“No, they don’t, because they have no use value. Whatever a person can profit from must be someone’s property . . . ,” Nahman tries.
“You’re telling us the sun has no use!” cries Yeruhim. “If the hands of the greedy could only reach it, they would slice it into pieces, lock it in a vault, and sell it off when the right time rolled around.”
“And yet the earth is carved up like the corpse of an animal, taken over, watched, guarded,” Reb Mordke mutters to himself, but his attention is increasingly consumed by the pipe, and everyone knows that he is about to float away into that gentle ecstasy in which “tax” becomes an incomprehensible word.
The subject of taxes in Nahman’s tale has stirred up a lot of emotions among his Rohatyn audience, and now Nahman must wait to continue, since they have begun to talk amongst themselves.
They offer each other all sorts of warnings, for example not to do business with “those other Jews,” for no good can come of it. Everyone knows what happened with Rabbi Isaac Babad of Brody, who misappropriated municipal money. And how can anyone afford the taxes here? They’re too high, and they’re applied to everything, so that it stops making sense to ever do anything at all. It would be better to lie down and sleep from morning to night, watch the clouds float over the sky and listen to the chatter of the birds. Christian merchants don’t have such troubles, the taxes they pay are reasonable enough, and the Armenians have it a lot easier since they, too, are Christians. That’s why the Poles and the Ruthenians consider Armenians their own kind, although those gathered in the Shorrs’ home would disagree. The mind of an Armenian is impenetrable, wily, and deceitful. An Armenian can even talk a Jew into voluntarily doing something that is against his own interests. Everyone goes along with them because they seem so nice, but in reality, they’re slippery as snakes. Meanwhile, the Jewish community has to pay higher and higher tributes, and the kahal has gone into debt from paying the head tax for Jews who couldn’t pay it themselves. And so the richest rule, and their sons and grandsons follow suit. They give their daughters in marriage to other men in the clan, and in this way, their capital remains intact.
Is it possible to avoid paying taxes somehow? To escape the entire construct? If you try to be honest and respect the order of things, the rules will betray you right away. Was it not just resolved in Kamieniec to throw all of the Jews out of town over the course of a single day? And now they cannot settle within six miles of it. What can you do with something like that?
“Our house had just been painted,” says the wife of Yeruhim, whose business is vodka, “and I had a lovely little garden.”
The woman starts to cry, mostly for the lost parsley and cabbage, which had been flourishing. The parsley was as thick as a hardy man’s thumb, the cabbage the size of an infant’s head. She wasn’t even allowed to take that with her. The comparison to an infant’s head effects a mysterious result—other women start to cry as well, so they pour themselves a dash of vodka, and, still sniffling, they are soothed, and then they go back to their work, to darning or plucking goose down, since their hands ought never to be idle.
Of Nahman’s appearance to Nahman, or: The pit of darkness and the seed of light
Nahman sighs, which silences the animated crowd. The most important part is coming now—everyone can tell. They freeze mid-motion, as though before a revelation.
The modest business interests of Nahman and Mordechai are not going particularly well in Smyrna. Too much of their time is taken up by the business of God; investing time in formulating questions, in thinking—these are expenses. And since every answer raises new questions, the expenses relentlessly increase, and their interests founder. There is always a shortfall when they do the accounts, more on the “owed” side than on the “received.” One thing’s for sure: If there were a trade in questions, Nahman and Mordechai would earn a fortune in it.
Sometimes his young disciples send Nahman out to battle someone in a disputation. He’s the best at this and can beat anyone. Many of the Jews and Greeks, eager to debate, provoke the neophytes. It’s a form of streetfighting—the opponents sit opposite one another, and around them gathers a crowd. The challenger chooses the topic—it actually doesn’t matter what he picks, the point is to see who can present his arguments in such a way as to make his opponent bend in the face of them, render him unable to counter. The loser of these competitions pays up, or buys dinner and wine. That turns into the occasion for the next disputation, and that’s how things keep going. Nahman always wins, which means they never go to bed hungry.
“One afternoon, when Nussen and I were looking for someone for me to battle, I stayed out in the street, as I preferred to watch the knife sharpeners, the fruit sellers, the pomegranate-juice squeezers, the street musicians, and the swirling and omnipresent crowd. I squatted down by the donkeys, in their shade, as the heat was severe. At some point, I noticed that out of the crowd some person or other had emerged and was heading toward the door of the home where Jacob lived. It took a moment, several heartbeats, for me to comprehend who it was I was seeing, although almost immediately he had struck me as familiar somehow. I looked up at him from where I squatted as he went to Jacob’s door dressed in his fustian kapota, the same kind I had back in Podolia. I saw his profile, the straggly stubble on his cheeks, his skin mottled with freckles, his red hair . . . Suddenly he turned to me, and that’s when I recognized him. He was me!” Nahman falls silent for a moment, just to be able to hear the astonished or suspicious cries:
“What do you mean? What does that mean?”
“That’s a bad omen.”
“That is an omen of death, Nahman.”
Not paying attention to this, he continues:
“It was hot, and the heat made the air sharp as knives. I felt weak, and my heart seemed to be hanging from the thinnest of threads. I wanted to get up, but I had no power over my own legs. Feeling I was dying, all I could do was cling to the donkey, who—I remember this—looked at me in surprise at this sudden surge of tenderness.”
Somewhere in the room a child starts laughing loudly and is upbraided by its mother, then stops.
“I saw him like I might a shadow. The light was blinding, afternoon sun. He stood over me—I was only half conscious now—and leaned over to touch my burning forehead. Instantly the clarity of my thoughts was restored, and I stood up . . .”