So begins Nahman’s somewhat free-form manuscript. He likes to reread these opening pages. They make him feel the ground beneath him is more solid, or as if his feet have suddenly grown. Now he goes back to the camp, because he’s gotten hungry, and joins in with the rest of the company. The Turkish guides and porters have just returned from their prayers and are horsing around, getting ready for dinner. Prior to eating, the Armenians shut their eyes and ceremoniously make the seal of the cross over their bodies. Nahman and the other Jews pray in a hurried way. They are all hungry. They will wait to pray for real until they get home. They sit in loose packs, every man with his wares, with his mule, but all can see each other well enough. As they start to sate their hunger, they begin to converse, and eventually to relax and make jokes. Darkness falls all of a sudden—in a moment it is night, and they have to light the oil lamps.
Once, one of the visitors who had come to hunt at Lord Jab?onowski’s stopped in at the tavern, where it was mainly my mother who ran the operation. This guest was known to be a drunk and a brute. Since it was hot and stuffy, swamp gas hovering just above the ground, his daughter, a princess, desired to rest at once. Thus was our family thrown outside, to accommodate her, but I hid behind a stove and observed in a state of heightened emotion this scene: a beautiful lady, with footmen, ladies-in-waiting, and valets, entered the room. The pomp, the colors, the fashions, the beauty of these people made such a great impression upon me that my cheeks burned crimson, and soon my mother grew worried for my health. When those powerful people left, my mother whispered into my ear: “My little fool, in the world to come, the duksel will stoke the pezure for us,” meaning that in the next life the princess would add fuel to our stoves.
On the one hand, it was a source of great delight to me that somewhere up there, where the plans for the world were drawn up day by day, there was a strictly enforced system of justice. On the other hand, I felt pity for us all, and in particular for that proud lady, so lovely and so out of reach. Did she know about this? Had someone told her? Did they explain to people in their church that this was how things were going to be? That everything would be reversed, and the servants would become the lords, and the lords the servants? But would this in fact be just and good?
Before they departed, the gentleman dragged my father out of the room by the beard, his guests guffawing at the joke. And as they were leaving, he told his soldiers to drink up all the Jewish vodka, a task they eagerly undertook, and plundering the tavern, they destroyed the whole property without so much as a thought.
Nahman has to get up. As soon as the sun sets, it gets terribly cold, not like it does in the city, where the heat lasts longer, held by the warmed walls, and where, by this time, your shirt would be sticking to your back. He picks up a lamp and puts on a fustian coat. The porters are playing dice; the game soon leads to argument. The sky is strewn with stars, and Nahman reflexively orients himself by them. To the south, he can see Smyrna—or Izmir, as Reb Mordke prefers to say—which they left the day before. It is a city characterized by the chaos of uneven buildings that look like stacks of blocks, by a seemingly infinite quantity of roofs interwoven with minarets’ slim silhouettes and—every now and then—the domes of temples. And he can almost hear, from beyond the horizon, the muezzin’s voice, insistent, plaintive in the darkness, and he is almost sure another voice will answer now, from within the caravan, and in an instant the air will be filled with Muslim prayer, which is supposed to be a hymn and an encomium, but which sounds more like complaint.
Nahman looks north and sees far, far away, in the folds of the swirling obscurity, a little village that extends over the swamps, under the low sky that reaches all the way down to the church tower. It seems completely devoid of color, as if made out of peat coated in a fine layer of ash.
When I was born, in 5481—1721 according to the Christian system—my father, a new rabbi, was just taking up his position, not yet realizing the nature of where he had chosen to settle down.
In Busk, the river Bug connects with the Pe?tew. The city has always belonged to the king, not to the gentry, which is why life was easy enough for us there, though no doubt also why it was always being destroyed, now by the Cossacks, now by the Turks. If the sky is a mirror that reflects time, then an image of burning homes is ever o’erhanging Busk. The town would be totally destroyed and then rebuilt chaotically, in all directions, upon that swampy ground, water reigning supreme in Busk, so that whenever the spring thaws came, mud would creep onto the roads and cut off the town from the rest of the world, and the town’s inhabitants, like all inhabitants of swamps and peat bogs, would simply sit in their damp shacks, gloomy, stagnant, almost as if they’d been covered in mold.
The Jews lived in little groups around a number of different neighborhoods, but the highest concentration of them was in the Old Town and in Lipiboki. They were often in the horse trade, taking the animals from town to town, to different fairs and marketplaces, and some had small tobacco shops, although most of these were truly the size of a doghouse. Some of them farmed, and there were a few craftsmen. For the most part people lived in squalor, miserable and superstitious, wishful for some salvation to come.
We watched the Ruthenian and Polish peasants around us, and we saw that they were always bent over the land, straightening up only come evening, when they would sit out on the little benches in front of their houses with a certain superiority about them. But it was better to be a Jew than a peasant. They would take stock of us as well, wondering where those Jewish women might be going on those Jewish carts, and why were they so noisy! Their women squinted, having been blinded by the sun all day as they gathered the ears of corn left behind by the harvest.
In the spring, when the riverside pastures turned green, hundreds or maybe even thousands of storks flew into Busk, strutting about regally, extending their necks with great dignity, so proud. This must have been the reason such a quantity of children followed: the peasants believed the storks brought them.
There is a stork on Busk’s coat of arms, standing on one leg. So did we, the people of Busk, always stand on one leg, ready to set forth into the world, yet tethered to a lifelong lease, a single tenancy. All around us it was swampy and wet. We had the right to leave, officially, yet that right was unstable, murky as the dirty water.
Busk, like many little Podolian towns and much of the countryside, was inhabited almost entirely by us, by people who called each other “one of ours” and themselves “the true believers.” We believed with a pure heart and very deeply that the Messiah had already come to Turkey and that when he’d gone, he’d left us a successor, and above all a path down which we were enjoined to go.