The Books of Jacob Page 17

  The men have run down to the river, spooking the flocks of geese grazing on the pastures; little white feathers float after them and come to rest in their hair. Others have rushed to the Orthodox cemetery, where it is known the boy goes sometimes, at the very edge of the village.

  “Some demon has gotten into that child, some dybbuk, there are lots of them here, right near the cemetery. One of them must have gotten into him,” repeats his father, who is also frightened now. “I’ll show him when he comes back,” he adds immediately, to hide his fear.

  “What did he do?” Yehuda Leyb Buchbinder’s brother asks a shaken Rachel.

  “What did he do? What did he do?” she mocks him, gathering strength for a final burst. “What could he have done? He’s a child!”

  At dawn, the whole village comes out.

  “The Jews have lost a child! The Jews have lost a child!” the goyim call in both Polish and Ukrainian.

  They take up clubs and sticks and pitchforks, and they set out as if mobilizing against some werewolf army, against the underground kobold kidnappers, against the cemetery’s devils. Someone has the idea of going into the forest, outside the village—that’s where Priest’s Hill is, he could have run there.

  By noon, a small search party is standing at the entrance to a cavern. Narrow and terrifying, it is shaped like a woman’s private parts; going inside is akin to climbing back into the womb. No one wants to go.

  “He wouldn’t have gone in there, either,” they try to tell themselves. Finally a boy with washed-out eyes—they call him Bereś—screws up his courage; two others follow him. At first you can hear their voices from inside, but then there is quiet, as if they’ve been swallowed up by the earth. After a quarter of an hour, Bereś reemerges with the child in his arms. Little Jacob’s eyes are open wide in terror, and his relentless sobs have given him hiccups.

  The whole village keeps talking about this event for several days, and a group of adolescents united by a common goal begins an exploration of Jacob’s cave, shrouding it in the great secrecy to which children that age are prone.

  Hayah walks into the room where Yente is lying. She leans over her, checking carefully whether her eyelids are trembling, whether some vein on her sunken temples might be pulsing to the rhythm of her very weak heart. She takes the old woman’s little head in her hands.

  “Yente?” she asks quietly. “You alive?”

  But what is Yente supposed to say to that? Is that even the right question? Hayah ought instead to ask: Do you see, do you feel? How does it work, you moving rapidly as thought across the rippling ruffles of time? Hayah should know how to ask. Yente, who doesn’t have the strength to give any answer at all, goes back to where she was a moment ago, or maybe not exactly there, because now it’s a little later on, but that doesn’t really matter.

  Yehuda Leyb Buchbinder, Yente’s son, little Jacob’s father, is impulsive, unpredictable. He always feels like he’s being persecuted by someone for his heresies. He doesn’t like people. Isn’t it possible to live, think, and do what you like, but in such a way that no one finds out? Yente wonders. For that is what they have been taught: we will quietly lead a double life, following in the footsteps of the Messiah. We just have to master absolute silence, looking away, living in secret. Is that so hard, Yehuda? Not to give away your feelings, not to betray your thoughts? The inhabitants of this world, abyss-dwellers, understand nothing anyway, the great truth is as far away from them as Africa might feel. They are subject to laws we must reject.

  Buchbinder is simply a contrarian, always in disagreement with everyone. And his son takes after him, he’s exactly the same way, which is of course the reason they don’t get along. Yente’s gaze travels up under the damp bellies of the clouds and easily finds her son, asleep with his head resting on top of a big book. His oil lamp is burning out. His black beard has covered the writing on the page, shadows have carved little nests into his thin, sunken cheeks, and his eyelids tremble. Yehuda sleeps.

  Yente’s vision hesitates. Should she go inside his dream? Why does she see everything at once, all times swirled together, and on top of that, people’s thoughts? Yente can see thoughts. She orbits her son’s head; along the wooden table ants are marching, one after the other, in perfect single file. When Yehuda wakes up, he will wipe them off the table’s surface in a single motion, not even realizing.

  Of Yente’s onward wanderings through time

  Yente remembers how a few years later Yehuda came to visit her in Korolówka on his way to Kamieniec. He was traveling with Jacob, who was fourteen years old at the time. The father was hoping to teach his son a little bit about his business so that he could start to get involved.

  Jacob is thin, ungainly, a black mustache just starting to sprout under his nose. His face is covered with red pimples. Some of them have white, pus-filled tips, and his skin is ugly, reddened, shiny; Jacob is very ashamed of all this. He’s grown out his hair, and he wears it in such a way that it falls over his face. This annoys his father, who often grabs that “mop,” as he calls it, and throws it back over his son’s shoulders. They’re the same height now, and from behind they could be brothers. Brothers always in an argument. Whenever the younger one tries to talk back, the older one smacks him over the head.

  In the village, only four homes remain with the true faith. In the evenings, they close the door, close the curtains over the windows, light the candles. The younger members of these families take part only in the readings of the Zohar and the singing of the psalms. After that, an adult takes them to another cottage. It is better that their impressionable eyes don’t witness and that their ears don’t hear what happens when the candles start to be put out.

  Now even during the day the grown-ups sit behind closed shutters, waiting for news of the Messiah, who will have to show up at some point, after all. But that news from the world arrives with a delay, belated, for here someone has already dreamed of the Messiah—that he’ll be coming from the west, the fields and forests, villages and towns curling up behind him like patterns on a carpet. What remains of the world is a tight roll, a scroll covered with tiny symbols that are not quite legible. In the new world, there will be a different alphabet, different symbols, other rules. Maybe it will go bottom to top, instead of top to bottom. Maybe people will move from old age into youth, and not the other way around. Maybe people will arise out of the earth and eventually vanish into the bellies of their mothers.

  The coming Messiah is a suffering, aching Messiah, trodden down by the evil of the world and the misery of people. He might even resemble Jesus, whose mangled body hangs in Korolówka from crosses placed at almost every crossroads. The conventional Jews look away from this hideous figure, but the true believers look upon it. For was not Sabbatai Tzvi, too, a suffering savior? Was he not locked away in prison, and was he not tormented and oppressed?

  While the parents whisper amongst themselves, the heat ignites in the children’s minds all sorts of ideas for games. Then Jacob appears, neither an adult nor a child. His father has just chased him out of the house. His father’s face was flushed, his gaze absent; no doubt he had been crying over the Zohar, something that has been happening more and more.

  Jacob, whom everyone here still calls Yankiele, has banded the children together, from the eldest to the youngest, Christian and Jewish, and this harmonious band has set out for the cemetery. From his uncle’s house toward the village, they set off down a sandy road bordered with silverweed, until they reach the inn and pass the tavern of Solomon the Jew, also known as Black Shlomo. Now they’re walking uphill, toward the Catholic church and the wooden presbytery, then farther, past the church cemetery, until they get to the last homes in the village.

  From the top of the little hill, the village looks like a garden surrounded by fields of grain. Jacob has brought several boys and two little girls out of that garden and led them through the fields. They have climbed above the village, which extends beneath them like a string of beads; the sky is clear,
and the nearing sunset gilds the cerulean firmament. They enter a little forest. The trees that grow here are unusual ones that none of the children have ever seen before. Suddenly everything becomes strange, different. They can no longer hear the songs from down below, and voices vanish into the softness of the leaves, so very green it almost hurts to look at them. Are these the trees from the fairy stories? one of the younger boys asks, and Jacob begins to laugh and says that here it is always spring, and the leaves never get yellow and never fall down. Here is the cavern where Abraham rests, says Jacob, miraculously brought here from the Land of Israel, brought just for him so that he might show it off. And next to Abraham lies Sara, his wife and sister. And wherever Abraham is, time does not flow, so if you go into that cave and sit there a little, and then go out again after an hour, it would likely turn out that on the earth, on the outside, a hundred years had passed.

  “I was born in this cave,” he proclaims.

  “That’s a lie,” one of the girls says resolutely. “Don’t you listen to him. He’s always making things up.”

  Jacob gives her an ironic look. The girl takes her revenge for it:

  “Pimple face,” she snaps.

  Now Yente flies back into the past, where Yankiele is still little and has barely calmed down from his crying. She is trying to get him to sleep, and she looks at the other children, who are lying in a row on the bed. All of them are sleeping, except Yankiele. The little boy has to say good night to everyone around him. He whispers, neither to himself nor to her, quieter and quieter, but with intensity: “Good night, Grandma Yente, good night, Brother Isaac and Sister Hana and Cousin Tzifka, good night, Mama Rachel,” and he names all of their neighbors and remembers everyone he came into contact with that day and says good night to them as well, until Yente starts to be afraid that if he keeps going like this, he’ll never finish, because the world is so enormous, and even reflected back by such a tiny little mind, it is still endless, and Yankiele will keep talking this way until morning. And then the boy says good night to the neighborhood dogs and cats and heifers, to the goats, and finally to objects. A bowl, the ceiling, a pitcher, some buckets, pots, plates, spoons, the eiderdown, the big pillows, flowers in pots, the curtains, the nails.

  Everyone in the room has already gone to sleep, the fire in the stove has dimmed, becoming just a lazy red glow, someone is snoring, and here this child is, talking and talking, softer and softer, but into his words now creep strange mistakes and slips, and there is no one left awake to correct him, so slowly this litany contorts bizarrely, becomes a magic spell, incomprehensible, spoken in an old, forgotten tongue. Finally, the child’s voice softens fully, and then he goes to sleep. Then Yente stands up carefully and looks tenderly at this strange boy, who ought not to be called Jacob, but rather Trouble, and she notices his eyelids trembling, which means he has already moved on, into a dream where he’ll embark upon new antics.

  Of the terrible consequences of the amulet’s disappearance

  In the morning, when everyone is sleeping off the wedding in every corner of the house, when the sawdust in the big room is so trampled that it looks like dust, Elisha Shorr enters Yente’s bedroom. He is tired; his eyes are bloodshot. He sits on the bed beside her, sways back and forth and whispers:

  “It’s all over now, Yente. You can go. Don’t be angry I kept you this long. I had no alternative.”

  Gently, he pulls out from under her neckline a handful of strings and leather straps, looking for one in particular, and slides them one by one through his fingers. He assumes his tired eyes have overlooked it. He does it several times—he counts the tiny teraphim, the cases, pouches, bone tablets with spells scored into them. Everyone wears them, but old women like Yente always wear the most. There must be dozens of angels hovering around Yente, guardian spirits and other beings, nameless ones. But his amulet is not there. He finds only the string it was attached to, untied, with nothing on it. The spell has vanished. But how?

  Elisha Shorr sobers up, his movements growing nervous. He starts to palpate the old woman. Yente lies there like a log, not moving, with that smile slowly spreading over her face, the same smile his daughter Hayah glimpsed before. He lifts her inert body and searches under her back, under her hips, uncovers poor Yente’s skinny extremities, her big, bony feet that stick out stiff from under her skirt, he digs in the folds of her shirt, checks the insides of her palms, and finally, more and more terrified, searches in the pillows, in the sheets, the blankets and the quilts, under the bed and around the bed. How is this possible?

  It’s a funny sight, this eminent, mature man rummaging around in the bedding of an ancient woman, as if mistaking her for a young one, trying clumsily to clamber in with her.

  “Yente, are you going to tell me what’s happened?” he says to her in a fierce whisper, as to a child who has committed some monstrous offense, but she, of course, does not respond, only her eyelids tremble, and for a moment her eyeballs move to one side, and then the other, and her smile quivers slightly, almost imperceptibly, but doesn’t fade.

  “What did you write on it?” Hayah asks her father in an urgent whisper. Sleepy, in a nightshirt with a kerchief on her head, she’s run in here at his summons. Elisha is distressed, the wrinkles on his forehead settling into soft rolling waves, their pattern drawing Hayah’s gaze. This is how her father always looks when he feels guilty.

  “You know what I wrote,” he says. “I held her back.”

  “Did you hang it around her neck?”

  Her father nods.

  “Father, you were supposed to put it in a box and lock it.”

  Her father shrugs helplessly.

  “You’re like a child,” says Hayah, at once tender and enraged. “How could you? You just put it right around her neck? Well, where is it?”

  “It’s nowhere, it’s gone.”

  “Nothing disappears just like that!”

  Hayah sets about searching, but she quickly sees there is no point.

  “It’s gone. I’ve looked,” he says.

  “She ate it,” says Hayah. “She swallowed it.”

  Shaken, her father is silent; then, helplessly, he asks:

  “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. There is a pause. “Who else knows about this?” she asks.

  Elisha Shorr thinks. He has taken his fur cap off his head and is rubbing his forehead. His hair is long, thin, sweaty.

  “Now she won’t die,” he says to his daughter, despair rising into his voice.

  A strange expression of shock and suspicion appears on Hayah’s face, then slowly it turns into one of amusement. She laughs, quietly at first, then louder and louder, until a deep roar fills the small room and explodes through the wooden walls. Her father covers her mouth with his hands.

  What the Zohar says

  Yente is dying and not dying. That’s right: “Dying and not dying.” That’s how the learned Hayah explains it.

  “This is exactly the way it is in the Zohar,” she says, trying to temper her irritation, since everyone is making a very big deal out of it. People from Rohatyn are starting to come up to their home and look in through their windows. “There are many phrases like this in the Zohar that seem contradictory at first glance, but when you look more carefully, it becomes clear that there are things that are impenetrable to reason and that do not work according to our systems. Doesn’t the Old Man from the Zohar begin his peroration exactly in this way?”

  Hayah says this, standing in the vestibule, to several tired but trusted guests who have come here because they got a whiff of some sort of miracle. They could use a miracle right now. Among them is Israel of Korolówka, Yente’s grandson, who brought her here. Of all of them, he seems to be the most anxious and concerned.

  Hayah recites: “For who are the beings who, when they rise, go down, and when they go down, climb up; and two being one, the one who is three.”

  Her listeners nod as if this were exactly what they had expected, and Ha
yah’s words have calmed them down. Only Israel does not seem to be satisfied with this response, because he genuinely doesn’t know whether Yente is alive or not. He immediately begins with his question:

  “But—”

  Hayah, tying a thick wool scarf under her chin, for it has gotten cold, responds impatiently:

  “People always want things to be simple. This or that. Black or white. People are idiots. Was not the world made out of countless shades of gray? You can take her home,” she concludes, speaking to Israel.

  Then she quickly crosses the courtyard and vanishes into the annex where Yente lies.

  In the afternoon, the medic Asher Rubin comes back and conducts a careful examination of the patient. He asks her age. Old, is the answer. At last, Rubin pronounces this to be something like a coma, and says they mustn’t for God’s sake treat her as if she were dead—rather as if she were sleeping. But they can see from his face that he does not really believe what he is saying.

  “Most likely she’ll die on her own, in her sleep,” he adds, by way of consolation.

  After the wedding, as the guests are heading out, the wooden wheels of their carriages carving deep ruts into the road before the Shorr home, Elisha Shorr goes up to the cart where Yente has been laid. When no one is watching, he says quietly to her:

  “Don’t be angry with me.”

  She doesn’t answer him, of course. Israel, Yente’s grandson, comes over. He is angry with Shorr. Shorr could have kept his grandmother and let her die here. He and Sobla have argued about this, because she didn’t want to leave Yente behind. Now he whispers to her: “Grandmother, Grandmother.” But no answer comes, and no reaction. Yente’s hands are cold; they have rubbed them in theirs, but that didn’t heat them up. Even so she breathes evenly, slowly. Asher Rubin has taken her pulse several times and cannot believe it is so slow.