The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  “After you, my good lady.”

  The presbytery stands just off the dilapidated road. It’s a small wooden manor house, whitewashed nicely and well cared for. You can see that in the summer it was encircled by clusters of flowers, which now lie slumped and yellow, low to the ground. Already someone’s hand has gone about putting things in order, placing a portion of the stalks in a pile that is only smoldering—the fire evidently feels unsure of itself in such damp air. Among the stalks roam two proud peacocks, one of them old and resigned, with not much of his tail left. The other is confident, even aggressive, he runs up to Drużbacka and butts into her dress again and again until the frightened woman steps aside.

  She looks around the garden—it’s beautiful, every flower bed delimited with clean, straight lines, round stones placed along the path, and everything planned out according to the finest botanical art: by the fence are roses for vodka and no doubt for church wreaths, too; farther down, angelica, anise, plants for incense. Over the stones creep thyme, mallow, hazelwort, and chamomile. Not many of the herbs are left at this time of year, but their presence can be gathered from the little wooden tablets placed before them, containing their names.

  From the presbytery, a meticulously raked path leads into the heart of a small park, and on either side of the path, there is a somewhat primitive bust with a caption carved underneath it. Over the entrance to the garden, there is a clumsy inscription on a slat, which the priest very obviously attempted himself:

  To preserve the body from foul stench, Here is this garden’s healthy fragrance.

  Such verses make Drużbacka wince.

  The grounds are rather small; at some stage, the embankment slopes sharply down toward the river, but there, too, the priest has readied a surprise: stone steps, a little bridge over a tiny stream, past which point stands the church: high, imposing, and gloomy. It towers over cottages with thatched roofs.

  Going down the steps, you can see the lapidarium on either side. You are supposed to stop at each stone and read its caption.

  Ex nihilo orta sunt omnia, et in nihilum omnia revolvuntur: From nothing came everything, and to nothing will everything return, reads Drużbacka, and suddenly a shudder passes through her, both from the cold and from that caption, somewhat awkwardly engraved into the stone. So what was the point of it all? she wonders. Of all this effort? These paths and little bridges, little gardens, wells, steps—these inscriptions?

  The priest now leads her to the road along the rocky path, and in this way, they complete their orbit around the modest property. Poor Drużbacka—she seems not to have expected such a turn of events. She does have good shoes, leather shoes, but she nearly froze in the carriage and felt more like warming her old back at a stove than scampering about in the wilderness. At last, after this forced promenade, her host invites her inside; at the door to the presbytery, another inscription, engraved on a large plaque:

  Benedykt Chmielowski, the priest

  Firlejów’s sinner now deceased

  Just a parson in Podkamień

  Vicar forane of Rohatyn

  Not worthy, and gone in a flash

  Not canon now, but dust and ash

  For his sins he begs for prayers

  That they not gore him there like mares

  Almighty Father, who art sublime,

  You have fulfilled him for all time.

  She looks at him in astonishment.

  “What can this be? Are you already preparing for death?”

  “Better to have it all ready in advance, so as not to unnecessarily burden bereaved relatives later on. I want to know what will be on my tombstone. Otherwise it would be some foolishness, no doubt—not what I would write myself. At least this way I know.”

  Drużbacka, too tired, takes a seat and starts to look around for something to drink, but the table in the room is empty, not counting papers. The house smells of damp mixed with smoke. The chimneys have probably not been cleaned in some time. And the draft is cold. In the corner stands a stove lined with white tiles, and next to it a basket filled with wood, so much that she can tell the stove was only just lit—no wonder the room hasn’t heated up yet.

  “I really froze out there,” says Drużbacka.

  The priest, wincing like he’s just swallowed a piece of rotten food, quickly opens a cupboard and takes out a cut-crystal carafe and two glasses.

  “Mrs. Kossakowska looked very familiar to me . . . ,” he begins uncertainly, pouring the liqueur. “At one time, I knew her eldest sister . . .”

  “Mrs. Jabłonowska, you mean,” Drużbacka says, distracted, flooding her mouth with the sweet drink.

  A jaunty, rotund woman enters the room—she must be the priest’s housekeeper—carrying two bowls of steaming soup on a tray.

  “Whoever saw a guest flitting around in the cold so,” she chides the priest, and he evidently feels uncomfortable under her reproachful gaze. Drużbacka, meanwhile, is slowly coming back to life. Blessed be that stout lady savior. The soup is thick, vegetable, with potatoes and noodles swimming in it. It is only now that the vicar forane notices Drużbacka’s muddied shoes and her hunched back; now he realizes she’s shivering all over, and out of instinct he makes a gesture as if to embrace her, although of course he doesn’t follow through with it.

  A dog trots into the room after the housekeeper. It’s medium-sized, shaggy, with floppy ears and wavy chestnut fur. Very gravely, it sniffs around Drużbacka’s dress. And when Drużbacka bends down to pet it, she glimpses puppies, four of them, each of them different. The housekeeper wants to kick them out of the room right away, and she reproaches the priest for yet again failing to close the door. But Drużbacka asks if they can let the dogs stay for now. So they accompany them into the evening, delighted to sit near the stove, which finally heats up the room enough for the guest to be able to remove her fur-lined vest.

  Drużbacka looks at Father Chmielowski and suddenly understands how very lonely this aging, neglected man is, bustling all around her, wanting to impress her as a little boy might. He sets the cut-crystal carafe on the table and examines the glasses under the light, making sure they’re clean. His ragged, threadbare cassock of camlet wool has worn thin at his stomach, and here a lighter patch shines bright. She doesn’t know why, but Drużbacka finds it exceptionally touching to see all this, and she has to look away. She picks up a puppy and puts it on her lap—it’s a female, the one that most resembles the mother; she rolls right over onto her back, revealing her delicate little belly. Drużbacka starts to tell the priest about her grandchildren, all of them girls—though who knows, perhaps this only makes him feel worse? Chmielowski listens inattentively to her, his eyes flitting around the room as he tries to think what else this woman might like. The priest’s liqueurs are delicious, and Drużbacka nods appreciatively. Then it is finally time for the main dish. Pushing aside the glasses and the carafe, Chmielowski proudly lays before her on the table his great work. Drużbacka reads the title out loud:

  “New Athens, or the Academy of Every Science, divided into different ti‑ tles as into classes, issued that the Wise might have it as a Record, that Idiots might learn, that Politicians might practice and that melancholy Souls obtain some slight Enjoyment from it . . .”

  The priest, leaning back comfortably in his chair, downs his liqueur in one gulp. Drużbacka exclaims with unrestrained admiration:

  “Beautiful title. It’s so hard to give a work a good title.”

  The priest answers modestly that what he would like is to create a compendium of knowledge of the sort that could be found in every home. And in it a little about everything, so that a person might reach for such a book whenever there is something he does not know, and there he might find it. Geography, medicine, human languages, customs, but also flora and fauna and curiosities of all kinds.

  “Just imagine, madam—everything at hand, in every library, nobleman’s and peasant’s. All of mankind’s knowledge collected in one place.”

  He has al
ready amassed a lot of it, which he published in two volumes a few years ago. But now he would like to also have, aside from Latin, a knowledge of Hebrew, and from Hebrew to draw more tasty tidbits. But obtaining Jewish books is difficult, you have to ask their Jewish owners, and few among the Christians can read in that language. Father Pikulski has volunteered for now to translate this and that for him, but Benedykt, not having the language himself, cannot really gain access to that wisdom.

  “The first volume came out in Lwów at the printery of one Golczewski . . .”

  Drużbacka is playing with the dog.

  “I am now writing a supplement to both books, which is to say volumes three and four, and that is where I am thinking of concluding my description of the world,” Father Chmielowski adds.

  What is Drużbacka to say? She puts down the puppy, replacing it in her lap with the book. Yes, she knows this book, she once read it in the home of the Jabłonowskis, who owned the first edition. Now she opens to a chapter on animals and finds something there about dogs. She reads in a powerful voice:

  “‘In Piotrków we had a dog so delightful that at the command of its master it would take a knife into the kitchen, and there it would clean it with its paws, rinse it in water, and deliver it back.’”

  “That was her mother that did that.” The priest smiles, pointing at his dog.

  “But why is there so much Latin in this, Father?” Drużbacka says, skimming the next section. “Not everybody understands it.”

  The priest shifts uneasily.

  “But what do you mean? Every Pole speaks in Latin as if it were his mother tongue. The Polish nation is a gens culta, polita, capax of every type of wisdom, justifiably relishing Latin and pronouncing it the best of all the nationalities. We do not say, like the Italians, Redzina, but Regina, not tridzinta, quadradzinta, but triginta, quadraginta. We don’t ruin Latin like the Germans and the French, who in the place of Jesus Christus say Jedzus Kristus, instead of Michael, Mikael, instead of charus, karus . . .”

  “But which Poles, dear Father? Women, for example, rarely speak Latin, for they have frequently not been taught it. And the middle classes don’t really know Latin at all, and after all, you do want them and even classes lower than them to read this . . . Even the starosta prefers French over Latin. It strikes me that in the next edition you might as well weed out all your Latin, in the same way that you weed your garden.”

  The priest is shocked by this critique.

  It would appear that this lady he is hosting is more interested in his dogs than she is in his books.

  The sun is nearly setting by the time she gets into the britchka and the priest hands her a basket with two puppies in it. It will be dark by the time she gets back to Rohatyn.

  “You could spend the night in my humble priestly quarters,” offers the priest, though he is angry with himself for offering.

  Once the carriage has gone, the priest doesn’t know what to do with himself. He expended more than just the strength required for two hours’ time—he expended the energy of a whole day, of a week. The fence’s slats have slumped over by the hollyhock, leaving a distasteful gap, so the priest, not thinking overmuch what he is doing, gets right down to work. But then he freezes and can feel a kind of stillness trickling into him from every side, along with doubt, and past that there’s a collapse of all the things that haven’t yet been named, and chaos is created, and everything starts to rot with the leaves, to tumefy before his eyes. He still forces himself to fasten the slats to the fence, but then suddenly it seems too hard to him, and the slats slide out of his hands and fall onto the damp ground. The priest goes inside, kicks his shoes off in the dark vestibule, and then goes into his library—the low-ceilinged room with beams exposed along the ceiling now seems suffocating to him. He sits down in his armchair. The stove is as hot as it can get, and the white tiles that cover the copper enamel are slowly warming up. He looks at the old woman’s little book, picks it up, smells it. It still smells of printing ink. He reads:

  . . . true, shriveled, there is the horror she inspires

  Junctures fastened with veins like lots of thin wires;

  She never sleeps, eats, or drinks, cannot deserve,

  Her entrails can be seen just past her ribs’ curve,

  Where her eyes had been, deep crevices are scored,

  Where her brain resided, as if pitch were poured.

  “Protect us, Lord God, from all that is evil,” whispers the priest, and sets aside the book. She seemed like such a nice lady.

  And suddenly he knows that he has to summon back up that old, childlike enthusiasm that causes him to write. Since otherwise he will perish—he’ll decay in the autumnal damp like a leaf.

  He sits down at the table, stuffs his feet into a pair of wolfskin boots sewn for him by his housekeeper so that he doesn’t freeze as he sits still for hours to write. He puts out his paper, sharpens his quill, rubs his icy hands together. At this time of year, he always feels like he will not survive the winter.

  Father Chmielowski knows the world only through books. Whenever he sits down in his Firlejów library and reaches for a book, whether for a handsome folio edition or just a little Elzevir, it always feels if he is setting off on a journey to some unknown country. This metaphor appeals to him, he smiles to himself and starts trying to set it in a graceful sentence . . . Yet it is easier for him to write about the wide world than it is to write about himself. Always focusing on something or other, he is never focused on himself, and since he’s never written down the things that have happened to him, now it seems to him that he has no biography. If that woman who writes such gloomy verses were to ask him who he is, how he’s spent his years, what would he say? And if he wanted to write it down, there wouldn’t be more of it than just a few pages, so not even a booklet, not even one of those diminutive Elzevirs, barely even a brochure, just a scrap of paper, the little life of a non-saint. Neither a peregrinator nor a surveyor of foreign lands.

  He dips his pen in its ink and holds it for a moment over the sheet of paper. Then, with fervor, he begins:

  The story of the life of Father Joachim Benedykt Chmielowski, of the Nałęcz coat of arms, pastor of Firlejów, Podkamień, and Janczyn, vicar forane of Rohatyn, canon of Kiev and poor shepherd of a paltry flock, written in his own hand and not imposing of high-level Polish, so as not to obscure the meanings, dedicated ad usum to the Reader.

  The title takes up half the page, so the priest reaches for the next sheet of paper, but his hand seems to have numbed up—it doesn’t want to or can’t write anything more. When he wrote “to the Reader,” Drużbacka appeared before his eyes, that little older lady with her hale complexion and her bright, shiny eyes. The priest promises himself that he will read those verses of hers, though he doesn’t expect anything much of them. Folly. It must just be folly and impossible platoons of Greek gods.

  It is a shame she had to leave.

  He takes another sheet of paper and dips his pen in the ink. But what is he to write? he wonders. The story of the priest’s life is the story of the books he read and wrote. A true writer has no biography. What of interest, then, can there be? His mother, seeing little Benedykt’s love of books, sent him to the Jesuits of Lwów at the age of fifteen. That decision considerably improved his relationship with his stepfather, who never cared for him. From then on, they almost never saw each other. Immediately after that, he went to seminary and was soon ordained. His first employment was with the Jabłonowskis at their estate, as the preceptor to young—though only five years younger than himself—Dymitr. There he learned how to seem older than he really was and how to speak in a tone of perpetual instruction, which to this day some people take ill. He was also permitted to avail himself of his employer’s library, which was quite ample, and there he discovered Kircher as well as Comenius’s Orbis pictus. In addition, his hand, that recalcitrant servant, took to writing on its own, particularly during that first spring he spent there, humid and stuffy, especially when Lad
y Joanna Maria Jabłonowska happened to be nearby—she was Dymitr’s mother and his employer’s wife (which the priest tried not to think about). Head over heels in love, dazed by the strength of his feeling, absentminded, weak, he waged a terrible battle with himself in his efforts to reveal nothing, dedicating himself entirely to his work and writing a book of devotions for his beloved. This maneuver enabled him to distance himself from her, to defuse, to sanctify, to sublimate, and when he presented her with the manuscript (before it got published in Lwów, upon which time it attained considerable popularity, going through several more editions), he felt as if he had married her, entered into a union with her, and that he was now giving her the child of that union. The course of one whole year—a prayer book. In this way, he discovered that writing saves.

  Joanna was at that age, so dangerous for so many men, between the age of the mother and the mistress. This made the erotic allure of motherhood less obvious and made it therefore possible to luxuriate in it at leisure. To imagine your own face pressed into the softness of that lace, the faint scent of rosewater and powder, the delicacy of skin covered in peach fuzz, no longer so firm or so taut, but warm, gentle, soft as suede. Through her intercession, he received from King Augustus II the presbytery in Firlejów, and as a twenty-five-year-old with a broken heart, he took up that small parish. He had his collection of books brought in, and he built for it beautiful carved cases. Of his own books, there were forty-seven; others he would borrow from monastic libraries, from the bishopric, from magnates’ palaces, where they often languished uncut, mere souvenirs from excursions abroad. The first two years were hard. Especially the winters. He strained his eyes because darkness would fall fast, and yet he could not stop working. He wrote two strange little books, Flight of the Saints to God and Journey to That Other World, which he wasn’t brave enough to publish under his own name. Unlike the prayer book, they did not do particularly well and went missing amidst the shuffle of this world. The priest has a couple of copies of them here, in Firlejów, in a special trunk he had covered in sheet metal and equipped with good locks in case of fire, theft, or any other cataclysm, to which mere mortals’ libraries are, after all, not immune. He remembers exactly the shape of the prayer book and the smell of its cover—made of dark, plain leather. It’s strange, he also remembers the touch of Joanna Jabłonowska’s hand, she had a habit of covering his hand with hers in order to pacify him. And something else: he remembers the delicate softness of her cool cheek when—out of his mind with love—he dared to kiss her once.