Moliwda, embarrassed, does not speak. So Mrs. Kossakowska continues:
“I’ll tell you this much: As far as I can tell, the Jews are probably the only people who can be of any use in this country, since the lords don’t know how to do anything and don’t care to learn, too busy with their sport. But your Jewish heretics also want land!”
“They are settling on land in Turkey, too. All over Giurgiu, Vidin, and Ruse, half of Bucharest, Greek Salonika. There they buy land and are able to have some peace and quiet . . .”
“. . . if they convert to Islam, right?”
“Your Ladyship, they are prepared to be baptized.”
Mrs. Kossakowska props herself up on her elbows and leans in toward Moliwda’s face, like a man, staring him in the eye.
“Who are you, Moliwda? What is your position here?”
Moliwda answers without blinking:
“I am their translator.”
“Is it true you were once with the Old Believers?”
“It is true. I’m not ashamed of it, and I don’t deny it. What does it matter?”
“It matters that you are all after money—you heretics.”
“There are many roads to God, it isn’t ours to judge.”
“Of course it’s ours. There are roads, and there’s the wilderness.”
“Then help them, Your Ladyship, to get on the true path.”
Mrs. Kossakowska leans back and smiles broadly. She stands, goes up to him, and takes him by the hand.
“And the sin of the Adamites?” She lowers her voice and looks at Agnieszka, but the girl, attentive as a mouse, has already pricked up her ears and extended her neck. “They say their practices are not at all Christian.” Katarzyna discreetly fixes the thin fabric over her décolletage. “Anyway, what is the sin of the Adamites? Explain, my enlightened cousin.”
“Everything that those who use that term cannot imagine.”
Moliwda sets out and beholds the kingdom of the vagabonds
Since his return to his country, everything has struck Moliwda as foreign and strange. He hasn’t been here for many years, and his memory is either short or flawed, or both—he certainly hadn’t remembered things being this way. Above all, he is amazed by the grayness of the landscape and the distant horizon. And the light, too—more delicate than in the south, softer. A mournful Polish light that leads to melancholy.
First he travels from Lwów to Lublin in a carriage, but in Lublin he rents a horse—he feels better this way than in some stuffy, clattering box.
He has barely gotten past the tollhouses of Lublin, but already he is entering another country, a different cosmos, in which people are no longer planets that orbit according to established paths, around the market square, the home, the shop, or the field, but are instead errant streaks of fire.
These are the freemen and vagabonds Nahman told Moliwda about, many of whom have come to join the true believers. But Moliwda can see that these untethered people aren’t only Jews, as he had thought until now—as a matter of fact, Jews are in the minority here. Moliwda also sees that this is a kind of nation unto itself, different from anything that can be found in cities or towns or rural areas. These are people who do not belong to any lord or to any municipality or other form of government. These are wanderers, frolicsome bandits, fugitives of every sort you can imagine. It seems clear they all share the same distaste for the peaceful, settled life, that they suffer from wanderlust and could not bear to be enclosed by four walls. Or so a person might think at first glance—that they like it this way, that they live like this out of choice. But from the height of his horse’s back, Moliwda looks upon them with sympathy and thinks that the majority of these people are in fact the kind who do dream of having their own bed, their own bowl to eat from, and a regular, settled life, but that just isn’t how the cards have played out for them, so instead they’ve had to roam. He knows because his fate has been the same.
Just beyond the city limits, they sit on the side of the road, as if resting after a difficult visit to a human settlement, as if shaking off its foul air, its garbage that sticks to their feet, the filth and noise of the masses. The itinerant merchants count the money they have made. They have laid aside their portable stalls—mostly empty now, the goods they held gone—although they keep an eye out for any scrap enthusiasts who might happen down the road. Oftentimes they’re Scots, men who come from their own far-off land to set up a shop they hang over their shoulders: beautifully woven silk ribbons, tortoiseshell combs, holy pictures, remedies for baldness, glass beads, mirrors in wooden frames. Their language is bizarre, and sometimes it is impossible to understand them, but the language of coins is universal.
Nearby rests the picture-maker—an old man with a long beard, wearing a woven hat with a broad brim. He has a wooden rack hung from leather straps, affixed with holy pictures. He has removed from his shoulders this heavy baggage and now feeds on what the peasants have paid him in—dense white cheese and damp rye that transforms into a dumpling in his mouth. A feast! He probably also has bottles of holy water in his leather bag, little pouches of the desert sand Jesus prayed over for forty days, among other wonders, the sight of which will widen his customers’ eyes. Moliwda remembers these things from his childhood.
On a daily basis, the picture man pretends to be a saintly person who just happened to become a seller of pictures. Then, as befits a saintly person, he raises his voice a little, so that it will be more like the voice of a priest, and he speaks in a singsong tone, as if reciting the Holy Scriptures, and from time to time he interjects Latin words, regardless of whether they make sense, since it impresses the peasants. The picture man wears a giant wooden cross around his neck, which weighs him down considerably; he has rested it against a tree and is airing out his footwraps on it now. He sells his pictures by first identifying one of the nicer houses in the village, then going there as if in a kind of trance, insisting that the picture itself has chosen this home, and even this particular wall, the one in this chamber—the sacred one. It is hard for a peasant to turn down a holy picture; he will take his hard-earned money out of its hiding place and hand it over.