They were all as timeless as that moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring, these ornaments, utensils, and mementoes stranded in the Terezín bazaar, objects that for reasons one could never know had outlived their former owners and survived the process of destruction, so that I could now see my own faint shadow image barely perceptible among them. As I waited outside the bazaar, Austerlitz resumed after a little while, a light rain had begun to fall, and since neither the proprietor of the shop, whose name was given as Augustýn Němeček, nor anyone else was in evidence, I finally walked on, going up and down a few streets until suddenly, on the northeast corner of the town square, I found myself outside the so-called Ghetto Museum, which I had overlooked before. I climbed the steps and entered the lobby, where a lady of uncertain age in a lilac blouse, her hair waved in an old-fashioned style, sat behind a kind of cash desk. She put down the crochet work she was doing and leaned slightly forward to give me a ticket. When I asked if I was the only visitor today she said that the museum had only recently opened and not many people from outside the town came to see it, particularly at this time of year and in such weather. And the people of Terezín didn’t come anyway, she added, picking up the white handkerchief she was edging with loops like flower petals. So I went round the exhibition by myself, said Austerlitz, through the rooms on the mezzanine floor and the floor above, stood in front of the display panels, sometimes skimming over the captions, sometimes reading them letter by letter, stared at the photographic reproductions, could not believe my eyes, and several times had to turn away and look out of a window into the garden behind the building, having for the first time acquired some idea of the history of the persecution which my avoidance system had kept from me for so long, and which now, in this place, surrounded me on all sides. I studied the maps of the Greater German Reich and its protectorates, which had never before been more than blank spaces in my otherwise well-developed sense of topography, I traced the railway lines running through them, felt blinded by the documentation recording the population policy of the National Socialists, by the evidence of their mania for order and purity, which was put into practice on a vast scale through measures partly improvised, partly devised with obsessive organizational zeal. I was confronted with incontrovertible proof of the setting up of a forcedlabor system throughout Central Europe, and learned of the deliberate wastage and discarding of the work slaves themselves, of the origins and places of death of the victims, the routes by which they were taken to what destinations, what names they had borne in life and what they and their guards looked like. I understood it all now, yet I did not understand it, for every detail that was revealed to me as I went through the museum from room to room and back again, ignorant as I feared I had been through my own fault, far exceeded my comprehension. I saw pieces of luggage brought to Terezín by the internees from Prague and Pilsen, Würzburg and Vienna, Kufstein and Karlsbad and countless other places; the items such as handbags, belt buckles, clothes brushes, and combs which they had made in the various workshops; meticulously worked out projects and production plans for the agricultural exploitation of the open areas behind the ramparts and on the glacis, where oats and hemp, hops and pumpkins and maize were to be grown on plots of land meticulously parceled out. I saw balance sheets, registers of the dead, lists of every imaginable kind, and endless rows of numbers and figures, which must have served to reassure the administrators that nothing ever escaped their notice. And whenever I think of the museum in Terezín now, said Austerlitz, I see the framed ground plan of the star-shaped fortifications, color-washed in soft tones of gray-brown for Maria Theresia, her Imperial Highness in Vienna who had commissioned it, and fitting neatly into the folds of the surrounding terrain, the model of a world made by reason and regulated in all conceivable respects. This impregnable fortress has never been besieged, not even by the Prussians in 1866, but throughout the nineteenth century—if one disregards the fact that a considerable number of political prisoners of the Habsburg empire pined away in the casemates of one of its outworks—remained a quiet garrison for two or three regiments and some two thousand civilians throughout the nineteenth century, somewhat out of the way, a town with yellow-painted walls, galleried courtyards, well-clipped trees, bakeries, beerhouses, casinos, soldiers’ quarters, armories, bandstand concerts, occasional forays for the purpose of military maneuvers, officers’ wives who were bored to death, and service regulations which, it was believed, would never change for all eternity. When, towards the end of the day, the museum guardian came up to me and indicated that she would soon have to close, said Austerlitz, I had just been reading, several times over, a note on one of the display panels, to the effect that in the middle of December 1942, and thus at the very time when Agáta came to Terezín, some sixty thousand people were shut up together in the ghetto, a built-up area of one square kilometer at the most, and a little later, when I was out in the deserted town square again, it suddenly seemed to me, with the greatest clarity, that they had never been taken away after all, but were still living crammed into those buildings and basements and attics, as if they were incessantly going up and down the stairs, looking out of the windows, moving in vast numbers through the streets and alleys, and even, a silent assembly, filling the entire space occupied by the air, hatched with gray as it was by the fine rain. With this picture before my eyes I boarded the old-fashioned bus which had appeared out of nowhere, and stopped by the pavement directly in front of me a few paces from the entrance to the museum. It was one of those buses which travel from the country into the capital. The driver gave me change for a hundred-crown note without a word, and I remember that I held it clutched firmly in my hand all the way to Prague. Outside, the darkening Bohemian fields passed by, hop poles, deep brown fields, flat, empty country all around. The bus was very overheated. I felt drops of perspiration break out on my forehead and a constriction in my chest. Once, when I looked over my shoulder, I saw that the other passengers, without exception, had fallen asleep, leaning and sprawling at awkward angles in their seats. Some had their heads dropped forward, others sideways or tipped back. Several were snoring quietly. Only the driver looked straight ahead at the ribbon of road gleaming in the rain. As so often when one is traveling south, I had the impression of going steadily downhill, particularly when we reached the suburbs of Prague and it seemed as if we were descending a kind of ramp into a labyrinth through which we moved very slowly, now this way and now that, until I had lost all sense of direction. (Austerlitz)

She had several addresses for Maximilian—a hotel in the rue de l’Odéon, a small rented flat near the Glacière Métro station, and a third place, said Vera, in a district I no longer remember—and she tormented herself by wondering whether at some crucial moment she had mixed up these addresses, so that it was her own fault if her correspondence had gone astray, while at the same time she feared that Maximilian’s letters to her had been detained by the security services on their arrival in Prague. And indeed the letterbox was always empty up to the winter of 1941, when Agáta was still living in the šporkova, so that as she said to me once, oddly, it was as if those messages in which we placed our last hopes were misdirected or swallowed up by the evil spirits abroad in the air all around us. It was only later, said Vera, that I realized how well this remark of Agáta’s conveyed the invisible terrors beneath which the city of Prague lay cowering at the time, only when I learned of the true extent of the perversion of the law under the Germans, the acts of violence they committed daily in the basement of the Petschek Palace, in the Pankrác Prison, and at the killing grounds out in Kobylisy. After ninety seconds in which to defend yourself to a judge you could be condemned to death for a trifle, some offense barely worth mentioning, the merest contravention of the regulations in force, and then you would be hanged immediately in the execution room next to the law court, where there was an iron rail running along the ceiling down which the lifeless bodies were pushed a little further as required. The bill for these cursory proceedings was sent to the relations of the hanged or guillotined victim, with the information that it could be settled in monthly installments. Although little hint of it made its way out at the time, fear of the Germans spread through the whole city like a creeping miasma. Agáta said it even drifted in through the closed doors and windows, taking one’s breath away. When I look back at the two years following the outbreak of the war, said Vera, it is as if at that time everything was caught in a vortex whirling downwards at ever-increasing speed. Bulletins came thick and fast over the wireless, read by the announcers in a curiously high-pitched tone of voice, as if forced out of the larynx: news of the never-ending exploits of the Wehrmacht, which had soon occupied the entire European continent, while its successive campaigns, with apparently conclusive logic, held out to the Germans the prospect of a vast world empire in which, thanks to the fact that they belonged to the chosen people, they would all be able to embark on the most glittering careers. I believe, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that even the last remaining German skeptics were overcome by a kind of euphoria, such as one feels at high altitude, in these years when victory followed upon victory, while we, the oppressed, lived below sea level, as it were, and had to watch as the SS pervaded the economy of the entire country, and one business firm after another was handed over to German trustees. They had even aryanized the fez and slipper factory in Sternberg. The means Agáta still had at her disposal were barely enough for the necessities. Her bank accounts had been frozen ever since she was obliged to send in an eight-page statement of her assets, under dozens of headings. She was also strictly forbidden to dispose of any valuables such as pictures or antiques, and I remember, said Vera, how she once showed me a passage in one of those proclamations issued by the occupying power stating that in the case of any contravention of this regulation, both the Jew concerned in the transaction and the person acquiring the property must expect the most severe of measures to be taken by the State Police. The Jew concerned in the transaction! Agáta had cried, adding: Really, the way these people write! It’s enough to make your head swim. I think it was in the late autumn of 1941, said Vera, that Agáta had to take her wireless, her gramophone and the records she loved so much, her binoculars and opera glasses, musical instruments, jewelry, furs, and the clothes Maximilian had left behind to the so-called Compulsory Collection Center. Because of some mistake she had made in complying with this order, she was sent to shovel snow on Ruzyně airfield on a freezing day—winter came very early that year, said Vera—and at three o’clock the next morning, in the deepest part of the night, the two envoys of the Israelite religious community whom she had been expecting for some time arrived with the news that Agáta must prepare to be taken away within six days. These messengers, as Vera described them to me, said Austerlitz, who were strikingly alike and had faces that seemed somehow indistinct, with flickering outlines, wore jackets furnished with assorted pleats, pockets, button facings, and a belt, garments which looked especially versatile although it was not clear what purpose they served. The pair spoke quietly to Agáta for some time, and gave her a sheaf of printed forms and instructions setting out everything down to the very smallest detail: where and when the person summoned must present herself, what items of clothing were to be brought—coat, raincoat, warm headgear, earmuffs, mittens, nightdress, underclothes, and so on—what articles of personal use it was advisable to bring, for instance sewing things, leather grease, a spirit stove, and candles; the weight of the main item of luggage, which was not to exceed fifty kilos; what else could be brought in the way of hand baggage and provisions; how the luggage was to be labeled, with name, destination, and the number allotted to her; the proviso that all the attached forms were to be filled in and signed, that it was not permitted to bring cushions or other articles of furnishing, or to make rucksacks and traveling bags out of Persian rugs, winter coats, or other valuable remnants of fabric; and furthermore that matches, lighters, and smoking were prohibited at the embarkation point and thereafter in general, and all orders issued by the official authorities were to be followed to the letter in every contingency. Agáta was unable, as I could see for myself, said Vera, to follow these nauseatingly phrased directives; instead, she simply flung a few wholly impractical items into a bag at random, like someone going away for the weekend, so that finally, difficult as it was for me and guilty as it made me feel, I did her packing while she simply stood at the window, turning away from me to look out at the empty street. (Austerlitz)

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.” (The Books of Jacob)

. . . I send these volumes of mine to the venerable Vicar Forane, whose quick eye shall perhaps find something in them beyond mere mundane vanity, for I believe that to express in language the vastness of the world, it is impossible to use words that are too transparent, too unambiguous—that would be like drawing a pen-and-ink sketch, transferring that vastness onto a white surface to be broken up by clean black lines. But words and images must be flexible and contain multitudes, they must flicker, and they must have multiple meanings.

Not that your efforts, dear Father, have gone underappreciated by me—on the contrary, I am deeply impressed by the scale of your work. But it does occur to me that you seek only the counsel of the dead. Your citations and compilations are a way of rummaging around in tombs. Yet facts in isolation soon become unimportant, lose their relevance. Can our lives be described beyond fact? Can there be a description that is based exclusively on what we see and feel, on details, on sentiment?

I try to see the world through my own eyes, and to have my own language, rather than merely repeating someone else’s words.

His Excellency Bishop Załuski worried he would, as my publisher, lose money on me, imbuing his correspondence with so much bitterness, and here it turns out that the whole print run has already sold out, and they are getting ready for another. It pains me a bit that now I’m being asked to sell my own poems, published by him. He has sent me a hundred copies, and since the Piarists who run the printing press are troubling him for money, he wants me to move this stock. I informed him that I do not put down my verses out of a hunger for profit, but rather that my readers might reflect and obtain some slight enjoyment. I don’t want to make money from them, nor would I know how. How could I? Am I, like some traveling merchant, to take my own poems on a cart around the fairs and press them on people for a penny? Or force them on some nobles and await their benefaction? To be honest with you, my dear friend, I would prefer to deal in wine than in poems.

Did you receive the package I sent via some persons traveling to Lwów? It contained some felt slippers that we made here in the autumn—I myself sewed little, for my eyesight is already quite poor, but my daughter and my granddaughters did—as well as dried fruits from our orchard, plums, pears (which are my favorites), and a little barrel of my signature rose wine; watch out, Father, for it is strong. Most important, the package contained a splendid cashmere scarf for the colder days in your Firlejów seclusion. I permitted myself to include, as well, a little volume you would not have encountered yet. If you were to place your Athens and my little handicrafts on a scale, of course they would be incomparable. That’s the way it is, I suppose—the selfsame thing comes out very differently in the hands of two different people. Those who are left and those who leave will always draw different conclusions. Likewise the person who possesses and the person possessed, the person who is sated and the one who is hungry—and the wealthy daughter of a nobleman dreams of a little pug from Paris, while the poor daughter of a peasant dreams of a goose to have for meat and feathers. That is why I write:

For my ordinary mind it will suffice,

Unable to count the sky’s stars anyhow,

To add up the oaks, and firs and pines precise,

Practice that arithmetic at least for now.

Whereas your vision is quite different. You would like information to be an ocean from which all can draw. And you think that an educated person, on reading every piece of it, will know the whole world without leaving his home. And that human knowledge is like a book, in the sense that it also has its “covers,” its bounds, which means it can be summarized and made available to all. It is a glorious goal that motivates you, and for that, as your reader, I am grateful. But I know what I’m talking about, too.

Every person is a little world:

The firmament is where the head is,

The mind’s the sun, its rays are words,

And the planets are the senses.

The world errs and takes with it mankind;

Death pursues the day from east to west.

Women keep the world in mind

And on its feet, to stand the test.

You will say: “imprecise, idle chatter.” And no doubt you’ll be right. Maybe the whole art of writing, my dear friend, is the perfection of imprecise forms . . . (The Books of Jacob)