She writes on a scrap of paper: “If you are truly merciful, bring them back to life.” She sprinkles it with sand and waits for the ink to dry, then she rolls the paper up tight. She keeps this little roll in her hands as she enters the chapel. It is cold, and there are not many pilgrims, so she walks down the middle, going up as close as she is allowed, as close as the barriers will permit her. To her left, a legless soldier, with disheveled hair that looks like a hank of hemp, whimpers. He can’t even kneel. His uniform is ruined, its buttons long since replaced, the aiguillettes torn off, no doubt to be used for something else. Behind him is an elderly woman wrapped in headscarves, with a little girl whose face is misshapen by a purple lump. One of her eyes is almost completely obscured under that proud flesh. Dru?backa kneels nearby and prays to the covered picture.
She has had all of her jewelry melted down and fashioned into a big heart, not knowing how else to express her pain. She has a hole in her chest, and she must be mindful of it; it hurts and oppresses her. And so she had cast a prosthesis out of gold, a crutch for the heart. Now she makes a votive offering of it in the monastery, and the monks hang it alongside the other hearts. She doesn’t know why, but the sight of the heart joined with the other hearts, big and small, brings Dru?backa the greatest relief, greater than prayer and greater than gazing into the black, impenetrable face of the Madonna. There is so much pain on view here, Dru?backa’s own pain just a drop in the sea of tears that have been shed in this place. Every human tear enters a stream that flows into a little river, and then the river joins a bigger river, and so on, until in the end, in the great current of an enormous river, it washes into the sea and dissolves on the horizon. In these hearts hung up around the Madonna, Dru?backa sees mothers who have lost, or are losing, or will lose their children and grandchildren. And in some sense, life is this constant loss. Improving one’s station, getting richer, is the greatest illusion. In reality, we are richest at the moment of our birth; after that, we begin to lose everything. That is what the Madonna represents: the initial whole, the divine unity of us, the world and God, is something that must be lost. What remains in its wake is just a flat picture, a dark patch of a face, an apparition, an illusion. The symbol of life is after all the cross, suffering—nothing more. This is how she explains it to herself.
At night, in a pilgrims’ home where she has rented a modest room, she cannot sleep—she hasn’t slept in two months, only dozing off for brief periods. In one of those, she dreams of her mother, which is odd, because she hasn’t dreamed of her mother in twenty years. For this reason, Dru?backa understands this dream as a harbinger of her own death. She is sitting on her mother’s lap, she can’t see her face. She sees only the complicated pattern on her dress, a sort of labyrinth.
When the next morning, still before dawn, she returns to the church, her gaze is drawn by the tall, well-built man in a Turkish outfit, dark, with a caftan buttoned up to the neck, his head bare. He has a thick black mustache, and long hair flecked with gray. At first he prays feverishly, kneeling—his lips move soundlessly, and his lowered eyelids, with their long lashes, tremble; then he lies down with his arms outspread on the cold floor, in the very center of the church, right in front of the barrier that protects the holy picture.
Dru?backa finds a place for herself in the nave, near the wall, and kneels with difficulty, the pain running from her knees all through her little old body. In the nearly empty church, every shuffle, every breath is amplified into a hum or a whistle that rebounds off the vault until it is drowned out by one of the songs intoned at irregular intervals by the monks:
Ave regina coelorum,
Ave Domina Angelorum:
Salve radix, salve porta,
Ex qua Mundo lux est orta.
Dru?backa tries to find some scratches in the wall, some chinks between the marble slabs with which the walls are lined, where she might be able to insert her roll of paper. For how would her missive make it to God if not through the stone lips of the temple? The marble is smooth, and its joints are mercilessly meticulous. In the end, she is able to press the scrap of paper into a shallow crack, but she knows it won’t last long there. No doubt it will fall out soon, and crowds of pilgrims will trample it.
That same day, in the afternoon, she meets again that tall man with the pockmarked face. Now she knows who he is. She grabs hold of his sleeve, and he looks at her in surprise, his gaze soft and gentle.
“Are you the imprisoned Jewish prophet?” she asks without preamble, looking up at him; she reaches barely to his chest.
He understands, and he nods. His face doesn’t change; it is gloomy and ugly.
“You have worked miracles, you have healed, that is what I heard.”
Jacob does not so much as blink an eye.
“My daughter died, as did six of my grandchildren.” Dru?backa spreads out her fingers before him and counts: one, two, three, four, five, six . . . “Have you heard of bringing the dead back to life? Some people seem to be able to do it. Prophets know the way. Have you ever managed to do it, even with just an old dog?”
25.
Yente sleeping under stork wings
Pesel, who has already been baptized, has decided to marry a cousin with the same last name, so now her name is Marianna Paw?owska. The wedding takes place in Warsaw, in the autumn of 1760, during the sad time when the Lord is imprisoned in Cz?stochowa and when the whole machna seems to be sort of pressed down to the ground, uncertain and fearful. And yet her father, Israel, now Pawe?, also Paw?owski, as the whole family took the same name, believes that they have to go on living and marrying and bearing children. That cannot be avoided. Life is a force, like a flood, like a powerful current of water—you cannot oppose it. That is what he says as he sets up, with his limited means, his leather goods workshop, where he intends to sew beautiful wallets and belts from Turkish leather.
A modest wedding takes place early one morning, in a church in Leszno. The priest took a long time to explain to them how everything would happen, but even so, Pesel and her fiancé, along with her mother, Sobla (now Helena), her father, Pawe? Paw?owski, and all the witnesses and guests feel insecure, as if they haven’t quite mastered the dance steps they are about to perform.