The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  It was a letter from an Amsterdam scholar he’d never heard of, dated only by the Hebrew 5 Shvat, 5424, and written in an elaborate, scholarly Hebrew. Aaron skimmed, understanding half of what he read. The subject was a disputation about the nature of time in the Torah. Evidently some third party had asserted that the Torah’s chronology contradicted itself, and the writer was launching what promised to be a lengthy elaboration on the meaning of phrases such as thousands of years.

  Helen was waving impatiently.

  “I’m reading as fast as I can,” Aaron protested.

  “Skip to the fourth paragraph.”

  He started the paragraph, near the bottom of the page. For G-d is not bound by nature but is its creator and alters it at will, so the understanding of the sun’s movements and the cycling of the seasons rests beyond man’s—Aaron puzzled over the next words, something about either understanding or wisdom.

  “The margin!” Helen commanded.

  There, in the margin alongside the third paragraph, written in the same elegant handwriting Aaron had been reading for three days, were the words Deus sive Natura.

  He stared at the page: the blockish Hebrew of the Amsterdam rabbi; the small sloping letters added by Aleph in the margin. And the Latin: one of Spinoza’s catchphrases. He recognized it from a philosophy course he’d taken his senior year in college. Deus sive Natura: God or Nature. The phrase encompassed Spinoza’s radical notion that God and nature might be one and the same. It was the springing-off point for Spinoza’s mind-bending contentions about extension, determinism, and more.

  “This makes no sense,” Aaron declared.

  Helen waited.

  “Where the hell does a seventeenth-century Jew—let alone a seventeenth-century woman, if Aleph is even really a woman—get off making a reference to Spinoza? Spinoza was banned. Plus this is Latin, and there’s no reason a Jewish woman would study Latin, let alone have any involvement with philosophy.” Yet there was no denying that Aleph’s margin note was a direct comment on the part of the letter that referred to God as separate from nature. A contradiction of it. He thought a moment. “This letter is what, 1660?” he said. “Spinoza hadn’t even published his major works then, had he? Who would even know about his theories at that point?”

  Helen’s answer came low and compressed. “Maybe someone from the community that excommunicated him. The Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam.”

  Aaron raised his head. “Do you think HaCoen Mendes or his scribe might have crossed paths with Spinoza?”

  “It wasn’t a large community.”

  There was a sharp knock on the great carved door. It echoed in the entryway.

  Neither Helen nor Aaron moved. Then, abruptly, Helen pulled several more pages to her and began scanning them.

  The door’s knocker sounded again, heavily. Then again.

  There was a rustle from above, followed by Bridgette’s step on the stairs. “Coming . . . ,” she called. She was dressed now, wearing slacks and a powder-blue wrap and heels. She didn’t look at Aaron as she passed.

  Helen still hadn’t raised her eyes. Aaron heard a man’s voice, and Bridgette’s teasing response: “You’re early. You scholars are an eager lot.”

  A flirtation meant for Aaron’s ears, or the unseen stranger’s? Aaron was too preoccupied by what he’d just read to care. But the portly figure that accompanied Bridgette across the entryway provided the answer. The assessor, a short, middle-aged man, grasped two satchels in his right hand. A stack of large polyester-film document sleeves refused to stay tucked under his left arm, causing him to pause midway across the room to adjust them; as soon as he resumed walking, they slid immediately out of place once again. It would have been comical, Aaron thought, in another situation. Everything about the man said bookworm. Everything about him said cozy, likable, unthreatening, and Aaron hated him immediately. Any notion they’d had of what these documents might be had been sent flurrying by three words of Latin: Aleph might or might not have been a woman; might or might not have been copying down opinions she didn’t understand; might or might not have been championing Spinoza’s notions. The mystery, Aaron felt instinctively, should rightly be Helen’s and his to solve—but now the documents were being impounded. And if the assessor spotted the Spinoza reference, there was no guarantee that the whole trove wouldn’t be snatched by another institution that could limit Aaron’s access—the papers might even be locked away by a private collector, if England didn’t have strong enough patrimony laws against that sort of thing.

  Bridgette led the assessor into the nook beside the stair; without a word, Helen and Aaron stood and rounded the corner, in time to see the man bend before the open panel under the stair.

  There was a long silence.

  “Oh my,” the man said.

  Aaron followed his gaze to the open space: the top shelf that Helen and Aaron had only partially succeeded in emptying, the untouched shelf of documents below.

  The assessor straightened with a grunt of effort, his eyes still fixed on the cupboard beneath the stair. The soft smile that broke on his face hurt Aaron’s stomach.

  Helen’s voice behind Aaron nearly made him jump. “Good afternoon.”

  The assessor turned, still smiling. “You’re the historian Mrs. Easton has told me about, I trust?”

  “Yes,” said Helen. “A pleasure to meet you.” She turned from the assessor to Bridgette—who pressed her lips together in a way that said Now that that’s done with.

  In fact, something in Bridgette’s tight expression surprised Aaron. He hadn’t spotted it until now—but Helen had gotten under Bridgette’s skin. He’d no idea why. He decided not to care.

  He braced, instead, for the launch of Helen’s argument: they needed more time with the manuscripts. Another hour or even half-hour would do.

  “Well then,” Helen said to Bridgette. “Thank you for your toleration of our little endeavor here. We’ll be on our way.”

  Helen turned for the library.

  Aaron followed her only as far as the doorway. There he stopped, confused. Helen was gathering her things with the slow, careful motions of a woman who could not, after all, get worked up over something as trivial as having these papers taken out of their hands for what, with luck, might be only a period of weeks or months.

  He turned back to look at the open stairwell. There, beyond Bridgette pattering about her renovation plans and the assessor fussing with his satchels, lay a set of documents that had traveled mutely through centuries to arrive here, fragile and mysterious as a newborn. Aaron Levy, unworthy, had cradled them for just a moment in his hands. And all he wanted was to hold them again.

  “Mr. Levy?” Helen Watt stood with her satchel, her coat folded across her arm.

  Did the woman reserve her strength strictly for bullying subordinates? Was she incapable of mustering to do battle when it was important?

  In the silence, the assessor let a pile of transparent sleeves slither onto a chair. As the man knelt laboriously to remove a first document from the shelves, Bridgette gave Aaron an amused smile.

  He met it with a flat stare, then turned for the library. He stacked his notes, packed away his laptop, threw on his coat, and followed Helen out the front door. Someone—Bridgette, he presumed—shut it behind them.

  Outside on the path he confronted Helen. “So you’re just going to walk away? Wait for someone else to decide whether we ever get another shot at those papers?”

  It had stopped snowing. A light coating covered the ground, and the black branches of two trees overhanging the yard clicked against each other in a brief wind.

  “I didn’t wish to argue for more time,” Helen said quietly, “or draw attention to what we found in the margin. The assessor might not notice it. Not every specialist in antiquities, not even one from Sotheby’s, is going to know the difference between a catch phrase of Spinoza’s and three random Latin words.”

  Gathering her coat collar tighter to her throat, she looked up at t
he house. “Both of us did,” she said.

  She was complimenting him, he realized belatedly.

  “If Sotheby’s spots the Spinoza reference,” she continued, “and if they think it’s evidence that someone in the London Jewish community might have been debating Spinoza’s ideas even before Spinoza published them, the availability of these papers is going to be hard to keep mum. The price of the documents might rise out of our reach. Jonathan Martin may be able to jolly the vice chancellor into a moderate expenditure, but there are limits.”

  The stonework of the house was bluish in the falling light, the frigid afternoon rapidly darkening. Inside, the assessor would now be beginning his work in earnest. The thought of the papers being carted away from this hulking edifice—the stairwell that had housed them left hollow—filled Aaron with an irrational loneliness.

  He was surprised to note that Helen was, for once, looking at him in a way that was almost sympathetic.

  “Well,” Aaron said, momentarily disoriented. He buttoned his coat and tried to sound chipper, though he’d no stomach for it. “At least we’ve got a head start on other scholars who might hear about the papers.”

  He expected a lecture about the universal benefits of collaborative scholarship, which would have restored him to a comfortable irritability. Instead Helen smiled grimly, as though she appreciated his competitive spirit.

  Darkness had begun to blur the roof and the out-flung walls of the large weathered house. Aaron crammed his fists into his pockets and looked, dumbly, at his feet. The snow-covered dirt he stood on had been trod more than three hundred years ago by the occupants of the great house. He wished obscurely now for the company of those people—as though knowing them could warm him, change him in some necessary way he couldn’t manage on his own.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he said softly, though he wasn’t even sure what he was referring to. All of it, maybe: Marisa’s e-mail, the assessor’s satisfied smile, the papers. His own strange, abrupt grief.

  Helen started down the path, her cane leaving small black circles in the thin snow.

  He walked beside her, matching her slow pace. “Why,” he said, his voice strengthening, “would any Jew in a religious community risk taking Spinoza seriously—let alone write down his words? All contact with Spinoza and his ideas was forbidden. If I’m remembering right, it was forbidden in the most severe, threatening terms the rabbis could muster.”

  Helen stopped walking. She leaned on her cane. At first Aaron thought she was resting, but then he saw her eyes. Their cornflower blue was shockingly keen, her face alive in the lowering sun. She didn’t look like the colorless harridan he’d suffered under for the past three days. She wore an expression of complete attentiveness, at once mournful and reckless.

  Knowing when not to speak was a talent that visited Aaron rarely. But as it settled on him now with its feathery grace, he knew to be grateful.

  She said to him then, crisply, “Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.”

  She lifted her cane and continued ahead of him down the path.

  Part 2

  10

  October 2, 1659

  15 Tishrei, 5420

  London

  My love is as a fever, longing still

  For that which longer nurseth the disease.

  She fitted her hands to the rippled glass of two diamond-shaped panes.

  On the street below a thin, distorted stream of strangers passed—none bracing his gaze against the white sky to glance up at her window.

  What might she possibly be longing for?

  She pulled herself away from the window. Rubbed her hands together to warm them. The failure of the Lord Protector’s son was rippling through London; she’d heard shopkeepers say change was everywhere. In the wake of the younger Cromwell’s abdication, gambling and theater were springing back already. Motes of life rising, defying the morbid sobriety of the Puritans. Soon, perhaps, there would be a final end to Puritan apparel, a return to bright fabrics, ribbons. Even, perhaps, the return of a king.

  And if there were? What had she to do with London even now, and what sense wishing for change?

  The figures below her window wavered in the thick glass of the bottom panes. They stretched, their somber colors braided—then seemed to loft, curving into the air before snapping out of view—angels or devils climbing their own ladders, wending toward their business in a world beyond her reach.

  There remained only one flame still lit in her life. It glimmered in the room below, in the rabbi’s mercifully quiet library.

  She descended the stair.

  From the library, the rabbi’s voice dipped and rose. After a hesitation, his soft chant was taken up by the bleary voices of his two pupils.

  “Moshe kibel torah m’sinai” . . . How many times had she heard Isaac repeat the words of this lesson at the rabbi’s patient insistence? And how Isaac would have laughed at the spectacle that greeted her now as she reached the bottom of the stair: the HaLevy brothers—two young men with beards already sprouted on their chins—reciting phrases that should be the province of boys fresh from their first haircuts.

  For an instant, Isaac’s boyish chanting voice broke the surface of her memory. She pressed her fingertips into the hard wood of the handrail until they whitened.

  She would constrict the world to a pinhole.

  Pushing off from the handrail, she walked across the room, toward the light still available to her. She settled at her table, ignoring the curious glances of the HaLevy brothers. She took up a quill and began to copy the letter she’d written for the rabbi that morning. Across the room, the rabbi was passing the next phrase to the brothers, tipping each syllable gently from his lips: “U’masrah l’Yehoshua, v’Yehoshua la’zkenim.” The younger of the two mumbled after him; the older had fallen silent.

  The rabbi paused, waiting for his second pupil to repeat the words.

  “I didn’t hear,” the older brother said, in a voice that made no attempt to mask his lack of interest.

  Did he think the rabbi too blind to comprehend rudeness?

  But Rabbi HaCoen Mendes merely offered the line once more, and the elder brother repeated it in an indifferent tone. His younger brother’s voice swiftly joined, as though in apology for the elder’s inattention.

  The two dark-haired sons of the merchant Benjamin HaLevy: according to Rivka they’d been sent to study with the rabbi only because their father wished to please the rabbi’s rich nephew, Diego da Costa Mendes, with whom he’d invested heavily in a trade venture in the New World. Ester lifted her face from her work for just a moment now to regard them. The younger was slightly built, with a pale, oval face and a nervous air. His eyes rested on the rabbi only briefly; then returned, troubled, to his older brother; then ventured toward Ester, almost reaching her before fleeing back to his brother, as though seeking the next cue as to how he ought conduct himself.

  As for the elder brother, Ester had free rein to watch him now. He’d leaned back in his cushioned seat with his eyes closed, bored.

  “V’zkenim li’nvi’im,” the rabbi continued.

  The next time Ester looked up from her work, she saw that the older brother had sat forward and was watching her, his eyes a keen adamantine color—green and brown that made her think of dirty brass. He was taller and more thickly built than his younger brother; the set of his jaw said he was accustomed to the fulfillment of his wishes.

  “Coffee,” he called, his voice booming across the rabbi’s in the quiet room.

  She’d started in her seat. It took her a moment to realize he was issuing a command, and another to realize it wasn’t addressed to her, but to Rivka in the kitchen.

  There was a silence, interrupted only by the sound of the fire. Then he smiled at Ester, just slightly. Here we are, looking at one another, his smile said, and the blind rabbi doesn’t know. An idle invitation, issued perhaps only to amuse himself. Nothing in his demeanor said he thought her worth more.

&nbs
p; Still, she felt herself straighten, her indignation twinned with curiosity.

  The rabbi continued. “The sages would say three things,” he said. “‘Be temperate in judgment. Take many pupils. Make a fence around the Torah.’”

  The elder brother’s eyes still held hers—a lazy dare. He was sprawled in his seat, as though its confines, too, bored him. He lifted his chin.

  Beside him, the younger brother turned from him to Ester, uncertain.

  Alvaro HaLevy—that was the younger one’s name. And the elder was Manuel. She met Manuel’s stare with a stony one of her own. His brows rose: he was amused by her defiance. Together they ignored his smooth-cheeked brother.

  “Make a fence around the Torah,” she pronounced, without dropping her gaze. “Meaning, establish further requirements beyond the perimeter of God’s laws. This shows the sages’ eagerness to follow God’s word, and their wish that even those who stumble fulfilling the details of these additional laws won’t risk violating God’s will.”

  The rabbi turned his face and spoke mildly. “I trust, Ester, that Manuel and Alvaro are capable of interpreting the passage without your aid.”

  She flushed, but brushed aside the rebuke—and along with it, some dim hunger Manuel’s stare had woken in her. At least she’d made her mind clear to Manuel, she told herself, on the matter of his rudeness. It served nothing for the rabbi to tolerate such behavior. In this she and Rivka were in agreement.

  As if summoned by this last thought, rather than Manuel’s command, Rivka emerged from the kitchen. She served the rabbi first, then set a small bowl before each brother. It pained Rivka, Ester knew, to dispense the sooty coffee to the rabbi’s students—she was in the habit of grinding the precious beans only as a medicinal for the rabbi. Although the rabbi’s nephew had thus far paid them a handsome upkeep, Rivka still treated each month’s payment as though it might be the last, and counted each coin with a suspicion that made the delivery boy mutter about the hag Jewess. But even Rivka understood that the HaLevy boys’ money and family connection must be respected. If they required coffee, she’d serve it.