The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  When the doctor leaves, both women, Drużbacka and Agnieszka, sleep. They’ve fallen asleep on either side of the bed—one kneeling, with her head resting on her own hand on the bed, leaving a mark on her cheek that will remain for the duration of the evening, the other in an armchair, with her head dropping onto her chest; her breathing sets the delicate lace around her throat in motion, like anemones in a temperate sea.

  The white end of the table at Starosta Łabęcki’s

  The starosta’s house looks like a castle. Moss-covered stone standing on ancient foundations, hence the damp. In the yard, a massive chestnut that is already releasing its glistening fruits, sending yellow leaves, too, in their wake. This makes it look like the whole outdoors is covered in a lovely orange-gold carpet. From the great hall, the visitor enters a series of drawing rooms that are sparsely furnished but brightly painted, with splendid ornaments. The floor, an oak parquet, has been polished so that it shines. Preparations for winter are under way—in the vestibule stand baskets of apples that will be taken around the winter bedrooms, to which they will lend their fragrance as they await the Christmas holiday. Outside there is much hustle and bustle, the peasants have carted in wood and are busy making piles. Women bring in baskets of nuts; Drużbacka can’t get over their size. She has cracked one of them, and now she relishes its soft, flavorful meat as her tongue investigates the lightly bitter taste of its skin. The smell of plums simmering for jam comes to her from the kitchen.

  The medic passes her downstairs, mutters something under his breath, and goes back upstairs. She has already gleaned that this “saturnine” Jew, as Łabęcki called him, a doctor trained in Italy who keeps quiet and who is never fully present here, nonetheless commands the full respect of the starosta, who’s spent enough time in France to abandon certain prejudices.

  By the following afternoon, Kossakowska has ingested a little broth, after which time she asked that pillows be placed behind her, to prop her up, and paper and ink be given to her.

  Katarzyna Kossakowska, née Potocka, wife of the castellan of Kamieniec, whose dominion extends over numerous villages and towns, mansions and estates, is by nature a predator. Predators, even after falling into dire straits, such as into the grips of a poacher’s trap, lick their wounds and go back into battle. Kossakowska has animal instincts, like a she-wolf in a pack of males. She will always be fine. Drużbacka ought rather to worry about herself. Drużbacka ought instead to consider: What kind of animal is she? She survives thanks to the predators, keeping them company, entertaining them with light verse. She is a tamed wagtail—a little bird with a lovely warble—but she will be blown away by any gust of wind, the draft from a window knocked open by a storm.

  By afternoon, the priest has come—a little too soon, still wearing the same coat and that bag of his that would suit a traveling salesman more than it does a priest. Drużbacka spots him the second he enters the house.

  “I beg the vicar forane’s forgiveness for my impetuousness earlier. I fear I may have even dislodged some of your buttons,” Drużbacka says to him, and leads him by the elbow into a drawing room, although she doesn’t quite know what she’ll do with him there. They won’t be called to table for another two hours.

  “Oh, that was a specialem statum . . . Nolens volens I was of some use to the honorable castellan’s wife, and her health.”

  Drużbacka has grown accustomed by now to hearing somewhat different types of Polish around the different Polish estates, so these Latin interjections merely amuse her. She spent half her life as a lady-in-waiting and a secretary. Then she got married, had children, and now, after her husband’s death and the birth of her grandchildren, she tries to go it alone, or to be with her daughters, or maybe Mrs. Kossakowska, even if it’s as a lady-in-waiting. She is pleased, now, to be back on landed property, where there’s so much going on, and where poetry may be read in the evenings. She has several volumes in her luggage, although she is too shy to take them out. She doesn’t talk. Instead, she listens as the priest chatters away, gradually coming to a common language with him, despite all the Latin, for it turns out that the priest has just visited the palace in Cecołowce, belonging to the Dzieduszyckis, and that he is hatching a plan to replicate where he lives, in his presbytery, the things he has learned from being there. Delighted and animated by the liqueur he’s now had three glasses of, happy that someone will listen to him, he speaks.

  Yesterday Kossakowski, the castellan, was sent for in Kamieniec, and he is expected at any moment. He will no doubt arrive by morning, perhaps even in the middle of the night.

  Around the table sit residents and guests of the house, permanent and temporary. The less important ones have been seated at the boring end, where the white of the tablecloths does not quite reach. Among the residents is the host’s uncle, an older gentleman, somewhat heavyset, who wheezes and calls everyone “illustrious sir” or “illustrious madam.” There is also the manager of the Łabęckis’ properties, a shy, mustachioed man with excellent posture, as well as the former religious instructor to the Łabęckis’ children, the highly educated Bernardine priest Gaudenty Pikulski. He is immediately caught up by Father Chmielowski, who takes him over to the corner of the room to show him his Jewish book.

  “We did an exchange, I gave him a copy of my Athens, and he gave me a Zohar,” Father Chmielowski says proudly, and takes the tome out of his bag. “I would love for you to . . . ,” he starts, then continues in the impersonal: “If just a little bit of time could be found, to give me just a little taste of what’s inside this book . . .”

  Pikulski looks at the volume, opening it from the back and reading it, his lips moving along.

  “This is no Zohar,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Old Shorr stuck you with some ordinary Jewish fairy tales.” He runs his finger from right to left along the incomprehensible symbols. “‘Jacob’s Eye.’ That’s what it’s called. Some kind of little folk story.”

  Shorr-changed, the priest thinks, but he just sighs. He shakes his head. “He must have gotten mixed up. Well, anyway, I’m sure I’ll find some wisdom here. If I can get someone to translate it for me . . .”

  Starosta Łabęcki gives a sign with his hand, and two servants bring in trays with liqueur and tiny glasses, as well as a serving dish with thinly sliced crusts of bread. Whoever wishes may in this way whet their appetite, since the lunch to be served is heavy and abundant. First soup, and then boiled beef cut up into irregular pieces, brought in along with other meats—roast beef, game like venison and boar, and some chickens, served with boiled carrots, cabbage with bacon, and bowls of kasha glistening with fat.

  Father Pikulski leans over the table toward Father Chmielowski and says in a low voice:

  “Stop by my place sometime, I have Jewish books in Latin, too, and I can help you with Hebrew. Whatever gave you the idea of going to the Jews?”

  “You advised me to do so, my son,” answers Father Chmielowski, who finds this slightly vexing.

  “I said that as a joke! I didn’t think you’d go.”

  Drużbacka proceeds cautiously with her meal; beef is tough on her teeth, and she sees no toothpicks here. She picks at some chicken and rice and glances furtively at two young servants clearly not yet entirely familiar with their new employment, since they continue making faces at one another across the table and generally clowning around, thinking that the guests, absorbed in their meal, will notice nothing.

  Though presumably still weak, Kossakowska has ordered for her ample sickbed in the corner of the room to be supplied with candles and now asks to be served rice and chicken meat. Soon she requests Tokay.

  “Well, I guess the worst is behind you, madam, if you are ready for some wine,” says Łabęcki with almost imperceptible irony. He’s still a little irritated he didn’t get to go play cards. “Vous permettez?” He stands, and with an exaggerated bow, he fills Kossakowska’s glass. “To your health.”

  “I ought to be drinking to
the health of that medic, who managed to get me back on my feet again with that tincture,” says Kossakowska, and takes a big gulp.

  “C’est un homme rare,” says Łabęcki. “An educated Jew, though he has been unable to cure me of my gout. He studied in Italy. Apparently, he can take a cataract out of your eye with a needle, and just like that, your vision is restored—at least that was what happened with one of the noblewomen from around here. Now she can embroider even the tiniest stitches.”

  Kossakowska pipes up again from her corner. She has finished eating and is lying back against the pillows, pale. Her face keeps changing in the candlelight, like she’s grimacing again.

  “Everywhere is full of Jews now, just you wait, they’ll gobble us up with dumplings soon,” she says. “Our gentlemen don’t want to work, and they won’t take care of their own property, so they rent it out to the Jews, and they go off and live in the capital. So now I look, and I see it’s a Jew in the bridge house, a Jew managing the land on the estate, a Jew cobbling, a Jew sewing the clothes. They’ve taken every industry.”

  As the lunch goes on, the conversation turns to the economy, which, here in Podolia, is always floundering, though the riches of Podolia are so great. It could make a flourishing country. The potash, the saltpeter, the honey. Wax, tallow, canvas. Tobacco, cattle, horses—there’s so much, and yet it can’t be sold. But why? inquires Łabęcki. Because the Dniester is shallow, and broken up by rapids, and the roads are terrible, impassable in the spring thaw. And how can trade proceed when Turkish marauders cross borders with impunity and, in packs, prey upon travelers—one must travel with armed guards, hire security.

  “But who can afford it?” Łabęcki laments. His dream is for things to be as they are in other countries, for trade to flourish and for the wealth of the people to increase. So it is in France, although of course the land is hardly better there, nor the rivers.

  Kossakowska thinks all this is owing to the noblemen who pay the peasants in vodka, rather than money.

  “Did you know that on the Potockis’ estates the peasants already have so many days of mandatory labor that they can only do their own work on Saturdays and Sundays?”

  “We give them Fridays off, too,” snaps Kossakowska. “In any case, what matters is that their work is rotten. Half our crops go to them in exchange for the harvest of the other half, yet even those generous gifts from heaven cannot be turned to our advantage. To this day, my brother has an enormous heap of grain being feasted on by worms—there is no way to sell any of it.”

  “Whoever hit upon the idea of fermenting cereals for vodka ought to be given a huge gold medal,” says Łabęcki, and taking the napkin out from under his chin, he gives the sign to retire to the library, where they will smoke their pipes, according to time-honored custom. “Vodka goes by the gallon now in carriages that take it over to the other side of the Dniester. True, the Koran prohibits drinking wine, but it says nothing about vodka. And anyway, the land of the Moldavian hospodar is close enough, and there the Christians can drink liquor to their heart’s content . . .” He laughs, showing his teeth, which have yellowed from tobacco.

  Starosta Łabęcki is an accomplished man. In the library, the place of honor is taken by Instruccions for young Gentlemen by the Marquis de La Chétardie a Knight of the Army and highly distinguish’d at the Royal Court of France, here briefely assembled, in which a young Gentleman asks and receives answers, at the last Lwów academies, a Vale and farewel from His Lordship the Magnanimous Szymon Łabęcki, Starosta of Rohatyn, this me‑ mento for his Friends duly submitted to print.

  When Drużbacka politely inquires what the subject matter of this book is, it turns out that it’s a chronology of significant battles and that—this becomes clear after a longer speech by Łabęcki—it is more of a translation than an original book written by him.

  Which, it is true, is not entirely evident from the title.

  Then everyone has to listen in the smoking room—the ladies, too, as both are passionate smokers—to the story of Starosta Łabęcki giving the dedication speech at the inauguration of the Załuski Library.

  When the starosta is summoned because the doctor has arrived to perform his treatments, the conversation turns to Drużbacka, and Kossakowska reminds them that she is a poet, which takes the vicar forane by surprise, politely suppressed. When she produces a small tome, he greedily reaches out for it, since printed pages inspire in him an instinct that is difficult to master: the need to seize and not let go before getting a good look—if only a fleeting one—at the whole. And so it is now; he opens it, brings it to the light in order to get a better look at the title page:

  “It’s a rhyming book,” he says, disappointed, though he quickly corrects himself and nods in apparent appreciation. A collection of spiritual, panegyric, moral, and worldly rhymes . . . He doesn’t like that they’re poems, he doesn’t understand poetry, but the volume rises in his esteem when he sees that it has been published by the Załuski brothers.

  From outside the not-quite-closed door comes the starosta’s voice, suddenly somewhat meek:

  “Oh, wonderful Asher, this ailment makes my life so vile, my toes hurt, please do something, my dear man.”

  Another voice follows immediately, this one deep and with a Yiddish accent:

  “I’m going to give up trying to treat you. You were supposed to not drink wine and not eat meat, especially red meat, but you refuse to heed the advice of your medic, so it hurts, and it’s going to hurt. I do not intend to treat you by force.”

  “Come, now, don’t take offense, they’re not your toes, they’re mine! You really are the devil’s medic . . .” The voice fades into the distance as the two men retreat deeper into the manor.

  3.

  Of Asher Rubin and his gloomy thoughts

  Asher Rubin walks out of the starosta’s home and heads toward the market square. With evening, the sky has cleared, and now a million stars are shining, but their light is cold and brings down a frost upon the earth, upon Rohatyn. The first of this autumn. Rubin pulls his black wool coat tighter around him; tall and thin, he looks like a vertical line. The town is quiet and cold. Candlelight glimmers weakly from some windows, but, barely visible, it looks more like a mirage, and could easily be conflated with the trail left by the sun on your iris from a sunnier day, and Rubin’s memory goes back, lingering on objects it’s encountered before. He is interested in what we see when our eyes are closed, and where that thing we see comes from. Whether from impurities on the eyeball, or because the eye is configured more like the lanterna magica he saw in Italy.

  The idea that everything he sees now—the darkness punctuated by the sharp points of the stars above Rohatyn, the outlines of homes, small, tilted, the lump of the castle, and not too far away the sharply pointed church tower, like apparitions, the well-pole shooting askew into the sky, as if in protest, and maybe even the rumble of the water from somewhere farther down, and the very light scraping of the leaves the frost has taken—the idea that all of that arises out of his own mind is both terrifying and alluring in equal measure. What if we’re imagining all of it? What if each of us sees everything differently? Does everyone see the color green the same? Or is “green” maybe just a name we use as if it were a paint to coat completely distinct experiences in order to communicate, when in reality every one of us is viewing something different? Is there not some way this can be verified? And what would happen if we were to really open our eyes? If we were to see by some miracle the reality that surrounds us? What might that be like?

  Asher has these kinds of thoughts fairly frequently, and then he starts to be afraid.

  Dogs begin to bark, and men’s voices rise, and shouts break out—that must be coming from the inn on the market square. He goes in among the Jewish homes, passing to the right of the big, dark mass that is the synagogue; from down where the river is comes the smell of water. The market square separates two groups of Jews who are in conflict with one another, mutually hostile.
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  Who are they waiting for? he thinks. Who is it that’s supposed to come and save the world?

  What do the two factions hope for? There are those in Rohatyn who are faithful to the Talmud, squeezed into just a few homes that make up something like a fortress under siege, and there are the heretics, the renegades, toward whom, deep down, Asher feels an even greater aversion, for they are primitive, superstitious, with their muddy, mystical prattle, clanging their amulets, smiling their secret cunning smiles, like Old Shorr. These people believe in a miserable Messiah, the kind who’s fallen as low as anyone can go, for it is only from the lowest place, they say, that you can rise to the highest. They believe in a tatterdemalion Messiah who has already arrived. The world has been saved already, although you might not see it at first glance, but those in the know cite Isaiah. They skip the Shabbat, they commit adultery—sins incomprehensible to some, to others so banal there is no sense in giving them much thought. Their houses on the upper part of the market square stand so close together it looks like their facades have been joined, creating one row, strong and solid like a military cordon.

  That’s where Asher is going now.

  This Rohatyn rabbi, a greedy despot eternally agonizing over petty absurdities, often summons him, too, to the other side of the square. He does not particularly esteem Asher Rubin, who rarely goes to synagogue and doesn’t dress in the Jewish or the Christian fashion, but rather in between, in black, in a modest frock coat and an old Italian hat by which the townspeople recognize him. In the rabbi’s house, there is a sick young boy for whom Asher can do nothing. In truth, he wishes him death, so that his undeserved young suffering might end soon. It is only on account of this boy with the twisted legs that he feels any sympathy for the rabbi; otherwise he considers him merely a vain and meanspirited lout.