“This is the end,” he says. Without another word, he goes around Wo?owski, leaving him standing there alone on the muddy street as he forges ahead over frozen puddles. He nearly falls. As though just now coming to his senses, Wo?owski turns and runs after him and invites him to his place.
Soon a winter darkness falls; it is unpleasant out. Moliwda knows he should first go to see Bishop Za?uski, who is said to be in Warsaw now, and seek his support, rather than running straight to the neophyte Jews. He ought to search for So?tyk, but it’s too late now, and he hasn’t shaved and is tired from his journey, and so he looks covetously into the open door of the Wo?owskis’ home, whence warmth and the smell of lye burst forth. He allows Franciszek to grab him by the elbow and guide him inside.
It is January 27, 1760. He did not make it in time for Jacob’s interrogation yesterday. But there will be others.
What was going on in Warsaw when Jacob disappeared
In the New Town, where Shlomo, or Franciszek Wo?owski, has just opened a little tobacco warehouse with his brothers, there is considerable traffic. Above the store is a small apartment the brothers have rented. It is a good thing the cold has trammeled the earth, allowing you to traverse the trodden, muddied, puddle-strewn streets.
Moliwda walks into the entryway, and then the salon, where he sits down on a brand-new chair that still smells like carpenter’s glue and looks at the clock that enjoys pride of place in this room and is steadily ticking. In a moment the door opens and Marianna Wo?owska, Little Hayah, appears in its frame, and behind her some children, three of the youngest, the ones who don’t yet go to school. She wipes her hands on the apron she has over her dark dress; he can see she was working. She looks tired and worried. From somewhere farther inside the house he can hear the sounds of a piano. Marianna takes his hands when he gets up to greet her and tells him to sit back down. Moliwda feels embarrassed that he forgot about the children, he could have at least brought them a bag of candied cherries.
“At first he simply disappeared,” says Marianna. “We thought maybe he was visiting somebody for a little while, so for the first few days we weren’t that worried. Then Shlomo and Jakubowski went to his house and found Kazimierz, the man he had hired as his butler, in despair, saying he had been kidnapped. Since then, someone sent for his warm clothing. Nothing else. ‘Who?’ we asked. ‘Armed men, several of them,’ he told us. So Shlomo, as soon as he arrived here from Lwów, got dressed in elegant attire and started going around town, asking, but we learned nothing. Then we started to feel very afraid, because ever since Shlomo returned from Lwów, things have been going awry.”
Marianna puts a little boy onto her lap and pulls out of her sleeve a handkerchief to wipe her eyes, and while she is at it, the boy’s nose. Franciszek goes out to get Yeruhim Dembowski, who lives next door, and the others.
“What is your name?” Moliwda asks the boy inattentively.
“Franio,” says the child.
“Like your dad?”
“Like my dad.”
“It all started with this interrogation in Lwów,” Marianna continues. “It is a good thing you came, it’s better that they not get all tangled up in that Polish.”
“But you speak well . . .”
“Well, maybe it would be better if they would interrogate us women.” She smiles bitterly. “Hayah would give them all the pipe to smoke. She and Hirsh—Rudnicki,” she corrects herself, “bought a house in Leszno, they’re moving in in the spring.”
“Is Hayah well?”
Marianna gives him a startled look.
“Hayah is Hayah . . . The worst part is that now they’re taking them to be interrogated one by one. They’ve taken Jakubowski.” She falls silent.
“Jakubowski is a mystic and a Kabbalist. He’ll fill their ears with nonsense.”
“Well, exactly, what he filled their ears with, no one knows. Shlomo was saying that when they were all testifying together, Jakubowski was very afraid.”
“That they would lock him up, too?” Moliwda takes Marianna’s hands and moves closer to her. He whispers into her ear: “I’m scared, too. I’m sitting in the same cart as all of you, but I can see it isn’t safe now. Tell your husband he’s an idiot, that you all need to settle your petty, stinking scores amongst yourselves . . . You wanted to get rid of him, that’s why you told them what you did, isn’t that so?”
Marianna gets out of his grasp and starts crying into her handkerchief. The children look at her in fear. She turns to the door and shouts:
“Basia, take the children!
“We are all afraid,” says Marianna. “And you should be afraid, because you know all our secrets, and you are like one of us now.” She raises her tearful hazel eyes to Moliwda, and for just a moment, Moliwda hears in her hushed voice the sound of a threat.
Spit on this fire
The interrogation of the Warsaw Frankists takes place without any of them being arrested. Yeruhim, or J?drzej Dembowski, speaks on behalf of the whole group, self-assured and talkative, along with the younger Wo?owski, Jan. Both give their testimonies in Yiddish, but this time Moliwda has been made just an assistant to the main interpreter. So he sits at the table with pen and paper. Someone named Bielski interprets, quite well. Moliwda has managed to get them to speak in general terms, nice and polite.
But they keep digging themselves in deeper. When they start talking about Jacob’s miracles, which he apparently worked everywhere, Moliwda is silent, biting his lip and lowering his gaze to the empty page before him, the sight of which soothes him. Why are they doing this?
Moliwda senses the initially friendly attitude of the court changing now, the inquisitors’ bodies tensing, and from small talk a real hearing is created, voices get lower, the court’s questions get more inquisitive and suspicious, the defendants whisper to each other nervously, while the secretary starts looking over an agenda with dates, so that maybe—thinks Moliwda in a panic—it will be like that: they’ll schedule the next hearing, and the matter won’t just be wrapped up the way they thought it would be.
Without even realizing it, he moves his chair away from them, closer to the stove. And sits sort of sideways now.