“Yet,” he laughed, bowing his farewell, “you are not.”
She walked home alone, gripping her cloak tight about her, thoughts piling and slipping. Manuel HaLevy understood her more truly than any—he saw she was no docile creature, nor did he wish her to be. And his warning echoed the rabbi’s: she’d have no livelihood, no protection from hunger and need after the rabbi’s death. Why, then, not marry him, under such terms as he offered? But her nature, it seemed, was unnatural. What she wished—she could not help it, the wish persisted darkly inside her—was to be a part of the swelling wave she felt in the words of the books and pamphlets lining the tables outside St. Paul’s, the piles of fresh-bound quires at the bindery. What she wished was to struggle with all her force to urge that wave along, so that she might herself sweep and be swept in its furious progress—driving against the shore to smash some edifice of thought that stood guard over the land, throw herself against it and watch it crumble. For some new truth lay beyond it, she was sure of it. A continent awaiting discovery.
How to explain to all the world that her own vanity—her pretension at philosophical thought, which a man like Manuel HaLevy would trample—was more valuable to her than the safety he offered?
She’d reached home. The door shut hard behind her, and in its wake quiet reigned. The rabbi had retired to his room, the fire in the study had gone to embers.
A woman’s body, said the world, was a prison in which her mind must wither.
She forced herself to stand still in the center of the room, palms resting lightly on the fabric of her skirts. She would not permit herself another step until she calmed herself with reason.
Nature gave a woman not only body but also intelligence, and a wish to employ it. Was it then predetermined that one side of Ester’s nature must suffocate the other? If two of God’s creations were opposed, must it be that God decided in advance that one was more perfect and therefore must be victorious? Did God determine before each storm that either the wind or the oak tree must prevail, one being more dear to Him?
Or perhaps, rather, the storm itself was God’s most prized creation—and only through it could the contest between wind and oak tree be resolved, and one proven hardier. Perhaps—she trembled at her own heresy—the storm itself was God. And God was only the endless tumult of life proving new truths and eradicating old.
Then it was only right that she do as her spirit told her, and let the struggle itself answer the question of which was the stronger: her will or her womanly nature.
Still dressed in her cloak, she crossed the room, sat at the writing table, dipped a quill, and wrote quickly, as though the words she set on the paper might be spied and seized from her.
To the esteemed Thomas Hobbes,
I write to inquire whether I might engage your illustrious mind in discussion. Although I am unknown to you, I believe myself to be one such as you may trust: a companion in inquiry, and no part of the powers that would condemn a thinker for incredulity or atheistery.
My interests in metaphysical inquiry are many, but of late concern the question of extension. If I may embolden myself to do so, I would like to inquire as to what relationship you find between the divine and natural worlds, and what beliefs you hold in the matter of providential intervention. I myself, as you surely intuit, hold thoughts in these matters that are other than those commonly held. I am in disagreement not only with the notion of divine dominion over nature, but also with the belief in its expression through miracles, the which notion seems to me the facile recourse of a poor mathematician whose numerical proofs, having failed to arrive at a wished-for sum, may yet be solved by the sudden mysterious introduction of a new number to right the balance.
It is my keen wish to discuss and learn from my fellow thinkers, so that where I err I might be corrected, and where I possess a spark of understanding it might be fanned. Yet an infirmity of body bars me from traveling to your door to converse with you face to face as two gentlemen ought. It is my hope that you will take my word, insubstantial though it must seem, for surety. It is my hope that you will answer my letter.
So she wrote, and signed the letter Thomas Farrow, and when she had finished this letter she set it to dry.
There on the desk beside it, written in her hand, lay the rabbi’s letter to Florence. Slowly but deliberately, she turned it on the wooden table. She dipped the quill heavily, and drew the nib across the paper between the inverted lines of the letter, shaping a ribbon of blue-black ink to ease her own thoughts.
She wrote, in Hebrew, Here I begin.
17
December 22, 2000
London
He’d arrived this morning to find the rare manuscripts room strafed by shafts of sunlight, and empty with the exception of the necessary Patricia. He’d requested a document, and Patricia had brought this bill for provisions, written by an anonymous merchant in December 1664—so much money for so many sacks of flour and a barrel of something illegible. The paper was moderately damaged, and Aaron let his eyes slide over the letters with their brown halos. Nothing of interest.
An English sort of quiet reigned in the hall—reverent and fraught. She doesn’t know what she’s missing, he told it.
Only last night, making room on his kitchenette table for a sheaf of transcriptions of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s letters, he’d moved aside a stack of dissertation research notes (and how foreign his dissertation now revealed itself to be: a work written in Sanskrit by an earnest scholar who vaguely repelled Aaron) and, in doing so, dropped his Signet Shakespeare to the floor. Picking it up, he’d browsed the sonnets until one stopped him:
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.
Staring at the lines, he’d felt a sudden gust of anger. Yet again, he didn’t fucking get it. Or maybe Shakespeare was bullshitting. Wasn’t love, by definition, the wish to be remembered? Nowhere in Aaron’s notion of love was there anything remotely resembling the willingness to erase himself for the sake of the other’s ease.
No matter; Marisa had erased Aaron without his help, for her own ease.
He blew out a long breath, and admitted it: she didn’t love him.
Beyond that thought was a vast, featureless terrain.
After a while he saw that he could traverse it all day without arriving anywhere.
There was a pencil in his palm. He took it between his fingers, bore down with his bruised knuckle on its ridges, and like a miner picking his way toward an unknown destination began to write—slowly, steadily, filling the void with work.
Was that what sadness did to a man?
He transcribed meticulously, responsibly, avoiding shorthand that could create confusion later. The lone scratching of his pencil on the page livened the silence, humanized it, comforted him.
Good Lord. He was growing up.
Women loved that.
By noon, he’d transcribed two documents, neither of any importance. Household detritus: A bill for bookbinding. A note about the timing of a pupil’s next lesson.
He stood from his table, his body stiff with the morning’s labor. He wanted another look at that cross-written letter. Something about it bothered him, though he couldn’t say exactly what—something he couldn’t get at by staring at the transcription on his laptop. The Hebrew words were taut and carefully chosen, as though each sentence had to arc around some invisible obstacle before setting down lightly on some delicate, all-important point.