Jacob himself laughed with us, and his laughter was deep, resounding, as if reaching us from the bottom of a well. It immediately did everyone good when he laughed, for it was as though he were building a tent over our heads, keeping us safe. Moshe of Podhajce is a good actor, even though he is a learned rabbi.
One August day, a breathless Osman of Czernowitz arrived with the news that the true believers who had been camped out along the river, armed with the king’s letter and encouraged by some messengers from the new bishop, had crossed over the Dniester with all of their belongings, a song on their lips, untroubled by anyone, the border guards merely observing the joyful procession. Osman said they had scattered over three villages among the bishop’s landholdings in which they had some connections, and some were now living there—in Us´ciski, Ivanie, and Harmackie—and were sending supplications with Osman for Jacob to return.
“They are waiting for you like they are waiting for redemption,” said Osman, and knelt down. “You don’t even know how desperately they wait for you.” And Jacob suddenly started laughing and repeating with audible relish: “Lustig, unsere Brüder haben einen Platz erhalten,” which I assiduously noted down.
Now almost daily someone appeared from Poland with good news, their faces flushed, and it became ever clearer that we would be returning. Hana had already learned of it, for she was often in a gloomy mood and regarded me with great disgust, not speaking a word, as though it were my fault that Jacob wished to leave this lovely home he had with her. And right after the harvest, which was the best in many years, the grapes so sweet that they stuck to our fingers, we set off to see our people in Bucharest and obtain their support. We gathered so many grapes that we were able to buy carts and horses and make the proper preparations for our journey. In a letter from Poland we learned from our people that an entire village belonging to the bishop was awaiting us. And for the first time the name was spoken: Ivanie.
There are external and internal things. External things are appearance, and we live amongst external things like people in a dream, and the laws of appearances must be taken for real laws when in fact they are not. When you live in a place and a time in which certain laws are in effect, then you must observe those laws, but never forgetting that they are only partial systems, never absolute. For the truth is something else, and if a person is not prepared to come to know it, then it may seem frightening and terrible, and that person may curse the day he learned of it.
But I do believe that everyone can tell what kind of person he truly is. It is just that deep down, he doesn’t want to find out.
Father Benedykt weeds the oregano
The Kabbala Denudata from 1677 by von Rosenroth, written in Latin, was given by Elisha Shorr to Father Chmielowski after he saved his Jewish books. Since the issuing of the royal letter, the books have returned to their owner. Truth be told, this came as a great relief to Father Chmielowski. If anyone had found out what the priest had been keeping in the Firlejów presbytery, there would have been quite the scandal. For this reason, he also has an ambiguous relationship with his gift. The book was brought by some farmhand, wrapped up in linen, tied with a hemp rope. It must have cost a fortune. The farmhand gave it to Father Chmielowski without a word and disappeared.
Father Chmielowski reads it in the afternoons. The letters are small, so he can only read in broad daylight, by the window. When it gets darker, he opens a bottle of wine and sets aside the book. He holds the wine in his mouth and looks at his garden, and past it, at the ragged meadows across the river. The grass is tall, and a gust of wind will sway it, so that it waves, trembles, as if the meadows were living organisms. Their surface resembles the hide of a horse that balks and shivers when a bumblebee lands on it. With each gust the grass reveals its lighter underbelly, greenish gray like the undercoat of a dog.
To tell the truth, the priest is disappointed; he doesn’t understand a thing, even though it is written in Latin, only Latin, but its contents are more like what Mrs. Drużbacka writes. For instance, “My head is filled with dew.” What could that mean?
The coming to be of the world is somehow too poetic, he thinks—for us it’s snip, snip, in six days God created the world, like a boss who knows how to get something done, instead of thinking about doing it. But here it’s all so complicated. And the priest’s vision is weakening, and reading tires him out.
It is a strange book. Father Chmielowski had been craving for a long time this kind of general knowledge that explains the beginning and the end, the travels of the planet in the sky and all the miracles and wonders, but this account strikes him as too elusive, and even his favorite Latin scholastics would never have ventured explanations of such miracles—such as that Jesus Christ was Adam Kadmon, pure divine light descended to the earth. Now he thinks about the migration of souls, for instance. To tell the truth, he has heard about this heresy, but he has never given much thought to its logic. The book says that there is nothing wrong in it, that even a good Christian should believe that after death we are reborn in other forms.
Yes, the priest admits quite willingly—for he is above all a practical man—that would be a shot at salvation. Each life in another form would give us more opportunities to perfect ourselves, to redeem our sins. Eternal punishment in hell only rarely makes amends for the whole of the evil one has inflicted.
But then he feels ashamed of having had such thoughts. Jewish heresies. He kneels at the window beneath the image of Saint Benedict, his patron, and requests his intercession. He also apologizes for his vanity, for letting himself get pulled into such divagations. But what is he to do? The intercession of Saint Benedict doesn’t seem to be working, for wild thoughts come once more to his mind . . . The priest has always had a bit of a problem with hell. He could never quite believe in its existence, and the terrifying images he has seen in books—there have been a good number of them—haven’t helped. Yet here he reads, for example, that the souls residing in the bodies of pagans who have been cannibals do not proceed directly or always to hell, for that would be merciless. After all, it is not their fault that they were pagans and that they had not seen the light of Christianity. Thanks to their subsequent incarnations, however, they have a shot at improvement, at redeeming the evil they have done. Is that not just?
The priest is so excited and enlivened by this thought that he steps out into the garden to take some fresh air, but as always happens to him in the garden, even though the sun’s about to set, he immediately begins to pinch off unnecessary shoots from his plants, and before he knows it, quite to his own surprise, he is on his knees weeding the oregano. But what if the oregano, too, is taking part in this great project of perfection, and in it, too, reside some faint, amorphous souls? What then? And even worse: What if the priest himself is an instrument of eternal justice and at this very moment is punishing the sinful little plants—pulling up the weeds, depriving them of their life?
The runaway
In the evening, a Jewish cart covered in a hemp horse blanket drives up in front of the presbytery of Firlejów, but it only slows, then turns around in the priest’s courtyard and disappears down the road to Rohatyn. Father Chmielowski looks out from the garden and sees a tall figure standing motionless alongside the wicker fence. A dark coat flows down from its shoulders all the way to the ground. A terrible thought flashes through Father Chmielowski’s mind—that this is death, that death has come for him today. He grabs his wooden rake and lopes over to meet it.
“Who goes there? Speak at once. I am a priest of the most holy Church and have no fear of the devil.”
“I know that,” a man’s voice says quietly. It is hoarse, faltering, as though its owner has not used it in a hundred years. “I am Jan of Okno. Do not be afraid of me, kind father. I am a good man.”
“Then what are you doing here? The sun’s gone down.”
“The Jews left me here.”
The priest goes up and tries to take a look at this newcomer’s face, but he keeps his head down, an
d his big hood covers everything.
“They’ve really gone too far this time, those Jews. Who do they take me for?” mutters the priest, trying to keep his candle going. “What do you mean, they left you? You keep company with them?”
“Now I keep company with you, Father,” answers the stranger. He speaks in a hazy way, as if carelessly, but he speaks Polish, with just a slight Ruthenian accent.
“Are you hungry?”
“Not very, they fed me well.”
“So what do you want?”
“Shelter.”
“You don’t have a home of your own?”
“I don’t.”
The priest hesitates for a moment and then, with resignation, invites him inside.
“Go on,” he says. “There is damp in the air today.”
The figure moves uncertainly toward the door, hobbling, and fleetingly his hood shifts and bares a bit of his bright cheek. The man draws it back over his face, but the priest has already glimpsed something unsettling.
“Look here, at me,” he orders.
Then the stranger lifts his head, and the hood falls back onto his shoulders. The priest involuntarily jumps back and cries:
“Jesus of Nazarene, are you a human person?”
“I don’t know myself.”
“And I am to take you in under my own roof?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Roshko,” the priest quietly calls to his servant, mostly so that this terrible-faced stranger knows he isn’t here alone.
“You’re afraid of me,” the figure laments.
After the briefest moment of hesitation, the priest holds out his arm to encourage the figure to go inside the house. Truth be told, his heart is pounding, and Roshko has disappeared somewhere, as he is wont to do.
“Go on,” he says to the stranger, who steps inside ahead of Father Chmielowski. There, in the light of the candle in the holder, he can see more—the lower half of the man’s face is completely distorted by scars, as though the skin had been ripped off him. Above that injury, beneath thick black brows, shine big, dark, luminous eyes, young, maybe even beautiful. Or maybe it just seems that way because of the contrast.
“For Christ’s sake, what happened to you?” asks Father Chmielowski, shaken to his core.
The runaway’s tale: Jewish purgatory
The priest is surprised by this extraordinary being who calls himself Jan of Okno. Okno—which in Polish means “window”—is a village not far from Toki, many miles from here. The priest doesn’t know to whom it belongs, since Jan doesn’t want to say. He calls his owner “lord.” If it is a lord, it must be Potocki: everything in that area is theirs.
The man eats a little bread and sips some buttermilk. The priest doesn’t have any more than that. He offers him vodka, but the man declines. He sits stiffly, without even taking off his cloak, and the smell of horses wafts from him. Saba, her reddish coat bristling, sniffs him all over with great seriousness, as though conscious of his mystery—evidently the newcomer has lots of smells she hasn’t encountered before, because it takes her quite a long time until, satisfied, she lies down to sleep by the fireplace.
“I am a corpse,” says the man with the terrible face. “You won’t denounce a dead body, will you, Father?”
“I commune with the dead,” says the priest, showing with his hand the books behind him, lying on the table. “I’m accustomed to their stories. Nothing surprises me. I can even honestly say that I prefer to listen to the dead than to the living.”
Then the stranger seems to relax, removing from his shoulders the dark Jewish cloak he’s been wearing, showing his strong arms and the long hair that falls onto them. He starts to tell his story in a low voice, in a monotone, as if he had repeated the tale in his head for so long that he’d learned it by heart. Now he gives it to the priest like a handful of coins in exchange for his hospitality.
The father of Jan of Okno came from near Jasło, while his mother was from Masuria. They arrived here as settlers, as colonizers, as they say, since there was little land in their families, and nothing to give to the children. They married and were given a piece of land to cultivate near Tarnopol. The agreement with the lord who owned those lands was that they would work for themselves for fifteen years (which was still good, for other estates offered less—ten, or even five years). Then they were to pay their lease of the lord’s land in goods and labor. They also had to commit to performing a number of duties for free, such as helping with the threshing, construction on the estate, shelling peas, even cleaning—there was always something in the house to do, so that there was never enough time for the work their own home needed.
The priest is reminded of the crosses that always fill him with horror and a vague sense of guilt when he sees them. They stand next to the peasants’ huts like peasant versions of memento mori. The peasants put pegs into the crosses, one for each year of their release from serfdom. Then each year they take one out, until one day the cross stands bare—then, in return for those few years of freedom, they have to pay dearly with their own slavery, and that of their entire family as well.
Okno was known for its woven kilims, and his father dreamed of Jan learning that trade.
Jan was born into slavery as the youngest of nine siblings. When he was a child, his parents had to work off their debt to the lord four days a week; by the time he married, it was often seven. That meant that his whole family also had to work on the lord’s estate. Often, in order to tend to their own land, they had to dedicate their Sundays to it and couldn’t even go to church. Two of Jan’s older sisters worked in the house—one as a cook, the other stoking the ovens. When that one got pregnant, the lord had her married off to a man in a neighboring village. That was the first time Jan tried to escape. He had once heard from the freemen and vagabonds who sometimes passed through the village and paused in front of the inn that if he were able to get up to the North Sea, he could join a ship’s crew and go to other countries where a person could live better and prosper. Young and inexperienced, he set off on foot, with a little bundle on a stick, happy and sure of himself. He slept in the woods and soon became convinced that the forests were full of fugitives like him. But he got caught by a couple of the lord’s farmhands just a few miles away from home. They beat him bloody and dragged him off to jail, which was a kind of dungeon under a cowshed. He spent four months there. After that, he was put in stocks and publicly whipped. He should have been happy the punishment was so mild. To top it all off, the lord ordered him to marry a girl from the house who was visibly with child. That’s what was done with flighty men—a family would soon settle them down. But Jan was no less unsettled, and he never came to love the girl. The child died, and his wife ran off somewhere, out of the village. They said she became a whore in the taverns of Zbaraż, and later Lwów. For a while, Jan did his work humbly and learned to weave in someone else’s workshop, but when one winter both his parents died, one after the other, he put on his warm clothes and, taking all of their savings, hitched a horse to the sleigh, determined to get to his father’s family near Jasło. He knew that the lord was cruel, but he also knew he was sluggish, and no one would be in a hurry to chase him in that cold. He made it all the way to Przemyśl, and there some guards stopped and arrested him when he could neither provide any documentation nor explain to them who he was or what he was doing there. After about two months, the lord’s people came for him. They threw him onto a sleigh, tied up like a hog, to take him back. It would take a few days because the roads were snowed over, and they used that as an excuse not to rush back to their village. Once they left him tied up and went into an inn to get drunk. As always happened when they would leave him on the sleigh at such stops, people would look at him in silence, with horror in their eyes, though probably what affected them most was the thought that they might meet a similar fate. A peasant who escapes for the second time, and who manages to make it that far, is a dead man. When he begged for something to drink, people were afrai
d to help him. In the end, some traders, drunk and more as a joke than out of any desire to help their fellow man, freed him one night by an inn when the lord’s strongmen had drunk themselves unconscious. But he didn’t have the strength to run far. The lord’s drunken myrmidons caught him again and beat him so badly that he lost consciousness. Fearing the lord’s wrath, they tried to revive him, but feeling certain he was dead, they left him in an oak grove and covered him in snow so that he didn’t give away their sin. There he lay, facedown, and there, by some miracle, he was found by some Jews passing by on a couple of carts.
He woke up a few days later in the Shorrs’ cowshed, surrounded by animals and the smell of their bodies, their excrement, engulfed in their warmth. Around him, people spoke another language, had different faces, and Jan thought that he had died and found himself in purgatory, and that for some reason purgatory was Jewish. And that here he would spend eternity, recollecting the innocent, small sins of his peasant’s life and repenting them.
Cousins putting up a unified front and launching their campaign
“Now, you are not my uncle, and I am not your aunt. I am, by birth, a Potocka. Of course you may have some connection with my husband, but I do not recognize your line,” Mrs. Kossakowska says to him, and gives him leave to sit. His view of her is obstructed by papers, which she gathers and sets aside in a pile, and from there they are taken care of by Agnieszka—inseparable from Katarzyna now—who dries them with sand.
What advantage is she seeking? wonders Moliwda.
“I am the one who attends to our extensive holdings, I oversee all our bills, all the gossip in society, all the correspondence—my husband does not have the inclination for it,” she says, as though reading his mind, and Moliwda raises his eyebrows in surprise. “I keep up with the family finances, I make matches, I deliver information, I make agreements, arrangements, I issue reminders . . .”
The Books of Jacob Page 44
