“You don’t believe in them, either.”
“These Jews are elated! For them it’s a great miracle, greater than the ones that used to happen in the old days. They had been calling the bishop Haman, and now that he’s dead, they can beat up the changelings. Old Rapaport already put out an edict, did you hear? Stating that killing a heretic is a mitzvah. Did you hear about that?”
Asher says nothing. He wipes the blood with tows, cleans his tools with a rag, and puts them back in his bag, since he has to go right out to let the blood of Deym the postmaster, who is suffering from apoplexy. He steps into the room where he keeps the leeches in their jars. He takes the smallest one, the hungriest one, since Deym is a man of small stature, so there won’t be all that much superfluous blood.
“Lock the door behind me,” he says to Gitla. “Both hasps.”
It is October again, and that same smell of dried leaves and moisture is in the air. Asher Rubin sees in the darkness small groups of people with lit torches, shouting. They make their way along the city walls, where the poorest of the heretics live. Asher Rubin can hear shrieking. Somewhere toward the city limits a glow is dimly visible—one of their miserable shacks must be burning, one of those places where people live alongside animals. Just like the Talmuds lately burned, so now are the Zohar and the other books forbidden to God-fearing Jews being consumed by flames. Asher sees a cart filled with Jewish youths frenzied and delighted by the burning of heretical books—they are heading out of town, probably to Gliniany and Busk, where the greatest numbers of heretics live. A few people, running with clubs raised over their heads, crash into him. Asher squeezes the jar of leeches tighter and rushes to the sick man’s home. When he gets there, he finds that the postmaster has died only moments ago, leaving the leeches to go hungry.
Mrs. El?bieta Dru?backa to Father Chmielowski, or: Of the perfection of imprecise forms
. . . 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 Za?uski 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 Vicar Forane Benedykt Chmielowski writes to El?bieta Dru?backa