People of the Book (22 page)

“Giovanni Domenico Vistorini. I am! Giovanni. Domenico. Vistorini.” He murmured the name, over and over. He reached for the glass. Empty! His hand tightened. The thin Venetian glass shattered, and a shard pierced the fleshy part of his thumb. He barely felt it, though the blood dripped and mingled with the wine stain already blooming on the parchment.

He closed the haggadah, smearing the russet stain. Burn it, Giovanni Domenico Vistorini. Burn it now. Do not wait for the auto-da-fé. I will go to the altar of God. I, Giovanni Domenico Vistorini. I will go, because I am. Giovanni Domenico Vistor—I am…I am…Am I…am I? Am I Eliahu ha-Cohain?

No! Never so!

Suddenly, the pen was in his injured hand. He flipped the pages until he found the place. He wrote:
Giovanni Dom. Vistorini.
That is who I am, in this Year of Our Lord 1609.

He flung the pen across the room, laid his head down on the desk, on the cover of the haggadah, and wept as his world spun and whirled.

Boston, Spring 1996

“I
T’S TOO BAD,
” Raz said, reaching for the basket of warm pappadams, “that we’ll never know what really happened.”

“I know.” I’d been thinking about little else all evening. I looked out the restaurant window onto Harvard Square, one floor below. Students with their necks wrapped in scarves made their way past the homeless people panhandling in their accustomed doorways. Middle of April, and the temperature had plunged again, leaving the last remnants of ashy, unmelted snow pushed into stubborn clumps on the street corners. Harvard Square could feel like a party on a warm night, full of energy and privilege and promise. Or it could seem like one of the bleakest places on earth—an icy, windswept rat maze where kids wasted their youth clawing over one another in a fatuous contest for credentials.

After the initial exhilaration of discovering the bloodstain, I’d fallen into a funk. It was a familiar feeling for me; an occupational hazard. It was as if I was up against some genie who lived within the pages of old books. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you got to release him for an instant or two, and he would reward you with a misty glimpse into the past. Other times,
pouf
—he’d blow it all away before you could make sense of it, and stand there, arms crossed:
Thus far, and no farther.

Raz, oblivious to my mood, just kept rubbing it in. “Blood is potentially so dramatic,” he said, swirling the pinot in his glass.

Raz’s wife, Afsana, stayed in Providence three nights a week because she’d scored an assistant professorship teaching poetry at Brown. So we were dining alone and could talk shop as much as we liked. But all we could do was speculate, and that was annoying me.

“I don’t know how you drink red wine with Indian food,” I said, trying to change the subject. I sucked on my beer.

“Could’ve been some big drama,” Raz continued, undaunted. “Passionate Spaniards, fighting for possession of the book—sabers drawn, daggers—”

“More likely some bloke was carving the Passover roast and his hand slipped,” I interrupted grumpily. “Don’t look for zebras.”

“What?”

“Just a saying. ‘If it has four feet, a long nose, and it eats hay, look for a horse before you go searching for a zebra.’” It was my mother’s saying, actually; something to do with her residents. Apparently inexperienced docs always want to diagnose rare syndromes, even if the patient’s symptoms fit some perfectly common condition.

“Oh, you’re just a wet blanket. Zebras are
much
more exciting.” Raz reached for the bottle and recharged his glass. The haggadah wasn’t his project; he didn’t feel the frustration the way I did. “You could run a DNA test, I suppose…. Find out the ethnic origins of the person whose blood it is….”

“You could. Except you can’t. You’d have to violate the parchment to extract a big enough sample. And even if I recommended it, which I wouldn’t, I doubt they’d let me.” I broke a piece of pappadam—flat, crisp, like matzoh. Like the matzoh the mysterious black woman held in the haggadah illumination. Another mystery I wouldn’t be able to solve.

Raz went rabbiting on: “It’d be great if you could transport back in time and be there when it happened….”

“Yeah, I bet the wife yelled at him: ‘You klutz! Look what you’ve done to our book!’”

Raz grinned, defeated at last by my sour mood. He’d always had a romantic streak. That’s what had drawn him to shipwrecks, I suppose. The waiter arrived with a bowl of searing vindaloo. I dribbled the fiery sauce over my rice, took a forkful, and felt my eyes water. I loved this stuff. I had lived on it when I was at Harvard. The burn was as close as I’d found to my favorite food in the world: the king prawn sambal at the Malayan restaurant at home in Sydney. Food can be very restorative sometimes. After a few bites I started to feel a bit better.

“You’re right,” I said. “It
would
be something, to be back there, when the haggadah was still just some family’s book, a thing to be used, before it became an exhibit, locked up in a vitrine….”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Raz said. He was poking at the vindaloo suspiciously. He served himself a scant spoonful and loaded the rest of his plate with dal. “It’s still doing what it was meant to do, or it will be, as soon as it goes into the museum. It was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, from what you’ve told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You’ve got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the
Convivencia,
and everything’s humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize ‘the other’—it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists…same old, same old. It seems to me the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.”

“Pretty profound, for an organic chemist.” I could never resist a chance to take the piss. Raz scowled at me, then he laughed, and asked what I was planning to talk about at the Tate. I told him I was giving a paper on the structural features and conservation problems of Turkish manuscripts. Their binding format often leads to damage in use, and it’s amazing how many conservators still don’t know how to deal with it. From there we drifted into gossip about my bezillionaire client and the pros and cons of university deaccessioning programs. Raz’s lab did all the important work on Harvard’s holdings, so he had some strong views on the subject.

“It’s one thing if a manuscript is in a university library, accessible to scholars, another if it gets passed off to a private collector and locked away in a vault somewhere….”

“I know. And you should see this guy’s vault….” My client lived in one of the huge old mansions on Brattle Street, and he’d excavated a safe room that was state of the art and absolutely stuffed with treasures. Raz, who had access every day to fantastic things, was pretty hard to impress. But even his eyes widened when I told him, in strict confidence, about a few of the things this guy had managed to acquire.

From that discussion we moved on to museum politics in general and from there to spicier shop talk: sex in the stacks, a.k.a. the love lives of librarians. And that pretty much was the whole conversation for the rest of the evening. At one point I was fiddling with the saltshaker. In all the excitement of checking out the bloodstain, we hadn’t looked at the scraping of salt crystals I’d taken off the parchment. I told Raz I’d need to trouble him again the next day because I really wanted to get a look at those crystals under his video spectral comparator.

“You’re very welcome. Anytime. You know we’d love to have you at Straus. Permanently. There’s a job for you, whenever you raise your hand.”

“Thanks, matey, that’s very flattering. But there’s no way I’d leave Sydney.”

I guess all the chatting about who was doing who in our little world had something to do with what happened next. We were leaving the restaurant when Raz put a hand on my hip. I turned and looked at him.

“Raz?”

“Afsana’s not here,” he said. “What’s the harm? Auld lang syne and all that.”

I looked down at his hand, picked it up between my thumb and forefinger, and removed it from my person. “Guess I’ll have to rename you.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll have to call you ‘Rat’ from now on, instead of Raz.”

“Oh, come on, Hanna. When did you turn into such a prude?”

“Ah, let’s see—perhaps that would be two years ago? When you got married?”

“Well, I certainly don’t expect Afsana to live like a nun when she’s in Providence, with all those juicy young undergrads sitting dewy-eyed at her feet, so I don’t see—”

I covered my ears with my hands. “Spare me. I don’t need to know the details of your marital arrangements.”

I turned away from him and hurried down the stairs. I suppose I am a bit of a prude, about some things, anyway. I like loyalty. I mean, do what you like when you’re single. Live and let live. Lay and get laid. But why bother to be married at all, if you don’t want the commitment?

We walked the few blocks to my hotel in an awkward silence and parted with a stilted good night. I went up to my hotel room feeling ticked off, and a little bit desolate. If I found someone I loved enough to marry, I wouldn’t be as reckless about it as Raz.

Weirdly, when I fell asleep, I dreamed about Ozren. We were downstairs from his apartment, in the bakery at Sweet Corner, except the stove was my DeLonghi, from the flat in Bondi. We were cooking muffins, of all things. When I took the tray out of the oven, he came up behind me so that his forearm rested against mine. The muffins were perfectly risen, steaming, fragrant, bursting out of their patty pans. He held one up to my lips. The crust gave way in my mouth and I tasted something creamy and rich and delicious.

Sometimes a muffin is just a muffin. But not in that dream.

I woke to the insistent bleating of the telephone. Thinking it was just my wake-up call, I rolled over, lifted the receiver, and dropped it back into the cradle. Two minutes later, it was ringing again. This time I sat up and noticed the time winking red on the digital clock. Two-thirty. If it was my wake-up call, four hours early, the desk clerk was going to have hell to pay. I muttered a grumpy,
“Huhgn?”

“Dr. Heath?”

“Mmmm.”

“This is Dr. Friosole, Max Friosole. I’m calling from Mount Auburn Hospital. I have a Dr. Sarah Heath here….”

Anybody else in the world would have been wide-staring awake and in an anxiety attack right then. But the fact that my mother was at a hospital in the middle of the night struck me, in my sleepy stupor, as perfectly ordinary.
“Mmmhuh?”
I grunted.

“She’s seriously injured. I believe you are next of kin?”

Suddenly I was sitting up, groping for the light switch, disoriented in the strange hotel bed. “What’s happened?” My voice was husky, like I’d swallowed a toilet brush.

“It was an MVA. She was ambulatory on scene with pain on palpation suggesting pulmonary—”

“Wait. Stop. Speak English, will you?”

“But I thought…Dr. Heath…”

“My mother’s an MD, I’m a PhD.”

“Oh, uh. She was in a car accident.”

I thought of her hands first. She’s so protective of her hands.

“Where is she? Can I speak to her?”

“Well, I think you should come down here. She…she’s, well, to put it frankly, she’s been a bit difficult. She signed herself out AMA—ah, that’s ‘against medical advice’—but she suffered a syncope—I mean fainted—in the hospital corridor. She has a ruptured spleen—massive hemoperitoneum—blood in the abdomen. We’re prepping her for surgery now.”

My hands shook as I took down the hospital details. By the time I got there, she’d been moved from the ER and up to the OR. Dr. Friosole turned out to be a junior resident with a five o’clock shadow and a gaunt, sleep-deprived look around the eyes. In the very short time it took me to throw on some clothes, find a cab, and get over there, he’d dealt with a gunshot wound and a heart attack, so he could hardly remember who I was. He looked up the admitting info for me and established that Mum had been a passenger in the car, driven by an eighty-one-year-old woman who had been DOA. They’d hit a crash barrier on Storrow Drive. No other vehicle involved. “The police took a statement from your mother at the scene.”

“How come? I mean, are they allowed to do that, if someone is seriously injured?”

“She was lucid when they got there, administering CPR to the other victim, apparently.” He glanced again at the notes. “Argued with the EMTs—wanted to intubate the woman at the scene and was quite difficult when the EMTs insisted on proceeding to the ER.”

That’d be right, I thought. I could just hear her. “But if she was in good shape then, what happened?”

“That’s the spleen for you. Sneaky. You’re a bit sore but basically fine and you don’t know you’re hemorrhaging until much later, when your BP crashes through the floor. She diagnosed herself, you know, just before she passed out….” I must have looked a little green at this point because he stopped talking about oozing guts and asked if I wanted to sit down.

“The old lady…do you have a name?”

He flicked the paper on his clipboard. “Delilah Sharansky.”

It didn’t mean anything to me. I tried to follow the directions Friosole was giving me to the part of the hospital where Mum was, but my mind was working so hard on the whole idea of this unlikely accident that I made about six wrong turns getting there. I sat down on a hard plastic chair—buttercup yellow, almost obscenely bright against the gray sludge color of everything else in the hospital. Then there was nothing for me to do but wait.

She looked absolutely awful when they wheeled her out of recovery. She had IVs the size of garden hoses in her arm, and one cheek was all bruised and swollen where it must have slammed into the side of the car. She was groggy, but she recognized me straightaway and gave a crooked grin that might have been the most sincere smile she’d ever given me. I took the hand that didn’t have the large-bore IV in it.

“Five on this one,” I said. “And five on the other one. Surgeon Heath, still in business.”

She groaned softly. “Yes, but doctors who work in hospitals need their spleens,” she whispered. “Can’t fight infections….” Her voice broke and her eyes watered and big fat tears traveled down her poor smashed cheek. I had never, in thirty years, seen my mother cry. I picked up her hand and kissed it, and then I started crying, too.

They let me stay in her room on a kind of Barcalounger chair. The sedation and the painkillers knocked her out again within about fifteen minutes, which was a good thing because she was pretty upset. I couldn’t get back to sleep on the damned chair so I just zoned out, waiting for the sky to get light and listening to the gathering sounds in the corridors outside as the morning shift got ready to do meds and BPs and prep the poor sods arriving for elective surgery. I thought of all the things I needed to do—call the Tate and cancel my presentation. Call Mum’s secretary, Janine, and get her to work on reschedding the appointments waiting for Mum back in Sydney. Call the police, and find out what Mum’s legal obligations were, if any. In Sydney there’d be an inquest, probably, if an accident resulted in a fatality. I imagined Mum would be pretty dark if she had to stick around Boston to appear at something like that.