The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  There is one God in three figures, and the fourth is the holy Mother.

  Some time later, urged on by my letters, there came to Smyrna a merchant’s caravan from Podolia, and with it, Elisha Shorr and his sons, Nathan and Solomon. With Jacob, Isohar, and Reb Mordke, I maintained that it was divine will guiding us, placing us in front of people and having us meet with precisely the ones we most needed to see, but the truth was otherwise. I had been writing to Reb Shorr even from Salonika, describing to him Jacob’s ruah haKodesh, and other details of what had happened with us there. However, truth be told, I had not believed that this would cause that older man to saddle his horses, take out the carts, and head off on such far-flung travels. But the Shorrs were always able to unite matters of the spirit with business dealings of various kinds, and so while the brothers took up the sale and purchase of goods, Old Man Shorr conversed with us, and slowly out of those evenings emerged a vision of the days that were supposed to come and that we were supposed to be guided by. He found great support in the person of Reb Mordke, who had long been muttering about this subject, citing his own strange dreams. But the Shorrs cared not for dreams.

  Did Jacob know what we had in store for him? He got very sick then and almost died, but when he awoke from his fever, he said he’d had a dream. That he had dreamed of a man with a white beard, who had said to him: “You will go north, and many are the persons you will draw there to the new faith.”

  Wise Jacob objected: “How am I to go to Poland, when I don’t understand the Polish language and have all of my affairs here, in the Turkish country. And I have a very young wife, with a newborn daughter—she won’t want to go with me.” So Jacob defended himself before us and before his own dream as we sat there, a ceremonial committee of four: Isohar, Elisha Shorr, Reb Mordke, and myself.

  “That man with the beard, whom you saw in your sleep, that is Elijah—didn’t you realize?” said Reb Mordke to him. “When things are hard for you, he will go ahead of you. You will go first, and then Hana will come to you. In Poland you will be the king and the savior.”

  “I will be with you,” added I, Nahman of Busk.

  Scraps: Of meeting Jacob’s father in Roman, and also of the starosta and the thief

  At the start of October 1755, we headed north in two wagons pulled by several horses. We certainly did not resemble what we were—messengers of some significant matter—but had rather the appearance of ordinary merchants circling around and around like ants. On the road to Czernowitz we went to Roman to visit Jacob’s father, who after his wife’s death lived there on his own. We paused at the city’s tollhouse so that Jacob could put on his best costume, for what purpose I know not.

  Yehuda Leyb Buchbinder lived in a very little house with just one room, cramped and smoky. There was no place even for the horses, so they stood outside all night. There were just the three of us, Jacob, Nussen, and I, as the Shorrs’ caravan had set forth for Poland long before.

  Yehuda Leyb was of tall stature, but skinny and wrinkled. His face at the sight of us took on an expression of dissatisfaction and disappointment. His thick, bushy eyebrows almost concealed his eyes, particularly since he had a habit of tilting his head forward and glowering. Jacob had been very excited at the prospect of seeing his father, but they greeted each other almost indifferently. His father seemed happier about the arrival of Nussen, whom he knew well, than about seeing his own son. We brought good food: a wealth of cheese, carboys of wine, a full pot of olives, all of the finest quality, purchased along the way. Jacob had spent most of what he had on these treats. But the sight of them did not cheer Yehuda in the slightest. The old man’s eyes remained sad and avoided meeting other people’s.

  Jacob, too, who had previously so rejoiced, now slumped and was silent. So it is: our parents remind us of what we like least about ourselves, and in their growing old we see our many sins, I thought, but perhaps this was something more—sometimes it happens that the souls of parents and children are fundamentally hostile to one another, and they meet in life in order to remedy this hostility. But it doesn’t always work.

  “Everyone around here has the same dream,” said Yehuda Leyb at the very start. “Everyone has dreams about the Messiah already being in some town, somewhere nearby, except that no one ever remembers the name of that town or the name of that Messiah. I had the same dream, and I sort of recognized the name of the town. Others say the same and always fast for days on end to try and have a second dream that will tell them what the city’s name might be.”

  We drank wine and snacked on olives, and finding myself the most garrulous, I told of everything that had happened with us. I told it in the same way I am telling it here, but it was evident that old Buchbinder was not listening. He was silent and kept looking around his own room where there wasn’t anything that might have drawn his gaze. At last Nussen spoke up.

  “I don’t understand you at all, Leyb. We came here from the world and are telling you all these things, and getting nothing back from you. You listen with one ear and ask no questions. Are you well?”

  “But what do I get out of your telling me stories about some heavenly fair?” Leyb responded. “What do I care for this wisdom of yours, when I’m just curious how it’s supposed to be benefiting me? How much longer will I have to live like this, alone, in pain, in sorrow? What is God prepared to do for us, tell me of that.”

  Then he added:

  “I no longer believe that anything will change. No one knows the name of that little town. I had thought it was something like Sambor, Sampol . . .”

  We went out with Jacob in front of the little house, where a river flowed downhill. Jacob said that all of their homes had looked like that: they stood on a river and every evening the geese would come out of the water, one after the other, that’s how he recalled it from his childhood. By some miracle, the family had always settled on a river just like this one—flowing between the hills, shallow, sunny, swift. They would race into it and splash water all around; in places by the shore where the whirlpools had washed away the sand, you could learn to doggy-paddle from one side to the other. Suddenly Jacob remembered that once, when he and the other children were engaged in their usual games, he had decided to play the starosta, and since he had to exercise his authority, there also had to be a thief. So they cast a little boy in that role, tied him to a tree, and burned him with a metal bar heated in their campfire, wanting to get him to confess where he’d hid the horses. The little boy begged them to stop, reminding them they were just playing, that there were no horses. But then the pain became too great, and the boy nearly passed out, and then he screamed out that he had hidden the horses here, and there. Then Jacob let him go.

  I had no idea what to say to such a story. When it had come out, his father had beat him with birch switches, said Jacob after a moment’s silence. As he spoke, he was pissing on his father’s nearly collapsing fence.

  “He was right to do so,” I answered, for that cruel story had astonished me. The wine was hitting me now, and I wanted to go back inside, but he grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me to him.

  He told me always to listen to him, and that when he told me I was the thief, then I was to be the thief. And when he told me I was the starosta, then I was to become the starosta. He said this straight to my face, and I could smell the fruity wine on his breath. I was frightened of his eyes, darkened with anger, and I dared not oppose him. When we went back inside, both of the older men were crying. Tears ran down their cheeks and soaked into their beards.

  “What would you say, Yehuda, if your son were to go to Poland on a mission and teach there?” I asked him as we were leaving.

  “God forbid.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He shrugged.

  “They’ll kill him. There are lots of folks that could kill him there. They’re just waiting for someone like him.”

  Two days later, in Czernowitz, Jacob got the ruah haKodesh again in the presence of many of the faithful. Ag
ain he was thrown to the ground, and for the whole rest of the day he said nothing other than something like “ze-ze-ze,” which as we listened we realized was “Ma’ase Zar, Ma’ase Zar,” or “Strange Deed.” He was shaking all over, and his teeth were chattering. Then people went up to him, and he laid his hands on them, and many went away healed. Some of ours from Podolia were there, men who crossed borders openly or illegally to work small trades. They sat around in front of the shack like dogs, despite the cold, waiting for Jacob to come out, wanting to just touch his coat. I recognized several among them, including Shyle from Lanckoron´, and talking with them I got homesick, with my home being so nearby.

  One thing was for sure—our people from Czernowitz supported us, and it was clear that the legend of Jacob had a wide range already, and knew no borders. And it was as though everyone had been waiting for him, as though there were no longer any way of saying no.

  At the end we spent another night with Jacob’s father, and I told him that story about the starosta and the thief.

  Then Leyb said:

  “Watch out for Jacob. He really is a thief.”

  Of Jacob’s dance

  People gather in a village on the Turkish side, since the guards won’t let them into Poland. They have reports of a plague there. Some musicians returning from a wedding have sat down, exhausted, on the logs ready to be floated across the river. They have drums, flutes, and bağlamas, little instruments with strings they pick with cherrywood bark.

  Jacob comes up to them and removes his overcoat, and his tall figure begins to move rhythmically. At first he stomps his foot, but in such a way as to speed up the player, who reluctantly accepts this rhythm, faster than he’d wanted. Now Jacob rocks from side to side and, stepping faster and faster, he shouts at the rest of the players, and they understand that this strange man is demanding that they start playing, too. An older man arrives from somewhere with a santur, a Turkish zither, and when he joins in with the players, the music becomes complete, perfect for dancing. Then Jacob puts his hands on the shoulders of two onlookers jerking from side to side, and they begin to take little steps. The drums beat out a clear rhythm, which carries over the water to the other side and down the river. Soon others join in—Turkish cattle herders, merchants, Podolian peasants all toss aside their traveling bags, discard their sheepskin coats. A row of dancers forms, and its ends curl in until eventually a circle is made, which instantly begins to spin. And those whom the ruckus and hoopla draw in also begin to sway, and then, as if in desperation, as if they’ve had enough of waiting, as if they’ve decided to go for broke right here and now, they join the circle. Jacob leads the dance around carts and surprised horses, set apart from the rest by his tall hat, but when the hat falls off, it isn’t clear anymore that he is the one who is the leader. Behind him goes Nahman, ecstatically, like a saint, with his hands raised up, his eyes closed, a blissful smile on his face. Some beggar, despite his limp, transforms into a dancer, grinning, wideeyed. Women laugh at the sight of him, but he just makes faces back. After a moment’s hesitation young Shlomo Shorr joins in; he has come with his father to wait for Jacob, to safely convey him over the border. The flaps of his wool overcoat fluttering around his thin figure, Nussen behind him with the scar on his face, and then a somewhat stiff Hershel. Children and servants link up with this procession and a dog barks at them, running up to their stomping feet and jumping back. Some girls set down the carrying poles they’ve brought to get water, and lifting up their skirts, tentatively step with their bare feet, so petite they don’t even reach Jacob’s breast. A fat peasant woman in wood-soled shoes stuffed with straw is also starting to move now, and the Turkish vodka smugglers begin to dance, playing innocent. The drum goes faster and faster, and the dancers’ feet move faster and faster. Jacob starts to whirl like a dervish, the dance circle breaks off, people fall down on the ground in heaps of laughter, sweaty, red with effort.

  That’s how it ends.

  After it’s over, a Turkish guard with a big mustache approaches Jacob.

  “Who are you?” he asks him in Turkish, in a threatening tone. “Jew? Muslim? Rus?”

  “Can’t you see, stupid? I’m a dancer.” Jacob pants. He leans over, resting his hands on his own knees, and then he turns away from his inquisitor as if wanting to show him his bottom. The guard grabs for his saber, offended by that “halfwit,” but Old Shorr, who until now has been sitting in the cart, calms him down. He takes his hand.

  “What kind of idiot is this?” asks the guard, furious.

  Reb Elisha Shorr says that he’s a holy fool. But this means nothing to the Turk.

  “Well, if you ask me, he’s a crackpot,” he says. Then he shrugs and walks away.

  III.

  The Book of

  THE ROAD

  13.

  Of the warm December of 1755, otherwise known as the month of Tevet 5516, of the country of Polin, and pestilence in Mielnica

  The travelers stand grouped together on the shore of the Dniester, on its low-lying southern bank. The frail winter sun casts red shadows over all that it can reach. December is warm—strangely, abnormally so. The air is an interleaving of warm gusts with freezing, and smells of newly dug-up earth.

  Before them is the high, steep bank on the other side, now vanishing into shadow, the sun having dipped below the dark face they must now scale.

  “Polin,” says Old Shorr.

  “Poland, Poland,” everyone repeats joyfully, and their eyes are made narrow as slits by their smiles. Shlomo, Shorr’s son, begins to pray, to thank the Lord that they have made it in one piece, all together. Quietly he speaks the words of his prayer; the others all join in, mumbling, careless, their minds on other things, loosening the saddles, removing their sweaty hats. Now they will eat, drink. They need to rest before the crossing.

  They don’t wait long. Night has barely started to fall when the Turkish smuggler arrives. They know him, it’s Saakadze, they’ve worked with him many times. When it is completely dark they ford the river on horseback and in their carriages. The only sound is the splash of the water beneath the horses’ hooves.

  On the other side, they separate. The steep wall seems dangerous only when seen from the other bank. Saakadze leads them along a path that slopes up gently. Both Shorrs, with their Polish papers, ride ahead to the guardhouse, while Nahman and a few of the others wait a bit in perfect silence, then go down some side paths.

  Polish sentries guard the village, not admitting travelers from Turkey due to the plague. Old Shorr and his son, whose papers and permits are in order, argue with them for a while to divert their attention, then bribe them, for it gets quiet, and the travelers continue on their way.

  Jacob has Turkish papers that say he is the sultan’s subject. That’s how he looks, too, in his tall hat and his fur-lined Turkish coat. Only his beard sets him apart from a real Turk. He appears fully at ease, with just the tip of his nose sticking out above his collar. Perhaps he’s even sleeping?

  They reach the village, quiet and pitch-black at this time of night. No one stops them; there are no sentries. The Turk bids them farewell, stuffing the coins they give him under his belt; he is proud of the job he’s done. He smiles, baring a set of white teeth. He has deposited them before a little inn, where a slumbering innkeeper evinces great surprise at these late arrivals, at their having been admitted into town.

  Jacob falls asleep immediately, but Nahman spends the whole night tossing and turning in his not particularly comfortable bed, burning candles and examining the sheets for bedbugs. The tiny windows are filthy, with desiccated stalks upon the sills; perhaps they were once flowers. In the morning, their host, a middle-aged Jew, thin and ill at ease, serves them heated water with some matzah crumbled in. The inn looks quite luxurious, but their host explains that as the plague has racked up victims, people have grown more and more afraid to leave their homes, terrified to purchase things from those who have been stricken. They have already eaten their own stores here at the i
nn, so he begs their forgiveness and urges them to arrange for their meals on their own. As he says all this, he keeps his distance, avoiding their breath and their touch.

  This strange, warm December has reinvigorated those minuscule creatures that ordinarily, fearing frost, spend this season hibernating underground; spurred by this unseasonable warmth, they have surfaced to destroy and kill. They lurk in the dense, ineffable fog, in the stuffy, toxic cloud that hangs over the villages and towns, in the fetid vapors given off by infected bodies that people everywhere refer to as “pestilential air.” As soon as they make their way into a person’s lungs, they enter the bloodstream, igniting it, and then they squeeze into the heart—and at that point, the person dies.

  When in the morning the newcomers go out onto the streets of this village, which is called Mielnica, they see a big, almost completely empty market square with low homes around its edges and three streets that issue from it. There is a terrible damp chill—apparently the warm days are over now, or else here, on this high embankment, the climate is completely different. In the puddles in the mud they marvel at the low-racing clouds. All the shops are closed. Only one empty stall still stands on the square; a hemp rope flutters before it, the kind a hangman might employ. Somewhere a door creaks open, and a bundled-up figure flits past the houses. This is what the world will look like after the Final Judgment, emptied of people. How hostile, how nefarious it is, thinks Nahman, as he counts the money in his pocket.

  “They don’t take money from people with the plague,” Jacob said when he saw Nahman about to go shopping. He was washing up in the icy water, the southern sun still preserved in the skin of his naked torso. “Don’t pay them,” he added, splashing cold water all around him.

  Nahman has ventured confidently into a little Jewish shop, having seen someone emerge from it. Behind the counter stands a little old man, as though his family has required this of him, to make contact with the world so that its younger members will not have to.