The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Their only hope, Aaron thought, was that Wilton’s group hadn’t yet figured out the gender bombshell. He consulted his notebook. “I wonder,” he said, “have they photographed RQ182?” The letter from Yacob de Souza carrying the request that the girl be replaced as the rabbi’s scribe at earliest convenience.

  “That and the cross-written letter were the first two documents they requested when they came in this morning.” Patricia lowered her reading glasses.

  “Well,” Helen said.

  Something on Patricia’s desk seemed to require her attention. She busied herself with it; yet though her face was averted, her posture was intent, as though she were silently counseling some course of action.

  Helen said, softly, “The next document, please.”

  Nodding her approval, Patricia left to retrieve it.

  They worked for a half-hour in silence. Making his way through the document before him, Aaron transcribed a trickle of useless material—a statement of household accounts in Aleph’s secretary hand, the flourishes atop the capital letters torqued back so far, they looked like coiled creatures about to fling themselves across the page. For two vessels of whiting a summe of 4d. For 1 lb coffee 2s 6d. He noted again that there were no entries for income from students—an indication, perhaps, that the rabbi’s stream of pupils had dried up? Now and again, he paused in his work and watched Helen furtively. He’d never before taken the opportunity to watch her write. Her white knuckles pushed the stubby pencil across the pages of her notebook in a glacial scrawl so determined, he could imagine its lead point carving valleys and leaving behind boulders. If he’d noticed her writing style earlier, he thought, he’d have been more fearful of her.

  At twelve-thirty, Library Patricia, unsolicited, approached their table. She set a cushion before Helen: the next document in the series. Never mind that Helen and Aaron were each already at work on a document. She departed, then returned three times more, bearing more documents. Six at once: a flagrant breach of library rules. Patricia arranged the new pages in a straight line before Helen without a word. Then, without looking at either of them, she laid a bare weathered hand on the tabletop, patted it once, and retreated to her desk.

  “Jesus,” said Aaron. He turned to Helen. “She has a crush on you.”

  Helen had risen and was busy scanning the documents.

  “You two are friends?” he persisted. “I never see you talk.”

  Helen slid a cushion closer and squinted at it. “I hardly know the first thing about her,” she said distractedly. “Nor she me. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  He pointed at the six documents on their identical brown cushions. “Well, if you don’t call that friendship . . .”

  She faced him. “That,” she said, lowering her glasses to the tip of her nose, “is British for May the best team win.”

  He looked at her, but chose not to laugh at the irony. What could possibly be the point in racing through the next documents? Speed didn’t matter anymore. Wilton’s team was going to press with the story of a female scribe and the previously unknown correspondence about the Florentine Sabbatean crisis: two huge findings, which he and Helen had had the naiveté to hold back until they’d done a proper job of working through the cache of documents and forming a coherent picture of who left it and why. Just like that, with no fanfare, their work had become irrelevant.

  Failure. This time he didn’t recoil from it, but poked at it like a missing tooth, carefully prodding the sickening metallic taste, the blank, textureless surface.

  Then he turned back to his work. He’d never done that: sit down to a task even though he knew he wasn’t going to win. He wasn’t sure he understood himself. But what else did he have to do? The horizon was bare.

  Ignoring the new documents for the moment, he surreptitiously pulled out his laptop and positioned it on his thighs beneath the table. Despite Patricia’s transgression of reading-room rules, he had little doubt she’d throw him out for such a flagrant violation. Helen Watt, on the other hand, seemed too focused to care. On his computer screen he pulled up a translation of the original cross-written letter.

  Start at the beginning, he counseled himself. Like a good Cartesian thinker, he needed to approach the evidence with systematic doubt. A return to first principles: what, in all the universe, did he know for certain?

  He read Aleph’s words.

  I pose questions forbidden to men, yet I am myself blameless of violating the law.

  Very clever, Aleph. You’re a woman, so you can’t be accused of doing things “forbidden to men.” Clever, but by no means revelatory. Somehow he’d had more respect for Aleph than this. Somehow he’d expected her to do more than doodle upside down on her boss’s letter in breathless hyperbole about how very terribly mysterious her scribe work was. “Come on,” he muttered. “Give me something better.”

  He felt Helen’s eyes on him but didn’t lift his gaze from the screen.

  I gave this answer: I am an empty vessel.

  It is not so. For if desire be the essence of man, it must be also of woman. I am a vessel that brims with desire.

  He read the Hebrew text in full, then the final line in English.

  Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain, for they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.

  He’d been through all of this with Helen multiple times, but it felt as obscure now as the first time he’d read it. Richard II had been in circulation since before 1600, so certainly Aleph could have seen it performed or read it in quarto. Still, the quote felt as disjointed as the rest of the cross-written text. Maybe, Aaron conjectured, the business about forbidden questions was a sly reference to Sabbatai Zevi—maybe Aleph had been drawn to Sabbatai Zevi’s movement against her boss’s better judgment. Or maybe all the grandiose confessional language was simply Aleph metabolizing the fact that the rabbi wasn’t supposed to have a girl scribe? Still, the soap-opera references to the day’s events, the business about the most wicked of souls—it all felt paranoid, overblown. Possibly even a bit psychotic.

  Still, even as he thought that, he imagined the shadowy girlish figure of Aleph herself lining up behind Helen and Patricia, all shaking their heads in disapproval at the obtuse American: why did he assume everything was as it appeared on the surface?

  I pose questions forbidden to men.

  Why? Why was it forbidden for men to ask about a Sabbatean crisis in Florence—assuming that’s what Aleph was referring to?

  “Helen,” he said.

  Only when she stared at him did he realize he’d called her by her first name.

  With the tip of his pencil he tapped the line on his screen, angling the contraband computer so she could see it. “What do you make of that?” he said.

  There was a silence, during which Aaron had a chance to appreciate something he’d overlooked about Helen: she was the sort who’d never berate a student for asking her to look at material she’d already looked at ten times before.

  “She’s saying,” murmured Helen, “that it’s the rabbi who’s guilty of violating the law, not the scribe who sets down his words. But of course underneath that she’s being mischievous and saying that she’s not sinning because she’s not a man. She’s speaking through riddles.”

  “Yeah,” said Aaron. “Okay.” Clearly Helen didn’t think there was anything amiss.

  Helen was watching him.

  “Okay, what?” she said.

  The words burst out of him. “Why is it forbidden to men?”

  Her gaze drifted to the high ceiling. Then back to him.

  “Good question,” she said.

  They sat together at the table.

  “Do you think she could be talking about something else?” he said to Helen. “Some other kind of questioning, something that was illegal?”

  “It’s possible,” she said.

  “What questions couldn’t a person ask in the seventeenth century?”

  Helen responded with a dry laugh. “Where do we begin? I
n the 1660s you could be imprisoned for promoting Catholicism when the king swung Protestant, and Protestantism when he swung Catholic, and the minefield was worse for Jews. French authorities searched bags at the borders to check for banned books—woe betide you if you were caught smuggling ideas across borders. Atheist remarks could get you butchered. And think about what happened to Johan de Witt, a voice of tolerance and political moderation! He and his brother were torn literally to pieces by a mob. Only the landlord’s decision to lock Spinoza inside the house that day prevented Spinoza—who was out of his head with horror and grief—from confronting the mob holding a sign saying You are the greatest of barbarians, and meeting the same fate himself.”

  Aaron gave her a moment to return from the terrain her speech had carried her to.

  “I just think,” he said quietly, “that Aleph is up to something.”

  “Why?” countered Helen, but the sharpness of her tone was nothing personal. She was going to interrogate his idea; it was what they were there to do.

  Even to his own ears, his arguments sounded thin. “Why the cross-written document? Why the sudden urge to save paper?”

  “You’ve seen the meticulous household accounts. Perhaps she was just being mindful of expenses.”

  “Still,” insisted Aaron, “we’ve read through dozens of HaCoen Mendes’s letters that she wrote for him, and there’s no precedent for her using one as scrap paper for her own musings.”

  “All right. What do you think she was up to?”

  He slowed; here he was on unsure footing. “Maybe it’s a commentary of some kind.”

  “How so?”

  He tapped the computer screen once more. The straight lines of text failed to re-create the feeling he recalled from the original letter: an overgrowth of words sprouting from the cross-written page. “You know how a page of the Torah is laid out for study, right?” he said. “There’s the main Hebrew text of the Torah—just a verse or two—and then framing it, in tiny script all around it, there are blocks of interpretation and counterargument. Well, this just reminds me of it. As though the inverted lines are a commentary on—or maybe more like a response to—that Florence letter.”

  Helen’s silence felt like a lucid, steady current. She didn’t say aloud I take you seriously—yet as the seconds passed without reprimand, Aaron felt loose-limbed with relief.

  “I want you to see this,” she said.

  She moved her cushion closer to him. He read.

  The hand was unfamiliar; the letter, written in Latin, dated April 17, 1665.

  To Thomas Farrow,

  Being the recipient of two of your letters, I am compelled to offer a reply. Your intelligence is sound I am sure, but you err in thinking I will rush into discourse concerning such propositions and proofs as you contemplate.

  I am not of a mind to engage in disputation with persons unknown to me. Nonetheless I feel compelled to warn you that your arguments are dangerous in nature. I do not entertain such notions as you suggest, nor do I welcome further correspondence.

  Faithfully,

  F. van den Enden

  “Who’s Thomas Farrow?” said Aaron. “And why does Van den Enden sound familiar?”

  “No idea about Farrow,” said Helen. “But Van den Enden is a name you surely once memorized for an exam. He was a former Jesuit and a convener of radical circles in Amsterdam—he tutored Spinoza and was one of Spinoza’s influences. Van den Enden was known mostly for his political theories, and in the end got himself executed for conspiring against Louis XIV. I’ve no idea, though, what he might be responding to here. Nor do I have any idea what this letter is doing with Aleph’s papers. Perhaps Farrow or Van den Enden had some connection to the rabbi, or to whoever put the papers in the stairwell in Richmond. Or who knows—perhaps someone entirely unrelated threw this letter into the Richmond cache at a later time.” She wrote the two names deliberately on her notepad. It took her a long time to shape the letters: Thomas Farrow. Franciscus van den Enden. “I can go over to the archives tomorrow,” she said, “and start a records search on Farrow.”

  For a moment Aaron worked his neck in a circle, thinking. “I still can’t get used to the notion,” he murmured, “that you Londoners can just do a search for records of some nobody who lived in the seventeenth century. A paper trail for everyone going back into the mists of time.” He slid the cushion and its document away. “Sometimes I wonder how you people breathe in this country.”

  She pulled the cushion back toward her protectively. “What’s wrong with having good records? Historians thrive on records.”

  “No offense, it’s just that the English are pinned under the microscope from the moment they’re born. Everyone knows about their heredity. Their lineage.”

  Helen responded with a small sniff and turned back to the document.

  Had he sworn to stay out of dangerous territory with Helen Watt? Fuck it. “We,” he dimpled at her, “don’t give a rat’s ass about lineage.”

  “Yes,” she said thoughtfully, pencil in hand. “It’s one of a very finite number of things I’ve always respected about America.”

  He straightened. “See that?” he said.

  “See what?”

  “You English can’t give a compliment. Not a real one. You don’t know how to do it.”

  She turned fully in her seat to face him. “And how, Mr. Levy, do you suggest I compliment you? Please. I’d like precise instructions.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “I like you,” he enunciated.

  She looked at him over the rims of her glasses, her eyebrows arched. He almost laughed at the perfect pose of English discomfiture, but held back.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I dare you.” He exaggerated each word now, as though teaching elocution to a foreigner. “I like you, Aaron Levy—you’re a decent human being after all.”

  Her mouth had shut. She opened it, after a time, to say only, “You’re a bigger fool than I’d thought.”

  “That was close,” he said. “We’ll try again some time, okay? Don’t feel bad, you almost got it.”

  When she was busy with her work again, he turned to his laptop once more. Let Helen go to the archives, he thought. He opened his browser and typed in the name.

  A hundred Thomas Farrows lit his screen. A Canadian politician. An obituary in a Florida newspaper. He narrowed the search to the seventeenth century. The yield this time, once he’d weeded out the junk, was one solitary link. A graduate student in Michigan named Brendan Godwin was writing a dissertation on a Thomas Farrow, circa 1622–1667. Godwin had delivered a paper at a conference three years prior; presumably he, like Aaron, was still laboring away to produce his masterwork. Godwin, according to the précis listed on the conference’s outdated website, was arguing that Farrow was an overlooked voice in seventeenth-century thought, a man of slim but prescient output.

  Potentially interesting, assuming this was the same Thomas Farrow. Certainly the fellow wasn’t getting a friendly reception from Van den Enden. Aaron made a note to find Godwin’s address and e-mail him later; he’d do it outside the rare manuscripts room, where clicking away at a keyboard wasn’t risky.

  Across the room, Wilton’s team entered. They settled together at the table farthest from Helen and Aaron, silently positioning themselves so that eye contact with Helen and Aaron was impossible—all but the woman postgraduate, who was the last to the table and took the seat at the end. Aaron caught her eye as she lowered herself into the chair, and she turned away guiltily.

  Immediately, Patricia was at their table. As Aaron discreetly tucked away his laptop, he saw why she’d come. Without seeming to look up, Helen indicated the two cushions she wanted to keep on the desk. Within seconds, the evidence of Patricia’s favoritism was gone, and Patricia was back at her desk.

  The document that remained in front of Aaron was the letter addressed to Thomas Farrow. On the cushion before Helen was a page Aaron hadn’t seen.

  It was a simple page, written in the famil
iar flowing hand. A roster of expenses and debts—again, there seemed to be no income from students. Near the bottom, though, was something that had not appeared on any of the other household accounts. There was the usual letter aleph signed by the scribe . . . but trailing down from it vertically was a signature, done not in a flowing hand but in separated Hebrew letters, as though the writer were daring the world to miss this slim path of markings leading toward the bottom of the page. Aleph samech taph reish.

  And then, beneath that, written horizontally in small Roman letters: Ester Velasquez.

  “That’s her,” Helen whispered. “That’s her.” And a look settled on her face, one Aaron did not understand: a look laden with regret and sympathy, as one might wear to a reunion with a friend one has wronged terribly, and from whom one does not expect forgiveness.

  “Ester.” Aaron tried out the name.

  Beneath Ester’s name, signed with a small flourish by the same hand, was another.

  Thos. Farrow.

  Let there be one place where I exist unsundered. This page.