“Vidui,” he said.
Were the world not so altered, Sasportas or some other respected man of the synagogue would receive the rabbi’s confession. And wouldn’t it be better for the rabbi not to confess at all, rather than have one who had betrayed him hear his vidui?
Yet the communication he must make now was with heaven—and she, with prayer book in hand, would be his necessary conduit. Closing her eyes, she pledged to purge all other thoughts from her mind, so that she might do at least this one task for him without fault.
She found the worn volume and read out the words slowly, allowing each phrase time to reach him. Modeh ani lefanecha. He repeated some of the words after her, and let others fall unvoiced from his moving lips. Te’he mitati kapara.
Some time after she’d finished, a parched sound came from his throat. With effort, he spoke again. “I speak now my own confession.”
He swallowed, a long and labored process.
“The distances between things,” he whispered, “are vast.”
His hand rose, wavered in the air, then settled on the blanket covering his chest. “It is my consolation,” he said, “to come safe to death, without being tested a second time. For I’ve known I would fail. Just as I failed in boyhood, when my soul was tested by the inquisitors.
“I have little memory of how I answered their terrible questions, though they asked again and again. I recall only trying to erase from my mind names I knew, names that would cause other Jews to suffer. Yet this I confess: had they asked me to deny my God, I would have done so—for in that dreadful place, my body felt only its own pain, and my weak spirit could not believe the suffering I witnessed to be the birth pangs of the Messiah.”
He’d spent his strength. He rested, then gathered himself once more.
“After my eyes were taken, I felt my way through each room, each passageway and alley of Lisbon, and then Amsterdam, with my fingers outstretched. And do you know what I felt, Ester?”
She swallowed.
“That the distances between things were vast, vaster than I had known when I had sight. Everywhere I felt a void. Everywhere was hollow, God’s presence withdrawn. I walked with fingers outstretched and felt the brokenness of God’s world.
“God blesses me now,” he whispered, “and spares me a second torment. It is the only thing I have feared in this world . . . that should the Inquisition take me once more, my soul would fail a second time. I have feared, Ester, to die without a psalm on my tongue.” He raised a quaking hand and slowly, lightly, touched his sealed eyelids, first one and then the other. “As was Zedekiah punished,” he said, “so have I been. For all my life, all these weary years, the last vision I saw has remained before me. My mother,” he whispered, his hand hovering before his eyelids. “Upon the rack. Her body broken, but her eyes yet open, shining as the life drained from her. She had asserted her faith. She could not raise a hand to cover her nakedness.” There was a long silence. He lowered his hand. “She has remained before my sightless eyes, every morning, every day and night, as I saw her then. I have walked through a hollow world, carrying her.”
His breath was uneven, coming soft and then loud.
“I have worked to restore some of God’s presence to the hollowness. For repairing the world through His words is the work for which God has intended us.” He paused a long while. “Only,” he said, “I have wished each day that I could stop seeing her. Even if it meant forgetting her beloved face forever.”
After a moment he continued, his voice strengthened. “My sin that I confess now is to have wanted death. In secret I have longed for it, for blindness can never suffice to extinguish the sight of the terrors of this broken world.”
Once more he fell silent. A moment later, he nodded slowly, his thin, stained beard rising and falling on the blanket that covered his concave chest. He said, “This I confess.”
He said no more to her. Gradually he fell into some sort of sleep.
Rivka, bringing a chair, sat beside Ester and commenced whispering psalms from memory. Some time in the night, Ester joined Rivka in her recitations. Their words flowed in the silence. Beneath the current of whispers, by the light of the fire, Ester watched the transformation as the rabbi sank into himself. And as though he were even now continuing his gentle tutelage—instructing her, even as he slipped beyond her reach, to study him as carefully and minutely as any phrase they’d learned together—she felt that she saw a circlet surrounding his head and then his laboring chest, made wholly of pain. Yet the circlet, even as it was his torment, shed a soft reminder of something he’d known all his life—as though a voice within it or above it whispered: you always knew so, did you not? And she saw the rabbi heed it, and she saw him agree at last. For death—so it seemed to Ester now—awaits agreement, even where it must persuade and threaten and insist without mercy until agreement is granted.
She watched, then, as life trailed ragged from the rabbi like a ship’s wake.
The fire, no longer needed to warm him, burned down to its last embers.
The sounds of Rivka’s grief roused Ester.
Thus was the world altered. With a dull concussion in the chest.
There were no more individual graves nor headstones in London, the capacity of gravediggers and stone carvers being long outmatched by the pace the city now required. The earth of St. Peter upon Cornhill’s churchyard, they said, had been raised to waist height with the coffins stacked one atop another, then abandoned in favor of mass graves. The dead were sent sliding now into pits, raising clouds of lime dust, hastily prayed over by clusters of the living who didn’t dare approach one another. It made no difference that the rabbi had not died of plague, for all claims of other causes of death were now scoffed at, so often did families seek to mask the cause of death in order to make pretense that their home was not gripped by the pestilence. So Ester and Rivka hired a wagon and brought the rabbi themselves to the pit at Stepney Mount, and averted their eyes from what seemed a hundred bodies, many not even wrapped—limbs and sore-encrusted faces dusted with lime. They said what prayers seemed proper, then slid his frail body, in the shroud Rivka had stitched for him, into the silent, thronged gully.
They returned together to the house.
There, slipped through the crevice at the door’s base, Ester found a note from Mary.
Please come, it said, in a hand too rounded and girlish for one her age and in her state.
The house, without the rabbi’s labored breathing, stood in powerful silence. Following Rivka, Ester washed her hands and face in the kitchen basin; then lingered, strangely idle, in the front room. She allowed the thought: even should she and Rivka survive the plague, this household would soon be dissolved.
With a small scissor taken from her pocket, Rivka cut the cloth of her own collar to signify mourning; then Ester’s. In the hollow house, the slow rasp of scissor biting cloth was alarmingly loud. But the quiet in its wake was worse. As Rivka lowered the scissor, Ester saw the realization reflected on her face: they were alone.
She said to Rivka, “I’m going to the da Costa Mendes house. I’ll return. Before dark.”
Rivka nodded, lips pressed tight.
She hurried through the deserted streets. The Jewish houses around Creechurch Lane were abandoned or silent. If any remained behind those windows who might care that the rabbi had died or that Ester and Rivka still lived, they hadn’t shown themselves in weeks. Still Ester couldn’t help gaze into each, as if some familiar soul might peer back through the dark mullioned panes as though from underwater or from beyond this world.
She entered the gate of the da Costa Mendes house, shut it carefully behind her, and only then looked up to see the white cross painted on the door.