The writing, shaky but insistent, proceeded down the remainder of the page, and filled two more as well. There were places where the ink seemed darker or the quill tip thicker—here Ester had rested and returned to the text, perhaps an hour later, perhaps on a different day. Helen’s eyes slid down the lines, and with each she felt a lightening, as though it were she disburdening sentence by sentence. Her spirit could not be bent, yet her rage found little purchase . . . Helen read on, realizing now and again that she was dragging her heavy finger down the paper, heedless of the damage it might do. It was all here—Ester’s family, her mother, the pinched morality of Amsterdam’s frightened Portuguese refugees. And one detail—one absurd, audacious detail—Helen had not at all expected. Rising with difficulty, she made her way to the cabinet and searched out what she’d pulled off her printer only two days earlier: the final document e-mailed by the Amsterdam archivist. The Dotar’s self-righteous reply to the rabbi’s final letter, dated weeks after his death. The phrase that corresponded, word for word, with one of Ester’s.
Her head listing with fatigue, she closed her eyes and worked out the dates twice, three times. Ester’s year of birth; her mother’s; her grandmother’s.
A gossamer-thin connection. But if there was one thing she’d no longer do, it was fight intuition.
Yes. It was indeed all of our history. No people’s thread was separate from any other’s, but everyone’s fate was woven together in this illuminated, love-stricken world. There could be no standing apart. She’d known that always, hadn’t she?
Long after midnight, she rose. Her legs wavered under her. Had she eaten today? Patricia had fed her something, she was nearly certain of it. Near the bottom of a drawer in her bedroom, sifting papers under a bright light as though she were hunting for evidence at a crime scene, she at last found the page. She unfolded it, clumsily tearing the brittle paper, and carried it to her kitchen table where she smoothed it atop Ester Velasquez’s pages.
She reread the single dense, ruined page of notes. Had her own handwriting ever been this tiny, this precise, this bloodlessly certain of itself? Blue script covered the page: first her name in sharp, angry letters—Helen Ann Watt. She remembered how restlessly she’d penned it, planning to show her notes to Dror when he returned to the room where he’d left her to read his precious history book. She’d burned to mock this primary-school exercise he was forcing her into—as though reading his history could ever persuade her to leave him! Then, below this, scattered names of city-states, dates. Here and there, lower down on the page, a question: Inquisition laid the ground for 19th century? She saw where her fury had faded—where the history she was reading had caught her and her fury had given way to fascination. She saw where she’d run out of space at the bottom of the page, where she’d filled the back of it, turned the page upside down and written another full page between the lines of each side. Inverted words, observations, exclamations, all swarming up between the enraged logic of her earlier notes. And half of it ruined—blurred where she’d spilled the coffee Dror had brought her and the bright ink had bled freely, mixing lines penned in outrage with those written in growing understanding—a page poised between love and fear.
When she’d finished reading she closed her eyes, and only then became aware of a strange sensation, as though something cold and smooth were wrapping her left arm and leg, numbing them, gently separating them from her senses. A moment later, the feeling passed. But in its wake she at last permitted Dr. Hammond’s somber predictions to nest in her mind.
Dread washed her. This time she didn’t hide from it. What she’d experienced earlier today on her way to the rare manuscripts room was only the start.
The strange, numbing sensation grew again; then receded. It was different from anything she’d experienced with the Parkinson’s—different in fact from anything even Dr. Hammond had warned about, in all his detailing of the protracted decline she must prepare for.
Yet illness had taught her already that the body was bound by no rules but its own.
A sense of imminence took her. Now, she thought. Now. For wasn’t Ester Velasquez showing her, in thick lines of tremulous ink, that the time had come for Helen to say the things she needed to say—while she still could?
She felt for the paper, and slid it to one side. When she opened her eyes, she was looking at Ester’s final page.
Here, at the last of her confession, Ester’s hand had wavered more widely.
I have long lived alone in my mind, and would die alone—but my husband, fond man that he is, insists he shall attend my final hour and I cannot deter him. Yet to die alone would be honest. For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely? The hand pushes on, cramping, laboring in the hope of a friend who might one day receive the ink’s imprint. The friend, the dream of the friend, the wish that some welcome for one’s spirit might yet exist . . . My hand makes its slow progress across the skin of the paper in candlelight, though my eyes close with weariness, fueled by this eternal hope: the mirrored image of my thoughts etched, if only for a moment, into another’s.
I wish the servants would make a noise upon the stair.
Heaviness comes. If death muddies my thinking then death take me now, for I grow weak. This morn I cried tears such as never marred my vision when I had far greater cause to cry. My thoughts blur and I can no longer survey them.
When my husband comes, I shall ask him to douse the light.
It was Alvaro who counseled I write these words to relieve my spirit, and his physick was correct. I am relieved. I have given him my papers to burn, now—all but the last of my treasures. To my shame, I have not yet submitted these for the fire: letters exchanged with souls who feel and think as I. Still I cherish them, and still I steal hours to read and think upon them in my solitude. Yet I shall fortify myself before the end and give these greatest of my treasures into the flames. Those thinkers whose words are found in my prized pages have elsewhere printed their works for the world to see, speaking more decorously than ever I was able; and such words of mine as may be worth preserving have been sent ere now to others, who may one day make use of them. It is not for me to determine which of the seeds I scatter will blossom, nor have I the vanity to think I ought leave greater mark upon the world that has so marked me. The world too much hates a freed thought or heart. Let the pages burn, for such be the fate of the soul, that all our striving be dust, and none in the bright living world ever know truly what once lived and died in another heart. And let me dispense with my foolish dream of leaving the tracery of my thought whole, perhaps to be read in an age in which there is greater kindness.
It is not such an age.
Let the truth be ash.
Yet Helen held it in her two hands.
She set it down. Then, moving gingerly, stepped to her desk for paper.