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?”
An Insect’s Wing Sarajevo, 1940
Here lies the grave. Stay, for a while, when the forest listens.
Take off your caps! Here rests the flower of a people that knows how to die.
—Inscription, World War II memorial, Bosnia
THE WIND BLEW ACROSS the Miljacka River, hard as a slap. Lola’s thin coat was no protection. She ran across the narrow bridge, her hands thrust deep in her pockets. On the other side of the river, a set of rough-hewn stone stairs rose abruptly, leading to a warren of narrow lanes lined with shabby apartment buildings. Lola took the stairs two at a time and turned in to the second alleyway, sheltered at last from the bitter gusts.
It was not yet midnight, so the outer door to her building hadn’t been locked. Inside, it was not much warmer than on the street. She steadied herself and took a moment to catch her breath. A heavy smell of boiled cabbage and fresh cat piss hung over the foyer. Lola crept up the stairs and gently turned the latch on her family’s apartment. Although her right hand reached up instinctively to touch the mezuzah on the doorjamb before she slipped inside, Lola could not have said why. She took off her coat, unlaced her boots, and carried them as she tiptoed past the sleeping forms of her mother and father. The apartment was one room, with a dividing curtain the only privacy.
Her little sister was just a bulge beneath the quilt. Lola lifted the coverlet and slid in beside her. Dora was curled up like a small animal, radiating welcome heat. Lola reached for the warmth of her sister’s back. The child protested in her sleep, uttering a tiny cry and pulling away. She tucked her icy hands into her own armpits. Despite the cold, her face was still flushed, her brow still damp from the dancing, and if her father woke, he might notice that.
Lola loved the dancing. That was what had lured her to the Young Guardians meetings. She liked the hiking, too; the long, hard walks in the mountains to a hanging lake or the ruins of an ancient fortress. The rest of it, she didn’t care much for. The endless discussions of politics bored her. And the Hebrew—she didn’t even enjoy reading in her own language, much less struggling to decode the strange black squiggles that Mordechai was always trying to get her to remember.
She thought about his arm across her shoulder in the circle. She could still feel the pleasant weight of it, muscular from farm labor. When he’d rolled up his sleeves, his forearm had been brown and hard as a hazelnut. Even though she didn’t know the steps, it was easy to follow the dance with him beside her, smiling encouragement. A Sarajevan—even a poor one like Lola—would never give a second glance to a Bosnian peasant. Never mind if the farmer was quite well-off, a city person felt superior. But Mordechai was another thing entirely. He’d grown up in Travnik, which, while not Sarajevo, was a fine town nevertheless. He was educated; he’d attended the gymnasium. Yet two years earlier, at the age of seventeen, he’d gone off on a boat to Palestine to work on a farm. And not a prosperous farm either, by his description. A dried-out, barren piece of dust where you had to break your back to raise a crop. And for no profit, just the food in your mouth and the work clothes on your back. Worse than a peasant, really. Yet when he talked about it, it was as if there was no more fascinating or noble profession in the world than digging irrigation ditches and harvesting dates.
Lola loved listening to Mordechai when he talked about all the practical things a pioneer had to know, like how to treat a scorpion bite or stanch a bad cut; how to site a sanitary latrine or improvise a shelter. Lola knew she would never leave home to pioneer in Palestine, but she liked to think about the kind of adventurous life that might demand such skills. And she liked to think about Mordechai. The way he spoke reminded her of the old Ladino songs her grandfather had sung to her when she was a little girl. He had a seed stand at the open-air market, and Lola’s mother would sometimes leave her there with him while she worked. Grandfather was full of tales of knights and hidalgos, and poems from a magic place called Sepharad, where he said their ancestors had lived long ago. Mordechai spoke about his new land as if it were Sepharad. He told the group that he couldn’t wait to get back there, to Eretz Israel. “I am jealous of every sunrise I am not there to see the white stones of the Jordan Valley turn to gold.”
Lola didn’t speak up in the group discussions. She felt stupid compared to the others. Many of them were Svabo Jijos, Yiddish-speaking Jews, who had come to the city with the Austrian occupation in the late nineteenth century. Ladino-speaking families like Lola’s had been in the city since 1565, when Sarajevo was part of the Ottoman empire, and the Muslim sultan had offered refuge from Christian persecution. Most of those who came had been wandering since the expulsion from Spain in 1492, unable to find a permanent home. They had found peace in Sarajevo, and acceptance, but only a few families had really prospered. Most remained small-time merchants like her grandfather, or artisans with simple skills. The Svabo Jijos were more educated, more European in their outlook. Very soon they had much better jobs and were blending with the highest ranks of Sarajevan society. Their children went to the gymnasium and even sometimes to the university. At the Young Guardians, they were the natural leaders.
One was the daughter of a city councilor, one the son of the pharmacist, a widower, for whom Lola’s mother did
