Nikopol is a small city, and from its position on the southern bank of the Danube it sends ferries across to Turnu, the Wallachian town also called Greater Nikopol, on the other side of the wide river. Anyone who travels from south to north must stop here, to sell some of the goods he is carrying or exchange them for others. This is why there is so much happening in this city, why business is booming. Here, in Nikopol, Jews speak Ladino, a language they brought with them from Spain when they were exiled, picking up new words along the way, its pronunciation changing until it became what the Sephardic Jews speak in the Balkans. Some spitefully refer to it as broken Spanish. But why should it be broken? It’s a beautiful language, after all. Everybody here speaks it. Sometimes they switch to Turkish. Jacob was raised in Wallachia, so he knows Ladino well, although the witnesses to his wedding, Mordechai of Prague and Nahman of Busk, do not even try to use the few Ladino words they know, preferring to continue speaking Hebrew and Turkish.
The wedding lasted seven days, from the 24th day of the month of Sivan, 5512 (in other words, June 6, 1752). The father of the bride, Tovah, borrowed money to make this happen and is already worrying that he will fall into financial ruin, since even aside from the burden of this event, things haven’t been going particularly well for him lately. The dowry was rotten, but the girl is lovely and couldn’t stop staring at the groom. This was no cause for surprise—Jacob was in fine spirits and funny, graceful as a red deer. The relationship was consummated on the very first night, or so the groom boasts—and consummated several times, at that. No one asked the bride. Surprised by the intrusion of her husband—sixteen years older than she—into the drowsy flower beds of her body, she gazed inquisitively into the eyes of her mother and her sisters on the following day. So this is how things are?
As a married woman, Hana received a new outfit, worn in the Turkish fashion—soft sirwal, and over them a Turkish tunic embroidered in roses and decorated with precious stones, and also a beautiful cashmere scarf, now tossed onto a balustrade, since it is very hot.
The necklace she received from her husband was so valuable that it was taken from her right away and locked up in a chest. But Hana did have a different kind of dowry—the prestige of her family, the resourcefulness of her brothers, the books written by her father, the ancestry of her mother, who descends from Portuguese Jews, and her own sleepy beauty, and her gentleness, which has delighted Jacob thus far, since he is accustomed to slim, proud, impertinent women with strong wills like the Jewish women of Podolia, his grandmother, his sisters and female cousins, or the mature widows he permitted to spoil him in Smyrna. But Hana is as gentle as a doe. She gives herself to him with love, taking nothing for herself—for pleasure he has yet to teach her. She gives herself to him with surprise in her eyes, and this excites Jacob. She observes him carefully, like he’s a horse she might have been given as a gift. Jacob dozes, and she examines his fingers, the skin on his back, the pockmarks on his face, wrapping his beard around her finger, until finally, when she has worked up the courage, she gazes in utter astonishment at his genitalia.
A trampled garden, an overturned fence, dancers who’ve gone out to cool down and come back in scattering sand—a sign that the desert is nearby—across floors covered with kilims and cushions. Dirty dishes not yet cleared away, though there have been women bustling around since early morning, the smell of urine in the orchard, scraps of food thrown out for the cats and the birds, bones picked clean—this is all that is left of the feast, which lasted several days. Nahman’s head hurts; he may have overdone it with the Nikopolian wine. He is lying in the shade of a fig tree, watching Hana poking at the house with a stick, trying to get at a wasps’ nest. She’ll be sorry shortly, and they’ll all have to run away. She’s upset that so soon after the wedding the men want to leave. She’s barely even glimpsed her husband, and already he is moving on.
Nahman pretends to be sleeping, but he takes secret peeks at Hana. He doesn’t really like her—she seems a little bland to him. Who is this girl who has been given to Jacob? He wouldn’t be able to describe her if he were to return to his Scraps. He doesn’t know whether she’s intelligent or stupid, cheerful or melancholic, whether she’s short-tempered or the opposite, good-natured. He doesn’t understand how this girl with the round face and the greenish eyes can be a wife. They don’t cut married women’s hair in Nikopol, so he can see how wild and beautiful hers is, dark brown, like coffee. She has lovely hands with long, thin fingers and fecund hips. She doesn’t look fourteen. She looks like she might be twenty, like a woman. Pretty and curvy—that’s how she should be described. That’s enough. And to think that a few days ago he regarded her as he would a child.
He also takes a look at Hana’s twin brother, Hayim. There is such a likeness between them it gives him chills. Hayim is shorter, slimmer, livelier, with an oval face, his hair in boyish disarray, down to his shoulders. Because his body is trimmer, he also looks younger. He is quick and always laughing boisterously. His father has chosen him as his successor, and now the siblings must be separated, which won’t be easy. Hayim wants to go to Craiova, too, but his father needs him here, or maybe merely fears for him. Daughters are destined to be given away, and everyone knows from the start they’ll leave the nest, like money neatly put away that must later be paid back to the world. When Hana stops scowling and forgets she’s gotten married, she goes up to her brother and whispers something or other into his ear, their dark heads leaning in together. It is a beautiful sight to behold, and not only for Nahman; he can see that everyone enjoys the double image—only united are the siblings complete. Should man in fact not be like this, double? What would it be like if we all had twins, boys for girls, girls for boys? We could all talk without words.
Nahman also watches Jacob. It seems to him that Jacob’s eyes have been covered by a film of some sort since the wedding. Perhaps it’s exhaustion, perhaps the result of all the toasts—but where is his bird’s gaze, the ironic look that makes everyone else glance down or away? Now he’s put his hands behind his head—there are no strangers here, he feels relaxed; his wide sleeve has slid all the way down to his shoulder and bared the concavity of his armpit, lushly overgrown with dark hair.
His father-in-law, Tovah, murmurs something into Jacob’s ear, his hand resting on Jacob’s back, so that you might wonder—Nahman thinks spitefully—whether it was Tovah who married Jacob, and not Hana. Hayim, meanwhile, spars with everyone, but Jacob he avoids. When Jacob tries to grab his attention, Hayim falls silent and scurries off. For some reason this amuses the adults.
As for Reb Mordke, he doesn’t leave his house, he does not care for the sun. He sits alone in his chamber, leaning up against some cushions, and he smokes his pipe—slowly, lazily, savoring each particle of smoke, thinking things over, closely examining every moment of the world under the watchful gaze of all the letters of the alphabet. Nahman knows he’s waiting, that he’s standing guard, keeping watch so that everything he sees—even when he’s not looking at anything—will come to pass.