The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Yet Farrow, in a letter that likewise indulged in no niceties, was not dissuaded.

  I propose no dramas of tree and cloud or any such childish mysteries, rather I speak of the impulse behind all life. Let us leave off discussion of passion, for there I accept your argument. Yet I must differ regarding desire. There is nothing inert or impartial in the universe. I mean by this not that rocks possess consciousness or that the earth that opens and swallows a city is a ravening deity, or any such superstitious folly—rather that the impulse that acts through them is that which I call God.

  Spinoza’s reply was still sharper:

  What you speak of here is no more and no less than Conatus, which already holds a place in my reasoning. Yet your arguments are ill advised and I am not persuaded to carry the point to the regions to which you take it.

  Aaron read, and felt as though he were standing in a scouring wind, two great forces buffeting each other over logical points he barely understood. He read, in Ester’s hand,

  Yet I maintain that while God cannot be attached to desire, God is the storm that is the sum of all desires. Substance, in all its infinite variety, is a manifestation of that storm, rather than the reverse.

  The notion that man’s actions might incur God’s wrath or pleas­ure we both know to be absurd. A correct morality merely guides desire toward that which does not violate the desires and needs of others. When I speak of desire, further, I speak of much that is not finite but infinite—or, to adopt the language of the theologians, holy. I speak not of mere fleeting urges of the senses, but of deeper desire, desire not only of body but of spirit. I speak of your love, and mine, for truth. I speak of the impulse that bids us risk danger to pen these letters. We do this not because we are rational seekers after our own well-being—for we are not driven merely by Conatus. We do this because we are creatures of desire.

  You relate in your letter that in your labors on a compendium of Hebrew grammar, you find that all Hebrew words have the force and properties of nouns. Perhaps you will no longer be surprised to learn that I myself know something of the Hebrew language. Yet it seems to me, in truth, that it is the verb rather than the noun that commands the language.

  In this perhaps lies the difference in our thinking.

  To separate substance from impulse, our reasoned life from our desires, is an error—one I regret though at times I have been forced to it. Your reasoning being the purest and most capacious I have encountered, surely you will not wish to allow such an error to taint your philosophy.

  And here, mid-paragraph, Thomas Farrow’s letter switched from Latin to Portuguese.

  You and I agree on much, I believe, despite our differences. And I feel we are in accord that, as Nature is one with God, the impulse toward life be of surpassing value. Therefore all imperatives that oppose it, chief among them martyrdom, are in error.

  The teachers of the Amsterdam of your youth feared a God of scouring demands. Yet even should I shed my own name and existence, I shall not forget what I learned from those whose sacrifices I witnessed, and all the more strongly will I follow the sole God I know: a vast, blooming thing.

  I have come now to understand that all that you have proposed, and perhaps all I believe as well, is not in fact atheism. It is, rather, something for which I do not yet have a word.

  Spinoza’s reply—the final letter in his hand—was addressed To the Estimable and Insistent Mister Farrow.

  Like a child, Aaron had listened to them battle, and demur, demand clarification, and now, at last, settle into a spent silence. Reaching the final lines above Spinoza’s last signature, Aaron was startled to see that these, too, were in Portuguese.

  Therefore, although you and I do not and shall not agree, I will expand my language to address this argument, for which I send my appreciation. I will add that words you penned in your letter regarding the notion of kindness have returned to me of late, and I find much to recommend your thinking on this matter, which I hope to return to at some future time.

  The ability to shed one’s existence, Mister Farrow, is indeed a manner of freedom, and may bring comfort, in particular for those who have seen much. You are correct that the teachers of my Amsterdam knew a scouring God. This was true of even Rabbi HaCoen Mendes, for whom you and I share a regard, and whose test at the hands of the Inquisition was one of many stains upon humanity. I learned only lately of his death in London after years confined to his household. You, it seems, were one of few to converse with him in that span.

  There were some fatal fires in Amsterdam, I recall. It is a consolation to imagine the survivors have found safe haven.

  My text of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus now concluded, I labor in some whimsy on a treatise concerning the optics of rainbows. Yet it eludes me. Perhaps we who struggle much in darkness, as all thinkers must, may be forgiven for faltering at the contemplation of such a wondrous and unbounded thing as freeborn light.

  Benedictus de Spinoza

  Aaron looked up from the pages. Silently he took in the pub. The low scraping of a barstool; the rough grain of the tabletop under his palm. Each detail etched itself on his senses as though he’d never heard or felt such things in all his life, and every glint of glass from the barman’s rack struck his eyes like glory. He understood why Helen sat with eyes closed, as though in meditation or prayer. On page after ink-damaged page, in documents meticulously restored and borne down to them by the Patricias, they’d witnessed Ester Velasquez starving in plain sight. Yet here, in the pages laid out on this wooden tabletop, that wild, insistent loneliness had at last been sated. Aaron could feel it in the thick ink of Ester’s final letter to Spinoza, in Portuguese: We understand one another well, and I shall now be content. The words had been inked slowly, the quill shaping unusually broad lines on the page, as though each motion of the writer’s hand had laid something to rest . . . and all that remained in the wake of that final now was a satisfaction as heavy as sleep.

  And though he knew it was folly to presume, it seemed to Aaron there was a fainter sigh of relief audible beneath the words of the famed philosopher. Spinoza: a man who’d tried, armed with only a placard and his outrage, to confront the mob that had ripped a tolerant leader limb from limb; a man well persuaded of the barbarism of humanity, yet still insisting, despite exile and already failing health, on the sanctity of the mind’s cool reasoning . . . Aaron couldn’t escape the feeling that this man had, in these few pages of logical clashing, met something like a friend.

  There was no further correspondence between them.

  Standing in the soft light of the pub, Aaron murmured, “He figured it out.”

  Beside him, Helen nodded silently.

  The letters he’d just read were an act of intimacy, and Aaron—in his cowardice, in his inability to make even the simplest answer to Marisa’s e-mail—knew himself unworthy to have witnessed it. Yet it wasn’t Ester, or even Spinoza, who now raised tears of gratitude in his eyes. It was Helen Watt. Her quaking hands, resting lightly on the tabletop, were the tenderest of sculptures, things of almost unendurable beauty. And he knew that he would never be able to tell her that he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.

  She opened her eyes and they looked at each other, and she offered him a weary smile. Then she turned back to the papers on the table.

  It was as she leaned forward to reread that he saw there were a few pages still in the folio she held against her chest.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  For just an instant, her eyes seemed to telegraph some sort of apology. She uttered an unintelligible syllable. She cleared her throat, then repeated the word. “Ash,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She spoke crisply now. “Iron gall ink.” She drew herself back from the table, the folio to her breastbone. “Severe damage. These will need to go to the conservation lab before they’re handled.”

  “Okay.” He squinted at her, the bar’s
warm light suddenly inadequate for the task of interpreting the strange guardedness on her face. She hadn’t been herself all day, he reminded himself. She was unwell. “Do you want me to take them to the Patricias for you? Maybe they’d agree to—you know—fix the pages up a bit, even if the university hasn’t purchased them?”

  She didn’t speak.

  “You look—” He hesitated. He said, “You look spent.”

  She smiled then, a small and rueful smile. “I’ll see to it,” she said. “Why don’t you go home and get some rest.”

  He suspected it wasn’t only pride that made Helen refuse his help. He’d never been able to fool Helen Watt, and no amount of bravado could now hide how utterly he’d lost himself. Surely Helen could see it—surely she could see he was too weak to shepherd even these papers back to wholeness. And suddenly, as though her words had the power of a spell, he felt how very tired he was. How heavily the air weighed on his shoulders. His head.

  He didn’t thank Helen, he didn’t say I’m grateful to you or You were right all along. He gathered the documents one by one, and passed them to her, and with the bartender ushering them courteously to the door he accompanied Helen to the lamp-lit street and into the night, where they parted.

  28

  August 12, 1667

  22 Av, 5427

  Richmond, Surrey

  A sound beyond the window. A sharp, thin knocking.

  And again.

  She looked up, noting as she did that the candle’s light was unnecessary, for while she was reading the morning sun had strengthened, and now daylight flooded the panes and blanched half her writing table. Though such wastefulness would once have been unthinkable, she allowed herself a moment to enjoy the candle’s wavering flame, pallid in the white sunlight—the waxy heat kissing the skin on the inside of her wrist as she reached past it and rested her palm on the cool lever of the window.

  The knocking stopped, then resumed: a bird of some kind, one of the many river birds whose calls she woke to, mornings in her sun-struck chamber with her head on soft white linen. She’d lived in this house, in these rooms with their windows overlooking the slow bend of the Thames, almost two years, without knowing the names of those birds. Perhaps, she thought with a laugh, she would ask her husband. Yes. He’d know.

  Yesterday’s rain had passed, the mist had lifted off the hills, and something in their green had intensified in earnest. Even now, she thought, Richmond’s seasons had the power to bewilder her. London had been no preparation for the English countryside—in that matter, John had been correct.

  She raised the lever and pushed. The window swung open onto a day so vivid it scuttled thought. The sky was a vibrating blue she’d only recently have believed impossible. The brightness was almost more than her eyes could bear.

  What a fool she was, to cry at a sky.

  And how different from the sky beneath which she’d married—and how fitting, that they’d wed under an obscuring haze. But Benjamin HaLevy hadn’t wished to delay the wedding a single day, despite the magistrate’s insistence that the smoke was an ill portent to wed beneath. HaLevy had waited long enough, he said—for it had taken months for his letter to reach the ship in its port in the New World, and months to receive the captain’s answer, and after that certain sums had to be paid in order to procure an impressed ship-hand’s release. Indeed, each delay in the plan had seemed to raise in the old man a silent vexation, so Ester feared he might change his mind. But when at last the ocean had returned what he’d long ago tossed to it, Benjamin HaLevy insisted that the wedding proceed the very next afternoon. And so the preparations were made despite the dreadful smoke, and despite the grim faces of the London boatmen and their fleeing passengers—people who’d only recently reconciled with their city as the coals of its plague burned low, only to see the fates smite it with a conflagration such as none had ever seen. London was in cinders. The dome of St. Paul’s had melted, people said; the lead ran streaming in the streets.

  Yet in Richmond, the old man had presided over wedding preparations with a fury that cowed the household. The seamstress had pressed on with final adjustments on the silk wedding dress Benjamin HaLevy insisted upon, and throughout the morning the old man had checked on the progress of the work with an air of furious tension, as though each piercing of the woman’s needle into the layers of fabric must now, after a long and unjust delay, piece together all that had been rent.

  They faced each other for the first time in the great atrium of the house, beneath a canopy made of Benjamin HaLevy’s prayer shawl and held aloft by HaLevy himself, his manservant, and two men mustered from the stables. The magistrate had been summoned to preside, though he spent most of the ceremony glancing anxiously back through a window toward the smoke slowly rolling from London. The ceremony was pronounced in Hebrew by a Jew even older than the master of the house, an ancient Italian, the sole learned Jew Benjamin HaLevy had been able to procure on short notice—for the letter announcing Alvaro HaLevy’s return had been delayed. In the end, the paper bearing the disembarkation date reached the doorstep only hours before the son himself: a lithe, nearly unrecognizable man with unruly dark curls, a weather-beaten face with a scar at the chin, a sun-kissed brow from his service aboard merchant vessels in far reaches of the sea, and fine lines of sorrow at the corners of his eyes.

  A rim of fire stood on the dull horizon. Black smoke drifted amid the mossy trees beyond the windows, and the tinge of fire entered through the cracks of the closed windows. Any chink in the house, any door or window swung open for even a moment, seemed to admit ash, so that Ester’s cream-colored dress was grayed by the time she finished making the seven circles around Alvaro HaLevy and stood opposite him beneath the canopy. She could feel the silt in her own hair—but it was the ash on Alvaro HaLevy’s head that sowed the first bubble of laughter in her. Beneath his ash-grayed curls, his face took on a strange gravity, and it was a simple matter to imagine him in his dotage: the aged master of this manor . . . with his devoted wife by his side? A joke to crown all jokes. The bubble rose in her chest, in her throat. She fought to quell it. Beneath the wedding canopy, Alvaro HaLevy was gazing at her with an uncomfortable, apologetic solemnity, which—to his own evident shock—cracked. Their laughter, escaping their closed lips, twice interrupted the old Jew from his recitation of the necessary words. Benjamin HaLevy shut his eyes as though in pain and did not open them until he had a daughter-in-law.

  At last the old Jew closed his prayer book and coughed his disapproval in the thick air; the magistrate peered yet again out the window and then with an impatient gesture dipped quill in ink, and had Benjamin HaLevy spell for him the names of the groom and bride. Rivka, who’d stood shadowed at the side of the hall with a curious expression, as though she were watching the doings of animals in some exotic menagerie, now seemed to wake to something familiar. Swiftly she gestured Ester toward her new father-in-law. With a last glance to Alvaro, with his ashy hair and his eyes shining from their laughter, Ester formed her face into a more solemn expression and stepped toward Benjamin HaLevy. Was she to kiss him on his withered cheek? She did it, a quick deed with dry lips, and he appeared shocked, then grateful.

  Only then did she glance down at the page where the magistrate had entered the marriage in the register—but where Alvaro’s name should have been, the father had given the name Manuel HaLevy.

  Benjamin HaLevy followed her gaze. Then his eyes rose to hers—a long stare that aimed for defiance but fell short; and she saw that the fire inside him had died with his elder son, and that he himself would soon follow.

  “It should have been,” he said, in a voice so quiet she almost pitied him.

  She turned her body so that Alvaro wouldn’t see the page on which his name had not been inked, and stepped back toward him. He smiled at her, hesitant again. More than a year at sea had trained the clumsiness out of him, but he still had the liquid gaze of a boy. How ancient she felt in comparison.

  The thought must have fli
ckered on her face, because Alvaro tilted his head. “You’re not troubled by our arrangement?” he said.

  She shook her head, incredulous.

  “Is it him?” he whispered, indicating his father. His face tightened; the shadow of his long anguish passed over him. He did not attempt to hide it. But there was something else in him, too—she saw it—something that had formed in him during his exile, shaped out of the terror and wonder of his new life, nights watching the brave emptiness of the sea. “All the same,” he said, “I think we can weather him. I’ll help you if I can.” He hesitated. “But there’s something else troubling you. I see it.”

  How could one answer such a man, who said what he saw and didn’t pretend the world was other than it was? She couldn’t work out whether Alvaro was foolish or wise; whether she despised his innocence or admired it; whether she thought him the most soft-minded boy, or whether he’d grown into something different and altogether alien—a man unlike any she’d encountered. But at that moment she decided she would be as truthful with him as he was with her. “You,” she said. And seeing her stern perplexity, he laughed.

  Together they turned to Benjamin HaLevy: husband and wife. With a small sniff, HaLevy led the way to the meal he’d had the cooks prepare. It was a shadow of a real wedding feast, their forks clinking in the cavernous dining room, the magistrate working away dutifully at his plate, and only the old Italian Jew eating with zeal, consuming a startling quantity of food and drink. Benjamin HaLevy, for his part, set down his fork midway through the meal and stared at Ester, as though for a moment regretting the bargain he’d struck: that while he lived, he’d be seen after by a son and a daughter-in-law. She’d promised no heir to inherit the grand HaLevy house—she’d made clear that point. But there would be no shame on the HaLevy name while the old man lived. And he would die accompanied by kin, not only servants.