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“Is it really for this,” Gitla often repeats, “that a woman’s body gives away its finest substances—to create within it a future person who will only die anyway, so that all will turn out to have been for naught?
Under the divine gaze, everything becomes strange and heavy with portent.
Couldn’t there have been everything in excess—warmth, and food, and roofs over people’s heads, and beauty? Whom would it have hurt? Why was such a world as this created? There is nothing permanent under the sun, everything passes, and you won’t even have time to get a good look at it. But why is it like that? Could there not have been more time, and more reflection?
In this way, it is as if there are now two versions of every person, all having doubles by different names.
It all disgusts Deymowa, until her servant Marta brings the news that these are the Jews who have come to be baptized. Then it is as if Katarzyna Deymowa had taken off a pair of glasses she hadn’t even realized she’d been wearing. Suddenly she is all sympathy—Holy Mother! come to be baptized! Those who speak of the end of the world have it right. It has come to this: The Lord Jesus’s greatest enemies are going to be baptized.
Pinkas is surprised, astonished—he didn’t expect Frank would make such a big impression on him, and he cannot bear the fact that somehow he actually likes this man.
that here they are letting in all these foreign, impenetrable faces, although their intentions are muddled, vague.
Faces should remain in hiding, in the shadows, she thinks, like deeds, like words.
he wonders what would happen if hate could transform into a plague. Is that how herem works? Asher often sees how a cursed person quickly becomes defenseless, weak, ill, and when the curse is taken off him, he gets well.
Asher knows such people, many magnates have it, the nobly born—that inexplicable self-confidence, founded in nothing, or perhaps in the existence of some internal center of gravity that makes the person feel like a king in any situation.
we were on the road, and as it is written in the Shocher Tov, four things weaken a person: hunger, travel, fasting, and authorities.
People cried a great deal, for reasons that struck me as unclear, as they did not know the deceased, nor did they particularly understand who he had been. In the parish church, when the local bishop gave his sermon, the whole church was in tears, perhaps because the words “in vain” came up so many times in it, and together, those two words are likely even worse than “death.”
There is something wonderful in being a stranger, in being foreign, something to be relished, something as alluring as candy. It is good not to be able to understand a language, not to know the customs, to glide like a spirit among others who are distant and unrecognizable. Then a particular kind of wisdom awakens—an ability to surmise, to grasp the things that aren’t obvious. Cleverness and acumen come about. A person who is a stranger gains a new point of view, becomes, whether he likes it or not, a particular type of sage.
That evening I came to understand that we had taken our first step into the abyss.
The woman emerges from the wall, positioned high in the dome’s vault, over our heads, powerful. She is holding a child in her lap, as if she is holding a piece of fruit. But it is not the child that is important. Her mild face betrays no human affect except that which lies at the foundation of everything—a love that is absolutely unconditional. I know, she says, without moving her lips. I know everything, and nothing escapes my understanding. I have been here since the dawn of time, hidden in the smallest particle of matter, in the stone, in the shell, in the wing of an insect, in this leaf,
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Especially today, on seeing this city that is at once haughty and miserable.
“Does Jacob’s wife know about this?” asks Kossakowska, peering underneath the wide skirts of the elegant dolls, where their long, lace-finished pantaloons reassure her.
Moliwda sees with horror what an absolute fortune the dolls cost. They go back to the buggy through snow dirtied by horse droppings.
It is true that this also causes me some moral Discomfort, for how can it be—they have barely come into our World, and already they are climbing our Society and getting into our Government. We worked for Generations to get our noble Titles, and our Forefathers earned them with some real Service to our Fatherland, while with them it’s just a Fistful of Gold thrown onto the Table.
It’s true that the child is uncommonly beautiful. Seemingly serious, but also wild, as if snatched out of some pagan, Arabian splendor.
For there is too much world, and there are too many tasks ahead of little Evunia. She has never felt this miserable before. She feels as if someone were clutching her heart, and she cries, but not like when she cries because she’s scraped her knee—it is a despair that happens deeper inside, at the very bottom of her being.
The girl takes her doll and vanishes like a dust ball.
Moliwda knows him well enough to see that Jacob is cleverer than all the rest of the assembly put together, though they take him for an idiot, just as the Jews once did, and he himself seemed to have a particular fondness for hiding in smallness, for taking on the guise of a simpleton.
Known to the Church, as well, are the esteemed Mr. Kossakowski’s youthful transgressions; the Church’s memory is everlasting; the Church never forgets. And he goes on and on like this, as if showing off his information, and the information is a massive trove,
The most melancholy sound in the world, thinks Moliwda: music heard from a distance, crippled by the wooden walls, the buzz of human beings, the scraping of the ice—reduced to hollow, lonely drumbeats. Soon the sound of distant bells from the town will join in and flood the whole area with an unbearable despair.
the world itself demands to be narrated, and only then does it truly exist, only then can it flourish fully. But also that by telling the story of the world, we are changing the world. That is why God created the letters of the alphabet, that we might have the opportunity to narrate to him what he created.
The messianic machine, how it works
The person flails; the machine works. The motion of the wheels transfers power to the stone gears that grind the grain. Everything that falls into them will be crushed into dust.
The Messiah is something more than a figure and a person—it is something that flows in your blood, resides in your breath, it is the dearest and most precious human thought: that salvation exists. And that’s why you have to cultivate it like the most delicate plant, blow on it, water it with tears, put it in the sun during the day, move it into a warm room in the nighttime.
No doubt they have ceremonial clothing at home, but on Good Friday you have to bring all the worthlessness and ugliness of the world out into the light of day. There is so much of it that the ordinary human heart would be unable to bear it without the help of that body on the cross, which is willing to take upon itself all the pain of Creation.
“Here people are trying to paint her so they don’t forget about her, whereas she has to hide in the abyss. They miss the sight of her. But that is not her real face, since everyone sees her differently—we have senses that are imperfect, that’s why that is. But every day she will appear to us more clearly, down to her every detail.”
Kazimierz thinks a long while, as though savoring the fact that he is in possession of such valuable information.
Jacob holds them to him, like boys who have gotten into all sorts of trouble, he hugs them, holding their heads,
My death, which until now has lurked somewhere in the distance, offstage, dressed up and made up, has now cast off its ball gown, and I see it before me in its true form. I am not frightened, and my death brings me no pain. It only seems to me that the months and years are now moving contrarywise. For how can an old person be permitted to go on, while the lives of the young are cut short?
And in some sense, life is this constant loss. Improving one’s station, getting richer, is the greatest illusion. In reality, we are richest at the moment of our birth; after that, we begin to lose everything. That is what the Madonna represents: the initial whole, the divine unity of us, the world and God, is something that must be lost. What remains in its wake is just a flat picture, a dark patch of a face, an apparition, an illusion.
believes that they have to go on living and marrying and bearing children. That cannot be avoided. Life is a force, like a flood, like a powerful current of water—you cannot oppose it.
It’s as if they were seated around a great void that they were consuming with spoons, as if what was covered in white tablecloths were pure nothingness, and they were celebrating its pale chill.
On the terrible days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, kneytlakh legn takes place—the measuring of graves. The women measure out the cemeteries with a string, then wind the string back up around a bobbin, for later use as candlewicks; some of the women will also use it to tell fortunes.
Once, Yente herself measured the graves, believing it to be the duty of every woman to measure how much room was left for the dead, or whether there was any room at all, before any new living people were born. It is a kind of bookkeeping that women take care of—women are always better, in any case, at keeping the accounts.
The dead would like to be talked about; they are hungry, and that is their food. What they want from us is our attention.
May God judge us, we thought we had killed You.
We changed our attire and hid our customs in deep closets, so as to pretend to be people we were not at all.
Understanding nothing, everyone demanded further explanation with their eyes.
Then the Baal Shem Tov replied: ‘On the day when someone comes and tells you this story, you will know that you have been forgiven.’ ” Jakubowski would also like for someone to come and visit him and tell him such a story. Jakubowski would also like to be forgiven.
One night someone sets the shed on fire, and it’s just lucky that it starts snowing, and the fire goes out.
Kossakowska attends their small, humble funerals.
but no answer arrives. It is as if the messengers have simply vanished.
we ought to care about each other—to take care of each other—not rip scraps from one another’s mouths like hostile dogs.
that because of the curse in Wojsławice, Kossakowska cannot sleep, and every night she flagellates herself. If Bishop Sołtyk had by some miracle the opportunity to undo her lace top and pull up the linen undershirt to reveal her back, he would see the effects of that insomnia—chaotically scattered bloody swaths, the components of some unrealized inscription.
The truth is that holy people have no age; they are born old.
