Jacob feels sorry for this old man and gives him a few groszy to convey, as usual, some letters outside the monastery’s censorship, which means he’ll have to take them into the village and there give them to Shmul. Jacob, too, would like for there to be a war. Then he goes to the prior, intending to complain that the brothers are holding on to his food and other things from town, including tobacco. He knows the prior won’t do anything about it, he complains like this every Thursday. But the prior does not receive him now. Jacob shivers from the cold, he waits so long it gets dark. Then the prior goes to evening mass and goes by Jacob without a word. Jacob, tall and skinny, wrapped up in his opończa, goes back to his tower, frozen.
In the evening, having amply paid off the guards as usual, Matuszewski is smuggled into the tower, and together he and Jacob write a letter. Matuszewski’s hand is shaking from the cold when he writes “Nuncio Visconti” at the top of the page, and it continues to tremble as he writes a number of other famous names. This letter must be written now that the old order is dying, too, and a new one is being born. Now, after the death of the old king, everything is being turned upside down, black becoming white and vice versa. Right now—when the new order has not yet been established and the new chancelleries have not yet gotten under way, when the seemingly inflexible laws have yet to soften like dry bread in water, and while those who were at the top are nervously trying to work out whom to make alliances with and whom to stop talking to—right now there is a chance for this letter to matter. Thus Jacob asks to be released. And if the nuncio should deem this release premature, then Jacob requests at least his intervention; he is suffering from the cramped and miserable conditions in prison. The monks withhold every assistance from his family and friends and do not even allow him to take air; his health has been damaged severely by spending more than two years in the cold tower. He remains, after all, a fervent Catholic, fully devoted to his faith, and his proximity to the Holy Virgin lately has caused his faith, always solid as an oak, to attain even greater heights.
They finish this portion of the letter, but the most important part awaits—they just don’t quite know how to write it. They work on it all night, burning through several candles. Come morning, this part, too, is ready. It goes like this:
The Holy Church has already drawn attention to the falseness of the accusations of the use of Christian blood by Jews. And while we have already met with many misfortunes, still another befell us when this occurred in Wojs?awice, yet not through any fault of our own, but rather because we were used by others for their own ends.
Being eternally grateful to our generous protectors, i.e., Bishop Kajetan So?tyk, as well as Andrzej Joseph Za?uski, who have kindly taken us in under their roofs, and also Katarzyna Kossakowska, our great benefactress, we must defend ourselves against every insinuation that it was we who started the accusations against the Jews of letting Christian blood, and let it be known that the terrible slaughter that followed—which went against the teachings of the Holy Church—occurred without any intentional participation on our part, for we remain humble servants of the Catholic faith.
Of how the interregnum translates into the traffic patterns of the carriages on Krakowskie Przedmie?cie
As there suddenly aren’t enough lodgings for everyone in Warsaw, the traffic on Krakowskie Przedmie?cie becomes relentless. Every powerful personage has come here in his carriage, creating an instant jam and crush.
Agnieszka, having learned how, lets her mistress’s blood, but recently this hasn’t helped. By day, Kossakowska does all right, but at night she cannot sleep; she has hot flashes and heart palpitations. The doctor has already been called thrice. Maybe she should stay at home, in Busk or Krystynopol? Where is Katarzyna Kossakowska’s home, exactly?
As soon as the king died, she, too, raced to the capital and there wasted no time in plotting with So?tyk to back Prince Frederick Christian as the new ruler. The bishop’s carriage, in which they are now going to Prince Branicki’s for more political plotting, is stuck on Krakowskie Przedmie?cie, right by ?wi?tokrzyska. Kossakowska sits opposite the heavy, sweaty So?tyk and speaks in her low, almost masculine voice:
“How can you not lose faith in the order of things in this country, looking at our beloved husbands, brothers, and fathers who hold our fate in their hands? Just take a closer look at them, Your Excellency. One busies himself with newfangled alchemy and seeks the philosopher’s stone, another is drawn to painting pictures, a third spends his nights in the capital and gambles away all the money from his estates in Podolia, and still another—just look at him!—is an equestrian who squanders his fortune on Arabian colts. I haven’t even mentioned those who write poems rather than bothering with our accounts. Those who pomade their wigs while their sabers rust . . .”
The bishop doesn’t seem to be listening to her. He looks through a crack in the window; they are now before the Church of the Holy Cross. He is worried because he is once again in arrears. Debts—they seem to be the painfully real, recurring concern in the bishop’s life.
“. . . it often seems to us that we are Poland,” Kossakowska continues stubbornly. “But they are Poland, too. For although this peasant who was just given a flogging does not even know that he, too, belongs to the Republic, nor does that Jew who handles your business dealings have any awareness of it, and perhaps he would not even wish to admit it, nonetheless we are all traveling in the same carriage, and we ought to care about each other—to take care of each other—not rip scraps from one another’s mouths like hostile dogs. Like right now. Do we want to let ourselves be ruled by Russia’s ambassadors? Let them impose their king on us?”
Kossakowska yammers on, all the way to Miodowa, and So?tyk silently marvels at her inexhaustible energy, but the bishop does not know what Agnieszka knows: that because of the curse in Wojs?awice, Kossakowska cannot sleep, and every night she flagellates herself. If Bishop So?tyk had by some miracle the opportunity to undo her lace top and pull up the linen undershirt to reveal her back, he would see the effects of that insomnia—chaotically scattered bloody swathes, the components of some unrealized inscription.
Pinkas edits the Documenta Judaeos