The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  “Roses,” he said, “die.”

  And thorns endure the winter. It struck her for the first time that he might be serious.

  “My mother was a weak woman,” he said, “though in my childhood I thought her kind. Nonetheless she slipped from this world with hardly a struggle.” His eyes were hard; there was no room in them for contradiction. “Women die easily,” he said. “I’m sure it can hardly have escaped your notice. They die of the everyday rough use of the world, they die in childbed, they die because they have not the endurance or the taste for this world that men do. They die, and they do not resist dying, like sheep. No. Less than sheep.” His voice quickened, like a student philosopher rehearsing a disputation. “It vexes the mind that God would create a creature and give it so little will. Even a flea argues more strongly for its life than a woman. Perhaps when a rabbi can explain God’s purpose in making women thus, he will earn my admiration. If even a priest could explain it, I would give him my allegiance in an instant. And don’t pretend surprise at my blasphemy, Ester, because I’ve seen your face as the rabbi recites his prayers and I know you share it. The rabbi’s words don’t explain the way women die.” He stared, for a moment, at the low clouds. “It vexes the mind,” he repeated.

  But she saw it was not his mind that was vexed, but his heart. A thing that might, like an animal, prove docile or dangerous.

  A scrap-metal vendor pushed his rattling cart past; two housemaids walked by, giving curious glances. He paid them no mind.

  “Such weak womanly souls,” he continued, “are deemed desirable. But in truth they’re cowardly, betraying all promises of life and sustenance. The promise of a weak woman,” he said, “is worthless. I seek a woman who will not murmur the Lord in his wisdom and gently expire, but fight with clenched fist and jaw to remain in the world and in my household and raise my children. I want no faint woman for my wife, though such I may seek for pleasure.” He was silent a moment, then stepped nearer. “I’ve seen your face set against all of London like a rock set against the sea.” She was shocked to see true pleasure on his face. “You make no effort to mask how little you care for the opinion of others.” He raised his hand; she couldn’t fathom its motion toward her. At the touch of his fingertips on her cheek she flinched, but he only gave a low laugh. “When you come to marriage, you’ll come with gratitude, and you’ll apply to it the strength you now apply to scorning it. Affection will follow on the heels of marriage.” He spoke sternly but his eyes were watchful. “When you cease your scribing and bookish pursuits, and turn from the unnatural to the natural, you’ll bear children. And even your essence will bend, your temper will ease to that of a mother. Nor will I tolerate”—one eyebrow rose as his voice lowered—“a difficult woman.”

  “Then,” she said, “let us spare you that fate without further discussion.” She turned to leave, her thoughts in disarray.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve set my mind. You wield your puny might like”—he laughed—“like a child’s fist cocked at a man’s world. It pleases me. I said so, unthinking, in the company of the widow Mendoza, but I wasn’t displeased that she took it as profitable business to make inquiries. Though”—he twisted his lips—“you drew a conclusion that was comic, don’t you agree?”

  Tears rose in her eyes, though she couldn’t have named what drove them there. “You can’t want me,” she murmured.

  He spoke to her gently—for the first time she saw that he had in him a great store of gentleness. “You’ve spent too many days with Mary’s petty criticisms as your only mirror. Look again. You’ll see there’s no blemish in you.” His words trailed as he considered her. “Once you’ve done what women do to their hair” . . . he gestured at her head . . . “and erased this false augur of age that you wear” . . . reaching up, he tugged at a lock of her hair, then released it softly. “There is life hidden there.”

  She wished to flee but could not.

  “You have a beauty of a sort,” he said. “But more important than that, you have enough manly strength in you to match me.”

  She found her voice. “Do you love men, then, like your brother?”

  He laughed at the taunt. His large frame loomed before her, commanding. “My brother and I could not be more opposed in temperament or desire.”

  She did not doubt him.

  All amusement was gone from his face. His jaw was set. Fear mixed in her with an unfamiliar longing for protection. What would it mean to stop fighting for what none other than she believed in, and accept the shelter that was offered?

  “I’m not a selfish man, Ester. You see me standing here before you.” For a moment his face bore a wistfulness strange for one so accustomed to the fulfillment of his wishes. Then he raised both hands, palms up, in a gesture so emphatic it could not be submissive. “I want your ferocity for myself. That’s true. But I want it also for my sons. I want,” he said, “a woman of will.”

  On the corner of Bury Street and Creechurch Lane, carts trundling past now and again on the uneven stones, he waited for her answer.

  She said softly, “You won’t have me.”

  “What are you, then, if you refuse to be a woman?”

  She faced down the narrow street, a darkened strip beneath overcrowding balconies. “An empty vessel,” she said, though she knew not whether the words were meant to spite him or herself.

  “Yet,” he laughed, bowing his farewell, “you are not.”

  She walked home alone, gripping her cloak tight about her, thoughts piling and slipping. Manuel HaLevy understood her more truly than any—he saw she was no docile creature, nor did he wish her to be. And his warning echoed the rabbi’s: she’d have no livelihood, no protection from hunger and need after the rabbi’s death. Why, then, not marry him, under such terms as he offered? But her nature, it seemed, was unnatural. What she wished—she could not help it, the wish persisted darkly inside her—was to be a part of the swelling wave she felt in the words of the books and pamphlets lining the tables outside St. Paul’s, the piles of fresh-bound quires at the bindery. What she wished was to struggle with all her force to urge that wave along, so that she might herself sweep and be swept in its furious progress—driving against the shore to smash some edifice of thought that stood guard over the land, throw herself against it and watch it crumble. For some new truth lay beyond it, she was sure of it. A continent awaiting discovery.

  How to explain to all the world that her own vanity—her pretension at philosophical thought, which a man like Manuel HaLevy would trample—was more valuable to her than the safety he offered?

  She’d reached home. The door shut hard behind her, and in its wake quiet reigned. The rabbi had retired to his room, the fire in the study had gone to embers.

  A woman’s body, said the world, was a prison in which her mind must wither.

  She forced herself to stand still in the center of the room, palms resting lightly on the fabric of her skirts. She would not permit herself another step until she calmed herself with reason.

  Nature gave a woman not only body but also intelligence, and a wish to employ it. Was it then predetermined that one side of Ester’s nature must suffocate the other? If two of God’s creations were opposed, must it be that God decided in advance that one was more perfect and therefore must be victorious? Did God determine before each storm that either the wind or the oak tree must prevail, one being more dear to Him?

  Or perhaps, rather, the storm itself was God’s most prized creation—and only through it could the contest between wind and oak tree be resolved, and one proven hardier. Perhaps—she trembled at her own heresy—the storm itself was God. And God was only the endless tumult of life proving new truths and eradicating old.

  Then it was only right that she do as her spirit told her, and let the struggle itself answer the question of which was the stronger: her will or her womanly nature.

  Still dressed in her cloak, she crossed the room, sat at the writing table, dipped a quill, and wrote quickly, as though the
words she set on the paper might be spied and seized from her.

  To the esteemed Thomas Hobbes,

  I write to inquire whether I might engage your illustrious mind in discussion. Although I am unknown to you, I believe myself to be one such as you may trust: a companion in inquiry, and no part of the powers that would condemn a thinker for incredulity or atheistery.

  My interests in metaphysical inquiry are many, but of late concern the question of extension. If I may embolden myself to do so, I would like to inquire as to what relationship you find between the divine and natural worlds, and what beliefs you hold in the matter of providential intervention. I myself, as you surely intuit, hold thoughts in these matters that are other than those commonly held. I am in disagreement not only with the notion of divine dominion over nature, but also with the belief in its expression through miracles, the which notion seems to me the facile recourse of a poor mathematician whose numerical proofs, having failed to arrive at a wished-for sum, may yet be solved by the sudden mysterious introduction of a new number to right the balance.

  It is my keen wish to discuss and learn from my fellow thinkers, so that where I err I might be corrected, and where I possess a spark of understanding it might be fanned. Yet an infirmity of body bars me from traveling to your door to converse with you face to face as two gentlemen ought. It is my hope that you will take my word, insubstantial though it must seem, for surety. It is my hope that you will answer my letter.

  So she wrote, and signed the letter Thomas Farrow, and when she had finished this letter she set it to dry.

  There on the desk beside it, written in her hand, lay the rabbi’s letter to Florence. Slowly but deliberately, she turned it on the wooden table. She dipped the quill heavily, and drew the nib across the paper between the inverted lines of the letter, shaping a ribbon of blue-black ink to ease her own thoughts.

  She wrote, in Hebrew, Here I begin.

  17

  December 22, 2000

  London

  He’d arrived this morning to find the rare manuscripts room strafed by shafts of sunlight, and empty with the exception of the necessary Patricia. He’d requested a document, and Patricia had brought this bill for provisions, written by an anonymous merchant in December 1664—so much money for so many sacks of flour and a barrel of something illegible. The paper was moderately damaged, and Aaron let his eyes slide over the letters with their brown halos. Nothing of interest.

  An English sort of quiet reigned in the hall—reverent and fraught. She doesn’t know what she’s missing, he told it.

  Only last night, making room on his kitchenette table for a sheaf of transcriptions of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s letters, he’d moved aside a stack of dissertation research notes (and how foreign his dissertation now revealed itself to be: a work written in Sanskrit by an earnest scholar who vaguely repelled Aaron) and, in doing so, dropped his Signet Shakespeare to the floor. Picking it up, he’d browsed the sonnets until one stopped him:

  Nay, if you read this line, remember not

  The hand that writ it, for I love you so

  That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot

  If thinking on me then should make you woe.

  Staring at the lines, he’d felt a sudden gust of anger. Yet again, he didn’t fucking get it. Or maybe Shakespeare was bullshitting. Wasn’t love, by definition, the wish to be remembered? Nowhere in Aaron’s notion of love was there anything remotely resembling the willingness to erase himself for the sake of the other’s ease.

  No matter; Marisa had erased Aaron without his help, for her own ease.

  He blew out a long breath, and admitted it: she didn’t love him.

  Beyond that thought was a vast, featureless terrain.

  After a while he saw that he could traverse it all day without arriving anywhere.

  There was a pencil in his palm. He took it between his fingers, bore down with his bruised knuckle on its ridges, and like a miner picking his way toward an unknown destination began to write—slowly, steadily, filling the void with work.

  Was that what sadness did to a man?

  He transcribed meticulously, responsibly, avoiding shorthand that could create confusion later. The lone scratching of his pencil on the page livened the silence, humanized it, comforted him.

  Good Lord. He was growing up.

  Women loved that.

  By noon, he’d transcribed two documents, neither of any importance. Household detritus: A bill for bookbinding. A note about the timing of a pupil’s next lesson.

  He stood from his table, his body stiff with the morning’s labor. He wanted another look at that cross-written letter. Something about it bothered him, though he couldn’t say exactly what—something he couldn’t get at by staring at the transcription on his laptop. The Hebrew words were taut and carefully chosen, as though each sentence had to arc around some invisible obstacle before setting down lightly on some delicate, all-important point.

  At the desk he gave Patricia a perfunctory smile. “Document RQ206, please,” he said.

  She shook her head. Her gray hair, pulled back in its usual tight bun, looked like something she’d applied to her head with a paint scraper. She appeared, if possible, more irritated than usual. “That won’t be available until one o’clock.”

  He turned to scan the long room with its rows of tables, populated at this hour only by a pair of classics postgraduates. “But I’m the only person here working on the Richmond papers. Who’s got the document?”

  “It’s unavailable,” she said. “Until one o’clock.” The repetition seemed to satisfy her.

  He blew out air. “I’ll take the next available document, then.”

  He worked for another hour before Helen came in.

  “Where were you?” he said, rising. “I thought you were going to be here more than an hour ago.” He knew he sounded accusatory, but in truth he felt himself relax at the sight of her.

  Helen set down her briefcase. At first she didn’t answer. A tight anguish curved her lips. When she spoke it was quietly, though they were alone in the reading room save Patricia, bent over her glowing computer screen.

  “I just saw Wilton and one of his students in the lift, with a camera. Coming down.”

  Down from the conservation lab.

  Aaron swore.

  At the circulation desk he stood over Library Patricia, backing up a step only when she looked up from her computer. A tall man occupying space: now there was a dissertation topic he could have done justice to, if he hadn’t stupidly chosen a death match with Shakespeare. He knew just how to move in space with women, at least those within shouting distance of his own age: when to prop an arm and lean slightly over them as he made a point. When to sit back and let them come to him.

  He wasn’t quite as sure of himself, though, with these older women.

  He set the fingers of one hand lightly on Patricia’s desk and spoke in what he hoped was a casual tone. “What’s up with the paparazzi in the conservation lab?”

  She looked at his hand. He didn’t withdraw it.

  “One photographer is hardly paparazzi,” she said. She turned back to her screen. But her distraction showed in the fitful way she moved the computer mouse, and he could see that he wasn’t the source of it.

  He didn’t move.

  “The document in question is being photographed,” she said after a moment. “Along with a few others.”

  His hand faltered on the desk. “They can do that?” he said.

  “They can,” Patricia sang under her breath, “if Jonathan Martin wants them to.”

  “And Conservation Patricia let them?”

  Library Patricia stiffened at the nickname, but he was too aghast to care. He thought quickly. He’d double down. A little camaraderie to sweeten the pot? He said, “I’d think she’d zap them with her laser-beam eyes.”

  Library Patricia stared at him. Her eyes were a pale, steady blue. She’d taken off her glasses. Slowly she folded them, with a soft dual
click. A sound understood the world over to mean you were in trouble with the librarian.

  “Of course,” he began—and before continuing he offered a sheepish smile to ensure that she’d get the joke, and understand both that this was a compliment, and that the flirtation was recreational only. “Your eyes are lethal, too.”

  She blinked at him.

  He leaned forward conspiratorially, bracing his weight on his hand. “You don’t find me charming,” he said in a low voice.

  She leaned forward as well, her gray head nearly brushing his. “Shocking,” she said, “isn’t it?”

  Her breath smelled of stale coffee.

  She turned back to her computer.

  After a moment he withdrew his hand and left.

  “Well?” said Helen, back at the table.

  He jutted his jaw. “She might not actually have a crush on me.”

  Her face was clotted with a desperation he only half understood. She brushed past him and went to Patricia’s desk. After a moment Aaron followed.

  Helen was addressing Patricia in a hushed, urgent tone. “They photographed RQ206?”

  Patricia referred to her catalogue. She sighed. “Yes. And the next few in the series.”

  He watched Helen and Patricia exchange a look. It was like watching two weather-beaten lighthouses flash at each other across a wintry bay. A silent, fleeting exchange to which he had no access.

  Helen turned to Aaron and nodded, her jaw clenched. Patricia had turned away in what might have been a gesture of tact or even sympathy—he might have known how to interpret it if only he understood Brits. Or older women.

  Maybe people. Maybe what was missing was that he didn’t understand people.

  Wilton was going to scoop them on the Sabbatean crisis in Florence. Aaron had trusted they’d be the first. But what hope did he and Helen have of that, when the other team had four able-bodied researchers to work on the project—not to mention a shortcut to publication in the form of Jonathan Martin, who had only to lift the phone to get the attention of the editor of Early Modern Quarterly? Wilton’s choice to photograph this week, when most academics were drifting off to start their boozy holiday rounds, might even mean the editor had agreed to look at it over the Christmas holiday. Wilton was going to rush out an article on the cross-written letter and whatever else he’d read, before he’d even finished going through the documents. It might not be the most thorough scholarship, but it was a brilliant move. Anyone who wrote a second article on the Richmond document cache would merely be deepening Wilton’s work—a follower on the trail Wilton had blazed.