The Bookseller's Sonnets Read online

  “No.” I said. “You know that’s not what I think. Would I even be here,” I wiped my hands on a dishtowel, “if that were the case?”

  He sighed as he lifted the heavy pot from the burner and drained the pasta into a colander in the sink. A damp cloud of steam rose into the air. “Probably not. But it seems as if you get it from all sides – your mother, your grandmother, your job, even the survivors that you visit every week. Sometimes I feel like I can’t convince you to talk to her,” he seemed to be choosing his words with some care, “not so much because of what she thinks, but because you’re so steeped in these ideas yourself. And there are times when I wonder if you didn’t have this job, would it be easier for you?”

  “I don’t know. I have no way of knowing. I mean, this is what I do.” I gathered up the sliced tomatoes and tossed them in the bowl with the lettuce. “Why? Do you think I should give up my job?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “There are hundreds of museums in New York City.”

  “And only one,” I said, “where I was lucky enough to find a job in an area of expertise that actually means something to me.”

  “I know. But face it, Jill, you’re getting burned out listening to these stories all day. You’re burned out now. On vacation, you were a different person. You were happy. You weren’t tired all the time. There was light in your eyes. And it wasn’t just that you were happy. We were happy.”

  I stopped fixing the salad for a moment and considered what he was saying. All at once, I felt a shiver come over my body, remembering the nights in the little hotel at the beach, the sweet touch of his fingertips on my skin, his deep voice whispering, making irresistible pictures in my head, his contented smile in the darkness, the feel of his body curled against mine.

  His next words brought me back to the kitchen.

  ”Now you’re back at work, just one day, and you have this shadow on you all over again. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that you came home tonight and started telling me about an artifact that sounds as if it might have an interesting story. But to be honest, I haven’t seen you excited about your job in months. You’re just sadness and shadow all the time. And you just don’t want to face it.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew he was right. He knew he was right. But I didn’t feel like talking about it anymore. I didn’t want to ruin the evening by escalating a conversation into a fight. After a moment or two, I looked up from the salad bowl and tried to smile.

  “Come on,” he said, as he tossed the cooked pasta in the sauce. “Why don’t you bring in the wine, and I’ll take the dishes inside.” He took two plates from the cabinet, expertly piled them with pasta, and removed the garlic bread from the oven. “We can figure this out some other night.”

  “Thanks, Michael.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said, cutting the bread with a stabbing motion. “This is only another postponement. You know that we’ll have to talk about it sometime.”

  “I know,” I murmured. “I just wish we didn’t have to.”

  “Me either. Because maybe we both already know how this is going to end – and all of these conversations are just a polite way of telling us that we’re only putting off the inevitable.”

  4

  I loved the quiet peace of the museum early in the morning, before the other staffers – and the visitors – arrived, the way the early sunlight sparkled on the water of the harbor and the icy bare trees in the park as I walked from the subway. Getting in at 8:30 also meant I had a chance to get out of the house without resuming the conversation of the night before.

  Sometimes I used early mornings to check over the assignment lists before the junior staffers arrived. To my surprise, Aviva was already at her desk, talking on the phone in a voice too low for me to hear what she was saying. After a few more minutes, I finally heard the plastic click of the receiver being replaced in the cradle.

  I settled into my chair. “You’re obviously trying to make me look bad, getting in so early.”

  “I have a lot to do,” she replied quietly.

  I peered around the wall. Violet shadows clouded the skin under her eyes. The rest of her face had a translucent pallor.

  “Aviva, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said dismissively. “You know what they say about the bloom of pregnancy? It’s all lies.”

  “Didn’t you get any sleep?”

  “Not a lot.” She cradled her belly. “I just can’t get comfortable. The baby kept kicking every time I closed my eyes.”

  “I’m so sorry. You look exhausted.”

  “I am exhausted,” she said. “But I wanted to talk to you before the meeting. I’ve been thinking about how we might use the artifact donor database to find out who sent the book.”

  “You’re far along enough in your day to think about going through the database?” I shook my head incredulously. “How early did you get here?”

  “Early enough.”

  “But we haven’t even had a chance to really take a look it,” I said. “Maybe we should do that before anything else. Let’s keep reading. There might be some clues in the text.”

  She nodded. I walked across to the vault, retrieved the book and settled it on top of the counter in our conservation area. Then I pulled up two chairs and motioned for Aviva to join me. I noticed how heavily she seemed to carry herself, even across the short distance. She brought over two pairs of white cotton gloves that she had picked up from the basket between our desks.

  As she approached, I noticed a couple of stray blonde ringlets unfurling from beneath the edge of her crimson wool beret, a tiny careless sign that something was bothering her. I had a feeling it went deeper than lack of sleep.

  I put on the gloves and positioned the book carefully upon the papercovered counter. Even those small motions gave me pause to worry about whether the worn covers would begin to crumble in my hands. “Well, at least we know that this is definitely pre-World War II.”

  Aviva laughed. “Of course it is! Even if we hadn’t seen the date on the inside, this doesn’t even look like a twentieth-century object. You expect everything that comes in to be from the 1930s and 40s.”

  “Sometimes that’s how I feel, given the sorts of artifacts we usually deal with.”

  “I know, it feels like a lot of the objects we’ve been seeing lately are coming from people who hid things during the war, but remember, there were more than three thousand years of Jewish history before the Holocaust.”

  Aviva and I surveyed the book with practiced eyes. Then she reached into a box for a small white surgical mask to cover her nose and mouth. Placing a magnifying loop over her eye, she drew closer to the book, the thick glass mere inches from the dark brown binding.

  “It’s not from this century, that much is certain. And it was definitely bound by hand. See the imperfections right there, in the spine?” she asked, pointing.

  I nodded.

  “Those didn’t come from a machine,” she continued. “Also, there’s a lot of dust in the spine, but it doesn’t look like regular house dust to me. Actually,” she peered closer, “it looks more like dirt. I’d guess the book was exposed to the elements at some point. We should look at it under the high-powered light.”

  “Well, the binding looks tough, but I don’t know if I’d expose the interior pages.”

  We carefully opened the book again and turned to the page where we had left off reading the night before. “See how fragile they are?”

  Oh, that the days when I learned my lessons could be restored to me, for I am sick with betrayal and with grief. I record the poetry of these lines, this first gentle sonnet written in my days as a schoolgirl, as proof of what I once was. For the arrogance of youth believes that each day and each unthinking act will not alter the immortal soul. Of all the lessons I have learned, this is the most bitter. I am no longer the thing that I was; for as the verses tell: This is as I was.

  It is vanity; proud arrogance, and
perhaps – though I can hardly bear to write it nor think it - the betrayal of the very learning that defines me that has led to my fall. I am defeated. My life’s unborn purpose has been torn from me, as a child is torn from the womb in which it is nourished until such time as it can draw its first breath from the world.

  Now it is mere months since my dearest father was lost to me, and I fear that he, who loved me so well, would not know the daughter’s face he looked upon with such fatherly pride and gentleness.

  When I was a child, the eldest child of four not unintelligent creatures, my father said to me, on the passing of my mother: Dearest Margaret, assuage thy grief in study, for in these books and these languages, thou shalt learn that there is real solace in the mastery of skills, so thou mayest arm thyself against further griefs, and instruct thyself to be aware of truths greater than one’s own.

  Haply I immersed myself in languages and learning until that sore day; oh, that day wrought with grief and sorrow, when the serpent entered the garden - the garden that my father had prepared for me, so that I might later enjoy the sweet and mellow fruit borne from my youth; alas. Now that it is ripe, there shall be no gathering. For the serpent hath destroyed the best of the harvest; and hath laid the blossoms to waste.

  I looked up from the page and saw Aviva’s face suddenly turn even paler under the white cover of the mask. “Are you all right?” I asked. “Is it the baby?”

  “Just some kicking.” She tore the mask from her mouth. “And punching. And any other forms of pre-natal violence that this kid can dream up.”

  “Do you want me to run the staff meeting today? It’s not a problem.”

  She shook her head. “No, let me take care of it. I have a ton of database and exhibition catalog items to assign.” She gazed at the book. “Stay here with this,” she said, and heaved herself up from the low chair. “It had your name on it. And I think it’s going to take more than the usual workup to figure out what we’ve got here.”

  “I agree. And I don’t know if anyone else in the department should see it yet.”

  As with any museum dealing in the currency of historical artifacts, we both intimately knew the process by which an artifact’s actual date and origin had to be proven, and then authenticated – a lengthy, detailed process that involved a combination of scholarship and science. And thus, we knew from experience to keep quiet about an object – no matter how potentially significant — until we knew exactly what we were dealing with.

  Much of the time it was easy for us to prove an artifact’s legitimacy. In our museum, objects tended to occur in multiples, and it was easy for us to compare potential new acquisitions with existing items in the collection. For instance, when a yellow fabric star – used to designate Jews from Gentiles in many European cities during the war - once arrived from a potential donor who had in turn purchased it from a seller on eBay, we knew by means of comparison that it was not an item that came from a ghetto, but probably from the set of a Holocaust film.

  After so many years of examining artifacts, Aviva and I intimately knew the hallmarks of genuine objects; the color and shape of the coins and bills that had been exchanged as currency in various ghettos; the particular weave of the uniforms worn at Auschwitz, the composition of metals in a labor camp’s fencepost, painstakingly chipped away and melted down in hiding to make a ring for a secret marriage.

  For the most part, many of the people who came to us with their “one of a kind” objects weren’t looking to scam us. More often than not, the most heartbreaking part of our job was when we had to tell someone they didn’t possess the symbol of a story they had heard their whole lives.

  It was unutterably sad when we had to tell an elderly person that the translation of the inscription on the title page of an ancient book revealed no connection to a long-lost relative; or that a cherished, priceless silver yad –a pointer used to read the Torah, believed to have been rescued from a destroyed synagogue, was actually made of pewter or tin, and virtually valueless except for its historic significance. It was just as painful to see the reaction of a survivor’s child upon hearing the crumbling, yellowed postcard from Germany was not from a long-dead relative writing in the early 1930s, as the inks used to create the illustration were chemical-based, and unavailable for use until the mid1950s.

  So far, our museum had been able to avoid being duped, but we had seen others in our field humiliated both publicly and professionally when they had gotten overexcited about an artifact before proving the truth of its origins.

  And everyone in the very small museum community knew about the scandals that had taken place behind closed board room doors, away from the eyes of deep-pocketed donors and loyal supporters, when certain curators and executive directors had been forced to admit that their so-called cultural institution had actually been dealing in stolen goods.

  In recent months, the newspapers had been full of stories about stolen art, falsified records, and under-the-table deals, which had deposited significant amounts of cash in the pockets of certain highlevel, internationally known museum officials. In my department, we followed those stories the way that most New Yorkers follow the Yankees or the Giants.

  From the hallway we heard the usual commotion of our staff arriving. “Let me go take care of the meeting,” Aviva said, “and then we’ll keep going.”

  I turned back to the parchment page that lay open before me. Softly, I touched the paper with a gloved fingertip; carefully, I turned the pages back to examine the book’s endpaper. It was patterned in a beautiful design, swirling, almost Florentine-looking blues and greens and golds, nearly unfaded except for about quarter-inch of what appeared to be water damage along the outer edges, where the endpapers had once been glued to the binding.

  I saw that along the edges, the intricate designs were blurred, creating a muddy, faded stain of the once-colorful inks. As I examined underneath the unglued sections of the inside cover, I marveled at how the rich quality of the endpapers and the fine, delicate parchment were at odds with the thick, rough-beaten binding. It made me wonder, again, who had sent us such an object, and where it came from.

  I waited impatiently for Aviva, listening to the muffled tones of her voice from the conference room as she gave the junior curators their assignments for the day. When she returned, her color was a little better, and she looked less tired.

  “Find anything interesting?” she asked.

  “I waited for you,” I replied. “But this looks very promising,” I said, revealing the endpapers. “This green and the gilt trim this looks almost Florentine. So I would think the construction was somehow linked to Italy. And over here,” I pointed to the edges, “this looks like water damage.”

  Aviva nodded. “I’d say so. Look at the way the inks have blended together. You’re right, it does look Italian, but it could have been created by someone who knew that style, or who was familiar with different types of paper and bindings.”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know, maybe it was someone who published books for the wealthy. Or it could have come from a monastery. Think about all of those beautiful illuminated manuscripts from the middle ages. This paper looks hand-painted.”

  “What do you think the chances are that it’s authentic?” I asked.

  “I don’t know enough about the sixteenth century, or about bookbinding styles, or paper and ink and illuminations from that time, to be able to answer. But whether it’s the real thing or not, whatever time period it comes from, this book looks as if it’s had a hard life.”

  We turned the page and continued reading.

  It was thus, in happy, happy childhood: I remember so clearly the long, misty days spent in the nursery, or the bright days of the garden in sunlight. In my memory there are books, always books; as if there were no end to the glorious possibilities of men and their ideas. The touch of soft vellum pages, the sharp deep odour of ink; the letters upon the page so clear as to nearly be breathed in, the words becoming part of my brea
th and blood and bone, their taste nearly as sweet as fruit of knowledge itself.

  How dearly I remember the patience and wisdom of my dearest governess, as she sat for hour upon hour with me, learning the mysteries at the heart of some ancient text, her face pale in the light from the leaded window, the candlelit shadows of afternoon and evening falling upon the antique drape of her modest gown, her sweet soft voice gentle with praise or reproof ; O sweet lady, that thy most devoted student should have come to this end; locked in a stone tower room like her father before her; but the keeper this time is no King - though joined to me as subject to sire - he is the man I call husband.

  And I am here now, among these distrait, half-writ thoughts; under lock and key, by light of a thin taper, under cloak and secrecy; for if the man knew of my deeds, I should suffer punishment at his hand; untempered by justice or mercy.

  “She was a prisoner of some sort,” I said. “In London, in 1536.”

  “That was during the reign of Henry VIII,” Aviva mused. “She could have been in the Tower of London.”

  I glanced at her, surprised. “They taught you about the Tudors in that yeshiva of yours?”

  “Ever heard of the Inquisition?” She raised her eyebrows. “Henry’s first wife was Katherine of Aragon. A fervently Catholic Spanish princess.”

  “Let me guess. Bad for the Jews?”

  “Sure, she would have been, if there had been any Jews left in England. They were expelled from England some years before, almost concurrently with the Spanish Inquisition, which as you know was brought about by Katherine’s parents, Ferdinand and Isabella. And our museum has the papers to prove it.”

  “Which somewhat resemble the papers we’re looking at right now,” I pointed out. “As you said last night.”

  “And I also said we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, if I remember correctly.”

  “You remember correctly,” I murmured. “Let’s keep reading.”

  Were I to question the will of the Lord, I should fall upon my knees and ask of Him: what in His wisdom would sever such a gentle connexion between father and child; leaving that child to the care of a servant of cruelty and darkness? Is it in the realm of His wisdom to consider my sin so grievous, that all I hath been given should be taken from me, as the earth hath demanded rain from the heavens to nourish its starving soil after the hot suns?