“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, “Mam?e.”
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.
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.