“You two are friends?” he persisted. “I never see you talk.”
Helen slid a cushion closer and squinted at it. “I hardly know the first thing about her,” she said distractedly. “Nor she me. Sorry to disappoint you.”
He pointed at the six documents on their identical brown cushions. “Well, if you don’t call that friendship . . .”
She faced him. “That,” she said, lowering her glasses to the tip of her nose, “is British for May the best team win.”
He looked at her, but chose not to laugh at the irony. What could possibly be the point in racing through the next documents? Speed didn’t matter anymore. Wilton’s team was going to press with the story of a female scribe and the previously unknown correspondence about the Florentine Sabbatean crisis: two huge findings, which he and Helen had had the naiveté to hold back until they’d done a proper job of working through the cache of documents and forming a coherent picture of who left it and why. Just like that, with no fanfare, their work had become irrelevant.
Failure. This time he didn’t recoil from it, but poked at it like a missing tooth, carefully prodding the sickening metallic taste, the blank, textureless surface.
Then he turned back to his work. He’d never done that: sit down to a task even though he knew he wasn’t going to win. He wasn’t sure he understood himself. But what else did he have to do? The horizon was bare.
Ignoring the new documents for the moment, he surreptitiously pulled out his laptop and positioned it on his thighs beneath the table. Despite Patricia’s transgression of reading-room rules, he had little doubt she’d throw him out for such a flagrant violation. Helen Watt, on the other hand, seemed too focused to care. On his computer screen he pulled up a translation of the original cross-written letter.
Start at the beginning, he counseled himself. Like a good Cartesian thinker, he needed to approach the evidence with systematic doubt. A return to first principles: what, in all the universe, did he know for certain?
He read Aleph’s words.
I pose questions forbidden to men, yet I am myself blameless of violating the law.
Very clever, Aleph. You’re a woman, so you can’t be accused of doing things “forbidden to men.” Clever, but by no means revelatory. Somehow he’d had more respect for Aleph than this. Somehow he’d expected her to do more than doodle upside down on her boss’s letter in breathless hyperbole about how very terribly mysterious her scribe work was. “Come on,” he muttered. “Give me something better.”
He felt Helen’s eyes on him but didn’t lift his gaze from the screen.
I gave this answer: I am an empty vessel.
It is not so. For if desire be the essence of man, it must be also of woman. I am a vessel that brims with desire.
He read the Hebrew text in full, then the final line in English.
Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain, for they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
He’d been through all of this with Helen multiple times, but it felt as obscure now as the first time he’d read it. Richard II had been in circulation since before 1600, so certainly Aleph could have seen it performed or read it in quarto. Still, the quote felt as disjointed as the rest of the cross-written text. Maybe, Aaron conjectured, the business about forbidden questions was a sly reference to Sabbatai Zevi—maybe Aleph had been drawn to Sabbatai Zevi’s movement against her boss’s better judgment. Or maybe all the grandiose confessional language was simply Aleph metabolizing the fact that the rabbi wasn’t supposed to have a girl scribe? Still, the soap-opera references to the day’s events, the business about the most wicked of souls—it all felt paranoid, overblown. Possibly even a bit psychotic.
Still, even as he thought that, he imagined the shadowy girlish figure of Aleph herself lining up behind Helen and Patricia, all shaking their heads in disapproval at the obtuse American: why did he assume everything was as it appeared on the surface?
I pose questions forbidden to men.
Why? Why was it forbidden for men to ask about a Sabbatean crisis in Florence—assuming that’s what Aleph was referring to?
“Helen,” he said.
Only when she stared at him did he realize he’d called her by her first name.
With the tip of his pencil he tapped the line on his screen, angling the contraband computer so she could see it. “What do you make of that?” he said.
There was a silence, during which Aaron had a chance to appreciate something he’d overlooked about Helen: she was the sort who’d never berate a student for asking her to look at material she’d already looked at ten times before.
“She’s saying,” murmured Helen, “that it’s the rabbi who’s guilty of violating the law, not the scribe who sets down his words. But of course underneath that she’s being mischievous and saying that she’s not sinning because she’s not a man. She’s speaking through riddles.”
“Yeah,” said Aaron. “Okay.” Clearly Helen didn’t think there was anything amiss.
Helen was watching him.
“Okay, what?” she said.
The words burst out of him. “Why is it forbidden to men?”
Her gaze drifted to the high ceiling. Then back to him.
“Good question,” she said.
They sat together at the table.
“Do you think she could be talking about something else?” he said to Helen. “Some other kind of questioning, something that was illegal?”
“It’s possible,” she said.
“What questions couldn’t a person ask in the seventeenth century?”
Helen responded with a dry laugh. “Where do we begin? In the 1660s you could be imprisoned for promoting Catholicism when the king swung Protestant, and Protestantism when he swung Catholic, and the minefield was worse for Jews. French authorities searched bags at the borders to check for banned books—woe betide you if you were caught smuggling ideas across borders. Atheist remarks could get you butchered. And think about what happened to Johan de Witt, a voice of tolerance and political moderation! He and his brother were torn literally to pieces by a mob. Only the landlord’s decision to lock Spinoza inside the house that day prevented Spinoza—who was out of his head with horror and grief—from confronting the mob holding a sign saying You are the greatest of barbarians, and meeting the same fate himself.”
Aaron gave her a moment to return from the terrain her speech had carried her to.
“I just think,” he said quietly, “that Aleph is up to something.”
“Why?” countered Helen, but the sharpness of her tone was nothing personal. She was going to interrogate his idea; it was what they were there to do.
Even to his own ears, his arguments sounded thin. “Why the cross-written document? Why the sudden urge to save paper?”
“You’ve seen the meticulous household accounts. Perhaps she was just being mindful of expenses.”
“Still,” insisted Aaron, “we’ve read through dozens of HaCoen Mendes’s letters that she wrote for him, and there’s no precedent for her using one as scrap paper for her own musings.”
“All right. What do you think she was up to?”
He slowed; here he was on unsure footing. “Maybe it’s a commentary of some kind.”
“How so?”
He tapped the computer screen once more. The straight lines of text failed to re-create the feeling he recalled from the original letter: an overgrowth of words sprouting from the cross-written page. “You know how a page of the Torah is laid out for study, right?” he said. “There’s the main Hebrew text of the Torah—just a verse or two—and then framing it, in tiny script all around it, there are blocks of interpretation and counterargument. Well, this just reminds me of it. As though the inverted lines are a commentary on—or maybe more like a response to—that Florence letter.”
Helen’s silence felt like a lucid, steady current. She didn’t say aloud I take you seriously—yet as the seconds passed without reprimand, Aaron felt loose-limbed with relief.
“I want you to see this,” she said.