These nice social evenings end when Prince Lubomirski arrives at the monastery with his troops. They say in the town that Prince Lubomirski is even worse than the Russians. He loots the surrounding villages without mercy, and his soldiers do not hesitate to rape. The peasants call him a Hussite. Lubomirski’s troops patrol the enormous terrain and chase off the Russians, but they are resistant to obeying the orders of the confederate command, and slowly they turn into a band of villains and thieves.
When Lubomirski comes to the monastery, Jacob hides Avacha among the brothers, and she is not allowed to go out until he and his villains have moved on. Lubomirski organizes great bouts of drinking in the garrison, and this has ill effects on Pułaski’s soldiers. Only the warhorses seem to admire the young prince.
“That’s the kind of leader we need,” says Roch, treating Jacob to some of the tobacco he received from the prince. “We’d chase away those Russians like a pack of mangy dogs.”
Jacob takes a pinch and is silent. One evening, the drunken prince keeps trying to get into Jacob’s tower, until Jacob is obliged to receive him. He inquires of Jacob as he would of a father figure into matters pertaining to women. His gaze darts about the chamber, no doubt seeking one woman in particular, the one everyone here has been mentioning to him.
In the fortress are some soldiers from the king’s troops captured by the confederates, and many of them serve without much zeal. One of them, a captain of the Mirów guard, three officers of which have already been killed by the Muscovites, comes to Jacob for advice one day, which gives rise to a new trend—from now on, many of them start going to Jacob for counsel, the wise Jew who isn’t a Jew exactly, who is a sort of indefinable prophet, whose mysteriousness is enhanced by his imprisonment in such a strange place. This captain, who is slender, fair-haired, and winsomely polite, asks Jacob in great confidence what he is to do, for he is young, and he is scared of death. They are sitting on stones, turned toward each other, on the northern side of the tower, where the soldiers tend to piss on the wall.
“Tell me, mister, am I to run away to Warsaw, where I come from, and make myself into a deserter and a coward, or fight for the fatherland and let myself be killed for the good of the country?”
Jacob’s advice is concrete. This officer is to go to the market in Częstochowa and buy up little items of value—watches, rings. Since there is a war on, he will get it all for cheap. And he is to keep it as a safeguard, should everything go wrong.
“War is a jumble between marketplace and nightmare,” Jacob Frank tells him. “Throw around those securities, buy your way out of the front line, pay bribes so you eat well—respect yourself, that’s how you’ll fend off death. It’s no kind of heroism to let yourself get killed.”
He pats the young officer on the back, and for the briefest moment the young officer leans into Jacob’s collar.
“Mister, I’m so scared.”
Of the passing of Lady Hana in February of 1770 and of her final resting place
“I shall view it as an eccentricity,” says the prior. “I’ll not oppose you on this question, since the prisoner isn’t ours, but the Holy Church’s. As the woman is baptized, I would try for a place for her in the cemetery in town—we do not bury laypersons here.”
The prior looks out the window and sees the aging confederates drilling with their sabers. The monastery really looks more like a garrison now. As usual, Jakubowski places a purse on the table.
It is Hana’s second day lying in the officer’s chamber in the tower. It seems like an awfully long time; no one has any peace, knowing she has not yet been taken by the earth. It is Jakubowski’s second time going to the prior to request permission to bury the deceased in the cave, something he has done before—many times before, in fact, and again recently when little Jacob died. But Hana is not a small child, nor is she some second-rate neophyte. She is, after all, the wife of Jacob Frank.
Hana died of grief. Last year she gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Josepha Frances. No sooner was she baptized than she died. First Hana lost her strength due to some unexplained bleeding that lasted a long time after her last labor, never letting up. Then she came down with a fever, too, and a painful swelling of the bones. Zwierzchowska, who was taking care of her, said that it was from the cold that came in through the stones. The down bedding that arrived from Warsaw did not help. The damp was omnipresent here. Her joints grew so swollen that in the end Hana could scarcely move at all. Then little Jacob died. The children were buried in the cave without a priest, furtively, and after those two deaths Hana did not rise again. Jacob had Wołowski take Avacha to Warsaw, while the ailing Hana was to be brought out to take sun in front of the house in Częstochowa. It was only there that they could really see how pale she was, how ruined. Her skin, always a light olive, was now gray and looked like it was covered in a layer of ash. For a time, willow bark extract helped; the girls would go into the nearby forests for it. The willow grew there down the balks in even rows, bright switches sticking out of their misshapen, stocky trunks. What an ugly tree, that willow, Hana would say, all spread out and disheveled, like a decrepit, crippled old woman. And yet for some time this ugly plant did help her. The women would cut off the switches and pry the bark from them. At home they boiled the bark in water and gave the decoction to the patient to drink. One of the Pauline Fathers tried to treat Hana with a vodka-andhoney rub, but his cure did not work, either.
Now it is cool and damp. The earth has a troubling smell of the grave. From the fields around Częstochowa the distant horizon is visible, like a single string hung between sky and earth on which the wind is strumming the same monotonous, gloomy sound, over and over.
No one dares look in on Jacob. They stand huddled on the stairs, pale, their lips like dark dashes, circles under their eyes from their unceasing vigil; no one has eaten since yesterday, the pots are cold; even the children have fallen silent. Jakubowski presses his cheek to the wall of this cursed tower. One of the women nudges him, so he puts his hands on his forehead instead and starts to pray, and the others join in instantly. He imagines that even if the firmament of heaven were built of the same rough, wet stone, his prayer would be able to break through it, word by word. First they say the Lord’s Prayer, then they sing the Yigdal.
All eyes are on him, on Nahman-Piotr Jakubowski. They know that it’s just possible that the Lord will let him in. So Jakubowski cracks the heavy door on its rotten hinges. He can feel the others pushing in over his shoulder to take a peek inside. They’re most likely expecting a miracle, the Lord in his white robe floating over the earth, and Her Ladyship alive and radiant in his arms. Jakubowski stifles a sigh that isn’t far from a sob, but he knows he must get ahold of himself because whatever he does now, the others will do, too. He squeezes into the tiny opening and instantly shuts the door behind him. All but one of the candles have long since gone out. Her Ladyship is lying just as before she died; she has not risen, nothing has changed except that now there can be no doubt she is a corpse. Her jaw has dropped, opening her mouth, her eyes are half closed, the glow of the holy candle flickering over their slippery surface, and Her Ladyship’s skin is gray, dour.
Next to her lies Jacob—naked, skinnier, angular, dark, though the hair on his body is now completely gray, matted like a dog’s, and his eyes are sunken. His thin hips touch Hana’s body and his hand lies on her breast, as if embracing her. It occurs to Jakubowski that perhaps Jacob, too, has died, and he suddenly grows hot and falls on his knees before the bed, not feeling the impact of the stone floor, unable to hold in his sobbing any longer.
“Did you really believe we would not die?” Jacob asks him, rising from his wife’s body. He looks at Nahman, and his dark eyes don’t reflect the light of the holy candle, they are like the entrance to the cave. The question, which Jakubowski does not answer, sounds mocking, aggressive. Jakubowski regains control over himself and takes from the trunk a fresh shirt as well as a woolen Turkish tunic and starts dressing Jacob.
>
The cortege goes out past the walls the next morning before dawn. Around noon they are at the Makpela Cave. Both Wołowskis, Pawłowski, and Matuszewski struggle to carry the casket inside.
Scraps: Being under siege
I will write of deaths.
First the eldest son passed, little seven-year-old Jacob, beloved by his father and being prepared as his successor. This was the end of November, and snow was already coming down. In the monastery, turned into a fortress, cold and deprivation reigned. In that time, the fortress already held its new commander, Kazimierz Pułaski, and he, being on good terms with Jacob, and often conversing with him, allowed the funeral to take place in the cave. We already had our humble sepulcher there, where all of ours were buried, far from strangers’ cemeteries, though we had no intention of advertising it. We had taken this cave for ourselves, taken it away from the bats and the blind lizards, for it had wandered our way from the Land of Israel, as Jacob had discovered. And since Adam and Eve rested here, and Abraham and Sara, as well as the patriarchs, we began to bury our dead in it. The first was Reb Eli, our treasurer, and then Jacob’s children, and in the end, Hanele. If ever we had anything of value in Poland, it was this cave where we laid all our treasures, for it was also the door to the better worlds that were awaiting us.
Those were bad days, and they cannot possibly be justified before God. In the autumn of 1769, Pułaski’s confederates started stalking Avacha. It did not help that their commander announced that she was the daughter of a Jewish mage, and that they ought rather to leave her in peace. Her beauty aroused universal interest. Once some senior officers saw her and asked Jacob for a visit with his daughter. Then one of them said that, on the basis of her beauty, she might as well be the Holy Virgin, which pleased Jacob a great deal. Ordinarily, however, he kept her hidden in the tower, and when the soldiers drank, he forbade her from going out even if she needed to. An evil spirit, however, entered into those soldiers, that motley crew, who often grew bored with sitting in the fortress and drank themselves into a veritable frenzy after smuggling in alcohol from town. As soon as Avacha would go out, they immediately blocked her path and tried to talk with her, and sometimes it got unsavory, so many men setting upon one woman, a young and beautiful one at that. She herself was surprised by all the interest she aroused, a mixture of fascination and hostile lustfulness. More than once it exceeded the usual whistles and comments, and it appeared that the whole garrison was unable to focus on anything other than stalking her. The intercession of Mr. Pułaski did not help, though he strictly forbade anyone forcing themselves upon Eva Frank. But deprived of the activities in which they would normally be engaged, in a state of suspension and uncertainty over what is going to happen next, soldiers become an irrational mob over which there can be no control. I would prefer not to write about it—I would rather not say it at all—but out of obligation to the truth I will only mention that in the end, when it did happen, Jacob and Wołowski and I took her to Warsaw, so that she returned only after her mother’s death and was then with her father to the end. On the night that she was being assaulted, she had a dream in which she was freed from the tower by a German man who was dressed in white. She was told in the dream that he was an emperor.
Those years of being under siege were difficult for me and for all of us. I was thankful to fate that as an envoy I often traveled between the capital and Częstochowa, which meant I felt less depressed than Jacob, who after years of relative freedom was now tormented by his imprisonment in the monastery. Almost all of our people had left their quarters in a hurry and returned to Warsaw, knowing that here we would soon be under siege. The Wielun´skie Przedmies´cie had emptied. Only Jan Wołowski and Mateusz Matuszewski remained with the Lord.
After Hana’s death, Jacob fell ill, and I will confess that I thought this would be the end. I thought a great deal about why Job had said, “In my flesh I will see God”—that verse from Isaiah gave me no peace. For since a person’s body is neither lasting nor perfect, then he who created it must also be weak and miserable. That is what Job had in mind. That is what I thought, and the times to come would only strengthen this belief in me.
And so with Wołowski and Matuszewski we agreed to send to Warsaw for Marianna and then Ignacowa, so that Jacob could suck from their breasts. That always helped him. I have before my eyes this same picture still: under Russian siege, as cannons thundered and the fortress walls crumbled, as the earth quaked and people fell like flies, the Lord in the officer’s chamber of the tower of his prison nursed upon a woman’s breast, and in this way, he repaired this calamitous world, so riddled with holes.
By the summer of 1772, there was no longer anything to defend. Częstochowa had been sacked, people were exhausted and hungry, and the monastery could barely function, lacking water and food. The commander, Pułaski, had been accused of conspiring against the king after having ordered the fortress to surrender to the Russian troops. Praying on the Day of Assumption of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, on August 15, did not help. The brothers lay in the form of a cross on the dirty floor and waited for a miracle. In the evening after mass, white flags were hung on the fortress walls. We helped the monks hide the valuable paintings and votive offerings, and in the place of the holiest picture we hung a copy. The Russians entered a few days later and ordered the monks to be locked in the refectory; for several days their prayers and songs could be heard from in there. The prior lamented that for the first time in its whole history, the monastery had found itself in foreign hands, and that this doubtless heralded the end of the world.
The Russians lit huge fires in the monastery courtyard and drank the communion wine, and whatever they didn’t drink, they poured out onto the cobblestones until these were red, as though drenched in blood. They looted the library and the treasury, destroyed the powder magazine and many weapons. They blew up the gate. From the walls of the monastery, we could see the smoke of the surrounding villages going up in flames.
Yet to my astonishment, Jacob’s spirits were not dampened by this situation. On the contrary: this chaos was giving him strength. The frenzy of wartime was exciting him. He would go out to those Russians and converse with them. They feared him, as Hana’s death had changed him greatly—he was now terribly thin, with dark circles under his eyes, and the features of his face had sharpened, and his hair had gone gray. Someone who hadn’t seen him in a long time might have said it was a different person. It is also true that he interceded with the Russians on behalf of the Pauline Fathers, and they were freed from their refectory prison.
Several days later, General Bibikov came to the monastery. He entered on horseback through the actual door to the chapel, and from his horse he assured the prior that nothing bad would happen to them under Russian rule. That very same evening we went with Jacob to ask the Russian general for an exceptional release from prison. I thought I would be needed to translate into Russian, but they spoke in German. Bibikov was exceedingly polite, and within two days, Jacob had received official permission to leave the monastery.
Jacob, our Lord, says:
“Everyone who seeks salvation must do three things: change his place of residence, change his name, and change his deeds.”
And so we did. We became other people, and we left Częstochowa, at once the lightest and the darkest place.
VI.
The Book of
THE DISTANT COUNTRY
26.
Yente reads passports
Yente sees the passports that are shown at the border. A gloved officer takes them gently, leaves the travelers in their carriage so he can read the passports in peace in the guardhouse. The travelers keep silent. The gloved officer reads in a murmur:
Karol Emeryk, Baron von Revisnye, chamberlain of the Roman, in the German, Hungarian, and Czech lands, Royal Apostolic Majesty, active ambassador and attested minister at the royal court of Poland, hereby makes it known that the bearer of this document, Mr. Joseph Frank, a merchant, along with his s
ervice, being composed of eighteen people, in two carriages, travels on business interests from here to Brünn in Moravia, and so all authorities to whom the power to do so belongs are called upon to put no obstacles before the aforementioned Joseph Frank and the servants with whom he voyages—of whom there are to be eighteen—nor to prevent them from crossing any border, and should the need arise to provide him with the appropriate assistance. Given in Warsaw, the 5th of March, 1773.
Besides this Austrian passport, there is also a Prussian one, and Yente sees it very clearly; it is written in beautiful penmanship, authenticated by a great seal:
The bearer of this document, the merchant Mr. Joseph Frank, having arrived here from Częstochowa, now makes his way, after an eight-day stay in Warsaw, with eighteen persons in his service, in two carriages, through Częstochowa to Moravia, on private business. Since here the air is everywhere clean and healthy, and thank God there is no trace of plague . . .
Yente looks closely at this German formulation: “und von ansteckender Seuche ist Gottlob nichts zu spüren . . .”
. . . and all authorities, military and civil, are hereby requested to permit the aforementioned merchant, along with his people and carriages, to cross the border without hindrance, following the appropriate verification, and continue on his way. Warsaw, 1st of March, 1773. Gédéon Benoît, His Royal Highness’s ambassador residing in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The Books of Jacob Page 80
