“We have received with great thanks your shipment of two volumes,” he continued. “The number of our pupils grows with the help of God, though slowly.”
She dipped the quill, and in her haste to return it to the paper, tipped the bottle. A satin puddle glistened on the page she’d begun. A stain blossomed on the back of her left hand.
The fire crackled in the silence.
“What’s happened?” the rabbi asked.
“The ink bottle,” she whispered.
He nodded. Then bent his head until his beard touched his chest. After a moment she realized he was waiting for her to clean the spill and begin again.
She looked at her hand. Rivulets of ink had spread into the creases between her fingers, settling into the frail pathways of her skin like a map of all that was ruined. Didn’t the rabbi understand that the quick pupil he’d tutored at her father’s house was lost? Was it his sealed eyelids—the perfect, blanched skin of his scars—that permitted him to imagine her as she’d once been?
But of course, he wasn’t asking her to scribe because he thought her a worthy instrument. It was, rather, that he had no choice.
She stood. “Isaac will be back,” she told the rabbi, careful to keep the wretchedness out of her voice. “He’ll write for you.”
“Your brother will not return,” the rabbi said softly. “He never harbored any love of the labor of ink and paper. And now”—he gestured gently with the tips of his fingers: Now that that fire has occurred. Now that Isaac is damned in his own eyes.
A welling silence.
“I brought Isaac to London,” the rabbi said, “in the hope that he might have a different life, free of what trailed him in Amsterdam. For the mercy of the Almighty can release us”—he paused, as though bracing to bear his own words—“from all bonds of slavery. And cause even the blind to see.”
She could not quiet her thoughts. How could he speak of seeing? Did faith so sustain him that he felt his stolen faculties restored? She’d no such faith. Even in girlhood, the comforts of the Hebrew prayers in synagogue had failed to attach to her, leaving her perplexed among the chanting believers. Yet she could almost believe Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s words, for how else did he endure blindness with such serenity, if not for some inner vision—some vista of consolation available behind his sealed lids?
Rabbi HaCoen Mendes sat with his fingertips pressed together. “Isaac does not accept the life I offer him,” he said. “I must trust him to the hands of the Almighty. But I fear, Ester, that he won’t rest in that embrace.” The rabbi turned his face toward her. “Your brother places himself at the mercy of rougher hands.”
It was true. There was no worth in pretending any longer. Isaac would not be back.
“Write,” said the rabbi. “Please.”
She didn’t move. Her clumsy hand shamed her.
“I spoke too quickly,” he said, “and caused you too great haste. The spill was my doing.”
She righted the bottle with her stained hand, cleaned the mess with a cloth, and, taking a fresh page, dipped her quill in the small reserve of ink that remained.
“To the learned Yacob de Souza,” the rabbi dictated.
She wrote.
Your kind inquiries after my health are more than I merit. I am well tended to in my household, and remain whole in spirit and body.
She finished the line, and waited. The air above the wood fire was alive with pirouetting waves of heat. Even at this distance from the hearth, she felt the heat echo on her face. Beside her feet, under the finely finished writing table, a small stove awaited lighting, to dry the ink of the rabbi’s words more rapidly. Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s nephew, who despite his own indifference to Jewish learning had acquired and furnished this house for them, had spared no expense in remaking this damp residence into a proper house of study for the aged man.
In the silence now, something kindled in her. The writing table seemed abruptly to be a vast expanse—a plateau where some small remaining freedom might be possible. A tidy stack of paper, a wide glass jar of quills, a pen knife. A stick of red sealing wax. The smooth grain of the tabletop. She felt her body rush with quick heat, as though every bit of her, every plain and hidden part, were waking.
The rabbi was speaking again, his blind eyes turned to her. The words he spoke streamed through her hand, leaving a bright black wake on the page.
Your concern for my position here is further evidence of your generous nature. Yet I urge you to put your mind at rest, dear Yacob, and devote your efforts to those in greater need. The rumors that have reached you are correct. The community here does not hunger to learn. Yet this does not shake my faith in the rightness of my labors. I, for my part, accept the very things you rue. Menasseh ben Israel, it’s said, heard indifference in the community’s failure to embrace him. I hear, instead, fear. I sit among them in the synagogue and I hear their hands sliding on their woolen cloaks that they’ve laid on the benches beside them. How tightly they hold to these garments, as though loath to be parted from them should they need to leave in haste. I listen to them shift each time the synagogue door opens: they must turn their heads to learn who has arrived or departed before they may reenter holy prayer. I say this now without rebuke, but in the hope my words will aid: it is all too easy to speak, when one is at leisure in Amsterdam, of the glory of martyrs. Those rabbis who do so, I suggest humbly, are not those who themselves endured the Inquisition, but those who learned of it from afar . . . and perhaps, if I may say, do not understand fully the nature of what they speak of. Some of them argue that we must shun those who conformed with the Christian church—that we must abhor as saint-suckers those who chose, rather than the pyre, another night in their safe beds.
The Almighty created man in his image. He created not only our endurance and our infrequent wisdom, but also our fear. Man has no desire to be persecuted, and this impulse too must be the doing of G-d. Some will disagree with me. So let them tend another congregation, one whose Jews are not so fear-pricked as mine. I will tend to this flock that does not love my presence, for the invalid that spurns physick requires it no less than the one who welcomes it.
The last of the rabbi’s words, freshly inked, glimmered before her.
He sighed. “Copy the letter for me,” he said, “and sign it.”
She took a second sheet of paper from the stack and began, the words spooling onto the page under her hand. As she worked, the rain needling quietly against the window, she felt the writing lift her out of her weary body, so she could almost look down on her self from the low ceiling: A young woman bent over a table. A young woman scribing in the chair that should be her brother’s.
Slowly, steadily, her hand repeated its passage across the page.
Once, twice, then again.
Isaac.
He’d been a boy still, on the verge of manhood, but a softness yet in his cheeks. He’d stepped away from some nighttime escapade to fetch her, flinging stone chips at the window beneath which she slept. She’d risen, found her shoes in the dark, and descended the stair to the flaring of the lantern in her brother’s hand—a blackened over-large thing taken from some unlocked storeroom, with something uneven about its light so that the shadows shrank and grew wildly inside the house. In the swinging lantern-light her mother’s tapestries from Lisbon—dark mythic scenes shimmering with gold thread—loomed and extinguished. Bright and dark forms materialized, fled along the walls. In the seasick light her brother was a boy, a man, a boy . . . a feverish-faced stranger in this world of mahogany and silver plate.