The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

The paths of her mind like the treads of an old staircase, concave from the passage of long-gone feet.

From this ominous feeling that had begun in her the instant she’d first seen the documents: the astonishing sensation that her mind—her one refuge amid all the world’s tired clamor—was tinder.

Do not succumb to darkness. Lack of hope, as I learned long ago, is a deadly affliction.

Recall that the light you bear, though it may flicker, yet illuminates the path for our people. Bear it. For in this world there is no alternative.

Time and history might march on, but human nature didn’t change.

It was as though someone had reached through the centuries with a message: Here it is. I left this for you.

if he could only bring her into his excitement, pick her up with his two typing hands and carry her into the world as he saw it, she would know him.

History, reaching out and caressing his face

The gentle, insistent touch of something like a conscience, stilling him. Waking him to a lucid new purpose.

What did it even mean, for one human to be right for another?

Our life is a walk in the night, we know not how great the distance to the dawn that awaits us. And the path is strewn with stumbling blocks and our bodies are grown tyrannous with weeping yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.

Do not consider then, however learned you are, that your knowledge is complete. For learning is the river of G-d and we drink of it throughout our lives.

Even motionless, she was decisive. A different manner of creature from the silent, reverent group surrounding her. A fuse waiting to light.

“When I fall for someone,”

“it’s absolute and immediate.”

“Or else I know, absolutely and immediately, that I have no interest.”

“With you I’m not sure.”

“There’s something about you that makes me hesitate.”

“I’m not used to hesitating,”

“American Jews are naive. They don’t want memory, or history that might make them uncomfortable, they just want to be liked. Being liked is their . . . sugar rush.”

“I’ll probably be the most left-wing person in all of Israel, but at least I’ll be arguing with people who deal with reality instead of living in a bubble.”

think about this a great deal: If we looked through the eyes of history, we’d live differently. We’d live right.

If I looked through the eyes of history, I wouldn’t want to live.

“Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.”

How could desire be wrong—the question seized her—if each living being contained it? Each creature was born with the unthinking need to draw each next breath, find each next meal. Mustn’t desire then be integral—a set of essential guideposts on the map of life’s purpose? And mightn’t its very denial then be a desecration?

Shutting her eyes, letting the crowd steer her, she saw behind closed lids the books that awaited her, the thinkers’ collected voices inked onto each crowded page. An ecstasy of ink, every paragraph laboring to outline the shape of the world. The yellow light of a lamp on leaves of paper, the ivory-black impress of words reasoning, line by line. Yet in the confused picture in her mind, the hands caressing and turning those lamp-lit pages were not her own, but a stranger’s. She didn’t know which she wanted more: the words or the hands, the touch to her spirit or to her skin.

never let your true thought be known, for it is by truth that you are noosed and for truth burnt.

And even in the same instant, she wanted to beg the secret of their boldness.

She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one’s soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one’s own soul, tenaciously and without mercy.

she found the living skin of his inner arm, then his warm body reaching, and something gave way.

Even had she wished to speak of it, with what words could she have explained that she’d changed—that her body had changed—that every molecule in her was alive, aligned, iron filings to a magnet?

After a long while he said in her ear, “I can rest with you.”

Later he lay beside her on the narrow towel, drying in the sun: a man who could have preened, had he chosen to. Spare and muscular from his training, nothing wasted, his features like something carved. She rested her head on his chest. With the pads of her fingers, she tapped his heartbeat back to him. He clasped her hand to his chest, stopping her.

“When I kiss you,” he said, “I’m just one man. I’m not carrying all of them with me.”

don’t know, Helen, whether you understand all that you’re touching when you touch me.”

“You’re right. I don’t. The Nazis made your world a horror, and now after everything you went through, you’ve decided that world is where you’ll stay?

Do you want to live in a world where no one can cross any lines or—or to...

“When you see what makes no sense to you, you say something.” He paused. “Don’t stop doing that.”

That night she lay down with him on the rough blanket, with the feeling of sliding from a great height. He met her there with a solemn welcome, his hands on her body indelible.

She lay in the barracks beside him, the pulse visible in the skin of his neck, and her fear evaporated. Here she was at the center of things. Here she was, at last, where it was possible to lie naked and at rest, to look into the dark eyes of the man beside her and know they’d pledged each other the gift of truth. For the first time since childhood, she realized, she didn’t dread living in the world. She said it aloud in the still air of the barracks and listened to the two Hebrew words drop peacefully from her, like twin stones into the quiet desert: “I’m alive.”

Loneliness gripped her—a physical need for the sound of rain.

Stood a moment before the panes that admitted not light, but rather a thinning of the dark.

How intimate the love of books had always seemed to Ester;

“What is the purpose of study?” the rabbi had asked. She’d said, “That the spirit be clothed in reason, which is more warming than ignorance.” The rabbi had corrected, gently, “Yet the text we studied said knowledge, Ester, not reason.” And she’d countered, “But reason is more warming, for it seeds knowledge. But knowledge can grow nothing outside itself.”

Words that wisped about her and warmed her still, all these years later,

When any man of any nation cries out in his wish to know God, then his questions merit considering.”

A desire to touch each page, each line of ink.

More than half the candle remained. She could read an hour before it guttered, longer if she took another candle from the drawer. How many had she burned already this month?

if Latin was the language in which thinkers clasped hands, she’d study it until it opened its secrets to her.

So she read on, a great and solemn feeling moving through her body: a scaling fatigue, a scaling curiosity.