Czerniawski has arranged it so that whenever anyone goes in for an audience with the Lord, they must first drop down and put their face to the ground, and wait for the Lord to speak first. He also monitors the Lord’s diet. He orders his robes. The weaker Jacob gets, the more certain Czerniawski grows of what he’s doing, but he isn’t in it for himself—he does not want to rule over the others’ souls. It is enough for him that the Lord can’t do without him, that he calls him in when he’s upset about even the smallest things. Czerniawski understands all the Lord’s needs, does not judge them and never opposes them, either.
He has situated himself just next door to the Lord’s chambers, and now whenever anyone wishes to speak with the Lord they must register with Czerniawski first. He guards this order without compromise; he is the one who gets the Lord’s doctors for him and conducts Eva’s correspondence. It is also he whom the Lord sends out with letters to the prince and any delegation that goes to Warsaw. And it was through his intercession that they managed to obtain a portion of the money they needed to move to Offenbach.
He feels somewhat like a sheepdog, the kind the peasants had back in Wallachia, that herds all the sheep into a pack and takes care that they don’t wander off again.
The Lord’s health has improved, although the paresis of his left hand and the left side of his face persists. This lends the Lord’s face a new expression of sadness and surprise. The women run in with broths and delicacies. The Lord fancies a bit of catfish, so they race to the fishermen at the river to get it. Eva, Avachunia, spends whole days sitting by his bedside, but he never asks for his sons, no matter how long they have been waiting for an audience.
After a week, he feels well enough to be taken to the church in Bürgel, and then along the river, in the sun, for a walk. In the evening, he gives his first lesson since he fell ill. He says that he has taken upon himself all the anguish on the road to Daat—sacred knowledge, the sole road to salvation. Whoever travels on it will be freed from every pain and every plague.
Of Thomas von Schönfeld’s big plans
Jacob’s rooms are on the first floor, with a direct entrance from the galleries and enormous panes of stained glass in the windows. It is furnished with the carpets he so loves. Here you sit on pillows, according to the Turkish custom. Since these rooms are dominated by damp, Eva remembers to cense them every day. The incense burns until afternoon, and everyone is duty-bound to go in the morning to the “temple,” as Jacob’s ceremonial room is called, and in their prayers to pay their respects to the Lord, who is hidden in the back. Eva knows exactly who has come and who has not performed this duty—the smell of the incense gets into your clothes; it’s enough just to sniff them.
Zwierzchowska, who is allowed to go in and see the Lord at any time of day or night, brings him girls to warm up his bedding. The older the Lord gets, the more he likes his girls to be extremely young. He has them get undressed and lie beside him in bed, two at a time. At first they’re usually frightened, but then they quickly get used to it and begin to giggle. Sometimes the Lord makes jokes with them. The bodies of such young girls are reminiscent of parsley, long, delicate rootlets. Zwierzchowska doesn’t worry about their virtue. The potency of the Lord is now limited to speech. Somebody else will have to tire himself out over their virtue. They are there to keep the Lord warm.
Zwierzchowska knocks and doesn’t wait for an answer to enter.
“The young Dobrushka has come.”
Jacob gets up with a grunt and orders his clothes to be brought and put on him, so he can greet his guest. Slowly the castle lights up, although it is the middle of the night.
Thomas von Schönfeld runs to his uncle with open arms. Behind him is his younger brother, David-Immanuel.
They sit until almost dawn—Jacob has returned to bed, Thomas sits at the foot of it. Young Immanuel has dozed off on the carpet. Thomas shows Jacob some receipts and some drawings, at which Jacob has Czerniawski awakened and brought over. Czerniawski shuffles up, wearing his long nightshirt and his nightcap. Whenever Czerniawski is called, it has to be something to do with money.
Before he’s even made it to the door, Czerniawski hears the voice of Thomas von Schönfeld:
“I will divorce my wife and marry Eva. You are weak now, you cannot bear all this, you need peace. Wealthy people at your age go south—the air is better there. In Italy the air will cure even the gravest ailments. Just think, you can barely walk now, Uncle.”
When Czerniawski knocks and enters, one last sentence reaches his ears:
“And I know that I am the closest person to you, and that no one else understands what you are saying as well as I do . . .”
Then, with Czerniawski standing there, they really do talk of investments: money on the stock market is momentarily immobilized, but there will be new possibilities soon. Investments in America, bonds. Thomas knows what he is doing. Czerniawski, meanwhile, thinks in terms of trunks full of gold, not believing in bonds, which are—what? Just scraps of paper.
Thomas sits with Jacob all day long and takes the liberty of ordering food for himself. He reads him all his letters and writes down what he dictates. He tries to get in league with Czerniawski, but Czerniawski is impenetrable—polite, obedient, yet very firm when necessary. Thomas also tries the so-called “elders,” meaning Dembowski and Jakubowski, but they say little and look at him as if not even remotely understanding what he’s going on about. When Jan Wołowski comes, Thomas tries to ally himself with him, but this doesn’t work out, either, although he had been counting on it. The Poles are still strongest at this court, and they run a tight ship here. The “Krauts” have very little say in things, even if their numbers are increasing.
There is a man in the castle now named Hirschfeld, a wealthy and learned burgher, an eccentric Jew who never converted and who gets along pretty well with Jakubowski. It is he, cajoled by Jakubowski, who goes to the Lord to warn him about Thomas von Schönfeld.
“He is certainly a brilliant man,” he said. “But he is also a libertine. He has been thrown out of the lodge of the Evangelists for Asia that he founded himself and for which he wrote such an honorable charter. In Vienna he was constantly invoking your name, Lord, and Lady Eva’s, as his relatives, which gave him better access to the court. He has gotten into debt because of women and licentiousness. It pains me to say this, because I was once on such good terms with him,” confesses Hirschfeld, “but I must loyally warn you, Lord: he is a profligate and a pettifogger.”
Jacob listens, his face betraying nothing. Since his attack, he blinks with just one eye. The other one, the one that never blinks, now waters. His healthy eye, meanwhile, has taken on a kind of metallic sheen.
“He can’t go back to Vienna any longer, that is why he’s here,” adds Hirschfeld.
Then Czerniawski discovers a truly shameful thing: that Thomas has sent around in his own name letters to the kahalim of true believers, primarily to Germany and Moravia, claiming to be Jacob’s right hand, and with the very distinct suggestion—though intricately involuted—that after the Lord’s death, he, Thomas von Schönfeld, will be appointed his successor. Czerniawski shows these letters to the Lord, who instantly summons Thomas von Schönfeld.
Now Jacob leans over him, his face drawn. He still sways on his feet, but he slowly recovers his equilibrium and then—Jezierzańska sees it well, because she’s standing closest, but there are other witnesses there, too—with all his strength, Jacob strikes Thomas in the face. Thomas topples over, and blood splotches appear instantly on his white lace jabot. He tries to get up, hides behind a chair, but Jacob’s strong bony hand grabs him by the arm and pulls him in closer. Then there is a second slap, and Thomas, struck once more with full force in the face, falls again, astonished by the blood on his lips. He does not defend himself, shocked that this halfparalyzed old man has so much strength. Jacob’s hand lifts him up off the floor by the hair, aims the next blow. Thomas starts to whimper:
“Please don’t hit me!”
But he takes it in the face again, and this Jezierzańska cannot countenance any longer, and she grabs Jacob by the hands, putting herself between the men. She tries to catch Jacob’s eye, but he escapes her. His eyes are bloodshot, his jaw hangs loose, he’s drooling and looks as if he’s drunk.
Thomas lies on the floor, crying like a little child, his blood mixing with his spit and snot, he covers his head and cries into the floor:
“You don’t have the strength anymore. You’ve changed. Nobody believes you any longer, nobody will follow you. You will die soon.”
“Quiet!” a horrified Jakubowski shouts at him. “Quiet!”
“From a persecuted victim you’ve come to be a tyrant, a rotten baron. You have become just like all those you used to stand against. In the place of that law that you rejected, you’ve introduced your own system that is even worse. You are pathetic, like a character in a comedy . . .”
“Lock him up,” Jacob says in a hoarse voice.
Who the Lord is when he is no longer who he is
From his little pigeonhole upstairs, Nahman Jakubowski comes down—his room is now next door to the room that’s been assigned his brother, Paweł Pawłowski, who has also been residing here since the summer. Jakubowski takes some time to descend; the stone staircase is tightly coiled. He holds on to the iron railing and treads very carefully. Every few steps he pauses, and then he mutters something to himself in a language Antoni Czerniawski doesn’t understand. He is waiting for Jakubowski at the bottom. He wonders how old this skinny little elder with his arthritic hands might be. This brother Jakubowski, whom the Lord, when they were amongst the inner circle, still called “Nahman.” And now that is often how Czerniawski thinks of him—as Nahman.
“Everything happens according to how it is supposed to happen,” Nahman Jakubowski informs Czerniawski. Czerniawski reaches out and helps him get down the final few steps. “First it fell to us to change our names, a process known as shinui haShem, something you younger people don’t want to so much as hear about now. Then it fell to us to change location, when we set out from Poland on our way to Brünn, and here—shinui haMakom—and now it’s shinui Ma’ase that is happening: changing the Deed. The Lord has taken illness upon himself in order to spare us. He has taken upon himself all the suffering of the world, as it was said in Isaiah.”
“Amen,” Czerniawski feels like saying in response, although he doesn’t. The old man has reached the bottom of the stairs now and, briskly, all of a sudden, he has set off down the hall.
“I need to have a visit with him,” he says.
All this talk of suffering and salvation works on certain people, but Czerniawski isn’t one of them. He thinks concretely, does not believe in all that Kabbalah—doesn’t understand it. But he does believe that God is watching over them, and that the matters he cannot understand ought better to be left to the specialists. He must rather concentrate on the fact that at news of the Lord’s illness large numbers of his followers have started coming into Offenbach, and they must be lodged in town and received at the castle. Audiences are only once a day, in the evening, and they are brief. People come with their children to be blessed. The Lord lays his hands on pregnant women’s bellies, and on sick people’s heads. Ah, Czerniawski remembers, he needs to order from the printers the leaflets with the drawing of the Sefirot that are distributed among the novices. Czerniawski leaves Jakubowski, pushing on ahead. Let someone else take care of the old man! He turns toward the chancellery, where he sees two youths, no doubt from Moravia, ready to enter the ranks of the disciples and to supply the court with a fair sum of money that their families have provided them. When he goes in, his two secretaries—Zaleski and Czyński—rise respectfully. Both of Zaleski’s parents died here, in Offenbach, having come here with him on the obligatory pilgrimage to see the Lord. After their death, he turned inward, and he really does not have any reason to go back to Warsaw now. The company has dealt with all matters pertaining to his inheritance, selling off the little shop the Zaleskis had back in the capital, transferring the money here. Not many of their residents are like Zaleski. They tend to be older people, the elder brothers—both the Matuszewskis with their blind daughter who plays the clavichord so well, which has allowed her to become the music teacher of the court, or Paweł Pawłowski, Jakubowski’s brother, until recently an envoy of the Lord. There is Jezierzańska, a widow, and the two sons of the famous Elisha Shorr. There is Wolf and his wife, whom everyone calls the Wilkowskis (from the Polish word for “wolf”), and Jan the Cossack, whose recent widowing temporarily extinguished his infectious sense of humor, but who now seems to be returning to his former self—lately he was even seen courting some young woman. Joseph Piotrowski and the Lord’s trusted Yeruhim Dembowski, whom the Lord refers to as “Jędruś,” tenderly now, are also there. And of course among the elders you would have to include Franciszek Szymanowski, divorced multiple times, second-in-command of the Lord’s guard to Lubomirski, who has turned up rarely, irregularly, ever since he took up residence in town.
One autumn night, the Lord has all the brothers and sisters awakened. Audible in the darkness is their footfall on the stairs; candles are lit. Sleepy people, without saying a word to one another, take up their places in the large hall.
“I am not who I am,” says the Lord after a sustained period of silence. In the nocturnal quiet, coughing can be heard.
“I was hidden before you under this name of Jacob Frank, but that is not my true name. My country is very far from here, seven years’ trip by sea from Europe. My father was called Tygier, and my mother’s signet was a wolf. She was the daughter of a king . . .”
As the Lord continues, Czerniawski looks around at the faces of those gathered. The elders listen attentively, nodding their heads, as though what they are hearing is a confirmation of what they have long known. They are used to whatever Jacob says being the truth. The truth is like a gnarled tree, made up of many layers that are twisted all around each other, some layers holding others inside them, and sometimes being held. The truth is something that can be expressed in many tales, for it is like that garden the sages entered, in which each of them saw something else.
The younger among them, meanwhile, listen at the start, and then that long and complicated story, almost like some Eastern fairy tale, bores them, and they fidget and whisper among themselves, most of them not hearing everything, since Jacob speaks quietly, with difficulty, and the story itself is so strange that they no longer even know who it is about. Is it about Jacob, that he is from a royal lineage, and he was given to the Jew Buchbinder to be raised in exchange for his son, also called Jacob, and that Buchbinder taught him the Jewish language—for show, to keep people at bay? Which is why his daughter Eva, Avacha—may her health be good—must only marry someone from a royal family, too.
The young appear to be more interested in the news coming from France, which the newspapers write of with rising unease. Some of that news is strangely in tune with what Jacob says when he cites Isaiah—that when the time comes for the baptism of all Jews, the words of the prophets shall be fulfilled: “He will make all equal: the big and the small, the rabbis and the sages, the masters and the demeaned and the illiterate. All will be dressed and look alike.” This makes an impression on the youths, but then when Jacob moves on to some sort of star named Sabbatai who will show them the way to Poland, where there lies some great treasure, they lose interest once more.
The Lord concludes this strange speech with these words:
“When they ask you where you’re from and where you’re going, make yourselves deaf, give the impression that you cannot understand their words. Let them say of us: Those people are lovely and good, but they are simpletons and have no understanding. Accept this.”
They all go off to bed cold and tired. The women are still whispering over the Lord’s long and unexpected monologue, but it pales and dissolves with the night, come sunrise.
The next day, tiny little Kapliński is baptized
, for at the news of the Lord’s ailment, all the Kaplińskis have come in from Wallachia. Seeing them, Jacob livens up and starts to cry, so overwhelmed is he to see them, and Czerniawski and all the elder brothers cry, too, humbled by that subtle presence of Hana through her brother and ashamed somehow that time has treated them thus, without any mercy. Hayim, now Jacob Kapliński, has aged and hobbles now, but his face is still lovely, and it is so reminiscent of Hana’s that a chill passes through them all.
The Lord takes the little boy in his arms, and he submerges his own hand in the holy water brought in from the church. First he rinses off the child’s head, then he places a little turban on it to remind them of the Turkish religion. And, as a sign of the place where they are now, he ties a little silk handkerchief around his neck. During this ceremony, his drawn, suffering face, half motionless, is flooded with tears. For his words seem clear, as he says that the true believers are now sailing on three different ships, and the ship on which he, Jacob, is sailing, will offer his companions the greatest fortune. But the second is good, too, for it will sail nearby; those are the brothers in Wallachia and the Turkish lands. The third ship sails far, far into the world—that ship carries those who will disperse across the waters of the world.
Of Roch Frank’s sins
One day, while Jacob is ailing, and thus the castle is hushed, there is a sudden ruckus downstairs, and in spite of the guards posted all around, some woman gets inside the main entrance and keeps on going into the gallery, shrieking. Czerniawski runs down and finds his wife there, trying to calm this other woman down. She is young, and her blond hair has come undone in the scuffle that at last put an end to her progress. She unties the bulging bundle from her breast and places it on the ground. Czerniawski sees in horror that the bundle is moving; he tells the guards to leave, along with all the accidental witnesses to this event, so that it is only the three of them who remain:
The Books of Jacob Page 97
