When we arrived in Brünn, the palace on Petersburger Gasse was already almost empty. Jacob summoned for those final months those who remained from our Ivanie havura, the eldest brothers and sisters: Eva Jezierzan′ska, Klara Lanckoron′ska, the Wo?owski brothers, and me. Of the younger brothers, Redecki and Brac?awski. Already present were Old Paw?owski, Yeruhim Dembowski, and a few more, too.
We found him alone in his rooms, for he had had Eva and Anusia Paw?owska moved to another part of the building, which struck me as rather imprudent, given he had been suffering of late from hemorrhage and apoplexy. He was irritated and ordered Redecki to take care of him—he was the spitting image of the late Hershel, who had died in Lublin. Jacob had wasted away. His several weeks’ worth of facial hair was now completely gray, the hair on his head white, albeit thick and wavy. He walked leaning on a cane. It was hard for me to believe I was seeing him like this, and that this had all occurred over the course of a single year, for in my memory he still remained the Jacob of Smyrna, of Ivanie—certain of himself, coarse, speaking in a voice that carried everywhere, moving quickly, even violently.
“What are you looking at me like that for, Jakubowski,” he said by way of greeting. “You have grown old. You look like a scarecrow.”
It was obvious that I, too, had been marked by the passage of time, but I was not feeling it since I suffered from no old-age ailments. Yet unnecessarily he compared me with a scarecrow in front of everyone.
“You, too, Jacob,” I answered, but he did not even respond to my impertinence. Others laughed a little.
Every morning we would go somewhere, into Brünn to see the creditors, or to Vienna, where the sons of Solomon, may he rest in peace, who were quite well connected, would advise us as to how we might pay off those sky-high debts.
When it would start to get dark—and the evenings were long now—we would sit together as we used to in our common chamber; Jacob would take care to pray in the old way—our way—but very briefly, probably only so as not to forget. By day, it was all packing up and selling off what could still be sold. In the evening Jacob would grow eager to tell stories, and it must have cheered him that he was seeing so many of us. Many of those chats I recorded elsewhere, as did my comrades.
“There is this place I am guiding you toward,” he would say, and I could have listened to this tale over and over, endlessly, for it soothed me greatly, and if I were to wish for any story on my deathbed, it would be this one, “and although now you are impoverished, you would not wish for any treasures of the world, if you were to know this place. This is the place of that Great Brother, the Good God, who is favorable to man and bestows upon him fraternal feeling, and who resembles me. And he has around him a retinue, very much like what we have here—with twelve brothers and fourteen sisters, and the sisters are bedmates to the brothers, as it is with us. All of those sisters are queens, for there it is the women who rule, not the men. And it may seem strange to you, but the names of those brothers and sisters are exactly the same as yours in Hebrew. And their figures are similar to yours, just young—just as you were, in Ivanie. And it is to them that we are heading. When we finally meet them, then you will marry those sisters and those brothers.”
I knew this tale, and they knew it, too. We always listened to it with emotion, but this time, in this empty home, I had the impression that they were all turning a deaf ear to it. As if it no longer meant what it always had meant, but was simply a lovely parable.
It was clear to all of us that now the most important person to Jacob was Moshe Dobrushka, who was here known as Thomas Sch?nfeld. Jacob spent days on end waiting for his arrival from Vienna, asking every day if there was a letter from him. Yet the only person who would visit him was the treasurer Wessel, a friend of Dobrushka’s, with whom he had some dealings or other, though nothing was communicated to us. It fell to me, meanwhile, to write the letters, mostly letters to creditors, soothing, polite, but also letters to the brothers in Altona and Prossnitz.
Jacob even started to talk about returning to Poland, and to ask me in turn all kinds of questions about Warsaw, what things were like there now, and I felt that he was homesick for it, or that he was too weak now to start another new life in another foreign land. In the evenings, he grew nostalgic, and so I took up pen and paper and wrote all his memories down, and when my hand would start to hurt, Anusia Paw?owska would take over, and then Antoni Czerniawski would correct and copy it out the following day.
“Look,” he told us, “when I was in Poland, it was a peaceful and prosperous land. As soon as I was thrown in prison, the king passed away, and troubles began to plague that country. And when I left Poland for good, the Commonwealth was torn asunder.”
It was hard to deny him this.
He also said that the reason he maintained his Turkish style of dress was that according to Polish legend, one day a man born of a foreign mother would arrive, and he would repair the country, and liberate it from every oppression.
He would constantly warn us not to return to the old Jewish faith, but that winter on the first night of Hanukkah he suddenly lit the first candle and ordered Jewish dishes be prepared, and everyone ate them with great gusto. And then we sang in the old language that old song that Rebbe Issachar had taught us long ago:
What is man? A spark.
What is human life? A moment.
What is the future now?
A spark. And what the crazed course of time? A moment.
Where does man come from?
A spark. And what is death? A moment.
Who was He while he contained the world?
A spark. And what will he be once he swallows up the world again?
A moment.
Moliwda in search of his life’s center