The murmurs and the clamor slowly die down, but Nahman waits awhile, aware that he now has their full attention. He starts by taking a deep breath. This is followed by an absolute silence. The air he takes in and then releases from his lungs is from a different world—Nahman’s breath rises like challah dough, golden, and the room begins to smell of almonds, to shimmer with the warmth of the sun at noon, to carry the aroma of a far-flung river—because this is the air of Nikopol, a Wallachian town in a distant country, and the river is the Danube, on the bank of which lies Nikopol.
The Danube is so wide that sometimes on foggy days you can’t even see the other side. Over it looms a fortress with twenty-six towers and two great gates. The castle is replete with guards, their commander residing above the prison, where the debtors and the thieves are kept. At night, the guards beat drums and cry: “Allahu Akbar!” The area is rocky, dry in the summer, but in the shadows of people’s homes grow figs and mulberries, and there are grapevines on the hills. The town lies on the southern bank of the river, and has some three thousand beautiful houses covered in tiled roofs or shingles. Most neighborhoods are Turkish, interspersed with a few Jewish and Christian quarters. Nikopol’s market is always crowded, for it has as many as a thousand dazzling stalls. The craftsmen have their workshops in the well-built halls next door. Especially numerous are the tailors, who are famous for sewing every vesture, every ?upan or shirt, though their finest works are their Circassian prayer robes. And how many nations are represented at this bazaar! Wallachians, Turks, Moldovans and Bulgarians, Jews and Armenians, and sometimes even merchants from Gdańsk.
The crowd gleams with its different colors, chatting in different languages, arraying astonishing goods for sale: fragrant spices, vivid carpets, brightly colored rugs, Turkish delicacies so sweet you’ll grow dizzy with pleasure, dried dates and raisins of every sort, beautifully dyed leather slippers stitched with silver thread.
“Our people often have stalls there, or keep trading agents—a number of us are in fact quite familiar with that hallowed place.” Nahman repositions himself in his seat and looks at Old Man Shorr, but Elisha’s face is inscrutable, betraying not so much as a trace of a blink.
Nahman sighs again and is quiet, reining in everyone’s impatience. All eyes appear to exhort him, to say, Go on, go on, man, because of course they know that the real story—the one they’re all here for—hasn’t gotten under way yet.
First Nahman tells them of the bride. When he speaks of her—of Hana, daughter of the great Tovah—he makes, without realizing it, several gentle gestures that lend a velvet softness to his words. Old Man Shorr’s eyes fall halfway shut now, as if in a smile of satisfaction—for this is precisely how one ought to speak of young brides. Nahman’s audience nods contentedly. The beauty, gentleness, and thoughtfulness of young women are what give humanity hope. Once more, too, at the mention of Hana’s father’s name there is a burst of happy smacking, so Nahman is quiet for another moment, to give his listeners time to take their full pleasure in all this. In how the world is filling out, coming together again. The tikkun has begun.
The wedding took place in Nikopol a few months earlier, in June. With Hana we are already familiar. Her father is Yehuda Tovah ha-Levi, the great hakham, whose writings have made it all the way here, to Rohatyn, and Elisha Shorr has them in his cabinet; he was studying them not long ago. Hana was Tovah’s only daughter among many sons.
What this Jacob Leybowicz might have done to deserve her, however, remains unclear. Who is this person of whom Nahman speaks so glowingly? And why him? Jacob Leybowicz from Korolówka? No, Czernowitz. So is he one of us? What are you talking about, he must be one of us, if Nahman’s telling us of him. He’s someone from here—someone remembers now he knew this Jacob’s father, so wouldn’t he be the grandson of the same Yente who is in the process of dying in this very house? Everyone looks over at Israel from Korolówka and his wife, Sobla, but they’re not sure what’s about to be said yet, so for now they just sit tight—though Sobla’s face does flush bright red.
“Yehuda Leyb from Czernowitz, that’s this Jacob’s father,” says Elisha Shorr.
“He was the rabbi of Czernowitz!” blurts Moshe from Podhajce.
“Rabbi, shmabbi,” grunts Yeruhim, who does business with the Shorrs. “He taught children how to write in yeshiva. Buchbinder, they called him.”
“He’s the brother of Moses Meir Kamenker,” Shorr says gravely, and there is a hush, because this Moses Meir Kamenker is a hero—he smuggled holy books into Germany for our brothers and sisters in faith, suffering a curse in punishment.
Now it all comes back to them. They begin to talk over each other, saying how this Yehuda was a tenant first in Bere?anka and Czernowitz, in the service of the local lord, collecting taxes from the peasants. It seems the peasants even beat him once. And when he went and told on them, the lord ordered for them to be beaten to the point that one of them died from the blows. Then this Buchbinder had to depart the region, for the peasants would never have left him alone after that. The Jews turned against him, too, since he would openly read from the writings of Nathan of Gaza.
He was a strange fellow, unpredictable. Somebody remembers that after the curse was put on his brother, the rabbis turned on Leyb, ultimately forcing him to resign and move to Czernowitz in Wallachia, where under Turkish rule you could live in peace.
Malka, Shorr’s sister, pitches in: “They were always drawn to the Turks, anyway, with their fear of the Cossacks.”
Nahman realizes that the figure of the father is an unpopular one. The more they find out about him, the worse it will be for the son. So he determines to move on.
This makes sense: prophets never come from within. All prophets must come from elsewhere, must suddenly appear, seem strange, out of the ordinary. Be shrouded in mystery, like the one the goyim have, even, of the virgin birth. A prophet has to walk differently, talk differently. Ideally he hails from some unimaginable locale, source of exotic words and untasted dishes and unsmelled smells—myrrh, oranges, bananas.
And yet a prophet must also be one of our own. Let him have at least a drop of our blood, let him be a distant relative of somebody we know, even if perhaps we’ve forgotten what they look like. God never speaks through our neighbor, through the guy we’re in a fight with about the well, or the one whose wife attracts us with her charms.
Nahman waits for them to finish.
“I, Nahman of Busk, was a groomsman at that wedding. The other groomsman was Reb Mordke of Lwów.”