And so when Asher sees that furrow on her nose and that strange skin color, he understands her time has come. On Tuesday morning she tells him to help her get dressed—him, not Sofia, the woman they have hired to help around the house. Asher laces up her dress. Gitla sits down at the table but does not eat, and then she goes back to bed, and Asher takes off her dress for her. He has a hard time removing the straps from their clasps—his hands have grown coarse, uncertain. He feels as if he is unpacking a valuable, fragile object, something like a Chinese vase, like a delicate crystal goblet, breakable glass, in order to put it away; he will not use this object again. Gitla, bearing it with patience, also asks in a weak voice to write a short letter to Samuel. She asks for paper, but she doesn’t have the strength to write, so she merely dictates a few words, and then, after her laudanum, she falls asleep, not reacting when Asher interrupts his letter-writing. She lets herself be fed (but only by Asher) soup, broth, but she eats only a few spoonfuls. Asher puts her on the chamber pot, but Gitla produces only a couple of droplets of urine, and Asher thinks it is as though her body is stuck, like a small, complex mechanism. And so it goes until evening. In the night Gitla awakes, asks about various things, such as if they’ve paid the book dealer, and she reminds him to take the flowers out of the window box for winter. She asks him to take back the materials from the seamstress—they will never turn into dresses now. The girls definitely wouldn’t like them—they are such fashionable women—even though the quality of the materials is high. He could give them to Sofia—Sofia would be happy to have them. Then memories come back to her, and Gitla tells of the winter when she came to Asher’s door in Lwów, of sleighs, snow, and the Messiah’s retinue.
On Wednesday morning she gives the impression of feeling better, but at around noon, her eyes glaze over. She fixes them upon some distant point, seemingly beyond the walls of this Viennese household, somewhere in the air, high above all homes. Her hands are restless, wandering over her bedclothes, her fingers making little folds in the damask of her comforter, then trying hard to straighten it back out.
“Fix my pillow,” she says to Adelaida, her dear friend, whom Asher has already informed and who has rushed here from the other end of the city. But the pillow is no help—she is obviously in a great deal of discomfort. Rudolf Ascherbach summons their daughters, but he can’t know when they’ll arrive. One of them lives in Weimar, the other in Wroc?aw.
Gitla’s voice has slowed down and lost all its melody, her tone is flat, metallic, unpleasant, Asher notes. It is hard to understand her. And several times she asks what day it is. Wednesday. Wednesday. Wednesday. Asher answers with a gesture her simple question:
“Am I dying?”
He nods soundlessly, and then adds in a hoarse voice:
“Yes.”
And she, being Gitla, assured, mobilizes within herself, and you might think that she was now taking this whole death business into her own hands, this problematic and irreversible process, as if it were merely the latest in the long list of tasks she has had to perform. When Asher looks at her body, tiny, emaciated, devastated by her illness, tears come to his eyes, and this is the first time he has cried in a very long time, maybe even since that day when the Polish princess was resting in their home, when everyone was trying to collect the vodka spilled from broken barrels with their rags.
At night, Adelaida and Mrs. Bachman, the downstairs neighbor, watch over her. Asher asks his wife:
“Do you want a priest?”
After a moment’s hesitation he adds:
“Or a rabbi?”
She looks at him in surprise, perhaps she doesn’t understand. He had to ask her. But there will be no priest or rabbi. Gitla would be mortally offended if he did that to her. On Thursday at dawn the throes begin, and the women wake Asher, who has been napping with his head on the desk. They light the candles around the bed. Adelaida starts praying, but quietly, as if talking just to herself. Asher sees that Gitla’s fingernails have whitened, and then, irrevocably, they turn blue, and when he takes her hand in his, it is icy. Gitla’s breathing is wheezing and difficult, each breath requiring effort; in an hour, it has turned to a rattle. It is difficult to listen to it, and both Adelaida and Mrs. Bachman start to cry. Then her breathing softens—or maybe their ears get used to it?—and Gitla calms down and floats away. Asher witnesses the moment—it happens quite a bit before her heart stops, and her breathing, Gitla simply slips away somewhere, she is no longer in this whistling body, she is gone, vanished. Something took her, caught her attention. She didn’t even look back.
On Thursday afternoon at twenty past one, Gitla’s heart stops beating. She takes a last deep breath, and that breath stays inside her, filling her breasts.
There is no final exhalation, Asher thinks with mounting rage, no soul that slips out of the body. Quite the contrary, the body sucks the soul inside it, so that it can carry it into the grave. He has seen this so many times, but only now has he fully comprehended it. Just like that. There is no final exhalation. There is no soul.
A Warsaw table for thirty people
News of Jacob Frank’s death makes it to Warsaw late, at the start of January, when the city suddenly empties due to the frost and the whole world seems withdrawn into itself, tied up with rough twine.
At the Wo?owskis’ on Waliców a great table has been set for thirty people, carefully covered in a white cloth and set with porcelain. Next to each plate lies a bread roll. The windows are covered. The Wo?owskis’ children, Aleksander and Marynia, politely greet the guests, from whom they receive little gifts—fruits and sweets. Lovely Marynia, with her curly, pitch-black hair, curtseys and repeats: Thank you, Uncle, thank you, Aunt. Then the children disappear. Arranged at equal intervals, the seven-armed lampstands illuminate the assembled—all dressed like burghers, neatly, in black. Old Franciszek Wo?owski sits at the head of the table, next to him his sister Marianna Lanckorońska and her son, Franciszek the younger, and his wife, Barbara, and then there are the adult children of the other Wo?owski brothers with husbands, wives, and also the Lanckoroński children, the two Jezierzański brothers, Dominik and Ignacy, and Onufry Matuszewski and his wife from the ?ab?cki family, the Majewskis of Lithuania, and Jacob Szymanowski with his new wife from the Rudnicki family. Franciszek helps his father get up, so that he can take a good look at everyone, and then he extends his hands to those standing on either side of him, and everyone else does the same. He thinks his father will intone one of those songs they have to sing quietly, almost whisper, but his father only says:
“Let us thank our almighty God and his glory, the Holy Virgin of Light, that we have survived. Let us thank our God that he has guided us here, and let each of us pray for him as he is able, and with the greatest love.”
Now they pray in silence, their heads bowed, until old Franciszek Wo?owski speaks up again in his still-powerful voice:
“What announces the arrival of the new times? What did Isaiah say?”
Sitting to his left side, the eldest ?ab?cka says mechanically:
“The cessation of the laws of the Torah and the falling of the kingdom into heresy. So it was said in the oldest times, and for this we have been waiting.”
Wo?owski clears his throat and takes a deep breath:
“Our ancestors understood this as best they were able, and they thought that that prophecy had to do with how Christians were running the world. But now we know that it wasn’t about that—all Jews must pass through the kingdom of Edom, in order for the prophecy to be fulfilled! Jacob, our Lord, was the incarnate Jacob who went first to Edom—since the biblical story of Jacob also told, fundamentally, our story. And so says the Zohar: Our father Jacob did not die. His earthly legacy has been taken on by Eva, who is Jacob’s Rachel.”
“In essence Jacob did not die,” they answer him in chorus.
“Amen,” Shlomo Franciszek Wo?owski answers them all, sitting down to the table, tearing his roll in half, and starting to eat.
Of ordinary life
One of the contractors from whom the Wo?owskis buy hops is especially inquisitive. With his hands in his pockets he watches Franciszek the younger weigh the bags and finally asks: