I, too, have somehow lost the Impetus for all Activity. I have been ailing a bit, I must have caught a Cold during my Journey from Rohatyn to Kamieniec, and nothing has been able to restore my internal Warmth since then, even my husband’s much-aged aqua vitae. People are saying that Bishop Dembowski was cursed by the Jews, and that this was the reason he died. An Innkeeper told me that two Curses had been battling for some time over the Bishop’s Head. One was trying to defend him, the other to destroy him. One had been cast by his beloved Shabbitarians, the other by the Talmudist Rabbis. And so the people here all prattle on, although I do not believe in Curses, Jewish or otherwise. But it did sow some Anxiety within me to think that over our Heads some cosmic Wars are being waged by all kinds of Forces flying around, swirling like Clouds, while we, so fragile and so blithe, are simply unaware.
They’re saying the Bishop’s Successor is going to be Łubieński, whom I know well and who will, I hope, take up our Cause.
I remain hopeful, Your Excellency and my dear Friend, that we will meet at the Funeral, which everyone is preparing for as though for some great Wedding. I myself saw the Herds of Oxen purchased in Wallachia and chased across the Dniester to Kamieniec for the Funeral Banquet . . .
Pompa funebris: January 29, 1758
Archbishop Dembowski’s body, carefully groomed, had initially been transferred from the rumpled bed that witnessed his cruel death to a special chamber with no windows, where the merciless frosts made the long wait until the funeral possible. It traveled from there to the sumptuous show chamber, to a four-poster bed, where bouquets of the last flowers of the season have been placed, along with bundles of spruce and juniper. Ever since, the unflaggingly praying nuns have kept him constant company.
A whole battery of scribes has been set to writing the notices, and a makeshift secretariat has popped up—tables arranged like in a monastery’s scriptorium, bottles upon bottles of ink, and a special cleric with curly hair who drowsily sharpens the quills.
The hubbub has done everyone good. They’ve stopped thinking about the bishop’s contorted body and the horror of his eyes wide open and bright red, the burst blood vessels testimony to the toll that passing into the next realm took on him. There was nervous discussion about whether there would be time to prepare a proper funeral, since it is soon Christmas and then right away Zapusty, when people eat and drink and visit neighbors and are often away, so they had to take that into account when determining the date of the funeral. It is quite vexing that the bishop died at such an awkward time.
Now poems are being commissioned to honor the deceased, speeches written, nuns hired to sew funeral banners and chasubles. Two of the best painters in Lwów paint coffin portraits. And the living all wonder whether they have a worthy coat, whether a fur would be more appropriate, and whether their winter boots are in good condition, since the day of the funeral will no doubt be cold. Should they not order a new fur-lined cloak with a fox fur collar for their wife? They could also do with a Turkish belt, and of course a fur hat, ornamented with a feather and a jewel. The prevailing custom is to come to a funeral richly dressed in the Eastern fashion, in the Sarmatian way—such are the dictates of tradition.
Father Pikulski is not concerned for his own attire—he will be dressed as a priest, in his cassock and his fur-lined black wool coat that reaches down to the ground. Estimates for the funeral have begun to come in, and they contain sums he has never dreamed of. The violet material to cover the walls of the church—they’re still discussing how many hundreds of cubits of it, since no one is able to measure the surface area of the cathedral’s walls exactly—plus the torches and the wax for candles, that’s already almost half of his budget! Organizing the guests’ transportation and lodgings is done by one group of people, while another—just as numerous—plans the banquet. Loans from the Jews have already been taken out for the construction of a catafalque in the cathedral, and for the candles.
Archbishop Dembowski’s funeral thus becomes an unexpected early high point of this year’s Carnival. It is to be a real pompa funebris, with speeches, banners, salvos, and choirs.
There is an issue, since on opening his will and testament they learn that the bishop in fact wanted a quiet funeral, shrouded in modesty. This causes widespread consternation—how can that possibly be? Bishop Sołtyk is right when he says that no Polish bishop may be allowed to pass quietly. It is good that it is icy out, so that the burial can be delayed until everyone learns the news and is able to plan their journey.
Immediately after Christmas, the archbishop’s body is ceremoniously and with great pomp brought by sleigh to Kamieniec. Along the way, altars are laid out and masses are conducted, though the cold is nigh unbearable, and clouds of steam rise into the heavens from the mouths of the faithful like prayers. Peasants watch this procession with piety and devotion, kneeling in the snow—the Orthodox ones, too, making the sign of the cross over and over and with fervor. Some assume it is a military march and not a funeral procession.
On the day of the funeral, to the sound of gunshots and salvos, a procession consisting of all three Catholic rites—Latin, Uniate, and Armenian—as well as of szlachta and dignitaries of state, guilds, the military, and the regular population makes its way to the cathedral. Farewell orations are given in different parts of the city, and a Jesuit ordinary gives the final speech. The ceremonies last until eleven at night. Masses are held on the following day, and the body is not placed in its grave until seven in the evening. Torches burn throughout the city.
It is a good thing that the cold had already set in and turned Bishop Dembowski’s blackened body into a frozen slab of meat.
Of spilled blood and hungry leeches
One evening, as Asher stands leaning against the doorframe watching the women bathe little Samuel, someone pounds on the door. Reluctantly, he opens it. He sees a disheveled young man partly covered in blood who splutters half in Polish, half in Yiddish, urging Asher to follow him to save someone, a rabbi.
“Elisha? Which Elisha?” asks Asher, but he is already rolling up his sleeves and pulling his coat from its peg. He grabs his valise from beside the door—it is always there and fully stocked, as a doctor’s bag should be.
“Elisha Shorr of Rohatyn was attacked, beaten, broken, Jesus Lord,” the man stammers.
“Who are you?” Asher asks him as they are going down the stairs, struck by this use of “Jesus Lord.”
“I am Hryćko, Hayim, it doesn’t matter, just try not to be frightened, sir, doctor, so much blood, so much blood . . . We had some things to take care of in Lwów and . . .”
He leads Asher around the corner, down a narrow alleyway, and then into a dark courtyard, where they go up some stairs and get into a narrow room lit by an oil lamp. On the bed lies Old Shorr—Asher recognizes him by his high forehead with its receded hairline, though the face is drenched in blood; he recognizes, too, the eldest of his sons, Solomon, Shlomo, and behind him Isaac, and then some others he does not know. All of them are smeared in blood and bruised. Shlomo is holding his ear, blood flowing out between his fingers and then solidifying in dark unmoving streams. Asher would like to ask what happened, but there is a kind of death rattle coming out of the old man’s mouth, so instead he rushes to him and carefully props him up a bit, lest, unconscious, he be suffocated by his own blood.
“Give me more light,” he says in a calm, controlled voice, and the sons hurry to light more candles. “And water, warm water.”
Having carefully removed the wounded man’s shirt, he sees on his chest little pouches on a leather cord, with amulets; he wants to take them off, but the other men won’t allow it, so he merely moves them over to Shorr’s shoulder, to uncover the broken collarbone and the massive bruise on his chest flushed with purple. Shorr’s teeth have been bashed out, his nose is broken, and blood is pouring from the cut on his forehead.
“He’ll live,” he says, perhaps somewhat prematurely, but he wants to reassure them.
Then they s
tart to sing, in a whisper, but Asher doesn’t recognize the words—all he knows is that it is the language of the Sephardim, some prayer of theirs.
Asher takes the injured men back to his home, where he has more bandages and other medical supplies. Solomon will need his ear sewn up. Gitla peeks in through the half-open door. Young Shorr looks at her face, but he does not recognize her; she’s put on a little weight. Besides, it wouldn’t have occurred to him that the medic’s woman could have been one of Jacob’s lady guardians not so long ago.
When the bandaged men emerge, Gitla, vigorously slicing an onion, sings a Sephardic prayer under her breath. It gets louder and louder.
“Gitla!” says Asher. “Stop mumbling like that.”
“In town they’re saying the bishop has become a ghost and is pacing around in front of his big house, confessing to all his faults. This is a protective prayer, an ancient one—that’s why it works.”
“In that case all of us will be ghosts after we die. Stop going on like that, the baby will get scared.”
“What kind of Jew are you that doesn’t believe in ghosts?” Gitla laughs and wipes her onion tears with her apron.
“You don’t believe in them, either.”
“These Jews are elated! For them it’s a great miracle, greater than the ones that used to happen in the old days. They had been calling the bishop Haman, and now that he’s dead, they can beat up the changelings. Old Rapaport already put out an edict, did you hear? Stating that killing a heretic is a mitzvah. Did you hear about that?”
Asher says nothing. He wipes the blood with tows, cleans his tools with a rag, and puts them back in his bag, since he has to go right out to let the blood of Deym the postmaster, who is suffering from apoplexy. He steps into the room where he keeps the leeches in their jars. He takes the smallest one, the hungriest one, since Deym is a man of small stature, so there won’t be all that much superfluous blood.
“Lock the door behind me,” he says to Gitla. “Both hasps.”
It is October again, and that same smell of dried leaves and moisture is in the air. Asher Rubin sees in the darkness small groups of people with lit torches, shouting. They make their way along the city walls, where the poorest of the heretics live. Asher Rubin can hear shrieking. Somewhere toward the city limits a glow is dimly visible—one of their miserable shacks must be burning, one of those places where people live alongside animals. Just like the Talmuds lately burned, so now are the Zohar and the other books forbidden to God-fearing Jews being consumed by flames. Asher sees a cart filled with Jewish youths frenzied and delighted by the burning of heretical books—they are heading out of town, probably to Gliniany and Busk, where the greatest numbers of heretics live. A few people, running with clubs raised over their heads, crash into him. Asher squeezes the jar of leeches tighter and rushes to the sick man’s home. When he gets there, he finds that the postmaster has died only moments ago, leaving the leeches to go hungry.
Mrs. Elżbieta Drużbacka to Father Chmielowski, or: Of the perfection of imprecise forms
. . . I send these volumes of mine to the venerable Vicar Forane, whose quick eye shall perhaps find something in them beyond mere mundane vanity, for I believe that to express in language the vastness of the world, it is impossible to use words that are too transparent, too unambiguous—that would be like drawing a pen-and-ink sketch, transferring that vastness onto a white surface to be broken up by clean black lines. But words and images must be flexible and contain multitudes, they must flicker, and they must have multiple meanings.
Not that your efforts, dear Father, have gone underappreciated by me—on the contrary, I am deeply impressed by the scale of your work. But it does occur to me that you seek only the counsel of the dead. Your citations and compilations are a way of rummaging around in tombs. Yet facts in isolation soon become unimportant, lose their relevance. Can our lives be described beyond fact? Can there be a description that is based exclusively on what we see and feel, on details, on sentiment?
I try to see the world through my own eyes, and to have my own language, rather than merely repeating someone else’s words.
His Excellency Bishop Załuski worried he would, as my publisher, lose money on me, imbuing his correspondence with so much bitterness, and here it turns out that the whole print run has already sold out, and they are getting ready for another. It pains me a bit that now I’m being asked to sell my own poems, published by him. He has sent me a hundred copies, and since the Piarists who run the printing press are troubling him for money, he wants me to move this stock. I informed him that I do not put down my verses out of a hunger for profit, but rather that my readers might reflect and obtain some slight enjoyment. I don’t want to make money from them, nor would I know how. How could I? Am I, like some traveling merchant, to take my own poems on a cart around the fairs and press them on people for a penny? Or force them on some nobles and await their benefaction? To be honest with you, my dear friend, I would prefer to deal in wine than in poems.
Did you receive the package I sent via some persons traveling to Lwów? It contained some felt slippers that we made here in the autumn—I myself sewed little, for my eyesight is already quite poor, but my daughter and my granddaughters did—as well as dried fruits from our orchard, plums, pears (which are my favorites), and a little barrel of my signature rose wine; watch out, Father, for it is strong. Most important, the package contained a splendid cashmere scarf for the colder days in your Firlejów seclusion. I permitted myself to include, as well, a little volume you would not have encountered yet. If you were to place your Athens and my little handicrafts on a scale, of course they would be incomparable. That’s the way it is, I suppose—the selfsame thing comes out very differently in the hands of two different people. Those who are left and those who leave will always draw different conclusions. Likewise the person who possesses and the person possessed, the person who is sated and the one who is hungry—and the wealthy daughter of a nobleman dreams of a little pug from Paris, while the poor daughter of a peasant dreams of a goose to have for meat and feathers. That is why I write:
For my ordinary mind it will suffice,
Unable to count the sky’s stars anyhow,
To add up the oaks, and firs and pines precise,
Practice that arithmetic at least for now.
Whereas your vision is quite different. You would like information to be an ocean from which all can draw. And you think that an educated person, on reading every piece of it, will know the whole world without leaving his home. And that human knowledge is like a book, in the sense that it also has its “covers,” its bounds, which means it can be summarized and made available to all. It is a glorious goal that motivates you, and for that, as your reader, I am grateful. But I know what I’m talking about, too.
Every person is a little world:
The firmament is where the head is,
The mind’s the sun, its rays are words,
And the planets are the senses.
The world errs and takes with it mankind;
Death pursues the day from east to west.
Women keep the world in mind
And on its feet, to stand the test.
You will say: “imprecise, idle chatter.” And no doubt you’ll be right. Maybe the whole art of writing, my dear friend, is the perfection of imprecise forms . . .
The Vicar Forane Benedykt Chmielowski writes to Elżbieta Drużbacka
Father Chmielowski is sitting in a strange position; Saba, Firlejka’s sister, has just fallen asleep on his lap. He must keep his legs stiff, resting his feet on the crossbar under the table so that the dog doesn’t slide off onto the floor. In order to reach the inkwell, he must make an arch over the table, which he manages to do. It is harder with the pens he has on the shelf behind him—he twists around now and tries to reach the box. The quills fall to the floor; the priest sighs. He supposes he will have to wait until Saba wakes up. But since such inactivity is not in his nature, he starts to write with
a blunt pen, and it doesn’t really look that bad. It’s good enough, he thinks.
I send You the very warmest Greetings and Wishes, My Lady, for I myself caught a Cold at the Funeral of Bishop Dembowski, may he rest in Peace, and now, coughing and expectorating, I sit shut in my House and warm my Bones. And I feel old Age coming on at full Speed. The Truth is that the Archbishop’s Death has strained my Health, for he was very dear to me, and I had a Kind of Intimacy with him that can only be shared by two Servants of the Church. I think that slowly my own Time is coming, and without having finished my Work, I feel some Anxiety, and the Fear overcomes me that I might never see the Załuski Brothers’ Library before I die. I made an Agreement with Bishop Załuski that as soon as Winter abates, I shall travel to Warsaw, which made him very glad, and he has promised me every Hospitality.
Forgive me for conversing with You at such modest length today, but I am being burned up, I can feel, by Fever, and the sleeping Dog does not permit me to change my Pen. I gave away all of my Saba’s Puppies, and now the House is empty and forlorn.
I found Something for You, my dear Friend, and I note it here, hoping to occupy You with something more interesting than overseeing the Estate, et cetera:
How may a Person sitting in his Room see what is happening outside?
Whosoever might wish to see all the Activities occurring in the Courtyard, not looking with his own Eyes, but lying down, let him make the Room a dark one, shutting out every Shred of Light that might make its way in from the outdoors through the Windows. Then let him bore a round Hole, small, directly onto the Courtyard, and in it let him place the Lens from a Perspective or from Spectacles that would represent Things as greater than they are; having done this, have him hang a thin, white, sturdy Canvas or a large piece of white Paper in that dark Room, opposite that little Opening. On this Canvas or Screen You will see, kind Friend, Everything that occurs in the Courtyard—who goes there, rides there, fights there, gambols, who removes something from the Pantry or the Cellar.
The Books of Jacob Page 41
