By day they eat and drink, and they pray without putting on tefillin. Besides, the boy sees that they do not keep the kitchen kosher here, they eat ordinary Turkish bread, dipping it in olive oil and herbs, crumbling cheese with their hands. They sit on the floor like Turks. The women wear wide-legged pants made from lightweight material.
Hana comes up with the idea of visiting her sister in Vidin. First she proposes it to her father, but he merely scowls at her, and Hana quickly understands that she is supposed to ask her husband now. She plays with the pearl hanging on its gold chain, Jacob’s gift to her. Hana has clearly had enough of her parents, must want to show off her wedded status, wants Jacob to herself, wants travel, wants a change. Hershel sees she’s still a child, just like him, that she’s pretending to be a grown woman. He spies on her one time as she’s bathing in the back part of the garden. She is plump, with wide hips, big buttocks.
During their three days of travel along the Danube from Nikopol to Vidin, Hershel falls in love with Hana. Now he loves both of them, Jacob and Hana, with a single feeling. It is a strange state to be in. He obsessively desires to be near Hana. He still remembers her buttocks, big and soft and innocent—he wants to storm them.
Just before they come to Vidin, they ask Hershel to drive up into the surrounding rocky hills outside the city. Out of the corner of his eye, Hershel can see where Jacob’s hand is heading, and he tightens his fingers around the reins. They tell him to wait with the horses like a servant, while they disappear in between rocks that resemble petrified monsters. Hershel knows that it will be a while, so he lights up a pipe and adds to it a dash of the resin he has been given by Jacob. He takes a drag like old Reb Mordke, and the horizon softens. He leans against a rock and looks down at the huge brown grasshoppers, all angles. And when he lifts his gaze to the rocks above, he sees a white stone city outstretched past the horizon, and—how strange—it is a city that looks at people, and not the other way around. He doesn’t know how to explain it, the fact that the rocks are watching. In fact it doesn’t surprise him at all. He’s watching, too. He sees a naked Hana bracing her arms wide against the rock wall, and, pressing into her backside, a half-naked Jacob, moving slowly, rhythmically. Jacob suddenly turns to look at Hershel where he sits behind the horses, and although he looks at him from far away, his look, so hot and powerful, gives Hershel an erection. Soon the brown grasshoppers meet a wet impediment in their path. It must surprise them to encounter this potent splotch of organic matter, this abrupt incursion into their insect world.
10.
Who the person is who gathers herbs on Mount Athos
On his small boat from the port in Develiki, Count Antoni Kossakowski reaches the harbor at the base of the mountain. He feels profoundly grateful, deeply emotional, and the pain that was only just recently squeezing his chest now passes completely, though it isn’t clear whether it’s because of the sea air and the wind, which, bouncing back off the steep bank, takes on an inimitable smell of resin and herbs, or because of his proximity to a holy place.
He ponders this sudden change in his own mood and sense of wellbeing. A radical and unexpected change. When he left cold Russia a few years earlier for the Greek and Turkish countries, he became another man, someone “luminous and airy,” as he might say. Is it that simple—is it just about light and heat? Oh, the sun—its abundance renders colors all the more intense, and because it heats the land, fragrances dazzle. And because of all that sky, the world appears to be subject to mechanisms other than the ones that apply in the north. Here Destiny is still in effect, the Greek version of Fatum that sets people in motion, marking out their paths like little strings of sand that flow along a dune from top to bottom, creating arabesques and other figures of which the finest artist would hardly be ashamed, twisting, chimerical, exquisite.
Here in the south, all this exists quite tangibly. It grows in the sun, lurks in the heat. And the awareness of its existence brings Antoni Kossakowski relief, so that he becomes lighter, softer, more tender toward himself. At times he feels like crying, that’s how free he feels.
He considers that the farther south he goes, the weaker Christianity becomes, the stronger the sun, the sweeter the wine, the more Fatum there is—and the better his life gets. His decisions are not decisions, arriving instead from outside, having their proper place in the order of the world. And since it is this way, there is less responsibility, and therefore less of that internal shame, that unbearable feeling of guilt for everything he has done. Here every action can be corrected, you can have a chat with the gods, make them a sacrifice. That is why people are able to look at their reflections in the water with respect. And look upon others with love. No one is bad, no murderer can be condemned, because it is all part of a larger plan. That is why you can feel the same love for the executioner as you can for the condemned. People are gentle and good. The evil that happens comes not from them, but rather from the world. The world can be evil—and how!
The farther north you go, the more people concentrate on themselves, and in some sort of northern madness (no doubt due to the lack of sun) they ascribe to themselves too much. They make themselves responsible for their actions. Fatum is punctured by raindrops, then farther on, snowflakes making a final incursion, and soon it disappears altogether. What remains is the conviction that destroys every person, supported by the Ruler of the North, the Church, and its ubiquitous functionaries, that all evil is in man yet can’t be fixed by man. It can only be forgiven. But can it be forgiven? Hence comes that tiring, destructive feeling that one is always guilty, from birth, that one is stuck in sin and that everything is sin—doing something, not doing it, love, hate, words, and even thoughts. Knowledge is a sin, and ignorance is a sin.