The Books of Jacob

We see, through Yente’s eyes, a low horizon and an enormous sky, gold and orange. Great bulbous cumulus clouds flow westward, unaware that soon they’ll drop into the abyss. The desert is red, and even the most diminutive pebbles cast long and desperate shadows, with which they try to dig into solid matter and cling on.

Horse and donkey hooves barely leave traces, gliding over the stones, kicking up just a little dust that immediately settles, covering whatever little furrows arise. The animals go slowly, heads bowed, exhausted from long days of journeying, as if in a trance. Their backs have grown accustomed to the weights placed on them every morning, after an overnight stop. Only the donkeys raise a ruckus, shattering the dawn with their squall of suffering and unbearable confusion, waking people up. But now even those born rebels have gone silent, hoping to stop for the night somewhere soon.

People move among them, slender against the backdrop of the animals’ shapes, which are rounded, deformed by their loads. Like clock hands that have freed themselves from faces, independently now they mark a stray, chaotic time no clockmaker will ever be able to quell. Their shadows, long and sharp, jab the desert, vex the falling night.

Many of them are dressed in long, light-colored coats, wearing turbans on their heads that were once green, but which the sun has faded. Others are hidden under the big brims of their hats; their countenances differ little from the shadows cast by stones.

This is a caravan that set out a few days ago from Smyrna, heading north through Constantinople, and then through Bucharest. Along the way, it will splinter, and others will join in. Some of the merchants will break off in just a few days, in Stamboul; they will be traveling through Salonika and Sofia to Greece and Macedonia, while others will continue all the way to Bucharest, some even to the very end, along the Prut to the Polish border, which they’ll cross, besting the shallow Dniester.

Every time this caravan stops for the night, they must remove the goods they are transporting from the backs of the animals and check those that lie carefully packed inside carts. Some of them are fragile, like the batch of chibouks, long-stemmed Turkish pipes, each individually wrapped in tow and also tightly bound in linen. There is also some Turkish weaponry and a parade harness; there are ornate woven carpets and the woven belts with which the noblemen of Poland tie their long ?upans.

Then there are dried fruits and other delicacies in wooden boxes, protected from the sun, assorted spices, and even lemons and oranges, packed unripe so that they might last the journey.

There is an Armenian among them, a certain Jakubowicz, who joined the caravan at the last minute, transporting luxury goods in a separate carriage: the finest carpets, Turkish kilims. Now he frets over these wares, flies into a rage at the drop of a hat. He had been on the verge of getting on a ship to take everything from Smyrna to Salonika in just two days, but sea trade is dangerous now—one could be taken into slavery, the stories go around whenever the caravan stops to rest around a fire.

Nahman Samuel ben Levi of Busk has just sat down with a slender box placed on his knees. Nahman is transporting tobacco tightly packed in hard packets. Not a lot of it, but he’s still expecting to make a sizable profit, since he bought the tobacco cheap, and it’s of good quality. He also has on him, in specially sewn pockets, other small but valuable things: beautiful stones, mostly turquoise, as well as several sticks of highly compressed resin that resembles tar. This can be added to a pipe and smoked—Mordechai’s favorite.

They spent many days readying the caravan, while at the same time going around to all the different offices to get, for a sizable baksheesh, a firman—an order to the Turkish authorities to allow the caravan to pass.

That’s why Nahman is so tired, and why it’s so hard for him to shake off his exhaustion. The thing that helps him most is the sight of the stony desert. Now he goes out beyond the camp and sits there, at some remove from all the chatter. The sun has gotten so low that the long dark shadows cast ahead by the stones look like earthly comets, the opposites of those on high, these made of shade instead of light. Nahman, who sees signs wherever he looks, wonders what kind of future is portended by these lowly bodies, what fortune they are trying to tell. And as the desert is the only place on earth where time spins around, loops back then leaps ahead like some fat locust, select pairs of eyes might be able to get a glimpse into the future here. This is in fact how Yente sees Nahman now, at a time when he has aged, is frail and hobbled. He sits before a little window that doesn’t let in much light, as cold flows from the thick stone walls. The hand that holds his pen visibly trembles. In the little hourglass that stands next to his inkwell, the last few grains of sand trickle down: his end is near now, but Nahman is still writing.

The truth is, he can’t stop himself. It’s like an itch that goes away only when he begins to scratch out the chaos of his thoughts into sentences. The pen’s noise soothes him. The trace it leaves on a piece of paper brings him pleasure, like eating nothing but sweet dates, like holding lokum on his tongue. And soon everything falls into place. Because Nahman has always had the sense that he’s a part of something bigger, something unprecedented and unique. That not only has nothing like this ever happened before, but also that it never will—never can—again. And that he is the one who must write it all down for all those who’ve not been born yet, because they’re going to want to know.

He always has his writing gear on hand: that shallow wooden case, rather ordinary to look at, but it holds quality paper, a bottle of ink, a box of sand with a lid, a supply of quills, and a knife to sharpen them. Nahman doesn’t need much: he sits on the ground, opens up his case to turn it into a low Turkish table, and just like that he’s ready to start writing.

Ever since he started keeping company with Jacob, however, he has met with displeased, reproachful looks. Jacob doesn’t like the scratching of the pen. Once he glanced over Nahman’s shoulder. It’s a good thing Nahman happened to be just balancing accounts at the time, since Jacob has insisted that his words not be recorded. Nahman had to assure him he would not do that. Yet the issue still weighs on him. Why not?

“I don’t get it,” he said to Jacob once. “Don’t we sing: ‘Give me speech, give me a tongue and the words to tell the truth about You’? And that’s in Hemdat Yamim.”

But Jacob scolded him:

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