The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  That is why Zelik can’t be stopped now. Now he’s heading south, on foot, like a pilgrim. Along the way he knocks on the doors of Jewish households where he spends night after night. Over dinners he tells his story, and people pass him along from home to home, from town to town, like brittle, fragile goods. Soon the news precedes him—they know his story and know where he is going; he is enveloped in a kind of reverence and care. Each helps him as he can. He rests on the Shabbat. One day each week he writes letters—to his family, to the Jewish councils, to the rabbis, to the Council of Four Lands. To Jews and Christians. To the Polish king. To the pope. He goes through many pairs of shoes and uses up about a quart of ink before he makes it to Rome. And by some miracle, as though greater forces really are looking out for him, the day after he arrives in Rome, he finds himself standing face-to-face with the pope.

  II.

  The Book of

  SAND

  5.

  Of how the world was born of God’s exhaustion

  Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick. Then, like an enormous, omnisensitive oyster, his body—so naked and delicate—feels the slightest tremble in the particles of light, scrunches up inside itself, leaving just enough space for the emergence—at once and out of nowhere—of a world. The world comes quick, though at first it resembles mold, delicate and pale, but soon it grows, and individual fibers connect, creating a powerful surrounding tissue. Then it hardens; then it starts to take on colors. This is accompanied by a low, barely audible sound, a gloomy vibration that makes the anxious atoms quake. And it is from this motion that particles come into being, and then grains of sand and drops of water, which divide the world in two.

  We find ourselves now on the side of sand.

  We see, through Yente’s eyes, a low horizon and an enormous sky, gold and orange. Great bulbous cumulus clouds flow westward, unaware that soon they’ll drop into the abyss. The desert is red, and even the most diminutive pebbles cast long and desperate shadows, with which they try to dig into solid matter and cling on.

  Horse and donkey hooves barely leave traces, gliding over the stones, kicking up just a little dust that immediately settles, covering whatever little furrows arise. The animals go slowly, heads bowed, exhausted from long days of journeying, as if in a trance. Their backs have grown accustomed to the weights placed on them every morning, after an overnight stop. Only the donkeys raise a ruckus, shattering the dawn with their squall of suffering and unbearable confusion, waking people up. But now even those born rebels have gone silent, hoping to stop for the night somewhere soon.

  People move among them, slender against the backdrop of the animals’ shapes, which are rounded, deformed by their loads. Like clock hands that have freed themselves from faces, independently now they mark a stray, chaotic time no clockmaker will ever be able to quell. Their shadows, long and sharp, jab the desert, vex the falling night.

  Many of them are dressed in long, light-colored coats, wearing turbans on their heads that were once green, but which the sun has faded. Others are hidden under the big brims of their hats; their countenances differ little from the shadows cast by stones.

  This is a caravan that set out a few days ago from Smyrna, heading north through Constantinople, and then through Bucharest. Along the way, it will splinter, and others will join in. Some of the merchants will break off in just a few days, in Stamboul; they will be traveling through Salonika and Sofia to Greece and Macedonia, while others will continue all the way to Bucharest, some even to the very end, along the Prut to the Polish border, which they’ll cross, besting the shallow Dniester.

  Every time this caravan stops for the night, they must remove the goods they are transporting from the backs of the animals and check those that lie carefully packed inside carts. Some of them are fragile, like the batch of chibouks, long-stemmed Turkish pipes, each individually wrapped in tow and also tightly bound in linen. There is also some Turkish weaponry and a parade harness; there are ornate woven carpets and the woven belts with which the noblemen of Poland tie their long żupans.

  Then there are dried fruits and other delicacies in wooden boxes, protected from the sun, assorted spices, and even lemons and oranges, packed unripe so that they might last the journey.

  There is an Armenian among them, a certain Jakubowicz, who joined the caravan at the last minute, transporting luxury goods in a separate carriage: the finest carpets, Turkish kilims. Now he frets over these wares, flies into a rage at the drop of a hat. He had been on the verge of getting on a ship to take everything from Smyrna to Salonika in just two days, but sea trade is dangerous now—one could be taken into slavery, the stories go around whenever the caravan stops to rest around a fire.

  Nahman Samuel ben Levi of Busk has just sat down with a slender box placed on his knees. Nahman is transporting tobacco tightly packed in hard packets. Not a lot of it, but he’s still expecting to make a sizable profit, since he bought the tobacco cheap, and it’s of good quality. He also has on him, in specially sewn pockets, other small but valuable things: beautiful stones, mostly turquoise, as well as several sticks of highly compressed resin that resembles tar. This can be added to a pipe and smoked—Mordechai’s favorite.

  They spent many days readying the caravan, while at the same time going around to all the different offices to get, for a sizable baksheesh, a firman—an order to the Turkish authorities to allow the caravan to pass.

  That’s why Nahman is so tired, and why it’s so hard for him to shake off his exhaustion. The thing that helps him most is the sight of the stony desert. Now he goes out beyond the camp and sits there, at some remove from all the chatter. The sun has gotten so low that the long dark shadows cast ahead by the stones look like earthly comets, the opposites of those on high, these made of shade instead of light. Nahman, who sees signs wherever he looks, wonders what kind of future is portended by these lowly bodies, what fortune they are trying to tell. And as the desert is the only place on earth where time spins around, loops back then leaps ahead like some fat locust, select pairs of eyes might be able to get a glimpse into the future here. This is in fact how Yente sees Nahman now, at a time when he has aged, is frail and hobbled. He sits before a little window that doesn’t let in much light, as cold flows from the thick stone walls. The hand that holds his pen visibly trembles. In the little hourglass that stands next to his inkwell, the last few grains of sand trickle down: his end is near now, but Nahman is still writing.

  The truth is, he can’t stop himself. It’s like an itch that goes away only when he begins to scratch out the chaos of his thoughts into sentences. The pen’s noise soothes him. The trace it leaves on a piece of paper brings him pleasure, like eating nothing but sweet dates, like holding lokum on his tongue. And soon everything falls into place. Because Nahman has always had the sense that he’s a part of something bigger, something unprecedented and unique. That not only has nothing like this ever happened before, but also that it never will—never can—again. And that he is the one who must write it all down for all those who’ve not been born yet, because they’re going to want to know.

  He always has his writing gear on hand: that shallow wooden case, rather ordinary to look at, but it holds quality paper, a bottle of ink, a box of sand with a lid, a supply of quills, and a knife to sharpen them. Nahman doesn’t need much: he sits on the ground, opens up his case to turn it into a low Turkish table, and just like that he’s ready to start writing.

  Ever since he started keeping company with Jacob, however, he has met with displeased, reproachful looks. Jacob doesn’t like the scratching of the pen. Once he glanced over Nahman’s shoulder. It’s a good thing Nahman happened to be just balancing accounts at the time, since Jacob has insisted that his words not be recorded. Nahman had to assure him he would not do that. Yet the issue still weighs on him. Why not?

  “I don’t get it,” he said to Jacob once. “Don’t we sing: ‘Give me speech, give me a to
ngue and the words to tell the truth about You’? And that’s in Hemdat Yamim.”

  But Jacob scolded him:

  “Don’t be such a fool. If a person wants to storm a fortress, he won’t get in by talking. Words come and go. A person’s got to have an army. We, too, must act, and not just speak. Did our forefathers not chatter, not pore over written words enough? What did all that talking do for them? What came of it? It’s better to see with your eyes than write down a bunch of words. What do we want some sage for? If I catch you writing, I’ll have to knock some sense into you with my fist.”

  But Nahman knows what he’s doing. His primary task is The Life of His Holiness Sabbatai Tzvi (of blessed memory). But this he’s drawing up for order’s sake, that’s all, just laying out the facts, both the well-known ones and the lesser-known ones; a few he embellishes a bit, but of course that’s not a sin—rather a service, as they’ll be easier to remember this way. Underneath, however, at the very bottom of the case, he also has another little bundle—sheets of paper hand-bound with thick twine. Scraps. These he writes in secret. From time to time he breaks off, burdened by the notion that whoever reads this work will still need to know the identity of the person who wrote it. There is always a hand behind the letters, always a face that emerges from the sentences on the page. After all, even reading the Torah, one immediately feels some other presence, a great presence whose true name cannot be contained in any—even gilded, even weighted—letter. And yet the Torah and the world entire are composed of God’s names. Every word is his name, every thing. The Torah is woven from God’s names like a fabric, like a great arigah, although as is written in the Book of Job: “No mortal knows its order.” No one knows which is the thread and which the warp, nor can anyone discern the pattern on the right or its relation to the pattern on the left.

  The sage Kabbalist Rabbi Eleazar realized long ago that parts of the Torah had been given to us out of order. For if they had been in their proper order, everyone would have instantly become immortal, would have been able to revive the dead, work miracles. Which was why—to maintain the order of this world—the pieces had been put in disarray. Do not ask by whom. The time for that has not yet arrived. Only the Holy One will be able to put them in order.

  Nahman knows that behind his Life of His Holiness Sabbatai Tzvi, in the bundle of those other pages sewn up with twine, he himself, Nahman Samuel ben Levi of Busk, can be seen. And he pictures his own image: small in stature, ordinary. Always on the road. He documents himself. He calls those notes “scraps,” for they are what remains after other, more important work. Crumbs—such is the stuff of life. His writing on the lid of the case set up on his lap, in the dust and discomfort of travel, is in essence tikkun, the repair of the world, mending the holes in its fabric so filled with overlapping patterns, squiggles, tangles, trails. This is how to view this strange pursuit of Nahman’s. Some people heal others, some build homes, others study books and rearrange the words in them to find the proper meaning. Nahman writes.

  Scraps, or: A story born of travel’s exhaustion, by Nahman Samuel ben Levi, Rabbi of Busk. Where I come from

  I know I am no prophet, and I know there is no Holy Spirit in me. I hold no sway over voices, nor can I see into the future. My origins are lowly, and there is nothing that elevates me from the dust. I am like so many others, and I belong to those whom the matzevot will crush first. And yet, I also see my own advantages: I am suited to business and to travel, I count quickly and have a gift for languages. I am a born messenger.

  When I was a child, my speech was like the patter of rain on the wooden roofs of shoddy sukkoth, a dull drumming in which words became indistinguishable. Furthermore, some force deep down inside me was unable to complete a phrase or sentence started and instead had to repeat it several times, hurriedly, rendering it almost into gibberish. I was a stutterer. In despair, I realized my parents and siblings could not understand me. Then my father boxed my ears and hissed: “Speak slowly!” And so I had to try. I learned how to go outside myself, in a sense, and take myself by the throat, so as to restrain the rattle that would otherwise be found there. I finally managed to break down the words into syllables, to water them down like soup, like my mother would do with our barszcz on the second day, so that there might be enough for everyone. But I was also clever. Out of politeness, I would wait for others to finish speaking, even though I often knew after just a few words what it was they wished to say, and the way they would say it.

  My father was the rabbi of Busk, just as I was to become later on, though I would not hold that position for long. He and my mother operated a tavern on the edge of the swamps, not much frequented, which meant we lived in poverty. Our family, both my mother’s and my father’s sides, had come to Podolia from the west, from Lublin, and before that from the Germanic lands, whence they were expelled, narrowly escaping with their lives. Of those times not many stories have survived, perhaps just the one that was the second thing to terrify me as a child, namely the story of the fire that consumed all of the books.

  Of my childhood, however, I do not remember much. Mostly just my mother, whose side I never left, always clinging to her skirt, causing my father to be perennially angry with me, predicting I would become a mama’s boy, a feygele, an effeminate weakling. I remember the plague of mosquitoes when I was just a few years old, when all the apertures of our home were stuffed with rags and clay, and our bodies, hands, and faces turned red from all the bites, as if we’d all come down with smallpox. My wounds were salved with fresh sage, but the traveling merchants who made the rounds of the villages also sold a foul-smelling miracle cure they had extracted from the earth somewhere in the vicinity of Drohobycz . . .

  So begins Nahman’s somewhat free-form manuscript. He likes to reread these opening pages. They make him feel the ground beneath him is more solid, or as if his feet have suddenly grown. Now he goes back to the camp, because he’s gotten hungry, and joins in with the rest of the company. The Turkish guides and porters have just returned from their prayers and are horsing around, getting ready for dinner. Prior to eating, the Armenians shut their eyes and ceremoniously make the seal of the cross over their bodies. Nahman and the other Jews pray in a hurried way. They are all hungry. They will wait to pray for real until they get home. They sit in loose packs, every man with his wares, with his mule, but all can see each other well enough. As they start to sate their hunger, they begin to converse, and eventually to relax and make jokes. Darkness falls all of a sudden—in a moment it is night, and they have to light the oil lamps.

  Once, one of the visitors who had come to hunt at Lord Jabłonowski’s stopped in at the tavern, where it was mainly my mother who ran the operation. This guest was known to be a drunk and a brute. Since it was hot and stuffy, swamp gas hovering just above the ground, his daughter, a princess, desired to rest at once. Thus was our family thrown outside, to accommodate her, but I hid behind a stove and observed in a state of heightened emotion this scene: a beautiful lady, with footmen, ladies-in-waiting, and valets, entered the room. The pomp, the colors, the fashions, the beauty of these people made such a great impression upon me that my cheeks burned crimson, and soon my mother grew worried for my health. When those powerful people left, my mother whispered into my ear: “My little fool, in the world to come, the duksel will stoke the pezure for us,” meaning that in the next life the princess would add fuel to our stoves.

  On the one hand, it was a source of great delight to me that somewhere up there, where the plans for the world were drawn up day by day, there was a strictly enforced system of justice. On the other hand, I felt pity for us all, and in particular for that proud lady, so lovely and so out of reach. Did she know about this? Had someone told her? Did they explain to people in their church that this was how things were going to be? That everything would be reversed, and the servants would become the lords, and the lords the servants? But would this in fact be just and good?

  Before they departed, the gentleman dragged my father
out of the room by the beard, his guests guffawing at the joke. And as they were leaving, he told his soldiers to drink up all the Jewish vodka, a task they eagerly undertook, and plundering the tavern, they destroyed the whole property without so much as a thought.

  Nahman has to get up. As soon as the sun sets, it gets terribly cold, not like it does in the city, where the heat lasts longer, held by the warmed walls, and where, by this time, your shirt would be sticking to your back. He picks up a lamp and puts on a fustian coat. The porters are playing dice; the game soon leads to argument. The sky is strewn with stars, and Nahman reflexively orients himself by them. To the south, he can see Smyrna—or Izmir, as Reb Mordke prefers to say—which they left the day before. It is a city characterized by the chaos of uneven buildings that look like stacks of blocks, by a seemingly infinite quantity of roofs interwoven with minarets’ slim silhouettes and—every now and then—the domes of temples. And he can almost hear, from beyond the horizon, the muezzin’s voice, insistent, plaintive in the darkness, and he is almost sure another voice will answer now, from within the caravan, and in an instant the air will be filled with Muslim prayer, which is supposed to be a hymn and an encomium, but which sounds more like complaint.