The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  So Ester Velasquez’s writing had stopped with the rabbi’s death.

  Aaron watched Conservation Patricia retreat to Librarian Patricia’s desk, where the two conferred, presumably comparing methods of beheading researchers who chewed gum.

  Had Ester died in the plague? According to Wilton’s paper, the parish records had noted the rabbi’s death—but there was no mention of any female Velasquez in either the plague year or the subsequent decade. Had Ester died an unrecorded death, in the most chaotic weeks of the plague? Or had she survived the plague to vanish into silence—her scholarly life extinguishing the moment the rabbi’s death ended her access to writing? Was the evidence of her own death to be found in the London registers of a later year . . . recorded, perhaps, under a married name?

  Aaron returned to the document on the cushion before him. They’d each read it a half dozen times. In truth, there was no justification for holding on to it all afternoon except the feeble wish to delay Wilton and his group from getting their hands on it. He stared again at the single word. Ahavti. I loved.

  Past tense. Whatever the nature of that love, it had been done with by the time Ester put quill to paper to slip that word between the lines of the household accounts.

  I loved, Aaron thought. The words made him feel old. He looked at the document before him. He felt an urge to remove it from its cradling cushion and rest his head in its place.

  Well, he thought numbly.

  Well.

  Perhaps Ester Velasquez had simply died an obscure death in London, either during or after the plague, as Wilton’s article had implied.

  But then, hadn’t Wilton seemed a bit too eager to brush off Ester’s story—a bit too preoccupied with the larger prize of Sabbatean Florence to have given Ester’s fate sufficient thought? What if Ester Velasquez’s death was absent from the London registers simply because it had occurred elsewhere?

  One phone call and twenty minutes later, he was on a bus to Richmond upon Thames. He’d made up an excuse for leaving the reading room early—no reason to raise Helen’s hopes until he had something concrete to show.

  He exited the station with the late-afternoon throng, walked the ten minutes up the hill to the building that housed the town hall and museum, and, through a warren of narrow bulletin-board-lined hallways, found the Local Studies office, where he was greeted by Anne—a girl younger than he’d guessed from her mature, professional manner over the phone. Yes, she had the records he’d requested. Yes, she could keep the office open another half-hour for him, as she’d promised on the telephone. The Local Studies office was supposed to be closing, but as she had work to do here anyway . . .

  As she spoke, she busily cleared a small area of table for him in the cluttered space. The room was large but crowded with shelves and tables, all laden with files. Visitors, he gathered, were sparse even during normal hours—his mere interest in the archive’s offerings was commendation enough to merit keeping the office open late. Still, Aaron also noted the furtive glances Anne stole as she arranged a workspace for him, and the way she fled his gaze when she addressed him. He was used to this sort of response—but he rarely took a second look at someone like Anne. Yet he paused now to do so. She wore no makeup, and her buttoned blouse offered only the slightest guess at the contours of her breasts. Returning to him once more, she wordlessly set a pad and pencil in his reach. Was this the way such girls flirted? It occurred to him that it might be; bewildered by sexuality, they wooed a man with their reliability.

  As he sat, Anne returned and silently deposited three thick volumes in front of him.

  How had he ever overlooked shy girls? It struck him that the fact that he wasn’t attracted to them just might represent a flaw in his character, not theirs.

  Seated at the table, three original seventeenth-century record books stacked before him, he considered for a moment his own proud record of acquisitions, and was startled. Could that be right? That he hadn’t so much as kissed a girl since Marisa? He scrolled through the past weeks—then on backward through the three months since she’d cut off contact, the five months since he’d seen her—and came up blank.

  In his distraction, he opened the topmost record book and turned its soft, thick pages. Parish register, Richmond, Surrey. It was the same sort of textured paper he’d grown accustomed to in the rare manuscripts room, only without the high security guarding it. No gloves here, no pencil stubs, no Patricia to hiss at him. Though it occurred to him, squinting across the large room at Anne—who was filing something in a cabinet and occasionally glancing in his direction—that Anne might be a nascent Patricia, given enough years.

  And, he thought with a pang, enough men with attitudes like his own.

  Columns of names, dates, deaths and births and marriages, all reasonably legible if you were used to the ornate curves of secretary hand.

  In the second book of records, he found the name HaLevy.

  September 4, 1666. Married. Manuel HaLevy of Richmond, to Ester Velasquez of Amsterdam.

  He sat back in the wooden chair.

  So she’d lived. And married.

  He ought to be delighted. Delighted for Ester that she’d survived the plague; and for himself—because now he knew how the documents had come to be deposited in Richmond. Ester, obviously, had brought them with her when she’d married . . . though in truth Aaron could hardly imagine what value a dowry of inked paper might hold for a man like Manuel HaLevy. The single reference to HaLevy in Ester’s writing had made clear the man’s disdain for learning. Was that why Ester had locked the papers away—to hide them from a husband who’d gladly have disposed of them in one of those broad stone hearths?

  She’d refused Manuel HaLevy vehemently, or so the cross-written letter implied. She’d seemed to find him or his views repugnant. But then she’d married him anyway.

  He tried to imagine Aleph leaving behind plague-stricken London to come here. He tried to imagine her being married in this village—married, in fact, while London burned behind her . . . because if he was remembering correctly, September 4th of 1666 was smack in the middle of the Great Fire of London. He tried to picture a festive occasion regardless—guests resigned or indifferent to the destruction happening just scant miles away. And Ester Velasquez under the marriage canopy, freed at last from the burden of all she’d once attempted. Had it been a relief?

  During the months he’d labored over her handwriting, he’d gradually formed a mental image of Ester Velasquez: petite, large-eyed, too skinny, pale with dark hair. Emily Dickinson, he realized with a jolt—with a slightly Jewish nose. Had she truly become mistress of the once-grand house on the rise above the river? He imagined her, her spidery letter aleph retired for good, making her rounds supervising the servants’ labors. Walking dozens of times each day past the expensively carved stairwell in which she’d entombed the brief budding of her intellectual and personal freedom. Perhaps she’d found moments here and there to unlock the cupboard and reread the papers, mementos of her lost liberty. Though perhaps she hadn’t—perhaps she’d found the rec­ord of her bygone opportunities too painful to visit.

  He shook off the thought. It was unlikely, wasn’t it, that he’d ever fathom the mindset of an obscure seventeenth-century English Jew. Ester Velasquez had lived, scribed a while—then, in the wake of the rabbi’s death, been saved by Manuel HaLevy’s offer of marriage. Perhaps she’d been content here in Richmond, perhaps not. No one would ever know. And in any event, it had nothing to do with him.

  He sat in the airless records room, a 334-year-old roster in his hands. It dawned on him that he’d been counting on Ester’s story not to fizzle out in some trivial, humdrum ending. Alongside Helen, he’d ignored the unpleasant fact that Wilton’s vision of Ester’s aptitude and temperament was the most likely one. Instead, he’d wanted Ester’s story to serve up something staggering: some triumphal parade showcasing the very qualities Aaron wished to see in his own reflection. He’d wished Ester to be independent, clever, indomitab
le, rebellious. He’d expected her story to serve as something unseemly: his own coronation. But in fact history was indifferent to him. It didn’t matter what he wanted.

  The world had simply closed over Ester Velasquez’s head. And it could just as easily close over Aaron’s.

  This should not have been news to him.

  In a rush of obscure panic, he searched the records for further news of Ester. Childbirth or death, perhaps both at once? He slid his finger down the lines, searching for her name, now wanting only the ending to the goddamn story that had gripped him all these months. Across the room, Anne was glancing reluctantly at the clock. He knew she was trying to delay, until the last possible moment, telling him he needed to leave. He turned pages; he’d made it through 1667, then 1668, 1669 . . . but the records were growing longer with every year, the population of the area apparently rising. Thus far he’d found no further mention of Ester HaLevy, though one Benjamin HaLevy, presumably Ester’s father-in-law, had died in 1667. There seemed to be no children so far, though perhaps in the 1670s?

  “I’m afraid it’s time,” Anne said. She was standing beside his table, one hand, with its trimmed-to-the-quick nails, resting tentatively on the back of an empty chair.

  He offered her a humble smile. “I wonder if I couldn’t go through just a few more pages?”

  “No,” she said simply. “Sorry.”

  Small wonder he couldn’t get anywhere with the Patricias; even in their youth they respected the importance of limits. He packed up his notes. Preceding Anne down the series of corridors and stairs, her quiet tread trailing him, he wanted to turn and compliment her—yet though he meant it sincerely, he could think of no way to say it without sounding sarcastic: you’ll go far.

  On the street he hesitated. He wasn’t ready to return to the bus station, but didn’t know where else to go. Anne, who had locked and tested the main door, now descended the building’s stone steps and started for the main street—but seemed to hesitate as well.

  “If there’s any other way I can help?” she said.

  Her blue eyes were clear and lovely. He paused to curse a world that might never offer such a girl romance, or whatever it was she dreamt of. And he had a sudden, intolerable feeling that the shape of that world just might be his fault.

  “Thanks anyway,” he said. “It’s just—I’m trying to find out when someone died.”

  She waited.

  “It’s 1670 or later,” he said. “Ester HaLevy.”

  Nodding, she took out a notepad and wrote down the name. Then, with a slight flush, Aaron’s mobile number. “I’ll have a look for you.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Truly.”

  She turned and disappeared into the steady foot traffic.

  The afternoon had turned to evening. All around him, English people were returning to their homes. But in an instant the foreignness of living abroad, which had sustained Aaron all these months, had lost its magic—and he saw how his new, exotic existence had allowed him to ignore the isolation that was the bedrock of his life, whether in England or in the United States. He, unlike these strangers striding with their briefcases and packages up the long, curving hill, had no one to go home to.

  Some candle inside him was dangerously close to guttering. A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn’t what you thought it was.

  He fought back. So what if Ester had married Manuel HaLevy? It wasn’t necessarily a defeat. At least she’d escaped the plague. And who knew that she didn’t eventually fall in love with HaLevy, however much of a cretin the guy initially seemed? That, he resolved, was what he’d tell Helen Watt—for suddenly, maddening though Helen could be, he wanted to give her the gift of a gentle ending. Look, he’d tell her. Puppy love blossoming out of disdain. Ester decided to marry the guy she once despised.

  Helen wouldn’t be fooled for an instant. Ester—Aleph—could not have wished to marry a man with no patience for learning.

  Through a break in the trees he stared down miserably at the mute river. Then, to his own surprise, he turned uphill rather than back down toward the station. He’d buy himself a beer at Prospero’s.

  But he didn’t.

  Bridgette answered the door. It seemed to take her a moment to place him. A small, wry smile formed on her face. She stood there for a long time, smiling. So long, he began to feel foolish.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Still curious?” she said.

  He said, “A bit.” Then added—a beat too late—“About the house.”

  That was what he meant. It was what he thought he meant. He’d turned off the street and walked up the narrow path across the Eastons’ newly manicured front garden because he thought, somehow, that seeing the house once more might help him gain some still-elusive understanding of Ester Velasquez’s choice.

  “By all means, then,” she said, “come see the house.”

  He wasn’t sure whether to join her laughter.

  Inside, all was quiet. He understood immediately that Ian wasn’t at home. The high ceiling was lost in the dim evening light, and there was a smell of recent construction—plaster and paint. Bridgette flipped a wall switch as she passed him, and tiny spotlights illuminated the canvases lining the walls: abstract images lurid against the dark-stained, elaborately carved paneling. Through a doorway to the right, a smaller room featured a menagerie of torqued still lifes—flowers and fruits distorted in some unsettling way Aaron couldn’t have named. Carved on the lintel over the doorway between the two rooms, like sentinels of the seventeenth century watching over what the Eastons had wrought, were two cherubs Aaron hadn’t noticed before: expressive creatures of dark polished wood, their heads inclined as though regarding with curiosity all who passed below them. Their faces were lit with a conspiratorial amusement recognizable despite the centuries since it had been carved there.

  The elaborate woodwork, the unsettling art, the high ceilings, the stark light from the mullioned windows . . . Aaron had to admit that the juxtaposition (he could almost hear the word in Helen’s flinty voice) was effective. The whole thing felt jarring in a way that wasn’t necessarily bad, though he didn’t know if it was good either. If viewers wanted visual tension, here it was. Speaking personally, it made his teeth hurt.

  “Do you like it?” Bridgette said. “We open next week. Working to square renovation priorities has been a bit”—her face took on a hard expression, and he understood that Bridgette was in a dangerous mood—“intense.”

  He moved through the hall, pretending to look at the paintings and nodding with what he hoped was a thoughtful, approving mien. But all the while he was working his way toward the shadowed stairwell.

  “We closed it up,” she said flatly.

  Dropping pretense and crossing directly to the base of the stairs, he saw that indeed the stairwell had been closed, the dark panel with the keyhole patched. The carpenter had done a good job. From a distance, the repair was undetectable.

  Bridgette was watching. Had she noticed the sharp sting he felt at seeing the now-empty staircase so readily resealed? For it seemed to him that the staircase had itself become an exhibit in the Eastons’ gallery: one demonstrating how inconsequential, finally, were someone else’s passion and defeat.

  “A drink?” Bridgette said.

  He nodded vaguely, which seemed to amuse her. She turned, opened a pocket door between two paintings—Aaron noted that the narrow door bore a small, elegant sign that read Private Area—and disappeared through it. He could hear her moving away along what must have been an old servant’s passage. Her footsteps faded; there was a distant sound like a heavy door closing.

  Minutes passed. He stood beside the stairwell, the stilled heart of the house. The building echoed with silence; he could hear it breathing, moving, coursing from room to room like oxygen through a body. A three-hundred-year-old silence.

  Sermon-quiet, he thought—but before he could traverse the worn mental path
toward ruing the self-importance of his father’s profession, he made himself admit it: he’d never gotten the rabbi thing out of his system. All his life he’d wanted to be what his father was—a devotee venerated for his humble devotion; a man standing in the middle, in thrall to something larger while others were in thrall to him.

  That he’d failed to measure up to even his father’s standard now seemed patently obvious. Aaron Levy lacked the gravitas to be a conduit for the wisdom of history. He’d thought he loved history; in truth, he couldn’t even see history.

  An uncomfortable question floated back to him. What was that story Marisa had told about her gay brother? He’d paid little attention at the time, focusing instead on calibrating the impression he was making on Marisa. But now the conversation returned to him like a thread unspooling. The brother was a jock, girls followed him everywhere; the brother never told anyone except Marisa, who would do reconnaissance for him, spying on boys he liked so he might run into them by accident, get a chance to at least talk. Later some asshole outed him and his life turned to shit in a couple weeks; he barely survived the depression. Even our grandmother, who’d lived through Bergen-Belsen, just pretended it wasn’t happening. Marisa had spoken levelly, slowly. It almost killed my brother. And I kept saying: Danny, why don’t you let yourself be free? But he was too ashamed. So I decided I had to be free. Despite the beer in her hand, Marisa’s eyes had rested steadily on Aaron’s. People go through life trying to please some audience. But once you realize there’s no audience, life is simple. It’s just doing what you know in your gut is right.