This reassures them, and they stop paying attention to Krysa now. Especially since Old Shorr and Hayah are arriving.
Shorr drags his legs, and Hayah leads him in. Although no external wounds can be seen on him any longer, it is clear he has undergone some sort of trauma. He does not bear any resemblance to that ruddy old man, full of vim and vigor, of a year ago. And perhaps the new concern that arises is connected with the arrival of Elisha and Hayah—no one really knows—or perhaps it has been there all along, awaiting its turn in line. At this point it’s hard even to tell who was the first to formulate this notion for their final reckoning with their enemies. When they say “enemies,” they mean Rapaport, Mendl, Shmulewicz, and all the rabbis, from Satanów, Jazłowiec, Mohylew—all of them, along with their wives, who still spit on the heretics in the street and throw stones at their women.
This enemy is familiar, even close, which means the enmity is that much greater. Knowing your enemy well, you know exactly where to strike him, how to hurt him most. Though he may wound you, too. There is in this struggle with a close enemy a strange sort of twisted pleasure, for it is like striking oneself, yet simultaneously dodging every blow. In any case, when the notion does arise (who knows from whose mind), a silence falls, and they all think it over in that silence. No one knows what to say. They add the seventh point to the supplication:
7. That the Talmud teaches that Christian blood is needed, and anyone who believes in the Talmud must demand said blood.
“There’s nothing like that in those teachings,” says Nahman grimly.
“The teachings contain all things,” Jacob answers him.
They sign the supplication in silence. It is also signed by the newest members of their group: Aron ben Shmul of Czernowitz; Meyer ben David of Szegirt, here with his whole family; Moshko ben Jacob of Bucharest; as well as Anczel, who has been tittering so. The supplication will be delivered by Moliwda, and if the archbishop agrees, they will send an official delegation.
Finally, after they all put in their signatures, Nahman convinces Moliwda to add a final sentence in his beautiful writing, so replete with swirls:
We are all awaiting, as we would much-coveted water, the day when the holy alef, now curving, straightens to bless and unite the four corners of the world.
On the last night, Tanna, the very girl he had liked, comes to Moliwda. For a brief moment he thinks that it is Hana, for it might be said that they are strikingly similar—the same wide hips and flat stomachs. She is a little bit shy, and he is, too. He makes room for her close to him, and she lies down quietly, with her hands over her face. He starts to caress her back, which is like silk.
“Do you have a fiancé?” he asks in Turkish, since the girl looks to be Wallachian.
“I did, but he stayed behind.”
“Will you take another?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want me?”
“I do.”
He gently removes her hands from her face, and she embraces him and clings to him with her whole body.
Of the everlasting interconnectedness between divinity and sinfulness
“Why is the biblical Jacob so important to you?” asks Moliwda, as Nahman accompanies him on horseback to Kamieniec. “I don’t get that.”
Nahman explains in a convoluted way. Moliwda has to sift it through the sieve of his own language, since they are speaking a little in Hebrew and a little in Polish. In Hebrew, things can get complicated by virtue of being so ambiguous. But in Polish, the things that Nahman says in his singsong voice, as though reciting books from memory, are also difficult to understand. The Polish language lacks the words for such questions. It has little experience with them, and knows little of theology. This is why every heresy in Poland has been unleavened and bland. In fact, no real heresy could ever come about in Polish. By its nature, the Polish language is obedient to every orthodoxy.
“But this was a blessing received through deception and theft,” Moliwda interjects.
“Exactly. Jacob himself defied the law and deceived his father. He went beyond the law, and because of it, he became a hero.”
Moliwda is silent for a moment.
“But later, Jacob, once he was himself a patriarch, guarded the law. That is so perverse: when you need to be, you are against the law, and when it serves your purposes, you’re for it . . .” He laughs.
“That’s true, too. Remember how Jacob didn’t allow Rachel to take her idols, the teraphim,” says Nahman.
“Why?”
“Here Jacob made a mistake. Rather than recognize the divinity contained in the teraphim, Jacob would rather throw it out because it exists in idols, which is to say he does not allow holiness that appears in some other, foreign form to be joined with our faith. But Rachel understands that there is divinity even in an idol.”
“Women sometimes have a greater wisdom.”
“They are less attached to words.”
“Hayah Shorr, too?”
“She isn’t entirely a woman,” Nahman answers seriously.
Moliwda starts laughing.
“I wanted her, but Jacob wouldn’t let me,” he says.
Nahman doesn’t say anything. They are traveling along the Dniester, the river meandering along their right side, appearing and disappearing again. They can already see the enormous buildings of Chocim and Okopy, known as the Ramparts of the Holy Trinity, from afar.
“Jacob is a con man,” Moliwda says provocatively, but Nahman acts as though he hasn’t heard. He doesn’t say anything until upon the horizon emerge the powerful shapes of the fortress and the little town lying at its base.
“Did you know that the Baal Shem Tov was born right there, in Okopy?” says Nahman.
“Who is that?”
Nahman, stunned by his ignorance, simply says:
“A great sage.”
They leave the main road as a precaution, even though there is nowhere to hide on the barely undulating plain.
“I respect you very much, Moliwda. Most of all because I know you are a good man. And Jacob loves you. You have been a greater help to us than anyone. I just don’t know why you are doing it. What do you need all this for?”
“For profit.”
“That’s enough for me. But you think differently. You may not even understand us. You say: black and white, good and evil, woman and man. But it isn’t that simple. We no longer believe in the things of which the elder Kabbalists spoke, such that if all the sparks could be collected from the darkness, they would unite into a messianic tikkun and transform the world for the better. We’ve already crossed over. Because divinity and sinfulness are everlastingly interconnected. Sabbatai said that after the Torah of Bria, the Torah of the Created World will come the Torah of Atzilut. But Jacob and all of us know that the two Torahs are interwoven, and the only thing that can be done is to move beyond the both of them. The struggle is about leaving behind that point where we divide everything into evil and good, light and darkness, getting rid of all those foolish divisions and from there starting a new order all over again. We don’t know what’s past that point. It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket and just taking that step into the darkness. We are headed into the darkness.”
When Moliwda looks at Nahman, this small, freckled man who speaks so quickly that he starts to stutter, it surprises him that such a great intelligence would be used for the plumbing of such wholly useless depths. For Nahman knows by heart whole passages of books, perhaps whole books even, and, when necessary, he shuts his eyes and recites, quickly and passionately, so that Moliwda doesn’t even understand. He has spent weeks on paradoxes, on commentaries of commentaries, or on the presence of a single ambiguous word in a text. He is capable of praying for hours, hunched over. Yet he knows nothing of astronomy, nor of geography—only whatever he has happened to overhear on his travels. He knows nothing of political systems, governments, no philosophers other than his own Kabbalists. Descartes could just as soon be a kind of paper cart
ridge, as far as he’s concerned. And still, Nahman moves Moliwda. Does he know anyone more zealous and more naive than this rabbi of Busk, Nahman Shmulewicz, Nahman ben Samuel?
Of God
“You know, Moliwda, that I can’t tell you everything. I am bound to secrecy,” says Nahman suddenly, as his horse stops and lowers its head, as if this confession had filled it with sadness. “You think we are traveling over to Edom out of poverty and a lust for privileges . . .”
“I think that would be understandable,” says Moliwda, squeezing his horse’s sides to make him stop. “Human. There would be nothing wrong in it . . .”
“It may seem that way to you Christians, and we want you to think that. Because you don’t understand other reasons. You are shallow, surfaces suffice for you—you have your church dogma, your chapel, and you don’t keep looking beyond that.”
“What reasons?”
“That we are whole in God, and that this is tikkun. That it is we who are saving the world.”
Moliwda smiles, his horse has started moving around in a circle. The great space, undulating with little hills, with the Ramparts of the Holy Trinity on the horizon, moves along majestically before his eyes, which sting when they look up at the white, milky sky.
“What do you mean, saving?” he asks.
“Because it’s made poorly. All of our sages, from Nathan of Gaza to Cardoso, have said that the Mosaic God, the Creator of the World, is merely a Small God, a surrogate for the Other, Vast God, to whom our world is altogether foreign and irrelevant. The Creator is gone. That’s what exile is—we have to pray to a God who is not there in the Torah.”
This makes Moliwda feel ill at ease—Nahman’s tone has grown so mournful all of a sudden.
“What’s gotten into you today?” he says, and moves a little forward, but Nahman doesn’t follow, so Moliwda returns.
“That God is one God . . . ,” begins Nahman, but Moliwda urges his horse forward and takes off at a gallop, and all Nahman can hear is:
“Silence!”
Moliwda stops where the road forks—one goes to Kamieniec, the other to Lwów. He looks back. He sees the little figure that is Nahman sitting uncertainly on his horse, lost in thought, his horse moving at a walk, looking like it is treading carefully along the line of the horizon, like a funambulist.
“The miller grinds the flower”
The letter announcing the nomination of Archbishop Łubieński’s chamberlain catches Moliwda in Kamieniec with Castellan Kossakowski, the sort-of cousin he has traveled from Ivanie to visit, though really he is there for the baths, clean clothes, books, and the latest gossip. He has not found Katarzyna, however—she is, as usual, on the road, and cousin Kossakowski will not really do for deeper conversation, all he does is natter on about dogs and hunting. After a few glasses of Tokay he suggests to Moliwda that they go to some place that supposedly has the best girls. Moliwda declines: after Ivanie, he has had his fill of girls. In the evening, they play cards with the garrison commander, the noisy and attention-seeking Prince Marcin Lubomirski, and that is when Moliwda is called—a messenger has arrived from Lwów with a letter.
The news is like a lightning bolt. Moliwda wasn’t expecting it. When he reads the letter at the table, his face still expresses boundless surprise, but Castellan Kossakowski understands everything at once:
“Well, that’s just my wonderful little wife arranging things so she has somebody of hers right there at the primate’s side. Yes, that Łubieński’s already been appointed primate. Did you not know all that?”
Prince Lubomirski has a crate of good wine brought up, and some Gypsies to play music, and now the card game stalls. Moliwda is overwhelmed, his thoughts keep racing away from him, ahead to the unimaginable future that awaits. Without knowing why, he is reminded of that day when, on Mount Athos, under the enormous parasol of the sky, he followed the path of a beetle, his head full of the monotonous cicada music. And here is where he’s ended up.
The next day, freshly shaved and beautifully dressed, he appears in Lwów before the archbishop.
Moliwda is put up in the episcopal palace, where it is clean and nice. He immediately goes out into town, to an Armenian warehouse, where he buys a lovely Turkish belt, masterfully woven, glittering with different colors, and a żupan. He thinks about a light blue one, but practical considerations prevail—he chooses another, the color of dark water, a cloudy azure. He looks around the Lwów cathedral, but soon he is freezing, so he goes back to his room and unfolds his papers. He will write letters. But first, he undertakes the work he does daily, the assignment he has set himself, so as not to forget his Greek—his translation of Pythagoras. A few lines every day, since otherwise his brain will rot under this cold, hostile, enormous Polish sky:
“Flighty men, like empty vessels, are easily laid hold of by the ears.” Or: “The wise man leaves this world as he would a feast.” Or: “Time transforms even wormwood into sweet honey. Circumstance and necessity often lead a man to turn an enemy into a friend.” He intends to sprinkle the primate’s letters with these intelligent, eloquent quotes.
Meanwhile, the barber is applying suds to Archbishop Łubieński. He caught a cold during his journey from Warsaw, where he spent two months, and now he has a cough. The curtains are pulled around his bed. Father Pikulski stands nearby and through the thin opening looks at the part of the archbishop’s hefty body the barber’s delicate hands are now tormenting.
Father Pikulski has the overwhelming impression that all of this has already happened, that he has already seen this, that he has already said these things to Bishop Dembowski, may he rest in peace, and stood before him in the same way, like a servant before a lord, trying desperately to warn him. Why are these Church hierarchs so naive? he thinks, and his eyes linger over the fanciful Turkish patterns on the curtains. He says:
“His Excellency ought not to permit any acceptation of this type of insolent demand, as it would create a precedent on the world stage.”
A moan emerges from behind the curtains.
“Because they were unable to legalize their sect within the framework of their Jewish religion, now they’re trying out some new trickery.”
He waits for a reaction, but in the absence of any, he continues:
“What does it even mean that they wish to preserve some of their customs and dress? What would it mean to ‘mark their Shabbat’? And keep their beards and their hairstyles? In any case, the Talmudists themselves do not want these Shabbitarians to go around dressed as Jews, since they consider them not to be Jews any longer. They don’t belong to anybody now—they’re like dogs without masters. This would be the worst possible solution—we’d be taking responsibility for a bunch of heretics, after having just dealt with heretics elsewhere.”
“Whom do you have in mind?” says a weak voice from behind the curtains.
“I have in mind those unfortunate Polish Brethren,” answers Father Pikulski, although in fact his mind has already moved on to something else.
“Baptism is baptism. Rome would like such a great baptism—ouch—would . . . ,” the archbishop says hoarsely from behind the curtains.
“But it must be unconditional. We must demand from them an unconditional conversion, no exceptions, and as soon as possible, in the best-case scenario immediately after the conclusion of this disputation we’re planning, as Your Excellency knows, for spring, as soon as it’s a bit warmer. No buts. Remember, Your Excellency, that it is we who dictate the conditions. The first to be baptized must be their leader, his wife, and their children. And with as much pomp and circumstance as possible, so that everyone hears of it and sees it. There can be no further discussion.”
When Moliwda comes in, he sees the archbishop being examined by some medic, a tall Jew with a gloomy gaze. He has taken a number of different glass lenses out of his bag and is putting them up to His Excellency’s eyes.
“I am going to wear these lenses, I have trouble reading now,” says the archbishop. “You wrote ev
erything up very nicely, Mr. Kossakowski. Everything is set, I see. Your efforts to bring these people to the bosom of the church are significant and noteworthy. From here on out, you will occupy yourself with this same matter, but under my wing.”
“My merit is minor, but those lost little lambs’ desire is very great,” answers Moliwda humbly.
“None of your lost lambs here, that will not work on me, sir . . .”
“What does Your Excellency see now? Can you read these letters?” asks the Jew, holding up a piece of paper with a crooked inscription: THE MILLER GRINDS THE FLOWER.
“The miller grinds the flour. I can see well, very well, it is really quite the miracle,” says Archbishop Łubieński.
“We both know that everyone will be better off by sticking to the side that’s strongest,” says Moliwda.
Apparently the next lens also works well, for the bishop grunts with pleasure:
“This is even better, oh, this one, this one. Goodness, how well I can see. Every little hair in your red beard, Asher!”
When the medic has packed up his bag and left, Łubieński turns to Moliwda:
“And what of these accusations, known to the whole world, that the Jews need Christian blood for their matzah . . . Sołtyk can prove this is true, can’t he?” He smiles broadly. “To me this is like playing with a knife’s blade without a handle.”
“That’s what they wanted. I suppose it’s a form of revenge.”
“The pope has definitively forbidden such blood accusations . . . But if they are making them of their own accord . . . There has to be something to it, then, doesn’t there . . .”
The Books of Jacob Page 51
