He says this in a sepulchral tone. Krysa cries again: “You all want to go straight into the belly of that beast, that Leviathan . . .”
“Moliwda’s right,” says Nahman. “There’s no other option besides baptism. Even if it’s just for the sake of appearances,” he adds under his breath, glancing hesitantly at Moliwda, who has just lit his pipe. He lets out a cloud of smoke that obscures his face for a moment.
“If it’s just for the sake of appearances, you’ll have to prepare yourselves for them to be sniffing around forever more.”
There is a prolonged silence.
“You have a different approach to intercourse. You don’t see anything wrong with a man sleeping with his wife, nothing shameful,” Moliwda says, now rather drunk, once he and Jacob are alone. They are squatting in Jacob’s shack, wrapped in sheepskin coats, because the poorly sealed windows let in the cold.
Jacob has eased off the alcohol by this time. “I like it that way,” he says. “It’s more human. People who have intercourse get closer to each other.”
“Because you can sleep with other men’s women, while no one sleeps with yours, they all know that you are the one in charge,” says Moliwda, “the way it works with lions.”
This comparison seems to please Jacob. He smiles a mysterious smile and starts to fill his pipe. Then he gets up and says he’s going out for a moment. He doesn’t return for a long while. That’s the way he is: unpredictable. You never know what he’ll do next. By the time he comes back in, Moliwda is very drunk indeed, and he insists on continuing the conversation:
“And how you decide who’s going to be with whom, and you make them do it with candles lit—I know why you do that. Because of course it can be done discreetly in the dark, everyone with the person of their choosing . . . But this is how you conquer them and bind them together so tightly that they’ll be closer than family, greater than family. They will have a common secret, they’ll know each other better than anyone, and as you know well, the human spirit is inclined to love, to loving, to connection. There’s nothing more powerful in the world. And they’ll say nothing about it. They have to have a reason to keep quiet—they have to have something to keep quiet about.”
Jacob lies down on the bed on his back and inhales the familiarly scented smoke, making Moliwda remember nights in Giurgiu.
“And then there are children, of course. What ultimately ends up happening is shared children. How do you know that that young thing that lay with you last night won’t have a child soon? And whose will it be? Her husband’s or yours? That binds them together tightly, too, since that way they’re all fathers. Whose child is Shlomo’s youngest daughter?” asks Moliwda, now absolutely intoxicated.
Jacob lifts his head and looks at him for a moment; Moliwda’s eyes have softened, clouded.
“Shut up,” says Jacob. “That’s none of your business.”
“Oh I see,” says Moliwda, “now it’s not my business, but when you want a village from the bishop, then it is my business.” He reaches for the pipe as well. “It’s a good system. The child belongs to the mother, and thus to the mother’s husband, too. It’s mankind’s greatest invention. It means that only women have access to the truth that agitates so many.”
That night they go to bed drunk, sleeping in the same room because neither wants to go out in search of his own bed, with a blizzard raging. Moliwda turns to Jacob, not knowing if he’s asleep yet or not, or if he can hear—his eyes are partly closed, but the lamplight is reflected in the slender glassy strips below his lashes. Moliwda feels that he is talking to Jacob, but maybe he isn’t talking at all—maybe it only feels that way—and he doesn’t know if Jacob is listening.
“You always said she was either pregnant or in confinement. And these long pregnancies and long confinements meant that she was always unavailable, but in the end, you had to release even her from the women’s rooms; you, too, must be bound by the same justice you impose on everyone else. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Jacob doesn’t react. He’s lying on his back, his nose pointing straight at the ceiling.
“I watched you communicating by glances on the road, you and her. And she was telling you no. Am I right? And your glance also said no. But now that will mean something more. I’m waiting, I’m asking you for that same justice with which you handle your own people. I’m one of you now, too. And I’m asking for your Hana.”
There is a silence.
“You have all the women here, they’re all yours, and all the men, body and soul. I understand that you are something greater than a group of people with the same goal. You’re something greater than a family, because you are bound together by all the sins that are forbidden to a family. You’re bound by saliva and semen, not just blood. Those ties are strong. They bring you closer together than ever before. That’s how it was at home in Craiova, too. Why should we submit to laws we don’t believe in, laws that are incompatible with the religion of nature?”
Moliwda jabs him in the shoulder, and Jacob exhales.
“You embolden your people to be with one another but not like they want, not just following the call of nature—you decide, because you are their nature.”
By the last sentence, he’s mumbling almost unintelligibly. He can tell that Jacob is asleep now, so he stops talking, disappointed by the lack of reaction he’s received. Jacob’s face is relaxed and calm—he clearly heard nothing because he wouldn’t be smiling that way if he had. He is beautiful. It occurs to Moliwda that he is like a patriarch even though he is young, his beard still black, without a trace of gray, flawless, and Moliwda thinks he must be catching this same Ivanie madness, because he also sees a kind of glow around Jacob’s head, which Nahman had told him about so excitedly—Nahman, who now also calls himself Jakubowski, after Jacob. Suddenly Moliwda thinks of kissing Jacob’s lips. He hesitates for a moment and touches his fingers to Jacob’s mouth, but even that does not awaken him. Jacob simply smacks his lips and rolls over.
In the morning they have to clear the snow from in front of the door, the drift too deep for them to step outside at first.
Divine grace, which calls out from the darkness into the light
The following day, Jacob hurries Moliwda back to work. In Nahman’s little house there is a separate chamber for such things. Moliwda has begun to call it “the chancellery.”
They will be writing yet more supplications, which they will use to further importune the episcopal and royal secretariats. Moliwda sips beer with a spoonful of honey in it—for his stomach. Before any of the others come in, Jacob asks, out of nowhere:
“What is your business with us here, Moliwda? What’s your game?”
“I have no business with you.”
“Well, we’re paying you.”
“I take the money to cover my costs, to have something to eat and something to wear, because otherwise I’m poor as a dervish. I’ve seen too much of the world, Jacob, not to understand you all. These bishops and nobles are just as foreign to me as they are to you, even though I come from them.” He swallows a spoonful of his mixture and adds after a moment, “Although I do and I don’t.”
“You’re a strange man, Moliwda. It’s like you’re broken in half. I can’t understand you. Whenever I look at you, you just pull the curtain down. I’ve heard there are animals in the sea that whenever you try and catch them, they release ink.”
“Those are octopuses.”
“Well, that’s exactly how you are.”
“When I’ve had enough, I’ll just leave you.”
“Krysa says you’re a spy.”
“Krysa is a traitor.”
“Who are you, Count Kossakowski?”
“I’m the king of an island in the Greek sea, the ruler of agreeable subjects, don’t you know?”
Now, sentence by sentence, they concoct a new request to Władysław Łubieński, Archbishop of Lwów.
“Do not overdo it,” Moliwda worries, “because we don’t know what he’s
like. He might not look upon us too favorably. They say he’s motivated by self-interest and vanity.”
The one thing they know for sure, though, is that the supplications have to be written and written and written, one after the next. They have to be careful and rounded as drops of water, in order that they might patiently wear away at the crag. Moliwda falls into thought, gazing at the ceiling.
“We have to start from the beginning,” he says. “From Kamieniec. From the bishop’s decree.”
And that’s just what they do. They present themselves in a good, noble light and spend so long on their good intentions that they all start to believe what they’re saying.
“And having learned of this, always struggling against the spirit of wisdom, our opponents raised their hands against us and accused us of inconceivable crimes before the bishop,” suggests Moliwda.
They nod. Nahman would like to insert something.
“Perhaps it could be that they raised their hands against us and ‘furthermore against God Himself’?”
“But what would that mean?” asks Moliwda. “What does God have to do with this?”
“It’s just that we’re on God’s side.”
“It’s that God is on our side,” says Shlomo Shorr.
Moliwda doesn’t really care for it, but he adds the hand of God, like Nahman wants.
Then he again reads them what he’s written:
How all of this occurred, how God gave us the strength and the hope in order that we, weak and stripped of all support, without any knowledge of the Polish language, expounded our theses with skill. Now, too, for we have come to such a certainty and a desire, that we urgently require the holy baptism. For we believe that Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, was a man whom our ancestors tormented on the wooden cross, and that he was the true Messiah promised in the convents and the prophecies. We believe in it, lips, heart, and souls, and this our faith we declare.
The words of this profession of faith fall heavy and blunt. Anczel, Moshe’s young son-in-law, titters nervously but quiets down at a look from Jacob.
Only then does Moliwda add in the beginning:
From the Polish, Hungarian, Turkish, Muntenian, Wallachian, and other countries, the Israelites, through their messenger—who is faithful to Israel and learned of the Scriptures and the holy prophets, having raised his hands to the heavens, whence help used to come, with tears of primordial happiness, health, long-standing peace, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, stands—wish you, Your Great and Powerful Excellency, all the best and most wondrous of things.
Probably only Nahman understands the intricate, ornate style Moliwda is using. He smacks his lips in delight and ineptly tries to translate his twisted phrases into Yiddish and Turkish.
“Are you sure that’s Polish?” Shlomo Shorr says. “Now we absolutely have to put that we’re asking for the disputation, so that . . . so that . . .”
“So that what?” asks Moliwda. “What’s the point of this disputation? What’s it going to do?”
“So that everything is out in the open, nothing held back,” says Shlomo. “In order for justice to function, it’s best for it to take place on a stage, so that people will remember.”
“And on, and on.” Moliwda moves his arm in a circle as though rolling some sort of invisible wheel. “Anything else?”
Shlomo would like to add something, but by nature he is very polite, and you can see that there is something that does not quite escape his lips. Jacob looks upon this scene and retreats, leaning back in his armchair. Then Little Hayah, Shlomo’s wife, pipes up as she brings in some figs and nuts for them.
“The other thing is revenge,” she says, setting the little bowls on the table. “For beating Rabbi Elisha, for stealing from us, for every element of persecution, for chasing us out of our towns, for the wives who left their husbands and were labeled whores, for the curse put on Jacob and on all of us.”
“She’s right,” says Jacob, who’s been silent until now.
They nod. Yes, it is about revenge. Hayah says:
“This is a war. We are going to war.”
“The woman is right.”
So Moliwda dips his pen.
It is not hunger, not exile, nor the scattering of our belongings that leads us to step away from our old customs and unite with the Holy Roman Church, for we, sitting peacefully in our sorrows, have until now looked upon the injuries of our exiled and starving brothers and never been called. But divine grace calls us now, especially, from darkness into light. We cannot but heed this call from God, as our fathers have done. We march joyfully under the banner of the Holy Cross, and we ask for a field upon which to carry out a second battle with the enemies of the truth, as we desire to show from the Holy
Scripture, openly, the appearance in the world of God in human form, his passion on behalf of humankind, the need for universal oneness in God as well as to prove the ungodliness of our opponents, the gross unbelief . . .
They take a lunch break.
Moliwda is drinking again in the evenings. Jacob has had good wine brought in from Giurgiu, saying it’s from a vineyard he has purchased. The wine is clear, tastes of olive groves and melons. Jacob does not take part in the discussions and the writing of the supplications. He is busy working in the village and—he says—teaching, which actually means sitting with the women as they pluck feathers, and holding forth. That’s how they see him, as an innocent, not wrapped up in any of this, not in letters or sentences. He hoists them up by their collars when they grow heedless and try to bow before him. He doesn’t want that. We are equal, he says. And this delights these miserable people.
Of course they’re not equals, thinks Moliwda. Back in the Bogomil village, they weren’t equals either. There were corporeal, psychic, and spiritual people. Somatics, psychics, and pneumatics, they called them, from the Greek. Equality goes against nature, however rightly one might strive toward it. Some are made of more earthly elements, and those people are thick, sensual, and non-creative. They are only good for listening. Others live with their hearts, their emotions, in bursts of the soul, and others still have contact with the highest spirit, distant from the body, free from affects, spacious inside. It is to this final group that God has access.
But living together, they should have identical rights.
Moliwda likes it here, he doesn’t really have too much to do aside from the writing that takes up his mornings. He would gladly remain here with them, passing himself off as one of them, hiding among their beards and caftans, in the wrinkled, many-layered skirts of the women, in their fragrant hair. He would happily let them christen him again, and maybe he would even return to the faith by this other road, along with them, from a different direction, from the kitchen door through which one does not enter into the salons with their carpets, but rather where the slightly spoiled potatoes lie in boxes, where the floor is slick with fat, and where the awkward, crude questions are asked. For instance: Who is this Savior who allowed himself to be killed in such a cruel manner, and who sent him? And why must a world created by God be saved in the first place? And, “Why is it so bad, when it could be so good?” wonders Moliwda, quoting to himself the good, innocent Nahman, and smiling.
He knows many of them believe that, once baptized, they will become immortal. That they will not die. And maybe they’re right—this motley crew that comes and stands submissively in line for rations every morning, these dirty children, scabies in between their fingers, women whose caps conceal filthy, tangled hair, and their emaciated husbands. By evening they’ll go to sleep with their bellies full. Perhaps it is in fact this community that shall be led now by the Holy Ghost, the Spirit, that everlasting light, distinct from the world and a stranger to it, just as they are strangers, made of some other substance, if light can be considered substance. And the Spirit opts for just such people, for freed of the shackles of dogma and decree—and until they have created their own rules—they shall be truly pure, truly innocent.
The
supplication to Archbishop Łubieński
It takes several long days before what follows can be clearly established:
1. That the prophecies of all the prophets on the coming of the Messiah have already been fulfilled.
2. That the Messiah was the true God, whose name is Adonai, and he took our body and according to it suffered to attain our redemption and salvation.
3. That since the coming of the true Messiah, sacrifices and ceremonies have ceased.
4. That every person should be obedient to the order of the Messiah, for in it lies salvation.
5. That the Holy Cross is an expression of the Holiest Trinity and the seal of the Messiah.
6. That it is impossible to accede to the faith of the Messiah and the King in any way other than through baptism.
When they put the first six theses to a vote, Krysa is against the baptism one, but seeing the raised hands, he realizes that nothing can be done about it now. He waves his hand violently and sits with his head down, his elbows resting on his knees, looking at the floor, where little clumps of mud carried into the room on people’s shoes reluctantly sink into the sawdust.
“You have to come to your senses! You’re making a big mistake.”
Despite his ugly face, Krysa is a good speaker, and as such, he is able to unfold before the eyes of those gathered a vision so calamitous that they begin to lean toward his suggestions. According to him, their future will gradually and inevitably come to resemble the life of a peasant. By the afternoon, when they have eaten and their warmed bodies grown sluggish, when twilight is falling outside the little windows, taking on the steel color of a knife’s blade, and looks like it will last into infinity—at that point the argument begins to hold. Krysa manages to introduce some conditions for baptism in writing:
The baptism will not take place before the festival of Epiphany of 1760. They will not be required to shave their beards or cut their payot. They will be able to go by dual names—both a Christian name and a Jewish one. They will continue to wear Jewish clothing. They will be able to marry only amongst themselves. They will not be forced to consume pork. In addition to Sunday, they will also be allowed to mark their Shabbat. And they will get to keep their Hebrew texts, the Zohar in particular.
The Books of Jacob Page 50
