As he always does when he gets nervous, Yankiel plucked a blade of grass and put it in between his teeth—he believes this heightens his selfconfidence. Now he knows that he should have turned on his heels and vanished from the sight of this shiksa, but in the moment, he could not take his eyes off her white thighs, he was suddenly seized by such an intense desire that in some sense he simply lost his mind. It also excited him that they were shielded from view by reeds as tall as walls and that the marshes smelled of rot and silt. Every particle of the hot air felt swollen, full, and juicy like a cherry, and soon it would burst, and its juice would spill onto their skin. A storm was coming.
He crouched shyly by the woman and saw that she was no longer young, that her breasts, full and white, hung down, and that her stomach, slightly protruding, with a birthmark on her navel, was cut across by a fine line that has been impressed into her skin by her skirt. He wanted to say something, but he found no words in Polish appropriate to the situation. And anyway, what exactly would he say? Meanwhile, her hand was the first to reach out, moving toward him, starting with his calf, his thigh, stroking his crotch, touching his hands and his face, where her fingers played a little with his beard. Then, gently, as if it were only natural, the woman lay down on her back and spread her legs. Yankiel, to tell the truth, does not believe that there is anyone in the world who would have turned around and left had they been in his place. He experienced a brief, incredible pleasure, and then they just lay there, still, without a word. She stroked his back, their heated bodies stuck together by sweat.
They arranged to meet in the same place several more times, but when autumn came, and it got cold, she stopped coming, which meant that Yankiel of Glinno was no longer committing a terrible sin, for which he was grateful to her. But he was overwhelmed by an inconsolable longing as well as a great pain that prevented him from focusing on anything. He realized he was unhappy.
That’s when he met Nahman, with whom he had studied at the Besht’s years ago. They threw their arms around each other. Nahman invited him to Ivanie, saying he would understand everything once he got there. Why should he sit around in an empty house? But Rabbi Yankiel of Glinno was not particularly enthusiastic. So Nahman mounted his horse and said:
“Don’t come to Ivanie, if you don’t want to. But beware your own mistrustfulness.”
That’s what he said to him. Beware your own mistrustfulness. This got the rabbi of Glinno—this convinced him. He stayed leaning against the doorframe, grass between his teeth, indifferent on the surface, but in fact deeply moved.
At the beginning of April he set out on foot for Ivanie, and since then he has slowly succumbed to considerable genuine enthusiasm, to the point that he doesn’t even want to admit to himself how important it is to stay close to this man in the Turkish hat.
In Busk, a small scandal breaks out at Princess Jab?onowska’s estate around the time that Mrs. Kossakowska arrives a few months later. The governess of the young Jab?onowskis, already forty years old, suddenly starts to weaken and seems to have caught something like hydrops, and then develops pain so terrible that they call the medic for her. But the medic, instead of letting her blood, calls for hot water: she’s about to give birth. This announcement occasions a small nervous breakdown on the part of the princess, for it had never entered her mind that Barbara . . . Well, of course, there are no words! And at her age!
At least the floozy has the decency to die on her third day in childbed, as often happens with older women, their time having obviously passed. She is survived by a little girl, tiny but in perfect health, whom Princess Jab?onowska is ready to give to the peasants in the village and maintain from afar. But Mrs. Kossakowska’s arrival in Busk causes the matter to take a different course. For Mrs. Kossakowska, having no children herself, had been thinking about setting up an orphanage, with the help of Bishop So?tyk, but somehow the idea had never quite become a priority. Now she asks Princess Jab?onowska to keep the infant on her estate for a little while, until she can ready the shelter.
“What harm will it do you? You won’t even know that such a tiny person was ever here, on such an enormous property.”
“It’s a child obtained from harlotry . . . I don’t even know whose it is.”
“But what fault is that of the little girl’s?”
Truth be told, the princess doesn’t require too much convincing. The baby is lovely, and so quiet; she is christened on Easter Monday.
Of Strange Deeds, holy silence, and other Ivanie diversions
A trusted messenger brings a letter from Moliwda just as the comet is slowly disappearing. Drying off from the drizzle outside by the fire in the room, he tells them that all over Podolia this celestial body has generated great anxiety, and many people have insisted that it augurs a great plague and pogroms, as in Khmelnytsky’s day. And famine, too, and an impending war with Frederick Augustus. Everyone agrees that the Last Days are coming.
When Jacob enters the room, Nahman silently hands him the letter, his face serious and impenetrable. Jacob is unable to read it, so he gives it to Hayah, but even she strains over the swirls, so the letter goes from hand to hand until it makes its way right back to Nahman. As he reads it, a broad smile, sly and insolent, appears on his face. He says that Primate ?ubieński has granted their requests. The disputation will take place in the summer, with the baptism to follow.
This news has been so eagerly anticipated, so desired for such a long time, and yet at the same time, it simply heralds what’s inevitable. A silence follows Nahman’s announcement.
It isn’t easy to take the first step. They have been taught so determinedly how to behave that the instructions have been permanently etched into their brains. Yet now they must erase all that, wipe the Mosaic Tablets of their false commandments that keep them imprisoned like animals in cages. Thou shalt not do this, thou shalt not do that—none of it’s allowed. The boundaries of the unsaved world are built out of prohibitions.
“What you have to do is leave yourself behind, set yourself down somewhere else,” Nahman explains to Wajge?e later. “The situation is similar to when you have to slit a painful abscess and squeeze all the pus out of it. The worst part is making the decision and the first movement; then, once it’s under way, everything becomes quite natural. It’s an act of faith, jumping headfirst into the water without any regard for what’s at the bottom. When you come back to the surface, you are new. Or it’s like a person who has gone to distant countries and returned, and suddenly he sees that everything that used to seem natural and obvious to him is in fact merely local and bizarre. And what seemed foreign and bizarre he now understands, so that it feels like it belongs to him.”