Then he again reads them what he’s written:
How all of this occurred, how God gave us the strength and the hope in order that we, weak and stripped of all support, without any knowledge of the Polish language, expounded our theses with skill. Now, too, for we have come to such a certainty and a desire, that we urgently require the holy baptism. For we believe that Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, was a man whom our ancestors tormented on the wooden cross, and that he was the true Messiah promised in the convents and the prophecies. We believe in it, lips, heart, and souls, and this our faith we declare.
The words of this profession of faith fall heavy and blunt. Anczel, Moshe’s young son-in-law, titters nervously but quiets down at a look from Jacob.
Only then does Moliwda add in the beginning:
From the Polish, Hungarian, Turkish, Muntenian, Wallachian, and other countries, the Israelites, through their messenger—who is faithful to Israel and learned of the Scriptures and the holy prophets, having raised his hands to the heavens, whence help used to come, with tears of primordial happiness, health, long-standing peace, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, stands—wish you, Your Great and Powerful Excellency, all the best and most wondrous of things.
Probably only Nahman understands the intricate, ornate style Moliwda is using. He smacks his lips in delight and ineptly tries to translate his twisted phrases into Yiddish and Turkish.
“Are you sure that’s Polish?” Shlomo Shorr says. “Now we absolutely have to put that we’re asking for the disputation, so that . . . so that . . .”
“So that what?” asks Moliwda. “What’s the point of this disputation? What’s it going to do?”
“So that everything is out in the open, nothing held back,” says Shlomo. “In order for justice to function, it’s best for it to take place on a stage, so that people will remember.”
“And on, and on.” Moliwda moves his arm in a circle as though rolling some sort of invisible wheel. “Anything else?”
Shlomo would like to add something, but by nature he is very polite, and you can see that there is something that does not quite escape his lips. Jacob looks upon this scene and retreats, leaning back in his armchair. Then Little Hayah, Shlomo’s wife, pipes up as she brings in some figs and nuts for them.
“The other thing is revenge,” she says, setting the little bowls on the table. “For beating Rabbi Elisha, for stealing from us, for every element of persecution, for chasing us out of our towns, for the wives who left their husbands and were labeled whores, for the curse put on Jacob and on all of us.”
“She’s right,” says Jacob, who’s been silent until now.
They nod. Yes, it is about revenge. Hayah says:
“This is a war. We are going to war.”
“The woman is right.”
So Moliwda dips his pen.
It is not hunger, not exile, nor the scattering of our belongings that leads us to step away from our old customs and unite with the Holy Roman Church, for we, sitting peacefully in our sorrows, have until now looked upon the injuries of our exiled and starving brothers and never been called. But divine grace calls us now, especially, from darkness into light. We cannot but heed this call from God, as our fathers have done. We march joyfully under the banner of the Holy Cross, and we ask for a field upon which to carry out a second battle with the enemies of the truth, as we desire to show from the Holy
Scripture, openly, the appearance in the world of God in human form, his passion on behalf of humankind, the need for universal oneness in God as well as to prove the ungodliness of our opponents, the gross unbelief . . .
They take a lunch break.
Moliwda is drinking again in the evenings. Jacob has had good wine brought in from Giurgiu, saying it’s from a vineyard he has purchased. The wine is clear, tastes of olive groves and melons. Jacob does not take part in the discussions and the writing of the supplications. He is busy working in the village and—he says—teaching, which actually means sitting with the women as they pluck feathers, and holding forth. That’s how they see him, as an innocent, not wrapped up in any of this, not in letters or sentences. He hoists them up by their collars when they grow heedless and try to bow before him. He doesn’t want that. We are equal, he says. And this delights these miserable people.
Of course they’re not equals, thinks Moliwda. Back in the Bogomil village, they weren’t equals either. There were corporeal, psychic, and spiritual people. Somatics, psychics, and pneumatics, they called them, from the Greek. Equality goes against nature, however rightly one might strive toward it. Some are made of more earthly elements, and those people are thick, sensual, and non-creative. They are only good for listening. Others live with their hearts, their emotions, in bursts of the soul, and others still have contact with the highest spirit, distant from the body, free from affects, spacious inside. It is to this final group that God has access.
But living together, they should have identical rights.
Moliwda likes it here, he doesn’t really have too much to do aside from the writing that takes up his mornings. He would gladly remain here with them, passing himself off as one of them, hiding among their beards and caftans, in the wrinkled, many-layered skirts of the women, in their fragrant hair. He would happily let them christen him again, and maybe he would even return to the faith by this other road, along with them, from a different direction, from the kitchen door through which one does not enter into the salons with their carpets, but rather where the slightly spoiled potatoes lie in boxes, where the floor is slick with fat, and where the awkward, crude questions are asked. For instance: Who is this Savior who allowed himself to be killed in such a cruel manner, and who sent him? And why must a world created by God be saved in the first place? And, “Why is it so bad, when it could be so good?” wonders Moliwda, quoting to himself the good, innocent Nahman, and smiling.
He knows many of them believe that, once baptized, they will become immortal. That they will not die. And maybe they’re right—this motley crew that comes and stands submissively in line for rations every morning, these dirty children, scabies in between their fingers, women whose caps conceal filthy, tangled hair, and their emaciated husbands. By evening they’ll go to sleep with their bellies full. Perhaps it is in fact this community that shall be led now by the Holy Ghost, the Spirit, that everlasting light, distinct from the world and a stranger to it, just as they are strangers, made of some other substance, if light can be considered substance. And the Spirit opts for just such people, for freed of the shackles of dogma and decree—and until they have created their own rules—they shall be truly pure, truly innocent.
The supplication to Archbishop ?ubieński