“I’ll spend a couple of days here with you all,” says Moliwda. “It reminds me of Smyrna.”
Moliwda means it. He feels more at home among these Jews than he does in Warsaw, where they don’t even know how to prepare coffee correctly, pouring too much and watering it down, which then causes heartburn and anxiety. Here you can sit on the floor or on bowed benches at low tables where coffee is served in absolutely tiny cups, as though for elves. And here they provide him with decent Hungarian wine.
Hana comes in and greets Moliwda warmly, handing him Jacob’s daughter, little Avacha. The child is quiet, calm. She seems intimidated by Moliwda’s great red beard. She looks at him unblinking, as though trying to determine who exactly he might be.
“She seems to have fallen in love with Uncle Moliwda.” Jacob laughs. But then that evening, when it’s just the five of them—with Osman, Hayim of Warsaw, and Nahman—and once they’ve opened up their third jug of wine, Jacob points a finger in Moliwda’s face and says, “You saw my daughter. Know that she is a queen.”
They all nod agreeably, but this is not the reaction that Jacob desires.
“Do not think, Moliwda, that I mean merely that she’s good-looking.”
There is a brief silence.
“No,” Jacob continues. “She truly is a queen. You don’t even realize yet just how great a queen she is.”
Once it’s down to a smaller group of brothers, Moliwda—before he gets drunk—gives the others an update on their efforts with Archbishop ?ubieński. They’re on the right track, although the archbishop still has doubts as to whether their hearts are truly and fully with the Church. The next letter Moliwda will write will be on behalf of Krysa and Shlomo Shorr, to give the archbishop the impression that there are many among them who wish to be baptized.
“You’re very clever, Moliwda,” Nahman of Busk says to him, patting him on the back.
Everyone has been making fun of Nahman since his second marriage. His childlike bride totters after him wherever he goes. Nahman, meanwhile, seems somewhat terrified of their marriage.
Moliwda suddenly bursts out laughing.
“We never had our own savages, like the French and the English did with their Bushmen and their Pygmies. These Polish lords would love to draw you all—their very own savages—into their fold.”
The wine from Giurgiu that arrived with Hana’s carriages is clearly working now. They talk over one another.
“. . . and that’s why you were going behind our backs to Bishop Dembowski?” Shlomo Shorr is saying in a rage to Krysa, grabbing him by his somewhat sullied stock tie. “That’s why you were bothering with him on your own, so that you could get his favors for yourself, right? And that’s why you were going back to Czarnokozińce for letters from the bishop that would grant you safe conduct. Was he promising you that?”
“Oh yes, he always promised me that we’d gain independence within the kingdom. There was never any mention of baptism. And we ought to keep it that way. After he died it all fell apart. And you idiots are clamoring for baptism like starving pigs. That was never part of it!” Krysa leaps up and slams his fist up into the ceiling. “Afterward, somebody sent some thugs after me, and they beat me within an inch of my life.”
“You are despicable, Krysa,” says Shlomo Shorr. On pronouncing these words he walks straight out into the snowstorm. Snow flies in through the briefly opened doorway, melting on impact with the floor’s fresh spruce covering.
“I agree with Krysa,” says Yeruhim. Others nod at this: baptism can wait.
Here Moliwda chimes in: “You’re right, Krysa, here in Poland no one is going to give full rights to the Jews. Either you become Catholic or you remain nothing. Now Their Graces back you up with gold, because you’re against the other Jews, but if you were to want to go off somewhere and get set up with your own religion, they’d hound you about it right away. And they’d keep at it till they had you prostrate in their church. Anybody who thinks otherwise is mistaken. Before you there were heterodox Christians, the Polish Brethren, innocuous people who were much closer to their religion than you all. And they were tormented until they were finally driven out altogether. They had everything taken away from them, and they were either killed or exiled.”
He says this in a sepulchral tone. Krysa cries again: “You all want to go straight into the belly of that beast, that Leviathan . . .”
“Moliwda’s right,” says Nahman. “There’s no other option besides baptism. Even if it’s just for the sake of appearances,” he adds under his breath, glancing hesitantly at Moliwda, who has just lit his pipe. He lets out a cloud of smoke that obscures his face for a moment.
“If it’s just for the sake of appearances, you’ll have to prepare yourselves for them to be sniffing around forever more.”
There is a prolonged silence.
“You have a different approach to intercourse. You don’t see anything wrong with a man sleeping with his wife, nothing shameful,” Moliwda says, now rather drunk, once he and Jacob are alone. They are squatting in Jacob’s shack, wrapped in sheepskin coats, because the poorly sealed windows let in the cold.
Jacob has eased off the alcohol by this time. “I like it that way,” he says. “It’s more human. People who have intercourse get closer to each other.”
“Because you can sleep with other men’s women, while no one sleeps with yours, they all know that you are the one in charge,” says Moliwda, “the way it works with lions.”
This comparison seems to please Jacob. He smiles a mysterious smile and starts to fill his pipe. Then he gets up and says he’s going out for a moment. He doesn’t return for a long while. That’s the way he is: unpredictable. You never know what he’ll do next. By the time he comes back in, Moliwda is very drunk indeed, and he insists on continuing the conversation:
“And how you decide who’s going to be with whom, and you make them do it with candles lit—I know why you do that. Because of course it can be done discreetly in the dark, everyone with the person of their choosing . . . But this is how you conquer them and bind them together so tightly that they’ll be closer than family, greater than family. They will have a common secret, they’ll know each other better than anyone, and as you know well, the human spirit is inclined to love, to loving, to connection. There’s nothing more powerful in the world. And they’ll say nothing about it. They have to have a reason to keep quiet—they have to have something to keep quiet about.”
Jacob lies down on the bed on his back and inhales the familiarly scented smoke, making Moliwda remember nights in Giurgiu.