They disperse in silence, shuffling through the sawdust on the floor.
How Gitla’s stepmother’s pessimistic predictions come true
When the turmoil erupted in Lanckoroń, and they arrested all the men, Gitla didn’t suffer overmuch. Hayah’s husband came to get her right away, and she took in both “guardians” for that night. Making their beds for them, serving them soured milk, Hayah, whose breasts were so recently being ceremonially kissed, looked more like an ordinary housewife.
“There’s nothing here for you, dear child,” she said to Gitla, sitting on her bed and caressing her cheek. “You must leave, go back to Lwów, and apologize to your father. He’ll take you in.”
The next day she gave them each a couple of groszy and sent them on their way. They immediately set off in opposite directions without a word, Gitla leaving behind her a trail of blood in the snow. She paused to turn her fur-lined coat inside out and headed for the road. She was hoping to get a lift from a passing sleigh and make it to Lwów, although not on account of her father, but rather because she had reason to believe that Jacob, the Lord, would likely end up there.
Come February, Gitla has reached Lwów, but she does not dare let her father see her. She spots him once as he walks to the kahal, keeping close to the city wall, old and hunched over; he takes little steps and is talking to himself. Gitla feels sorry for him, but she doesn’t move from where she’s standing. She goes to her dead mother’s sister, who lives near the synagogue, but her aunt has already heard about everything that’s happened and shuts the door in her face. Gitla listens through the closed door as they lament the fate of her father. Then she stands on the corner of the street where the Jewish homes begin. The wind flutters her skirt, and bits of snow melt into her flimsy stockings. Soon she will put her hand out for alms or start selling herself for bread, and everything will be as her stepmother predicted—she will hit rock bottom. Which is why for now she stands in the freezing cold with dignity, or so she hopes. And yet some young Jew in a shtreimel presses a grosz into her hand without even looking at her, and Gitla uses it to buy herself a warm obwarzanek. Slowly she reconciles herself to the thought that she looks like a harlot—dirty, with matted hair, and hungry. And suddenly she feels absolutely free. She goes into the first decent courtyard she comes across and up to the first decent building, and then she climbs the stairs to the first floor and knocks on the first decent-looking door she encounters.
The person who opens the door is a tall, stooping man in a nightcap and a dressing gown thinly lined with dark fur. He has spectacles over his nose. He is holding a candle before him that lights up his face and sharp features.
“What do you want?” he asks in a hoarse, low voice, and reflexively starts searching for groszy to give her alms.
“I am the great-granddaughter of the Polish king,” says Gitla. “I am looking for a decent place where I can spend the night.”
15.
How the old minaret in Kamieniec turns into a column with the Holy Mother on top
In the summer of 1756, Nahman, Jacob, and Shlomo Shorr show up in Kamieniec as ordinary Jews from just outside Smotrycz who came to sell garlic. Nahman has a carrying pole over his shoulders with baskets of garlic attached on either end. Although Jacob is now wearing a shabby kapota, he would not agree to bast shoes and is instead wearing good leather boots that stick out from beneath his wide-leg trousers. Dressed in an outfit that is half Turkish, half Armenian, he resembles a vagabond who doesn’t belong anywhere, the kind the borderlands are full of, the kind no one pays any special mind. Shlomo Shorr, tall and thin, has such dignity in his face that he’s harder to make look like a vagabond. In his long dark coat and peasant’s shoes, he looks more like a cleric of some undetermined religion, and he arouses people’s automatic respect.
The three of them now stand before Kamieniec’s Peter and Paul Cathedral among a sizable crowd that is observing with great excitement the placement of a statue atop a tall column. This event has attracted all those from the little neighboring villages and the nearby alleyways, and customers from the stalls at the market. Even the priests have come out to watch the wooden crane raise this gold figure. A moment earlier they had been talking in an animated, noisy way, but now, looking at the sculpture, which has suddenly begun to sway, threatening to snap the cords and send everything careening onto the onlookers, they have quieted down. The crowd moves back a bit. Some of the workers are foreign; people are whispering they’re from Gdańsk, that the whole statue was even cast in Gdańsk, completely covered in thick gold, and that it took a full month for it to be brought here in carts the authorities commissioned that made their way from post house to post house. The column itself, meanwhile, was built by the Turks, and for years that crescent of theirs was atop it, those heathens having made it part of a minaret. But now the Holy Virgin has returned and will tower over the town and the heads of its inhabitants.
At last, the statue is in place. The crowd sighs, and someone starts singing. Now the whole figure can be seen. The Holy Mother, the Mother of Mercy, the Virgin Mary, Queen of the World, is portrayed here as a young woman, running with the carefree grace of a dancer, her arms outspread and raised as though in greeting. As though she were about to pick you up and squeeze you tight. Nahman raises his head and covers his eyes as the white sky blinds him, and it seems to him that she is saying, “Come, dance with me,” or “Play with me,” or “Give me your hand.” Jacob raises his hand into the sky and points at the statue, unnecessarily, since it is what everyone has come to see. Nahman knows, though, what Jacob is trying to indicate—that this Virgin is the holy Shekhinah, God’s presence in the dark world. Then the sun jolts out from behind the clouds, completely unexpectedly, since the sky has been cloudy since morning, and one of its rays hits the statue, and all that Gdańsk gold starts to gleam like a kind of second sun, and suddenly the square in front of the cathedral in Kamieniec shines with a fresh and joyful light, and the Virgin, who is running in the sky, is pure goodness, like someone who alights among people to give them hope—that everything will be good. Everyone sighs ecstatically at this powerful show of pure light. The Holy Virgin. People squint and kneel before this obvious evidence of her miracle. It’s a sign, it’s a sign, they all repeat, and the crowd is kneeling, and they are, too. Nahman’s eyes fill with tears, and his feelings are shared by the others. A miracle is a miracle, regardless of the creed.
To them, it seems that the Shekhinah is descending into this statue gilded in Gdańsk, and that in this glimmering guise she will guide them to the bishop’s residence like a mother, like a sister, like the most tender lover who would give up everything just to gaze upon her beloved for even a moment, even if he’s dressed in the shabbiest kapota. But before they go in for their secret audience with Bishop Dembowski, Jacob, being Jacob, unable to endure any solemnity, breaks away from the crowd and, in a fit of childish mischief, starts to wail along the city wall like an old Jewish beggar, hunched and lame.
“Insolent Jewry,” hisses some heavy townswoman about him. “No respect for what’s sacred.”
That same day, late in the evening, they present the bishop with a manifesto of nine theses they plan to defend at the disputation. They also request some protection, since the Talmudists are still persecuting them. And then there’s the curse. That’s what angers the bishop the most. Curse! What is this Jewish curse of theirs?
He has them sit while he reads:
“One: We believe in everything the God of the Old Testament commanded mankind to believe in. We believe in everything He taught.
“Two: The Scriptures cannot be effectively comprehended by human reason without God’s Grace.
“Three: The Talmud, filled with unprecedented blasphemies toward God, ought and needs to be rejected.
“Four: God is One, and He is the creator of all things.
“Five: This very God is in three Persons, indivisible in nature.
“Six: God may take the form of human flesh upon
Himself and be subject to every passion apart from sin.
“Seven: In accordance with the prophecy, the city of Jerusalem will not be rebuilt.
“Eight: The Messiah promised in the Scriptures will not come again.
“Nine: God Himself will bear within Himself the curse of the first parents and of the whole nation, and the one who is the true Messiah is God Incarnate.”
“Is it good like that?” asks Nahman, placing a small Turkish purse of delicate goatskin—it looks like it’s embroidered with crystals and turquoise, beautiful handiwork—discreetly on the small table by the door. The bishop can guess what is inside—they wouldn’t have come with just anything. It will contain expensive stones, enough of them to set a whole monstrance. Imagining this makes his head spin. But the bishop has to focus. It’s not easy, for this seemingly small matter has suddenly taken on enormous dimensions: the opponents of these ragamuffins have gotten to Baruch Yavan, aide to Chief Minister Brühl—on the bishop’s table lie letters from Warsaw, relating in detail all the palace intrigues—and now wield this powerful man at court, the Polish king’s most important adviser. Who would have thought that kissing a naked woman in some village in the middle of nowhere would ever attain such proportions?
The bishop takes the purse, and in so doing, he takes Frank’s side, though the brazenness of this Jew annoys him. The Jew demands a disputation. Demands protection. Demands land, to settle down “quietly,” he says. And furthermore: the Jew demands ennoblement. The bishop must thoroughly protect them, and then they’ll get baptized. He also wishes for those most eminent among them (here the bishop struggles to imagine their “eminence,” for they are after all only leaseholders, furriers, shopkeepers) to be able to try for ennoblement according to the law of the Commonwealth. And that they might gain the right to settle down on church lands.
The other one, the redhead who translates for Jacob, explains that the tradition since back when they lived in Spain was to organize such disputations when some thorny question arose. The time has come to do so. He translates Frank’s words:
“Take even a few hundred rabbis and intelligent bishops, and lords, and the best scholars. Let them debate me and my people. I’ll answer every question they ask, because the truth is on my side.”
They are like merchants come to make a profit: their asking price is high.
But they also have a lot to offer in return, the bishop considers.
What Bishop Dembowski ponders as his face is being shaved
It really is strange how very cold and damp the bishop’s mansion is in Kamieniec Podolski. Even now, in summer, when in the early morning the barber comes, the bishop as he sits must warm his feet with a hot stone wrapped in thick linen.
He has had his chair moved to the window, and before the barber sharpens the knife, wiping the blade on the leather strop with great pomp and circumstance, before he prepares the lather and carefully—so as not to sully His Holiness in any way, God forbid—covers up his shoulders with embroidered linen towels, the bishop has time to look over the latest missives from Kamieniec, Lwów, and Warsaw.
The day before, the bishop met with a man called Krysa, who is apparently working in the name of Jacob Frank, but also seems to be playing his own hand. With great determination, the bishop has been summoning the so-called Talmudists, learned rabbis from all over Podolia, asking them to participate in the disputation, but the rabbis have been dodging his summons. Once, twice, he has ordered them to appear before him, but they haven’t done so, evidently holding the office of the bishop in contempt. When he fines them, they just send Hershko Shmulewicz, a very clever Jew, apparently a representative, who comes up with every conceivable excuse on their behalf. Meanwhile, the contents of their purse are very concrete, if decidedly less elaborate: gold coins. The bishop attempts not to betray that he has already taken a stand, and that it is with the other ones.
If only he could understand these Jews the same way he can more or less comprehend the intentions of a peasant! Yet here you have their tassels, their hats, their bizarre speech (which is why he is so favorably disposed toward Pikulski’s efforts in this regard, to master their language), their suspicious religion. Why suspicious? Because it’s too close. Their books are the same, Moses, Abraham, Isaac on the stone under his father’s knife, Noah and his ark—all of it’s the same, and yet, with them it appears in some strange new context. Even Noah doesn’t look the same, exactly—he’s disfigured, somehow, and his ark is not the same, but rather Jewish, more ornamental, Eastern, bursting at the seams. Even Isaac, who was always a blond little stripling with rosy skin, has now transformed into a wild child, sturdier, not quite so defenseless. With us, everything is somehow lighter, as though more conventional, sketched in an elegant hand, thinks the bishop—delicate, meaningful. Their faith is dark and concrete, almost uncomfortably literal. Their Moses is an old pauper with bony feet; ours a dignified elder with a flowing beard. It strikes Bishop Dembowski that it is Christ’s light that illuminates in such a way the Christian side of the Old Testament—the one we share with the Jews—hence these differences.
The worst is when a foreign thing is disguised as something that belongs. As though they were mocking us. As though they were making a joke out of the Holy Scriptures. And there is one more thing: their stubbornness! After all, the Jews have been around for longer, and yet they persist in their error. It is certainly not unreasonable to suspect that they must be up to something. If only they were as open in their behavior as the Armenians. When the Armenians are up to something, you know it’s only ever over gains that can be measured in gold.
What are all these Jews discussing? wonders Bishop Dembowski, observing them from the window as they gather in small groups of three or four and debate in their halting, singsong language, accompanying their words with movements of the body, too, and gestures: they stretch their heads forward, they shake their beards, they hop like someone burned when they don’t agree with the reasoning of one of the others. Is it true what Sołtyk, a friend the bishop trusts, always says about them? That, urged to do so by some commandment, by some dark beliefs they hold, they permit in their squat, damp little houses such practices as require Christian blood? God forbid. It can’t be, and the Holy Father in Rome has stated clearly that they must not believe in such things, must snuff out the rumor that Jews make use of Christian blood. Oh, but just look at them. Out of the window, the bishop watches the small square in front of his mansion where a seller of paintings, a young boy still, shows a holy picture to a girl dressed in the Ruthenian style in an embroidered shirt and a colorful skirt. The girl cautiously touches with the tip of her pinkie the little depictions of the saints—this Jewish salesman has both Catholic and Orthodox likenesses for sale—while he pulls from his breast pocket a cheap little medallion and places it in her hand; their heads lean in to almost meet over the medallion of the Virgin. The bishop knows the girl will buy it.
The barber puts the lather on his face and starts to shave him. The razor scrapes him quietly, slicing away his hair. Suddenly the bishop’s imagination makes the leap beneath their frayed kapotas, and he is tormented by the image of their members. They are circumcised. This both fascinates and shocks him, and also makes him angry in some way he can’t quite understand. He clenches his jaw.
If this peddler of holy pictures—which is against the law; they really have absolutely no respect for the rules!—were to be stripped of this tallit of his and dressed in a cassock, would he look any different from the clerics walking just over there? And if he, the Bishop of Kamieniec, Dembowski of the Dąb coat of arms, who is patiently waiting to be named archbishop of Lwów—if he were to be stripped of his rich robes and dressed in those tattered Jewish kapotas and set out with those pictures before a mansion in Kamieniec . . . The bishop winces at this absurd idea, though for a moment he can see himself, fat and pink, as a Jew selling pictures. No. No.
If it were as people said, if they were so powerful, then they would be wealthy, and
not poor like these Jews just outside. Are they strong or weak? Do they pose a threat to the bishop’s mansion? Is it true that they hate the gentiles and find them filthy? And that they have tiny dark hairs all over their bodies?
God would not allow them to have such power as Sołtyk thinks—after all, they rejected Christ’s act of salvation, and therefore no longer have any relation with the true God; cast off the path to salvation, they have wandered out into the wilderness somewhere.
The girl doesn’t want the medallion—she unbuttons her shirt just below her neck and pulls out her own, which she shows to the boy, who eagerly moves in closer to her neck.
The girl does buy the picture, however, and the salesman wraps it up in thin, stained paper.
What are these other people like when they take off their robes? the bishop wonders. What changes in them when they are alone, he thinks, dismissing the deeply bowing barber, and realizes that it is time for him to go and change for mass. He goes to his bedroom, happy to get rid of the heavy cassock he wears at home. For a moment, he stands naked, wondering whether he is committing some sort of terrible sin; already he has started to beg God to forgive him for it—whether it is the sin of shamelessness or maybe just of human piteousness. He feels the lightest cool breeze rustle ever so gently the tiny hairs on his stocky, hairy body.
Of Hayah’s two natures
Jacob has brought with him several horsemen, richly dressed after the Turkish fashion—men who have been given a special room. Their leader is Hayim, Hana’s brother. They speak only Turkish to each other. Jacob Frank is now known as Ahmed Frenk, and he has a Turkish passport. He is untouchable. Every day a messenger delivers news to him from the disputation in Kamieniec.
The Books of Jacob Page 36
