The Books of Jacob Read online

  In the heat, on the balconies, Anna Popielawska and Moliwda lie out on ottomans, catching the eyes of the young men who strain and flex before them. They are a previously unimaginable sight for the Turks. This is how the blond Anna Popielawska catches the eye of that agha. A short conversation starts up between the two of them one afternoon while Moliwda is reading inside the house, in the shade. The next day she vanishes along with all of the money Moliwda had saved from his work with the Trinitarians.

  Moliwda goes back to Smyrna, but the Trinitarians already have another dragoman, and the two endlessly conversing Jews have gone. He signs on to a ship’s crew and goes back to Greece.

  Looking out at the marine horizon, hearing the splash of waves hitting the sides of the hull, he becomes amenable to recollection. Thoughts and images come together in long ribbons; he could look at them closely and see what comes out. He remembers his childhood. Those years seem stiff to him, like the starched dress shirts his aunt prepared for him and his brothers on Easter, the roughness that took days to surrender to the warmth of the body and its sweat.

  Moliwda always reflects on his childhood when he finds himself at sea—he doesn’t know why. Evidently the water’s limitlessness makes him feel a little dizzy; he has to grasp at something.

  His uncle, whose hand they had to kiss, kneeling, by way of greeting, had a second wife, dangerously young—she created around herself an atmosphere completely incomprehensible to young Antoni, an atmosphere of theater, of pretense. She came from very poor, disreputable nobility, and so had to strive for some better version of herself. She was ridiculous in her efforts. When guests came to their estate, she would stroke her nephews’ faces with ostentatious tenderness, gently grabbing them by the ears and boasting, “Oh, yes, little Antoni, life will smile on this one.” After the guests left, she would stow the boys’ elegant garments in the wardrobe in the hallway, as if one day other orphans left by other dead relatives might show up, this time of superior provenance.

  The flight of his lover, the sea, and this memory from his childhood make Moliwda feel frighteningly lonely. His only relief will come, not too long from now, from the Wallachian Bogomils, whom many stubbornly, and erroneously, maintain are Filippians. They will give him some respite from the torment of having a self broken in two (what a strange ailment—no one seems to suffer from it anymore, and there is no way to speak of it, and no one to tell). And all this has happened because Moliwda is fully convinced by now that his life has reached its natural conclusion, and that there won’t be any other world.

  11.

  How in the town of Craiova Moliwda-Kossakowski runs into Jacob

  Two years later, in the spring of 1753, Moliwda is thirty-five years old and a little thinner due to the diet of the Bogomils. He has pale, watery eyes that are hard to read. His beard is sparse, reddish gray, the color of a jute sack, and his face is tanned from the sun. On his head is a very dirty white Turkish turban.

  Moliwda is about to go and see this madman, this holy fool all the Jews keep talking about, saying how the soul of the Messiah has entered him, which is why he doesn’t act like a normal person. He’s seen many like this already, as if the soul of the Messiah enjoyed incarnating in someone new every couple of days.

  He doesn’t get too close. He stays on the other side of the street, leaning against the wall, filling his pipe with the relaxed, languorous movements of a Turk. Smoking, he watches all of the commotion. It’s mostly young men milling around, Jews and Turks. Something’s going on inside the building, and now a cluster of the young whippersnappers are pushing their way through the door, you can hear bursts of laughter.

  When he’s finished smoking, Moliwda decides to go inside, too. He has to bend down to pass through the dark hallway until he reaches the courtyard, where a small well has been converted into something like a fountain. It’s cool here, and some men are lying under a tree with broad leaves, almost all of them in Turkish clothing, but there are a few, too, in Jewish gabardines, who don’t sit on the ground, but rather on stools. There are also some dressed in the Wallachian style, and clean-shaven burghers, and two Greeks, recognizable by their characteristic wool coats. For a moment those gathered look at Moliwda with suspicion, and finally a thin man with a pockmarked face comes up to him and demands to know what it is he’s come for. Moliwda responds in perfect Turkish: “To listen.” The man backs off, but the mistrust in his eyes remains. He glances over at Moliwda every so often. They must think he’s a spy. Let them think so.

  In the center of a loose semicircle stands a tall, well-built man, dressed like a Turk. He speaks carelessly, in a voice that carries and vibrates so that it would be difficult to interrupt him. He speaks Turkish, slowly, with a strange foreign accent. It’s not the accent of a learned man—more like a merchant’s accent, or even a vagabond’s. He uses words that sound straight out of the horse trade, but Greek and Hebrew words creep in, no doubt ones he has been taught. Moliwda grimaces, as the clash is too great and makes an unpleasant impression. This can’t be anything, really, he thinks, but then suddenly it dawns on him that this is the language of all these people around him, this mix of people who are always on the road, instead of some language carefully assembled in a single place for the benefit of a few. This is why it’s hard to figure out what sort of accent it is. Moliwda doesn’t know yet that in every language Jacob speaks you can detect a foreign accent.

  Jacob Frank’s face is oblong, and he’s fairly light-skinned for a Turkish Jew; his skin is rough, especially his cheeks, which are covered in tiny pits that must be scars, like an attestation of some calamity, as if a flame had harmed his face at some point in the distant past. There is something unsettling about that face, thinks Moliwda, and it also arouses an involuntary respect—Jacob’s gaze is completely impenetrable.

  In great astonishment, Kossakowski recognizes the old man sitting closest to this supposed prophet, smoking a pipe, closing his eyes each time he takes a drag. His beard is thick, gray, yellowed from the tobacco; the old man is not wearing a turban, but rather a simple Turkish cap, from beneath which sticks out hair that is as wild as it is gray. He gives himself a little time to remember where he has seen him before.

  “What a small world,” he says to the old man in Turkish, trying to sound nonchalant. The old man turns to him and after a moment a hearty smile bursts forth out of his thick gray beard.

  “Well, well, look at that, our great lord, the aristocrat,” Reb Mordke says ironically, indicating Moliwda with his finger and addressing a oneeyed man who is dark as an Arab. “So you managed to break free, I see.” He laughs loudly, delighted by the twist of finding not only Moliwda but himself back in Jacob’s company again. They embrace and clap each other’s shoulders. They greet each other more enthusiastically than they might have had they been old friends.

  Moliwda stays with them until evening, observing the constant movement at this place—men come and go, drop in for a moment, then return to their tasks, their caravans, their stalls. In private conversations they give each other addresses and names of Turkish clerks who can be bought off. They have little notebooks especially for this purpose; you can buy them at the stalls here. Then they rejoin the general conversation as if they had never left. The disputation is ongoing. Someone asks a question, a stupid one or a provocative one, and the race begins: everyone wants to answer at the same time, they all shout over one another. Sometimes they can’t understand one another—some of them have caught an accent somewhere, like a disease, so that they must repeat everything twice. There are also translators, and then Moliwda recognizes the Jewish language from Poland, that strange blend of German, Polish, and Hebrew. When he hears it, he is overwhelmed by sudden emotion, especially when he sees that one of the speakers is Nahman, who has resurfaced here as well. Nahman speaks the way Malka and her sisters spoke, and suddenly Moliwda is covered with a warm coat of images from those times. For instance: crops, grain all along the horizon, light yellow, and interspersed in them the
dark blue points of cornflowers; fresh milk and a just-cut loaf of bread that is lying on the table; a beekeeper in a halo of bees, extracting sheets sticky with honey.

  But who cares, there is honey in Turkey, too, and bread. Moliwda feels deeply ashamed of himself. He banishes the suddenly blooming bouquet of images to the back of his mind and is present again, just as the discussion is winding down and the prophet is telling little tales, a spiteful smile lurking on his face. He tells of how he fought a hundred highwaymen, how he slashed his way through them like through nettles. Someone interrupts him, shouts out something over the heads of those assembled. Others leave or just move away, into the shadows of the olive trees, and there, smoking their pipes, they murmur commentaries on all that they have heard. At some point, Nahman’s voice takes over. He speaks in a learned, elegant manner. He invokes Isaiah. It would be hard to outtalk him. He has evidence for everything. When he cites the appropriate passage from the Scripture, he looks up, as though somewhere in the air a library hangs, invisible to others’ eyes. Jacob does not react to Nahman’s lectures, gives no indications that he’s heard. When Nahman finishes, Jacob doesn’t even nod to him. What a strange school.

  It is getting dark by the time the audience thins out, and a raucous group of young men forms around this Frank. Then they head into town. They meander noisily down its narrow streets, looking to get into fights. They intercept passersby, comment on the street performers, drink wine, make trouble. Moliwda and Reb Mordke follow at a distance of several steps, so as to avoid becoming embroiled in a brawl should one erupt. This little group with Jacob at its head has some sort of strange power; they’re like young bucks looking for a chance to prove their mettle. Moliwda likes this. It would be nice to be in their midst, shoulder to shoulder with them, to clap them on the back, move in the cloud of their scent—the tart sweat of young men, wind, dust. Jacob has a rakish smile on his face, which makes him look like an amused little boy. Moliwda catches his eye for a moment and wants to lift his hand and wave, but already Jacob is turning away. Women selling fruit and men selling pancakes dart out of the way of this retinue. Suddenly the whole procession stops for a moment. Moliwda can’t see what’s going on up there ahead, but he waits patiently, buys himself a piece of cake with sweet syrup poured on top and eats it with great pleasure. Up ahead there is some sort of commotion, voices raised, an outburst of laughter. Yet another incident with Jacob. What happened this time, he isn’t sure.

  The story of His Lordship Moliwda, or Antoni Kossakowski, of the Ślepowron coat of arms, which is also known as Korwin

  He comes from Żmudź, his father was a Hussar in the Crown Army. He has five brothers: one of them is a military man, two are priests, and of the other two he knows nothing. Of the priests, one lives in Warsaw, and they exchange letters once a year.

  He hasn’t been in Poland for over twenty years. At this point, it is a strain for him to put together any even remotely eloquent sentence in his native tongue, but by some miracle, he still thinks in Polish. And yet for many things he lacks the Polish words. He has had so many experiences in life that he lacks the Polish words to describe them all. He does this with the aid of a mixture of Greek and Turkish. Now, working for the Jews, Hebrew words enter the mix. Described in these languages, Moliwda is a hybrid, a strange creature from the antipodes.

  In Polish, he can tell of his childhood in the home of the Kowno stolnik Dominik, Kossakowski’s uncle, who—after the sudden death of both his parents—took him in along with his five brothers. But the uncle was demanding, and ruled his home with an iron fist. When he caught one of his nephews in a lie, or some prevarication, he would backhand him hard. In cases of more severe transgressions (when, for instance, Antoni ate a little honey out of the pot and then, hoping to cover up his crime, added a little water, which spoiled the remainder), he would take out a leather scourge—probably intended for self-flagellation, as the family was very pious—that would slice through the boy’s naked back and buttocks. The most robust of the brothers the uncle prepared for a military career, and the two calmer and more trustworthy ones he sent off to the priesthood, but Antoni wasn’t suited for either. Several times he ran away from home, and the servants would search for him around the village or dig him out of peasants’ barns, where he had cried himself to sleep in the hay. Uncle Dominik’s methods were hard and painful, but at last there came a hope that Antoni might find his place in good society. His influential uncle had, after all, educated him well, and soon he arranged for the fifteen-year-old to take up a position in King Stanisław Leszczyński’s chancellery. He got him the appropriate clothing, bought him a travel case and shoes, sets of undergarments, and a handkerchief, and, so equipped, the boy set off for Warsaw. Once he got there, it turned out no one knew what to do with such a youngster, so he was made to write out copies of documents in his fine hand and to trim the wicks of candles. He told the chancellors that his uncle had found him in the forests of Żmudź, where a she-wolf had raised him for several years, so that he was fluent in the languages of dogs and wolves, and that he was the son of the sultan, begotten when the sultan was traveling incognito to the Radziwiłłs’. When he had had enough of copying out boring reports, he hid a whole folder of them behind a heavy piece of furniture under a window, where, since the panes weren’t fully sealed, they were ruined by damp. There were other offenses, too—schoolboy stuff, like when some older kids got him drunk and left him in a brothel in Powiśle, and he only narrowly escaped with his life, taking three full days to recover. In the end, he took the money he had so unwisely been entrusted with and used it to reign over Powiśle, until what he had left was stolen, and he was beaten up.

  Moliwda has thought a lot lately about what would have happened if he had stayed in the chancellery, what he might have become by now—maybe a lord, a royal officer in the capital, under the new king, who is so rarely in Warsaw, residing instead by the border with Saxony, in order to be close to Dresden. What has become of Moliwda instead?

  He was told in the chancellery never to show his face around there again; his uncle had been informed. He had come after his nephew, but he hadn’t dared beat him now as he had done in the past—after all, young Antoni was, in spite of everything, in the employ of the king.

  By way of punishment, his uncle sent him instead to the ancestral estate of Antoni’s dearly departed mother, which was being run by a local steward. Antoni was informed that he would now learn the techniques of agronomy—tillage, harvest, birthing sheep, keeping chickens. The estate was called Bielewicze.

  Antoni, still a teenager, a young lord, arrived at Bielewicze toward the end of winter, when the ground was still frozen. For the first few weeks he was so consumed by guilt and a sense of squandered opportunity that he barely left the house, praying fervently and rummaging around in the empty rooms for traces of the mother he had lost. In April, for the very first time, he made it to the mill.

  The mill at Bielewicze was leased to Mendel Kozowicz, who had only daughters, one of whom was Malka. Malka was already betrothed to some good-for-nothing; their wedding was coming up. Antoni started visiting the mill daily, on the pretense of bringing in grain and checking on its grinding—all of a sudden he became a great landlord, returning to look in on the progress of that grain, checking the flour. He would take a pinch of it between his fingers and raise it to his nostrils to see whether the rye was stale, and he would emerge from the mill dusted in flour, looking like a white-haired old man. But he never cared as much about the flour as he did about Malka. She told him her name meant Queen, but she didn’t look like a queen, more like a princess—small, quick, with black eyes and uncommonly dry, warm skin, like a little lizard, so that when they brushed arms once, Antoni heard a rustle.

  No one noticed the love affair. Maybe it was all those clouds of flour in the air, or maybe it was because the romance was a rather odd one. Two children who had fallen in love. She was just a little bit older than he was, but it was enough that she could show him whic
h stones hid crawfish and where the agaric grew in the grove as they took their walks together. It was really more like two orphans joining forces.