The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Suddenly that knife set with turquoise, lost or given as a gift to some prostitute, cut from all the chaos of the prince’s thoughts a single astonishing idea—that as it turned out he must have something in common with those people, since he kept running into them everywhere he turned, every few years, since after all he had seen them for the first time in Kamieniec, when they were still Jews, hidden behind their great beards, and then, once baptized, when all through winter, at the request of that ball-breaker Kossakowska, they lived on his estate. There must be some invisible force that links human fates, for otherwise it would be impossible to explain such coincidences as meeting them again in Częstochowa. Now Lubomirski, with practically nowhere else to live, is happy to believe in the invisible threads of fate, but, above all, he has a great deal of faith in himself. He has a deep conviction that the path of his life is straight and orderly, rather like a path cut with a saber through a field of grain. His only regret is that he never exchanged a single word with Jacob Frank in Częstochowa. Still, that tarnished old Częstochowa prisoner now has his own castle and court. And doubtless the reason he has those things is so that he can save Prince Lubomirski, who must now flee from Warsaw.

  Only bold, unusual ideas have any chance of coming to fruition—this he has been taught throughout his entire turbulent life. For Prince Lubomirski’s whole life has been made up of just such unusual decisions that the regular rabble could never possibly comprehend.

  It was similar this time around. He sent a letter to his old friend from his time serving Prussia, Prince Frederick Karol Lichnowski, asking him to recommend him to Frank, now that Frank had somehow attained such dizzying heights. He asked Lichnowski to mention their old acquaintance, without going into too much detail, and his prickly situation now. Soon he had from his friend a quickly written and enthusiastic note that said that the Baron Dobrucki-Frank would be honored, that he could offer His Majesty the Prince the command of his guard, as he would in such a manner further elevate the splendor of his court. Frank also offered the prince an apartment in the nicest quarter of town, a carriage, and an aide-de-camp with the rank of colonel.

  And so the best thing that could possibly happen happened, for the prince did not even have the money to make the journey to Offenbach, and he had to fight out the loan of some post horses at every stop he made.

  Of the dollhouse

  “Dear friend—I think I can call you that now,” says Sophie von La Roche with the directness she is known for. She takes a confused Eva by the elbow and leads her to the table where the others have sat down already. They are primarily burghers and Offenbach entrepreneurs—such as, for instance, André and Bernard, descendants of Huguenots taken in by an ancestor of the Duke of Isenburg over a hundred years ago, just as now this duke has welcomed Frank and his court.

  Visitors mill around the living room, and through the open door to the next room several musicians are seen tuning their instruments. Eva Frank and Anusia Pawłowska sit. Eva, as always when she feels insecure and wants to seem like she is confident, even a little churlish, slightly puffs out her lips.

  “You see, there is always some commotion around here. How am I to work? Yesterday, however, André, our friend, brought in from Vienna the most fashionable sheet music, which we’ll practice. Do you ladies play an instrument? We need a clarinet.”

  “I have no talent for music,” says Eva. “My father attached great importance to a musical education, but . . . well. Perhaps I could accompany you on the clavichord?”

  Now they inquire after her father.

  “My father begs your forgiveness, he rarely leaves the house these days. He is ailing.”

  Sophie von La Roche, handing them cups of hot chocolate, asks with concern:

  “Does he need a doctor? One of the best is in Frankfurt, I’d be happy to send him a note!”

  “No, thank you, there’s no need, we have our own doctors.”

  There is a moment of silence, as though everyone now needs to contemplate carefully all that Eva Frank has said—what “we” means, and the implications of “our own doctors.” Praise be to God, however, that the first bars of music are beginning to enter from the room adjacent. Eva lets the air out of her lungs and purses her lips. Sheets of music are lying on the coffee table, evidently straight from the printer’s, their pages as yet uncut. Eva reaches for them and reads: Musikalischer Spass für zwei Vio‑ linen, Bratsche, zwei Korner und Bass, geschrieben in Wien. W. A. Mozart.

  The tea drunk from the round cup tastes delicious. Eva is not used to this drink—Sophie von La Roche makes a mental note of it. Do not all Russians drink tea?

  Eva looks curiously but discreetly at Sophie—she is around fifty years old, but her face is surprisingly fresh and young, and her eyes downright girlish. She dresses modestly, not like an aristocrat, more like a townswoman. Her gray hair is combed up and held in place by a delicate bonnet with meticulously pleated frills. She appears quite neat and tidy, until you look at her hands, which are stained with ink, like a child’s.

  When the small ensemble finally begins to play, Eva takes advantage of the fact that she no longer needs to converse with anyone to look around the room. She sees something that holds her attention longer than the music. As soon as the break begins she intends to ask her hostess about it, but the musicians come back to the coffee table, and cups are clinking, the men are joking, and their hostess is busy introducing the latest guests in the midst of all the hubbub. Eva has never seen such direct, such amusing society people. In Vienna everyone was very artificial and distant. And suddenly, without knowing how it has happened—it must have been because of Anusia, who, in her excitement, her cheeks flushed, praised Eva, and then there were Sophie’s kind, wise eyes, reassuring her and guaranteeing her safety—Eva finds herself sitting down at Mrs. von La Roche’s clavichord, her heart pounding, but of course she knows that her greatest talent is certainly not playing the clavichord, but rather keeping her feelings under control: “The lips won’t let themselves be fooled by the heart, nor will the body reveal what the heart feels,” a function of old lessons. Eva tries to think of what to play, she is handed some music, but calmly pushes that aside, and from under her fingers flows what she learned in Warsaw, when her father was still locked up in Częstochowa, a simple country ballad.

  When Eva and Anusia take their leave, Sophie von La Roche stops Eva by the dollhouse.

  “I noticed you were interested,” she says. “That’s for my granddaughters. They’ll come soon. These wonders are created by this craftsman from Bürgel, just take a look—the most recent thing he did was the linen press.”

  Eva moves closer so she can make out the smallest details. She sees a tiny chest of drawers, a linen cupboard with a wooden bolt mounted on top, pressing a minute piece of white cloth.

  Before she goes to sleep, she takes the time to recall every element of that little home. On the first floor, the sewing room and the laundry room, filled with washtubs and buckets, a stove and pots, a loom and little barrels. There is even a little henhouse, painted white, and a tiny ladder for the poultry. And the poultry itself, the miniature wooden ducks and chickens. On the second floor there is a room for the women, with walls covered in paper and a four-poster bed, while on the coffee table there is a beautiful cream-colored coffee set, and next to it a lovely little crib surrounded by a tiny lace curtain. On the third floor, there is the man of the house’s office, and the man himself in his frock coat; on his desk lie his writing instruments and a ream of paper not much larger than a thumbnail. Over all this hangs a crystal chandelier, and on the wall there is a crystal mirror. At the very top of the dollhouse is the kitchen, filled to the brim with pots, sieves, plates, and bowls the size of thimbles; on the floor there is even a tin butter churn with a wooden crank, the same kind they had in Brünn, as the women preferred to make their butter themselves.

  “Just take a look at it from up close,” says her hostess, and hands her the tiny butter churn. Eva takes the thing between
her thumb and her forefinger and brings it up to her eyes. She sets it down carefully.

  That night, Eva cannot sleep, and Anusia hears her quietly crying. Barefoot on the icy floor, she goes over to her mistress’s bed and puts her arms around her back shaken by sobs.

  The dangerous smell of the raspberry bush and muscatel

  In the mornings, Jakubowski transcribes a version of the Lord’s dream from his notes. Thus he dreamed:

  I saw a very aged Pole whose gray hair reached down to his chest. I drove with Avachunia and arrived at his apartment. His home stood alone on the plain beneath a tall mountain. We walked up to that home, and beneath our feet there was ice, and on that ice grew lovely herbs. The palace was all underground, and in it there were six hundred rooms, each of them covered in red cloth, and farther inside, in a great quantity of rooms, sat Polish magnates, Radziwiłłs and Lubomirskis and Potockis, and not one of them had on an expensive belt, they were all young and humbly dressed, with black and red beards, and they were employed to do tailoring work. I was much surprised by that sight. And then an old man showed us the siphon in the wall from which it was possible to draw a certain libation, and Avachunia and I drank of that elixir, and its taste was unspeakably good, like that of a raspberry bush or muscatel, and it remained on my lips even after I awoke.

  It is a late December night, the stove has just gone out, and Jakubowski is planning on going to bed. Suddenly there is some sort of racket downstairs, as if something made of metal has fallen on the floor, and then women’s cries and the stamping of feet. He throws on his coat and carefully goes down the winding stairs. On the second floor, candle flames are flickering. Zwierzchowska races by:

  “The Lord has passed out!”

  Jakubowski presses into the room. Almost everyone is already in here (they either live on lower floors or are quicker at those awful stairs than he is). Jakubowski forces his way to the front and starts praying loudly: “Dio mio Baruchiah . . .” But someone shushes him.

  “We can’t hear if he’s breathing. The doctor’s on his way.”

  Jacob is lying on his back as though sleeping; he’s trembling slightly, or perhaps these are convulsions. Eva kneels beside her father and cries silently.

  Before the doctor comes, Zwierzchowska removes everyone from Jacob’s room. They are now standing in the corridor, where they can hear the howling of the wind, and it is horrifically cold. With numbed fingers, Jakubowski holds his coat shut tight and prays quietly, rocking back and forth. The men who lead in the doctor from Offenbach push Jakubowski back almost angrily. He stands there with the others until morning, and it isn’t until almost dawn that it occurs to someone to bring into the corridor some Turkish stoves.

  The morning of the next day is strange, as if the day hadn’t started at all. The kitchen does not open; there is no breakfast. The young people, who gathered here like every morning for their lessons, were informed that everything’s been canceled. People come up to the castle from town to inquire after the baron’s health.

  It is interesting, everyone says, that the Lord knew what would happen, for why else would he have sent out all those letters to Warsaw telling the true believers to make their way to Offenbach?

  And who has come?

  His sons Roch and Joseph have come here permanently; they arrived with trunks and servants. But if they had hoped to find at their father’s side some power due to them by birthright, they have made a grave mistake. They were given lovely rooms, but for gold to cover any expense they must, like everyone, ask Czerniawski. Praise be to God, the Lord is generous toward his children. Piotr Jakubowski also came to Offenbach with two of his daughters, Anna and Rozalia, having realized after the death of his wife that there was nothing left for him to do in Warsaw (though the eldest girl stayed) and deciding to join in the Lord’s care. Now he lives in a little room on the highest floor, with a single little window and a slanting wall, and there—as Czerniawski commanded—he dedicates himself to editing the words of the Lord and to his own eccentric studies. When Czerniawski stops by this little nook at times when Jakubowski isn’t in it, he finds on the small table a stack of papers he is not ashamed to rifle through. He understands nothing of Jakubowski’s Hebrew calculations, drawings, and sketches. He also finds some strange prophecies, written in a shaky hand, a chronicle of events reaching back far into the past, and handsewn pages, the first of which bears the title Scraps. Czerniawski flips through them, intrigued, not understanding what they are scraps of, what they could have belonged to before.

  Antoni Czerniawski, son of Israel Osman of Czernowitz, the Turkish Jew who led Frank’s company across the Dniester, does not take after his father at all. Where the father was dark-complexioned, skinny, violent, the son is a little overweight, calm, attentive. He is a quiet man, small in stature, very focused, with a frowning, worried forehead that ages him. In spite of his relative youth, he has already acquired quite the belly, and this makes his whole figure appear somewhat massive. He has thick black hair down to his shoulders, and a beard he trims every so often. And his is the one beard in the whole of the Offenbach castle that the Lord does not find fault with. The Lord trusts him without limit and entrusts to him the care of their finances, which isn’t easy—their income, though ample, is very irregular, while their expenses remain, unfortunately, quite regular indeed. He also performs the duties of a secretary and has a habit of walking into any room whenever he pleases, without knocking or announcing his arrival. His dark brown eyes check every detail. His sentences are short and concrete. He sometimes smiles slightly, not so much with his mouth as with his eyes, which turn into narrow slits.

  It was he, Czerniawski, who proved himself worthy of the hand of the Lord’s youngest sister, Ruta. He believes he was given “a treasure.” Ruta, or Anna Czerniawska, is a sensible and intelligent woman. The former closeness of his own sister, Eva Jezierzańska, with Jacob makes Czerniawski feel kind of like a brother-in-law twice over, and at that point it’s the same as being a brother. Eva Jezierzańska has long since lost her husband and become sort of like the Lord’s wife. Now, when Jacob is ill, this is how Antoni Czerniawski regards him—like an older brother who has lost his strength. Antoni himself does not have any predisposition for ruling. He prefers to keep things organized. The only thing that sometimes makes him lose control is the prospect of good food. Once a week he sends a cart to Bürgel and Sachsenhausen for eggs and poultry, especially guinea fowls, which he loves most. He also has an extensive tab in town with the cheese purveyor, Kugler. Czerniawski cannot resist that cheese. He buys up the local wine by the barrel. This is what is running through his mind—barrels of wine and dozens and dozens of eggs—as he walks the quiet castle corridors.

  Czerniawski realizes that out of all the stories that have happened on earth so far, the story of their machna and their company under Jacob’s leadership is exceptional; he usually thinks in the plural, the “we” reminiscent of a kind of pyramid, the pinnacle of which is Jacob, the base of which this whole crowd here in Offenbach, floating around the galleries without any occupation, practicing parade steps to the point of extreme boredom—but out there, too, in Warsaw, and all over Moravia, in Altona and Germany, in the Czech city of Prague (though those are more like offshoots of the selfsame “we”). And when he looks through the chronicle Jakubowski has written (Czerniawski tells him to be more consistent in it, to establish certain facts with the other elders, such as Jan Wołowski, who has also come down to Offenbach, and Yeruhim Dembowski, who has been here from the start), he realizes that the story of this “us” truly is extraordinary. He is confirmed in this when in the evenings the Lord tells his tales, and he and Jakubowski write them down, until out of these stories Jacob’s life starts to emerge—a life that is simultaneously the life of this “us.” Then Czerniawski becomes one of those who greatly regret that they were born too late and that they could not accompany the Lord on his dangerous journeys, sleep with him in the desert and survive with him that maritime adventure.
That is the story everyone likes best, as the Lord does a good job parodying Jakubowski, imitating his shrieking, and Jakubowski becomes recognizable to all as the inglorious hero of that sea squall.

  “He promised, bawling to high heaven, that he’d never let another drop of wine pass his lips,” howls the Lord, and they with him—even Jakubowski gets a chuckle out of this. “Then he promised to be a Jan Wołowski—the Cossack, as he’s called—who is a mustachioed elder now, but back then he used to sneak out of the sultan’s lands and smuggle money in barrels over the border.”

  Czerniawski treats the Lord’s service with gravity, and it is a ceaseless source of emotion for him, and there is probably no one else in this chatty, heedless crowd who understands as he does what actually happened when his parents came to Podolia to join Jacob. No one calls them Shabbitarians or converts anymore, and nothing remains of that disdain that was once almost a part of the air they all breathed. He looks proudly at the regular Sunday retinue that rides to the church in Bürgel, and at the Lord they lead in when they get there, holding him up by his shoulders, and at Eva—he considers every honor given her to be absolutely proper, though he acknowledges that she does somehow lack presence. He knows that the Lord’s sons hate him, but he believes that this bad feeling arises from a simple misunderstanding that will dissipate with time. He cares for them, these aging bachelors unsuited to any work, demanding and unhappy. Roch is a sybarite, Joseph a man of very few words, an oddball.