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.