The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  So he had. That winter following the marriage, the life had drained from the old man like water from a fissured vessel. He’d wanted death, Ester had known it, but now it came too fast, and daily she saw the dread on his face. One morning, finding him stilled beside the window at the turn of the grand stair, as though its vista of budding trees barred him from proceeding down to his meal, she’d said to him, “Death tarries and tarries, then speeds when we’d beg just another hour.” And he’d turned his baleful wintry face on her as though he reviled her—then, something giving within him, nodded.

  She read to him on his sickbed those final weeks from the only book he would hear—Usque’s Consolação às Tribulações de Israel—its pages bright by the light of a fire he gazed at with a feverish hunger. “Choradas que auemos jaa estas chagas . . . tempo he que busquemos o remedio e consolo pera todas ellos pois somos aquí vinos a ese fim o qual . . .” She could not forgive the man, but she herself had been nursed back to health by Rivka when Rivka had reason to spurn her, and she knew now what it was to be tended by patient hands. She turned his bony body in bed when he could not turn himself, she moistened his lips with a wet cloth when he could not drink. She read to him, in a steady voice, words she did not believe. And on the day when she came to his rooms and found him staring mute at the frost on the panes of the window above his bed, tears threading slowly along the wrinkles on his pale cheeks, she summoned his son. Alvaro, who could no more withhold love than he could resist taking in each next breath, forgave his father in a rush of words the old man could only bat away with a circling, trembling hand—a veined, papery hand that pushed away and beckoned, pushed away and beckoned.

  Alvaro stood over his father’s bedside as the hand turned feeble and subsided.

  So the house fell silent with mourning, and in that hush Alvaro at length turned from his father’s deathbed, his face wet with tears he didn’t bother to wipe away before the servants, his footsteps sounding thin on the polished floor as he passed from his father’s bedchamber through the quiet rooms and halls of the great house, and became its master.

  A knocking, a vibrating blue. Tears on her own cheeks.

  The bird. She was crying because of a knocking bird. And a sky. And a feathery softness the bird and the sky made together in her chest—as if she might, with an effort no more arduous than a sigh, rise and reshape herself into something altogether new. Hadn’t Rivka said as much this morning? She’d paused at the door, holding a stack of pressed and folded linens against her ample waist, and chided Ester. “You’re not old enough to huddle here in the dark.” Irritably, Ester had gestured in explanation at the thick book before her—though in truth, she’d been struggling to keep her mind on it. But Rivka continued. “London is past. You bargained for a different life. Why don’t you live it?”

  “Why don’t you, then?” she’d retorted, heat spreading in her cheeks. She hadn’t meant to speak sharply, but her heart had jumped in her chest at Rivka’s question, her hands clenching the book as though her life depended on not easing her grip on it.

  Rivka drew herself up with that pride she’d had about her lately, as she quietly but emphatically gave instructions to the household staff that was now hers to order. She said, “I am.”

  “As am I,” retorted Ester, regretting her brusqueness even as she spoke. How strong, how admirable Rivka seemed to her now, as the older woman ticked her tongue against her teeth, then moved off on her rounds. All the sufferings they’d endured had left Rivka purified: a priestess of the house. Whereas even now, almost two years after their safe arrival, Ester felt as though she herself were poised midstep—one foot raised, uncertain, weary with the wish to set it down.

  Pushing aside the book, she opened a drawer and retrieved the letter she’d begun writing. She hadn’t yet decided to whom she’d send it. Perhaps this time she’d write a page that was only for herself. Perhaps, she thought restlessly, she’d write something unspeakable, and burn it in the fire.

  She read what she’d inked earlier in the morning: The universe is shaped by the desire for life. This is its only morality.

  She believed it, but something now troubled her.

  She’d desired John, hadn’t she? She’d gambled for his love. Yet in that first stunned season after the plague, when each passing day’s silence affirmed that John had forgotten her, she hadn’t pursued him. Perhaps if she had—if she’d shed pride, jettisoned all notion of the heart’s freedom and reminded John of his debt to her—she might yet have persuaded him, roused his pity, sued for his reluctant love and won it. And if she had?

  Had John asked aught of her, through words or simply through silence, she could no longer have refused him—even had he required her to extinguish her learning for the tending of house and children; even at the cost of becoming a spirit shuttered from thought. She’d never learned to measure out love: give so much, withhold so much. She’d known it even in London, when she threw down the gauntlet of her own body: come with me in love.

  How bold she’d been. She could not regret it.

  Nowhere in the known world, it seemed to her, could she live as she’d been created: at once a creature of body and of mind. It was a precept so universal as to seem a law of nature: one aspect of a woman’s existence must dominate the other. And a woman like Ester must choose, always, between desires: between fealty to her own self, or to the lives she might bring forth and nurture.

  Some months ago, she’d written to him at last. Alvaro, knowing nothing of what the name John Tilman might mean to her, had repeated to her a tale of a well-liked magistrate, married and settled in Coventry, to whom petitioners now flocked instead of to the father, for the son was the more merciful, even tolerating views that elsewhere incurred harsh punishments.

  Her own letter had said but little: she hoped John was well. She wished him health and peace.

  Ester, his reply had begun.

  I am much gladdened to know you’re well, for your wellness in this world matters greatly. I live now as a magistrate in Coventry. My father grows old and I ease his burdens from him, as is his due. My wife, Isabelle, is a good woman and much patient with the demands of my profession. We are blessed now with a child, a girl named Judith.

  During my years in London I leaned as far as a man may lean into a void of newness before he recalls his obligation to remain who he is. I am not a bold man, Ester, except in my own wish to be so.

  I do not forget my failures, or your courage that teaches me still, and remains a standard against which I judge much, not least myself.

  She’d read the letter until she knew it by heart, before setting it aside.

  How fearsome a thing was love. She’d welcomed it, all the same.

  She stared now at the words she’d already set to paper. Yes, the universe was driven by the desire for life. But the question remained . . . whose? Perhaps, it seemed now to Ester, the forcing of a woman’s choice was itself against nature.

  She lifted her quill and wrote.

  Yet sacrifice of the self is everywhere viewed as the highest calling, and the more so for a woman, who must give every element of her life to others. Kindness is at all times counseled to women, who are called unnatural if not kind.

  Yet how can a kindness that blights the life of even one—though it benefit others—be called good? Is it in fact kindness to sever oneself from one’s own desires? Mustn’t the imperative to protect all life encompass—even for a woman—her own?

  Then must we abandon our accustomed notion of a woman’s kindness, and forge a new one.

  A light breeze from the window, and the candle’s flame shrank to a tiny globe, then vanished. A thin line of smoke rose, a perfectly straight line. She watched it waver and break, and the sorrow of its dissipation so gripped her that at the creak of a nearby floorboard she let out a cry.

  Alvaro stood in the doorway, laughing. “Rebuke me then, will you? When I’ve come to set you free?”

  She said nothing, only crossed her hands priml
y over the even lines of her writing. An old habit: hiding the page before her.

  “Today,” he sang softly.

  “You’ve gone mad,” she said, thinking as she said it that she almost believed it.

  “Please,” he said. But seeing he wouldn’t extract her so easily, he stepped deeper into the room to address her. “Tell me, what new invisible guests are we housing within these walls now? Thomas Farrow philosophizes no more, you’ve at last let the poor man die a decent death. Now who takes his place? Which of your invisible minions will be issuing letters from the HaLevy household this season?”

  She couldn’t help a small smile. “Bertram Clarke.”

  Alvaro, his white shirt open at the neck and tucked loosely into his breeches, was nearing her writing table, his amused expression deepening. Instinctively, she pulled the book over her half-written page. Her hand closed, protective, on the ink bottle.

  He sat on her writing table. “Shan’t we make him Sir Bertram?” he whispered, looking grave. “He might secure a more rapid reply.”

  She moved as though to shoo him off—but Alvaro’s eyes were, ever, a pup’s. “Perhaps,” she whispered. “If he earns it.”

  Alvaro laughed. Then his gaze rose to her window: a reflex. She knew who he looked for, of course—she was as familiar with the comings and goings of his visitor as he was with the phantom philosophers under whose names she wrote—her spirits of the air, as Alvaro called them.

  How painful it had been to begin telling the truth. The morning when she’d first confessed to Alvaro, her jaw had clenched so she could barely speak. Lying had become her clothing—without it she’d freeze.

  Yet she’d decided that this new life must be birthed without lies. Rivka knew the truth—and Alvaro must as well. Nakedness was the least of all she owed him.

  He’d surprised her with the delight with which he’d received her confession—his bemused This explains matters! so genuine she’d let go her grip on the armrest of her chair and breathed what felt like the first breath she’d drawn in years. Indeed, he’d so startled her with his happy exclamations over her halting account of her correspondences that she didn’t know whether to disapprove—for didn’t he understand the wrong she’d done to the rabbi? Shouldn’t he despise her?

  Yet though he turned obediently solemn at her insistence that he see what she was, he neither condemned her nor made any suggestion that she cease her writing. The possibility did not seem to occur to him.

  It took her months after their wedding to understand what so captivated her about Alvaro: she felt unafraid of him. It was such an unaccustomed feeling that for a time she wondered whether this lack of fear might be love. She doubted that her heart was capable of new love. Yet in the absence of any demand that she be other than what she was, something small and insistent flowered within her—so that once, in a feverish hunger in the first spring of their marriage, she touched his sleeve, then led him to his rooms. It was their sole experiment with being man and wife: an awkwardness of laces and buttons, a rushed disrobing as though they both feared losing nerve, a wave that washed them onto his bed and left them marooned there . . . at length dissolving into fits of laughter that shook first his frame, then hers, then the bed they lay upon, so that a servant called from outside the door in a voice taut with concern, which quickly turned surly when the master of the house refused to open the door. This was their love: her naked chest shaking with laughter until tears slid down her temples, and then—as she lay beneath his bright window with his arm across her belly—into her ears, so the sounds of her heartbeat, and his, and the quiet household shifting all around them, made a sunwashed, underwater blur. For a moment, lying absurdly with her husband, the light and the tears making diamonds across her vision, it seemed to her these must be the sounds heard by a babe carried by its mother.

  It was Alvaro who made arrangements for the printing of Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes’s Seven Arguments Against a False Messiah, and who himself went to London to carry the manuscript to the printer. She’d spent weeks redacting the rabbi’s letters to his pupil in Florence into a single condensed argument. Where she’d thought the rabbi’s arguments weak, she’d subtly strengthened and clarified them, so that when she finally ordered the pages and sent them with Alvaro, it seemed to her that no other denunciation of Sabbatai Zevi and the Sabbateans had so rigorously pointed out the follies of their arguments. The recent news of Sabbatai Zevi’s arrest and conversion to Islam had not yet dissuaded his followers. The rabbi’s words, she was certain, were still needed. It seemed to her that, were he able to overlook the identity of their editor, he might have been pleased.

  She’d hesitated over the dedication, but on this matter alone Alvaro had been insistent. “Make it for my father,” he’d said firmly. So she had inked the name onto the front page, followed by the words Alvaro dictated to her: Benjamin HaLevy, a man with a heart heavy and brimming with love for his people. She thought the words a desecration. But Alvaro had taken the manuscript from her hands with a determined nod. “This book is your atonement to someone you had to wound,” he said. His gaze slid to one side of her. “The dedication is mine.”

  She wished to tell him there was no comparison between her need to atone and his, nor between the gentleness of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes and the stone-heartedness of Benjamin HaLevy. Hadn’t HaLevy sent his son to be entombed in the sea? Hadn’t all expected rosy-cheeked, faltering Alvaro to die the very week he sailed—impressed to a ship at the hand of his own father?

  Unlike Alvaro, Ester had wronged a flawless man—and the wrong she’d done was of the deepest nature. For much though her deceit haunted her, there was a far greater sin she’d committed against the rabbi. She, Ester Velasquez, had taken the rabbi’s teachings and his trust—she’d taken all his labors to show her how to use her own intelligence—and she’d employed these to prove that there could be no God who would prize martyrdom. The meaning of this was inescapable—and she knew the rabbi had understood it all too well. For when she proved that there was no God who could treasure martyrdom, then she proved, too, that Moseh HaCoen Mendes had walked through the world sightless, and his mother had offered up her body to be broken, for naught.

  It was this that she could never forgive herself.

  But she saw that Alvaro understood none of this—and that he was set on paying tribute to a noble father who had never existed, and that guilt still weighted him. So she allowed him to go to London and hand the pages to the printer with an inscription that was a lie, that it might lessen that weight. And they’d spoken of the matter no further.

  She’d learned of Thomas Farrow’s death in a riding accident a half year after it had occurred. Though she’d been writing under his name for months without knowing he was dead, once aware of his death Ester found herself unwilling to sign his name, using it only wincingly to answer those correspondences already set in motion. Her own fastidiousness stymied her—she’d thought herself heartless when seated at her desk, long since numbed to sentiment.

  Yet now London was in ruins. The synagogue, located in that sliver of city spared the flames, had survived. So too had the da Costa Mendes home, only recently reappointed by Mary’s father and his heavily pregnant wife—a lady described by Rivka as young, and lovely, and unafraid to weep openly over Mary’s fate while, with her very own hands, she helped Rivka retrieve those books left unmolested by plunderers. But the rest of the city that Ester had known—narrow Milk Street, Gracechurch and Thames Streets, Fishmongers’ Hall, the binderies and the booksellers’ tables outside Saint Paul’s, and the thatch-roofed warren tipping down toward the bridge . . . ash.

  Some things deserved entombment. So she’d laid Thomas Farrow to rest—and after sitting at her table a long time, the ink drying on her suspended quill, she had dipped it again, and conceived Bertram Clarke.

  These past months, Clarke had written a series of letters to Johannes Koerbagh, and he would author the next missive she was planning, to one Matthew Collins, whose recen
t essay on theology and social order had troubled her. After Clarke had lived his useful life, there would perhaps be another. A small school of philosophers, all claiming to be temporary guests at this address in Richmond, their views all cohering around the same beliefs . . . their reasoned arguments floating ownerless from her window like the seeds of dandelions, journeying she knew not how far.

  Alvaro had wished, of course, that she break her isolation. He’d taken her once to a London coffeehouse famed for attracting philosophes. There she’d cradled her cold tankard of bitter liquid for hours, listening to the small sparks of light generated by some speakers, and to the foolery of others. But the few women who essayed to enter the conversation pained her, for they spoke rarely, and seemed so conscious of their own figures and attire that they arrayed themselves artfully in their seats as they spoke, mingling coquetry with hurried bursts of talk—and she saw, for all this, that they were not heeded as the men were, and that their ideas ventured only into the terrain of women’s concerns, and even there were diffident. Nonetheless she rose twice, leaving Alvaro dozing gently against the wall, to attempt speech with these other women. Yet she was not dressed in fashion as they were, and they seemed to think her strange. She could not fault them; had a creature ever approached her in such hunger as she approached them, she too might have balked. Finally, leaning forward in her seat and straining to be heard above the men’s joustings, she herself essayed to enter her voice into a debate about the ideal political order—but when she’d finished her short speech, her lingering Yet is that not the sum and purpose of man? was answered with a gaping silence, and then a few uneasy laughs.