Zaddik, page 24
“I beg your forgiveness, Reb Naftali,” said Hirsh Leib. “I, I am not myself.”
“Naftali forgives you,” said Bunem. “Isn’t that true, Naftali?”
Naftali, gasping, nodded.
“Now go home, Hirsh Leib. We know it was not you who struck our friend. It was the Evil Impulse. Not you.”
Hirsh Leib covered his face with his hands and staggered out of Berel’s tavern into the cold. The street was quiet, the square empty. The sky above was black and filled with stars.
What is wrong with me? thought Hirsh Leib. What is happening to me? Was the boy I saw Naftali as a child? Why was his skin black? Is it because my deed is black? And who was the man?
Hirsh Leib forced himself to think of the Torah. He saw the page of Exodus before his eyes: “He who raises his hand against another is called rasha, wicked.” And in a hoarse, trembling voice, Hirsh Leib recited aloud to the empty square, ‘And he said to the rasha: Wherefore wilt thou strike thy neighbor?’ ”
This was not like hitting that drunken peasant who was beating his horse, thought Hirsh Leib, shame and remorse rising up in his throat, choking him. It is forbidden to cause needless pain to a dumb animal, and I struck the Pole only to protect myself. That is permitted. But now I have committed a grave sin, and God will punish me. Of course, he has already punished me, as there is no before or after, earlier or later, in the Torah. As God said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” Is that black child a sign of my punishment? Is the weeping man my father or my son? I must ask the Seer.
But I am unfit to stand in the Seer’s presence. I am unfit. I am unfit, and I am unclean.
Where is the mikvah? thought Hirsh Leib. I must get clean.
It’s too late for the mikvah, Hirsh Leib told himself. You will wake the rebbe’s household, and everyone will see your shame. Go to the river. Yes.
Hirsh Leib began walking unsteadily down Tailor Street, toward the small stream that skirted the eastern boundary of Lublin. Looking down the street, beyond the slaughterhouse, above the trees, Hirsh Leib could see the cross of the Polish church, and behind it the heavens turning gray with the coming dawn.
The cross reminded Hirsh Leib of Prince Czartoryski. Is he on his way to Warsaw right now, as he promised the Seer, with our message to Napoleon? Hirsh Leib wondered.
Or is he lying on his silken sheets in his castle, plotting to nail us all to that horrible cross?
Chapter 38 The Seer’s Bedchamber
Lublin
Wednesday, October 13
THE SUN FELL ACROSS the Seer of Lublin’s face. He opened his eyes and sat up, and his soul went out of his body. It flew across the forests and entered the great city of Warsaw. Later, he would tell Hirsh Leib what he saw there and what he understood:
The morning sun was leaking through the shutters as Countess Marie Waleska poured water over her hands from a blue filigreed glass pitcher by her bed. Then she dabbed her eyes with her fingers, wiping away the sleep. In a corner of the countess’s bedroom, Napoleon Bonaparte, the exiled emperor of France, squatted over a porcelain chamber pot and groaned.
He’s grown so fat, thought Waleska, regarding Napoleon with a critical eye. He used to be so beautiful. She wrinkled her nose at the odor filling the room from Napoleon’s tortured bowels and reached for a flacon of perfume to drive away the smell.
Seven years ago, when Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski—with whose robust, blond good looks, so like her own, Marie Waleska was entirely smitten—suggested that she take Bonaparte to her bed, the eighteen-year-old countess was terrified. She wasn’t concerned about her sickly sixty-seven-year-old husband, Count Waleska, who rarely stirred from his house in the country and who hadn’t visited his bride in Warsaw for almost a year. But she had heard such stories, she told Czartoryski. Wasn’t it true that the French had insatiable appetites—surely the prince knew what she meant—and wasn’t it true that their equipment compared favorably with that of their horses? And wasn’t it true that their emperor was chosen to lead them because his equipment was the largest of all? And weren’t these French violent, savage beasts who, it had been said, devoured babies, ripping them from their mothers’ arms?
Czartoryski took her into his arms, kissed her, and assured her that these were just stories told to frighten women and children and make them behave. But although she was prepared to believe whatever her adored Czartoryski said, even if he had told her that the French were angels come to earth in Christ’s name, her fears did not entirely depart until she finally saw Napoleon at the duke of Warsaw’s palace.
The thirty-seven-year-old conqueror of most of Europe had a high, noble brow and a thin Roman nose. He was, it was true, rather short—far shorter, certainly, than Marie herself—but beneath his simple uniform his body looked powerful, his shoulders broad, his thighs and calves muscular. Wherever he moved in the duke’s grand ballroom, walking with a heavy tread and almost comically long strides, as if to compensate for the shortness of his legs, people would give way, allowing him space, as if to touch his person would be dangerous. To Waleska he looked like a rough Mars, god of war. And when Prince Czartoryski brought her over to him, he bowed deeply and kissed her hand. Looking up into her eyes, he murmured softly, only for her to hear, “Now I know why I took Warsaw.”
She slept with him that night.
He was a strong, gallant lover, impetuous and somewhat crude, more like the boys she had slept with in the duke’s stables and forests than her husband. In time, however, she was able to teach Napoleon how to kiss her between her legs, how to lie back and do nothing while she straddled him, how to accept the loving slaps and bites that allowed Europe’s conqueror to be himself conquered. In Marie Waleska’s bed Napoleon could escape from the responsibilities of empire and become, once again, a child suckling at his mother’s breast.
And time and time again he would return to her bed, riding night and day to reach her from some far-flung battlefield. Marie Waleska was sure that he was falling in love with her. And when she told him that she was carrying his child, she was sure he would offer her a seat next to him on France’s, and therefore Europe’s, throne.
Instead, of course, he divorced Josephine and married—on April Fool’s Day 1810—Marie Louise, the blandly pretty, blond, bovine nineteen-year-old daughter of the Hapsburg emperor, Francis of Austria.
“Politics,” he told Marie Waleska, as if that excused his treachery.
If she had not known it before, she knew it now: her dominion over Napoleon, absolute though it may have been, extended no farther than her bedroom door.
Now, watching her lover of seven years straining over the chamber pot, Marie Waleska savored her revenge. Marie Louise had brought Bonaparte nothing, not even the loyalty of her father, who had turned against him last January and, as Paris fell, brought his army onto the field on Tsar Alexander’s side. Marie Louise had not even accompanied her husband into exile, fleeing to Italy with a lover and taking with her Napoleon’s tiny son, the magnificently if idiotically titled King of Rome.
Of course, Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise never prevented him from turning up regularly at Marie Waleska’s door and begging from her the sweet punishments upon which he had grown to depend.
“Marie, get me a cloth,” said Napoleon, squatting.
Waleska swung her long legs across the sheets, picked up a linen from the table next to Napoleon’s side of the bed with her toes, and tossed it to him. It fluttered to the floor well out of his reach.
“Please, Marie. I don’t want to soil myself.”
Waleska rolled off the bed. After picking up the linen handkerchief, monogrammed with his royal N, she walked over to Napoleon and dropped it into his lap.
“But, Marie,” said Napoleon, looking up at his mistress towering nakedly over him, his loins, even in his bowels’ distress, stirring at the sight, “this is my handkerchief.”
“Why should you dirty one of my linens?” said Waleska, noting the sweat running in rivulets down the folds of fat in Napoleon’s red, swollen face and noting, too, his growing erection. “They are expensive to clean. You may not be poor,” she said, referring to the annual two million francs granted Napoleon by the victorious rulers of Prussia, Austria, Russia, and England upon his abdication last April, “but I am.”
“I deny you nothing,” said Napoleon, accepting the handkerchief and cleaning himself.
Waleska turned away and sat on the edge of the bed. Napoleon gathered his dressing gown around him, stood up, and walked over to Waleska.
“Get rid of the pot,” Waleska said. “It stinks.”
Napoleon swung open the window, picked up the chamber pot, and poured its contents onto the gardens below.
“Russia,” muttered Napoleon, returning to the bed and sitting beside Waleska.
“What does that mean?”
“My bowels have never recovered from the Russian campaign,” said Napoleon.
“Before Russia,” Waleska said, “you blamed Spain. Your digestion has always been bad, and that’s because you stuff yourself like a pig.”
“Marie, why are you so angry with me?” asked Napoleon, placing his hand lightly on her thigh. “What have I done?”
“I would not know where to begin, mon empereur,” said Waleska, brushing his hand away.
“Marie, I have told you before, I was wrong. Marrying Marie Louise was a mistake. It was Talleyrand’s idea, that fop, that sneak, that shit inside the ass of a worm. But it was my mistake. I have paid for it. What more can I say?”
Waleska shrugged.
“You are the only person in the world to whom I have ever apologized for anything. You are the one person who has stood beside me in this terrible time. The rest are all traitors. They will drown in their own blood and shit. But you, Marie. When I take back the throne, when the French people throw themselves at my feet and beg me to restore their honor, their glory, you will sit at my left hand, I promise you.”
Waleska stood up, and Napoleon wrapped his arms around her ass, burying his head in her belly. She rested her right hand on the top of his head and idly brushed his hair. He’s getting bald, too, my emperor, she thought, lifting up a thin brown strand and studying his pink scalp. His hair used to be a warrior’s helmet. Fat already, and soon bald.
She didn’t doubt that he would reclaim France. What could Napoleon Bonaparte not accomplish? But put a poor Polish countess on France’s throne? He’ll marry another Marie Louise, she thought. A younger and stupider version with a royal father who has a big army or a big purse.
Waleska sighed, and Napoleon, mistaking its meaning, lowered his head to her groin. She pushed him away and broke his embrace. “Not now,” she said. “I am not in the vein. Besides, I must be about breakfast.”
“Just coffee and milk,” said Napoleon.
“And bread and butter and jam and cheese and eggs and ham and raspberries and pears,” said Waleska, throwing on her gown. “When have you eaten less? If you stay longer, I’ll have to sell my jewels to feed you.”
“Coffee and milk,” said Napoleon. “Perhaps some bread. You joke. Can’t you see my agony?”
“Yes, mon empereur. You suffer so terribly, and so terribly well.”
Waleska swept out of the bedroom to see to her servant and ready breakfast. A sharp, burning pain, like a saber thrust, cut through Bonaparte’s guts. From his dressing gown pocket he removed a small ivory-and-gold box and opened it. He removed a tiny black ball of opium—his rabbit turds, he called them—and swallowed it. Then he swallowed another. The spasm subsided. In a little while he would be himself.
There was a knock on the door. Napoleon stood up and smoothed his robe. “Enter,” he said.
Marcel Betrand, a sergeant in the palace guard who had accompanied him to Elba and now guarded his person during his secret trips off the island, peeked into the room.
“Yes, Marcel?”
“You have a visitor, mon empereur,” Marcel whispered.
“Impossible,” said Napoleon.
“Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski is here, mon empereur. He says he has ridden all night and all morning and has not slept. He says he has a message for you.”
And hearing that, the Seer knew that there would be no turning back. The cosmic conspiracy had begun.
Chapter 39 The Seer’s Hoyf
Lublin
Wednesday, October 13
IN THE MARKET square Hirsh Leib, his head throbbing and his body aching, bought a citron and the sheaf of bound palm, myrtle, and willow branches with which one celebrates the holiday of Sukkos. They were expensive—the merchant swore that they came all the way from the Holy Land—but they were perfect: the citron without blemish; the leaves fresh and green. Hirsh Leib brought the willow up to his face, its sweet, earthy odor helping him to clear his head. He sniffed the citron, then placed them all in his saddlebag and rode out of the noisy market toward the Seer’s hoyf.
Last night Hirsh Leib had fallen asleep by the banks of the river. After awakening, he had gone to the public bathhouse on Tanner Street, where he’d washed, put on his tefillin, and prayed. From there, he’d gone to Neshe’s for a glass of tea, some black bread with salt, a slice of onion, and a small glass of sweet brandy. By the time he had left the market, his hands had stopped shaking and the storm in his soul had begun to pass.
Riding down the Old Road, Hirsh Leib told himself that brooding on his sins would only make him their captive. You stir filth, he thought, and what do you get? Stirred filth. Is it not written, “Depart from evil and do good?” You have done wrong, Hirsh Leib? Well, then, balance it by doing right. Is this not the message of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement? The gates of repentance are always open.
At that moment Hirsh Leib saw an elderly Jew with a beard the color of tin sitting in the dust by the side of the road. He was dressed as a peasant in rough clothes, a leather cap, and old, cracked boots. Hirsh Leib reined his horse and called to him.
“Are you all right, Rabbi?”
“If I were all right, would I be sitting here in the dust? I am old, and I am exhausted from my travels,” said the old man.
“Are you going to see the Seer?”
“Are you a melamed?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Because like a melamed, like a teacher of idiot children, you ask stupid questions instead of helping.”
“Come, Rabbi, you can ride with me.”
“You call that help? If I could lift myself up to walk, why would I need you?”
Hirsh Leib dismounted, stroked his horse’s neck, told him to stay, and walked over to where the old man sat. He lifted him up by his elbows, feeling the man’s bones beneath the thin material of his black coat and the even thinner material of his flesh.
“You’re hurting me,” the old man whined. “What’s the matter with you? You don’t know your own strength?”
Hirsh Leib apologized, thinking, This is a sour one; look at his eyes. They were so red, it was if he had a fever. The old man took a deep breath, and with the Zaddik of Orlik’s right arm around his waist, he shuffled toward Hirsh Leib’s horse.
“What’s your name, Rabbi?” asked Hirsh Leib.
“Yekl.”
“And where are you from, Reb Yekl?” asked Hirsh Leib.
“From everywhere,” the old man said, “and from nowhere. I have been all over the world looking for an honest Jew. Most recently, I have been in Pshiskhe.”
“Did you see Reb Yitzhak there?” asked Hirsh Leib, referring to the Zaddik of Pshiskhe, the Holy Yehudi. “Certainly,” he said, smiling, “he is an honest Jew.”
“Yes, indeed he was,” Yekl replied. “But last night the Jew died, and my search continues.”
Hirsh Leib was stunned. Rebbe Yakov Yitzhak, who shared the Seer of Lublin’s name, was the Seer’s disciple. He was called the Yehudi, the Jew, because once, with a fellow student, he had put on peasant clothes to search for the prophet Elijah, who often wandered the world in that disguise. Walking through the Pshiskhe market, the Yehudi had suddenly grabbed his friend’s arm and, pointing to a peasant leading a horse by a rope, said, “There he is!” The peasant had turned to Reb Yitzhak, crying angrily, “Jew! If you know, why do you boast?” And then the peasant had vanished, for it had been, indeed, Elijah. After that people simply called Rabbi Yitzhak the Yehudi, or, later, the Holy Yehudi.
Hirsh Leib felt tears gathering behind his eyes and in his throat. While the Yehudi lay dying, he thought, I was brawling in a tavern with Reb Bunem. While the Yehudi was saying the Shema for the last time, I was calling for brandy. It is not the common, prosteh Jews who delay the Messiah and prevent the unification of the upper and lower worlds; it is righteous hypocrites like myself.
“Well,” said the old man, “are you going to help me onto your horse or are we going to stand here all day?”
“How did Rebbe Yitzhak die?” asked Hirsh Leib.
“Like all men, when it’s their time. He stopped breathing,” Yekl said.
“How can you be so unfeeling, old man?” said Hirsh Leib. “Surely, having met the Yehudi, you know that he was the holiest man in the world.”
“Is that saying such a great deal? I think not. Anyway, did not Hashem say, as it is written, ‘You are not permitted to be more compassionate than I am’?
“Hashem decided that it was time for the Yehudi to leave this world. Is it for you or I to say, No, it was not time, we know better? Are you always so arrogant, young man? And were you lying when you said you would give me a ride? My tired feet and my aching back tell me you were.”
Hirsh Leib felt confused and angry. This man was sent as a torment, he thought, but I will treat him with the kindness he does not deserve.
So Hirsh Leib lifted the old man—who weighed no more than a child—onto his horse, then swung himself into the saddle. Yekl put his arms around Hirsh Leib’s waist, and they set off down the Old Road.
“So,” said Yekl, “you are a shiker, a drunkard, yes?”
Hirsh Leib turned his head to look at his passenger. The old man was smiling merrily now, showing broken, tobacco-stained teeth. His red eyes seemed to glitter like rubies. His breath reeked of garlic.
