Jacob listens, his face betraying nothing. Since his attack, he blinks with just one eye. The other one, the one that never blinks, now waters. His healthy eye, meanwhile, has taken on a kind of metallic sheen.
“He can’t go back to Vienna any longer, that is why he’s here,” adds Hirschfeld.
Then Czerniawski discovers a truly shameful thing: that Thomas has sent around in his own name letters to the kahalim of true believers, primarily to Germany and Moravia, claiming to be Jacob’s right hand, and with the very distinct suggestion—though intricately involuted—that after the Lord’s death, he, Thomas von Sch?nfeld, will be appointed his successor. Czerniawski shows these letters to the Lord, who instantly summons Thomas von Sch?nfeld.
Now Jacob leans over him, his face drawn. He still sways on his feet, but he slowly recovers his equilibrium and then—Jezierzańska sees it well, because she’s standing closest, but there are other witnesses there, too—with all his strength, Jacob strikes Thomas in the face. Thomas topples over, and blood splotches appear instantly on his white lace jabot. He tries to get up, hides behind a chair, but Jacob’s strong bony hand grabs him by the arm and pulls him in closer. Then there is a second slap, and Thomas, struck once more with full force in the face, falls again, astonished by the blood on his lips. He does not defend himself, shocked that this halfparalyzed old man has so much strength. Jacob’s hand lifts him up off the floor by the hair, aims the next blow. Thomas starts to whimper:
“Please don’t hit me!”
But he takes it in the face again, and this Jezierzańska cannot countenance any longer, and she grabs Jacob by the hands, putting herself between the men. She tries to catch Jacob’s eye, but he escapes her. His eyes are bloodshot, his jaw hangs loose, he’s drooling and looks as if he’s drunk.
Thomas lies on the floor, crying like a little child, his blood mixing with his spit and snot, he covers his head and cries into the floor:
“You don’t have the strength anymore. You’ve changed. Nobody believes you any longer, nobody will follow you. You will die soon.”
“Quiet!” a horrified Jakubowski shouts at him. “Quiet!”
“From a persecuted victim you’ve come to be a tyrant, a rotten baron. You have become just like all those you used to stand against. In the place of that law that you rejected, you’ve introduced your own system that is even worse. You are pathetic, like a character in a comedy . . .”
“Lock him up,” Jacob says in a hoarse voice.
Who the Lord is when he is no longer who he is
From his little pigeonhole upstairs, Nahman Jakubowski comes down—his room is now next door to the room that’s been assigned his brother, Pawe? Paw?owski, who has also been residing here since the summer. Jakubowski takes some time to descend; the stone staircase is tightly coiled. He holds on to the iron railing and treads very carefully. Every few steps he pauses, and then he mutters something to himself in a language Antoni Czerniawski doesn’t understand. He is waiting for Jakubowski at the bottom. He wonders how old this skinny little elder with his arthritic hands might be. This brother Jakubowski, whom the Lord, when they were amongst the inner circle, still called “Nahman.” And now that is often how Czerniawski thinks of him—as Nahman.
“Everything happens according to how it is supposed to happen,” Nahman Jakubowski informs Czerniawski. Czerniawski reaches out and helps him get down the final few steps. “First it fell to us to change our names, a process known as shinui haShem, something you younger people don’t want to so much as hear about now. Then it fell to us to change location, when we set out from Poland on our way to Brünn, and here—shinui haMakom—and now it’s shinui Ma’ase that is happening: changing the Deed. The Lord has taken illness upon himself in order to spare us. He has taken upon himself all the suffering of the world, as it was said in Isaiah.”
“Amen,” Czerniawski feels like saying in response, although he doesn’t. The old man has reached the bottom of the stairs now and, briskly, all of a sudden, he has set off down the hall.
“I need to have a visit with him,” he says.
All this talk of suffering and salvation works on certain people, but Czerniawski isn’t one of them. He thinks concretely, does not believe in all that Kabbalah—doesn’t understand it. But he does believe that God is watching over them, and that the matters he cannot understand ought better to be left to the specialists. He must rather concentrate on the fact that at news of the Lord’s illness large numbers of his followers have started coming into Offenbach, and they must be lodged in town and received at the castle. Audiences are only once a day, in the evening, and they are brief. People come with their children to be blessed. The Lord lays his hands on pregnant women’s bellies, and on sick people’s heads. Ah, Czerniawski remembers, he needs to order from the printers the leaflets with the drawing of the Sefirot that are distributed among the novices. Czerniawski leaves Jakubowski, pushing on ahead. Let someone else take care of the old man! He turns toward the chancellery, where he sees two youths, no doubt from Moravia, ready to enter the ranks of the disciples and to supply the court with a fair sum of money that their families have provided them. When he goes in, his two secretaries—Zaleski and Czyński—rise respectfully. Both of Zaleski’s parents died here, in Offenbach, having come here with him on the obligatory pilgrimage to see the Lord. After their death, he turned inward, and he really does not have any reason to go back to Warsaw now. The company has dealt with all matters pertaining to his inheritance, selling off the little shop the Zaleskis had back in the capital, transferring the money here. Not many of their residents are like Zaleski. They tend to be older people, the elder brothers—both the Matuszewskis with their blind daughter who plays the clavichord so well, which has allowed her to become the music teacher of the court, or Pawe? Paw?owski, Jakubowski’s brother, until recently an envoy of the Lord. There is Jezierzańska, a widow, and the two sons of the famous Elisha Shorr. There is Wolf and his wife, whom everyone calls the Wilkowskis (from the Polish word for “wolf”), and Jan the Cossack, whose recent widowing temporarily extinguished his infectious sense of humor, but who now seems to be returning to his former self—lately he was even seen courting some young woman. Joseph Piotrowski and the Lord’s trusted Yeruhim Dembowski, whom the Lord refers to as “J?dru?,” tenderly now, are also there. And of course among the elders you would have to include Franciszek Szymanowski, divorced multiple times, second-in-command of the Lord’s guard to Lubomirski, who has turned up rarely, irregularly, ever since he took up residence in town.