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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas begin to sweep the continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumours of his sect's secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. In The Books of Jacob, her masterpiece, 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk writes the story of Frank through the perspectives of his contemporaries, capturing Enlightenment Europe on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.
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THE BOOKS OF JACOB
OR
A FANTASTIC JOURNEY ACROSS SEVEN BORDERS, FIVE LANGUAGES AND THREE MAJOR RELIGIONS, NOT COUNTING THE MINOR SECTS.
TOLD BY THE DEAD, SUPPLEMENTED BY THE AUTHOR, DRAWING FROM A RANGE OF BOOKS AND AIDED BY IMAGINATION, THE WHICH BEING THE GREATEST NATURAL GIFT OF ANY PERSON.
THAT THE WISE MIGHT HAVE IT FOR A RECORD, THAT MY COMPATRIOTS REFLECT, LAYPERSONS GAIN SOME UNDERSTANDING AND MELANCHOLY SOULS OBTAIN SOME SLIGHT ENJOYMENT.
OLGA TOKARCZUK
Translated by JENNIFER CROFT
‘A magnificent writer.’
— Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate
‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’
— Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News
‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’
— The Economist
‘Prodigious … An impressive novel … Combining immense erudition to writing that is as fluid as it is poetic, Tokarczuk brings to life, over the course of a thousand pages, the epic story of a messianic group in a multicultural Poland.’
— Le Monde
‘A literary-philosophical masterpiece’
— Die Zeit
‘The heaviest book of the year is also the best … one day, [Tokarczuk] will receive the Nobel prize!’
— Helsingborgs Dagblad
‘Can you write a 900-page novel that keeps you in suspense? Olga Tokarczuk succeeded.’
— Polityka
‘Magnificent’
— Dagens Nyheter
Praise for Flights
‘Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.’
— Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
‘In the vein of W. G. Sebald, Flights knits together snippets of fiction, narrative and reflection to meditate on human anatomy and the meaning of travel: this is a delicate, ingenious book that is constantly making new connections.’
— Justine Jordan, Guardian
‘The best novel I’ve read in years is Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (trans. Jennifer Croft): Most great writers build a novel as one would a beautiful house, brick by brick, wall by wall, from the ground up. Or using another metaphor, a writer gathers her yarn, and with good needles and structure, knits a wonderful sweater or scarf. I tend to prefer novels where a writer weaves her threads this way and that, above and below, inside outside, and ends up with a carpet. Flights is such a novel.’
— Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman
‘Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. Flights has echoes of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own. … Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness, for the acceptance of “fluidity, mobility, illusoriness”. After all, Tokarczuk reminds us, “Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.” Hotels on the continent would do well to have a copy of Flights on the bedside table. I can think of no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.’
— Kapka Kassabova, Guardian
‘It’s a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons — the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy — we venture forth into the world. … The book is transhistorical, transnational; it leaps back and forth through time, across fiction and fact. Interspersed with the narrator’s journey is a constellation of discrete stories that share rhyming motifs and certain turns of phrase. … In Jennifer Croft’s assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.’
— Parul Sehgal, New York Times
‘Tokarczuk is one of Europe’s most daring and original writers, and this astonishing performance is her glittering, bravura entry in the literature of ideas. … A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited.
— Eileen Battersby, Los Angeles Review of Books
Praise for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
‘Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it’s one of the most existentially refreshing novels I’ve read in a long time.’
— Jia Tolentino, New Yorker
‘Amusing, stimulating and intriguing … [Drive Your Plow] might be likened to Fargo as rewritten by Thomas Mann, or a W. G. Sebald version of The Mousetrap. … Olga Tokarczuk’s previous novel, Flights … was the winner of the Man Booker International Prize, for translated fiction, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, though smaller in scale, will help confirm her position as the first Polish writer to command sustained Western attention since the end of the Cold War.’
— Leo Robson, The Telegraph
‘Though the book functions perfectly as noir crime – moving towards a denouement that, for sleight of hand and shock, should draw admiration from the most seasoned Christie devotee – its chief preoccupation is with unanswerable questions of free will versus determinism, and with existential unease. … In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, the prose is by turns witty and melancholy, and never slips out of that distinctive narrative voice. … That this novel caused such a stir in Poland is no surprise. There, the political compass has swung violently to the right, and the rights of women and of animals are under attack (the novel’s 2017 film adaptation, Spoor, caused one journalist to remark that it was “a deeply anti-Christian film that promoted eco-terrorism”). It is an astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.’
— Sarah Perry, Guardian
‘Tokarczuk’s novels, poems and short stories consistently open up unpredictable wonders and astonishments, and there isn’t a genre that she can’t subvert. … Antonia Lloyd-Jones pulls off a flawless, intimate translation, even tackling the technically dazzling feat of presenting Blake’s poems as translations from English into Polish, back into English. … It will, however, make you want to read everything that Tokarczuk has written.’
— Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Once swallowed, the piece of paper lodges in her oesophagus near her heart. Saliva-soaked. The specially prepared black ink dissolves slowly now, the letters losing their shapes. Within the human body, the word splits in two: substance and essence. When the former goes, the latter, formlessly abiding, may be absorbed into the body’s tissues, since essences always seek carriers in matter – even if this is to be the cause of many misfortunes.
Yente wakes up. But she was just almost dead! She feels this distinctly now, like a pain, like the river’s current – a tremor, a clamour, a rush.
With a delicate vibration, her heart resumes its weak but regular beating, capable. Warmth is restored to her bony, withered chest. Yente blinks and just barely lifts her eyelids again. She sees the agonized face of Elisha Shorr, who leans in over her. She tries to smile, but that much power over her face she can’t quite summon. Elisha Shorr’s brow is furrowed, his gaze brimming with resentment. His lips move, but no sound reaches Yente. Old Shorr’s big hands appear from somewhere, reaching for her neck, then move beneath her threadbare blanket. Clumsily he rolls her body onto the side, so he can check the bedding. Yente can’t feel his exertions, no – she senses only warmth, and the presence of a sweaty, bearded man.
Then suddenly, as though from some unexpected impact, Yente sees everything from above: herself, the balding top of old Shorr’s head – in his struggle with her body, he has lost his cap.
And this is how it is now, how it will be: Yente sees all.
I.
THE BOOK OF FOG
THE BOOK OF FOG
I.
1752, ROHATYN
It’s early morning, near the close of October. The vicar forane is standing on the porch of the presbytery, waiting for his carriage. He’s used to getting up at dawn, but today he feels just half awake and has no idea how he even ended up here, alone in an ocean of fog. He can’t remember rising, or getting dressed, or whether he’s had breakfast. He stares perplexed at the sturdy boots sticking out from underneath his cassock, at the tattered front of his faded woollen overcoat, at the gloves he’s holding in his hands. He slips on the left one; it’s warm and fits him perfectly, as though hand and glove have known each other many years. He breathes a sigh of relief. He feels for the bag slung over his shoulder, mechanically runs his fingers over the hard edges of the rectangle it contains, thickened like scars under the skin, and he remembers, slowly, what’s inside – that heavy, friendly form. A good thing, the thing that’s brought him here – those words, those signs, each with a profound connection to his life. Indeed, now he knows what’s there, and this awareness slowly starts to warm him up, and as his body comes back, he starts to be able to see through the fog. Behind him, the dark aperture of the doors, one side shut. The cold must have already set in, perhaps even a light frost already, spoiling the plums in the orchard. Above the doors, there is a rough inscription, which he sees without looking, already knowing what it says – he commissioned it, after all. Those two craftsmen from Podhajce took an entire week to carve the letters into the wood. He had, of course, requested they be done ornately:
HERE TODAY AND GONE TOMORROW ИO USE TO MILK IS YOUR SORROW
Somehow, in the second line, they wrote the very first letter backwards, like a mirror image. Aggravated by this for the umpteenth time, the priest spins his head round, and the sight is enough to make him fully awake. That backwards И… How could they be so negligent? You really have to watch them constantly, supervise their each and every step. And since these craftsmen are Jewish, they probably used some sort of Jewish style for the inscription, the letters looking ready to collapse under their frills. One of them had even tried to argue that this preposterous excuse for an N was acceptable – nay, even preferable! – since its bar went from bottom to top, and from left to right, in the Christian way, and that Jewish would have been the opposite. The petty irritation of it has brought him to his senses, and now Father Benedykt Chmielowski, dean of Rohatyn, understands why he felt as if he was still asleep – he’s surrounded by fog the same greyish colour as his bedsheets; an off-white already tainted by dirt, by those enormous stores of grey that are the lining of the world. The fog is motionless, covering the whole of the courtyard completely; through it loom the familiar shapes of the big pear tree, the solid stone fence and, further still, the wicker cart. He knows it’s just an ordinary cloud, tumbled from the sky and landed with its belly on the ground. He was reading about this yesterday in Comenius.
Now he hears the familiar clatter that on every journey whisks him into a state of creative meditation. Only after the sound does Roshko appear out of the fog, leading a horse by the bridle; after him comes the vicar’s britchka. At the sight of the carriage, Father Chmielowski feels a surge of energy, slaps his glove against his hand and leaps up into his seat. Roshko, silent as usual, adjusts the harness and glances at the priest. The fog turns Roshko’s face grey, and suddenly he looks older to the priest, as though he’s aged overnight, although in reality he’s a young man yet.
Finally, they set off, but it’s as if they’re standing still, since the only evidence of motion is the rocking of the carriage and the soothing creaks it makes. They’ve travelled this road so many times, over so many years, that there’s no need to take in the view any longer, nor will landmarks be necessary for them to get their bearings. Father Chmielowski knows they’ve now gone down the road that passes along the edge of the forest, and they’ll stay on it all the way to the chapel at the crossroads. The chapel was erected there by Father Chmielowski himself some years earlier, when he had just been entrusted with the presbytery of Firlejów. For a long time he had wondered to whom to dedicate the little chapel, and he had thought of Benedict, his patron saint, or Onuphrius, the hermit who had, in the desert, miraculously received dates to eat from a palm tree, while every eighth day angels brought down for him from heaven the Body of Christ. For Father Chmielowski, Firlejów was to be a kind of desert too, after his years tutoring His Lordship Jabłonowski’s son Dymitr. On reflection, he had come to the conclusion that the chapel was to be built not for him and the satisfaction of his vanity, but rather for ordinary persons, that they might have a place to rest at that crossroads, whence to raise their thoughts to heaven. Standing, then, on that brick pedestal, coated in white lime, is the Blessed Mother, Queen of the World, wearing a crown on her head, a serpent squirming under her slipper.
She, too, disappears into the fog today, along with the chapel and the crossroads. Only the treetops are visible, a sign that the fog is beginning to dissipate.
‘Kaśka won’t go, good sir,’ Roshko grumbles when the carriage comes to a stop. He gets out of his seat and vigorously crosses himself – once, twice, and then again.
He leans forward and peers into the fog as he would into water. His shirt pokes out from underneath his faded red Sunday doublet.
‘I don’t know where to go,’ he says.
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? We’re on the Rohatyn road now,’ the priest says in astonishment.
And yet! He gets out of the britchka to join his servant. Helplessly they circle the carriage, straining their eyes into the pale grey. For a moment they think they see something, but it’s only that their eyes, unable to latch on to anything, have begun to play tricks on them. But how can they not know where to go? It’s like getting lost in one’s own pocket.
‘Quiet!’ the priest says suddenly and raises his finger, straining to hear. And indeed, from somewhere off to the left, through the billows of fog, the faint murmur of water reaches their ears.
‘Let’s follow that sound,’ the priest says with determination. ‘That’s water flowing.’
Now they’ll slowly creep along the river people call the Rotten Linden. The water will be their guide.
Soon Father Chmielowski relaxes back inside his carriage, stretching his legs out before him, allowing his eyes to drift within this mass of fog. Right away he slips into his musings – for man thinks best in motion. Slowly, reluctantly, the mechanism of his mind awakens, wheels and pinions starting up, the whole getting going just like the clock that stands in the vestibule of the presbytery, which he purchased in Lwów for an exorbitant sum. It’ll be just about to chime. Did not the world emerge from such a fog? he starts to wonder. After all, the Jewish historian Josephus maintains the world was created in the autumn, at the autumn equinox. A reasonable notion, since of course there were fruits in paradise; given the apple hanging from the tree, it must indeed have been autumn… There is a logic to it. But right away another thought occurs to him: What kind of reasoning is this? Could not Almighty God create such paltry fruits at any time of year?
When they come to the main road leading to Rohatyn, they join the stream of persons on foot and horseback and in every variety of vehicle who appear out of the fog like Christmas figurines sculpted from bread. It is Wednesday, market day in Rohatyn, and the peasants’ carts are loaded with grain sacks, cages with poultry fowl – all sorts of agricultural bounty. As the carts roll slowly by, merchants skip between them, carrying every imaginable commodity – their stalls, cleverly collapsed, can be thrown over their shoulders like carrying poles; then, in a flash, unfolded, they are tables strewn with bright materials or wooden toys, eggs bought up from the villages for a quarter of what they cost here, now. Peasants lead goats and cows to be sold; the animals, frightened by the tumult, stop among the puddles and refuse to budge. Now a wagon flies by them, its cover a tarpaulin riddled with holes; it carries a load of the exuberant Jews who converge upon the Rohatyn market from all over. Next a very ornate carriage wedges its way through, though in the fog and the crowd it has trouble preserving its dignity – its vibrant little lacquered doors are caked with mud, and the cerulean-cloaked coachman’s countenance is wan, as he must not have been expecting such a commotion and is now desperately seeking any opportunity to get off this terrible road.
Roshko is persistent and will not be forced onto the field; he keeps to the right side with one wheel in the grass, one on the road, and moves steadily forward. His long, gloomy face gets flushed, then taken over by a hideous grimace; the priest glances at him and remembers the etching he studied yesterday, featuring spitfires in hell with faces very like Roshko’s right now.
‘Let the Very Reverend through! Nu, poshli! Out of the way!’ shouts Roshko. ‘Out!’
Suddenly, without warning, the first buildings appear in front of them. Evidently the fog changes all perception of distance, as even Kaśka seems confused. She lurches, yanking the drawbar, and were it not for Roshko’s firm hand and whip, she would overturn the britchka. In front of them is a blacksmith’s; maybe Kaśka got spooked by the sparks spewing from that furnace, or else by the anxiety of the horses waiting their turn to be shod…
Further on is the inn, in a state of partial ruin, reminiscent of a rural cottage. A well-pole juts out over it like a gallows, piercing the fog, then disappears somewhere higher up. The priest sees that the filthy fancy carriage has come to a stop here, the exhausted coachman’s head fallen to his knees; he doesn’t leave his seat, nor does anyone emerge from inside. Already a tall, skinny Jew and a little girl with tousled hair are standing before it. But the vicar forane sees no more – the fog subsumes every passing view, each scene as fleeting as a flake of dissolving snow.
This is Rohatyn.
It starts with huts, tiny houses made of clay with straw thatch that seems to be pressing the structures down into the ground. The closer you get to the market square, the shapelier these little houses become, and the finer the thatching, until thatch disappears altogether into the wooden shingles of the smaller townhouses, made of unfired bricks. Now there is the parish church, now the Dominican monastery, now the Church of Saint Barbara on the market square. Continuing on, two synagogues and five Orthodox churches. Little houses all around the market square like mushrooms; each of these contains a business. The tailor, the ropemaker, the furrier in close proximity, all of them Jews; then there’s the baker whose last name is Loaf, which always delights the vicar forane because it suggests a sort of hidden order that – were it more visible and consistent – might lead people to live more virtuous lives. Then there’s Luba the swordsmith, the façade of his workshop more lavish than anything nearby, its walls newly painted sky blue. A great rusted sword hangs over the entrance to show that Luba is an excellent craftsman, and that his customers have deep pockets. Then there’s the saddler, who has set out a wooden sawhorse in front of his door, and on it a beautiful saddle with stirrups that must be plated in silver, so they gleam.
In every place there is the cloying smell of malt that gets into all that is up for sale and gluts a person just as bread can. On the outskirts of Rohatyn, in Babińce, are several small breweries that give the whole region this satiating scent. Many stalls here sell beer, and the better shops also keep vodka, and mead – mostly trójniak. The Jewish merchant Wachshul, meanwhile, sells wine, real Hungarian and Rhineland wine, as well as some sourer stuff they bring in from Wallachia.
The priest moves among stands made out of every imaginable material – boards, pieces of thickly woven canvas, wicker baskets, even leaves. This good woman with the white kerchief on her head is selling pumpkins out of a cart; their bright orange colour draws in the children. Next, another woman offers up lumps of cheese on horseradish leaves. There are many women merchants besides, those who have suffered the misfortune of widowhood or who are married to drunks; they trade in oil, salt, linen. The priest generally purchases something from this lady pasztet-maker; now he gives her a kind smile. After her are two stands that feature evergreen branches – a sign they’re selling freshly brewed beer. Here is a rich stall that is operated by Armenian merchants, with light, beautiful materials, knives in ornamental scabbards. Next to it is the dried sturgeon stand, with a sickening scent that gets into the wool of the Turkish tapestries. Further along, a man in a dusty smock sells eggs by the dozen in little baskets woven out of blades of grass, which he keeps in a box that hangs from his skinny shoulders. Another sells his eggs sixty at a time, in large baskets, at a competitive, almost wholesale price. A baker’s stall is completely covered in bagels – someone must have toppled one into the mud because a little dog is now rapturously scarfing it up off the ground.
People sell whatever they can here. Floral materials, kerchiefs and scarves straight from the bazaar in Stamboul, and children’s shoes, and nuts, and that man over by the fence is offering a plough and all different sizes of nails, as thin as pins or as thick as fingers, to build houses. Nearby, a handsome woman in a starched bonnet has set out little clappers for night watchmen, the kind that sounds more like crickets’ nocturnes than a summons from sleep, alongside bigger ones, loud enough to wake the dead.
How many times have the Jews been told not to sell things having to do with the Church. They’ve been forbidden by priests and rabbis alike, to no avail. There are lovely prayer books, a ribbon between their pages, letters so marvellously embossed in silver on the cover that when you run your fingertip along their surface they seem warm and alive. A smart, almost lavishly dapper man in a yarmulke holds them like they’re relics, wrapped in thin paper – a creamy tissue to keep the foggy day from sullying their innocent Christian pages, fragrant with printing ink. He also has wax candles and even pictures of the saints with their halos.
Father Chmielowski goes up to one of the travelling booksellers, hoping he might find something in Latin, but all the books are Jewish; beside them lie yarmulkes and other things of which the priest does not know the nature.
The farther you look down the little side streets, the more obvious the poverty becomes, like a dirty toe sticking out of a torn shoe; a plain old poverty, quiet, low to the ground. There are no more shops now, no more stalls – instead, hovels like doghouses, thrown together out of flimsy boards picked from around the trash heaps. In one of them, a cobbler fixes shoes that have been mended again and again, patched up and resoled repeatedly. In another, a tinker has set up shop, surrounded by hanging iron pots. His face is thin and sunken. His cap is drawn down over his forehead, which is covered in brown lesions; the vicar forane would be afraid to have his pots mended here, lest this wretch pass along some terrible disease through his touch. Next, an old man sharpens knives along with all types of sickles and scythes. His work station consists of a stone wheel tied around his neck. When given a thing to sharpen, he sets up a primitive wooden rack that several leather straps make into a simple machine, the wheel of which, set in motion by his hand, hones the metal blade. Sometimes sparks fly and then careen into the mud, which provides particular pleasure to the filthy, mangy children around here. From his profession, this man will earn groszy: a pittance. Someday, this wheel may help him drown himself – an occupational advantage of sorts.
On the street, women in tattered rags gather dung and wood shavings for fuel. It would be hard to say, based on their rags, whether this is a Jewish poverty, or Eastern Orthodox, or Catholic. Poverty is non-denominational and has no national identity.
‘Si est, ubi est?’ the priest wonders of heaven. It certainly is not here in Rohatyn, nor is it – or so he thinks – anywhere in the Podolian lands. It would be a grave mistake to think things are better in the big cities. True, Father Chmielowski has never made it to Warsaw or Kraków, but he knows a thing or two from the Bernardine Pikulski, who is more worldly, and from what he’s heard around nobles’ estates.
God situated Paradise, or the Garden of Eden, in a delightful unknown place. According to the Arca Noë, paradise is somewhere in the land of the Armenians, high up in the mountains, though Brunus insists it’s sub polo antarctico: below the South Pole. The signs of proximity to paradise are the four rivers: Gihon, Pishon, Euphrates and Tigris. There are authors who, unable to locate paradise on earth, put it in the air, fifteen cubits higher than the highest mountain. But this strikes the priest as extremely silly – for how could that be? Wouldn’t those living on Earth be able to glimpse heaven from below? Could they not make out the soles of the saints’ feet?
On the other hand, one cannot agree with those who try to spread false claims, such as the notion that the Scripture on paradise has mystical meaning only – in other words, that it ought to be understood in some metaphysical or allegorical sense. The priest believes – not only because he’s a priest, but also from his deep conviction – that everything in the Scriptures must be taken literally.
He knows everything about paradise, having just last week completed that chapter of his book. It’s an ambitious chapter, drawing on all the books he has in Firlejów – and he has a hundred and thirty of them. Some he went to Lwów for; others, all the way to Lublin.
Here is a corner house, modest – this is where he’s going, as instructed by Father Pikulski. The low doors are wide open, letting out an unusual smell of spices amidst the surrounding stench of horse shit and autumn damp. There is another irksome scent, with which the priest is already familiar: Cophee. Father Chmielowski does not drink Cophee, but he knows he will have to acquaint himself with it at some point.
He glances back, looking for Roshko, who is examining sheepskins with grim attention; farther back, he sees the whole market absorbed in itself – no one returns his gaze, for the market is all-consuming. Hustle and din.
Above the entrance hangs a crude handmade sign:
SHORR GENERAL STORE
This followed by Hebrew letters. There is a metal plaque on the door, with some symbols next to it, and the priest recalls that according to Athanasius Kircher, the Jews write the words ‘Adam hava, hutz Lilith’ on the walls when a woman is due to give birth, to ward off witches: ‘Adam and Eve may enter here, but you, Lilith, you evil sorceress, must leave.’ That’s what those symbols must mean, he thinks. A child must have been born here not long ago.
He takes a big step over the high threshold and is entirely submerged in the warm fragrance of spices. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, since the only light inside is admitted through a single little window, cluttered with flowerpots.
An adolescent boy stands behind the counter, with a barely sprouted moustache and full lips that tremble slightly at the sight of the priest, before attempting to arrange themselves into some word or other. The priest can see he is unnerved.
‘What is your name, son?’ the priest asks, to show how comfortable he feels in this dark little low-ceilinged shop, and to encourage the boy to talk, but he does not respond. So the priest repeats, more officially now, ‘Quod tibi nomenest?’ But the Latin, intended as an aid to communication, winds up sounding too formal, as if the priest has come to perform an exorcism, like Christ in the Gospel of Saint Luke when he poses the same question to a man possessed. The boy’s eyes bulge, and still all he manages is a ‘buh, buh’ sound before he bolts back behind the shelves, bumping into a braid of garlic bulbs hanging from a nail, and then vanishes.
The priest has acted foolishly. He ought not to have expected Latin to be spoken here. He takes a bitter look at himself, notices the black horsehair buttons of his cassock poking out from underneath his coat. That must be what has scared the boy off, thinks the priest: the cassock. He smiles to himself as he recollects Jeremiah, who in a near-frenzy stammered, ‘A, a, a, Domine Deus ecce, nescio loqui!’: ‘Lord God, for I cannot speak!’
From now on the priest will call the boy Jeremiah in his head. He doesn’t know what to do, with Jeremiah having disappeared. He looks around the store, buttoning his coat. Father Pikulski talked him into coming here. Now it doesn’t really seem like such a good idea.
No one comes in from outside, for which the priest thanks the Lord. It would hardly be your ordinary scene: a Catholic priest – the dean of Rohatyn – standing in a Jewish shop, waiting to be helped like some housewife. At first Father Pikulski had advised him to go and see Rabbi Dubs in Lwów; he used to go there himself, and had learned a lot from him. And so he went, but old Dubs seemed to have had enough by then of Catholic priests pestering him with questions about books. The rabbi had seemed unpleasantly surprised by the priest’s request, and what Father Chmielowski wanted most he didn’t even have, or at least pretended not to have. He made a polite face and shook his head, tut-tutting. When the priest asked who might be able to help him, Dubs just threw up his hands and looked over his shoulder like someone was standing behind him, giving the priest to understand that he didn’t know, and that even if he did, he wouldn’t tell. Father Pikulski explained to the dean later that this was a question of heresies, and that while the Jews generally liked to pretend they didn’t suffer from that problem, it did seem that for this one particular heresy they made an exception, hating it head on.
Finally Father Pikulski suggested he go and visit Shorr. The big house with the shop on the market square. As he said this, he gave Chmielowski a wry, almost derisive look – unless Chmielowski was imagining it, of course. Perhaps he should have arranged to get his Jewish books through Pikulski, despite not liking him very much. Had he done so, he wouldn’t be standing here, sweating and embarrassed. But Father Chmielowski has a bit of a rebellious streak, so here he is. And there is something else a little irrational in it, too, an element of wordplay. Who would have believed that such things had any impact on the world? The priest has been working diligently on one particular passage in Kircher, on the great ox Shorobor. Perhaps the similarity between the two names – Shorr and Shorobor – is what brought him here. Bewildering are the determinations of the Lord.
Where are the famous books, where is this figure inspiring such fear and respect? The shop looks like it belongs to an ordinary merchant, though its owner is supposedly descended from a renowned rabbi and sage, the venerable Zalman Naftali Shorr. They sell garlic, herbs, pots full of spices, canisters and jars containing so many seasonings, crushed, ground, or in their original form, like these vanilla pods and nutmegs and cloves. On the shelves, there are bolts of cloth arranged over hay – these look like silk and satin, very bold and alluring, and the priest wonders if he might not need something, but now his attention is drawn to the clumsy label on a hefty dark green canister: ‘Thea’. He knows what he will ask for now when someone finally comes back – some of this herb, which lifts his spirits, which helps him to continue working without getting tired. And it assists with his digestion. He might buy a few cloves, too, to use in his evening mulled wine. The last few nights were so cold that his freezing feet prevented him from focusing on his writing. He casts around for some sort of bench.
Then everything happens all at once: from behind the shelves appears a stocky man with a beard, wearing a long woollen garment and Turkish shoes with pointed toes. A thin dark-blue coat is draped over his shoulders. He squints as if he’s just emerged from deep inside a well. Jeremiah peeks out from behind him, along with two other faces that resemble Jeremiah’s, rosy and curious. And meanwhile, at the door that leads to the market square, there is now a scrawny boy, out of breath, perhaps even a young man – his facial hair is abundant, a light-coloured goatee. He leans against the doorframe and pants – he must have run here as fast as he could. He looks the priest up and down and smiles a big, impish smile, revealing healthy, widely spaced teeth. The priest can’t quite tell if it’s a mocking smile or not. He prefers the distinguished figure in the coat, and it is to him that he says, with exceptional politeness:
‘My dear sir, please forgive this intrusion…’
The man in the coat regards him tensely at first, but the expression on his face slowly changes, revealing something like a smile. All of a sudden the dean realizes that the other man can’t understand him, so he tries again, this time in Latin, blissfully certain he has now found his counterpart.
The man in the coat slowly shifts his gaze to the breathless boy in the doorway, who steps right into the room then, pulling at his dark jacket.
‘I’ll translate,’ the boy declares in an unexpectedly deep voice that has a bit of a Ruthenian lilt to it. Pointing a stubby finger at the dean, he says something in great excitement to the man in the coat.
It had not occurred to the priest that he might need an interpreter – he simply hadn’t thought of it. Now he feels uncomfortable but has no idea how to get out of this delicate situation – before you know it the whole marketplace could hear of it. He would certainly prefer to get out of here, out into the chilly fog that smells of manure. He is beginning to feel trapped in this low-ceilinged room, in this air that is thick with the smell of spices, and to top it all off, here’s somebody off the street poking his head in, trying to see what’s going on.
‘I’d like to have a word with the venerable Elisha Shorr, if I may be permitted,’ says the dean. ‘In private.’
The Jews are stunned. They exchange a few words. Jeremiah vanishes and only after the longest and most intolerable silence does he re-emerge. But evidently the priest is to be admitted, because now they lead him back behind the shelves. He is followed by whispers, the soft patter of children’s feet, and stifled giggling – and now it seems that behind these thin walls there are veritable crowds of other people peeking in through the cracks in the wood, trying to catch a glimpse of Rohatyn’s vicar forane wandering the interior of a Jewish home. It turns out, too, that the little store on the square is no more than a single enclave of a much vaster structure, a kind of beehive with many rooms, hallways, stairs. The house turns out to be extensive, built up around an inner courtyard, which the priest glimpses out of the corner of his eye through a window when they briefly pause.
‘I am Hryćko,’ pipes up the young man with the narrow beard. Father Chmielowski realizes that even if he did wish to retreat now, he could not possibly find his way back out of the beehive. This realization makes him perspire, and just then a door creaks open, and in the doorway stands a trim man in his prime, his face bright, smooth, impenetrable, with a grey beard, a garment that goes down to his knees, and on his feet woollen socks and black pantofles.
‘That’s the Rabbi Elisha Shorr,’ Hryćko whispers, thrilled.
The room is small and sparsely furnished. In its centre, there is a broad table with a book open atop it, and next to it, in several piles, some others – the priest’s eyes prowl their spines, trying to make out their titles. He doesn’t know much about Jews in general; he only knows these Rohatyn Jews by sight.
Father Chmielowski thinks suddenly how nice it is that both of them are of moderate height. With tall men, he always feels a little ill at ease. As they stand facing one another, it seems to the priest that the rabbi must also be pleased that they have this in common. Then the rabbi sits down, smiles, and gestures for the priest to do the same.
‘With your permission and under these unlikely circumstances I come to your excellency altogether incognito, having heard such wonders of your wisdom and great erudition…’
Hryćko pauses in the middle of the sentence and asks the priest:
‘In-cog-neat?’
‘And how! Which means that I implore discretion.’
‘But what is that? Imp-lore? Disc… ration?’
Appalled, the priest falls silent. What an interpreter he’s wound up with – one who understands nothing he says. So how are they supposed to talk? In Chinese? He will have to attempt to speak simply:
‘I ask that this be kept a secret, for I do not conceal that I am the vicar forane of Rohatyn, a Catholic priest. But more importantly, I am an author.’ Chmielowski emphasizes the word ‘author’ by raising his finger. ‘And I would rather talk here today not as a member of the clergy, but as an author, who has been hard at work on a certain opuscule…’
‘Opus…?’ ventures the hesitant voice of Hryćko.
‘… a minor work.’
‘Oh. Please forgive me, Father, I’m unskilled in the Polish language, all I know is the normal words, the kind people use. I only know whatever I’ve heard around the horses.’
‘From the horses?’ snaps the priest, a bit excessively perhaps, but he is angry with this terrible interpreter.
‘Well, because it’s horses I handle. By trade.’
Hryćko speaks, making use of gestures. The other man looks at him with his dark, impenetrable eyes, and it occurs to Father Chmielowski that he might be dealing with a blind man.
‘Having read several hundred authors cover to cover,’ the priest goes on, ‘borrowing some, purchasing others, I still feel that I have missed many volumes, and that it is not possible for me to access them, in any case.’
Here he stops to wait for a response, but Shorr merely nods with an ingratiating smile that tells Chmielowski nothing at all.
‘And since I heard that Your Excellency is in possession of a fully realized library,’ says the priest, adding hurriedly, reluctantly, ‘without wishing to cause any trouble, of course, or any inconvenience, I gathered up the courage, contrary to custom, but for the benefit of many, to come here and––’
He breaks off because suddenly the door flies open and with no warning a woman enters the low-ceilinged room. Now faces peer in from the hallway, half visible in the low light, whispering. A little child whimpers and then stops, as if all must focus on this woman: Bare-headed, wreathed in lush curls, she doesn’t look at the men at all, but rather gazes fixedly, brazenly, at something straight ahead of her as she brings in a tray with a jug and some dried fruits. She is wearing a wide floral dress, and over it an embroidered apron. Her pointy-toed shoes clack. She is petite, but she is shapely – her figure is attractive. Behind her pads a little girl carrying two glasses. She looks at the priest in such terror that she inadvertently crashes into the woman in front of her and falls over, still clasping the glasses in her little hands. It’s a good thing they are sturdily made. The woman pays no attention to the child, though she does glance once – rapidly, impudently – at the priest. Her dark eyes shine, large and seemingly bottomless, and her overwhelmingly white skin is instantly covered in a flush. The vicar forane, who very rarely has any contact with young women, is terribly surprised by this barging in; he gulps. The woman sets the jug and the plate on the table with a clatter and, still looking straight ahead, leaves the room. The door slams. Hryćko, the interpreter, also looks perplexed. Meanwhile, Elisha Shorr leaps up, lifts the child and sits down with her in his lap. The little girl wriggles loose and runs after her mother.
The priest would wager anything that this whole scene with the woman and the child coming in here was staged solely for the purpose of everyone getting a look at him. It is something, a priest in a Jewish home! Exotic as a salamander. But so what? Isn’t he seen by a Jewish doctor? And are not his medicaments ground by another Jew? The matter of the books is a health issue, too, in its way.
‘The volumes,’ says the priest, pointing to the spines of the folios and the smaller Elzevir editions lying on the table. Each contains two symbols in gold, which the priest assumes are the initials of their owner as he can recognize the Hebrew letters:
ש"צ
He reaches for what he thinks will be his ticket into the fold of Israel and carefully sets the book he’s brought before Shorr. He smiles triumphantly: This is Athanasius Kircher’s TurrisBabel, a great work in terms of both content and format; the priest took a big risk in dragging it all the way here. What if it fell into the fetid Rohatyn mud? Or what if some ruffian snatched it from him in the marketplace? Without it, the vicar forane would not be what he is today – he’d just be some ordinary rector, a Jesuit teacher on some estate, a useless clerk of the Church, bejewelled and begrudging.
He slides the book towards Shorr as if presenting his own beloved wife. He delicately raps its wooden cover.
‘I have others,’ he comments. ‘But Kircher is the best.’ He opens the book at random, landing on a drawing of the Earth represented as a globe, and on it, the long, slender cone of the Tower of Babel.
‘Kircher demonstrates that the Tower of Babel, the description of which is contained within the Bible, could not have been as tall as is commonly thought. A tower that reaches all the way to the Moon would disrupt the whole order of the cosmos. Its base, founded upon the Earth, would have had to be enormous. It would have obscured the sun, which would have had catastrophic consequences for all of creation. People would have needed to use up the entire earthly supply of wood and clay…’
