He’d abandoned The Tempest.
Darcy had consoled him. That is, Darcy had come as close to consolation as one could expect from a British academic. Darcy had combed his thin gray hair back over his bald spot with the fingers of one hand, and counseled him with a mildness that Aaron suspected was as close as the man came to warmth: Dark nights of the scholarly soul were sadly unavoidable for those who chose the rigorous path. Aaron would carry through in the end.
With a clap on the shoulder and a gesture at his clock, Darcy had ushered Aaron out of his office and his afternoon.
It would have been far simpler, yes, for Aaron to engage in small ideas, rather than try to say something fresh about the Bard, to whom academic crackpots flocked like iron filings to a magnet. Once, over beer and chips at a party, a fellow who’d been sizing up Aaron’s Bard-olatry credentials had boasted that he himself had disproven all three leading theories about the identities of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and Fair Youth, and would soon be the one to unearth the true identities of Shakespeare’s female and male paramours. When Aaron had questioned the guy, though, he’d gotten cagey, guarding his ideas as though Aaron were angling to steal them. He needn’t have bothered; in Aaron’s opinion, obsessing about the identity of long-dead individuals—even presuming you first made the leap and assumed Shakespeare wasn’t just writing imaginatively in those sonnets but was talking about actual people he’d admired or loved—was a complete waste of time. Discovering which particular individuals caught the Bard’s fancy and what sort of relationships might or might not have ensued would cast no real light on Shakespeare’s significance. Let the Dark Lady and Fair Youth sonnets speak for themselves over the ages, universal messages that needed no external context.
Yet hadn’t he just argued the irrelevance of his own dissertation? How was finding links between Shakespeare’s writings and a long-lost Jewish community any different? Perhaps he ought to thank Helen Watt for allowing him temporary shelter in a time period a full fifty years after the Bard had had the good grace to expire.
In an e-mail written more than three weeks ago, Marisa had mentioned a possible visit to London this coming summer, to attend a friend’s wedding.
He pictured her.
He pictured her in his London flat, setting her travel bag on the floor.
Looking at him. And abruptly laughing.
He pictured her naked.
He pictured her reclining.
He pictured her reclining on black velvet drapes in a portrait painted by Rodney Keller.
He wondered whether Rodney Keller was gay.
A bus on a roundabout.
He set his fingers on the keyboard once more.
Unfortunately, there’s a wrinkle in the process. We’re not the only ones working on these documents anymore. The head of the History Department is about to give another team access. And don’t even ask: nobody is about to offer to collaborate. Helen Watt was ready to explode when she got the news (I could tell, clever fellow that I am, because her lips got three microns thinner when the competing scholar’s name was mentioned) but I’m guessing she’s scared. Maybe she’s human after all. Me, I’ll keep slaving away on the papers all day in this reading room that’s quiet as a cathedral. Got to be both painstaking and fast. Do not hurry; do not rest. So said Goethe. I don’t rest, but it’s a lot of rough hours conversing with nothing but three-hundred-year-old paper and my computer.
His fingers rested on the keys. He tried to think of some way to describe what he felt, day after day, in the rare manuscripts room. The massive silence; tables of very thin students with very bad posture; a page nested before Aaron, on a furrowed pillow on which he’d have loved to rest his own head. He tried to think how to tell Marisa what it was like to sit reading documents he was forbidden to lift or move, making notes with a pencil stub grooved with some unknown scholar’s tooth marks, until he was a coiled spring—until he felt that some mad idea was about to break in him like a wave and he would jump from his seat and follow it, whatever the consequences. A state at once intolerable and intoxicating. He searched for words that would be true and also acceptable to Marisa. There was nothing. Then abruptly his fingers sprang into urgent action on the keys, and he watched the words appear on the screen.
Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.
He planned to delete the sentence. He’d typed Helen’s words only to feel them out, like trying someone else’s gloves on his hands.
Then he knew that he would keep them, send them as his own.
If I read your last e-mail right, you’re nostalgic for London. Well, there’s a welcome waiting for you if you want it.
—A
He hit Send, watched the computer release his message into the void of the irretrievable.
Inside the rare manuscripts room, settling alone at the long table, he wearily regarded the pencils Library Patricia rolled onto the table. “No offense,” he said to her, giving her a smile, “but these are killing my knuckles.” He raised a hand and ruefully indicated the red-gray calluses left behind by yesterday’s work.
Library Patricia turned her dispassionate gaze to his shirt pocket, where a round pencil of his own was peeking out: contraband. With the slightest flicker of satisfaction on her impassive face, she plucked it from his chest and turned her back—leaving him to a faintly inked letter dated 1659 and three sharpened brown pencils, notched into painful hexagons, each no longer than his index finger.
“Hey!” he said, his indignation real this time.
She didn’t turn back.
“You flirt!” he muttered when her stodgy figure was out of earshot, and his own humor righted him.
He worked. The first letter was in Portuguese and he dispatched the translation within a half-hour, dry-gulping two ibuprofen as his temples began their daily throbbing.
March 18, 1665
2 Nisan, 5425
Amsterdam
To Rabbi HaCoen Mendes,
Surely you will not remember your undeserving pupil from so many years ago, yet I’ve not forgotten your tutelage in my youth. Your learning was ever a light to those privileged to study at your side, and your pupils spread that learning as mirrors multiply one candle and make it a thousand.
I am but an unimportant scholar in the kahal of Amsterdam, yet it is an abundant blessing to labor here in support of the great rabbis and to be asked to respond to a letter such as yours. You will be honored to know that the Rabbi Solomon de Oliveyra concurs with your methods for teaching Hebrew, and he refers you to his work on the subject, Sarsot Gablut, which perhaps you have not yet encountered. With regard to the other questions you posed, debate continues here regarding whether the messianic age comes in this year of 5425 or the coming year, yet whichever be true, the fervor of many here, including myself, rises. Even the Rabbis Aboab and Oliveyra have written prayers that are included in new books dedicated to the imminent coming. From the words of your letter, I understand that you and many in London have not yet woken to the coming of the Redeemer, yet I am told your city is hushed in contemplation of the portent seen in your night skies, as it is in our skies here in Amsterdam. Though I am unfit to persuade a learned man such as you, still must I try to impress upon you the import of a sign your eyes cannot behold. The significance of G-d’s bright beacon to our heavens cannot be mistaken. With eyes lifted to the hills,
Yacob Rodriguez
Aaron finished the translation and made notes on a separate pad. The involvement of Aboab and Oliveyra in the false-messiah hysteria was already well documented, but this was a nice piece of evidence regardless. Might be part of a paper one day.
He requested the next letter, this one with a somewhat earlier date, and after a break to stretch his legs and get a soda he sat back down to the new document.
March 13, 1665