King Frederick Wilhelm’s ordinance, meanwhile, clearly states:
. . . this man, Jacob Frank, was the leader of a sect, and at the same time a concealed agent of an as-yet unknown force. Recently letters have come out that call for the uniting of the different synagogues under the auspices of his sect. From now on, everything that is linked to secret societies arisen under unknown or unclear circumstances, every political enthusiasm, will require particular attention, considering that secret societies always act under cover of darkness and silence, each of them using Jacobinic propaganda for their terrible criminal intentions . . .
With time, meanwhile—for time has a wonderful ability to efface all uncertain places and patch up all holes—the analysis achieves a certain consistency:
As for the sect of Frankists now called Edom, insofar as it was until recently treated by many of our aristocrats as an exotic curiosity, we ought now, after the frightening and terrible experiences of the Revolution in France and their connections with Jacobinism, to change our perspective and treat mystical rituals as a cover for political and revolutionary intentions.
30.
The death of a Polish princess, step by step
Now things play out of their own accord. It is difficult to fully appreciate this when you are seeing them from the stage on which they are unfolding. Nothing is visible, there are too many sets, and they cover each other up and give the impression of chaos. In the confusion, the fact that Gitla Gertruda Ascherbach dies the same day as the Lord goes unnoticed. This is the fulfilment of a process begun somewhere in Podolia, one cold winter, when her great, tempestuous love, the fruit of which is Samuel, took its unjustly short place, a duration of the blink of an eye amongst all the events on this flat stage.
Yet Yente sees this order, this accord—Yente, whose body is slowly transforming into crystal in a Korolówka cave. The entrance to it is now almost completely overgrown with black lilac, their lush umbels filled with long-ripe berries already fallen to the ground, where those that resisted the birds froze long ago; Yente sees the death of Jacob—but does not stay with it, for she is being drawn to another, in Vienna.
Asher, Rudolf Ascherbach, has been sitting at the bedside of his wife, Gertruda, Gitla, ever since she collapsed. He knew all he needed to some two, three months ago, when he looked at the tumor on her breast—he is, after all, a doctor; he thinks he was even coming to know it back when Gitla was still walking, and in a strange kind of anxiety trying to manage the household.
She was angered, for example, by the onions they ordered for winter in thick linen sacks, which had rotted on the inside and would not last until spring. She said that the laundress was ruining the cuffs of their sleeves and that the ice in the ice well smelled strange, like it had smelled in Busk—of stagnant water. Reading the newspapers, she inveighed against the stupidity of politicians, and her gray head would drown in the smoke of the Turkish pipe she would smoke until the end.
Now she lies on the sofa, mostly—she doesn’t want to go to bed. Asher measures out her ever-larger doses of laudanum and observes everything thoroughly and carefully. Observation, cool and dispassionate, brings him relief and defends against despair. For instance, for several days before her death Gitla’s skin gets thick, stiff, and matte, reflecting the daylight differently. This affects her facial features—they grow sharper. An oblong depression appears at the tip of her nose. Asher sees it on Monday evening, in the candlelight, when Gitla, though she is very weak, sits down to organize her files. Out of the drawers she pulls everything she has, everything she has written, all of her letters to her father in Lwów, written in Hebrew; articles, drawings, designs. She divides it into little piles and puts the files into soft paper folders. She keeps asking Asher for things, but Asher cannot focus. He has seen that furrow in her nose, and terror has gripped him. She knows she is going to die, he thinks in horror, she knows her illness is incurable, and that nothing can be done. But she’s not expecting death—that is something else entirely. She knows it with her reason, she can say it in words, write it, but deep down her body, being the animal it is, has not believed it at all.
In this sense, death doesn’t really exist, thinks Asher—no one has ever described the experience. It’s always someone else’s death, a stranger’s. There is no sense in being scared of it, since what we would be scared of is something other than what it really is. We are afraid of an imagined death (or Death), a thing that is a product of our mind, a tangle of thoughts, tales, rituals. It is the contractual sadness, the agreed-upon caesura, that introduces order into human lives.