“Where’d you come by all that Turkish cooking?” asks the old soldier indifferently, and when he learns that Kazimierz was brought up on Wallachian and Turkish cuisine, the whole garrison knows by evening. At night, those who are not standing guard go down into town and warm themselves up with the cheapest, most watered-down beer, and shoot the breeze. Some of them have family here, but those you can count on one hand. The rest are lone wolves, old men worn out in battle, with their miserable army pensions, supported by the Pauline Fathers. When a noble and his entourage come through on pilgrimage, they are not ashamed to put one hand out for alms as they hold their weapon in the other.
At Easter, after many petitions from Jacob, the prisoner is granted permission to walk out onto the ramparts once a week. From then on, all the old soldiers await his Sunday promenade. Would you look at that, he’s up there now. The Jewish prophet. His dark figure, tall but stooped, walks along the wall, there and back, turning with a kind of violence and racing in the other direction, to then rebound off some invisible wall and start back again, like a pendulum. You could set the clocks by him. Roch will do exactly that—he will adjust the watch he received from the convert. It is the most valuable thing he has ever owned in his life, and he regrets that this has happened to him only now. If he had had it twenty years ago . . . He pictures himself in his parade uniform, walking into an inn teeming with comrades in arms. At least he can be assured that, thanks to this watch, he will have a decent funeral, with a wooden casket and a grand salvo.
He observes the prisoner calmly, without sympathy, accustomed as he is to unexpected twists of fate. To Roch’s mind, this convert prophet’s is a pretty decent fate. His followers provide their master with good food and smuggle money into the monastery, even though it is strictly prohibited. Many things are prohibited in the monastery, and yet they have everything here, whether it’s Wallachian or Magyar wine or even vodka, and everyone closes their eyes to tobacco. The bans have little effect. They only work at the start, but then human nature with its long finger begins to poke a hole in them, first a little one and then, when it encounters no resistance, a larger and larger one. Until finally the hole is bigger than what isn’t the hole. That’s how it goes with any interdiction.
The prior, for example, has banned the old soldiers on numerous occasions from begging for alms at the entrance to the church. And they really did quit for a while, but then, after a few days—though there wasn’t any begging—one hand did extend for just a little while as the pilgrims passed by. Soon others joined it, then more and more, until, after another few days, a muttering began:
“Spare a little change.”
The flagellants
Over the course of several days, warmth returns, and the beggars who flock to the monastery from all over cluster around the gate. Some of them hop on one leg, unpleasantly waving the stump of the other like an enormous, shameful member. Others point out to the pilgrims the empty sockets left when the Cossacks gouged out their eyes. Along with this they sing long, melancholy songs, the words of which have been turned to felt from endless rolling and pressing in toothless mouths, becoming unrecognizable. The men’s hair is matted—it hasn’t been cut in a long time—their clothing is in tatters, and their feet are wrapped in gray rags riddled with holes. They extend their bony hands for alms; you would need to have your pockets full of coins in order to give something to everyone here.
Jacob is sitting with his face to the sun, right by the window. The patch of light is exactly the size to cover it, like a gleaming handkerchief. On the rampart opposite sits Roch, also basking in the early springtime sun; he has more of it than the prisoner does. He has slipped off his uncomfortable boots and undone his wrappings—now his bare white feet with their black toenails point straight up into the clear blue sky. He takes out some tobacco and carefully, slowly, puts it in his pipe.
“Hey, you, Jewish prophet, you still in there?” he says in the direction of the window.
Jacob, surprised, opens his eyes. He smiles a friendly smile.
“They say you’re some kind of heretic, not like Luther, but like a Jewish Luther, and that we ought to keep our distance.”
Jacob doesn’t understand him. He watches the man light his pipe, and his stomach hurts to look—he would love to smoke, but he doesn’t have any tobacco. Roch must feel him looking, because he holds the pipe out toward him, but of course he can’t actually pass it to him, they’re separated by several meters.
“Everybody wants to smoke,” he mutters to himself.
A while later, he brings Jacob a little bundle, and in it are tobacco and a pipe, a simple peasant’s pipe. He sets it down on the stone step and limps off.
All through Lent the penitents come every Friday. They come from town in a procession. At the front, one of them carries a great cross with the figure of the Crucified, so realistically done that your blood runs cold just looking at it. They are dressed in sacks of thick-woven pink linen, with an opening cut into the backs so that they can whip themselves better. This opening can be covered with a flap. On their heads are smaller sacks with openings for their ears and eyes, which makes them look like animals or spirits. When the flagellants at the head and tail of the procession beat their staffs, the others lie down on the ground, pray, and then raise the flaps on their backs and begin to whip themselves. Some do this with leather whips, others with wire ones that have sharp metal spikes on the tips to better tear apart the body. Often when a spike catches the skin, a spray of blood hits onlookers.
It isn’t until Good Friday that things really get going in the monastery. From dawn, when the gates are opened, there is an undulating flow of gray-brown crowds, as if the earth—itself just coming back to its senses, gray and still partly frozen—has sent up these people like so many halfrotten tubers. It is mostly peasants in thick felt trousers and sukmanas of indeterminate color, their hair disheveled, their wives in thick wrinkled trousers and fustian kerchiefs, aprons tied around their middles. No doubt they have ceremonial clothing at home, but on Good Friday you have to bring all the worthlessness and ugliness of the world out into the light of day. There is so much of it that the ordinary human heart would be unable to bear it without the help of that body on the cross, which is willing to take upon itself all the pain of Creation.
As proof that this is a special time, among the crowd there are those who are possessed, who cry out in a terrifying voice, and madmen who speak many languages at once so that you cannot understand them. There are exorcists as well, ex-priests in tattered cassocks, their bags filled with relics they lay on the heads of the possessed to drive out the demons.