The sorrow in his eyes confused her. She shook her head—wasn’t he going to deny it? She’d run here counting on the fact that he’d tell her it was a misunderstanding—that she could fall into his arms with the relief that they’d leapt another hurdle together.
“Helen,” he said quietly, “I didn’t lie. I want to work for the country if they’ll have me. But—”
The conversation was happening too fast—she couldn’t take it in. Something in him was alien to her—she was a foreigner here after all. But then, hadn’t she always been? Loneliness gripped her—a physical need for the sound of rain. England. The rockscape outside Dror’s window made her heart race as though it would give out if she couldn’t see a bit of green. What if she was afraid of it all? The thought came to her: I can’t do it if I can’t be sure of him.
She raised her voice, louder than she needed to. “What you’re saying, Dror, is that I’ll always come second. And I’ll never understand you because I’m not Jewish. I’ll never be as—”
“You’re”—he rose, stepped toward her, gestured uselessly. “Helen, everything I do is to be honest with you. I want you to know the worst, so you can run away now if you need to. But that’s not—if you decide to be with me, Helen, I see now that we can make this—”
Her only thought now was to wound him, so he would hold her once more—so he would whisper his apology for the unbearable images Muriel’s words had conjured: Dror lost. Dror missing. Helen alone in an empty kitchen years from now, listening to the radio in a country she’d never understand. In a ragged voice, she spoke the ugliest words she could find. “There’s a hole in you where your heart once was. And in its place, you’ve put history.”
A blast of silence. His eyes were closed. He said, simply, “No.”
He opened his eyes and looked at her. “You’re in my heart,” he said. “But you’re right too, Helen. I’m not who I was. I—”
It took her a moment to register that his voice was breaking.
“I hated it,” he said. And then, louder, “I hated it. Do you think I didn’t know when it was happening to me? Do you think the world can operate on your heart without you knowing it?”
His voice was breaking for himself, she realized—and she despised herself for forcing him to see what she saw. And she loved him as she hadn’t loved a human being in her life—felt his blamelessness so powerfully that she would willingly have lain down on the painted concrete floor and rested her head on his worn, motionless boots.
He’d finished. He stood for a moment. Then he opened the door and motioned her out.
And there was a soldier sketching the silhouette of Masada from the hood of his jeep. She left her suitcase and her ticket for London in the car she’d rented to drive herself out of the desert for the last time. She could feel the iron in her smile, but she saw the soldier’s eyes soften with foolish hope as she approached, in the skirt and blouse that were foreign on her body after her months in uniform. And she took the sketch from his hand with a grim, hard grip.
How did you come to history?, Aaron had asked her, that first long day of work at the Eastons’ house.
She gathered her coat. Her satchel. Her cane, the finish worn away on one side of its knobbed handle. She turned off the overhead light, and locked her office door.
Outside, in the dimming afternoon, she leaned her cane against a railing, and with both hands labored to button her coat against the chill. She reached the top button. Put her hands into her pockets, and rested. Then worked one glove onto each hand, retrieved her cane, and began the slow walk to her car.
12
December 6, 1663
7 Kislev, 5424
London
She slid open the bed curtain, the wooden rings clicking.
The stone floor was ice. She firmed her bare feet on it and stood, her breath weightless in the dark room. From the truckle bed, the heavy sounds of Rivka’s sleep. She reached and found the windowsill. Stood a moment before the panes that admitted not light, but rather a thinning of the dark.
A pale smudge of moon was visible above the city wall, and a small commotion passed briefly on the street below her window—the brief, raucous laughter of men on their way back from a tavern. She wrapped her shawl tight about her shoulders, then followed the wall until it opened to the cold stair.
Without its warming fire, the rabbi’s study was hollow. She lingered a moment at the threshold. Even now, it was this instant she most treasured: the moment when she entered the dark room. The bound volumes, arrayed silent on the cloaked bookshelves, waited. She stepped across the threshold, drew one long breath. Then, swiftly, found candle and striker in a drawer near the hearth. Revealed, the room shone with a brave brightness. The volumes she’d retrieved most recently from the bindery lay on a table where she would read from them to the rabbi on the morrow. Setting the candle in a dish, she drew the curtain covering the closest shelves and slipped her hand across the spines, her fingertips slowly crossing the fine rivulets of each leather binding. The first book she touched was in Portuguese: Consola??o às Tribula??es de Israel. The next, Ketseh Ha-Arets, in Hebrew. The next in French, Les Principes de la Philosophie; then Sidereus Nuncius—written in a dense Latin that had, for most of the past month, confounded her, only slowly yielding to her attention.
Something had sprung alive in her these years—slowly at first, then more powerfully with every passing day. Surely the rabbi must know it? Something had seized her. The city, its books.