The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  This I knew with ever greater certainty, but it tired me, and at night I could not sleep, so much did my recurring memories boil my blood. For it seemed to me that sudden esteem had altered Jacob beyond recognition, that he had started to care much more about his clothing and his carriage than he did about the great idea he had to convey to others. Now he busied himself with shopping and perfumes. He preferred the Christian barber to shave his beard and trim his hair; he would tie a perfumed handkerchief around his neck and call it a stock tie. In the evenings, women would massage oil into his hands, because he had complained that they were getting chapped from the cold. He would chase after women, give them presents he would purchase using our common funds, which Osman and I had already been grumbling about back in Ivanie. The change took place after he started seeing bishops and bargaining with them with Moliwda’s help. It was like doing trade, like in Craiova at the office, as in Izmir, when he went around with a pearl or a precious stone to a meeting in order to sell it. I accompanied him many times and know that in no respect did that differ from this commerce here. There he would sit at a table, and he would take the jewel out of its silk pouch, place it on a piece of cloth, having also set up the candles to put it in the best possible light, and in that way the beauty of the merchandise came out. And here we were the merchandise.

  As I walked in this way through that frozen city, I remembered that particular evening in Salonika when the Spirit entered Jacob for the first time. Jacob was drenched in sweat, and fear had dulled his eyes, and the air around us got so thick that it seemed to me that we were moving slower and speaking slower, as though suspended in honey. And everything then was true; so true the whole world hurt, for you could feel how unwieldy it was and how far removed from God.

  And then and there, young and unseasoned, we were in our proper place; God spoke to us.

  And now everything has become untrue, this whole city—painted lightly on a panel, as the background is painted for puppets in little market fair theaters. And we, too, are changed, as if someone had cast an evil spell on us.

  I walked down those streets and had the impression that everything was looking at me, and I knew that I would have to do what I had planned in order to save not only Jacob, but all of us, and our road to salvation, since here, in this flat country, it had begun to twist and turn in disturbing ways, to turn back on itself and to mislead.

  I believe there was one other person in our havura who knew what I was going to do. That was Hayah Shorr, now Rudnicka or Lanckoron´ska—it was hard for me to remember all those new last names. I could distinctly sense her supporting me, knew that she was with me even from afar, and that she understood my intentions quite well.

  At first, Jacob’s testimony was read to us. It took a long time, and it was in Polish, so we did not understand it all. Jacob’s answers sounded artificial in that official style of speech, and untrue. Then one of the priests solemnly warned us not to listen to any further “fairy tales” from Jacob Frank, nor to believe his stories about the Prophet Elijah or other matters he did not even wish to mention, not wanting to give them any weight.

  A little priest was chiding six defendants, all adult men . . . In the end, he made the sign of the cross in the air above us, and I felt like Judas—for I had to tackle the matter everyone else was too repulsed by to take in hand.

  I went to the interrogation first. I had to present that truth to our persecutors, knowing well what would happen. The Messiah must be imprisoned and persecuted. That is what was said, and that is what must happen. The Messiah must fall down into the lowest realm, the lowest of all possible realms.

  They started with Smyrna. I was not forthcoming, they had to drag things out of me, but that, too, was a part of my plan. I played the role of the kind of person who does not like to brag, and they took me for a stupid oaf. But I told the truth. I would not have been able to lie about such things. About others—of course; lying is useful in business, but here I could not lie. I tried to say as little as I could about it, but just enough to make an impression on them. I also didn’t say too much, in order to protect us. I told them about the ruah haKodesh, the descent of the Holy Spirit, about the light we all saw over Jacob’s head, the prophecy of death, the halo, the Antichrist he met in Salonika, the impending end of the world. They were polite and even stopped asking questions. I spoke factually and concretely, and even when it came to corporeal matters, I did not hesitate to reveal anything. All you could hear was my voice and the scraping of pens.

  When I had finished and was leaving the room, I passed Shlomo in the doorway. We glanced at each other. I felt great relief, and at the same time, such enormous sadness that I sat down right there on the street, against the wall, and began to weep. I only came to my senses when some passerby threw a coin at me; it landed in my lap.

  Hana, consider in your heart

  Hana is constantly having someone go and check whether the post hasn’t come.

  It hasn’t.

  No help comes from any direction, and trying to resist Her Ladyship no longer makes sense. Mrs. Kossakowska has already arranged a dress for her, and shoes, just as she has for little Avacha. The baptism is slated for February 15.

  Hana wrote to her father in Giurgiu, as soon as they had word of Jacob’s imprisonment. She wrote it straight: the episcopal court, on the basis of interrogating her husband and—perhaps even more so—his followers, had found Jacob guilty of proclaiming himself the Messiah, and the highest-ranking church official in Poland, that is, the primate, sentenced him to life imprisonment in the Częstochowa fortress, a sentence no one will be able to appeal.

  All this seems mad to me. Since if he was such a heretic as they make him out to be, then why would they put him in the holiest sanctuary they have? Right there with their greatest teraphim? That I cannot and do not want to understand. Father, what am I to do?

  She did get an answer to that two weeks later—in other words, as soon as possible. That meant letters could reach her, just not from Jacob. She read it when she finally found herself alone, facing the wall, crying. What it said was:

  Hana, consider in your heart what you can and cannot do, for you will be putting yourself and your children at risk. Be—as I have tried to teach you—like the smartest animal that sees what others do not see and hears what others do not hear. Since you were a child, everyone has always marveled at your careful consideration.

  Her father goes on to assure her that they will receive her with open arms at any time.

  But what sticks in Hana’s mind is that first sentence of the letter: “Hana, consider in your heart.”

  She feels those words like they’re a physical weight, somewhere just beneath her breasts, on the left side.

  Hana is twenty-two years old, and she has two children, and she has wilted and become very thin. She is skin and bones now. She tries to negotiate, through a translator, with Kossakowska, but it would appear that that window has closed. Supposedly free, she feels as if she is in prison. She looks through the window at the grayish-white landscape, the bare orchard, pathetic and barren, and she understands that even if she were to get out of here, it wouldn’t matter, because this orchard and these fields, and this scant network of roads, the fords in the rivers and even the sky and the earth itself will be her prison. It is a good thing that Wittel Matuszewska and Pesel Pawłowska are there with her; Kossakowska treats the former as her secretary and the latter as a maid, chiding her exactly as she does her employees.

  From early in the morning on February 19, Hana has been waiting in her ceremonial garments as if she was about to be thrown to the dragon to be devoured. It is a Tuesday, an ordinary day, cold and gloomy. The staff is bustling around the house, the girls lighting the tiled stoves, giggling and calling out. The cold is moist and sticky and stinks of ash. Avacha cries, seems to have a fever, senses her mother’s anxiety, and follows her with her eyes above the little wooden doll she dresses and undresses. The one she got for Christmas is seated on her bed;
Avacha hardly ever touches her.

  Hana looks out the window, Kossakowska’s carriage is already pulling up, cream-colored, with the Potocki coat of arms on the door, the one Avacha likes so much she would like to ride in it everywhere they go. Hana looks away from it. She massages her arms, because the beautiful dress she received from Kossakowska for her baptism has sleeves of thin gauze. She looks through her chest for a warm Turkish scarf in dark red and wraps herself in it. The scarf smells of their home in Giurgiu—of dry, sun-cracked wood and raisins. Tears come to her eyes, and Hana abruptly turns away from her daughter so she won’t know her mother’s crying. Any minute now, the girls will come in with her coat, and she will have to go down with them. So she tries to pray quickly: Dio mio Baruchiah, Our Lord, Luminous Virgin—she doesn’t even know what she’s supposed to say in a prayer like that. What had her father told her to do? She brings back the incomprehensible words, one by one. Her heart starts beating quickly, and she knows that she has to do something fast.

  When the door opens, Hana faints clean to the floor, and the blood pours from her nose. The girls run up to her, letting out cries, to try to revive her.

  And so her prayer has been heard. The baptism must be postponed.

  V.

  The Book of

  METAL AND SULFUR

  24.

  The messianic machine, how it works

  Among the advantages of the state in which Yente has found herself is that she now understands the workings of the messianic machine. She sees the world from above—it is dark, faintly marked by sparks of light, each of them a home. A faltering glow in the western sky draws a red line under the world. A dark road winds, and beside it the river’s current gleams like steel. Along the road moves a vehicle, a tiny dot that can hardly be seen; a dull rattle spreads in waves through the dark, thick air as the cart goes over the little wooden bridge and on past the mill. The messianic machine is like that mill standing over the river. The dark water turns the great wheels evenly, without regard for the weather, slowly and systematically. The person by the wheels seems to have no significance; his movements are random and chaotic. The person flails; the machine works. The motion of the wheels transfers power to the stone gears that grind the grain. Everything that falls into them will be crushed into dust.

  Getting out of captivity also requires tragic sacrifices. The Messiah must stoop as low as possible, down into those dispassionate mechanisms of the world where the sparks of holiness, scattered into the gloom, have been imprisoned. Where darkness and humiliation are greatest. The Messiah will gather the sparks of holiness, which means that he will leave behind him an even greater darkness. God has sent him down from on high to be abased, into the abyss of the world, where powerful serpents will mercilessly mock him, asking: “Where’s that God of yours now? What happened to him? And why won’t he give you a hand, you poor thing?” The Messiah must remain deaf to those vicious taunts, step on the snakes, commit the worst acts, forget who he is, become a simpleton and a fool, enter into all the false religions, be baptized and don a turban. He must annul all prohibitions and eliminate all commandments.

  Yente’s father, who saw with his own eyes the First, that is, Sabbatai, brought the Messiah on his lips into their home and passed it on to his favorite daughter. The Messiah is something more than a figure and a person—it is something that flows in your blood, resides in your breath, it is the dearest and most precious human thought: that salvation exists. And that’s why you have to cultivate it like the most delicate plant, blow on it, water it with tears, put it in the sun during the day, move it into a warm room in the nighttime.

  Of Jacob’s arrival, on a February night in 1760, in Częstochowa

  They get on the Warsaw highway. The wheels of the carriage clatter over the slick cobblestones. The horses of the six armed men must pull forward and keep to the narrow road so as not to fall into the mud. Dusk approaches, and the last scraps of color fade into darkness, white murks into gray, gray becomes black, and black vanishes into the abyss that opens up before human eyes. It is everywhere, under every thing in the world.

  The little town of Częstochowa is situated on the left side of the Warta River, facing the monastery on the hill. It is made up of some dozen little homes, low, unsightly, damp, set up around a rectangular marketplace and along several little streets. The market is almost empty, its uneven, undulating cobblestones thinly iced over so that they seem to be covered in a shiny glaze. Yesterday’s trade fair has left horse droppings, trampled hay, and litter not yet swept up. Most of the little houses have double doors protected by an iron bar, which means that business is conducted inside them, although it would be difficult to guess what sort.

  They pass four women wrapped in plaid woolen shawls, from underneath which bright patches of aprons and bonnets stick out. A drunk man in a ragged peasant’s sukmana staggers by and grabs on to the beams of an empty stall. In the market square they turn right, onto the road that leads to the monastery. It is immediately visible when they emerge into the open: a tall tower, shooting straight up into the sky, alarming. Along the road, trees have been planted, and the lindens, now bare, accompany this shot of alarm like a soprano with a powerful bass.

  Suddenly a ragged snippet of a song is heard—it is coming from a group of pilgrims making their way quickly toward the little town. At first this song sounds like mere clamor, background noise, but gradually words can be distinguished, women’s high-pitched voices echoed by the rumble of two or three men’s: “We escape into your care, O Holy Mother of God . . .”

  These tardy pilgrims hurry past them, and the road is empty once again. The closer they come to the monastery, the more clearly they can see that it’s a fortress, a bastion holding fast to the hillside, squat and quadrangular. Behind the monastery, a bloodred strip of sky is suddenly revealed along the horizon.

  Jacob had asked his escorts to unshackle him, and they did so as soon as they left Warsaw. Inside the small carriage, an officer holding the rank of captain sits with him. At first he stared at the prisoner fairly insistently, but Jacob did not return his gaze and looked instead out the little window, although they soon had to cover it on account of the wind. The officer tried to talk to him, but Jacob ignored him. In the end, the only hint of intimacy that has emerged between them is the puffs of smoke released from two pipes when the prisoner accepts the offer of tobacco.

  The armed guards don’t know exactly who this prisoner might be, so they have tried to be particularly watchful just in case, although this man does not look like someone who would make a run for it. He is pale and probably ill—there are big dark circles under his eyes and a bruise on his cheek. He is weak, and unsteady on his feet. He coughs. When they stopped and he wanted to pee, his cook had to help him, holding him up by his shoulders. He sits huddled in the corner of the carriage, shivering. Kazimierz, who serves him not only as cook but as valet, is constantly putting the man’s fur cloak back onto his shoulders.

  It is already dark when they pull into the monastery courtyard, which is entirely empty. Some old wretch opened the gate for them and then disappeared. The tired horses come to a stop, turning into bulky, steaming shadows. After some time, there is the sound of a door creaking, and then some voices, and the brothers appear, carrying torches, surprised and embarrassed, as if they have been caught doing something they weren’t supposed to. They lead Jacob and Kazimierz into an empty waiting room with two wooden benches in it, but only Jacob sits. They wait for a long time; they arrived in the middle of a service. From somewhere beyond the walls of the waiting room they can hear men’s voices singing. From time to time the sound bursts through the walls, then the voices fade and a silence falls, as if the singers were now hatching some sort of plot. Then another song starts up. This pattern repeats several times. The captain yawns. It smells of damp stone, mossy rock, and vaguely of incense—the odor of the monastery.

  The prior is surprised by Jacob’s state. He keeps his hands inside the sleeves of his
light-colored wool habit, which is stained with ink at the cuffs. He takes an exceptionally long time to read the letter from Warsaw, probably finding room between the lines in which to consider how to handle this situation. He was expecting some headstrong heretic, impossible to get rid of in any more efficient way—which is why they’ve readied a cell for him in a monastery dungeon that has never been used before, at least not in the prior’s memory. But the letter clearly speaks of “internment,” rather than “imprisonment.” And in any case, this person with his hands shackled in no way gives the impression of being a villain or a heretic. His perfectly decent dress brings to mind instead a foreigner, an Armenian on the road, a Wallachian hospodar who lost his way in the night and wound up in this sacred place. The prior looks inquiringly at the captain of the convoy. Then he looks over at the frightened Kazimierz.

  “That is his cook,” says the captain, and those are the first words that have been uttered in the room.

  The prior’s name is Ksawery Rotter. He’s been in this role for just four months, and he doesn’t know what to do. That gray-blue cheek—did they beat him? he would like to ask. It was no doubt justified, sometimes confessions must be brought about through corporal means, he doesn’t question that general principle, but the fact laid bare like that is unpleasant. Violence disgusts him. He tries to see into the man’s face, but Jacob keeps his head lowered. The prior sighs and decides for now to have his humble belongings taken into the officer’s chamber by the tower, which no one uses. Brother Grzegorz will bring a mattress and hot water shortly, and maybe something to eat—if there’s something left in the kitchen.