The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  In his study, the rabbi was still seated beside the fire, opposite the HaLevy brothers, reciting. “The world is balanced upon three pillars: The study of Torah. The worship of God. Acts of kindness.”

  The last word was lost to a reverberating slam. Manuel HaLevy had dropped a book on the stone floor. Slowly he bent and retrieved it.

  “My apologies,” he said flatly.

  There was a brief silence. “That concludes our lesson,” said the rabbi. If he suspected Manuel had dropped the book deliberately, his face didn’t betray it.

  As the brothers gathered their cloaks, the rabbi called to Ester. Yet instead of asking the nature of Mary and Catherine’s visit, or protesting any claim the da Costa Mendes women might make on her as Ester half hoped he would, he said only, “The commentaries were bound two weeks ago. It’s time to retrieve them, Ester.”

  This was the third such set of books he’d ordered from Amsterdam: tomes of scholarship suitable for pupils more advanced than any here in London. In truth, the rabbi’s folly in this matter puzzled Ester: who else but they might conceivably study such volumes? Still, if he wished to conduct himself as though a crop of scholarly youths was ready to sprout through the cobbled streets at any moment, it was to her own benefit.

  “I thought Rivka—” Ester began.

  But the rabbi shook his head, almost sternly—as though the da Costa Mendes women’s visit had prompted him at last to acknowledge what they both knew: that Ester hid from London. Days passed when she ventured no farther than their door, shying from the city that had swallowed her brother. She’d become a creature Isaac would have scorned, cringing from daylight. The pallor she’d just glimpsed in Mary’s glass proved it.

  “Ester,” the rabbi said. With his long fingers he indicated a high shelf behind him.

  She counted as he instructed her, taking the silver coins from the narrow brimming box and dropping them into a pouch. With trembling fingers, she fixed the clasps of her cloak. Then set out, hurrying, her shoulders tightening against the unexpected cold.

  The street was nearly empty, blocked at one end by an age-darkened stone wall. Above her, the tiered houses cast their shadows on the cobbles, each level of a building jutting farther than the one it sat upon as though competing to darken the street. Between the topmost balconies, which threatened to touch overhead, the hazy sky promised nothing.

  The bindery the rabbi had named was somewhere in Southwark. She knew how to reach the river, but that was all. She hesitated. Then, deciding, hurried out of the street and to the next wider one, as though speed could prevent the city from touching her.

  The edges of the cobblestones were slicked with waste, every few steps a new odor assaulted—how to breathe without breathing? The city tilted at her, dangerous—the foul streets in which she’d lost Isaac. By now the HaLevy sons would have turned into the alleys past the Clothworkers’ Hall. She quickened her step to catch them—for as much as she distrusted the elder brother, still she’d rather ask directions in Portuguese than in English.

  Rounding the corner, she spied Manuel and Alvaro HaLevy strolling ahead of her. Here on the street, they appeared less foolish than in the rabbi’s study. More powerful.

  At the sound of her steps, the younger brother turned. Shyly he smiled, and laid a hand on his brother’s sleeve, stopping him.

  Manuel took in Ester’s presence on the street with an expression of mild surprise: he hadn’t suspected she’d be so bold as to seek him out. He folded his arms, looking amused.

  She addressed them bluntly in Portuguese. “Where’s Chamberlain’s bindery?”

  “Across the river,” Alvaro said in his English-accented Portuguese. “Just beyond the bridge.” He gestured at the road, in the direction they’d been walking. “It’s the second turn to the left off the main road. Beside a bread bakery.”

  She gave a curt nod.

  “Be careful,” Alvaro added, staying her as she started past. “Mind you don’t miss the closing of the gate, you’ll be caught outside the walls.” His voice dropping to an earnest near whisper, he continued in a mix of Portuguese and English. “Last I was there,” he said, “a boy came swinging a spar.” As he spoke he flushed, his slight figure inclining toward her as though he were in need of comfort. “He swung it hard, so my head felt its wind. He and his companions said Jews excel at murder. That we helped slice off the head of their last king.”

  Manuel was watching Ester closely.

  She addressed Alvaro in Portuguese. “Obrigada. For the warning.”

  Alvaro’s flush flowered into full red. He nodded and looked to his well-stitched black shoes, strapped into matching pattens.

  But Manuel was smiling softly at Ester now, as though he’d just heard a pleasing joke. “They wanted him to drop his breeches,” he said in English, not bothering to translate, “so they could see what a Jew looked like.”

  Alvaro paled.

  “I ran,” Alvaro said simply, and Ester saw he’d long been resigned to the pleasure his older brother took in shaming him.

  “Obrigada,” she said to Alvaro again. “You’re good to warn me.”

  “He ran like a puppy,” sang Manuel.

  Alvaro was a puppy. She held back from nodding. And his elder brother was a cur too free with his bite. “And you wouldn’t run?” she challenged Manuel. She let a small, teasing smile form on her lips. Hadn’t she sworn to herself all her life never to act in this manner? She looked at Manuel HaLevy and it didn’t matter. She wanted to see—wanted Alvaro to see—that smirk swept from the elder brother’s face.

  “Perhaps you should stay and lower your breeches for them,” she said. “I’d wager that if you did”—she let her gaze slide to his waist, then below, then rise to meet his inscrutable eyes—“you’d look no different from the English.”

  He let out a sound of surprise. Then his brass eyes fastened strangely on hers. She matched his gaze, no flush of heat marring her composure: a skill gleaned from her mother, though Ester had never before felt compelled to use it. It hardly mattered whether she’d guessed correctly that the London community didn’t yet submit its sons to the rite; Manuel’s expression had turned like something fermenting—as though he were assessing Ester anew. He looked as though he wanted to wound her for shaming him as a Jew, and he looked as though he wanted her eyes to travel the same route down his body once more.

  Abruptly the recollection of her mother’s red-lipped visage, reflected in the mirror in her own palm, unraveled her resolve. She turned and began walking away.

  “I heard about your brother,” Manuel said from behind her. “Not a very committed son of Israel himself, was he? Running off from the rabbi’s house to brawl like an animal among the dockworkers?”

  She walked on without a glance back.

  The streets narrowed, then widened abruptly and thickened with people. A boy swung out of a doorway and trotted down the street, carrying a roll of cloth. Neatly dressed maids with parcels walked ahead, whitsters hefting baskets of soiled linens. A horse and coach in the street, passing her so narrowly her cheek felt the heat off the animal’s flank. Sudden laughter in the doorway of a tavern, from its dark windows an oily smell that at once warmed Ester and turned her stomach.

  Why now would she embrace her mother’s ways, when she’d so long and so fiercely guarded against them? Even a girl like Mary, petty and vain, knew the dangers of risking her reputation.

  As though taking a cautious sip of strongest liquor, she permitted herself a single image. Her mother’s green dress. And her voice: a burning draught. Ester. You’re just like me.

  She’d insulted Manuel HaLevy today because he angered her—yet, she admitted, also to pique him. For though Ester disliked him, still her body had woken to his challenge—just as every caged part of her, her thoughts, her breath, her pulse, seemed to wake now to this city from which she’d hidden herself. London, which had consumed her brother; London of her mother’s drunken, eviscerating whispers. The very language spoken on
these streets fired Ester strangely—as if a thing long shuttered in her spirit had, quietly and all at once, quickened.

  With the quickening, memory. How could one love such a mother—and how not long for her? Those in the synagogue who’d claimed they wished nothing to do with Constantina had ever lied, for didn’t they ­savor their gossip of Constantina’s famed tempers? Didn’t they gladly visit the home of Samuel Velasquez—and not only because of his standing as a merchant, but because of the opportunity to admire Constantina’s lush beauty in the elegance of her home, and be pre­sent for those moments of delight and danger when her spirits lifted? For when Constantina Velasquez’s face and figure lit with happiness—when she laughed and played delicate melodies on the parlor spinet as her own mother had taught her, or sang a sinuous verse in her rare, light, throaty voice—then she no longer seemed ill-suited to the world but instead was the very heart of it, so that to turn away was impossible. And if it was true that Constantina’s temper sometimes plunged, or that she mocked those who should not be mocked; if it was true that her disobedience sometimes took the form of coquetry—dancing when the mood took her, lifting her skirts to a shocking height, even setting a hand lightly on a man’s chest, as if for emphasis, as she spoke to him, and continuing to converse with a faint smile as though she didn’t notice the man coloring—still, most took their cue from Samuel’s silence and said nothing until they’d left the house.

  The most famed example of Constantina’s rebelliousness Ester herself recalled, though she herself had been but a child: eight days after giving birth to Isaac, Constantina had barred the door of the bedchamber with splayed arms and refused to allow the infant to be circumcised. Women were sent to persuade Constantina: naturally in Portugal they’d lacked the freedom to circumcise their sons, yes. And now indeed there was strangeness in rejudaizing the young—but wasn’t circumcision the mark of their new safety? Constantina merely turned her dark eyes on them and laughed in their earnest faces. More than one of the women cried with bewilderment upon leaving the Velasquez house, and had to recompose herself before returning home to make prim report of a mind distressed by the rigors of childbirth.

  Only the herem issued by the Mahamad, barring members of the Velasquez family from setting foot in the synagogue until the deed had been done, ended the matter. Samuel Velasquez took his infant son bodily from his wife. He left for the synagogue disheveled from their struggle, Constantina’s fury pursuing him down the stairs: “Naturally you agree with the Mahamad! Now that you cling to Judaism like a babe to a teat you’re not half the man you were—you should never have let them do it to you either!” While the door’s slam still reverberated, Constantina seized paper and quill. In swift, sharp strokes she penned her letter, and moments later dispatched the wary maid to the synagogue with instructions to deliver it to the most dignified-looking rabbi she could find, and watch his face while he read it. “And make certain my husband sees,” Constantina cried as the maid exited.

  Nonetheless, the boy was circumcised and returned to the house within the hour, crying lustily and refusing to be soothed by the drops of wine fed to him. Right on the parlor table Constantina swaddled her son, and before turning him over to the nursemaid and seeking her own comfort in a wine bottle, she’d rocked him for a time with a tender grief, as if she held in her arms her own unsoothable spirit. Ester had witnessed all from the top of the stair—squeezing her eyes shut even after her mother had gone, so that she might continue imagining that she herself were the wailing infant held so tight.

  And when Ester’s father first brought Rabbi HaCoen Mendes to their home, Constantina’s voice tore the air over Ester’s head. “I gave no permission for that man to come into my house.”

  “That man,” said Samuel Velasquez slowly, “is a rabbi. He’s going to tutor the children.”

  Her father. His thick brown hair and neatly trimmed beard only starting to gray. Broad palms smelling faintly of aniseed oil, coffee, and the barrels of spice he inspected at the docks; his fine white blouse and breeches pressed, his mild brown eyes wide with fatigue.

  All through that first hour Ester had spent with the rabbi, her father had lingered on the perimeter of the room as though to protect them from the storm he knew was coming. In the hush of the parlor, the blind rabbi’s face lifting in her direction like a plant slowly turning toward the sun, Ester had answered Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s gentle questions—what did she know of Hebrew, which works had she read in Castilian and which in Portuguese? She’d read aloud from the volume the rabbi had brought, whispering apologies for her every hesitation or stumble.

  Immediately upon the rabbi’s departure, the quiet shattered.

  “Don’t speak to me as though I’m simple!” Constantina’s voice, breaking, tightened Ester’s own throat.

  In her green gown with its deep bosom, Constantina closed her delicate hands on the carved back of Ester’s chair. “He’s a rabbi, yes! A poor, miserable creature who lost his eyesight for the priests’ satisfaction—and now he and all the rest of them want us to lock away our senses. No attending plays we like, or eating what food we wish, or heaven forbid letting our legs be glimpsed during a dance if it pleases us!”

  The maid entered, head down, and closed the windows—although the thin glass could hardly keep such fury from the eager ears of neighbors.

  “I’ll no longer discuss the matter of attending Spanish comedies,” Samuel said. “The Mahamad is against it.”

  “The Mahamad,” she enunciated from behind Ester, “exists only to wallow in its own holy muck.”

  “Constantina!”

  “No! When my mother and I ran from Lisbon, we ran to save our lives. Not our Jewish lives. Our lives. We ran because even if we never said a prayer, even if my mother and aunts went to the dance hall after their Friday feast”—swiftly she stepped to her husband and jabbed her finger into his chest—“even so, the priests wanted to drag us into their torture rooms.” As her father edged back from the onslaught, Ester understood that Constantina had been drinking. He said nothing, but Ester felt him shut like a heavy door, leaving the room colder.

  “You brought me to this place as a bride,” Constantina continued, at an even higher pitch, “and you decided we would be pious. But no one is pious in every single thought—no one, except you.” Constantina said the word with a glad viciousness.

  Forearms on the table, face averted, Ester had closed her eyes. What, she asked herself, did the rabbi see behind his sealed lids? And what, she pressed silently, was the true meaning of the verse the rabbi had recited from Pirkei Avot? The rabbi’s lesson turned in her mind, pieces of a puzzle seeking their match. Something in them troubled her. She could not get the notions to align.

  “You were content,” her father said, “when I arranged to educate our children in French and our son in Latin, as befits our standing. Yet you want me to shun our own people’s learning. Your grandfather didn’t die, Constantina, for us to shun it.” Her father’s voice too had risen. Ester cringed at what it might unleash. Yet she couldn’t help clinging to the sound of his words. “In Amsterdam, even a girl may study the faith. And if Ester may learn, then she ought. I’m in disagreement with many on this matter, I know. But Rabbi HaCoen Mendes is willing to teach a girl. And”—he pronounced the words softly but firmly—“as the master of this house, I have requested that he do so. I do not make it my habit to insist with you, Constantina, though some call me a fool for the degree to which I tolerate your whims.”

  In the long silence that ensued, Ester shut her eyes. Behind closed lids, she forced her mind to the rabbi’s words. The saving of a life is equal in merit to the saving of the world. So it is said, he who saves one life saves a world. Yet if this was so, then what exactly was meant by world? Were there worlds of different size and merit? Or was the world of one soul as capacious as the world that contained all of creation—infinite, even? Was Ester’s world, peopled by her parents and her brother, equal to all the others God had created?


  Yet if all worlds were equal, then each world the Jesuits murdered was equal to all God’s others. How then could one be certain God’s power was greater than that of the Jesuits?

  The thought rang frighteningly, forcing her eyes open: Had she trod near the notions of heretics? Even in her studies, was she taking up her mother’s ways?

  Her father was speaking. His voice was low but firm. “I need not remind you what could become of you in Portugal, Constantina. This Amsterdam congregation you hate, despite your rage against its rulings, is your protection.”

  Constantina stood motionless. It seemed the fury was draining from her, hopelessness entering in its wake. “You trap me in a box full of Jews,” she said quietly.

  Her father’s face was weighted with fatigue, yet instantly a tender sympathy rose there, and Ester saw that his love for Constantina was untouched, and should his wife but permit it he’d take her in his arms to comfort her. He said, gently, “It was not I who decided it should be a trap.”

  A moment’s equipoise. Then Constantina’s face clouded. She waved vaguely at the open book in front of Ester. Then briskly. “Leave that nonsense.”

  Ester didn’t move.

  “I said leave it!”

  Slowly, as though looking up from underwater, Ester met her mother’s dark eyes.

  “Well,” Constantina said. A strange loneliness rippled in her voice. But she stood soldier-straight as she continued, braving whatever bewilderment had seized her. “You may indeed be a Jewess, Ester,” she said. Yet though the words were addressed to her daughter, all Constantina’s attention was on her husband. “But you, Ester, are a Jewess with Iberian blood and a coat of arms in your family.”

  Samuel’s posture sagged, as though a melody he’d listened for had vanished. “It serves little,” he said quietly, “to put stock in purity of blood. Or in titles purchased by great-great-grandfathers that nonetheless failed to purchase safety.”