The Books of Jacob Read online

  During the summer harvest, Antoni was never seen in the fields, and he was rarely seen at home. By the Jewish New Year, in September, it was clear that Malka was pregnant, and someone—some madman—advised him to abduct her, christen her, and marry her, so that both families, presented with a fait accompli, would find their fury defused.

  And so Antoni kidnapped Malka, and he took her to the city and there, having bribed a priest to quickly baptize her, Antoni married his princess. He and the sacristan were the witnesses at the christening. She was given the Christian name Małgorzata, the Polish version of Margaret.

  But this was not enough. But this was nothing. As they stood side by side before the altar, anyone—the best example being Yente, who sees all—would have said this was a couple, a couple composed of a boy and a girl of around the same age. But in reality, there was a chasm between them that could never be filled, a chasm so deep that it reached clear to the center of the earth, maybe even farther. It would be hard to explain it in words. To say she was a Jew, and he a Christian? That wasn’t it. That meant very little. At its heart it was that they represented two types of people, which at first glance no one could see, two human beings similar to one another but diametrically opposed: for she would not be saved, while he would live eternally. While still in her earthly guise, she was in fact already ash and phantom. From the perspective of the miller Kozowicz, who rented the mill from Dominik, their differences were even bigger: Malka was a real person, whereas Antoni was a creature who merely resembled a person, false, not even worth paying attention to in the real world.

  Unaware of these differences, the couple showed up just once at the mill at Bielewicze, but it was obvious that there would never be a place for them there. Malka’s father was so devastated by what had happened that he grew weak and fell ill. The family tried to lock Malka in their cellar, but she escaped.

  Antoni and his young wife moved, then, to the Bielewicze estate, but it turned out to be just for a few months.

  The servants greeted them with some reserve. Malka’s sisters started coming to see her right away; increasingly intrepid, they would peer under the tablecloths, rummage around in drawers, caress the bedcovers. They would sit down at the table together, five girls and one boy with barely any hair on his face yet. The young couple would make the sign of the cross, and Malka’s sisters would pray in their language. A republic of Jewish children. As the girls chirped in Yiddish, Antoni quickly grasped the tone, and the words came to his tongue as though of their own accord. It certainly seemed like they were a good family, a perfect family—just the children, without any prime mover.

  After several months, disturbed by such a course of events, the steward sent letters to Uncle Dominik, who arrived as dark and stormy as a hail cloud. When young Antoni realized that he was about to receive a thrashing in the presence of his wife, now very much with child, the young couple packed up and went to the mill. Kozowicz, however, fearing his master, upon whom his livelihood depended, dispatched the two under cover of night to relatives in Lithuania. At this point their trail was lost.

  Of what draws persons together, and certain clarifications regarding the transmigration of souls

  Moliwda spends more and more time in the warehouse where Jacob works. Business takes place here during the morning hours, when the heat isn’t too bad yet, or late in the evening. For the couple of hours after the sun sets, there is wine instead of tea for long-standing clients.

  Moliwda knows Osman of Czernowitz well. He knows him thanks to certain Turks—he won’t say from where, he’s vowed to keep it a secret. Mystery, concealment, masks. If one were to view these mysteries through Yente’s all-seeing eyes, one would soon understand that they met during the secret gatherings of the Bektashi.

  This is how Moliwda introduces himself—as a long-standing client. What makes the greatest impression about him is that he is—as he himself is eager to emphasize—a Polish count. On the faces of his Jewish interlocutors this evokes an expression of disbelief and a sort of childlike respect. He says a few words in Turkish and in Hebrew. His laugh is deep, infectious. Throughout September, Moliwda goes to see Jacob every day. Up till now he has only actually purchased a turquoise clip, and even that Jacob sold to him at a scandalously low price, to Nahman’s outrage. Reb Mordke likes to sit around with them, talking over different things. The stranger the subject, the better.

  Some traders from the north come in, speaking a foreign language. Nussen focuses his attention on them, turns from scholar into salesman. They turn out to be Jewish merchants from Silesia, interested in malachite, opals, and turquoise. Jacob also shows them pearls; whenever he’s trying to make a sale, he raises his voice. Seeing the transaction through takes hours; the tea flows, young Hershel brings sweets and whispers into Jacob’s ear that Abraham says to also show them some carpets. The merchants fuss and grumble in their language, consulting one another in murmurs, certain no one understands them. They ought not to be so confident. Nussen listens with his one eye closed, and then, behind the curtain, where Nahman sits, he relates the latest:

  “They only care about the pearls, they have the rest already, and they paid more for it. They’re regretting not coming here before.”

  Jacob sends Hershel to get pearls from Abraham and from other stalls. And when in the late evening they wrap up the deal, and the day is acknowledged to have been exceptionally good, this motley family spreads out rugs and pillows in the largest room of the house and has a late supper that rapidly becomes a feast.

  “Yes, the people of Israel will devour Leviathan!” Jacob exclaims, as if making a toast, and he pushes a piece of meat into his mouth; grease runs down his chin. “The great, enormous hulk of the monster, delicious and soft as quail meat, or like the flesh of the most delicate fishes. Folks will be feasting on Leviathan for so long they’ll satisfy their centuries-old hunger.”

  All of them eating, they laugh and joke.

  “The wind will flutter the white tablecloths, and we’ll throw the bones under the table for the dogs,” Moliwda adds.

  Nahman, relaxed by the good wine from Jacob’s cellar, says to Moliwda:

  “When you look at the world as good, then evil becomes the exception, something missed, something mistaken—and nothing suits you. But if you were to switch it around—say that the world is evil, while good is the exception, then everything works out elegantly, understandably. Why don’t we want to see what is obvious?”

  Moliwda picks it up from here.

  “Where I come from, they think of the world as being divided into halves. Two ruling forces, one good, one evil . . .”

  “Where is it you come from?” Nahman inquires, his mouth still full.

  Moliwda dismisses him with an impatient gesture and goes on:

  “There is no man who would not wish ill upon another, no country that would not rejoice in the fall of another country, no merchant who doesn’t want his competitors bankrupt . . . Give me the creator of all that. The one who botched the job!”

  “Moliwda, give it a rest,” says Nahman. “Have some food. You’re not eating, you’re only drinking.”

  They all talk over one another; Moliwda has stirred up a hornet’s nest. He breaks off a piece of flatbread and dips it into some seasoned olive oil.

  “What’s it like where you come from?” Nahman pipes up. “You might tell us how your people live.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Moliwda tries to evade their curiosity; his eyes are slightly hazy from an excess of wine. “You would have to swear never to reveal the secret.”

  Nahman nods without hesitation. This seems obvious to him. Moliwda refills their glasses; the wine is so dark it leaves a purple stain on their lips.

  “This is how it is, I’ll tell it to you straight,” Moliwda starts, his tongue getting all tangled. “It’s all very ordinary. There’s light, and there’s dark. Dark attacks the light, and God creates men to try and defend it.”

  Nahman slides away his plate and raises his
eyes to Moliwda. Moliwda looks into the dark, deep eyes of Nahman of Busk, and the sounds of feasting float away somewhere beyond them both. In a quiet voice, Nahman tells of the four great paradoxes that must be contemplated by anyone who considers himself a thinking person.

  “First, in order to create a finite world, God had to limit himself, but there still remains an infinite part of God completely unengaged in creation.

  “Isn’t that so?” Nahman asks Moliwda, to make sure he’s following.

  Moliwda assents, so Nahman goes on: “If one accepts that the idea of the created world is one of an infinite number of ideas in the infinite mind of God, then it is, without any doubt, marginal and insignificant. It is possible that God didn’t even notice he had created something.” Nahman monitors Moliwda’s reactions closely. Moliwda takes a deep breath.

  “Second,” Nahman continues, “creation as an infinitesimal part of God’s mind strikes Him as insignificant, and He is only barely involved in this creation; from the human perspective, this indifference may be perceived as cruelty.”

  Moliwda downs his wine in one gulp, slamming the cup against the table.

  “Third,” Nahman continues in a quiet voice, “the Absolute, as infinitely perfect, had no reason to create the world. So that part of the Absolute that did lead to creation must have outsmarted the rest, and must go on outsmarting it now, and we take part in those machinations. Do you get me? We are taking part in a war. And fourth—since the Absolute had to limit Himself, in order for the finite world to arise, our world is for Him a kind of exile. Do you understand? In order to create the world, the all-powerful God had to make himself as weak and passive as a woman.”

  They sit in silence, spent. The sounds of the feasting return; they can hear Jacob telling bawdy jokes. Then Moliwda, very drunk by now, claps Nahman on the back, for such a long time that it becomes the subject of indecent jokes, until finally he lays his head on Nahman’s shoulder and says into his shirt:

  “I know all this.”

  Moliwda disappears for a few days, then comes back for a day or two. He spends those nights at Jacob’s.

  When they sit until evening, Hershel adds hot ash to the tandir, the clay oven that sits on the ground. They rest their feet on it; a pleasant, gentle warmth travels higher with the blood and heats up the whole body.

  “Is he çubuklu?” Moliwda asks Nahman, looking at Hershel. That’s what the Turks call epicenes, those equipped by God in such a way that they can pass as a woman or a man.

  Nahman shrugs.

  “He’s a good boy. Very dedicated. Jacob loves him.”

  After a moment, feeling that honesty on his part will oblige Moliwda to similar sincerity, Nahman says:

  “Is it true what they say about you, that you are a Bektashi?”

  “That’s what people say?”

  “And that you were in the service of the sultan . . .” Nahman hesitates for a moment. “As a spy.”

  Moliwda looks at his interlaced hands.

  “You know, Nahman, that it’s a good thing to keep company with them. And I do.” A moment later he adds: “There’s also nothing wrong with being a spy, so long as you serve some good purpose with it. You know this, too.”

  “I do. What do you want from us, Moliwda?”

  “I don’t want anything. I like you, and I admire Jacob.”

  “You, Moliwda, are a high-minded man tangled up in mundane things.”

  “Then we’re alike.”

  But Nahman doesn’t seem convinced.

  A few days before Nahman sets out for Poland, Moliwda invites them to visit. He comes on horseback and has with him, too, a strange carriage, which is where Nussen, Nahman, and the rest wind up. Jacob and Moliwda ride up ahead. It takes about four hours, because the road is tricky and narrow, and winds uphill.

  On the road Jacob is in a good mood and sings in his beautiful, powerful voice. He starts with the holiday songs, in the old language, and he finishes with the Yiddish ditties the badchan performs at weddings to entertain the guests:

  What is life, after all,

  if not dancing on graves?

  When he finishes, he turns to filthy songs of wedding nights. Jacob’s powerful voice echoes off the rocks. Moliwda rides half a step behind him and suddenly realizes why this strange man so easily attracts people to him. In everything he does, Jacob is absolutely authentic. He is like that well from the folktale. No matter what a person shouts into it, it will always answer the same.

  Jacob’s story about the ring

  They rest along the way, in the shade of some olive trees, with a view of Craiova before them. How small this city seems now—like a little handkerchief. Nahman sits next to Jacob and locks his head in the crook of his arm, seemingly in play, and Jacob gives in to it, and for a moment they tussle like puppies. It strikes Moliwda that they’re just big kids. On such stops, someone always has to tell a story, even if it’s one everybody already knows. Hershel asks, a little grumpily, for the one about the ring. Jacob, who never needs to be asked twice, launches into it right away.

  “Once upon a time there was a man,” he opens, “who had an extraordinary ring, passed down from generation to generation. Whoever wore that ring was a happy man, things went well for him. Yet despite his good fortune, he did not lose his sympathy for others and did not shy away from helping them. And so the ring belonged to good people, and whoever wore it would pass it down to his child.

  “It so happened that one set of parents gave birth to three sons at once. They grew up healthy and in brotherly love, sharing everything and supporting one another in all pursuits. Their parents thought and thought about what would happen when the boys grew up, and they would have to give one of them the ring. They discussed it well into the night, until at last the children’s mother proposed the following solution: they would take the ring to the best goldsmith and have him make two more exactly like it. The goldsmith would have to make sure the rings were identical, so that no one could tell which was the original. For a long time they searched, and at last they found one, an extraordinarily talented man, whom with great effort and great pains they were able to convince to carry out the task. When the parents came to pick up the rings, the goldsmith mixed up all three in front of them, and they couldn’t tell which was which. Even the goldsmith was astonished to find that he could not tell them apart.

  “When the sons reached adulthood, a grand ceremony took place at which the parents handed the boys their rings. The boys weren’t entirely satisfied, although they tried not to betray their emotions in order not to hurt their parents’ feelings. Each of them, in his heart of hearts, believed that it was he who had received the real ring, and so the brothers began to look upon one another in suspicion and mistrust. After the deaths of their parents, they immediately went to a judge so that he might once and for all resolve their doubts. Yet even the wise judge was unable to do this, and instead of issuing a determination, he told them: ‘Apparently, this treasure has the property of making its wearer good to God and to man. As this does not seem to apply to any of you, it may be that the real ring has been lost. Live, then, as if your ring were the real one, and your life will show whether or not you were right.’

  “And just like those three rings, there are three religions. And he who was born into one of them ought to take the other two like a pair of pantofles and walk in them toward salvation.” Moliwda knows this story. Most recently he heard it from a Muslim with whom he was doing business. For his part, he has been very much taken with the prayer he heard Nahman recite in lilting Hebrew. He doesn’t know if he’s got the whole thing, but what he did manage to memorize he’s put into Polish, recomposing the whole, so that now, when he says it over in his head, relishing the rhythm, his mouth floods with waves of pleasure, as though he were eating something good and sweet.

  Beating its wings, seeking the aether,

  But neither crane nor raven,

  My soul, which knows no conqueror,

  Soars up into
the heavens.

  It can’t be trapped in sulfur, iron,

  Get tangled in the heart,

  Will never die of plague in prison,

  Be subject to man’s court.

  Breaking down walls, it freely flits

  Over rumors and smooth words,

  For it wants not your narrow streets,

  Your alleys, boulevards.

  Knowing no limits, it roams free,

  Mocks what you all deem wise,

  Calls beauty ugly secretly,

  Dispels illusions, lies.

  It shakes its plumes and sees a light

  That can’t be put in words,

  It cares not who and what sort might

  Hold places in this world.

  O Father, help me wield my tongue

  So that I voice my pain

  And add truth to man’s talk—o let

  My soul glimpse the divine.

  After a while, this sweetness turns into an almost unbearable longing.

  Scraps: What we saw among Moliwda’s Bogomils

  Although I would very much like to, I am unable to make a record of everything, for after all, things are so inextricably bound together that should I merely tap the tip of my pen against one, then it nudges another, and soon a great sea has unfurled itself before me. What kind of dam are the edges of my paper, is the trail of ink I leave? How, then, would I be able to express all that my soul has received in this life, and in a single book, at that?

  Abulafia, whom I studied with great zeal, says that the human soul is part of the great cosmic stream that flows through all creatures. It is a single force, one motion, but when a person is born into a physical body, when he comes into the world as an individual being, that soul has to separate from the rest, otherwise a person would not be able to live—the soul would drown in the One, and the person would go mad in just a few instants. That is why such a soul gets sealed, that is, seals are stamped upon it that will not let it mix with that unity but will allow it to operate in the finite, bounded world of matter.