The Books of Jacob Page 6

  He is certain the rabbi would like for the Messiah to be a king on a white horse, riding into Jerusalem wearing gold armor, perhaps with an army, too, with warriors who would seize power alongside him and bring about the final order of the world. That he’d want him to be like some famous general. He would strip the masters of this world of their power, and they would give him every nation without a fight, kings would pay him tributes, and at the River Sambation he would find the ten lost tribes of Israel. The Temple in Jerusalem would be released fully formed from heaven, and that same day, those who had been buried in the Land of Israel would rise from the dead. Asher smiles to himself when he remembers that those who died outside the Land of Israel would not be resurrected for another four hundred years. He believed that as a child, even though it struck him as cruelly unfair.

  Both sides accuse each other of the worst sins, both engage in a war of intelligence. Each is as pathetic as the other, thinks Asher. Asher Rubin is a misanthrope, after all—it’s strange he became a doctor. People always irritate and disappoint him.

  As for sins, well, he knows more about them than anyone. Sins get written on the human body like on parchment. The parchment differs little from person to person. Their sins are surprisingly similar, too.

  The beehive, or: The home of the Shorr family in Rohatyn

  In the Shorrs’ house on the market square as well as in several others—for the Shorr family is big and has many branches—preparations for the wedding are ongoing. One of the sons is getting married.

  Elisha has five of them, and one daughter, the eldest of the children. The first son is Solomon, now thirty, who takes after his father and is cautious and quiet. He is reliable and enjoys widespread respect. His wife, Haikele, thus nicknamed to differentiate her from Solomon’s sister, Hayah, is expecting another child. She comes from Wallachia, and her beauty draws attention even now, when she is pregnant. She makes up funny little songs she sings herself. She also jots down little stories for the women. Nathan, who is twenty-eight, with a sincere, gentle face, is proficient in conducting business with the Turks; he is always on the road, making good deals, though no one really knows what kind of deals they are. At this point he rarely comes back to Rohatyn, but he came for the wedding. His wife, a lady, is dressed in elegant, lavish clothing; she comes from Lithuania and looks down on the Rohatyn clan. She has lush hair that she wears high on her head, and her dress is tight. The carriage in the courtyard belongs to them. Then there is Yehuda, lively and lots of fun. They tend to have trouble with him, however, because it’s hard to keep his violent nature in check. He dresses in the Polish fashion and carries a saber. His brothers call him “the Cossack.” Right now his business is in Kamieniec, where he is the main supplier for the fortress, which earns him a pretty good living. His wife died not long ago in childbirth; the child could not be saved, either. He has two little ones from that marriage, but he has made it clear he’s already looking for another partner; the wedding will be a good occasion for it. He likes the oldest daughter of Moshe from Podhajce, who is fourteen now, old enough to marry. And Moshe is an honorable man, very learned; he studies Kabbalah, knows the whole Zohar by heart, and can “grasp the mystery,” whatever that might mean to Yehuda. For him, truth be told, that is less important than the beauty and intelligence of the girl whose Kabbalist father named her Malka, or Queen. Elisha’s youngest son, Wolf, is seven. His freckled and joyful face is most often seen next to his father.

  The groom is the boy Father Chmielowski called Jeremiah, whose real name is Isaac. He is sixteen years of age now, and apart from the fact that he is tall and ungainly, he does not have too many characteristics of his own just yet. His bride, Freyna, comes from Lanckoroń and is a relative of Hirsh, the rabbi of Lanckoroń, who is the husband of Hayah, daughter of Elisha Shorr. Everyone here in this low-ceilinged but extensive home is in some way family, has some connection—blood, marriage, trade, loans cosigned, carts borrowed.

  Asher Rubin comes here fairly often. He is called not only for the children, but also for Hayah. She is always coming down with mystery ailments, which he can treat only by talking with her. In fact, he likes these visits to Hayah. They are perhaps the only thing he does like. And it is usually Hayah who insists on having him brought in, since no one in this home believes in any kind of medicine. They converse, and the ailment passes. Sometimes he thinks that she is like that newt that can summon up all different colors at will in order to better hide from a predator or look like something else. And so one day Hayah has a rash, the next day she can’t really breathe, the next she has a bloody nose. Everyone believes it is because of spirits, dybbukim, demons, or maybe ba’aley kabin—bałakaben, as they’re known around here—the limping underground creatures that guard treasures. Every illness she has is significant, and every one leads to a prophecy. Then they send him away. Then he is no longer necessary.

  It amuses Asher to note that among the Shorrs it’s the men who do business and the women who prophesy. Every other female in the family is a prophet. And to think that in his Berlin newspaper today he was reading that in far-off America it was demonstrated that lightning is an electrical phenomenon and that by means of a simple rod you could defend against “God’s wrath.”

  But such information does not reach this far, not all the way to Rohatyn.

  Now, since their wedding, Hayah has moved in with her husband, but she comes here often. They married her off to the rabbi of Lanckoroń, one of theirs, a true believer, and a friend of her father’s, significantly older than Hayah. They already have two children. Father and son-in-law are like two drops of water: bearded, gray-haired, with sunken cheeks that hold the shadow of the rooms where they station themselves most often. It’s a shadow they wear on their faces wherever they go.

  When telling the future, Hayah goes into a trance, and during her trances, she plays with little figures made of bread or clay, which she sets out on a board she has painted herself. And then she prophesies. For this she needs her father, who puts his ear to her lips, so close it looks like she is licking it, and he closes his eyes and listens. Then he translates what he has heard from the language of the spirits into human language. A lot of it turns out to be true, although a lot of it also doesn’t, Asher Rubin doesn’t know how to explain it, and he doesn’t know what kind of disease it is. Because he doesn’t know, he finds it unpleasant, and he tries not to think about it much. They call this prophesizing “ibbur,” which means she is inhabited by a good and sacred spirit that gives her information that would ordinarily be unavailable to humans. Sometimes all Asher does is let her blood; he tries, when he does this, not to look her in the eye. He believes this procedure purifies her, weakens the pressure in her veins so that the blood doesn’t overwhelm her brain. The family listens to Hayah just as much as they listen to Elisha Shorr.

  But now they have called Asher Rubin to see a dying old woman who came to their home as a wedding guest. She got so weak on the way they had to put her straight to bed; they are afraid she’ll die during the wedding itself. So Asher probably won’t see Hayah today.

  He goes in through a dark, muddy courtyard, where just-slaughtered geese, fattened all summer long, hang upside down. He walks through a narrow entryway and smells the fried cutlets and onions, hears someone somewhere grinding pepper in a mortar. The women are noisy in the kitchen; the cold air is burst by the steam that comes out from there, from the dishes they’re preparing. There are the smells of vinegar, nutmeg, bay leaves; there is the aroma of fresh meat, sweet and sickening. These scents make the autumn air seem even colder and more unpleasant.

  Men behind the wooden partition speak aggressively, as if they’re arguing; you can hear their voices and also smell the wax and damp that has permeated their clothing. The house is full to bursting.

  Asher passes children; the little ones pay him no attention, too excited about the impending festivities. He passes through a second courtyard, weakly lit by a single torch; here there is a horse and cart. So
meone Rubin can’t quite see is unloading this cart in the dark, carrying sacks inside the chamber. In a moment Asher catches a glimpse of his face and balks involuntarily—that’s the runaway, the boy Shorr pulled out of the snow half dead last winter, his face all frostbitten.

  At the doorstep, he runs into a tipsy Yehuda, whom the whole family calls Leyb. As a matter of fact, Rubin’s name isn’t Rubin, either, but Asher ben Levi. Now, in the semidarkness and the throng of guests, all names seem somehow fluid, interchangeable, secondary. After all, no mortal holds on to his name for very long. Without a word, Yehuda leads him deep into the house and opens the door to a small room where young women are working, and in the bed by the stove lies an old woman, supported by pillows, her face dried out and pale. The women who were working greet him effusively and position themselves around the bed, curious to watch him examining Yente.

  She is little and thin, like an old chicken, and her body is limp. Her chicken’s rib cage rises and falls at a rapid rate. Her half-open mouth, covered by extremely thin lips, caves inward. But her dark eyes follow the medic’s movements. After he has chased all the onlookers from the room, he lifts her covers and sees her whole figure, the size of a child’s, sees her bony hands clutching strings and little leather strips. They have wrapped her up in wolf hides up to her neck. They believe that wolf hides restore heat and strength.

  How could they have brought along this old woman with so little life left in her, thinks Asher. She looks like a shriveled-up old mushroom, with her wrinkled brown face, and the candlelight further and more cruelly carves it up, until gradually the woman ceases to appear human; Asher has the sense that soon she will be indistinguishable from nature—from tree bark, gnarled wood, a rough stone.

  She is obviously well taken care of here. After all, as Elisha Shorr explained to Asher, Yente’s father and Elisha Shorr’s grandfather, Zalman Naftali Shorr—the same man who wrote the famous Tevu’at Shorr—were brothers. So there was nothing surprising in her wanting to attend her relative’s wedding, since there would be cousins from Moravia and from distant Lublin here, as well. Asher crouches beside the low bed and immediately smells the saltiness of human sweat and—he thinks for a moment, looking for the right association—childhood. At her age, people start to smell like children again. He knows there is nothing wrong with this woman—she’s simply dying. He examines her carefully and finds nothing other than old age. Her heart is beating unevenly and weakly, as if out of exhaustion. Her skin is clear, but thin and dry like parchment. Her eyes are glassy, sunken. Her temples are sinking, too, and that’s a sure sign of impending death. From under the slightly unbuttoned shirt at her throat he can see some strings and knots. He touches one of the old woman’s clenched fists, and for a moment she resists, but then, as if ashamed, her fist blossoms open like a dry desert rose. In her palm lies a piece of silk cloth, completely covered in thickly made letters:

  It almost seems to him that Yente is smiling at him with her toothless mouth, and her deep, dark eyes reflect the candles’ burning; Asher feels as if that reflection were reaching him from very far away, from the unfathomable depths that all human beings hold within them.

  “What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with her?” Elisha asks him, suddenly bursting into that cramped little space.

  Asher rises slowly and looks into his anxious face.

  “What do you think? She’s dying. She won’t last the wedding.”

  Asher Rubin makes a face that speaks for itself: Why would they have brought her here in such a state?

  Elisha grabs him by the elbow and takes him aside.

  “You have your methods, don’t you, that we don’t know. Help us, Asher, please. The meat has already been chopped, the carrots peeled. The raisins are soaking in their bowls, the women are cleaning the carp. Did you see how many guests there are?”

  “Her heart is barely beating,” says Rubin. “There’s nothing I can do. She should never have been brought on such a journey.”

  He delicately frees his elbow from the grasp of Elisha Shorr and heads for the door.

  Asher Rubin thinks that most people are truly idiots, and that it is human stupidity that is ultimately responsible for introducing sadness into the world. It isn’t a sin or a trait with which human beings are born, but a false view of the world, a mistaken evaluation of what is seen by our eyes. Which is why people perceive every thing in isolation, each object separate from the rest. Real wisdom lies in linking everything together—that’s when the true shape of all of it emerges.

  He is thirty-five, but he looks a lot older. The last few years have hunched him over and made him go completely gray—before, his hair was jet-black. He’s also having trouble with his teeth. Sometimes, too, when it’s wet out, the joints in his fingers swell; he is delicate, he has to take care of himself. He has managed to avoid marriage. His fiancée died while he was studying. He barely knew her, so her death did not sadden him. Since then he has been left in peace.

  He comes from Lithuania. Because he did well in school, his family collected funds in order for him to continue his education abroad. So he went to study in Italy, though he did not finish. He developed a sort of generalized incapacity. He barely had enough strength, as he was returning, to make it to Rohatyn, where his uncle Anczel Lindner sewed vestments for Orthodox popes and was well-off enough to take him in under his roof. Here Rubin started to feel a little like himself again. Despite the fact that he had a few years of medical studies behind him by then, he had no idea what was wrong with him. An incapacity, an inability. His hand would be lying before him on the table, and he would not have the strength to raise it. He didn’t have the strength to open his eyes. His aunt smeared sheep’s fat with herbs on his eyelids several times a day, and this brought him slowly back to life. The knowledge imparted to him by his Italian university came back to him bit by bit, and eventually he started treating people himself. This is going well for him now, although he feels trapped in Rohatyn, as if he were an insect slipped into resin and frozen for all time.

  In the beth midrash

  Elisha Shorr, whose long beard gives him the look of a patriarch, is holding his granddaughter up in the air, tickling her stomach with his nose. The little girl giggles, showing her still-toothless gums. She leans her head back, and her laughter fills the whole room. It sounds like doves cooing. Then droplets start to fall onto the floor from her diaper, and her grandfather rushes to pass her to her mother, Hayah. Hayah passes her along again to the other women, and the little one vanishes into the depths of the house, a trickle of urine marking her path along the worn floorboards.

  Shorr must step out of the house and into the chilly October afternoon in order to cross over to the next building, where the beth midrash is located, and from which come, as usual, many male voices, sometimes raised and impatient, so that one might be excused for mistaking this reading and studying area for some sort of bazaar. He goes to the children, to the room where they are being taught to read. The family has many children—Elisha alone has nine grandchildren already. He believes that children should be kept on a tight leash. Studying, reading, and prayer until noon. Then they work in the store, help around the house, and learn to do practical things, like bills and commercial correspondence. But also working with the horses, chopping wood for the stove and making even stacks of it, performing little household repairs. They have to know how to do everything, because any and all of it could come in handy. A man has to be independent, self-sufficient, and ought to know a little bit about a lot. He also has to have one real skill that will allow him to make a living when he needs to—this is to be determined according to talent. You have to pay careful attention to whatever the child becomes really attached to and fond of—this is a method that can’t lead astray. Elisha lets the girls study, too, but not all of them, and not together with the boys. His eagle eye gets straight to the heart of things, and he can see clearly which of the girls will make a clever pupil. On those with less aptitude, those more f
rivolous, there is no sense in wasting time, as they will still make good wives and will bear many children.

  There are eleven children in the beth midrash, almost all of them his grandchildren.

  Elisha himself is nearing sixty. He is small, wiry, quick-tempered. The boys, who are already there waiting for their teacher, know their grandfather is coming to check on their progress. Old Shorr does this every day, so long as he is in Rohatyn and not on one of his frequent business trips.

  Now he races in, his face slivered by two vertical wrinkles, which makes him look even more severe. But he doesn’t want to scare the children. So he makes sure to smile at them. Elisha looks at each one of them individually first, and he is filled with a tenderness he tries to conceal. He addresses them in a muffled voice, somewhat hoarse, like he’s trying to rein himself in, and he takes several large nuts out of his pocket; they are genuinely enormous, almost the size of peaches. He holds them in his open palms and offers them up to the children. They watch with interest, thinking he will give them these nuts now, not expecting to be tricked. But the old man takes one of them and cracks it open in the iron grip of his bony hand. Then he holds it up to the first boy, Leybko, Nathan’s son.

  “What is this?”

  “A nut,” Leybko pronounces with satisfaction.

  “What’s it made of?” says Shorr, moving on to the next boy, Shlomo. Shlomo is less certain. He looks up at his grandfather and squints: