She opened her eyes. A dim evening, the air inexplicably cool. A rough rime of salt on her face. She blinked into the lightless room, a first recognizable thought taking form. It hovered like a small nesting bird uncertain of its safety. Then, finally, it roosted: she understood that Rivka’s hands had gone. Rivka’s figure, hunched in a hard-backed chair in the shadowed corner opposite the bed, was motionless. Only when she spoke did Ester realize she was drunk. “You lived,” she said. “Most don’t.”
Ester listened, as though the echo of these words might tell whether this was good or ill. Slowly, she raised herself to sitting. Then, when Rivka didn’t chide her, let her feet slide to the floor, the skin prickling with the touch of the wood.
“How long?”
“A week,” said Rivka. “More, maybe.” She waved the fingers of one hand toward the window. “Ask him. He knows, for he counts each day and each night he sleeps on our doorstep.”
Holding to the edge of the bed, then to the wall, she stood. Her body felt too light—a stick bobbing in an eddy. She felt her way to the window.
Below, seated on the broad stone in front of the door and leaning against it, was an unfamiliar figure in a broad-brimmed hat. The stranger appeared to be dozing.
“He came a few days after we buried Mary,” said Rivka, who hadn’t moved from her seat. “We’re a registered plague house now, and not just because Mary’s friend painted our door. The city sends guards.”
“How long?” Ester repeated stupidly, her tongue thick.
“Forty days in all until a house can be reopened. He shouted his purpose up to the window the day he came, and they’re the only words he’s said all this time, except to tell me he wears that broad hat so we can’t drop a noose from our window and quietly hang him by his neck to make an escape. Into what? I asked him.” Her voice was loose, swimming with drink. Amid the vials and cloths arranged neatly on a side table was a dusty bottle with an ornate label—Ester guessed Rivka had pulled it from the da Costa Mendeses’ cellar at the breaking of Ester’s fever. “I told him”—Rivka continued, with a rough gesture toward the window—“the city is a worse demon now than the plague, and as far as I care he can guard us from it until the world turns to dust.”
The journey from the bed had exhausted Ester. She grasped the windowsill.
Lifting a glass to her lips, Rivka said, “And it has.”
Ester raised her hand feebly to her brow. She could feel no trace of fever—only the salt from her fever sweats, which coated her body as though she were some new-birthed thing. “I lived,” she said.
Rivka swallowed her drink, then closed her eyes. She sat, palms open on her knees, cheeks flushed, her face strangely animated.
Slowly, as though thoughts might enter her mind only single file, Ester became aware that she’d never before seen Rivka rest. The endless labors of nursing had surely staved off Rivka’s grief for the rabbi. Now there was no one left to nurse.
She didn’t know how to say to Rivka: I understand you’ve no home anymore. So she said only, “Better souls than I were taken.”
Rivka inhaled steeply. “Death,” she said, “doesn’t take the ones who want it.” She opened her eyes and looked at Ester without accusation. “You wanted to die. I saw it.”
In the dusky room she looked like something ancient and ponderous, a statue carved roughly out of a boulder.
“I was young,” Rivka said quietly, “when the men came through my village. I was a girl.” And by the way she spoke the final word, Ester understood what had been done to her.
Ester found the edge of the bed, and sat.
“If I’d been offered the choice to die,” Rivka said, “my name would be among those of the martyrs.”
Did Rivka still want to die? Then had Mary guessed aright, after all?
“Did you know you were safe from the pestilence?” Ester asked.
Rivka let out something like a laugh. She shook her head.
Yet the very Polish village that had burned behind her seemed in truth to have offered her some protection that Ester and Mary had lacked. Rivka’s body alone had refused to sicken, though she’d offered it up at every chance.
The room darkened with the oncoming dusk. Rivka’s close-set eyes were nearly lost to shadows when she spoke again. “Now you’ll be able to go on with those letters you write,” she said. And continued, more sharply. “About truth and thought. About whatever all of it meant.”
“You—”
“I can read,” Rivka said.
Over the rush of blood in her head, Ester could hear bitter amusement in Rivka’s voice. “You’re shocked.”
The dim room swung about her and refused to steady.
“I learned when I was young. Not much, not like you. But some.”
“If you knew—”
“I didn’t try to stop you, Ester, because he”—her voice softened, caressing the word—“he needed learning. It was the only light he had. And you were the only one with enough learning to bring him that light. Something in those letters made him muster his strength and sit upright. If I’d had enough learning, I would have done it. And without lies.” Briefly her voice rose. “I’d have lighted his vision. I’d—” She stopped.
When she spoke again, her voice slid with drink and feeling. “And you sat there writing down his words only for your own purposes, caging his thoughts in a drawer to send to no one. An unfeeling creature.”
“Not unfeeling,” Ester managed.
“You believe you’re the only one who knows what it is to lose everything?” For a moment Ester entertained the notion that Rivka might stand and turn on her, strike down the very life she’d sustained through the fever. “Still,” said Rivka, “I didn’t stop you from doing it. And do you know why, Ester?” She wagged her head, then pronounced quietly, “He lived longer than he would have, because he thought someone in Florence needed his help.”
“But he knew,” Ester said. “He told me, near the end. In all those letters he had me write, he was trying to correct my thinking, in his own way. Only”—she drew breath—“I wouldn’t be corrected.”
Rivka absorbed this.
Slowly the room settled into darkness.
“He was the purest soul on this earth,” Rivka said.
No candle, no light from the street. Ester had the sensation that neither she nor Rivka was real—that were she to try to locate her own body in the room, try to touch her own arm or leg or shoulder, she’d touch nothing.
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.”