When Jacob returns from seeing her, he tells the brothers and sisters of their meetings, and the brothers and sisters thrill to imagine the Lord with Eva at his side as Viceroy of Wallachia. What, in comparison with such visions, were the dreams they had so recently held so dear—those miserable few little villages in Podolia that now strike them as terribly amusing and childish. Jacob goes to the empress with gifts; there is no visit at which Maria Theresa does not receive something, now a cashmere scarf, now hand-painted silk kerchiefs, now shoes decorated with turquoise, made of the finest Turkish leather. She has set them aside as if uninterested in such luxury, but deep down she is delighted by these presents, as she is by Jacob’s visits. She realizes that many must hate him. He is naturally gallant, and he has that sort of ironic humor that she particularly likes. Her sympathy for this man must make many people feel uneasy. All kinds of denunciations and reports are always landing on the empress’s desk. The first of one day’s stack informs:
. . . a no less suspicious thing was the source of his income, a quite substantial income, when he was living a life of luxury in Warsaw. It is said, for instance, that this Jacob Frank has his own postal service, people stationed up and down the Polish borders, through whom he sends his communiqués. Consignments of money, always in barrels, come to him under escort by his own guard.
“What of it?” she responds to such doubts to her son. “Bringing in gold across our borders and spending it here, where we are, merely enriches us. Better he land among us than if he were to find himself in Russia.”
Or there is the accusation that Frank is arming his private guard, ever more numerous.
“Let him arm himself,” says the empress. “Let him take care of his own safety. Did not our aristocracy in Galicia have their own army? He may yet be of service to us as a commander.”
And she says to her son in a quieter voice:
“I have my designs for him.”
Joseph thinks she has returned to her reading now, but after just a moment she adds:
“But you should not make any designs on her.”
The young emperor says nothing in response to this and leaves. His mother often humiliates him like this. He is firmly convinced that this is the stubborn peasant Catholicism in her.
27.
How Nahman Piotr Jakubowski is appointed an ambassador
The court in Brünn is not just a place for idle merrymaking or a vanity fair. In the chancelleries upstairs, the work never stops. Jacob goes there first thing in the morning and dictates letters that must then be copied out and sent. Next door, under the direction of Zwierzchowska, is the court’s bookkeeping. In the third chancellery, the Czerniawskis—the Lord’s sister and her husband—conduct the youth recruitment, respond to letters, and negotiate with the parents of young people sent to the Lord’s court. Insofar as the second chancellery is occupied with courtly matters, the first is a little ministry of foreign affairs. The third, meanwhile, is focused squarely on trade and the economy.
As late as December 1774, Jacob’s best messengers travel from Vienna to Stamboul: Paweł Pawłowski, Jan Wołowski and his brother-in-law Jacob Kapliński, Hayim, who, after Tovah’s death, gathered together his whole family and brought them to Brünn. Before their departure, a solemn ceremony is held, during which Jacob gives a speech. He calls them warriors of the Messiah, says they have no religion; they have heard this many times. The only important thing is their mission, which is a secret one—they are to curry favor with the sultan, and offer their services to their former patrons. On the evening preceding their departure, the communal prayers go on at great length, concluding with prayers said in a circle and songs. In these ceremonies everyone takes part, including the guests, but afterward only the brothers and sisters remain, and then the feast begins, with vast quantities of the Moravian wine they have grown so fond of since their arrival. It is like before, in Ivanie, but now the Strange Deeds have become symbolic, have metamorphosed into rituals. They are all so close to one another still, can recognize each other by smell, by touch, and all of it makes them emotional—Jan Wołowski’s long face, his just-shaved cheeks, Pawłowska’s little shoulders, her short stature, Yeruhim Jędrzej Dembowski’s graying mop, Zwierzchowska’s limp. They have all aged, they have grown children now, and some of them are grandparents already. Others have buried their husbands or wives and entered into new marriages. They have known terrible tragedies and great sorrows—the deaths of children, and serious illnesses. Henryk Wołowski, for example, recently suffered an apoplexy, which left him with paresis on the right side of his body, causing him to slur his speech, though his vitality has remained the same as always. Not long ago, supported by his daughters, he personally drilled a colorful legion of motley, very young pseudo-soldiers.
At dawn, when the messengers set out, the house is still quiet. The women readied baskets of provisions for the road the day before. The horses seem a little sleepy. Jacob goes out into the courtyard in a red silk robe and gives each of his emissaries a gold coin and a blessing. He tells them that the future of the true believers depends upon this mission. The carriage rolls over the cobblestones of Brünn to the market square, and from there it will pass out of the city, heading southeast.
They return empty-handed several months later—such experienced ambassadors, and they didn’t even obtain a meeting with the sultan, squandering whole weeks in the process. In the spring of 1775, when Jacob considers himself the emperor’s greatest friend, he sends a second delegation to Stamboul. This time Nahman Piotr Jakubowski goes with Ludwik Wołowski, Jan Wołowski’s son. They come back from Turkey in the autumn, their mission having failed again. Not only did they obtain no audience with the sultan, but something much worse occurred: at the instigation of the Stamboul Jews, they were accused of heresy and spent three months in a Stamboul prison, which caused Jakubowski to develop an illness in his lungs. Furthermore, the sultan’s officials confiscated all the money they had brought as tribute to the sultan, a considerable sum. Jacob ignored the desperate letters from their cell—maybe he was sick, maybe he was too busy at the emperor’s court. It is also possible, as Jakubowski adamantly insists, that no news from Turkey ever reached him. The mission’s objective was the same: to win over the sultan, promise him unswerving dedication, reveal to him the benefits of such close access to the emperor, speak to him of the reward there would be if . . . Well, Jakubowski would know how to do it, he’s the best at Turkish, and at painting vivid pictures of their visions.
They have come back thin and exhausted; in order to be able to pay for their return, they had to take out loans in Stamboul. Jakubowski is dry as burlap, coughing. Wołowski’s face is clouded.
The Lord does not even acknowledge them. In the evening, according to the old ritual, he orders Jakubowski beaten for losing the money.
“I have no use for you, Jakubowski. You’re an obstinate old mule,” he says. “You’re only suitable for writing—not for the real work a person must do.”
Jakubowski tries to stick up for himself, but he sounds like a ten-yearold boy.
“So why did you send me, then? Don’t you have someone younger, who speaks languages better?”
All punishment here goes like this: The person to be punished is laid down on a table, wearing only a shirt, and all of the true believers who have gathered, brothers and sisters, must lash his back with a switch. The Lord begins, usually slashing without mercy, and after him go the men, but striking less forcefully, while the women usually close their eyes and administer blows that are more symbolic than anything, as if they were tapping the person with palm branches (unless one of them has some reason of her own for hitting harder). And this is how it goes with Jakubowski, too. Doubtless some blows do hurt him, but all in all, he isn’t badly wounded. When it is over, he drags himself down off the table. He does not answer Jacob’s calls to stay. His shirt hangs almost to his knees, open in the front. His face is absent. People say Jakubowski has grown eccentric in his advancing age. Now
he walks out the door, not even looking back.
Following his departure, there is a silence that lasts just a little too long, and everyone’s heads drop, so the Lord begins to speak and continues without interruption, fast, so that it’s difficult to write it, and Dembowski, left alone with that task now, eventually sets aside his pen. He says that the world will always pose a threat to them, which is why they have to stick together and support each other. They have to give up their old understanding of all things, because that old world has already ended. The new one has come, but it is even more ruthless and hostile than the one it has replaced. These are exceptional times, and they, too, must be exceptional. They must live together, close together, and they must form bonds with one another, not with outsiders, so that they make up one great family. Part of this family will constitute the core, and the rest will surround them. Goods should be treated as common, and only managed by individuals, and he who has the most will share with he who has the least. That is how it was in Ivanie, and that is how it must be here. Always. As long as you all share what you have, as long as you exist as a machna and are a mystery to others. This mystery, this secret, must absolutely be kept at all costs. The less others know about you, the better. They will invent all kinds of extraordinary stories about you, yes—but that is good, let them invent their stories. But on the outside, you must never give a reason for customs or the law to be transgressed.
Jacob tells them to stand in a circle and put their hands on each other’s shoulders, with their heads slightly bowed and their eyes focused on a point in the middle of the circle.
“We have two goals,” says Jacob. “The first one is making our way to Daat, to the knowledge that will permit us to attain eternal life, and then we will break free of the prison of the world. We can accomplish this in a manner that is very mundane—our own place on the earth, a country into which we can introduce our own laws. And since the world is craving war now, and arming itself, the old order has already fallen, and we, too, must join in with the commotion, so as to gain something from it for ourselves. This is why you must regard my Hussars and my banners without any suspicion. He who has banners and an army, even a modest one, is considered to be a true ruler in this world.”
Then they sing the Yigdal, the same song they sang back in Ivanie. And in conclusion, as they are just preparing to leave, Jacob tells them about the dream he had last night, about King Stanisław Poniatowski. That he chased after him and Avacha and wanted to fight. He also saw in this dream that he, Jacob, was led into an Orthodox church that had been completely scorched inside.
The return of Bishop Sołtyk
In the winter of 1773, a crowd moves from Warsaw to the river. The company, including bishops, crosses the frozen ice to reach an island, where it waits for Bishop Sołtyk as if he were a holy martyr. The church banners stiffen in the cold. Clouds of steam rise from mouths as they sing hymns. Warsaw townswomen wear fur bonnets and are wrapped in fur-lined capes, shrouded further in woolen headscarves. The men wear fur-lined cloaks down to the ground—they are carters, salesmen, craftsmen, cooks, aristocrats. All of them are freezing.
At last, a carriage appears, accompanied by military escort. Everyone rushes to get a glimpse inside, but the curtains are drawn. When the carriage stops, the crowd kneels in the middle of the river, right there in the snow.
The bishop appears just for a moment, supported on either side, wrapped in a long purple coat lined with light-colored fur probably taken from Siberian creatures. He looks big, even heavier than before. Over the heads of the faithful he makes the sign of the cross, and a woeful song bursts forth into the frozen air. It is hard to understand the lyrics, since everyone is singing at their own pace, some slower, some faster, so their intonations overlap and drown each other out.
For a brief moment the bishop’s face is visible—it is changed, strangely gray. Instantly people start to whisper that he must have been tortured there, and that is why he looks this way. Then he vanishes into the carriage, which slowly moves along the ice toward Warsaw’s Old Town.
Soon rumors spread all over Warsaw that out there, in Kolyma, in that frozen hell, Bishop Sołtyk lost his senses, his clarity of thought returning to him only now and then. Some who knew him before suggest that even when the Russians took him, he wasn’t sound of mind. They say that he is among those whose opinions of themselves are so high that it completely blinds them, and wherever they look they see only themselves. And their conviction of their own importance deprives them of their reason and their power of judgment. Bishop Sołtyk is absolutely one of these people, and therefore it hardly matters whether he has lost his senses in Siberia or not.
What’s happening among the Lord’s Warsaw machna
The emissaries have to report to the machna on the time spent in Brünn and their failed diplomatic missions. In Warsaw, everything now revolves around the home of Franciszek Wołowski. The machna either meets at his place on Leszno (he has the biggest house) or in the home of his daughter, the one who married Lanckoroński, Hayah’s son. It is a difficult time, dominated by a kind of political excitability, an anxiety, so that any news of Brünn sounds improbable here.
In the capital, Jakubowski meets Jacob Goliński, whom he last saw in Częstochowa. He has a strange weakness for him—maybe because Goliński is the incarnation of Jakubowski’s memory of his time with the Besht in Międzybóż, which is a memory that always makes him emotional somehow. They embrace, and for a moment they stay standing this way, without moving. Through his heavy coat, Jakubowski can feel how Goliński has lost weight, or seems to have shrunk somehow.
“Are you doing all right?” he asks anxiously.
“I’ll tell you later,” Goliński whispers, because already they hear Old Podolski, a small, shriveled man in that dark gray caftan buttoned up under his neck. His hands are stained with ink. He does the accounts at the Wołowskis’ brewery.
“I will be so bold as to say it,” he pipes up in Polish, in a strong, lilting Yiddish accent. “I am old and scared of nothing now. Especially since it seems to me that you think the same way as I think, you just don’t have the courage to say it out loud. Nu, I will say it.”
He pauses for a moment, and then starts up again:
“It’s over. When he—”
“He who?” someone angrily interjects from over by the wall.
“When Jacob, our Lord, left us here, there was no reason to expect anything more of him. We are bound to take care of ourselves now, to live properly, to stick together, and, without abandoning any of our practices, to cut them back according to circumstances . . .”
“Like rats that flatten themselves to the ground in fear . . . ,” says that same other voice.
“Rats?” Podolski turns toward the voice. “Rats are wise creatures; they can survive anything. You are mistaken, son. We have good jobs, food on our plates, roofs over our heads—what rats can you be thinking of?”
“This wasn’t why we got baptized,” says the same voice, a man named Tatarkiewicz, whose father was from Czernowitz. He is an officer of the post; he’s come wearing his uniform.
“You are young and impulsive. Your head is hot. But I am old and good at counting. I tally up all the expenses of our community and know how much gold we have sent to Moravia and how hard earned it was, how we worked to amass such sums here in Poland. For that kind of money, you could send your children to university.”
A murmur goes around the room.
“How much have we sent?” Marianna Wołowska asks calmly.
Old Podolski takes the papers from his bosom and lays them out on the table. They all squeeze in around him, but no one understands the tables with the figures.
“I gave two thousand ducats. Just about everything I had,” says Jacob Goliński to Piotr Jakubowski, who has sat down next to him. Both of them have remained on their chairs against the wall, knowing that once people start talking about money, it will end in a brawl. “Podolski is right!”
And indee
d, the quarrels begin over the table now, with Franciszek Wołowski the elder trying to keep them under control. He hushes them and explains to them that their needless rumpus will be overheard from the street, and that they are turning his home into a Turkish bazaar, that they—polite, well-dressed burghers and clerks—are suddenly revealing themselves to be no better than street vendors from the marketplace in Busk.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves!” he tries.
Suddenly it is as if the devil himself had entered Piotr Jakubowski. He throws himself onto the table, covering with his whole body all the scattered papers.
“What is wrong with all of you? You want to settle accounts with Jacob, like he’s some merchant? Don’t you remember where you were before he came? And who would you be now, were it not for him? Merchants, tenants with your beards down to your waists, groszy sewn into your shtreimels? Have you already forgotten?”
The Books of Jacob Page 86
