scene. A family of Jews—Spanish, by their dress—sits at a Passover meal. We see the ritual foods, the matzoh to commemorate the unleavened bread that the Hebrews baked in haste on the night before they fled Egypt, a shank bone to remember the lamb’s blood on the doorposts that had caused the angel of death to “pass over” Jewish homes. The father, reclining as per custom, to show that he is a free man and not a slave, sips wine from a golden goblet as his small son, beside him, raises a cup. The mother sits serenely in the fine gown and jeweled headdress of the day. Probably the scene is a portrait of the family who commissioned this particular haggadah. But there is another woman at the table, ebony-skinned and saffron-robed, holding a piece of matzoh. Too finely dressed to be a servant, and fully participating in the Jewish rite, the identity of that African woman in saffron has perplexed the book’s scholars for a century.
Slowly, deliberately, I examined and made notes on the condition of each page. Each time I turned a parchment, I checked and adjusted the position of the supporting forms. Never stress the book—the conservator’s chief commandment. But the people who had owned this book had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile, genocide, war.
As I reached the end of the Hebrew text, I came to a line of script in another language, another hand. Revisto per mi. Gio. Domenico Vistorini, 1609. The Latin, written in the Venetian style, translated as “Surveyed by me.” Were it not for those three words, placed there by an official censor of the pope’s Inquisition, this book might have been destroyed that year in Venice, and would never have crossed the Adriatic to the Balkans.
“Why did you save it, Giovanni?”
I looked up, frowning. It was Dr. Karaman, the librarian. He gave a tiny, apologetic shrug. Probably he thought I was irritated at the interruption, but actually I was surprised that he had voiced the very question in my mind. No one knew the answer; any more than they knew how or why—or even when—the book had come to this city. A bill of sale from 1894 stated that someone named Kohen had sold it to the library. But no one had thought to question the seller. And since World War II, when two-thirds of the Jews in Sarajevo were slaughtered and the city’s Jewish quarter ransacked, there had been no Kohens left in the city to ask. A Muslim librarian had saved the book from the Nazis then, too, but the details of how he’d done it were sparse and conflicting.
When I had completed the notes on my initial examination, I set up an eight-by-ten camera and worked through again from the beginning, photographing every page so as to make an accurate record of the book’s condition before any conservation work was attempted. When I was done with the conservation work and before I re-bound the pages, I would photograph each page again. I would send the negatives to Amitai in Jerusalem. He would direct the making of a set of high-grade prints for the world’s museums and the printing of a facsimile edition that ordinary people everywhere would be able to enjoy. Normally, a specialist would do those photos, but the UN didn’t want to jump through the hoops of finding another expert that passed muster with all the city’s constituencies, so I’d agreed to do it.
I flexed my shoulders and reached for my scalpel. Then I sat, my chin resting on one hand, the other poised over the binding. Always a moment of self-doubt, at the instant before you begin. The light glinted on the bright steel, and made me think of my mother. If she hesitated like this, the patient would bleed out on the table. But my mother, the first woman to chair a department of neurosurgery in the history of Australia, was a stranger to self-doubt. She hadn’t doubted her right to flout every convention of her era, bearing a child without troubling to take a husband, or even naming a father. To this day, I have no idea who he was. Someone she loved? Someone she used? The latter, more likely. She thought she was going to raise me in her own image. What a joke. She’s fair and perpetually tennistanned; I’m dark and pale as a Goth. She has champagne tastes. I prefer beer straight out of the tinnie.
I realized a long time ago that she would never respect me for choosing to be a repairer of books rather than bodies. For her, my double-honors degrees in chemistry and ancient Near Eastern languages might as well have been used Kleenex. A masters in chemistry and a PhD in fine art conservation didn’t cut it, either. “Kindergarten work,” she calls it, my papers and pigments and pastes. “You’d be through your internship by now,” she said when I got back from Japan. “At your age I was chief resident” was all I got when I came home from Harvard.
Sometimes, I feel like a figure in one of the Persian miniatures I conserve, a tiny person forever watched by immobile faces, staring down from high galleries or spying from behind lattice screens. But in my case, the faces are always just that one face, my mother’s, with her pursed mouth and disapproving glare.
And here I am, thirty years old, and still she can get between me and my work. That feeling, of her impatient, disapproving scrutiny, finally stirred me. I slipped the scalpel under the thread, and the codex eased apart into its precious folios. I lifted the first one. A tiny speck of something fluttered from the binding. Carefully, with a sable brush, I moved it onto a slide and passed it under the microscope. Eureka. It was a tiny fragment of insect wing, translucent, veined. We live in a world of arthropods, and maybe the wing came from a common insect and wouldn’t tell us anything. But maybe it was a rarity, with a limited geographic range. Or maybe it was from a species now extinct. Either would add knowledge to the history of the book. I placed it in a glassine envelope and labeled it with a note of its position.
A few years ago, a tiny sliver of quill paring I’d found in a binding had caused a complete uproar. The work was a very beautiful little set of suffrages, short prayers to individual saints, supposedly part of a lost Book of Hours. It was owned by an influential French collector who had charmed the Getty into considering paying an absolute fortune for it. The collector had provenance documents going way back, attributing it to the Bedford Master who had painted in Paris around 1425. But something about it didn’t sit just right with me.
Generally, a quill paring won’t tell you much. You don’t need an exotic feather to make a quill. Any good strong flight feather from any robust bird can be made into a serviceable pen. It always makes me laugh when I see actors in period movies scribbling away with flamboyant ostrich feathers. For one thing, there weren’t a whole lot of ostriches marching around in medieval Europe. And for another, scribes always trimmed the feather down to something that looked pretty much like a stick, so the fluffy bits didn’t get in their way while they were working. But I insisted on checking out the paring with an ornithologist, and what do you know? The paring came from a Muscovy duck feather. Muscovys are common everywhere these days, but in the 1400s they were still pretty much confined to Mexico and Brazil. They weren’t introduced to Europe until the early 1600s. Turned out the French “collector” had been faking manuscripts for years.
As I gently lifted off the haggadah’s second folio, I drew out the frayed thread holding it, and noticed that a fine white hair, about a centimeter long, had become trapped in the thread fiber. Checking under magnification, I could see that the hair had left a very slight indentation near the binding, on the page that depicted the Spanish family seder. Gently, with surgical tweezers, I disentangled it and placed it in its own envelope.
I needn’t have worried about the people in the room being a distraction. I didn’t even notice they were there. People came and went, and I didn’t raise my head. It was only when the light began to fade that I realized I’d worked right through the day without a break. I suddenly felt stiff from tension, and ravenously hungry. I stood, and Karaman was immediately there, his dreadful metal box ready. I laid the book with its separated folios carefully inside.
“We absolutely have to change this right away,” I said. “Metal is the worst thing for transmitting variations in heat and cold.” I placed a sheet of glass on top and weighed it with little velvet sandbags to keep the parchments flat. Ozren fiddled with his wax, stamps, and strings while I cleaned and organized my tools. “How do you find our treasure?” he said, inclining his head toward the book.
“Remarkable
