For Tovah, what Jacob says is shocking. His son-in-law is doing worse than he sounded in his letters. But Tovah also sees that the members of his Częstochowa retinue take his words as if they were completely normal. Jacob says the Shekhinah is here in Esau’s captivity, which is why they have to accompany the prisoner, who has become the guardian of the Shekhinah in the Jasna Góra icon. He says that Poland is the country of the Shekhinah’s incarceration, the imprisonment of God’s Presence in the world, and it is here that the Shekhinah will also get out of jail in order to free the world. Poland is the most particular place on earth, at once the worst and the best. The Shekhinah must be raised from the ashes and allowed to save the world. Sabbatai tried, and Baruchiah tried, but only Jacob will succeed. Because he has come to the right place!
“Just look, Father, at the customs of the world,” says Tovah’s daughter, his beloved Hanele, as if suddenly waking up. “The Shekhinah cannot be chased with Ishmael, because the Shekhinah is in woman, and they, the Ishmaelites, do not care at all about the woman, she is a slave, and no one respects her. The Shekhinah can only be found in a country where honor is paid to the female, and so it is in Poland, they not only stand before their women with their heads uncovered, but they also pay them compliments, and they act like servants toward them, and on top of all of that, they pay the greatest tribute to this Virgin with her child here, in Częstochowa. This is the land of the Virgin. So we, too, ought to get under her wings.”
She takes her husband’s hand in hers and lifts it to her lips.
“The Lord will make us knights of that Virgin, and we will all be warriors of the Messiah.”
Hana’s father has thoughts of which he cannot rid himself. He would like to take her and his grandchildren far away from here. And explain to Jacob that it is for their well-being. Or kidnap them. Perhaps he could hire some ruffians to do it? It is so dark here, so damp. Living within the walls of this fortress has made them like mushrooms. Hana’s bones hurt, her ankles are swollen, and her face is puffy and ugly. The children are fragile and frightened. Lovely Avacha, taken out of Warsaw, has grown shy and withdrawn toward her grandfather. She should be better cared for. Jacob will not teach her anything good here. He lets her run around the garrison, conversing with the soldiers. She goes up and talks to pilgrims. The children have too little sun, and their food, even what is purchased in the best stalls here or brought in from elsewhere, is never fresh, is of poor quality.
Jacob speaks, gesticulating with his hands, and, squeezed into the chamber, sitting on straw mattresses and on the floor, they listen to him:
“Ayelet ahuvim, or the favored deer, the roe doe. To the place where I am going, the Jacob of the Scriptures has already gone, and then the First Jacob, Sabbatai Tzvi. And now I am going—I, the true Jacob.” When he says “I,” he strikes his broad chest so that it booms. “Many have attempted to pound on the entrance to this place—all the patriarchs, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, all the great pillars of the world. Yet they couldn’t get it open. In the place where we are going, there is no death. There is where the Maiden lives, the Blind Virgin, the Roe Doe, who is the true Messiah.”
Now Jacob falls quiet and paces two steps this way, two steps that way. He waits for what he has said to sink in. There is absolute silence, and against this backdrop the noise of Tovah clearing his throat sounds like a thunderclap. Jacob turns to him and goes on:
“It is all written—you know it all. The Maid is God’s wisdom hidden in a painted board like a princess in a tall tower whom no one will ever obtain. For her we must commit Foreign Acts, deeds that will turn the world on its head. Do you remember that serpent in paradise? The serpent urges us toward freedom. Whoever digs up the Tree of Knowledge, and attains the Tree of Life, and becomes one with the Virgin, will possess the knowledge of salvation, that hidden Daat.”
They all repeat that word: Daat, everywhere Daat. Tovah is astonished by the change in his son-in-law. Before he came here, he heard gossip that Jacob had died, and that someone else had replaced him. But he is a new person, in fact. He has almost nothing in common with the man to whom Tovah whispered secrets under the huppah all those years ago.
Tovah and Hayim sleep in a musty, dirty little house whose owners have abandoned it. It is disgusting to touch anything there. The fumes of the outhouse make him feel weak; it’s just a small roof on some stakes with a filthy rag used as a curtain, near a pile of shit. His son has to take him, Old Tovah holding up his long coat lest it be sullied.
Every day he promises himself that he will talk with Hana, and every day he is unable to ask her the question: Will you come home with me?
Probably because he knows what she will say.
Tovah sees that over the course of their two-week visit, Jacob has also conquered Hayim; a kind of confederacy has arisen between them, an odd and ambiguous understanding, filled with incomprehensible mutual dedication. Hayim repeats after Jacob, talks with his words.
Jacob Frank is therefore someone who stole Tovah’s children from him. A really terrible thing has happened. Tovah undoes his amulets, prays over them, and ties them around his daughter’s and granddaughter’s necks.
It becomes clear that Tovah is of little faith, and one evening they come to a quarrel: Tovah calls Jacob a traitor and a trickster, and Jacob hits him in the face. At dawn, Tovah sets out with Hayim, who is pained by this decision, without even saying goodbye to his daughter and granddaughter. His fury does not subside at any point along their journey. In his mind he is writing the letter he will send around to all the truebelieving kahalim in Europe. He will write to Moravia and Altona, to Prague and Wrocław, to Salonika and Stamboul. He will take a stand against Jacob.
There are, however, things on which father-in-law and son-in-law agree—they have to look to the east, to Russia. Here in Poland their protectors are slowly losing their influence. Both Tovah and Jacob believe in always siding with the strongest.
Shortly after Tovah’s sudden departure, a delegation sets out for Moscow. The delegation is led by Jakubowski, who is delighted to be back in Jacob’s good graces. On the evening before they set off, the envoys have dinner with him in the tower. Jacob himself pours them wine.
“We ought to be grateful to the First, who took that initial step into the Turkish religion. And to the Second, who discovered this state in the religion of Edom, that is, baptism. Now I am sending you to Moscow—for the third time.”
As he says this, he stands and walks around the little room, his tall hat catching on the beams of the ceiling. That night, before their journey, the envoys—Wołowski, Jakubowski, and Pawłowski—have intercourse with Hana. In this way they all become Jacob’s brothers, closer than they have ever been before.
Elżbieta Drużbacka writes from the Bernardine monastery in Tarnów a last letter to the canon Benedykt Chmielowski in Firlejów
. . . for I, Dear Friend, Good Father, can barely see the world at all now, just as much as is possible through the window of my cell, and so I see the world as a monastery courtyard. My confinement brings me great relief; a smaller world will favor peace of mind. And, too, the things I have around me—which are not many—do not preoccupy my mind near so much as those whole household cosmoses I had to carry on my shoulders like some Atlas. After the death of my daughter, and my granddaughters, everything ended for me, and altho’ you warn that it is a sin to say so, I do not even care. From our birth, everything—the church, the home, our education, our customs and loves—bids us form an attachment to life. But no one ever tells us that the more attached we are to it, the more pain we’ll suffer later, once we have come by our final awareness.
I will not write to you again, dear Friend, you who have sweetened my older years with your stories, and consoled me when I met with such misfortune. I wish You a long and healthy life. And that Your lovely garden in Firlejów might last forever, like Your library and all Your books—that they might be of service . . .
Mrs. Elżbieta Drużbacka finishes her
letter and sets down her pen. She pushes aside her prie-dieu, which is turned to the Christ who hangs on her wall, whose every suffering tendon she knows so well. She lies down on her back on the floor, pulls on a brown wool dress that looks like a habit, and lays her hands over her breast, as she would in the coffin, fixing her gaze to some nothing hanging in the air. And she just lies there. She does not even try to pray, the words of prayer exhaust her, as if she were pouring out something that is empty into something that is void, grinding the same grain over and over, infected with ergot, poisoned through and through. After a few minutes, she manages to attain a specific state; she remains in it until they call her for the meal. It is hard to describe this state: Drużbacka simply manages to disappear.
Yente, who is always present, loses sight of Mrs. Drużbacka now. She flies fast as thought to the recipient of the letter lying on the table and sees him busying himself with soaking his swollen legs in a bucket. He sits hunched over—maybe he has fallen asleep: his head has come to rest on his chest, and he seems to be snoring slightly. Ah, but Yente knows that soaking his feet isn’t going to help him.
Father Chmielowski is no longer able to read this last letter, and it lies there for weeks on end, the seal still on it, on the table amongst his other papers. Father Benedykt Chmielowski, canon of Rohatyn, dies of pneumonia, from having incautiously and impatiently gone out into the garden as soon as the sun rose. Roshko’s successor, Izydor, a young, somewhat dim-witted man, and his housekeeper, Ksenia, delayed calling for the doctor until the next day, when the roads were soaked and barely passable. He died peacefully, his fever coming down just enough that he could confess and take the last rites. On the table there had been a book lying open for a long time, from which he had been translating a few verses that appeared under a terrible engraving.
Taking over the presbytery in Firlejów, Father Benedykt’s successor spends a whole evening going through his predecessor’s documents, preparing them to be sent to the curia. He opens the letter from Mrs. Drużbacka, but he doesn’t know exactly who she is. He is surprised, however, that the priest had been corresponding with women. He finds a whole box of letters, carefully arranged by date, overlaid with dried flowers, surely so that moths don’t get into the paper. He doesn’t know what to do with them, since he cannot work up the courage to add them to the volumes he’s been told to pack up and send to the Lwów bishopric. He keeps the box for a while by the bed, reading bits of the letters for pleasure, and then he forgets about them, pushing the box under the bed, where it stays, in the presbytery’s damp bedroom, so that the letters soon molder, turning into nests for mice.
In her last letter, Mrs. Drużbacka had also written that the two worst questions were “why” and “to what end.”
And yet I cannot keep myself from posing those questions. So I answer myself that the Lord God wants to punish us by means of creation itself: us, His creations, who sin with creation. He washes His hands of it, however, in order to preserve His goodness in our eyes. He looks for natural means to destroy us indirectly, by way of some natural cause, so that the blow is lighter than it would be if He Himself struck it, since such a thing we could not understand.
He could, after all, have healed Naaman with one word, but He had him go bathe in the River Jordan instead. He could have healed the blind man with His universal love, but instead He mixed saliva with mud and put it on his eyes. He could have healed everyone at once, but instead He made the pharmacy, the medic, medicinal herbs. His world is one great oddity.
Of bringing Moliwda back to life
Moliwda has grown thinner and does not really even resemble his former self from just a few years ago. He is clean-shaven, and while he doesn’t have a tonsure like many of the monks, he does wear his hair short, cropped very close to the head. He looks younger. His older brother, the retired military man, is somehow made uncomfortable by this matter of the monastery. He doesn’t really understand what happened to Antoni in his old age. They say in Warsaw that he fell head over heels in love with a married woman who indulged his advances, giving him hopes for a closer relationship. Then, having made Moliwda fall so in love with her, she cast him aside. His brother cannot understand that, doesn’t want to believe in such tales. He would understand if it were something to do with honor. With real betrayal—but not some love affair. He looks at his brother suspiciously. But maybe it was something else? Maybe someone cast a spell on him because he was doing so well with the primate.
“I feel fine now. Don’t look at me like that, brother,” Moliwda says, and pulls his habit over his head.
A carriage waits in front of the monastery, and in it is clothing for Antoni Kossakowski, known as Moliwda: trousers, a shirt, a Polish żupan, and a modest kontusz, dark in color, with a dark belt, no ostentation. To the prior of the monastery he has offered financial support, although the prior still seems slightly disappointed. After all, Moliwda-Kossakowski appears to be truly devout—he often spent whole days and nights in prayer, lying as though on the cross in the chapel, never wanting to leave the picture of Our Lady Queen of the World, to which he had taken such a liking. He rarely said a word to the brothers, and he declined to participate in the monastery’s daily tasks—it was hard for him to accustom himself to the monastery’s ways. Now he walks before his colonel brother, sticking close to the wall, his hand gliding over the bricks, his bare feet inside their sandals irritating his brother—feet should be shod, preferably in boots with bootlegs, in military style. Naked feet suggest peasants, Jews.
“I made use of all of my influences to get you into the royal chancellery. You got good backing, too, from the primate himself, and that was what did it. They don’t remember anything else about you. They do care a great deal about your knowledge of languages . . . I don’t want any gratitude from you, I’m doing this so that the soul of our dearly departed mother may rest in peace.”
When the carriage starts up, Antoni suddenly kisses his brother’s hand and starts to sob. The colonel clears his throat, embarrassed. He wants Antoni’s return to occur in a masculine manner and with dignity, as befits a person of noble birth. Of his younger brother he thinks: What a failure. What could have guided him to a monastery, when so much ill is occurring in this country? Whence these attacks of melancholy, while the nation-state, run by a young and foolish king, falls into ever greater dependency on the tsarina?
“You know nothing at all, brother, as you have been hiding within the monastery walls, leaving your country in need,” he says reproachfully and disgustedly, turning his gaze out the little carriage window.
And then, as if not to his brother, but to the landscape outside:
“In the Sejm, four members of the parliament of the Republic were dragged off the bench by henchmen of the empress’s ambassadors. They treated them like they were a bunch of bumpkins . . . For what reason, you may ask? Oh, but of course: they dared oppose the reforms for the religious dissenters that they’re trying to impose here by force.”
Now that same righteous indignation he felt when he first heard of that barbarity returns; he turns once more to his brother, still in tears, now wiping his eyes with his sleeve:
“They refused, and shouted, which led to a great uproar, since some of the members of parliament tried to side with them, and then—”
“Who were the members who were so brave? Do you know them?” Moliwda interrupts him, as if he’s just woken up again.
The colonel, glad his words are having some effect on his brother, responds animatedly:
“Absolutely. Załuski, Sołtyk, and the two Rzewuskis. The rest of the members, when they saw the army—the Russian army—coming in ready to shoot, simply shouted, ‘Shame, shame, they’re invading the Sejm,’ but those Muscovites couldn’t have cared less and dragged those four out of the room, too. Fat old Sołtyk, all red in the face, near to an apoplexy, tried to resist them and ended up grabbing on to some piece of furniture, but they still overpowered him. And you can imagine, the rest of them just let
it happen, damn them all, those cowards!”
“And what did they do with those four? Are they in prison?” asks Moliwda.
“If only it had been prison!” cries the colonel, now fully facing his brother. “They sent them straight out of the Sejm to Siberia, and the king didn’t even lift a finger!”
They both fall silent for a moment. The carriage is entering some small town, and the wheels start to clatter over the cobblestones.
“But why are they so determined not to give rights to religious dissenters?” asks Moliwda, as the wheels return to their soft, muddy ruts.
“What do you mean, why?” Moliwda’s brother cannot comprehend this question. After all, it is crystal clear that salvation can come only through the Holy Roman Church. Wanting leniency for Lutherans or Jews or Aryans is regular devilry. And why should Russia be interfering in their affairs? “What are you talking about?” he says, unable even to find the words.
“Wherever I have wound up in the world,” says Moliwda, “I have seen that maybe there is just one God, but that the ways of believing in Him are many, maybe even infinite . . . All kinds of different shoes can tread a path to God . . .”
“You should keep quiet about that,” his brother snaps. “That is a great stain on your honor. It is a good thing that your ignoble past is nearly forgotten now.” And he puckers his lips like he wants to spit.
They don’t talk much more until they get to Warsaw.
The Books of Jacob Page 78
