The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  “We can’t bury you, Grandma,” Pesel says to Yente. “But we can’t keep you here. Papa says that the times have gotten very troubled, and no one knows what will happen tomorrow.”

  “Or if there will even be a tomorrow,” adds her sister.

  “The end of the world is coming. We are afraid,” says Sobla, who is shaken. She thinks Grandma Yente’s eyelids are moving—they are, they really are, she can hear them. “What are we to do? Is this one of those hopeless causes you seem to be able to help with? Help us.” Sobla holds her breath so that she won’t miss even the tiniest sign. But there is nothing.

  Sobla is afraid. It would be better not to have the grandmother of that cursed and Turkified Jacob in their barn. It invites disaster. When she found out they had imprisoned him, she had felt a sort of satisfaction—that’s where you belong, Jacob, for wanting more than your fair share. You always sat yourself upon the highest branch, you always wanted to be better than everyone. Now you’ll end up in a dungeon. Yet when she found out he was safe in Giurgiu, she felt relief. Before, so much had seemed possible, and now the cold and darkness had come back. In October the light retired past the shed and no longer peeked into the yard. The cold would scoot under the stones for the duration of the summer, but it would come back—it would always come back.

  Before she falls asleep, Sobla remembers the stories about the cave—how Jacob, back when he was little Yankiele, took such a liking to that place. And how he went missing there when he was a child.

  She was a child then, too, and she knew Jacob well, and she was always afraid of him, because he was so rough-and-tumble. They used to play war: some of the children would be Turks, while the others would be Moskals. One time Jacob, as a Moskal or as a Turk, Sobla can’t remember, went berserk, fighting with such fury that he couldn’t stop, beating another boy within an inch of his life with his wooden sword. Sobla remembers that his father later beat him bloody for it, too.

  Now, with her eyes closed, she sees the entrance to the cave—she has never been inside. That place scares her. There is something strange about it: the trees are greener there, and the silence is so frightening, and the ground beneath the birch trees is completely covered in bear’s garlic. The bear’s garlic is harvested and given to people when they get sick. It always helps. No one knows how big the cave is, but they say it extends for miles underground and is shaped like an enormous alef; they say there is a whole city under there. In it live hobgoblins and the limping bałakaben who keep their treasures there . . .

  Suddenly Sobla stands, the blanket falling from her shoulders to the ground. She says:

  “The cave!”

  Of Asher Rubin’s adventures with light, and his grandfather’s with a wolf

  News of the earthquake in Lisbon reached Lwów last year. News, in general, takes a while to spread. What Asher discovered in a pamphlet illustrated with engravings is horrific. He looks at it over and over, dozens of times, so shaken he cannot look away. What he sees are scenes that might as well be from the Final Judgment. He can’t really think about anything else.

  The pamphlet tells of piles of corpses, and Asher tries to imagine how many a hundred thousand could be—it’s more than the population of Lwów, so you would have to add in the surrounding villages and towns, and summon everyone, Christians and Jews, Ruthenians and Armenians, women and men, the elderly, animals, innocent cows, the dogs around the hovels. How many is a hundred thousand?

  Later, however, when he has calmed down a bit, he thinks that after all this is nothing so extraordinary. Maybe no one counted up the victims of Khmelnytsky—those villages, those towns, those nobles’ heads cut off and rolling around the grounds of their estates, Jewish women with their stomachs split open. Somewhere he heard that they had hanged a Polish nobleman, a Jew, and a dog together. Nonetheless Asher had never seen engravings such as these, with scenes that defy the human imagination captured in pictures etched meticulously onto metal plates. This particular image takes root in his brain: he sees the depths of the sea storming the city. It looks like a war between the elements: the earth defending itself against water with fire, but the element of water is more powerful; wherever the waves strike, they extinguish all life, destroying and erasing everything. The ships look like duck feathers on a pond, and people are all but invisible in this Armageddon, what is happening is not happening on a human scale. With one exception—in a boat in the foreground stands a man, no doubt a noble, for he is wearing lovely clothes, holding up his hands, folded in prayer, to the heavens.

  Asher gazes with malicious satisfaction at the desperation of this man, noting the absence of the heavens in the picture. A sky reduced to a thin strip over the battlefield. After all, how could heavens be shown here?

  Asher has lived for four years in Lwów, practicing medicine, healing eyes. He works with one particular lens grinder to provide glasses to those who cannot see. He learned some of it in Italy, but it is really here that he has been developing his skills and knowledge. He brought along a book that has made a great impression upon him. One passage in particular could be said to be the real foundation of his studies, a guiding principle of sorts: “And I saw,” writes its author, one Newton, an Englishman, “that the light, tending to [one] end of the Image, did suffer a Refraction considerably greater than the light tending to the other. And so the true cause of the length of that Image was detected to be no other, than that Light consists of Rays differently refrangible, which, without any respect to a difference in their incidence, were, according to their degrees of refrangibility, transmitted towards divers parts of the wall.”

  Asher’s father was a Kabbalist whose primary area of interest was light, although he was also the leaseholder of two tiny villages on the estates of Prince Radziwiłł in Lithuania. Thus the leases fell to Asher’s mother, whose operations were orderly and strict. The village where they lived and kept an inn lay on the Neman River. In addition to several farmsteads, there was also a watermill and a small port with a depot for the ships that sailed in the direction of the Prussian Königsberg. This lease was quite lucrative, and, since his mother had a real gift for administering it, and a strong sense of responsibility, the family earned a good deal of money thanks to hazakah, the traditional Jewish system—far more than they would have under arenda, the traditional Slavic system.

  Asher’s father was rich in comparison with all the impoverished Jews around them, and thanks to this (as well as help from the kahal) he was in due course able to send his gifted son abroad for his education. He himself lived modestly, however, not trusting innovations, never favoring excess. For him the best-case scenario was that nothing would ever change. Asher remembers how rough his father’s hands used to get when he had to do some work around the estate. His skin would crack, and if any dirt made its way inside those cracks, it would give rise to a festering wound. His mother would smear goose fat over those places, and afterward he couldn’t touch his books. Asher’s father and Asher’s uncle were like Jacob and Esau, until finally the uncle moved out to Podolia, where Asher later sought him out, and where he eventually settled down.

  Both Poles and Ruthenians lived in the area, and the inn kept by Asher’s mother was beloved by all. Their house was very welcoming, and whenever any Jew would come up the road, rich or poor, Asher’s mother would greet him with a glass of vodka. The table was always set, and there was always enough food.

  A certain Orthodox priest used to come to his mother’s inn, a slothful man who could barely read or write, but a drinker of the most dedicated sort. He came within a hair’s breadth of bringing about the death of Asher’s father, and if he had, the fate of the family might have taken a completely different direction.

  This priest would spend whole days at the inn with the peasants, not doing a thing but causing trouble for anyone he could. He would always ask for his tab to be calculated, and yet he would never pay. Eventually, Asher’s old man had had enough, and he cut off the priest’s vodka. But this so enraged the pr
iest that he decided to get revenge.

  Asher’s father often illegally purchased wolf pelts from poachers. Among these were some peasants and some petty gentry, along with the occasional brave vagabond. Legally, hunting for forest game was the exclusive privilege of the lord. One night, a hunter from whom Asher’s father sometimes purchased the pelts came and knocked on the door of the family’s house. He told Asher’s father that he had a great specimen, which he took from his cart and deposited on the ground. The old man wanted to take a good look at the dead wolf to appraise its pelt, but it was dark and late, and the poacher was in a hurry, so he just paid him, put the sack aside, and went back to bed.

  Not long after this, there was a pounding at the door, and some guards came bursting in. They took an immediate interest in the bag and Asher’s father suspected that he was about to be fined for buying poached animals. But you can imagine his horror when it turned out that the body inside the sack was human.

  He was shackled immediately and thrown into a dark cell. A trial got under way at once, with the priest accusing Asher’s father of having murdered the man himself in order to drain his blood and use it to make matzah, as the Jews were so often accused of doing. Despair took hold of everyone, but Asher’s father, a worshipper of sparks of light even in the deepest darkness, did not confess when he was tortured, pleading instead for the hunter to be interrogated. At first the hunter denied everything, but when he was tortured, too, he confessed to having found a drowned man in the water and taken him to the priest to be buried, poor soul. The priest, however, talked him into leaving the body at the Jew’s, which was what the hunter did. For this, the court sentenced him to be whipped. Asher’s father was set free, but the priest received no punishment.

  Asher has learned that people have a powerful need to feel superior to others. It doesn’t matter who they are—they have to find someone who’s beneath them. Who is better and who is worse depends on a vast array of random traits. Those with light-colored eyes consider themselves to be above those with dark-colored eyes. The dark-eyed, meanwhile, look down on the light-eyed. Those who live near the forest’s edge feel superior to those living in the open on the ponds, and vice versa. The peasants feel superior to the Jews, and the Jews feel superior to the peasants. Townspeople think they’re better than the inhabitants of villages, and people from villages treat city people as though they were somehow worse.

  Isn’t this the very glue that holds the human world together? Isn’t this why we need other people, to give us the pleasure of knowing we are better than they are? Amazingly, even those who seem to be the worst-off take, in their humiliation, a perverse satisfaction in the fact that no one has it worse than they do. Thus they have still, in some sense, won.

  Where does this all come from? Asher wonders. Can man not be repaired? If he were a machine, as some now argue, it would suffice to adjust one little lever slightly, or to tighten some small screw, and people would start to take pleasure in treating one another as equals.

  Of the Polish princess in Asher Rubin’s house

  A child has been born in Asher’s home, and his name is Samuel. In his mind, Asher calls him “my son.”

  They cohabit without any kind of marriage. Asher pretends that Gitla is his servant—she has barely left the house, in any case, and when she has, she’s only gone to market. Asher lives and treats his patients on Ruska Street, in the Christian district, but from his windows he can also see the Turei Zahav Synagogue. On Saturday afternoons, as Shabbat is finishing and the Shemoneh Esreh, the eighteen blessings, are being given, the fervent words reach Asher’s ears.

  He closes the window. He barely understands that language anymore. He speaks Polish and Italian, and some German. He would like to learn French. When Jewish patients come to him, he speaks to them in Yiddish. He also uses Latin terms.

  Lately he’s been noticing a real epidemic of cataracts; one in three patients who come to him has them. People don’t take care of their eyes, they look directly into the light, and that opacifies their eyeballs, congeals them so they’re like the whites of hard-boiled eggs. So Asher has imported from Germany special glasses with tinted lenses, which he himself wears, though they make him look like a blind man.

  Gitla, the Polish princess, bustles about in the kitchen. He would rather his patients take her for some relative than a servant, since the servant’s role clearly does not suit her, makes her stomp around and slam the doors. Asher hasn’t so much as touched her, though it’s several months since she gave birth. She cries sometimes in the room he has given her, and rarely does she go out into the yard, even though the sun, like bright thin paper, has now drawn out from every recess all the damp darkness and moldy sadness of wintertime.

  When she’s in a good mood, which is rare, Gitla looks over his shoulder when he is reading. Then he can smell on her that signature smell of milk, which renders him helpless. He hopes that someday she will develop feelings for him. He was fine on his own, but here he has these two strange creatures who have inserted themselves into his life, one of them unpredictable and the other totally unknowable. Both sit now on the arm of a chair: one is reading, snapping radishes in half with her teeth, while the other is sucking on her large white breast.

  Asher can see the girl is melancholy. Perhaps it’s because of the pregnancy and delivery that her mood fluctuates so much. When she is in a better mood, she takes his books and newspapers and reads for days on end. She reads well in German, less fluently in Polish, and not at all in Latin. She knows a little Hebrew, though Asher can’t tell how much and doesn’t ask. They don’t converse much, anyway. Asher thought at first that he would put her up until the birth, and once she had delivered the child, he would figure out a place to take them. But now he isn’t sure. She doesn’t have anywhere else to go, she says she’s an orphan, that her father and mother were killed in a Cossack pogrom, although they weren’t her real parents anyway. In reality, of course, she is the illegitimate daughter of the Polish king.

  “And the child? Whose is that?” Asher finally ventured to inquire.

  She shrugged, which gave him some relief; he prefers silence to lies.

  It wouldn’t be easy to place a young girl with a child. He would have to find out from the kahal where there might be shelters of some sort for such women, he thought back then.

  Now things are different. Asher is no longer considering finding them a shelter. Gitla has begun to help around the house and has taken on the cooking. She is finally starting to go out—pulling her cap down over her face and flitting down the streets as though fearing someone might recognize her. She races to the market, buys vegetables and eggs, so many eggs, for she lives off their yolks, which she drizzles with honey. For Asher she cooks good, familiar dishes, like what he remembers from home—tasty kugel, or cholent with mushrooms instead of beef, since Gitla doesn’t eat meat. She says Jews do the same thing to animals that Cossacks do to Jews.

  But Lwów is not a big city, and it won’t be long before the secret is out. The Jewish quarter can be traversed in ten minutes—go out of the Market Square on Ruska Street and turn onto Jewish Street, and then move briskly along down the incredibly boisterous New Jewish Street, where homes are clustered one on top of the other, with endless extensions and stairs and tiny courtyards housing little workshops, laundries, stalls. People know each other well here, and nothing escapes their attention.

  Of the reversal of circumstances: Katarzyna Kossakowska writes to Bishop Kajetan Sołtyk

  Your Benevolent Excellency, please hear out your faithful Servant, who is not only the truest Daughter of our Most Holy Church, but also your Friend, in whom you shall always find Succor, even in Moments so terrible as this.

  The Bishop’s Death shocked us all to such an extent that for the first few Days in Czarnokozińce, all kept the Silence of the Crypt. Even I did not learn of it at once, as for some Reason it was initially shrouded in the greatest Mystery. It is said to have been an Apoplexy.

  The Fune
ral will not take place until January 29—you have no doubt already received News of it and still have a little bit of Time to make the proper Preparations for the Journey. You must know, Your Excellency, that upon the Death of Bishop Dembowski our Cause has taken a wholly new Turn. The Rabbis swung into Action, as did the King’s Advisers, who are quite in their Pocket, and soon it was that nowhere could our Pets find any Backing; without the Bishop, the whole Matter got covered in Ash, with no one to tend to it any longer. Wherever I go, and whatever I say on this Question, I instantly hit a Wall of Indifference. Furthermore, the Frosts are terrible this Year and people have shut themselves up inside their Houses—no one will so much as poke out their Nose. The Entirety of our Commonwealth seems to be dependent on the Weather. Perhaps this is also why they are putting off the Funeral, so that the Snow might relinquish its Hold enough to make Roads passable. Right now they could hardly dig the Grave.

  It worries me, Excellency, that all our Efforts may have been for naught. The Violence previously dealt to the Talmudists has now been turned against our Shabbitarians. The Jewish Communities have been requisitioning their Dwellings—in the best Case, that is, for many have simply been burned, along with Everything inside them. The poor Creatures come to me for Aid, but what can I do for them on my own now that the Bishop has gone? I give them Clothing and a little Money, just enough that they might afford a Carriage over the Dniester. For they are leaving Everything behind and hurtling southward en masse toward Wallachia, where their Leader is to be found. I sometimes envy them this and would myself like to go from here to where it is warm and there is Sunlight. In any Case, I lately saw one of the Shabbitarians’ little Villages. It was empty to the last little Shack, and it sent a Chill right down my Spine.