The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Franciszek Wołowski the younger responds calmly to this, as is his tendency:

  “Our fathers believed that since they were with the Lord, death couldn’t touch them. Now it’s hard to understand that.”

  “They believed they were immortal?” His cousin’s voice switches to an incredulous treble.

  “Why does that surprise you so much? You believe it, too.”

  “Well, yes, but not on earth. In the Heavenly Kingdom.”

  “Which is where?”

  “I don’t know. After death. What do you think happens?”

  Of Samuel Ascherbach, son of Gitla and Asher

  Yente, who is everywhere, now takes a look at Samuel, son of Gitla and Asher, or Gertruda and Rudolf Ascherbach, who have an optician’s shop on Alte Schmiedegasse in Vienna. This thin, pimply young man, a law student, stands with his friends and watches the rich open carriage passing by. In the carriage sits a man in a high hat, and next to him a young, beautiful woman. The woman has an olive-hued complexion and enormous dark eyes. Her entire outfit is light celadon, and even the feathers in her hat are that same color—it looks as though she’s casting a glimmering, underwater light. She is petite but perfectly built, narrow-waisted and curvy. Her ample décolletage is covered by a snow-white lace handkerchief. The carriage stops, and servants help the pair get out.

  The boys watch, curious, and from the excited whispers of passersby, Samuel learns that this is some sort of Polish prophet with his daughter. They disappear into an expensive candy store. That’s it. The boys move on to their own affairs.

  Samuel can sometimes be a bit vulgar, though at this age, such things are forgivable.

  “I’d run her up the flagpole, that pretty little Polish thing,” he says.

  His companions guffaw.

  “Not a meal for a heel, Ascherbach. She’s an important lady.”

  “It’s only the important ones I’d run up the flagpole.”

  In fact, that celadon beauty has made an enormous impression on Samuel. In the evening, he thinks of her when he masturbates. Her full, firm breasts pop out of her dress, and among the foamy petticoats, Samuel finds that hot, wet point that swallows him up and floods him with pleasure.

  28.

  Asher in a Viennese café, or: Was ist Aufklärung? 1784

  Tea from China, coffee from Turkey, chocolate from America: they have everything here. The little tables are packed together, with shapely bentwood chairs that stand on one leg. Asher and Gitla Gertruda like to come here, and with their coffee they order a piece of cake that they eat with a teaspoon, slowly, relishing every bite. The chocolate unleashes such sensory pleasure that the street outside becomes blurry; the coffee, meanwhile, restores the sharpness of their sight. They wind down this war of the elements waged within the human mouth in silence, watching the colorful crowd rolling along under Saint Stephen’s Cathedral.

  On the shelf by the entrance there are newspapers, a recent fashion people say has been imported from Germany and England. You take a newspaper and sit down at your little table—if possible, close to the window, where it’s brighter, since otherwise you have to read by candlelight, which tires the eyes. Numerous paintings line the walls, but it is difficult to make them out in the semidarkness, even by day. Oftentimes the customers go up to them with candlesticks and admire the landscapes and portraits in that fragile, flickering glow.

  Add to that the pleasure of reading. At first, he’d read the paper from cover to cover, hungry for the printed word. Now he knows where he will find something that interests him. He regrets that his knowledge of French is so poor, he has to remedy that, because they also import French journals here. He is getting up in years, nearly sixty, but his mind is agile and energetic.

  “Either the real or the intelligible universe has infinite points of view from which it can be represented, and the possible systems of human knowledge are as numerous as those points of view,” he reads in German translation. They are the words of a man called Diderot. With rapt delight, Asher has recently looked over his Encyclopédie.

  Asher Rubin has done well in life. When, after leaving Lwów, they found themselves here, in Vienna, Asher had his last name, Ascherbach, entered into the official register. He took the names Rudolf and Joseph, the latter no doubt after the young emperor, whose scientific impetus impresses him so much and whom he admires more generally; Gitla, meanwhile, became Gertruda Anna. The Ascherbach family now resides in a respectable tenement house on Alte Schmiedegasse. As an optician, Ascherbach treated local Jews at first, but his clientele grew quickly. He treats cataracts and prepares glasses. They also have a small optical store, which is run by Gitla-Gertruda. The girls are taught at home, they have a tutor, while Samuel is studying law. Asher, meanwhile, collects books, which is his most fervent passion; he hopes that someday Samuel will take over his library.

  Asher-Ascherbach’s first purchase was the sixty-eight volumes of the Universal Lexicon by Johann Heinrich Zedler, on which he spent the very first money he earned. He quickly earned it over again. The patients appear one after the next—everyone recommends him.

  At first Gitla grumbled over this purchase, but one day when Asher came home from the hospital, he saw her leaning over one of the volumes and closely examining an article. Lately, she had been interested in the shapes of shells. Gertruda wears glasses she ground herself. The lens is complex and allows her to look through the very same glasses at things that are far away and also at whatever she is reading.

  Along with their large apartment, they have rented a workshop in the outbuilding. Rudolf Ascherbach employed an old man, almost blind now, to grind the glass and make the lenses according to Ascherbach’s specifications. Gertruda would sit in the workshop and watch the old man craft those lenses with such precision. She didn’t even notice when she started to do it herself. She sat at the table, pulling her dress up over her knees so that it would be comfortable for her to press against the pedal that drove the grinding mechanism. And now it is she who makes the glasses.

  They often argue, and just as often reconcile. Once she threw a cabbage at him. Now she rarely goes into the kitchen—they have a cook and a girl who lights the stoves and cleans. A laundress comes once a week, and a seamstress once a month.

  The last volume of this enormous work appeared in 1754, and since Ascherbach puts the books on his shelves not according to series, title, or author’s last name, but rather according to the date when it was published, that volume now stands next to the New Athens they brought from Podolia, which Gitla used to learn to read in Polish. An effort that proved to be in vain. That language won’t be necessary for them now. Asher sometimes picks it up and looks it over, although his Polish is getting weaker by the day. This is always when he recollects Rohatyn, which seems to him now like a long-ago, faraway dream, one in which he was totally unlike himself but rather an old, embittered person, as though time worked in the opposite direction for him.

  The Ascherbachs, sitting in a café per their weekly Sunday-afternoon ritual, decide to join in the debate that has been going on for some time now in the pages of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, which they read regularly. It is Gertruda’s idea for them to try it, and she is the one who starts to write, but Ascherbach believes she has a poor style, too ornamental, and so he starts to correct her, and in this way, he, too, joins in the writing. The debate is about how to define this fashionable idea, intruding ever more frequently into ordinary conversations, of an “Enlightenment.” Everyone makes use of it as they can, but everyone also understands it somewhat differently. It started with a man named Johann Friedrich Zöllner, who, in one of his articles, defending the institution of church marriage, posed in a footnote the question: “Was ist Aufklärung?” This unexpectedly invited a flood of responses, including from famous people. Moses Mendelssohn was the first to respond to it, and with time an article on enlightenment was published in the journal by the well-known philosopher from Königsberg, Immanuel Kant.

  The Asche
rbachs don’t care about getting paid for their writing, of course—they are doing perfectly well as it is. It is more of a need, a kind of calling—to polish words so that it will be possible to see through them clearly. Gertruda, who always smokes a pipe in the café, causing quite a stir among the sober-minded Viennese burghers, takes notes. They agree only on the point that the most important aspect is reason. For one entire evening they play around with the metaphor of the light of reason that illuminates everything equally and dispassionately. Gertruda remarks immediately and intelligently that wherever something’s brightly lit, there is also a shadow, a darkening. The more powerful the light, the deeper, the more intense the shadow. That’s true, that’s a little bit disturbing; they stop talking for a while.

  And then, since people should make use of that which is most valuable, i.e., reason, skin color is invalidated, as is the family one comes from, the religion one practices—even gender. Ascherbach adds, quoting Mendelssohn, whom he has been reading passionately lately (on the table lies Phaedon oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, or Phaedon, or on the Im‑ mortality of the Soul; the title is printed in a red font) that Aufklärung’s relationship to culture is the same as theory’s to practice. Enlightenment has more to do with scholarly work, with abstractions, while culture is the perfection of interpersonal contacts through the intercession of the word, literature, the image, fine arts. They agree with each other about this. When Ascherbach reads Mendelssohn, he feels, for the first time in his whole life, proud that he’s a Jew.

  Gitla-Gertruda is forty years old now; she has gone gray and gained weight, but she is a beautiful woman still. Now, before going to bed, she braids her hair and covers it with a cap. They sleep together, but they are physically intimate less and less often, even though Asher, when he looks at her, at her raised, full shoulders, at her profile, still feels desire. He thinks that no one in the whole world is as close to him as she is. None of the children. No one. His life began when, in Lwów, a pregnant girl came to him, when she stood at his door, freezing, hungry, and impertinent. Now, as it happens, Ascherbach is living a new life that has nothing in common with Podolia or the low, starry sky over the market square in Rohatyn. He would have forgotten all of that completely were it not for a certain day when he encountered a familiar face on the street in front of his favorite café, a young man, modestly dressed and walking briskly, carrying sheets of music under his arm. Ascherbach, as he passes, looks at him so intrusively that the other man slows. They pass each other almost reluctantly, looking back over their shoulders; in the end, they stop and walk back up to each other, more surprised than pleased by this unexpected meeting. Asher recognizes this young man, but he cannot quite match the names he remembers to time, or time to the places with which he associates them:

  “Are you Shlomo Shorr?” he asks in German.

  A shadow runs over the young man’s face, and he makes a motion as if wanting to leave. Ascherbach understands now that he has made a mistake. He doffs his hat, embarrassed.

  “No, my name is Wołowski. Franciszek. You mistake me for my father, Mr. . . . ,” the other man responds in a Polish accent.

  Ascherbach apologizes, understanding the man’s embarrassment at once.

  “I was a doctor in Rohatyn. Asher Rubin.” It has been a long time since he has pronounced his old name, he wants to embolden this boy with it now. It does make him uncomfortable, as if he had slipped his feet into old, trampled shoes.

  The young man is silent for a moment, his face betraying no emotion, and only now does the difference between him and his father become clear. This father had very lively facial expressions.

  “I remember you, Mr. Asher,” he says after a little while in Polish. “You used to treat my aunt Hayah, right? You came to our home. You pulled a nail out of my heel, I still have a scar there.”

  “You can’t remember me, son. You were too little,” says Ascherbach, suddenly feeling emotional, whether because he has been remembered, or because he is speaking in Polish.

  “I remember. I remember a great deal.”

  They smile, each man to himself, thinking of those days gone by.

  “Yes . . . ,” Ascherbach says with a sigh.

  They walk for some time in the same direction.

  “What are you doing here?” Asher asks at last.

  “I am visiting my family,” Łukasz Franciszek says calmly. “It is time for me to get married.”

  Ascherbach isn’t sure what to ask in order to avoid hitting a sensitive spot. He can tell that there are many of them.

  “Do you have a fiancée already?”

  “In my mind. I want to choose myself.”

  This response makes Ascherbach happy, although he doesn’t know why.

  “Yes, that is very important. May you make a good choice.”

  They trade some irrelevant information that reveals nothing, and then go their separate ways. Ascherbach hands the boy a business card with an address, and he looks at it for a long while.

  He does not tell Gitla-Gertruda about this meeting. In the evening, however, as they are working on their article for the newspaper in Berlin, he returns to it, like a vision—a certain night in Rohatyn, as he was walking along in the dark through the market square to the Shorrs’ home. The faint starlight that only promised some other reality, but did not even illuminate the path. The smell of the rotting leaves, the animals in their pens. The chill that got into your bones. The foreignness and indifference of the world contrasted with the great trustfulness of those little huts lying low to the ground, the short fences grown over with dry ropes of clematis, lights in the windows, miserable and uncertain—all of it contained in the rotten order of the world. That is, at any rate, how Asher saw things then. He has not thought of it in ages, but now he cannot stop. So Gitla, disappointed by his distraction, writes alone, mercilessly smoking up the whole salon as she does so.

  That evening, Asher is overwhelmed by the melancholy of those days. He is irritated; he has a lemon balm infusion prepared. Suddenly it seems to him that aside from all those lofty theses printed by the Berlinische Monatsschrift, beyond light and reason, beyond human power and freedom, there remains something very important, a kind of dark ground with the sticky consistency of cake batter onto which all words and ideas fall as though into tar, losing their shape and their meaning. The lofty tirades from the newspaper sound as if they had been spoken by a ventriloquist—indistinct and grotesque. From everywhere comes something like a chuckle; perhaps at one time Asher might have thought that it was the devil, but nowadays he doesn’t believe in such things. He remembers what Gitla said—a shadow, something well-lit casts a shadow. That is what is disturbing about this new idea. Enlightenment begins when people lose their faith in the goodness and the order of the world. The Enlightenment is an expression of mistrust.

  Of the healthful aspects of prophesying

  Asher is sometimes called in the evenings for other ailments. Someone must have recommended him, for the local Jews, and in particular those who are secretly inclining toward assimilation, many of whom come from Poland, from Podolia, summon him not as an optician, but as an excellent doctor who can treat every concern, however shameful and strange.

  This happens because in these spacious tenement houses, in the bright rooms, there come to be heard old demons, as if bursting from the seams of the clothes people wear, from the souvenir tallitot passed down from their grandfathers, from the velvet jackets once woven by their greatgrandmothers, embroidered with red threads. These tenement houses are usually the homes of wealthy merchants and their numerous families, well assimilated, more Viennese than the Viennese themselves, selfsatisfied but only on the surface, for in reality, they are the most insecure, and the most lost, of all.

  Asher pulls the handle and hears on the other side the sound of a bell, pleasant to the ear.

  The girl’s worried father grasps his hand in silence; her mother is one of the daughters of the Moravian Jew Seidel, a cousin of the Roha
tyn Shorrs. They lead him straight to the patient.

  The illness is strange and not particularly pleasant in nature. It would be preferable to hide it somehow, so that it would not assault eyes accustomed to lovely heavy curtains, to wallpapers of classical design, now so fashionable, to the gracefully curving legs of coffee tables and Turkish carpets. And yet the heads of these families do come down with syphilis, infecting their wives, while their children get scabies; respectable uncles and proprietors of large companies drink so much they pass out, and their exquisite daughters sometimes wind up pregnant by who knows whom. And that is when they summon Rudolf Ascherbach, who becomes once more Rohatyn’s Asher.

  That is how it is here, too, in the home of the merchant Rudnitzky, who started out manufacturing buttons and now has a little factory outside Vienna that sews uniforms for the army. His young wife, whom he married as a widower, has taken ill.

  He says she has gone blind. She has shut herself inside her room, and she has been lying there in the dark for two days, afraid to move lest all her blood escape her with her monthly bleeding. She knows that warmth can be favorable to hemorrhage, and so she does not permit her stove to be lit and covers herself with only sheets, which in turn has made her catch a nasty cold. She keeps lit candles all around her bed, since she wants to be able to make sure there is no blood coming out of her. She doesn’t speak. Yesterday she tore off a section of her linen sheet and made herself a tampon, which she stuck between her legs, hoping to plug in this way any hemorrhage that might befall her. She is afraid that defecating might also bring about a hemorrhage, so she has not been eating, and she has been blocking her anus with her finger.

  The merchant Rudnitzky has conflicting feelings about this—he is dying of anxiety, and yet at the same time he is embarrassed by the illness of his young wife. Her madness frightens and appalls him. If it came out, he would lose his reputation.