The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Dusk. The river widened and curved before them in a great gray arc. Overhead, a first prickle of stars—faint, sickly. The veiled smudge of the comet.

  The boatman was bent to his task, his good hand grasping one oar, his claw-hand strapped with a leather thong to the other oar. Above the frayed nose cone of herbs that he wore against the distemper, his blue eyes rested now and again on Ester and Rivka—asking no questions, wanting no answers beyond the coins Ester had handed him, with the promise of the other half upon arrival.

  Not a single craft approached them on the water. How sparse was the river’s traffic now, compared to that spring day not four months earlier—Ester closed her mind against the memory.

  The boatman had warned, as he’d tucked her money into a pocket with his good hand, that if they were hailed and their papers demanded, he’d put them ashore and be gone. He’d insisted too on delaying departure until the afternoon sun had begun its descent. But they hadn’t been stopped—they hadn’t seen more than a few solitary oarsmen, greeting one another with low calls as they passed at a distance. London, it seemed, had finally grown porous from the death or defection of its guards; few were left to keep the sick in their pen.

  The river bent on ahead of them, broad and impassive, its destination hidden. Rivka sat in the stern of the small boat, her gaze fixed back at the water they’d traveled. They’d barely spoken since the church. When the ragged singing of hymns had ceased and the church had begun to empty of its small sated congregation, they’d made as one for the river, fleeing before some second thought of the vicar’s could recall them. How strange it was, having been carried to the church by a crowd, to emerge from it to an empty city—and how easy it seemed now to pass unseen. If London had once been a city of a thousand eyes, now those eyes had been all but extinguished, and two women could wend their way down street after street, past a hundred shuttered windows, without a single greeting or jeer.

  Here, Ester had murmured to Rivka, steering them down a narrow byway. Here. Down to the river she’d guided them with neither thought nor plan, pausing only briefly now and again to catch her breath—then leading on—here—here—to places where she’d once sought her brother. To a quay that had once shuddered with the sounds of men loading cargo—now forlorn, the tang of the tide heavy in the air. Down and down, to the shadowed lee of the bridge, Rivka following like a child. A moment’s rest against a stack of splintered crates; then she ducked behind a wooden shed and fell upon a dozing boatman—who woke with a gasp to a ghostly apparition, silver coins in her outstretched fist.

  Even in the fading light, the banks on either side were still verdant. The city’s glut of death hadn’t harmed a blade of their grasses. Ester watched them slip past. A soft breeze rose. The thought sounded in her like a single struck chime: if someone were to sing her a song, she would weep.

  Rivka was struggling in her low seat—only now did Ester note that something prevented her from sitting properly. Her chin tucked, her body angled carefully away from the boatman, she was working at the fastenings of her cloak, then her dress. For a moment Ester thought she’d resolved to disrobe and plunge into the deep waters, embracing at last a death she’d only deferred. Yet Ester was too numbed to do more than stare as, with effort and evident relief, Rivka worked a thick sheaf of papers from deep within her broad bodice. These were bent from the curve of her body—scores of pages, hundreds. Ester watched, uncomprehending. The innermost page bore a small dark stain on its upper edge. Blood, from the knife that had pierced Rivka’s skin.

  She gave the papers to Ester.

  For a moment Ester didn’t recognize the hand—slanted, flowing, precise. Then she saw it was her own. Rivka had salvaged everything—all the papers Ester had left beneath her mattress at the da Costa Mendes house. And only now did Ester look down and see a few slim books beside Rivka’s feet in the boat’s stern, already deposited there while Ester had been in her own reverie—just a small portion of the rabbi’s library, but more than Ester would have imagined Rivka could carry.

  All about them the green, living countryside slipped by. For some time Ester watched it. “Why?” she said at last.

  With her face still turned toward the water, Rivka shrugged.

  In the silence, the soft, deep pull of the oars was audible, and their quiet drip as they floated above the water. The boatman had lowered his nose cone, closed his eyes in the fresh evening air, and bent his head to the task, and his breathing rose and fell in rhythm with his motions.

  Abruptly Rivka turned, and the expression on her face was avid. “I needed him with me,” she said. “There.” In the church. Rivka had held the rabbi’s words to her heart. “God is near to the broken-hearted,” Rivka recited—and in Ester’s memory, the rabbi’s voice quietly finished the verse . . . those who are anguished in spirit.

  “I couldn’t carry the rest of his books,” Rivka said, “so I hid them. Behind bedsteads, behind a jib door. Perhaps some won’t be ruined by the thieves. But his own words are here, safe.” Rivka gestured at the papers in Ester’s hands. Then added, haltingly, “And yours, Ester. I may never understand what drove you to disagree with him, but if those letters were important enough that you’d lie to such a man, and he’d permit it . . .” Rivka stopped. The gaze she leveled at Ester was naked. “Something had to be saved. Those papers are yours.”

  A soft wind pressed the river, weighting the heavy tops of low trees on the banks, then releasing them. From either side came the calls of unfamiliar birds, their whistles sounding clearly across the water. Overhead the stars were clarifying, the comet growing more vivid. Ester looked at the sheaf in her hands. The ink that had shone blue-black when she first touched it to the page was now a dull, senselessly unfurling ribbon. How had its twists and turns so excited her—as though thought could possibly reshape the world?

  She held the sheaf above the dark, moving waters. It would take but an instant for the river to bleed the pages clean of the vanity with which she’d stained them.

  Without meaning to, she rested her eyes on the top page in her hands: a half-finished letter.

  The notion of God, then, may be simply another name for Universe, and it be a cold universe in which there is no preference for love over hatred, comfort over harm.

  The folly of her own words astonished her. She pulled the papers back from over the water, and read more, and as she read she saw the enormity of her blindness. In her arrogance and loneliness she’d thought she understood the world—yet its very essence had been missing from her own philosophy.

  The imperative—she whispered it to herself—to live. The universe was ruled by a force, and the force was life, and life, and life—a pulsing, commanding law of its own. The comet making its fiery passage across their sky didn’t signify divine displeasure, nor did it have anything to say of London’s sin; the comet’s light existed for the mere purpose of shining. It hurtled because the cosmos demanded it to hurtle. Just as the grass grew in order to grow. Just as the disfigured woman must defy Bescós, who’d consider her unfit for love; just as Ester herself had once, long ago, written because she had to write.

  She’d been wrong to think the universe cold, and only the human heart driven by desire. The universe itself was built of naught but desire, and desire was its sole living god.

  And desire itself, now, was what detained her from throwing the spent, misguided papers into the water: she simply wished—for one stubborn instant, and then another—to hold them. She sat in the belly of the boat with the pages held fast to her chest, while the boatman pulled his oars through the water’s sweet resistance, and birds she’d never heard before sang in bright piercing tones. She thought: I ought at least tell him. De Spinoza. A fish or tree was no god; yet the craving that flickered or surged or pulsed within it was.

  A simple letter. Perhaps she’d write one last, simple letter.

  It was nearly dark when they stepped out at the small splintered dock. As Rivka surveyed the dim meadows about them, Ester
paid the rest of her money into the boatman’s good hand and watched him pocket it and push off from shore without a word. For a moment he seemed to hesitate midcurrent: the free night air filling his nostrils, or the city and his livelihood? He dipped an oar and turned his boat for London.

  Above them, on a ridge of land a short distance from the river, the great house. There could be no mistaking it, even in this light. It rose formidable, walled and ornamented. A brick front, Manuel HaLevy had written, to make the Jew-haters forget they hate us and come polish our boots instead.

  They walked blindly through the meadow for a few moments before their feet found a winding path. It climbed gently through a stone gateway before branching, one part proceeding to the house, the other disappearing between two arches of pleached branches to gardens beyond. The grand house itself was a pale orange, with light stone carvings, three stories high; in the dark Ester made out deep eaves and soaring windows, a few of which glowed with the light of some lamp or hearth within. A house of unguessable depths and dimensions, whose proper upkeep would require a fleet of servants. Manuel HaLevy had been right: his father had issued a challenge made of brick and mortar, so solid none could deny its claim to a piece of England’s map.

  In the growing darkness, Rivka’s monumental figure—once more padded with the few books she’d salvaged—faltered.

  Stepping into the boat in London, Ester had told Rivka only that they were going to Manuel HaLevy’s estate. Rivka hadn’t questioned the plan, nor had she asked who at the estate might receive them or what Ester might do, should they be refused. Now, though, as Rivka registered the scale of the great house, she stopped walking.

  “Rivka,” Ester urged.

  In the dim light, defeat showed plainly on Rivka’s face. She gestured at herself: too ugly, too poor, too tarnished.

  Yet a moment later she resumed walking with the air of someone too depleted for skepticism—her defeat displaced, unaccountably, by trust.

  They climbed the remainder of the hill.

  She’d thought no further, in truth, than the grassy bank: stepping out of the boat, standing on a bed of green so soft it made her throat ache. But now a plan formed in Ester’s mind, and she steeled herself to follow it whether or not it had hope of success.

  It took both her bony hands to lift the knocker from the carved oak door. It bounced heavily on its metal plate: a dry, solemn sound.

  A shadow at a nearby window hesitated, then vanished. There was a long silence.

  At length, a servant carrying a candle opened the door. His silhouette was framed by the firelit hall behind him. His grayed head and sloped shoulders reminded Ester of a stuffed hawk she’d once seen in a shop: frayed and molting, its scowl undiminished.

  The man raised his candle toward Rivka, then Ester, not bothering to disguise his scrutiny. “From the city?” he said.

  Too late Ester realized she must wear the catastrophe on her very skin. She resisted the urge to raise a hand to her face to touch the scars left by her illness.

  “Papers of good health?” he said.

  “We’ve none,” said Ester.

  He stiffened and stepped back from the door, closing it further before speaking again through an opening no wider than his narrow face. “You’re not welcome.”

  She was about to insist that she knew his master, when from within the dim house came an indistinct call. Without another word the servant closed the door.

  A low rumble of voices. Then the door swung open, wider this time, and peering at them alongside the servant was Benjamin HaLevy himself.

  She’d long since grown accustomed to faces carved by grief. Still, the change in HaLevy was startling. Gone was the haughty merchant who’d stood in finery outside the synagogue, speaking with Mary’s father of tides and profits. Benjamin HaLevy wore the dark colors and torn collar of mourning, and though he stood in silence as he regarded them, his breaths were dreadful to behold: each a silent indictment. He had the look of a man in a labyrinth who has just tried the only remaining exit and found it blocked; she saw that the very walls of his house, indeed his very breathing body, were prison.

  A flinch of recognition. “You’re the one he wanted. Aren’t you? From the house of the rabbi.”

  She saw he could not speak Manuel’s name. “Yes,” she said.

  “Where is your rabbi?”

  “Dead, though not of plague.”

  He received this information without remark. His gaze on her face was pitiless. “Yet you’re scarred.”

  She allowed his gaze without turning away—knowing as she did so that she gambled. He might recoil from the marks of her suffering, or see them as cousin to his own.

  After a moment he turned from her to Rivka. Then, as though unable to resist staring at her scars, back again to Ester. “So,” he said at length. “You come here bringing the city’s pestilential air, to finish off what remains of the HaLevy name? You can’t wait for it to die of its own decay?” For a moment his voice rose as if with anger. But almost at the same instant something in him gave way; he no longer had enough faith in anger’s utility to pursue its course. He’d been defeated—not by her, but by his own impatience for this hour, this day, to be extinguished. Abruptly he motioned to his servant, murmuring, “Tonight they stay.”

  She’d always thought Benjamin HaLevy and Manuel alike in appearance—their stocky bodies and square-set faces, their green-brown eyes coolly evaluating the world. And now it seemed to her that in the father’s grief-stilled countenance she saw both faces, Benjamin’s and Manuel’s—twinned in their comprehension of death, as they once had been in their determination to take firm hold of life.

  “In the morning you go,” said HaLevy. Turning from them, he added, “Don’t eat from my plates.” To his servant he said, “Burn the sheets they sleep on.”

  The servant cast his eyes once more over Ester and Rivka—then glared at his master’s back.

  HaLevy disappeared from the doorway. Ester heard his tread ascending a stair.

  The servant stood with his arms folded. Rivka made a small, deliberate sound in her throat. Ester saw the two lock eyes. It would have been hard to say which looked at the other with greater haughtiness. Then, stepping aside to allow them entry, the servant called a maid to prepare their meal. He led them swiftly to the back of the house, bypassing a grand wooden staircase and rooms whose doorways offered glimpses of opulent furnishings. They followed, hurrying to match his pace, through a jib door and up one flight of a dim, twisting stair, into a maze of narrow passages—the hidden arteries through which the house’s servants circulated.

  The servant showed them to a windowless room with one narrow bed, upon which lay a pile of neatly folded bedding. He indicated a candle and striker, waited for Rivka to kindle a flame, then left, shutting the door behind him.

  The water basin was empty and layered with dust, the bed sheets clean but patched, the bedding thin. A metal chamber pot adorned a corner. There was no hearth.

  They sat side by side, listening to the house around them—its silence punctuated only by occasional footsteps that drew tantalizingly near before fading in distant passages. Some time later—a quarter hour? an hour?—Rivka opened the door to find food, left there unannounced: a basket of cold meats and dry bread, a small pail of water. There were no utensils or plates. They ate hungrily with their hands, then drank from the water and splashed their faces with what remained, and went to bed shoulder-to-shoulder on the hard cold bed, still dressed in the only clothing they had. Ester shivered, grateful for Rivka’s warmth beside her and her cloak thrown over both of them.

  She waited until Rivka was asleep and the house’s quiet had reached a deeper register. Then she stood, found the candle and striker, and lit the wick.

  The narrow passageway outside their door let into another longer hall, then a stair. She climbed, shadows stretching and looming at every turn. At the landing she hesitated, then made her way along another hall and turned again, the logic of the servan
ts’ passageways leading her to a jib door she felt certain let out onto the balcony overlooking the entrance hall two flights below.

  Swinging the jib door open, she let herself into a cavernous space. She could sense the high ceilings above her, the grand entry below swathed in a darkness upon which her candle made no impression. The air of the house felt immense and foreign.

  She stepped onto the balcony and touched the cool wooden rail. Making her way along it, she walked soundlessly to its end, then ventured a step into the blackness beyond. Another. And then a third, into a hall as broad as a thoroughfare, dimly illuminated at one end by rushlights. Turning toward these, she moved down the hall, past carved furnishings and heavy-framed artwork whose bulk she felt more than saw. She found herself before a wide carved door, its wood so dark it was nearly black.

  An instant; a last, shuddering thought of the path she’d walked to this moment.

  She knocked on the door, quietly—she trusted that he slept lightly, if at all.

  A moment. Then a slow tread—from his closet, through his bedchamber, to his sitting room. His voice was hoarse. “Who goes?”

  She didn’t speak.

  She could feel HaLevy straining to hear on the other side of the door. “Barton? Some trouble?”

  She knocked again, softly.

  He opened the door. The light of his candle fell on her—he registered her pale face—and he startled as though the apparition he saw were the very angel of death, come on silent feet to seize what little remained him. He shied from her, his candle raised as though it might protect him.

  “Por favor,” she said. He retreated farther—for a moment she thought he would close the door. Yet when she reached for him, he seemed unable to move. With the tips of her fingers she brushed, just barely, the weathered back of his once-powerful hand.