Oh yeah—and Cromwell up and dies right after this. So much for any guarantees of safety. At which point the gears start turning for the monarchy to return, and things start to look dicier again for the Jews.
So now here’s why I’ve recited this whole interminable history, Marisa (and no, it’s not just because I had to memorize this stuff for my undergrad comps). Today, this afternoon, I literally had my hands on two letters sent from an obscure rabbi to old Menasseh ben Israel himself, reporting on the London community’s progress and urging Menasseh not to give up hope. And they’re not just dry stuff, Marisa. I read one and I have to say, I felt I was in the room with the guy who wrote it. I liked him.
So there’s the history. But there’s another complicating factor: the documents are written in iron gall ink. This ink is such a fucking headache, Marisa. It’s the kind everybody used before they moved over to the soot-based stuff. Some varieties stay stable for centuries, and some batches eat through paper—and nobody knows why, because nobody knows exactly how iron gall ink was made. But the effect is bizarre and totally unpredictable. Say a man 300 years ago sat down to write a letter, and let’s say the ink that happened to be in his ink-bottle when he started was a good batch . . . now, 300 years later, what he wrote on the first page of the letter is readable, maybe just a bit blurred. But when he got to page two of the letter, let’s say he started a new bottle of ink, and this one was a bad one. So 300 years later half of the words written in that ink will have eaten through the paper. Single letters can get spliced out of the paper. Entire words or phrases can just dissolve themselves out of the letter, especially where the writer maybe lingered over a word (dripping extra ink) or wrote with a heavier hand to place added emphasis. If he let a blot form on a word . . . 300 years later the acids may have excised that word and only that word.
I opened a ledger this afternoon, not knowing it was completely deteriorated inside, and the whole thing blew up in my face. I had paper ash in my eyelashes. Professor Ice Queen looked like she was going to behead me with her fountain pen.
He stopped and reread by the faint light of the screen. His e-mail showed nothing of where he had hesitated—not where the clock had ticked as his hands lingered on the keyboard, not the unaccustomed indecision that made him drag his mouse back over entire blocks of text and click them into oblivion. His incapacitating, shameful yearning ate through nothing that was visible.
So there you have it: we dive into the papers beginning tomorrow. A side trip into the late seventeenth century, a little breather from the Shakespeare work, which will probably enrich my approach to the dissertation when I return to it. Darcy, my advisor, seems pleased.
Now write back and tell me all the clever and naughty things you’ve been up to, far from dusty libraries and nasty old Englishwomen, out there in the Promised Land where the men and women are bold and brave, and even shitty airline food, traffic jams, and taxes are good for the Jews.
—A.
He pressed Send, and regretted it.
4
November 22, 1657
16 Kislev, 5418
London
With the help of G-d
To the esteemed Menasseh ben Israel, Word reaches us here in London that you have traveled as far as Middleburg but are unwell.
In the days that remain to me I shall not attain your level of scholarship. I am unable to open for myself the doors of holy books, but must wait for a student to read their precious words aloud. Yet I will presume to speak to you once more. I have not told you, nor shall I, of all your father endured at the hands of the Inquisitors in Lisbon. You do not need to be told, for you have ever understood, and willingly labor on behalf of our people. Yet it is not required of you to bear on your own shoulders the burden of hastening the Messiah’s arrival, when we will throng to greet him with tears in our eyes.
Unlike me, you are not yet an old man. May I then offer my counsel, that your able body and spirit might make use of it? The spark of your learning is still needed by the people. And, my son, if it is extinguished, even the blind will feel the darkness deepen.
I beg of you to rest, to seek healing of the spirit and healing of the body.
Our life is a walk in the night, we know not how great the distance to the dawn that awaits us. And the path is strewn with stumbling blocks and our bodies are grown tyrannous with weeping yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.
With the help of G-d, R. Moseh HaCoen Mendes
5
November 3, 2000
London
A brittle light stretched across the dark tabletop, across the manuscripts before him. Seated under the tall windows of the shelf-lined room the Eastons had turned over to them—the house’s old library, by the look of it—Aaron rubbed his hands together for warmth. The Eastons hadn’t provided a heater, and the house’s great hearths were in other, grander rooms. No wonder people had died young in the seventeenth century, he thought. Shivered to death, probably, in drafty rooms like this.
Outside, a dusting of snow.
Helen Watt sat opposite him, a separate set of documents laid before her, writing in pencil on a notepad. Upon Aaron’s arrival, nearly on time despite the sluggish bus, she’d greeted him with only a pointed glance at her wristwatch—and, as he’d spread notebook and papers around him, a cluster of facts: the records Helen had tracked down so far showed that the HaLevy family, to whom the house had belonged for a period of thirty-seven years, were Portuguese Jews who had arrived in London around 1620. The family also seemed to have owned a substantial house back inside the walled city of London. Possibly they’d used the Richmond house as a country residence—in those days London was defined by the City walls and Richmond was the countryside, a half day’s ride by coach or a slow trip up the Thames.
Other than that update and rapid instructions regarding which documents to start with (evidently she’d decided to trust his skills as a translator for the moment), Helen Watt had said not a word to Aaron in more than an hour—nor had she inquired whether he himself had troubled to do any outside research. Well, if she wanted to underestimate him, let her; he’d intended to tell her straightaway about the connection he’d discovered, but maybe he’d pick his own time to raise the subject.
He surveyed the pages before him now. He’d chosen the best preserved of the first batch to begin with, and had made quick work of six documents, one each in Hebrew and English and four in Portuguese. Quick consultations with online resources had aided him past a few rough spots in the translations, and he was pleased with his progress, despite the stern looks Helen shot every time he turned to his computer. Bridgette had breezed by to set up a web connection for him, leaning past him at the table, her wrist brushing his as she typed in her password. He’d felt Helen Watt watching keenly then, too, and had laughed inside at the iron weight of her gaze.
The document Aaron had just begun translating was a sermon, recorded in the same elegant sloping hand, the same aleph scratched at the bottom. He was beginning to feel a camaraderie with this Aleph—who had probably been trapped day after day in some chilly room like this one at the rabbi’s household inside the City walls—working hours on end, inked quill in his cramped hand. Slaving away to do the boss’s will.