The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

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.

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.

And when I saw You, led out with a bruised face, when you said to us: “Spit on this fire,” I realized that this was how it was supposed to be, and that the workings of salvation had gotten back on track, in gear, like a clock that measures time in eons—You had to fall, and I had to push You.

Then suddenly Hayah says, in the same tone she uses for the jam, that the king is going to die, and that there will be an interregnum.

“The new king will be the last king of Poland.

Jacob will be freed by his greatest enemies, and with his closest allies, he will make an escape to the south. Everyone in this room right now will live in a great castle on a wide river, where they will wear sumptuous clothing and forget their language.”

After the death of Augustus III of Wettin, in October 1763, the bell rings all day.

Since none took part in his betrayal, women will be his guards. He also needs naarot, or young maids, for his Avacha—serving girls and teachers. And he needs women to take care of him. Women, he needs women, lots of them—he needs them everywhere, as if their mild, vibrating presence might turn back the dark time of Częstochowa.

As he looks at them like this, he says the same thing he once said in Ivanie—that they are to choose one from amongst themselves, but in unison, without any quarrelling, and that she will remain with him for some time, and he will take her seven times by night and six by day.

Just as Jacob said, in July of 1763, in a little house on Wieluńskie Przedmieście, a son is born to him and receives the name Jacob.

“Where we’re going, there will be no laws, because laws are born of death, and we are connected with life. The evil force that created the cosmos can be cleared out only by the Virgin. A woman will overcome that force, because she is powerful.”

Poland is the most particular place on earth, at once the worst and the best.

“Wherever I have wound up in the world,” says Moliwda, “I have seen that maybe there is just one God, but that the ways of believing in Him are many, maybe even infinite . . . All kinds of different shoes can tread a path to God . . .”

I thought a great deal about why Job had said, “In my flesh I will see God”—that verse from Isaiah gave me no peace. For since a person’s body is neither lasting nor perfect, then he who created it must also be weak and miserable. That is what Job had in mind. That is what I thought, and the times to come would only strengthen this belief in me.

By the summer of 1772, there was no longer anything to defend.

Several days later, General Bibikov came to the monastery. He entered on horseback through the actual door to the chapel, and from his horse he assured the prior that nothing bad would happen to them under Russian rule. That very same evening we went with Jacob to ask the Russian general for an exceptional release from prison. I thought I would be needed to translate into Russian, but they spoke in German. Bibikov was exceedingly polite, and within two days, Jacob had received official permission to leave the monastery.

Eva likes to please her father—only when he likes her does she like herself.

The Lord does not care to have infants around him, which is why expectant women are sent away from the court, back to their families in Poland, unless the Lord, who sometimes likes to suck their milk, determines otherwise.

The Lord does not permit spouses to live together. He is the one who determines who will be with whom, and the truth is there have never been any disagreements on this score.

In the early spring of 1774, when Jacob is ailing again, this time with indigestion, he brings in from Warsaw the wife of Kazimierz Szymon Łabęcki, Łucja, one of the women who nursed him back to health in Częstochowa. Now he wishes to repeat the therapy.

For half a year she breastfeeds him, and then she’s sent away, and he begins to spend more and more time in Vienna.

It is written that there are three things that do not come if you are thinking of them: the Messiah, lost objects, and scorpions.

The truth is that I was never able to take much pleasure from that place in Brünn; it was the lifestyle of a lord, and not how it ought to have been.

But then I thought that one would be a fool to expect people to remain as they once were, and that it is a kind of o’erpridefulness in us to treat ourselves as constant wholes, as if we were always the same person, for we are not.

“War is good for us—in muddied waters you can fish out a little something for yourself.”

“There will be a war between Austria and Turkey, that is certain—and what if we were to secure ourselves a coveted piece of land during all that wartime turmoil? For that we’ll need hard work and gold. The idea being that we could gather around thirty thousand people at our own cost, arranging with Turkey to support them in the war, and in exchange receive a piece of land for a small kingdom somewhere in Wallachia.”

Nothing but politics mattered to them anymore.

To my astonishment, Jacob bade Yeruhim Dembowski and me to record his evening chats.

But I was surprised by this new request, since he had always rejected my previous pleas to sanction such record-keeping.

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.

They have raised more than the Lord requested, thanks to news of an ancient manuscript discovered in Moravia, in which it was written in black and white that during its final days, the Holy Roman Empire would pass into the hands of some foreign person. And apparently it was stated, too, that it would be a person in Turkish attire, but without a turban on his head, wearing instead a high red hat embroidered with a slender lamb, and that he would overthrow the emperor.

The emperor is still interested in the latest achievements in the field of anatomy. To keep “Sibylla” company, he has purchased a wax model of a human body without skin, the circulatory system marked;

It is like before, in Ivanie, but now the Strange Deeds have become symbolic, have metamorphosed into rituals.

They have all aged, they have grown children now, and some of them are grandparents already.

This time Nahman Piotr Jakubowski goes with Ludwik Wołowski, Jan Wołowski’s son. They come back from Turkey in the autumn, their mission having failed again.

at the instigation of the Stamboul Jews, they were accused of heresy and spent three months in a Stamboul prison, which caused Jakubowski to develop an illness in his lungs. Furthermore, the sultan’s officials confiscated all the money they had brought as tribute to the sultan, a considerable sum.

The Lord does not even acknowledge them. In the evening, according to the old ritual, he orders Jakubowski beaten for losing the money.

All punishment here goes like this: The person to be punished is laid down on a table, wearing only a shirt, and all of the true believers who have gathered, brothers and sisters, must lash his back with a switch. The Lord begins, usually slashing without mercy, and after him go the men, but striking less forcefully, while the women usually close their eyes and administer blows that are more symbolic than anything, as if they were tapping the person with palm branches (unless one of them has some reason of her own for hitting harder).

When it is over, he drags himself down off the table. He does not answer Jacob’s calls to stay. His shirt hangs almost to his knees, open in the front. His face is absent. People say Jakubowski has grown eccentric in his advancing age. Now he walks out the door, not even looking back.

Bishop Sołtyk lost his senses,

They say that he is among those whose opinions of themselves are so high that it completely blinds them, and wherever they look they see only themselves. And their conviction of their own importance deprives them of their reason and their power of judgment. Bishop Sołtyk is absolutely one of these people, and therefore it hardly matters whether he has lost his senses in Siberia or not.

Women still attract him, but he is rarely up to the execution of ordinary relations, which exposes him to smirks and ambiguous glances. For some time now, he has not even tried.

The territory between the fronts, the delectable anarchy, the suspension of all laws, human and divine, villages burned after the army passed through, battlefields covered in corpses to be looted, the slaughter of paupers found poking around out there, the nauseating smell of the blood mixed with the sour smell of digested alcohol—all that was the kingdom of Jerzy Marcin Lubomirski.

“Death is no bad thing,” Jakubowski says suddenly, without turning around. “And in fact, there’s no need to deny it, it belongs to the good God, who in this way mercifully saves us from life.”

They managed to make their sect into a kind of state within the state, ruled by its own laws, with its own guard, and its accounts in the majority conducted outside any banking system.”

And she, being Gitla, assured, mobilizes within herself, and you might think that she was now taking this whole death business into her own hands, this problematic and irreversible process, as if it were merely the latest in the long list of tasks she has had to perform.

Then her breathing softens—or maybe their ears get used to it?—and Gitla calms down and floats away. Asher witnesses the moment—it happens quite a bit before her heart stops, and her breathing, Gitla simply slips away somewhere, she is no longer in this whistling body, she is gone, vanished. Something took her, caught her attention. She didn’t even look back.

There is no final exhalation, Asher thinks with mounting rage, no soul that slips out of the body. Quite the contrary, the body sucks the soul inside it, so that it can carry it into the grave. He has seen this so many times, but only now has he fully comprehended it. Just like that. There is no final exhalation. There is no soul.

Because it appealed to me to travel back, in memory, because the past remained alive for me, while the present was barely breathing, and the future lay before me like a cold corpse.