Nahman, or Piotr Jakubowski, has been sitting in his tiny room and writing for many days now. It is terribly cold in the apartment he and Wajge?e rented in Solec, which is far away from everything. Wajge?e has not been herself since the death of the child; whole days go by without her saying a word. No one comes to see them, and they don’t go to see anyone. Dusk falls fast, the color of rust. Jakubowski gathers wax and squeezes together new candles from the scraps. He writes out page after page that falls onto the floor.
. . . overflows. Every situation feels endless to me when I try to describe it, and out of helplessness, the pen falls from my hands. The description of a situation never fully exhausts it, for there is always something left undescribed. When I write, every detail sends me back to another, and then the next one again to something else, to some sign or gesture, so that I must always make a decision about what direction to pursue, in telling this story, where to fix my internal gaze, that same powerful sense that is able to summon back past images.
So in writing I stand at every moment at a crossroads, like the idiot Ivan from the fairy tales Jacob used to love telling us so much back in Ivanie. And now those crossroads are before my eyes, those bifurcating paths, of which one, the simplest one, the middle path, is for fools, while the other, to the right, is for the overconfident, and then there is the third path, which is for the brave, the desperadoes, even—that one will be full of traps, potholes, hexes, and calamitous occurrences.
It happens that sometimes I choose that simple road, the one in the middle, and I naively forget about all the complications of what I am describing, trusting in the so-called facts, the events as I would narrate them to myself, as if my eyes were the only ones to perceive them, as if there were no hesitation or uncertainty in existence, and things were as they appeared to be (even as we behold them, as I discussed so feverishly with Moliwda back in Smyrna). Then I write: “Jacob said,” as if it weren’t my ears that heard it, but God’s—that is what Jacob said, and that is a fact. I describe a place as if others would have experienced it as I did, as if that were the way it was. I trust my memory, and in recording what comes out of it, I make that frail instrument into a hammer that is to forge a bell. Going down that path, I believe that what I describe really happened, and that it happened that way once and for all. I even believe that there was never any chance of anything else having happened instead.
The simple middle road is false.
When such doubt comes over me, I choose the road on the right. Now it is the other way around—I am the rudder and the ship, and so I focus on my own experiences, as if the world before my eyes did not exist but was instead formed solely by my senses. And in spite of what Reb Mordke always taught me, I blow on my own fire and thereby ignite the embers of my self, about which I ought to forget, the ashes of which I should rather scatter to the wind—but instead I feed it until it is a gigantic flame. And then what do I have? Me, me, me—a regret-worthy state of accidental imprisonment in a hall of mirrors, the sort the Gypsies sometimes put up in order to charge an admission fee. Then everything is more about me than it is about Jacob, his words and acts are made to pass through the sieve of my tangled vanity.
The road to the right is a pathetic state indeed.
Therefore in desperation but also hope I run toward the left, and in doing so, make the same choice as the idiot Ivan. Just like him, I let myself be guided by chance and the voices of those who would help me. No one who did not do this, who did not trust the voices from the outside, would survive that madness of the left path, instead becoming an instant victim of the chaos. Recognizing myself as a speck being whipped around by greater forces, recognizing myself as a boat on the sea flung around by the waves (as when we sailed to Smyrna with Jacob), abandoning my ideas of my own power and having the trust to surrender to rule, I really become the idiot Ivan. And yet, it was he who conquered all the princesses and all the kingdoms of the world and tricked the most powerful into their downfalls.
And so I, too, surrender to the guidance of my own Hand, my own Head, Voices, the Ghosts of the Dead, God, the Great Virgin, Letters, Sefirot. I go sentence by sentence, blindly down the line, and although I don’t know what awaits me at the end, I patiently stumble forward, not inquiring into the price I will have to pay, and even less so about any reward. My friend and ally is that moment, that urgent hour, the dearest time to me, when suddenly out of nowhere the writing gets easy, and then everything appears to be wonderfully able to be expressed. What a blissful state it is! Then I feel safe, and the whole world becomes a cradle that the Shekhinah has laid me down in, and now the Shekhinah leans in over me like a mother over an infant.
The path to the left is only for those who have shown they deserve it, those who understand what Reb Mordke always said—that the world itself demands to be narrated, and only then does it truly exist, only then can it flourish fully. But also that by telling the story of the world, we are changing the world.
That is why God created the letters of the alphabet, that we might have the opportunity to narrate to him what he created. Reb Mordke always chuckled at this. “God is blind. Did you not know that?” he would say. “He created us that we would be his guides, his five senses.” And he would chuckle long and hard until he began to cough from the smoke.
On February 17, 1760, they summoned me to be interrogated, and I concluded that I would disappear now, as Jacob already had. I could not sleep the whole night and was unable to get dressed for the interrogation, as though now that Jacob had left us, my body clung to the old Jewish clothes. I remember that I went out dressed in the Jewish fashion, wearing my own old clothes, and that it wasn’t until I was out on the street that I turned back, in order to change into the nondescript outfit of black wool we had been wearing here, neither ours nor anyone else’s, and so short that right away my calves began to freeze.
The old idiot Jew dressed up as the little dandy, Wajge?e’s eyes said. Her face was full of skepticism (and maybe contempt), her cheeks red so that up close you could see the tiny networks of veins in them. Her lips, once so full, so joyful, had now set into a grimace of displeasure. Wajge?e knows that everything bad that has happened, happened because of me.