The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  The young mother doesn’t even notice the luxuriousness of Nahman’s room. On the carved backs of chairs she hangs blankets and diapers. They sleep in the vast bed with the child between them, and Nahman feels that from now on everything is going to go well, that they have turned the crucial corner. That even the seventh point had to be made.

  He says to Wajgełe:

  “Your name is Sofia.”

  For the child, he chooses the name Rebecca, Rivka, just like the mother of the biblical Jacob, that will be her secret ancient name. The one she will take when she is baptized, however, is Agnieszka. Wajgełe signs up for lessons in Catholicism with the other women, but she is so focused on the child that nothing else can interest her. She can barely cross herself.

  Father Mikulski’s bills and the market of Christian names

  The whole burden of maintaining the newcomers camping out on the streets of Lwów has fallen on Father Mikulski. He expends thirty-five ducats on them every week. Fortunately it is his niece, a woman not much younger than he is, resourceful and clever, who keeps in tight order his court expenditures and the money he spends on his neophytes, as he strives to call them, avoiding the word converts. Everyone knows her at market. When she is purchasing some fresh alimentation, no one dares haggle over anything with her. The city is also helping where it can, and local people have pitched in. Peasants have been observed sharing what they’ve been able to grow in their vegetable gardens. This villager in the four-cornered cap with the feather and the brown felt coat brought in a cart of young green apples and is dropping them directly into women’s aprons and men’s hats. Someone brought a cart of watermelons and several baskets of cucumbers. Nunneries take in women and their daughters, providing them with room and board. For the nuns this is a major challenge, as the number of sisters doubles and triples, and there are also those who spit on the Jewish women. The monks feed several dozen men per monastery. They mostly serve pea soup and bread.

  Just before the baptism in Lwów, something like a market of Christian names emerges, where the name of highest value is Marianna. The name is in honor of Maria Anna Brühl, the wife of the king’s chief minister, who has been a generous supporter of the Contra-Talmudists. But they also say it’s the cleverest name—it contains within it both Mary, the mother of Christ, and Anne, Christ’s grandmother. Besides, it sounds good, like a nursery rhyme: Marianna, Marianna. So a lot of girls and young women want to be Marianna.

  The daughters of Srol Mayorkowicz of Busk have already divvied up names amongst themselves. Shima turns into Victoria, Elia into Salomea, Freyna becomes Róża, Masha is Tekla, and Miriam Maria. Esther takes a long time to choose her name and finally resigns herself to Teresa.

  In this way, it is as if there are now two versions of every person, all having doubles by different names. Srol Mayorkowicz, the son of Mayorek and Masha of Korolówka, becomes Mikołaj Piotrowski. His wife Beyla is Barbara Piotrowska.

  It is widely known that some will receive their godparents’ last names. Moshe of Podhajce, who knows Her Ladyship Łabęcka well and has done business with her husband, will take the name Łabęcki. And since this wiry, intelligent rabbi has imagination and aplomb, and is the best-versed of everyone in Kabbalah, he understands the strength words and names have. He takes his first name after unfaithful Thomas. He will be called Tomasz Podhajecki-Łabęcki. His toddler sons, David and Solomon, will be Joseph Bonaventura and Casimir Simon Łabęcki.

  But not all the nobles are so eager to give away their names. Count Dzieduszycki, for instance, is not as inclined to debase his own name as Łabęcki was. He will be godfather to Old Hirsh, Reb Sabbatai of Lanckoroń, and his wife, Hayah, née Shorr. Hayah is all gray now. Gray curls pop out from under her cap, and her face is pale gray, though her extraordinary beauty remains. Does this arrogant aristocrat in his English tailcoat—a thing never before seen in these parts and that makes him look like a heron—know he will be baptizing a prophetess?

  “Take something simple, easy, rather than burdening yourselves with my name. Since you’re all redheaded,” he says to Hirsh, “why not choose Rudnicki, doesn’t that sound good? Or since you’re from Lanckoroń, maybe simply Lanckoroński? That sounds like a prince’s name.”

  So they hesitate about whether to become Rudnickis or Lanckorońskis, but the fact is it’s all the same to them. Neither of them seems to fit Old Hirsh. He stands in his brown caftan, in the fur-lined hat that he never takes off, even in the summer, with his long beard and shaded face. He does not look particularly happy.

  Also valued high on this stock exchange is the name Franciszek, or Francis, and one-third of the newly baptized members of the male sex will become Franciszek—they say it is in honor of Franciszek Rzewuski, who agreed to be the godfather of Jacob Frank himself and has put in a pretty penny for the process, too. But that’s not entirely exact. The real reason the name of the Assisi saint is so popular, as the priests discover in performing the baptisms, along with the ever-inquisitive Father Mikulski, it that Franciszek sounds a little bit like Frank—like Jacob Frank, their fearless leader.

  It is evening on Friday in the Halickie Przedmieście. The late-setting sun still drenches the roofs in orange, and people who are sitting in little groups suddenly begin to feel uncomfortable. A strange and shameful silence follows. The crowd, who had been noisy half an hour ago as they gathered around yesterday’s bonfires, amongst rotten wicker carts stuffed with baskets and quilts and tethering several goats, has hushed. They look at the ground, their fingers playing with the fringes of their scarves.

  A man’s voice suddenly begins to sing the Shema, but the others instantly quiet him.

  The Queen of the Shabbat passes over their heads, not even grazing them, and travels straight into the Jewish quarter on the other side of town.

  Of what happens to Father Chmielowski in Lwów

  “Do you recognize me, Reverend Father?” some young man calls out to Father Chmielowski, who has just arrived in Lwów.

  The priest looks at him closely, but does not recognize him, though he has the unpleasant sensation that he has encountered this boy somewhere before. Can his memory be failing him? Who could it be? Then he has it on the tip of his tongue—but the beard and the Jewish attire confuse him.

  “I was your interpreter when you went to see the Shorrs several years ago.”

  The priest shakes his head—he doesn’t remember.

  “I am Hryćko. You know, in Rohatyn . . . ,” says the boy, with a light Ruthenian lilt.

  And suddenly the priest remembers the young interpreter. But there is something here he doesn’t understand. He is missing a front tooth, but then he has these breeches, this kapota . . . “Mother of God, why are you dressed like a Jew?” he asks.

  Hryćko looks away, up at the roofs, probably regretting having started this spontaneous conversation with the priest. He would like to tell him everything that has happened in his life, but at the same time, he is afraid to speak.

  “Are you still with the Shorrs?” the vicar forane prods him.

  “Oh, well, Shorr is a great man. Learned. He has money . . .” He waves his hand in resignation, as if the amount of money in question exceeded the very possibility of counting. “But what could be strange about that, Good Father, since he is like a father to me and my brother?”

  “For heaven’s sake! How stupid you are!” Father Chmielowski looks around, frightened, to check whether anyone can see them. Yes, yes, the whole city can see them. “Have you gone completely mad? He ought not to have taken you in—you, Christian souls—but rather reported you as orphans, and then the way of orphans would you have gone. What will it look like! I ought not to care, since you are Orthodox, but all the same, you’re Christians.”

  “Sure, and we would have ended up in some church orphanage,” Hryćko says angrily, and suddenly raises his eyes to the priest. “But you’re not going to rat us out to anyone, are you, Father? For what? To what end? We’re good there with them. My brother is learn
ing to read and write. He cooks with the women because he’s kind of a feygele.” He giggles. Father Chmielowski raises an eyebrow: he doesn’t understand.

  From the crowd a girl emerges and starts to come up to Hryćko, but seeing he’s talking with a priest, she retreats in some alarm. She is young, thin, with a big, pregnant belly. And unmistakably Jewish.

  “Christ Almighty . . . So you are not only a Jewish hireling, but also newly wed to a Jewess! Holy Mother of God! People have lost their lives for far less!”

  The priest does not know what to say, so surprised is he by these revelations, so the clever boy takes advantage of his surprise and keeps talking in a half whisper, almost directly into the Father’s ear.

  “Now we have Turkish business—over the Dniester to Moldavia and into Wallachia we venture. The trade isn’t bad—the best is vodka. Over the river the kingdom of the Turk is Muslim, but there are still many Christians there, too, and they buy the good vodka from us. Besides, in their book, the Al-Quran, it says they are not allowed to drink wine. Wine! But not a word about vodka,” explains Hryćko.

  “Do you not know that this is a deadly sin? That you are a Jew . . .” The priest finally comes to. And then he adds quietly, in a whisper, leaning into the boy’s ear: “You could face trial, my son.”

  Hryćko smiles, and the priest thinks it’s an exceptionally stupid smile.

  “But Father, you won’t go telling, this is like confession.”

  “Lord Almighty . . . ,” repeats the priest, and feels a tingling sensation on his face, from his nerves.

  “Don’t go telling on us, Father. In Rohatyn I’ve been with the Shorrs as good as always, since the Flood. People have forgotten what and how. What’s the sense in going on about it now. Now all of us are going to the Lord Jesus and the Holy Virgin together anyway . . .”

  Suddenly the priest remembers what all these Jewish crowds are here for, and he understands the paradoxical situation of this boy with the bashed-out tooth. They are going to be baptized now, after all, so that he will have to become what he was, stand in place, while they cross over to where he is of their own accord. He tries clumsily to express this, but Hryćko says mysteriously:

  “It’s not the same.”

  Then he disappears into the crowd.

  The vicar forane Benedykt Chmielowski has chosen a pretty bad moment to come to Lwów on business.

  From all angles come carriages and carts filled with Jews, Christian children running after them with a shriek, while residents of Lwów stand in the streets and look on in amazement, wondering what’s going to happen next. A townswoman bumps into him, and, trying to explain and excuse herself, she tries to kiss him on the hand, but she can’t in her rush, so she just says over her shoulder as she runs on: “They’re going to baptize the Jews!”

  “Shabbitarians,” shout individual voices, but they get tripped up on that difficult word, and so it stays in motion, traveling from mouth to mouth, until its awkward angularity softens and straightens out. “Shabbycharlatans,” someone tries, but that doesn’t work, either. How to chant that, how to shout it? Suddenly the word comes back from the other side smoother and simpler, like a stone the water has been toying with for years: Shalbotels, Shalbotels, cries that side of the street, but the other is already calling: Ne’er-do-wells, ne’er-do-wells. The people who walk amidst these rows of insults, for these words are meant to be insults, seem to hear but don’t understand clearly what has been said. Perhaps they just can’t recognize themselves in this chanted Polish.

  The priest can’t get Hryćko out of his mind, and the chasm of his memory, which holds everything he encounters, everything his eyes run across and his ears overhear, goes back to the old days, back to the beginning of the century when a Radziwiłł—Karol perhaps—issued a regulation that Jews could not take Christians into their service. All mixed marriages were forbidden once and for all. Which is why it was such a great scandal when in 1716 or 1717 (the priest was then in the midst of his novitiate with the Jesuits) it turned out that two Christian women had converted to the religion of the Jews and moved into Jewish quarters. One of them was already a widow, and the daughter—Father Benedykt remembers this part well—of some Orthodox priest named Ochryd of Vitebsk, and she with great stubbornness defended her conversion and showed no remorse about it. The second one was a very young girl from Leżajsk who out of love converted to Judaism and went after her beloved. When they were both arrested, they burned the older woman at the stake, while the younger was beheaded by sword. That’s how those wretches wound up. The priest remembers that the penalty was much milder for the women’s husbands. They each got a hundred lashes and besides having to cover the costs of the trial were furthermore required to gift the churches wax and tallow. Today no one would punish this by death, thinks Father Benedykt, but the scandal would still be great. But—on the other hand—who would concern himself with someone like Hryćko, who would take an interest in him? And yet. Would it not be better for his immortal soul if someone did turn him in? That is a nasty thought, and the priest has already chased it out of his mind. The accounts are in the black: even if one converts in that direction, in just a little while hundreds, or maybe even thousands, will convert the other, proper way.

  Since he can’t get to the bishop to discuss his matter, he would like to use this stay in Lwów to have some of his stories printed and bound, in order to be able to send them out to friends—especially Bishop Załuski, and of course Mrs. Drużbacka, that they might think with fondness of his humble name. He has collected the most interesting ones along with several little poems, and one especially for her, but he is embarrassed to take it into the Jesuits’ printer, where he had his Athens printed a few years ago, so instead he has found Golczewski’s modest workshop. He stands in front of its small, humble window and pretends he is reading the pamphlets spread out in it, wondering what to say when he goes inside.

  The crowd is jostling for shade at the gates, there is nowhere for them to put their feet, it’s hot, so the priest retreats into the little courtyard of a two-story tenement house with a dark facade. He checks to see if his bag is in order, if the documents testifying to his innocence are still there. And he reminds himself again that today is August 15, 1759, and that it is a day of remembrance for Saint Louis, King of France. Since he was a peace-loving king, Father Chmielowski starts to believe that he will be able to solve his own problem peacefully that day.

  A commotion reaches him from the market square, something like a collective sigh. Taking very small steps, breathing heavily, he goes out into the sun and manages to push his way out almost to the street. Now he can see what has so amazed his fellow onlookers—a town coach drawn by six horses, each of a different color, and alongside the carriage twelve riders richly attired in the Turkish fashion. The carriage rides around the market square and returns to the Halickie Przedmieście, where the Jews have spread out their carts. There he notices a tent with a striped roof, colorful, surrounded by Jews. And suddenly he has a kind of revelation in the matter of the runaway Jan. He is still owed something for those books he’s kept around his chambers for Old Shorr. The priest rushes back out of the heaving and excited crowd, smiling at everyone who passes him by.

  At the printing press of Paweł Józef Golczewski, His Majesty the King’s preferred typographer

  In Lwów, Armenian townswomen differ from Polish women by the size of their bonnets. Armenian townswomen wear them very large, finished in a green pleat right by their faces, as well as a ribbon over their foreheads, while Polish women wear white bonnets, starched and smaller, though these lure the eyes with their collars, or rather, goffered ruffs, beneath which hang another two or three strings of beads.

  Katarzyna Deymowa, postmistress, wife of the head of the royal post in Lwów, also wears a Polish bonnet and a ruff. But no necklaces, since she is in mourning. Just now she is walking at a breakneck pace, as she tends to do, through the Halickie Przedmieście, and she cannot get over the crowd they’
ve got going. And all of them dressed in dark colors, murmuring in their language, foreigners—Jews. Women with children in their arms and clinging onto their skirts, skinny men absorbed in debates, all standing around in little groups, the heat starting to beat down on their heads. Wherever there is still a little patch of ground free, they sit right on the grass and eat; some townswomen distribute loaves of bread they carry around in baskets, and pickles, and blocks of cheese. Over everything there are flies, those brazen, intrusive August flies that get into your eyes and settle on your food. Some boys carry two baskets of large nuts.

  It all disgusts Deymowa, until her servant Marta brings the news that these are the Jews who have come to be baptized. Then it is as if Katarzyna Deymowa had taken off a pair of glasses she hadn’t even realized she’d been wearing. Suddenly she is all sympathy—Holy Mother! come to be baptized! Those who speak of the end of the world have it right. It has come to this: The Lord Jesus’s greatest enemies are going to be baptized. Their sinful stubbornness has softened; it has dawned on them at last that there can be no salvation beyond that of the holy Catholic Church, and now, as shamefaced children, they are finally ready to be on our side. And although they still look different, strange, in those kapotas of theirs, with their beards down to their waists, pretty soon they’ll be just like us.

  She looks at a family of girls, a woman with a child at her breast just climbing down awkwardly from her cart, the driver chasing her off because he has to take the cart back right away to pick up others on the outskirts of town. The bundle she had on her back falls down, and a few faded rags and a single string of beads, small and dimmed, tumble out of it onto the ground. The woman gathers them back up in embarrassment, as if she had suddenly bared her most inaccessible secrets to the eyes of the world. As Deymowa passes her, a little boy suddenly runs up—he looks like he might be six or seven—and looking at her with smiling eyes, very pleased with himself, he says, “Praised be our Lord Jesus!” She responds automatically, but solemnly, too: “Forever and ever, amen.” And her hand flies up to her heart, and her eyes fill with tears. She squats down beside the boy, grabs him by the wrists, and he looks her straight in the eye, still smiling, that little rascal.