. . . for I, Dear Friend, Good Father, can barely see the world at all now, just as much as is possible through the window of my cell, and so I see the world as a monastery courtyard. My confinement brings me great relief; a smaller world will favor peace of mind. And, too, the things I have around me—which are not many—do not preoccupy my mind near so much as those whole household cosmoses I had to carry on my shoulders like some Atlas. After the death of my daughter, and my granddaughters, everything ended for me, and altho’ you warn that it is a sin to say so, I do not even care. From our birth, everything—the church, the home, our education, our customs and loves—bids us form an attachment to life. But no one ever tells us that the more attached we are to it, the more pain we’ll suffer later, once we have come by our final awareness.
I will not write to you again, dear Friend, you who have sweetened my older years with your stories, and consoled me when I met with such misfortune. I wish You a long and healthy life. And that Your lovely garden in Firlejów might last forever, like Your library and all Your books—that they might be of service . . .
Mrs. El?bieta Dru?backa finishes her letter and sets down her pen. She pushes aside her prie-dieu, which is turned to the Christ who hangs on her wall, whose every suffering tendon she knows so well. She lies down on her back on the floor, pulls on a brown wool dress that looks like a habit, and lays her hands over her breast, as she would in the coffin, fixing her gaze to some nothing hanging in the air. And she just lies there. She does not even try to pray, the words of prayer exhaust her, as if she were pouring out something that is empty into something that is void, grinding the same grain over and over, infected with ergot, poisoned through and through. After a few minutes, she manages to attain a specific state; she remains in it until they call her for the meal. It is hard to describe this state: Dru?backa simply manages to disappear.
Yente, who is always present, loses sight of Mrs. Dru?backa now. She flies fast as thought to the recipient of the letter lying on the table and sees him busying himself with soaking his swollen legs in a bucket. He sits hunched over—maybe he has fallen asleep: his head has come to rest on his chest, and he seems to be snoring slightly. Ah, but Yente knows that soaking his feet isn’t going to help him.
Father Chmielowski is no longer able to read this last letter, and it lies there for weeks on end, the seal still on it, on the table amongst his other papers. Father Benedykt Chmielowski, canon of Rohatyn, dies of pneumonia, from having incautiously and impatiently gone out into the garden as soon as the sun rose. Roshko’s successor, Izydor, a young, somewhat dim-witted man, and his housekeeper, Ksenia, delayed calling for the doctor until the next day, when the roads were soaked and barely passable. He died peacefully, his fever coming down just enough that he could confess and take the last rites. On the table there had been a book lying open for a long time, from which he had been translating a few verses that appeared under a terrible engraving.
Taking over the presbytery in Firlejów, Father Benedykt’s successor spends a whole evening going through his predecessor’s documents, preparing them to be sent to the curia. He opens the letter from Mrs. Dru?backa, but he doesn’t know exactly who she is. He is surprised, however, that the priest had been corresponding with women. He finds a whole box of letters, carefully arranged by date, overlaid with dried flowers, surely so that moths don’t get into the paper. He doesn’t know what to do with them, since he cannot work up the courage to add them to the volumes he’s been told to pack up and send to the Lwów bishopric. He keeps the box for a while by the bed, reading bits of the letters for pleasure, and then he forgets about them, pushing the box under the bed, where it stays, in the presbytery’s damp bedroom, so that the letters soon molder, turning into nests for mice.
In her last letter, Mrs. Dru?backa had also written that the two worst questions were “why” and “to what end.”
And yet I cannot keep myself from posing those questions. So I answer myself that the Lord God wants to punish us by means of creation itself: us, His creations, who sin with creation. He washes His hands of it, however, in order to preserve His goodness in our eyes. He looks for natural means to destroy us indirectly, by way of some natural cause, so that the blow is lighter than it would be if He Himself struck it, since such a thing we could not understand.
He could, after all, have healed Naaman with one word, but He had him go bathe in the River Jordan instead. He could have healed the blind man with His universal love, but instead He mixed saliva with mud and put it on his eyes. He could have healed everyone at once, but instead He made the pharmacy, the medic, medicinal herbs. His world is one great oddity.
Of bringing Moliwda back to life
Moliwda has grown thinner and does not really even resemble his former self from just a few years ago. He is clean-shaven, and while he doesn’t have a tonsure like many of the monks, he does wear his hair short, cropped very close to the head. He looks younger. His older brother, the retired military man, is somehow made uncomfortable by this matter of the monastery. He doesn’t really understand what happened to Antoni in his old age. They say in Warsaw that he fell head over heels in love with a married woman who indulged his advances, giving him hopes for a closer relationship. Then, having made Moliwda fall so in love with her, she cast him aside. His brother cannot understand that, doesn’t want to believe in such tales. He would understand if it were something to do with honor. With real betrayal—but not some love affair. He looks at his brother suspiciously. But maybe it was something else? Maybe someone cast a spell on him because he was doing so well with the primate.