A dog trots into the room after the housekeeper. It’s medium-sized, shaggy, with floppy ears and wavy chestnut fur. Very gravely, it sniffs around Dru?backa’s dress. And when Dru?backa bends down to pet it, she glimpses puppies, four of them, each of them different. The housekeeper wants to kick them out of the room right away, and she reproaches the priest for yet again failing to close the door. But Dru?backa asks if they can let the dogs stay for now. So they accompany them into the evening, delighted to sit near the stove, which finally heats up the room enough for the guest to be able to remove her fur-lined vest.
Dru?backa looks at Father Chmielowski and suddenly understands how very lonely this aging, neglected man is, bustling all around her, wanting to impress her as a little boy might. He sets the cut-crystal carafe on the table and examines the glasses under the light, making sure they’re clean. His ragged, threadbare cassock of camlet wool has worn thin at his stomach, and here a lighter patch shines bright. She doesn’t know why, but Dru?backa finds it exceptionally touching to see all this, and she has to look away. She picks up a puppy and puts it on her lap—it’s a female, the one that most resembles the mother; she rolls right over onto her back, revealing her delicate little belly. Dru?backa starts to tell the priest about her grandchildren, all of them girls—though who knows, perhaps this only makes him feel worse? Chmielowski listens inattentively to her, his eyes flitting around the room as he tries to think what else this woman might like. The priest’s liqueurs are delicious, and Dru?backa nods appreciatively. Then it is finally time for the main dish. Pushing aside the glasses and the carafe, Chmielowski proudly lays before her on the table his great work. Dru?backa reads the title out loud:
“New Athens, or the Academy of Every Science, divided into different ti? tles as into classes, issued that the Wise might have it as a Record, that Idiots might learn, that Politicians might practice and that melancholy Souls obtain some slight Enjoyment from it . . .”
The priest, leaning back comfortably in his chair, downs his liqueur in one gulp. Dru?backa exclaims with unrestrained admiration:
“Beautiful title. It’s so hard to give a work a good title.”
The priest answers modestly that what he would like is to create a compendium of knowledge of the sort that could be found in every home. And in it a little about everything, so that a person might reach for such a book whenever there is something he does not know, and there he might find it. Geography, medicine, human languages, customs, but also flora and fauna and curiosities of all kinds.
“Just imagine, madam—everything at hand, in every library, nobleman’s and peasant’s. All of mankind’s knowledge collected in one place.”
He has already amassed a lot of it, which he published in two volumes a few years ago. But now he would like to also have, aside from Latin, a knowledge of Hebrew, and from Hebrew to draw more tasty tidbits. But obtaining Jewish books is difficult, you have to ask their Jewish owners, and few among the Christians can read in that language. Father Pikulski has volunteered for now to translate this and that for him, but Benedykt, not having the language himself, cannot really gain access to that wisdom.
“The first volume came out in Lwów at the printery of one Golczewski . . .”
Dru?backa is playing with the dog.
“I am now writing a supplement to both books, which is to say volumes three and four, and that is where I am thinking of concluding my description of the world,” Father Chmielowski adds.
What is Dru?backa to say? She puts down the puppy, replacing it in her lap with the book. Yes, she knows this book, she once read it in the home of the Jab?onowskis, who owned the first edition. Now she opens to a chapter on animals and finds something there about dogs. She reads in a powerful voice:
“‘In Piotrków we had a dog so delightful that at the command of its master it would take a knife into the kitchen, and there it would clean it with its paws, rinse it in water, and deliver it back.’”
“That was her mother that did that.” The priest smiles, pointing at his dog.
“But why is there so much Latin in this, Father?” Dru?backa says, skimming the next section. “Not everybody understands it.”
The priest shifts uneasily.
“But what do you mean? Every Pole speaks in Latin as if it were his mother tongue. The Polish nation is a gens culta, polita, capax of every type of wisdom, justifiably relishing Latin and pronouncing it the best of all the nationalities. We do not say, like the Italians, Redzina, but Regina, not tridzinta, quadradzinta, but triginta, quadraginta. We don’t ruin Latin like the Germans and the French, who in the place of Jesus Christus say Jedzus Kristus, instead of Michael, Mikael, instead of charus, karus . . .”
“But which Poles, dear Father? Women, for example, rarely speak Latin, for they have frequently not been taught it. And the middle classes don’t really know Latin at all, and after all, you do want them and even classes lower than them to read this . . . Even the starosta prefers French over Latin. It strikes me that in the next edition you might as well weed out all your Latin, in the same way that you weed your garden.”
The priest is shocked by this critique.
It would appear that this lady he is hosting is more interested in his dogs than she is in his books.
The sun is nearly setting by the time she gets into the britchka and the priest hands her a basket with two puppies in it. It will be dark by the time she gets back to Rohatyn.
“You could spend the night in my humble priestly quarters,” offers the priest, though he is angry with himself for offering.
Once the carriage has gone, the priest doesn’t know what to do with himself. He expended more than just the strength required for two hours’ time—he expended the energy of a whole day, of a week. The fence’s slats have slumped over by the hollyhock, leaving a distasteful gap, so the priest, not thinking overmuch what he is doing, gets right down to work. But then he freezes and can feel a kind of stillness trickling into him from every side, along with doubt, and past that there’s a collapse of all the things that haven’t yet been named, and chaos is created, and everything starts to rot with the leaves, to tumefy before his eyes. He still forces himself to fasten the slats to the fence, but then suddenly it seems too hard to him, and the slats slide out of his hands and fall onto the damp ground. The priest goes inside, kicks his shoes off in the dark vestibule, and then goes into his library—the low-ceilinged room with beams exposed along the ceiling now seems suffocating to him. He sits down in his armchair. The stove is as hot as it can get, and the white tiles that cover the copper enamel are slowly warming up. He looks at the old woman’s little book, picks it up, smells it. It still smells of printing ink. He reads:
. . . true, shriveled, there is the horror she inspires
Junctures fastened with veins like lots of thin wires;
She never sleeps, eats, or drinks, cannot deserve,
Her entrails can be seen just past her ribs’ curve,
Where her eyes had been, deep crevices are scored,
Where her brain resided, as if pitch were poured.
“Protect us, Lord God, from all that is evil,” whispers the priest, and sets aside the book. She seemed like such a nice lady.