These ones, as it turns out, have legs. They sit at two large tables upon which numerous books are splayed, and reams of paper, and scrolls. They must be working on a project in here. The men look like Jews, like the Jewish scholars who can be seen in Prague—they have long beards, but they are dressed in the Polish fashion, in vests that were once vivid and are now somewhat worn. They wear oversleeves to protect them from ink. One of the elders stands and, barely even glancing at them, hands them a piece of paper on which is printed some odd drawing covered in interlocking rings, and he says in the same accent as the beautiful woman:
“My sons, the Shekhinah is in captivity, being kept in prison in Edom and Ishmael. Our task is to free her from her chains. This will occur when the three sefirot are united into a single Trinity; then salvation will come.” With a bony finger, he indicates the rings.
Joseph’s companion gives him a furtive, amused look; he seems to be suppressing laughter. Joseph looks around the room and sees an odd mixture: in the foreground hangs a cross, and next to it a picture of the Catholic Virgin Mary, but when you look at it closer, it turns out to be a portrait of that beautiful woman, adorned in such a way as the Virgin Mary is adorned in churches and chapels, and below her are portraits of some men, and figures with Hebrew letters, the meaning of which he has no clue. He can only make out on one of the tablets some names he vaguely remembers, without knowing their deeper sense: Keter, Chokhmah, Binah, Chesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, Malkuth—connected with lines, they join into a single concept of Ein Sof.
The elder says:
“Two of the sefirot have already appeared in human form. Now we must await the arrival of the last one. Praise be to him who is chosen to unite with Tiferet—Beauty—for out of him the savior will arise. Pay attention, therefore, and listen to everything very carefully, so that you, too, might belong to the chosen.”
The elder says all of this as if reciting something everyone already knows, as if he had already repeated this thousands of times. He turns and leaves without a word. He is small and shriveled, and he takes tiny steps.
Out the door, both boys burst out laughing.
Immediately after returning from the elders, they are conscripted into the guard, they hand over the money they brought from home and receive funny multicolored uniforms. Now every day they will participate in drills, as well as in shooting lessons and hand-to-hand combat. Their sole obligation will be to carry out the orders of the man with the Polish mustache who runs their drills, and then show their muscles before an old man whose uniform marks him as a general and who appears at court from time to time and receives parades. The kitchen provides three big meals a day, and in the evenings, those who are not serving go to the great hall to study with the Elders. Both boys and girls participate in these lessons, and it is clear to everyone that the students care more about looking around at each other. Joseph catches only individual words from the lectures, their whole content is bizarre, and he isn’t really cut out for such things. He doesn’t understand whether what they say here is to be taken literally or as metaphor. In the lectures, quotes from the prophet Isaiah are repeated, as is the word Malkut—“Kingdom.” When Joseph is invited—no doubt through the intercession of the beautiful woman, who sometimes has him come for coffee—to join the guard of honor for the Sunday expeditions to the church in Bürgel, he starts to understand that it in fact signifies the same “Lord” whom they transport in a hermetically sealed carriage into the little town. Held up by stalwart bruisers, covered in a great hood, he enters the church with difficulty and remains there alone for some time. Then Joseph figures out that that “Lord” is in fact the same “Lord” who recently died, yet the truth is that he didn’t die. All the guards, dressed in their multicolored uniforms—Joseph feels like a circus performer in it—must then turn to face away, so that now they have before their eyes the peacefully flowing Main River and the sails of ships, fragile as dragonfly wings.
Sometimes the guards get days off. Then Joseph goes with his peers into the city, and there they join in with the exotic, bored crowd of young people who have already occupied all the parks and squares and are either flirting with whoever is around or playing instruments. They speak many different languages—you can hear the northern German dialect from Hamburg, and the southern one from the Czech and Moravian lands, and Czech, and more rarely some Eastern languages that Joseph doesn’t recognize. The most common language here is Polish, which he has learned to understand by now. Whenever the youths can’t understand a conversation, they try speaking in Yiddish or French. Romances blossom; he saw a lovely young man who, strumming a guitar, sang a song of longing under the window of his lady love.
Joseph quickly made friends with a boy from Prague, who like him came here fleeing the severe figure of Mars. His name is Moses, but he tells people to call him Leopold. He has not been baptized, and in the beginning he still recites his Jewish prayers, but soon gives that up. It is with him that Joseph spends the most time, and it is a good thing—he has someone in whom to confide his ever-stronger sense of the absurdity of this city, country, even the big river that observes their lazy life here with indifference.
Yet Joseph enjoys a special status, which he figures is not only because he is a distant relative of the beautiful woman, but also thanks to his uncle. Several times he is invited to the table where she sits with her brothers. They ask him questions about his family—the woman knows his aunts well. She asks him about the clock in his grandmother’s living room, whether it’s still running. This emboldens Joseph at the table. He tells them anecdotes about Brünn, mentions merchants, wineries, and confectionaries, though in fact he has very few of these recollections, he rarely went to see his grandmother. One day, tears come to the woman’s eyes, and she asks him for a handkerchief. Her dog looks at him with an inhuman calm, yet suspiciously. When, however, he is left alone with her, he loses all his confidence. It seems to him that a particular kind of goodness flows from this lady, mixed with an indefinite sadness, so that he comes back from seeing her with a muddle in his mind, defenseless.
Moses-Leopold is quite a bit more critical.
“This is all one big make-believe,” he says. “Look, nothing is real here, it’s like everyone’s acting out a play.”
They gaze down at the carriage readied to go. The horses have great plumes on their heads. On either side of the carriage, boys in motley uniforms line up; they will run alongside it. Moses is right.
“And these elders, they’re just funny, they repeat the same things over and over, and when you try and actually find something out, they hide behind some secret. Those wise faces of theirs . . .”
Moses imitates their faces and gestures. He squints, lifts up his head, and recites some nonsense blends of words. Joseph bursts out laughing. He, too, has the ever-increasing suspicion that they have wound up in a great theater that extends all across the city, where everyone plays the role in which they have been cast, yet without knowing the contents of the play they are performing, or its significance, or its end. The drills, boring and tiring, are like practice for a ball: they form two rows, which are then supposed to connect with each other, then separate, like in some sort of contredanse. He gets lucky in a way that Moses does not—he is chosen by the general for horse-riding lessons. And this is the sole concrete and useful thing he learns in Offenbach.
Of women soaking their legs
Eva had to consent long ago to marry off Anusia Pawłowska. Despite the fact that she has a husband and children in Warsaw, Anusia still comes every year to Offenbach. She did not go far to marry—her husband is her cousin Pawłowski, she didn’t even have to change her last name. Her husband is an officer; he is often away from home. Now Anusia Pawłowska has come with her daughter, Paulinka, who will stay with the Lady through the lovely winter in Offenbach, fortunately no longer in the castle, which it has not been possible to maintain, but rather in a solid house on the main street. The Czerniawskis purchased it under thei
r name, to help Eva give her creditors the slip.
Paulinka has gone with the maid into town, while they, the older women, have arranged a soak for their legs. The bones of Eva’s big toe have swollen, and it hurts her a great deal. When Anusia takes off her white stockings, Eva sees her friend suffers from the same affliction. Healing salts have been dissolved in the warm water. Their tucked skirts reveal their legs; Eva’s are all red from varicose veins. On the little table next to them the ladies have put a pitcher of coffee and a saucer with little wafer cookies. Eva especially likes the ones with pistachio filling. They are wondering how many children Jacob might have had, and who they could be. Eva is actually happy that she might have all those brothers and sisters, which would mean she has all kinds of great-nephews and -nieces in Warsaw, in Moravia, in Wallachia. Perhaps one of the little Kaplińskis, whom Jacob baptized with such emotion not long before his death. Remember, Anusia? Remember? Or Magda Jezierzańska? Remember? Or Ludwiczek Wołowski? He always looked like him. Or Basia Szymanowska? Certainly, Janek Zwierzchowski.
And suddenly Anusia asks:
“Or me?”
Eva looks at her kindheartedly and suddenly pats her hair, as if consoling her.
“Maybe you, too. I don’t know.”
“Either way, we’re sisters.”
They embrace over their basins of water. Then Eva asks:
“What was your mother like?”
Anusia ponders this, putting her hands under her head.
“She was good and clever. She had an instinct for business. She was so involved in everything, until the end. My father would never have made it without her. The way she got the shop going, and brought up my brothers. And now we have that shop.”
“She was called Pesel, wasn’t she? My father spoke of her that way: Pesel.”
“I know.”
“What’s it like being married, Mrs. Pawłowska?” Eva asks her later, when they are wiping off their legs with soft towels.
“Good. I married too late. I got too attached to you.”
“You abandoned me,” says Eva, as if teasing.
“Well, what can a woman do if she doesn’t marry well?”
Eva ponders this. Then she bends down and rubs her swollen bones.
“She could become a saint. You could have stayed with me.”
“I’m here now.”
Eva leans back, rests her head on the chair, and shuts her eyes.
“But you will leave,” she says, and with some difficulty she leans over to pull on her stockings. “I’ll stay here alone with my brother who is a drunk and my other brother who is a libertine.”
“Wait, I’ll help you,” says Anusia, and she leans in over Eva’s stockings.
“I have debts everywhere, I’m not allowed to leave the city. The Czerniawskis have dropped everything and gone off to Bucharest, or Budapest—who knows. They abandoned me to deal with it on my own. All these people I have around me now are total strangers.”
Anusia manages to pull Eva’s stocking onto her leg. She knows what Eva’s talking about. She has seen posters hung around the streets of Offenbach informing everyone that the Frank siblings promised to pay off all their debts to the local craftsmen and merchants, and that with this goal the younger Baron Frank is heading to Petersburg for money.
“Why to Petersburg?” asks Anusia.
“Zaleski came up with that. They think we’re Russians. From the tsar’s family. Roch is actually going to Warsaw.”
“He’ll get nothing there. Everyone is poor there. Do you want some vodka?” asks Anusia. She rises and reaches for the cupboard, where she gets a bottle and two glasses. She returns and pours the golden beverage into the glasses.
“Honey liqueur.”
They savor the vodka in silence for a while. Through the window a beam of the red glow of the setting winter sun falls, and for just a moment makes the room feel truly cozy—a feminine boudoir, the soft bed, the striped armchairs standing around the little coffee table, the classic “Roman” desk topped with piles of bills and a letter started but not finished. The nib of the pen has dried out now. Then the sun disappears, and the room starts to be submerged in thickening darkness. Anusia gets up to light a candle.
“Don’t light a candle,” says Eva. “Remember you once told me how in your mother’s village there was a woman who did not fully die.”
“Yes, that’s true. My mother said she kept breathing, and she just got smaller. She was our great-grandmother. In the end she was as small as a child, or a doll. They left her in the cave.”
Eva shifts uneasily.
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” says Anusia, and pours herself a second glass. “It’s too late to find out now.”
Scraps: Of the light
Nahman is old now, hunched over and shriveled up. He sits at the little window from which not much light comes in, a chill flowing through the thick walls. The hand holding the pen is visibly shaking. In the little hourglass standing next to his inkwell the last little grains of sand are flowing down; in just a moment, he will have to turn it over. Nahman writes:
Our ancestors would always say how it is written in Pesachim 3: There are four types of money that never bring happiness: writers’ fees, translators’ fees, orphans’ benefits, and money coming from countries overseas.
I do think that the wisdom of the Talmud was really very great, for these were the primary sources of income in my life, which means it is understandable that I did not attain any great happiness. Though I did attain some fulfillment that might be called a little happiness, just ordinary human happiness, and that occurred from the moment I settled here, in Offenbach, and I understood at once that here I would die. Then I also lost suddenly my greatest weakness, my sin—impatience. For what does it mean to be impatient?
To be impatient means never really living, being always in the future, in what will happen, but which is after all not yet here. Do not impatient people resemble spirits who are never here in this place, and now, in this very moment, but rather sticking their heads out of life like those wanderers who supposedly, when they found themselves at the end of the world, just looked onward, beyond the horizon? What did they see there? What is it that an impatient person hopes to glimpse?
Yesterday I was reminded of a question from the discussion, as usual well into the night, between Yeruhim Jędrzej Dembowski and myself. It is said, he said to me, that there, beyond the world, it is like behind the scenes of some sort of little street theater: a chaos of lines, old sets, costumes, and masks, all sorts of different props—the whole machinery necessary to create the illusion. That is what they say it looks like there. Ahayah aynayim, which in the old language means illusion, prestidigitation.
This is how I saw it now from my room. An illusion. A performance. As long as I could walk up and down the stairs, every morning we held lessons for the young, and with each passing year they appeared to me less distinct, until they completely merged together into a single face that changed and rippled. And in fact I could no longer find a single thing of interest in them. I would talk to them, but they wouldn’t understand me, as if the tree from our world had put out branches in completely diverging directions. But this does not worry me now.
After Jacob’s death, I entered into a period of peace. My main occupation became studying Merkavah, which my conversations with Yeruhim Dembowski also managed to cover, as we lived in the one room, which meant we got closer to each other. To him, to Yeruhim, I also confessed about Hayah Shorr—that she was the one woman I was ever able to love, and that I had loved her from that beautiful moment when I was given her for one night, back when I had come with news of Jacob to Rohatyn. But above all, of course, it was Jacob I had loved.
And now here, in Offenbach, a peaceful, sleepy place, we spent whole days doing nothing other than studying Hebrew words. We would rearrange their letters and tally up their values, so that new meanings would arise from them, and thus possibilities for new wor
lds. Yeruhim, when he succeeded at it, would giggle, and it would seem to me that that was exactly how God had giggled when he had created us all.
Sometimes we would be flooded with memories. Then I would ask him: “Do you remember how you were Bishop Dembowski’s favorite Jew? How he coddled you?” Because it appealed to me to travel back, in memory, because the past remained alive for me, while the present was barely breathing, and the future lay before me like a cold corpse.
We were both always waiting for our children and grandchildren. Yeruhim was to be visited in Offenbach by his sons, Jan and Joachim. He would speak of them so often, and describe them in such detail, that soon the visit itself became almost superfluous. Everyone remembered them from their childhood and youth as boys who were a little haughty, having been educated with the Theatines, and who bore themselves proudly. They grew up, became handsome. “One will come in a silver frock coat,” said Old Yeruhim, “and the other in a Polish uniform.” But they never came.
I meanwhile took great comfort in my granddaughters, who came to Our Lady, and one of them even married in Offenbach, to a Piotrowski. Our grandchildren cheer us up only until a certain time, when we become more sensitive to the affairs of the world, and we begin to mix up even our grandchildren’s names.
No one wanted to listen to us, everyone was busy with themselves. Eva, Our Lady, with the help of her very dedicated secretaries Zaleski and young Czyn´ski, ran the court as if it were a guesthouse. People would roam around it, but a significant portion of them now lived in town. Concerts were played downstairs, which Yeruhim and I never attended, preferring our exercises in gematria and notarikon. Last year the Wołowski brothers came here, and Yeruhim and I worked all summer on a letter to all the Jewish kahalim in the world. They wrote out that letter hundreds, maybe thousands of times in red ink, over and over again from scratch. It was a warning to all about the great catastrophe that awaited them should they not convert to the faith of Edom, for the Church will be the only escape from that holocaust. The letter was signed with their Jewish names by Franciszek Wołowski (Solomon ben Elisha Shorr), Michał Wołowski (Nathan ben Elisha Shorr), and Jędrzej Dembowski (Yeruhim ben Hananiah Lipman of Czarnokozin´ce). Yet I did not wish to sign this letter. I don’t believe in the disasters that might come. I believe in the ones we have been able to escape.
The Books of Jacob Page 100
