The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Instead she spent her waking hours kneading thick, dry dough under Rivka’s direction, stirring stews heavy with potatoes and the occasional slice of salted beef shipped from the Jewish butcher in Amsterdam. Day after day she prepared Rivka’s spiceless Polish food, which bore no resemblance to the Portuguese dishes she’d been accustomed to in her parents’ home. At Rivka’s direction she prodded these ingredients into meals, which she carried in to the rabbi and his occasional students . . . only to return them, barely touched, to Rivka—the rabbi’s because he had no appetite, the students’ because even they, raised on heavy English fare, knew better. But Ester had neither strength nor skill to propose any fare more pleasing.

  Even after her parents’ deaths in Amsterdam, when Ester had labored in others’ homes for her keep, she’d still been treated as a daughter of the Portuguese community—set to sewing and other lighter tasks while the heavier labors were accomplished in back rooms by Dutch or Tudesco servants. Only here in London did she at last see the truth: a household was a creature of bottomless hungers. It ravened for wood and coal and white starch, for sailcloth and bread and ale; for breath and sinew, and life itself, which wreathed away invisibly beneath the press of daily labor like the wax of a lit candle. When the kitchen or the eternally waning fires didn’t demand Ester’s attention, she was sent to polish brass and pewter jugs with mare’s-tail, scour pots and floor, turn the beds, haul linens to the attic in buck-baskets. Daily, she beat drapes and furnishings to remove the soot of the cheap sea coal that heated the household; only the rabbi’s fire was made up with wood, as Rivka insisted that soot harmed the rabbi’s frail constitution, and Rivka would not under any circumstance have him breathe the coal-warmed air that drifted through the rest of the house.

  Through these labors, Rivka offered Ester little by way of talk, though when tasks proved difficult she was patient with Ester’s clumsiness. Now and again Rivka offered a brief smile, or a squeeze of her thick hand on Ester’s arm to release Ester from some too-taxing chore, which Rivka then bent to herself. But these gestures never blossomed into greater warmth. Ester knew Rivka wished her comfort. But it was plain Rivka felt the distance between them to be unbridgeable, and their fellowship inevitably transient: the daughter of a Sephardic family, even an orphaned one, would marry and have a household of her own. Rivka, her hair thinned and colorless, her body as thick as her accent, seemed never to have entertained such dreams, even in her own long-ago youth. Wringing dry the heaviest feather coverlet for the rabbi, the next for Isaac, and then Ester, and the thinnest for herself, Rivka kept her own counsel—expending few words beyond her occasional incomprehensible Tudesco mutterings, which seemed to Ester more expressive than anything Rivka ventured in her terse Portuguese.

  Sometimes, mending with her cramped stitches, Ester stole a moment’s reprieve to listen to the rabbi and his students in the room at the foot of the stair. Moshe kibel torah m’sinai . . . Words she herself had learned from the rabbi. She’d been still a girl when her father had first brought the rabbi to their house in Amsterdam. She’d known him by sight long before, of course: Rabbi HaCoen Mendes, seated at the edge of the men’s section in the Talmud Torah sanctuary, his lips moving to prayers he knew by heart. In Amsterdam, students had been brought to HaCoen Mendes when the other rabbis were unavailable or unwilling to teach them. To the younger boys he would tell quiet tales that left them rapt: Daniel and the lion, Akiva and his devoted wife, Bar Koch­ba and the saplings. The older boys he tasked with reading passages of Mishneh Torah, then dug for their opinions until they lit up with comprehension or became bored. Some took advantage of his blindness, making frivolous alterations to the content of the passages they read aloud, or circulating mocking verse while the rabbi spoke: pranks whispered of with righteous anger in the women’s balcony at the synagogue. Yet Ester had heard her father say that the other rabbis took advantage of HaCoen Mendes’s tolerance as well, sending him their most troublesome pupils. HaCoen Mendes never complained. When the congregation’s most disobedient student of all—Miguel de Spinoza’s son, a pupil determined to upend all tradition for the sake of his own self-regarding logic—was excommunicated for his hubris, HaCoen Mendes even had himself escorted to the synagogue to voice his objection to the severity of the punishment—to no avail.

  She wished now obscurely, as the rain splashed on the London cobbles outside the window, that the rabbi could plead thus to some court on her behalf. But for what reprieve? The life she’d known in Amsterdam had vanished. The very table where she’d once pored over the rabbi’s lessons was now ash. So, it seemed, was her spirit, which had risen to greet each text she’d studied with the rabbi. In that too-brief time of her studies, a tide of words and reasoning had lifted her and rushed her far past the stagnant canals that hemmed the Jewish neighborhood, toward some bright distant horizon. She’d wanted that horizon so much, it dizzied her.

  Yet now she touched books only in the basest sense. The rich library they’d brought with them from Amsterdam to London required tending like all else in the house, for coal soot found its way even behind the curtain that protected the long shelf of books. The first time Ester had been assigned the task of dusting the rabbi’s treasures, she’d drawn back the curtain and stood breathing in wonder at the leather-and-gilt spines. The library, a gift from the congregation in Amsterdam to support the rabbi’s undertaking in London, was a gauntlet of expensive tomes thrown down by Amsterdam’s Jews. The titles embossed on the spines were astonishing: Pirkei Avot, yes, and Moreh Nevuchim and Ketubim, of course, but also works of philosophy. Standing flush with Menasseh ben Israel’s De la Fragilidad Humana was a volume of Aristotle’s writings—as though the Amsterdam Jews who had donated these books assumed that England’s Jews had become such boors in their separation from the community that they now required not only reeducation in Jewish teachings, but an introduction to the rudiments of thought itself. Slowly Ester slid books from their perches. Frontispieces, framed by calligraphers, were inscribed with the signatures of the Amsterdam merchants who’d had these extravagant gifts bound for their London brethren—without, Ester felt sure, ever reading the books’ contents themselves. She opened a supple leather binding to discover a work by the Englishman Francis Bacon, translated into Castilian. What use had the givers of this lavish volume felt the Castilian would be to a Jew of England? And was it envy that made her think the men who had given these books valued the bindings more than the words they bound?

  But Rivka, seeing Ester stilled and dreaming at the task of dusting, had issued a grunt of disapproval and sent Ester to wring linens.

  Not two months since their arrival from Amsterdam—yet the brief flare of hope Ester had carried with her had deadened in these damp stone rooms. Considered slight before her arrival in London, she’d grown thinner still. Some afternoons her exertions darkened the air and she had to sit on the floor while the room swooned about her. Once, as she crouched waiting for the swooning to cease, with the shelf of magisterial volumes above her as unreachable as the moon, it seemed to her that the stone floor she clung to was an isle on which she’d been exiled from the last remains of all she’d once loved. It came to her to wonder whether the banished young de Spinoza too had felt his rebellious mind darkened in his own exile by the labor of earning his keep. Had his thoughts, rumored the worst sort of heresy, also been smothered, as the rabbis surely hoped?

  Questions that floated away in the silt of the dim, rocking room.

  Nights, when Rivka’s snores resounded, Ester lay silent under the cover, willing herself toward the sweet sleep she now craved more than almost all else. The death of each day’s life. End it, she thought. End this day’s life if the world holds mercy. Her long-ago studies were mere shadows—she could not recall what had made her think them worthy. Here and again, as she lay in the dark, a thought might rise murky out of the fatigue, and—she couldn’t help herself—she’d hold it tender as a newborn lest it slip from her hands, caressing it, trying to shield it
against oblivion. Until finally it slipped, a spark extinguished by sleep.

  A dream, buried in the night like a seed of light in the dark: her father’s hand, atop the polished wooden table—patting it once, twice. Protection, safety. Gone.

  The rabbi’s face was turned toward the livid flames.

  “Since your brother chooses not to return,” he said, “I’ll ask to employ your hand the remainder of today.”

  She stood. With tentative steps, she made her way to the table. Lowered herself into the wooden seat, hesitated, then selected a goose quill from the jar.

  Its smooth shaft, rolling between her fingers, was foreign. Had it been two years since she’d held a quill? More?

  “Begin a letter to Amsterdam,” the rabbi said quietly. “Sixth of Kislev.”

  The paper was before Ester. Her hands were clumsy.

  She wrote,

  6 Kislev, 5418

  With the help of G-d

  “To the honored Samuel Moses,” the rabbi said.

  She dipped the quill and wrote the words, her lettering cramped. The wet blue-black letters shone on the thick paper.

  “We have received with great thanks your shipment of two volumes,” he continued. “The number of our pupils grows with the help of God, though slowly.”

  She dipped the quill, and in her haste to return it to the paper, tipped the bottle. A satin puddle glistened on the page she’d begun. A stain blossomed on the back of her left hand.

  The fire crackled in the silence.

  “What’s happened?” the rabbi asked.

  “The ink bottle,” she whispered.

  He nodded. Then bent his head until his beard touched his chest. After a moment she realized he was waiting for her to clean the spill and begin again.

  She looked at her hand. Rivulets of ink had spread into the creases between her fingers, settling into the frail pathways of her skin like a map of all that was ruined. Didn’t the rabbi understand that the quick pupil he’d tutored at her father’s house was lost? Was it his sealed eyelids—the perfect, blanched skin of his scars—that permitted him to imagine her as she’d once been?

  But of course, he wasn’t asking her to scribe because he thought her a worthy instrument. It was, rather, that he had no choice.

  She stood. “Isaac will be back,” she told the rabbi, careful to keep the wretchedness out of her voice. “He’ll write for you.”

  “Your brother will not return,” the rabbi said softly. “He never harbored any love of the labor of ink and paper. And now”—he gestured gently with the tips of his fingers: Now that that fire has occurred. Now that Isaac is damned in his own eyes.

  A welling silence.

  “I brought Isaac to London,” the rabbi said, “in the hope that he might have a different life, free of what trailed him in Amsterdam. For the mercy of the Almighty can release us”—he paused, as though bracing to bear his own words—“from all bonds of slavery. And cause even the blind to see.”

  She could not quiet her thoughts. How could he speak of seeing? Did faith so sustain him that he felt his stolen faculties restored? She’d no such faith. Even in girlhood, the comforts of the Hebrew prayers in synagogue had failed to attach to her, leaving her perplexed among the chanting believers. Yet she could almost believe Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s words, for how else did he endure blindness with such serenity, if not for some inner vision—some vista of consolation available behind his sealed lids?

  Rabbi HaCoen Mendes sat with his fingertips pressed together. “Isaac does not accept the life I offer him,” he said. “I must trust him to the hands of the Almighty. But I fear, Ester, that he won’t rest in that embrace.” The rabbi turned his face toward her. “Your brother places himself at the mercy of rougher hands.”

  It was true. There was no worth in pretending any longer. Isaac would not be back.

  “Write,” said the rabbi. “Please.”

  She didn’t move. Her clumsy hand shamed her.

  “I spoke too quickly,” he said, “and caused you too great haste. The spill was my doing.”

  She righted the bottle with her stained hand, cleaned the mess with a cloth, and, taking a fresh page, dipped her quill in the small reserve of ink that remained.

  “To the learned Yacob de Souza,” the rabbi dictated.

  She wrote.

  Your kind inquiries after my health are more than I merit. I am well tended to in my household, and remain whole in spirit and body.

  She finished the line, and waited. The air above the wood fire was alive with pirouetting waves of heat. Even at this distance from the hearth, she felt the heat echo on her face. Beside her feet, under the finely finished writing table, a small stove awaited lighting, to dry the ink of the rabbi’s words more rapidly. Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s nephew, who despite his own indifference to Jewish learning had acquired and furnished this house for them, had spared no expense in remaking this damp residence into a proper house of study for the aged man.

  In the silence now, something kindled in her. The writing table seemed abruptly to be a vast expanse—a plateau where some small remaining freedom might be possible. A tidy stack of paper, a wide glass jar of quills, a pen knife. A stick of red sealing wax. The smooth grain of the tabletop. She felt her body rush with quick heat, as though every bit of her, every plain and hidden part, were waking.

  The rabbi was speaking again, his blind eyes turned to her. The words he spoke streamed through her hand, leaving a bright black wake on the page.

  Your concern for my position here is further evidence of your generous nature. Yet I urge you to put your mind at rest, dear Yacob, and devote your efforts to those in greater need. The rumors that have reached you are correct. The community here does not hunger to learn. Yet this does not shake my faith in the rightness of my labors. I, for my part, accept the very things you rue. Menasseh ben Israel, it’s said, heard indifference in the community’s failure to embrace him. I hear, instead, fear. I sit among them in the synagogue and I hear their hands sliding on their woolen cloaks that they’ve laid on the benches beside them. How tightly they hold to these garments, as though loath to be parted from them should they need to leave in haste. I listen to them shift each time the synagogue door opens: they must turn their heads to learn who has arrived or departed before they may reenter holy prayer. I say this now without rebuke, but in the hope my words will aid: it is all too easy to speak, when one is at leisure in Amsterdam, of the glory of martyrs. Those rabbis who do so, I suggest humbly, are not those who themselves endured the Inquisition, but those who learned of it from afar . . . and perhaps, if I may say, do not understand fully the nature of what they speak of. Some of them argue that we must shun those who conformed with the Christian church—that we must abhor as saint-suckers those who chose, rather than the pyre, another night in their safe beds.

  The Almighty created man in his image. He created not only our endurance and our infrequent wisdom, but also our fear. Man has no desire to be persecuted, and this impulse too must be the doing of G-d. Some will disagree with me. So let them tend another congregation, one whose Jews are not so fear-pricked as mine. I will tend to this flock that does not love my presence, for the invalid that spurns physick requires it no less than the one who welcomes it.

  The last of the rabbi’s words, freshly inked, glimmered before her.

  He sighed. “Copy the letter for me,” he said, “and sign it.”

  She took a second sheet of paper from the stack and began, the words spooling onto the page under her hand. As she worked, the rain needling quietly against the window, she felt the writing lift her out of her weary body, so she could almost look down on her self from the low ceiling: A young woman bent over a table. A young woman scribing in the chair that should be her brother’s.

  Slowly, steadily, her hand repeated its passage across the page.

  Once, twice, then again.

  Isaac.

  He’d been a boy still, on the verge of manhood, but a softness yet in
his cheeks. He’d stepped away from some nighttime escapade to fetch her, flinging stone chips at the window beneath which she slept. She’d risen, found her shoes in the dark, and descended the stair to the flaring of the lantern in her brother’s hand—a blackened over-large thing taken from some unlocked storeroom, with something uneven about its light so that the shadows shrank and grew wildly inside the house. In the swinging lantern-light her mother’s tapestries from Lisbon—dark mythic scenes shimmering with gold thread—loomed and extinguished. Bright and dark forms materialized, fled along the walls. In the seasick light her brother was a boy, a man, a boy . . . a feverish-faced stranger in this world of mahogany and silver plate.

  And then he was her brother once more, gesturing her impatiently toward the street. “You won’t forgive yourself if you miss this,” he said. “It’s at a far dock, but if we go fast you’ll see. Someone smashed three barrels of fish, and the birds—Ester, you have to see, it’s ten thousand wings like—”

  She never saw it. Did he stumble as he turned, his shoe knocking the heavy doorstop? Did the lantern grow too heavy in his hands, had its handle grown so hot he had to shift his grip? Whatever the cause, the flame had tipped out of the lantern without a sound, spilling over the lip of the metal like liquid gold, touching the curtain by the parlor window, and instantly beginning a desperate climb to the heavens. Before Ester could move another step on the stair, the door was framed with fire. The tapestry a roaring scene of black curling figures.

  And then Grietgen was shoving her in the back, she was cursing Ester down the stairs, shrieking: To the street, to the street, naar buiten, children! Steps from the door, Ester glimpsed her father, halfway down the stairs, stumble, stop—then turn to climb back up to their mother’s chamber, racing upward alongside the flames.