At this, Jacob ceased to be able to keep a straight face. He smiled broadly, and we were all relieved, for we hadn’t known where this conversation was headed.
“If you say so, then I’ll go to him right away,” Jacob said after a moment. “I want to do whatever I can for him. If he wants me to chop wood, I’ll chop wood for him. If he tells me to carry the water, I’ll carry it. If he’s in need of someone to go into battle, I’ll be first among the troops. Just say the word.”
It is said in the tractate Hagigah 12: “Woe to them, the creations, who see and know not what they see.” Somehow, this happened that same night. First, Jacob stood before Reb Mordke, and Reb Mordke, praying and invoking the most powerful words, touched Jacob’s lips over and over, and his eyes, and his eyebrows, and then he spread a kind of herbal unction over his forehead, so that Jacob’s eyes got glassy and he grew quiet, docile. We took off his clothes and left only one lamp burning. Then, with a trembling voice, I began to sing that song that we all knew, but that has now taken on a completely different meaning, for we were no longer asking for the spirit to descend, as everyone does on a daily basis, in a general way, for the sake of the improvement of the world, for our salvation—now we were asking for a truly tangible descent of the spirit into the naked body we had right here before us, the body of a man, of a brother, whom we knew well, but whom we also did not know. We were putting him to a trial by the spirit, trying to determine whether he could endure such an onslaught. And we weren’t asking for any ordinary sign, as before, for the comfort of our hearts. We were asking for action, for an arrival in our world, our filth, our gloom. We set out Jacob like bait, like a dazed lamb before a wolf. Our combined voice rose, then finally turned shrill, as though we’d become women. Tovah rocked back and forth; I felt nauseated, as though I had eaten something spoiled, and I felt I would faint. Only Reb Mordke simply stood there, at ease, his eyes raised high toward the ceiling, where there was a little window. Maybe he thought the spirit would come in through that small window.
“The spirit circles around us like a wolf around those trapped in a cave,” I said. “It seeks the smallest hole to get through to those weak figures living in the shadow world. It sniffs, it checks each crack, each sliver, smelling us inside. It moves like a lover consumed by desire, in order to fill with light those delicate creatures, like underground mushrooms. And people—little, fragile, lost—leave him signs, marking stones with olive oil, and tree bark, and doorframes; people make signs on their foreheads in oil, so that the spirit might enter.”
“Why does the spirit like olive oil so much? Why all that anointing? Is it to make it slippery, so it will be easier for it to go inside of matter?” Jacob asked once, and all the students burst out laughing. And I did, too, because it was so bold it could not be unwise.
Everything happened so quickly. Jacob suddenly got an erection, and his skin became covered in sweat. He had strangely bulging, unseeing eyes, and he was sort of buzzing. Then he was thrown down on the ground, and there he remained, in a strange, contorted position, shaking all over. In a natural impulse, I took a step toward him to help him, but the unexpectedly strong hand of Reb Mordke stopped me. It lasted but a moment. Then from underneath Jacob there began to slowly flow a stream of urine. It is difficult for me to write of this.
I will never forget what I saw there, and I have never seen anything so real that might testify to how foreign we are to the spirit in our earthly, corporeal, material forms.
9.
Of the wedding in Nikopol, the mystery under the huppah, and the advantages of being foreign
A mid-eighteenth-century map of Ottoman territory displays a vast terrain marked only intermittently with cities. Most of these settlements were located along rivers, especially the Danube; on the map, they look like ticks latching on to bloodstreams. The element of water dominates here—it seems to be everywhere. The empire begins with the Dniester to the north, grazes the shores of the Black Sea to the east, and reaches south across Turkey and the Land of Israel, continuing farther around the Mediterranean Sea. Not much is missing for it to come full circle.
And if the movements of people might be indicated on a map like this, it would show them leaving chaotic trails, unpleasant to the eye. Zigzags, twisting spirals, lopsided ellipses—the record of travel for commerce, pilgrimage, merchants’ expeditions, visits to families, homesickness, and flights.
There are many bad people around, some of them really very cruel. They might spread out a kilim on the highway and drive spears into the ground around it—this is a sign that they must be paid a fee, without the traveler ever even glimpsing the villain’s cunning face. If the traveler opts not to pay, spears will rain down on him from the surrounding thickets, and then the highwaymen will follow and chop the traveler into bits with their swords. Some travelers, however, are not daunted by such dangers. And so the caravans move onward, bales of cotton on their carts. Whole families in carriages, on the way to relatives. Holy fools, exiles, and eccentrics who have already survived so much that nothing fazes them, including murderers’ forced tributes. Members of the sultan’s government who, at a leisurely pace, luxuriating, collect taxes, taking a rich cut for themselves and their confidants; the carriages of pashas’ harems, which leave in their wake the fragrance of oils and incense; herders driving their cattle south.