The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  He stared at her. She still wasn’t looking at him. He made no effort to mask his anger. “This could be the new Glückel and we’ve got fresh information on the influence of Sabbatai Zevi in Florence. One of those things alone is a huge find. Together?”

  Still looking at the window, she said, “I’ll check the translation of the Portuguese first thing in the morning.”

  He sat straight-backed in his chair. Again, some vague agony—something to do with Marisa that he hadn’t yet wrapped his mind around—thudded dully inside him. With effort, he held himself perfectly still. “That’s all you have to say?”

  Helen stared at the window as though she hadn’t taken in a word. As if waiting for him to leave. As if she too had decided she preferred not to be in touch with him right now.

  “So you won’t believe it until you double-check to see if my Hebrew vocabulary is up to scratch?” His hands, loose at his sides, felt hot. “Is that it?”

  She raised her eyebrows in the manner of one annoyed by a far-off sound.

  “Well,” he said, “if you’re not going to trust me as a scholar, you ought simply tell me that right now.”

  She glanced at him, surprised, as though the question of trust hadn’t occurred to her. She spoke with unexpected mildness. “I’m simply stating that I intend to check these translations before we proceed further. It’s a matter of prudent scholarship.”

  Fuck prudent, he enunciated in his thoughts. Fuck you.

  She resumed her inward focus, as though too preoccupied to notice that the other person in the office with her was staring at her with as much hatred as he’d ever felt for another human being. His fury had lifted him almost out of his seat, his hands clenched by his knees as though he were being threatened with fists rather than her bludgeoning indifference. Helen Watt, imperious expert in Jewish history—a woman with Masada framed on her wall, as though to prove she loved the Jews and their suffering. How sick he was of English people who loved martyred Jews. How sick he was of her. He would not leave this office without being acknowledged. “Do you see what this could mean?” he repeated, and this time he didn’t disguise the demand in his voice.

  She turned to face him so suddenly, his body braced as if in self-defense. Her voice was extremely quiet. “Yes, young man. I have seen it all along.”

  There had been, perhaps, a point when he could have stopped, when he could have prevented a conflict that would change everything. But as he opened his mouth to answer her, he knew that point, if it had ever existed, had passed.

  “You could’ve hired a child to turn pages for you,” he said. “You should have. They work cheaper than postgraduates, and they don’t mind being ordered around by someone who hasn’t a vestige of consideration. Even better”—he continued, not caring anymore, wanting only to fire back at the blanched, haughty woman to whom he’d been enslaved because of his own desperation—“children don’t challenge Brits who get their kicks out of dissecting other people’s histories without the least—”

  She cut him off. “I have as much right to research Jewish history as you. Perhaps more, if you count years of—”

  He didn’t care. He wouldn’t care. “Spoken like an old-fashioned colonialist.”

  He had, at intervals throughout his life, burned himself badly through an inability to control his temper once he got started. He could go years without an incident—he could go so long that he came to believe his Teflon Man moniker. And then, without any warning he himself could see, he would erupt as though there were no such thing as a consequence. Thus far he’d damaged himself very little, allowing his temper to fly in the faces of those who held only paltry power over him—so he’d been able to proceed with full confidence to the next mentor, the next study group, leaving in his wake only a thin trail of muttering TAs or resident advisors, whom he would never use as job references and whose ill opinion of him would never reverberate into his future. Now he felt it happening with Helen Watt and had no wish to stop it. He wanted only to blow the flames higher, to see how high they could rise—how quickly this whole enterprise, the entire fantastical trove under the staircase, this golden chance to save his stalled academic career that gave this bitter woman such intolerable power over him, could blow to ash.

  Faint pink patches had arisen on Helen’s cheeks. “Mr. Levy, you are on very shaky ground.”

  “Bullshit.” He got up out of his chair. “Bullshit,” he said again, as though it were necessary to repeat this from his new vantage point. The word strengthened him. The way her nostrils flared—as though everything about him were odious—strengthened him. “This story, for example, belongs to the global Jewish community. Florence. Sabbatean crisis.” He spat the words. “Rabbis sending advice across Europe. Yet you go along with Jonathan Martin’s plan to skirt the Freedom of Information Act, because you don’t want to share this with Jewish scholars. You don’t want to share it with anyone.” He was arguing against his own interests now and he didn’t care. All he cared about was humbling her. And something else, something seductive suddenly flurrying inside him—the prospect of succumbing to reality. There, he’d thought it: so he wouldn’t get a Ph.D. He didn’t need Shakespeare, he didn’t need Helen Watt, he didn’t need drizzly England and its sodden queues and waterlogged personalities. He didn’t even need history; he could make his life without it.

  The only pinch of regret he felt, as he spoke on, was at a momentary image of the documents, packed so carefully on their shelves in that stairwell in Richmond. The tide of lines on paper, written by a steady unknown hand, speaking to him across the fraught silence of centuries.

  He blinked it aside.

  “The university,” he said to Helen, “has gotten queries from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. From Harvard’s Judaic Studies Department. The Patricias whisper about it, you ought to know. If you love the pursuit of Jewish history so much, the least you could do is urge Martin to expedite the release of the papers so a larger pool of scholars can tackle them. Yet you haven’t raised a finger.”

  Helen’s posture was taut. “This is not a Jewish story. This story, whatever it proves to be, belongs to all of us.”

  “Awfully convenient of you to say that,” he spat, “as you cooperate in elbowing everyone else away from the table. What, did you spend a summer in Israel? Just because you once read a Jewish newspaper or ate a kosher hot dog or maybe”—some instinct propelled his words forward, the line of his argument a heat-seeking missile—“once for a month you had a Jewish boyfriend, it doesn’t mean that you own this history.” He swallowed. “Exclusively.”

  On her cheeks, the flush had deepened. “You believe I’m just profiteering from someone else’s heritage?” Her voice was neutral, as though his answer didn’t matter to her.

  He didn’t have to say more. He knew, in some confused way, that he’d hit a target, and the satisfaction that spread in him pushed aside all else, keeping at bay for the moment the wave of regret he knew was coming.

  “Well,” she said, and was silent.

  “I’ll go, then.” He picked up his bookbag. “Perhaps we can have a more sensible discussion about this tomorrow.” He knew they would not. He would walk out with his head high, organize his papers, and give notice to Darcy that he was no longer in Professor Watt’s employ.

  And then, after he’d done that, perhaps he’d just go ahead and tell Darcy he’d be taking a leave from Shakespeare. Why not? Did he dare? And who would stop him?

  As he slung his bag over his shoulder, he imagined a phone call with Marisa—in his mind he’d already reached out across the miles, persuaded her to talk to him—in which she’d celebrate his explosive liberation from academia. Perhaps, now that he’d shaken loose some old and outdated version of himself, she’d even encourage him to join her on some adventure in Israel or travel with her around the world. What was there to stop him from choosing some completely different life, after all?

  Nothing but the fact that he’d never wanted a different life
.

  He felt his exuberance crest. The total, pool-still silence of something at equipoise. And the beginning of what he knew would be freefall.

  Had Marisa guessed this about him, then? Had she, out of all the women he’d slept with, seen through his cool and his vanity and understood what he’d long secretly feared: That underneath it all, Aaron Levy lacked the courage for an authentic life? That he had not the slightest idea who he was without praise, without steady advancement toward a degree and title, without organized competition for some elite goal?

  A secret no one had yet guessed. Except Marisa—who had summarily decided she wanted nothing to do with him.

  And, perhaps, Helen. Yes, Aaron thought: Helen had guessed.

  And even now, as his adrenaline drained, as he stood before Helen Watt with his hands loose at his sides and his heart still pumping hard, Aaron was beginning to fear what he’d done. A stunning sobriety broke over him, washed him cold from head to foot. The arrogance that had always granted him a safe landing from every exercise of boyish temper had finally blown a hole in his career that could not be patched. Darcy would hear of his behavior. The question of whether to continue his studies might not even be in his hands. What in him had desired this, had inexorably pushed toward and past this brink?

  Helen was talking. “Do you imagine, young Mr. Levy, that if I had been involved with a Jewish man I’d necessarily have some sort of blind possessiveness—that condescending colonialist viewpoint you and your cohort make your careers describing?” Her blue eyes were ice. Instinctively, he folded his arms across his chest to warm himself.

  “I was,” she said. “I did love a Jewish man, Mr. Levy. Does that make me less capable of honest scholarship?”

  Aaron concentrated on her words only with effort. They made no sense to him, just as it would have made no sense if she had told him she’d had a former life as an acrobat or circus clown. He wanted this conversation over. He had no idea how he’d gotten into it, he had no desire to hear whom or what Helen Watt had loved, if she was even capable of such a thing. He wanted only some quiet in which to marvel at what he’d done, and what it might mean.

  “Well,” he said to Helen, “life is complex.”

  She stared.

  “Perhaps,” he muttered, “perhaps if he hadn’t broken it off with you, maybe—”

  With a white hand, she gripped her cane. She stood with difficulty to her full height, somehow taller than Aaron remembered, and held herself there. “What makes you think, Mr. Levy, that he broke off with me?”

  With a sensation like startling from a dream, Aaron woke to the knowledge that he had gone dreadfully wrong. He wanted to vomit.

  “He didn’t leave me,” she said, with a peculiar intensity. “I left him.”

  Aaron leaned hard against the wall as though it might open and offer an exit. He didn’t want to ask her why she’d left, or when, or what it mattered. He didn’t want to know. But he couldn’t draw his eyes away from her flushed, living face.

  And so. With a few words she seemed to have chosen not to take it to the grave, after all, but to place its bare outlines in the hands of Aaron Levy—a youth without the maturity to see or care. A pointless, empty choice.

  Over the years, in a process so gradual she’d barely felt its motion, she’d come to understand that beneath it all, Dror had been trying to tell her something. That he’d loved her enough to want to offer her a way out. It was she who’d wavered, who’d stolen, who’d run. It was she who’d chosen to believe in Muriel’s jealous words; in the soughing cypress tree that told her she was alien; in the jarring, distorted reflection of her own pale face in the barracks’ dented mirror.

  Dror had followed her from his quarters. He’d called Helen’s name despite stares from all directions, he’d caught her arm despite the uniformed soldiers straining to hear—and he’d said to her in a low voice that was only for her, “This is who I am. This is my world. If you’ll have me despite everything, I’ll marry you in an instant.” He’d held her eyes as though the two of them weren’t on a stage before the entire base—before the entire empty, ringing desert. “I love you,” he said. “I haven’t said those words until now, because I’ve wanted to say them to only one woman in my life. I’ve wanted to be sure.” His face was fierce with concentration, his dark eyes fastened on her with unspeakable tenderness. His hands encircled her as she faced him. “Can you understand that?”

  His hands on the small of her back. His face, broken open, shocking.

  He stepped forward to seal her fast in his arms. Yet as his embrace closed on her, his trust seemed to take on physical weight, bearing down on her—and her heart raced hard and then harder, until it was loud in her ears and she feared it—a foreign-tongued stranger speaking too fast, too urgently, whether of love or terror she didn’t know. She’d broken away and left him there.

  “Why?” Aaron Levy said, his mouth so dry the word barely sounded.

  Helen looked at him for a long time, her face suffused by some combination of emotions he felt unqualified to understand. She turned, then, and gestured simply at the framed sketch above the mantle.

  The faded silhouette of Masada offered itself, its mute lines clear testimony for those who knew to read what was written there. A stark choice. Self-immolation or slavery. Freedom or life, but not both.

  “Because,” Helen said, “if we had been there, he would have cut my throat.”

  Part 3

  14

  February 6, 1665

  21 Shvat, 5425

  London

  With the toe of her shoe, Ester tipped away the loose half-cobblestone someone had used to anchor the pamphlet against the day’s unseasonably warm gusts. She picked it up from the rabbi’s doorstep and read it. A Proclamation from the London Mahamad.

  Softly, she laughed. She needed no proof to know it was Mary who’d laid it at the door during the hour Ester had been out arranging to send a letter. As blithely as Mary changed dresses to suit her needs, so now had Mary fashioned herself as the Mahamad’s unofficial courier, delivering its decrees to the Jewish homes clustered on Bevis Marks and Bury Streets and Creechurch Lane—a task that, by no coincidence, obliged Mary to visit the door of every Jewish house, pausing where she wished to collect gossip or to make show of her charms to any who might have an unmarried cousin or nephew. Ester could imagine the distracted haste with which Mary would have deposited the pamphlet at the rabbi’s household, without troubling to knock. None of what she sought was to be found here.

  Ester read the first page of the pamphlet, the Portuguese ornamented with the occasional Hebrew phrase. Be it known that the Jews of London shall not cavort at brothels in the manner of London society. Nor shall their women appear outside their domiciles with their flesh exposed, nor shall they allow strangers to see their hair but instead shall keep it covered on the byways of the city.

  Ester would have wagered any sum that Mary had delivered this announcement with a shawl drawn piously across her bosom . . . and that beneath the shawl, the rise of her powdered breasts had been adorned with crescent-moon patches. A few hours laboring for the Mahamad was all Mary would tolerate before she moved on to sample one of the city’s gaieties. Indeed, a few hours’ sobriety seemed more than most of London would willingly endure. So thoroughly had London remade itself since the restoration of the royal court that Ester found it a strain to recall the city that had come before. Now the king and his famed lovers had made an art of raucousness, and it seemed all London followed. Not a food or song or deed or costume was left plain that might be somehow adorned. Torrents of lace and ribboned love locks festooned gentlemen everywhere but among the Puritans and Quakers; women young and old promenaded the city under the weight of expensive and brightly colored fabrics such as had been banned under the Puritans; and an overfullness seemed to strain the city’s very walls, as though each satiety had to be challenged to see if the body that was London could be made to sustain yet further pleasure.

  Ag
ainst this abundance the synagogue’s new Mahamad had swiftly set itself, a bulwark against all it deemed grotesque. With the elegant and austere Rabbi Sasportas—newly imported from abroad—now walking openly in his dark robes and skullcap on London’s streets, and with the wealthier members of the congregation talking of constructing a new and grand synagogue building suitable for such an esteemed rabbi, London’s Jewry daily seemed to Ester more and more like Amsterdam’s. The small ring of men who’d lately formed the Mahamad spoke up stridently from the men’s side of the synagogue, issuing warnings against praying with Tudescos and against the self-declared Messiah Sabbatai Zevi, and proclaiming new community standards for dress, dance, music, and of course attendance of the theater. Indeed, Constantina’s long-ago pronouncements about Amsterdam’s Jews now kept Ester jarring company. See how these men of the synagogue set themselves up as judges. It remained true that all had not yet submitted to the community’s new rules; a mighty argument was even now in progress, Rivka had reported, because Sasportas had threatened to expel two men of the community who refused circumcision. Indeed, many of the synagogue’s men and women nodded respectfully to his sermons and then ran their households as they pleased, and the young winked at the Mahamad’s proclamations and flung themselves at London.

  Still, it was the Mahamad’s impositions that had helped set Ester on the very errand she now returned from. Only yesterday she had entered the rabbi’s room to find him seated idle beside his fire, as he was so often of late. So few pupils came now to the rabbi’s doors, choosing instead to learn under Sasportas or to join with the sons of the wealthy at the Ets Haim. As Ester had looked on at the rabbi pressing his empty hands together lightly and parting them, pressing them and parting them, a thought had seized her.

  “Isn’t it time we compose your teachings into a book?” she’d said.

  The rabbi had turned to her slowly—and as he did she noted yet again how the winter seemed to have sapped his strength, though he never complained. But his body was more bent, his face even paler.