The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Then Ester was on the street, the night air cold on her face. In the flaring, crashing dark, the neighbors. Futile pails of water: steam ribboning off windowpanes. Inside, timber and fabric raging untouched. The street’s cobbles dark with wasted water, reflecting licks of light. And then, the tip of the roof aglow. Brighter, brighter, the rooftop a jailed star in the night.

  The fire shot into the sky.

  A single rending shriek. She’d never known whose it was.

  Her brother had been gone before the roof had fallen. Toward dawn, he was found curled asleep on the deck of a ship set to depart that morning. He was led to shore and to the synagogue, mute and soot-stained, by the ship’s navigator—who surveyed the Jews chanting mourning prayers in rent clothes, then rubbed the thick silver cross dangling from his own neck and, producing Isaac, said in Dutch thick with shyness and regret, “This one isn’t old enough yet to throw his troubled self into the sea.”

  But now he was.

  Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s voice. “I wish you to scribe for me every day,” he said. “Tell Rivka, please, to hire a girl to fulfill your household labors.”

  She was unable to form an answer. She stared instead at the rivulets of ink sunk into her skin, and for an instant heard her brother’s voice in her head: Isaac, as he had been before the fire, ruddy and alight with plans. Now thank your brother for your good fortune! Though if you’d only step out of your shuttered rooms, Esti, you’d love the fresh winds better than a life of books.

  She bent her head and whispered a prayer she’d no faith in: “May it please the Almighty to guide Isaac’s feet to safety.” The words were hollow. Here she sat, in his seat, while somewhere in London he was negotiating a price for his own death.

  Days, a week, a fortnight—it took no longer. Wash day: Rivka, who’d silently doubled her own labors rather than expend the rabbi’s money to hire a girl, had risen before dawn and spent the morning with her broad back bent over the buck-baskets, thick reddened hands wringing. At midday Ester left the rabbi’s side to help haul the water-heavy linens to the attic. Then Rivka went out into the chilly afternoon to purchase a new clothesline.

  Ester was laboring over a page of Pirkei Avot, reading and rereading to the rabbi at his request, inking the last of an interpretation he wished her to record and send to a student in Amsterdam, when the door opened softly, then closed behind Rivka.

  She stood before Ester without removing her cloak. Had Rivka ever stood before Ester thus—face to face, hands stilled at her sides? Her words to Ester were always sidelong, directions meted out in passing as Rivka moved from task to task. Yet now Rivka’s gaze glimmered, as though the cover on a well had been lifted.

  Ester rose from her seat.

  “I looked for him where he labored.” Rivka’s brown eyes, small in her thick, lined face, turned fierce as though to repel her own message. “At the docks.”

  “Isaac?” Ester whispered.

  “A man tried to tell me in German, but he didn’t know enough words. And in English”—Rivka shook her head like a mule tormented by a fly. “Maybe two days ago. The man said it was someone he’d—” Rivka broke off with a gesture: someone Isaac had angered. “The man said they attacked Isaac, from behind. A knife. He didn’t see them come.”

  Silence. For an instant, Rivka’s hand floated toward Ester’s shoulder. But at Ester’s flinch Rivka lowered her hand, nodding as though she understood and even agreed: neither of them could bear consolation.

  Ester whispered, “Where . . .”

  Rivka’s face buckled. “They threw him in the river.”

  She departed for the kitchen, closing the door behind her. A moment later Ester heard a racked, terrifying sound. Then a low Tudesco chanting.

  “Ester,” said the rabbi.

  But she couldn’t answer. Strange sensations filled her. A loud silence in her ears, her body cold stone. She needed something to warm her. She needed Isaac’s head nested beneath her chin. A confusion of pictures in her mind: His small boyish body. His grim squint at the London skies, as he predicted his own death. He’d dreamt of saving someone. Now he’d gone without redeeming anything.

  She turned at a whispering from beside the fire. The rabbi sat, arms wrapped around his thin chest, his head shaking slowly from side to side. His lips were moving in prayer.

  Softly she said, “Does God console you now?”

  She’d spoken the words thinking they were a question. But as they rang in the hushed room, she understood they were an accusation. An apology rose in her, reflexive. She let it dissolve unspoken.

  There was a long silence. “And you,” the rabbi said softly. “Though it may be a dreadful and long time before we feel His consolation.”

  From the fireside and the kitchen, prayer and weeping. She tried to imagine dropping into grief. She pictured it, like letting go of a rope. To crumple with sorrow, fall at someone’s feet, beg mercy? But these things required belief that mercy existed in the world.

  She was nineteen years of age and could no longer bend her mind to believe in the comforts embraced by others. The fire had forged them both—she and her brother—into brittle instruments. Should she bend, she would break.

  She struck the tears away with the backs of her hands.

  No star remained now to navigate by. Isaac had been her last.

  A frenzy of words filled her—all she’d confess now, if he were only with her. With what gladness she’d have trusted him with every thought of hers, every bewilderment—every secret save one she’d carried in silence all these years, for it would have wounded him.

  Instead his clenched voice rose now in her memory. A man comes into the world to perform one function.

  What function remained for Ester? Father, mother, brother, gone.

  She stared at the chair she’d risen from: Isaac’s chair. Then, a terrifying, grief-stricken freedom flooding her, she lowered herself into it.

  Only a single desire remained to her: To be amid these books. To hear the quiet scratch of quill on paper. To find, amid these consolations, some slim filament that had once been hers, and follow it to its unseen destination.

  She picked up the quill, stained with ink, and dipped it. The thought came to her, unwelcome: ink purchased with blood.

  The price of her freedom.

  Slowly she began to copy out the rabbi’s interpretation.

  At the sound of the quill he turned to her, his face taut with concentration.

  She shaped the Portuguese and Hebrew words carefully. It took a long while. At length, long after the sounds of Rivka’s praying had faded and the house settled into deep silence, she finished the copy.

  She signed her own initial, and watched the black ink settle into the page.

  9

  November 4, 2000

  London

  He said he wouldn’t, and then he did. He positioned himself next to the towering window, his shoulder brushing the lowest panes. Outside, snow flurried like ash. Keeping his profile to Helen Watt and his laptop angled so as to obscure the screen from her view, he checked the translations of two Portuguese words on an online dicionário, then turned off the sound on his laptop and opened his e-mail.

  There in his inbox was a reply from Marisa. The subject line: “Professor.”

  Professor Levy:

  Thanks for the lecture, I’d been missing my 3-hour college seminars.

  But seriously, thank you for being a pompous son-of-a-bitch. I learned something, which is more than I can say for most of the conversations I’ve had lately. I’m stuck here in kibbutz-ulpan with two potheads and a right-wing fanatic for roommates, and so far spend almost no time with the kibbutz’s actual Israelis—the only saving grace being that ulpan is kicking my ass. That’s what I’m here for: I aim to come out fluent in Hebrew if it kills me. Otherwise the kibbutz thing is dull for a city girl. The evening breeze in the orchard is lovely, yes, but the smell from the cow barn gets old fast. There’s a supervisor here who thinks the foreign studen
ts are his chance to play drill sergeant. On our cases for the least little thing when we’re not in class, nothing better to do with his time than try to rake me over the coals for smoking a cigarette for five minutes when he wants me to be clearing rocks off a field. He had me down as a soft American, so he was in for a bit of a shock yesterday when he muttered something nasty to me under his breath in Hungarian and I let loose on him in the same. Poor man, how was he to know my grandmother taught me how to say “I’ll put your balls in the laundry wringer” in her native language? The other students had no idea what was happening. But he laughed, and this morning he passed me a cigarette on the sly and said he thinks I’ll make it in this country.

  The ESL teaching job I’ve lined up in Tel Aviv doesn’t start till spring, so till then it’s more grammar tests and more field work—the real kind, not the sort you professor types do.

  Keep me posted, please, on the drama with the documents, and on Professor Ice Queen. I hope the papers turn up enough surprises to rattle her out of her bitchiness. And enough to keep Aaron Levy happy. That’s a good thing.

  Marisa

  Her black cropped hair. The long muscles of her back. The single afternoon they’d been together.

  She’d sat across the room from him every Monday and Wednesday afternoon through the damp London spring. Fourteen weeks of Advanced Classical Hebrew, a class Aaron took seriously, leaning against the back wall of the room and half-raising his hand to pose questions about archaic verb constructions that left the professor and the two other postgrad students nodding with enthusiasm, and the undergraduates looking mildly terrorized. Only Marisa seemed amused when Aaron spoke, though he wasn’t entirely certain he was in on the joke.

  Midway through the term, when she’d approached Professor Ludman after class, Aaron had lingered over his open notebook to listen. Marisa was, from what Aaron could hear, requesting an alternate assignment, one more relevant to her situation. She was a visiting student, here from the United States for only these few months in London before moving on to Israel. She couldn’t care less, she told Ludman flatly, about her grade—no offense, but she’d earned this scholarship to London before she’d settled on her Israel plan, and she was now reshaping her studies around that, and what she really needed was modern language—not classical Hebrew. Suppressing a laugh, Aaron had waited for Ludman to suggest drily to Marisa that she try something on the World Wide Web.

  Instead, Professor Anatol Ludman—a middle-aged scholar known for his rigorous pedagogy—smiled an almost fatherly smile that said he was pleased by Marisa’s spunk. Aaron listened, stunned, as Ludman offered to lend her some modern Hebrew materials at the next class.

  The next week Aaron left class at the same time as Marisa.

  “You’re going with a student program?” he asked, as they turned into the corridor.

  She slowed long enough to study him, that same amused expression on her face.

  “To Israel, I mean.” He raised an eyebrow. “I mean, I don’t suppose it’s one of those Encounter Israel bus tours?” He meant to be funny, he supposed, though he couldn’t have said exactly what the joke was.

  She looked at him with her gray-green eyes. Then she laughed easily, in a way that said she knew exactly what the joke was, and it wasn’t what Aaron thought. “Nope,” she said. “Not one of those Encounter Israel bus tours.”

  And she walked away.

  At a student Holocaust Memorial Day vigil later that spring, he’d seen her from across the small gathering outside the library. He’d pretended not to watch her . . . though how could he fail to watch Marisa, standing alert amid the crowd? Even motionless, she was decisive. A different manner of creature from the silent, reverent group surrounding her. A fuse waiting to light. He was puzzled by her position near the front of the gathering, and still more puzzled by her brief conference with the Jewish Society leaders as they prepared to begin the ceremony. She hardly seemed the sort to hang out with the bubbly, over-earnest Jewish Soc types. Not until she was on the stone steps with the somber student leaders—not until she was speaking the names of relatives and holding a candle—did he understand: Marisa was the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. He’d missed it entirely—missed it because she was nothing like the survivors’ granddaughters he’d met at his own college Hillel or his father’s synagogue. Those were mostly dutiful girls, many bearing the names of lost cousins or aunts whose ashes had been blown all over Europe; perpetual A students who repeated the stories of their families verbatim, lest a detail be lost. He had no quarrel with such girls, nor did he ever wish to touch one.

  He watched, riveted, as Marisa lit a candle, then looked over the heads of the small assembled crowd as though she preferred to make this tribute without the intrusion of their input.

  One September evening, still disheartened by the murky and insufficiently air-conditioned summer, Aaron had left the library and ducked into the visual arts building. He aimed to treat himself to a free dinner at a post-lecture reception: a postgraduate’s tithe from the fields of academia, sustenance for the hours ahead. The thought of yet another evening’s dogged bargaining with an indifferent Shakespeare made panic blossom in his gut. As he firmed his grip on the rail and climbed faster, he indulged a faint, rote hope of running into Marisa, whom he’d twice spotted from a distance in the café, downing her coffee with two or three of the art students. But the stairwell was deserted.

  At the second-floor landing he swung left as usual, then stopped short, his shoes squeaking to a halt on the linoleum floor. Through the partially open door of the painting studio to the right he’d glimpsed something he was certain he’d imagined. He walked to the door nonetheless. He pushed it fully open. There was Marisa painted on the canvas, naked. Her skin peach and white against the black velvet drape she lay on, the planes of her body seeming to vibrate with life—small, firm breasts, nipples like drops of dark honey. Her figure lay still on the canvas but there was a warm mocking light to her eyes under her raised black eyebrows, as though the painter had caught her saying Yes, you.

  Behind the canvas was the cot where she must have posed. The velvet drape was bunched over the arm of a nearby chair.

  The pungent smell of drying paint. He let it fill his lungs.

  The painter had signed his work. The name, Rodney Keller, was familiar to Aaron—a talented art postgraduate. At the art students’ opening last spring—another set of hors d’oeuvres Aaron had raided—Rodney’s intensely pigmented portraits had been on exhibit: people more vivid than life, their colors too sharp, their gazes so cutting and direct that the portraits were suffused with the hyper-real intimacy of a camera too close to its subject. Aaron had found himself taking an uncomfortable step back from those canvases. But this painting was different. Rodney Keller had painted Marisa not with the mannered exaggerations of those other portraits, but instead in the quiet, straightforward boldness of her beauty.

  As Aaron stood before her image, elated and stricken, an unheroic question grew in him. He tried to resist it, and failed: Had Marisa slept with Rodney Keller?

  Or, was Rodney Keller gay? He seemed gay to Aaron. Seemed it, but Aaron couldn’t be sure.

  He backed out of the studio.

  Nearly a month later, he’d found her after a lecture by an Israeli journalist, titled “Our Side of the Story: An Israeli Perspective.” It was anything but coincidence—Anatol Ludman had announced the lecture to his class before the end of last term, and Aaron watched Marisa make note of the date and time—he even heard her tell a classmate that the event was only days before she was due in Israel.

  The journalist’s weary lecture had been so thinly attended, Aaron couldn’t help wonder whether Jewish Studies had deliberately underpublicized it to minimize the inevitable protests an Israeli speaker would draw. But the small audience made for a deeper-than-usual question-and-answer period, which continued until only the journalist and a small knot of audience members stood at the front of the hall—among them Marisa, separated
from Aaron by only three undergraduates, then two. Finally, at a broad hint by a portly professor Aaron recognized from the Classics Department, they all drifted outside, past the lone protester lofting a sign that read Zionists = Nazis, and into a nearby pub.

  He waited until Marisa was on her second beer—he kept track from a distance, chatting with an undergraduate whose name he didn’t bother to learn, biding his time. When he approached her at last, his own untouched beer dangling casually in his hand, she grinned into his face. “I’ve been watching you,” she said, before he had a chance to say more than hello. “You’re more complicated than you seem.”

  Surprised, he matched her grin, the afternoon turning suddenly weightless. “Is that so?” He leaned against the bar and raised his beer. “How do I seem?”

  She took a swig from her beer. “You seem like a pompous son-of-a-bitch.”

  He swallowed. He could smell the beer on her breath. “But now you’ve discovered . . . ?”

  “I get the feeling there’s more to you.” For a moment she sounded utterly serious.

  He could make out the shape of her breasts through her T-shirt. “Tell me,” he said, pleased that he sounded both gracious and smooth.

  She leaned in and gave his cheek a light, stinging slap. “Tell you about yourself? No, thank you.”

  He felt himself flush, but recovered quickly. “Then tell me about Israel. And don’t walk away this time.”

  She sipped her beer once, twice, before seeming to forgive him enough to answer. She was going to do a few months on a kibbutz, she said, an intense language course combined with volunteer work to help her make the leap into life as a new Israeli citizen. Was sick of American Jewish culture, of American culture altogether—and by the way, the English could take a flying leap as well. As she spoke she watched Aaron, a challenge in her expression. She said, “I want to be with people who know what they care about and aren’t afraid to say so.”