The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  The prior comes to see the prisoner the following day, but they are unable to communicate. The cook tries to translate, but since his Polish is garbled, the prior isn’t sure whether this strange prisoner is able to understand his good intentions. Dejected, he responds with no more than a yes or a no, so the prior does not importune him further and is relieved to leave him. Back in his own chamber, he glances at the letter lying on the table:

  The person whom we have entrusted to the fatherly protection of the Church and given over to the wardship of the Jasna Góra monastery is not dangerous in the sense in which a common villain would be, quite the opposite. He will seem calm and good to you, Father, though no doubt foreign and very different from the people with whom you would ordinarily come into contact . . . For he, though born as a Jew in Podolia, was raised in foreign Turkish lands, fully converting to their foreign language and customs . . .

  There follows an abbreviated biography of the prisoner, arriving at an alarming formulation that causes the prior an unpleasant cramp in his stomach: “considered himself the Messiah.” Then the missive concludes:

  For this reason we do not recommend any close association with him. And during his internment, it would be best to seclude him as much as possible and treat him as a singular resident, the duration of his arrest being infinite, after all, and there being no circumstances under which this will change.

  This final sentence, too, fills the prior with unexpected alarm.

  What Jacob’s prison is like

  It is a chamber right next to the tower, right there in the defensive wall, with two narrow little windows. The fathers put in two pallets—apparently this is what they sleep on, too—and a straw mattress just stuffed with hay, a little table, and a chair. There is also a porcelain chamber pot, mercilessly chipped all over to the point of being perilous. In the afternoon a second mattress appears, for Kazimierz. Kazimierz, who alternates between grumbling and crying, unpacks his baggage and his minimal supplies, but there is no way he will be allowed into the monastery kitchen. They show him to a second kitchen, the one for the help, and right next to it is a firepit where he can cook.

  Jacob has a fever for several days and stops getting up from his pallet. This is why Kazimierz requests from the Pauline Fathers some fresh goose meat, and from the kitchen he borrows a pot, since he didn’t bring his own cooking utensils. He prepares the meat over the primitive firepit and, throughout the day, mouthful by little mouthful, he gives Jacob the broth. The prior supplies them with bread and crumbly old cheese; he has a stake in the prisoner’s health, and he chips in a bottle of powerful spirits, as well. He says to drink it with hot water—it will heat them up. In the end, Kazimierz drinks the spirits, justifying this by the thought that he has to be strong to take care of Jacob; in any case, Jacob does not wish to touch the spirits, but he does consume the broth, which seems to do him good. One day, Kazimierz awakens in the early morning, as the brothers shuffle in for their prayers. The pale dawn enters their chamber through the little window, and Kazimierz sees that Jacob isn’t sleeping—his eyes are open, and he is looking at the cook as though he cannot see him. A chill runs down Kazimierz’s spine.

  All day the guards’ eyes follow Kazimierz’s movements with great curiosity. These guards are strange, old and crippled. One of them is missing a leg and uses a wooden crutch to get around, but he wears a uniform and keeps a musket slung over his shoulder. He behaves like a real soldier, puffing out his chest although the buttonholes of his uniform are frayed and the seams of his sleeves are half unstitched. Around his neck he wears a tobacco pouch.

  What kind of army is this? wonders Kazimierz, his lips curling in disgust. But he is scared of them. He has noticed that anything may be arranged with them in exchange for tobacco, so he swipes the occasional pinch from the Lord—in this way he is able to get both a pot and some fuel to heat it. One day one of those veterans, almost toothless, with his threadbare uniform buttoned all the way to the top, sits down next to Kazimierz and starts a conversation:

  “Who is that master of yours, son?”

  Kazimierz doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say, but since this particular soldier brought him a gridiron before, he feels obligated to respond somehow.

  “He is a great gentleman.”

  “We can see that, that he’s great and all. But what’s he in for?”

  The cook just shrugs. He doesn’t know. They are all staring at him—he can feel them looking.

  The toothless one, the one hungriest for money, is Roch. He keeps Kazimierz company for hours on end, as Kazimierz is cooking outside. The smoke from the damp wood reeks.

  “What’s that you’re cooking up, son? The smell of it really turns my guts,” Roch starts, filling his little pipe.

  Kazimierz tells him that his master likes Turkish food and Turkish spices. Everything is spicy—in his open palm he shows the man little dry peppers.

  “Where’d you come by all that Turkish cooking?” asks the old soldier indifferently, and when he learns that Kazimierz was brought up on Wallachian and Turkish cuisine, the whole garrison knows by evening. At night, those who are not standing guard go down into town and warm themselves up with the cheapest, most watered-down beer, and shoot the breeze. Some of them have family here, but those you can count on one hand. The rest are lone wolves, old men worn out in battle, with their miserable army pensions, supported by the Pauline Fathers. When a noble and his entourage come through on pilgrimage, they are not ashamed to put one hand out for alms as they hold their weapon in the other.

  At Easter, after many petitions from Jacob, the prisoner is granted permission to walk out onto the ramparts once a week. From then on, all the old soldiers await his Sunday promenade. Would you look at that, he’s up there now. The Jewish prophet. His dark figure, tall but stooped, walks along the wall, there and back, turning with a kind of violence and racing in the other direction, to then rebound off some invisible wall and start back again, like a pendulum. You could set the clocks by him. Roch will do exactly that—he will adjust the watch he received from the convert. It is the most valuable thing he has ever owned in his life, and he regrets that this has happened to him only now. If he had had it twenty years ago . . . He pictures himself in his parade uniform, walking into an inn teeming with comrades in arms. At least he can be assured that, thanks to this watch, he will have a decent funeral, with a wooden casket and a grand salvo.

  He observes the prisoner calmly, without sympathy, accustomed as he is to unexpected twists of fate. To Roch’s mind, this convert prophet’s is a pretty decent fate. His followers provide their master with good food and smuggle money into the monastery, even though it is strictly prohibited. Many things are prohibited in the monastery, and yet they have everything here, whether it’s Wallachian or Magyar wine or even vodka, and everyone closes their eyes to tobacco. The bans have little effect. They only work at the start, but then human nature with its long finger begins to poke a hole in them, first a little one and then, when it encounters no resistance, a larger and larger one. Until finally the hole is bigger than what isn’t the hole. That’s how it goes with any interdiction.

  The prior, for example, has banned the old soldiers on numerous occasions from begging for alms at the entrance to the church. And they really did quit for a while, but then, after a few days—though there wasn’t any begging—one hand did extend for just a little while as the pilgrims passed by. Soon others joined it, then more and more, until, after another few days, a muttering began:

  “Spare a little change.”

  The flagellants

  Over the course of several days, warmth returns, and the beggars who flock to the monastery from all over cluster around the gate. Some of them hop on one leg, unpleasantly waving the stump of the other like an enormous, shameful member. Others point out to the pilgrims the empty sockets left when the Cossacks gouged out their eyes. Along with this they sing long, melancholy songs, the words of which have been turned to felt from endless
rolling and pressing in toothless mouths, becoming unrecognizable. The men’s hair is matted—it hasn’t been cut in a long time—their clothing is in tatters, and their feet are wrapped in gray rags riddled with holes. They extend their bony hands for alms; you would need to have your pockets full of coins in order to give something to everyone here.

  Jacob is sitting with his face to the sun, right by the window. The patch of light is exactly the size to cover it, like a gleaming handkerchief. On the rampart opposite sits Roch, also basking in the early springtime sun; he has more of it than the prisoner does. He has slipped off his uncomfortable boots and undone his wrappings—now his bare white feet with their black toenails point straight up into the clear blue sky. He takes out some tobacco and carefully, slowly, puts it in his pipe.

  “Hey, you, Jewish prophet, you still in there?” he says in the direction of the window.

  Jacob, surprised, opens his eyes. He smiles a friendly smile.

  “They say you’re some kind of heretic, not like Luther, but like a Jewish Luther, and that we ought to keep our distance.”

  Jacob doesn’t understand him. He watches the man light his pipe, and his stomach hurts to look—he would love to smoke, but he doesn’t have any tobacco. Roch must feel him looking, because he holds the pipe out toward him, but of course he can’t actually pass it to him, they’re separated by several meters.

  “Everybody wants to smoke,” he mutters to himself.

  A while later, he brings Jacob a little bundle, and in it are tobacco and a pipe, a simple peasant’s pipe. He sets it down on the stone step and limps off.

  All through Lent the penitents come every Friday. They come from town in a procession. At the front, one of them carries a great cross with the figure of the Crucified, so realistically done that your blood runs cold just looking at it. They are dressed in sacks of thick-woven pink linen, with an opening cut into the backs so that they can whip themselves better. This opening can be covered with a flap. On their heads are smaller sacks with openings for their ears and eyes, which makes them look like animals or spirits. When the flagellants at the head and tail of the procession beat their staffs, the others lie down on the ground, pray, and then raise the flaps on their backs and begin to whip themselves. Some do this with leather whips, others with wire ones that have sharp metal spikes on the tips to better tear apart the body. Often when a spike catches the skin, a spray of blood hits onlookers.

  It isn’t until Good Friday that things really get going in the monastery. From dawn, when the gates are opened, there is an undulating flow of gray-brown crowds, as if the earth—itself just coming back to its senses, gray and still partly frozen—has sent up these people like so many halfrotten tubers. It is mostly peasants in thick felt trousers and sukmanas of indeterminate color, their hair disheveled, their wives in thick wrinkled trousers and fustian kerchiefs, aprons tied around their middles. No doubt they have ceremonial clothing at home, but on Good Friday you have to bring all the worthlessness and ugliness of the world out into the light of day. There is so much of it that the ordinary human heart would be unable to bear it without the help of that body on the cross, which is willing to take upon itself all the pain of Creation.

  As proof that this is a special time, among the crowd there are those who are possessed, who cry out in a terrifying voice, and madmen who speak many languages at once so that you cannot understand them. There are exorcists as well, ex-priests in tattered cassocks, their bags filled with relics they lay on the heads of the possessed to drive out the demons.

  The prior allows Jacob to go out onto the rampart that day, under Roch’s watchful eye, so that he can observe this murky human flood. He must be counting on this procession to make an impression on his prisoner and exhort his insufficiently Catholic soul to repent.

  It takes some time for Jacob’s eyes to grow accustomed to the light and to the bouquet of spring colors. Then they follow the movements of the people, sating themselves, and it seems to Jacob that the crowd is fermenting, bubbling like sourdough. His eyes consume all the details hungrily, after weeks of having only the stones on the wall and the tiny piece of the world visible from the cell’s little window to react to. Now, from the rampart, they take in the monastery, the tower, the whole enormous complex and the walls that enclose it. Finally his gaze slides over the heads of the pilgrims, over the monastery roofs and walls to absorb the full panorama: a slightly undulating terrain, gray and sad, stretching to the vast horizon, dotted with villages and towns, the largest of which is the village of Częstochowa. Roch explains to him, partly in words, partly with gestures, that this name comes from the fact that the holy shrine located within it often (często) conceals (chowa) itself from the eyes of sinners, and you have to take a really good look to spot it among the gently sloping hills.

  The holy picture that conceals without revealing

  Jacob is permitted to enter the crowd in front of the picture. He is scared, but not of the picture—of the crowd. It is made up of pilgrims—highly emotional men, sweaty, with freshly shaven faces and smoothed hair, and townswomen, a motley bunch with flushed faces, the married ones in their finest garments, with yellow leather boots. What can he have in common with them? He towers over most of their heads, staring at this crowd that strikes him as frighteningly foreign.

  The chapel is filled with paintings and votive offerings. It has only recently been explained to him that these are offerings for the monastery, all in the shape of ailing body parts the Virgin Mary has healed. There are also wooden legs and crutches left for her after miraculous recoveries, along with the thousands of hearts cast in silver, gold, or copper, and livers and breasts and legs and arms, as if a single being has been broken down into a million pieces that the holy picture will put back together and fix.

  The crowd is silent, but for a cough here and there, to which the chapel’s vault adds gravity. A single, full-throated cry escapes a possessed man who can no longer bear the anticipation.

  Suddenly the bells ring, and then the drums beat so loudly that Jacob would like to cover his ears with his hands. As if struck by a sudden blow, everyone throws themselves to their knees with a boom and a sigh, and those who can find the space lie facedown on the floor, while those who can’t hunch over the floor like clods of earth. Now the frightening trumpets play like Jewish shofars, the air vibrates, the noise is terrible. Something strange freezes in the air, so that your heart contracts as if from fear, but it isn’t fear, it’s something bigger, and it happens to Jacob, too, so that he falls on his face, onto the floor that was only just stomped all over by peasants’ dirty shoes, and here, next to the floor, the racket quiets, and it’s easier to bear the tightness in his chest that out of nowhere folded him in half. Now, through the bodies that carpet the chapel floor, God ought to pass. But Jacob smells only the horse dung brought in on people’s shoes and rubbed into the cracks between the planks of the floor, and the distinctly unpleasant smell, ubiquitous at this time of year, of damp combined with wool and human sweat.

  Jacob looks up and sees that the ornate cover over the picture has been lifted so that it is now almost completely exposed, and he expects that a light will shine from within it—a blinding light that cannot be borne by the human eye—but all he sees are two dark shapes against a silver backdrop. It takes him a while to realize those shapes are faces, a woman and a child, dark, impenetrable, as if they were leaning out of the deepest darkness.

  Kazimierz lights a tallow candle—he has a package of them. It shines brighter than the oil lamps the monks have given them.

  Jacob is sitting with his cheek pressed to the wall. Kazimierz is cleaning the shaving bowl. Floating in it are the short hairs of Jacob’s beard; Kazimierz has just finishing shaving him. Jacob’s hair is tousled, but it refuses to be made orderly. Kazimierz thinks that if things keep going like this, his master will resemble those warhorses with their matted, unkempt hair. Jacob is talking, partly to himself, partly to Kazimierz, who in a moment will start
preparing dinner. He managed to get a little bit of good meat at the market—the butchers’ stalls are overfull now, just before the holidays. The Lord demanded pork, and Kazimierz has it. He turns the iron bowl upside down to create something like a grill. The meat has been marinating since morning. Jacob is playing with a nail, and soon he’s using it to scratch something into the wall.

  “Kazimierz, do you know that delivery of the people from Egypt was only partial, because the one who got them out of there was a man, and the true delivery will come from a Virgin?”

  “What virgin?” Kazimierz asks, only half paying attention, laying out the meat on the grill.

  “That’s obvious. It’s obvious because once you sweep all the dust off all those stories and parables, all that chicanery, it’s clear as day. Have you seen the picture they have here? The dark shining face of the Jasna Góra Virgin is the Shekhinah.”

  “How can a face shine darkly?” Kazimierz wonders astutely. The meat is roasting now—now he just has to watch the fire to make sure it stays the way it is and doesn’t get too hot.

  “If you don’t know that, you don’t know anything,” Jacob says, annoyed. “David and Sabbatai were secretly women. It can’t come to salvation any way other than through a woman. I know that now, and that’s what I’m here for. From the beginning of the world, that Virgin has been dedicated to me alone, to no one else, because I can protect her.”

  Kazimierz doesn’t really understand. He flips over the pieces of meat, carefully spreads fat on them.

  Jacob isn’t sensitive to smells. He goes on:

  “Here people are trying to paint her so they don’t forget about her, whereas she has to hide in the abyss. They miss the sight of her. But that is not her real face, since everyone sees her differently—we have senses that are imperfect, that’s why that is. But every day she will appear to us more clearly, down to her every detail.”