My dearest Dror,
How many years have passed since you stood that way, holding your broken arm in the base’s dark kitchen? I never told you how you appeared to me that night. For all your severity, you were like a gazelle caught on that cement floor. How breathtaking it was, to see you uncertain.
And when you danced. Your steps brushing the ground in the middle of that desert, the cast on your arm. I fell in love with you then, too. But in my blindness, I saw only what frightened me. I never understood how truly a wounded heart could love.
Let there be one place where I exist, unsundered. This page.
When I heard you’d died, I couldn’t understand it. I’d thought you invincible, it’s true. But I’d also been waiting, although I surely knew better, for a day when some debt—How to say it? How did I conceive of it in those times, how would I have put words to what I hardly knew I felt?
I was waiting for a day when some debt of devastation and sorrow and vigilance would be paid, and my own petty fear would be spent, and we’d return to each other.
It took a long time for me to understand that you were dead.
But now that it’s my turn, Dror, I see it clearly. Your car, the car you were driving for whatever mission they sent you on—whatever mission you undertook with a heavy heart, yet with the certainty (were you still certain, Dror? I hope so, I hope that you were)—the certainty that you were keeping them all safe, your loved ones, past and present and future. (I know you loved your wife and family. I know you did. I’d expect no less of you.) And I see clearly the car following yours. In my mind, it’s black and featureless. And then the acceleration, and the impact that’s no accident, your car bucking off the road and into the air. Your face turns grave as the tires leave the road. I see your car soar, I see how it spins. I see you, Dror, wrenched in the air. A calamity of sound, then. A heartbeat. An explosion. And then, a grieving quiet. I grieve when I hear it. The hollow rush of flames, sparks touching the heavy green treetops. There is smoke, Dror, impossible smoke, and heat.
Yet somehow you walk out of it, unscathed. A whole and beautiful man.
There is a hole where my heart once was. In its place, your history.
34
Water forcing her palm open, the current kissing her fingers. And swimming to the place where she stood waist-deep, her husband: master of the great house commanding the hill. She couldn’t keep from laughing in his face. He laughed with her—then, with a soft tug, pulled her off balance. The current tipped her forward and her husband led her, and the surface of the water was velvet and foam, and her legs and feet were absurd and she had no notion what to do with them—until the water lifted her limbs and made them glad and foolish. She settled her eyes on his, brown and sun-flecked as the water.
“Here,” he said, guiding her wrists to his slim, sturdy shoulders. “Rest your arms here.”
Author’s Note
The characters and events of The Weight of Ink are entirely imagined; the novel’s seventeenth-century backdrop, however, is real. The Sabbatean movement mentioned in the novel had a long-lasting impact on a large swath of the seventeenth-century Jewish community. The philosophers mentioned in this book are also real, as are the central figures from the Jewish community of Amsterdam; and while Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes is imagined, his counsel to Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel about the latter’s journey to England and its aftermath are based in the documented facts of Menasseh ben Israel’s life.
The play Ester and Mary attend is invented; however, I based some of its details on Sir George Etherege’s 1664 The Comical Revenge: or, Love in a Tub, and the song the players sing (If she be not as kind as fair . . .) is from that play. Ester’s fictitious warnings to Mary about love likewise contain an allusion to Mary Astell’s 1666 remarks about marriage. Several Shakespeare quotes also appear in the text (The death of each day’s life . . . from Macbeth; My love is as a fever . . . from Sonnet 147; What’s gone and what’s past help . . . from The Winter’s Tale). The line of poetry that Helen recalls in the conservation lab (These fragments I have shored against my ruins) is from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
For the sake of clarity I chose to simplify certain references; for example, the area now known as Richmond upon Thames was called Petersham in the seventeenth century. Rather than refer to the same area by two names, I used the modern name throughout. And my depiction of the program through which Helen and other foreigners volunteer in Israel is based on programs that were developed several years after Helen would have been in Israel.
A list of the works I found helpful while researching this book could fill pages. I’d like to give particular mention, though, to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity; Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life and Spinoza’s Heresy; David S. Katz’s The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850; Miriam Bodian’s Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam; Julia R. Lieberman’s Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora; Jonathan I. Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750; Kristin Waters’s Women & Men Political Theorists: Enlightened Conversations; and Liza Picard’s Restoration London, which I returned to again and again for the details of Ester’s surroundings.
A master cherub carver worked in Richmond/Petersham in the seventeenth century; his work can still be seen in grand houses of the era, though his name has been lost to history.
Acknowledgments
I’m deeply grateful to the historians, conservators, archivists, and others I consulted in the process of researching this novel. Among them: Amy Armstrong, Gloria Ascher, Zachary Baker, Rachel Brody, David DeGraaf, Frank Garcia, Jane Gerber, Dominic Green, Rachel Greenblatt, Joshua Jacobson, Paul Jankowski, Camille Kotton, David Liss, Sharon Musher, Nell Painter, Jonathan Schneer, Kathrin Seidl-Gomez, Stephanie Shirilan, Skye Shirley, Malcolm Singer, and Simon Wartnaby. My gratitude also to the staff and volunteers at the Northeast Document Conservation Center, the Jewish Historical Society of England, the Richmond upon Thames Local Studies Collection, and English Heritage, for their assistance and their patience.