And then he was her brother once more, gesturing her impatiently toward the street. “You won’t forgive yourself if you miss this,” he said. “It’s at a far dock, but if we go fast you’ll see. Someone smashed three barrels of fish, and the birds—Ester, you have to see, it’s ten thousand wings like—”
She never saw it. Did he stumble as he turned, his shoe knocking the heavy doorstop? Did the lantern grow too heavy in his hands, had its handle grown so hot he had to shift his grip? Whatever the cause, the flame had tipped out of the lantern without a sound, spilling over the lip of the metal like liquid gold, touching the curtain by the parlor window, and instantly beginning a desperate climb to the heavens. Before Ester could move another step on the stair, the door was framed with fire. The tapestry a roaring scene of black curling figures.
And then Grietgen was shoving her in the back, she was cursing Ester down the stairs, shrieking: To the street, to the street, naar buiten, children! Steps from the door, Ester glimpsed her father, halfway down the stairs, stumble, stop—then turn to climb back up to their mother’s chamber, racing upward alongside the flames.
Then Ester was on the street, the night air cold on her face. In the flaring, crashing dark, the neighbors. Futile pails of water: steam ribboning off windowpanes. Inside, timber and fabric raging untouched. The street’s cobbles dark with wasted water, reflecting licks of light. And then, the tip of the roof aglow. Brighter, brighter, the rooftop a jailed star in the night.
The fire shot into the sky.
A single rending shriek. She’d never known whose it was.
Her brother had been gone before the roof had fallen. Toward dawn, he was found curled asleep on the deck of a ship set to depart that morning. He was led to shore and to the synagogue, mute and soot-stained, by the ship’s navigator—who surveyed the Jews chanting mourning prayers in rent clothes, then rubbed the thick silver cross dangling from his own neck and, producing Isaac, said in Dutch thick with shyness and regret, “This one isn’t old enough yet to throw his troubled self into the sea.”
But now he was.
Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s voice. “I wish you to scribe for me every day,” he said. “Tell Rivka, please, to hire a girl to fulfill your household labors.”
She was unable to form an answer. She stared instead at the rivulets of ink sunk into her skin, and for an instant heard her brother’s voice in her head: Isaac, as he had been before the fire, ruddy and alight with plans. Now thank your brother for your good fortune! Though if you’d only step out of your shuttered rooms, Esti, you’d love the fresh winds better than a life of books.
She bent her head and whispered a prayer she’d no faith in: “May it please the Almighty to guide Isaac’s feet to safety.” The words were hollow. Here she sat, in his seat, while somewhere in London he was negotiating a price for his own death.
Days, a week, a fortnight—it took no longer. Wash day: Rivka, who’d silently doubled her own labors rather than expend the rabbi’s money to hire a girl, had risen before dawn and spent the morning with her broad back bent over the buck-baskets, thick reddened hands wringing. At midday Ester left the rabbi’s side to help haul the water-heavy linens to the attic. Then Rivka went out into the chilly afternoon to purchase a new clothesline.
Ester was laboring over a page of Pirkei Avot, reading and rereading to the rabbi at his request, inking the last of an interpretation he wished her to record and send to a student in Amsterdam, when the door opened softly, then closed behind Rivka.
She stood before Ester without removing her cloak. Had Rivka ever stood before Ester thus—face to face, hands stilled at her sides? Her words to Ester were always sidelong, directions meted out in passing as Rivka moved from task to task. Yet now Rivka’s gaze glimmered, as though the cover on a well had been lifted.
Ester rose from her seat.
“I looked for him where he labored.” Rivka’s brown eyes, small in her thick, lined face, turned fierce as though to repel her own message. “At the docks.”
“Isaac?” Ester whispered.
“A man tried to tell me in German, but he didn’t know enough words. And in English”—Rivka shook her head like a mule tormented by a fly. “Maybe two days ago. The man said it was someone he’d—” Rivka broke off with a gesture: someone Isaac had angered. “The man said they attacked Isaac, from behind. A knife. He didn’t see them come.”
Silence. For an instant, Rivka’s hand floated toward Ester’s shoulder. But at Ester’s flinch Rivka lowered her hand, nodding as though she understood and even agreed: neither of them could bear consolation.
Ester whispered, “Where . . .”
Rivka’s face buckled. “They threw him in the river.”
She departed for the kitchen, closing the door behind her. A moment later Ester heard a racked, terrifying sound. Then a low Tudesco chanting.
“Ester,” said the rabbi.
But she couldn’t answer. Strange sensations filled her. A loud silence in her ears, her body cold stone. She needed something to warm her. She needed Isaac’s head nested beneath her chin. A confusion of pictures in her mind: His small boyish body. His grim squint at the London skies, as he predicted his own death. He’d dreamt of saving someone. Now he’d gone without redeeming anything.
She turned at a whispering from beside the fire. The rabbi sat, arms wrapped around his thin chest, his head shaking slowly from side to side. His lips were moving in prayer.
Softly she said, “Does God console you now?”
She’d spoken the words thinking they were a question. But as they rang in the hushed room, she understood they were an accusation. An apology rose in her, reflexive. She let it dissolve unspoken.
There was a long silence. “And you,” the rabbi said softly. “Though it may be a dreadful and long time before we feel His consolation.”
From the fireside and the kitchen, prayer and weeping. She tried to imagine dropping into grief. She pictured it, like letting go of a rope. To crumple with sorrow, fall at someone’s feet, beg mercy? But these things required belief that mercy existed in the world.
She was nineteen years of age and could no longer bend her mind to believe in the comforts embraced by others. The fire had forged them both—she and her brother—into brittle instruments. Should she bend, she would break.
She struck the tears away with the backs of her hands.
No star remained now to navigate by. Isaac had been her last.
A frenzy of words filled her—all she’d confess now, if he were only with her. With what gladness she’d have trusted him with every thought of hers, every bewilderment—every secret save one she’d carried in silence all these years, for it would have wounded him.
Instead his clenched voice rose now in her memory. A man comes into the world to perform one function.
What function remained for Ester? Father, mother, brother, gone.
She stared at the chair she’d risen from: Isaac’s chair. Then, a terrifying, grief-stricken freedom flooding her, she lowered herself into it.
Only a single desire remained to her: To be amid these books. To hear the quiet scratch of quill on paper. To find, amid these consolations, some slim filament that had once been hers, and follow it to its unseen destination.
She picked up the quill, stained with ink, and dipped it. The thought came to her, unwelcome: ink purchased with blood.
The price of her freedom.
Slowly she began to copy out the rabbi’s interpretation.
At the sound of the quill he turned to her, his face taut with concentration.
She shaped the Portuguese and Hebrew words carefully. It took a long while. At length, long after the sounds of Rivka’s praying had faded and the house settled into deep silence, she finished the copy.
She signed her own initial, and watched the black ink settle into the page.
9
November 4, 2000
London