The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  I know not whether to credit the drunken words of a spirit tormented by its own loneliness, yet my mother’s ragged tale seared in me the knowledge that the power of desire is sufficient to shake the roots of the world. I have recalled this ever, though love has proven not to be my own fate.

  I will not indulge the gentle lie of claiming I have not grieved its loss. A woman such as I is a rocky cliff against which a man tests himself before retreating to safer pasture. I cannot fault any such man as takes what ease the world offers him. Nor shall I blame those who disdain the life I choose, and think it misbegotten. Yet this life I have conceived and have sworn to nourish. The choice is mine, and I have borne its burdens.

  He read to the end, through Ester’s repeated avowals of her intent to burn her papers, the writing growing increasingly shaky.

  Let the truth be ash.

  He sat for a moment, Ester’s final page framed between his hands. Then he lifted it. Beneath it were two sheets of crisp modern paper. The first bore a half page of sharp black ink—the issue, Aaron realized, of the toner cartridge he’d installed in Helen’s printer. An e-mail from Dina Jacobowicz, in Amsterdam.

  Dear Professor Watt,

  Here is a reply addressed to Rabbi HaCoen Mendes by the Amsterdam Dotar. It was sent to London, but was returned undelivered to the Dotar, as neither the recipient nor any members of his household were any longer to be found at the London address.

  I hope this proves helpful. Best of luck.

  Aaron turned the page.

  August 11, 1665

  30 Av, 5425

  Amsterdam

  To the Honored Rabbi HaCoen Mendes,

  It is with regret for the lateness of this reply that we pen it. It was some time before we ventured to open your missive, as there are those who say that any communication from London may bear the pestilence. We write in hope that this reply finds you recovered through a miracle of G-d, and that your welcome in the world to come has been delayed, that this world’s pupils might yet reap the fruits of your wisdom.

  It is to our further regret that we inform you we are not able to provide a dowry for the Velasquez girl. This matter was discussed in the Mahamad with vehemence, for many recall the girl’s father and wish to honor his name. Yet to our great sorrow, the girl’s mother carried a wildness stamped deeply in the memory of this kahal. We wish you to understand this matter, distressing though it may be. The woman Constantina Velasquez, the mother of Ester, refused to circumcise her son, fighting with spirit and body until the child was wrested from her. Upon her comprehension that she could not prevent the community from fulfilling this duty, she wrote to this Mahamad a missive full of such spite as had never been heard in the walls of a synagogue, calling us cowards and mice, and informing us of her power to tempt the better angel of the most righteous among us, and corrupt his soul to be a devil—a witchcraft she claimed to learn from her own mother. She boasted, further, of her own mother’s adultery with an Englishman she claimed illumined all England with his merest words—she claimed that her own blood was admixed with such as made our community seem a laughingstock.

  It was only in respect for the husband that the Mahamad issued no rebuke to her outrages, choosing instead merely to declare her madness a residue of the distresses of childbirth. Some members of this council who disputed that decision remain among our assembly, even these years later. It is therefore our opinion now that the community cannot support the marriage of a daughter of Israel who bears the stain of such a mother. Nor shall it be said that there is no consequence to insulting the authority of the Mahamad in Amsterdam.

  On behalf of the Dotar, with prayers for your recovery and hearts eager for the coming redemption,

  Efraim Toledano

  Aaron sat for a long while, his face to the ceiling, trying to ford the sensation flooding him. The outrageous irony. History, coming back to him now like a torchlight procession—bearing a trick, a joke, a gift.

  There was nothing more important right now than thinking clearly—and his mind, for the first time in what felt like months, was clear. As deliberately as he could, he worked his way through all he knew of Ester’s story, and her mother’s. Then, without warning, he found himself thinking, for a long and motionless time, about Marisa.

  And then Helen’s voice returned to him, snapping with conviction as it had that day they’d fought in her airless office. This story, whatever it proves to be, belongs to all of us.

  No one would believe it. A fresh bit of potential evidence in one of historians’ favorite head-scratchers, provided through a Portuguese refugee’s aggrieved, possibly self-aggrandizing tale?

  Slowly he reread Ester’s lines. A beauty to tempt away a man’s better angel, corrupting his saint to be a very devil. Then, the final lines of the letter from the Dotar. Her power to tempt the better angel of the most righteous among us, and corrupt his soul to be a devil. Even in the Portuguese, the reference was plain: a phrasing coined by William Shakespeare, presumably to describe the woman he loved against his better judgment. Sonnet 144.

  Of course he could dismiss it as a coincidence—Ester’s memory of her mother’s story so closely echoing the Dotar’s account of the same woman’s screed. So what if both used the same peculiar, signature wording? So what if Constantina Velasquez had repeatedly insisted on expressing her fury through these specific phrases? Perhaps she was an avid reader of English verse. Perhaps she was delusional and had fabricated her mother’s story. Perhaps Aaron was somehow misunderstanding the Portuguese.

  And yes, so what that Constantina Velasquez, based on the records Aaron had long ago gathered for Helen, would have been ten years old in 1616?

  He could publish a rich dissertation—ten rich dissertations—using the rest of the letters in this folio, without chasing after coincidences. He could bury this last coda to Ester’s tale . . . let it, as Ester said, be ash.

  But the thumping of his heart said he wouldn’t. Once he’d feared his own clumsy weight could damage the fragile documents arrayed beneath the stair. Now he was their steward, protector of the life they contained.

  And as such, he would before all else give Ester Velasquez her due. Ester’s life and her letters required no embellishment, nor extra revelation of connections to another of history’s marquee names, to make them important. It would take months, if not years, to track down any surviving letters she’d sent to her correspondents . . . and simply corroborating Ester’s story in itself—verifying the origins of the letter from Spinoza, countering inevitable accusations of fraud—would be a great labor.

  Only after Ester had had her day and he’d published her annotated correspondence would Aaron explore this final possibility. He’d need to be careful; Brian Wilton’s haste to publish a false report of a Florentine crisis—a misstep for which Wilton would surely pay a price for years to come—was a cautionary tale. And amid the eternal flurry of cherished certainties and crackpot theories surrounding Shakespeare studies, would anyone be willing to entertain the notion that Ester’s grandmother, a Portuguese Jewess, might have been Shakespeare’s conjectural Dark Lady—his woman color’d ill with eyes raven black?

  Aaron himself didn’t know whether to entertain it.

  But Helen had thought it possible. And one thing the past months had taught Aaron was that he understood less about secrets, or love, or regret, than he once thought he did.

  He imagined an atlas of seventeenth-century history, its pages inked with a tangle of dangers—and all Ester’s labors forming only the faintest watermark. But the mark was visible to those who knew to look. And whether or not any kinship through blood existed with Shakespeare—or for that matter with any other thinker of the time—one existed in spirit: Ester Velasquez was a link in the ongoing conversation that wove through Shakespeare’s revolutionary humanism and on through Spinoza’s wrenching, liberating depersonalization—and on beyond them, to all that roiled and consoled spirits even now. All that roiled and consoled Aaron Levy, as he sat, th
is very minute, at his kitchen table.

  His mind was a lit corridor, each step before him clear.

  In the morning he’d bring the documents to Darcy—Darcy, who could be counted on to graciously overlook Aaron’s temporary breakdown. It was true that Wilton might be an ideal scholarly partner in this area, and perhaps Aaron would work with Wilton in the near future. But Darcy was the one who would help Aaron ensure that Helen’s name would appear as first author on an initial paper that laid out Ester’s story for the world to evaluate. Aaron would write that paper before anything else—Helen’s paper, his name trailing hers on the byline.

  And when he’d finished all his work on the documents, assuming patrimony laws hadn’t taken them out of his hands before then, he’d sell them to the university. He wouldn’t profiteer, but neither would he be a fool about the price. He wanted Marisa and the baby to be comfortable . . . and the salary of a historian, whether he spent his career in England or in Israel, wasn’t lordly.

  Marisa.

  He didn’t have her phone number. How could he not have the phone number of the woman he’d be connected to for life, whether she wanted him or not? He’d worry about airline tickets later. For now he stood, turned his back on the documents arrayed on his small kitchen table, clicked on his desk lamp, and opened his laptop, his fingers moving quickly on the keys.

  Dear Marisa,

  There’s no point trying to find a good place to begin. What I have to say is complicated but really very simple, and it’s true whether or not you decide you want me.

  32

  Pulling himself from the water, his white shirt clinging so she could see every rib, he squinted up the path.

  “Promise!” she said. But the sunshine had turned delicious on her face.

  A high, clear birdcall sounded from a nearby tree.

  Alvaro wrung his blouse at his narrow waist and watched her. “Richard says it’s a linnet that makes that call.”

  The river flowed thickly before her, and she shielded her eyes to watch it. Upriver, a few men fished off boats, their voices coming thin across the water. Nearer to Ester, three boys were towing a small raft against the current, laboring on the path on the river’s far side. In a brightly painted skiff, traveling more swiftly and in the opposite direction, a portly boatman rowed a bored-looking couple toward the city. The young man stared unseeing at the riverbank, but the young woman, fair-haired and expensively dressed with a trail of small black patches just visible on her throat and bosom, leaned in the direction of the city as though this might encourage the boat to travel faster—past this relentless greenery to London’s enclosing walls, its parlors that cradled and amplified laughter, its rebuilt theaters and newly widened streets.

  The more Ester looked, the less tame the river appeared: the calling birds unperturbed by the receding skiff; the high, ragged grasses along the banks, bristling with hidden life. The wildness of things came back to her.

  Turning to Alvaro, she let him see she was afraid.

  On the grassy hill above them, Rivka was laying blinding white linen to dry on the grass. They squinted up at her, and for a moment she paused to look down at them, shaking her head absently as though at two children. Then they made their way under a tangle of tree branches to the small inlet where, Alvaro said, she’d be shaded and safe from the current.

  In the shelter of the tree, her back to him, she disrobed to her shift. When she turned, her arms crossed on her chest, shivering and regretful already, he was in the water, swimming a brisk loop across the current and calling back instructions. Yet, strange though it was, just then she did not comprehend his words, but only the confident voice in which he spoke them. Her husband: a propertied man, keeper of the ninety-nine-year lease inherited from his father that would outlast their lifetimes. Standing on the shore, she stared. Something was lodged in her throat, aching to come loose.

  She stepped in, ginger, the muddy rocks shifting under her tender feet. One step; a second; she stood and dipped her hand into the edge of the current. Thick, cold water streamed between her fingers, gently at first—then more strongly as she stepped deeper, the water now forcing her palm open and her fingers wide as the current found its way between them.

  How bitterly she’d been brought to understand—through fire and fever, through deaths and her own failure to die—that life fought for its own continuance.

  But she realized now that she’d never thought to ask why.

  This, she saw, was the reason. Water forcing her palm open, the current kissing her fingers. This. This shock of pleasure.

  33

  April 7, 2001

  My dearest Dror,

  How many years have passed since you stood that way, holding your broken arm in the base’s dark kitchen? I never told you how you appeared to me that night. For all your severity, you were like a gazelle caught on that cement floor. How breathtaking it was, to see you uncertain.

  And when you danced. Your steps brushing the ground in the middle of that desert, the cast on your arm. I fell in love with you then, too. But in my blindness, I saw only what frightened me. I never understood how truly a wounded heart could love.

  Let there be one place where I exist, unsundered. This page.

  When I heard you’d died, I couldn’t understand it. I’d thought you invincible, it’s true. But I’d also been waiting, although I surely knew better, for a day when some debt—How to say it? How did I conceive of it in those times, how would I have put words to what I hardly knew I felt?

  I was waiting for a day when some debt of devastation and sorrow and vigilance would be paid, and my own petty fear would be spent, and we’d return to each other.

  It took a long time for me to understand that you were dead.

  But now that it’s my turn, Dror, I see it clearly. Your car, the car you were driving for whatever mission they sent you on—whatever mission you undertook with a heavy heart, yet with the certainty (were you still certain, Dror? I hope so, I hope that you were)—the certainty that you were keeping them all safe, your loved ones, past and present and future. (I know you loved your wife and family. I know you did. I’d expect no less of you.) And I see clearly the car following yours. In my mind, it’s black and featureless. And then the acceleration, and the impact that’s no accident, your car bucking off the road and into the air. Your face turns grave as the tires leave the road. I see your car soar, I see how it spins. I see you, Dror, wrenched in the air. A calamity of sound, then. A heartbeat. An explosion. And then, a grieving quiet. I grieve when I hear it. The hollow rush of flames, sparks touching the heavy green treetops. There is smoke, Dror, impossible smoke, and heat.

  Yet somehow you walk out of it, unscathed. A whole and beautiful man.

  There is a hole where my heart once was. In its place, your history.

  34

  Water forcing her palm open, the current kissing her fingers. And swimming to the place where she stood waist-deep, her husband: master of the great house commanding the hill. She couldn’t keep from laughing in his face. He laughed with her—then, with a soft tug, pulled her off balance. The current tipped her forward and her husband led her, and the surface of the water was velvet and foam, and her legs and feet were absurd and she had no notion what to do with them—until the water lifted her limbs and made them glad and foolish. She settled her eyes on his, brown and sun-flecked as the water.

  “Here,” he said, guiding her wrists to his slim, sturdy shoulders. “Rest your arms here.”

  Author’s Note

  The characters and events of The Weight of Ink are entirely imagined; the novel’s seventeenth-century backdrop, however, is real. The Sabbatean movement mentioned in the novel had a long-lasting impact on a large swath of the seventeenth-century Jewish community. The philosophers mentioned in this book are also real, as are the central figures from the Jewish community of Amsterdam; and while Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes is imagined, his counsel to Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel about the latter’s journey to Engla
nd and its aftermath are based in the documented facts of Menasseh ben Israel’s life.

  The play Ester and Mary attend is invented; however, I based some of its details on Sir George Etherege’s 1664 The Comical Revenge: or, Love in a Tub, and the song the players sing (If she be not as kind as fair . . .) is from that play. Ester’s fictitious warnings to Mary about love likewise contain an allusion to Mary Astell’s 1666 remarks about marriage. Several Shakespeare quotes also appear in the text (The death of each day’s life . . . from Macbeth; My love is as a fever . . . from Sonnet 147; What’s gone and what’s past help . . . from The Winter’s Tale). The line of poetry that Helen recalls in the conservation lab (These fragments I have shored against my ruins) is from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.