Читать книгу People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks - Страница 11

VIENNA SEEMED to be doing rather well off the fall of communism. The whole of the city was getting a makeover, like a wealthy matron going under the knife. As my taxi merged with the traffic on the Ringstrasse, I saw construction cranes everywhere, bowing over the city’s wedding cake skyline. Light flared off the freshly gilded Hofburg friezes, and sandblasters had flushed the soot off dozens of neo-Renaissance facades, revealing the warm cream stone that had been obscured by centuries of grime. Western capitalists evidently wanted spruced-up headquarters for all their new joint ventures with neighboring countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic. And now they had cheap laborers from the east to do the work.

When I’d been in Vienna in the early 1980s on a traveling scholarship, it had been a gray, grimy place. Every building was filthy, although I didn’t realize that at the time. I thought they were all meant to be black. I’d found it a depressing place and a bit creepy. Vienna’s location, teetering at the far edge of Western Europe, had made it a Cold War listening post. The stout matrons and the loden-clad gents with their bourgeois solidity existed in an atmosphere that always seemed a little stirred, a little charged, like the air after lightning. But I had liked the gilded rococo Kaffeehäuser and the music, which was everywhere—the city’s pulse and its heartbeat. The joke was that anyone in Vienna who wasn’t carrying a musical instrument was either a pianist, a harpist, or a foreign spy.

One didn’t think of the city as a hub of science, and yet it had its share of high-tech businesses and innovative labs. My old mate Amalie Sutter, the entomologist, headed one of them. I’d met Amalie years earlier, when she was a postdoc, living about as far as you could get from gilded rococo cafés. I came across her on the side of a mountain in remote northern Queensland. She lived in an upended, corrugated-iron water tank. I was backpacking at the time. I dropped out of my expensive, elitist girl’s school at sixteen, which was the first possible moment I could get free of it. I’d tried to get them to expel me earlier, but they were too scared of Mum to go for it, no matter what outrages against decorum I managed to devise. I walked out of our palatial home and joined that shifting band—the healthy Scandinavian kids on working holidays, the surfie dropouts, and the gaunt druggies—drifting north to Byron Bay and then on up the coast, past Cairns, past Cooktown, until the road ran out.

I’d traveled almost two thousand clicks to get away from my mother, and I ended up finding someone who was, in some ways, exactly like her. Or like she might have been in a parallel universe. Amalie was my mother stripped of social pretensions and material ambition. But she was just as driven by what she did, which was to study how a certain species of butterfly relied on ants to keep its caterpillars safe from predators. She let me stay in her water tank and taught me all about compostable toilets and solar showers. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I now think those weeks on the mountain, watching the way she looked at the world with this close, passionate attention, the way she busted her butt just for the chance to find out something new about how the world worked, were what turned me around and headed me back to Sydney, to start my real life.

Years later, when I came to Vienna and apprenticed myself to Werner Heinrich, I ran into her again. Werner had asked me to investigate the DNA of a book louse he’d extracted from a binding, and someone said the DNA lab over at the Naturhistorisches Museum was the best in the city. At the time I thought that seemed odd. The museum was a fantastic antique of a place, full of moth-eaten stuffed animals and nineteenth-century gentlemen’s rock collections. I loved to wander around in there because you never knew what you’d find. It was like a cabinet of curiosities. There was a rumor, though I’d never confirmed it, that they even had the severed head of the Turkish vizier who’d lost the seige of Vienna in 1623. Supposedly, they kept him in the basement.

But Amalie Sutter’s lab was a state-of-the-art facility for the research of evolutionary biology. I remembered the rather bizarre directions to her office: take the elevator to the third floor, follow the skeleton of the diplodocus, and when you reach the jawbone, her door is on the left. An assistant told me she was in the collections room and walked me down the corridor. I opened the door to a pungent blast of mothball odor. There was Amalie, pretty much as I’d left her, poring over a drawer full of silvery blue shimmer.

She was pleased to see me, but even more pleased to see my specimen. “I thought you were bringing me another book louse.” Last time, she’d had to grind it up to extract the DNA, amplify it, and then wait days to do an analysis. “But this,” she said, holding the envelope carefully. “This, if I’m not much mistaken, is going to be a lot easier. I think what you’ve got here is an old friend of mine.”

“A moth?”

“No, not a moth.”

“It can’t be part of a butterfly?” Bits of butterfly don’t generally wind up in books. Moths do, because they come indoors, where books are kept. But butterflies are outdoor creatures.

“I think it might be.” She stood and closed the collection cabinet. We walked back to her office, where she scanned the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, then hauled down a huge tome on wing veination. She pushed open a tall door that had a life-size picture of her as a graduate student, in the Malaysian rain forest, brandishing a four-meter butterfly net. It was remarkable how little she’d aged since then. I think her absolute enthusiasm for her work acted on her like some kind of preservative. On the other side of the door was a gleaming lab, with postdocs wielding pipettes and peering at DNA graphs on computer monitors. She gently lifted my little bit of wing onto a slide and placed it under a powerful microscope.

“Hello, lovely,” she said. “It is you.” She looked up and beamed at me. She hadn’t even glanced at the veination diagrams. “Parnassius mnemosyne leonhardiana. Common throughout Europe.”

Damn. My heart sank, and my face must have shown it. No new information there. Amalie’s smile widened. “Not much help?” She beckoned me to follow her back down the corridor to the room filled with collection cabinets. She stopped in front of one and opened the tall metal door with a clang. She slid out a wooden drawer. Rows of Parnassius butterflies hovered in their perpetual stasis, afloat forever above their carefully lettered names.

The butterflies were lovely in a subtle, muted way. They had creamy white forewings, splashed with black dots. The rear wings were almost translucent, like lead glass, divided into panes by the distinct tracery of black veins. “Not the flashiest butterfly in the world by any means,” said Amalie. “But collectors love them. Perhaps because you have to climb a mountain to get one.” She closed the drawer and turned to me. “Common throughout Europe, yes. But confined to high alpine systems, generally around two thousand meters. The caterpillars of the Parnassius feed only on an alpine variety of larkspur that grows in steep, stony environments. Your manuscript, Hanna, dear. Has it been on a trip to the Alps?”