“I am the sort of person—and this is a family trait of ours, no doubt—who always attempts to glean the good in whatever life brings,” Thomas goes on. “It is true that there were things we did not get to accomplish, but on the other hand, there were other things we did. That medicinal balm has enjoyed considerable success even here, in Vienna; I have been trying to disseminate it discreetly and only among friends and trustworthy persons.”
His chattering annoys Eva.
“Yes,” she interjects. “We all know that the income from that cannot possibly provide us even a small part of the life we have grown accustomed to, and it will certainly not keep up the whole court.”
Thomas walks a step behind Eva, and with the sharp end of a bamboo rod, he cuts the tips off the nettles.
“That is why I am telling you, in perfect sincerity”—he turns to Jacob—“that I experienced great relief when I heard that you, Lord, had recently ordered all the brothers and sisters and that parasitic riffraff to go home. That is a good sign.”
“We also got rid of a large part of our movable property,” adds Eva.
Her father says nothing.
“That is very good, that will allow us to gather together and take the next step, which I urge you, Uncle, to do.”
Only now does Jacob speak, so quietly that you have to really strain to hear him. He always does this when he is angry, it is a sort of starter violence—forcing his interlocutor to listen to him.
“We gave you the money we gathered from the brothers and sisters. You said you would increase it on the stock exchange. That you would lend it out and get back interest. Where is that money?”
“It is coming! That much is obvious.” Thomas starts to get excited. “There will be war, we know that for sure. The emperor must keep his commitments to Catherine, and she will strike in Turkey. I secured a safe conduct to provision the army in great quantities, and you know that I know everyone, every important person in Europe.”
“You said the same thing when we were bringing in alembics and retorts.”
Thomas laughs artificially.
“Well, I was wrong. Everyone was wrong. As far as I know, no one has managed to get gold out of it, though there have been rumors. And yet there is something a great deal more certain than hundreds of experiments in retorts, all those nigredos and conniunctios. This new alchemy is bold and skillful investing, trusting your inner voice, just as it goes in the alchemy lab—you try things out, you take certain risks . . .”
“Things ended badly for us once already,” says Jacob, sitting down on a fallen tree trunk, ruining with the tip of his walking stick the path of some traveling ants. He raises his voice: “You have to help us now.”
Thomas stands before Jacob. He is wearing silk stockings. Tight dark green trousers cling to his slim hips.
“I have to tell you something, Uncle,” he says after a moment. “You have generated quite a bit of intrigue among my companions. You will no longer obtain any support from the emperor, but you will get it from them. Your mission here is finished. The emperor has advisers who are biased against you, that is clear. I have heard people speaking of you as though you were some charlatan, have heard them unjustly equating you with those confidence men who are eternally at royal courts. Your credit line in Vienna is cut, and I cannot give you any support at this particular moment either, as I have my own great financial ambitions and would prefer for us not to be linked.”
Jacob gets up and brings his face close to Thomas’s. His eyes darken.
“You’re ashamed of me now.”
Jacob heads back, walking quickly, Thomas following him uncomfortably, trying to explain:
“I have never been ashamed of you and will never be. Between us there is a generational difference; if I had been born when you were, then perhaps I would be attempting to be just like you. But now other laws prevail. What you say, I would like to do. You keep waiting for mystical signs, for some sort of confederacy of the bałakaben, while it seems to me that man can be liberated much more simply and not in mystical spheres, but here, on earth.”
Eva looks at her father fearfully, certain that Thomas’s impudence will provoke paroxysms of rage. But Jacob is calm, walks leaning forward, eyes on his feet. Thomas trots after him.
“A person must be shown that he has an influence on his life and on the whole world. When he stomps, thrones will tremble. You say: The law must be broken in secret, in our bedchambers, while we pretend externally that we have followed it. Breaking the law in bedrooms and boudoirs!” Thomas senses he has gone too far in the direction of criticizing his uncle, and his tone of voice softens a bit. “I say that it’s the other way around: the law, if it is unjust and if it brings people misfortune, needs to be changed, we must act in the open, boldly, making no compromises.”
“A person often doesn’t even realize his misfortune,” Jacob says calmly into his shoes.
His calm evidently emboldens Thomas, for now he runs out in front of Jacob and continues to pontificate, walking backward:
“Then he must be made aware of it and dragged into action, instead of us just dancing around in circles, singing songs and waving our arms.” Eva is certain that now Jacob will strike Thomas von Schönfeld in the face, but he doesn’t even pause.
“Do you think anything can be rebuilt from the ground up?” Jacob asks him, continuing to look down at his feet.
Thomas stops, shocked, and raises his voice.
“But those are your words, your teachings!”
When in the evening von Schönfeld prepares to return to Vienna, Jacob draws him in and hugs him. He whispers something into his ear. Thomas’s face lights up, and he clears his throat. Eva, standing next to her father, is not sure whether she has heard correctly what he said. It seems to her that it was: “I trust you implicitly.” And that he also used the word “son.”
Several months later, a package arrives from Vienna. It is brought by a courier dressed in black. It contains letters assuring their safe passage, and among them, news from Thomas:
. . . My brothers, whose influence is great, have found a certain person of angelic goodness, the prince of a separate little state, who would receive you with the entire court intact. His is an impressive castle on the River Main, near Frankfurt, and he will put it at your disposal, should you consent to adapt it to your needs. This is a change in the right direction—west, farther from the war that the emperor, albeit reluctantly, has declared upon Turkey. It will be better for you all to roll up your tents and move to this new place. Consider what I write you here in the greatest confidence.
Your wholeheartedly devoted
Thomas von Schönfeld
Eva, reading this letter, which her father has shown her, says in shock:
“How did he do it?”
Her father, buttoned all the way up despite the heat from the fireplace, sits with his eyes closed. Eva notices he needs the barber already. He has rested his bare feet on the soft, upholstered stool, and Eva sees the varicose veins that color his skin blue. She is suddenly overwhelmed by terrible exhaustion, and it is all the same to her now what happens to them next.
“I find this city so disgusting now,” she complains. She looks through the window at the empty courtyard, which has just emerged, with some difficulty, from under the dirty snow, exposing the garbage. Eva sees someone’s abandoned glove. “I just find it disgusting. I cannot look upon it any longer.”
“Silence,” says her father.
On the evening before their departure, a delegation of Brünn townspeople comes to the emptied court of the Franks. Since there are no longer any furnishings, they are received standing. Jacob goes out to them leaning upon young Czerniawski, with Eva standing beside him. The burghers bring farewell gifts—a crate of the finest Moravian wine for “the lord baron” and a silver platter with a view of the city engraved on it and the inscription: “Farewell friends of Brünn, from its residents.”
Jacob looks touched—they are all touched,
and in the townspeople there is also some sense of guilt, since it is now known that those on their way out are leaving a significant sum for alms and for the city councillors.
Jacob Frank, in his high Turkish cap and his coat with the ermine collar, stands on a low step and says in his coarse though correct German:
“Once I set out on a long journey and was so tired that I sought some place to rest. Then I found one tree that gave great shade. Its fruits smelled from afar, and next to it was a source of the purest water. And so I lay down under that tree, ate its fruits and drank the water from that source, and I slept a fine slumber. ‘How can I ever repay you, tree?’ I asked. ‘How can I bless you? Should I wish you many branches? You have them already. Should I say: May your fruit be sweet and have a magnificent smell? You are in possession of that already, too. Say: May you have around you a source of fresh water? This has already been given to you. Thus I have no way to bless you other than to simply say: May all honest passersby rest beneath you and give praise to the God who has created you.’ And this tree—it is Brünn.”
It is February 10, 1786, and the snow is beginning to fall again.
Scraps: Jacob Frank’s sons, and Moliwda
I have always carried out my missions with devotion, for I knew that Jacob would distinguish me for it. For whom, if not me? I was fluent in Turkish and knew those local customs as well as my own. And yet the latest mishaps have caused Jacob to distance himself from me again, keeping company now more with the younger and more agile Jan Wołowski, who, dressed up as a Cossack, his swarthy face cut crosswise by his bushy Polish mustache, has continued to be close to Jacob. He made Antoni Czerniawski, his brother-in-law, his second aide-de-camp. They’ve circled around him like flies, Matuszewski and Wittel also did their part, and most of all Eva, who defended him and slowly transformed from daughter into mother to Jacob.
Yeruhim and I had so much in common, and while the younger ones gave themselves over to what they rumblingly referred to as life, we preferred to talk about the old subjects, those no one here remembered anymore, nor valued. For we had been conducting our cause from the start, and we had seen more broadly than anyone out of our whole big machna. And I could take pride in the fact that I remained, the only one who had been with Jacob from the start, for after all, Reb Mordke, Issachar, even Moshe of Podhajce and his father, who were buried in that Częstochowa cave, are with us no longer, though I always think, really, that they have just gone off and are waiting for us all somewhere, sitting around a big wooden table, and the door to their room is somewhere here, in this great castle. Is not death merely appearance, like the many phenomena that appear in the world and in which we believe, like so many children?
I thought a great deal then about death, for during one of my absences from Warsaw, my Wajgełe died, giving life to a little girl whom I named Rozalia and whom I greatly loved. She was a child born too soon, and she was very weak; her mother, no longer young, could not endure the difficult labor. She passed away quietly in our apartment on Długa, in the presence of her two sisters, who communicated to me this terrible information when I returned from Brünn. I judge that God wished to tell me something, giving me this little crumb of a child at a time so filled with doubt and wretchedness—me, a person who had never been close to his family; for by that time my physical intercourse with my wife was rare, and we had not had any real hopes for parenthood in a long while. What did God want to tell me, giving me Rozalia? I think that he was appointing me a father again in this way, reminding me of that role I had so forgotten, so that I could begin to watch over Jacob’s sons.
That is why I was glad to go back to Warsaw, where I pursued my own business, as well as the obligations I had to our great family, but above all I looked after both of Jacob’s sons, Joseph and Roch (leaving Rozalia for the time being with her aunts), to whom I dedicated more attention than I had my own. Placed in schools, they were training to become officers. Jacob knew very well what he was doing, putting them in my custody, for I tried to prevent them from dissolving into the heady concoction that was Warsaw, and I felt particular affection for them, especially for the elder of the two, Roch, who was close to my heart, and so many times did I count on my fingers those gloomy months in Częstochowa, when he came into the world, and when I was raised up by Jacob, and when I was forgiven so wondrously and generously for my misdeed. But Roch avoided me as much as possible and was even rather harsh with me. I had the impression that he was ashamed of me, that I was not Polish enough for him, that I was too Jewish, that he was irritated by my Jewish accent, and that he found me personally unbearable. When he would come up to me, he would wrinkle up his nose and say, “It smells like onions here,” which made me feel terrible. Meanwhile, his younger brother, guided by his sibling, also treated me roughly, but sometimes tenderly as well; I think that aside from me they had no one who was close to them. And they did not have it easy, those boys—constantly in other people’s houses, and then in the dormitories of the School of Chivalry, seemingly surrounded by peace and esteem, but really treated like freaks. They became willful, lawless, connected with each other only, as if the rest of the world were their enemy. They made sure to hide their Jewish origins, always more Polish than their Polish peers.
When they were younger, they were sent to the Piarists. Roch went first—I asked him how he was doing there, and he complained to me in tears that they had to wake up at six in the morning, and then go to mass right away, and after mass all they got was bread and butter, but if they wanted coffee, they had to send for money for it. At eight it was back to the classroom, where they had lessons into afternoon. Then there were the guards’ rounds, whoever was on guard duty, and only after that could they have lunch. Until two they were given time to play in the garden out behind the building, and from two they had more lessons until five. Until eight in the evening they were to study and do their homework, leaving them just one hour for entertainment, from eight until nine. At nine-thirty they were to go to bed. And so on, over and over again. Is that the life of a happy child?
They were taught there that coming from a noble lineage is mere happenstance and blind fortune, and that true nobility rests in virtue and is a conduit to virtue, as without virtue, ability, and decency, nobility is empty and vain. First among their studies came Latin, in which they were instructed very thoroughly, so as to be able to understand the other disciplines after. These other disciplines were mathematics, foreign languages, world history, and the history of Poland, as well as geography and modern philosophy. Reading newspapers in other languages was mandatory, too. They also had something there that I could not comprehend—experimental physics with actual experiments, which reminded me somewhat—based on what I was told about it by Joseph—of the alchemy lab.
Later, at the Corps of Cadets, where they went as the ennobled Counts Frank, they grew used to keeping completely silent on the subject of themselves, never saying one word too many, and never getting close to anyone. Roch, small and redheaded, of nervous disposition, worked up his courage with an incredible bravado, and, later, with wine. Joseph, meanwhile, with his delicate complexion, looked more like a girl. Sometimes, when I beheld him, I had the impression that his cadet uniform was holding him in place, and that if you were to take it off him, Joseph Frank would spill out of it like butter. Joseph was taller than Roch and better built, with his sister’s big eyes and full lips, and he always kept his hair very short. Quiet and agreeable, in some ways he reminded me of Franciszek Wołowski.
Over the holidays, they stayed either with me or with Franciszek, and I would try to pass along my knowledge of the faith of the true believers, though they would often completely refuse it. They would seem to be listening to my lessons, but they were as if absent, as when their father would punish them for even the slightest transgression, since Jacob considered that boys had to be governed absolutely. I often felt pity for them, even back in Częstochowa, and especially for Roch, who up until Hana’s death spent his whole childhood
in prison, his whole world the officer’s chamber and the small courtyard in front of the tower, his only friends those old warhorses, and every so often novitiate monks. He reminded me of that plant that grows in the cellar, in humidity, and maybe that was why he was so slight and weak, so inconspicuous. How could such a creature ever become Jacob’s successor? Jacob did not like him or respect him, and I believe that even the sight of his sons got on his nerves. That is why I undertook this task. Yet fathering those two lost souls did not turn out as I had hoped.
I was also to play a role, when the time came, similar to the one Reb Mordke and I used to play long ago on our peregrinations—that of matchmaker. At first Jacob planned for them to take high-born, noble wives, for at that time he was steering everyone toward the outside—having them take husbands and wives not of our faith. But this did not last long.
I always felt that we had to stick together, otherwise we would never survive. My son, Antoni, Leah’s only child, had married Marianna Piotrowska, granddaughter of Moszek Kotlarz, and my grandchildren were now growing up in Warsaw, and all of our efforts went toward their education. My eldest daughter was already promised to Henryk Wołowski’s youngest boy. We did not wish her to marry too young, so we waited for her to grow up a little.
Once I ran into Moliwda on the street in Warsaw. I was shocked, for he had not changed one bit, except perhaps he had gotten skinnier, and as soon as he took off his cap it was revealed that he had gone bald, but his face and his signature gait, and everything else about him, appeared unaltered. It was just that his attire was now completely different—foreign, perhaps elegant once, but now somewhat worn and neglected. He did not recognize me right away. First he passed me, but then he turned around, and I did not know how to behave, and so I stood, giving him the right to say the first word. “Nahman,” he said, shocked. “Is that you?”
“It is I. Except that I am Piotr Jakubowski. Do you not remember?” I said.
The Books of Jacob Page 92
