Nussen and I were squatting down beneath the trees. We were waiting for a miracle. The sky in the east got pink, the birds began to sing, and then the call of the muezzin joined in with theirs. When the sun began to make its way out from under the horizon, the little homes with their flat roofs covered themselves in long, damp shadows and all the smells of the world awoke: orange flowers, smoke, ash, and yesterday’s rotting remains tossed out onto the streets. And incense, and donkey excrement. I felt unimaginable happiness overflowing in me—it was a miracle, and a sign that every day the world arises anew and gives us a new chance for tikkun. It gives itself over into our hands trustfully, like an enormous and uncertain animal, crippled and dependent on our will. And we must harness it to our work.
“Will we find Jacob’s shed skin on the floor?” Hershel asked in excitement, as I stood and in the light of the rising sun, to the accompaniment of the muezzin’s wailing, I danced.
That day, Jacob woke angry and suffering. He told us to pack our paltry goods, and since we had no money for a ship, we set out on donkeys along the shore to the east.
En route to Adrianople, we camped by the seaside. Jacob was hissing in pain, and the dressings I made for him didn’t help at all. Then a woman passing through on a donkey, no doubt also a witch, like all Thessalonian women, advised him to enter into the salty seawater and to stand there as long as he could take it. Jacob did as she said, but the water did not wish to take Jacob. He staggered in it, got knocked over, and the sea ejected him, weak, onto the shore. He tried to throw himself upon the waves, but it looked as if they were fleeing from him, and he was left in the wet sand. Then—I saw this myself and record it here as an eyewitness—Jacob raised his hands to the sky and gave a series of horrific shouts. He shouted so that all the nearby travelers paused, uneasy, and the fishermen, who were readying their nets, stopped mid-motion, and the women who were selling fish straight out of the basket, and even the sailors who were just coming into port looked up and over. Nussen and I couldn’t bear to hear it. It was as if they were skinning him alive. I covered my ears, and then a strange thing happened—suddenly the sea let him in, a wave came up, and Jacob plunged into it up to his neck, and in the end, for a moment, all of him disappeared under the water, his hands and feet flashing, and the water turned him over like a little scrap of wood. At last he emerged onto the shore and lay in the sand like a dead man. Nussen and I ran up to him and, getting our robes wet, dragged him farther onto the shore. To tell the truth—I thought that he had drowned.
But after this bath the skin fell off him in sheets all day, and underneath appeared new and healthy skin, pink like a child’s.
In two days Jacob was healthy and when we got to Smyrna he was young again, and so handsome and full of light, like himself again. And this was how he presented himself to his wife.
Nahman is very happy with what he’s written. He hesitates over whether or not to mention the adventures at sea that came next. He could describe it—the trip was certainly dramatic enough to be described. He dips his pen, then instantly flicks the drops of ink onto the sand. No, he won’t write about that. He won’t write that for a small sum a little trade ship agreed to carry them to Smyrna. The passage was cheap, but the conditions were very bad. They had barely settled in belowdecks, and the ship had sailed out to sea, when it turned out that its proprietor, a man who was neither a Greek nor an Italian, but some Christian, was not a merchant at all, but rather a pirate. When they demanded to be taken straight to Smyrna, this man abused them and threatened to have his thugs throw them all overboard.
Nahman remembers the date well—it was July 25, 1755, the day of the patron saint of this horrible man, a saint to whom he prayed incessantly, confessing all his crimes (which they had to hear, and which made the blood in their veins run cold). A terrible squall descended on the water. It was Nahman’s first time experiencing something so abominable, and he became convinced that he was going to die that day. Terrified, he tethered himself to the mast, in order that the frenzied waves not wash him away, and he lamented loudly. Then, in a panic, he clutched at Jacob’s coat, trying to hide under it. Jacob, who had no fear in him, tried at first to calm him, but when nothing helped, he began to ridicule poor Nahman, making fun of the whole situation. They held on to the flimsy masts, and when those broke under the beating of the waves, they grabbed hold of anything they could. The water was worse than a robber—it washed out all the loot from below the deck and also took one deckhand who was drunk and barely able to stay on his feet. The loss of this man to the depths caused Nahman to completely lose control of himself. He jabbered incoherent words of prayer, tears as salty as the seawater blinding his eyes.
Amused by Nahman’s state, Jacob had him make confession as well, and—worse still—had him make an assortment of promises to God. In his terror and his tears, he bound himself never again to touch wine or any spirits, or to smoke a pipe.
“I swear, I swear!” he shouted with his eyes closed, too terrified to think clearly, which brought Jacob great joy, so that in the midst of the storm he guffawed like a demon.
“And you’ll clean up after me when I shit!” Jacob shouted over the storm.
And Nahman answered:
“I swear, I swear.”
“And wipe my ass!” shouted Jacob.
“And wipe Jacob’s ass. I swear, I swear I’ll do it all!” answered Nahman, until the others, who were all listening, also started to collapse with laughter and mock the rabbi, and this ended up engaging them more than the storm, which passed like a bad dream.
Even now Nahman can’t shake his sense of shame and humiliation. He doesn’t speak a word to Jacob all the way to Smyrna, although Jacob often puts his arm around his shoulder and pats him on the back. It is hard to forgive someone for having fun at your misfortune. But—strangely—Nahman also finds an odd pleasure in it, a pale shadow of unspeakable delectation, a slight pain, when Jacob’s arm squeezes the nape of his neck.
Among all the oaths that Jacob laughingly forced Nahman to take, there was the promise he had made that he would never leave him.
Scraps: Of triangles and crosses
In Smyrna everything seemed familiar to us, as if we had been gone for just one week.
Jacob and Hana, and that tiny little girl who had recently been born to them, rented a small house on a side street. Hana, with the dowry given by her father, even arranged it so that it was pleasant to go there and sit for a bit, while she, in the Turkish fashion, would disappear with the child into the women’s part of the home, although I often felt from somewhere her gaze on my back.
Isohar, having heard about the entrance of the Holy Spirit into Jacob, had begun to behave completely differently from before. He began to seek out my company, as a direct witness of Jacob and as his voice. We would gather daily for long sittings, and Isohar ever more fervently would urge on us the study of the teachings of the Trinity.
This forbidden idea we found so thrilling, so illicit, that we wondered whether it was so for every Jew, whether it had, as it did for us, the same force as those four Hebrew letters that create the name of God.