“Your Excellency, may I beseech you to dismiss me . . .”
Now the carriage crosses over a wooden bridge, which feels like an earthquake might.
“Yes, I know what you want,” Primate Łubieński says, and falls silent. After a pause that seems endless to Moliwda, the primate adds: “You’re scared. I don’t see anything wrong with the fact that you were their interpreter. It might even be better, because you know more. You know, Mr. Kossakowski, strange things are said about you. People say you’ve eaten bread out of more than one stove. And that you’re an important figure among the heretics. Is that true?”
“Your Excellency, those were youthful excesses. I was hotheaded, but with time I have become more reasonable. Regarding the heretics, that is mere gossip. I know many other histories, but that of the heretics—no.”
“Then tell us a story, it will make the time go by,” says the primate, and rests his head back on the padding behind him.
Moliwda thinks for a moment that the time has come for him to tell the story of his life, to get rid of that old burden and on this cold day start a new life. He realizes that it was Kossakowska’s influences that found a way to get him into this position—Kossakowska, who does not care for Łubieński and considers him an enemy to Polish interests and an unworthy man. No doubt in order to have someone she trusted in the opposition camp. She promised, in exchange, to quash any rumors that might be circling Moliwda like a different sort of halo.
No, Moliwda will never tell these two people what really brought him to the place in which he finds himself now. So he tells them how he and some random fellow passengers, met at sea by a squall, had to tether one another to the masts so that the waves wouldn’t take them . . . And how the sea tossed him ashore, where he was found by a beautiful princess, the daughter of the king of the island, how he was imprisoned in a cave and fed from a basket on a long pole, for they feared his red beard . . . And it is clear that the primate has never seen a sea, or a beach, or a princess, or probably even a cave, for his imagination can’t keep up, and he is overcome by boredom and starts to doze off. Moliwda calms down. Perhaps too quickly.
In the evening when they stop, once they have eaten dinner, the primate asks him to tell them about the Philippians and the Bogomils. Which Moliwda, ensnared, reluctantly, and in the most general possible terms, does.
“Just think of all a person can still learn. And what we believe we can find out only from a heresy,” the primate sums up Moliwda’s lecture, with the smile of a child much pleased by the strength of his own pronouncement.
Hieronim Florian Radziwiłł has been preparing for this day for months. Hundreds of peasants on his estates in Lithuania have captured every variety of animal: foxes, wild boars, wolves, bears, elk, and roe deer have been jammed into great cages transported by sled to Warsaw. Along the Vistula, he had a big field planted with little Christmas trees, giving rise to an artificial forest with simple footpaths. In the very center there are elegant facilities for important guests and friends of King Augustus—two stories, covered in green cloth on the outside and lined in black fox skins within. Farther down, past the enclosure, stands for the spectators have been built.
The king and his sons and their entourage, in which Primate Łubieński rubs shoulders with the rest of the purpurate class, have entered those facilities, and the szlachta and the courtiers have settled in the stands, to have a good view. Brühl and his wife are a little bit late, arriving once the chase is already under way. In the frosty air, everyone is having a great time, aided by the mead and the mulled wine with spices, supplied in generous portions by the servants. Moliwda casts furtive glances at the king, whom he is seeing for the first time. August is big, fat, sure of himself, and ruddy-cheeked from the cold. His soft, closely shaved royal chin looks as soft as a big baby’s. Next to him, his sons are scrawny brats. He drinks, knocking back the whole goblet in one gulp, leaning his head back and then, following the Polish custom, flicking the rest onto the ground. Moliwda cannot take his eyes off the soft, quivering jowl.
At the trumpet’s signal, the animals are released in batches from their cages. The stunned and frozen animals, long motionless, barely standing now, linger by the cages, not understanding what they’re supposed to be running from. Then the dogs are released on them, and there is a terrible tumult: the wolves attack the elk, the bears the boar, the dogs the bears, all in front of the king, who is shooting at them.
Moliwda pushes his way toward the rear; he reaches the tables where the snacks are laid out and asks for vodka. They pour him a glass, and then a second, and then a third. By the time the show is over, he is pretty drunk, which makes him conversational. The king has apparently derived an even greater enjoyment from this entertainment than had been expected, and no doubt Prince Radziwiłł is responsible, everyone says. And since the king is not a frequent visitor to Warsaw, he appreciates it all the more. A fat nobleman in a fur cap with a feather in it, who speaks with an eastern accent, tells Moliwda that Florian Radziwiłł is a man of great imagination, with a hobby of shooting animals like cannonballs out of a specially built machine. Then he shoots at them as they fly—that’s how it was in Słuck in the year 1755, so memorable for its great winter, when foxes were shot in midair. For wild boar a special hedgerow was designed, and at its end, just below, there was a moat filled with water; the boar were herded into that hedge and then sicced with dogs, and when they tried to run in terror, they fell straight into the moat, where they would try in vain to swim, becoming easy targets for the shooters. This inspired great jubilation amongst the guests, in which Moliwda’s interlocutor also had his share.
Here, meanwhile, there is another attraction in the afternoon. All the hunters, who are by then quite tipsy, gather around a special arena—young boar are let into it with cats tethered to their backs like riders. A pack of dogs is set against them. Everyone enjoys it enormously, so that they are all in an excellent mood when it comes time for the ball in which the day’s hunting finally culminates.
Moliwda returns alone. His Excellency the Primate of the Commonwealth remains for a while longer a guest of the magnate. The secretary, however, is hastened on by important matters of the Church. He reaches Warsaw, whence he is to pick up letters for Łowicz, but this takes him barely three hours. He doesn’t even notice what the capital looks like on such a gloomy winter day as this. He doesn’t look at anything at all. Or maybe he sees out of the corner of his eye the wide streets, muddy—you have to watch out for horse shit, steaming in the chill of this strange air, which seems to Moliwda so foreign that he would be unable to breathe it for long. He can smell the cold steppe, the wind. He realizes how stiff he is, how shrunken, and whether because of the cold or the alcohol he has consumed, he is panting rather than breathing. In the afternoon he sets out for Łowicz. He travels on horseback, without stopping.
Outside Warsaw, the sky is gray, low, the horizon expansive and flat. It looks like the earth won’t be able to bear the burden of the sky for much longer. On the battered road, the wet snow is beginning to turn to ice—it is late afternoon, soon it will be dark, which is why more and more horses are congregated out in front of the inn. The odor of horse urine and droppings and sweat mixes with the smoke that comes out of the inn’s crooked chimney and bursts out its open door. Two women in red skirts and short sheepskin coats thrown over their white holiday shirts stand at the doorway, carefully examining all who enter, evidently searching for someone in particular. The younger, rounder one successfully grapples with the aggressive advances of a drunk man in a dun sukmana.
The inn itself is a building made of wooden logs whitewashed with lime, low, with several small windows and a thatched reed roof. On the bench by the fence sit old women who come here out of boredom to watch the wide world. Wrapped in plaid wool shawls, with frozen red noses, they sit in silence and look attentively, without sympathy, at everyone who passes. Sometimes they exchange a word over some minor event. Suddenly the two women in the sheepskin co
ats notice someone, and a scrimmage breaks out, with shrieks. Maybe it’s one of the women’s drunken husband, or maybe a runaway fiancé—the man extricates himself from the women, and then, once he has been calmed down, allows himself to be led toward the village. The iced snow crunches under the hooves of the horses, who also look hopefully at the smoky entrance to the inn, but only muffled sounds of instruments can be heard from inside. The most melancholy sound in the world, thinks Moliwda: music heard from a distance, crippled by the wooden walls, the buzz of human beings, the scraping of the ice—reduced to hollow, lonely drumbeats. Soon the sound of distant bells from the town will join in and flood the whole area with an unbearable despair.
Scraps: Of the three paths of the story and how telling a tale can be its own deed
Nahman, or Piotr Jakubowski, has been sitting in his tiny room and writing for many days now. It is terribly cold in the apartment he and Wajgełe rented in Solec, which is far away from everything. Wajgełe has not been herself since the death of the child; whole days go by without her saying a word. No one comes to see them, and they don’t go to see anyone. Dusk falls fast, the color of rust. Jakubowski gathers wax and squeezes together new candles from the scraps. He writes out page after page that falls onto the floor.
. . . overflows. Every situation feels endless to me when I try to describe it, and out of helplessness, the pen falls from my hands. The description of a situation never fully exhausts it, for there is always something left undescribed. When I write, every detail sends me back to another, and then the next one again to something else, to some sign or gesture, so that I must always make a decision about what direction to pursue, in telling this story, where to fix my internal gaze, that same powerful sense that is able to summon back past images.
So in writing I stand at every moment at a crossroads, like the idiot Ivan from the fairy tales Jacob used to love telling us so much back in Ivanie. And now those crossroads are before my eyes, those bifurcating paths, of which one, the simplest one, the middle path, is for fools, while the other, to the right, is for the overconfident, and then there is the third path, which is for the brave, the desperadoes, even—that one will be full of traps, potholes, hexes, and calamitous occurrences.
It happens that sometimes I choose that simple road, the one in the middle, and I naively forget about all the complications of what I am describing, trusting in the so-called facts, the events as I would narrate them to myself, as if my eyes were the only ones to perceive them, as if there were no hesitation or uncertainty in existence, and things were as they appeared to be (even as we behold them, as I discussed so feverishly with Moliwda back in Smyrna). Then I write: “Jacob said,” as if it weren’t my ears that heard it, but God’s—that is what Jacob said, and that is a fact. I describe a place as if others would have experienced it as I did, as if that were the way it was. I trust my memory, and in recording what comes out of it, I make that frail instrument into a hammer that is to forge a bell. Going down that path, I believe that what I describe really happened, and that it happened that way once and for all. I even believe that there was never any chance of anything else having happened instead.
The simple middle road is false.
When such doubt comes over me, I choose the road on the right. Now it is the other way around—I am the rudder and the ship, and so I focus on my own experiences, as if the world before my eyes did not exist but was instead formed solely by my senses. And in spite of what Reb Mordke always taught me, I blow on my own fire and thereby ignite the embers of my self, about which I ought to forget, the ashes of which I should rather scatter to the wind—but instead I feed it until it is a gigantic flame. And then what do I have? Me, me, me—a regret-worthy state of accidental imprisonment in a hall of mirrors, the sort the Gypsies sometimes put up in order to charge an admission fee. Then everything is more about me than it is about Jacob, his words and acts are made to pass through the sieve of my tangled vanity.
The road to the right is a pathetic state indeed.
Therefore in desperation but also hope I run toward the left, and in doing so, make the same choice as the idiot Ivan. Just like him, I let myself be guided by chance and the voices of those who would help me. No one who did not do this, who did not trust the voices from the outside, would survive that madness of the left path, instead becoming an instant victim of the chaos. Recognizing myself as a speck being whipped around by greater forces, recognizing myself as a boat on the sea flung around by the waves (as when we sailed to Smyrna with Jacob), abandoning my ideas of my own power and having the trust to surrender to rule, I really become the idiot Ivan. And yet, it was he who conquered all the princesses and all the kingdoms of the world and tricked the most powerful into their downfalls.
And so I, too, surrender to the guidance of my own Hand, my own Head, Voices, the Ghosts of the Dead, God, the Great Virgin, Letters, Sefirot. I go sentence by sentence, blindly down the line, and although I don’t know what awaits me at the end, I patiently stumble forward, not inquiring into the price I will have to pay, and even less so about any reward. My friend and ally is that moment, that urgent hour, the dearest time to me, when suddenly out of nowhere the writing gets easy, and then everything appears to be wonderfully able to be expressed. What a blissful state it is! Then I feel safe, and the whole world becomes a cradle that the Shekhinah has laid me down in, and now the Shekhinah leans in over me like a mother over an infant.
The path to the left is only for those who have shown they deserve it, those who understand what Reb Mordke always said—that the world itself demands to be narrated, and only then does it truly exist, only then can it flourish fully. But also that by telling the story of the world, we are changing the world.
That is why God created the letters of the alphabet, that we might have the opportunity to narrate to him what he created. Reb Mordke always chuckled at this. “God is blind. Did you not know that?” he would say. “He created us that we would be his guides, his five senses.” And he would chuckle long and hard until he began to cough from the smoke.
On February 17, 1760, they summoned me to be interrogated, and I concluded that I would disappear now, as Jacob already had. I could not sleep the whole night and was unable to get dressed for the interrogation, as though now that Jacob had left us, my body clung to the old Jewish clothes. I remember that I went out dressed in the Jewish fashion, wearing my own old clothes, and that it wasn’t until I was out on the street that I turned back, in order to change into the nondescript outfit of black wool we had been wearing here, neither ours nor anyone else’s, and so short that right away my calves began to freeze.
The old idiot Jew dressed up as the little dandy, Wajgełe’s eyes said. Her face was full of skepticism (and maybe contempt), her cheeks red so that up close you could see the tiny networks of veins in them. Her lips, once so full, so joyful, had now set into a grimace of displeasure. Wajgełe knows that everything bad that has happened, happened because of me.
Walking with Matuszewski, who saw me off, I thought how I had never seen a city like Warsaw—the broad, completely empty streets, the blocks of frozen mud creating clods impossible to traverse or even, in many cases, to leap over, human figures more reminiscent of lumpen bundles, their heads grown into their fur collars. In their midst, the carriages, gleaming with lacquer, with the ornate initials of their owners, their coats of arms, their feathers, medallions. Vanity after vanity in this world made out of ice. My whole body was shaking from the cold, and tears were flowing from my eyes, and I could not tell whether they were on account of nervousness or cold.
It was early morning, and wagons of firewood, harnessed to slow, heavy horses, were standing at the gates of households while the peasants, wrapped in their warmest clothes, carried the wood in bundles tied with string and set them into piles. Some well-dressed Armenian was opening up his warehouse, which had a glass window; I glimpsed in that sheet of glass my own reflection, and it actually hurt to see myself looking so pathetic. Who w
as I, and what had happened to me? Where was I supposed to go, and what was I to say? What were they going to ask me, and in what language would I respond to them?
Suddenly it seemed to me that those decorations I once fleetingly envisioned as the whole world had now faded and aged so that no one could possibly be taken in by them today. The illusion is so imperfect, hideous and crippled. We are living in Hayah’s board game—we are the little figures molded out of bread by her nimble fingers. We move around the circles drawn over the board, meeting one another, and everyone is a task and a challenge for everyone else. And now we are approaching the decisive place—one toss of the dice and we will gain or lose everything.
Who would Jacob become if the game let him win here? He’d turn into one of those self-assured, arrogant people who go for ostentatious pleasure rides through the streets of this northern city in their carriages. He’d live like they do, emptily and sluggishly. The spirit would leave him in shame, not as it entered him, but with a disappointed sigh. Or it would slip out of his body like a fart or a belch. Jacob, my beloved Jacob, would become a piteous convert, and in the end, his children would be able to pay their way into their noble titles. The entire path we’ve traveled up till now would lose its reason and its meaning. We’d be stuck here, on this little stopover, like prisoners. We would have mixed up our immense objectives with just another pause along the way.
How can I talk without saying anything? With what sort of vigilance can I equip myself so that I won’t be seduced by the game, by smooth words? We studied this, and he tried to teach us.
I prepared well. I left all my money and a few valuables for my son with Marianna Wołowska, I put my books in order, and I bound together my writings with a string. As God is my witness, I was not afraid. I actually even felt cheerful to be attending such a ceremonious occasion, since I knew from the very beginning, when I thought of this plan, that I was doing the right thing, and that I was doing it for Jacob, even if he would curse me for it, even if he never let me see him again.
The Books of Jacob Page 69
