The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  The stranger who enters the room must bow his head to do so, so that the first thing everyone notices about him isn’t his face but his clothing. He is wearing a light-colored coat of a sort that isn’t common in Poland, sullied, and on his feet are muddy white stockings and sandals. A bag made of colorful leather strips hangs from his arm. At the sight of him, the conversation dies down; only when he raises his head and the lamplight creeps over his face does the general cry come:

  “Nahman! It’s our Nahman!”

  Not everyone knows him, so there are whispers:

  “What Nahman, who’s Nahman? From where? The rabbi of Busk?”

  They immediately lead him to Elisha, to where the elders are sitting—Rabbi Hirsh from Lanckoroń, Rabbi Moshe from Podhajce, the great Kabbalist, as well as Solomon Dobrushka from Prossnitz, and there the door shuts behind them.

  The women spring into action. Hayah and her assistants prepare vodka, hot barszcz, and bread with goose lard. Hayah’s younger sister readies a bowl of water for the traveler to be able to wash up. Only Hayah is permitted to enter the room where the men are. Now she watches Nahman as he carefully cleanses his hands. She sees a small, slender man accustomed to being hunched over, his face affable, the corners of his eyes tilting downward, as though he were eternally sad. He has long, silky chestnut hair and a flaxen-russet beard. His elongated face is still young, though wrinkles have settled in around the eyes—Nahman is always squinting. The lamplight turns his cheeks orange and red. Once he has sat down at the table, Nahman takes off his sandals, completely inadequate at this time of year with these Podolian spurts of foul weather, and now Hayah studies his big, bony feet in their light-colored, dirty socks. It strikes Hayah that these feet have traveled all the way from Salonika, Smyrna, and Stamboul, still in their coating of Macedonian and Wallachian dust, in order for good news to reach this place. Or perhaps it is bad news? It is not yet clear what to make of Nahman’s arrival.

  She glances furtively at her father, Elisha Shorr, curious as to what he might be about to say. But he has turned away, toward the wall, and is swaying slightly back and forth. Whatever news Nahman has brought to them is of such great weight that the elders have determined together that he must share it with everyone.

  Hayah watches her father. She feels acutely the absence of her mother, who died last year. Old Shorr had wanted to remarry, but Hayah wouldn’t allow it, and she never will. She doesn’t want a stepmother. She holds her little daughter in her lap. She has crossed her legs, creating something like a little pony for the child. From under her ruffled skirts, beautiful red lace-up boots reach halfway up her calves. Their polished toes, neither pointed nor round, are eye-catching.

  First Nahman hands Shorr the letter from Reb Mordke and from Isohar of Podhajce, which Shorr takes a long time to read in silence. They wait until he’s done. The air gets thick, as if it’s taking on a burden.

  “And everything tells you that this is really the one?” Elisha Shorr asks Nahman, after what feels like an eternity.

  Nahman assents. His head is spinning from exhaustion, and from the vodka he has drunk. He feels Hayah’s gaze on him, sticky, wet—like a dog’s tongue, you could say.

  “Let him rest, all of you,” says Old Shorr. He stands and gives Nahman a friendly pat on the shoulder.

  Others come up, too, and touch the newcomer’s shoulder, or his back. A circle is formed as they place their hands on their companions’ shoulders on either side. For a moment this circle closes, and in the middle of it, something seems to appear, a kind of presence—something odd. They stand this way, leaning in to the circle’s center, their heads lowered, almost touching. Then someone takes the first step back. It is Elisha, and soon the rest of them move aside, exhilarated, with flushed faces; finally, someone gives Nahman tall boots with sheepskin uppers to warm his legs.

  Nahman’s Tale: Jacob’s first mention

  The murmurs and the clamor slowly die down, but Nahman waits awhile, aware that he now has their full attention. He starts by taking a deep breath. This is followed by an absolute silence. The air he takes in and then releases from his lungs is from a different world—Nahman’s breath rises like challah dough, golden, and the room begins to smell of almonds, to shimmer with the warmth of the sun at noon, to carry the aroma of a far-flung river—because this is the air of Nikopol, a Wallachian town in a distant country, and the river is the Danube, on the bank of which lies Nikopol.

  The Danube is so wide that sometimes on foggy days you can’t even see the other side. Over it looms a fortress with twenty-six towers and two great gates. The castle is replete with guards, their commander residing above the prison, where the debtors and the thieves are kept. At night, the guards beat drums and cry: “Allahu Akbar!” The area is rocky, dry in the summer, but in the shadows of people’s homes grow figs and mulberries, and there are grapevines on the hills. The town lies on the southern bank of the river, and has some three thousand beautiful houses covered in tiled roofs or shingles. Most neighborhoods are Turkish, interspersed with a few Jewish and Christian quarters. Nikopol’s market is always crowded, for it has as many as a thousand dazzling stalls. The craftsmen have their workshops in the well-built halls next door. Especially numerous are the tailors, who are famous for sewing every vesture, every żupan or shirt, though their finest works are their Circassian prayer robes. And how many nations are represented at this bazaar! Wallachians, Turks, Moldovans and Bulgarians, Jews and Armenians, and sometimes even merchants from Gdańsk.

  The crowd gleams with its different colors, chatting in different languages, arraying astonishing goods for sale: fragrant spices, vivid carpets, brightly colored rugs, Turkish delicacies so sweet you’ll grow dizzy with pleasure, dried dates and raisins of every sort, beautifully dyed leather slippers stitched with silver thread.

  “Our people often have stalls there, or keep trading agents—a number of us are in fact quite familiar with that hallowed place.” Nahman repositions himself in his seat and looks at Old Man Shorr, but Elisha’s face is inscrutable, betraying not so much as a trace of a blink.

  Nahman sighs again and is quiet, reining in everyone’s impatience. All eyes appear to exhort him, to say, Go on, go on, man, because of course they know that the real story—the one they’re all here for—hasn’t gotten under way yet.

  First Nahman tells them of the bride. When he speaks of her—of Hana, daughter of the great Tovah—he makes, without realizing it, several gentle gestures that lend a velvet softness to his words. Old Man Shorr’s eyes fall halfway shut now, as if in a smile of satisfaction—for this is precisely how one ought to speak of young brides. Nahman’s audience nods contentedly. The beauty, gentleness, and thoughtfulness of young women are what give humanity hope. Once more, too, at the mention of Hana’s father’s name there is a burst of happy smacking, so Nahman is quiet for another moment, to give his listeners time to take their full pleasure in all this. In how the world is filling out, coming together again. The tikkun has begun.

  The wedding took place in Nikopol a few months earlier, in June. With Hana we are already familiar. Her father is Yehuda Tovah ha-Levi, the great hakham, whose writings have made it all the way here, to Rohatyn, and Elisha Shorr has them in his cabinet; he was studying them not long ago. Hana was Tovah’s only daughter among many sons.

  What this Jacob Leybowicz might have done to deserve her, however, remains unclear. Who is this person of whom Nahman speaks so glowingly? And why him? Jacob Leybowicz from Korolówka? No, Czernowitz. So is he one of us? What are you talking about, he must be one of us, if Nahman’s telling us of him. He’s someone from here—someone remembers now he knew this Jacob’s father, so wouldn’t he be the grandson of the same Yente who is in the process of dying in this very house? Everyone looks over at Israel from Korolówka and his wife, Sobla, but they’re not sure what’s about to be said yet, so for now they just sit tight—though Sobla’s face does flush bright red.

  “Yehuda Leyb from Czernowitz, that’s th
is Jacob’s father,” says Elisha Shorr.

  “He was the rabbi of Czernowitz!” blurts Moshe from Podhajce.

  “Rabbi, shmabbi,” grunts Yeruhim, who does business with the Shorrs. “He taught children how to write in yeshiva. Buchbinder, they called him.”

  “He’s the brother of Moses Meir Kamenker,” Shorr says gravely, and there is a hush, because this Moses Meir Kamenker is a hero—he smuggled holy books into Germany for our brothers and sisters in faith, suffering a curse in punishment.

  Now it all comes back to them. They begin to talk over each other, saying how this Yehuda was a tenant first in Bereżanka and Czernowitz, in the service of the local lord, collecting taxes from the peasants. It seems the peasants even beat him once. And when he went and told on them, the lord ordered for them to be beaten to the point that one of them died from the blows. Then this Buchbinder had to depart the region, for the peasants would never have left him alone after that. The Jews turned against him, too, since he would openly read from the writings of Nathan of Gaza.

  He was a strange fellow, unpredictable. Somebody remembers that after the curse was put on his brother, the rabbis turned on Leyb, ultimately forcing him to resign and move to Czernowitz in Wallachia, where under Turkish rule you could live in peace.

  Malka, Shorr’s sister, pitches in: “They were always drawn to the Turks, anyway, with their fear of the Cossacks.”

  Nahman realizes that the figure of the father is an unpopular one. The more they find out about him, the worse it will be for the son. So he determines to move on.

  This makes sense: prophets never come from within. All prophets must come from elsewhere, must suddenly appear, seem strange, out of the ordinary. Be shrouded in mystery, like the one the goyim have, even, of the virgin birth. A prophet has to walk differently, talk differently. Ideally he hails from some unimaginable locale, source of exotic words and untasted dishes and unsmelled smells—myrrh, oranges, bananas.

  And yet a prophet must also be one of our own. Let him have at least a drop of our blood, let him be a distant relative of somebody we know, even if perhaps we’ve forgotten what they look like. God never speaks through our neighbor, through the guy we’re in a fight with about the well, or the one whose wife attracts us with her charms.

  Nahman waits for them to finish.

  “I, Nahman of Busk, was a groomsman at that wedding. The other groomsman was Reb Mordke of Lwów.”

  Into the minds of those assembled in those cramped quarters, in that lowceilinged room, comes a thought that reassures them. Everyone is connected to everyone else. The world is simply the multiplication of this room in the Shorrs’ Rohatyn home above the market square. Through the slits in the curtains and the haphazardly nailed door starlight seeps in, which means that even the stars are close acquaintances, that some forebear or cousin must certainly have had some close contact with them. Say one word in a room in Rohatyn, and soon it will be carried all around the world, on the paths and roads taken by commercial expeditions, with the help of the messengers who roam the earth incessantly, bearing letters and repeating gossip. Like Nahman ben Levi of Busk.

  Nahman knows what to talk about now, giving every detail of the bride’s garments, of the beauty of her twin brother, Hayim, the two as alike as drops of water. He describes the dishes served at table, and the musicians and their exotic instruments, never before seen here in the north. He describes the figs ripening on the trees, the stone house situated so that you can see the great Danube from it, and the vineyards, where clusters of grapes have already formed; soon the grapes will look like Lilith’s nipples as she nursed.

  The groom, Jacob Leybowicz, is muscular and tall, says Nahman; dressed after the Turkish fashion, he looks like a pasha. He’s already spoken of as “wise Jacob” even though he’s only thirty. He studied in Smyrna with Isohar of Podhajce (here once more the admiring smacks of the lips of his listeners). In spite of his youth he has already amassed a considerable fortune, trading silk and precious stones. His bride is fourteen years old. They make a handsome couple. During the wedding, the wind stops blowing.

  “Then,” says Nahman, and he pauses again, though he is in a hurry for this story to be told, “then Jacob’s father-in-law went under the huppah and whispered something into Jacob’s ear. Even if everyone had been perfectly silent, if the birds had stopped singing and the dogs had stopped barking, if all the carriages had come to a halt—even so, no one would have overheard the secret Tovah told to Jacob. Because it was the Raza deMehemenuta, the secret of our faith, although few are the men who are wise enough to hear it told. The secret is so powerful that they say your body starts to shake all over if you learn it. It can only be whispered into the ear of the person closest to you, and on top of that only so that no one can see, so that no one guesses either by reading the lips of the teller or by the changes in the listener’s awestruck face. It can only be whispered into the ear of the chosen, who have sworn they will never repeat it to anyone lest a curse bringing illness or sudden death befall them.

  “How can this great secret be contained in a single sentence?” Nahman anticipates the question. “Is it a simple assertion, or perhaps the opposite—a negation? Or perhaps it is a question?”

  Whatever it is, he who learns this secret will forever be at peace and certain of his actions. From this point forward, the most complicated thing will seem simple. Perhaps it’s something complex, because complexity is always closest to the truth, a sentence that acts as a cork that closes off the mind to thought while opening it to truth. Maybe the secret is a curse, a dozen syllables that seem to be without meaning, or a string of numbers, the numerical values of corresponding letters that reveal a completely different meaning: gematric perfection.

  “It was in search of this secret that Hayim Malach was sent from Poland to Turkey many years ago,” says Shorr.

  “Did he bring it back?” asks Yeruhim skeptically.

  A murmur goes around the room. Nahman’s story is enticing, but it’s hard for people to believe that what he’s describing has to do with someone from around here. Holiness? From here? “Jacob Leybowicz” sounds like the name of every butcher. There’s a furrier from Rohatyn with exactly the same name.

  Late in the evening, when everyone’s gone home, Old Man Shorr takes Nahman by the arm, and together they walk out in front of the store.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” he says, gesturing toward the muddy Rohatyn market square and the dark, hurtling clouds, so low you can almost hear them tearing as they catch on the church tower. “We’re not allowed to buy land, settle down permanently. They chase us off in all directions, and in every generation there’s some disaster, some gezerah. Who are we, and what awaits us?”

  They take a few steps away from each other, and in the darkness there is the sound of streams of urine striking the boards of the fence.

  Nahman sees a little cottage, stooped beneath a cap of straw thatch, with tiny little windows, rotted boards; beyond it loom others with the same stoop, stuck together like the cells of a honeycomb. And he knows that there is a whole network of passages and walkways and nooks and crannies where carts of wood sit, waiting to be unloaded. And there are courtyards bordered by low fences, atop which during the day clay pots heat up in the sun. Beyond that lie passages that lead to other courtyards so small you can barely turn around in them, each faced with three doors that lead to three different homes. Higher up are attics linking the tops of these little homes, full of pigeons that mark out time with layers of droppings—living clocks. In gardens the size of an overcoat spread out on the ground cabbage leaves struggle to coil, potatoes swell, carrots cling to their beds. It would be wasteful to devote space to flowers other than hollyhocks, which grow straight up. Now, in December, their naked stalks seem to support the houses. Along the little streets the trash heap extends to the fences, guarded by cats and feral dogs. And so it goes through the whole village, along the streets, through the orchards and the bounds of the fields to the r
iver, where the women busily rinse out all the filth of the settlement.

  “We need someone who will support us in everything, someone who will sustain us. Not a rabbi, not a hakham, not a rich man, not a warrior. We need a strong man who looks like a weak man, someone with no fear. That man will be the one to get us out of here,” says Elisha Shorr, smoothing down his heavy coat. “Do you know anybody like that?”

  “Where?” says Nahman. “Where would we go? To the Land of Israel?”

  Elisha turns around and starts back. Nahman catches a whiff of his scent for a second, tobacco not completely dried.

  “Into the world.” Elisha Shorr makes a gesture with his hand as if to indicate some area above them, out over the roofs of Rohatyn.

  When they are back inside, Elisha Shorr says:

  “Nahman, bring him here. This Jacob.”

  Isohar’s School, and who God really is: The next installment in the story of Nahman ben Levi of Busk

  Smyrna knows it sins, deceives, cheats. In the narrow little streets, by day and by night, trade takes place; someone always has something to sell, someone always wants to buy something. Goods pass from hand to hand, fingers extending for coins that disappear into deep coat pockets, into the folds of wide trousers. Little bags, handbags, purses, boxes—everywhere coins sound, everyone hoping to make money on every transaction. On the stairs of the mosques sit people known as sarafs, who keep on their laps little tables with a groove along the side that serves to slide away coins already counted. Next to them stand sacks of silver and gold or the currency for which the client wishes to exchange their money. They must have every type of money that exists in the whole world, and they know the exchange rates by heart; no wise book, not even the best map portrays the world so clearly as the profiles of rulers with their names minted into copper, silver, and gold. It is from here that they really rule, gazing sternly out at their subjects like pagan gods.