No one knows if it’s lovely or how lofty it is, Its bright, expeditious flights rule out analysis.
Help me, O merciful God and everlasting Lord, Express that free spirit with my mortal tongue, in words.
Open my calamitous mouth, make my tongue be bright, And I will state once and for all: you are good and right.
I was happy. Spring arrived one day not long after that, or one afternoon, really, the sun gathering its strength and beginning to burn our backs. We had already managed to sell all our goods, so we took a break in our bookkeeping. The next morning, singing birds awoke me, and right after that, though I know not how, everything turned green, little blades of grass growing between the stones in the courtyard, and the tamarisk burst into bloom. The horses stood motionless in patches of sun, warming their hides, half closing their eyes.
My window overlooked the vineyard, and that year I witnessed the whole process of life returning after the winter, from beginning to end, from buds to mature grapes. By August it was already time to pluck them, so heavy and full of juice were they. It occurred to me that God was giving me an example: an idea can arrive seemingly out of nowhere. It has its own schedule, advances at its own pace. Nothing can be rushed or bypassed. I crushed the grapes in my fingers and thought how much God had done in this time, letting the vineyards ripen, growing the vegetables in the ground and the fruits on the trees.
Anyone who might think we were listlessly sitting around would be mistaken. By day, we wrote out letters and sent them all over the world to our brothers—this one to Germany, this one to Moravia, this to Salonika, another to Smyrna. Jacob, meanwhile, remaining in intimate relations with the local authorities, met with the Turks often, and I accompanied him. Among the Turks there were also the Bektashi, who considered Jacob one of their own, and sometimes he would go to them, although he didn’t want us to accompany him there.
As we had not given up our business while staying with Jacob, several times that summer we set out from Giurgiu to Ruse, on the other shore, and from there we would take our products farther, to Vidin and Nikopol, where Jacob’s father-in-law, Tovah, still lived.
I got to know this road along the Danube well—a road along the shore which, though mostly going low, sometimes climbs up high on the escarpment. One can always see from it the massive power of the flowing water, its true potential. When in the spring the Danube overflows its banks widely, as it did that year, one might take it for the sea, so much water is there across the whole of the lowlands. Some riverside settlements face flooding nearly every spring. To protect themselves from deluge, people plant trees of a certain kind along the shore, trees with powerful roots to absorb the water. The villages here appear miserable, their homes made out of clay, with nets hung up to dry alongside. Their inhabitants are small and swarthy, and the women will gladly read one’s palms. Farther from the water, among the vineyards, the more prosperous build their houses of stone, and their cozy courtyards are covered with a thick awning of vines that shields them from the heat. It is in these courtyards that family life occurs from spring on, it is here guests are received, here that people work, chat, and drink wine come evening. At sunset, by the river, you often hear a distant song carrying across the water—whence it comes is never clear, nor is it easy to identify what language it is sung in.
Around Lom, the banks climb particularly high, and from there it seems like you can see half the world or more. We always stopped there for supplies. I remember the warmth of the sun’s rays on my skin, and I can smell the heated vegetation, a mixture of herbs and the silt in the river. We would buy stores of goat’s cheese, as well as pots of zacusca, a well-seasoned paste of eggplants and red peppers roasted over the fire. Now I think that never in my life have I eaten anything as good. The inn was more than just an ordinary rest stop for the horses, the food better than the typical local cuisine. Everything interwove and locked together in that seemingly ordinary moment, and the boundaries of ordinary things dissolved, so that I stopped eating and simply stared, mouth open, into that silvery space, until Jacob or Yeruhim must have bashed me in the back to bring me down to earth again.
Looking at the Danube soothed me. I saw the wind moving the ships’ rigging, rocking the boats moored to the shore. I saw that our lives were stretched out between two great rivers, the Dniester and the Danube, which, like two players, set us on the board of Hayah’s strange game.
My soul is inseparable from Jacob’s. I cannot otherwise explain my attachment. Obviously at some time in the past we were one creature. Reb Mordke must have been there as well, and Isohar, of whose passing we were saddened to learn.
One spring day of Pesach we conducted the old ritual that marked the beginning of the new road. Jacob took a small barrel and attached to it nine candles, while he had a tenth, and he lit that one and those nine, and then he put them out. He did this three times. Then he sat down next to his wife, and then the four of us went up to him individually and joined with him our souls and bodies, recognizing him as our Lord. And then we did it again, but all together. Many of our people were waiting behind the door, wanting to join. It was the ritual Kav haMalkhut, also known as the Royal Cord.
In the meantime, our brothers fleeing Poland were coming into Giurgiu en masse, trekking either to Salonika, to our D?nmeh brothers, lost and determined never to go back to Podolia again, or here, to Wallachia. Jacob’s house was open to them, even to those who, not knowing who he was, talked about a certain Jacob Frank, apparently still marauding through Poland and crushing the Talmudists. This brought Jacob great joy, and he spent a long time asking them all sorts of questions and dragging the matter out before he finally revealed to them that he was this very man. It just meant that his fame was growing, and that more and more people were hearing of him. Yet Jacob did not seem happy, and Hana and all of us had to bear the brunt of his bad moods, when he would curse and summon Israel Osman and have him go off somewhere with some urgent message, or else go and arrange something or other with the agha.