Читать книгу People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks - Страница 9

WE STEPPED OUT into the dark city streets, and I shivered. Most of the snow had disappeared during the day, but now the temperature was dropping again, and heavy clouds hid the moon. There were no streetlights working. When I realized that Karaman proposed to walk to the Old City, the feeling of a stone in the gut returned.

“Are you sure that’s, you know, OK? Why don’t we have my UN escort drive us?”

He made a slight face, as if he smelled something unappetizing. “Those oversized tanks they drive will not fit in the narrow ways of the Baščaršija,” he said. “And there has been no sniping for over a week now.”

Great. Tremendous. I let him handle the argy-bargy with the UN Vikings, hoping he wouldn’t be able to convince them to let me go on without an escort. Unfortunately, he was a pretty persuasive fellow—stubborn, anyway—and finally we set off on foot. He had a long-legged stride, and I had to quicken my pace to keep up with him. As we walked, he delivered a kind of countertourism monologue—a guide-from-hell kind of a thing—describing the city’s various shattered structures. “That is the Presidency Building, neo-Renaissance style and the Serbs’ favorite target.” A few blocks farther: “That is the ruins of the Olympic Museum. That was once the post office. This is the cathedral. Neo-Gothic. They had midnight Mass there last Christmas, but they held it at noon because, of course, no one went out at night at that time unless they were suicidal. On its left you see the synagogue and the mosque. On the right the Orthodox church. All the places where none of us go to worship, situated within a very convenient hundred meters of one another.”

I tried to imagine how I would feel if Sydney were suddenly scarred like this, the landmarks of my childhood damaged or destroyed. Waking up one day and finding that the people in North Sydney had set up barricades on the Harbour Bridge and started shelling the Opera House.

“I suppose it’s still a bit of a luxury to walk in the city,” I said, “after four years of running from snipers.” He was walking a little bit ahead of me. He stopped suddenly.

“Yes,” he said. “Quite.” Somehow he poured a whole bucket of sarcasm into that terse reply.

The wide avenues of Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo had gradually given way to the narrow, cobbled footpaths of the Ottoman town, where you could stretch out your arms and almost touch buildings on opposite sides of the way. The buildings were small scale, as if built for halflings, and pressed together so tightly that they reminded me of tipsy friends, holding each other upright on the way home from the pub. Large parts of this area had been out of range of the Serb guns, so the damage here was much less evident than in the modern city. From a minaret, the khoja called the faithful to aksham, the evening prayer. It was a sound I associated with hot places—Cairo, Damascus—not a place where frost crunched underfoot and pockets of unmelted snow gathered in the crotch between the mosque’s dome and its stone palisade. I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims’ vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace.

The khoja of this small mosque was an old man, but his voice carried, unwavering and beautiful on the cold night air. Only a handful of other old men answered; shuffling across the cobbled courtyard, dutifully washing their hands and faces in the icy water of the fountain. I stopped for a moment to watch them. Karaman was ahead of me, but he turned back, and followed my gaze. “There they are,” he said. “The fierce Muslim terrorists of the Serb imagination.”

The restaurant he had chosen was warm and noisy and full of delicious aromas of grilling meat. A photograph by the door showed the proprietor, in military fatigues, brandishing an immense bazooka. I ordered a plate of cevapcici. He ordered a salad of shaved cabbage and a dish of yogurt.

“That’s a bit austere,” I said.

He smiled. “I’ve been a vegetarian since I was a child. That was useful, during the siege, since there wasn’t any meat. Of course, the only greens you could get most of the time were grass clippings. Grass soup, that became my specialty.” He ordered two beers. “Beer, you could get, even during the siege. The brewery was one thing in the city that never closed down.”

“Aussies would approve of that,” I said.

“I was thinking about what you said earlier, about the people from this country who migrated to Australia. Actually, we had quite a few Australians visiting the museum library, just before the war.”

“Oh?” I said absently, sucking on my beer, which was, I have to say, a little soapy.

“Well dressed, speaking terrible Bosnian. Same peoples came from the United States as well. We averaged about five a day, looking up their family history. At the library we gave them a nickname, after that black man in the American TV show—Kinta Kunte.”

“Kunta Kinte,” I corrected.

“Yes, him: we called them the Kunta Kintes because they were searching for their roots. They wanted to look at the official gazettes, 1941 to ’45. Never looking for Partisans in their family tree. They didn’t want to be descendants of leftists. Always it was the nationalist fanatics—Chetniks, Ustashe, the killers of the Second World War. Imagine wanting to be related to such people. I wish I’d known then that they were the storm crows. But we didn’t want to believe that such madness could ever come here.”

“I’ve always kind of admired Sarajevans for being so surprised by the war,” I said. It had seemed the rational response to me. Who wouldn’t be in a state of denial when your next-door neighbor suddenly starts shooting at you, casually and without remorse, like you’re some kind of unwanted introduced species, the way the farmers at home eradicate rabbits.

“It’s true,” he said. “Years ago, we watched Lebanon fall apart and said, ‘That’s the Middle East, they’re primitive over there.’ Then we saw Dubrovnik in flames, and we said, ‘We’re different in Sarajevo.’ That’s what we all thought. How could you possibly have an ethnic war here, in this city, when every second person is the product of a mixed marriage? How to have a religious war in a city where no one ever goes to church? For me, the mosque, it’s like a museum, quaint thing to do with grandparents. Picturesque, you know. Once a year, maybe, we’d go and see the zikr, when the dervishes dance, and it was like theater—like, what do you call it? A pantomime. My best friend, Danilo, he’s a Jew, and he’s not even circumcised. There was no mohel here after the war; you had to go to the local barber. Anyway, our parents were all leftists, they thought such things were primitive.…” He trailed off, downing his beer in a couple of swallows and ordering two more.

“I wanted to ask you about the day you saved the haggadah.”

He grimaced and looked down at his hands, which were spread out on the speckled Laminex of the café table. His fingers were long and delicate. Funny how I hadn’t noticed that earlier, when I’d been rude to him and worried he might lay an unauthorized paw on my precious parchment.

“You have to understand. It is as I was just saying. We did not believe in the war. Our leader had said, ‘It takes two sides to have a war, and we will not fight.’ Not here, not in our precious Sarajevo, our idealistic Olympic city. We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don’t have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death. We know that now. But then, those first few days, we all did things that were a little crazy. Kids, teenagers, they went off to demonstrate against the war, with posters and music, as if they were going to a picnic. Even after the snipers shot a dozen of them, we still didn’t get it. We expected that the international community would put a stop to it. I believed that. I was worried about getting through a few days, that’s all, while the world—how do you say?—got its act together.”

He was speaking so quietly I could barely hear him over the buzz of laughter that filled the restaurant. “I was kustos; the museum was being shelled. We were not prepared for it. Everything there was exposed. There were two kilometers of books in the museum, and the museum was just twenty meters 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.”