“What, you don’t know?” Reb Mordke glared at him. “You’re always hanging around with his followers.”
“The Messiah is in Salonika,” said Tovah calmly. The wine seemed to stretch out his words. “After Sabbatai Tzvi’s death, the Holy Spirit passed from him into Baruchiah (of blessed memory).” For a moment he was silent, and then he added, as if hoping to provoke a certain reaction: “And now they say the spirit has found itself a home in Baruchiah’s son, Konio. They say it’s him—that he is the Messiah.”
At this, Jacob ceased to be able to keep a straight face. He smiled broadly, and we were all relieved, for we hadn’t known where this conversation was headed.
“If you say so, then I’ll go to him right away,” Jacob said after a moment. “I want to do whatever I can for him. If he wants me to chop wood, I’ll chop wood for him. If he tells me to carry the water, I’ll carry it. If he’s in need of someone to go into battle, I’ll be first among the troops. Just say the word.”
It is said in the tractate Hagigah 12: “Woe to them, the creations, who see and know not what they see.” Somehow, this happened that same night. First, Jacob stood before Reb Mordke, and Reb Mordke, praying and invoking the most powerful words, touched Jacob’s lips over and over, and his eyes, and his eyebrows, and then he spread a kind of herbal unction over his forehead, so that Jacob’s eyes got glassy and he grew quiet, docile. We took off his clothes and left only one lamp burning. Then, with a trembling voice, I began to sing that song that we all knew, but that has now taken on a completely different meaning, for we were no longer asking for the spirit to descend, as everyone does on a daily basis, in a general way, for the sake of the improvement of the world, for our salvation—now we were asking for a truly tangible descent of the spirit into the naked body we had right here before us, the body of a man, of a brother, whom we knew well, but whom we also did not know. We were putting him to a trial by the spirit, trying to determine whether he could endure such an onslaught. And we weren’t asking for any ordinary sign, as before, for the comfort of our hearts. We were asking for action, for an arrival in our world, our filth, our gloom. We set out Jacob like bait, like a dazed lamb before a wolf. Our combined voice rose, then finally turned shrill, as though we’d become women. Tovah rocked back and forth; I felt nauseated, as though I had eaten something spoiled, and I felt I would faint. Only Reb Mordke simply stood there, at ease, his eyes raised high toward the ceiling, where there was a little window. Maybe he thought the spirit would come in through that small window.
“The spirit circles around us like a wolf around those trapped in a cave,” I said. “It seeks the smallest hole to get through to those weak figures living in the shadow world. It sniffs, it checks each crack, each sliver, smelling us inside. It moves like a lover consumed by desire, in order to fill with light those delicate creatures, like underground mushrooms. And people—little, fragile, lost—leave him signs, marking stones with olive oil, and tree bark, and doorframes; people make signs on their foreheads in oil, so that the spirit might enter.”
“Why does the spirit like olive oil so much? Why all that anointing? Is it to make it slippery, so it will be easier for it to go inside of matter?” Jacob asked once, and all the students burst out laughing. And I did, too, because it was so bold it could not be unwise.
Everything happened so quickly. Jacob suddenly got an erection, and his skin became covered in sweat. He had strangely bulging, unseeing eyes, and he was sort of buzzing. Then he was thrown down on the ground, and there he remained, in a strange, contorted position, shaking all over. In a natural impulse, I took a step toward him to help him, but the unexpectedly strong hand of Reb Mordke stopped me. It lasted but a moment. Then from underneath Jacob there began to slowly flow a stream of urine. It is difficult for me to write of this.
I will never forget what I saw there, and I have never seen anything so real that might testify to how foreign we are to the spirit in our earthly, corporeal, material forms.
9.
Of the wedding in Nikopol, the mystery under the huppah, and the advantages of being foreign
A mid-eighteenth-century map of Ottoman territory displays a vast terrain marked only intermittently with cities. Most of these settlements were located along rivers, especially the Danube; on the map, they look like ticks latching on to bloodstreams. The element of water dominates here—it seems to be everywhere. The empire begins with the Dniester to the north, grazes the shores of the Black Sea to the east, and reaches south across Turkey and the Land of Israel, continuing farther around the Mediterranean Sea. Not much is missing for it to come full circle.
And if the movements of people might be indicated on a map like this, it would show them leaving chaotic trails, unpleasant to the eye. Zigzags, twisting spirals, lopsided ellipses—the record of travel for commerce, pilgrimage, merchants’ expeditions, visits to families, homesickness, and flights.
There are many bad people around, some of them really very cruel. They might spread out a kilim on the highway and drive spears into the ground around it—this is a sign that they must be paid a fee, without the traveler ever even glimpsing the villain’s cunning face. If the traveler opts not to pay, spears will rain down on him from the surrounding thickets, and then the highwaymen will follow and chop the traveler into bits with their swords. Some travelers, however, are not daunted by such dangers. And so the caravans move onward, bales of cotton on their carts. Whole families in carriages, on the way to relatives. Holy fools, exiles, and eccentrics who have already survived so much that nothing fazes them, including murderers’ forced tributes. Members of the sultan’s government who, at a leisurely pace, luxuriating, collect taxes, taking a rich cut for themselves and their confidants; the carriages of pashas’ harems, which leave in their wake the fragrance of oils and incense; herders driving their cattle south.
Nikopol is a small city, and from its position on the southern bank of the Danube it sends ferries across to Turnu, the Wallachian town also called Greater Nikopol, on the other side of the wide river. Anyone who travels from south to north must stop here, to sell some of the goods he is carrying or exchange them for others. This is why there is so much happening in this city, why business is booming. Here, in Nikopol, Jews speak Ladino, a language they brought with them from Spain when they were exiled, picking up new words along the way, its pronunciation changing until it became what the Sephardic Jews speak in the Balkans. Some spitefully refer to it as broken Spanish. But why should it be broken? It’s a beautiful language, after all. Everybody here speaks it. Sometimes they switch to Turkish. Jacob was raised in Wallachia, so he knows Ladino well, although the witnesses to his wedding, Mordechai of Prague and Nahman of Busk, do not even try to use the few Ladino words they know, preferring to continue speaking Hebrew and Turkish.
The wedding lasted seven days, from the 24th day of the month of Sivan, 5512 (in other words, June 6, 1752). The father of the bride, Tovah, borrowed money to make this happen and is already worrying that he will fall into financial ruin, since even aside from the burden of this event, things haven’t been going particularly well for him lately. The dowry was rotten, but the girl is lovely and couldn’t stop staring at the groom. This was no cause for surprise—Jacob was in fine spirits and funny, graceful as a red deer. The relationship was consummated on the very first night, or so the groom boasts—and consummated several times, at that. No one asked the bride. Surprised by the intrusion of her husband—sixteen years older than she—into the drowsy flower beds of her body, she gazed inquisitively into the eyes of her mother and her sisters on the following day. So this is how things are?
As a married woman, Hana received a new outfit, worn in the Turkish fashion—soft sirwal, and over them a Turkish tunic embroidered in roses and decorated with precious stones, and also a beautiful cashmere scarf, now tossed onto a balustrade, since it is very hot.
The necklace she received from her husband was so valuable that it was taken from her right away and locked up in a chest. Bu
t Hana did have a different kind of dowry—the prestige of her family, the resourcefulness of her brothers, the books written by her father, the ancestry of her mother, who descends from Portuguese Jews, and her own sleepy beauty, and her gentleness, which has delighted Jacob thus far, since he is accustomed to slim, proud, impertinent women with strong wills like the Jewish women of Podolia, his grandmother, his sisters and female cousins, or the mature widows he permitted to spoil him in Smyrna. But Hana is as gentle as a doe. She gives herself to him with love, taking nothing for herself—for pleasure he has yet to teach her. She gives herself to him with surprise in her eyes, and this excites Jacob. She observes him carefully, like he’s a horse she might have been given as a gift. Jacob dozes, and she examines his fingers, the skin on his back, the pockmarks on his face, wrapping his beard around her finger, until finally, when she has worked up the courage, she gazes in utter astonishment at his genitalia.
A trampled garden, an overturned fence, dancers who’ve gone out to cool down and come back in scattering sand—a sign that the desert is nearby—across floors covered with kilims and cushions. Dirty dishes not yet cleared away, though there have been women bustling around since early morning, the smell of urine in the orchard, scraps of food thrown out for the cats and the birds, bones picked clean—this is all that is left of the feast, which lasted several days. Nahman’s head hurts; he may have overdone it with the Nikopolian wine. He is lying in the shade of a fig tree, watching Hana poking at the house with a stick, trying to get at a wasps’ nest. She’ll be sorry shortly, and they’ll all have to run away. She’s upset that so soon after the wedding the men want to leave. She’s barely even glimpsed her husband, and already he is moving on.
Nahman pretends to be sleeping, but he takes secret peeks at Hana. He doesn’t really like her—she seems a little bland to him. Who is this girl who has been given to Jacob? He wouldn’t be able to describe her if he were to return to his Scraps. He doesn’t know whether she’s intelligent or stupid, cheerful or melancholic, whether she’s short-tempered or the opposite, good-natured. He doesn’t understand how this girl with the round face and the greenish eyes can be a wife. They don’t cut married women’s hair in Nikopol, so he can see how wild and beautiful hers is, dark brown, like coffee. She has lovely hands with long, thin fingers and fecund hips. She doesn’t look fourteen. She looks like she might be twenty, like a woman. Pretty and curvy—that’s how she should be described. That’s enough. And to think that a few days ago he regarded her as he would a child.
He also takes a look at Hana’s twin brother, Hayim. There is such a likeness between them it gives him chills. Hayim is shorter, slimmer, livelier, with an oval face, his hair in boyish disarray, down to his shoulders. Because his body is trimmer, he also looks younger. He is quick and always laughing boisterously. His father has chosen him as his successor, and now the siblings must be separated, which won’t be easy. Hayim wants to go to Craiova, too, but his father needs him here, or maybe merely fears for him. Daughters are destined to be given away, and everyone knows from the start they’ll leave the nest, like money neatly put away that must later be paid back to the world. When Hana stops scowling and forgets she’s gotten married, she goes up to her brother and whispers something or other into his ear, their dark heads leaning in together. It is a beautiful sight to behold, and not only for Nahman; he can see that everyone enjoys the double image—only united are the siblings complete. Should man in fact not be like this, double? What would it be like if we all had twins, boys for girls, girls for boys? We could all talk without words.
Nahman also watches Jacob. It seems to him that Jacob’s eyes have been covered by a film of some sort since the wedding. Perhaps it’s exhaustion, perhaps the result of all the toasts—but where is his bird’s gaze, the ironic look that makes everyone else glance down or away? Now he’s put his hands behind his head—there are no strangers here, he feels relaxed; his wide sleeve has slid all the way down to his shoulder and bared the concavity of his armpit, lushly overgrown with dark hair.
His father-in-law, Tovah, murmurs something into Jacob’s ear, his hand resting on Jacob’s back, so that you might wonder—Nahman thinks spitefully—whether it was Tovah who married Jacob, and not Hana. Hayim, meanwhile, spars with everyone, but Jacob he avoids. When Jacob tries to grab his attention, Hayim falls silent and scurries off. For some reason this amuses the adults.
As for Reb Mordke, he doesn’t leave his house, he does not care for the sun. He sits alone in his chamber, leaning up against some cushions, and he smokes his pipe—slowly, lazily, savoring each particle of smoke, thinking things over, closely examining every moment of the world under the watchful gaze of all the letters of the alphabet. Nahman knows he’s waiting, that he’s standing guard, keeping watch so that everything he sees—even when he’s not looking at anything—will come to pass.
Under the huppah Tovah said something to Jacob, one short sentence, a few words, its beginning and end getting tangled in his ample beard. Jacob had to lean in to his father-in-law for a moment, and then serious surprise, even astonishment appeared on his face. Then Jacob’s face set, as though he were trying to master a grimace.
The guests ask after the groom, they want to hear once more those stories that Mordechai, Reb Mordke, who now sits with them at the table, is glad to tell. He is always either filling up his pipe or emerging at regular intervals from within a cloud of smoke, to say how he and Nahman ben Levi brought Jacob to Tovah. He tells the story in his croaking voice:
“‘This is the husband for your daughter,’ we said. ‘Only him.’ ‘But why him?’ asked Tovah. ‘He is exceptional,’ I said, ‘and she, thanks to him, will attain the highest honors. Look at him. Don’t you see? He is great.’” Reb Mordke breathes in the smoke from his pipe, which smells of Smyrna, Stamboul. “But Tovah hesitated. ‘Who is he, this boy with the pitted face, and where are his parents from?’ he asked. Then I, Reb Mordke, and Nahman of Busk here—we patiently explained that his father is a famous rabbi, Yehuda Leyb Buchbinder, while his mother, Rachel of Rzeszów, comes from the finest home, that she is a relative of Hayim Malach, whose cousin was given in marriage to Dobrushka in Moravia, the great-grandson of Leybele Prossnitz. And there are no madmen in his family, nor sick people, nor cripples. The spirit only goes into the chosen. Oh, if only Tovah had a wife he could go to for advice, but he doesn’t, since she died.”
Reb Mordke doesn’t say anything for a moment, reminded of Tovah’s hesitation, how it annoyed them, seeming like the hesitation of a merchant fretting over wares. This was Jacob they were talking about!
Nahman listens to Reb Mordke, but how does he know that Jacob is Jacob? He watches him now, sitting across from his father-in-law in silence. Jacob has lowered his head and is gazing at his shoes. The heat makes it so that words can’t reach pronouncement, grown heavy and slow. Jacob won’t take off his Turkish costume now—the new, brightly colored turban on his head, the same one he wore at the wedding, the color of fig leaves. He looks nice in it. Nahman sees his soft Turkish leather shoes with the toes curled up. Then the hands of both men rise in the same moment as they take sips of coffee from their little cups.
Nahman knows that Jacob is Jacob because when he looks at him as he is doing now, from afar, without Jacob being aware, Nahman feels a pressure in the vicinity of his heart, as though some invisible hand were holding him by it, hot and wet. This sense of being squeezed makes him feel good, calm. His eyes fill up with tears. He could just look and look and look in this way. What further proof could he want? It’s the heart that knows such things.
Jacob has begun to introduce himself not as before, not as Yankiele Leybowicz, but as Jacob Frank. Frank is what Jews from the west are called in Nikopol; that’s what they call his father-in-law and his wife, Hana. Frank, or Frenk, means foreign. Nahman knows Jacob likes this—being foreign is a quality of those who have frequently changed their place of residence. He’s told Nahman that he feels best in new places, because it
is as if the world begins afresh every time. To be foreign is to be free. To have a great expanse stretch out before you—the desert, the steppe. To have the shape of the moon behind you like a cradle, the deafening symphony of the cicadas, the air’s fragrance of melon peel, the rustle of the scarab beetle when, come evening, the sky turns red, and it ventures out onto the sand to hunt. To have your own history, not for everyone, just your own history written in the tracks you leave behind.
To feel like a guest everywhere you go, occupying homes just for a while, not bothering about the garden, enjoying the wine without forming any attachment to the vineyard. Not to understand the language, and therefore to register gestures and faces better, the expressions in people’s eyes, the emotions that appear on faces like the shadows of clouds. To learn a foreign language from scratch, a little bit in every place, comparing words and finding orders of similarity.
This state of foreignness must be carefully guarded, for it gives enormous power.
Jacob had told him one thing, as if in jest, Jacob being Jacob, as if for laughs, an unclear thing that instantly made a permanent home in Nahman’s memory, for it was Jacob’s first teaching, though perhaps he did not know that yet. The thing was that you have to practice saying no, every single day. What does that mean? Nahman promises himself he will ask, but when? There isn’t any time left now. He has grown sad and irritable—maybe there was something wrong with the wine. He couldn’t say when he began to turn from a master to a friend, and then, imperceptibly, into a student. He let it happen, somehow.
Jacob never talks like the tzaddikim do, in long, complicated sentences brimming with rare and precious words, always harking back to quotes from the Scriptures. He speaks concisely and clearly, like someone who earns his living at the market or drives a cart. He’s always joking, but you can’t tell if he’s actually joking in what he says or being serious. He looks you straight in the eye, says a sentence like he’s firing a shot, and then waits for a reaction. Usually his persistent gaze, like that of a bird—eagle, falcon, vulture—flusters his interlocutors. They look away, they falter. Sometimes he’ll start laughing, apropos of nothing, to everyone’s relief. He can be rude; he can be outrageous. He often mocks. If you get on his bad side, he’ll grimace, and his eyes will become like knives. He says wise and stupid things. No man should trust him too much, for he will make fun of anyone—Nahman has seen him do so, though Jacob has not yet turned his vulture’s gaze on him. Because of all of this, Jacob seems at first glance like someone familiar, a peer, but soon, after a little conversation, people realize that there is nothing familiar about him—that he is peerless.
The Books of Jacob Page 21
