Excerpt
from People of the Book
by Geraldine Brooks
Chapter 1
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 of the museum, the bank cannot remove it from the vault
unless he is present."
Restless, I walked to the windows.
We were on the top floor of the bank, an Austro-Hungarian wedding
cake of a building whose stuccoed facade was speckled with mortar
pockmarks just like every other structure in the city. When I put my
hand on the glass, the cold seeped through. It was supposed to be
spring; down in the small garden by the bank's entrance, the crocuses
were blooming. But it had snowed earlier that morning, and the bowl
of each small flower brimmed with a foam of snowflakes, like tiny
cups of cappuccino. At least the snow made the light in the room even
and bright. Perfect working light, if only I could get to work.
Simply to be doing something, I unrolled some of my papers --
French-milled linen. I ran a metal ruler over each sheet, working it
flat. The sound of the metal edge traveling across the large sheet
was like the sound of the surf I can hear from my flat at home in
Sydney. I noticed that my hands were shaking. Not a good thing in my
line of work.
My hands are not what you'd call one of my
better features. Chapped, wattled across the back, they don't look
like they belong on my wrists, which I am happy to report are slender
and smooth like the rest of me. Charwoman's hands, my mother called
them, the last time we argued. After that, when I had to meet her at
the Cosmopolitan for coffee -- brief, correct, the pair of us brittle
as icicles -- I wore a pair of gloves from the Salvos as a sort of
piss-take. Of course, the Cosmopolitan is probably the only place in
Sydney where someone might miss the irony in that gesture. My mother
did. She said something about getting me a hat to match.
In
the bright snow light, my hands looked even worse than usual, all
ruddy and peeling from scouring the fat off cow gut with a pumice
stone. When you live in Sydney, it's not the simplest thing in the
world to get a meter of calf 's intestine. Ever since they moved the
abattoir out of Homebush and started to spruce the place up for the
2000 Olympics, you have to drive, basically, to woop woop, and then
when you finally get there, there's so much security in place because
of the animal libbers you can barely get in the gate. It's not that I
blame them for thinking I was a bit sketchy. It's hard to grasp right
off the bat why someone might need a meter of calf 's
appendix. But if you are going to work with five-hundred-year-old
materials, you have to know how they were made five hundred years
ago. That's what my teacher, Werner Heinrich, believed. He said you
could read about grinding pigments and mixing gesso all you like, but
the only way to understand is to actually do it. If I wanted to know
what words like cutch and schoder really described, I
had to make gold leaf myself: beat it and fold it and beat it again,
on something it won't stick to, like the soft ground of scoured calf
intestine. Eventually, you'll have a little packet of leaves each
less than a thousandth of a millimeter thick. And you'll also have
horrible-looking hands.
I made a fist, trying to smooth out
the old-lady wattle skin. Also to see if I could stop the trembling.
I'd been nervous ever since I changed planes in Vienna the day
before. I travel a lot; you basically have to, if you live in
Australia and want a piece of the most interesting projects in my
field, which is the conservation of medieval manuscripts. But I don't
generally go to places that are datelines in war correspondents'
dispatches. I know there are people who go in for that sort of thing
and write great books about it, and I suppose they have some kind of
"It can't happen to me" optimism that makes it possible for
them. Me, I'm a complete pessimist. If there's a sniper somewhere in
the country I'm visiting, I fully expect to be the one in his
crosshairs.
Even before the plane landed, you could see the
war. As we broke through the gray swag of cloud that seems to be the
permanent condition of the European sky, the little russet-tiled
houses hugging the Adriatic looked familiar at first, just like the
view I'm used to, down over the red rooftops of Sydney to the deep
blue arc of Bondi Beach. But in this view, half the houses weren't
there anymore. They were just jagged bits of masonry, sticking up in
ragged rows like rotting teeth.
There was turbulence as we
went over the mountains. I couldn't bring myself to look as we
crossed into Bosnia so I pulled down the window shade. The young
bloke next to me -- aid worker, I guessed, from the Cambodian scarf
and the gaunt malarial look of him -- obviously wanted to look out,
but I ignored his body language and tried to distract him with a
question.
"So, what brings you here?"
"Mine
clearance."
I was tempted to say something really
borderline like, "Business booming?" but managed,
uncharacteristically, to restrain myself. And then we landed, and he
was up, with every single other person in the plane, jostling in the
aisle, ferreting around in the overhead bins. He shouldered an
immense rucksack and then proceeded to almost break the nose of the
man crowding the aisle behind him. The lethal backpacker
ninety-degree turn. You see it on the bus at Bondi all the time.
The
cabin door finally opened, and the passengers oozed forward as if
they were glued together. I was the only one still seated. I felt as
if I'd swallowed a stone that was pinning me to my spot.
"Dr.
Heath?" The flight attendant was hovering in the emptied
aisle.
I was about to say, "No, that's my mother,"
when I realized she meant me. In Australia only prats flaunt their
PhDs. I certainly hadn't checked in as anything other than Ms.
"Your
United Nations escort is waiting on the tarmac." That explained
it. I'd already noticed, in the run-up to accepting this gig, that
the UN liked to give everyone the flashiest possible
handle.
"Escort?" I repeated stupidly. "Tarmac?"
They'd said I'd be met, but I thought that meant a bored taxi driver
holding a sign with my name misspelled. The flight attendant gave me
one of those big, perfect, German smiles. She leaned across me and
flung up the drawn shade. I looked out. Three huge, armor-plated,
tinted-window vans, the kind they drive the American president around
in, stood idling by the plane's wingtip. What should have been a
reassuring sight only made the stone in my gut a ton heavier. Beyond
them, in long grass posted with mine-warning signs in various
languages, I could see the rusting hulk of a huge cargo plane that
must have missed the runway during some earlier unpleasantness. I
looked back at Fräulein Smiley-Face.
"I thought the
cease fire was being observed," I said.
"It is,"
she said brightly. "Most days. Do you need any assistance with
your hand luggage?"
I shook my head, and bent to tug out
the heavy case wedged tightly under the seat in front of me.
Generally, airlines don't like collections of sharp metal things on
board, but the Germans are great respecters of trades, and the
check-in clerk understood when I explained how I hate to check my
tools in case they end up touring Europe without me while I sit on my
rear end unable to do my work.
I love my work. That's the thing.
That's why, despite being a world-class coward, I agreed to take this
job. To be honest, it never occurred to me not to take it. You don't
say no to the chance to work on one of the rarest and most mysterious
volumes in the world.
Reprinted by arrangement with Viking,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
Copyright © Geraldine Brooks, 2008