The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Thomas laughs.

  “So those gaudy uniforms were Lubomirski’s notion?”

  Jacob is offended by this supposition. The idea for the uniforms was his: amaranth breeches and cerulean jackets with gold aiguillettes. The halberdiers, meanwhile, wear azure on one side and crimson on the other.

  Of boiled eggs and Prince Lubomirski

  The castle, which has not been heated in years, is covered in a mycelium of frost and every variety of chill; the walls are cold and damp, the fireplaces and stoves are lazy, slow to start. They do heat up well, but as soon as the last log has burned, the fireplace cools down again immediately. And so their silhouettes round out—from the several layers of clothing they all wear, one on top of the other. The cold here is different, foreign—it clings to the skin, keeps hands and feet in a state of constant numbness; it is hard to make a needle go into an embroidery hoop, hard to turn the pages of a book. In winter, life takes place in one room on the first floor, the largest one, next to the fireplace and the glowing Turkish stoves arranged around the edges, which causes the clothes to absorb the particular smell of that damp smoke.

  “It smells like it used to in Ivanie,” says the Lord when he walks in.

  This is also where they eat all of their meals. They sit at a long table that is placed as close as possible to the fireplace. On their beautiful tableware, they are served almost exclusively boiled eggs.

  “You’ve turned into an old maid already. Not even Lubomirski wanted you, even though you asked him to come to tea,” Jacob says suddenly to his daughter as they are all having breakfast.

  This is how his bad moods usually start—Jacob has to lay into someone.

  Eva flushes crimson. His comment has been heard by Matuszewski, both her brothers, Anusia Pawłowska, Eva Jezierzańska, and—and this is truly awful—Thomas. Eva sets down her silverware and leaves the room.

  “But he’s here for Tekla Łabęcka,” says Eva Jezierzańska in a conciliatory tone, serving Jacob some more horseradish. “He’s like a big dog when it comes to women, you have to watch out for him. Tekla resisted him, but that just attracts him to her more.”

  “She didn’t resist him long,” says Matuszewski with his mouth full, pleased that the subject has successfully been changed.

  Jacob is quiet for a little while. Lately he has been living off boiled or baked eggs. He says his stomach won’t digest anything else now.

  “He’s a Polish prince . . . ,” says Jacob.

  “Maybe so, but his honor and his finances are finished,” Czerniawski says quietly. “He has no money, and no respect. He had to escape here from Poland because his creditors were after him. It’s a good thing he comes in handy as a stableman . . .”

  “He is the general of the palace guard,” Matuszewski corrects him.

  “But he’s a prince,” says Jacob, exasperated. “Go after her,” he says to Zwierzchowska.

  But Zwierzchowska has no intention of getting up.

  “She won’t come back. You offended her.” And after a slight pause, she adds, “Lord.”

  A silence falls on the table. Jacob cannot control his rage, his lower lip trembles. Only now can it be seen with perfect clarity that the left side of his face has flagged, drooped down slightly, since his last apoplexy in Brünn.

  After a moment’s silence he says, “I have taken all illness upon myself.” He begins quietly, then gathers volume. “Look at who you are, and that is without listening to me at all and caring nothing for my words. I led you here, and if you had just listened to me from the very beginning, then you would have gotten even further. You can’t even perceive it. You would be sleeping on swan’s down, on chests full of gold, in royal palaces. Who among you has ever truly believed in me? You are all fools. I’ve been struggling over you in vain. You’ve learned nothing, all you do is watch me, but you don’t think about how I feel or how I’m hurting.”

  He shoves his plate away violently. Shelled eggs fall onto the floor.

  “Get out. You, Eva, stay,” he says to Jezierzańska.

  When the others have left, she leans over him and straightens his thin wool stock tie.

  “It’s scratching me,” Jacob complains.

  “It’s meant to scratch you, that’s how it keeps you warm.”

  “You were always good to me, the kindest after my sweet Hana.”

  Jezierzańska tries to extricate herself, but Jacob has caught her by the hand and is pulling her closer.

  “Draw the curtains,” he says.

  She obediently draws the thick fabric so that it gets almost dark, and now they are hidden, as if in a box. Jacob says in a plaintive voice:

  “My thoughts are not your thoughts. I am so lonely. You may be lovely, good people, but you are also simpletons, without any understanding. You need to be treated like children. I talk to you about simple things in simple analogies. Stupidity can conceal great wisdom. You know that, because you are wise,” says Jacob, and lays his head on her lap. Eva Jezierzańska carefully slides his ever-present hat off his head and plunges her fingers into the Lord’s greasy silver locks.

  Jacob is old. Eva Jezierzańska, who bathes him every week, knows his body well. The skin on it has dried out and gotten very thin, but also smooth as parchment; even the pockmarks on his face have leveled out, or maybe they’re still lurking, under his deep wrinkles. Eva knows that people can be divided into those who have horizontal wrinkles on their foreheads and those who have vertical ones. The former are cheerful and friendly—that’s how she thinks of them, anyway, and she herself is like this—but they rarely get what they want in life. The others, those with the furrows over their noses, are angry and impetuous, but they usually do succeed in attaining their goals. Jacob belongs to that second group. In his youth, those angry wrinkles were more visible, but now they, too, have receded; perhaps his aim has already been reached, and they no longer have any reason to be there. Only their shadow has remained on his forehead, rinsed away daily by the sun’s rays.

  Jacob’s skin is tanned; the hair on his chest is gray and thinner—he used to have thick hair there, and it used to be black. The same is true of his legs—now they’re almost bare. Even Jacob’s penis has changed. Jezierzańska would know, as she used to have dealings with it often, hosting it inside her. But it has been a long time since she saw it take its fighting stance. Now it looks more like a formless codpiece flopping between his legs, the effect exaggerated by the hernia. Little networks of varicose veins—delicate filigrees—in every possible color have appeared on his calves and thighs, seemingly in all the colors there are. Jacob has gotten skinny lately, though his stomach is bloated from his poor digestion.

  She turns her head tactfully to the window as she gently washes his genitals with a sponge. She has to be careful with the water—God forbid it is too cold or too hot, for then Jacob shrieks as if she were murdering him. Although of course she could never have harmed him in any way. This is the most precious human body that she knows.

  She was the one who thought of sending out to the country, to the peasants, for the special shears they use to trim the split hooves of farm animals, which are the only things that work to cut Jacob’s toenails.

  “You go, Eva, to the younger women, pick three for me, you know the kind I like, tell them to ready a white costume and to keep it at hand. I’ll be calling them soon.”

  Eva Jezierzańska sighs theatrically and says in mock indignation:

  “Illness and old age just don’t exist as far as you’re concerned, Jacob. You ought to be ashamed.”

  This evidently flatters him, he smiles a little to himself and puts his arms around her thickset waist.

  How Zwierzchowska the She-Wolf maintains order in the castle

  She has to start everything from scratch. Zwierzchowska is the exhausted keeper of this whole court, all the keys hooked to her belt. It took her a long time to learn them all.

  Wherever she finds herself, Zwierzchowska always sets up and takes charge of the home.
She is like a she-wolf caring for her pack—feeding them, protecting them. She knows how to economize, knows how to run a household—she learned that back in Ivanie, and kept on learning it wherever they went, in places like Wojsławice, Kobyłka, Zamość, the smaller manor houses and villages where they were allotted some little place to live. She knows she is partly to blame for a crime, that fourteen people died because of her; she has them on her conscience, and even now, all these years later, she remembers that scene so vividly, when she pretended to be the wife of the Wojsławice rabbi Zyskiel. She wasn’t good at it—anyone ought to have been able to see right through her act, in fact. She justified it to herself as necessary, they were at war, and in war the rules are different from what they are in peacetime. Her husband tells her all the time that she can’t blame herself; they all took part in it. They lashed out like rabid animals. It seems as though no one cares anymore about what happened the way she does. Jacob promised her that when the last days came and they went to the Virgin, he would hold her hand. That promise has helped her a great deal. She hopes no curse has been cast upon her, and that no curse is lying in wait. After all, she was only protecting her pack.

  Now, when her swollen legs are bothering her, she asks her very young daughter-in-law, Eleonora, née Jezierzańska, to help her. Zwierzchowska, who moves rather sluggishly these days, often leans on Eleonora, and then people say of them that they look like Naomi and Ruth.

  Eva Jezierzańska, Zwierzchowska’s daughter-in-law’s mother, handles the youth recruits when she is with Jacob and not in Warsaw—she looks after their lodging, the girls, their jobs, their recreation. She conducts correspondence, arranging accommodation and the arrival dates of the brothers coming to Offenbach, as if this were a heavily frequented inn. When she goes back to Warsaw, her duties are taken over by Jacob Zalewski, the younger Dembowski’s son-in-law. The Czerniawskis, meanwhile, are in charge of finances. Their son, Antoni, is the Lord’s secretary, along with Yeruhim Dembowski, whom the Lord wishes to be always at his side these days. They have a chancellery next to the Lord’s room, bigger than the one in Brünn. Some of the young people copy out letters when the time comes to send them around to the true believers. Dembowska, Yeruhim’s wife, in a tiny little room at the very top of the palace that is constantly being stormed by pigeons with their noisy claws, handles the vending of golden drops. There is another small room that is like a post office, filled with little wooden boxes and piles of tow to arrange inside. The expensive goods are set along the shelves—hundreds of little bottles already filled up with golden drops; the labels are written by her daughter. The kitchen is run by one of the Matuszewskis, the one who married Michał Wołowski’s son. She is a self-confident, domineering woman, and in attitude and temperament she is suited to the kitchen’s design, as there are not any pots here, though there are cauldrons and huge pans, and the roasting tins they bought are big enough they could fit even the fattest goose. For the worst jobs they hire girls from town, but every girl who visits is expected to help out in the kitchen.

  Franciszek Szymanowski, who in Brünn handled the guard and the drills and had absolute power, has to share it here with Prince Lubomirski. He has done so willingly and even with a certain panache, presenting him with the baton that had been ordered back in Brünn, solemnly, on a pillow. He is already feeling exhausted by the ever-growing “legion.” He has reserved for himself only the function of leading the procession every Sunday, when they all ride to church on the road along the river. That’s when people come out of their houses to look at them. Szymanowski heads up the whole cavalcade—he sits up very straight and proud on his horse. He wears a half smile on his lips, looking neither ruminative nor ironic. His eyes pass over the people they go by as they would a lawn, boring and monotonous. Prince Lubomirski, meanwhile, always goes in the carriage with Jacob and Eva. This parade arrives so punctually that the inhabitants of Offenbach could set their watches by it, as far as he’s concerned—time for morning coffee! Here is that Polish count going to Bürgel, the one Catholic church in the area, surrounded by his entourage like some sort of faun.

  This mass is celebrated only for them, and the so-called Polacken pack the little church. They pray in silence and sing in Polish. Jacob continues his habit of lying in the form of the cross before the altar, which has created quite the sensation among the Catholics of Bürgel; they are unfamiliar with such ostentatious eastern piety. The parish priest praises them and tells others to follow their example. Since they have been here, the church has never wanted for candles or incense. And recently Eva funded new episcopal robes and a beautiful gold monstrance studded with the most expensive stones. The parish priest all but fainted when he saw it, and now every night he worries about whether keeping such a valuable thing won’t tempt every sort of thief.

  The knife set with turquoise

  Prince Jerzy Marcin Lubomirski was already completely broke when he turned up in Offenbach. Of his great fortune, one of the largest in all of Poland, nothing remains. In recent years he dedicated all of his energy to working for the king, who appreciated his excellent knowledge of all the local actresses as well as everything happening behind the scenes—he organized the royal theater in Warsaw. Unfortunately, he cannot shake his reputation as a traitor and a rabble-rouser. First, back when he was still commander of the fortress in Kamieniec, he sullied his royal honor by marrying a woman without her or his parents’ permission. The marriage turned out to be short-lived and unhappy. After obtaining a divorce, he married again, but that marriage, too, was not long for this world. He’s also had dalliances with men. To one of his male lovers he gifted a town and several villages, proving himself to be miserable marriage material. He always considered himself a soldier first and foremost. His tactical talents were evidently also noticed by Frederick, the Prussian emperor, who made him a general during the Silesian Wars. Due to almost inexplicable boredom connected with the Prussian way of waging war, the prince deserted from the Prussian army and founded his own division, with which he attacked his former comrades in arms. He was in fact fighting on two fronts, battling the Polish army at the same time, and he indulged with great gusto in rape and plunder as well. The territory between the fronts, the delectable anarchy, the suspension of all laws, human and divine, villages burned after the army passed through, battlefields covered in corpses to be looted, the slaughter of paupers found poking around out there, the nauseating smell of the blood mixed with the sour smell of digested alcohol—all that was the kingdom of Jerzy Marcin Lubomirski. In the end he was captured by the Poles and sentenced to death for treason and banditry. His family interceded on his behalf, and he escaped death in exchange for a long prison sentence. When the Bar Confederation was formed, however, suddenly people were reminded of his leadership talents, and he was given an opportunity for reform. He supplied provisions to Pułaski’s troops in the Jasna Góra fortress and spent time there himself.

  Lubomirski still remembers well the evening in Częstochowa when the wife of this Jacob Frank died. He watched the neophytes making their funeral procession, getting permission from the commander of the fortress to go outside the walls to bury the body in some cave. He had never in his life seen people more grief-stricken. Poor, downtrodden, gray, some of them dressed like Turks, some of them like Cossacks, and their women in cheap, garish dresses that didn’t suit a funeral at all. He felt sorry for them then. Who would have thought that he would find himself among them now?

  For the duration of the chaotic siege, he knew that although it was forbidden to have any contact with the prisoners, the soldiers would go to Frank like to some kind of holy father, and Frank would put his hands on their heads. Among the soldiers there was a belief that his touch could make you impervious to blows and bullets. And he also remembers that girl, Frank’s daughter, so young and flighty, whom the father never let out of the tower, no doubt fearing for her virtue, and how she would sometimes slip in from the town to the monastery with a hood over her beautiful head.


  The prince’s mood darkened there in stifling Częstochowa. He wasn’t really able to pray; the votive offerings hanging on the walls made him uncomfortable as he rattled off his devotions. For what if he were to meet with such misfortune? If he lost a leg, or was disfigured in some explosion? But of one thing he was sure: People like him enjoyed special privileges with the Holy Mother, she had proven that to be the case a great many times. She was like his family, like a kind aunt who would help him out of any type of scrape.

  Bored by the listlessness of the monastery, he got drunk every evening and encouraged his noncommissioned officers to take up with the prisoner’s young daughter. Once, in a fit of drunken generosity, weary of this place where he felt no less a prisoner than that strange Jew, he sent the neophytes a basket of hard-won victuals as well as a barrel of inferior wine out of the brothers’ stores. Frank sent him a polite thank-you as well as a striking Turkish knife with a silver hilt set with pieces of turquoise—a present worth a great deal more than that basket of food and some vinegary wine. Lubomirski mislaid the knife somewhere along the way, but when he fell on hard times and wound up in Vienna, he suddenly remembered its existence.

  After the fall of Jasna Góra, he returned to Warsaw. People said that at the Partition Sejm, he was the one to drag Tadeusz Reytan out of the doorway where he had lain in an attempt to prevent the ratification of the First Partition of Poland, and that then he had demarcated the new boundaries of the Kingdom of Poland, mutilating the nation, crippling it. Which is why, in Warsaw, his acquaintances started to cross the street at the sight of him. And there Lubomirski led a life of dissolution, squandering the rest of his fortune and taking out massive loans, in a city that was deep in chaos. He drank, played cards, and was called a “libertine,” a fashionable recent word, even though for as long as possible he associated mostly with the ultra-Catholics. When in 1781 a list of his debts was published, it contained the names of over a hundred different creditors. The meticulously calculated sums were astronomical: two million, six hundred and ninety-nine thousand, two hundred and ninety-nine Polish zlotys. He was bankrupt, maybe the most bankrupt person anywhere in Europe. A few years later, he learned from one of his old friends, old Kossakowska, that the court of Jacob Frank had moved to Offenbach.