The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Rivka, looming above her, continued a broken recitation: “Shfoch levavi—al mnat kedoshecha.” Now she closed her eyes, her lips moving ceaselessly—and even as Ester cried out for her to stop, Ester recalled helplessly how often she’d heard Rivka speak of holy martyrdom and the kindness of a death that did not compromise the soul. And it seemed to Ester that Rivka had been rehearsing for her own death since she’d first been cursed with survival.

  But the stream of Rivka’s prayer seemed to have snagged on some detail. She squeezed her closed eyes, struggling to resume her concentration. She shook her head—once, twice—like a merchant ready to sign an agreement, but for one minor point. And for all she wished to, she could not let this point rest.

  The tip of the knife quivered at Rivka’s bosom. It writhed, burrowed, and then was still. Ester saw a small spot of blood flower on the front of Rivka’s dress. But the knife pierced no farther.

  Rivka opened her eyes. Gently she laid the knife down atop the stove, caressing its handle once, as though the instrument of her failure must not be blamed for her cowardice. She turned, and set her hands on the stout table where she’d labored to produce bread to keep them alive all these weeks.

  Slowly, as Ester raised herself from the floor, Rivka bent forward in grief, giving the weight of her body to the floured wooden surface. Her flurrying prayer had ceased. Rivka would throw herself on the mercy of the world, Ester saw, and would wait for it to do the violence she herself had failed to do.

  And how strange, when Ester’s hands were hot and shaking, and her own pulse—danger danger—was thick in her ears . . . how strange that the words that floated into her mind should be words of reason. In silence she mouthed them: life being the ultimate morality, so it must savage all.

  It took long minutes to coax Rivka into motion. When Rivka turned at last, she seemed uncertain, weak as though she herself had just risen from a sickbed. But at length Ester ushered her, with a hand on Rivka’s back, up to the room where Rivka had nursed Ester through her fever.

  There, Ester took Rivka’s rough hand and squeezed—Rivka, her gaze downcast, let out a murmur—and Ester left her standing beside the bed.

  Ester opened a window. The din outside had grown. A man now threw himself bodily against the door below, to cheers. There were several more men now, sour-faced and ill-favored—and more women too, and a few children on the edges of the crowd, one girl with a collection of small stones in her bunched apron.

  A sharper shout—she’d been spied. A bit of refuse pelted the wall to her left.

  She cried down to them—she had to call the words three times to be heard. “We give it to your church!”

  There was a single shout, then a confused murmur.

  A rock hit the brickwork above the window.

  “We give all this house to your church.” Ester drew another breath and trained her attention on the woman with the swollen eye. “We deed it, every bit of silver and furnishing and the very bricks and timbers, to your vicar. Let him come and accept our tribute.”

  The woman was about Ester’s age and, Ester saw, must once have been pretty. Her brown hair, though dull, framed a heart-shaped face whose soft outline was still discernible despite the distorting eye. As Ester spoke, the woman fell silent. She turned to some nearby women who were whispering, and waved them quiet. As Ester repeated her message, one of those women turned to two men jostling beside her and laid a hand on one’s shoulder. “The vicar!” she reprimanded him.

  The men hesitated.

  From below Ester’s window, the dull noise of the man hammering his shoulder against the door continued, but fewer voices cheered each blow. From near the door, a harsh cry. Bescós. “It’s a devil’s trick,” he shouted.

  But Ester spoke above him, her voice thin and high. “We trust in your church, not this man’s.” Without looking at Bescós, she pointed a trembling hand in his direction. “Let your vicar use our wealth to expunge our sins. We’ll give this household and all it contains to him and to him alone. This man here—he’s called Esteban Bescós—he wishes to take it for himself. Don’t let him withhold the fortune from your church.”

  Beside Ester, Rivka drew a jagged breath, as though she’d only now woken from a dream. She was staring as if Ester were the vilest of all traitors. Then she turned away, as though she’d discovered the same of her own self.

  Below the window, the woman with the swollen eye was raising her voice to override the pug-faced man beside her. “Then go to the church and find him,” she said.

  A brief hesitation. Then the pug-faced man nodded and departed.

  A rigid smile remained on Bescós’s face. “It’s a trick!” he shouted. And he gestured broadly toward the da Costa Mendes house, as though welcoming friends to a feast. But the woman with the swollen eye answered without turning to him. “We’ll let the vicar say so, won’t we?”

  The man thudding against the front door made two last efforts, accompanied by a few companions’ laughter, then staggered back into the crowd, calling for ale.

  Ester shut the window. “We have to gather our things,” she said.

  For a minute Rivka didn’t move.

  Ester spoke softly. “Do you know what the rabbi said to me, before he died?”

  Rivka looked up.

  “He said he’d failed to be brave enough to be a martyr when he was young. And he was afraid he’d fail again, were he tested. Imagine”—Ester was shocked by the quaking of her own voice—“such a man believing he failed God. Rivka, I disbelieve this notion of God. A God who would ask this of us can’t be the same as gave us our wish to live. If I’m wrong, then the sin be on me.”

  Rivka shook her head hard. “Don’t speak these things to me.”

  Ester swallowed. “Then listen to the rabbi’s words, not mine. He would wish you consolation. He taught the verse, God is near to the broken-hearted.”

  Rivka said nothing, only turned for the stair.

  An hour, more. It was afternoon, the air thick with heat. Ester watched from the window, clenching and unclenching in her hand the heavy key to the da Costa Mendes house.

  Below, the crowd grew steadily, passersby trickling in from either end of the street as they happened upon the day’s sport. Shouts and laughter surged. Several women walked the edge of the gathering—the one with the swollen eye and her companion with the babe on her hip and others—and with almost lascivious eagerness they appeared to be telling the story to all who entered. Two sharp cracks from the house’s attic, loud as gunshots—Ester and Rivka cried out—then scattered shouts from below as shards fell to the cobblestones. A few youths stood on the street, picking up more rocks, taking lazy aim at the panes of the attic windows. Nearby, a small number of men stood stolid, paternal, their backs to the house as if to guard it from premature trespass; or perhaps merely to ensure their place in line to loot it. Almost furtively, they watched the women on the perimeter of the crowd. Something in their posture was wolfish and apprehensive—and Ester saw that they hungered for an enemy against which they might yet be capable of protecting someone. Then they’d fight it with a fury like none they’d mustered before—pound and pound until the fibers of its flesh loosened, and lost hold.

  She couldn’t see Bescós.

  The vicar’s arrival spread a simmering hush along the street.

  Ester opened the window to its fullest and stood in plain view.

  Could it be that a man so frail still walked? He was wrinkled, his form bent with age, his eyelids red and puffed. Perhaps, Ester thought, he was simply the only vicar left in the city.

  But as he drew near, she saw that his pale face bore the fury of a man spurned. He spread his arms wide, and his voice had a shocking strength. “Do you give this house to the church?” As he cried out the question, the vicar glanced upward at the window only briefly. His glare slid from Ester’s face to those congregated about him—as though he’d at last corralled his flock and this time meant to brand them. Those nearest stepped back from
his fury. Ester saw a few bow their heads, though most of the crowd appeared unmoved. But the old vicar advanced on those around him, turning to one and then another. Still louder, he cried, “The devil must be driven out without mercy!”

  Straining to be heard, Ester shouted from the window. “I give this!” She held out the thick key. “It opens every door. All will belong to the church, the house and all its wealth.”

  But the vicar still did not look at her. “The Lord does not accept empty riches,” he screamed to those standing about him. “Not without the lone tribute that is eternal.”

  His words held the street in thrall.

  He turned his withered face to Ester so suddenly, she stepped back from the window. “Do the Jewesses,” he enunciated, “give their souls?”

  She’d known it would be necessary. Yet the words were dreadful. She held herself upright. “I do,” she said.

  Behind her, a small sound escaped Rivka.

  “This sin is mine, not yours,” Ester whispered.

  “They offer their souls,” the vicar announced majestically to his congregation. Yet he raised a hand, delaying absolution. “Will God accept such an offering?”

  Swiftly Ester opened a drawer of the dressing table that had been Mary’s. “We have to gather what we can,” she said to Rivka. With a whispered discúlpame, she slid Mary’s necklaces and rings aside and, closing her spirit to all that the delicate, familiar baubles threatened to raise in her, she found a few coins—enough, perhaps, to pay for passage out of London, if they lived. Then, without a glance at Rivka—for it seemed to her that the slightest provocation might prompt Rivka to balk—she fled downstairs.

  Moments later she heard Rivka thumping clumsily about the bedchambers as though blind. When they met at the foot of the stair, Rivka had donned a voluminous cloak, and her figure was thickened by bundles she’d stowed within her clothing.

  Her brown eyes rested for a long moment on Ester’s. Then she set a hand on Ester’s arm, and gripped.

  The sun was sectioning the floor of the front room, each wedge of yellow light a threshold. Together they crossed one after another, until they reached the shadowed entryway. For the first time in forty days, Ester set her hand on the lock, then turned to Rivka for permission.

  Rivka drew a long breath through her nostrils, then nodded.

  She unlatched the heavy door and swung it open.

  An assault of sunlight. The strangers stepped back.

  Ester opened her mouth to speak—but the words never sounded. Bodies shoving. Rough hands, grabbing. A face, too close to Ester’s—a scabbed sore on a stubbled cheek. Shouts, open mouths, an elbow knocking her forehead, hard. A hand snaking into Ester’s hair, twisting, wrenching—fiery pain, she heard the hank rip from her scalp. She gasped, but didn’t let out a scream, nor did Rivka, whose grip was iron on her arm. A press of bodies pushed them forward, hands hard on Ester’s shoulders, on her waist, feeling for her breast through the fabric of her dress, one unseen hand rummaging her skirt to squeeze sharply at her sex. She could feel Rivka struggling beside her, heard a man grunt as Rivka did something to make him twist away. And then before them the vicar stood waiting.

  As they neared he spread his arms above them, a look of satisfaction on his fallen face. And the hands, one by one, released them.

  The vicar regarded them. The scent emanating from him—incense and damp stone—pinioned Ester. How many had stood as she and Rivka did now, waiting to die for what they were, blood singing in their temples?

  For a moment, as the vicar held them in his frail, vengeful shelter, the throng stood riveted. Then, as his silence lengthened, the crowd faltered—and in the next heartbeat, in some swift and mute decision, it broke, tempted beyond endurance by the open house and the shouts of those who had already ventured in.

  Distracted by the dispersal of his congregation, the vicar cried, “He who takes for himself robs the church!” But it was plain that the house the vicar claimed would be a plundered one. By opening the door to the da Costa Mendes house, Ester had flayed open a body; now scavengers rushed to pick the meat from the bones.

  She watched it happen. Beside her, equally fixed by the sight, stood Rivka and the vicar. Strangers emerged with arms full of valuables—Mary’s father’s silver plate and vases. A silk skirt of Catherine’s. Mary’s necklaces draped over the ten outspread fingers of the pug-faced man. A woman was busying herself nearby with a box of intricate velvet patches, running her thumb across the bristles of a brush Mary had used to glue them to her skin. Something—grief—seized at Ester’s throat, but there was no time for it, and the vicar was shouting. What did he want? She couldn’t make out his words at first, but saw that he, like she, was gauging the mood of the crowd. The house would yet be a fine shell, even if looted: a treasure for a church and its vicar to use in the world after the plague, if such a world even existed—and if the force of the law didn’t suffice to wrench it back to any surviving remnant of the da Costa Mendes family.

  “These souls cannot wait,” the vicar cried abruptly, his voice at once bitter and glad, as though he’d expected no better and it satisfied him to know he’d been correct. “They must purge themselves now before the Lord!” He turned away from Ester and Rivka and began to walk. As Ester turned to follow, she spied Bescós framed for a moment in an upstairs window of the house. His arms, she could see, were laden with silver—yet his face bore a sickened expression as though they were empty.

  The vicar’s calls had drawn half a score away from the spectacle of the house, and this diminished escort moved Ester and Rivka along in his wake. As they reached the end of the street, Ester wrenched a last look at the house that had been their prison and shelter. Its façade stood violated, filth-splashed, the mullioned windows missing panes. As she watched, one of Rivka’s reverently whitened bed sheets sailed down from an upper window, forming a perfect bell of air as it fell—then, with astonishing gentleness, collapsed on the street.

  A boy had joined them, bearing a censer that gave off scented smoke. He swung it hard, the chain jerking at the crest of every swing, and positioned himself at the head of the procession—Ester couldn’t guess whether this was some part of a ritual or whether he simply meant to drive off the plague, but the drifting smoke laid their path through a city unrecognizable. Door after door with painted crosses. People with faces pinched and ravaged walking singly on the street. A few hungry-­looking children joined the procession, but others shrank away, as though they’d long since learned that death was in other people. Hands were upon Ester and Rivka once more—fewer this time, exploring at their leisure, more curious. Hands on Ester’s back, her hair, her ears, fondling her neck. Rivka, her grip dire on Ester’s arm, shuffled amid the press with head bowed and eyes half closed—a dreadful expression on her face. Raising her head to avoid the scratch of fingernails on her cheek, Ester glimpsed, for just an instant, something unexpected: high and sweet above the city, visible between the overarching roofs, was a sky the like of which she’d not seen since coming to England—a thread of thin blue, stretching to infinity. The proprietors of the tanneries and lime kilns that had fouled the city were dead or departed, leaving a clean-washed sky like a new truth stretched above all the city’s suffering, just out of reach.

  Then it was gone. They’d come to an archway, and beyond it a courtyard boxed by high walls, each topped by stone-carved skulls. And then the church—how many times, in another London, had she hurried past these buildings? Now, prodded from behind, they entered the dim interior, the vicar barely visible ahead. Vaulted stone encased them; flickering candle-shadows, echoes, a dizzying smell like a hundred years’ incense lingering in the air. Ester leaned into Rivka. Words from childhood sprang to her mind—an incantation she hadn’t known she remembered, taught to Ester by a girl whose own mother had made her memorize it. “There’s something you can say,” she whispered to Rivka. “I learned it when I was a girl. It’s Spanish. It means Everything I’m about to say is null and void.
You say, Todo lo que voy a decir es nulo—”

  “No,” Rivka whispered. Her eyes were wide, fixed on the spot near the front of the church toward which they were being led. With her free arm she clutched her chest, as though cradling a baby. “God sees. I accept His judgment.”

  They were at the front of the sanctuary—pushed up a set of steps by the curious hands that still surrounded them—and as they approached the altar someone spat, and the spittle landed on Rivka’s cheek, but though she flinched she didn’t wipe it off.

  “So come they to Christ,” the vicar called in a high, thin voice.

  There was a sudden hush, the nave echoing.

  “So shall we,” he said. “Our land is desolate, our city in ruins. God has shown these lost ones the way, and our forbearance toward them redeems all of us. For enough have died, and it is now in our hands to save.”

  His brittle mercy sank into the silence. In the expression of a white-haired woman standing near Ester, something dormant awoke. She nodded slowly at the vicar, and her eyes welled with a purity like love.

  Entranced by the otherworldly peace on the vicar’s face and the growing strength of his voice, Ester failed to comprehend his instructions, even when he repeated them. But hands pushed her from behind so she fell into a kneel, and her head was pushed forward until her chin touched her chest, and the vicar spoke, and his hands, cold but efficient, worked some unfamiliar task. The vicar’s fingers dripping oil, marking a swift cross between her eyebrows. Water splashing the crown of her head, running warm down the bridge of her nose. Then she lifted her face and looked not at the people about the altar, but beyond them to the stone walls and roof. The church bent and swam, glazed with what she realized were her own tears—though how could the vicar’s gestures of conversion undo one such as she, who did not believe there could be a god who cared about such things? Still, she couldn’t deny the feeling she had now, as though she’d been dirtied beyond the possibility of ever being clean. Gazing across the nave, she saw a statue carved in pale stone: a woman—one of the Christian saints—beseeching the heavens with raised arms, her body racked with suffering. And lowering her gaze at last, at the smallest sound of protest beside her, she saw Rivka kneeling: the vicar’s cross oiled on her head, her weathered face lifted in supplication.