Yet it seemed to me that since my arrival in Brünn an invisible wall had arisen between Jacob and myself, or a kind of curtain—as if someone had strung up the finest muslin sheets in that space.
The Lord’s words
“Three are hidden from me, and of the fourth the lot of you is ignorant.” What do those words of Jacob mean? They mean that there are three Gods who are very powerful, and they exercise an uncompromising rule over the world in its entirety. So said the Lord, and I wrote it down after him. One God gives life to everyone, and for this reason, He is good. Another God gives wealth—not to everyone, but only to those he wishes. The third God is Malakh haMayet—the Lord of Death. He is the strongest. And that fourth, the one of whom we are all ignorant—that is the Good God Himself. You cannot arrive at the Good God without having first passed through the other three.
All this, said Jacob, and we wrote it down, was unknown to Solomon, who tried to force his way up to the Highest One, but he could not reach him, and so he had to pass away from the world, without bringing it eternal life. Then a call reverberated through the heavens: “Who will go in search of eternal life?”
Jesus of Nazareth replied: “I’ll go.” But he, too, accomplished nothing, although he was very wise and learned, and though his power was great. Then he went to those three who rule the world, and by the power of the Good God, he began to heal, but those other three saw it and grew uneasy that he would take control over the world, for they knew from the prophecies that the Messiah would come and that death would be swallowed for ever and ever, amen. Thus Jesus of Nazareth came to the first of those three, and that one let him through to the second, and then that one let him through to the third. But the third, who was the Lord of Death, took him by the hand and asked: “Where are you going?” And Jesus said: “I am going to the fourth, who is the God of Gods.” At this the Lord of Death grew angry and said: “I am the Lord of the world. Stay here with me, you will be my right hand—you will be God’s Son.” And then Jesus understood that the power of the Good God was not with him, and that he was defenseless as a child. Then he said to the Lord of Death: “Let it be as you say.” But the Lord of Death responded: “My son, you must sacrifice your body and your blood for me.” “What do you mean?” Jesus replied to this. “How can I give you my body, when I have been told to bring eternal life into the world?” And that God, the Lord of Death, said to Jesus then: “It cannot be that death does not exist in the world.” And Jesus answered: “And yet I told my disciples that I would bring eternal life—” The Lord of Death interrupted him: “Tell your disciples that that eternal existence will not be in this world, but in the next, as it stands in the prayer: ‘And after death eternal life, amen.’” And this is why Jesus remained with the Lord of Death and brought a more powerful death into the world than even Moses. Jews die against their will, without desiring it, without knowing where they go after their deaths, while Christians die gleefully because they avow that each has their part in heaven with Jesus who sits to the right of the Father. And so Jesus went from this world. Many centuries on, once again the call resounded: “Who will go?”
In answer to this, Sabbatai Tzvi said, “I will go.” He went like a child, gaining nothing, accomplishing nothing.
That is why I was sent after him, Jacob says, and the silence among his listeners is that of the crypt, as if Jacob were telling them some kind of fairy tale, as if they were children. I was sent, he said, in order to introduce an eternal existence into the world. I have been given that power. But I am a great simpleton, and I cannot go alone. Jesus was a great scholar, and I am a simpleton. To those three you have to go quietly, down winding roads, and they can read our lips even when we do not say a word. There is no need to shout; it is possible to move along in silence, keeping quiet. I will not go forth, however, until the time has come for my words to be fulfilled.
Only some of them recognized in this tale our holy treatise, which only in this simplified and broken form could really reach people.
When he had finished, they begged him to say something else. So he started a new story.
It is like it was with a certain king who founded a great church. The foundations were laid by a certain foreman, an elbow deep and high as a man. And when he was supposed to keep on building, suddenly that foreman disappeared for thirteen years, and when he came back, he took to building the walls. The king asked him why he had gone off without a word and abandoned his work like that.
“My king,” answered the foreman, “this building is very big, and if I had tried to finish it at once, the foundations could not have borne the weight of the walls. That is why I went away intentionally, so that the foundation would be good and settled in. Now I can start putting up the edifice, and it will be eternal and will never fall down.”
Soon I had dozens of pages containing such stories; Yeruhim Dembowski had the same.
The bird that hops out of a snuffbox
Moshe, when he appears at court in Brünn, brings with him some craftsmen who speak in German with a strange accent.
First he shows Jacob and Eva the drawings.
He explains in great detail all the advantages of the invention, though Jacob appears not to understand how it works. Apparently the very same thing is at the imperial court, where Moshe has many friends and acquaintances. He is sometimes there himself, and he is hoping that soon he will also be able to take Jacob and his beautiful daughter. From now on, he wants to be called Thomas.
It is actually quite simple, and after just a few weeks it becomes clear how it works. It is a stone bowl placed in the highest room, beautifully polished; inside it there is a pipe that rises clear up through the roof, and, like a chimney, it extends outside. They had to pull off a few of the roof tiles and build wooden frames to support it, but it is all in operation now.
“Camera obscura,” says Moshe-Thomas with pride, like the master of ceremonies in a theater. The women applaud. With his hands on their flexible wrists Thomas makes circles in the air, the lace on his cuffs swishing around. His kind, smooth-shaven face, his wavy hair. His broad smile and slightly crooked teeth. Who could resist this young man who has a hundred ideas a second, and who works faster than anybody else? thinks Eva. They each go up to the bowl, and what do they see?
It is exceptional. Leaning in over the polished inside, they can see all of Brünn in that bowl, the roofs, the church towers, the narrow little streets running up and down the hill, the trees’ crowns, the market with all of its stalls. And this is no dead old picture—everything moves, why, look at Alte Schmiedegasse, that four-horse-drawn carriage, and over there, those nuns leading the orphans, and there, the workers laying pavement. Someone sticks out a finger to try to touch the picture but withdraws it in shock at once: this view of the city has no material character at all. Fingertips feel just the chill of polished stone.
“You will be able to keep an eye on the whole city, Lord. It is a great invention, though there is no magic nor Kabbalah in it. It is a product of the human imagination.”
Moshe is impudent. He dares to push Jacob in the direction of the bowl, and Jacob gives in to him without protest.
“Seeing, while not being seen—that is truly a divine privilege,” Moshe fawns.
Moshe-Thomas gains with this invention the admiration of the youth. Seeing that the Lord is so positively inclined toward him, they begin to treat him a bit like the Lord’s son. Especially since the majority of them do not know his real sons. They are back in Warsaw now, the Lord has sent them away, and both were relieved to return to Poland, where they are under the care of Jakubowski and Wołowski.
Jacob looks at Moshe from the window; he examines him very closely. He sees him part the sides of his French jacket, spread his legs wide, in their white silk stockings, in order to draw something with a stick on the ground for the young people gathered around him. He leans in, and you can see the top of his head. His lovely curls only suffer under that wig. His facial hair is barely visible, his skin smo
oth, olive-hued, flawless. His mother spoiled him too much. Sheyndel spoils her children, and they grow up like little princelings, very sure of themselves, confident, comely. Insolent. But life will take its toll on them.
When he leans out slightly, Jacob notices Avacha, who is also observing this scene from her window, watching this dandy. In her body there is always that same submissiveness, for she does not carry herself like a queen, although he has tried over and over to teach her: spine straight, head high, better to err on the side of too high than too low—after all, she has a beautiful neck, and skin like silk. He has taught her one thing by day, however, and something else by night. Sometimes night breaks forth in the middle of the day, and then her submissiveness attracts him. A slight trembling of her eyelids, her beautiful, completely dark eyes, so dark that when they reflect the light, it looks like they are covered in glistening icing.
Suddenly Thomas, as though knowing perfectly well he is being observed, raises his eyes, and Jacob doesn’t have time to move. Their eyes meet for a moment.
Thomas does not notice that, from a different window, Eva is observing him, too.
Come evening, when the Lord is retiring to bed, he sees that the young people have all gathered around Thomas Dobrushka again. There is Eva, Anusia Pawłowska, and Agata Wołowska, along with the younger Franciszek Wołowski. This time Thomas is showing them a snuffbox, as though intending to offer them tobacco. When Franciszek reaches out and touches the lid, however, the snuffbox opens with a clatter, and out of it hops a little bird, which flaps its wings and chirps. Franciszek pulls his hand back, frightened, while the rest of the company bursts into unrestrained laughter. In the end, Franciszek, too, starts laughing. After a while Zwierzchowska—who, according to her custom, is making her rounds of the palace and inviting everyone to put out their candles—looks into the room. Entertained, they call her in.
“Go on, show her,” the young people tell Thomas.
“Auntie, have some tobacco,” they call.
Thomas holds out to her a small, rectangular object, beautifully decorated. After a moment’s hesitation, amused, sensing that a little trick may be in store, Zwierzchowska reaches for the snuffbox.
“Auntie, just press here,” Thomas begins in German, but, reprimanded by her gaze, he switches to his funny accented Polish: “Niech ciocia naciśnie tu.”
She takes the snuffbox, and the little bird dances that same mechanical dance just for her, and Zwierzchowska, completely losing her seriousness, squeals like a little girl.
A thousand compliments, or: Of the wedding of Moshe Dobrushka, or Thomas von Schönfeld
The wedding of Moshe Dobrushka to Elke von Popper takes place in Vienna in May of 1775, after the period of mourning for Solomon has ended. Gardens near the Prater are rented for the purpose. As the groom’s father is deceased, he is walked down the aisle by Michael Denis, his friend and the translator of Macpherson’s famous Works of Ossian, as well as the publisher Adolf Ferdinand von Schönfeld, who has come from Prague for this wedding. Before the groom makes his appearance at the church, there is a small Masonic ritual; his brothers from the lodge, all dressed in black, lead him into this new stage of his life with great gravity. Von Schönfeld thinks of Moshe as a son, and he has in fact just embarked upon the complicated bureaucratic procedure of receiving Thomas within the Schönfeld coat of arms. Moshe will become Thomas von Schönfeld.
Now, however, there is a party under way. Aside from the magnificence of the tables, which hold food and enormous bouquets of May flowers, the main attraction is the pavilion, where there is an extraordinary collection of butterflies on display. The man responsible for this is Michael Denis, the groom’s employer. Eva’s female cousins take her there, and now, leaning over the vitrines, they all admire these wonderful dead creatures pinned onto silk.
“You are a butterfly, too,” Esther, the youngest Dobrushka child, says to Eva. This bit of praise lodges in Eva’s memory, and she thinks about it for a long time after. For butterflies come from chrysalises, from ugly worms, plump and misshapen, a process that is also documented in one of the vitrines. This reminds Eva Frank of herself when she was Esther’s age—fifteen—in the dark gray dress her father made her wear in Częstochowa so she wouldn’t attract the soldiers’ attention. She remembers the chill of the stone tower, and her mother’s contorted joints. An inexplicable sadness overwhelms her, and a yearning for her mother. She doesn’t want to think about that, and has been trying to forget. Which has been going fairly well so far.
In the evening, when the lanterns are lit in the garden, she stands in a group, a little tipsy from the wine, listening to the voluble Count von Schönfeld, who, dressed in his long, dark green jacket, raising his glass of wine, turns playfully to the not especially pretty but very intelligent bride:
“. . . The groom’s entire family is so upstanding that you could not possibly find a better one. Hardworking, loving, they came to their fortune honestly.”
The guests make their agreement known, nodding.
“In addition, they have many attributes and talents, and above all, they are ambitious,” the count goes on. “And good for them. They are no different in that respect from those of us who were ennobled long ago, in barbarian times, when our ancestors backed the kings with swords or plundered local farmers and took up all their land. You all know perfectly well that not every ‘von’ is synonymous with great attributes of spirit and heart . . . And we need people who are powerful, in order to share and incarnate that which is most valuable. You can accomplish more from the outset with connections and power. All that we consider to be obvious and universal, the whole structure of the world as we know it, is decaying and crumbling before our very eyes. This house needs reconstruction, and we hold the trowels to repair it in our hands.”
There is resounding applause, and the guests’ mouths are submerged in the finest Moravian wine. Then the music starts—no doubt there will be dancing. Curious glances dart to Eva Frank, and soon Count Hans Heinrich von Ecker und Eckhofen appears at her side. A smiling Eva gives him her hand, as her aunt has taught her, but at the same time she looks for her father. There he is. He is sitting in darkness, surrounded by women, and he is looking straight at her from all the way over there. She can feel his gaze as if it were his hand. It gives her permission to dance with this graceful young aristocrat who looks like a grasshopper, whose name she can’t possibly remember. But then, when a man named Hirschfeld, a fantastically wealthy merchant from Prague, comes up to her, her father almost imperceptibly shakes his head. After a moment’s hesitation, Eva declines, blaming a headache.
That night, she hears a thousand compliments, and when she finally falls into bed still wearing her dress, her head is spinning wildly, and her stomach, on account of an excess of Moravian wine, consumed furtively with Esther, seethes with nausea.
Of the emperor and people from everywhere and nowhere
The great enlightened emperor, who co-rules with his mother, is a handsome thirty-something-year-old man and a widower twice over. He is said to have sworn that he would not get married a third time, which has sent many young ladies from the best homes into despair. He is reserved and—even those who know him best say this—shy. A shy emperor! He lends himself a little courage by slightly raising his eyebrows, which makes him feel like he is looking down on everyone. His girlfriends say that he is not very present in bed, and he finishes quickly. He reads a great deal. He corresponds with the Prussian Frederick, whom deep down he admires. He imitates him in that he sometimes goes out into the city incognito, dressed as an ordinary soldier, and in this way he sees with his own eyes how his subjects live. Naturally he is discreetly accompanied by bodyguards, also in disguise.
He seems to have a slight inclination toward melancholy, and he is interested in the human body and its mysteries, all those bones, remains, human skulls. He also likes taxidermy and rare monsters. He has set up a fantastic Wunderkammer, where he takes his guests; he is amused by their childi
sh surprise, their disgust blended with fascination. In that moment he carefully watches his guests—yes, now that polite smile of theirs falls away, that obsequious grimace they all have on their faces as they interact with the emperor. Then he sees who they really are.
Soon he would like to turn this Wunderkammer into an organized, systematic collection, divided into classes and categories—then his collection of curiosities could become a real museum. It would be an epochal transition—the Wunderkammer represents the old world, chaotic, filled with anomalies and incomprehensible to reason, while the museum is the new world, enlightened by the glow of reason, logical, classified, organized. When it opens, this museum will be a first step toward further reforms—toward fixing the nation. He dreams, for instance, of reforming the overgrown, overly bureaucratized administration that devours enormous sums from the treasury; he dreams of abolishing the serfdom of the peasants. Such ideas do not please his mother, the Empress Maria Theresa. She considers them newfangled eccentricities. They disagree completely on such questions.
And yet the question of the Jews is one that interests them both. The task the young emperor has set himself depends upon freeing the Jews for their own good from their medieval superstitions, as the natural and indubitable talents of these people are now being exploited for all kinds of Kabbalah, suspicious and unproductive speculations. If they could properly educate themselves at the same level as the rest of the population, they would be of considerably greater service to the empire. The emperor’s mother would like to draw them into the one true faith, and she has heard that this would be possible with a great many of them. When, therefore, on the list of those wishing to visit the emperor on the occasion of his name day there appears the name Joseph Jacob Frank, Joseph II and his mother are greatly pleased and curious, since lately everyone has been talking of this Frank and his daughter.
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