Yes, the priest admits quite willingly—for he is above all a practical man—that would be a shot at salvation. Each life in another form would give us more opportunities to perfect ourselves, to redeem our sins. Eternal punishment in hell only rarely makes amends for the whole of the evil one has inflicted.
But then he feels ashamed of having had such thoughts. Jewish heresies. He kneels at the window beneath the image of Saint Benedict, his patron, and requests his intercession. He also apologizes for his vanity, for letting himself get pulled into such divagations. But what is he to do? The intercession of Saint Benedict doesn’t seem to be working, for wild thoughts come once more to his mind . . . The priest has always had a bit of a problem with hell. He could never quite believe in its existence, and the terrifying images he has seen in books—there have been a good number of them—haven’t helped. Yet here he reads, for example, that the souls residing in the bodies of pagans who have been cannibals do not proceed directly or always to hell, for that would be merciless. After all, it is not their fault that they were pagans and that they had not seen the light of Christianity. Thanks to their subsequent incarnations, however, they have a shot at improvement, at redeeming the evil they have done. Is that not just?
The priest is so excited and enlivened by this thought that he steps out into the garden to take some fresh air, but as always happens to him in the garden, even though the sun’s about to set, he immediately begins to pinch off unnecessary shoots from his plants, and before he knows it, quite to his own surprise, he is on his knees weeding the oregano. But what if the oregano, too, is taking part in this great project of perfection, and in it, too, reside some faint, amorphous souls? What then? And even worse: What if the priest himself is an instrument of eternal justice and at this very moment is punishing the sinful little plants—pulling up the weeds, depriving them of their life?
The runaway
In the evening, a Jewish cart covered in a hemp horse blanket drives up in front of the presbytery of Firlejów, but it only slows, then turns around in the priest’s courtyard and disappears down the road to Rohatyn. Father Chmielowski looks out from the garden and sees a tall figure standing motionless alongside the wicker fence. A dark coat flows down from its shoulders all the way to the ground. A terrible thought flashes through Father Chmielowski’s mind—that this is death, that death has come for him today. He grabs his wooden rake and lopes over to meet it.
“Who goes there? Speak at once. I am a priest of the most holy Church and have no fear of the devil.”
“I know that,” a man’s voice says quietly. It is hoarse, faltering, as though its owner has not used it in a hundred years. “I am Jan of Okno. Do not be afraid of me, kind father. I am a good man.”
“Then what are you doing here? The sun’s gone down.”
“The Jews left me here.”
The priest goes up and tries to take a look at this newcomer’s face, but he keeps his head down, and his big hood covers everything.
“They’ve really gone too far this time, those Jews. Who do they take me for?” mutters the priest, trying to keep his candle going. “What do you mean, they left you? You keep company with them?”
“Now I keep company with you, Father,” answers the stranger. He speaks in a hazy way, as if carelessly, but he speaks Polish, with just a slight Ruthenian accent.
“Are you hungry?”
“Not very, they fed me well.”
“So what do you want?”
“Shelter.”
“You don’t have a home of your own?”
“I don’t.”
The priest hesitates for a moment and then, with resignation, invites him inside.
“Go on,” he says. “There is damp in the air today.”
The figure moves uncertainly toward the door, hobbling, and fleetingly his hood shifts and bares a bit of his bright cheek. The man draws it back over his face, but the priest has already glimpsed something unsettling.
“Look here, at me,” he orders.
Then the stranger lifts his head, and the hood falls back onto his shoulders. The priest involuntarily jumps back and cries:
“Jesus of Nazarene, are you a human person?”
“I don’t know myself.”
“And I am to take you in under my own roof?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Roshko,” the priest quietly calls to his servant, mostly so that this terrible-faced stranger knows he isn’t here alone.
“You’re afraid of me,” the figure laments.
After the briefest moment of hesitation, the priest holds out his arm to encourage the figure to go inside the house. Truth be told, his heart is pounding, and Roshko has disappeared somewhere, as he is wont to do.
“Go on,” he says to the stranger, who steps inside ahead of Father Chmielowski. There, in the light of the candle in the holder, he can see more—the lower half of the man’s face is completely distorted by scars, as though the skin had been ripped off him. Above that injury, beneath thick black brows, shine big, dark, luminous eyes, young, maybe even beautiful. Or maybe it just seems that way because of the contrast.
“For Christ’s sake, what happened to you?” asks Father Chmielowski, shaken to his core.
The runaway’s tale: Jewish purgatory
The priest is surprised by this extraordinary being who calls himself Jan of Okno. Okno—which in Polish means “window”—is a village not far from Toki, many miles from here. The priest doesn’t know to whom it belongs, since Jan doesn’t want to say. He calls his owner “lord.” If it is a lord, it must be Potocki: everything in that area is theirs.
The man eats a little bread and sips some buttermilk. The priest doesn’t have any more than that. He offers him vodka, but the man declines. He sits stiffly, without even taking off his cloak, and the smell of horses wafts from him. Saba, her reddish coat bristling, sniffs him all over with great seriousness, as though conscious of his mystery—evidently the newcomer has lots of smells she hasn’t encountered before, because it takes her quite a long time until, satisfied, she lies down to sleep by the fireplace.
“I am a corpse,” says the man with the terrible face. “You won’t denounce a dead body, will you, Father?”
“I commune with the dead,” says the priest, showing with his hand the books behind him, lying on the table. “I’m accustomed to their stories. Nothing surprises me. I can even honestly say that I prefer to listen to the dead than to the living.”