Words that wisped about her and warmed her still, all these years later, as she and the rabbi labored together.
Only yesterday, he had instructed her to pull from the shelf a heavy volume, Augustine’s Confessiones. “Read,” said the rabbi. Slowly she’d spoken the Latin words aloud. The afternoon filled and brimmed with them; the afternoon was suspended like a great heaven-kissing bird that did not need to flap its wings. Noverim te, noverim me. The rabbi interrupting only to correct her pronunciation. When she’d closed the book, he said, “I dread their priests, yes, Ester. Yet I read such works in Lisbon in my youth, and though many think me in error in this, I fear neither such books nor the language in which they’re written. If Latin is the language in which the world arrays its beliefs, Jews may also speak it. Nor do I grant the irons that closed my eyes permission to close my mind. When any man of any nation cries out in his wish to know God, then his questions merit considering.”
She fingered the spine of the book before her. Whispers overheard on Amsterdam’s barges tickled her memory. She said, “Even the questions of one such as de Spinoza?”
The rabbi’s face tightened. But Ester continued, searching her mind for the wisps of scandalized conversation she’d overheard as she sewed mutely in a neighbor’s parlor after the fire. “People said he believed even a tree or a fight might be God.”
She’d but one recollection of Baruch de Spinoza from childhood—doubtless she’d seen him at later times, surely they’d passed on the street, surely he’d been in the synagogue gallery while she’d stood in the balcony. Yet her sole memory was from years before his exile. He’d been older than Ester, perhaps of age thirteen or fourteen, and that afternoon he had been tasked with escorting the rabbi from the synagogue to her family’s door. She remembered only dark, heavy-lidded eyes, quietly taking in all. And a figure that seemed, in retrospect, too slight, too timid, too gentle, to support such devilishness as she would later hear was burning in his spirit.
“De Spinoza,” said the rabbi, “flaunted his doubts.” He chose each word with care, as though reluctant to speak at all. “I failed to sway the other rabbis to a gentler course. And I failed to persuade him to hear reason.” The rabbi turned his face intently toward Ester. “De Spinoza chose exile and therefore death.”
Yet—Ester thought with a vexation that surprised her—had it not been whispered that the heretic, who’d spurned his Jewish name, now carried on his curious debates in alehouses and binderies as Bento—or even Benedictus—de Spinoza? Was it not whispered that he studied gladly with the former Jesuit Van den Enden, whose own thoughts were said to border on atheism? How then must de Spinoza be counted among the dead?
From the kitchen, Rivka’s call: the evening meal was prepared. Slowly the rabbi freed himself of what had troubled him. At length he turned to Ester with a peaceful countenance. “I believe it no danger to your faith to read the words of a Christian. Yet it would be wise not to reveal that I’ve introduced you to such books. Word that I have permitted a girl this knowledge might stir our good cousins in Amsterdam to force an end to your labors on my behalf, which they seem for the time to have forgotten.”
It was the first he’d spoken of her sex in all these years, and she received his speech in silence, afraid any word of hers might jar him from his indulgence, and at last make plain to him the impropriety of this new life he’d permitted her.
Now, in the glow of candlelight, the books lay before her: Augustine, Descartes. Atop these volumes rested her own hands, no longer chafed from constant housework: strange and delicate things with a fixed desire of their own. A desire to touch each page, each line of ink.
More than half the candle remained. She could read an hour before it guttered, longer if she took another candle from the drawer. How many had she burned already this month? Her hours of night reading seemed to grow ever more necessary, for each day’s study compelled her to explore these volumes further, and with a fierce attention impossible when others were about. On nights when she could rouse herself after her first sleep, she forced herself from bed and down the stairs to the rabbi’s room. Once there, she studied until she could read only by brushing tears of strain from her eyes. In vain were her most solemn determinations to burn only one candle; for when that candle guttered, she lit another—and after all, was the household’s allowance not abundant enough to pay for but one more? She’d use the rabbi’s coins to purchase replacements the next time she was sent abroad in the city. Praying Rivka wouldn’t discover the depleted drawer until Ester had filled it once more, she sighed a long, peaceful sigh, and opened Confessiones. The remaining half-candle spent itself as she puzzled over Augustine’s fervor. She sought something here that she couldn’t name, and felt it elude her narrowly. She turned to Descartes—a second and third candle, thin smoke wreathing and rising. And back to Augustine, until she knew long passages by rote—for if Latin was the language in which thinkers clasped hands, she’d study it until it opened its secrets to her. So she read on, a great and solemn feeling moving through her body: a scaling fatigue, a scaling curiosity. Only when the fourth candle went out—the room’s hollowness suddenly magnified a thousandfold by the dark—did she rise and shut the books, returning each to its place by feel. Through the towering silence she slipped quietly toward her bed, her head light from exhaustion, the dimensions of the household seeming to grow and shrink about her.
At dawn she was a stone, unmoved by sunlight or the twitter of starlings on the roof, responding only to the slap of Rivka’s open hand on the wall beside her bed. In the kitchen she mixed Rivka’s pale batter, the upper limits of her vision darkening if she raised her head too quickly, as though curtains threatened to close on a stage. A question floated in her mind, knocking against the side of the wooden bowl with each turn of her spoon. Why, when the rabbis wished to understand God’s will or Augustine the construction of man’s soul, did they not reason as Descartes did, taking nothing as given? Must true inquiry proceed from texts and traditions already established, or could the mind on its own perceive all it needed to fathom the world? And which path of inquiry led more straightly to truth? The spoon knocked, the questions knocked, her lips shaped single words of Latin.
Rivka was before her. “What animal of the night,” she said in Portuguese, “has crept into the house and used every candle in the rabbi’s study?”
Ester stared, dumb, Rivka’s square face a senseless blur.
“Or has the rabbi found himself fond of lighting the night, though he lives in darkness even so?” Rivka’s voice brimmed with strange anger. Ester could focus only on the vein-webbed nose, the large dark pores—she could absorb only details, not the whole of Rivka’s tired face. “Is it he who’s left wax drippings on the table for others to clean?”
Ester clutched the bowl to her chest. And then at once, as Rivka continued, Ester saw the face before her in its entirety, and everything writ on it: a fury and anguish she’d never before seen in Rivka. “We live in this terrible city,” Rivka said, “in this terrible cold house that worsens his health, so that he can teach. Yet you spend the house’s money on candles for your passing whim for study.”
She’d no answer.
“If he wishes to have you scribe in place of a man”—Rivka drew breath—“then I will honor his choice. I won’t deny him your labor. But I won’t have you steal from the only one”—Rivka’s voice turned dangerous—“the only one among your precious Sephardic lords and ladies kind enough to take in orphans.”