On the second day I performed the baptism of thirteen Jews and Jewesses, while for the tortured child I had an epitupticum prepared, and the sacred body of that innocent martyr I had buried on church grounds with great solemnity.
Ista scienda satis, terrible, yet in all respects absolutely necessary in order to punish the perpetrators of such a shameful act. I trust Your Excellency will find in these clarifications everything he wished to know, and that it will allay the unease expressed in his letter that we have done something here that would go against the Church, Our Holy Mother.
Zelik
The one who escaped simply jumped off the cart that was taking those under arrest, all tied up, to be tortured. It turned out to be easy, since they were not securely tied. The fate of the fourteen prisoners, including two women, was already sealed, since they were considered essentially dead already, and it occurred to no one that one might try to escape. The cart, convoyed by a troop of men on horseback, went into the woods just outside ?ytomierz for a mile. And it was there that Zelik ran. Somehow he worked his hands out of their tether, waited for the right moment, and when they got closest to the thicket, in one jump he was out of the cart and gone into the woods. The other prisoners just sat quietly with their heads bowed, as if celebrating their own impending deaths, and the guards did not immediately realize what had happened.
Zelik’s father, the man who loaned money to So?tyk, shut his eyes and started praying. Zelik, when his feet had touched the undergrowth, looked back and made sure to remember what he saw: an old man hunched over, an old married couple huddled together, their shoulders touching, a young girl, his father’s two neighbors with their white beards contrasting with the black of their overcoats, the black-and-white splotch of a tallit. Only his father gazed back at him, calmly, as if he had known everything all along.
Now Zelik travels. He does so only by night. By day he sleeps; he lies down at dawn, when the birds make the most noise, and he gets up at dusk. He walks and walks, never on a road, but always next to one, in the thicket, trying to bypass open tracts of land. And if he must pass through an exposed area, he tries to make it at least one where crops are growing, for not everything has been harvested just yet. On his journey he scarcely eats—once in a while an apple, a bitter wild pear—but he does not experience hunger. He is still shaking, as much from terror as from anger or outrage; his hands keep shaking, and his stomach convulses, and his intestines seize up, and sometimes he vomits bile, spitting afterward for a long time in disgust. He’s had a couple of very bright nights on account of a full moon that shone, seemingly pleased with itself. Then he saw in the distance a pack of wolves, heard their howling. A herd of roe deer watched him—surprised, they followed him calmly with their eyes. He was also spotted by some old man who was wandering, blind in one eye, shaggy and filthy; the old man was deeply afraid of him, kept crossing himself and vanished fast into some bushes. From afar, Zelik observed a small group of escaped serfs who were trying to cross the river into Turkey—he watched as men on horseback rode up, caught them, and tied them up like cattle.
The next night it begins to rain, and the clouds cover the moon. Zelik manages to cross the river. The whole next day he tries to dry out his clothes. Frozen, weak, he thinks constantly about one thing. How could it be that the gentleman for whom he managed the forest’s accounts—a decent man, as far as he could tell—turned out to be evil? Why would he testify to a lie before the court? How was it possible that he lied under oath, and not about money or business, but on this, when people’s lives were at stake? Zelik cannot understand it; the same images replay over and over before his eyes: arrested, dragged out of their houses along with others, with his old, deaf father, who didn’t understand at first what was happening. And then that horrific pain that governs the body and rules the mind; pain, the emperor of this world. And then the tumbrel, taking them from the cells to the torture chamber, through the town, where people spit on them—spit on the wounded and destroyed.
After a month or so, Zelik makes it to Jassy, where he seeks out some friends of his mother’s. They take him in, knowing what has happened; he spends some time there recovering. He has trouble sleeping, is afraid to shut his eyes; in sleep, when he does finally fall—as if slipping down the clay shores of a morass, charging into water—he sees his father’s body, covered in sludge, unburied, terrible. By night he is gnawed by the fear that death is lying in wait for him in the darkness and might snatch him up again—there, in the darkness, is death’s beat; there are the barracks of its armies. Since he escaped in such a banal way, since it didn’t even notice him gone from the heap of people it already owned, it will have designs on him forever.
That is why Zelik can’t be stopped now. Now he’s heading south, on foot, like a pilgrim. Along the way he knocks on the doors of Jewish households where he spends night after night. Over dinners he tells his story, and people pass him along from home to home, from town to town, like brittle, fragile goods. Soon the news precedes him—they know his story and know where he is going; he is enveloped in a kind of reverence and care. Each helps him as he can. He rests on the Shabbat. One day each week he writes letters—to his family, to the Jewish councils, to the rabbis, to the Council of Four Lands. To Jews and Christians. To the Polish king. To the pope. He goes through many pairs of shoes and uses up about a quart of ink before he makes it to Rome. And by some miracle, as though greater forces really are looking out for him, the day after he arrives in Rome, he finds himself standing face-to-face with the pope.
II.
The Book of
SAND
5.
Of how the world was born of God’s exhaustion
Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick. Then, like an enormous, omnisensitive oyster, his body—so naked and delicate—feels the slightest tremble in the particles of light, scrunches up inside itself, leaving just enough space for the emergence—at once and out of nowhere—of a world. The world comes quick, though at first it resembles mold, delicate and pale, but soon it grows, and individual fibers connect, creating a powerful surrounding tissue. Then it hardens; then it starts to take on colors. This is accompanied by a low, barely audible sound, a gloomy vibration that makes the anxious atoms quake. And it is from this motion that particles come into being, and then grains of sand and drops of water, which divide the world in two.
We find ourselves now on the side of sand.