The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  When she’d finished reading she closed her eyes, and only then became aware of a strange sensation, as though something cold and smooth were wrapping her left arm and leg, numbing them, gently separating them from her senses. A moment later, the feeling passed. But in its wake she at last permitted Dr. Hammond’s somber predictions to nest in her mind.

  Dread washed her. This time she didn’t hide from it. What she’d experienced earlier today on her way to the rare manuscripts room was only the start.

  The strange, numbing sensation grew again; then receded. It was different from anything she’d experienced with the Parkinson’s—different in fact from anything even Dr. Hammond had warned about, in all his detailing of the protracted decline she must prepare for.

  Yet illness had taught her already that the body was bound by no rules but its own.

  A sense of imminence took her. Now, she thought. Now. For wasn’t Ester Velasquez showing her, in thick lines of tremulous ink, that the time had come for Helen to say the things she needed to say—while she still could?

  She felt for the paper, and slid it to one side. When she opened her eyes, she was looking at Ester’s final page.

  Here, at the last of her confession, Ester’s hand had wavered more widely.

  I have long lived alone in my mind, and would die alone—but my husband, fond man that he is, insists he shall attend my final hour and I cannot deter him. Yet to die alone would be honest. For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely? The hand pushes on, cramping, laboring in the hope of a friend who might one day receive the ink’s imprint. The friend, the dream of the friend, the wish that some welcome for one’s spirit might yet exist . . . My hand makes its slow progress across the skin of the paper in candlelight, though my eyes close with weariness, fueled by this eternal hope: the mirrored image of my thoughts etched, if only for a moment, into another’s.

  I wish the servants would make a noise upon the stair.

  Heaviness comes. If death muddies my thinking then death take me now, for I grow weak. This morn I cried tears such as never marred my vision when I had far greater cause to cry. My thoughts blur and I can no longer survey them.

  When my husband comes, I shall ask him to douse the light.

  It was Alvaro who counseled I write these words to relieve my spirit, and his physick was correct. I am relieved. I have given him my papers to burn, now—all but the last of my treasures. To my shame, I have not yet submitted these for the fire: letters exchanged with souls who feel and think as I. Still I cherish them, and still I steal hours to read and think upon them in my solitude. Yet I shall fortify myself before the end and give these greatest of my treasures into the flames. Those thinkers whose words are found in my prized pages have elsewhere printed their works for the world to see, speaking more decorously than ever I was able; and such words of mine as may be worth preserving have been sent ere now to others, who may one day make use of them. It is not for me to determine which of the seeds I scatter will blossom, nor have I the vanity to think I ought leave greater mark upon the world that has so marked me. The world too much hates a freed thought or heart. Let the pages burn, for such be the fate of the soul, that all our striving be dust, and none in the bright living world ever know truly what once lived and died in another heart. And let me dispense with my foolish dream of leaving the tracery of my thought whole, perhaps to be read in an age in which there is greater kindness.

  It is not such an age.

  Let the truth be ash.

  Yet Helen held it in her two hands.

  She set it down. Then, moving gingerly, stepped to her desk for paper.

  In the morning Helen rose, her hand still cramped from the effort of writing. Standing from her bed, she was greeted by a chorus of lights that she thought of, without alarm, as brain-lightning. A strange calm took her as she made her way to the kitchen, and abided with her even as she reached for her second shoe, and felt a ripping inside her mind. A sudden, violent tearing of seams. It didn’t feel at all like the Parkinson’s; in the quiet lucidity that suddenly brimmed in her, it seemed to her instead that this was something altogether new—something freeing—a thunderbolt, a stroke, a mercy. Saving her from the grinding fate she’d most dreaded, even as it schooled her in disappointment. It’s all right, she told it. I’ve known for a long time.

  Still wearing the rumpled suit in which Patricia Starling-Haight and Patricia Smith had dressed her, she carried a slim envelope to the post office half a block from her flat. The wait was long, and the low-ceilinged room tilted and slewed about her. She shuffled forward in the queue, holding to the wall.

  The clerk behind the counter was sallow, lightly pimpled, too thin for his clothing. She handed him the envelope.

  He studied it, then held it up before her, pointing to the stamp she’d attached.

  “This isn’t enough postage to get to Israel,” he said.

  She smiled thinly. Then, to appease him, she fished her coin purse from her satchel. She opened it and set it on the counter.

  He looked affronted. “I’m not going to search about in there for your money.”

  She waited, swaying slightly at the counter.

  He squinted, perplexed—and then, when seconds had passed and still she hadn’t spoken, as though he wanted to ask whether she was all right, but couldn’t find the words in which to do it. She saw that he needed forgiveness for his failure to inquire after her well-being, and for all the things he’d failed to say in his slim but mounting years. And so, toppling the open purse with the tips of her fingers until it had disgorged a small pile of coins—enough, surely, to purchase postage for a letter that bore no signature and would not reach its destination because it had none—she answered him with a small smile that held the world’s mercy.

  30

  August 12, 1667

  22 Av, 5427

  Richmond, Surrey

  Birdcalls. The hush of the moving current. The sounds of the river, fresh and expectant.

  A bright, bewildering blue.

  The large white sheet Alvaro had laid on the grassy bank was dazzling in the sun. She took the final steps of the dirt path toward the bank. Then, hesitating an instant, stepped onto the grass, her shoes slipping on the gentle pitch.

  From the water’s edge, he looked at her and smiled. His breeches were rolled above the knee.

  “If I die of a chill,” she said.

  “At last,” he said. “I knew I’d persuade you.”

  The grass smelled intoxicating. “You haven’t,” she warned.

  “If you die of a chill,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard, “I shall publish your writings under my name, and become famous throughout the world for my thoughts, until some king removes my head to prevent it from producing them.”

  She refused to laugh. “Promise,” she said severely. “Say you’ll burn them.”

  Skimming the water’s surface with one foot, he sent a splash just shy of her feet. “Shall I teach you to swim, now?”

  “Not until”—she began again—but was stilled, unexpectedly, by a thought: how Mary would laugh at the two of them, and tut at the bargain that had bought this life, and laugh again.

  “Watch now, Ester!” He stood, aligned his feet on the verge of the bank, and pushed off. His thin form dove arrow-straight into the water. She watched his body shoot under the brown surface, a strange species not dreamt of in all her days.

  He stroked back to her, his arms scattering brilliant droplets.

  How, in the exile that ought to have killed him, had he learned this?

  Pulling himself from the water, his white shirt clinging so she could see every rib, he squinted up the path—up the hill whence the cherub carver would come, once the servants directed him from the house. A glad anticipation lit his face.

  “Promise!” she said weakly.

  A bright, bewildering blue.

  31

  April 9, 2001

  London

  He reached for his phone, the
fourth time today. He dialed Helen’s number—he’d learned it by heart these past forty-eight hours—and spoke to her answering machine.

  “Helen, it’s Aaron again. I swear I’m not stalking you. Just let me know you’re all right, will you? I promise I won’t come steal the documents, despite being a marauding American.” He hesitated. “Listen, this isn’t a threat, but if I don’t hear from you today I’m going to have to sound the alarm at the university.” The silence on the line felt endless. “I promise not to tell Martin how much you’ve always admired him.” While he was weighing how much further to carry the joke, the machine cut him off.

  He turned back to the computer screen. The blinking cursor reproached him. Without the new set of Richmond documents in hand, and in the absence of any word from Helen for the second day running, he’d found himself at such a loss that, sometime around noon, he’d made himself open his dissertation. What he’d found there: pedantic analyses; notes for an argument he’d never succeeded in building. He’d read and read—walking circuits around his dissertation as though it were a walled city—unable to find a point of entry.

  What was he waiting for? Something had happened to Helen; he needed to act. Yes, logic said she might just have retreated to work on the papers all by her prickly English self. But he didn’t believe it. Something was wrong: she wasn’t well, she’d fallen, she needed help. Or so it seemed to him—that is, if he could trust his instincts about anything anymore?

  His own impotence shocked him. Five days had passed since Marisa’s e-mail, and he still hadn’t replied. Marisa would assume, correctly, that his silence meant cowardice. She’d sniffed him out from the start: Aaron Levy was half real, half façade . . . and by now it must be clear to her, as it was to Aaron, which half would prevail. This—his deadening failure, his inability to even approach the subject without an obliterating panic rising in his chest—was the measure of the man he would always be.

  And now Helen had disappeared, and he couldn’t even think what to do. How had he never bothered finding out where she lived?

  Slowly he rose and forced himself to change out of his sweatpants—realizing only as he did so that he hadn’t left his flat since the day before yesterday. He made it to the door and was blinded by the pollen-laden afternoon. The fact of spring seemed incongruous. But once out in the fresh air, he revived. Shaking off his torpor, he set off for the Tube.

  He arrived at the rare manuscripts room only to find it closed. A sign indicated that a bookcase was being installed, and the room would reopen at three-thirty. It was three-fifteen, and he slumped against the glass wall to wait. He hadn’t been there two minutes, though, when footsteps sounded on the floor, and he was joined by none other than Brian Wilton—who balked at the sight of Aaron but clearly could think of no plausible excuse to retreat. Wilton read the sign—then, with a polite nod, took up a station near Aaron.

  They stood side by side, backs to the glass wall.

  “Bloody bookcases,” Wilton said.

  “Bloody bookcases,” Aaron echoed.

  Wilton nodded agreement.

  They stood.

  Wilton’s brown hair was thick and wavy; his clothing was rumpled but well-kept; everything about him was affable. Aaron had never disliked Wilton personally the way Helen did, but now it seemed to him that he might be able to muster the emotion. It was unnatural, Aaron thought, for a historian and an Englishman to be so polished. To have such an innocent face. Wilton would be the hands-down winner of the all-England charming historian competition. The all-England bodacious hair competition.

  “You haven’t seen Helen Watt lately,” said Aaron, aware of a faint churlishness in his tone, “have you?”

  “No,” Wilton said immediately, as though he’d been thinking about Helen too. “Not for a few days.” Something played on his face. Slowly it dawned on Aaron that it was guilt.

  Speaking cautiously, Wilton continued. “I hear she’s retiring.”

  “In word only,” Aaron countered—too fast to mask his defensiveness.

  Wilton smiled tightly and looked away.

  What he wouldn’t give right now to tell Wilton about the documents Helen had bought off Bridgette. Or see Wilton’s face when Aaron and Helen published their article. If, that was, Helen hadn’t decided to cut Aaron loose and go it alone. Or if she and the documents hadn’t fallen into a rabbit hole. Or if she wasn’t in a hospital somewhere in this crowded, lonely city—which he was determined to find out by the end of today.

  Aaron looked at his watch. Five minutes to go.

  Wilton exhaled, then spoke without looking at Aaron. “I’ve never forgotten the time I offended her.” He shook his glossy head slowly. “It was years ago. I made a rude joke, and I turned around and she was there, and the look she gave me nearly turned me to stone.”

  At Wilton’s admission, Aaron felt his lips curl into a smirk—but as Wilton continued speaking, the feeling of superiority faded and was replaced with a suspicion that, in fact, Aaron might like Wilton more than he liked himself.

  “She’s the kind of person whose good opinion matters, you know?” Wilton said. “Because it’s not easily earned.”

  Aaron nodded.

  “I’ve never earned it,” said Wilton.

  Behind the thick glass, Librarian Patricia materialized. A brief rasp of metal and she’d unlocked the door from the inside, and Wilton was off into the room before Aaron could find words for what he wanted to say: I could use a friend like you.

  Patricia was staring at him. He realized he was standing in the entry, blocking the door from closing. “Listen,” he said to her. “I can’t reach Helen. She was going to bring in some documents, maybe you’ve seen her?”

  Before he’d finished speaking, Patricia’s expression had thickened into a scowl. She shook her head once, hard. It struck Aaron that she too had been worried—and that she was among those whose worry took the form of anger at the world for its failure to remain safe. “I haven’t seen her in days,” Patricia said—and as if his own troubles had given him new ears, Aaron understood that her terseness was love—that all of it was love: the Patricias’ world of meticulous conservation and whispering vigilance and endless policing over fucking pencils.

  “I’ll call her myself,” Patricia said. “If she doesn’t answer I’ll go to her home after the carpenter comes to finish the installation. That’s in two hours.”

  Using the grooved pencil Patricia procured from a pocket, Aaron wrote his mobile number on a white slip of paper from the circulation desk, and accepted the one she gave him.

  And then he was free. He couldn’t believe how easily Patricia had slipped the responsibility out of his hands and into her own. He wanted to kiss her withered cheek in gratitude.

  But a minute later, adrift in the atrium outside the rare manuscripts room, it occurred to him that she’d lifted responsibility from him the way one takes an injured animal out of the hands of a small child.

  Was there no point when Aaron Levy would rise to the occasion—no Thank you, ma’am, but I’ll handle this one myself? Wasn’t that part of Aaron’s definition of a man . . . or didn’t he have one any longer?

  The thought made him do something so illogical, only an idiot would call it courage. He made his way out of the building at a clip, across the courtyard, and to the History Department. Yes, he’d do it: announce his failure, fall on his own sword to prove (to whom?) he’d some grain of integrity left. For months he’d imagined rebooting his academic career with the work he’d done with Helen—he’d pictured marching into Darcy’s office and informing him that while Shakespeare was no longer a going concern, Aaron had a brighter, shinier dissertation topic. Except now, since Marisa’s news, he couldn’t credibly argue that he was capable of writing anything. And without Helen’s austere judgments echoing in his ear, it appeared he was capable of nothing. Hours at his desk producing no words, until the computer threatened to swallow him whole. Even the new documents now seemed a mirage, Spinoza’s signat
ure a fantasy of Aaron’s own desperate ego. And here he was, knocking on Darcy’s office door—not in the tweed jacket he usually wore to meetings, but in—what? He looked down and saw blue jeans and a blue T-shirt—both rumpled, as Wilton’s attire had been, only Wilton’s disarray had been fashionable and this was the real thing. As he heard Darcy’s footsteps approach the door, he realized he’d worn this T-shirt three days already this week.

  Darcy opened the door. “Hello,” he said, looking surprised. “Had we scheduled a meeting?”

  The mere sight of Darcy gave Aaron comfort: the square, metal-framed glasses, the thinning brown-gray hair, the tall but slightly stooped figure. Darcy had the mildly preoccupied air of a man steeped in the slow labors of history, whose confidence that the details of the rest of life could be entrusted to someone else—presumably a wife hovering just offstage—had largely been borne out.

  Darcy still had a hand on the doorknob, and Aaron could see he was ruing the interruption. “Or did you want to schedule something?” he said.

  His voice was reasonable, even fatherly, and it steadied Aaron. Still, he found himself unable to answer.

  “Well,” Darcy said after a moment. “Do come and sit.”