The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  But a look of nausea crossed his face and she saw her words had hit home.

  “Helen. What do you think life could bring that would frighten me now?”

  Not a footstep disturbed the quiet of the barracks.

  “Please,” he said.

  He’d brought her dinner in his room, setting it on a tray beside her as she sat reading on his cot in her thin sundress. Carefully he arranged napkin and fork, then turned the room over to her with a tenderness that might have been comical under other circumstances.

  She paged through the book resentfully, like a child forced to fulfill the terms of an unjust penance. Outside the single window of his room Dror was visible, leaning against a tree in his blue short-sleeved shirt, smoking one cigarette after another. He wanted her to embrace his history, she knew, or to flee him then and there—before they were so tightly knit together that no surgery could separate them without devastating both.

  She scanned the opening, the words falling away from her senselessly. Dror wanted her to weigh every sentence? Fine. She forced herself to a second page, a third. Dror wanted a fair-minded inquiry. But for once in her life, Helen did not. She knew the ending she wanted for this story, and she was going to head for it regardless. She would read Dror’s history book, and she would tell him—no matter the horrid truths on these pages—that despite all evidence and logic they could still be together.

  She tested a pen on the notepad he’d brought her, wrote her name in sharp, angry letters. After several minutes, she wrote a sloppy row of headings to keep track of the time periods she was reading about. Israelite Kingdom. Diaspora Beginnings. Greeks and Hellenization.

  The story of Mattathias and the Judean martyrs caught her, and she read despite herself. In the isolation of their desert exile, the truth was evident: speaking their beliefs directly meant annihilation. She absorbed the words, and read on. Her anger faded. Whatever message she’d wanted to impose on the history dropped away—she’d recall it later. For now the stories themselves, set in a stark, familiar landscape, had all her attention. As she read, she wrote down names and dates, as though echoing harrowing facts with her pen would seal them into her memory and there make sense of them.

  Outside Dror stamped cigarette butts into the dirt, and paced.

  How soft she had been, then. Every breath she took—shifting on Dror’s thin mattress, reaching to turn a page—was still an exchange, a question, a hopeful sampling of the world.

  When he came with two glasses of mint tea, she shut the book and folded her notes out of view. “This is pointless, Dror.”

  He shook his head mutely and stirred her tea, raising a whorl of dark leaves from the bottom of the glass.

  “Tell me about your sister,” she said, watching them settle. “That’s the Jewish history I want to know, Dror. Your history.”

  With the deliberate motions of a man coaching himself not to smash the objects in his hands, he set the tea and spoon quietly on the tabletop. “We can talk about everything,” Dror said softly, “after you read.”

  She read on in a fever of concentration, through afternoon and evening. She read into the night by his bedside light. He slept beside her, his body cupping hers, moving only to pull a pillow over his eyes when the light disturbed him. The fingertips of his hand rested, trusting, against the skin of her thigh: the first touch he had allowed since handing her the book.

  She read until the starred black sky gave way to a deep predawn blue.

  She finished and shut the book, and only then did the tears of frustration rise.

  The single page on which she’d taken notes was filled on both sides. She had turned it, written on the back; filled in the margins; inverted the page and filled it again upside down, writing between the lines she’d already penned.

  Dror, waking, rose and brought her breakfast: leben, pita, a sliced and salted cucumber, all laid out neatly on blue plastic dishes from the mess hall. He set her coffee before her with care.

  “What did you learn?” he said softly.

  She’d never before seen him afraid.

  “Did you read about Dreyfus?” he said. “About the White Paper?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you see”—he was watching her carefully—“how things changed without change? How it only gets worse—how the trap closes harder each time? Helen, why do you want this in your life?”

  She didn’t speak.

  “Do you see?” he repeated.

  “See what? That you want me to think loving you is a curse?”

  “I need you to see the truth.”

  “Which is that you’re trying to scare me away.” The words hurt her throat. “You don’t want to let go of”—she gestured, her fingers splayed—“a milligram of the horror.”

  Her fingertips caught the edge of her coffee cup and it spilled—over her legs, over the handwritten page beside them, blurring the bright blue ink so long lines of her words bled to the margins and were wasted.

  Then she was crying, and with a choked sound he pushed book and page and coffee cup from his cot, and when they made love his voice was like the hush of a rainstorm in her ears: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.

  One afternoon Muriel cornered her without warning beside the outhouse. She grabbed Helen’s arm, hard, and there was no pretense of goodwill. “Don’t you know he’s going to work in intelligence? Don’t you know they want him—after they saw what he could do as a commando? Did he tell you he starts in June, he’s going to spend half his life undercover in other countries if they ask him to? Or that his wife will never know what he really does? Have you even heard of the Mossad—or is England too pure to need that sort of thing? Then I’ll explain: these are the men who leave widows, and you’ll never see a memorial for them because their work doesn’t exist.”

  Muriel’s grip had stopped the pulse in her arm. Helen tried to wrench away. But Muriel only gripped tighter as though in a trance of vindication—and Helen was aware, even then, that Muriel would regret her words after her wildness had subsided. “I supposed he wouldn’t have bothered to tell you that. But he told Uri before you ever arrived here on your precious noble vacation, he told Uri that he wants to devote his life to national security. To doing what our people need so this country doesn’t become another trap that closes on the Jews.”

  At the echo of Dror’s words, Helen no longer noticed the pain in her arm.

  “He’s ready to throw himself off a cliff for this country,” Muriel went on, “and he’ll do it the minute they ask him to. Probably they’ll start him doing intelligence in eastern Europe, maybe just for a few months, maybe a few years. Is that who you thought you were having your little fairy tale with? Or did he forget to tell you you’ll always come second? He’ll never love you the way he loves us.”

  She left Muriel and ran, not caring who stared, to Dror’s room, where she found him on his cot, reading a newspaper. “You’re going to leave me. You’re going to run off and get killed for the country.”

  Slowly he folded the newspaper and set it aside.

  “Muriel told me. You’re planning for me to be a war widow, that’s what you’re preparing me for?”

  The sorrow in his eyes confused her. She shook her head—wasn’t he going to deny it? She’d run here counting on the fact that he’d tell her it was a misunderstanding—that she could fall into his arms with the relief that they’d leapt another hurdle together.

  “Helen,” he said quietly, “I didn’t lie. I want to work for the country if they’ll have me. But—”

  The conversation was happening too fast—she couldn’t take it in. Something in him was alien to her—she was a foreigner here after all. But then, hadn’t she always been? Loneliness gripped her—a physical need for the sound of rain. England. The rockscape outside Dror’s window made her heart race as though it would give out if she couldn’t see a bit of green. What if she was afraid of it all? The thought came to her: I can’t do it if I can’t be sure of him.

  S
he raised her voice, louder than she needed to. “What you’re saying, Dror, is that I’ll always come second. And I’ll never understand you because I’m not Jewish. I’ll never be as—”

  “You’re”—he rose, stepped toward her, gestured uselessly. “Helen, everything I do is to be honest with you. I want you to know the worst, so you can run away now if you need to. But that’s not—if you decide to be with me, Helen, I see now that we can make this—”

  Her only thought now was to wound him, so he would hold her once more—so he would whisper his apology for the unbearable images Muriel’s words had conjured: Dror lost. Dror missing. Helen alone in an empty kitchen years from now, listening to the radio in a country she’d never understand. In a ragged voice, she spoke the ugliest words she could find. “There’s a hole in you where your heart once was. And in its place, you’ve put history.”

  A blast of silence. His eyes were closed. He said, simply, “No.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her. “You’re in my heart,” he said. “But you’re right too, Helen. I’m not who I was. I—”

  It took her a moment to register that his voice was breaking.

  “I hated it,” he said. And then, louder, “I hated it. Do you think I didn’t know when it was happening to me? Do you think the world can operate on your heart without you knowing it?”

  His voice was breaking for himself, she realized—and she despised herself for forcing him to see what she saw. And she loved him as she hadn’t loved a human being in her life—felt his blamelessness so powerfully that she would willingly have lain down on the painted concrete floor and rested her head on his worn, motionless boots.

  He’d finished. He stood for a moment. Then he opened the door and motioned her out.

  And there was a soldier sketching the silhouette of Masada from the hood of his jeep. She left her suitcase and her ticket for London in the car she’d rented to drive herself out of the desert for the last time. She could feel the iron in her smile, but she saw the soldier’s eyes soften with foolish hope as she approached, in the skirt and blouse that were foreign on her body after her months in uniform. And she took the sketch from his hand with a grim, hard grip.

  How did you come to history?, Aaron had asked her, that first long day of work at the Eastons’ house.

  She gathered her coat. Her satchel. Her cane, the finish worn away on one side of its knobbed handle. She turned off the overhead light, and locked her office door.

  Outside, in the dimming afternoon, she leaned her cane against a railing, and with both hands labored to button her coat against the chill. She reached the top button. Put her hands into her pockets, and rested. Then worked one glove onto each hand, retrieved her cane, and began the slow walk to her car.

  12

  December 6, 1663

  7 Kislev, 5424

  London

  She slid open the bed curtain, the wooden rings clicking.

  The stone floor was ice. She firmed her bare feet on it and stood, her breath weightless in the dark room. From the truckle bed, the heavy sounds of Rivka’s sleep. She reached and found the windowsill. Stood a moment before the panes that admitted not light, but rather a thinning of the dark.

  A pale smudge of moon was visible above the city wall, and a small commotion passed briefly on the street below her window—the brief, raucous laughter of men on their way back from a tavern. She wrapped her shawl tight about her shoulders, then followed the wall until it opened to the cold stair.

  Without its warming fire, the rabbi’s study was hollow. She lingered a moment at the threshold. Even now, it was this instant she most treasured: the moment when she entered the dark room. The bound volumes, arrayed silent on the cloaked bookshelves, waited. She stepped across the threshold, drew one long breath. Then, swiftly, found candle and striker in a drawer near the hearth. Revealed, the room shone with a brave brightness. The volumes she’d retrieved most recently from the bindery lay on a table where she would read from them to the rabbi on the morrow. Setting the candle in a dish, she drew the curtain covering the closest shelves and slipped her hand across the spines, her fingertips slowly crossing the fine rivulets of each leather binding. The first book she touched was in Portuguese: Consolação às Tribulações de Israel. The next, Ketseh Ha-Arets, in Hebrew. The next in French, Les Principes de la Philosophie; then Sidereus Nuncius—written in a dense Latin that had, for most of the past month, confounded her, only slowly yielding to her attention.

  Something had sprung alive in her these years—slowly at first, then more powerfully with every passing day. Surely the rabbi must know it? Something had seized her. The city, its books.

  At least once each month now the rabbi required her to venture into London to arrange for the binding of the books the Amsterdam community continued to send, or else to purchase new texts with the income the rabbi’s nephew provided. Ester had long feared a day when the rabbi might realize his folly—for the number of books in his library grew at greater pace and far greater expense than the needs of the household might justify. The rabbi himself could study only some few hours before fatigue overtook him, and the students knocking on his door had lately diminished to a mere rill, the HaLevy brothers being two of only five pupils who arrived at the threshold at intervals through the day, if at all. Yet outside this matter of amassing books, the rabbi’s mind seemed intact—and, Ester reasoned, one who had spent his life so meagerly surely merited the chance to indulge himself in such extravagant purchases of texts now, when at last he was provided with the income to do so.

  With each of Ester’s forays into London, the city seemed to grow and brighten, its streets threading into a dense map that she’d walked first with caution, and now confidence. She lingered at booksellers’ tables to inhale; how strange that she could ever have forgotten the smell of books—as though her years of mourning had blotted her senses. Now, the squared Latin and English letters delighted her; she relished the feel of each word as her mouth silently shaped it. All about her, strangers slid their fingers along lines of print, their touch curious, reverent, even tender. How intimate the love of books had always seemed to Ester; yet among Jews the holiest books could not be touched by human hands. No woman could approach the Torah, and even a man could touch its scrolls only with a wood or silver pointer. Here, though, among the Gentiles, even the holiest words could be caressed. When the rabbi’s errands first brought her to the booksellers’ stalls at St. Paul’s, she hadn’t dared approach the Christian texts. It had taken her weeks to embolden herself to lay hands on one—and then a second, and a third, opening each book’s quires and standing long minutes before the pages. At first, as though the words might burn, she’d read without allowing her fingertips to graze the printed letters. Then, she’d touched. We have thought fit, by this book, to give an account of our faith . . . What strange voices these were, questing inward, as though truth were to be found not in the instruction of the community but in a single spirit and mind. With effort she deciphered the careful sentences of an English Christian named John Jewel. She turned page after page of a text called Summa Logicae—and though the meager instruction in Latin she’d once gleaned from her brother’s lessons was inadequate to the more difficult passages, still she sifted the fragments of each argument until she felt she could glimpse the shape of the whole. And here was a book written by a pious Christian woman known as Julian of Norwich, whom the Christians—could such a thing be true?—had walled into their church to live out her life there, bringing her food and necessities so that parishioners could come lean into the small window in her stone prison to confess and receive her wisdom. On page after page, the woman gave account of her own visions.

  At the bindery, an establishment warmed as much by the bodies shuffling its narrow aisles as by the low fire in its hearth, she stood alongside strangers at tables piled with parchments, loose quires, and pieces of leather binding. Expensively bound volumes were stacked high here and there, waiting to be claimed by those whose g
ilt initials adorned the spines alongside the names of the authors. There was a peculiar political work by Van den Enden—a description of the ideal society, passages of which she committed to memory. A copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, with a heavy swirl of ink on its frontispiece, lay awaiting collection for weeks; when she visited it, she took to parting the book’s thick girth with the wedge of her fingernail, and whatsoever page it might fall to, she studied that passage to glean what she might. So too did she linger with a set bound in dark green leather, the edges of the pages marbled in reds and purples. Descartes. Galileo, William Alabaster. William Shakespeare.

  And when the rabbi sent Ester about London for ink and paper or quills, she rushed to each errand, then bundled the rabbi’s purchases under her arms and wandered where she pleased. How different these excursions were from the rounds she made with Mary to dressmakers and cordwainers—hours so thick with Mary’s gossip that Ester barely glimpsed London’s riches passing outside the window of the da Costa Mendeses’ coach. But set loose on her own in London, she watched a brightly painted barge and a worn herring-bus being unloaded by a crew of men; passed a tall Moor with dark lips that opened to a bright and still brighter smile as she neared him, until they both laughed aloud before parting without a word. She stopped at the cart of a fat, whiskered woman and bought from her a plum, not for its small bitter heft but for the opportunity to memorize the Englishwoman’s gestures and the satisfied way her mouth gathered itself when she’d finished speaking. She watched two apprentices squatted together beside the river, saw them shimmy their closed fists and fling forbidden dice at the bare earth between their kissing knees. Nearby, three men watched, and banged together their metal mugs of posset, hob and nob, as they toasted a long list of sins soon to be restored to England with the return of the king: dicing, bowling, bear-baiting—each sin saluted by the men with a three-voice chorus of “a very rude and nasty pleasure.”