He planned to delete the sentence. He’d typed Helen’s words only to feel them out, like trying someone else’s gloves on his hands.
Then he knew that he would keep them, send them as his own.
If I read your last e-mail right, you’re nostalgic for London. Well, there’s a welcome waiting for you if you want it.
—A
He hit Send, watched the computer release his message into the void of the irretrievable.
Inside the rare manuscripts room, settling alone at the long table, he wearily regarded the pencils Library Patricia rolled onto the table. “No offense,” he said to her, giving her a smile, “but these are killing my knuckles.” He raised a hand and ruefully indicated the red-gray calluses left behind by yesterday’s work.
Library Patricia turned her dispassionate gaze to his shirt pocket, where a round pencil of his own was peeking out: contraband. With the slightest flicker of satisfaction on her impassive face, she plucked it from his chest and turned her back—leaving him to a faintly inked letter dated 1659 and three sharpened brown pencils, notched into painful hexagons, each no longer than his index finger.
“Hey!” he said, his indignation real this time.
She didn’t turn back.
“You flirt!” he muttered when her stodgy figure was out of earshot, and his own humor righted him.
He worked. The first letter was in Portuguese and he dispatched the translation within a half-hour, dry-gulping two ibuprofen as his temples began their daily throbbing.
March 18, 1665
2 Nisan, 5425
Amsterdam
To Rabbi HaCoen Mendes,
Surely you will not remember your undeserving pupil from so many years ago, yet I’ve not forgotten your tutelage in my youth. Your learning was ever a light to those privileged to study at your side, and your pupils spread that learning as mirrors multiply one candle and make it a thousand.
I am but an unimportant scholar in the kahal of Amsterdam, yet it is an abundant blessing to labor here in support of the great rabbis and to be asked to respond to a letter such as yours. You will be honored to know that the Rabbi Solomon de Oliveyra concurs with your methods for teaching Hebrew, and he refers you to his work on the subject, Sarsot Gablut, which perhaps you have not yet encountered. With regard to the other questions you posed, debate continues here regarding whether the messianic age comes in this year of 5425 or the coming year, yet whichever be true, the fervor of many here, including myself, rises. Even the Rabbis Aboab and Oliveyra have written prayers that are included in new books dedicated to the imminent coming. From the words of your letter, I understand that you and many in London have not yet woken to the coming of the Redeemer, yet I am told your city is hushed in contemplation of the portent seen in your night skies, as it is in our skies here in Amsterdam. Though I am unfit to persuade a learned man such as you, still must I try to impress upon you the import of a sign your eyes cannot behold. The significance of G-d’s bright beacon to our heavens cannot be mistaken. With eyes lifted to the hills,
Yacob Rodriguez
Aaron finished the translation and made notes on a separate pad. The involvement of Aboab and Oliveyra in the false-messiah hysteria was already well documented, but this was a nice piece of evidence regardless. Might be part of a paper one day.
He requested the next letter, this one with a somewhat earlier date, and after a break to stretch his legs and get a soda he sat back down to the new document.
March 13, 1665
26 Adar, 5425
Amsterdam
To Rabbi HaCoen Mendes,
Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca has received your report regarding the progress of the congregation’s return to tradition in London, which shall with G-d’s will prove favorable. Rabbi Aboab has instructed me to dispatch this reply to you, as his labors on behalf of our blessed community here in Amsterdam leave him little time for such correspondence.
You and I are not acquainted, yet I have been assured of your merits and your sufferings under the cursed Inquisition, and the long devotion you have shown in your work in London, such as will be rewarded in the world to come. I am, however, obliged to tell you that the new-formed Mahamad of London has already reported to us all that you describe in your recent letter, and now that the honored Rabbi Sasportas will soon be installed in the community we will of course be honored to receive such communications from him. You must not strain your health to produce such an account as you have given. Your age merits that you rest, and you may do so glad in the knowledge that your congregation’s esteemed leaders do all that is required. Benjamin HaLevy, whose name as you know is held in high respect, tells us of the Ets Haim house of Jewish learning lately founded in London with generous gifts by men such as himself, and he reports that he long ago removed his two sons from your tutelage and has set them to study there, to be examples to the community of the strength of the Council’s institution of Jewish learning.
Happy is the teacher whose students grow beyond his reach, so you are to be praised, for surely these two young men of Israel have learned all that you had to teach them.
On the matter of your inquiry as to whether we might publish a book of your teachings here in Amsterdam, I will say that of course we will be honored to do so if it is deemed suitable. You are aware, no doubt, that the London Mahamad, in its growing labors to safeguard the strength and virtue of the Jewish community of your city, has banned the publication of any work without its prior approval, but I am certain that when you show the Mahamad the work of your hand it will quickly approve its publication. I respectfully await word of your Mahamad’s authorization.
Lastly, in response to your question, I am asked to relate to you that all congress with the heretic de Spinoza is forever banned, and this ban is not subject to any limitation. The passage of time does not lessen the dangers of exchange with him, nor does it make him more likely to be persuaded of wisdom. He has left our city and our souls are eased for it. Rabbi Aboab has instructed me to make this matter clear.
In trust of the coming of the Redeemer, whose rumor reaches Amsterdam even now, and I a young man who trembles at the approach of Eternity,
Avner Ben-Samuel
Aaron finished the translation. The retort about Spinoza was an eye-catcher, of course. He wondered what Helen would make of that. Had someone—Aleph—wished to contact Spinoza, despite his excommunication for heresy? It seemed unlikely. Probably the rabbi, who might plausibly have taught Spinoza as a youth in Amsterdam before his apostasy, had wondered about the permissibility of dropping a line to his old student. In any event, this would make for another paper—any authentic document that mentioned Spinoza, even the thinnest reference, could be spun into a publication. It should have put Aaron in a good mood—yet he couldn’t deny that this letter irked him. Couldn’t Aboab or Oliveyra have at least done HaCoen Mendes the dignity of answering him personally? Or didn’t seventeenth-century rabbis believe in professional courtesy? It was no shock, of course, that HaCoen Mendes was being supplanted—the London community had, inevitably, organized itself, and had invited the acclaimed Rabbi Sasportas to be their synagogue’s first Haham. Their loss, thought Aaron. Within the year the great Sasportas would have fled the plague and London, never to return. London’s Jews would have done better to skip the celebrity rabbi and stick with someone like HaCoen Mendes.
He called up the next document by its code: RQ206. A few moments later, Patricia set it—a stack of six or seven handwritten pages—on the cushion in front of Aaron.
March 23, 1665
7 Nisan, 5425
To Daniel Lusitano,
My distress grows with every hour I meditate upon your letter. And so I hope you will forgive the crowding of one missive atop another, as my thoughts crowd like sheep at the pasture gate when a wolf prowls. In my own darkness I see perhaps too vivid a picture of the error that lies before your community in Florence. It is an error not only of soul but also of body, for they that muster for th
e next world before it has come can only betray their lives in this one. Long have I heard rumor of Sabbatai Zevi and yet I remained foolishly silent, and I can only rebuke myself that it has taken a new report of the threat from my beloved student to awaken me. What small help my thoughts may offer is ever at your disposal, and so I set forward the following additional arguments.
Aaron read on. HaCoen Mendes laid out his case patiently, if laboriously. Sabbatai Zevi was a pretender; the true Messiah, sent by the Almighty, would be recognizable by certain traits, among them a lack of ambition for earthly power. As Sabbatai Zevi declared himself Messiah among Jews from Smyrna to Salonika to Aleppo—and as his fame drew adherents in congregations throughout Europe—he was an increasingly dangerous manipulator of the people’s desperate hopes.
Aaron had read this sort of argument before, and found himself skimming. But when he reached the fourth page, he set down his pencil.
He’d seen cross-written documents before. It had been a common enough practice, where paper was scarce or expensive, for the writer of a seventeenth-century letter to complete one page, turn it upside down, and ink another full page between the lines already written. But he’d never seen a cross-written document like this. In its orientation on the cushion before him, the page of Portuguese offered itself first to his eye. Yet midway through the page another text rose up, sprouting between the lines like a counterargument arising from unknown depths. The page grew abruptly crowded, the rabbi’s Portuguese interspersed with another message, upside down. Aaron leaned closer. The upside-down writing was in Hebrew, with the exception of one line in English. It was Aleph’s familiar handwriting, yet different—the words slanting from haste or urgency. He turned the other pages as swiftly as he dared, scanning both texts, trying to understand what was before him. Two messages, Portuguese and Hebrew, proceeding in opposite directions, their logic converging and then separating, their conclusions farther and farther apart.
“Patricia,” he said.
She didn’t hear, or if she heard perhaps she wished him to announce his dependence more clearly.
“Patricia,” he called softly, the humility in his voice unfamiliar.
She came.
“Please.” He motioned impotently with his hands: invert the document.
She stared. After a moment she seemed to understand. She pulled cotton gloves from a pocket, lifted the pages, and resettled them efficiently on the angled cushion. As Aaron gripped the nub of a pencil and began transcribing the Hebrew, Patricia lingered a long moment at his shoulder—as if mesmerized herself by the urgent counterpoint of the two languages on the page.
Ignoring his burning knuckles, he copied out the Hebrew on the fourth page, searching it for meaning—it seemed to be the end of a declaration or confession, but of what nature and of what kinship to the Portuguese text he couldn’t say, nor could he guess the significance of the English quotation at its end. Some time later he had Patricia invert the letter so he could read, beginning to end, in Portuguese; then had her invert it again so he could read end to beginning in Hebrew. He rechecked his transcription, crossing out and adding notes.
Over and over he returned to the sixth and final page of the Portuguese letter. Below the rabbi’s sprawling signature and the initial of the scribe Aleph, was the word, decorated with a small and elegant scroll, Finis.
But turn the page upside down and, in the same elegant hand, the Hebrew read, Here I begin.
Here I begin.
I am one soul in a great city.
I am the hand that moves over the page.
The rabbi speaks. I write. This has been my task and my refuge. I scribe for a man not honored by those who ought honor him.
I would do him honor.
But I do not. Instead I pose questions forbidden to men, though I myself am blameless of violating the law.
The words that leave my hand are my life.
I’ve brought forth no other life in my days, and believe I shall not.
This day, Manuel HaLevy, a man of a temperament to use a folio of verse to wipe his boots, came to the rabbi’s study to scoff at his own brother’s cruel impressment onto an English ship. I have observed this HaLevy these years, and know the force of his contempt for all of more delicate temperament.
When I refused his offer of marriage, he asked me what I am.
I gave this answer: I am an empty vessel.
It is not so. I am a vessel that brims with desire.
I write. Were the truth known of what I have wrought in the rabbi’s place, I would be counted among the most wicked of souls. Yet forgiveness I do not ask. If it be the nature of God’s universe that our lives must be made false to remain true, then be my conscience clear and scoured as my heart.
Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain, for they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
As soon as Aaron had checked over his full translation, he stepped out of the rare manuscripts room and left a message on Helen’s telephone. Several minutes later he left another—then a third, feeling vexed to the point of madness, in which he read to her answering machine the first lines of the cross-writing. He was considering leaving a fourth when his phone rang.
“Mr. Levy?”
How long was it going to take for her to use his first name?
In his phone messages he’d said things that would have piqued any historian’s curiosity. Yet now Helen didn’t ask him a single question. She simply said, “I’ll meet you at my office.”
Walking across a series of narrow courtyards toward her office, weaving between drifting clumps of students, he took a moment to imagine Helen Watt as a child. No thank you, Mother, I prefer to wait and open my Christmas presents next month.
She wasn’t in her office when he arrived. He leaned on the wall beside her door, then after a time slid down to sit cross-legged on the floor of the empty hallway. He tugged his laptop out of his bag and opened it.
Aaron,
I don’t want to be in touch with you right now. Sorry to be abrupt, but I’m telling you directly to spare you the experience of sending e-mails into a void.
Marisa
The words made no sense. He read them again. He closed his eyes, opened them, and found the words still on the screen.
At the sound of Helen Watt’s cane he shut his laptop, stood, and mutely followed her into her office.
As she settled at her desk, and he into the wooden chair opposite, he thought for an instant that Helen looked unwell. Then, under her unblinking stare, he decided he’d imagined it.
“Tell me what you found,” she said.
He began his description of the cross-written document—and the act of speaking righted him. Marisa’s bewildering, eviscerating e-mail receded . . . surely it would make sense later. As he addressed Helen, the full force of his excitement returned to him. Two texts singing together in harmony—it was a work of art. It read almost like a poem, he told Helen Watt: a personal diary meted out in crisp lines that stood apart from one another like islands. Perhaps it was simply something scribbled by a seventeenth-century woman in a meditative moment—but it had the feeling of a coded message. Certainly it hinted at some intense human story behind this collection of documents . . . yet that closing quote, for which Aleph had switched to English, was from Shakespeare’s Richard II—Aaron had already checked it online. And that phrase about desire—he’d have wondered if it might be a reference to Spinoza’s Ethics, only Ethics wouldn’t be published for more than a decade after this was written. Still, what were they to make of this sort of philosophical language? Wasn’t such discourse banned to Jewish men, let alone women?
When he’d finished, Helen Watt said nothing. She was staring out the window, her face stony with some fierce inner focus.
He decided to wait out her silence. If she could act as though the earth hadn’t just shifted under their feet, so could he.
Then, the clock on her desk ticking with obstinate stupid slowness, he couldn’t. Som
ething had pricked a hole in his confidence. Marisa’s words flew back into his mind and lodged. How could he have so offended or disappointed her that she couldn’t even tolerate his e-mails? The very thought of Marisa was, abruptly, a body blow. He shook his head involuntarily, ignoring the sharp glance this drew from Helen Watt.
Who had still said nothing.
However disoriented he felt, Aaron was not confused—not in the least bit—about the document he’d seen today. Didn’t Helen understand what he’d discovered? All forms of diary were extraordinarily rare in early-modern Jewish communities. There was no Jewish Augustine, no Jewish Julian of Norwich. There was Leon of Modena, true; but the only known diary by a Jewish woman of the early modern period was that of tedious Glückel of Hameln, filled with moralistic pronouncements and details of dowries. Didn’t Helen see what they had in their hands? If there were more notes like this in the trove—more personal margin-scribblings or cross-writing, or maybe even a more coherent passage by Aleph in which she’d explain what the hell she’d meant by that cryptic counted among the most wicked of souls—maybe this could be the new Glückel, except without Glückel’s plangent materialism. A young, philosophy-dabbling, melodramatic Glückel; that’s what he’d write up for his dissertation.
“This could be the new Glückel,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“And combined with the information in HaCoen Mendes’s letter about a Sabbatean crisis in Florence . . .”
Still Helen refused to respond.
He continued sharply. “Florence being a community that’s been thought of until now as a fairly safe haven from Sabbateanism. Making this find doubly important.”
Helen inclined her head. “Correct on all counts.”
The Weight of Ink Page 24