I would like to emphasize the extraordinary attachment of the neophytes to their leader. Everything he tells them is sacred, and they accept it without reservation. When one of them commits some offense, the Lord, as they call him, determines a corporal punishment, and then they all agree, as a group, to administer this punishment together.
I also got out of them that they believe that the Antichrist has been born in the Turkish lands and that Frank saw him himself. He will soon work certain miracles and persecute the Catholic faith. As well as the fact that to them the words of the Gospel are unclear, that Christ will arrive from Heaven as the Messiah. For—they say—is he not perhaps already in the world, in a human body? I had the impression here that, although they did not wish to say it clearly, they believe that the Messiah is hidden in the person of Frank himself. I would put this point to Your Excellency and the next inquisitions.
I learned, as well, that the village in Wallachia where Jacob Frank would visit Mr. Moliwda is in all likelihood one of Whips or Philippians, or some other sect that offends against our holy faith. Their knowledge of the Muhammadan religion also does not come from a single source, but is rather equally sectarian and disseminated amongst the officers of the Janissaries, known as Bektashi.
As for Your Excellency’s questions about whether or not it is true that, as they themselves say, there are many thousands of them, I believe that, calculating carefully, there might be between five and fifteen thousand in Podolia. But not all the followers of this Sabsa Tsivi will be inclined to be baptized and—what is more—only a minority will do it, those who cannot possibly be received back into their congregations and who have no other choice than to go to Christianity, like so many dogs shooed from a yard who will seek shelter under any old roof at all. I do not think that many of them had a pure heart and accepted baptism believing in true salvation under the care of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
At the same time, I wish to inform Your Excellency that as the plague maintains its hold over Lwów, the people have been saying that this is a divine punishment against the converts, and for that reason the fervor for baptism has abated a bit. The truth is that many of the neophytes have been afflicted by the illness, both before and after baptism. Some of them believed that baptism would bring them eternal life, not only spiritually, but also materially, here on earth, which merely goes to show how little versed they are in the Christian faith and how great is their naiveté.
I now turn to Your Excellency the Primate with the urgent request that you read through all of the reports we have prepared here and, being guided by your heart and by your wisdom, determine for us what we are to do next. And as a part of Frank’s company, which they themselves call giaours, has already set off after their commander to Warsaw, they ought to be carefully watched, lest their muddy views of Christianity, their effrontery, and their unregenerate ambitions disgrace in any way the Church, Our Holy Mother.
Father Pikulski has finished writing now and sets about to do his other correspondence, but then he puts it aside and adds to that first letter:
It would be an act of very little faith, however, to consider that the Holy Church could be in any way diminished by such a band of fraudsters . . .
The cornflower-blue żupan and the red kontusz
Moliwda ordered from a Polish tailor—since that’s what they are called now, the people in Warsaw who sew Polish garments, as opposed to the more fashionable French or German ones—a silk żupan and a thick wool broadcloth kontusz lined with soft fur. He must also commission a Słuck sash for it, although those cost a fortune. He has looked around for one already and liked several that he’s seen. In Warsaw they cost three times more than they do in Stamboul. If he had any talent for business, he would import them here.
Moliwda looks at himself in the mirror. The thick kontusz adds even more volume to his belly. But that is fine—he looks like a member of the szlachta. Now he tries to think what it was about him that Primate Łubieński had taken such a liking to, what had placed him in such high esteem—it certainly would not have been this belly, nor indeed any part of his physical aspect. Moliwda has lost half his hair, and the remaining half is dully flaxen. His face has grown fuller in the past few years, while his eyes have become even less colorful. His beard has grown out in every direction and looks like a bunch of old straw. It will not do for a primate’s secretary to have such a skein under his snout. What the primate must have liked about Moliwda was his eloquence at the disputation in Lwów and his noble relations with the neophytes. And of course the languages Moliwda knows. Not to mention Sołtyk’s recommendation, since it could not have come from his cousin Kossakowska, whom Łubieński does not like.
That same day he receives two urgent letters regarding one and the same thing. Both of them put him in a state of high alert—in one he is summoned by the church commission “for imminent interrogation of the Contra-Talmudists,” while the other is from Krysa. Krysa writes in Turkish that Jacob has vanished like a stone in still water. He went off alone in the carriage and never came back. The carriage was recovered near the house, but empty. No one saw anything.
Moliwda asks the primate for a delegation to Warsaw. The things the primate has to do have multiplied, in any case, and now there’s the church commission, too. When the nice English carriage sets off, Moliwda takes a big gulp of the tincture, of which he has packed a whole bottle—for warmth, for digestion, for clarity of mind, and as a remedy for anxiety, since Moliwda feels as if something bad is impending, something that might swallow him up, just when he had grabbed on to that blade of grass, which, though not the most secure of moorings, had at least prevented him from sinking. When he makes it to Warsaw without having had any sleep or rest, his head hurts, and he has to squint, so aggressively does Warsaw’s sun shine. The chill in the air is terrible, but there is not much snow, so the mud has frozen into clumps with just a light covering of frost, and there are sheets of ice over the puddles that anyone might slip on. Barely even conscious, Moliwda meets with Wołowski, from whom he learns that Jacob has been imprisoned by the Bernardines.
“What do you mean, ‘imprisoned’?” he asks in disbelief. “What did you all tell them?”
Wołowski shrugs helplessly, and then his eyes fill with tears. Moliwda’s horror mounts.
“This is the end,” he says. Without another word, he goes around Wołowski, leaving him standing there alone on the muddy street as he forges ahead over frozen puddles. He nearly falls. As though just now coming to his senses, Wołowski turns and runs after him and invites him to his place.
Soon a winter darkness falls; it is unpleasant out. Moliwda knows he should first go to see Bishop Załuski, who is said to be in Warsaw now, and seek his support, rather than running straight to the neophyte Jews. He ought to search for Sołtyk, but it’s too late now, and he hasn’t shaved and is tired from his journey, and so he looks covetously into the open door of the Wołowskis’ home, whence warmth and the smell of lye burst forth. He allows Franciszek to grab him by the elbow and guide him inside.
It is January 27, 1760. He did not make it in time for Jacob’s interrogation yesterday. But there will be others.
What was going on in Warsaw when Jacob disappeared
In the New Town, where Shlomo, or Franciszek Wołowski, has just opened a little tobacco warehouse with his brothers, there is considerable traffic. Above the store is a small apartment the brothers have rented. It is a good thing the cold has trammeled the earth, allowing you to traverse the trodden, muddied, puddle-strewn streets.
Moliwda walks into the entryway, and then the salon, where he sits down on a brand-new chair that still smells like carpenter’s glue and looks at the clock that enjoys pride of place in this room and is steadily ticking. In a moment the door opens and Marianna Wołowska, Little Hayah, appears in its frame, and behind her some children, three of the youngest, the ones who don’t yet go to school. She wipes her hands on the apron she has over her dark dress; he can see she was working. She loo
ks tired and worried. From somewhere farther inside the house he can hear the sounds of a piano. Marianna takes his hands when he gets up to greet her and tells him to sit back down. Moliwda feels embarrassed that he forgot about the children, he could have at least brought them a bag of candied cherries.
“At first he simply disappeared,” says Marianna. “We thought maybe he was visiting somebody for a little while, so for the first few days we weren’t that worried. Then Shlomo and Jakubowski went to his house and found Kazimierz, the man he had hired as his butler, in despair, saying he had been kidnapped. Since then, someone sent for his warm clothing. Nothing else. ‘Who?’ we asked. ‘Armed men, several of them,’ he told us. So Shlomo, as soon as he arrived here from Lwów, got dressed in elegant attire and started going around town, asking, but we learned nothing. Then we started to feel very afraid, because ever since Shlomo returned from Lwów, things have been going awry.”
Marianna puts a little boy onto her lap and pulls out of her sleeve a handkerchief to wipe her eyes, and while she is at it, the boy’s nose. Franciszek goes out to get Yeruhim Dembowski, who lives next door, and the others.
“What is your name?” Moliwda asks the boy inattentively.
“Franio,” says the child.
“Like your dad?”
“Like my dad.”
“It all started with this interrogation in Lwów,” Marianna continues. “It is a good thing you came, it’s better that they not get all tangled up in that Polish.”
“But you speak well . . .”
“Well, maybe it would be better if they would interrogate us women.” She smiles bitterly. “Hayah would give them all the pipe to smoke. She and Hirsh—Rudnicki,” she corrects herself, “bought a house in Leszno, they’re moving in in the spring.”
“Is Hayah well?”
Marianna gives him a startled look.
“Hayah is Hayah . . . The worst part is that now they’re taking them to be interrogated one by one. They’ve taken Jakubowski.” She falls silent.
“Jakubowski is a mystic and a Kabbalist. He’ll fill their ears with nonsense.”
“Well, exactly, what he filled their ears with, no one knows. Shlomo was saying that when they were all testifying together, Jakubowski was very afraid.”
“That they would lock him up, too?” Moliwda takes Marianna’s hands and moves closer to her. He whispers into her ear: “I’m scared, too. I’m sitting in the same cart as all of you, but I can see it isn’t safe now. Tell your husband he’s an idiot, that you all need to settle your petty, stinking scores amongst yourselves . . . You wanted to get rid of him, that’s why you told them what you did, isn’t that so?”
Marianna gets out of his grasp and starts crying into her handkerchief. The children look at her in fear. She turns to the door and shouts:
“Basia, take the children!
“We are all afraid,” says Marianna. “And you should be afraid, because you know all our secrets, and you are like one of us now.” She raises her tearful hazel eyes to Moliwda, and for just a moment, Moliwda hears in her hushed voice the sound of a threat.
Spit on this fire
The interrogation of the Warsaw Frankists takes place without any of them being arrested. Yeruhim, or Jędrzej Dembowski, speaks on behalf of the whole group, self-assured and talkative, along with the younger Wołowski, Jan. Both give their testimonies in Yiddish, but this time Moliwda has been made just an assistant to the main interpreter. So he sits at the table with pen and paper. Someone named Bielski interprets, quite well. Moliwda has managed to get them to speak in general terms, nice and polite.
But they keep digging themselves in deeper. When they start talking about Jacob’s miracles, which he apparently worked everywhere, Moliwda is silent, biting his lip and lowering his gaze to the empty page before him, the sight of which soothes him. Why are they doing this?
Moliwda senses the initially friendly attitude of the court changing now, the inquisitors’ bodies tensing, and from small talk a real hearing is created, voices get lower, the court’s questions get more inquisitive and suspicious, the defendants whisper to each other nervously, while the secretary starts looking over an agenda with dates, so that maybe—thinks Moliwda in a panic—it will be like that: they’ll schedule the next hearing, and the matter won’t just be wrapped up the way they thought it would be.
Without even realizing it, he moves his chair away from them, closer to the stove. And sits sort of sideways now.
Shlomo, or Franciszek Wołowski, a merchant and a bit of an adventurer, who can handle both people and money, is suddenly like a little boy before the court, his lower lip trembling like he’s about to cry. Yeruhim, on the other hand, acts sure of himself, acts like an open, simple man, although of course he isn’t, Moliwda knows that well. He tells how they usually pray, and then the court wishes them to sing this mysterious song, the meaning of which they cannot or do not want to clarify. They look at each other uncertainly, whispering—it is obvious that they are hatching some scheme, hiding something. Matuszewski butts in, as pale as if already sentenced to death. He becomes the conductor of this choir, raising his hand, and after a moment of whispering they sing the Yigdal before the consistory court of Warsaw like schoolboys. And they get so into their singing that they forget where they are, forget the solemnity of the church. Moliwda lowers his eyes.
He has heard this song so many times and sometimes joined in, that is true, but now, in the heated interior of the episcopal court, where the smell of damp battles the smell of the lye used to clean the hearths of the stoves, where the frost on the windowpanes has sketched out overnight delicate garlands of icy leaves and branches, the words of the Yigdal sound absurd, don’t make any sense. Moliwda has a position in Łowiczu in the highest Church office, with the primate of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; he has succeeded, he has come back to his country, to his people, all his faults have been forgiven, and he has been accepted back into the fold of decent people, so why would he be interested in the words of this song, and did he ever even really understand them?
As the defendants leave, they pass Jacob being led in. They squeeze up against the wall, turn pale. Jacob is ceremonially dressed, in his high hat and a coat with a collar. As if they were bringing in the king. His face is strangely focused. He looks at Wołowski, who begins to cry, and then Jacob says in Hebrew:
“Spit on this fire.”
An ocean of questions that will sink even the strongest battleship
Moliwda is to interpret. He has managed to weasel his way into the main position under the auspices of Bishop Załuski. Now he looks at the band in which the sides of his new kontusz are finished. He has worn the new one, but now he sees it is too showy, too elegant. He regrets his choice.
The commission is waiting. It is made up of three members of the clergy and two secular secretaries. Armed guards are still posted at the door to the hallway. Such pomp, thinks Moliwda. You would think they were interrogating a great usurper. Aside from the episcopal official, who will be playing the leading role here, there is Father Szembek, canon of Gniezno, and one Pruchnicki, the consistory registrar, and Father Śliwicki, a Jesuit and general inspector of the missionaries. They whisper to one another now, but Moliwda can’t hear what they’re saying.
At last the door opens, and the guards bring Jacob in. One glance at him is enough to make Moliwda concerned; Jacob seems changed, swollen somehow, and his face is tired, sagging. Have they beaten him? Suddenly Moliwda’s heart begins to thump faster, as though he were running, and his throat gets dry, and his hands start shaking. Jacob looks at him. All the ideas he had prepared, and all the turns of phrase he planned to use to cover for Jacob’s mistakes, now seem useless. He wipes his sweaty hands discreetly on the sides of his kontusz. There’s more sweat in his armpits. They have definitely beaten him. Jacob, his eyes cast down, peeks furtively at all of them. Their gaze finally meets, and Moliwda has to summon all his strength to force himself to slowly close his eyes, signali
ng to Jacob that everything is going to be okay, that he just has to keep calm.
After the official introduction and the objectives of the interrogation are read out comes the first question, which Moliwda translates into Turkish. He does it literally, not adding or removing anything. They ask Jacob where he was born, where he grew up, and where he has lived during his life. They are interested in his wife and in how many children he has, as well as material goods and possessions.
Jacob doesn’t want to sit down. He stays standing as he responds. His voice, deep but quiet, along with the lilt of the Turkish, make an impression on his interrogators. What does this man have to do with them? thinks Moliwda. He translates Jacob’s answer sentence by sentence. Jacob says he was born in Korolówka in Podolia and then lived in Czernowitz and that his father was a rabbi. They moved many times: to Bucharest and other cities in Wallachia. He has a wife and children.
“What indication do you have regarding those who wished to join the Christian faith?”
Jacob looks up at the ceiling and sighs. He is silent. He asks Moliwda to repeat the question, but he still doesn’t answer. Finally he looks up at Moliwda and speaks as if just to him. Moliwda tries to control each twitch of his own face.
“The sign by which I can recognize the true believers is that I see a light over their heads. Not all of them have it.”
Moliwda translates:
“The sign that enables me to discern, according to the promise of Our Lord Jesus, those who sincerely adhere to His faith, is a light in the shape of a candle that I see over their heads.”
The court requests clarification as to who is in possession of this light and who is not.
The Books of Jacob Page 67
