Shlomo Shorr and his brother Nathan are meeting with their sister. Hayah the prophet has lived in Lanckoroń since her wedding with the local rabbi, Hirsh, who runs a tobacco business here and enjoys great respect among the true believers. Nahman feels slightly dazed at the sight of her, as though he’s just had vodka.
She comes with her husband, and as they stand there in the doorway, Nahman first thinks it is her father, so much does Hirsh resemble Old Shorr. Which isn’t that surprising, given they are cousins. Hayah has grown more beautiful since having children, she’s very thin and tall. She wears a bloodred dress and a light blue scarf, like a young maiden. Her hair is tied back with a colorful schmatte, and it cascades down her back. From her ears hang Turkish earrings.
The dusty little windows always let in too little light, so all day they burn wicks submerged in oil inside a clay shell, hence the stench of soot and burnt fat. Both rooms are crammed with furniture, and there is a scuttling sound, a rustling from somewhere that never lets up. Since it’s winter, the mice have sought shelter from the frosts beneath the roof; they are creating vertical cities in the walls and horizontal ones under the floors, cities more complex than Lwów and Lublin combined.
In the front room above the hearth there is a recess to allow the air to reach the fire, but it’s always getting clogged, and the stove smokes. So everything is permeated by the mixed scent of smoke and mice.
They close the door carefully and cover the windows. It could seem as if they’ve gone to sleep—they’ve been traveling all day, they’re tired, just like the spies. There is already an uproar in the village, that this Sabbatian plague has reached all the way here. But there are also two curious people, Gershon Nahmanowicz and his cousin Naftali, the one who leases the land from the local lord and thinks very highly of himself because of it. He creeps up and manages to peek in through a window (someone must have left a bit of it exposed). The blood rushes from his head, and he stands there like someone’s cast a spell on him, and he can’t tear his eyes away, and although he can peer through only a vertical strip, by moving his head around he can nonetheless take in the whole scene. And so he sees—barely, by the light of a single candle—a circle of seated men, and in the middle of the circle, a half-naked woman. Her large, firm breasts seem to be glowing in the dark. This Jacob Frank walks around her in circles, seemingly babbling to himself.
Against the backdrop of all the clumsy objects in Leybko’s home, Hayah’s body is perfect, miraculous, as though she were come from another world. Her eyes are half closed, and her mouth is half open, so that you can see the tips of her teeth. Droplets of sweat glisten on her shoulders and her chest, and her breasts look so heavy as to make the viewer want desperately to hold them up. Hayah is standing on a stool, the only woman amidst the many men.
Jacob is the first to approach her. He has to stand ever so slightly on tiptoe to reach her breasts with his lips. It looks as though he even holds her nipple for a moment in his mouth, as though he might be swallowing a couple of drops of milk. And then the second breast. Next goes Reb Schayes, an old man with a sparse beard that comes down to his waist. His lips, moving like a horse’s, seek Hayah’s nipple, blindly—Reb Schayes doesn’t open his eyes. Then Shlomo Shorr, Hayah’s brother, comes up, and after a moment’s hesitation does the same, though hurriedly, and then everyone’s doing it—an emboldened Leybko Aronowicz, their host, and right behind him his brother, Moshko, and then another Shorr, this time Yehuda, and then Isaac of Korolówka, and each of them, even those who have been standing back, hiding in the shadows, now coming forth, knows that he has been admitted into the great mystery of this faith, and in this way he’s become a true believer, and these people are his brothers, and so it will be until the savior destroys the old world and reveals the new. Because the Torah itself has entered Hirsh’s wife, Hayah; that is what beams out now through her skin.
You have to close your eyes, and you have to go into the darkness, because it’s only out of the darkness that you see clearly, Nahman thinks to himself, taking Hayah’s breast into his mouth.
How Gershon caught the heretics
Later they will say it was Jacob himself who ordered the windows to be covered so carelessly—so that people might see. Now the onlookers run quietly back to the village, to the rabbi, and in a flash a group has gathered, armed with sticks.
Gershon is right—he first has them glance through the crack between the curtains, and then when they break down the door, for a moment they see a naked woman trying to cover herself with some piece of clothing, and people fleeing along the edges of the room. Gershon roars. Someone jumps through a window, but is caught by those outside. Someone else successfully escapes. The remainder are tied up, still a little tipsy, with the exception of Hayah, and Gershon orders they be taken to the rabbi. Acting on his own authority, he requisitions their carriages, horses, books, and fur-lined overcoats, after which he goes to the local magnate’s estate. But Gershon doesn’t know that it’s Carnival, and that the lord has guests. Furthermore, the lord does not wish to wade into Jewish problems—he owes them money—and cannot determine exactly what the situation is, which of them are mixed up in it and which aren’t. So he calls his steward, Romanowski, being far too engaged with the delectation of his cornelian cherry liqueur to go himself. The courtyard is lit, and the smell of roast meat seeps out, along with the sound of music and ladies’ laughter. Curious flushed faces peek out from behind the lord. The steward Romanowski puts on his long boots and pulls down a rifle from the wall, calls some farmhands, and together they go through the snow. Their righteous indignation, Jewish and Christian, brings to their minds unquiet images of some great sacrilege, a pervasive, extradenominational blasphemy. When they get there all they see are freezing men, tied up two by two, with no coats, shivering. Romanowski shrugs. He doesn’t understand what’s going on. But just in case, he puts them all in jail in Kopyczyńce.
The Turkish authorities soon learn about what’s happened, and by the third day, a small Turkish division comes to demand that Romanowski release the prisoner Jacob Frank, subject of the High Porte, a demand with which Romanowski is happy to comply. Let the Jews or the Turks deal with their own heretics for once.
People say that over the course of the three days he spent in jail in Kopyczyńce, before the Turks came to get him, Jacob once more received the Holy Spirit, the ruah haKodesh, and shouted strange things, like that he would convert to the Christian faith and take twelve of his brothers with him, as confirmed later by Reb Schayes and another man from Korolówka who was confined to the same cell. When the Turks did liberate him, they gave him a horse at once, which he mounted, heading straight for Chocim, on the other side of the Turkish border. The spies reported to Rabbi Rapaport in Lwów that, as he left, he said in Hebrew, clear as a bell: “We will be taking the royal road!”