Brother Grzegorz has been appointed as Jacob’s teacher. He is a gentle, middle-aged monk, patient and agreeable. Jacob’s bigger mistakes, the words he completely garbles, cause his cheeks to turn red—whether out of stifled anger or simply embarrassment. The lessons started with how to say “God bless” in Polish, “Szczęść Boże,” which is tough to pronounce and to write. Then they wrote out the Lord’s Prayer, until they finally got to simple conversations. Since the monastery does not have any books in Polish, and they have no particular need for Latin, Jacob brought Brother Grzegorz the book that had been recently delivered to him, Benedykt Chmielowski’s New Athens. Brother Grzegorz became a great fan of this vast volume and started secretly borrowing it from Jacob to read, no doubt feeling somewhat guilty about it, on the pretext of preparing texts to read together.
The lessons take place every day after morning mass, in which Jacob is permitted to participate. Brother Grzegorz brings in to the tower that reeks of damp the smell of incense and the rank oil with which they make their paint; his fingers are often stained colorfully, since they have begun the big paintings in the chapel, and Brother Grzegorz assists in mixing the paints.
“How are you today, sir?” He always starts with the same phrase, settling onto his stool and spreading his papers before him.
“All right,” answers Jacob. “I been waiting you, Brother Grzegorz.”
Pronouncing that name isn’t easy for him, but by May, Jacob is doing it almost perfectly.
“I have been waiting for you,” the monk corrects him.
Now they turn to chapter 10, “Of the Kingdom of Poland.”
In Sarmatia a precious Pearl appears to be the KINGDOM OF POLAND, of the Słowieński Nations the most renowned. Poland takes its Name from the Pola, or Fields, where the Polacy, or Poles, desired both to live and die; or else from a Polo Arctico, i.e., the North Star, to which the Kingdom of Poland corresponded, as Hispania is called Hesperia after the Western star Hesperus. To others it seems that this Name was given to Poles from the Pole Castle olim located on the Borders of Pomerania. There is that and there is the Opinion of the Authors that Polacy are Polachy, i.e., Lech’s Descendants should be known as such. Paprocki, meanwhile, ingeniose reasons that after Mieczysław I Polish Prince, when Poles Accepted the Holy Faith and acceded in droves to Holy Baptism, then the Czech Priests so invoked would ask: Are you polani? I.e., Have you been baptized? Then those who had been baptized responded: We are polani, hence polani, that is, Poloni went to the Poles in nomen gloriosum.
Jacob stammers through this text for a long time, getting stuck on the Latin interpolations, which he copies out to the side, no doubt for further study.
“And I am polani,” the student says to Brother Grzegorz, and raises his eyes from the book.
Of Jan Wołowski and Mateusz Matuszewski, who are the next to come to Częstochowa, in November of 1760
They both look like nobles. Especially Jan Wołowski, who of the Wołowski brothers has grown out his mustache the most—that’s what lends him much of his gravitas now. Both of them are dressed in winter kontusze lined with fur and warm fur hats, and they both seem sure of themselves and rich. The veterans view them with respect. They rented rooms in town down below, not far from the monastery. From their windows they can see the steep fortification wall. After two days of waiting, negotiations, and bribes, they are finally let inside to see Jacob. At the sight of them, Jacob bursts out laughing.
They stand there in astonishment. They certainly weren’t expecting this.
Jacob stops laughing and turns his back to them. They run up to him and kneel down at his feet. Wołowski has prepared a whole speech, but now he can’t quite get the words out. Jan, meanwhile, says simply:
“Jacob.”
At last Jacob turns toward them and gives them his hand. They kiss it, and he raises them to their feet. And then they cry, all three men, a pure weeping that is a kind of celebration, better than any words of greeting could ever be. Jacob holds them to him, like boys who have gotten into all sorts of trouble, he hugs them, holding their heads, patting the napes of their necks, until their fur hats with the decorative feathers fall off, and these envoys are transformed into sweaty children, happy to have found their way back home.
The visit lasts three days. They leave the tower only to attend to bodily necessities and to return to town at night. They have brought trunks and bags. In them are wine, sweetmeats, all manner of delicacies. The officer himself looked through them carefully and, well disposed after the bribe he got, did not forbid the presents—after all, Christmas is a time of mercy, even toward prisoners. In a large bag filled with things for Jacob, there is an eiderdown and some woolen scarves, leather slippers for the chilly stone floor, and even a small rug. Several pairs of socks, underwear with the monogram J.F. (all embroidered by the Wołowski women), writing paper and books . . . They lay it all out on the table first, and then, when they run out of space, they put it on the floor. Jacob is most interested in what he finds in the pots—butter, goose lard, and honey. In smaller linen bags there are also cakes and poppyseed rolls.
The candles burn late into the night, which unsettles Roch—he can’t stop checking in on them, under any pretext. He pokes his head in the door and asks if they don’t need hot water or a lit stove—hasn’t the other one gone out by now? Yes, they want water. But when he brings them full water jugs, they forget about them, and the water cools down again. On their last night they remain in the tower, and well into the morning their raised voices can be heard, and some long songs, and then everything falls quiet. In the morning all three of them go to mass.
Wołowski and Matuszewski leave Częstochowa on November 16. It is a lovely warm sunny day. They take with them a trunkful of letters and order lists. They leave the old soldiers a barrel of beer bought in town, and for the officers, Turkish pipes and the finest tobacco. What with the gold they gave them at the start, all in all they have made a pretty good impression.
That same month, Wołowski, Matuszewski, and Krysa go to Lublin to take a look at Wojsławice, where Kossakowska is preparing a place for them to live. But before they head there, the whole company is to transfer to Zamość, which is close to Wojsławice, and to wait there, under the care and protection of the ordynat.
Elżbieta Drużbacka to Father Benedykt Chmielowski, Vicar Forane of Rohatyn, Tarnów, Christmas, 1760
Because I find my hand suddenly willing to hold a pen, as it has not been for some time, I wish to congratulate you on your title of Canon, and on the 1,760th anniversary of the Lord’s birth, I wish you the greatest of His blessings, may you daily experience His grace.
I report to you as briefly as possible, dear friend, so as not to dwell o’ermuch on such a painful matter, and not to strain my agonizing heart, that last month my daughter Marianna died of the plague that came here from the east. That plague had already taken from this world six of my granddaughters, one after the other. Thus I have found myself in the most terrible situation, in which parents are condemned to outlive their children and grandchildren, despite the fact—or at least the appearance of fact—that this is contradictory to the whole natural order and to any sort of logic. My death, which until now has lurked somewhere in the distance, offstage, dressed up and made up, has now cast off its ball gown, and I see it before me in its true form. I am not frightened, and my death brings me no pain. It only seems to me that the months and years are now moving contrarywise. For how can an old person be permitted to go on, while the lives of the young are cut short? I fear to complain of it or to cry, for a creature like myself has not the boldness to debate with the Creator where he sets his limits, and I stand like a tree stripped of its bark—without feeling. I ought to depart, and no one would suffer or despair over it. I can’t find the words, and my thoughts break away from me . . .
Elżbieta Drużbacka’s heavy golden heart offered to the Black Madonna
She writes on a scrap of paper: “If you are truly merciful, bring them
back to life.” She sprinkles it with sand and waits for the ink to dry, then she rolls the paper up tight. She keeps this little roll in her hands as she enters the chapel. It is cold, and there are not many pilgrims, so she walks down the middle, going up as close as she is allowed, as close as the barriers will permit her. To her left, a legless soldier, with disheveled hair that looks like a hank of hemp, whimpers. He can’t even kneel. His uniform is ruined, its buttons long since replaced, the aiguillettes torn off, no doubt to be used for something else. Behind him is an elderly woman wrapped in headscarves, with a little girl whose face is misshapen by a purple lump. One of her eyes is almost completely obscured under that proud flesh. Drużbacka kneels nearby and prays to the covered picture.
She has had all of her jewelry melted down and fashioned into a big heart, not knowing how else to express her pain. She has a hole in her chest, and she must be mindful of it; it hurts and oppresses her. And so she had cast a prosthesis out of gold, a crutch for the heart. Now she makes a votive offering of it in the monastery, and the monks hang it alongside the other hearts. She doesn’t know why, but the sight of the heart joined with the other hearts, big and small, brings Drużbacka the greatest relief, greater than prayer and greater than gazing into the black, impenetrable face of the Madonna. There is so much pain on view here, Drużbacka’s own pain just a drop in the sea of tears that have been shed in this place. Every human tear enters a stream that flows into a little river, and then the river joins a bigger river, and so on, until in the end, in the great current of an enormous river, it washes into the sea and dissolves on the horizon. In these hearts hung up around the Madonna, Drużbacka sees mothers who have lost, or are losing, or will lose their children and grandchildren. And in some sense, life is this constant loss. Improving one’s station, getting richer, is the greatest illusion. In reality, we are richest at the moment of our birth; after that, we begin to lose everything. That is what the Madonna represents: the initial whole, the divine unity of us, the world and God, is something that must be lost. What remains in its wake is just a flat picture, a dark patch of a face, an apparition, an illusion. The symbol of life is after all the cross, suffering—nothing more. This is how she explains it to herself.
At night, in a pilgrims’ home where she has rented a modest room, she cannot sleep—she hasn’t slept in two months, only dozing off for brief periods. In one of those, she dreams of her mother, which is odd, because she hasn’t dreamed of her mother in twenty years. For this reason, Drużbacka understands this dream as a harbinger of her own death. She is sitting on her mother’s lap, she can’t see her face. She sees only the complicated pattern on her dress, a sort of labyrinth.
When the next morning, still before dawn, she returns to the church, her gaze is drawn by the tall, well-built man in a Turkish outfit, dark, with a caftan buttoned up to the neck, his head bare. He has a thick black mustache, and long hair flecked with gray. At first he prays feverishly, kneeling—his lips move soundlessly, and his lowered eyelids, with their long lashes, tremble; then he lies down with his arms outspread on the cold floor, in the very center of the church, right in front of the barrier that protects the holy picture.
Drużbacka finds a place for herself in the nave, near the wall, and kneels with difficulty, the pain running from her knees all through her little old body. In the nearly empty church, every shuffle, every breath is amplified into a hum or a whistle that rebounds off the vault until it is drowned out by one of the songs intoned at irregular intervals by the monks:
Ave regina coelorum,
Ave Domina Angelorum:
Salve radix, salve porta,
Ex qua Mundo lux est orta.
Drużbacka tries to find some scratches in the wall, some chinks between the marble slabs with which the walls are lined, where she might be able to insert her roll of paper. For how would her missive make it to God if not through the stone lips of the temple? The marble is smooth, and its joints are mercilessly meticulous. In the end, she is able to press the scrap of paper into a shallow crack, but she knows it won’t last long there. No doubt it will fall out soon, and crowds of pilgrims will trample it.
That same day, in the afternoon, she meets again that tall man with the pockmarked face. Now she knows who he is. She grabs hold of his sleeve, and he looks at her in surprise, his gaze soft and gentle.
“Are you the imprisoned Jewish prophet?” she asks without preamble, looking up at him; she reaches barely to his chest.
He understands, and he nods. His face doesn’t change; it is gloomy and ugly.
“You have worked miracles, you have healed, that is what I heard.”
Jacob does not so much as blink an eye.
“My daughter died, as did six of my grandchildren.” Drużbacka spreads out her fingers before him and counts: one, two, three, four, five, six . . . “Have you heard of bringing the dead back to life? Some people seem to be able to do it. Prophets know the way. Have you ever managed to do it, even with just an old dog?”
25.
Yente sleeping under stork wings
Pesel, who has already been baptized, has decided to marry a cousin with the same last name, so now her name is Marianna Pawłowska. The wedding takes place in Warsaw, in the autumn of 1760, during the sad time when the Lord is imprisoned in Częstochowa and when the whole machna seems to be sort of pressed down to the ground, uncertain and fearful. And yet her father, Israel, now Paweł, also Pawłowski, as the whole family took the same name, believes that they have to go on living and marrying and bearing children. That cannot be avoided. Life is a force, like a flood, like a powerful current of water—you cannot oppose it. That is what he says as he sets up, with his limited means, his leather goods workshop, where he intends to sew beautiful wallets and belts from Turkish leather.
A modest wedding takes place early one morning, in a church in Leszno. The priest took a long time to explain to them how everything would happen, but even so, Pesel and her fiancé, along with her mother, Sobla (now Helena), her father, Paweł Pawłowski, and all the witnesses and guests feel insecure, as if they haven’t quite mastered the dance steps they are about to perform.
Pesel’s eyes are filled with nervous tears, which the priest takes for the heightened emotions of an ordinary bride, and he smiles at her as he would at a child. If it were proper, he would pat her on the head.
Tables have been set around the apartment, from which the rest of the furniture has been removed. The food is already waiting for them. The guests, tired after the long mass in the cold church, would like to warm themselves. As they eat, Paweł Pawłowski pours vodka into their glasses—to reinvigorate them and to relax them, since the whole company is having to deal with something foreign and unpleasant and new. And yet they all know that from now on, this is how it’s going to be. It’s as if they were seated around a great void that they were consuming with spoons, as if what was covered in white tablecloths were pure nothingness, and they were celebrating its pale chill. This strange feeling lasts through the first two courses and glasses of vodka. Then the curtains in the windows are drawn, the tables are pushed up against the wall, and Franciszek Wołowski and the father of the bride perform a second wedding, the familiar kind, a wedding that is theirs. Hands seek out hands, nerves calm down once they are standing in a circle, holding on to one another, as up to the ceiling of the apartment rises a prayer in a language that Pesel and her young husband can no longer understand, said in a whisper, mysterious and eternal.
Pesel-Marianna bows her head like the others, and her thoughts fly far afield, to Yente, who stayed back in the Korolówka cave. She can’t stop thinking of it. Did they do the right thing, bearing that tiny body down into the depths of those passageways, as though against the flow of time, to its stone-black beginning? What else could they have done? Before leaving, she brought Yente nuts and flowers. She covered her up in a cape she had embroidered—it was supposed to be for the wedding, but then Pesel thought that since Yente was to stay behind, she
would by means of this cape nonetheless be able to be present on Pesel’s special day. The cape is made of pink damask, decorated with white silk and white tassels. Marianna embroidered a bird on it, a stork with a snake in its beak, standing on one leg, like the ones that fly into Korolówka’s riverside meadows and step pompously across the tall grass. She kissed her great-grandmother on the cheek and found her cheek cool and fresh as usual. She said in parting, “The Lord will cover you up with His feathers, Yente, and under His wings you will be safe, as it says in Psalm 91.” Pesel is quite certain that Yente would like the stork with the snake in his beak. His big, powerful wings, his red legs, his down, his dignified step.
Now, as this second wedding takes place, the doubly named PeselMarianna also thinks about her singly named sister Freyna, whom she has always loved the most of all her siblings and who remained in Korolówka with her husband and children. She vows to herself that she will visit Freyna again come spring, and that she will do so every year; she swears on her own grave.
Yente, who sees this from underneath the stork’s wing, from above, as usual, knows that this is a vow that her great-granddaughter will be unable to keep.
Of Yente’s measurement of graves
Yente’s gaze also hovers over Częstochowa, the little village nestled into the hillside over which the Madonna reigns. But Yente can see only the roofs—here the even roofs of the Jasna Góra monastery have just been covered with brand-new tiles, while down below the rotten roofs of the huts and houses have wooden shingles over them.
The Books of Jacob Page 73
