The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Ester, glancing up from rinsing butter, saw a look of sorrowful recognition on Rivka’s face, and realized that at last Rivka had forgiven London, and made the city her own.

  They sliced bread and spread it with a thick layer of butter—their new custom for the noon meal, for even Rivka could no longer bear to light a cooking fire in the day’s heat. But when they called Mary to eat, she was nowhere to be found.

  They searched the house, their voices calling her name plaintively into the cellar, the attic, the garden. She had disappeared.

  Hour by hour, without Mary’s fretful presence, the silence seemed to expand, until the house brimmed with a dreadful quiet that Ester and Rivka could break only in whispers.

  At dusk, the front door slipped open. Rivka, waiting beside Ester on the stiff parlor cushions Rivka rarely permitted herself, sprang from her seat and grabbed Mary’s arm, shoving the door closed behind her. “Where were you?”

  “No business of yours!” Mary cried, wresting free with a furious gesture. In order to cover her growing belly for her outing, Ester saw, Mary had altered a skirt using extra fabric snipped clumsily from her bedclothes. Mary was flushed, her eyes bright—a marked contrast to her dull expression of these past weeks. The excursion, Ester saw, had done her good.

  “The house’s errands are mine to do!” Rivka’s accent had thickened with emotion, her words barely intelligible. “Not yours. You should have sent me.”

  Mary, struggling in vain to release her arm, spoke with a repugnance long repressed. “You’re a liar! A greedy . . . thing! Just”—she gestured at Rivka—“look at you!” Carved on Mary’s face was a truth Ester hadn’t before guessed: that what Mary feared most was ugliness. All her life, prettiness had ever been her polestar and her safety. Now all protection was gone. She stood, belly jutting, forgotten. Facing Rivka like a creature from a nightmare.

  But Rivka laughed, and Ester was glad to see that Mary couldn’t hurt her.

  “You take all the freedom for yourself!” Mary pressed. “Or, no”—Mary pointed wildly—“you just want to escape this hell. That’s why you want to go into the city! It’s because you want to die.”

  Without warning Rivka seized Mary’s other shoulder and shook her, hard, so that Mary lost balance and was kept on her feet only by Rivka’s grip.

  For a moment the room was hushed, Mary’s face loose with disbelief.

  Rivka released her. “Stay in the house,” she said. “If you can’t be sensible for yourself, do it for that baby.”

  Mary snatched her arm away and, rubbing it with her opposite hand, cursed Rivka in nearly incoherent temper. But Rivka had turned for the stair.

  Minutes later, standing in the kitchen stuffing buttered bread into her mouth, Mary addressed Ester as if nothing had happened. “It’s all filth and horror in the streets, Ester. There are people wailing like—like ghosts, but more. Like they’ve lost their minds.” She stopped chewing suddenly, as though gripped by a pungent memory. Then she started chewing again, and Ester could almost see the energy surging up from her belly—an unthinking hunger for bread, drink, life. “I had to run past a dozen carts with bodies so I wouldn’t have to see—the first one I saw was vile enough. It took me hours to find someone who would send my letter to Thomas. And then the knave ruined my letter by spraying it with vinegar so it wouldn’t carry the distemper. I swore to him I’m not sick, but he wouldn’t heed. Now Thomas is going to think I stink to the heavens.”

  Lovely tears welled in her eyes. Ester watched, riveted. Could Mary still care about such a thing? “Why were you writing to him?” she asked.

  “I want him to know,” said Mary haughtily, wiping her eyes, “that I’m alive. And I’m going to come to him, once I acquire a permit to travel. Even if he despises me. He won’t despise me when I birth his baby.” She looked at Ester as though daring her to argue.

  The silence was broken by the distant clanging of a church bell. Mary bit her thumb at it. When the reverberations had ceased she drank again from her ale. “Do you remember,” she said to Ester, “that day at the dressmaker, when you asked whether our will alters anything?” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “And I told you,” Mary’s voice rose, “that I choose what I am?”

  Hesitant, Ester nodded.

  Mary’s fingertips circled: a gesture encompassing the deserted house, her own swelling body. She spoke at an unnatural pitch. “Yet I chose this.” Her face wrung with emotion. “So I was a fool.”

  “No,” Ester said slowly. “I was the fool. I tried to tell you that love could be refused. That one might live untouched by it.”

  But Mary shook her head. Tears coursed freely. “Did I ruin all, Ester? Tell me.”

  Ester hesitated. What words of consolation had she to offer, when even this instant she stood yet again in memory upon the rabbi’s threshold—watching John’s carriage depart, the sound of the wheels fading down the street?

  Closing her eyes, she imagined tapered fingers gently pressing keys on the spinet, dark hair turned silver—and heard the words of her own grandmother. She whispered them now to Mary. “It was the very shape of the world that made it so.” Then, as though gentling an animal, she set a tentative hand on Mary’s hair and stroked.

  When Mary at last pulled away, the bell had tolled twice more. She wiped her face. Then rose briskly. Her expression had righted itself. “Thomas will take me,” she declared. She turned on her heel and departed the kitchen, carrying with her a hunk of buttered bread.

  Alone in the kitchen, Ester listened to Mary move about upstairs. There was a current of life in Mary that Ester could no longer locate in herself. She thought: of all of us, Mary will be the one to live.

  But two days later, sweat ran in thin rivulets on Mary’s cheeks as she combed her hair, and she snapped angrily at Ester and Rivka when they called her for her supper, until at last she lay abed, panting. The fever she’d brought with her from her escape into the city shook her and drenched her pallet and she threw off her underclothes and shift and lay moaning in her nakedness, unwilling to tolerate a stitch of cloth upon her. She spread her hands on her taut belly as though consulting it, touching now and then the soft dark wool beneath, which stood out on her pale skin like the brush stroke of some forgotten tenderness. Ester, forbidden by Rivka in harshest terms to go nearer, stood at the foot of the bed and brought what necessities Rivka dictated—while Rivka herself washed Mary’s body and changed the soaked linens, and laid cool cloths on the small, secret hairs at the base of her neck, and all the while Mary cried and swam in the bed. She swore vengeance on Thomas, cursing his body’s parts with such epithets as Ester had never heard—and then spoke of those same parts again in terms of such endearment that Ester blushed and Rivka closed her eyes and fled to the garden to bow the flowering bushes with bucketfuls of Mary’s vomit. With her pretty face blooming in red patches where the blood spidered beneath her skin, Mary called first in English and then in Portuguese upon Thomas’s love for his son in her belly, and once she called, in a sweet and remorseful voice, “Mamãe.”

  She was certain, now, that the baby in her womb was a son. She knew that the boy had dark brown eyes. Then she knew he had a merry laugh and a fine voice for singing. Lying alone in her bed, hands locked on her belly or clutching the bed sheets, she could hear him singing, durme, durme, and she called for her father, for she was certain he’d be amazed at how high and sweet was the voice of his grandson. “Listen,” she called to him. “Only listen.” Then she fell silent herself, to hear.

  Outside, the sky was hooded and silent. A bell somewhere in the city rang for someone else’s death as they wheeled Mary’s body, on a cart for which they’d paid a sum that might have sustained a household for a week, to the mass grave at Hand Alley. As they dropped the cart’s railing to slide her down, Ester withheld her gaze from the other bodies. She kept her eyes instead on the pale moon of Mary’s face. On Mary’s lustrous black curls, as they slipped into the lime dust and were dulled.
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br />   Later, when they were locked back inside the house, the bell rang on, ceaseless this time, and all day and night they listened as a steady trickle of deaths became a clanging stream. A torrent. The bell rang that day until it broke and the city’s deaths poured into the earth unheralded.

  Three days later, Ester was slicing bread for their midday meal, the day’s heat making her fretful. The knife felt heavy, but she pressed on, thinking perhaps the blade was growing dull. Still the thick-crusted bread seemed to resist, the blade slipped, and she felt herself stumble. She caught herself on the table, and when she raised a hand to her neck, it rested on a single aching lump.

  Rivka was grimly ironing sheets in the parlor. As Ester left the kitchen to tell her, Mary was with her, and Manuel HaLevy too—and it was in their company that, obedient to Rivka’s furious commands, she climbed the stairs and lowered herself onto the mattress where Mary had died, to take her own turn.

  Why must man struggle to live, when he inevitably dies?

  Rivka’s hand on her forehead.

  Why is it a sin against God to wish for death—yet a virtue to choose to die in defense of God’s word? Is life a token, valued only for the thing it’s sacrificed for?

  Broth sliding down her chin, and a warm cloth at the back of her neck—she flung it across the room to be rid of it, for heat like this had never gripped her before. The evening slid and blurred. Night and then day, and then something that was neither.

  Yet the body insists on the struggle for life. Why?

  The world stretched wide about her. She could feel the spaces between things—the vast arching of infinity away from her lips, her brow, her breath . . . the distance separating her from the pinprick stars that must even now be shining somewhere far above London. She must tell the rabbi. But even as she merged into that great distance, she felt too the infinite smallness of every organ and vein—and every blood vessel in her, pulsing. She thought: Every living soul came into the world in infancy with wet bright eyes, blinking at motes. Every soul exited this same way. It was the damage that they wrought in between that she regretted. Her head shook slowly with regret. She stood lightly in John’s arms. Either of them could have pivoted away, but neither did. The lightest brush of his hand on her breast. With one hand she braced herself against his chest, and leaned, and then she fell—but there was none to catch her, and the long, sickening tumble was stopped only by Rivka’s rough hands on her bare body, rolling her back onto the mattress.

  She was once a tender girl. She is almost certain she remembers it.

  The circle is complete. In all the universe, she found one bright-seeming thing, and now she has lost it. Love didn’t fail, only one love did. But there can be no others. Has she tried too hard to remake the world? Her mind stumbles, it lacks the nimbleness to understand. And death shakes the ground like a heavy cart nearing, long overdue in its arrival, and her emptied heart brims suddenly with a wish to lie down beneath its wheels. She has fought to stay in the world until fate took life from her with a heavy hand. And only now that the time has come for her to die does she confess, weeping, how she’s longed for this release.

  She can believe, now, that some of the martyrs sang on the pyre.

  The thought confuses her. Is she permitted, at last, to wish for death?

  Permitted or not, she does.

  But as the cart nears, and its thunder overwhelms her senses and shakes the earth with her every heartbeat, her body wakes—and without her willing it, rolls itself just clear of the oncoming wheels.

  The thinning din of the receding cart leaves her grieving.

  She opened her eyes. A dim evening, the air inexplicably cool. A rough rime of salt on her face. She blinked into the lightless room, a first recognizable thought taking form. It hovered like a small nesting bird uncertain of its safety. Then, finally, it roosted: she understood that Rivka’s hands had gone. Rivka’s figure, hunched in a hard-backed chair in the shadowed corner opposite the bed, was motionless. Only when she spoke did Ester realize she was drunk. “You lived,” she said. “Most don’t.”

  Ester listened, as though the echo of these words might tell whether this was good or ill. Slowly, she raised herself to sitting. Then, when Rivka didn’t chide her, let her feet slide to the floor, the skin prickling with the touch of the wood.

  “How long?”

  “A week,” said Rivka. “More, maybe.” She waved the fingers of one hand toward the window. “Ask him. He knows, for he counts each day and each night he sleeps on our doorstep.”

  Holding to the edge of the bed, then to the wall, she stood. Her body felt too light—a stick bobbing in an eddy. She felt her way to the window.

  Below, seated on the broad stone in front of the door and leaning against it, was an unfamiliar figure in a broad-brimmed hat. The stranger appeared to be dozing.

  “He came a few days after we buried Mary,” said Rivka, who hadn’t moved from her seat. “We’re a registered plague house now, and not just because Mary’s friend painted our door. The city sends guards.”

  “How long?” Ester repeated stupidly, her tongue thick.

  “Forty days in all until a house can be reopened. He shouted his purpose up to the window the day he came, and they’re the only words he’s said all this time, except to tell me he wears that broad hat so we can’t drop a noose from our window and quietly hang him by his neck to make an escape. Into what? I asked him.” Her voice was loose, swimming with drink. Amid the vials and cloths arranged neatly on a side table was a dusty bottle with an ornate label—Ester guessed Rivka had pulled it from the da Costa Mendeses’ cellar at the breaking of Ester’s fever. “I told him”—Rivka continued, with a rough gesture toward the window—“the city is a worse demon now than the plague, and as far as I care he can guard us from it until the world turns to dust.”

  The journey from the bed had exhausted Ester. She grasped the windowsill.

  Lifting a glass to her lips, Rivka said, “And it has.”

  Ester raised her hand feebly to her brow. She could feel no trace of fever—only the salt from her fever sweats, which coated her body as though she were some new-birthed thing. “I lived,” she said.

  Rivka swallowed her drink, then closed her eyes. She sat, palms open on her knees, cheeks flushed, her face strangely animated.

  Slowly, as though thoughts might enter her mind only single file, Ester became aware that she’d never before seen Rivka rest. The endless labors of nursing had surely staved off Rivka’s grief for the rabbi. Now there was no one left to nurse.

  She didn’t know how to say to Rivka: I understand you’ve no home anymore. So she said only, “Better souls than I were taken.”

  Rivka inhaled steeply. “Death,” she said, “doesn’t take the ones who want it.” She opened her eyes and looked at Ester without accusation. “You wanted to die. I saw it.”

  In the dusky room she looked like something ancient and ponderous, a statue carved roughly out of a boulder.

  “I was young,” Rivka said quietly, “when the men came through my village. I was a girl.” And by the way she spoke the final word, Ester understood what had been done to her.

  Ester found the edge of the bed, and sat.

  “If I’d been offered the choice to die,” Rivka said, “my name would be among those of the martyrs.”

  Did Rivka still want to die? Then had Mary guessed aright, after all?

  “Did you know you were safe from the pestilence?” Ester asked.

  Rivka let out something like a laugh. She shook her head.

  Yet the very Polish village that had burned behind her seemed in truth to have offered her some protection that Ester and Mary had lacked. Rivka’s body alone had refused to sicken, though she’d offered it up at every chance.

  The room darkened with the oncoming dusk. Rivka’s close-set eyes were nearly lost to shadows when she spoke again. “Now you’ll be able to go on with those letters you write,” she said. And continued, more sharply. “About truth and
thought. About whatever all of it meant.”

  “You—”

  “I can read,” Rivka said.

  Over the rush of blood in her head, Ester could hear bitter amusement in Rivka’s voice. “You’re shocked.”

  The dim room swung about her and refused to steady.

  “I learned when I was young. Not much, not like you. But some.”

  “If you knew—”

  “I didn’t try to stop you, Ester, because he”—her voice softened, caressing the word—“he needed learning. It was the only light he had. And you were the only one with enough learning to bring him that light. Something in those letters made him muster his strength and sit upright. If I’d had enough learning, I would have done it. And without lies.” Briefly her voice rose. “I’d have lighted his vision. I’d—” She stopped.

  When she spoke again, her voice slid with drink and feeling. “And you sat there writing down his words only for your own purposes, caging his thoughts in a drawer to send to no one. An unfeeling creature.”

  “Not unfeeling,” Ester managed.

  “You believe you’re the only one who knows what it is to lose everything?” For a moment Ester entertained the notion that Rivka might stand and turn on her, strike down the very life she’d sustained through the fever. “Still,” said Rivka, “I didn’t stop you from doing it. And do you know why, Ester?” She wagged her head, then pronounced quietly, “He lived longer than he would have, because he thought someone in Florence needed his help.”

  “But he knew,” Ester said. “He told me, near the end. In all those letters he had me write, he was trying to correct my thinking, in his own way. Only”—she drew breath—“I wouldn’t be corrected.”

  Rivka absorbed this.

  Slowly the room settled into darkness.

  “He was the purest soul on this earth,” Rivka said.

  No candle, no light from the street. Ester had the sensation that neither she nor Rivka was real—that were she to try to locate her own body in the room, try to touch her own arm or leg or shoulder, she’d touch nothing.