By afternoon, the priest has come—a little too soon, still wearing the same coat and that bag of his that would suit a traveling salesman more than it does a priest. Dru?backa spots him the second he enters the house.
“I beg the vicar forane’s forgiveness for my impetuousness earlier. I fear I may have even dislodged some of your buttons,” Dru?backa says to him, and leads him by the elbow into a drawing room, although she doesn’t quite know what she’ll do with him there. They won’t be called to table for another two hours.
“Oh, that was a specialem statum . . . Nolens volens I was of some use to the honorable castellan’s wife, and her health.”
Dru?backa has grown accustomed by now to hearing somewhat different types of Polish around the different Polish estates, so these Latin interjections merely amuse her. She spent half her life as a lady-in-waiting and a secretary. Then she got married, had children, and now, after her husband’s death and the birth of her grandchildren, she tries to go it alone, or to be with her daughters, or maybe Mrs. Kossakowska, even if it’s as a lady-in-waiting. She is pleased, now, to be back on landed property, where there’s so much going on, and where poetry may be read in the evenings. She has several volumes in her luggage, although she is too shy to take them out. She doesn’t talk. Instead, she listens as the priest chatters away, gradually coming to a common language with him, despite all the Latin, for it turns out that the priest has just visited the palace in Ceco?owce, belonging to the Dzieduszyckis, and that he is hatching a plan to replicate where he lives, in his presbytery, the things he has learned from being there. Delighted and animated by the liqueur he’s now had three glasses of, happy that someone will listen to him, he speaks.
Yesterday Kossakowski, the castellan, was sent for in Kamieniec, and he is expected at any moment. He will no doubt arrive by morning, perhaps even in the middle of the night.
Around the table sit residents and guests of the house, permanent and temporary. The less important ones have been seated at the boring end, where the white of the tablecloths does not quite reach. Among the residents is the host’s uncle, an older gentleman, somewhat heavyset, who wheezes and calls everyone “illustrious sir” or “illustrious madam.” There is also the manager of the ?ab?ckis’ properties, a shy, mustachioed man with excellent posture, as well as the former religious instructor to the ?ab?ckis’ children, the highly educated Bernardine priest Gaudenty Pikulski. He is immediately caught up by Father Chmielowski, who takes him over to the corner of the room to show him his Jewish book.
“We did an exchange, I gave him a copy of my Athens, and he gave me a Zohar,” Father Chmielowski says proudly, and takes the tome out of his bag. “I would love for you to . . . ,” he starts, then continues in the impersonal: “If just a little bit of time could be found, to give me just a little taste of what’s inside this book . . .”
Pikulski looks at the volume, opening it from the back and reading it, his lips moving along.
“This is no Zohar,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“Old Shorr stuck you with some ordinary Jewish fairy tales.” He runs his finger from right to left along the incomprehensible symbols. “‘Jacob’s Eye.’ That’s what it’s called. Some kind of little folk story.”
Shorr-changed, the priest thinks, but he just sighs. He shakes his head. “He must have gotten mixed up. Well, anyway, I’m sure I’ll find some wisdom here. If I can get someone to translate it for me . . .”
Starosta ?ab?cki gives a sign with his hand, and two servants bring in trays with liqueur and tiny glasses, as well as a serving dish with thinly sliced crusts of bread. Whoever wishes may in this way whet their appetite, since the lunch to be served is heavy and abundant. First soup, and then boiled beef cut up into irregular pieces, brought in along with other meats—roast beef, game like venison and boar, and some chickens, served with boiled carrots, cabbage with bacon, and bowls of kasha glistening with fat.
Father Pikulski leans over the table toward Father Chmielowski and says in a low voice:
“Stop by my place sometime, I have Jewish books in Latin, too, and I can help you with Hebrew. Whatever gave you the idea of going to the Jews?”
“You advised me to do so, my son,” answers Father Chmielowski, who finds this slightly vexing.
“I said that as a joke! I didn’t think you’d go.”
Dru?backa proceeds cautiously with her meal; beef is tough on her teeth, and she sees no toothpicks here. She picks at some chicken and rice and glances furtively at two young servants clearly not yet entirely familiar with their new employment, since they continue making faces at one another across the table and generally clowning around, thinking that the guests, absorbed in their meal, will notice nothing.
Though presumably still weak, Kossakowska has ordered for her ample sickbed in the corner of the room to be supplied with candles and now asks to be served rice and chicken meat. Soon she requests Tokay.
“Well, I guess the worst is behind you, madam, if you are ready for some wine,” says ?ab?cki with almost imperceptible irony. He’s still a little irritated he didn’t get to go play cards. “Vous permettez?” He stands, and with an exaggerated bow, he fills Kossakowska’s glass. “To your health.”
“I ought to be drinking to the health of that medic, who managed to get me back on my feet again with that tincture,” says Kossakowska, and takes a big gulp.
“C’est un homme rare,” says ?ab?cki. “An educated Jew, though he has been unable to cure me of my gout. He studied in Italy. Apparently, he can take a cataract out of your eye with a needle, and just like that, your vision is restored—at least that was what happened with one of the noblewomen from around here. Now she can embroider even the tiniest stitches.”
Kossakowska pipes up again from her corner. She has finished eating and is lying back against the pillows, pale. Her face keeps changing in the candlelight, like she’s grimacing again.
“Everywhere is full of Jews now, just you wait, they’ll gobble us up with dumplings soon,” she says. “Our gentlemen don’t want to work, and they won’t take care of their own property, so they rent it out to the Jews, and they go off and live in the capital. So now I look, and I see it’s a Jew in the bridge house, a Jew managing the land on the estate, a Jew cobbling, a Jew sewing the clothes. They’ve taken every industry.”