The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  There was a creak from the wooden chair: Rivka had stirred. “I didn’t understand most of what you wrote,” Rivka said. “But enough. I knew the words hurt him. And I also saw”—her voice arched, incredulous—“that you loved him. I saw that his letters to Florence hurt you.”

  Ester bowed her head.

  “Even knowing you deceived him, he poured the last of his energies into your deception. Why, Ester? What was so important in your letters?”

  Ester had no answer. She sat a long while in the dark. Then she said, “I don’t believe I’ll be writing anymore.”

  Only reluctantly did strength return to her body. Dizziness forced her readily back to bed. Five days after her fever had broken, she was able at last to stand without support and, gathering herself at a window overlooking the garden, unlatch and push open the heavy frame. The sunlight blazed in her eyes, the world swam. She knew the day was warm, yet her body seemed to have forgotten how to absorb warmth.

  In the garden below, Rivka set down a full washtub, rested a moment, then upended it and stood watching a moment as the dark rivulets sank into the soil. She can read, Ester thought. In her pride, she’d been blinder than the rabbi—and now she saw how thin a divide had separated her from Rivka’s fate. Had Rivka had the gift of just a few years’ more education—had she been tutored in the necessary languages—then she, rather than Ester, might have scribed for the rabbi. Rivka would have sat in the warm front room, at the rabbi’s table—doing his bidding without wronging him. And Ester would have labored at running the household, until a marriage to Manuel HaLevy would have seemed a very heaven.

  And yet how strange it now seemed, her fervent pursuit of study against all obstacles, as though she couldn’t live without the ability to write. Illness had proved more persuasive than any teacher; her old ideas, if she could recall them, seemed paltry, hollow things. She dozed and woke atop her mattress with hardly a thought of the papers lying untouched beneath.

  How wrong she’d been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself . . . and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Ester now saw that thought proved nothing. Had Descartes, near his own death, come at last to see his folly? The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body—and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn. Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink. And every thin breath she drew told her which ruled her.

  25

  April 6, 2001

  London

  In the airless confines of the parish records office, Helen inched the cotton gloves back onto her hands. The fact that the records room was now requiring gloves had proved an unpleasant surprise. The gloves thickened her fingers hopelessly, so that every page turn required multiple attempts; worse, they rendered her unable to grip a pencil, so each note she jotted in her notebook meant long wasted minutes as she labored to remove her right glove, then put it on once more. The exertion worsened her tremor; at times, fearful of damaging the paper, she forced herself to suspend her work until it eased.

  She’d woken that morning disoriented from a night of dreams piled one upon the other: a glimmering black well that repelled and drew her; the sensation of relinquishing some precious burden she’d carried; a crushing, absolute silence, in which not even her own racing heart was audible. Rising with a start after oversleeping, she’d skipped breakfast, telling herself she’d go directly to the parish records office, then drive to the university and eat in her office, away from prying eyes.

  A thoughtless plan, and unlike her.

  Her stomach growled again, loud and low. The middle-aged man working at the other end of the long table issued a reprimand in the form of a small, dry cough.

  She squared herself, and faced off once more with the record book. Names and dates of decease blurred before her eyes. John Williamson, dead of plague 5th July, 1665. Below John Williamson’s name were dozens of others from the same day, all meticulously noted in the careful slanted hand of some anonymous parish clerk. With difficulty, she turned another page. No trace yet of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes, but she knew she’d find him here. She could simply have taken Wilton’s word for the rabbi’s death date, of course; yet she’d felt she owed it to Rabbi HaCoen Mendes to do this herself, accompanying him to the very final words of his story: a single line of ink hidden somewhere here, amid this infinite roster of expired souls.

  When she thought about Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s life, she felt at peace. It was the absence of a single written word in the wake of Ester Velasquez’s marriage that refused, somehow, to nest peaceably in Helen’s mind. She’d counted on Ester’s obstinacy to vanquish all: loss, terror, death. She’d needed Ester’s voice to endure.

  In order to believe that she herself could.

  With a shudder now, Helen recalled the abrupt, unanswerable silence that had haunted last night’s dreams.

  How great a weight she’d rested on what had never been more than an instinct.

  Back in November on that last afternoon in Richmond, with Aaron vanished on one of his breaks and the snow falling thinly on the path outside, and the hours winding down to the moment when the Sotheby’s assessor would arrive, Helen had stood from her seat and—following a feeling as steady and sure as the beam of a torch—climbed quietly and with effort up the great staircase. Treading softly, she’d surveyed the second floor—a scattering of small rooms, jib doors leading to servant staircases; and then, on opposite sides of the central gallery, two full sets of rooms in grand seventeenth-century style. The first set, closer to the staircase, was clearly in use by the Eastons—the faint sound of running water told her the original seventeenth-century closet had been turned into a bath. Farther along the upstairs gallery was the second set—a large chamber leading into a second, smaller one, and the second into the third: anteroom to bedchamber to closet, like nested boxes. The last and smallest room—the wood-paneled closet—was cluttered with the Eastons’ boxes. Still obeying that same wordless feeling, Helen had picked her way past these to the single window, with its blackened metal lever jutting like a crowbar. Through the narrow panes, which had surely once offered a view of orderly gardens, she could see tangled vines, the neighbors’ rooftops, and a patch of slow-winding river. Helen lingered here a while, for no reason she could explain to herself, watching the river through the uneven glass.

  She’d just retreated to the central gallery when she heard a tread on the stair. She should’ve guessed, of course, that Aaron Levy would be unable to resist the lure of defying Helen’s explicit orders. Stepping behind a column, she watched him crest the landing, stop in the upper gallery, and stare: at the carvings on the lintels, the shadowed heights of the ceiling. With a jolt she’d realized that Aaron Levy’s face held the same reverence as had her own only moments earlier—the same astonishment at the simple fact that this was here . . . that a place like this should have survived . . . and that he, Aaron Levy, had the great good fortune to stand in its cavernous embrace.

  A strange fascination overtook Helen, then, as she watched Aaron Levy try, one after another, the doors Helen herself had already opened. A moment later she’d been startled to hear Bridgette’s voice, and then, Aaron’s parry. Even from where Helen stood, around the corner and unable to see into the room where Bridgette was, the electricity between Aaron and Bridgette had been unmistakable.

  Her own quiet tread, as she retreated to a jib door, didn’t break the spell of their mutual enticement. She’d half-stumbled down the twisting staircase, a dreadful, chastened feeling in the pit of her stomach, her bony hands gripping the rail to prevent her fall. And some voice telling her she’d failed to understand something about life. Only her immersion in the documents had saved her from her confusion, and she’d returned to them with a ferocity that almost comforted her.

  She roused herself: her watch read twelve-forty. Her hunger was nearly intolerable, her innards protesting at increasing volume. She
was due in Jonathan Martin’s office at two o’clock for what Penelope Babcock had referred to as the standard pre-retirement sendoff. Personally, Helen would have liked nothing more than to conclude her decades of service without Jonathan Martin’s fare-thee-well. But even at this late date, she wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize her or Aaron’s access to the documents for the remainder of the term. She’d go to Martin’s bloody patronizing sendoff, stopping first in her office to fortify herself with the crackers and soda water she kept there.

  Her gloved finger juddering down the column of names, she scanned for HaCoen Mendes. And her finger stopped at a name that had no business being there.

  Manuel HaLevy, of plague, July 6, 1665.

  “Pardon me.” It was the archivist. Helen’s gaze swam upward. At length her eyes found him, haloed against the fluorescent bulbs. “It’s been brought to my attention,” he said—she noted he did not lower his voice to protect her privacy—“that your handling of the documents is inconsistent with our standards. I need to ask you to leave, and return when you’ve found someone to assist you in handling these records.”

  She looked away from the blinding light, down at the inked pages before her. She nodded into the list of deaths.

  On the steps to the street she withdrew her mobile from her bag with shaking hands and, with difficulty, dialed Aaron’s number. Ignoring the hesitant note in his greeting, she said, “I need you to check something for me.”

  “I’m at home,” Aaron said.

  It hadn’t occurred to her that he could be at home. “Why aren’t you at the manuscripts room?”

  “I needed a day off.” There was something strange in his manner. He didn’t seem to care what she thought of his answer.

  “I’ve just found a death record for Manuel HaLevy,” she said. “And it’s in the summer of 1665.”

  He seemed to wake slowly to this information. “But they were married in 1666.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Exactly. How long will it take you to get to the rare manuscripts room?”

  There was a long silence.

  What on earth was preventing Aaron Levy from jumping to the chase? It occurred to her to ask just what had happened to him the other day in her office. But she was familiar enough with her own shortcomings to guess that her words would be too blunt, likely to slam a door rather than open it.

  Aaron, for his part, seemed to feel no obligation to fill the silence on the phone line.

  Never mind: there was just enough time, if Helen omitted the stop at her office, to do it herself. “I’ll go to the rare manuscripts room and recheck Ester’s references to him,” she said. “Perhaps there’s some other detail there—something to differentiate the Manuel HaLevy she married from the one who died. I’ve a meeting with Martin at two o’clock. Can you meet me in my office at three?”

  “All right.” He seemed to be processing information very slowly. “I can call Richmond Local Studies, to verify the marriage date.” Another long pause. “Do you think there might have been more than one Manuel HaLevy?”

  “No,” she said. “Though we need to consider it a possibility. Also, the death record might be an error. One-fifth of the population of London died in that year. Surely mistakes happened.” Only she didn’t believe this was a mistake. She believed she and Aaron had gone wrong somewhere farther back up the trail.

  She hardly was aware of getting into her car, driving, parking. In her absorption she noted only that the city seemed unaccountably miniaturized. She parked her car and locked it, and walked toward the library building with her head strangely abuzz, a smell like ammonia in her nostrils rendering her light and lofty.

  Only when she’d entered the building, and the doors of the lift had enclosed her, did she note how her body was quaking. Not only her hands, this time, but her legs as well. She gripped the handrail, but it felt flimsy. The walls of the lift slid up and up around her, slow but unstoppable, then—abruptly—twisted as though readying to drop down on her for good. Standing was out of the question. Her knees hit the floor of the lift hard, and she let out a cry in a voice that wasn’t her own. She’d dropped her cane—it lay out of reach—and still the walls seemed to rise and turn, stretching dangerously. So swiftly did the world upend, with no time for appeal. The floor of the lift was her god, and she clung to it as though she might fall off, for although it was bearing her higher, she herself was sinking. She was aware vaguely that her need to use the loo couldn’t be delayed, and like a little girl she looked into the veil of dim air above her for permission. A warm stain and then cold, blooming on her skirt and stockings, leaking into her shoes.

  The doors of the lift slid apart.

  Ahead of her, in the amber light of the atrium, the student manning the security desk was intent on his computer screen.

  The lift stood open.

  She steadied the sole of one shoe on the floor, then the other. With her outstretched fingertips she found her cane. She reached into the infinity above her for the handrail, and grasped it. Slowly she stood, one shoe plashing in a small puddle of urine on the lift’s floor.

  The student at the security desk looked up. For a moment he looked uncertainly at her. Then he turned back to his screen.

  With shaking hands, she pulled her card from her wallet, presented it to him, and swept through the turnstile without looking to either side, not allowing herself to see whether or not he noticed the dark stains on her clothing. Stiffly she made her way into the rare manuscripts room, the fabric of her skirt and stockings soaked. She shut the door silently behind her, and walked as straight-backed as she could past the students bent over their work, to the circulation desk.

  “Patricia,” she said.

  Patricia Starling-Haight looked up. “Yes?” she said after a moment.

  Helen closed her eyes. She stood mute before the desk, her head impossibly high.

  Seconds passed. Then Patricia was standing beside her, her librarian’s voice a crisp whisper. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”

  “No,” Helen said. “I need . . .” She gestured; she couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes. “To clean up. And . . .” She licked her cracked lips. “I believe I need something to eat.”

  Only when she felt Patricia’s arm tuck securely under hers did Helen open her eyes, and let herself be led. Turning their backs to the reading room, Patricia Starling-Haight steered Helen swiftly out a wooden door behind her desk. The narrow hall they entered was congested with laden carts. A pale young woman sorting binders looked up curiously. “Is there a problem, Elizabeth?” Patricia snapped, and the woman’s face pinked as she returned to her appointed tasks. Patricia stopped them at a small cabinet, in which she rummaged a moment before pressing something to Helen’s hand: a nut bar. “Open it in here,” Patricia instructed, and guided Helen into a cavernous freight lift: a great, hollow, weather-beaten box. The doors closed on them.

  With a soft, wordless sound, Helen handed the bar to Patricia, who unwrapped it briskly and put it back in Helen’s palm.

  Helen ate. Patricia watched in silence as crumbs rained to the metal floor.

  When she was able to speak, Helen said, “What time is it?”

  “A quarter past one.”

  “I have a meeting,” Helen managed, “at two o’clock.”

  Patricia’s face was somewhere above Helen, hidden from view. “And precisely what,” she snapped, “do you find more important than minding your health?”

  Helen straightened and looked into Patricia’s face. “My last meeting with Jonathan Martin before I retire,” she said.

  Patricia’s expression darkened. But her hand, which had been hovering over a button for a lower floor, hesitated—then swept decisively upward. The lift lurched and began to rise.

  In the enclosed space, Helen was aware of the odor of urine emanating from her, filling the lift. If it offended Patricia, though, she didn’t permit it to show.

  “Where do you live?” Patricia said.

  Helen tol
d her the address.

  “Give me the keys to your flat.”

  She did so, fumbling, keeping her eyes fixed on Patricia. It was impossible to speak her gratitude as Patricia pocketed the keys. But Patricia Starling-Haight only glanced at her watch, and Helen saw that the librarian was going to do her the dignity of not allowing Helen’s predicament to make a ripple in her impatience.

  The doors opened into a space as brightly lit as heaven—so bright Helen nearly fell back. But Patricia ushered her forward. The conservation lab was spacious and clean—the sort of stark, white-on-white workroom where technicians might assemble a spacecraft. Patricia Starling-Haight steered Helen toward a table in the far corner where Patricia Smith perched on a stool, tweezers in hand—her spare frame bent over a tray beneath the glare of a goose-necked lamp, her red-brown hair tied back as severely as ever. The tray, Helen saw, contained small fragments of paper. Beside it on the table, arrayed like a surgeon’s tools, were labeled dropper-bottles and a variety of needles and fine threads; on a nearby table was a glass chamber that reminded Helen of old fairy-tale-book pictures of Snow White’s coffin: a well-lit transparent bubble.

  From Helen’s elbow, Patricia Starling-Haight said, “Jonathan Martin is expecting Professor Watt at two o’clock for an exit interview.”

  Patricia Smith, confused, glanced up at the clock; then at Helen.

  Patricia Starling-Haight continued, slowing her words for emphasis. “I have always believed that one deals with such men only, and always, with one’s dignity intact.”

  The two Patricias looked at each other. Then Patricia Smith nudged restlessly at the goose-necked lamp and, with barely a glance at Helen, gestured her toward a stool. “Professor Watt,” she said. “Make yourself comfortable.” To Patricia Starling-Haight she said only, “I’ll mind the rare manuscripts room for you.”