In the morning they bring him a letter from the primate’s chancellery that says he is to report there in the afternoon. He pours a bucket of cold water over his head, rinses his mouth out with water and vinegar. He stands with his face to the window and tries to pray, but he is so shaken up he can’t find within himself that place from which he is usually able to launch like a stone thrown into the sky. Now he’s very aware of the ceiling over his head. He knows what is about to happen, and he wonders whether they will let him leave. He glances at his minimal luggage.
At the primate’s palace, some ordinary priest receives Moliwda, not even introducing himself, and takes him in silence into a tiny room, where there is just a table and two chairs, and on the wall hangs an enormous cross with a skinny Christ on it. The priest sits facing him, folds his hands one over the other and says gently, not appearing to be addressing anyone in particular, that the past life of the esteemed Mr. Antoni Kossakowski, alias Moliwda, is well-known to the Church, in particular that heretical time spent in the colony of apostates in Wallachia. The activities of the Philippians are also known, and they fill right-minded Catholics with great disgust. The Commonwealth is not the country for such perversions, and all dissidents from the true faith ought to find themselves another place to live. Known to the Church, as well, are the esteemed Mr. Kossakowski’s youthful transgressions; the Church’s memory is everlasting; the Church never forgets. And he goes on and on like this, as if showing off his information, and the information is a massive trove, and then the priest opens a drawer and pulls out a few sheets of paper and a small bottle of ink. He steps out for a moment to bring back a pen, and with his fingertip he checks to see whether it is sharp enough. In one word, he alludes to ?owicz. Moliwda is so depressed that he ceases to be able to understand him. The priest’s words are still knocking around in his head: magic, metempsychosis, incest, unnatural practices . . . and he feels as if a great weight has pinned him down.
Then the priest tells Moliwda to write. He says there is no limit to the time he has. Everything he knows about Jacob Frank that other people might not know. And Moliwda writes.
23.
What hunting is like at Hieronim Florian Radziwi??’s
Until February 2, Candlemas Day, a festive atmosphere prevails throughout the country. Ball costumes are aired out in the cold, wrinkled dresses over panniers, silk ?upans, elegant cassocks. Even in the peasant chambers holiday clothes are hung around, trimmed with ribbons, beautifully embroidered. In the pantries there are pots of honey and lard, cucumbers quietly pickling in great, gloomy barrels, livening up only in the hand of some impatient person—then, slippery, they escape. Hanging from poles are sausage rings, smoked hams, and fatback from which some bold scout stealthily slices off pieces each day. As little as a month ago, these were living animals, trusting in their cozy stables and barns, with no idea they wouldn’t make it past Christmas. Mice plunder sacks of nuts; cats, fat and lazy at this time of year, settle atop the sacks, but it rarely comes to a confrontation—the mice are too smart for that. The scent of dried apples and plums fills people’s homes. Music bursts out from doors opened onto the chilly night like the puffs of steam that come from human breaths.
Primate ?ubieński, a person who, at his core, is vain and childish, has been invited by Radziwi?? to hunt, and he takes with him one of his secretaries, Antoni Kossakowski, known as Moliwda. They sit in the same carriage as his adviser M?odzianowski, since the primate never stops working. Moliwda neither likes nor respects this man, having seen a great deal already at the palace in ?owicz. He tries to make some notes, but the carriage shudders in the frozen ruts and doesn’t let him.
They are silent for a long while, as the primate observes through the window a noisy, happy sleigh ride passing by; finally Moliwda works up the courage to say:
“Your Excellency, may I beseech you to dismiss me . . .”
Now the carriage crosses over a wooden bridge, which feels like an earthquake might.
“Yes, I know what you want,” Primate ?ubieński says, and falls silent. After a pause that seems endless to Moliwda, the primate adds: “You’re scared. I don’t see anything wrong with the fact that you were their interpreter. It might even be better, because you know more. You know, Mr. Kossakowski, strange things are said about you. People say you’ve eaten bread out of more than one stove. And that you’re an important figure among the heretics. Is that true?”
“Your Excellency, those were youthful excesses. I was hotheaded, but with time I have become more reasonable. Regarding the heretics, that is mere gossip. I know many other histories, but that of the heretics—no.”
“Then tell us a story, it will make the time go by,” says the primate, and rests his head back on the padding behind him.
Moliwda thinks for a moment that the time has come for him to tell the story of his life, to get rid of that old burden and on this cold day start a new life. He realizes that it was Kossakowska’s influences that found a way to get him into this position—Kossakowska, who does not care for ?ubieński and considers him an enemy to Polish interests and an unworthy man. No doubt in order to have someone she trusted in the opposition camp. She promised, in exchange, to quash any rumors that might be circling Moliwda like a different sort of halo.
No, Moliwda will never tell these two people what really brought him to the place in which he finds himself now. So he tells them how he and some random fellow passengers, met at sea by a squall, had to tether one another to the masts so that the waves wouldn’t take them . . . And how the sea tossed him ashore, where he was found by a beautiful princess, the daughter of the king of the island, how he was imprisoned in a cave and fed from a basket on a long pole, for they feared his red beard . . . And it is clear that the primate has never seen a sea, or a beach, or a princess, or probably even a cave, for his imagination can’t keep up, and he is overcome by boredom and starts to doze off. Moliwda calms down. Perhaps too quickly.
In the evening when they stop, once they have eaten dinner, the primate asks him to tell them about the Philippians and the Bogomils. Which Moliwda, ensnared, reluctantly, and in the most general possible terms, does.
“Just think of all a person can still learn. And what we believe we can find out only from a heresy,” the primate sums up Moliwda’s lecture, with the smile of a child much pleased by the strength of his own pronouncement.