The Books of Jacob

She obediently draws the thick fabric so that it gets almost dark, and now they are hidden, as if in a box. Jacob says in a plaintive voice:

“My thoughts are not your thoughts. I am so lonely. You may be lovely, good people, but you are also simpletons, without any understanding. You need to be treated like children. I talk to you about simple things in simple analogies. Stupidity can conceal great wisdom. You know that, because you are wise,” says Jacob, and lays his head on her lap. Eva Jezierzańska carefully slides his ever-present hat off his head and plunges her fingers into the Lord’s greasy silver locks.

Jacob is old. Eva Jezierzańska, who bathes him every week, knows his body well. The skin on it has dried out and gotten very thin, but also smooth as parchment; even the pockmarks on his face have leveled out, or maybe they’re still lurking, under his deep wrinkles. Eva knows that people can be divided into those who have horizontal wrinkles on their foreheads and those who have vertical ones. The former are cheerful and friendly—that’s how she thinks of them, anyway, and she herself is like this—but they rarely get what they want in life. The others, those with the furrows over their noses, are angry and impetuous, but they usually do succeed in attaining their goals. Jacob belongs to that second group. In his youth, those angry wrinkles were more visible, but now they, too, have receded; perhaps his aim has already been reached, and they no longer have any reason to be there. Only their shadow has remained on his forehead, rinsed away daily by the sun’s rays.

Jacob’s skin is tanned; the hair on his chest is gray and thinner—he used to have thick hair there, and it used to be black. The same is true of his legs—now they’re almost bare. Even Jacob’s penis has changed. Jezierzańska would know, as she used to have dealings with it often, hosting it inside her. But it has been a long time since she saw it take its fighting stance. Now it looks more like a formless codpiece flopping between his legs, the effect exaggerated by the hernia. Little networks of varicose veins—delicate filigrees—in every possible color have appeared on his calves and thighs, seemingly in all the colors there are. Jacob has gotten skinny lately, though his stomach is bloated from his poor digestion.

She turns her head tactfully to the window as she gently washes his genitals with a sponge. She has to be careful with the water—God forbid it is too cold or too hot, for then Jacob shrieks as if she were murdering him. Although of course she could never have harmed him in any way. This is the most precious human body that she knows.

She was the one who thought of sending out to the country, to the peasants, for the special shears they use to trim the split hooves of farm animals, which are the only things that work to cut Jacob’s toenails.

“You go, Eva, to the younger women, pick three for me, you know the kind I like, tell them to ready a white costume and to keep it at hand. I’ll be calling them soon.”

Eva Jezierzańska sighs theatrically and says in mock indignation:

“Illness and old age just don’t exist as far as you’re concerned, Jacob. You ought to be ashamed.”

This evidently flatters him, he smiles a little to himself and puts his arms around her thickset waist.





How Zwierzchowska the She-Wolf maintains order in the castle


She has to start everything from scratch. Zwierzchowska is the exhausted keeper of this whole court, all the keys hooked to her belt. It took her a long time to learn them all.

Wherever she finds herself, Zwierzchowska always sets up and takes charge of the home. She is like a she-wolf caring for her pack—feeding them, protecting them. She knows how to economize, knows how to run a household—she learned that back in Ivanie, and kept on learning it wherever they went, in places like Wojs?awice, Koby?ka, Zamo??, the smaller manor houses and villages where they were allotted some little place to live. She knows she is partly to blame for a crime, that fourteen people died because of her; she has them on her conscience, and even now, all these years later, she remembers that scene so vividly, when she pretended to be the wife of the Wojs?awice rabbi Zyskiel. She wasn’t good at it—anyone ought to have been able to see right through her act, in fact. She justified it to herself as necessary, they were at war, and in war the rules are different from what they are in peacetime. Her husband tells her all the time that she can’t blame herself; they all took part in it. They lashed out like rabid animals. It seems as though no one cares anymore about what happened the way she does. Jacob promised her that when the last days came and they went to the Virgin, he would hold her hand. That promise has helped her a great deal. She hopes no curse has been cast upon her, and that no curse is lying in wait. After all, she was only protecting her pack.

Now, when her swollen legs are bothering her, she asks her very young daughter-in-law, Eleonora, née Jezierzańska, to help her. Zwierzchowska, who moves rather sluggishly these days, often leans on Eleonora, and then people say of them that they look like Naomi and Ruth.

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