Awaiting your reply with esteem,
Isabella Mendoza
She held the letter. A feeling like ice spread in her chest. Could a stranger so easily unmake Ester’s life—marrying her for a fee to a faceless youth, and in one stroke parting her forever from the rabbi and his quiet fireside, from her books?
The thought grew until it filled her: not yet.
The rabbi was stirring. As though able to sense his least motion from afar, Rivka entered from the kitchen and knelt at the fire, adding wood and stoking it high. Ester set down the letter.
At the rabbi’s quiet call, she answered, “Here I am.”
He beckoned her to a seat by the fire. For a long while, then, the rabbi sipped the tea Rivka brought. She waited for him to ask about the letter; then, as the moments passed, she realized he did not know any had been delivered.
The fire crackled. Rivka had piled the wood high, as though to supply all the warmth the rabbi’s meager body could not. For a long, silent time Ester sat opposite the rabbi near the blaze, until the heat made her eyes ache. Did his eyes, she wondered, suffer from the heat of the flames as did hers—or had the iron that extinguished them robbed them not only of sight, but of all sense of pain? And if he’d become insensible to pain, was he also deadened to desire for all that he could no longer have?
A snap from the fire assaulted her.
The rabbi spoke softly, without moving. “I believe,” he said, “that these stone walls are safe from fire.”
Even blind, he’d felt her startle.
“Let us read,” she said, more briskly than she intended.
Hadn’t she struggled only hours ago to find words for her gratitude to the rabbi? Now vexation propelled her into motion. She stood, crossed to the table, and took up a thin volume, a commentary on Jonah that she and the rabbi had begun discussing some days earlier.
“Something troubles you,” he said.
She could barely persuade her voice to sound. “No,” she said quietly.
The rabbi fell silent. Then he said, “I believe my mind is too dull this afternoon to read commentary.”
She laid the book down.
“Perhaps,” he said, “we ought to sit and recite psalms.”
A physick he was prescribing for her, not for himself. Her throat constricted with feelings she’d no name for.
“The words of prayer are like birds, Ester,” he said gently. “They soar.”
She did not believe prayers were like birds. Birds could fly out of a burning house. If prayer had flown, then her father would still live—perhaps, through her father’s devotions, even her mother would have survived—even rageful, bewildered, bereft Constantina. If prayer had flown, Isaac would not be dead.
Before she knew what she was saying, she turned to the rabbi. “What do you see,” she said, “behind the lids of your eyes?”
For the first time there was unease beneath his silence. She felt a hard, thin satisfaction she was ashamed of.
“I shall not, at this moment, answer this question,” he said. “But I will tell you what I learned after I lost my sight, in the first days as I came to understand how much of the world was now banned from me—for my hands would never again turn the pages of a book, nor be stained with the sweet, grave weight of ink, a thing I had loved since first memory. I walked through rooms that had once been familiar, my arms outstretched, and was fouled and thwarted by every obstacle in my path. What I learned then, Ester, is a thing that I have been learning ever since.”
She stood rooted by shame, dreading his words.
“The distances between things are vast,” he said. “They are vast.”
His blind eyes were turned toward the fire.
“Ester,” he said. “Do not rue your lack of freedom.”
Had he read her thoughts? That morning after Rivka had confronted her, she’d searched the drawer in the rabbi’s study, hoping to find even a single candle rolling inside. But Rivka had left not even a rushlight.
“You learn as no other women do,” the rabbi said, “yet you wish for more. Your mind is eager, Ester—and though all Amsterdam should disagree, I will say this eagerness is given to you by the divine. But it must have limits. Sometimes a soul must content itself, purify itself and burn inside itself, without receiving all it desires.” He turned to her, and she felt his attention, penetrating and sober. “The Jews of London, Ester, do not want me. They believe I come to scold them about the traditions they’ve disdained. Soon they’ll acquire what they wish: a respected rabbi for their synagogue, one who offers grandeur and a reminder of our tradition’s glory. Under such a rabbi they’ll return in their hearts, slowly but after a time fully, to the tradition. But they do not wish to be guided by one such as I.” The rabbi was still turned toward Ester, his face white in the firelight. “I will do what’s mine to do,” he said. “I will be their servant for as long as they tolerate my presence. It is not my place to argue for a grander welcome for my learning.”
“But you deserve their respect,” said Ester fiercely. “They ought be assembled before your door, awaiting the chance to study with you, entreating you to deliver sermons. You’re a scholar who endured torture for the sake of your faith—and they persist in wearing crosses in the streets of a city where they need fear no Inquisition.” All her love of the rabbi rose in her, hardening instantly to a wish to fight on his behalf. “What right have they to disdain a martyr?”
He flinched at the word. After a long moment he said, “I was no martyr.”
“What I mean is—”
“I begged,” he said.
There was a long silence.
“I used what words came,” he said, “in Lisbon. I do not believe I recanted my faith under the priests’ instruments, but neither did I proclaim it. My words tumbled without sense.” For a long moment he was quiet. “For a reason I’ve never understood, they released me. Perhaps they felt a moment’s pity, for I was yet young. Or perhaps in my moanings I uttered those very words they so cruelly wished me to speak.” The rabbi sat motionless. She watched some struggle pass across his face, and fade. “I do not recall ever speaking the name of their lord,” he said. “But it may be that I did. For I can think of no other reason I was allowed to live.
“Yet speaking their words would hardly have been more cowardly than what I am certain I did.” He winced, his eyelids wrinkling as though they could yet shut out vision. “I begged for life. After my father and mother had asserted their faith.”
Without thinking, Ester stepped forward. She set her hand on his arm and rested it there. The rabbi, motionless, allowed her touch.
“They let me go, saying my sight would be a small price to pay for my life. Before he took my eyes, the youngest priest said, ‘Look now, so that your last vision ever stay with you and remind you of the truth you learn today at God’s hands.’”
He sat undefended like a child. His shoulders were thin, his frail neck exposed.
“It was as he said. It has stayed with me always. I see that last sight even now, Ester, at this moment.”
She did not ask what he saw. She vowed never to ask.
The fire burned softly, the air over the hearth a fine shimmer.
“The psalms,” the rabbi said.
She went to the shelf and retrieved the small worn book, which awaited her there as though no violence had shaken the room.
“Number thirty-three,” he said.
She chanted with the rabbi.
Later, after Rivka had persuaded him to take the air outside and led him slowly to the street on her arm, Ester stood alone in the study. A long while she stood.
Then she unfolded the widow’s letter.
Did she wonder which young man might have spoken of her in the presence of Isabella Mendoza? Yes. Yes, perhaps she did. She could not deny it. She wouldn’t pretend Mary’s foolish yearnings had no kin in her own.
But she could ill afford to be like other girls. And she’d not yet learned of a woman’s passion th
at did not exact a fearsome price. Had the widow who wrote this letter herself once allowed her senses to rule her? Whatever choices this Isabella Mendoza had made, whatever hopes she’d dared, they hadn’t sustained her. It was now her business to insert herself, for sustenance, into the forming of further matches, whether or not they might serve as traps for the souls thus bound.
It is a danger to a woman, she told herself, even to feel it.
Did she believe it?
She reread the letter, and dropped it into the fire.
Just so—in the space of a heartbeat—she’d betrayed the rabbi.
Breathing deeply, she watched it burn. It curled in the flames, half rose in the heat, and subsided: the single page that could have expelled her from this narrow perch of home.
The fact of what she’d done pierced her even as she watched. Yet if she could have hastened the dissolving of the paper to ash, she’d have done so. She watched the last of the widow’s letter to the rabbi form a fine dark webbing of ash, then collapse onto the orange coals beneath it.
The choice sat ill in her body, like a physick she had chosen on impulse to swallow. It was too soon to say if the body would rebel.
13
December 16, 2000
London
Well, Marisa, you’ve got me curious. First your report of planned excursions to the north, then the news that suddenly you’re leaving your kibbutz program . . . and then you tell me you’ve planned a visit to the desert. Then silence. I’m thinking you’ve converted to Orthodoxy and are currently wearing a headkerchief and on your way to mothering eight children. Or else you’ve formed a punk band and are living the high life in Tel Aviv.
Am laboring away on the documents here for the ever-charming Professor Helen Watt. Some of the documents are pretty mundane, others interesting, but we’re only starting to put together a picture of what they are, let alone why they were under a staircase in Richmond, which in those times must have been at least a half day’s travel from London. There are some as-yet-unexplained references in one of the documents, which Watt seems to feel will be of earth-shattering importance. I’m not yet convinced, though it does seem we may have run across evidence of a woman scribe. That’s going to make waves when we publish. There’s no doubt this will advance the scholarship in the field, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that whatever papers we write on this material will be published . . . which somewhat eases the pain of dealing with Watt. A few times I’ve thought she was about to ease up and behave like a human, but I’ve been sadly disappointed. She’s the sort of person you can’t imagine having an actual home. It’s as though she turns a corner leaving her office and is shelved overnight in some storage unit for the terminally pedantic, and only materializes again on her return to work the next morning. God save us (note, please, how British I’m starting to sound) from the doyennes of academia. She refers to the seventeenth-century hidden Jews as “crypto-Jews,” which she pronounces like she’s talking about some specimen under a microscope. She calls the Ketuvim “the Hagiographa,” maybe to make sure I know she’s not one of those sentimental religious types. She studies Jews like we’re her favorite insect pinned to a wall. Well, I’m just going to have to develop that British stiff upper lip. I’m glad to be working on this project. And she needs my skills.
That last part was a lie. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Helen Watt would abruptly turn to him this very morning and give him credit for being something other than a page-turner?
Unlikely. He’d caught her rechecking one of his translations just yesterday. What was the point of hiring a grad student with eighteen combined years of Hebrew and Spanish and Portuguese study if you didn’t let him do so much as render a translation?
But then, what was the point of disdaining work, even as a page-turner, if you’d made no serious headway on your dissertation in a year?
Around his thoughts went, like a bus on a roundabout. It took so little to start his mind on this course, the sickening sweep of his months in London raising bile in his throat. The weeks he’d wasted in the library trying to make something new out of Shakespeare’s use of the name Bassanio in Merchant of Venice, and tracking down every possible connection between Shakespeare and the Jewish Bassano family then in the London court—only to discover that another scholar had already mapped the entire terrain of that blind alley . . . and by the way, the Bassano family wasn’t actually Jewish. The months he’d devoted to The Tempest, following some glimmering notion about Prospero’s references to magical books and a magic garment, which Aaron theorized might be derived from possible Jewish sources—only to realize that there was no evidence of any Jewish derivation . . . and, worse, to discover along the way that in fact he didn’t understand The Tempest at all, because he couldn’t honestly believe Prospero’s relinquishment of his magical powers. And if Aaron couldn’t take seriously the culmination of the play’s drama—if he couldn’t agree that a man like Prospero would ever willingly break his wand, and in doing so renounce his power to dazzle and wreak revenge and draw those he loved irresistibly to him—if Aaron failed to understand the very surface of this text, despite the fact that a significant portion of humanity seemed to think it was Shakespeare’s towering achievement . . . then how could he hope to glean any of what lay beneath?
He’d abandoned The Tempest.
Darcy had consoled him. That is, Darcy had come as close to consolation as one could expect from a British academic. Darcy had combed his thin gray hair back over his bald spot with the fingers of one hand, and counseled him with a mildness that Aaron suspected was as close as the man came to warmth: Dark nights of the scholarly soul were sadly unavoidable for those who chose the rigorous path. Aaron would carry through in the end.
With a clap on the shoulder and a gesture at his clock, Darcy had ushered Aaron out of his office and his afternoon.
It would have been far simpler, yes, for Aaron to engage in small ideas, rather than try to say something fresh about the Bard, to whom academic crackpots flocked like iron filings to a magnet. Once, over beer and chips at a party, a fellow who’d been sizing up Aaron’s Bardolatry credentials had boasted that he himself had disproven all three leading theories about the identities of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and Fair Youth, and would soon be the one to unearth the true identities of Shakespeare’s female and male paramours. When Aaron had questioned the guy, though, he’d gotten cagey, guarding his ideas as though Aaron were angling to steal them. He needn’t have bothered; in Aaron’s opinion, obsessing about the identity of long-dead individuals—even presuming you first made the leap and assumed Shakespeare wasn’t just writing imaginatively in those sonnets but was talking about actual people he’d admired or loved—was a complete waste of time. Discovering which particular individuals caught the Bard’s fancy and what sort of relationships might or might not have ensued would cast no real light on Shakespeare’s significance. Let the Dark Lady and Fair Youth sonnets speak for themselves over the ages, universal messages that needed no external context.
Yet hadn’t he just argued the irrelevance of his own dissertation? How was finding links between Shakespeare’s writings and a long-lost Jewish community any different? Perhaps he ought to thank Helen Watt for allowing him temporary shelter in a time period a full fifty years after the Bard had had the good grace to expire.
In an e-mail written more than three weeks ago, Marisa had mentioned a possible visit to London this coming summer, to attend a friend’s wedding.
He pictured her.
He pictured her in his London flat, setting her travel bag on the floor.
Looking at him. And abruptly laughing.
He pictured her naked.
He pictured her reclining.
He pictured her reclining on black velvet drapes in a portrait painted by Rodney Keller.
He wondered whether Rodney Keller was gay.
A bus on a roundabout.
He set his fingers on the keyboard once more.
Unfortunately, ther
e’s a wrinkle in the process. We’re not the only ones working on these documents anymore. The head of the History Department is about to give another team access. And don’t even ask: nobody is about to offer to collaborate. Helen Watt was ready to explode when she got the news (I could tell, clever fellow that I am, because her lips got three microns thinner when the competing scholar’s name was mentioned) but I’m guessing she’s scared. Maybe she’s human after all. Me, I’ll keep slaving away on the papers all day in this reading room that’s quiet as a cathedral. Got to be both painstaking and fast. Do not hurry; do not rest. So said Goethe. I don’t rest, but it’s a lot of rough hours conversing with nothing but three-hundred-year-old paper and my computer.
His fingers rested on the keys. He tried to think of some way to describe what he felt, day after day, in the rare manuscripts room. The massive silence; tables of very thin students with very bad posture; a page nested before Aaron, on a furrowed pillow on which he’d have loved to rest his own head. He tried to think how to tell Marisa what it was like to sit reading documents he was forbidden to lift or move, making notes with a pencil stub grooved with some unknown scholar’s tooth marks, until he was a coiled spring—until he felt that some mad idea was about to break in him like a wave and he would jump from his seat and follow it, whatever the consequences. A state at once intolerable and intoxicating. He searched for words that would be true and also acceptable to Marisa. There was nothing. Then abruptly his fingers sprang into urgent action on the keys, and he watched the words appear on the screen.
Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.
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