The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  “A shell and a kernel.”

  Elisha Shorr is pleased. Now he has them watch as, slowly and theatrically, he takes out the nut’s kernel and eats it, closing his eyes in rapture, smacking his lips. It’s odd. Little Israel on the last bench starts to laugh at his grandfather—it’s so funny how he rolls his eyes.

  “Ah, but that’s too simple,” Elisha says to Shlomo, growing serious all of a sudden. “Look, there’s another kind of little shield here on the inside of the shell, and a coat that covers the kernel.”

  He sweeps up the nuts and holds them out for the boys to peer over his hands.

  “Come and see,” he says.

  All this is to teach the children that the Torah’s structure is the same. The shell is the simplest meaning of the Torah, its description of what happened. Then we start to get down into its depths. Now the boys write four letters on their little tablets, peh, resh, dalet, shin, and when they have managed this, Elisha Shorr asks them to read aloud what they have written—all the letters together and each on its own.

  Shlomo recites it like a little poem, but as if he doesn’t understand:

  “P, pshat, that’s the literal meaning, R, remez, that’s the figurative meaning, D, drash, that’s what the learned say, and S, sod, that’s the mystical meaning.”

  At the word “mystical,” he starts to stammer, just like his mother. He is so similar to Hayah, Elisha thinks, moved by it. This discovery puts him in a good mood. All these children are of his blood, there is a part of him in each of them, as if he were a chopped log sending out splinters.

  “What are the names of the four rivers that flow from Eden?” he asks another boy, one with big ears that stick out from his diminutive face. That’s Hillel, his sister’s grandson. He responds at once: Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Phrath.

  In walks Berek Smetankes, the teacher, who observes this sweet scene through the eyes of the others. Elisha Shorr is sitting among the children, telling stories. The teacher assumes a blissful expression to please the old man, rolls his eyes in pleasure. He has very light skin and almost white hair, hence his sobriquet, Smetankes, which sounds like the Yiddish word for sour cream. Deep down, he is terrified of this little old man, and he doesn’t know of anyone who isn’t. Maybe only the two Hayahs, the little one and the big one—daughter and daughter-in-law. Both of them behave however they wish with him.

  “There were once four great sages, whose names were Ben Asai, Ben Soma, Elisha ben Abuyah, and Rabbi Akiba. One after the other they went to paradise,” begins the old man. “Ben Asai, well, he saw it, and he died.”

  Elisha Shorr breaks off, pauses dramatically, and with raised brow tries to gauge the effects of what he has just said. Little Hillel’s jaw drops in astonishment.

  “What does that mean?” Shorr asks the boys, but of course no one responds, so he raises a finger to the ceiling and finishes: “Well, it means that he got into the River Pishon, a name that can be translated as: lips that learn the strict sense.”

  He straightens out his second finger and says:

  “Ben Soma, well, he saw it, and he lost his mind.” He contorts his face into a grimace, and the children laugh. “And what does that mean? That means he got into the River Gihon, a name that tells us that the person is only seeing the allegorical meaning.”

  He knows the children won’t understand much of what he’s saying. That’s okay. They don’t need to understand it, all that matters is that they learn it all by heart. That will enable them to come to understand eventually.

  “Elisha ben Abuyah,” he goes on, “looked and became a heretic. That means that he got into the River Hiddekel, and he got lost in the great many possible meanings.”

  He points three fingers at little Isaac, who starts to squirm.

  “Only Rabbi Akiba went into paradise and came back out unscathed, which means that having plunged into the River Phrath, he got the deepest meaning, the mystical one.

  “And those are the four paths to reading and understanding.”

  The children gaze covetously at the nuts that lie before them on the table. Their grandfather cracks them open in his hands and passes them around. He watches them as they gobble the last crumbs. Then he walks out, his face crinkles up, his smile disappearing, and through the labyrinths of his house, which resembles a beehive, he goes to Yente.

  Yente, or: Not a good time to die

  Yente was brought from Korolówka by her grandson Israel and his wife, Sobla, who were also invited to the wedding. They are true believers, like everyone here. They live far away, but the family sticks together.

  Now they really regret doing what they did, and no one remembers whose idea it was. It doesn’t matter that Grandma wanted to come. They had always been afraid of her, because she had always been the ruler of their home. There was no saying no to her. Now it makes them shake with fear that she is going to die in the Shorrs’ home, and during a wedding at that, which will cast a dark shadow over the lives and futures of the newlyweds. When in Korolówka they got into the carriage, covered in tarpaulin, which they and some other guests had rented out, Yente was in perfect health and even clambered up onto her seat by herself. Then she asked for some snuff, and off they went, singing, until, tired, they tried to go to sleep.

  Through the canvas, dirty and torn, she watched the world they were leaving behind them folding itself up into winding lines of road, balks, trees, and horizon.

  They traveled for two days, the carriage shaking mercilessly, but Old Yente bore it well. They stayed with relatives in Buczacz, and at dawn the next day they set off again. Along the way, they got swept up in a dense fog, and when that happened, all of a sudden, all of the wedding guests began to feel uncomfortable, and that was precisely when Yente started to groan like she needed the others to pay her some attention. Fog is turbid water, and all sorts of evil spirits travel in it, spirits that cloud the minds of animal and man. Wouldn’t their horse run off the road and take them all up to the steepest riverbank? And from there they would crash into the chasm. Or would they not all be overtaken by evil creatures, cruel and terrible, or would the entrance to the cave where the dwarves hide their treasures underground not yawn open in the middle of the road, those dwarves as hideous as they are rich? Perhaps so much fear had weakened Grandma.

  In the afternoon, the fog subsided, and they saw, not too far ahead of them, the astonishing mass of the castle of Podhajce, uninhabited and fallen into ruin. Over it circled great flocks of crows that time and time again burst up off the half-collapsed roof. The fog retreated from their frightful cawing, which bounced off the castle walls and came back as echoes. Israel and his wife, Sobla, the eldest in the carriage besides Yente, determined to stop. They spread out by the side of the road, to rest; they took out bread and fruit and water—but Grandma wasn’t eating anymore. Of the water she drank only a few drops.

  When, late at night, they finally arrived in Rohatyn, she could not stand on her own, and they had to assemble some men to carry her into the house. The assembly turned out to be unnecessary—one would have been enough. How much could Old Yente weigh? Nothing. As much as a skinny goat.

  Elisha Shorr received his aunt with some uneasiness, but he gave her a nice place to sleep in her own little chamber and brought in some women to take care of her. In the afternoon, he went to see her, and they whispered together, as they always had. They’d known each other his whole life.

  Elisha gave her a worried look. But Yente knew exactly what was worrying him:

  “It’s not a very good time, is it?” she asked.

  Elisha didn’t answer. Yente gently narrowed her eyes.

  “Is there ever really a good time to die?” Elisha said, philosophically, at last.

  Yente said she would wait until the crowd of guests had passed; now their exhalations steamed the windowpanes and weighed down the air. She would wait until the wedding guests went home, after the dancing and the drinking, once the sullied, trampled sawdust had been swept from the floors, on
ce the dishes had been washed. Elisha looked at her as if concerned for her, but in reality, in his mind he was already elsewhere.

  Yente has never liked Elisha Shorr. He is someone whose insides are like a home with all sorts of different rooms—part of him is one way, other parts of him are another. From the outside, it looks like one building, but on the inside you can see that it is many. You can never know what he’ll do next. And there’s something else, too—Elisha Shorr is always unhappy. There is always something he is missing, something he misses—he wants what others have, or the opposite, he has something others don’t, and he considers it useless. This makes him a bitter and dissatisfied man.

  Since Yente is the eldest, everyone who comes for the wedding immediately goes to pay her a visit. Guests stream into her little room at the end of the labyrinth, in the second house, which you have to pass through the courtyard to reach, and which is just across the street from the cemetery. Children peer in to see her through the cracks in the walls—high time to seal them before winter sets in. Hayah sits with her a long while. Yente puts Hayah’s hands on her face, touches her eyes, her lips, and her cheeks—the children see this. She pats her head. Hayah brings her treats, gives her chicken broth to drink, adding a spoonful of goose fat, and Old Yente smacks her lips for a long time when she’s finished, licking her thin, dry lips, although even the fat doesn’t give her enough strength that she might get up.

  As soon as they arrive, the Moravians Solomon Zalman and his extremely young wife, Sheyndel, go to visit their old cousin. It took them three weeks to get here from Brünn through Zlin and Preschau, and then Drohobycz, but they will not go back the same way. In the mountains some escaped serfs attacked them, and Zalman had to pay them a considerable ransom—they were lucky they didn’t take everything they had. Now they’ll go back through Kraków, before snow falls. Sheyndel is already pregnant with her first child, she’s just informed her husband of it. She is often nauseated. She is not at all helped by the smell of coffee and spices that greets you when you enter the vast Shorr household, and when you go into the little shop. She also doesn’t like how Old Yente smells. She fears this woman as she would a wild animal, with her bizarre dresses and hair on her chin. In Moravia old women look a lot tidier—they wear starched bonnets and neat aprons. Sheyndel is convinced that Yente is a witch. She’s afraid to sit down on the edge of the bed, although everyone keeps telling her to do so. She’s afraid the old woman will pass something on to the child in her belly, some dark madness, indomitable. She tries not to touch anything in that little room. The smell never stops making her sick. Her Podolian relatives all seem wild to her. Finally, however, they push Sheyndel toward the old woman, so she perches on the very edge of the bed, ready to flee at any time.

  She does, however, like the smell of wax—she secretly sniffs every candle—and of mud mixed with horse droppings and—now she knows—of vodka. Solomon, significantly older than she is, with a solid build and a belly, a middle-aged man with a beard, proud of his lovely little wife, brings her a shot of vodka every once in a while. Sheyndel tastes the drink but cannot swallow it. She spits it out on the floor.

  When the young wife sits down at Yente’s bedside, Yente’s hand shoots out from underneath the wolfskins and lands on Sheyndel’s belly, although Sheyndel isn’t showing yet. But Yente can see that a separate soul has taken up residence in Sheyndel’s belly, a soul still indistinct, hard to describe because many; these free souls are everywhere, just waiting for the opportunity to grab some unclaimed bit of matter. And now they lick this little lump, which looks a bit like a tadpole, inspecting it, though there is still nothing concrete in it, just shreds, shadows. They probe it, testing. The souls consist of streaks: of images, and recollections, memories of acts, fragments of sentences, letters. Never before has Yente seen this so clearly. Truth be told, Sheyndel, too, gets uncomfortable sometimes, for she, too, can feel their presence—as if dozens of strangers’ hands were pressing on her, as if she were being touched by hundreds of fingers. She doesn’t want to confide in her husband about it—and anyway, she wouldn’t be able to find the words.

  While the men sit in one chamber, the women gather in Yente’s room, where they scarcely fit. Every now and then one of them brings in a little bit of vodka from the kitchen, wedding vodka, in semi-secret, like a smuggler, but of course this, too, is part of the fun. Crowded together and excited about the impending festivities, they forget themselves and start to clown around. But it doesn’t seem to bother the ailing Yente—she may even be pleased that she’s become the center of this merriment. Sometimes they glance at her, uneasy, feeling a little guilty as she suddenly dozes off, then a moment later awakes with a childlike smile. Sheyndel gives Hayah a significant look as Hayah straightens the wolfskins on the old woman, wraps her own scarf around Yente’s neck, and sees all the amulets she wears there—little pouches on strings, little pieces of wood with symbols written out on them, figures made of bone. Hayah doesn’t dare to touch them.

  The women tell terrible stories—about ghosts, lost souls, people buried alive, ill omens.

  “If you only knew how many evil spirits were lurking in a single droplet of your beloved blood, you would all turn over your bodies and your souls at once to the Creator of this world,” says Tzipa, a woman considered learned, wife of Old Notka.

  “Where are the spirits?” asks one of the women in a tremulous whisper, and Tzipa picks up a stick off the dirt floor and points at its tip:

  “Here! Here they all are, take a good look.”

  The women stare at the tip of the stick, their eyes squinting in a funny way; one of the women starts to giggle, and in the light of just a few candles now, they see double or triple, but they don’t see any spirits.

  What we read in the Zohar

  Elisha, with his eldest son, his cousin Zalman Dobrushka of Moravia, and Israel of Korolówka, who’s pressed his forehead into his forearms so hard that all can see how very guilty he feels, are stewing over an important question: What to do in a home about to host both a wedding and a funeral? The four of them sit huddled together. After a little while the door opens and Rabbi Moshko walks in, shuffling his feet. Rabbi Moshko is particularly knowledgeable about Kabbalah. Israel leaps up to help him over to where they are. There is no need to explain things to the elderly rabbi—everyone knows, it’s all anyone’s been talking about.

  They whisper among themselves, until finally Rabbi Moshko begins:

  “We read in the Zohar that the two dissolute women who stood before King Solomon with one living child were named Mahalath and Lilith, yes?” The rabbi breaks off inquiringly, as if giving them time to summon up the corresponding passage in their minds.

  “The letters of the name Mahalath have a numerical value of 478. Lilith, meanwhile, 480, yes?”

  They nod. They know now what he’s going to say.

  “When a person takes part in a wedding celebration, he rejects the witch Mahalath with her 478 demon companions, while when a person mourns someone close, he overcomes the witch Lilith with her 480 demon companions. This is why we find in Kohelet 7:2 that ‘it is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.’”

  Which means: They should call off the wedding and wait for the funeral instead.

  Dobrushka gives a knowing look to his cousin Elisha and then gazes up at the ceiling emphatically, disappointed by the verdict. He cannot simply sit around here forever. He has his tobacco business in Prossnitz, in Moravia, which he really has to keep on top of. And delivery of traditionally prepared wine for all the local Jews there, on which he enjoys a monopoly. These relatives of his wife’s here are nice people, but simple folk, a little backward, superstitious. His Turkish concerns are doing well with them, so he decided to come and visit. But he cannot simply sit around for all eternity. What if it snows? As a matter of fact, no one is pleased by this outcome. Everyone wants the wedding, and they want
it now. They can’t wait, everything is ready.

  Elisha Shorr is certainly not happy with the verdict. The wedding must take place.

  Once he is alone, he summons Hayah, she will advise him, and as he waits for her, he flips through the pages of that priest’s book, of which he cannot understand a single word.

  Of the swallowed amulet

  In the night, when everyone has gone to sleep, Elisha Shorr, writing by candlelight, scratches out the following letters on a tiny piece of paper:

  Hey-mem-tav-nun-hey. Hamtana: waiting.

  Hayah stands in the middle of the room wearing a white nightgown, tracing an invisible circle around herself in the air. Now she lifts the little piece of paper over her head. She stands this way for a long while. Her mouth is moving. She blows on it a few times, then she rolls up the tiny piece of paper very carefully and slips it inside a wooden carrier the size of a thumbnail. She stays there for a long time, in silence, head bowed, till suddenly she licks her fingers and sticks the strap through the hole in the amulet, which she hands to her father. Elisha, candle in hand, glides through the sleeping, rustling, intermittently snoring household, through the narrow hallways, to the room where Yente lies. He pauses at the door and listens. Evidently untroubled by anything he hears there, he softly opens the door, which humbly submits to him without a sound, revealing cramped quarters faintly lit by an oil lamp. Yente’s sharp nose is pointed straight up at the ceiling, casting a defiant shadow on the wall. Elisha has to pass through it in order to lay the amulet on the dying woman’s neck. When he leans over her, her eyelids start to flutter a little, and Elisha freezes mid-motion—but it’s nothing, she’s clearly just having a dream: her breathing is so light as to be almost imperceptible. Elisha ties the ends of the strap and slides the amulet under the old woman’s nightgown. Then he turns on his toes and vanishes without a sound.