Finally, at the beginning of summer, having settled matters in Poland, collected letters and merchandise, Nahman and Nussen set out for the south. Their road leads toward the Dniester, through the fields, a beautiful sun shining, the sky enormous. Nahman has had enough of that Podolian filth, of village smallness, envy and simplemindedness, he yearns for figs on the trees and the smell of coffee. But most of all, for Jacob. To Isohar he carries gifts from Shorr; for Reb Mordke, he has an amber tincture all the way from Gdańsk, a medicine to help him with his aching joints.
The banks of the river are now covered with brown grass, dry as bone, which under human and animal footsteps crumbles into dust. Nahman stands on the bank looking south, toward the other side. Suddenly he hears a rustling in the scrub nearby, and a moment later, a black-andwhite dog comes out of it, skinny and dirty, with swollen teats. Puppies scramble after her. The dog passes him, not even noticing the man standing motionless, but one of the puppies spots him and stops, perplexed. For a moment, they size each other up. The puppy looks at him curiously, trusting, but then, as though someone has just informed it that it’s standing face-to-face with its greatest enemy, it darts off after its mother. Nahman interprets this as a bad omen.
In the evening, they cross over the Dniester. On the shore, peasants burn bonfires, and along the water, wreaths float with lit candles. Shrieks and giggles resound. Near the shore, girls wade into the water up to their knees, in long white shirts hitched halfway up their thighs. Their hair is down, and they wear wreaths on their heads. They look at them, these Jews on horseback, in silence, until Nahman starts to think they’re not really village girls bidding them farewell at all, but rather water spirits who float up to the surface by night to drown whatever humans they encounter. Suddenly one of them leans over and starts splashing them, and the others join in, laughing. The men urge their horses on across the river.
News of some new holy man comes to them more often and more colorfully, the deeper they venture into Turkish territory. For a time, they ignore it. But it is impossible to keep this up for long. At the stops they make, where Jewish travelers usually swap gossip picked up on the road, they find out more and more details, for example that this holy man is in Sofia with some vast company and is working miracles there. Many take him for a con man and a swindler. In the stories it’s an old Jew from Turkey, or sometimes a young man from Bucharest, so that it takes them a while to realize that all these people, all these travelers, are talking about Jacob. Once that sinks in, Nahman and Nussen don’t sleep the whole long night, trying to figure out what has happened in their absence. And instead of feeling happy—for is this not exactly what they’d hoped for?—they begin to be afraid. The best medicine for fear and anxiety is the writing box. Nahman takes it out at every stop and writes down what is being said of Jacob. It goes like this:
In one of the villages, he spent half a day jumping on horseback over a certain hole, a deep hole into which it would be dangerous to fall. The horse, tired, began to resist with its hooves, but Jacob kept insisting. Soon the whole village was standing around him and that hole, and the Turkish guards came to see what the cause of the throng was and whether it wasn’t by any chance an uprising against the sultan.
Or:
Jacob went up to one wealthy-looking merchant, reached into the man’s pocket, took out of it something like a snake, and waved it around, shouting over people’s heads. A terrible tumult arose, and the horrible screech of women spooked the horses of the Turkish guards, while Jacob burst out laughing, and he laughed so hard he lay down and rolled in the sand. Then the crowd, embarrassed, saw that it was no snake, but rather just a string of wooden beads.
Or:
In some great synagogue he went up onto the bimah, and when it was time to read the Law of Moses, he ripped off the top of the pulpit and started to wave it around, threatening to kill everyone, and everyone ran right out of the temple, thinking him a madman, capable of absolutely anything.
Or even:
Once on the road he was attacked by a highwayman. Jacob simply shouted up into the sky, and in the blink of an eye, a storm gathered, with lightning that so frightened the highwayman and his associates that they fled at once.
Now, in smaller letters, Nahman adds:
We rushed to Sofia, but we didn’t manage to catch him there.
We asked all of our own everything we could about him, and they told us in animated tones of his exploits in that city, saying, too, that when he had done, he and his whole group had set off for Salonika. And now, they said, he rode like a tzaddik in a cart at the head of the caravan, behind him all the other carts and carriages, horses and people on foot, taking up the whole road and sending up a cloud of dust over everyone’s heads. Wherever he stopped, people wanted to know who this was, and when it was explained to them, they dropped whatever it was they had been doing and wiped their hands on their kapotas and then joined in with this caravan out of curiosity, if nothing else. So they told us. And they would hold forth further on the handsomeness of the horses and the quality of the carriages, assuring us that there were hundreds of people now involved.
Then I saw this “company” myself—paupers and mendicants, the kind who will never have a place to hang their hats. Sick and broken people desperate for some small miracle, though desirous still of scandal and sensation. Youngsters who had run away from their homes and their heavy-handed fathers; merchants who, out of lack of equilibrium, had lost everything, and now, full of bitterness and spite, were seeking any kind of satisfaction; all types of madmen and those who had simply fled their families, having had their fill of dull obligations. Add to this, too, female beggars and ladies of light virtue, sensing the advantages of being in such a big group. Not to mention the abandoned women, widows no one wants, children in hand, as well as Christian ragamuffins, and vagrants without any sort of occupation. This was the element that began to follow Jacob, and if you were to ask them what was happening and in whose wake they were following, none of them would know how to respond.
In Skopje, I asked our prophet Nathan at his grave—I asked him quietly, not even moving my lips, but in my mind alone, as secretly as possible—whether we couldn’t meet Jacob as soon as possible; sometimes thoughts would come into my head that suggested that I lacked humility and a proper assessment of my own person, but I did begin to think that he was going mad without me, and that as soon as I found him, he would calm down and stop stubbornly imitating the First One (of blessed memory). That this hullabaloo on the road was a sign that he needed me.