The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  “That long?”

  Librarian Patricia lowered her glasses.

  He persisted. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what’s actually in the letter?”

  She closed her mouth, breathed out slowly through her nose. “You don’t understand the English at all,” she said, “do you?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Not a bit.”

  She gave a short hum, then surveyed him in silence. “Let me help you, then.” Slowly she leaned forward at her desk. “We’re very patient people.”

  “It’s getting old”—he said—“your stoic-Britons-confront-the-impatient-American thing. Thought I’d just let you know.”

  “Is it?” she said evenly.

  “Yes. Also, it’s nonsense. Professor Helen Watt, who’s so English her resting pulse is a negative number, is at this moment putting on pompoms in anticipation of celebrating the last document’s release. She’s making a human pyramid, in fact, all by herself.”

  Patricia didn’t blink.

  “But if you get something out of the impregnable English thing,” he said, “I’ll go with it.”

  “Awfully game of you,” she said.

  “Quite,” he said.

  Neither of them had budged an inch from the desk. They stared at each other.

  “Did we just make friends?” he said.

  From the tables of laboring students around them, he heard a few snickers.

  “I mean, is that how you people do it?” he continued. “Bully each other to a standstill—then buy each other a pint? Is that what I’ve been missing all this time in England?”

  She raised her glasses again, and looked out at him from beneath them.

  “Silly me,” he said. “I’ve been skipping the bullying part.”

  She considered. “Try it without shortcuts next time,” she said.

  “I don’t think I will,” he said. “I’m not a very patient person. Besides,” he added, “I rather enjoy how unnerved English people get when you tell them you like them.”

  Like a drop of soap in oily water, the words scattered gazes in all directions—Patricia’s fled back to her computer, and the students on either side of him who had been surreptitiously staring a moment earlier now studied their manuscripts with renewed fervor.

  “Well,” he said to the silent room. “I’m glad we had this heart-to-heart.”

  Back in Helen’s office he set down his bags. Without a word he pulled the new toner cartridge from his bag and replaced Helen’s old one.

  “Thank you,” she said faintly.

  With a nod of acknowledgment, he took out his laptop and printed his transcript of the rabbi’s letter. He set it on her desk. “Here’s a tear-jerker for you.”

  She took the paper in a wavering hand and studied it a moment. Then she set it down beside her computer—carelessly, he thought, as though she weren’t much concerned about its contents. Her gaze returned to her window.

  Now that he looked at her properly, he saw she sat stiffly, and was wearing a heavy sweater despite the warm April afternoon. Briefly it occurred to him to be worried about her. Then again, how many times had he sat in her office, searching her distant expression for signs that she appreciated or even recognized a gift he’d just brought her? It had always been this way with Helen, and always would be. This, evidently, was the full extent of the friendship she cared to offer.

  “Can you find the e-mail address of the Amsterdam Jewish archive?” Helen’s voice sounded thin, though whether from disappointment or fatigue he couldn’t tell.

  “Sure, why?”

  “Let’s see if they have the final copy of this.” She spoke almost gingerly, as though trying not to bite down on something sour in her mouth. “They’ve got the best-documented seventeenth-century Jewish community in Europe, and this letter is addressed to one of its prominent rabbis.” She swallowed. It took a long time. “For once,” she said, “we might be able to track down the second copy of one of HaCoen Mendes’s letters.”

  He searched for the address and spelled it out for her; laboriously she typed it. Twice she had to backtrack and begin again, her index finger heavy on the delete key. Without meaning to, he drifted behind her to watch. The process was mesmerizing: words struggling to take shape on the screen. With effort, Helen moved past the salutation.

  Then, backtracking once more, she accidentally deleted all she’d written.

  She rose silently from her chair, stepped to the side. With one hand she gave him a vague wave. Swiftly, he took her place. Using the sort of formal phrases she might, he composed a query to the Amsterdam Jewish archives, signed with Helen’s name. As he worked she breathed softly over his shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “That will do.”

  The chime of the departing mail sounded in the office. He stood.

  “Well,” she said, resuming her seat. “The last letters.” Then, surprising him, she added, “I’d hoped for more proof.”

  He nodded. Without more evidence, their conjectures about Farrow were fool’s gold.

  She was staring at him.

  “What?” he said.

  She shook her head, as though to rid herself of a fly.

  Christ. “Helen Watt,” he said, enunciating like a schoolteacher.

  Reluctantly, as though confessing an intimacy she wasn’t sure she wanted to part with, she said, “There’s something about the Florence letters.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Why,” she said, “is there no other record of the Sabbatean crisis in Florence?”

  “Because most records don’t survive 350 years,” he said. “It’s more surprising when we do have evidence of something than when it’s missing.”

  “Yes,” said Helen, “but why don’t we have any of the letters from the rabbi’s student in Florence, whereas we have other letters the rabbi received?”

  “I’m not following you,” he said.

  “At one point, after the rabbi has come under pressure to stop using her as a scribe, the letters stop for a while. Then, a while later, they start again with these missives to Florence. Perhaps, don’t you think, she was invited to scribe for the rabbi again only because the Sabbatean crisis in Florence demanded it?”

  “It’s possible,” he began. “But there could be a hundred reasons for that gap in the letters. Ill health, documents lost in a fire, a voyage to—”

  “And don’t you think,” she interrupted—and there was now something explosive in her manner, “that being barred from learning might give a young woman with enough hunger for education—enough love of the work of thought itself—sufficient incentive to invent a Sabbatean crisis?”

  Now he knew she wasn’t well. Helen Watt, in full possession of her faculties, would have torn this logical leap to shreds, and sought a more likely explanation. Something was wrong with her today. Or maybe it had been for a long while.

  And she hadn’t finished. “You know the Masada story, of course,” she said. Slowly she pointed. Her finger, half bent at each knuckle as if she were unable to straighten it, hovered; then aimed itself, trembling, at the picture above the mantle.

  “I know the story.” As did anyone who ever attended a synagogue Hebrew school.

  “How do we know what happened up there?” said Helen. Her finger still wavered in the direction of the sketch.

  “You mean on Masada?” Aaron blinked. “It’s in Josephus. The Jewish War.” But as he spoke, he realized for the first time what a foolish answer this was.

  “Yes, and how did Josephus know?” continued Helen. “He wasn’t on Masada, he was with the Roman army. When he arrived, the Jews had already committed”—she pursed her lips—“glorious martyrdom. Or, as the Jews’ leader described it, a final act of kindness.”

  He dug in his memory. “Something about women who hid?”

  “Two women, yes. They hid in a cave with some children. It seems they disagreed with their leader’s notion that kindness meant self-­murder for a noble cause. It seems they were of the opinion that kindness
meant something quite different.” Helen’s finger was now wavering so widely he wanted to grab and steady it. “Everyone looks at that silhouette,” she said, “and thinks of people who chose to do the so-called honorable thing even though it meant death for themselves, their wives, and children. And that’s the only story of Masada anyone talks about. No one ever mentions those two women who decided to live and be captured, and find a way in the world whether or not it was honorable or free. No one ever mentions that they might have been something other than weak-hearted—that they might in fact have disbelieved the worldview that required their murder. But they stayed alive—and Aaron, they were the ones who told the story to Josephus—they’re the only reason we know what happened up there.”

  It was true. All those times he’d heard the Masada story, no one had ever troubled to linger on the question of how the details of the story were known—nor had he wondered. It was as though the story had been received from the ether. The one teacher who had mentioned the women hiding in caves, Aaron now remembered, had referred to them as cowards.

  “Right there,” Helen said. “There’s the watermark of a different choice.”

  She lowered her hand.

  She was asking him to connect dots across millennia, as though Ester Velasquez were part of the same invisible chain that included two women’s refusal to martyr themselves on Masada. “You’re proposing,” he said slowly, “that a seventeenth-century woman would go so far as to fake a Sabbatean crisis, just so she could write a few letters to philosophers.” He hesitated, feeling himself in an untoward position: he needed to impress upon a historian decades his senior the rashness of chasing grand, unsupported visions. “Don’t you think we need to be a bit cautious about superimposing some template of modern feminist rebellion onto people we know almost nothing about?”

  “I think, young man, that the time for caution has passed.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You’re not well,” he said.

  She didn’t bother answering. But he saw. She’d been in some obscure decline since he’d known her, but something had changed. Something in her was pitching toward a destination that he didn’t want to consider—that made him feel sick himself.

  But now she was speaking firmly, as though to erase the sound of his words. “I contacted your Derek Godwin. Through the Internet. I trust you won’t object. I told him I was fortunate to be working with you, you should know. And I kindly asked him for a sample of Farrow’s handwriting—promising, of course, not to publish about Farrow until after Godwin’s own article is in print. He was cagey, but he sent me a photo—a close-up of just a single sentence fragment. Aaron, it’s the same hand. Ester Velasquez wrote under the name of Thomas Farrow. And if we know Ester Velasquez lied about one thing, then why should lying about a Sabbatean crisis in Florence be any more surprising?” In her excitement, she half stood. “It was all made up, do you see?”

  His skepticism must have been written on his face.

  “Are you shocked, Aaron Levy, by the cold-bloodedness of the woman?”

  The words disoriented him. For an instant he was uncertain to whom she was referring.

  “If it seems unlikely, just think—think, Aaron, of when Ester Velasquez lived, and what kind of person she’d have to be to write the heretical things she appears to have written under Farrow’s name. Religious persecution, you’ll remember, was everywhere. The tortures were grotesque. Even Jews who chose to repent to the Inquisition were killed—in exchange for confession they were just offered the supposedly merciful death of the garrote, rather than being burnt at the stake, though after the garrote their bodies were burnt at the stake anyway for good measure. Life was strewn with terrors, and the worst were reserved for atheists. Imagine the kind of person it took to defy all that, and question religious belief altogether—in writing, on paper. She could not, you understand, have been nice.”

  He’d no answer for this. Helen had always been a stickler for proof. Yet somewhere in the past few days—or maybe gradually, during the weeks since she’d learned of their defeat at Wilton’s hands—she’d abandoned proof. He noticed, now, that her cardigan was buttoned askew.

  Intolerably, now, Helen was resting her gaze on his, trusting.

  A ping from Helen’s computer. He turned gratefully to the screen.

  To his surprise, there was already a reply to the e-mail they’d sent. At Helen’s terse nod, he opened it.

  From: Jewish Archives of Amsterdam

  Subject: Letter

  Professor Watt,

  You find me on a quiet day, and I’m glad to help with your inquiry. We do indeed have the letter you describe, and I’ve scanned it, see attachment. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

  Dina Jacobowicz

  Fourteen minutes since they’d made the request. May the Patricias of the world be blessed, he thought distractedly—may they sleep well at night, their desks clear and consciences clean. Helen beside him, he clicked the document open.

  There it was, Ester’s familiar writing. But seeing it on a screen rather than under his hands on textured paper made him feel tender and apologetic, as though he were suddenly seeing a woman he’d cared for in a museum display, anesthetized and out of reach.

  In the screen’s glow, Ester’s inked letters were a deadened, blanched brown. She’d copied the opening lines of the rabbi’s letter to Aboab exactly, he saw. Yet in the third paragraph, she’d omitted the sentences that extended sympathy to her and vouched for her as a woman of valor. She’d omitted, too, the rabbi’s request for God’s forgiveness for his sins.

  Aaron read the words she’d substituted.

  I have kept to my path though surrounded by waywardness.

  The rest of the letter Ester had copied faithfully.

  So the rabbi had tried to provide a dowry for Ester—and she’d refused the benefit of his praise.

  Hadn’t he just been faulting Helen for unproven conjecture? But now Aaron couldn’t resist picturing Ester Velasquez as he’d wished her to be all along—fierce, principled, determined.

  Helen was squinting at the screen, the miniaturized image of Ester’s script apparently defeating her. Without asking, Aaron leaned over and clicked Print.

  As Helen lifted the page off the printer, Aaron thought, improbably, of the only morsel he remembered from high school physics: the story of Ludwig Boltzmann, a man derided in his lifetime for his theories. So adamant had Boltzmann been that he’d ordered his repudiated entropy equation carved onto his tombstone. And there the equation remained to this day—right there on Boltzmann’s tombstone . . . and also in every physics textbook in the world, because Boltzmann, as he’d known, had been right, and had let nothing deter him.

  Ester too must have possessed that sort of stubbornness. Aaron respected her for it—yet he also wanted to curse her stupidity. Why suddenly become a stickler for integrity, just in time to cost herself some measure of stability? Maybe if she’d actually tried for that dowry from the Dotar, she wouldn’t have had to marry a wealthy man who wouldn’t let her write.

  Well. Not that any seventeenth-century husband would have let her write.

  His mobile rang. Turning his back on Helen, he dug it out of his bag, answered. The voice of the English girl on the line disoriented him.

  “Anne Fielding,” she repeated. “From Richmond Local Studies.”

  “Of course,” he said, but too late. The shy, hopeful voice with which she’d greeted him retreated immediately. In a tone of swift efficiency, she proceeded. “Ester HaLevy died in 1691. The records have it as June 13, of a fever.”

  “Thank you,” he said slowly.

  “You’re quite welcome.”

  “Any mention of children?” he thought to ask.

  “None we’ve record of.”

  He’d no justification for the disappointment he felt.

  Helen had stopped reading to listen. He mustered another “Thank you.”

  Catching wind of his mood,
Anne spoke in respectful tones. “I assume her husband outlived her. But so far I haven’t found the date of Manuel HaLevy’s death. We’re missing three and a half years of records, though, from 1694 to 1697, due to some water damage that happened in the 1920s in the building where these records were housed. So I can’t guess at what might have happened in those years. But as far as I can tell there were no heirs. The house was sold in 1698.”

  “Thanks,” Aaron said. “You’ve been tremendous. Truly. I’m . . .” He didn’t know how to say what he was. “You’ve been tremendous,” he finished.

  He could hear the intake of Anne’s breath, then a brief hesitation. “Would you like me to search a few more years of records?” she said. “I can see if I can find anything else about the HaLevys . . . or perhaps the house’s subsequent owners.”

  He pressed his palm onto the top of Helen’s desk, watching his fingers splay. He was beginning to suspect that he, Aaron Levy, was many wretched things, and that some of that wretchedness was indelible. But he suddenly had a wish to be, at the least, a man who didn’t lead Anne Fielding on. “Yes, I’d be grateful for that,” he said, in as indifferent a tone as he could summon. “I’ll call you next week to follow up. My girlfriend is visiting right now.”

  His heart hurt just a little for Anne as she drew in breath—and said, with the impressive dignity of a girl practiced at recovering from such disappointment, “I’ll hear from you, then.”

  He hung up and turned to find Helen regarding him skeptically.

  He answered her silent query with a moody shrug. “No, I don’t have a girlfriend.” To prevent Helen from asking more, he said, “Ester died in 1691. No children on the record. So then, that’s it. She lived twenty-six years after writing the last documents that were under the stair.” He scratched at a nick on Helen’s wooden desk. “No mystery as to why she stopped writing, is there? With Manuel HaLevy for a husband. What was Ester’s phrase? A man of a temperament to use a folio of verse to wipe his boots.”