I went to the interrogation first. I had to present that truth to our persecutors, knowing well what would happen. The Messiah must be imprisoned and persecuted. That is what was said, and that is what must happen. The Messiah must fall down into the lowest realm, the lowest of all possible realms.
They started with Smyrna. I was not forthcoming, they had to drag things out of me, but that, too, was a part of my plan. I played the role of the kind of person who does not like to brag, and they took me for a stupid oaf. But I told the truth. I would not have been able to lie about such things. About others—of course; lying is useful in business, but here I could not lie. I tried to say as little as I could about it, but just enough to make an impression on them. I also didn’t say too much, in order to protect us. I told them about the ruah haKodesh, the descent of the Holy Spirit, about the light we all saw over Jacob’s head, the prophecy of death, the halo, the Antichrist he met in Salonika, the impending end of the world. They were polite and even stopped asking questions. I spoke factually and concretely, and even when it came to corporeal matters, I did not hesitate to reveal anything. All you could hear was my voice and the scraping of pens.
When I had finished and was leaving the room, I passed Shlomo in the doorway. We glanced at each other. I felt great relief, and at the same time, such enormous sadness that I sat down right there on the street, against the wall, and began to weep. I only came to my senses when some passerby threw a coin at me; it landed in my lap.
Hana, consider in your heart
Hana is constantly having someone go and check whether the post hasn’t come.
It hasn’t.
No help comes from any direction, and trying to resist Her Ladyship no longer makes sense. Mrs. Kossakowska has already arranged a dress for her, and shoes, just as she has for little Avacha. The baptism is slated for February 15.
Hana wrote to her father in Giurgiu, as soon as they had word of Jacob’s imprisonment. She wrote it straight: the episcopal court, on the basis of interrogating her husband and—perhaps even more so—his followers, had found Jacob guilty of proclaiming himself the Messiah, and the highest-ranking church official in Poland, that is, the primate, sentenced him to life imprisonment in the Cz?stochowa fortress, a sentence no one will be able to appeal.
All this seems mad to me. Since if he was such a heretic as they make him out to be, then why would they put him in the holiest sanctuary they have? Right there with their greatest teraphim? That I cannot and do not want to understand. Father, what am I to do?
She did get an answer to that two weeks later—in other words, as soon as possible. That meant letters could reach her, just not from Jacob. She read it when she finally found herself alone, facing the wall, crying. What it said was:
Hana, consider in your heart what you can and cannot do, for you will be putting yourself and your children at risk. Be—as I have tried to teach you—like the smartest animal that sees what others do not see and hears what others do not hear. Since you were a child, everyone has always marveled at your careful consideration.
Her father goes on to assure her that they will receive her with open arms at any time.
But what sticks in Hana’s mind is that first sentence of the letter: “Hana, consider in your heart.”
She feels those words like they’re a physical weight, somewhere just beneath her breasts, on the left side.
Hana is twenty-two years old, and she has two children, and she has wilted and become very thin. She is skin and bones now. She tries to negotiate, through a translator, with Kossakowska, but it would appear that that window has closed. Supposedly free, she feels as if she is in prison. She looks through the window at the grayish-white landscape, the bare orchard, pathetic and barren, and she understands that even if she were to get out of here, it wouldn’t matter, because this orchard and these fields, and this scant network of roads, the fords in the rivers and even the sky and the earth itself will be her prison. It is a good thing that Wittel Matuszewska and Pesel Paw?owska are there with her; Kossakowska treats the former as her secretary and the latter as a maid, chiding her exactly as she does her employees.
From early in the morning on February 19, Hana has been waiting in her ceremonial garments as if she was about to be thrown to the dragon to be devoured. It is a Tuesday, an ordinary day, cold and gloomy. The staff is bustling around the house, the girls lighting the tiled stoves, giggling and calling out. The cold is moist and sticky and stinks of ash. Avacha cries, seems to have a fever, senses her mother’s anxiety, and follows her with her eyes above the little wooden doll she dresses and undresses. The one she got for Christmas is seated on her bed; Avacha hardly ever touches her.
Hana looks out the window, Kossakowska’s carriage is already pulling up, cream-colored, with the Potocki coat of arms on the door, the one Avacha likes so much she would like to ride in it everywhere they go. Hana looks away from it. She massages her arms, because the beautiful dress she received from Kossakowska for her baptism has sleeves of thin gauze. She looks through her chest for a warm Turkish scarf in dark red and wraps herself in it. The scarf smells of their home in Giurgiu—of dry, sun-cracked wood and raisins. Tears come to her eyes, and Hana abruptly turns away from her daughter so she won’t know her mother’s crying. Any minute now, the girls will come in with her coat, and she will have to go down with them. So she tries to pray quickly: Dio mio Baruchiah, Our Lord, Luminous Virgin—she doesn’t even know what she’s supposed to say in a prayer like that. What had her father told her to do? She brings back the incomprehensible words, one by one. Her heart starts beating quickly, and she knows that she has to do something fast.
When the door opens, Hana faints clean to the floor, and the blood pours from her nose. The girls run up to her, letting out cries, to try to revive her.
And so her prayer has been heard. The baptism must be postponed.
V.
The Book of
METAL AND SULFUR
24.
The messianic machine, how it works