The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Whatever had stayed Constantina’s hand, it was gone. With a small smile, as though delivering a fatal blow, she said, “Perhaps I’ll tell her, why don’t I, that her mother’s bloodline also traces to a fine Christian Englishman?”

  Samuel spoke quickly. “I should like to protect my family from your legacy of shame, as I protected you when I married you.” Without another word, he stepped around the table and toward the door. Before he reached it, Constantina was there. Ester heard her mother’s slap on her father’s face. Then Constantina’s sobs, receding up the stair. The slam of a heavy door, something smashing on the floor—then her mother’s sharp “Jesus Christo!” followed by a sob of drunken laughter.

  When Ester next looked up, her father had left.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the empty air.

  The house vibrated with quiet. The rabbi’s texts lay before Ester in the light from the window—the books he’d given her to study. She lowered herself into them, line by line—at first holding her breath so as not to dispel her fragile understanding. Then, gingerly, breathing.

  She hurried down the narrow London streets now, remembering: days of luxuriant study at the polished wood table of their home in Amsterdam, while her mother clipped past without acknowledging Ester’s presence and the maid Grietgen cleaned gently around her. Rising from the rabbi’s texts, Ester might pore over her father’s copy of a French treatise about the soul and matter, and the extension of matter in space. The contrast riveted her: the difference between the thinking of Christians and the increasingly complex rabbinic texts Rabbi HaCoen Mendes brought for her to study. The Christians, it seemed to Ester, wished to fathom the mechanism of the soul: by which levers did it pull the body into motion, and by which was it pulled by the divine? Yet the rabbis had little concern for such deliberation. What, they wished to know, were the minute instructions for doing God’s will? How must the economy of devotion be paid in laws of kashrut, in decorations of house and body, in the number of repetitions of a prayer . . . how were laws for behavior to be observed under this and that specific circumstance?

  The difference between the two manners of thought seemed to hold the key to something she couldn’t name. Must the two—the Christian and the Hebrew, the soul and the measurable, tangible world—remain disconnected? Or was there some middle terrain where a person—even someone like Ester’s own too-thin self, with her always-cold hands, her ribcage that felt too narrow to contain all the air she needed to gulp—might understand the purpose of life more readily? And what of the arguments of the apostates—why did the rabbis ban such speech, rather than welcome it in order to refute it?

  And how to answer the older maid’s soft huff of disappointment: “Didn’t your mother teach you what to do with the stained cloths? Or is she too busy with that bottle of hers to notice her daughter’s a woman?” The sheen of blood on her fingers, the smell of it—a confused humiliation suffusing all. To forget the maid’s words, she pulled the text closer and followed the rivulets of the rabbi’s teachings into fresh streams of argument that promised to carry her past the Herengracht, past the torpid waterways of the city toward some conclusion of such brightness it made her reel. At times she could barely speak in response to the rabbi’s questions. Other times she could hardly find enough breath for all the words she needed to utter, though the rabbi listened with great patience. On those days the new thoughts so brimmed in her that she felt the white plaster ceiling and the timbers and the brickwork walls couldn’t contain her—should she raise her head to speak once more, she’d shake the house down.

  But at last Constantina realized what the maids had known for months. And even Samuel Velasquez couldn’t deny Constantina’s logic: Ester being now of an age sufficient for marriage, her education ought be ended.

  The teeming bright world, shuttered. The rabbi, along with the French and Latin tutors, came to the house now to teach only Isaac—and though Ester endeavored to listen as she did her embroidery and the other tasks now assigned her, these lessons served mainly to remind her of what was lost. Isaac’s attention roved the room so that the long-suffering instructors had to teach the simplest texts and grammars over and again. Ester entered sometimes with an offer of tea or ale, or even stood at the threshold, waving her hands silently to wake her brother to attention—but Isaac ignored these signals with a sleepy shrug. The books Ester had studied were returned to the synagogue, and on the occasions when she was able to seize a few moments to read her brother’s simpler ones, she was distracted by every footfall, fearful the very act of studying the smooth lines of Hebrew letters, or even her brother’s prescribed doses of French or Latin, might ignite the ever more fragile mood of the house. For Ester’s womanhood seemed to have stung her mother, and Constantina regarded Ester now with a gaze full of obscure meaning. And when Samuel Velasquez, with the aim to cure Isaac of his waywardness, took the youth on a trade voyage, Constantina found at last, in the emptied house and a swift-emptying bottle of wine, the freedom to disburden herself.

  Shall I tell you, Ester, the truth about love?

  Listen now to what I learned from my own mother about the unmaking of her heart. And the making, Ester, of mine.

  That summer a silence settled in Ester’s mind, brittle and expectant—it stretched for days, weeks, begging to be broken.

  Then, as though summoned by that silence: a burgeoning roar.

  The night, the glowing roof. The fire’s brilliant leap from the tip of their house into the black sky. As if the flames had at last gained their freedom, the sky pulling them into its embrace.

  Up, and up.

  A year, more. Hollow, wishless months of needle-pricked fingers and a dull pain in the center of her chest, her voice stoppered. Isaac’s face shuttered and locked. The words I’m sorry, which spilled from her so steadily while her mother was alive, were now unutterable, though she knew her failure to make apology for her presence stiffened the backs of the synagogue matrons who housed and fed them. With each week those matrons’ whispers gained volume: What now? What of the blond-haired son who had carried the fatal lantern—surely it was the judgment of God that acted through his young hands, yet what to do with a youth with such a curse upon his head? He might be a capable dock laborer, but dock work was for Christians or Tudesco Jews, not the son of a Portuguese family. And what of the girl—see her there, mending with her dreadful tight stitches, gone from being the indulged daughter of a respected man to a burden on the community. Why doesn’t she cry over at least her father—poor man, to live and die alongside such a wife?

  How great was the matrons’ relief, then, when Rabbi HaCoen Mendes sent word through his Tudesco housekeeper that he’d take in the orphans. And how much greater when the blind rabbi—himself a burden on the community, unseemly though it was to say so—declared his willingness to accept Menasseh ben Israel’s call to carry the light of learning to London. Though Menasseh’s plan was of course unlikely to succeed, all would benefit should London indeed become a refuge for Jews. What’s more, a welcoming London might even draw off the ill-bred Tudescos, whose vulgar ways lately threatened all that the Portuguese congregation had built in Amsterdam.

  So the beadle had announced prayers for Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s success, the wealthy men of the synagogue had donated elaborately bound books for his mission—and the rabbi, like the orphans in his trust, was removed from the community’s care.

  So much expiated in one ship’s plashing departure.

  She walked. Old manure blanketed the London cobblestones. She passed soot-darkened brickwork, cats hale and lame, a stone edifice carved with a chipped angel. A hoof-marked yard tangled with withered vines, a fire-damaged house. Each step, a move deeper under the skin of the city. Walking, she recalled herself as she’d once been: the soft long layerings of her skirts, the wide winged collars parting at the small bones of her throat. The girl she was in Amsterdam before the fire seemed to her a figure in a framed portrait: downcast eyes fleeing the timid gaze of a n
eighbor boy with a shyness that now struck Ester as the most repellent of foolishnesses. She was ash now—that girl her father had escorted to synagogue and released with pride into the decorous crowd. Samuel Velasquez’s dignified tread, the smell of his wool cloak—the recollections a heavy pain in her throat.

  Ash: the girl who had once existed, with her vague moralities, her posture bent in apology, her desperate trust that virtue might guarantee safety. And her desperate hope too that all within her that was unruly, raging, sensuous—all that terrified and drew her—could be quashed.

  Along the narrow street, youths hauled sacks of sand, an ink vendor cried his wares, saltpeter men hauled stained sacks through a stable door. A girl leading a milch-ass knocked on a door and, when there was no answer, leaned her forehead to the door with a bleary call for any with babes in need of milk. Above the street, signboards mutely announced their wares—one carved in the shape of a mortar and pestle, another in the shape of a barrel of ale, another painted with a picture of crockery, that the unlettered might know where to enter with their coin. And now the road sloped downward beneath her shoes—first the slightest dip, barely perceptible. Then a steeper slope, as though not only her feet but the whole city were rushing toward the river. As she neared the water, something in the air seemed to loosen. Elsewhere in the city the Puritans’ grip might be easing slowly; here, by the river, the impatience for release seemed to pulse faster. A crane loomed over the heavy chop; a skiff discharged its passengers at a stair; in the long, commanding calls of the river men and the gulls, a barely restrained defiance. Here and again between buildings, the river now appeared, gray and leaden and powerful.

  The foot traffic thickened suddenly, and as it did, the way before Ester narrowed. She was in a crowd, passing alongside strangers into a corridor of stone, and without warning she was jostled and swept onto the great looming bridge—or rather, into a dark, narrow passage that became a tunnel. The bridge was lined with solid walls of shops on either side, and the merchants’ homes, stacked above, jutted and met to form a roof over the thoroughfare of the bridge. The crowd slowed as it pressed deeper into the dim corridor between lamp-lit shops. She could neither hear nor sense the river beneath her feet. There were men and women within a hand’s breadth, jostling her with silent familiarity. She shrank from them—she’d not been touched by so many people, she was sure, in all her life. Yet there was nowhere to retreat—and there was something, too, that astonished her, something dangerous and free in the touch of this crowd. She might have been a flea, so little was she noted. A flea—not a Jewess. Not the survivor of a fire that was whispered of throughout Amsterdam.

  Ahead now a horse went wild, kicking its rear legs high. There was a man’s warning shout and a burst of alarmed cries before it was subdued. A lath-thin woman, her strawberry-gray head balding, pressed her shoulder hard into Ester’s; a man with tousled blond hair seemed not to notice how he knocked Ester with his elbow; on her other side two women carrying babes gossiped as they shuffled, not minding how intimately they brushed against her.

  When Ester had seen London’s bridge from a distance, she’d imagined a wide clearing, a vantage point from which one could grasp the view of the city. But the bridge offered no vista; instead it was the artery through which all of London pulsed, stopping terrifyingly now and again—the crowd around Ester thickening rapidly in the lull—only to continue. Pressed forward, Ester kept pace to avoid falling. She was in a crush of English strangers and her breath came quick with fear—but their unfamiliar smells and rough fabrics and stout limbs carried her, and the heat of their bodies warmed her.

  A clearing between two shop buildings formed a brief window, and through this the river came into sight, and all of London on either side of the bridge—spilling past the city walls, piled along the banks as far as she could see. For a moment the heavy pounding water wheels below the bridge sounded clearly, and she saw the gray river, half dammed by the bridge, swirling high against the pilings on her right. Opposite, on the bridge’s downriver side where the water poured out of the narrow arches through which it had been forced, the level of the river was lower by a grown man’s height. So hard did the water rush, furrows of swift furious glass, it seemed impossible that this bridge—a city to itself—was not swept downriver.

  Pressed once more by the crowd, she walked on, but no sooner had her eyes reaccustomed themselves to the dim passageway than a pale white glow appeared ahead—the end of the bridge.

  All about her, men and women were strangely marked by the growing light—their faces half shadowed and half lit, sculpted and beautiful. It seemed to Ester that inside this dark tunnel of a bridge they’d shaken off the wariness that had cribbed the city. They thronged about her, their passions and hopes plain to see, their lives and their deaths patent. In that instant she forgave them fully for each thing that had made her fear them and their city. A strange tenderness seized her. For a heartbeat she was certain the bridge was in motion, shuddering as it prepared to tear away from its moorings and carry them all out, far beyond this city. But it was only the vibration of the rushing water, and the summoning din from the riverbank. She could hear the cries, once again, of gulls and boatmen, the clanging and thud of river commerce. She could smell the cool rolling road of water sluicing beneath all of them.

  For the first time, she felt it: this was the freedom her brother had sought.

  There was life in London. There was life in her. And desire. A flame leapt in her, defiant of the bounds in which she’d prisoned it.

  How could desire be wrong—the question seized her—if each living being contained it? Each creature was born with the unthinking need to draw each next breath, find each next meal. Mustn’t desire then be integral—a set of essential guideposts on the map of life’s purpose? And mightn’t its very denial then be a desecration?

  The thoughts were heretical, and they were her own. A frightening, alluring hunger surged in her, she knew not even for what—a fever for truth, for the touch of truth, the touch of warm bodies, the crush of unknown arms. She wanted to press her mouth to the mouths of the strangers beside her—to learn from their mouths the language they spoke. Somewhere across this bridge, beckoning her, were books that would be hers to explore and question—and yes, argue against—for in her new daring now nothing seemed impossible, and she allowed herself to admit even this: that she thought the sages scant in their exploration of what she most wished to understand—the will that set the world in motion and governed it. Shutting her eyes, letting the crowd steer her, she saw behind closed lids the books that awaited her, the thinkers’ collected voices inked onto each crowded page. An ecstasy of ink, every paragraph laboring to outline the shape of the world. The yellow light of a lamp on leaves of paper, the ivory-black impress of words reasoning, line by line. Yet in the confused picture in her mind, the hands caressing and turning those lamp-lit pages were not her own, but a stranger’s. She didn’t know which she wanted more: the words or the hands, the touch to her spirit or to her skin.

  And then, pale daylight. She was across, the sound of the water behind her, the clatter of stone and hooves and wheels ahead.

  Glancingback at the gate through which she had emerged, she saw a spectacle she could not at first comprehend. Above her, set on black pikes atop the bridge’s gate, were objects that might easily have been rocks, stumps, some natural decaying thing. As understanding assailed her, she stumbled to a halt. The hair tarred back, slack cheeks shiny and corroded like charred paper. Blackened heads, preserved in tar: traitors to the government. She’d heard rumor of this—the English government’s reminder to all of the price to be paid for disloyalty—yet now her stomach heaved and she could not look away, nor pass beneath them.

  One had a mouth agape. Void eyes open as wide—wider—than a man’s eyes could ever open in life. Wide enough, at the last, to see the cost of his most treasured beliefs.

  But the living bodies about her swept her forward. All about her, their will focuse
d on gaining the river’s margin, the English seemed for this moment to fear nothing—not the unlatched eyes high above them, not even a change of governance that could soon mean different heads lofted in punishment for the telling of different truths. She wanted to breathe the warning into all their ears: never let your true thought be known, for it is by truth that you are noosed and for truth burnt.

  And even in the same instant, she wanted to beg the secret of their boldness.

  But they were already departing from her. Amid the churn of the crowd, she left behind the blackened heads that shuddered, now, in a biting wind. On the cobbled street beyond the bridge, the crowd thinned and dissolved. She stood, released, on the south side of the river, her skin afire with the touch of English strangers who had borne her across. A hundred hands, living and dead.

  11

  December 1, 2000

  London

  The rare manuscripts room was hushed. Solitary postgraduates sat at tables here and there, looking sleep-deprived. There was a fraught, reverent silence, broken by the occasional ripple of pages turning. The soft scratch of a pencil. The sound of knuckles cracking. A single long sniff.

  Helen sat alone at a large table. A slim volume from the Eastons’ house lay on the brown cushion before her, its pages held open with weighted strings. The news that this first batch of documents was ready had reached her yesterday evening, in the form of a terse telephone message from the librarian, Patricia Starling-Haight. Helen had arrived this morning at the precise moment Patricia Starling-Haight unlocked the heavy door of the manuscripts room, and she’d moved through the usual protocols under the librarian’s owlish gaze—relinquishing all writing instruments, securing her bag in a locker, silencing her mobile phone—all before the librarian would budge to produce the first documents. She’d been here since, and had read through three letters already. Aaron had made similar progress—his document was arrayed on a cushion farther down the table, though Aaron himself was currently nowhere to be seen. With luck they would get through another few before closing.