And suddenly he knows that he has to summon back up that old, childlike enthusiasm that causes him to write. Since otherwise he will perish—he’ll decay in the autumnal damp like a leaf.
He sits down at the table, stuffs his feet into a pair of wolfskin boots sewn for him by his housekeeper so that he doesn’t freeze as he sits still for hours to write. He puts out his paper, sharpens his quill, rubs his icy hands together. At this time of year, he always feels like he will not survive the winter.
Father Chmielowski knows the world only through books. Whenever he sits down in his Firlejów library and reaches for a book, whether for a handsome folio edition or just a little Elzevir, it always feels if he is setting off on a journey to some unknown country. This metaphor appeals to him, he smiles to himself and starts trying to set it in a graceful sentence . . . Yet it is easier for him to write about the wide world than it is to write about himself. Always focusing on something or other, he is never focused on himself, and since he’s never written down the things that have happened to him, now it seems to him that he has no biography. If that woman who writes such gloomy verses were to ask him who he is, how he’s spent his years, what would he say? And if he wanted to write it down, there wouldn’t be more of it than just a few pages, so not even a booklet, not even one of those diminutive Elzevirs, barely even a brochure, just a scrap of paper, the little life of a non-saint. Neither a peregrinator nor a surveyor of foreign lands.
He dips his pen in its ink and holds it for a moment over the sheet of paper. Then, with fervor, he begins:
The story of the life of Father Joachim Benedykt Chmielowski, of the Na??cz coat of arms, pastor of Firlejów, Podkamień, and Janczyn, vicar forane of Rohatyn, canon of Kiev and poor shepherd of a paltry flock, written in his own hand and not imposing of high-level Polish, so as not to obscure the meanings, dedicated ad usum to the Reader.
The title takes up half the page, so the priest reaches for the next sheet of paper, but his hand seems to have numbed up—it doesn’t want to or can’t write anything more. When he wrote “to the Reader,” Dru?backa appeared before his eyes, that little older lady with her hale complexion and her bright, shiny eyes. The priest promises himself that he will read those verses of hers, though he doesn’t expect anything much of them. Folly. It must just be folly and impossible platoons of Greek gods.
It is a shame she had to leave.
He takes another sheet of paper and dips his pen in the ink. But what is he to write? he wonders. The story of the priest’s life is the story of the books he read and wrote. A true writer has no biography. What of interest, then, can there be? His mother, seeing little Benedykt’s love of books, sent him to the Jesuits of Lwów at the age of fifteen. That decision considerably improved his relationship with his stepfather, who never cared for him. From then on, they almost never saw each other. Immediately after that, he went to seminary and was soon ordained. His first employment was with the Jab?onowskis at their estate, as the preceptor to young—though only five years younger than himself—Dymitr. There he learned how to seem older than he really was and how to speak in a tone of perpetual instruction, which to this day some people take ill. He was also permitted to avail himself of his employer’s library, which was quite ample, and there he discovered Kircher as well as Comenius’s Orbis pictus. In addition, his hand, that recalcitrant servant, took to writing on its own, particularly during that first spring he spent there, humid and stuffy, especially when Lady Joanna Maria Jab?onowska happened to be nearby—she was Dymitr’s mother and his employer’s wife (which the priest tried not to think about). Head over heels in love, dazed by the strength of his feeling, absentminded, weak, he waged a terrible battle with himself in his efforts to reveal nothing, dedicating himself entirely to his work and writing a book of devotions for his beloved. This maneuver enabled him to distance himself from her, to defuse, to sanctify, to sublimate, and when he presented her with the manuscript (before it got published in Lwów, upon which time it attained considerable popularity, going through several more editions), he felt as if he had married her, entered into a union with her, and that he was now giving her the child of that union. The course of one whole year—a prayer book. In this way, he discovered that writing saves.
Joanna was at that age, so dangerous for so many men, between the age of the mother and the mistress. This made the erotic allure of motherhood less obvious and made it therefore possible to luxuriate in it at leisure. To imagine your own face pressed into the softness of that lace, the faint scent of rosewater and powder, the delicacy of skin covered in peach fuzz, no longer so firm or so taut, but warm, gentle, soft as suede. Through her intercession, he received from King Augustus II the presbytery in Firlejów, and as a twenty-five-year-old with a broken heart, he took up that small parish. He had his collection of books brought in, and he built for it beautiful carved cases. Of his own books, there were forty-seven; others he would borrow from monastic libraries, from the bishopric, from magnates’ palaces, where they often languished uncut, mere souvenirs from excursions abroad. The first two years were hard. Especially the winters. He strained his eyes because darkness would fall fast, and yet he could not stop working. He wrote two strange little books, Flight of the Saints to God and Journey to That Other World, which he wasn’t brave enough to publish under his own name. Unlike the prayer book, they did not do particularly well and went missing amidst the shuffle of this world. The priest has a couple of copies of them here, in Firlejów, in a special trunk he had covered in sheet metal and equipped with good locks in case of fire, theft, or any other cataclysm, to which mere mortals’ libraries are, after all, not immune. He remembers exactly the shape of the prayer book and the smell of its cover—made of dark, plain leather. It’s strange, he also remembers the touch of Joanna Jab?onowska’s hand, she had a habit of covering his hand with hers in order to pacify him. And something else: he remembers the delicate softness of her cool cheek when—out of his mind with love—he dared to kiss her once.