The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Once more the librarian floated past. When she’d gone, Helen leaned forward surreptitiously and breathed in. This volume—a small book of liturgical poetry—had a dark, smoldering smell like something burnt long ago, the fire extinguished but the danger still detectible.

  She sat back a moment to savor the notion of the entire collection of papers being prepared in the conservation lab upstairs—to savor, in its entirety, the string of fortuitous events that had led to this day, starting with the fact that the purchase price of the documents had been steep but not prohibitively so. The assessor’s remark about the documents’ time span (the dates spanning Interregnum and Restoration leave open the possibility of some as-yet-undiscovered material of value to historians of these periods) had possibly pushed up the price a thousand pounds. But Jonathan Martin, with his eternal ambition of outshining UCL, had stepped forward with money from some Department of History cache. And that money, coupled with a phone call from the vice chancellor, had sufficed to persuade the librarian to authorize the purchase. All of it might have been derailed, of course, had the assessor recognized the Spinoza reference—it had been a gamble, and by no means a certain one, for Helen to walk away from the documents that afternoon in Richmond, rather than demand more time as she’d longed to. But assessors, like document conservationists, were rarely scholars. They saw the documents as physical artifacts. It was the historians who cared about their meaning.

  And it was librarians who adjudicated crime and punishment, where paper was concerned. In fact Helen understood why Patricia Starling-Haight, with whom Helen had exchanged only brief conversations over the decades, was looking particularly severe today. In her position, Helen would have been livid. It was bad enough for a librarian to be strong-armed by a man like Jonathan Martin into purchasing documents with a dubious connection to the existing collections (Interregnum papers being more readily found at National Archives). But then, once the library had purchased the Richmond documents, Martin had insisted that the documents be placed at the front of the queue in the conservation lab. The head conservationist—a woman named Patricia Smith, whose fiefdom was the conservation laboratory two floors up from the rare manuscripts room—had been moved to march to Martin’s office herself to inform him that commandeering her laboratory was outrageous, and his precious seventeenth-century trove could bloody well wait for its turn after the four estates’ worth of documents already on schedule to occupy her through August.

  Helen could imagine the two Patricias’ responses when Martin not only refused to relent, but made it clear that—although each document was to be made available to Helen the moment it was ready—the conservation lab and the rare manuscripts room were to inform all inquiring parties (Martin having already spoken with the usual journalists about a possibly significant seventeenth-century find) that while of course, in keeping with the law, these documents would be made available to the public the very moment they were ready, the whole collection was currently quite fragile and was still being prepared by the laboratory.

  So turned the wheels of power at the hand of an ambitious chairman, freedom of information laws be damned. But this time—this time, for once—those wheels were turning on Helen’s behalf.

  The irony of being Martin’s new favorite cause was something she should have enjoyed. In truth, though, it rested uneasily.

  With both reigning Patricias in high temper, the hush in the rare manuscripts room was more fraught than usual. That the Patricias distrusted historians was nothing new; Helen had overheard enough whispered complaints over the decades she’d been visiting this room to know the essentials: historians saw rare documents merely as sources of information, rather than as objects of inherent value; historians didn’t care about the original documents once they’d stripped them of information. Patricia Starling-Haight had seen a history postgraduate chewing gum over a sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript. Patricia Smith had worked on fifteenth-century manuscripts that would have been salvageable if not for the irreversible damage a historian had wrought by Sellotaping two fragments together. Helen had once seen Patricia Smith ride the lift down from her laboratory to berate a history student who had accidentally punctured a document through some inexplicable pencil-point accident. Pausing before she bore the document out on its cushion like a patient on its pallet, the conservationist had practically hissed in the student’s stricken face. “That’s hours of labor to repair, and I’ll turn my hand to it when I’m good and ready.” Seeing the student’s gaze drift despairingly to the document, she’d added, with the ferocity of an animal protecting its young, “I suppose your dissertation will have to wait, then, won’t it?”

  Helen didn’t mind the Patricias’ strictness—she felt an unspoken affinity with these women whose life of commitment seemed to parallel her own, though she knew only a little about them. Patricia Starling-Haight, Helen had heard, had been raised by an older sister during the war while their mother worked for the code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park. Patricia Smith had a daughter struggling to make a career in dance, and a son on the dole who long ago had to be banned from napping in the library. As for what the Patricias might know of her, Helen had no idea.

  Today, though, it was apparent that Helen was the enemy.

  At an echoing noise, Helen started. A tall spectacled student entering the rare manuscripts room had let the door bang behind him. He stood frozen a few paces past the door, half-turned, his hand extended as though to grab back the sound: an animal caught in the headlights of Patricia Starling-Haight’s glare. With a bemused shake of her head, Helen returned to the book on the cushion before her. The date of the edition was 1658; the original Hebrew had been translated into Portuguese by one Simion de Herrera. Contented are they who dwell in Thy house . . . Contented are they who follow the Lord . . . The cover was stiff, concave, bound in dark red leather. Gilt edged the pages. Other than brown shadows where the front and back pages had lain in contact with the leather covers, the paper was healthy. Ink damage was moderate, each page bearing only a faint brown burn-through of the text on its opposite side: a ghostly echo of the verse from the page just turned, as though the words had not been left behind but rang softly through all else that might be said.

  Once more, she forced her eyes to focus on the lines before her. It was not that the text was difficult. The poems were mainly alphabetic acrostics, many familiar to her, though she hadn’t read these particular translations. Yet Helen couldn’t shed the sense of something awry. She found it difficult to articulate the problem precisely. The logistical arrangements for her work were as smooth as could be hoped: thus far, she had every reason to believe she and Aaron would have exclusive access to the documents for the rest of the term. But there was something about reading these documents singly, catalogued by number rather than by the logic of their arrangement on the shelves under the staircase, that felt wrong. To Helen, the arrangement of the documents in the stairwell had seemed deliberate, as though the unknown hand that had placed them there had intended the order as a message in itself. Now that message had been eradicated. Here in the rare manuscripts room she felt as though she were peering through a narrow aperture at a picture whose larger contours she couldn’t see. It reminded her of the way people Aaron’s age read the news, framed on a computer screen with only a few lines visible—a pressured, stymied vision of things, instead of the daily grasp of the broad sheaf of newsprint that was an adult’s true contact with the world.

  “Fifteen minutes to closing,” Patricia Starling-Haight said, startlingly close to Helen.

  “Page, please,” Helen countered.

  Looking somewhat mollified, Patricia positioned herself beside the book, lifted the string weights, turned a page, and resettled the weights. This was Helen’s self-imposed rule: she’d avoided touching rare documents for years, ever since her tremor reached a level where she feared it could do damage. With a nod of approval, Patricia Starling-Haight retreated.

  Aaron was approaching the tab
le. He’d left the room without a word to Helen forty minutes prior. Now he returned as though unexplained forty-minute breaks were one of those inalienable American rights. He pulled up his chair a few vacant seats away from Helen and slid his own cushion into place, a handwritten letter centered on it.

  “Fifteen minutes to closing,” Helen said to him.

  From his pocket he withdrew a pen, held it just under the table, and clicked it with a mischievous grin that made it clear he was impressing himself. This was Aaron’s way in the rare manuscripts room. He sucked hard candies when the Patricias’ backs were turned. Earlier that afternoon, just after the librarian walked past, he’d actually lifted a document himself and moved it from its cushion to one that evidently pleased him better.

  Let the Patricias make a meal of him. Helen returned her gaze to the left-hand page of poetry and made another note in her spiral-bound notebook. Her scrawl was ranging wide this afternoon—she could write only on every second line and was consuming pages like a schoolgirl. She gripped the pencil stub more tightly. It was maddening to her, how sluggishly she was thinking today. It wasn’t the levodopa; she’d stopped taking that weeks ago against Dr. Hammond’s advice, and had no regrets—the medicine had left long, dark spaces between her thoughts, each thought an island in a sea of nothing, the islands few and far between. The feeling had not been unpleasant, and that was the problem. Waking in the middle of the night to an inky peace that stretched on and on with no break, she’d become frantic. She could not recognize her own mind. The quiet in her head was the silence of defeat. She’d spent the night shivering in her thin nightdress, terrified. Unable to lie down lest she lose what remained of herself as she slept, her hands climbing at her throat, her temples. She’d told a skeptical Hammond she’d rather keep her tremor.

  Yet now her mind felt almost equally blank. What was wrong with her today? She’d have stood and paced the room to rouse herself, would the Patricias not have descended upon her for conduct threatening to paper fibers. The cruelest of ironies came to her: now that the papers had found her, it would be too late—because she lacked the stamina. Because in recent weeks she’d stopped fighting the fatigue—she elected to go without some small trifle she’d left in the next room, rather than stand up with her cane to fetch it; to let the toner cartridge on her printer gradually drain, rather than drive herself to the store to purchase a replacement. She was too infirm—she tested the thought for the first time—to put together the pieces of this puzzle. To do the documents justice.

  Aaron’s mobile phone rang, loud.

  “Christ,” muttered Helen. Both Patricias converged from opposite sides of the room in a silent ballet: rare-manuscript Valkyries, simultaneously pointing to the sign on the wall that forbade mobile phones.

  Aaron eyed his phone’s display, then switched it off and pocketed it with a sheepish shrug to the Patricias, as though he’d forgotten he had it on him.

  The Patricias glared and withdrew.

  Helen rose carefully from her chair and walked over to Aaron, who still looked amused. She peered at the manuscript in front of him: a list of books pertaining to Passover observance. “That wasn’t written by Aleph,” she said.

  Aaron nodded. “Probably it’s written by her replacement. I expect she stopped writing.”

  “No,” Helen said, more firmly than she intended. “Aleph might have lost her scribing position, but she wouldn’t have stopped writing.”

  Aaron looked up. It was clear he was going to take the contradiction personally. “How do you know?”

  “You saw the Spinoza reference, didn’t you?” She struggled for the words to articulate her meaning: if a woman had risked as much as was necessary to write three words by a banned philosopher on a rabbi’s letter in 1658, she wouldn’t stop there. “She simply isn’t going to stop writing.”

  Aaron looked unconvinced. Helen knew her own reasoning was absurd—even self-interested. A thousand things might have stopped Aleph from writing, and it was the height of folly for Helen to impose her own wishes on a female scribe.

  “All we know,” Aaron said, “is that for at least a few months a woman might have worked as a scribe, which is an unusual and interesting fact. But we’ve got nothing more. I mean—you’re treating that Spinoza reference as though it meant she was some sort of rebel herself . . . rather than just someone whose job it was to faithfully copy down the words dictated to her. But for all we know, the rabbi she scribed for said, ‘I hear Spinoza has been cooking up some idea about Deus sive Natura, I must remember to write a sermon condemning it, please make a note of it.’ And she wrote it on the only paper at hand.”

  He was right, of course. Still. There was something about Aaron—some tiny, dismaying thing he awoke in her—that made it impossible to concede even this to him. With a jolt of confusion it came back to her that she’d aimed to sack him after those three days at the Eastons’. No matter that his work was good—she could easily find a more compliant assistant. Why hadn’t she done so? She couldn’t now recall.

  “I believe,” she said, “the Americans call this thinking outside the box.”

  He shrugged in a way that said Not this American.

  “Closing time.” Without further warning, Librarian Patricia swept one document-bearing cushion, then another, off the table, and left Helen and Aaron to pack their things.

  In Helen’s office, Aaron was pulling his day’s translations off her shuddering printer when there was a knock at the door. Helen opened it to find Jonathan Martin’s secretary, Penelope Babcock—an indeterminately middle-aged, attractive woman who exuded a perennial doe-eyed charm.

  “I thought I’d stop by,” Penelope said, a polite half-smile on her elegantly lipsticked mouth, “to let you know that Jonathan will be granting access to Brian Wilton’s group to view the Richmond documents.”

  Helen gripped the doorknob. “Sorry?”

  “Brian Wilton,” Penelope enunciated, “will be allowed access in the rare manuscripts room alongside you.”

  Helen let out a sound.

  “He’ll begin work next week,” Penelope said. Her smile had thickened. “His presence won’t interfere with your labors there, I’m sure.”

  At Helen’s ongoing silence, Penelope’s arched eyebrows rose higher. “As you know, Brian is a former student of Jonathan’s. Jonathan has always kept a door open to his former students, as a matter of courtesy.”

  Penelope, presumably, had taken up this mission of mercy on her own initiative, after scolding Jonathan Martin about not giving Helen notice of his planned move. Penelope was scrupulous about her likability in the department—Helen had always suspected it was Penelope’s defense against the eternal rumors about herself and Jonathan Martin, and Helen couldn’t fault the tactic.

  Whatever the motivations behind Penelope’s mission of mercy, though, it was Helen’s role to thank Penelope politely, nod as if Jonathan’s consideration toward his former student were the height of chivalry, and shut the door. There was no defensible basis for doing otherwise. For doing what she now did: Stand mute, unable to bring herself to thank Penelope Babcock. Then shut the door slowly, without a word, on Penelope’s lovely face.

  She pressed her forehead to the door. A shiver of betrayal, like the soft fringes of some warming, life-restoring garment being slipped from her skin. For just a moment, she indulged the memory of standing before the Eastons’ open stairwell: before a silent chorus of documents, stilled voices trapped beneath the treads of a once-grand house. Documents waiting patiently all these centuries for someone—for her!—to read and decipher them. Was it folly to feel that those pages, remnants of a long-lost community of Jews, were written expressly for Helen’s very eyes, to soothe her heart now, after all these years? Was it too grandiose to say that in exchange for such a find she’d tendered her life?

  Perhaps it was. Perhaps she was simply desperate for this last illusion that her prospects were not all long spent.

  Aaron stood at her desk, papers in h
and. She braced for him to say something, but he didn’t.

  She sat. She opened a notebook and stared, disoriented, at a page of her own childishly wide scrawl.

  As if he knew she needed a moment to compose herself, Aaron knelt over the shoulder bag he’d set on the floor, and began sorting papers.

  His silence endured as she turned several pages of the notebook.

  She heard herself speak. “I suppose that wasn’t lost on you,” she said.

  From that position, he looked up at her with a mildness that took her aback. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “This is yours. We’ve got a head start. Besides, there’s no substitute for having seen the documents in situ.”

  She considered him. He was actually reassuring. For a moment he could have been someone’s trusted friend or older brother, offering a boost from the sidelines.

  Straightening, he handed her two sheets of paper. In silence she scanned them. Translations of two more letters, both from a Jewish press in Amsterdam and both addressed to Rabbi HaCoen Mendes—one asking for clarification of the number of prayer books required by the London congregation, the other confirming the shipment of said books.

  While she read, Aaron faced away from her desk.

  She finished and set down the papers. “That will do for today,” she said.

  He seemed in no hurry to leave. He bent his neck, wound his scarf slowly, buttoned his coat. Stood a moment. Then gestured toward the frame over the hearth. “So,” he said, “why Masada?”

  She lifted her eyes to the portrait of the mountaintop. It was suddenly evident, as it had somehow not been before, how badly the sketch had faded over the years. She’d never known the name of the artist—a soldier off duty; Helen had spied him leaning on the hood of a jeep and filling pages of his sketchbook. It hadn’t been hard to persuade him to part with one of his profiles of Masada. She had been a good-looking young woman in 1954. And the soldier, pockmarked and skinnier than he’d appeared from afar, had seen only the curve of her skirt over her hips; only the smoothness of her face and not the iron there.