But Asher would sooner let himself be infected than believe in such things. He knows that everything in fact comes down to water—just one contaminated well is enough to kill a whole city. The sick drink the water, and then their infected waste travels to other water supplies. Asher goes to the town hall and presents his observations—it must have some connection to the wells and to the water. They agree with him—him, a Jew—and order the wells to be closed, and indeed, the plague does seem to die down a bit. But then it explodes again, stronger than ever, having evidently migrated to some other water sources. They can’t very well shut down all the wells in Lwów. They can only hope that some of the population, for whatever reasons, will be immune to this plague. Some people do ail only briefly, and only slightly, and then their health comes back of its own accord. Others simply don’t fall ill, as if they are invincible.
And finally, in all this bleak confusion, Asher sees the anointed one; his eyes can take their fill of him now. Since his initial appearance in Lwów at the end of August, he has been spotted often—either in his sumptuous carriage or walking among the camps of his emaciated followers. He is obviously not afraid. In spite of the warm weather, he wears a tall Turkish hat and a Turkish coat of a lovely green color, like water in a pond or the glass used to make vessels for medicaments. He looks like an enormous green dragonfly that flits from one place to the next. When he approaches one of the afflicted, Asher steps aside without a word. Frank lays hands on the forehead of the patient and closes his own eyes. The patient is doubtless in seventh heaven, if he’s still conscious. Recently one of the sick Jews went on his own to a church and demanded to be baptized. As soon as the rite had been hastily performed, he got better. Or that is what they say in the Halickie Przedmie?cie. At the synagogue they say something else: that immediately after the baptism, the renegade died.
Asher has to admit that Frank is a handsome man. Perhaps that is what Samuel will look like someday. He wouldn’t have anything against it. But it isn’t Frank’s looks that give him his power. Asher knows such people, many magnates have it, the nobly born—that inexplicable selfconfidence, 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.
Since that man has been in town, Gitla has not known a moment of peace. She gets dressed, but she ends up not leaving the house. She stands a moment in front of the door, and then she takes off her things and stays. When Asher comes home, he finds her lying on the settee. Her belly is big again, round and hard. Her whole body seems slightly swollen, unwieldy. She is always in a bad mood and insists that she will die in childbirth. She is angry with him—without him, and without this latest pregnancy, she would have gone back to her father or run off with that Frank again. As she lies in the dark on the settee, she must be imagining all the possible versions of her life she won’t be able to experience.
When it turns chilly in the latter half of October, the plague does not pass, but instead gains momentum. The Halickie Przedmie?cie has been deserted ever since housing was found for the newcomers among the neighbors, around the monasteries and in aristocrats’ country manors. There are daily baptisms at the cathedral and in the churches of Lwów—there is actually a line. Whenever anyone dies, a lot of other people want to be baptized right away.
When those who have already been baptized continue to die, Jacob stops appearing on the streets and healing people with the touch of his long fingers. Some say he’s gone to Warsaw to see the king, to try to obtain some land for the converts. Others say he was afraid and fled once more to Turkey.
That’s what Asher thinks, his mind on the latest deaths. For instance, the Mayorkowicz family. Over the course of two days the mother, the father, and four of their daughters died in his hospital. A fifth is in the final throes, so wasted away she no longer looks like a human child, but rather like a dark specter, a phantom, while a sixth, their eldest, has suffered such despair that her hair has gone completely gray.
The Mayorkowiczes had a proper Christian funeral, with wooden coffins and places in the cemetery paid for by the city. They were buried under their new names, to which they had not had time to grow accustomed: Miko?aj Piotrowski, Barbara Piotrowska, and their daughters: Victoria, Ró?a, Tekla, Maria. Asher urges himself to remember: Srol Mayorkowicz, Beyla Mayorkowiczowa. As well as Shima, Freyna, Masha, Miriam.
And now, after the funeral of the Mayorkowiczes, or Piotrowskis, he is standing in the hallway of his house and slowly taking off his clothing. He rolls it into a ball and tells the maid to burn it. Death might cling to buttons, to trouser seams, to a collar. Naked, he goes into the room where Gitla is. She looks at him in astonishment and bursts out laughing. He doesn’t say a word.
He does manage to save, in the end, that skinny little girl, the second Mayorkowicz daughter, Elia, now called Salomea Piotrowska. Asher keeps her in the hospital and feeds her well. At first a gruel of rice and water, and then he goes and buys her chickens and has them boiled down to broth, and he pushes pieces of meat into her mouth, little by little, in tiny bits. The girl starts to smile each time she sees him.
At the same time he writes a letter to Starosta ?ab?cki, and a separate letter to the starosta’s wife. Two days later he gets a response from Rohatyn saying to bring little Salomea.
Why did he not write to Rapaport, to the kahal? He did consider it. But after just a moment’s reflection he realized that little Salomea would be better off at the ?ab?ckis’ palace than in the home of wealthy Rapaport, even if—and this was unlikely—he should want to take her in. When it comes to Jews, today they’re rich and powerful, tomorrow they are poor and sorrowful; Asher has learned that much in his life.
After Hanukkah and the Christian New Year, in early January, Gitla gives birth to twin girls. In March, as the last snows are disappearing, Asher and Gitla pack up all of their belongings and their children and set out for Vienna.
What Moliwda writes to his cousin Katarzyna Kossakowska
O beloved and enlightened Cousin of mine,
It is a good thing you got out of here quickly, for the plague has run completely rampant now, and the evidence of the rampages of the Lady of Death are everywhere visible. The most painful part of it is that the plague has taken such a liking to your wards, as there are many poor among them, and malnourished. In spite of Father Mikulski’s provisions and the goodwill shown to them by many noble people, they have remained in need, and hence more susceptible to illness.