“Simon,” said the man, in a deep voice that did not match his round figure.
He went back to the door and a moment later a wrinkled old Jew who resembled a rabbi appeared. He was tiny. From under his fur-lined hat, dark, piercing eyes flashed out. He went right up to Jacob, and Jacob stood up in surprise; the little man embraced him like an old friend. He cast a suspicious eye on Moliwda, who stood in a corner against the wall, drinking wine.
“This is Marcin Miko?aj Radziwi??,” said the one who called himself Simon, omitting any titles.
There was a moment of silence as we all stood motionless, astonished by the visit and the openness of such a powerful and important personage. For we had all heard, of course, about this magnate who had talked himself into the Jewish faith, although he had been treated with great suspicion by the Jews, as he kept a harem in his house and permitted bizarre acts to be conducted there. Jacob hid his own astonishment at Radziwi??’s behavior with his usual nonchalance, simply returning the embrace and inviting him to have a seat. Candles were brought in, and both men’s faces were well lit, the candlelight breaking into a myriad of splotches over the magnate’s furrowed face. Like a guard dog, Simon set himself by the door to keep watch, and he ordered the peasants to guard the inn’s perimeter, it soon becoming apparent from the conversation what all that fuss had been about.
Radziwi?? was—as he explained—under house arrest. For favoring the Jews, he asserted, and now he had come here incognito, having heard what a distinguished and learned guest was passing through Krasnystaw. He himself rarely spent any time in Krasnystaw, as he was imprisoned in S?uck. Then he leaned in to Jacob and whispered something, slowly and at length, as though giving a recitation of some kind.
I looked at Jacob’s facial expression—he had his eyes mostly closed and gave no indication whatsoever of what he was hearing. From what little I could make out, the magnate was speaking in Hebrew, but his words were mostly nonsense, as though he had learned by heart certain quotations, this from here, that from there. It made no real sense to me, though I could not hear all of it. And yet, from the outside, it looked as if he was conveying secrets of utmost importance to Jacob, and I think Jacob wanted us all to believe in the existence of those secrets.
Jacob always changes when he is interacting with an important person. His face becomes more boyish, more innocent, and he is vastly more inclined to make allowances for the high-born. He becomes winsomely solicitous and subservient as a dog submitting before a larger, stronger animal. At the start this disgusted me greatly. But anyone who knows Jacob knows, too, that this is a kind of game, a way for him to play.
No one is immune from acting differently with someone positioned higher than himself than with someone situated lower. The whole world depends on this dynamic, and this hierarchy is deeply ingrained in men. Yet it always annoyed me, and I sometimes would instruct Jacob, whenever he deigned to listen to me, that he ought to be standoffish and evasive with such people, and never to prostrate himself to them. I did hear him say once to Moliwda: “The majority of these big lords are all idiots, anyway.”
Later he would tell us about Radziwi??, saying he had imprisoned his wife and children for years, keeping them confined to a single chamber and subsisting on bread and water, until his relatives finally turned against him and convinced the king to treat him as a madman. That was why he was now under house arrest in S?uck. He supposedly had a whole harem made up of young girls who had been abducted or purchased from the Turks as slaves. The peasants who lived nearby said that he would draw blood from them and distill from it an elixir for eternal youth. If that is true, the elixir definitely didn’t work, because the man looked older than his years. He had so many sins on his conscience—he had attacked travelers, plundered his neighbors’ estates, lashed out in inexplicable frenzies—and yet, looking at him, it was hard to imagine him as such a rogue. His face was ugly, but so what? It could hardly be deduced from that that his soul was bad.
The innkeeper served us vodka and food, but our guest did not wish to touch anything, saying that he had already been poisoned many times. And that we ought not to take it personally, for bad people are everywhere and can easily impersonate good people. He sat with us until dawn, and some of us after the initial surprise of seeing him came back to our senses and dozed off while he was showing off his ability to speak in several languages, among them Hebrew. He claimed that he would convert officially to the Jewish faith, were he not so fearful.
“In Wilno,” he said, “exactly ten years ago, such an apostate was burned at the stake. That was the unwise Walentyn Potocki, who in good faith in Amsterdam acceded with his whole heart to the Mosaic religion and did not wish, upon his return to Poland, to return to the bosom of the Church. They subjected him to torture and eventually burned him at the stake. I saw his grave in Wilno myself. I saw how the Jews venerated him, but no one can give him back his life.”
“He’s useless to us,” Jacob said when Radziwi?? finally left. He stretched out and yawned loudly. We fell asleep at once with our heads on the table, and once the sun was up, it was time to set out for Lublin.
Of sad turns in Lublin