So the head of the kahal kept talking:
“At that time, I was a Christian; I was an important official. Among my responsibilities, I was charged with organizing forced conversions. When the Baal Shem Tov came to me that night, I jumped up from the table where I was writing out ordinances. I was surprised by the sight of that bearded Hasid, who furthermore began to yell at me in Polish: ‘How much longer? How long is this going to take? How much more will you make your brothers suffer?’ I looked at him in utter astonishment, thinking the old man had lost his mind and confused me with someone else. But he would not stop yelling: ‘Are you not aware that you are a rescued Jewish child, taken in and raised by a Polish family who always hid from you your true origins?’ Before the holy man disappeared, as suddenly as he had come in, I was overcome by great confusion, guilt, and regret. ‘Is it possible for me to be forgiven everything I have done to my brothers?’ I asked in a trembling voice. Then the Baal Shem Tov replied: ‘On the day when someone comes and tells you this story, you will know that you have been forgiven.’”
Jakubowski would also like for someone to come and visit him and tell him such a story. Jakubowski would also like to be forgiven.
The larch manor in Wojsławice and Zwierzchowski’s teeth
The manor house was fully restored over the summer. It received a new roof, a new truss, and larch shingles. The rooms were repainted, the stoves cleaned out, and one was completely redone in beautiful white tiles that came all the way from somewhere near Sandomierz. There are six rooms, two of which are intended for the ladies, Hana and her little daughter, while in the others the women who accompany Hana and serve her have taken up their lodgings. In one of the rooms lives the Zwierzchowski family. There is no drawing room—they all just meet in the big kitchen, where it is warmest. The rest of the company is confined to the grange, under poor conditions, for those dwellings are moldy and damp.
The worst is that from the start they are afraid to walk into the village. Everyone glowers at them there—the Jews who take up the little marketplace and run the businesses, and the goyim, too, are hostile. Someone has painted black crosses on the door of the manor, and they don’t know who did it and what they mean. The two brushstrokes going across one another make a sinister impression.
One night someone sets the shed on fire, and it’s just lucky that it starts snowing, and the fire goes out.
Zwierzchowski and Piotrowski have gone to see that woman, Kossakowska, who now watches over them from the palace of her cousins the Potockis, in Krasnystaw, and complain of idleness.
“To do business we would need to go to Krasnystaw, or even Zamość, because they won’t let us in here. We had a stand at the fair, but they overturned it in the snow, and much of what we had to sell was stolen and destroyed,” says Piotrowski, following Kossakowska with his gaze as she paces up and down the length of the room.
“They took apart our carriage—we don’t even have a way to get anywhere,” Piotrowski adds after a moment.
“Her Ladyship is afraid to leave the house,” says Zwierzchowski. “We had to set up guards around the orchard. But why should we have to have guards, when it’s mostly just women, children, and the elderly?”
After they leave, Kossakowska sighs to her distant cousin Marianna Potocka:
“There’s always some new demand from them. This thing is not good, that thing is bad. I have dealt with all of it. The stove alone cost me a fortune.”
Kossakowska is wearing all black, in mourning for her husband. He died on Christmas, 1761. The death of her husband—sudden, needless (he caught a cold from going out to the kennel when his favorite dog had a litter of puppies)—has put her in a strange state, as if she were slowly sinking into a pot of lard. Whatever she tries to hold on to simply slips out of her hands. She takes a step, and she sinks. She used to call him “that old cripple” to Agnieszka, but now, without him, she feels completely helpless. The funeral took place in Kamieniec, and she came directly thence to Krasnystaw; she knows that she will not go back to Kamieniec.
“I can’t help them any longer,” Kossakowska explains to Marianna. To which Potocka, an old woman by now, and very pious, says:
“And what more can I do for them? I have already sponsored so many baptisms, and we readied the manor for them together . . .”
“I’m not talking about more donations,” says Kossakowska. “From what I have heard from Warsaw, they have powerful foes who are equipped with powerful means, which they are not merely squandering on purses filled with gold. You would be surprised”—she lowers her voice for a moment, and then cries out—“with Minister Brühl! Who, as everybody knows, has a good relationship with the Jews, and deposits state money with them. So what can I, little old Kossakowska, do about that? When Bishop Sołtyk wasn’t able to do anything?” Kossakowska rubs her furrowed brow. “What we need is some sort of intelligent—”
“Write to them,” Marianna Potocka says to Katarzyna. “Tell them that they need to sit tight and wait. And set a good example for those other unfaithful Jews who are still so mired in the error of their sinful ways.”
This happens in the spring of 1762. An early spring wind, dense with moisture, is blowing. The potatoes are sprouting in the cellar, mold has gotten into the flour. On the door black crosses show up again, like a form of pre-harvest, misshapen flora. When one of Kossakowska’s charges tries to go shopping, the Jews spit in his face and close the shops to him. The goyim poke at them and call them ne’er-do-wells. The men are constantly getting into fights. Recently some young men from town attacked Zwierzchowski and his teenage daughter as they were coming back from Lublin in their carriage. They raped the girl and knocked out her father’s teeth. Afterward, Zwierzchowski’s wife gathered the teeth from the mud and brought them back into the manor and showed them to everyone on her outstretched palm. Three teeth—a bad omen.
A few days later, the girl hanged herself, much to her parents’ despair.
Of torture and curses
The solution is so simple it seems to be hanging right there in the air, ready for the plucking. So obvious is it that it would be very hard even to say whose idea it first was. It goes like this:
Shortly before Easter, a woman dressed as a Jew, with a turban on her head and a kerchief over her shoulders, wearing wrinkly skirts, goes to the local priest and introduces herself as the wife of the Wojsławice rabbi. She doesn’t say much, only that she overheard that her husband and some others killed a child for Christian blood, as Passover is approaching, and they need the blood for their holiday matzah. The priest is stunned. The woman is disturbed, behaving strangely, won’t look him in the eye, paces nervously from one end of the room to the other, covers her face. The father doesn’t believe her. He sees her to the door and advises her to calm down.
Nonetheless, the next day, the priest, feeling uneasy, goes to Krasnystaw to Lady Marianna Teresa Potocka and her close relative Katarzyna Kossakowska, and the three of them report this unusual affair to the police. An investigation is launched.
The investigators find the body without any particular effort; it is lying underneath some branches near the rabbi’s house. The child’s skin has been pricked, though the child isn’t bruised or otherwise marked. The tiny wounds on the naked body of the dark-haired, three-year-old Mikołaj look fake, shallow little pits that seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with blood. Come evening, they arrest the two rabbis of Wojsławice, Sender Zyskieluk and Henryk Józefowicz, along with the wife of the former and some dozen or so others from the Wojsławice kahal. The priest tries to find the other rabbi’s mysterious wife, so that she can confirm her testimony, but she has disappeared. The other rabbi, in fact, is a widower. During the torture to which all three prisoners are immediately subjected, they confess to a number of murders, to robbing churches and profaning the host, and soon enough it comes out that the whole Jewish kahal in the village of Wojsławice, numbering some eighty persons, is made up of murderers. Both rabbis, as well as Leyb M
oshkowicz Sienicki and Yosa Szymułowicz, confess under torture—as though they were one man—that they killed the little boy, and that, after draining his blood, they threw out the body to be eaten by dogs.
Zwierzchowska, both Piotrowskis, Pawłowski, and the Wołowskis, referring to the well-known “seventh point” of the Lwów disputation, all confirm the reality of these ritual crimes. This evidence makes such a great impression at court that the next day a mass lynching is only barely avoided. Kossakowska entreats Sołtyk to come—and in the end he does, as a specialist in such concerns. He instructs the two women, Kossakowska and Potocka, in what view they ought to take of it. Kossakowska, who is one of the last to testify, mentions the crosses on the houses and the persecution of the new arrivals. The trial takes a long time, since everyone wants to learn as many details as possible about this Jewish iniquity. Pamphlets are read out, mostly those of Serafinowicz, a Jewish convert who, years later, confessed to Jewish crimes, but also the writings of Fathers Pikulski and Awedyk. Everything seems clear and obvious, and so it comes as no surprise that all of the accused are sentenced to death. They will be drawn and quartered, unless they agree to be baptized, in which case they will be shown mercy and beheaded instead. Four of the convicts decide on baptism. Just before their beheading, they are baptized ceremoniously in church, and afterward they are buried with great pomp in the Christian cemetery. Sender Zyskieluk manages to hang himself in his cell and—since in this way he avoided the real punishment—his body is dragged through the streets of Krasnystaw and then burned in the market square. Afterward there is nothing to be done besides drive the rest of the Jews out of town, which, before he hanged himself, Rabbi Zyskieluk put a curse on, all its inhabitants included.
In the summer, the children at the Wojsławice estate and on the grange begin to get sick, but only the children of the neophytes, while the peasant children do not seem to be affected by this plague. Several of the neophyte children die. First, the Pawłowskis’ little girl, just a few months old, and then Wojtuś Majewski, and then his seven-year-old sister. By August, when the heat is at its peak, there is almost no family whose children have not been stricken. Kossakowska summons a doctor from Zamość, but he is unable to help. He tells them to place warm compresses on their backs and chests. He manages to save little Zosia Szymanowska only by cutting a hole in her throat with a knife as she is starting to suffocate. It is an illness that passes from child to child—first they cough, then they get a fever, and then they cough to death. Kossakowska attends their small, humble funerals. They dig the little graves in the Catholic cemetery in Wojsławice at a remove from the other graves, aware of their otherness. By the end of August, there is a funeral just about every day. Marianna Potocka is so alarmed that she has shrines built at the town’s five tollhouses to protect them from all the forces of evil: Saint Barbara from storms and conflagrations, Saint John of Nepomuk from floods, Saint Florian from fires, and Saint Tecla from any plagues. The fifth shrine is dedicated to Michael the Archangel, who is to protect the town from all manner of ill and spell and curse.
The eldest Łabęcki, Moshe, dies too, leaving behind his extremely young wife, Teresa, with a child at her breast. They say when someone is about to die, a great black crow settles on the roof of that person’s house. No one has any doubt that this is the curse at work, and that it is powerful and terrible. After the departure of Moshe Łabęcki, who knew how to lift herems and return them to their source, everyone feels defenseless. It seems to them that now everyone will die. This is why they remember Hayah Hirsh, now Lanckorońska, the prophetess. Lady Hana writes to her herself, with an urgent request: They must know what will happen next. She sends messengers with letters to Jacob in Częstochowa as well as to Hayah and the rest of the company in Warsaw, but no answer arrives. It is as if the messengers have simply vanished.
How Hayah prophesies
When she speaks in others’ voices, Hayah always keeps in front of her something that looks like a map, painted on a board. There are various mysterious signs on it, and a drawing of a sefirot tree, only quadrupled; it looks like an extremely ornate cross, like a four-branched snowflake that can’t exist in nature. She arranges on it pieces of bread with feathers stuck into them, and buttons, and seeds, and each one looks bizarre, like a human figurine, but nightmarish, indecent, somehow. Hayah has a pair of dice—one of them with numbers on it, and the other one with letters. On the board are some clumsily painted circles. The boundaries between them are blurred, indistinct; there are scattered letters and symbols, and in the corners there are animals, suns, and moons. There is a dog and a big fish, maybe a carp. The board must be old: in some places the paint has completely peeled off, leaving no understandable trace of what used to be there.
Now Hayah toys with the dice, rolling them around in her palms, staring at the board. You never know how long any of it is going to take, but then her eyelids start to blink and tremble, and the dice are rolled, revealing an answer. According to the prediction, Hayah then sets out the figures on the board, whispers something to herself, nudges them, changes their layout, sets some to the side, takes some others from somewhere else—the new ones even stranger than the last. It is hard to comprehend this odd game, looking at it from outside, since its configuration is constantly changing. And as she does these strange things, Hayah converses, inquiring after the children, the quality of this year’s jams, all the family members’ health. Then suddenly Hayah says, in the same tone she uses for the jam, that the king is going to die, and that there will be an interregnum. The women freeze amidst the potato peels; the children stop chasing each other around the table. Hayah stares at her figurines and speaks again:
“The new king will be the last king of Poland. Three seas will flood the nation. Warsaw will be left an island. Young Łabęcka will give birth to a child whose father has died, a little girl, and she will become a great princess. Jacob will be freed by his greatest enemies, and with his closest allies, he will make an escape to the south. Everyone in this room right now will live in a great castle on a wide river, where they will wear sumptuous clothing and forget their language.”
Even Hayah seems to be surprised by what she’s saying. She has a funny expression on her face, as if she were stifling laughter or trying to hold back the words that keep coming out of her mouth. She grimaces.
Marianna Wołowska, who has been putting eggs into a basket, says:
“I told you. The river is the Dniester. We’ll all go back to Ivanie, and that is where we’ll build our palaces. That great river is the Dniester.”
Edom is shaken to its foundations
After the death of Augustus III of Wettin, in October 1763, the bell rings all day. The monks take turns at the rope, while the crowd of pilgrims, not especially large at this time of year and diminished somewhat, too, by the chaos in the country, is suddenly overwhelmed by great terror—everyone lies on the ground with their arms spread out, until there is no longer any way to pass from the courtyard into the church.
Jacob learns of this from Roch, who comes right away and says it with some satisfaction.
“There will be a war. That is for certain, and they may take us all back again, since they’ve got no one watching over this Catholic country, and all the infidels and heretics are already out there, grasping for the Commonwealth.”
Jacob feels sorry for this old man and gives him a few groszy to convey, as usual, some letters outside the monastery’s censorship, which means he’ll have to take them into the village and there give them to Shmul. Jacob, too, would like for there to be a war. Then he goes to the prior, intending to complain that the brothers are holding on to his food and other things from town, including tobacco. He knows the prior won’t do anything about it, he complains like this every Thursday. But the prior does not receive him now. Jacob shivers from the cold, he waits so long it gets dark. Then the prior goes to evening mass and goes by Jacob without a word. Jacob, tall and skinny, wrapped up in his opończa, goes back to his
tower, frozen.
In the evening, having amply paid off the guards as usual, Matuszewski is smuggled into the tower, and together he and Jacob write a letter. Matuszewski’s hand is shaking from the cold when he writes “Nuncio Visconti” at the top of the page, and it continues to tremble as he writes a number of other famous names. This letter must be written now that the old order is dying, too, and a new one is being born. Now, after the death of the old king, everything is being turned upside down, black becoming white and vice versa. Right now—when the new order has not yet been established and the new chancelleries have not yet gotten under way, when the seemingly inflexible laws have yet to soften like dry bread in water, and while those who were at the top are nervously trying to work out whom to make alliances with and whom to stop talking to—right now there is a chance for this letter to matter. Thus Jacob asks to be released. And if the nuncio should deem this release premature, then Jacob requests at least his intervention; he is suffering from the cramped and miserable conditions in prison. The monks withhold every assistance from his family and friends and do not even allow him to take air; his health has been damaged severely by spending more than two years in the cold tower. He remains, after all, a fervent Catholic, fully devoted to his faith, and his proximity to the Holy Virgin lately has caused his faith, always solid as an oak, to attain even greater heights.
They finish this portion of the letter, but the most important part awaits—they just don’t quite know how to write it. They work on it all night, burning through several candles. Come morning, this part, too, is ready. It goes like this:
The Books of Jacob Page 75
