“So that’s where the young ladies have hidden away . . . ,” he says, and with these words, his smoky silhouette is gone.
Eva, who is sitting in a deep armchair and playing with the tassels of the curtain, can just make out the voice of her father from the living room, who is telling the story in an animated way of how he was released by the Russians. She hears him embellishing these events, perhaps even lying about them. In his version, it all sounds very dramatic, and he comes off as a hero—an attack, shots, the old soldiers dying, blood, monks covered in debris. In reality, it was all much less theatrical. The garrison surrendered. White flags were hung on the walls. Arms were laid down in great piles. It was raining, and the heaps of pistols, sabers, and muskets looked like piles of brushwood. The confederates were placed in four-file columns and led out. The Russians then turned to systematic plundering.
Wo?owski and Jakubowski talked with General Bibikov in Jacob’s name. After a brief deliberation with some officer, he had a proclamation written for Jacob saying he was now free.
As they all traveled to Warsaw in their rented carriage, they were stopped several times by different patrols of surviving confederates and Russians. Each would read the proclamation and suspiciously examine the pretty girl squeezed between the strange men. Once, they were stopped by a ragged band of highwaymen, but Jan Wo?owski fired some shots into the air and they ran off. Around Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, they turned off the road and, having amply paid the nuns in the monastery, deposited Eva with them, not wanting to take any risks with her traveling through that suddenly savage land. She was to wait there for her father to return. Taking his leave, he kissed her on the lips and told her she was the most important thing he had.
Now her father is recounting their efforts to obtain passports, and Eva can hear the voice of her aunt Sheyndel, screeching in disbelief:
“You wanted to go to Turkey?”
Eva can’t make out her father’s reply. And then her aunt again:
“But Turkey is now an enemy of Poland, and of Austria, and of Russia. There is going to be a war.”
Eva falls asleep in her armchair.
Of new life in Brünn and the ticking of clocks
Several days later, they rent a house on the outskirts of Brünn, from Ignacy Pietsch, a councillor. Jacob Frank has to show him their passports and file a statement with the authorities in which he avows that he comes from Smyrna, is traveling from Poland, and that, being now tired of professional activity, he wishes to settle permanently with his daughter in Brünn. And that he has the necessary means to do so, as a result of his aforementioned professional activity.
As they spend weeks unpacking their things, making the beds and arranging their undergarments on the shelves of their new wardrobes, an endless stream of sheets of paper babbles over their heads—letters, reports, denunciations, and notes, reports that meander forth and back again. A certain district head named von Zollern expresses doubts about whether they ought to permit these persons to reside in Brünn; it strikes him as suspect that a neophyte—as he has heard—would be able to afford such a quantity of hired help. Help, it should be noted, made up exclusively of other neophytes. Although His Imperial Majesty has put special emphasis on tolerance, Administrator von Zollern nonetheless fears taking responsibility for this company and would prefer they settle elsewhere, until such a time as they receive a final determination from the Imperial-Royal Provincial Administration.
The response he receives says that, given martial law in Poland, the newcomers’ fate should be determined by military authority, without the approval of which—pursuant to the imperial ordinance of July 26, 1772—persons of Polish origin cannot be permitted to remain in the country. Then a missive arrives from the military commander’s office, stating that the neophytes are in fact subject to civil, not military, jurisdiction, and that the civil authorities are therefore requested to issue a ruling on their eligibility for residency. The civil authorities, meanwhile, turn to the district head with the request that he obtain information regarding the person of Joseph Frank: the aims of his travels, his means, as well as further details of his purported business activity.
In the wake of investigations by official and unofficial intelligence agents, the district head reports:
. . . that this Frank has testified that in the Polish Kingdom, thirty miles from Czernowitz, now containing peoples of the Russian Empire, he owns a quantity of horned cattle, in which he trades extensively; however, on account of present circumstances and of the wartime disruptions in Poland, fearing for his and his family members’ lives, he now intends to dispense with trade and herd. That furthermore he owns property in Smyrna, the income of which he collects every three years, and thus, having no intention of conducting business in Moravian Brünn, he shall live exclusively off the aforementioned sources. Insofar as the aforementioned Frank’s behavior, conduct, character, and social relations are concerned, the most careful, wide-ranging, and painstaking investigation on the part of the District Office has found nothing that might impugn the reputation of this man. Jacob Frank is a person of proper conduct; he lives off his own income and ready monies and is not prone to the incurring of debts.
After a year on the outskirts of town, in the beautiful hills near Vinohrady, with their many gardens, they move to Kleine Neugasse and then to Petersburger Gasse, where, thanks to the assistance of Zalman Dobrushka and others, they are able to take a twelve-year lease on a town councillor’s house at number 4.
The house stands right next to the cathedral, on the hill, and from it you can see all of Brünn. Its courtyard is small and neglected, overgrown with burdock.
Eva gets the nicest, brightest room, with four windows and myriad pictures on the wall that depict little genre scenes with shepherdesses. There is a four-poster bed, quite high and none too comfortable. She hangs her dresses in the wardrobe. Magda Golińska sleeps on the floor each night, until they finally buy her a bed. This isn’t strictly necessary, since whenever it’s cold they sleep cuddled together anyway, but only when Eva’s father isn’t awake to see it, when his snoring carries all across the house.
And yet Jacob complains that he can’t sleep.