The Books of Jacob Read online

  This was how the delegation found him. First, they waited a day and a half, so numerous were those eager for an audience with the captive. They watched the thrilled crowd pass before them, effervescent in their many tongues. Speculation circulated: What was going to happen next? Jews from the south, darker-skinned, wearing dark turbans, crossed paths with Jews from Africa, colorfully clad like dragonflies. The Jews of Europe looked funny, dressed in black, wearing stiff collars that collected dust like sponges.

  Mayer and the others had to fast for a day, and then bathe in a bathhouse. At last, they were given white robes and allowed to see His Majesty the Messiah. This happened on a holy day, according to the newly designed messianic calendar. For Sabbatai Tzvi had abolished all traditional Jewish holidays, having invalidated the old Law of Moses, which he would replace with some other, still-to-be-articulated law, according to which no one knew how to behave or what to say just yet.

  They found him sitting on a richly carved stool, in scarlet robes, in the company of pious sages who asked them why they were there and what it was they hoped for from their savior.

  It was decided that Baruch Peysach would speak for them, and he started by describing the many misfortunes of the Polish lands, and with them the misfortunes of Polish Jews, and as evidence he submitted the chronicle of misfortunes of Meir ben Samuel of Szczebrzeszyn, titled in Hebrew Tzok haIttim, meaning Distress of the Times, published several years before. But as Baruch was carrying on in a tearful voice about wars and diseases, pogroms and human injustice, Sabbatai suddenly interrupted him and, indicating his scarlet robes, shouted in a booming voice: “Can you not see the color of revenge? I am clothed in scarlet, as the prophet Isaiah says: It is for me the day of vengeance; the year for me to redeem has come.” Everyone cowered at the sound of that voice, so strong and unexpected. Then Sabbatai ripped off his shirt and gave it to Isaiah, David Halevi’s son, and to the others he handed out lumps of sugar and told them to put them in their mouths, “that a youthful strength might awake in them.” Mayer tried to say that they didn’t need youthful strength, that what they needed was to be left to live in peace, but the Messiah cried, “Silence!” Mayer, as only Mayer could, managed to glance surreptitiously at the savior and to see his gentle, beautiful face, its delicate features and the extraordinary beauty of his eyes, bordered by those lashes, damp and dark. And he saw the Messiah’s dark and generous lips, still trembling in outrage, and his silky-smooth cheeks, which quivered almost imperceptibly, and he thought how soft they must be to the touch, like the finest suede. And it surprised him that the Messiah’s breasts were indeed like a woman’s, generous, with brown nipples. Someone rushed to cover him in a shawl then, but the sight of the Messiah’s naked breasts remained in Mayer’s memory to the very end of his life, and then—as happens with remembered images—got divided up into words and then reconstituted from these words inside the minds of his children.

  Mayer the Skeptic felt something then like a sting in his chest, a tug of emotion, and that must have deeply wounded his soul, because he passed that wound along to his children and, later, his grandchildren. Yente’s father, Mayer, was Elisha Shorr’s granduncle.

  And? That’s it. They wrote it all down, every movement and every word. The first night they sat in silence, not understanding what had just happened to them. Was this some kind of sign? Would they be saved? With the end times drawing near, would anyone be able to grasp with reason what was going on? After all, everything would be different, opposite to how it was before.

  In the end, after settling up all their business, they returned home to Poland in a strange and solemn mood.

  The news of Sabbatai’s apostasy left them thunderstruck. It happened on the 16th day of the month of Elul of 5426, or the 16th of September, 1666, but they only found out about it once they were home. That day an unexpected early snow fell, covering the crops that had not yet been collected from the gardens: pumpkins, carrots, and beets that were still living out their ripeness in the earth.

  The news was delivered by messengers in robes ripped in woe at their chests, their faces dirtied from their ceaseless travels. They walked through village after village without respite, wailing. The evil sultan of the infidels had threatened Sabbatai with death if he did not convert to Islam. He had threatened to behead him. And so the Messiah had agreed.

  At first, their homes were taken over by sobbing, and disbelief reigned. Then a silence fell. For a day, or two, or three, no one really wanted to talk. What was there to say? That once more we were the weakest, having been deceived—that God had abandoned us? Our Messiah, crushed? How could that be, when we expected him to dethrone the sultan, take power over the whole world, and exalt the humiliated? Once more over the poor Podolian villages great gray fustian clouds gathered; the sky looked like the roof of a ruined tent. To Mayer, it seemed the world had begun to rot, that gangrene had set in. Sitting at their heavy wooden table with his youngest daughter, tiny as a pea, poised on his lap, he wrote out, like everyone, gematrical columns. It was only when the cold set in that letters and explanations began to circulate, and not a week went by that some traveling merchant did not bring them some new tidbit. Even the milkman, who delivered milk and butter around the neighboring villages, became during that period a wise man, drawing systems of salvation with his finger on whatever surface he could find.

  From these shaky, broken reports and tales it was necessary to assemble a whole, reach for the books, consult with the wisest of men. And gradually that winter a new knowledge began germinating, which come spring was strong and powerful like the new shoot of a plant. How could we have been so wrong? The sadness had blinded us, sunk us in despair unworthy of good men. Yes, he had converted to the faith of Muhammad—but not really, only on the surface, only his image, his goal, meaning his shadow, donned the green turban, while the Messiah concealed himself to wait for the better time that was about to come, that was a matter of days away, that was very nearly here already.

  Yente can still see the finger that drew the sefirotic tree in the flour strewn across the table, while at the same time she finds herself in the countryside, near Brzeżany, eighteen years before. It is the very day she was conceived. Only now can she see it.

  In this strange state in which she finds herself, is Yente able to launch some little changes? Influence the course of events? Can she? If she could, she would change this one day.

  She sees a young woman walking through the fields with a basket in her hand, and in it, two geese. Their necks move to the rhythm of her steps, their beady eyes look around with the trust common to domesticated animals. A mounted Cossack patrol comes galloping out of the forest, getting bigger as she watches in approach. It is too late to run away, the woman stands astonished, covers her face with the geese. The horses surround her, closing in. As if on command, the men dismount, and now everything happens very fast and in silence. They push her down softly onto the grass, the basket falls, the geese get out of it, but they stay close, hissing a little, quietly, threatening, warning, bearing witness to what’s going on. Two of the men hold the horses, while one of them unfastens the belt of his broad, wrinkled trousers and lies down on top of the woman. Then they trade, the next one faster than the first, as though they have to perform these few movements in haste—there is no sign of their enjoying it, in fact. Their seed pours into the woman and then drips out onto the grass. The last one presses down hard upon her neck, and the woman starts to resign herself to the fact that she will die, but the others hand him his reins, and the man gets back on his horse. He looks at her for a moment longer, as if wanting to remember his victim. Then they quickly ride away. It all takes just a few minutes.

  The woman sits with her legs akimbo, the indignant geese looking at her, honking their disapproval. With a bit of her petticoat she wipes between her legs, then rips up some leaves and grass. She runs to the stream and raises her skirts high and sits down in the water, pushing out all the semen from inside her. The geese think this
is an encouragement to them, and they scamper up to the water’s edge. But before they can quite make up their minds to get in, overcoming their usual anserine reserve, the woman stuffs both of them back in the basket and returns to the path. She slows as she comes to the village, going slower and slower, until finally she stops, as if she has reached an invisible border.

  This is Yente’s mother.

  And this must be the reason that she always watched her daughter so closely; eventually, Yente grew accustomed to the looks, to the suspicious gaze cast from where her mother sat working on something at the table, stood cutting vegetables, peeling hard-boiled eggs, scrubbing pots. Her mother watched her all the time. Like a wolf, like a dog getting ready to sink its teeth into your shin. With time, a slight grimace began to appear in connection with this watching: a light rise in the upper lip, pulling it up toward her nose—not an expression of animosity or revulsion, just barely visible, insignificant.

  She remembers how, as her mother was braiding her hair one day, she found a dark mole over little Yente’s ear and rejoiced in it. “Look,” she said to Yente’s father, “she has a mole in the same spot as you, but on the other side, like a reflection in the mirror.” Her father listened only absentmindedly. He never suspected a thing, for his whole life. Yente’s mother died with the secret clenched in her fist. She died in a kind of convulsion, in a fury. She’ll no doubt come back as a wild animal.

  She was the eleventh-born. Her father named her Yente, which means: she who spreads the news, and she who teaches others. Her mother didn’t have the strength to take care of her by then—she was fragile of both mind and body. Yente was dealt with by the other women who were always bustling around the house—cousins, an aunt, and, for some time, her grandmother. She remembered her mother sliding off her cap in the evenings—then Yente would see from up close her wretched hair, cut short and sloppily, growing over her unhealthy, flaking skin.

  Yente had six older brothers who went to yeshiva and, at home, quoted passages from the Scriptures under their breath while she hung around the table at which they sat, too little to be assigned real women’s work. She also had four older sisters, one of whom was already married; significant efforts were being made to match up another.

  Her father, detecting her interest and zeal, showed her the letters of the alphabet, thinking they would be like little pictures for her, like jewels and stars—lovely alef, like the reflection of a cat’s paw, shin like a little boat with a mast made out of bark and let out onto the water. But—who knew how or when—Yente learned the letters in a different way, in such a way as to be able to make words of them soon. Her mother slapped her hands for this with an unexpected ferocity, as if Yente was reaching for too much. Her mother didn’t know how to read. She would listen happily, however, as Yente’s father, on rare occasions, or more often as their old relation, Abramek the Cripple, told the women and children stories from the books in Yiddish. Abramek always did this in a plaintive voice, as if the written words were by nature akin to a lament. He would start at dusk, by the dim light of the candles, and so, along with reading, there would appear in the house in the evenings the unbearable sadness of the village Kabbalists, of whom there were many in those days. You could develop a taste for this sorrow in the same way that some grow fond of vodka. They would all be overcome by such melancholy that someone would begin to cry and keen. Then they would want to touch with their hands everything of which Abramek had told, and they would reach out for something tangible—but there was nothing there. That lack was terrible. There began true despair. All around them darkness, cold, and damp. In the summer dust, dry grass, and stones. Where is all that, that world, that life? Where’s paradise, and how can we get there?

  To little Yente it seemed that every such evening of stories would grow dense, darker, impenetrable, especially when Abramek the Cripple would say:

  “And it is known that the space of the world is filled with ghosts and evil spirits, born of human sin. These float in that space, as is written clearly in the Zohar. We have to guard against them attaching to us on the way to the synagogue, and this is why we must know what is written in the Zohar, namely that the damage-doer lies in wait for you on the left side, for the mezuzah may be placed only on the right side, and on the mezuzah is written God’s name: Shaddai, which will defeat the damagedoer, which explains the mezuzah’s inscription: ‘And Shaddai will be on your doorframe.’”

  They nodded their heads in agreement. This we know. The left side.

  Yente knew this. “The air is full of eyes,” her mother would whisper to her, jerking her around like a rag doll every time she got her dressed. “They are watching you. Just put out a question before you, and the spirits will instantly answer. You just have to be able to ask. And to find those answers you receive: in the milk that has spilled into the shape of the letter samech, in the imprint of a horse’s hoof in the shape of the letter shin. Gather, gather these signs, and soon you will read a whole sentence. What is the art of reading from books written by man when the whole world is a book written by God, even the clay path that leads up to the river. Look at it. The goose feathers, too, the dried rings of the wood of the fence boards, the cracks in the clay of the houses’ walls—that is exactly like the letter shin. You know how to read, so read, Yente.”

  She feared her mother, and how. The tiny little girl stands before the thin, small woman, who is perpetually muttering something, always with spite. Shrew, that’s what everyone in the village called her. Her moods changed so frequently that Yente never knew whether her mother, setting her down on her lap, would kiss her and hug her or squeeze her shoulders painfully and shake her like a rag doll. So she preferred to just keep out of her way. She would watch her mother’s skinny hands putting the last of her dowry back in the chest—she had come from wealthy Silesian Jews, but little of that wealth remained. Yente heard her parents moaning in bed, and she knew that this was her father chasing the dybbuk out of her mother, something he kept secret from the rest of the family. Her mother would at first try faintly to escape him, but then she would take a deep breath, like someone submerging herself in cold water, in the icy water of the mikvah, where she could hide out from evil.

  Once, in a time of great poverty, Yente watched in secret as her mother ate the rations intended for everyone—her back hunched, her face lanky, her eyes empty. They were so black you couldn’t see her pupils in them.

  When Yente was seven years old, her mother died in childbirth along with the child who didn’t have the strength to make its way out from inside her. To Yente’s mind, it had obviously been a dybbuk, which she had eaten when she stole the provisions intended for everyone, and which her father had not managed to banish during those nocturnal struggles. That dybbuk had set up shop in her mother’s stomach and not wanted to leave. Death—that was the punishment. A few days before the fatal childbirth, fat and swollen, with pale eyes, she’d woken her sleeping daughter at dawn, pulling her by the braids, and said:

  “Get up. The Messiah has come. He is already in Sambor.”

  After the death of his wife, Mayer, guided by some hazy sense of guilt, took over the care of his little daughter himself. He didn’t really know what to do with her while he was studying, so she just sat with him and looked at what he was reading.

  “So what will salvation look like?” she asked him once.

  Mayer, brought back to reality, stood up and leaned back against the stove.

  “It’s simple,” he said. “When the last little spark of divine light returns to its source, the Messiah will appear to us. All laws will be invalidated. The division between kosher and non-kosher will disappear, like the division between holy and cursed. Night will cease to be distinguishable from day, and the differences between men and women will disappear. The letters in the Torah will rearrange themselves so that a new Torah will come to be, and everything in it will be opposite. Human bodies will be light as spirits, and new souls will come down into them, straight from the t
hrone of the good God Himself. Then the need to eat and drink will vanish, sleep will become superfluous, and every desire will dissipate like smoke. Corporeal reproduction will give way to the union of holy names. The Talmud will become covered in dust, completely forgotten and unnecessary. Everywhere will be bright from the glow of the Shekhinah.”

  Then, however, Mayer thought it fitting to remind her of the most important thing:

  “Between the heart and the tongue lies an abyss,” he said. “Remember that. Thoughts must be concealed, particularly since you were born, to your great misfortune, a woman. Think so that they think you are not thinking. Behave in such a way that you mislead others. We all must do this, but women more so. Talmudists know about the strength of women, but they fear it, which is why they pierce girls’ ears, to weaken them. But we don’t. We don’t do that because we ourselves are like women. We survive by hiding. We play the fools, pretend to be people we are not. We come home, and then we take off our masks. But we bear the burden of silence: masa duma.”

  And now, as Yente lies covered up to her neck in a Korolówka woodshed, she knows she has deceived them all.

  8.

  Honey, and not eating too much of it, or: Isohar’s school in Smyrna, in the Turkish land

  In Isohar’s school, Nahman has perfected gematria, notarikon, and temurah. You can wake him up in the middle of the night and have him shuffle letters around and produce words. He has already considered and calculated the numbers of words in the prayers and blessings, to uncover the secret principles according to which they were written. He’s compared them with others, transformed the words, rearranged the letters. Many times, when he was unable to sleep during those sweltering Smyrna nights, when Mordechai had drifted off into silence, smoking his pipe, and in order not to give longing and anxiety access to his heart, he would relish this play until dawn with his eyes closed, creating out of words and letters completely new, unlikely meanings and connections. When the gray dawn would light up the little square with its few miserable olive trees, under which dogs slept amidst the trash, it would strike him that the world of words was much more real than the one his eyes could see.