The Books of Jacob Read online

  Somewhere in the room a child starts laughing loudly and is upbraided by its mother, then stops.

  “I saw him like I might a shadow. The light was blinding, afternoon sun. He stood over me—I was only half conscious now—and leaned over to touch my burning forehead. Instantly the clarity of my thoughts was restored, and I stood up . . .”

  His listeners breathe a sigh of relief. There are murmurs and whispers from all corners. It’s a good story, people like it.

  But Nahman is making it up. In reality, he fainted by the donkeys, and no one came to save him. His companions picked him up from there later. And it was only in the evening, as he was lying in a dark room with no windows, cool and quiet, that Jacob came to him. He hesitated at the threshold, leaned his arm against the door, and peered into the room from there—Nahman saw only his outline, a dark silhouette in the rectangle of the doorway against the backdrop of the stairs. Jacob had to lower his head to come into the room. He paused before taking this step, which of course he didn’t yet know would change his life. In the end, he made up his mind and went in, to Nahman on his sickbed and Reb Mordke sitting next to him, on top of the sheet. Jacob’s hair flowed in waves from the fez he was wearing to his shoulders. The light played over his abundant dark beard for a moment, eliciting ruby gleams. He looked a bit like a big kid.

  When Nahman, having recovered, went out into the streets of Smyrna, passing hundreds of people hurrying about their business, he couldn’t shake the thought that among them might be the Messiah, but that no one was able to recognize him. And the worst of it was that the Messiah himself might not be aware of it.

  When he heard this, Reb Mordke nodded his head a long time before saying:

  “You, Nahman, are a sensitive instrument. Sensitive, delicate. You might even be this Messiah’s prophet, just as Nathan of Gaza was the prophet of Sabbatai Tzvi (of blessed memory).”

  And after the long pause it took him to crush the bits of resin and mix them with his tobacco, he added mysteriously:

  “Every place has two characters—every place is double. What is sublime is also fallen. What is clement is at the same time base. In the deepest darkness lies the spark of the most powerful light, and vice versa: where omnipresent clarity reigns, a pit of darkness lurks inside the seed of light. The Messiah is our doppelgänger, a more perfect version of ourselves—he is what we would be, had it not been for the fall.”

  Of stones and the runaway with the horrible face

  Suddenly, as everyone is talking over one another, and Nahman is rinsing his throat with wine, there’s a thudding against the roof and the walls, and there’s a cry, then a commotion. Through a broken windowpane, a stone has flown into the room, knocking over some candles; lustfully, fire starts to lick the sawdust sprinkled over the floor. An older woman rushes to the rescue, putting out the flames with her heavy skirts. Others have already raced outside, crying and screaming, and in the darkness, those on the inside can hear men shouting to one another, although the hail of stones has stopped. After a long while, people begin to trickle back inside, their faces flushed with anger and excitement, but then shouts sound again from outside, and soon several men burst in great agitation into the main room, where people were dancing until moments ago. Among them are two of the Shorr brothers—Shlomo and Isaac, the bridegroom—as well as Moshek Abramowicz of Lanckoroń, Hayah’s brother-in-law, a strong, sturdy man who has in his grip some skinny wretch who kicks and spits furiously all around him.

  “Haskiel!” Hayah shouts at him, and goes to look him in the face. Covered in snot and crying with rage, he turns away so that he doesn’t have to look her in the eye. “Who was with you? How could you?”

  “You bad seeds, you traitors, you heretics!” he cries, till Moshek punches him in the face so hard that Haskiel staggers and falls.

  “Leave him alone!” cries Hayah.

  So they let him go, and he struggles to get up off his knees, searching for the exit as blood from his nose stains his light-colored linen shirt.

  Then the eldest of the Shorr brothers, Nathan, goes up to him and says calmly:

  “Nu, Haskiel, tell Aron not to try any more of that. We don’t want to shed your blood. But Rohatyn is ours.”

  Haskiel bolts, tripping over the edges of his coat. By the gate, his gaze falls on a figure standing calmly by. Its face is horrible, deformed, and at the sight of it, Haskiel begins to yelp in fear.

  “A golem. A golem!”

  Dobrushka from Prossnitz is shaken and holds his wife to him. He complains the people here are all savages, that in Moravia everyone does whatever they want in their own homes, and no one interferes in it. Just imagine, throwing stones!

  A displeased Nathan Shorr gestures to the “golem” to go back to the shed where he lives. Now they’ll have to get rid of him, lest Haskiel rat them out.

  The runaway—that’s what they call this big, silent fugitive peasant with the frostbitten face and red hands. His features have been blurred by the scars that remained after he thawed. His great red hands are bulblike, beaten up and swollen. They inspire respect. He is strong as an ox, and gentle. He sleeps in the cowshed, in an annex that shares one warm wall with the house. He is enterprising and hardworking, and he does his work earnestly and well, slow but steady. His dedication is strange, for who are the Jews to him? As a peasant, he surely holds them in contempt, hates them as the reason for many of his own misfortunes—they lease out the nobles’ holdings, they collect the taxes, they intoxicate the peasants in their taverns, and as soon as one of them starts to feel a little more confident, he takes to acting like a serf-owner.

  Yet there is no sign of resentment in this golem. It may be that there is something wrong with his head, that in addition to his face and hands some part of his mind was affected by the frostbite—that would be why he is so slow, as if perpetually ensconced in ice.

  The Shorrs found him in the snow one harsh winter, as they were going home from market. They had only stopped because Elisha needed to answer nature’s call. There was another fugitive with him, dressed like him in a peasant’s sukmana, in shoes stuffed with straw, with a bundle in which only crumbs of bread and socks remained, but that one was dead. The bodies were already dusted with snow, and Elisha thought at first they were dead animals. The corpse the Shorrs left in the woods.

  It took a long time for the runaway to thaw. Slowly he came back to life, day by day, as if his whole soul had been frozen and were now melting back to its normal temperature, just like his body. His frostbite didn’t heal fully; his skin festered, and kept falling off in sheets. Hayah washed his face; it is she who knows him best, is intimate with his robust and lovely body. He slept indoors all winter, up until April, while they debated what to do with him. They were supposed to report him to the authorities, who would have seized him and punished him severely. They were disappointed he didn’t talk; since he wasn’t talking, he had no history or language, and it felt as though he had no home and no country. Shorr took an inexplicable liking to him, and whatever Shorr did, so did Hayah. The sons reproached the father: Why would they keep someone who needed so much food and was in addition foreign to them, a spy in the hive, a bumblebee amongst the honeybees? If the authorities found out, it would bring no end of trouble.

  Shorr decided not to mention it to anyone, and if anyone asked, to simply say he was a cousin from Moravia, a bit slow in the head, which was why he wasn’t speaking. The good thing about the runaway was that he never went out on his own, and he knew how to patch up the cart, hoop wheels, till the garden, thresh what he found in it, whitewash the walls—plus he did all sorts of little tasks around the yard in exchange for food and board, never asking for more.

  Shorr sometimes observes him, his simple movements, the way he works—efficient, swift, mechanical. He avoids looking him in the eye; he is afraid of what he might see there. Hayah told him once that she had seen the golem crying.

  Shlomo, his son, told him off for this display of pity, and for taki
ng the runaway in.

  “What if he’s a murderer?” he asked, raising his voice.

  “Who knows what he is,” said Shorr. “Maybe he’s a messenger.”

  “He is a goy,” Shlomo said.

  That was true—he was a goy. Keeping such an interloper was a terrible transgression. If the wrong person found out, Shorr would really be in trouble. But the peasant doesn’t react when they pantomime for him to leave. He ignores Shorr and everyone else, turns around, and simply returns to his pallet near the horses.

  Shorr thinks that it is bad to be a Jew, that Jews have it hard in life, but that being a peasant is harder. There really is no fate worse than theirs. In that respect, Jews and peasants are equals, in the sense that they share the lowest rung in the hierarchy of creation. Only vermin might be ranked beneath them. Even cows and horses, and especially dogs, get better care.

  Of how Nahman winds up with Yente and falls asleep on the floor by her bed

  Nahman is drunk. A couple of glasses sufficed, since he hasn’t had anything to drink for a long time, and he’s exhausted from his journey. The strong local vodka knocked him right off his feet. He wants to go out for some fresh air, but he wanders around in the labyrinth of corridors, searching for the courtyard. His hands grope along the rough wooden walls and finally find a handle. He opens this door and sees a tiny room, with just enough space for a bed. At the foot of the bed towers a pile of coats and furs. Someone with a pale, freckled, exhausted face emerges and looks at Nahman in a wary, unfriendly way, then passes him in the doorway and disappears. That must be the medic. Nahman staggers, places his hand on the wooden wall. The vodka they have plied him with and all that goose lard are really hitting him now. The only light here comes from a small oil lamp—a tiny flame that would need to be turned up to show any of the room at all. When Nahman’s eyes have grown accustomed to the darkness, he sees on the bed a very old woman in a crooked bonnet. For a moment, he isn’t sure who he is looking at. It’s almost like a joke—a woman on her deathbed in a home hosting a wedding. The woman’s chin is lifted, her breathing heavy. She rests against some pillows, her small, shriveled fists clenched atop the embroidered linen bedspread.

  Is that Yankiele Leybowicz’s—Jacob’s—grandmother? Nahman is horrified and simultaneously cheered by the sight of this strange old woman; behind him, his hands feel for the hasp of the door. He waits for a sign from her, but Yente seems to be unconscious, or at least, she isn’t moving; beneath her lashes gleams a section of her eye, reflecting the lamplight. Drunk Nahman thinks she might be summoning him in some way, so he tries to master his fear and his disgust, and he squats beside the bed. But nothing happens. From up close, the old woman looks a little better, almost as if she were simply sleeping. Only now does Nahman notice how exhausted he feels. The tension falls away from him; his back hunches, and his lids grow heavy. He has to shake himself a few times so as not to fall asleep, and now he rises to leave the room but is sickened and frightened by the thought of the crowd of guests with their inquisitive looks and their endless rounds of questions. And so, certain no one will come in here, he lies down on a sheepskin rug by the bed and, like a dog, curls into a ball, dead tired now, for they have sucked all the life out of him here. “Just for a little while,” he says to himself. When he closes his eyes, he sees Hayah’s face—her intrigued, admiring gaze. He begins to feel blissful. He can smell the damp floorboards and the odor of rags, unwashed clothing and the smoke that is in everything here and that reminds him of his childhood, and he knows he is home.

  If she could, Yente would burst out laughing. She sees the sleeping man as if from above, but definitely not with her closed eyes. Her new vision hovers over the sleeping man, and the strangest part is that from here, Yente can detect his thoughts.

  In the sleeper’s mind, she sees another man. She can also see that, like her, the sleeper loves this man. To her, the man is still a child—a newborn, still covered in the dark fuzz found on children expelled into the world too early.

  As he was being born, wicked sorceresses explored the perimeter of the house, but they couldn’t get inside because Yente was standing guard, along with a dog whose father was a real wolf, one of those that roamed on its own and claimed its prey out of the chicken coops. Yente’s dog’s name was Vilga. When the child of Yente’s youngest son was being born, Vilga ran around the house all day and all night, exhausting herself to the point of unconsciousness, but managing to keep the sorceresses and Lilith at bay. Later, they took the dog with them when they went to Czernowitz.

  There are few who do not know that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, but that since she didn’t want to be obedient to Adam, or to lie beneath him as God decreed, she fled to the Red Sea. There she turned red as though flayed. God sent three fearsome angels after her, Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, to drag her back by force. They accosted her in her hiding place, tormented her, and threatened to drown her. But she didn’t want to go back. Even if she had wanted to, she would no longer have been able; Adam would have been forbidden to accept her, for according to the Torah, a woman who has lain with another must not resume relations with her husband. And who was Lilith’s lover? Samael himself.

  So God had to create a second, more obedient woman for Adam. This one was gentle, if rather stupid. The unfortunate creature ate the forbidden fruit, resulting in the Fall. That was how the rule of law came to be, as a punishment.

  But Lilith and all beings similar to Lilith belong to a world from before the Fall, which means that human laws do not apply to them, that they’re not bound by human rules or human regulations, and that they don’t have human consciences or human hearts, and never shed human tears. For Lilith, there’s no such thing as sin. Their world is different. To human eyes, it might seem strange, as if drawn in a very fine line, since everything it contains is more luminous and lightweight, and beings belonging to that world may pass through walls and objects, and each other, back and forth—between them, there are no differences as there are between people, who are closed in on themselves as though in tin cans. Things are different there. And between man and animal there isn’t such a great gap, either—maybe only on the outside, for in their world you can converse soundlessly with animals, and they will understand you, and you them. It’s the same with angels—here they’re visible. They fly around the sky like birds, sometimes huddling on the roofs of houses where their own houses are, like storks.

  Nahman wakes up, his head spinning with images. He gets up unsteadily and looks at Yente; after a brief moment of hesitation, he touches her cheek, which is barely lukewarm. Suddenly he is afraid. She has seen his thoughts. She’s watched him dream.

  Yente is awakened by the creaking of the door, and she’s back inside herself. Where did she just go? In her scattered state, it seems to her she won’t be able to return to the hardwood floor of this world. So be it. It’s better here—times intermingle, overlap. How could she ever have believed in the flow of time? She had thought time flowed! Now she finds it funny. It’s obvious that time spins around like skirts whirling in a dance. Like a linden top twirled onto a table and sustained in motion there by the reverential eyes of children.

  She sees those children, their faces reddened from the heat, snot running from their noses, their mouths half open. There is little Moshe, and next to him is Tzifka, who will die of whooping cough not long from now. And there is Yankiele, as little Jacob is then known, and his older brother Isaac. Yankiele can’t resist and with a sudden movement takes a jab at the top, which sways like a drunk man and falls over. His older brother wheels around in a rage and Tzifka starts to cry. At the noise, their father appears, Leyb Buchbinder, angry to be torn away from work, and he seizes Yankiele by the ear so hard he almost lifts him up into the air. Then he points his finger at him, hissing through his teeth that Jacob is about to finally get what’s coming to him, and then he locks him in the storage shed. For a moment, there is a silence, but then from behind the door Jacob begins to scream, and he
screams for so long that no one can bear to listen to it or do anything else, so Leyb, red with anger, drags the child out of the shed and hits him several times in the face, until his nose starts bleeding. Only then does his father release his grasp on the boy and allow him to race out of the house.

  When the child has not come back by nightfall, the search begins. First the women look for him, and then the men join in, and soon the whole family and their neighbors are walking around the village, asking if anyone has seen the little boy. They make it all the way to the hovels where the Christians live, and they ask there, too, but no one has seen the child with the bashed-up nose.

  The village is called Korolówka. From above, it resembles a threepointed star. This is where little Jacob was born, right there, on the outskirts of the village, in the house where his father’s brother Yaakiev still lives today. Yehuda Leyb Buchbinder and his family are visiting now from Czernowitz, have come for the bar mitzvah of the youngest son of his brother, taking the opportunity to spend some time with the family; they hadn’t planned to stay for long—in a few days they were to return to Czernowitz, where they had moved several years before. The family home where they are staying is small—it’s hard to fit everyone in—and it sits next to the cemetery, so they assume that little Yankiele might have run there and hidden amongst the matzevot, but how will they be able to spot him? He’s such a slip of a thing, even if their search is now aided by the rising moon and the silver glow that floods the village. The boy’s mother, Rachel, gets weak from crying. She’s always known it would end up like this eventually, that if her brutal husband didn’t restrain himself from beating Jacob it would all turn out exactly like this.

  “Yankiele!” cries Rachel, hysteria audible in her voice. “The child is gone, and why is that? You killed him! You killed your own son!” she shrieks to her husband. She grabs a fence picket and shakes it until she has ripped it out of the ground.