’re in deep shit….”
“Hanna. Stop this.” Werner’s soft voice had a stern edge. I realized that the look I’d taken for concern was actually irritation. He wasn’t taking me seriously. To him, I was still the pupil from the antipodes, the girl who had so much to learn. I turned to Ozren. He, surely, would listen to me.
“Dr. Yomtov is right here in Sarajevo,” Ozren said. “He is the guest of the Jewish community for the ceremony tomorrow. He hasn’t been near the haggadah. The book has been locked in the vault at the central bank from the day you left here last month, until we moved it, under heavy guard, yesterday. It was in the box designed to your specifications, which you yourself watched me seal, until I personally broke the wax and the strings and deposited it in the vitrine. It was not out of my hand for one moment of that time. The vitrine is armed with state-of-the-art equipment, and the room is crisscrossed with sensors. There is a twenty-four-hour surveillance camera and a guard. You are making a fool of yourself with these accusations.”
“Me? Ozren, matey. Can’t you see? The Israelis—they must have wanted this book for ages…you must’ve heard all those rumors, during the war…. And Amitai, he’s an ex-commando, did you know that?”
Werner shook his silvery mane. “I had no idea.” Ozren just looked at me, blankly. I couldn’t understand why he was so passive. I wanted to shake him. Maybe he was still in shock over Alia. And then I thought of the weird phone call I’d made to his apartment.
“What was Amitai doing at your place, anyway, the other night?”
“Hanna.” His voice had been cold. Now it was icy. “I risked my life to save that book. If you are suggesting…”
Werner raised his hand. “I am sure Dr. Heath is not suggesting anything. But I think we’d best make an examination.” His brow was furrowed. His hands were trembling. What I’d said about Amitai clearly concerned him. “Come, my dear, and show us what it is that troubles you so.”
Werner, unsteady, took my arm. I was suddenly worried about him. He would be so shocked when he saw the fake.
Ozren rose from his desk and led the way back down the interminable corridor, through the exhibition halls where glaziers were at work, replacing the plastic sheeting that still covered many of the museum’s shattered windows. Ozren nodded to the guards and punched his code into the keypad.
“Can we take it out?”
“Not without disarming the entire system,” Ozren said. “Show us what it is that you think you are seeing.”
I pointed.
Werner bent over and peered into the vitrine. He examined the place I’d indicated for several minutes. Then he straightened.
“I’m relieved to say I can’t agree with you, my dear. The scatter is entirely in keeping with many examples I’ve examined from that type of parchment. We can, in any case, compare the page with the documentation photographs you took at the time of the stabilization, to set your mind at rest.”
“But I sent those negatives to Amitai! He used them to make this fake, don’t you see? And then he’ll have replaced my photos with pictures of this…thing. You’ve got to call the police, now, and alert the border authorities, and the UN….”
“Hanna, my dear, I am sure you are mistaken. And I think you must be a little more circumspect about throwing around such wild accusations against an esteemed colleague.”
Werner’s voice was low and soothing, still treating me like an overexcited child. He laid a hand on my arm. “I’ve known and worked with Amitai Yomtov for more than thirty years. His reputation is impeccable. You know that.” He turned to Ozren then. “But perhaps, Dr. Karaman, to reassure Dr. Heath, we’d best disarm the system and do a full inspection of the codex?”
Ozren nodded. “Yes, of course. We can do that. We must do that. But I will have to inform the director. The system is designed so that it requires both of us to input the codes that authorize a shutdown.”
The next hour was the strangest and most uncomfortable of my professional life. Werner, Ozren, and I went through the codex page by page. Everywhere I pointed out an anomaly, they both professed to see nothing irregular. Of course they sent for the facsimile photos, which were in perfect accordance with the book, as I knew they would be. But Werner’s conviction was unshakable, and my opinion wasn’t worth much, compared with his. Ozren, who, as he said, had risked his life for the book, was adamant that any security breach was impossible. In the end, a rat’s tooth of self-doubt began to gnaw at me. Little hot beads of sweat broke out all over my skin. Maybe it was all the stress of the last few days: Mum’s accident, the shock of finding out about my father, the news about Alia. And something else. When I’d seen Ozren, his forlorn eyes, his exhausted face, I’d felt something. Something unfamiliar to me, but I knew what it was. I knew then that I’d come back to Sarajevo because of him, not just for the book. I’d been missing him, desperately. They say love is blind. I started to believe that I was seeing things.
At the end of the inspection, Ozren and Werner turned to me.
“Well, what do you want to do?” Ozren said.
“Do?
Me? I want you to get a search warrant and check out every last jockstrap and handkerchief in Amitai’s suitcase. I want you to close the borders in case he’s already given the codex to an accomplice.”
“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.
Lola
Jerusalem, 2002
And to them I will give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name.
—Isaiah
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 mo
ther 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.