“There’s always some new demand from them. This thing is not good, that thing is bad. I have dealt with all of it. The stove alone cost me a fortune.”
Kossakowska is wearing all black, in mourning for her husband. He died on Christmas, 1761. The death of her husband—sudden, needless (he caught a cold from going out to the kennel when his favorite dog had a litter of puppies)—has put her in a strange state, as if she were slowly sinking into a pot of lard. Whatever she tries to hold on to simply slips out of her hands. She takes a step, and she sinks. She used to call him “that old cripple” to Agnieszka, but now, without him, she feels completely helpless. The funeral took place in Kamieniec, and she came directly thence to Krasnystaw; she knows that she will not go back to Kamieniec.
“I can’t help them any longer,” Kossakowska explains to Marianna. To which Potocka, an old woman by now, and very pious, says:
“And what more can I do for them? I have already sponsored so many baptisms, and we readied the manor for them together . . .”
“I’m not talking about more donations,” says Kossakowska. “From what I have heard from Warsaw, they have powerful foes who are equipped with powerful means, which they are not merely squandering on purses filled with gold. You would be surprised”—she lowers her voice for a moment, and then cries out—“with Minister Brühl! Who, as everybody knows, has a good relationship with the Jews, and deposits state money with them. So what can I, little old Kossakowska, do about that? When Bishop So?tyk wasn’t able to do anything?” Kossakowska rubs her furrowed brow. “What we need is some sort of intelligent—”
“Write to them,” Marianna Potocka says to Katarzyna. “Tell them that they need to sit tight and wait. And set a good example for those other unfaithful Jews who are still so mired in the error of their sinful ways.”
This happens in the spring of 1762. An early spring wind, dense with moisture, is blowing. The potatoes are sprouting in the cellar, mold has gotten into the flour. On the door black crosses show up again, like a form of pre-harvest, misshapen flora. When one of Kossakowska’s charges tries to go shopping, the Jews spit in his face and close the shops to him. The goyim poke at them and call them ne’er-do-wells. The men are constantly getting into fights. Recently some young men from town attacked Zwierzchowski and his teenage daughter as they were coming back from Lublin in their carriage. They raped the girl and knocked out her father’s teeth. Afterward, Zwierzchowski’s wife gathered the teeth from the mud and brought them back into the manor and showed them to everyone on her outstretched palm. Three teeth—a bad omen.
A few days later, the girl hanged herself, much to her parents’ despair.
Of torture and curses
The solution is so simple it seems to be hanging right there in the air, ready for the plucking. So obvious is it that it would be very hard even to say whose idea it first was. It goes like this:
Shortly before Easter, a woman dressed as a Jew, with a turban on her head and a kerchief over her shoulders, wearing wrinkly skirts, goes to the local priest and introduces herself as the wife of the Wojs?awice rabbi. She doesn’t say much, only that she overheard that her husband and some others killed a child for Christian blood, as Passover is approaching, and they need the blood for their holiday matzah. The priest is stunned. The woman is disturbed, behaving strangely, won’t look him in the eye, paces nervously from one end of the room to the other, covers her face. The father doesn’t believe her. He sees her to the door and advises her to calm down.
Nonetheless, the next day, the priest, feeling uneasy, goes to Krasnystaw to Lady Marianna Teresa Potocka and her close relative Katarzyna Kossakowska, and the three of them report this unusual affair to the police. An investigation is launched.
The investigators find the body without any particular effort; it is lying underneath some branches near the rabbi’s house. The child’s skin has been pricked, though the child isn’t bruised or otherwise marked. The tiny wounds on the naked body of the dark-haired, three-year-old Miko?aj look fake, shallow little pits that seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with blood. Come evening, they arrest the two rabbis of Wojs?awice, Sender Zyskieluk and Henryk Józefowicz, along with the wife of the former and some dozen or so others from the Wojs?awice kahal. The priest tries to find the other rabbi’s mysterious wife, so that she can confirm her testimony, but she has disappeared. The other rabbi, in fact, is a widower. During the torture to which all three prisoners are immediately subjected, they confess to a number of murders, to robbing churches and profaning the host, and soon enough it comes out that the whole Jewish kahal in the village of Wojs?awice, numbering some eighty persons, is made up of murderers. Both rabbis, as well as Leyb Moshkowicz Sienicki and Yosa Szymu?owicz, confess under torture—as though they were one man—that they killed the little boy, and that, after draining his blood, they threw out the body to be eaten by dogs.