He’d brought it on himself. But if she’d ever imagined there might be pleasure in seeing Aaron Levy’s arrogance humbled, she’d been wrong. For once he’d made no eye contact, his lean frame bent in defeat. He’d handed her his translation, mumbled “You need a new printer cartridge,” and left her office without another word.
After Aaron had left, she sat in her office, listening to the steady thrum of the heater, her hands loose on the fabric of her skirt, her eyes unable to settle on any one thing. It had taken her a full ten minutes to calm herself enough to turn to the pages on her desk. When she did, she was stricken to see what Aaron had been referring to: the printout of the transcription was so faint as to be barely readable. The imprint of a seventeenth-century mind and spirit, lost for almost three and a half centuries and finally salvaged . . . only to be thwarted by her drained printer cartridge. It was almost funny. But nothing was funny to her, nothing had been funny for years. Was that the problem? Was it her humorlessness—her stiffness—that had prevented her from giving Aaron his due when he’d presented his findings? Was that why he’d left with that humbled air she never expected from Aaron Levy, his moment of triumph turned to defeat? When had she become such a mirthless, ungiving person?
She knew when it had become irreversible. She remembered precisely when it had happened. It was the spring, four years ago, shortly after she’d learned of Dror’s death. She’d read of it in an article so brief it was barely an article, just two paragraphs in a newspaper she’d found on the Internet while searching for Dror’s name—something she’d still been in the habit of doing from time to time, at her computer on the small wooden desk in her bedroom.
The news report, which had been published three months earlier, referred to Dror as a “businessman” and this almost made her laugh aloud, before she read further.
Dror, the report said, had died when his car accidentally went off the road somewhere outside Moscow.
At first she’d not believed that Dror could die without her knowledge. She, who had no patience for theories of the paranormal, could not comprehend that the world could be emptied of Dror’s face, his body and hands and eyes, without her sensing it. Yet there were the words.
It hadn’t been an accident—of that she felt certain. If Dror’s car had veered to its destruction, it was because he’d been run off the road while doing something covert, something he or his superiors hoped would save lives.
His body, the report said, had been released by the Russians in exchange for something. Later, she wouldn’t be able to recall what. In the weeks to come, drifting off to sleep or waking in the middle of the night, she became confused, even, about which one of them had died. She’d be stricken in half-sleep by the image of Dror pausing somewhere amid his work or even at a meal with his vibrant family to recall Helen with a pang of sorrow—and the desire to spare him that grief rose in her like dark well water until she woke, drowning—and sat awake in her nightdress, disoriented, turning the pages of her volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
She’d readily have sacrificed her place in Dror’s heart—erased all memory of herself—if it would have eased him. But Dror had never forgotten her. Of that she was certain.
That spring was when she’d first felt the drag on her foot. It had started with the lightness of a touch, slight but insistent—as though someone who loved her with a great and abiding gentleness had rested two fingers on the top curve of her right foot as if to say, Are you certain?
She’d had to lift the foot consciously, the light press of the fingers giving way without protest: a loving presence that did not overrule her.
Then the whole foot grew reluctant. She’d stand up out of bed to find its weight grown heavier each morning. But though it dragged, she insisted on walking forward, and always it submitted to her will.
The doctors used words like radiculopathy and idiopathic—terms that sounded like jeers until she registered their meaning: not that her symptoms were ridiculous or idiotic, but rather that the doctors couldn’t pinpoint their origin. Still, she knew that because her doctors couldn’t explain her symptoms they disbelieved her, not directly but faintly, with a patronizing politeness she felt was worse than mockery. Only a year later, after she’d grown pale and stiff and had mastered the art of masking both pain and tremors before her colleagues, had the diagnosis been pronounced. She’d received it wordlessly, to the discomfort of Dr. Hammond, who seemed unnerved by her failure to ask questions. But she’d asked nothing then. Just as she’d asked nothing of Dr. Hammond yesterday, rebutting his lecture with silence.
It was Friday now, and almost noon. She sat at her desk, Aaron’s transcription in her hands. The echo of yesterday’s argument still rang in her mind. She couldn’t reconstruct the channels through which Aaron—or perhaps she?—had arrived at the subject of Dror. All she could retrieve was the feeling of it: like something rising up inside her and spilling—unstoppable because she didn’t want to stop it.
She told herself to focus. She’d nearly finished fighting her way through a dozen student papers from her Early Modern History course; she needed to clear her desk and her mind for the documents, which she expected would consume all her remaining force. In truth, attempting to work her way through the documents quickly enough to fend off Wilton and his team was hopeless. Aaron Levy would presumably announce his resignation in an e-mail today—that was the style of his generation, to communicate via the safety of pixels on a screen. Or perhaps he’d simply fail to show up to the rare manuscripts room, leaving the obvious unspoken. She couldn’t say at the moment whether she was sorry to see him go. But it was clear his departure would be a significant blow to her work, possibly a fatal one.
Fretfully she raised the transcription to the light, the better to read the faint print.
The words that leave my hand are my life.
I’ve brought forth no other life in my days, and believe I shall not.
In the dim light of her office, she was seized by an irrational premonition. She half rose from her desk to shake it. The transcription in her hands frightened her. She eyed it charily, as though the faint words on the page might have the power to overturn not only the received wisdom of seventeenth-century scholars, but what she thought she knew about her own life.
A loud knock.
She took up her cane, attempted to steady herself. Then, obedient as a girl, opened the door.
“Good morning,” Jonathan Martin said.
“Good morning.” Her voice sounded thin.
Despite not being particularly tall, Jonathan Martin occupied Helen’s doorframe with a tall man’s authority. Beneath his thick, graying hair, his face was lined but notably healthy-looking—how was it that Martin always looked sun-tinged, as though he’d just returned from vacationing in some warmer clime? He stood before her: fashionable rimless glasses, thick gold wedding band, the line of his shirt straight where it was tucked in beneath his open jacket—no trace of the paunch one would expect in a man his age.
His smile made her flinch.
“I thought I’d let you know that Brian Wilton and his group begin in the rare manuscripts room today. I trust their access to the documents won’t interfere with yours.”
“Do you?” she said.
“Of course I do,” he replied. “Adding Wilton’s energies to the mix is all for the good of the work.”
She stood as tall as she could. “Don’t you for-the-good-of-the-work me.”