Then the stranger seems to relax, removing from his shoulders the dark Jewish cloak he’s been wearing, showing his strong arms and the long hair that falls onto them. He starts to tell his story in a low voice, in a monotone, as if he had repeated the tale in his head for so long that he’d learned it by heart. Now he gives it to the priest like a handful of coins in exchange for his hospitality.
The father of Jan of Okno came from near Jas?o, while his mother was from Masuria. They arrived here as settlers, as colonizers, as they say, since there was little land in their families, and nothing to give to the children. They married and were given a piece of land to cultivate near Tarnopol. The agreement with the lord who owned those lands was that they would work for themselves for fifteen years (which was still good, for other estates offered less—ten, or even five years). Then they were to pay their lease of the lord’s land in goods and labor. They also had to commit to performing a number of duties for free, such as helping with the threshing, construction on the estate, shelling peas, even cleaning—there was always something in the house to do, so that there was never enough time for the work their own home needed.
The priest is reminded of the crosses that always fill him with horror and a vague sense of guilt when he sees them. They stand next to the peasants’ huts like peasant versions of memento mori. The peasants put pegs into the crosses, one for each year of their release from serfdom. Then each year they take one out, until one day the cross stands bare—then, in return for those few years of freedom, they have to pay dearly with their own slavery, and that of their entire family as well.
Okno was known for its woven kilims, and his father dreamed of Jan learning that trade.
Jan was born into slavery as the youngest of nine siblings. When he was a child, his parents had to work off their debt to the lord four days a week; by the time he married, it was often seven. That meant that his whole family also had to work on the lord’s estate. Often, in order to tend to their own land, they had to dedicate their Sundays to it and couldn’t even go to church. Two of Jan’s older sisters worked in the house—one as a cook, the other stoking the ovens. When that one got pregnant, the lord had her married off to a man in a neighboring village. That was the first time Jan tried to escape. He had once heard from the freemen and vagabonds who sometimes passed through the village and paused in front of the inn that if he were able to get up to the North Sea, he could join a ship’s crew and go to other countries where a person could live better and prosper. Young and inexperienced, he set off on foot, with a little bundle on a stick, happy and sure of himself. He slept in the woods and soon became convinced that the forests were full of fugitives like him. But he got caught by a couple of the lord’s farmhands just a few miles away from home. They beat him bloody and dragged him off to jail, which was a kind of dungeon under a cowshed. He spent four months there. After that, he was put in stocks and publicly whipped. He should have been happy the punishment was so mild. To top it all off, the lord ordered him to marry a girl from the house who was visibly with child. That’s what was done with flighty men—a family would soon settle them down. But Jan was no less unsettled, and he never came to love the girl. The child died, and his wife ran off somewhere, out of the village. They said she became a whore in the taverns of Zbara?, and later Lwów. For a while, Jan did his work humbly and learned to weave in someone else’s workshop, but when one winter both his parents died, one after the other, he put on his warm clothes and, taking all of their savings, hitched a horse to the sleigh, determined to get to his father’s family near Jas?o. He knew that the lord was cruel, but he also knew he was sluggish, and no one would be in a hurry to chase him in that cold. He made it all the way to Przemy?l, and there some guards stopped and arrested him when he could neither provide any documentation nor explain to them who he was or what he was doing there. After about two months, the lord’s people came for him. They threw him onto a sleigh, tied up like a hog, to take him back. It would take a few days because the roads were snowed over, and they used that as an excuse not to rush back to their village. Once they left him tied up and went into an inn to get drunk. As always happened when they would leave him on the sleigh at such stops, people would look at him in silence, with horror in their eyes, though probably what affected them most was the thought that they might meet a similar fate. A peasant who escapes for the second time, and who manages to make it that far, is a dead man. When he begged for something to drink, people were afraid to help him. In the end, some traders, drunk and more as a joke than out of any desire to help their fellow man, freed him one night by an inn when the lord’s strongmen had drunk themselves unconscious. But he didn’t have the strength to run far. The lord’s drunken myrmidons caught him again and beat him so badly that he lost consciousness. Fearing the lord’s wrath, they tried to revive him, but feeling certain he was dead, they left him in an oak grove and covered him in snow so that he didn’t give away their sin. There he lay, facedown, and there, by some miracle, he was found by some Jews passing by on a couple of carts.
He woke up a few days later in the Shorrs’ cowshed, surrounded by animals and the smell of their bodies, their excrement, engulfed in their warmth. Around him, people spoke another language, had different faces, and Jan thought that he had died and found himself in purgatory, and that for some reason purgatory was Jewish. And that here he would spend eternity, recollecting the innocent, small sins of his peasant’s life and repenting them.
Cousins putting up a unified front and launching their campaign
“Now, you are not my uncle, and I am not your aunt. I am, by birth, a Potocka. Of course you may have some connection with my husband, but I do not recognize your line,” Mrs. Kossakowska says to him, and gives him leave to sit. His view of her is obstructed by papers, which she gathers and sets aside in a pile, and from there they are taken care of by Agnieszka—inseparable from Katarzyna now—who dries them with sand.
What advantage is she seeking? wonders Moliwda.
“I am the one who attends to our extensive holdings, I oversee all our bills, all the gossip in society, all the correspondence—my husband does not have the inclination for it,” she says, as though reading his mind, and Moliwda raises his eyebrows in surprise. “I keep up with the family finances, I make matches, I deliver information, I make agreements, arrangements, I issue reminders . . .”
The castellan, her husband, strolls about the room with a glass of liqueur, walking in a humorous way, like a heron, dragging his feet over the Turkish carpet. He’ll soon wear through those soles, thinks Moliwda. He is wearing a pale yellow ?upan, tailored so well to fit his rotten figure it actually makes him look elegant.