“I’m not Jewish,” she said flatly.
Their relief was so obvious, it made them seem foolish to her: the easing of those fine lines around the mouth, the hands relaxing on the wooden table, Bridgette’s long torso arrayed more languidly against the seatback. Nor did she blame them. Clearly they’d assumed that her work in Jewish history meant she herself was a Jew. And now it was plain what had been behind Bridgette’s warning glances to her husband. Helen could guess that in the hour since Ian had phoned her, the Eas-tons had had time to rue what they might have set in motion. Probably they’d been advised that the Jewish community, if it got wind of this, would make their lives impossible. She imagined the sequence of the Eastons’ worries: ogling Jewish-American tourists knocking on their door, heaven forbid. Or worse, the Israelis, who didn’t waste time ogling but had simply ripped those murals by that murdered Jewish writer, Bruno Schultz, out of a wall in Ukraine to smuggle them to Israel. The Richmond Preservation people might be irksome, but at least they had a sense of procedure.
Not, of course, that Jews didn’t.
Helen said nothing, waiting it out. Sure enough, as the seconds passed the Eastons’ relief gave way to the puzzlement that she’d come, over the course of her career, to expect. The new question dawned as plain on their faces as if they’d spoken it aloud: What was she doing here across the table from them, then? What had drawn a non-Jewish woman of her generation to this obscure life as a specialist in Jewish studies?
“Perhaps we ought to leave it to them to handle the papers?” Ian said carefully. “The Jews,” he added.
“No!” The single word shot out before Helen could stop it—and in the silence that followed, the rest rang unspoken: the papers are mine.
Instinctively she rose from the table, as though to escape the shame of what they must think she’d meant—the academic pettiness, the Christian arrogance, the sheer desire to possess.
The Eastons stood with her.
“What I mean,” she said, “is that these papers are yours and they’re mine—the papers are all of ours, they’re England’s history. They belong at a major research university.”
Words none could refute.
“I’ll alert the head of my department immediately, and start the acquisition process. You’ll hear from our librarian.” Then she added, “You’ll be paid, of course.”
The Eastons’ faces went neutral, but Bridgette’s had gained a faint flush. Her husband might be too conscientiously genteel to care about the money; Bridgette wanted to know how much.
Ian’s eyes met Helen’s—and she saw that despite his stylish clothing and well-cared-for hands he was a straightforward man. “The main thing is to do what’s right,” he said. “And to get the papers out of here so we can continue with our renovations.”
Helen nodded—and proceeded as though her next request were mere common sense. “To strengthen the argument for the university to purchase the documents,” she said, “I’m going to ask you for three days to make a basic assessment. I’ll have to do it here. I don’t want to risk moving fragile papers; that’s a job for trained conservators.”
Bridgette looked nettled.
“You have my promise that I won’t remove anything from the premises without your permission.”
Bridgette glanced at Ian as though warning him not to respond.
Helen worded the next carefully. “If the university is interested, they’ll ask you to bring in an outside evaluator—Sotheby’s, perhaps—to estimate a price.”
Bridgette’s eyebrows rose. Sotheby’s.
“Given your circumstances, I’m sure they can be persuaded to move quickly,” Helen said. “Our archives feature a large collection from the Interregnum, and the fact that your papers seem to date from that period may be enough to persuade the librarian to make the purchase.” Turning to Ian, she assembled her face into a mask of mild professorial impatience. “I will warn you,” she said, “that inviting hobbyist collectors to come pick through the papers for second opinions is likely to not only damage the documents, but scare off serious interest.” She turned from Ian to his wife, and lingered on Bridgette’s clear, unblinking gaze.
“Understood,” Ian said. He took his wife’s hand, his large palm enveloping hers, and after a brief hesitation Bridgette pressed it with a small smile. Ian’s face broke into a grin of relief. “Just a short delay until the papers go. Looks like we’ll have our gallery, then?” He kissed the top of Bridgette’s golden head and after a moment her smile turned genuine.
Under the blinding patterned light of the windows, the Eastons had sealed the agreement with a few final niceties. Helen could read their relief. They didn’t care, in truth, whether the university or the British Library or even the chief rabbinate of Israel ended up with the documents. They’d be able to tell their friends they’d done the right thing. The Eastons had passed their own test, remaining fair-minded as their beloved gallery-in-the-making was threatened by two crammed shelves of strange Semitic lettering. They’d now be rewarded with a worthy story to relate over drinks, proof of the quixotic personality of their demanding old house. What’s more, like virtuous characters in a fairy tale, they’d be granted a bag of gold as well as the fulfillment of a pressing need: to have these foreign-tongued remnants, someone else’s long-dead hopes or prayers or sorrows left orphaned under their staircase, gone.
But the papers. Leaving the Eastons at their door, Helen had closed herself into her car, shut her eyes, and allowed the image to fill her vision: two shallow shelves of papers, visible through the rectangular space the electrician had opened in the side of the staircase. As perfectly packed as the contents of a small library. Folded letters, more than three hundred years old, with broken wax seals, aligned with unbound quires and faded leather-bound spines. And slumping into a gap where the electrician had removed a bound volume, one loose off-white page. Kneeling on the cold floor in the shadowy corner beneath the stair, Helen had reached out, and touched, as if her own wish to touch were still the most natural thing. A thirst that merited slaking.
A single inked page, resting on the quaking bed of her palms. The writing hand graceful and light, the ink a faded brown. The Portuguese and Hebrew words had been finished here and there with high, distinctive arches that sloped backward over the letters they adorned: the roofs of the Portuguese letters sloping to the left, those of the occasional Hebrew verse to the right, the long unbroken lines proceeding down the page like successive rows of cresting waves approaching a shore, one after another, dizzying.
In the hollow silence of her office now, she caught her reflection on the glass face of the clock on her desk. Even blurred, there was no masking the sharp vertical lines that caged her mouth, or the taut line of her chin, or the ropy tendons of her neck that betrayed her habit of skipping or rushing through meals. The cheeks, sloping steeply from high, round cheekbones, were colorless, feathered with wrinkles. She saw her face, for just an instant, as her younger colleagues might. Leaning closer, she breathed evenly, and watched a faint fog cloud the glass.
It had, long ago, been a face that had attracted attention, if not for its beauty then for another quality.
The most truthful face I’ve ever seen, Dror had once said.
But sometimes truth hurt.
She turned away from the reflection; she would not indulge the fallacy of wondering what her life would have been, had she been born to a different face.
A knock on the door. “Come,” she said.
He was young, tall. He stepped into the office, took off his ski cap, and folded it into the pocket of his jeans. He wore a T-shirt and a wool overshirt: casual enough to raise eyebrows, even among those history faculty who fancied themselves too modern for such concerns.