There was a long silence.
“I used what words came,” he said, “in Lisbon. I do not believe I recanted my faith under the priests’ instruments, but neither did I proclaim it. My words tumbled without sense.” For a long moment he was quiet. “For a reason I’ve never understood, they released me. Perhaps they felt a moment’s pity, for I was yet young. Or perhaps in my moanings I uttered those very words they so cruelly wished me to speak.” The rabbi sat motionless. She watched some struggle pass across his face, and fade. “I do not recall ever speaking the name of their lord,” he said. “But it may be that I did. For I can think of no other reason I was allowed to live.
“Yet speaking their words would hardly have been more cowardly than what I am certain I did.” He winced, his eyelids wrinkling as though they could yet shut out vision. “I begged for life. After my father and mother had asserted their faith.”
Without thinking, Ester stepped forward. She set her hand on his arm and rested it there. The rabbi, motionless, allowed her touch.
“They let me go, saying my sight would be a small price to pay for my life. Before he took my eyes, the youngest priest said, ‘Look now, so that your last vision ever stay with you and remind you of the truth you learn today at God’s hands.’”
He sat undefended like a child. His shoulders were thin, his frail neck exposed.
“It was as he said. It has stayed with me always. I see that last sight even now, Ester, at this moment.”
She did not ask what he saw. She vowed never to ask.
The fire burned softly, the air over the hearth a fine shimmer.
“The psalms,” the rabbi said.
She went to the shelf and retrieved the small worn book, which awaited her there as though no violence had shaken the room.
“Number thirty-three,” he said.
She chanted with the rabbi.
Later, after Rivka had persuaded him to take the air outside and led him slowly to the street on her arm, Ester stood alone in the study. A long while she stood.
Then she unfolded the widow’s letter.
Did she wonder which young man might have spoken of her in the presence of Isabella Mendoza? Yes. Yes, perhaps she did. She could not deny it. She wouldn’t pretend Mary’s foolish yearnings had no kin in her own.
But she could ill afford to be like other girls. And she’d not yet learned of a woman’s passion that did not exact a fearsome price. Had the widow who wrote this letter herself once allowed her senses to rule her? Whatever choices this Isabella Mendoza had made, whatever hopes she’d dared, they hadn’t sustained her. It was now her business to insert herself, for sustenance, into the forming of further matches, whether or not they might serve as traps for the souls thus bound.
It is a danger to a woman, she told herself, even to feel it.
Did she believe it?
She reread the letter, and dropped it into the fire.
Just so—in the space of a heartbeat—she’d betrayed the rabbi.
Breathing deeply, she watched it burn. It curled in the flames, half rose in the heat, and subsided: the single page that could have expelled her from this narrow perch of home.
The fact of what she’d done pierced her even as she watched. Yet if she could have hastened the dissolving of the paper to ash, she’d have done so. She watched the last of the widow’s letter to the rabbi form a fine dark webbing of ash, then collapse onto the orange coals beneath it.
The choice sat ill in her body, like a physick she had chosen on impulse to swallow. It was too soon to say if the body would rebel.
13
December 16, 2000
London
Well, Marisa, you’ve got me curious. First your report of planned excursions to the north, then the news that suddenly you’re leaving your kibbutz program . . . and then you tell me you’ve planned a visit to the desert. Then silence. I’m thinking you’ve converted to Orthodoxy and are currently wearing a headkerchief and on your way to mothering eight children. Or else you’ve formed a punk band and are living the high life in Tel Aviv.
Am laboring away on the documents here for the ever-charming Professor Helen Watt. Some of the documents are pretty mundane, others interesting, but we’re only starting to put together a picture of what they are, let alone why they were under a staircase in Richmond, which in those times must have been at least a half day’s travel from London. There are some as-yet-unexplained references in one of the documents, which Watt seems to feel will be of earth-shattering importance. I’m not yet convinced, though it does seem we may have run across evidence of a woman scribe. That’s going to make waves when we publish. There’s no doubt this will advance the scholarship in the field, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that whatever papers we write on this material will be published . . . which somewhat eases the pain of dealing with Watt. A few times I’ve thought she was about to ease up and behave like a human, but I’ve been sadly disappointed. She’s the sort of person you can’t imagine having an actual home. It’s as though she turns a corner leaving her office and is shelved overnight in some storage unit for the terminally pedantic, and only materializes again on her return to work the next morning. God save us (note, please, how British I’m starting to sound) from the doyennes of academia. She refers to the seventeenth-century hidden Jews as “crypto-Jews,” which she pronounces like she’s talking about some specimen under a microscope. She calls the Ketuvim “the Hagiographa,” maybe to make sure I know she’s not one of those sentimental religious types. She studies Jews like we’re her favorite insect pinned to a wall. Well, I’m just going to have to develop that British stiff upper lip. I’m glad to be working on this project. And she needs my skills.
That last part was a lie. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Helen Watt would abruptly turn to him this very morning and give him credit for being something other than a page-turner?
Unlikely. He’d caught her rechecking one of his translations just yesterday. What was the point of hiring a grad student with eighteen combined years of Hebrew and Spanish and Portuguese study if you didn’t let him do so much as render a translation?
But then, what was the point of disdaining work, even as a page-turner, if you’d made no serious headway on your dissertation in a year?
Around his thoughts went, like a bus on a roundabout. It took so little to start his mind on this course, the sickening sweep of his months in London raising bile in his throat. The weeks he’d wasted in the library trying to make something new out of Shakespeare’s use of the name Bassanio in Merchant of Venice, and tracking down every possible connection between Shakespeare and the Jewish Bassano family then in the London court—only to discover that another scholar had already mapped the entire terrain of that blind alley . . . and by the way, the Bassano family wasn’t actually Jewish. The months he’d devoted to The Tempest, following some glimmering notion about Prospero’s references to magical books and a magic garment, which Aaron theorized might be derived from possible Jewish sources—only to realize that there was no evidence of any Jewish derivation . . . and, worse, to discover along the way that in fact he didn’t understand The Tempest at all, because he couldn’t honestly believe Prospero’s relinquishment of his magical powers. And if Aaron couldn’t take seriously the culmination of the play’s drama—if he couldn’t agree that a man like Prospero would ever willingly break his wand, and in doing so renounce his power to dazzle and wreak revenge and draw those he loved irresistibly to him—if Aaron failed to understand the very surface of this text, despite the fact that a significant portion of humanity seemed to think it was Shakespeare’s towering achievement . . . then how could he hope to glean any of what lay beneath?