Just a little farther on is the inn, crooked and small, sloppily whitewashed, but with a porch before its entrance and wooden boards resting on posts that serve as benches. The benches are occupied by old men who are too poor to go inside and order something to eat, so instead they sit and hope for alms from someone who has already satisfied his own hunger and now finds himself in a better mood, with a more sensitive heart than when he turned them down on his way in.
Moliwda gets off his horse, although he hasn’t traveled that far yet from Lublin. Immediately two old men rush up to him with laments on their lips. Moliwda gives them some tobacco and stays to smoke himself, and, enchanted, they thank him. He learns from them that they both come from the same village: it is hard for their families to maintain them, so every spring they set out to beg, not returning until winter. They have been joined by a half-blind old woman traveling alone to Cz?stochowa, she says, but if you take a closer look at her, you’ll see all kinds of little pouches of herbs under her apron, some sort of seeds strung on threads, and other medicaments. She must be a woman with considerable knowhow—she’d be able to stem blood flow, and help deliver children, but if you paid her enough, she could get rid of a pregnancy, too. She keeps quiet all these things she knows, which is no surprise. They recently burned a woman just like her at the stake in Greater Poland, and last year several were captured in Lublin.
Inside the inn, there are two former Turkish prisoners of war, supplied with Church testimonies that state they have just been released from captivity and order whoever meets them to be charitable toward their bearer, out of Christian sympathy for their ill fate. But the former captives hardly look like they have suffered. They’re both fat and jolly, especially now that the first round of vodka has started working on them, and they’re just about to order another. Those Turks must have taken pretty good care of them. The innkeeper, a Jewish widow, independent and impertinent, gives them a bowl of potatoes seasoned with onion fried in butter and can’t keep from asking questions, curious about what it was like where they were. Everything they say amazes her, sending her hands flying to her cheeks. Moliwda eats the same dish of potatoes, drinks some buttermilk, and purchases a pint of vodka for the road. When he does get back on the road, he sees some commotion right away—it’s the bear men, heading to Lublin; they always make a lot of noise so that as many people as possible crowd around them to view the humiliation of the dirty, and probably ill, animal. That sight—who knows why—gives the oglers a strange satisfaction. Now they’re poking the bear with a stick. That poor animal, thinks Moliwda, but he understands the joy it brings to the vagabonds: look at that, it’s so strong, but it’s worse off than I am. Cretinous vermin.
There are always a lot of loose women on such tracts, too, for when a girl is pretty and young, or even just young, men immediately seize on to her, and as soon as they have seized, the girls may as well already be practicing the oldest profession in the world. Some of them are fugitive noblewomen who gave birth to a child out of wedlock, the child of a peasant or farmhand at that, and then the shame for the family is so great that it is better to abandon the child and hope for the mercy of its relatives than to swallow this misfortune. And so the girls leave—their only other option being a convent—with the tacit permission of their offended and indignant family, from the larch manor into the black of night. And if they come to a river, a bridge, a ford, then they fall into the hands of the eternally intoxicated raftsmen, and from then on, every man will demand, for every service—a night at the inn, a lift somewhere—one and the same payment. That’s how easy it is to fall.
Moliwda would like to make use of their services, but he fears their diseases and their filth, and the lack of a proper enclosure. He’ll wait until he gets to Warsaw.
How Moliwda is made messenger in the service of a difficult cause
During his first few days in Warsaw, he’s stuck in the home of his brother, a priest, who’s helped him out a little with equipment and attire, despite the fact that his share of the parish purse is scant. After so many years, Moliwda’s brother feels like a stranger, as two-dimensional as a sheet of paper, scarcely even real. For two nights they drink together, trying to break through this unexpected awkwardness that has arisen between them over the course of these twenty-some years. Moliwda’s brother tells him stories of Warsaw life, but it is only stolen gossip. Soon he is drunk, and airing a grudge against Moliwda for leaving him behind with their strict uncle, griping that the priesthood isn’t really his vocation, that it’s no good living on your own like this, that every time he enters the church it seems too big to him. Moliwda claps his brother on the back with the same sympathy he might have for a total stranger he met in some tavern.
Now he tries to arrange to see Branicki, but Branicki is always away, always on some hunting trip. He pleads his way into a meeting with Bishop Za?uski, and tries to court the Princess Jab?onowska, who happens to be in the capital. He tries, too, to discover the whereabouts of his friends from twenty-five years ago, but it isn’t easy. And so he spends his evenings with his brother; there’s not much to talk about with someone you haven’t seen in that long; he is a stranger, obsessed with his priestly career, weak, and vain. In fact, everyone in Warsaw strikes Moliwda as self-obsessed and vain. Everyone here pretends to be something they’re not. The very city tries to pass itself off as something else, somewhere more populated, more extensive, prettier, when in fact it’s just a plain old dump with muddy little roads. Everything is so expensive here that all you can do is window-shop, and it’s all imported from elsewhere. Hats from England, French-style frock coats from France, Polish-style fashion from Turkey. And the city itself? Terrible, cold, abysmal, full of empty squares the wind howls down. Magnificent houses are built right in the sand, in the mud, and you see servants transferring ladies from their carriage onto a wooden walkway so that they don’t drown in puddles in their thick, fur-lined mantles.