In Lwów, Armenian townswomen differ from Polish women by the size of their bonnets. Armenian townswomen wear them very large, finished in a green pleat right by their faces, as well as a ribbon over their foreheads, while Polish women wear white bonnets, starched and smaller, though these lure the eyes with their collars, or rather, goffered ruffs, beneath which hang another two or three strings of beads.
Katarzyna Deymowa, postmistress, wife of the head of the royal post in Lwów, also wears a Polish bonnet and a ruff. But no necklaces, since she is in mourning. Just now she is walking at a breakneck pace, as she tends to do, through the Halickie Przedmie?cie, and she cannot get over the crowd they’ve got going. And all of them dressed in dark colors, murmuring in their language, foreigners—Jews. Women with children in their arms and clinging onto their skirts, skinny men absorbed in debates, all standing around in little groups, the heat starting to beat down on their heads. Wherever there is still a little patch of ground free, they sit right on the grass and eat; some townswomen distribute loaves of bread they carry around in baskets, and pickles, and blocks of cheese. Over everything there are flies, those brazen, intrusive August flies that get into your eyes and settle on your food. Some boys carry two baskets of large nuts.
It all disgusts Deymowa, until her servant Marta brings the news that these are the Jews who have come to be baptized. Then it is as if Katarzyna Deymowa had taken off a pair of glasses she hadn’t even realized she’d been wearing. Suddenly she is all sympathy—Holy Mother! come to be baptized! Those who speak of the end of the world have it right. It has come to this: The Lord Jesus’s greatest enemies are going to be baptized. Their sinful stubbornness has softened; it has dawned on them at last that there can be no salvation beyond that of the holy Catholic Church, and now, as shamefaced children, they are finally ready to be on our side. And although they still look different, strange, in those kapotas of theirs, with their beards down to their waists, pretty soon they’ll be just like us.
She looks at a family of girls, a woman with a child at her breast just climbing down awkwardly from her cart, the driver chasing her off because he has to take the cart back right away to pick up others on the outskirts of town. The bundle she had on her back falls down, and a few faded rags and a single string of beads, small and dimmed, tumble out of it onto the ground. The woman gathers them back up in embarrassment, as if she had suddenly bared her most inaccessible secrets to the eyes of the world. As Deymowa passes her, a little boy suddenly runs up—he looks like he might be six or seven—and looking at her with smiling eyes, very pleased with himself, he says, “Praised be our Lord Jesus!” She responds automatically, but solemnly, too: “Forever and ever, amen.” And her hand flies up to her heart, and her eyes fill with tears. She squats down beside the boy, grabs him by the wrists, and he looks her straight in the eye, still smiling, that little rascal.
“What is your name?”
The boy responds resolutely in slightly shaky Polish:
“Hilelek.”
“That’s nice . . .”
“And then I am also named Wojciech Majewski.”
Now Deymowa can’t hold back her tears.
“Would you like a pretzel?”
“Yes, a pretzel.”
She tells this later to her younger sister, Golczewski’s widow, in the workshop of her brother-in-law, may he rest in peace, under a lovely signboard made of iron.
“. . . This little baby Jew who tells me ‘Praised be our Lord Jesus,’ have you ever seen such marvelous things?” Deymowa breaks down and starts crying again. Since her own husband’s death not long ago, she has cried often—daily—and everything has seemed unbearably sad to her, so that a great sorrow for the whole world often overwhelms her. And just underneath that sorrow is an anger that crosses over oddly easily into sympathy, and suddenly in the face of the enormity of the misfortunes of the world, she can only throw up her hands, and all of it brings her to tears.
Both sisters are widows, but Golczewski’s widow bears it better, having taken over her husband’s printshop that tries to compete with the big Jesuit printer’s by taking sundry orders of all kinds. Right now she is busy talking with some priest and only half listening to her older sister.
“Here, Your Ladyship, look!” He hands her a rather unevenly printed appeal signed by Primate ?ubieński, in which he calls on the szlachta and the townspeople to become godparents to the Contra-Talmudists.
“Contra-Talmudists,” repeats Deymowa seriously, while her sister adds: “Ne’er-do-wells.”
Father Chmielowski is insisting on printing a small run of his tales. Golczewska doesn’t want to interfere, but printing only a few copies will cost him dearly, she explains, whereas if he prints more, the cost per copy will come out to about the same. But the priest is discombobulated and can’t quite make up his mind. He explains that this is only for a name-day gift, and he doesn’t need that many copies, as it’s really just for one person.
“Then why don’t you write it out nicely in your own hand, Father? Maybe in some amaranthine or golden ink?”
But the priest says that only print lends the appropriate seriousness to each word.
“The handwritten word is too mangled somehow, while print speaks loud and clear,” he explains.
Golczewska, the typographer, leaves him deep in thought and turns once more to her sister.
There might not be two such different sisters anywhere in Podolia. Deymowa is tall and stout, with light-colored skin and blue eyes. Golczewska, meanwhile, is petite and has dark hair, grayed wisps of which work their way out from under her bonnet, even though she is barely forty. Deymowa is better off, which is why she is dressed so nicely, in a richly pleated mantle over many starched petticoats that took thirty cubits of black silk to make. Over this she has thrown a lightweight linen jacket that reaches her elbows, also black—after all, she was widowed recently. She wears a snow-white bonnet on her head. Next to her, her younger sister, girded by an apron stained with printer’s ink, looks like a servant. Yet they understand each other perfectly without speaking. They read the primate’s appeal and exchange glances full of meaning.
In Primate ?ubieński’s appeal, it says that each godparent must furnish his godchild with the appropriate Polish attire, as well as maintain him not only until his baptism but until he returns home. The sisters know each other so well and have been through so much together that they don’t even particularly need to get into a discussion of this topic.
After much hesitation, the priest finally agrees to a bigger print run. He points out in a quarrelsome voice that the title is to be in boldface, and that they are not to stint on space for it. And the date, and the place, without fail: Leopolis, Augustus 1759.
Of proper proportions