This is how Moliwda introduces himself—as a long-standing client. What makes the greatest impression about him is that he is—as he himself is eager to emphasize—a Polish count. On the faces of his Jewish interlocutors this evokes an expression of disbelief and a sort of childlike respect. He says a few words in Turkish and in Hebrew. His laugh is deep, infectious. Throughout September, Moliwda goes to see Jacob every day. Up till now he has only actually purchased a turquoise clip, and even that Jacob sold to him at a scandalously low price, to Nahman’s outrage. Reb Mordke likes to sit around with them, talking over different things. The stranger the subject, the better.
Some traders from the north come in, speaking a foreign language. Nussen focuses his attention on them, turns from scholar into salesman. They turn out to be Jewish merchants from Silesia, interested in malachite, opals, and turquoise. Jacob also shows them pearls; whenever he’s trying to make a sale, he raises his voice. Seeing the transaction through takes hours; the tea flows, young Hershel brings sweets and whispers into Jacob’s ear that Abraham says to also show them some carpets. The merchants fuss and grumble in their language, consulting one another in murmurs, certain no one understands them. They ought not to be so confident. Nussen listens with his one eye closed, and then, behind the curtain, where Nahman sits, he relates the latest:
“They only care about the pearls, they have the rest already, and they paid more for it. They’re regretting not coming here before.”
Jacob sends Hershel to get pearls from Abraham and from other stalls. And when in the late evening they wrap up the deal, and the day is acknowledged to have been exceptionally good, this motley family spreads out rugs and pillows in the largest room of the house and has a late supper that rapidly becomes a feast.
“Yes, the people of Israel will devour Leviathan!” Jacob exclaims, as if making a toast, and he pushes a piece of meat into his mouth; grease runs down his chin. “The great, enormous hulk of the monster, delicious and soft as quail meat, or like the flesh of the most delicate fishes. Folks will be feasting on Leviathan for so long they’ll satisfy their centuries-old hunger.”
All of them eating, they laugh and joke.
“The wind will flutter the white tablecloths, and we’ll throw the bones under the table for the dogs,” Moliwda adds.
Nahman, relaxed by the good wine from Jacob’s cellar, says to Moliwda:
“When you look at the world as good, then evil becomes the exception, something missed, something mistaken—and nothing suits you. But if you were to switch it around—say that the world is evil, while good is the exception, then everything works out elegantly, understandably. Why don’t we want to see what is obvious?”
Moliwda picks it up from here.
“Where I come from, they think of the world as being divided into halves. Two ruling forces, one good, one evil . . .”
“Where is it you come from?” Nahman inquires, his mouth still full.
Moliwda dismisses him with an impatient gesture and goes on:
“There is no man who would not wish ill upon another, no country that would not rejoice in the fall of another country, no merchant who doesn’t want his competitors bankrupt . . . Give me the creator of all that. The one who botched the job!”
“Moliwda, give it a rest,” says Nahman. “Have some food. You’re not eating, you’re only drinking.”
They all talk over one another; Moliwda has stirred up a hornet’s nest. He breaks off a piece of flatbread and dips it into some seasoned olive oil.
“What’s it like where you come from?” Nahman pipes up. “You might tell us how your people live.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Moliwda tries to evade their curiosity; his eyes are slightly hazy from an excess of wine. “You would have to swear never to reveal the secret.”
Nahman nods without hesitation. This seems obvious to him. Moliwda refills their glasses; the wine is so dark it leaves a purple stain on their lips.
“This is how it is, I’ll tell it to you straight,” Moliwda starts, his tongue getting all tangled. “It’s all very ordinary. There’s light, and there’s dark. Dark attacks the light, and God creates men to try and defend it.”
Nahman slides away his plate and raises his eyes to Moliwda. Moliwda looks into the dark, deep eyes of Nahman of Busk, and the sounds of feasting float away somewhere beyond them both. In a quiet voice, Nahman tells of the four great paradoxes that must be contemplated by anyone who considers himself a thinking person.
“First, in order to create a finite world, God had to limit himself, but there still remains an infinite part of God completely unengaged in creation.
“Isn’t that so?” Nahman asks Moliwda, to make sure he’s following.
Moliwda assents, so Nahman goes on: “If one accepts that the idea of the created world is one of an infinite number of ideas in the infinite mind of God, then it is, without any doubt, marginal and insignificant. It is possible that God didn’t even notice he had created something.” Nahman monitors Moliwda’s reactions closely. Moliwda takes a deep breath.
“Second,” Nahman continues, “creation as an infinitesimal part of God’s mind strikes Him as insignificant, and He is only barely involved in this creation; from the human perspective, this indifference may be perceived as cruelty.”
Moliwda downs his wine in one gulp, slamming the cup against the table.
“Third,” Nahman continues in a quiet voice, “the Absolute, as infinitely perfect, had no reason to create the world. So that part of the Absolute that did lead to creation must have outsmarted the rest, and must go on outsmarting it now, and we take part in those machinations. Do you get me? We are taking part in a war. And fourth—since the Absolute had to limit Himself, in order for the finite world to arise, our world is for Him a kind of exile. Do you understand? In order to create the world, the all-powerful God had to make himself as weak and passive as a woman.”
They sit in silence, spent. The sounds of the feasting return; they can hear Jacob telling bawdy jokes. Then Moliwda, very drunk by now, claps Nahman on the back, for such a long time that it becomes the subject of indecent jokes, until finally he lays his head on Nahman’s shoulder and says into his shirt:
“I know all this.”
Moliwda disappears for a few days, then comes back for a day or two. He spends those nights at Jacob’s.
When they sit until evening, Hershel adds hot ash to the tandir, the clay oven that sits on the ground. They rest their feet on it; a pleasant, gentle warmth travels higher with the blood and heats up the whole body.
“Is he ?ubuklu?” Moliwda asks Nahman, looking at Hershel. That’s what the Turks call epicenes, those equipped by God in such a way that they can pass as a woman or a man.
Nahman shrugs.
“He’s a good boy. Very dedicated. Jacob loves him.”
After a moment, feeling that honesty on his part will oblige Moliwda to similar sincerity, Nahman says:
“Is it true what they say about you, that you are a Bektashi?”
“That’s what people say?”
“And that you were in the service of the sultan . . .” Nahman hesitates for a moment. “As a spy.”
Moliwda looks at his interlaced hands.
“You know, Nahman, that it’s a good thing to keep company with them. And I do.” A moment later he adds: “There’s also nothing wrong with being a spy, so long as you serve some good purpose with it. You know this, too.”
“I do. What do you want from us, Moliwda?”
“I don’t want anything. I like you, and I admire Jacob.”