People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks

from the Chetnik guns. I was thinking that one phosphorous bomb could burn the whole thing down, or that these…these…the Bosnian word papci, I can’t translate it.” He curled his hand into a fist and walked it across the table. “What do you call the foot part of an animal? A cow or a horse?”

      “A hoof?” I said.

      “Yes, that’s it. We called the enemy ‘hoofs’—something from the barnyard. I thought, if they got into the museum, they would trample the place looking for gold, and destroy things whose value they were too ignorant even to guess at. Somehow, I made my way to the police station. Most of the police had gone to defend the city as best they could. The desk officer said, ‘Who wants to put his head on the block to save some old things?’ But when he realized that I was going anyway, alone, he rounded up two ‘volunteers’ to help me. He said he couldn’t have people saying that a dusty librarian has more guts than the police.”

      Some larger things they had moved to inner rooms. Smaller valuable items they had hidden away where looters might not look, like the janitor’s supply room. Ozren’s long hands fanned the air as he described the artifacts he had saved—the skeletons of Bosnia’s ancient kings and queens, the rare natural history specimens. “And then I tried to find the haggadah.” In the 1950s a museum staffer had been implicated in a plot to steal the haggadah, so ever since then, the museum’s director was the only one who was allowed to know the combination for the safe where it was kept. But the director lived across the river, where the fighting was most intense. Ozren knew he would never make it to the museum.

      Ozren continued speaking quietly, in short, undramatic sentences. No light. A fractured pipe. Rising water. Shells hitting the walls. It was left for me to fill in the blanks. I’d been in enough museum basements to imagine how it was; how every shell burst that shook the building must have sent a rain of plaster falling over the precious things, and over him, too, into his eyes as he crouched in the dark, hands shaking, striking match after match to see what he was doing. Waiting for a lull in the bombing so that he could hear the fall of the tumblers as he tried one combination and then another. Then not being able to hear anyway, because the beating of the blood in his head was so loud.

      “How on earth did you ever manage to crack it?”

      He raised his hands, palms up. “It was an old safe, not very sophisticated.…”

      “But still, the odds…”

      “I am not, as I told you, a religious man, but if I did believe in miracles…the fact I got to that book, in those conditions…”

      “The miracle,” I said, “was that you—”

      He didn’t let me finish. “Please,” he interrupted, wrinkling his face with distaste. “Don’t make me out to be a hero. I don’t feel like one. Frankly, I feel like shit, because of all the books I couldn’t save.…” He looked away.

      I think that’s what got me, that look. That reticence. Maybe because I’m the opposite of brave, I’ve always been a bit suspicious of heroes. I’m inclined to think they lack imagination, or there’s no way they could do the madly daring things they do. But this was a guy who got choked up over lost books, and who had to be dragged through an account of what he’d done. I was starting to think I liked him quite a bit.

      The food arrived then, juicy little patties of meat, peppery and thyme-scented. I was ravenous. I fell on the plate, scooping up the meat with rounds of hot, soft Turkish bread. I was so intent on the food that it took me a while to realize that Ozren wasn’t eating, just staring at me. He had green eyes, a deep, mossy green, flecked with glints of copper and bronze.

      “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked you about all that. I’ve put you off your food.”

      He grinned—that attractive, crooked grin. “It’s not that.”

      “What’s up, then?”

      “Well, when I watched you working today, your face was so still and serene, you reminded me of a Madonna in the icons of the Orthodox. It’s just quite amusing to me, a heavenly face with such an earthy appetite.”

      I can’t bear that I still blush like a schoolgirl. I could feel the blood rising, so I tried to pretend that no compliment was intended. “And that’s one way of pointing out that I eat like a pig,” I said with a laugh.

      He reached over then and wiped a smear of grease off my cheek. I stopped laughing. I reached for his hand before he could withdraw it, and turned it over in my own. It was a scholar’s hand, to be sure, with clean, well-kept nails. But there were calluses as well. I suppose even scholars had to chop wood, if they could find any, during the siege. The tips of his fingers glistened with the lamb grease from my cheek. I brought them to my lips and licked them, slowly, one by one. His green eyes regarded me, asking a question anyone could understand.

      

      His apartment was close by, an attic above a pastry shop on a crossroads called Sweet Corner. The door to the shop was steamy, and a wall of warmth hit us as we entered. The proprietor raised a floury hand in greeting. Ozren waved in reply and then steered me through the crowded café to the attic stairs. The scent of crisp pastry and burned sugar followed us.

      Ozren could just stand up under the swooping eaves of the attic. The ends of his unruly curls brushed the lowest beams. He turned to take my jacket, and as he did so, touched my throat, lightly. He ran his middle finger over the tiny arc of bone at the back of my neck, where my hair lifted and swirled into a twist. He traced the line of bone along my shoulder and then down, over my sweater. When he reached my hips, he slid his hands under the cashmere and eased it up, over my head. The wool caught on my hair clip. The clip rattled as it hit the floor and the twist of hair unfurled over my bare shoulders. I shivered, and he wrapped his arms around me.

      Later, we lay in a tangle of sheet and clothing. He lived like a student, his bed a thin mattress pushed up against the wall, piles of books and newspapers pushed carelessly into corners. He was as spare as a racehorse, all long bone and lean muscle. Not a gram of fat on him. He fingered a strand of my hair. “So straight. Like a Japanese,” he said.

      “Expert, are you?” I teased. He grinned and got up and poured two little glasses of fiery rakija. He hadn’t turned on the light when we’d come in, but now he lit a pair of candles. As the flame steadied, I could see that the far wall of the attic was filled by a large figurative painting, a portrait of a woman and an infant, in a thick, urgent impasto. The baby was partly hidden by the curve of the woman’s body, which seemed to shelter it in a protective arc. The woman was turning away from us and toward the child, but she looked back at the artist—at us—with a steady, appraising gaze, beautiful and grave.

      “It’s a wonderful painting,” I said.

      “Yes, my friend Danilo—the one I told you about—he painted it.”

      “Who is she?”

      He frowned, and sighed. Then he raised his glass in a kind of toast.

      “My wife.”

      IV

      WHEN YOU HAVE WORKED WELL, there should be no sign that you have worked at all.

      Werner Heinrich, my instructor, taught me that. “Never mistake yourself for an artist, Miss Heath. You must be always behind your object.”

      At the end of a week, there probably weren’t ten people in the world who could have told for sure that I’d taken this book apart and put it back together. The next thing I had to do was pay visits on a few old friends who’d be able to tell me what, if anything, the tiny samples I’d extracted from the codex meant. The UN had asked me to contribute an essay that would be included in the catalog when the book went on exhibition. I’m not ambitious in the traditional sense. I don’t want a big house or a big bank account; I don’t give a rat’s about those things. I don’t want to be the boss of anything or manage anyone but myself. But I do take a lot of pleasure in surprising my stuffy