He sat now at the table, hunched against the cold, his screen blanched in the window’s light. Then he looked at the header on Marisa’s e-mail and saw that she had written it only eleven minutes before—early evening, Israel time. If he hurried he might catch her.
Thanks for your note, Marisa, he typed. I’m glad my lecture didn’t make you run for the hills.
The taste of beer came back to him, the smell of the dimly lit pub, the feel of her slap on his cheek. With a focus that had eluded him at the time, he now recalled bits of their conversation at the bar. Marisa seated, her sandaled feet tucked behind a rung of the high stool; he standing, beer in hand. There had been an instant—hadn’t there?—when something shifted. He was almost certain now that he remembered it. Just before Marisa straightened and took his hand, and led him away from the pub to her bedroom. There’d been some kind of segue—a story Marisa related about her gay brother, before shaking her adamant mood with a laugh—but Aaron didn’t rack his memory for its details now because the arrow of memory had already carried him beyond it and straight to what he needed. Why hadn’t he recalled this part of their discussion before? Marisa saying something disparaging about American Jews, and Aaron asking what Marisa had against them, given that she was one. And then Marisa had looked right at him, her forehead furrowing—and then, in a conspiratorial flash, she’d seemed to decide that something about Aaron might be worth taking a flyer. “No offense,” she mock-whispered. She rested one hand lightly on his forearm; he felt its warmth through his rolled sleeve. “American Jews are naive. They don’t want memory, or history that might make them uncomfortable, they just want to be liked. Being liked is their . . . sugar rush.” She sat back, lifting away her hand. The ghost of its warmth remained on Aaron’s skin. “American Jews are addicted to sugar,” she pronounced, “and to being liked.” Aaron could only laugh at the beery neatness of this declaration, but Marisa’s eyes tightened as though his amusement displeased her. “It’s a serious thing,” she said. “I’ll probably be the most left-wing person in all of Israel, but at least I’ll be arguing with people who deal with reality instead of living in a bubble.”
Marisa, granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Her fierce words about memory felt like the key to something important they might have in common.
He typed:
I think about this a great deal: If we looked through the eyes of history, we’d live differently. We’d live right.
—A
He pressed Send. Then, unwilling to close his laptop, he pretended to engage his mind with other things that would please Helen, looking up definitions of archaic Portuguese words he already knew while his e-mail window remained open on his screen.
Three minutes, four, five.
His screen blinked. A reply from Marisa. He opened it. The e-mail was one line long.
If I looked through the eyes of history, I wouldn’t want to live.
Helen Watt was talking to him. He looked up but did not comprehend.
“For the third time,” she said. Her expression was keen with something that looked like anger. “I think Aleph was female.”
He stared at her.
“Evidently you don’t realize what a significant development this may be.”
He offered, more weakly than he wished, “I do.”
She shook her head skeptically. “She’d have to have an education beyond what a girl would usually receive,” Helen said. “She’d have been in a situation quite unusual for—”
“What’s the evidence?” he interrupted.
Pressing her lips together, she indicated the letter.
He donned the hateful gloves, pulled the letter toward him, and read it through. When he’d finished, he pushed it away carefully across the tabletop. “Fascinating, sure.” He knew he oughtn’t be so brusque, but for the moment he didn’t care. “They probably married her off the next week, though—sent some young man from Amsterdam to scribe for the rabbi just like they said they would. I doubt there’s much of a trail to follow.”
Helen Watt pursed her lips and seemed to keep a thought to herself.
He sat back at his computer. His mind rang with defenses, vindications, excuses. He wanted to open his e-mail and type What I meant was.
Instead he opened the file he should have been working on all along. The busywork would right him. And then, when he’d settled himself down, he would know—he would work out—how to answer Marisa.
Cursing his gloves, he rifled the stack and pulled out the English version of HaCoen Mendes’s sermon. The spellings were worse than the usual seventeenth-century fare, the writer either poorly educated or new to English. “Use a dictionary, Aleph,” he muttered, though of course there had been few dictionaries in those days. He began the mindless labor of comparing this version with the translation he’d already prepared from the Portuguese version. The work was slow and, despite his effort to resist, his path through it was riddled with self-recrimination. Why had he e-mailed Marisa without first thinking it through? In his haste, had he offended her? Failed a test?
Well, Marisa, he thought, you have my full attention. Something no other woman had yet achieved. It was perhaps not so great an honor as he’d thought.
He forced himself to concentrate. Quickly he read through the remainder of the lecture. The Portuguese and English versions were identical—though Aaron’s English sounded like English, and Aleph’s grammar was upside down even by seventeenth-century standards. But rather that labor we steady and humble in our day—
Beside him, Helen was absorbed in her work.
“I’m going out to get lunch,” he said.
She nodded without looking up.
“Would you like anything from the shop across the way?” An olive branch. Some grad students fetched coffee, some dog-sat for the professors they worked with; Aaron as a rule did nothing of the sort.
She shook her head.
“Don’t you eat?”
Helen lifted her head from her work.
He’d meant it as a joke, the old tactic of establishing familiarity by assuming it, but the words had come out tinged with antagonism.
She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I eat.”
She went back to her work.
Where was the button he could press to erase the past fifteen minutes? He had no business being nasty to the only professor likely to save him from Shakespeare. He wanted to apologize, but Helen didn’t look up. And he couldn’t bring himself to call for her attention when he didn’t know what words ought to follow.
He put on his coat and left the building. The air was colder than he’d expected. He walked quickly through the thin scrim of snow to stave off a faint, unfamiliar nausea of self-doubt. He bought himself a sandwich from the grocery next to Prospero’s and doubled back to the house to eat it.
Helen was nowhere to be seen.
They had only another hour before the Sotheby’s representative was due. He ought to translate at least one more document. He hung his coat on the rack in the entryway and set his food on the table in the library—he’d eat quickly and keep working. He sat, began to unwrap his sandwich, then stopped.
He told himself he could use it as a bargaining chip. He’d have information Helen might someday want, and if she didn’t kill him, she’d thank him. They still didn’t know, after all, the exact nature of the relationship between Rabbi HaCoen Mendes and the Benjamin HaLevy who’d owned this great house. Maybe knowing something about how HaLevy’s family had lived, how extravagant his house had been, would prove essential.
Of course, she’d told him not to.
Exactly.
He felt himself smile, and when he stood, though no one was there to see, he walked with a deliberately confident step.