The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  With understanding that it is ever difficult to find a learned scribe who is obedient to your needs, we will take care to select an appropriate student and will send him to your care at the first opportunity, should you but send word that you are unable to find a suitable young man in London.

  Although I made only brief acquaintance with the Velasquez family before the parents were gathered to G-d, yet I write with great respect and tenderness for the fate of all the sons and also the daughters of our suffering people.

  In perfect faith in the coming Redemption,

  Yacob de Souza

  The certainty hit with a thump of adrenaline. With effort Helen resisted it. She closed her eyes, then opened them and reread. She checked her translations. The Portuguese was archaic but clear. Sliding her notebook close, she studied the dates of the documents they’d so far discovered that had been signed by the same scribe—one, a brief note requesting two volumes from an Amsterdam bookseller, directly predating the letter Helen had just read.

  She sat back in her chair. And was startled by an unfamiliar sensation in her chest: the flurry of her own heart, like something long silent abruptly waking to argue its innocence.

  “Mr. Levy,” she said.

  He didn’t seem to hear.

  “Aleph was a woman,” she said, testing the words.

  He raised his eyes from his computer screen as though dragging himself from a great depth, and regarded her without focus. He looked, for the first time, vulnerable.

  8

  November 12, 1657

  6 Kislev, 5418

  London

  A shuddering boom.

  Rolling echoes up and down the quay.

  Damp wood, damp thatch, damped footsteps staggering on rotting boards—the men with ropes taut on their shoulders straining the crate away now from the stone wall it had collided with. Swinging dangerous from a high pulley, the crate sank—the men cursing it lower and lower onto a waiting barge, which took the weight and pressed deeper into the choppy water.

  A scattering of seagulls against a white glower of sky.

  She shielded her eyes.

  The skirts she wore were miserably thin, though they’d not seemed so in Amsterdam. But the damp here in London carried a blunt cold she couldn’t outpace. Her shoes, too, now proved paltry, though they’d been adequate to Amsterdam’s smoother streets. She’d slipped on waste-slicked cobbles all the way down the narrow alleys to the river, and the soles of her feet ached past endurance. All about her, a tumult of English faces: sharp, incomprehensible features, shaped by words equally sharp and foreign. Were she to speak the softer language pent inside her, her utterances would go unrecognized—sound shorn of meaning.

  How quickly, with the first touch of her foot on English shores, she’d become a thing without words. The ugliness of her life pooled inside her. Long ago she might have let it turn to tears.

  The rabbi had sent her for her brother. Three days now since Isaac had last set foot in their household—three days that the rabbi had no scribe to set down his thoughts.

  She hadn’t yet glimpsed her brother among the dockworkers, but knew to look twice. Isaac was ever thus. In Amsterdam, when their father had taken him about the port to educate him in the ways of the city’s trade, he’d been a quick student as well. Then only a boy of ten, he’d slipped easily into the tableau of sailors, much to the discomfort of the well-shod merchants and investors surveying the scene. In their father’s bemused telling, the boy had all but leapt in to help the laborers break open crates, tugging to the best of his small ability on chests of cargo, until the laborers could no longer dislike the boy for his kinship with the watchful Jewish merchants in their black cloaks and broad feathered hats.

  Ignoring the stares of the laborers preparing to heave a second crate, she moved cautiously along the riverside. She slid carefully around an old, bleary-looking man tarring the hull of a small boat—but his fingers grasped at her hem as she passed. She yanked the fabric away, and he winked into her face and raised thick palms as though to say Age permits me. She turned away, flushed, and here he was: her brother, standing among the English dockworkers as though he’d been born to this place.

  She’d known she’d find him here—she’d told the rabbi so. Why then did it sting to see him so at his ease amid strangers?

  “Isaac,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows in that new way he had, neither acknowledging nor denying her.

  Her throat seized. She’d never possessed Isaac’s ease with people. She’d been, always, a peculiarity: Isaac’s peaked, quiet elder sister with her constant apologies, her inability to make her voice heard in a crowd, her strange devotion to the bookish labors most girls were glad to be spared. Until now, though, her brother’s talent to befriend had been hers to share. All his life Isaac had gathered goodwill easily, and shared its harvest with his sister—friends, jokes, treats from vendors in the market. But here in England, though they slept under the same roof his ways were unknown to her.

  “Isaac,” she repeated. She stood opposite him, her hands useless at her sides. In Amsterdam she’d have reached up and tugged his straight hair, not hard enough to hurt but enough to say she knew his tricks, even if he was a man now and half a head taller.

  Two of his companions had turned. Both were thicker set and far older than Isaac—men old enough to have families, perhaps to have deserted them. The shorter had a wide pockmarked face and staring blue eyes; the taller had thinning tufts of hair and features thickly veined from weather or drink—his eyes seemed buried in his florid face.

  She turned to Isaac, her imp who was no longer impish, his blue eyes and gold-wheat hair . . . still her brother? It was weeks now since he’d shaved off his beard, but his naked jaw still made her uneasy—a reminder that he’d cast off the last remains of home. She feared she was not exempt from that purging.

  “The rabbi needs you,” she said quietly.

  At the sound of her Portuguese, she felt the workers’ attention thicken around her: another foreigner?

  “He’s composed letters, Isaac,” she continued in a near-whisper. “In his mind. He requires your hand to set them down on paper.”

  A shifting of the workers’ bodies—their growing awareness of their power over her. She stepped closer to Isaac. But he didn’t notice the men’s attention, or feigned not to. He pursed his mouth and then said something to her, in English, too fast—as though he’d forgotten that, unlike him, she’d had no opportunity to learn the spoken language, confined by household duties as she was. What good, here on these clanging docks, was the English she’d once gleaned from the printed page—the single volume of mysterious and confounding English poetry that she’d studied in secret in her mother’s room in Amsterdam, so long ago?

  With a shake of his head, Isaac laughed a hollow laugh. He said, in Portuguese, “I left my scribing hand across the channel.” His eyes, averted, said the rest: and my allegiance to you as well.

  She couldn’t hold her voice steady. “Isaac—”

  “Tell the rabbi I’m occupied,” he said. “Tell him I’ve let a room and won’t be returning to his household.”

  The words left her mouth thickly. “You ask me to spit on the one man who’s aided us.”

  There was no change in his expression, yet her words had struck him. An instant’s hesitation. In it, she saw her brother as he’d once been. His straight golden hair, the perfect grace in his compact body, the salt-and-butter smell of him snugged in her arms those long-ago afternoons in Amsterdam when he’d been left in her charge. Mischievous Isaac, unscathed by endless scolding from the house servants, or by teachers whose voices rose with the fury of betrayed admirers. Untouchable by any discipline but their father’s mild remonstrances. In the wake of their father’s quiet disappointment Isaac would turn to Ester, his determined expression suddenly vague, the spark of a request in his blue eyes—if not for approval, then for forgiveness. She had granted it, always. She’d scooped the blond fri
nge from his eyes. Helped him hide the broken glass of the nursemaid’s mirror until he’d replaced it with another, taken from their mother’s dressing table.

  And yes, she’d tied herself to the ballooning sail of his mischief—why pretend she hadn’t? She’d relished the freedom Isaac claimed in boyhood, freedom she herself was denied. Once she’d found him leaning from an upper window of their house, pelting the street with rotted apples he’d picked from the kitchen refuse, and she’d grabbed the linen of his shirt and twisted her fingers in it, round and round, until the shirt was tight around his middle. He’d tried to shrug her off. But instead of pulling him away from the window as they both expected she’d do, she’d knelt behind him and looked down to the street, at the cowed form of a man she recognized in a heartbeat—the synagogue beadle who had called her an unnatural girl, after the maid let out word that Ester had used up the household’s supply of candles for nighttime reading. The beadle had said it after Sabbath prayers, and repeated it gladly and often when he saw the approval the observation garnered. The girl has her mother’s beauty and must be overseen strictly—for with the mother’s blood so visible in her, the girl’s obedient ways might yet crack to reveal the same unruliness of spirit.

  Without a word to Ester, as though understanding her heart and knowing she wouldn’t stop him, Isaac had taken aim again. She’d dug her fingers deeper into her brother’s shirt and felt his warm small body, all strength and purpose, and she’d leaned on him, her fingers tight in his shirt, and they’d breathed together as he reached back and heaved, and the brown apple smashed against the man’s temple and banished him, retching threats, down the road toward the synagogue.

  The neighbors had been scandalized, of course. But as their mother looked at Isaac that evening, something in her expression flexed and was satisfied. It had been their father who’d taken Isaac to the synagogue to apologize to the man. From the window Ester had watched them go, and on their return had stolen to Isaac’s bed and left there on his pillow the small, clumsy figure she’d sewn—a dog of sorts, stuffed with bits of cloth she’d taken from the housekeeper’s sewing basket. A plaything to soothe his spirit.

  He stood before her now, a grown man. It was true that his face had hardened long before coming to London. Yet here, in these few weeks since their arrival, something further had settled in it—something new and stringent—as though he’d undertaken the final stretch of a journey he’d set upon after their parents’ deaths. Without the short blond crop of his beard, his jaw was naked, tense. There had never before been a single thing unnatural in Isaac, nor a single thing unfree—yet now his face, which had ever been whole, seemed composed of parts. There were, she now noticed, lines on either side of his mouth, and when he spoke he seemed to her like a wooden puppet with hinged jaw.

  “Scribing is for a different sort of youth,” he said. “For you, if you’d been born a boy. Never for me. Even before.”

  Before the fire. Isaac had barely spoken of it these two years.

  But his voice, which had been so eerily aloof, was now rising, snapping. “So the rabbi would have me pen interpretations of verses? Beautiful tributes to martyrs perishing in the Inquisition?” At the core of the spiraling words, a crying loneliness. “The rabbi wants my hand to set his holy thoughts to paper? Tell him I’m devoting myself instead to living up to my reputation as a murderer. Tell him what he knows: in my hand, his words would turn traitor. Tell him, won’t you”—he gestured to his face—“that the beard is gone. That I no longer even look a Jew.”

  The workers had stood these minutes in silence, watching theater in a language they didn’t comprehend. Now one let out a chuckle: a lover’s quarrel, was it?

  Isaac’s words flew at her. “I’ll wager you haven’t told him about my beard. I’ll wager you let him think I’m still what he wishes.” He tilted his head. “Tell him, if you like, that I’m lost and you couldn’t find me. Perhaps he’ll mourn me for dead.” Isaac smiled grimly.

  “Isaac, please—”

  The shorter of the men was laughing, saying something in English. He stepped forward. A leer, a gesture toward Ester: Is she yours?

  Slowly, Isaac shook his head.

  Like a shawl unwinding from her shoulders, she felt her brother fall away from her.

  In an instant the shorter man was upon her—his thick hand gripping her cheek, fingers pinching hard as though testing the merchandise. And just as swiftly she was shoved back—she saw only Isaac’s shoulder closing down, hard, with the swing of his fist into the man’s belly. For a moment the two stumbled at close quarters. Then the man fell and lay clutching his middle, gasping. The taller man, lunging ­forward—to join the fight, or stop it?—set his hands roughly on Isaac’s shoulders, and was pushing Isaac back—Ester could see now that the shove was a warning, not an attack. But before any of them could draw breath, Isaac had swung again, and the second man stumbled and fell against a crate, his head hitting the wooden slats with a dull knock.

  The man moaned. Ester watched him rouse himself, slowly, carefully. And his glare of newborn malice, aimed at Isaac.

  She turned and strode back the way she’d come, the pain in her feet reeling her along the cobbles, the shops along the narrow street looming dark before her.

  Footfalls, and Isaac caught her mutely by the arm.

  “Come home,” she told him, her head down. Beneath her aching feet, the stones of a city she’d no desire to know. All about them the slams and cries and raucous laughter of strangers. So this was to be her London: a city disfigured in advance by the stain they carried to it. She was crying, her face hot—why now? She’d hardly wept in the years since the fire. Even at their parents’ burial, where her failure to weep was seen by the gossips as further sign of an unnatural spirit—even then she hadn’t, for the burning in her chest had eradicated any tears before they could escape. But now some weakness assaulted her and she’d no defense.

  “Come home with me,” she murmured again.

  Isaac’s words carried no venom this time, only weariness. “The rabbi’s house isn’t our home.” He’d no quarrel with the rabbi, she knew. His enmity was aimed at life itself, and there was nothing she could do to ease it. “Or perhaps,” he said, “perhaps you can make it home. Ester. You can . . . marry. Have sons and daughters.” She raised her face, but he wasn’t looking at her. He stared into the white sky and spoke softly, as though constructing a pleasing tale for children. “You can. Ester. You’re still . . .” He glanced down at her, and there it was: that glimmer she hadn’t seen in so long, the light that said he knew her. “You’re made differently.” He spoke quietly but for a moment his voice had its old sturdiness. “You’re like a coin made out of stone instead of metal. Or a house made out of honeycombs or feathers or maybe glass—­something no one else in all the world would think to make a house of, Ester—­something strange, but sound too. You’ve been like that always. But no matter all that, you’re still a woman. A woman can recover. Women aren’t”—he hesitated—“they’re not set. Not like a man is. A man has to be a hero or a . . . villain.” He gripped her arm tighter. “This is what I want to tell you, Ester. This is the only thing I have to tell you.” His body tensed and she saw him glance toward the river, as though the labor awaiting him there could absorb all the violence mounting in him.

  Then he breathed and let go her arm, forcing himself still. She felt the effort it cost him to quell the wish to move, strike out, do something to release all that was pent in his body. Instead he spoke, quietly. “A man comes into the world to perform one function, Ester. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s evil. But starting that fire, you see, was my function. That makes me evil.” He looked at her squarely. His face was naked as she’d not seen it since he’d been a boy. But it held no request for forgiveness.

  “On my way out of this world, I’ll do something. Something good. Like Samson.” His lips held the grim echo of a smile. “I’ll bring down some wicked house. Down!” On the word he slammed a fist into
his open palm with such ferocity she cried out. “Right down on my head,” he said, simply. He breathed. “Or I’ll save someone. A boy, maybe.” The thought, for an instant, seemed to choke him. “I’ll climb onto the deck of the boy’s ship, just before the ship’s engulfed by fire. And before I’m burned, before I die, I’ll shove—him—off.” In each expelled word, a dizzying hatred.

  He would strike and strike, she understood, until he’d struck himself down.

  He turned and strode toward the docks.

  She walked back on the cobbles as though they were made of glass.

  The rabbi was where she’d left him. He raised his face to her, but waited until she’d hung her shawl.

  “Your brother’s not with you,” he said quietly.

  “No.”

  The chill rain that had begun during her walk streaked white beyond the large room’s high windows. The fire was loud with sap. Rivka must have stoked it high before leaving on her errands. Ester could picture her: her thick arms straining the wool of her dress, and every gesture enunciating her determination to defy the winter in the rabbi’s aged body. In Rivka’s absence the snapping fire, loud and sudden enough to break thoughts in half, continued her vigilant tending.

  Rabbi HaCoen Mendes sat close to the hearth. His form was slight in the high-backed chair. His cheekbones were pale knobs, his beard a yellowed white. Below his thick gray brows, the welded skin of the scars appeared tight, poreless as a child’s.

  She pulled a chair near to the fire and sat. The rapid lick of the flames wrested shadows to and fro across the floor. She raised one foot, crossed it carefully over the opposite knee, unbuckled her shoe. The sole of her foot throbbed through her stocking and she felt it gingerly. Just a moment’s respite. Then she’d go back to the kitchen, where Rivka would have left ample work for her. How she’d have loved to be asked, like Isaac, to work with quill and ink.