They look at each other as if they might be communicating with their eyes, determining who is going to speak now, until finally Wo?owski starts, though Pawe? Rohatyński swiftly interrupts him:
“As soon as the Lord—that is, Jacob Frank—got into Rohatyn, you could immediately see a light over him,” he says, and he looks at Wo?owski. Wo?owski hesitates for a moment about whether or not to confirm this, but Father Pikulski will not let him stop talking here, nor will the secretaries, with their pens stalled over their sheets of paper.
“A light?” Pikulski asks in a sweet voice.
“A light,” Wo?owski begins. “A brightness like a star, clear and pure, and then it would spread out by half a cubit or so, remaining over Jacob for some time—I’d rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.”
Now he waits to see the effect his words will have, and indeed, one of the secretaries just sits there with his mouth hanging open and doesn’t write anything down. Pikulski clears his throat loudly, and the pen falls back down onto the paper.
“But that’s nothing,” adds an excited Jacob Ty?mienicki. “When Jacob was supposed to go to Lanckoroń, where those incidents occurred, he had already told us in Brze?? that we were going to face a kind of trial in Lanckoroń and that they would sequester us. And that is exactly how it happened . . .”
“And how are we to understand that?” Father Pikulski asks in an indifferent tone.
Now they start talking amongst themselves, having switched to their language, and those who have been silent until now also suddenly remember some little miracles performed by Jacob Frank. At random they speak about Ivanie, about how he could cure people, about how he was able to respond to the brothers’ and sisters’ deepest secrets, never pronounced out loud. And that when they granted him more power than an ordinary person could possess, he declined it and said he was the most wretched of all the brothers. Jacob Ty?mienicki gets tears in his eyes as he is speaking, which he wipes off with his sleeves, and for a moment even Joseph’s light blue gaze softens.
Here Pikulski realizes that they actually love this Jacob character, that they are joined with this repulsive convert by some mysterious, unquestionable bond, which in him, a monk and a priest, arouses only disgust. And it is usually the case that when bonds are very strong, there is a kind of gap, or crack, that leaves room for rebellion, and suddenly there is something in the air, and he is almost afraid to ask another question—what question can he ask? Then Franciszek Wo?owski, with emotion on his face, tells him about how Jacob explained to them the necessity of converting to Christianity, how he would quote the Holy Scriptures to them at night, finding them the right verses to learn by heart. And then he adds that only a few knew of that, for it was only to the chosen ones that he revealed it. There is a momentary silence. Father Pikulski senses the odor of male sweat, sharp, musky, and he cannot quite say whether it is coming from him, from under his cassock buttoned up to the neck, or from them.
He does know he has caught them. And that they cannot be so stupid they don’t know what they are doing. Before they leave, they say the end of the world is nigh now, and that there will be one Flock and one Shepherd for all the people in the world. That everyone should plan accordingly.
Father Gaudenty Pikulski writes to Primate ?ubieński
That same evening, when everyone is asleep, and the city of Lwów looks like a deserted ruin on the Podolian lowland, Pikulski seals the transcribed conversation and completes his letter. At dawn a special messenger will be dispatched to Warsaw. It is strange—Father Pikulski has no desire whatsoever to sleep, as though he has happened upon an invisible energy source that will nourish him from now on, a little hot point in the very middle of the night.
I send Your Excellency by separate post the report from the interrogation I conducted yesterday with the ContraTalmudists, and I believe Your Excellency will find in it a number of interesting threads that will confirm the doubts I permitted myself to note in my previous letter.
I have attempted to deduce from other sources as accurately as possible whom we mean when we say “ContraTalmudists.” Father Kleczewski and Father Awedyk and I have also attempted to reconcile the information that has come from numerous other interrogations, but at this stage, that appears to be impossible. Most likely the group of Jewish converts is not at its heart a homogenous one, and they all come from different sects, the which is corroborated by the views they hold, which are mutually exclusive.
It is best to ask simple, uneducated people—then one can see the whole system, stripped of sophisticated adornments, and then their recently acquired Christian faith turns out to be just a thin layer, like icing on a cake.
And so some believe that there are three Messiahs: Sabsa Tsivi, Baruchiya, and the third is Frank himself. They also believe that the true Messiah must pass through every religion, which is why Sabsa Tsivi donned a green Muslim turban, and Frank must pass through our holy Christian Church. Others aren’t convinced of that at all. They say, meanwhile, that when Sabsa Tsivi stood before the sultan, it wasn’t really him, but his empty form, and that form accepted Islam, and his conversion doesn’t really mean anything, it was just for appearances’ sake.
It is clear that not everyone who is baptized falls from the same tree, and each of them believes in something different. What gathered them together was the Jewish curse cast on the followers of Sabsa Tsivi in 1756, which excommunicated them completely from the Jewish congregations, and whether they liked it or not, made them all “ContraTalmudists.” Some of them are thus convinced that in order to achieve true salvation, they have to convert to Christianity, while for others baptism is unconnected to salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ, and instead merely a way to get under the wing of a religious institution, as no one can live without belonging to anything. Apparently Frank calls the latter simply converts—and he doesn’t count them among his own. It’s from this mixed multitude that those delegates, numbering thirteen, came primarily, those who appeared at the Lwów disputation.