Krysiński cries:
“But that’s what we still are!”
Now Franciszek Wołowski attempts to reason with Piotr Jakubowski:
“Do not, Brother Piotr, get too carried away. We owe a great deal to our own resilience and faith. And to our own hard work.”
“He was in jail for thirteen years because of us. We betrayed him,” says Jakubowski.
“Nobody betrayed him,” says young Lanckoroński. “You said yourself that it had to be this way. You said that yourself, while we, the whole machna, got stronger and tougher those thirteen years, and while we were put to the test, never veering from the path.”
By the wall someone—perhaps it is only Tatarkiewicz again—says:
“We don’t even know . . . if that’s him or not. People say they swapped him.”
“You shut up!” Jakubowski screams now, but to his horrified astonishment, the criticism is taken up by Goliński:
“Who are we now? Who am I now? I was a rabbi in Busk; things were going fine for me, but now there’s no way back, and I am bankrupt.”
Jakubowski flies into a rage, races to his dear friend, and seizes him by his jabot. The pages from the table fly onto the floor.
“You are all petty, despicable people. You have forgotten everything. You would still be stuck in shit, in Rohatyn shit, Podhajce shit, Kamieniec shit.”
“Busk shit, too,” someone adds out of spite.
Jacob Goliński goes home on foot, alone. He is very troubled. His wife, who has been with Her Ladyship in Brünn for a year now, has not contacted him in some months; he had hoped that Jakubowski would bring some letters from her. He didn’t. He seemed to look away when asked, and then that argument erupted, and now Goliński can’t quite come back to his senses.
The numbers he saw in Podolski’s accounts give him no peace, and he has his own bills in mind—he was a fabric supplier to the royal court, and he was moving pretty high up, but that is over now. He was left with bales of expensive, luxurious materials—no one will buy them from him. Confident in his lucky streak, he put all his savings into the collection for Brünn, believing that in so doing he was aiding his own success and that of his family, but now, suddenly, he sees everything completely differently. As if the scales have fallen from his eyes. Why isn’t his Magda writing to him? Until now he hasn’t wanted to think about it—he was busy—but deep down in his brain a suspicion grows, almost a certainty, and it is like a malignant tumor, as if he had rotting meat in his head: she is with someone else.
Goliński doesn’t sleep all night, tossing and turning, hearing voices, like echoes of that violent argument, and again he sees Jakubowski’s averted gaze, and he feels hot all over. He can sense it, he knows it, even though his brain does not want to recognize it fully. Again he counts up his debts, and, half asleep, he sees the mice that nibble at his stocks of crimson brocade and bales of damask.
The following day, on an empty stomach, he walks to Długa Street, to the Jakubowskis’. Jakubowski opens the door, still half asleep, wearing a nightshirt and a dressing gown, looking gaunt and tired, his feet in their dirty socks rubbing one against the other. Wajgełe, in her nightshirt and the woolen scarf she has thrown over it, sets about lighting the stove without a word. Jakubowski looks at him for some time, then finally asks:
“What do you want from me, Goliński?”
“Tell me what happened there. What is going on with my wife, Magda?”
Jakubowski looks down at his socks.
“Come in.”
Nahman’s—Piotr Jakubowski’s—little apartment is cluttered. Here and there are baskets, boxes. It smells like boiled cabbage. They sit down at the table, and Jakubowski scoops the pages off it. He carefully wipes his pen and stores it in its case. Scraps of wine sediment are visible at the base of a glass.
“What is going on with her? Tell me!”
“What do you think is going on with her? How am I supposed to know? I’ve been traveling, don’t you know that? I haven’t been sitting around with the women.”
“But you have been in Brünn.”
A gust of wind strikes the window; its panes shake menacingly. Jakubowski stands and closes the shutters. It gets darker in the room.
“Remember, we used to sleep in the same bed at the Besht’s,” says Goliński, as if accusing him of something.
Jakubowski sighs.
“You know how things are there. You have seen it with your own eyes. You were there in Częstochowa, you were there in Ivanie. No one is going to supervise your wife there. She is a free woman.”
“I was never that close. I was never one of you ‘brothers.’”
“But you saw.” Jakubowski says this as if heartbroken Goliński were to blame for it all. “She asked for it herself. She’s with the Lord’s stableman now, Szymanowski. He’s kind of like a Cossack when he gets on a horse . . .”
“A Cossack,” Goliński mechanically repeats after him. He is shattered now.
“I am telling you this, Goliński, in the name of our many years of friendship, your support after the death of my son, and also because we shared a bed at the Besht’s . . .”
“I know.”
“If I were you I wouldn’t get so worked up about it, because what did you expect? They are doing everything for our greater good . . . With the greatest emperor in the world. The great court . . . If you want her to return, she will return.”
Goliński stands up and starts walking around the small room, two steps in one direction, two steps in the other. Then he stops, takes a deep breath, and starts sobbing.
“She didn’t ask for it herself, I know that for certain . . . They must have forced her.”
Nahman reaches for another glass from the cupboard and pours wine into it.
“You could sell all your stock in Brünn—you’d lose a little on it, brocade isn’t the concern it once was. But you’d get some of your money back at least.”
Goliński packs up within the hour and takes out promissory notes to cover the journey. A few days later, he finds himself in Brünn, dirty and tired. Having placed the product he has with him in storage, he goes at once to Petersburger Gasse, to the house by the cathedral, with a hat pulled down over his forehead, asking several people for directions along the way. Each of them points out the way to him. He is intending to knock and go in, announcing himself like a person of importance would, but suddenly a suspiciousness sets in, and he feels as if he’s about to go into battle, so he stands at the gate opposite, and although it is early, and the streets are filled with the long shadows of morning, he continues to just stand there, pulling his hat down even farther, and to wait.
First the gate opens, and a cart leaves, taking out rubbish and waste, and then some women exit. Goliński does not know them; they are carrying wicker baskets and going up the hill, no doubt to the market. Then a cart with vegetables pulls up, and then there is a rider on a horse. Finally from somewhere a carriage is brought up, it goes inside but doesn’t leave again until almost noon, when there is suddenly movement at the gate. Goliński thinks he sees two women: one of them is Zwierzchowska, who is giving something to a messenger, or a post officer, and the other one is the elder Czerniawska. Curtains part in some windows on the second floor, and someone’s face flashes there, but Goliński can’t see whose. His stomach is aching from hunger, but he’s afraid to leave—he might miss something important. Just before noon the gate opens again, and a little procession forms on the street, mostly young people, going to the cathedral for mass, but—again—he doesn’t recognize a soul. Only at the end does he see the familiar Dembowski, in Polish attire, with his wife. They walk in silence and disappear inside the cathedral. Goliński understands that neither Frank nor Avacha is here. He grabs the sleeve of one of the youths dashing by and asks:
“Where is your master?”
“In Vienna, with the emperor,” the young man answers gleefully.
Goliński spends that night in an inn that is luxuriously clean y
et inexpensive. He is able to wash up there and get a good night’s rest. He sleeps like a rock. The next day, early, he sets off for Vienna, propelled by the same anxiety.
It takes him all day to get to the Lord’s residence on the Graben. At the entrance to the house there are guards, dressed oddly in bright green and red livery, in hats with bunches of feathers. They hold halberds. There is no way for him to get inside. He asks to be announced; no response comes. In the evening a rich carriage drives up, accompanied by several men on horseback. When he tries to approach, the guard stops him quite violently.
“I am Jacob Goliński. The Lord knows me, I have to see him.”
They tell him to leave a note in the morning.
“The Lord receives visitors in the afternoon,” says one of the valets in his weird livery.
Eine Anzeige, or: A denunciation
Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina, by the grace of God the Dowager Empress of the Romans, Queen of Hungary, Bohemia, Galicia, and Lodomeria, Archduchess of Austria, Duchess of Burgundy, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, Great Princess of Transylvania, etc.
I was born a subject of Your Imperial Majesty’s, in Glinno, at a remove of four miles from Lwów. I was raised in Glinno, and I was also a rabbi in that city. It happened that in 1759, one Jacob Frank, a neophyte, currently living in Brünn, passed through there. His father, a Jewish teacher suspected of belonging to a Sabbatian sect and expelled from the kahal, had settled in Czernowitz in Wallachia. Thus Jacob Frank, though born in Korolówka, roamed around the world a fair amount, married, and had a daughter, at which point he took on the Muhammadan faith and was hailed among the Sabbatians as a hakham.
I am ashamed to admit that I, too, belonged to that sect, and that I counted among his worshippers. In my stupidity, I considered him not only a great sage but also the incarnation of the spirit of Sabbatai and a worker of miracles.
In the early part of 1757, the aforementioned Frank came to Poland and called upon the faithful to move to Ivanie, a property held by the Bishop of Kamieniec. There he proclaimed that the great lord and king Sabbatai Tzvi had to cross over to the faith of the Ismaelites, that the god Baruchiah had to pass through it as well, just as he did through the Orthodox one, but that he, Jacob, would have to cross over to the Nazarene faith, since Jesus of Nazarene was the peel of the fruit, and his coming only occurred to make way for the true Messiah. We were all required to convert to this faith and to observe it more closely in the eyes of the Christians than the Christians themselves. We had therefore to live piously, yet not take any Christian women as our wives, for although Señor Santo, that is, Baruchiah, had stated, “Blessed is he who permits the forbidden,” he had also said that the daughter of a foreign god was forbidden. Thus under no circumstances were we to mix with other nations, deep down remaining true to the three nodes of our kings: Sabbatai Tzvi, Baruchiah, and Jacob Frank.
After being much persecuted by the Jews, and under the protection of the Bishops of Kamieniec and Lwów, in the autumn of 1759, we agreed to be baptized.
To Frank, who, having come from Turkey, was poor, a large amount of money was given right away; I, too, contributed, offering him 280 ducats to start out.
Then the aforementioned Frank went to Warsaw and there preached to all and sundry that he was the lord of life and death and that those who believed in him with all their hearts would never die.
When, however, in spite of this, some of his closest and greatest supporters did die, and he was asked for clarification, he said that evidently they did not sincerely believe in him.
Some of his company, wanting to put him to the test, informed the Church authorities of everything . . .
“Is that how it was?” Goliński asks the man dictating to him, whose words he is writing down in his beautiful penmanship, stumbling only slightly on the lengthier German turns of phrase. But the other man does not respond to this, and so Goliński simply carries on:
. . . The case was submitted to the royal chancellor, the cathedral chapter, and bishops, who together comprised the court. The company of Frankists openly admitted, for the most part, the error of their ways and solemnly swore that they would refrain from such things going forward and live a Christian life. Frank himself was sentenced to life imprisonment in the monastery in Częstochowa. Unfortunately, that man, possessed as he is by Satan, knew how to draw people to him, even jailed. His followers went to him and lavished him with gifts, and many of them stayed there with him, for he knew, too, how to convince them that his arrest was necessary. And I must confess—again, with great shame—that I, too, was there, and I, too, remained with him in his incarceration, up until the death of his wife and her funeral.
Her death produced a strong effect on many, as did the teachings of Jacob Frank, according to which he praised acts that went against nature and human custom. It was then that I left him and became his enemy. Parting from Częstochowa, I returned to Warsaw, where I lived with my wife and child. Yet my wife has now been in Brünn for four years, most recently in the clutches of some companion . . .
Goliński’s hand hovers over that word, “Gefährten.”
“You know that, too?” he asks. “Already?”
The man doesn’t answer, so after a moment’s stillness, Goliński writes on:
. . . she was with Frank and his daughter in Vienna and has now returned to Brünn, where she agreed to see me, and feeling toward me an understandable tenderness, she disclosed to me that the Holy Lord, as Frank is known to his disciples, had ordered me and the others who attempted to resist him slain in Częstochowa.
“But that’s not true. There was nothing like that,” says Goliński in surprise, but he keeps going:
She learned of it since she has everyone’s full trust there, being the daughter of one of the most faithful of the Frankists. She therefore warned me so that I might save myself and hasten to remove myself. I filed a complaint with the royal authorities on account of it, and an investigation was launched, as I had previously entered my testimony into the official report that may now be accessed in Warsaw.
When Poland descended into turmoil, Frank found an opportunity, with the help of the Russian army, to free himself from jail. Then he went to Brünn, where he has been propagating his diabolical faith altogether unchecked.
His coachmen, stablemen, servants, postillions, Hussars, Uhlans—in a word, his entourage—consists exclusively of converted Jews. Every fourteen days, husbands, wives, sons, and daughters come to him from Poland, as well as from Moravia, and even from Hamburg, bringing copious gifts and horses; they are all of them converts from the selfsame sect, which has evidently already spread around the world. They kiss his feet, they stay a few days, and they leave, and then others come to take their places, and thus this novel vermin multiplies with every passing day.
I know that my words are no real evidence, but I am ready to face any punishment if Her Imperial Majesty’s investigation does not confirm these seemingly incredible things that have never been heard of since the dawn of the world, yet my denunciation . . .
Goliński considers that word for a moment, finally writes:
. . . will be proved in all particulars.
I thus extreme humbly request of Your Royal-Imperial Apostolic Majesty, on my knees and with the utmost respect, that out of consideration for the importance of this matter, it might be arranged for me to have a confrontation here in Vienna with Jacob Frank, that I could expose all of his crimes and recoup the thousands of ducats he took from me. And with this, for the mistakes I have made up to now, which I wish to erase with this open confession, I implore forgiveness.
Your Royal-Imperial Apostolic
Majesty’s humblest servant,
Jacob Goliński
The person who has been dictating this letter to Goliński now takes it from him and sprinkles it with sand. The sand dries the words, and thus they gather strength.
Coffee with milk: The effects of consumption
Jacob seems to have
been harmed by this new fashion for drinking two elements mixed: coffee and milk. It started with some slight indigestion, but soon it was as though his digestive processes had ceased completely, and the weakness that came over him could only be compared with the one that afflicted him in Częstochowa, when he was given poisoned hosts. In addition, his creditors keep pounding at the doors, and there is nothing to pay them with, as enormous amounts have gone to Vienna and been lost on legations. Waiting for Kapliński, Pawłowski, and Wołowski to return from Warsaw with money, he has ordered all expenditures on food to be restricted, and for a contingent of the guests whose maintenance has been a major burden on the court to be sent home. So weak and exhausted he cannot even sit any longer, he dictates letters to the machna in Warsaw, his beloved community. He urges them to be strong like the tree that despite the wind whipping around its branches still stands in place. They are to strengthen their hearts and be brave. He concludes his letter with the words: “Fear nothing.”
The dictation so exhausts him that come evening he falls into a deep, deathlike sleep.
This crisis lasts for several days, with the Lord lying in slumber, nothing near him altering except his caretakers, who moisten his lips, and change his bedding. The windows are covered, the communal meals canceled, so that now only simple food is served, bread and potatoes with a tiny bit of lard. No one is allowed onto the second floor, where the Lord’s rooms are. The roster of guards is determined by Zwierzchowska, who roams the hallways, tall and skinny, slightly hunched, clanking the keys clipped to her hips. It is she who, still sleepy on her feet one morning as she goes to open up the kitchen, sees the Lord in just his nightshirt, barefoot, standing in the doorway, swaying on his feet. Just look, his lady guardians have dozed off, and he has gotten well. Zwierzchowska wakes up the whole court; they make him broth he refuses to so much as touch. From now on he eats baked eggs, no bread or meat, just eggs, and soon he is himself again. Once more he strikes out on his own for his long walks outside town. Zwierzchowska discreetly sends someone from the court to keep an eye on him.
The Books of Jacob Page 87
