Yente was born years after all this happened, so she isn’t sure whether she’d have any share in the holiness of her father’s eyes as he beholds the face of the Messiah. His companions were Moshe Halevi, his son and stepson from Lwów, and Baruch Peysach of Kraków.
From Kraków to Lwów, from Lwów past Czernowitz, to the south, to Wallachia. The closer they got, the warmer it got, the less snow there was, and the more fragrant and gentler the air became, as her father would later recall. They would spend their evenings contemplating the Messiah’s arrival. They came to the conclusion that the misfortunes of the preceding years had been blessings in disguise, for they made a kind of sense, foretelling the coming of the savior, just as painful contractions foretell the birth of a new person. As the world gives birth to the Messiah, it must suffer, and all laws must break, conventions be eradicated, oaths and promises crumble. Brothers must lunge at one another’s throats, neighbors hate each other; people who once lived next door must now slit one another’s throats in the night and drink down the blood that rushes up to greet them.
The Lwów delegation found the Messiah in jail, in Gallipoli. As they were traveling south from Poland, the sultan, disquieted by the Jewish turmoil and by Sabbatai Tzvi’s plans, seized him and locked him up in the fortress.
The Messiah imprisoned! Inconceivable! How could such a thing occur? A great anxiety now took hold among all those who had come at that time to Stamboul, and not only from Poland. Prison! The Messiah in prison, could that be? Did that fit with the prophecies? What about Isaiah?
But wait, what kind of prison was it? And was it really prison? And what was “prison,” anyway? After all, Sabbatai Tzvi, amply provided for by the faithful, could scarcely have told the difference between this incarceration in the Gallipoli fortress and a stay in a palace. The Messiah did not eat meat or fish; people said he subsisted on fruit alone—and the freshest of these were picked for him from the surrounding territories and brought in by ship. He loved pomegranates, loved digging his long slender fingers into their granular insides, fishing out the ruby seeds and popping them into his holy mouth. He didn’t eat much—just a few seeds; people said his body derived life-giving strength directly from the sun. They also said in great secret—which nonetheless traveled faster than it would have had it been a slightly lesser secret—that the Messiah was a woman. Those who had been close to him had glimpsed his feminine breasts. His skin, soft and rosy, smelled like a woman’s skin. In Gallipoli, he had at his disposal a great courtyard and salons outfitted in carpets, where he would give his audiences. Was that really prison?
This was how the delegation found him. First, they waited a day and a half, so numerous were those eager for an audience with the captive. They watched the thrilled crowd pass before them, effervescent in their many tongues. Speculation circulated: What was going to happen next? Jews from the south, darker-skinned, wearing dark turbans, crossed paths with Jews from Africa, colorfully clad like dragonflies. The Jews of Europe looked funny, dressed in black, wearing stiff collars that collected dust like sponges.
Mayer and the others had to fast for a day, and then bathe in a bathhouse. At last, they were given white robes and allowed to see His Majesty the Messiah. This happened on a holy day, according to the newly designed messianic calendar. For Sabbatai Tzvi had abolished all traditional Jewish holidays, having invalidated the old Law of Moses, which he would replace with some other, still-to-be-articulated law, according to which no one knew how to behave or what to say just yet.
They found him sitting on a richly carved stool, in scarlet robes, in the company of pious sages who asked them why they were there and what it was they hoped for from their savior.
It was decided that Baruch Peysach would speak for them, and he started by describing the many misfortunes of the Polish lands, and with them the misfortunes of Polish Jews, and as evidence he submitted the chronicle of misfortunes of Meir ben Samuel of Szczebrzeszyn, titled in Hebrew Tzok haIttim, meaning Distress of the Times, published several years before. But as Baruch was carrying on in a tearful voice about wars and diseases, pogroms and human injustice, Sabbatai suddenly interrupted him and, indicating his scarlet robes, shouted in a booming voice: “Can you not see the color of revenge? I am clothed in scarlet, as the prophet Isaiah says: It is for me the day of vengeance; the year for me to redeem has come.” Everyone cowered at the sound of that voice, so strong and unexpected. Then Sabbatai ripped off his shirt and gave it to Isaiah, David Halevi’s son, and to the others he handed out lumps of sugar and told them to put them in their mouths, “that a youthful strength might awake in them.” Mayer tried to say that they didn’t need youthful strength, that what they needed was to be left to live in peace, but the Messiah cried, “Silence!” Mayer, as only Mayer could, managed to glance surreptitiously at the savior and to see his gentle, beautiful face, its delicate features and the extraordinary beauty of his eyes, bordered by those lashes, damp and dark. And he saw the Messiah’s dark and generous lips, still trembling in outrage, and his silky-smooth cheeks, which quivered almost imperceptibly, and he thought how soft they must be to the touch, like the finest suede. And it surprised him that the Messiah’s breasts were indeed like a woman’s, generous, with brown nipples. Someone rushed to cover him in a shawl then, but the sight of the Messiah’s naked breasts remained in Mayer’s memory to the very end of his life, and then—as happens with remembered images—got divided up into words and then reconstituted from these words inside the minds of his children.
Mayer the Skeptic felt something then like a sting in his chest, a tug of emotion, and that must have deeply wounded his soul, because he passed that wound along to his children and, later, his grandchildren. Yente’s father, Mayer, was Elisha Shorr’s granduncle.
And? That’s it. They wrote it all down, every movement and every word. The first night they sat in silence, not understanding what had just happened to them. Was this some kind of sign? Would they be saved? With the end times drawing near, would anyone be able to grasp with reason what was going on? After all, everything would be different, opposite to how it was before.
In the end, after settling up all their business, they returned home to Poland in a strange and solemn mood.