People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks

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Название People of the Book
Автор произведения Geraldine Brooks
Жанр Классическая проза
Серия
Издательство Классическая проза
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007379842



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      People of the Book

      Geraldine Brooks

      

      

London, New York, Toronto, Sydney and New Delhi

       Dedication

      For the librarians

       Epigraph

      There, where one burns books, one in the end burns men.

      – Heinrich Heine

      Table of Contents

       Title Page

       Hanna Vienna, Spring 1996

       Feathers and a Rose Vienna, 1894

       Hanna Vienna, Spring 1996

       Wine Stains Venice, 1609

       Hanna Boston, Spring 1996

       Saltwater Tarragona, 1492

       Hanna London, Spring 1996

       A White Hair Seville, 1480

       Hanna Sarajevo, Spring 1996

       Lola Jerusalem, 2002

       Hanna Arnhem Land, Gunumeleng, 2002

       Afterword

       P.S.

       About the author

       Nothing to Prove:

       LIFE at a Glance

       Top Ten Favourite Books

       About the book

       Uninvited Guests

       Read on

       Have You Read?

       If You Liked This, You Might Like…

       Find Out More

       About the Author

       Praise

       By the same Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Maps

       Hanna Sarajevo, Spring 1996

      I

      I MIGHT AS WELL SAY, right from the jump: it wasn’t my usual kind of job.

      I like to work alone, in my own clean, silent, well-lit laboratory, where the climate is controlled and everything I need is right at hand. It’s true that I have developed a reputation as someone who can work effectively out of the lab, when I have to, when the museums don’t want to pay the travel insurance on a piece, or when private collectors don’t want anyone to know exactly what it is that they own. It’s also true that I’ve flown halfway around the world, to do an interesting job. But never to a place like this: the boardroom of a bank in the middle of a city where they just stopped shooting at each other five minutes ago.

      For one thing, there are no guards hovering over me at my lab at home. I mean, the museum has a few quiet security professionals cruising around, but none of them would ever dream of intruding on my work space. Not like the crew here. Six of them. Two were bank security guards, two were Bosnian police, here to keep an eye on the bank security, and the other two were United Nations peacekeepers, here to keep an eye on the Bosnian police. All having loud conversations in Bosnian or Danish over their crackly radio handsets. As if that wasn’t enough of a crowd, there was also the official UN observer, Hamish Sajjan. My first Scottish Sikh, very dapper in Harris tweed and an indigo turban. Only in the UN. I’d had to ask him to point out to the Bosnians that smoking wasn’t going to be happening in a room that would shortly contain a fifteenth-century manuscript. Since then, they’d been even more fidgety.

      I was starting to get fidgety myself. We’d been waiting for almost two hours. I’d filled the time as best I could. The guards had helped me reposition the big conference table nearer to the window, to take advantage of the light. I’d assembled the stereo microscope and laid out my tools: documentation cameras, probes, and scalpels. The beaker of gelatin was softening on its warming pad, and the wheat paste, linen threads, gold leaf were laid out ready, along with some glassine envelopes in case I was lucky enough to find any debris in the binding—it’s amazing what you can learn about a book by studying the chemistry of a bread crumb. There were samples of various calfskins, rolls of handmade papers in different tones and textures, and foam forms positioned in a cradle, ready to receive the book. If they ever brought the book.

      “Any idea how much longer we’re going to have to wait?” I asked Sajjan. He shrugged.

      “I think there is a delay with the representative from the National Museum. Since the book is the property