“All we know,” Aaron said, “is that for at least a few months a woman might have worked as a scribe, which is an unusual and interesting fact. But we’ve got nothing more. I mean—you’re treating that Spinoza reference as though it meant she was some sort of rebel herself . . . rather than just someone whose job it was to faithfully copy down the words dictated to her. But for all we know, the rabbi she scribed for said, ‘I hear Spinoza has been cooking up some idea about Deus sive Natura, I must remember to write a sermon condemning it, please make a note of it.’ And she wrote it on the only paper at hand.”
He was right, of course. Still. There was something about Aaron—some tiny, dismaying thing he awoke in her—that made it impossible to concede even this to him. With a jolt of confusion it came back to her that she’d aimed to sack him after those three days at the Eastons’. No matter that his work was good—she could easily find a more compliant assistant. Why hadn’t she done so? She couldn’t now recall.
“I believe,” she said, “the Americans call this thinking outside the box.”
He shrugged in a way that said Not this American.
“Closing time.” Without further warning, Librarian Patricia swept one document-bearing cushion, then another, off the table, and left Helen and Aaron to pack their things.
In Helen’s office, Aaron was pulling his day’s translations off her shuddering printer when there was a knock at the door. Helen opened it to find Jonathan Martin’s secretary, Penelope Babcock—an indeterminately middle-aged, attractive woman who exuded a perennial doe-eyed charm.
“I thought I’d stop by,” Penelope said, a polite half-smile on her elegantly lipsticked mouth, “to let you know that Jonathan will be granting access to Brian Wilton’s group to view the Richmond documents.”
Helen gripped the doorknob. “Sorry?”
“Brian Wilton,” Penelope enunciated, “will be allowed access in the rare manuscripts room alongside you.”
Helen let out a sound.
“He’ll begin work next week,” Penelope said. Her smile had thickened. “His presence won’t interfere with your labors there, I’m sure.”
At Helen’s ongoing silence, Penelope’s arched eyebrows rose higher. “As you know, Brian is a former student of Jonathan’s. Jonathan has always kept a door open to his former students, as a matter of courtesy.”
Penelope, presumably, had taken up this mission of mercy on her own initiative, after scolding Jonathan Martin about not giving Helen notice of his planned move. Penelope was scrupulous about her likability in the department—Helen had always suspected it was Penelope’s defense against the eternal rumors about herself and Jonathan Martin, and Helen couldn’t fault the tactic.
Whatever the motivations behind Penelope’s mission of mercy, though, it was Helen’s role to thank Penelope politely, nod as if Jonathan’s consideration toward his former student were the height of chivalry, and shut the door. There was no defensible basis for doing otherwise. For doing what she now did: Stand mute, unable to bring herself to thank Penelope Babcock. Then shut the door slowly, without a word, on Penelope’s lovely face.
She pressed her forehead to the door. A shiver of betrayal, like the soft fringes of some warming, life-restoring garment being slipped from her skin. For just a moment, she indulged the memory of standing before the Eastons’ open stairwell: before a silent chorus of documents, stilled voices trapped beneath the treads of a once-grand house. Documents waiting patiently all these centuries for someone—for her!—to read and decipher them. Was it folly to feel that those pages, remnants of a long-lost community of Jews, were written expressly for Helen’s very eyes, to soothe her heart now, after all these years? Was it too grandiose to say that in exchange for such a find she’d tendered her life?
Perhaps it was. Perhaps she was simply desperate for this last illusion that her prospects were not all long spent.
Aaron stood at her desk, papers in hand. She braced for him to say something, but he didn’t.
She sat. She opened a notebook and stared, disoriented, at a page of her own childishly wide scrawl.
As if he knew she needed a moment to compose herself, Aaron knelt over the shoulder bag he’d set on the floor, and began sorting papers.
His silence endured as she turned several pages of the notebook.
She heard herself speak. “I suppose that wasn’t lost on you,” she said.
From that position, he looked up at her with a mildness that took her aback. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “This is yours. We’ve got a head start. Besides, there’s no substitute for having seen the documents in situ.”
She considered him. He was actually reassuring. For a moment he could have been someone’s trusted friend or older brother, offering a boost from the sidelines.
Straightening, he handed her two sheets of paper. In silence she scanned them. Translations of two more letters, both from a Jewish press in Amsterdam and both addressed to Rabbi HaCoen Mendes—one asking for clarification of the number of prayer books required by the London congregation, the other confirming the shipment of said books.
While she read, Aaron faced away from her desk.
She finished and set down the papers. “That will do for today,” she said.
He seemed in no hurry to leave. He bent his neck, wound his scarf slowly, buttoned his coat. Stood a moment. Then gestured toward the frame over the hearth. “So,” he said, “why Masada?”
She lifted her eyes to the portrait of the mountaintop. It was suddenly evident, as it had somehow not been before, how badly the sketch had faded over the years. She’d never known the name of the artist—a soldier off duty; Helen had spied him leaning on the hood of a jeep and filling pages of his sketchbook. It hadn’t been hard to persuade him to part with one of his profiles of Masada. She had been a good-looking young woman in 1954. And the soldier, pockmarked and skinnier than he’d appeared from afar, had seen only the curve of her skirt over her hips; only the smoothness of her face and not the iron there.
That shy soldier in whose callused hand she’d placed a few coins would be a grandfather now, or dead. Years of that quantity had passed. And here she sat. Still facing down the mountain’s silhouette from across her desk.
Aaron was studying the sketch up close, his cropped curls now blocking her view. There was something softer about him today, she was sure of it. As though he were angling toward some question he wanted to ask, despite himself. “I mean,” he said slowly, “I know it’s a dramatic landscape.”
Her voice was sharp. “Why do you ask?”
Aaron turned to her, and she was startled by the hesitation on his face. “I have a friend there,” he said. “Well, farther north. She’s staying on a kibbutz, actually.”
She didn’t believe for a moment that it was a friend. Aaron wasn’t the sort to have female friends. He was the sort to have girlfriends or bitter exes.
Something was troubling him, some topic he could neither mention nor walk away from. It was as though he were trying to motion her to pick up some conversational lead.
“I was a tourist there,” she said. The lie stiffened her shoulders, and she felt a twinge of regret.
He gave her an odd look, as though he disbelieved that she’d ever been a tourist: a person who did a thing merely for pleasure.
She gestured at the papers on her desktop. “You can go now,” she said.
He hesitated, then left, closing the door behind him.
She picked up a pen, set its point gently on the desktop, and with the slightest pressure of one finger held it vertical. It stood, then gave way as a small, invisible tremor passed through her.
Why not tell him?
It was a crazy question, but she followed it ruthlessly. She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one’s soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one’s own soul, tenaciously and without mercy. So she’d done at every significant turn in her life—and so she would now once again be her own pitiless interrogator, even if it meant mocking herself in terms that did violence to the few tender feelings she still had.