The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

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.

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.

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.

Asher Rubin is a misanthrope, after all—it’s strange he became a doctor. People always irritate and disappoint him.

Everyone here in this low-ceilinged but extensive home is in some way family, has some connection—blood, marriage, trade, loans cosigned, carts borrowed.

Everyone believes it is because of spirits, dybbukim, demons, or maybe ba’aley kabin—bałakaben, as they’re known around here—the limping underground creatures that guard treasures.

Asher Rubin thinks that most people are truly idiots, and that it is human stupidity that is ultimately responsible for introducing sadness into the world.

Real wisdom lies in linking everything together—that’s when the true shape of all of it emerges.

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.

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.

Now Yente sees everything from above, and then her gaze goes back to under her closed eyelids. That’s how it goes the whole night.

Strange—her thoughts blow over the whole region. “Wind,” says some voice in her head, which must be her own. Wind is the vision of the dead as they gaze upon the world from where they are.

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 titles 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 . . .”

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

Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick. Then, like an enormous, omnisensitive oyster, his body—so naked and delicate—feels the slightest tremble in the particles of light, scrunches up inside itself, leaving just enough space for the emergence—at once and out of nowhere—of a world.

He calls those notes “scraps,” for they are what remains after other, more important work. Crumbs—such is the stuff of life. His writing on the lid of the case set up on his lap, in the dust and discomfort of travel, is in essence tikkun, the repair of the world, mending the holes in its fabric so filled with overlapping patterns, squiggles, tangles, trails.

Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw from Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space. The word disappear comes from the root word elem, and the site of that disappearance is known as olam: world. Thus even the name for the world contains within it the story of God’s departure. The world was able to arise solely because God was not in it. First there was something, and then that something was gone. That is the world. The world then, in its entirety, is lack.

This makes sense: prophets never come from within. All prophets must come from elsewhere, must suddenly appear, seem strange, out of the ordinary. Be shrouded in mystery, like the one the goyim have, even, of the virgin birth. A prophet has to walk differently, talk differently. Ideally he hails from some unimaginable locale, source of exotic words and untasted dishes and unsmelled smells—myrrh, oranges, bananas.

Everyone is connected to everyone else. The world is simply the multiplication of this room in the Shorrs’ Rohatyn home above the market square. Through the slits in the curtains and the haphazardly nailed door starlight seeps in, which means that even the stars are close acquaintances, that some forebear or cousin must certainly have had some close contact with them.

A murmur goes around the room. Nahman’s story is enticing, but it’s hard for people to believe that what he’s describing has to do with someone from around here. Holiness? From here? “Jacob Leybowicz” sounds like the name of every butcher. There’s a furrier from Rohatyn with exactly the same name.

But Lilith and all beings similar to Lilith belong to a world from before the Fall, which means that human laws do not apply to them, that they’re not bound by human rules or human regulations, and that they don’t have human consciences or human hearts, and never shed human tears. For Lilith, there’s no such thing as sin. Their world is different.

How could she ever have believed in the flow of time? She had thought time flowed! Now she finds it funny. It’s obvious that time spins around like skirts whirling in a dance. Like a linden top twirled onto a table and sustained in motion there by the reverential eyes of children.

In the new world, there will be a different alphabet, different symbols, other rules. Maybe it will go bottom to top, instead of top to bottom. Maybe people will move from old age into youth, and not the other way around. Maybe people will arise out of the earth and eventually vanish into the bellies of their mothers.

“People always want things to be simple. This or that. Black or white. People are idiots. Was not the world made out of countless shades of gray?

Every one of us thinks differently, and imagines Something altogether singular when he is reading. Sometimes it unsettles me greatly to think that what I write with mine own Hand may be understood in a completely different Way from how I had intended.

Everyone who heard this instantly fell silent and tried to make sense of this short sentence: The Messiah has arrived. For it is not a common phrase. And it is a final answer. Anyone who pronounces it will watch the scales fall from his eyes, will see the world completely differently from that day forward.

He said: If it were as you all say, then a Messiah would come in every generation, he’d be here this month, and there the next. He’d be born again after every riot and after every war. He’d intervene after every misfortune. And how many of those have we had? Countless.

They came to the conclusion that the misfortunes of the preceding years had been blessings in disguise, for they made a kind of sense, foretelling the coming of the savior, just as painful contractions foretell the birth of a new person.

As the world gives birth to the Messiah, it must suffer, and all laws must break, conventions be eradicated, oaths and promises crumble.

That day an unexpected early snow fell, covering the crops that had not yet been collected from the gardens: pumpkins, carrots, and beets that were still living out their ripeness in the earth.

Yente’s mother died with the secret clenched in her fist. She died in a kind of convulsion, in a fury. She’ll no doubt come back as a wild animal.

You could develop a taste for this sorrow in the same way that some grow fond of vodka.

Yente heard her parents moaning in bed, and she knew that this was her father chasing the dybbuk out of her mother, something he kept secret from the rest of the family.

“Between the heart and the tongue lies an abyss,” he said.

But does not every religion have some truth to it? All of them, even the most barbaric, have been permeated by the holy sparks.

When later, excited, we discussed the Trinity with others, he claimed that the Christian teachings on the Trinity are a distorted version of an older understanding of the divine mystery, which no one can remember anymore. It is but a pale shadow, riddled with mistakes. “Keep your distance from the Trinity,” he warned.

To be foreign is to be free. To have a great expanse stretch out before you—the desert, the steppe. To have the shape of the moon behind you like a cradle, the deafening symphony of the cicadas, the air’s fragrance of melon peel, the rustle of the scarab beetle when, come evening, the sky turns red, and it ventures out onto the sand to hunt. To have your own history, not for everyone, just your own history written in the tracks you leave behind.

There is no one here. God created the world, and the effort of doing so killed him. Kossakowski had to come all the way here to understand this.

Moliwda thinks how snow keeps life more honest: everything is somehow more distinct, and every rule applies more absolutely.

There are some people with whom you have a little problem from the start because you feel too attracted to them—you like them without any justification, even as you feel certain that it is all a simulacrum, a game.