Aaron stepped into Darcy’s office, but instead of sitting in his usual seat beneath Darcy’s towering bookshelves, he stood, his hands on the wooden back of the chair. “I’m having,” he said, “a bit of a hard time.”
His voice cracked on the final word. He felt himself on the cusp of a fatal error—yet unlike all the other times Aaron Levy had lost control, this time it wasn’t his temper that had driven him here, but a sense that he was made of something so brittle the slightest breeze could turn him to ash and it was essential that someone see before it was too late.
Sitting very still at his desk, Darcy offered a cautious smile. “Shakespeare treating you poorly?”
Aaron shook his head. It was a moment before he trusted himself to speak. “I seem to have made a mess of my life.”
A lone set of footsteps passed and faded in the hall outside Darcy’s office. “How irretrievable?” Darcy said.
He felt feverish; his throat was impossible. “I don’t know yet. I might need to take some time off. I think I’d like to write a dissertation with certain materials Helen Watt has found. Only I’m having trouble focusing, because of some personal things, and now . . .” He struggled. “Now I can’t find her,” he finished, knowing he wasn’t making sense, knowing he sounded like a boy who’d lost his mother in a department store.
“What do you mean, you can’t find her?” Darcy spoke sharply.
Aaron recalled, suddenly, that they were friends. “She hasn’t answered my calls.”
Darcy frowned and glanced at the clock. Then, pocketing his worry for later, he leaned forward. Forearms resting on the desk, hands steepled, he addressed Aaron. “I never advise making sudden changes,” he said slowly, “while one’s life is”—he gestured with one hand—“in flux.” The hand returned to its side of the steeple. He fell silent again, and Aaron saw he was trying to leave Aaron room to recover—backtrack, minimize what he’d said. But Aaron was silent.
“Perhaps,” said Darcy—and he looked up at Aaron from beneath a furrowed brow, as though he were struggling to communicate in an utterly foreign language—“you might consult with your rabbi?”
Aaron blinked—did Darcy know Aaron’s father was a rabbi? But of course Darcy didn’t know—Darcy was simply assuming, as the English did, that a Jew, no matter how secular, would naturally solve his problems through a Jewish solution, rather than see a psychologist like anyone else. Aaron could have been offended—but who was he to be offended at anyone else’s blind spots? He nodded—then nearly laughed as he realized, with a start, that it was Friday. And when he said to Darcy, who was looking alarmed, “Yes, I think I will,” attending Sabbath services seemed such a logical choice that he hesitated only a moment more . . . then rose, offered his thanks, and, to Darcy’s clear relief, made for the door.
The platform was already packed when he arrived. Some problem on the line had stalled the early evening commute. He waited amid a crush of Londoners of all shades and shapes—business-suited, turbaned, dyed, and pierced—packed together in restless silence.
It took nearly a half-hour for service to resume; once it had, six crammed trains passed before Aaron succeeded in boarding one. As his train started, he held to a pole, closed his eyes. For a moment, he imagined that Helen was somewhere on this car. She would make her way to him, size him up. Demand to know what he was doing outside the rare manuscripts room, when there was so much yet to be done.
The train lurched and rocked and reached its terrible speed—the tunnel blurring through the greasy window, each station a bright gift given, only to be wrested away. In the flickering light the strangers around Aaron were sculpted and beautiful, and in each face he read the reflection of all his own questions: Was Helen still alive? Was he, himself? Was there a world left, outside this tunnel, any longer? It was with unexpected relief that he gave himself over, hurtling amid strangers—palms bracing walls and poles and one another, the crowd rocking against his shoulders and back and arms—a hundred hands, living and dead.
When at last he stepped out onto Bayswater Road, he saw that it was evening, and that the afternoon’s thick clouds had made good on their promise. The streets were wet, the light fading; by now, surely a Reform synagogue would have concluded its services. Still, he made for the address he’d written on his notepad.
In all his time in London, Aaron had never so much as tried to visit the synagogue, though of course his parents had recommended it; but he’d had no interest in English Reform Judaism, an even stuffier variant of what he’d left behind at home. And now that Aaron was looking for the synagogue, he couldn’t find it. Three times he walked past the large yellow awning before he realized this was it. There was no sign labeling it as a synagogue, and in fact the burly security guards had at first appeared to be bouncers; he’d assumed the building was a club of some sort. It was the well-dressed middle-aged Jews exiting in twos and threes that made him stop and squint at the small sign inside the glass doors. Hebrew lettering. Three hundred and fifty years after Ester’s time, he thought numbly, and London’s Jews were still being careful not to stand out—though now the threat was not the garrote or the pyre, but bombs; and the grist wasn’t heresy, but Israel.
The security guards eyed Aaron, then nodded him in. Inside, a jowly man regarded him. “You’ve missed the service,” he said.
Aaron forced a smile. “May I at least look around?” he said, simply because it didn’t seem right to let the man dismiss him so readily.
A shrug: it was all the same to the man what Aaron did.
Aaron walked through the foyer and deeper into the building, pausing outside the wooden doors of the sanctuary to read a small plaque. This congregation was established in 1840, drawing its original membership from two sources: the Great Synagogue of London, an Ashkenazic congregation established in 1690 at Dukes Place; and the Bevis Marks synagogue, which was itself built in 1701 to house the growing congregation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had worshiped for much of the seventeenth century on Creechurch Lane.
Inside the doors, the sanctuary was large and surprisingly ornate. Colorful designs capped the ceiling; an organ was set into the back wall; a dome overshadowed the bima, where a few people were gathered—stragglers from the evening’s service, Aaron presumed. One of the side walls of the platform was a screen, behind which the synagogue choir surely stood unseen during the service: voices emanating from nowhere in anesthetized four-part harmony. He’d heard about English Reform congregations—Jewish services as High Victorian undertaking. In addition to a beadle, this congregation would have three top-hat-wearing wardens—he could see, at the front side of the sanctuary, the wooden box in which they must have been stationed during the service that had just ended, standing and sitting at the right moments in the prayers, the congregation following their lead.
Aaron walked halfway down an aisle, then settled into a seat on the end of a row: he’d sit just a moment, then leave. What better place for a rabbi’s son—one, he admitted, with father issues—to contemplate fatherhood? But one of the people at the bima—a young woman who wore a green headband and long skirt and looked like a university student—had turned and was beckoning him. “Don’t be shy,” she called.
She was too cheerful and informally dressed to fit with Aaron’s notion of English Reform services. In fact, most of those standing with her were young, and wore loose flowing skirts, casual slacks, even jeans. Some of them looked American.
“Just here to see the sanctuary,” he called.
“Join us for a bit, anyway,” the girl insisted with a summoning wave. “We’re an alternate service, we meet monthly. You’ll like it, we’re a bit more fun than the regular services here.”
Unable to think of an excuse not to, he stood. Shunning the upholstered pews, the group had arranged folding chairs in a circle near the bima, and as he settled into one near the girl with the headband, he saw that another member of the group—a bearded young man—was pulling a drum out of a cloth bag. A middle-aged m
an had a violin, and a woman with wild curly hair soon produced both a guitar and a flute. She—the woman with the guitar and flute—seemed to be the leader of this service. But so did the drummer, and so did the violinist, and so did the girl in the headband and two freckled teenage boys. With no fanfare beyond a round of smiles, they sang “Shalom Aleichem,” then a psalm in Hebrew, set to a tune Aaron vaguely recognized—the flute sounding the melody simply under the ornate dome. The whole service, it soon became clear, was to be sung. No sermon would be delivered in sermon-voice; no freighted pauses would be sculpted before each next solemn declaration. In the seats around him, some people swayed or sat with their eyes shut; some tapped rhythm with their hands on their metal seats. Aaron nearly laughed aloud. No wonder the wary fellow in the vestibule hadn’t thought this service worth mentioning—among the more old-school American Reform congregations this sort of service was still viewed askance; doubtless it went against the very DNA of the English Reform. The people on either side of Aaron seemed determined to wind as many harmonies around each melody as it could carry—or perhaps the harmonies were the main show and the melody was just along for the ride, but either way the sound was beautiful. Aaron himself had never believed in God. But whether or not these bright-faced people did, it was clear they believed in something they liked to sing about. Maybe they believed in singing. To Aaron, closing his eyes for a long moment amid the bed of voices, it seemed worth believing in.
Abruptly, the music stopped. Announcements. The woman with the curly hair gave the particulars of an upcoming dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. “Wherever you stand on Israel today,” the woman was saying, “whether you’re right or left or confused, we want to come together to grapple with these dilemmas.” Nods around the circle; someone spoke up to clarify the location of the event. Then the singing resumed. And it struck Aaron: history, the god he’d worshiped all his adult life, was the wrong god.
He’d always pitied those ensnared in the time periods he studied—people captured in resin, their fates sealed by their inability to see what was coming. The greatest curse, he’d thought, was to be stuck in one’s own time—and the greatest power was to see beyond its horizons. Studying history had given him the illusion of observing safely from outside the trap. Only that’s what the world was: a trap. The circumstances you were born to, the situations you found yourself in—to dodge that fray was impossible. And what you did within it was your life.
Hadn’t Helen tried to tell him so?
The singing ended. He watched the service-goers pack up their instruments under the absurdly ornamented dome and gather in clusters to share wine and challah. Neither synagogue nor prayer would ever be his thing. But it seemed to him nonetheless that the god these people had just prayed to was the present: a world in which they felt compelled to act, stepping into the history flowing right in front of their feet; making choices in the knowledge that they might fail.
Outside the synagogue, he dialed Library Patricia.
When he reached the stoop on Cranley Place, Patricia was fumbling with the key. She turned at his step, and let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you,” she said.
Inside the tidy, shadowed flat, a single softly glowing lamp.
Patricia called Helen’s name once, and then again.
Silence.
As they made their way through the rooms, Aaron touched each object he passed: the modest sofa and armchair, the low coffee table with its neat stack of journals, the wooden frame of Helen’s bedroom door. And he touched Patricia’s elbow to steady her as she swayed at the foot of the bed, in which Helen lay beneath her covers as though asleep.
When it was time to speak, he said to Patricia, “What do we need to do for her?”
It was late when he left Helen’s flat. He’d followed Patricia’s directives, obtained phone numbers, unlocked the door for the man from the funeral home. And while Patricia made calls he’d lingered over Helen: slight as a child under her plain white coverlet, her pale face eased into an expression of girlish peace. He’d pulled over a chair and sat by her bed, and with both hands had grasped and held, through the covers, the curve of her right foot, as though the touch might at last tell her what he wanted her to know: you’re not alone.
He’d lingered even after the man from the funeral home had taken over—but finally there was nothing left to do. Nowhere to go, it seemed, but home. It occurred to him that at an appropriate moment—perhaps tomorrow—he ought to tell Patricia Starling-Haight that Helen might have left valuable papers with Patricia Smith in the conservation lab.
In truth, with Helen gone Aaron found the existence of those last Richmond letters implausible. So desperately had Helen traded for that last folio that its contents now seemed synonymous with her life, and just as ephemeral.
But wherever the letters were, they now belonged to some unknown relatives of Helen’s. At the right time, Aaron would need to reach out to those relatives—or, better, have Darcy do it. With luck, Darcy might dissuade them from selling to a private collector who would restrict scholarly access. Regardless, Aaron knew better than to hope he’d ever get his hands on those letters again, except perhaps as a peripheral member of Wilton’s group. Maybe not even that. A postgraduate undone by his own dissertation could hardly expect to be trusted with such significant documents. He wasn’t sure he’d hire himself for the job.
As he zipped his jacket beside Helen’s front door, though, Patricia called his name. “This was on her kitchen table,” she said.
Into his hands she placed a thick folder. Taped to it, slightly askew, was a small white square of paper that said, in Helen’s shaky handwriting, For Aaron Levy.
Seeing he’d no words with which to respond, Patricia opened the door gently and let him out into the night.
He did not open the folder then, or on the train, or on the walk home, but held it to his chest until he’d reached his doorstep. He opened it there, his hands unsteady. Inside, a single sheet of lined paper was laid atop a folio he recognized instantly.
He read.
Dear Mr. Levy,
If you’re holding these pages, it’s because I’m no longer able to.
I’m not a sentimental person—a statement you’ll surely find unsurprising. Yet you should know that I did wish very much to work with you on these documents. Your receipt of this file, however, means that that could not happen. Nonetheless, I’ve made my decision about the fate of the documents in my absence.
Here is your dissertation.
These papers are yours now. I lied when I said the last were damaged. It seemed to me important to read them alone. When you arrive at the next-to-final page of Ester’s confession, please set it beside the letter from the Amsterdam Dotar. I’ve little doubt, Aaron, that you will recognize the repeated words. When you read them, think of our argument, please, concerning to whom this story belonged. You were very angry, and perhaps I returned your feelings in equal measure.
You were correct, Aaron, about who owns Ester’s history. But so was I, though I never dreamt of this possibility. Perhaps you’ll think the possibility remote. Certainly it is. But I feel I’ve earned the right, at this hour, to assert without proof that I believe it.
From the first, you recognized what a museum I’d made of my life. It would seem I found that insupportable. My apologies for my poor behavior.
Do what’s right with these papers. I trust you.
Helen
He entered his apartment. He turned on the lights, unsteadily prepared tea. He read Helen’s letter thrice more before opening the folio and beginning.
There you are, he said to Ester.
There you are.
Yet though I saw myself straying ever farther from the path laid before me, I cried out then and still: why say woman may not follow her nature if it lead her to think, for must not even the meanest beast follow its nature? And why forbid woman or man from questioning what we are taught, for is not intelligence holy?
The world and
I have sinned against each other.
He read each section slowly, and reread before moving on. He took notes, reflexively, on the single paper within reach—a grocery list he’d begun halfheartedly the night before, and abandoned after only three items. Below cereal and coffee and bread he filled the page with notes—transcribing phrases and even whole sentences, as though he didn’t trust these pages not to dissolve once he’d read them. He wrote blindly, barely lifting his eyes from Ester’s words.
Reaching the second-to-final page, he set his pen down, lifted Ester’s thick paper, and held it in his hands.
Constantina de Almanza Velasquez had a nature that might have flowered in other climes, yet she was neither born nor constituted to be a matron of the Amsterdam synagogue. She escaped the terrors of the Inquisition and came as a young bride to live amid Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews, who feared nothing so much as outspokenness, or any infraction that might visit upon them once more the troubles they’d fled in Portugal, a vale of blood and sorrow. My mother, who could not countenance being that thing she was to the priests of Lisbon, spent her days defying the elders of the Amsterdam community, her husband among them. Her spirit could not be bent, yet her rage found little purchase—and whilst I shall not enumerate her quarrels against her life, I witnessed much, and more did she confess to me. I chose never to reveal to my brother that one of her rebellions, unknown to any, led to his birth.
My mother’s nature was jailed in Amsterdam, and all her attempts at escape failed to free her. Had I the mercy of the world at my command, I would command it forgive her.
Though born in Lisbon in the house of her own mother and the man she called father, my mother did confide in me that she herself was conceived here in this England, in the city of London. Her true father, she did aver, was not her mother’s husband, nor any other Jew of Lisbon, but one Englishman of fine letters—a man bound in wedlock to another. My mother believed, or in her confusion and spite wished to believe, that the Englishman’s heart later misgave him and he spurned the woman he had loved and the child she bore. My mother averred that her own mother was a beauty to tempt away a man’s better angel, corrupting his saint to be a very devil, and she swore she herself would do the same when provoked, for men were faithless ever. The tale she told was mudded by time and drink and grievance. Yet despite all her fury, I heard in my mother’s words a different truth: that my grandmother and her beloved feared the wrath and reprisal of a world that forbade them from joining hands. That they bore this fate with dignity merely added to my mother’s rage. When my mother was but ten years of age, her own true father died without spurning all else to reunite with his beloved. This sin my mother never pardoned. For their love, my mother believed, was so great and capable of mending the broken world that its loss sundered all and could never be forgiven.
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