“Look at you! I remember you rather differently.”
“I, too, could say I had a different image of you in my mind.”
He patted me on the shoulder like he used to back in Smyrna, and took my hand, and we came off of the street and went into a courtyard, both of us somewhat uncomfortable, yet joyous, too. I was overcome by emotion, and tears came into my eyes. “I thought you were going to pass by me,” I said.
And then, in that courtyard, he did a surprising thing—he wrapped his arms around my neck, buried his face in my collar, and sobbed—so terribly that I, too, wanted to weep, although I had no reason for it.
After that, I met with him a few times, and we would go to a little winery at the back of the market where they served Tokay—the very sort we always used to drink together, too. Each time, Moliwda wound up drunk, and—to tell the truth—so did I.
He was now a well-placed royal scribe, and he enjoyed the finest society, wrote for the newspapers, and would bring me printed pamphlets, and I thought that the reason he dragged me to that winery was that it was in a cellar and was darkish, and even if someone were to come in there, they would not have been able to make out our faces. “Why have you not married?” I would ask him every time, unable to understand that he preferred to live on his own, having strangers do his washing, taking strangers to bed. Even if you don’t care much for women, still it is useful to live with one.
He would then sigh and tell some story, as was his wont, and every time it was a slightly different one, he would get all tangled up in the details, and I would merely nod my head with understanding, for I was familiar with his storytelling style.
“I have no peace of mind, Nahman,” he said, leaning on his glass. “I have no peace in my soul.”
The conversation always turned then to memories of Smyrna and Giurgiu, and on that, our adventures would conclude—there was never any more to them than that. He did not wish to hear of Częstochowa, he would start to fidget, and it seemed to me that whatever had happened after Jacob’s imprisonment did not concern him in the least. I wrote down for him, too, the Wołowskis’ address, and Hayah Lanckoron´ska’s, but so far as I know, he never went. He did once come to my place, when I was about to travel to Brünn, a bit tipsy already, and we went to drink together on Grzybowska Street. He told me of the king, who invited Moliwda for lunches sometimes and rated his poems quite highly, and once, when he was drunk, he sketched out for me on the table a map indicating which loose women would receive him, and where.
Just recently I learned that he recommended Michał Wołowski’s son, a young lawyer, for a post in the royal chancellery, and that he watched over him there; the boy was very capable.
That is all about Moliwda. Just after Christmas in 1786, the Lord summoned us to Brünn for those final months; shortly before leaving, I learned Moliwda was deceased.
Last days in Brünn
When we arrived in Brünn, the palace on Petersburger Gasse was already almost empty. Jacob summoned for those final months those who remained from our Ivanie havura, the eldest brothers and sisters: Eva Jezierzan´ska, Klara Lanckoron´ska, the Wołowski brothers, and me. Of the younger brothers, Redecki and Bracławski. Already present were Old Pawłowski, Yeruhim Dembowski, and a few more, too.
We found him alone in his rooms, for he had had Eva and Anusia Pawłowska moved to another part of the building, which struck me as rather imprudent, given he had been suffering of late from hemorrhage and apoplexy. He was irritated and ordered Redecki to take care of him—he was the spitting image of the late Hershel, who had died in Lublin. Jacob had wasted away. His several weeks’ worth of facial hair was now completely gray, the hair on his head white, albeit thick and wavy. He walked leaning on a cane. It was hard for me to believe I was seeing him like this, and that this had all occurred over the course of a single year, for in my memory he still remained the Jacob of Smyrna, of Ivanie—certain of himself, coarse, speaking in a voice that carried everywhere, moving quickly, even violently.
“What are you looking at me like that for, Jakubowski,” he said by way of greeting. “You have grown old. You look like a scarecrow.”
It was obvious that I, too, had been marked by the passage of time, but I was not feeling it since I suffered from no old-age ailments. Yet unnecessarily he compared me with a scarecrow in front of everyone.
“You, too, Jacob,” I answered, but he did not even respond to my impertinence. Others laughed a little.
Every morning we would go somewhere, into Brünn to see the creditors, or to Vienna, where the sons of Solomon, may he rest in peace, who were quite well connected, would advise us as to how we might pay off those sky-high debts.
When it would start to get dark—and the evenings were long now—we would sit together as we used to in our common chamber; Jacob would take care to pray in the old way—our way—but very briefly, probably only so as not to forget. By day, it was all packing up and selling off what could still be sold. In the evening Jacob would grow eager to tell stories, and it must have cheered him that he was seeing so many of us. Many of those chats I recorded elsewhere, as did my comrades.
“There is this place I am guiding you toward,” he would say, and I could have listened to this tale over and over, endlessly, for it soothed me greatly, and if I were to wish for any story on my deathbed, it would be this one, “and although now you are impoverished, you would not wish for any treasures of the world, if you were to know this place. This is the place of that Great Brother, the Good God, who is favorable to man and bestows upon him fraternal feeling, and who resembles me. And he has around him a retinue, very much like what we have here—with twelve brothers and fourteen sisters, and the sisters are bedmates to the brothers, as it is with us. All of those sisters are queens, for there it is the women who rule, not the men. And it may seem strange to you, but the names of those brothers and sisters are exactly the same as yours in Hebrew. And their figures are similar to yours, just young—just as you were, in Ivanie. And it is to them that we are heading. When we finally meet them, then you will marry those sisters and those brothers.”
I knew this tale, and they knew it, too. We always listened to it with emotion, but this time, in this empty home, I had the impression that they were all turning a deaf ear to it. As if it no longer meant what it always had meant, but was simply a lovely parable.
It was clear to all of us that now the most important person to Jacob was Moshe Dobrushka, who was here known as Thomas Schönfeld. Jacob spent days on end waiting for his arrival from Vienna, asking every day if there was a letter from him. Yet the only person who would visit him was the treasurer Wessel, a friend of Dobrushka’s, with whom he had some dealings or other, though nothing was communicated to us. It fell to me, meanwhile, to write the letters, mostly letters to creditors, soothing, polite, but also letters to the brothers in Altona and Prossnitz.
Jacob even started to talk about returning to Poland, and to ask me in turn all kinds of questions about Warsaw, what things were like there now, and I felt that he was homesick for it, or that he was too weak now to start another new life in another foreign land. In the evenings, he grew nostalgic, and so I took up pen and paper and wrote all his memories down, and when my hand would start to hurt, Anusia Pawłowska would take over, and then Antoni Czerniawski would correct and copy it out the following day.
“Look,” he told us, “when I was in Poland, it was a peaceful and prosperous land. As soon as I was thrown in prison, the king passed away, and troubles began to plague that country. And when I left Poland for good, the Commonwealth was torn asunder.”
It was hard to deny him this.
He also said that the reason he maintained his Turkish style of dress was that according to Polish legend, one day a man born of a foreign mother would arrive, and he would repair the country, and liberate it from every oppression.
He would constantly warn us not to return to the old Jewish faith, but that winter on the first night of Hanukkah he suddenly
lit the first candle and ordered Jewish dishes be prepared, and everyone ate them with great gusto. And then we sang in the old language that old song that Rebbe Issachar had taught us long ago:
What is man? A spark.
What is human life? A moment.
What is the future now?
A spark. And what the crazed course of time? A moment.
Where does man come from?
A spark. And what is death? A moment.
Who was He while he contained the world?
A spark. And what will he be once he swallows up the world again?
A moment.
Moliwda in search of his life’s center
It has to be the best, the kind that doesn’t make your head hurt the next day. After wine, however, he sleeps badly, and wakes first thing in the morning, and that is the worst time of day: everything at that time seems to be a problem, some terrible misunderstanding. As he tosses and turns on his bed, old memories come back to him, very distinct in all their details. More and more often the stubborn thought comes to mind: When did he reach the halfway point of his life? What day was it when his story reached its highest point, its noon, and from that time on—though he did not know about it—began to progress toward setting? It is a very interesting problem, for if people knew which day was the midpoint of their lives, perhaps they would be able to imbue their lives and the events taking place within them with some kind of meaning. Lying sleeplessly, he adds up dates, creates combinations of numbers, like Jakubowski with his obsession with Kabbalah. It is 1786, late autumn. He was born in the summer of 1718. He is therefore sixty-eight years old. If he died now, that would indicate that the middle of his life fell in the year 1752. He tries to remember that year, turning the pages of the internal, not especially precise calendar in his mind, and in the end he finds that if he were to die right now, then that point might well be the day he arrived in Craiova. How strange: he remembers it well. He even remembers that he was wearing the white linen shirt of the Bogomils, that it was hot, and that small overripe plums were falling on the dry road, where they were soon crushed by carts’ wheels. Big, fat wasps, more like hornets, drank up the sweet pear juice in the orchard. People dressed in white were dancing in a circle. Moliwda stands among them and feels joy, but it is the kind of joy you have to force yourself to undergo—and then it blossoms.
His work in the royal chancellery is not the most difficult; he, as a senior clerk, oversees more than he actually writes. To him belongs the division in communication with the Ottoman Porte, since he knows languages. In fact, at his age, a person can simply pretend to be working, and that is what Moliwda does.
The king likes the witty Moliwda, his hoarse voice, his yarns. They often trade a few sentences; the exchange is always humorous and ends in a burst of laughter. This is why Moliwda is widely respected. When Stanisław August comes into the chancellery, everyone quickly gets up and bows—it is only Moliwda who takes a long time to rise, having to exert himself on account of his big belly, and since the king does not care for exaggeration, Moliwda limits his bow to a quick tilt of the head.
Moliwda considers himself to be something of a wise man now, and in spite of small crises, he maintains his good opinion of himself. Ultimately, he does not believe that he has been harmed by life. He tries to live like a Cynic philosopher. Few things are capable of wounding him. He has a sharp pen, of which he makes frequent enough use. Recently someone named Antoni Felicjan Nagłowski wrote a book titled The Warsaw Guide, in which he presented the beautiful and important places of the capital. Moliwda mocked him, deeming that complaisant vision of the capital worthy of a schoolgirl. He determined to write an homage to Warsaw’s whores, whose customs he had been investigating over the last few years, as a scholar investigates the lives of the savages on distant islands. This work, called A Supplement to the Guide Published by Another Author, appeared in 1779 and was rapidly disseminated. It made some Warsaw courtesans famous, while Moliwda’s own social position improved; even though the publication was not only ephemeral but anonymous, everyone knew it had been done by him.
For years he has been getting together with a group of friends—among them are some men from the chancellery, but there are also journalists, and playwrights. A merry company that never shies away from intelligent conversations. The men meet every Wednesday to taste wine, smoke pipes, and then, happily, bolstered by the wine, they set out into Warsaw, seeking new places, even better than the ones they found the week before. For instance, they go to Liza Szynder’s on Krochmalna Street, where it is cheap and comfortable. The girls wear flimsy little shirts, not some frippery with frills. Moliwda does not care for that sort of overperformance in his girls. Sometimes they head over to Trembecka Street, where the ground floor of every home is a shrine of sorts to love, and the women sit in the windows and beckon to their customers. It should be said that he rarely makes use of their services now, his manhood does not share his enthusiasm for women in flimsy shirts that barely cover their bottoms—in half-asses, as the men say jokingly, maliciously of them. Women still attract him, but he is rarely up to the execution of ordinary relations, which exposes him to smirks and ambiguous glances. For some time now, he has not even tried.
And that’s another thing—women attract him, but they also disgust him more and more. He has the impression that only now has the whole construct of his attitude toward women, a kind of edifice that built itself up so intricately all his life—their defenselessness, their sanctity, their purity—finally begun to rumble toward collapse. He always suffered on their score, was always falling in love, and more often than not his love went unrequited. He prayed to them . . . Now he sees women in their overwhelming majority as very simple things, wily little whores, empty and cynical, doing business off their own bodies, trading in holes, the one and the other, as though they were eternal, their youth carved out of stone. He’s known so many and observes their falls with satisfaction. A few of them have been able to use their cunts to come into considerable wealth—like that Maciejewska all the officers used to go and see, one after the next, which permitted her to get a little tenement house on Nowe Miasto. Then it was just ordinary soldiers, but she did not stop there, he had seen her lately in excellent health, now a dowager and a member of the bourgeoisie. This contempt of Moliwda’s applies to all women, even the noble ones (who only appear noble, he thinks), those who loftily flaunt their origins, over which they had no influence at all, of course, and who, themselves quite frigid, become guardians of others’ purity.
His buddies seem to take the same pleasure from this doddering misogyny as he does, and afterward they have all kinds of discussions about their girls, entertaining themselves by drawing up lists and tallies, making rankings. In his old age, Moliwda realizes that he despises women, not just those on the lists, but all of them. That it was this way from the very beginning, that he has always felt this, that he was raised this way, and that this is how his brain works. And that the pure love of his youth was an attempt to deal with this very dark sensation that must necessarily be contempt. A naive revolution, an attempt to make himself pure and free from all bad thoughts. In vain.
When at last he left his position for a well-deserved rest, his friends commissioned his portrait and told the painter to include in it all of Moliwda’s many adventures, just as he had recounted them—adventures at sea, pirates, the island where he was king, the exotic lovers, the Jewish Kabbalah, the monastery on Athos, converting pagans . . . Of course the bulk of it was an egregious lie. A monument to his lying life was thus erected.
He sometimes wanders the streets of Warsaw, muddy and riddled with holes. He sometimes goes all the way to Ceglana Street, where many of the court’s craftsmen reside, and where the Wołowskis have their businesses. Here is where Shlomo Wołowski built his home—it is a stillunfinished two-story tenement house with a shop on the ground floor and brewery buildings in the courtyard. Over everything here hangs a nauseating smell of malt that also arouses hunger.
Once, seeing some young woman, he worked up his courage and asked about Nahman Jakubowski.
The woman cast him an unfriendly glance and replied:
“You mean Piotr. I don’t know anybody here named Nahman.”
Moliwda enthusiastically confirmed.
“We knew each other in our youth,” he added, to set her mind at ease.
Now he takes out of his pocket a little slip of paper where she wrote Jakubowski’s address for him, and he decides to go.
He finds him at home, packed for the road. Nahman, who does not seem too pleased to see him, pushes a little boy, no doubt a grandson, off his lap, and stands to greet Moliwda. He is slight, unshaven.
“Going somewhere?” Moliwda asks him, and without waiting for an answer, he sits down on a free chair.
“What, can’t you see? I am an envoy,” says a smiling Jakubowski, showing his teeth darkened by tobacco.
And Moliwda smiles, too, looking at this funny little old man who just recently was telling him of the light that escapes from within man. Amusing, too, is the word “envoy” in conjunction with this old bag of bones. Jakubowski seems a little bit embarrassed that Moliwda has found him in such a shameful situation—children racing around the table, a daughter-in-law who bursts in with a menacing face and then flees. Shortly she will reappear with a jug of compote and a little basket of small, sweet buns. But Moliwda will not drink that compote. They go out to the tavern, and there Moliwda orders a whole jug of wine. Nahman Jakubowski does not protest, although he knows it will mean heartburn tomorrow.
The next chapter in the history of His Lordship Antoni Kossakowski, also known as Moliwda
“I took one of your women as my wife, and had a child with her,” he begins. “I ran away from home and had a Christian wedding with her.”
The Books of Jacob Page 93
