The emissaries have to report to the machna on the time spent in Brünn and their failed diplomatic missions. In Warsaw, everything now revolves around the home of Franciszek Wo?owski. The machna either meets at his place on Leszno (he has the biggest house) or in the home of his daughter, the one who married Lanckoroński, Hayah’s son. It is a difficult time, dominated by a kind of political excitability, an anxiety, so that any news of Brünn sounds improbable here.
In the capital, Jakubowski meets Jacob Goliński, whom he last saw in Cz?stochowa. He has a strange weakness for him—maybe because Goliński is the incarnation of Jakubowski’s memory of his time with the Besht in Mi?dzybó?, which is a memory that always makes him emotional somehow. They embrace, and for a moment they stay standing this way, without moving. Through his heavy coat, Jakubowski can feel how Goliński has lost weight, or seems to have shrunk somehow.
“Are you doing all right?” he asks anxiously.
“I’ll tell you later,” Goliński whispers, because already they hear Old Podolski, a small, shriveled man in that dark gray caftan buttoned up under his neck. His hands are stained with ink. He does the accounts at the Wo?owskis’ brewery.
“I will be so bold as to say it,” he pipes up in Polish, in a strong, lilting Yiddish accent. “I am old and scared of nothing now. Especially since it seems to me that you think the same way as I think, you just don’t have the courage to say it out loud. Nu, I will say it.”
He pauses for a moment, and then starts up again:
“It’s over. When he—”
“He who?” someone angrily interjects from over by the wall.
“When Jacob, our Lord, left us here, there was no reason to expect anything more of him. We are bound to take care of ourselves now, to live properly, to stick together, and, without abandoning any of our practices, to cut them back according to circumstances . . .”
“Like rats that flatten themselves to the ground in fear . . . ,” says that same other voice.
“Rats?” Podolski turns toward the voice. “Rats are wise creatures; they can survive anything. You are mistaken, son. We have good jobs, food on our plates, roofs over our heads—what rats can you be thinking of?”
“This wasn’t why we got baptized,” says the same voice, a man named Tatarkiewicz, whose father was from Czernowitz. He is an officer of the post; he’s come wearing his uniform.
“You are young and impulsive. Your head is hot. But I am old and good at counting. I tally up all the expenses of our community and know how much gold we have sent to Moravia and how hard earned it was, how we worked to amass such sums here in Poland. For that kind of money, you could send your children to university.”
A murmur goes around the room.
“How much have we sent?” Marianna Wo?owska asks calmly.
Old Podolski takes the papers from his bosom and lays them out on the table. They all squeeze in around him, but no one understands the tables with the figures.
“I gave two thousand ducats. Just about everything I had,” says Jacob Goliński to Piotr Jakubowski, who has sat down next to him. Both of them have remained on their chairs against the wall, knowing that once people start talking about money, it will end in a brawl. “Podolski is right!”
And indeed, the quarrels begin over the table now, with Franciszek Wo?owski the elder trying to keep them under control. He hushes them and explains to them that their needless rumpus will be overheard from the street, and that they are turning his home into a Turkish bazaar, that they—polite, well-dressed burghers and clerks—are suddenly revealing themselves to be no better than street vendors from the marketplace in Busk.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves!” he tries.
Suddenly it is as if the devil himself had entered Piotr Jakubowski. He throws himself onto the table, covering with his whole body all the scattered papers.
“What is wrong with all of you? You want to settle accounts with Jacob, like he’s some merchant? Don’t you remember where you were before he came? And who would you be now, were it not for him? Merchants, tenants with your beards down to your waists, groszy sewn into your shtreimels? Have you already forgotten?”
Krysiński cries:
“But that’s what we still are!”
Now Franciszek Wo?owski attempts to reason with Piotr Jakubowski:
“Do not, Brother Piotr, get too carried away. We owe a great deal to our own resilience and faith. And to our own hard work.”
“He was in jail for thirteen years because of us. We betrayed him,” says Jakubowski.
“Nobody betrayed him,” says young Lanckoroński. “You said yourself that it had to be this way. You said that yourself, while we, the whole machna, got stronger and tougher those thirteen years, and while we were put to the test, never veering from the path.”
By the wall someone—perhaps it is only Tatarkiewicz again—says:
“We don’t even know . . . if that’s him or not. People say they swapped him.”
“You shut up!” Jakubowski screams now, but to his horrified astonishment, the criticism is taken up by Goliński:
“Who are we now? Who am I now? I was a rabbi in Busk; things were going fine for me, but now there’s no way back, and I am bankrupt.”
Jakubowski flies into a rage, races to his dear friend, and seizes him by his jabot. The pages from the table fly onto the floor.
“You are all petty, despicable people. You have forgotten everything. You would still be stuck in shit, in Rohatyn shit, Podhajce shit, Kamieniec shit.”
“Busk shit, too,” someone adds out of spite.
Jacob Goliński goes home on foot, alone. He is very troubled. His wife, who has been with Her Ladyship in Brünn for a year now, has not contacted him in some months; he had hoped that Jakubowski would bring some letters from her. He didn’t. He seemed to look away when asked, and then that argument erupted, and now Goliński can’t quite come back to his senses.