The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  A few seconds more. Then she lowered her hand.

  “The later pages of the ledger may be in better shape,” she said, turning away from him, “but we’ll let them determine that in the conservation lab.”

  So this was why she needed him. She couldn’t trust herself to touch fragile documents. Was that his role then? To be her robotic arm?

  She was reading the letter. Reflexively, his eyes followed hers to the aged paper. Its textured surface drew him, and without looking to her for permission he touched a corner of the page—and felt the fine grid of ridges and troughs, delicate and intimate as the lines of his thumbprint. Held to the light, it would reveal the pattern of the paper mill’s screen and perhaps a watermark that might indicate, with a little research, where the paper had been purchased.

  The letter was in good condition, only a faint brown haze around each word, a penumbra of age.

  They read in silence.

  After a moment she turned to look at him. Without a word, he nodded: he knew it too. Not seven feet from them were two packed shelves—and if the rest of that material had been selected by the same source who had seen fit to preserve this letter, and if even a quarter of those pages were readable, this could be a monumental find.

  In the hush that filled the house, a new landscape opened to Aaron Levy.

  Gingerly, he collected more loose pages from the shelf: three letters and a copy of a sermon, all in Portuguese; a half page of Latin jottings that looked like someone’s reading notes on a theological topic; something in Hebrew—a list of ritual items to be prepared for a Passover seder. He laid the pages on the table, then pulled up a second chair and studied the document before him, lingering over the archaic Portuguese. Beside him, Helen took even longer with the page in front of her.

  Moving very slowly from one document to the next, they surveyed the lot.

  At length she straightened, removed her glasses, and lowered them, suspended on their thin chain, to her breastbone.

  “I hadn’t heard of HaCoen Mendes,” he said.

  Her voice was husky. “I’ve seen one or two references to him in seventeenth-century sources, as one of the early teachers of the Jewish community here after they came out of hiding. He was blinded by the Inquisition in Lisbon in his youth, taught pupils in Amsterdam into old age, then came to London near the end of his life. Apparently only one work of his was ever published, and posthumously—an argument against Sabbateanism. I’ve never read it. I don’t even know if copies still exist.”

  Aaron paused, rereading. One line drew him, his eyes tracing the elegant, looping lines of the Portuguese words. Unlike me, you are not yet an old man. May I then offer my counsel, that your able body and spirit might make use of it?

  An inexplicable longing tightened Aaron’s throat. “I like him,” he said quietly, and regretted it immediately: the unguarded tone of his voice, the naïveté of his words. He waited for her to say the obvious: it wasn’t his business to like or dislike a subject. But she said nothing, only turned back to the documents.

  “Of course,” she said after a moment, “he didn’t write these himself. You note the initial of the scribe?”

  “Scribe?”

  “Scribe, scrivener, copyist, whatever term you use for it. As I said, HaCoen Mendes was blind.”

  She stood and walked through a doorway to a side room, returning a moment later with another page. She’d laid it atop a tea tray and carried it carefully, as if handling fine china. “This is the one I read yesterday.”

  As she passed it to him, he noted that her hand shook less dramatically now—evidently the tremor was variable.

  He read the letter slowly, its antiquated phrasings difficult to decipher. When he’d finished, he looked at the other pages spread before him. There it was, at the bottom right corner of each letter: the faint spidery mark that he’d taken for a few small test-strokes of the quill. Now he saw it was the Hebrew letter aleph.

  “The copyist was probably one of his students,” she said. “We might eventually be able to work out who. It was a minuscule community.” She paused. “HaCoen Mendes’s practice of keeping copies of letters he sent does imply that he knew he was doing something significant in aiding the reestablishment of an official Jewish community in England. Perhaps he felt his records would be important to someone.” She looked at her watch, and what she read there seemed to distress her. “We’ll meet here tomorrow,” she said. “Seven o’clock in the morning, until six. I’ve arranged it with the Eastons. That will be the schedule the following day as well. And that’s all we have.”

  Aaron stood. With regret he lifted his eyes from the page.

  She pulled two plastic sleeves from her satchel and handed them to him, indicating with a wave that he was to insert the letters. As he set to work she stood, leaning on her cane, looming over him. Like a gargoyle. The thought amused him and he felt suddenly buoyant.

  “So our scribe is aleph,” he said.

  “Presumably.”

  “Avraham?” he mused, sliding one page into its holder with deliberate slowness. “Asher? Amram? Aaron?”

  “We know nothing more than aleph.”

  “Aleph the faithful scrivener?” He grinned abruptly at her. “Doesn’t have much of a ring to it. Lacks pizzazz, don’t you think?” This was how he would save his sanity working for this woman. Because he was going to work for her.

  He could admit to himself only now how the panic had grown in him these months—quietly, steadily, soft and choking like silt. How anxiously he’d wished for an excuse to flee his chosen subject. Shakespeare, where the best and brightest went to test their mettle. Shakespeare, where Aaron Levy had launched his mission to hypothesize and prove, applauded by every mentor who had ever said he had great promise. Shakespeare, where Aaron had lately begun to understand that while he was terribly good at promise, he seemed to have promised more than he could deliver.

  But this find was something entirely different. Every historian dreamt of this sort of mother lode. No one would question why he’d turn his attention away from Shakespeare for a little while. And if this cache of documents fulfilled even half of what Helen Watt seemed to expect of it, then—it wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine this, though of course it would be premature to speak of it—some fragment of its riches might become a dissertation. A solid, unassailable dissertation. Maybe even a dazzling one, fulfilling every bit of promise Aaron had ever issued.

  A fresh chance.

  He would survive working with Helen Watt—even as the thought occurred to him, he recognized it as a stroke of genius—by pretending she was a different sort of person. He would act as though she were a woman with a sense of humor.

  She was looking down at him, her jaw tight.

  “Joke,” he said. “Ha ha.”

  That night, over tea in the chill of his flat, the heater ticking quietly by the legs of his desk chair, he wrote an e-mail to Marisa.

  Hey there Marisa.

  The cursor blinked at him, impassive, a virtual sphinx.

  “Hey there.” The acceptable territory between the risky “Dear” and the too-chilly “Hi.”

  How goes life on the kibbutz? Have you repented of your foolishness yet, and booked a ticket back to London to enjoy rain and greasy chips? & how goes the Hebrew? You know I can’t help with modern usage, but if you ever run across a falafel vendor speaking ancient Aramaic or biblical Hebrew, I’m your man.

  “I’m your man.” He stared at the words, wondering how she might hear them.

  Marisa. Too often he’d relived it when he should have been dissecting Shakespeare: The slow tease of her black tank-top lifting over her head. The shock of her eyes as she turned. Her hands, her every motion, as direct as a drumbeat.

  Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black. If Shakespeare had a Dark Lady to yearn for and despair over until her image wore a path in his thoughts, couldn’t he? Or was something about Aaron too petty to qualify for such poetic heights of passion—was he, desp
ite every accomplishment and award, too mundane?

  Sometimes the twin thoughts pinioned him, tackling him as the water thrummed against his chest in the shower or as he loaded his dinner tray in the college’s hall: that he’d only fancied himself good enough to be her lover. Just as he’d fancied himself a true scholar of Shakespeare’s world.

  He typed with a fresh burst of energy.

  Here, an unexpected turn of events. Are you sitting? Sit. Shakespeare will have to wait, I’m afraid. There’s been a trove of old documents found, from the seventeenth century. It’s been hiding under a stairwell in a dormitory suburb of London through who knows how many owners, and only now did someone think to open up the space for renovations. And presto: History Unearthed.

  The trouble is that the prof who’s looking into this is an utter bitch, a Brit of the ice-in-her-veins variety. She’s invited me to be her assistant and I can’t resist the temptation, though it’s going to be hell working with her, so will you kindly remind me to keep my sense of humor?

  The first interesting thing about these papers—and the thing that gives us a good guess at which group of English Jews left them—is that they aren’t only in Hebrew and English and Latin, but also in Castilian and Portuguese. That probably doesn’t make a bit of sense to someone who isn’t wasting her youth researching seventeenth-century Jewish history . . .

  Dared he risk boring her? He could lose the tenuous intimacy that stretched between them. One wrong move, he felt, would snap it. And sharing the strange excitement he felt over these two shelves of documents would be like standing before her naked.

  But wasn’t that the point?

  Hesitantly he worked the keyboard, and as he did it seized him: if he could only bring her into his excitement, pick her up with his two typing hands and carry her into the world as he saw it, she would know him.

  And no one had ever known him.

  He laid this thought before him, examined it for self-pity, found stores of it, and declared it true nonetheless. Who, in fact, understood him? None of his many ex-girlfriends. Not his chatty mother, his doe-eyed sister, nor even his rabbi father, with his rigidly benign religion. If Aaron could persuade Marisa to feel what he’d felt today in front of that staircase in Richmond, it would be like having her in his arms—unspooling his life and respooling it in her presence. Marisa beside him, as he cringed in the pew through sermons that earned his father effusive praise; beside him at the newly sponged kitchen table Sunday mornings, as he moved from the newspaper to hardcover tomes taken from his father’s immaculate library—cracking the spines of history books his father had never opened, to learn of the deaths of entire worlds, the sowing or defeat of ideas, millions of lives rising and falling in the surf of time . . . all filling Aaron with awe and fear, and a kind of excitement he knew not to admit to the high school classmates who admired his cool mastery of all he encountered.

  Today, when he’d peered under that staircase, it was as though what he’d starved for all these lifeless months of dissertation research had been restored to him. History, reaching out and caressing his face once more, the way it had years ago as he sat reading at his parents’ kitchen table. The gentle, insistent touch of something like a conscience, stilling him. Waking him to a lucid new purpose.

  And to something else he preferred not to dwell on. At the sight of those shelves beneath the stair, his bones had balked at supporting his weight. He’d felt them waver, almost fail as he caught his balance—as though they understood already, decades ahead of Aaron, about death.

  Even the recollection made him shudder.

  He took his hands off the computer keyboard, stretched his arms high over his head until he felt a satisfying crack somewhere in the middle of his back, then sipped the bitter tea he’d made on the hot plate.

  He didn’t care if Marisa was right for him. What did it even mean, for one human to be right for another? The correct match of life goals to ensure a few decades of life-cycle events and platitudes? He didn’t care what Marisa’s toughness portended, or whether her free spirit would scoff at domestication—he didn’t care, in short, whether a man could make a life with such a woman. He wanted to be good enough for her. He craved the compact grace of her body, the sharp line of her cropped hair, the soft skin of her upper arms sliding down his shoulders. The onslaught of her laughter.

  Desire moved his hands across the desert of his keyboard. To weave a web for her. To lure her with intelligence, humor. To pique her curiosity until she couldn’t refuse it.

  Are you ready for the lecture, Marisa? I promise I’ll be as brief as I can, and you’ll be committing the magnanimous act of humoring an irrationally exuberant postgraduate who needs to think through a new discovery. Think of this as your charitable donation to seventeenth-century scholarship.

  So here are a few things most people don’t know. Ready? The Jews were booted out of England in 1290 (see under: tribulations, massacres, betrayals, the usual). And were officially gone for nearly four hundred years—although yes, of course, a few came and went disguised as Christians.

  Jump ahead a couple centuries to the height of the Inquisition, and now the Jews of Spain and Portugal are fleeing those countries however they can. And some of these Spanish-and-Portuguese-speaking Inquisition refugees find a new home in Amsterdam, where lo & behold the Dutch—the practical, business-minded Dutch—offer these amazingly tolerant laws regarding the presence of religious minorities. Of course Jews in Amsterdam still can’t intermarry or socialize with Christians, but hey, they’re allowed to be Jews, so long as they don’t try to convert anybody or foment heresy . . . and for the 1600s that’s a goddamn picnic.

  So these Inquisition refugees move in, call Amsterdam their “New Jerusalem,” and get busy trying to revive Judaism. And this turns out to be no simple task, because under the Inquisition they’ve now spent generations as Marranos—meaning secret Jews in Inquisition times, who practiced only vestigial bits of the religion, and even then at risk of death. (“Marrano” was the Spanish word for “pig.” Pretty much sums up Catholic Spain’s view of Jews.) But now that they’re safe in Amsterdam, these until recently secret Jews are so intent on being Good Jews—that is, practicing their faith and reeducating everybody and not making waves with the local populace—that they not only prioritize Jewish education, but suppress dissent, impose rigid social order . . . and give the young Spinoza, who grew up in their ranks, their biggest, most badass excommunication. Never mind the temporary excommunications they usually meted out to troublemakers. These Jewish leaders in Amsterdam banned Spinoza for life and forbade all Jews to have any contact with him, just to make sure nobody would think Amsterdam’s Jews were encouraging religious upheaval.

  They were, the record shows, just a wee bit intense.

  And also kind of messed up in a predictably tragic way. I’ll skip the details of all the pleasant things the Inquisition did in those days. But in Amsterdam these traumatized Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition refugees now looked down on the eastern European Jews they met—Polish Jews fleeing pogroms—and wouldn’t let them marry into their community or even be buried in their cemetery. Not only that, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews still considered Iberian languages and culture to be the gold standard for sophistication . . . which goes to show how the Stockholm Syndrome works. They might have spoken Dutch with non-Jews, but they used Portuguese for daily life and Castilian (medieval Spanish) for anything more formal.

  And that’s where I’m lucky . . . because in addition to the far-too-many years of Hebrew and Latin under my belt, I happen to have a solid reading knowledge of Portuguese, helped along by a semester I spent bumming around Brazil, and I can get by in Castilian.

  Am I boring you yet?

  You know, some women find pompous son-of-a-bitches a turn-on.

  (You will note I don’t hold that comment against you. Though I should.)

  A comment she might not even remember making, so little he meant to her. While his thoughts bent irresis
tibly. Her jet-black cropped hair, her tank-top lifting over her head, the muscles of her back lengthening as her arms reached for the ceiling—he hadn’t guessed a woman’s back could be so beautiful, could humble him with its strength. And had Shakespeare at least had the pleasure of a substantial affair with his Dark Lady, if there ever even was such a woman—or had he, too, wasted sweat and ink and solitary hours in a dark bedroom on a woman he’d slept with only once?

  So if you’re even still reading, if you haven’t yet deleted me from your inbox for the length of this thing, you might guess that the people who wrote those papers found under the stairwell were Portuguese Jews, and from Amsterdam. And the thing is, they also knew Menasseh ben Israel. He was one of the most famous of the Portuguese Jewish rabbis in Amsterdam. The guy was respected not only among the Jews, but by Christians too—he was in with both Rembrandt and the queen of Sweden, a big deal for a Jew.

  Now imagine this: Menasseh’s day is a big time for all kinds of desperate messianic thinking. Plenty of eyes are peeled for the Messiah—even Christian scholars have definitively declared that 1666 is going to be the year the big one comes back. And famous, well-connected Menasseh ben Israel is sitting there in Amsterdam in the 1650s and thinking about bringing the Messiah, and also thinking about all the tortured Jews in Spain and Portugal and even the tortured Jews in Poland and Russia who need safe haven. And he hears a rumor that the lost tribe of Israel has been found in Brazil: Jews! In the Americas! And he remembers the prophecy that Jews have to be present in all corners of the world in order for the messiah to come.

  And in all the known world of that time, guess which country is the only one with officially no Jews?

  Bingo. Now you can guess where all this is heading.

  So old Menasseh approaches Oliver Cromwell, who’s now won the English Civil War. And he tells Cromwell it’s time to bring the Messiah by letting the Jews into England. And despite difficulties I won’t go into because your eyes are surely already glazing over, Cromwell decides he likes the idea. At this point it’s an open secret that there already are Jews in London, about twenty families of extremely successful merchants—they claim to be Catholics but keep a rudimentary Jewish practice in secret. So whether it’s because Cromwell just wants his England to benefit by welcoming prosperous merchants, or because he thinks he might use his Jews with their ships and their connections in Europe’s ports to collect intelligence . . . or else maybe because he honestly does believe it’s going to hasten the messianic age . . . Cromwell agrees to let Jews live in England. He can’t do it officially—try though he may, he can’t get Parliament to agree to welcome the Jews. But he does it sort of semi-officially.