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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 tennis-tanned; 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